Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

  During the night Donovan ordered scouts to establish contact with the 167th Alabama on the right and the 166th Ohio on the left. Donovan reasoned that since the Germans could no longer see an attacking party, he might be able to break through in the dark. He sent Captain Bootz and his company into action. The American casualties were heavy, and Bootz returned to report.

  “We have got too many green replacements to do this sort of work,” he said. “All day long we have been trying to keep them from bunching up, but they will do it and are even worse at night, when they can’t see each other unless they are bunched up. The Germans are jittery and at the slightest noise bring down a heavy fire. I think we had better wait until morning, as you can see all we have done so far is to thoroughly wake up the Germans. Look at the rockets going up along their whole line.”

  Some Americans were captured in the night fighting. One escaped and came back to tell Donovan that there were Germans in front of the barbed wire only about 100 yards away. More waited behind the wire, and still others were coming up. A counterattack seemed certain.

  “I was so damned tired,” Donovan admitted later. “I had about reached the point where I didn’t give a damn if they did counterattack.”

  In the morning Donovan’s old First Battalion, now commanded by Major Kelly, attacked. Wrote Donovan,

  I knew all the older men in it. Just before Kelly started, I walked around amongst them telling them that we had to go through and that they were the fellows to do it. When they started forward I went with them. I had hardly started when I was shot in the knee. I always thought it was a rifle bullet, but the men near me said it was a machine gun one. At any rate down I went. Just as I did so, I saw the tanks coming back. I was told that one of them had gotten into the wire, but where they had attacked was on the other side of a slight fold in the ground so I did not personally see it. Also I was lying on the ground so my vision was limited. I sent Wheatley over to one of the tanks. He came back and said the driver was shot in the eye. I then asked for artillery fire. My request was promptly complied with, but the fire was not heavy enough to keep the Germans down and give our men a chance to break through.

  The Germans counterattacked from just south of Landres-et-St.-Georges, but Stokes mortar and machine-gun fire turned them back.

  “This counterattack,” continued Donovan, “convinced me that Kelly’s position invited enemy attempts to cut him off. Also he was suffering badly from direct fire from the German artillery in the Bois Hazois, to say nothing of fire into his right flank and rear from the Côte de Châtillon.

  “I therefore sent word for him to retire. He sent back the reply that he would do so with a written order. Therefore, lying on the ground, I wrote out an order and sent it by one of my runners, Mack Rice.”

  When Donovan was hit, he later wrote Ruth, “I fell like a log, but after a few minutes managed to crawl into my little telephone hole. A machine gun lieutenant ripped open my breeches and put on the first aid. The leg hurt, but there were many things to be done.”

  Major Anderson, commanding the reserve battalion, came up. “I had heard that Donovan had been shot through the leg,” he said after the war, “so started up to see him. It was then about seven o’clock in the morning. It was broad daylight by the time we got to where we could see him. He was lying in a foxhole on the reverse slope of the hill just in front of the German position. His position was not only isolated but an extremely dangerous one.”

  Captain Fecheimer also arrived on the scene. “How in hell is anybody going to get him out of here?” he asked himself.

  Anderson and Fecheimer lay down on the ground.

  “Hello,” Donovan said. Shrapnel and bullets winged about them.

  “You’d better get in here with me,” he told Anderson. “Fecheimer, you get over in that foxhole over there,” he said to the captain.

  “I looked at it,” Fecheimer remembered later, “and there were already two men in it, so I looked for another one. Seeing an empty one just behind the one Donovan had pointed out, I got in it. Shortly after, a shell landed in the one with the two men in it, blowing them both to pieces.”

  “The situation was bad,” Donovan wrote. “There was more defense than we thought, and the battalion was held up. Messengers I sent through were killed or wounded and messages remained undelivered. We were shelled heavily. Beside me three men were blown up, and I was showered with the remnants of their bodies. No communication with the rear as the telephone was still out. Gas was then thrown at us, thick and nasty. Five hours passed. I was getting very groggy.”

  Kelly, having received his written orders, fell back with the First Battalion to a little stream and dug in on the night of October 15. The front was now stable. Donovan, propped up against the bank of his foxhole, his leg swathed in a bloody bandage, was growing too weak from loss of blood to continue much longer and at last had to allow his men to wrap him in a blanket. He had continued in command for a long day after being wounded. When shock wore off, he had been in great pain. Four men picked him up and started back across the open terrain. A shell burst nearby.

  “Take cover and leave me, boys,” Donovan weakly demanded. “You can never make it.”

  “We can go anywhere you can, Colonel,” said one.

  They carried him safely back to the regimental dressing station set up by surgeon George Lawrence. There he was met by Father Duffy. Donovan weakly shook his fist at the chaplain. “Father, you’re a disappointed man,” he said. “You expected to have the pleasure of burying me here.”

  “I certainly did, Bill, and you are a lucky dog to get off with nothing more than you got,” Duffy replied.

  Donovan’s wound was dressed in the first-aid station, and he was placed in an ambulance for a 2-mile ride over shell-torn roads to the Field Hospital. He was placed on the ground while it was determined that no immediate operation was needed. Again he rode in a lurching ambulance, this time for 4 miles to a mobile unit.

  “At this hospital I was taken in during a pounding rain,” he wrote to Ruth. “They took a complete record of my name, regiment, rank, nature, and date of wound. Then they stripped me and rubbed me over with a warm sponge. It being the first in many days, it was very welcome. Then the anti-tetanus injection. Then on a stretcher and put in a row in the waiting room off the operating room awaiting my turn.”

  Donovan closed his eyes and tried to sleep. “Hello, Colonel!” he heard someone say. It was a runner from his old battalion who had been wounded after he had.

  In the operating room the surgeons decided that no operation was needed, so with his leg splinted, Donovan was put into a ward. He luxuriated between clean sheets.

  Beside me was an officer shot through the stomach and dying, across two officers coming out of ether and asking the nurse to hold their hands or smooth their brows. In the next ward a bedlam of delirium. Early in the morning the man next to me died, still calling for his wife and children.

  Pancakes for breakfast and then prepared for evacuation. Our cards containing our history were attached, and we were loaded into ambulances and sent to Evacuation No. 10. It was in a pouring rain, and the road was terrific. I had with me several badly wounded officers who groaned the whole time, and I was not very comfortable myself, so that on the road things were not happy.

  At the Evacuation Hospital we were handled like pieces of freight. Put on a rack, and when your turn came put in front of a checker who carefully noted your record. Then to bed. I was given a room. I was in an old French barracks hospital. The nurse was a sister of Rose, the hammer thrower, and looked to me husky enough to handle any of us.

  The hospital was filled to overflowing as casualties came in from the bloody Argonne. Donovan and 15 others were put on a French train.

  “The stretchers and slings were most uncomfortable,” he wrote. “We had coffee without milk, canned corned beef heated, and nothing else. I passed it all and dug up some Y.M.C.A. crackers I had been saving. We had a French orderly on the train. An
old Breton, most obliging. He knew no French yet always knew what the men wanted. All night long this patient fellow worked, always awake, and always smiling.”

  In Paris, Donovan was placed in the Latin Quarter in a building that before the war had housed American girls studying art. There he convalesced as the war came to an end.

  9

  The Men We Left Behind

  COLONEL WILLIAM J. DONOVAN’S extraordinary heroism at Landres and St. Georges, France, October 14–15, 1918, won him a bronze oak leaf cluster to his Distinguished Service Cross. He was also awarded two Purple Hearts and the nation’s highest honor, the Congressional Medal of Honor, which entitles its holder to receive a salute from any person in the military services and to walk out on the floors of Congress at any time.

  The citation in the Congressional Record reads:

  Before Landres and St. Georges in the Argonne on October 14 and 15 the positions were known to be strong. The artillery preparation was brief. It was evident that the attack could be carried through only by desperate resolution. This resolution Lt. Colonel Donovan determined to reinforce by his own example. When the Third Battalion moved out to the assault, he went forward in the rear of the first wave, deliberately wearing the marks of his rank so as to be easily recognized by his men though it also rendered him conspicuous to the enemy.

  The assaulting battalion met with a terrible reception as it crossed the open ground and moved up the slopes toward the trenches. Machine guns and artillery ravaged it from the front and flanks.

  Officers and many of the best non-commissioned officers were hit and some platoons began to be disorganized. Then Colonel Donovan, moving erect from place to place in full view of the enemy, reorganized and heartened his men. As spurts of dust went up around him and shells broke in the vicinity, “See,” he said, “they can’t hit me and they won’t hit you.”

  Officers and men of this battalion say that it would have been impossible for them to have made the advance they did had it not been for the cool resolution, indifference to danger, and personal leadership of Colonel Donovan. It is the general opinion that his conduct on this occasion was of the highest type of courage witnessed by anybody in this regiment during the four major actions in which it has been engaged.

  Donovan’s reaction was much like that of the 12-year-old boy who had won a medal for elocution in a grammar school on the Buffalo waterfront. “It doesn’t belong to me; it belongs to the boys who won it,” he said.

  America’s allies also gave high awards to the hero of the Argonne as he regained his strength in the Paris hospital. The French had already given him the Croix de Guerre. Now the Italian government conferred the Croce al Merito di Guerra on him. The French added a palm and a silver star to his Croix de Guerre and awarded him the Légion d’Honneur, with the rank of commander, and the Italians countered with the Order of the Crown. The king of England made him a knight commander of the Order of the British Empire. Leopold, king of the Belgians, named him to the Order of Leopold with the rank of grand officer, Belgium’s highest award, with a palm denoting heroism in action. Poland gave Donovan the Commander’s Cross with Star, Polish Order of Polonia Restituta, and Norway the Commander’s Order with Star, Order of St. Olav. William J. Donovan received more awards than any other American in the 42nd Division, including Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and most likely in the entire American Expeditionary Force.

  On October 2, former President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Bill Donovan. “I see you have been cited again and promoted to a Lieutenant Colonelcy. I wish to tell you how proud I am of you and with what interest I follow all that you have done.” Later, on October 25, he wrote again, “Ted has just written me saying he would give anything if only he could be made a Lt. Colonel in a regiment under you as Colonel and under Frank McCoy as Brigadier General. My boys regard you as about the finest examples of the American fighting gentleman.”

  Doubtless Bill Donovan, remembering how as a little boy he had tried to live the virile life of challenge as exemplified by the Rough Rider, was more pleased with the letters from Roosevelt than with the awards that kings now competed in giving him.

  Years later, John J. McCloy told an audience of former OSS men how in 1918 he had gone with his commanding officer to see General Menoher, commander of the 42nd Division. “My chief greeted him with, ‘Minnie, how are you getting along?’ Menoher’s nickname at West Point had been ‘Minnie.’

  “His reply was, ‘Fine, except that I have two extraordinary characters in this division, neither of whom I can control. The enemy I can deal with, but these two win more medals than I have to give out. One is Bill Donovan and the other is Douglas MacArthur.”

  A short time after that McCloy met Donovan himself at the front.

  “I have now in my library a picture taken of him at that time with his steel hat just a little cocked, his tunic muddy, and his Irish eyes aflash,” he told the OSS men. “He had the mark of bravery and leadership written all over him. I remember how much I then envied him, his élan, his spark, and his record.”

  While Donovan was still in the hospital, the provost marshal had him transferred to his department, and when he was well enough, Donovan set about his duties. He toured France by car. In his position of inspector instructor in the provost marshal’s department, he was entitled to the best billets and the best food. On Thanksgiving Day the Old 69th was at Useldingen Castle in Luxembourg, still scarcely believing that the war had ended. It was only a few weeks before, on November 11, that they had seized Engineer and Signal Corps supplies of rockets and flares to celebrate the armistice. Bonfires had burned along the lines, and in the chill of a French November, Allied and German soldiers had warmed themselves together at the fires. Now Father Duffy was celebrating Mass in the courtyard of the castle, using a breach in the fortifications as his pulpit. Glancing to the side of the soldiers, he saw a familiar figure on crutches. It was Bill Donovan. The men, catching sight of him, set up a mighty cheer.

  “I want to be back with my old outfit,” Donovan confided to Duffy.

  “For Donovan’s sake, I shall omit the pathos,” Duffy wrote in his diary. “When that young man wants anything very bad, he gets it. I expect to see him back on duty with us in a very, very brief time.”

  Duffy was right. But Donovan continued at his work for the provost marshal long enough to reorganize the administration with such efficiency that he was given still another top award, the Distinguished Service Medal.

  On December 3, the Fighting 69th marched across a bridge over the Sauer River into the village of Bollendorf. They had at last arrived in Germany. The men tramped over rough roads through the Eifel Mountains and rested in Wershofen for five days, going over equipment and patching shoes. They were there when Lt. Col. William J. Donovan caught up to them and took command of the Old 69th by direct order of general headquarters.

  Things were different now. The men marched in easy stages through the valley of the Ahr River to Altenahr, where they were billeted in luxurious resort hotels. They passed through the walled town of Ahrweiler and reached the Rhine at Remagen, which was to be their home for the next four months. They moved into homes and hotels, and every soldier had a bed. As the regiment approached the town, Bill Donovan and Father Duffy went ahead to arrange the billet for headquarters. They called on the Burgermeister, as Duffy said, “a kindly, gentlemanly, educated man, who was anxious to do everything to make our stay in town a harmonious one.”

  The regiment celebrated Christmas at Remagen amidst a defeated enemy who seemed to want only peace and friendship. When the soldiers sang “Take Me Back to New York Town,” German girls looked properly pensive. Little girls learned to skip rope to “The Sidewalks of New York.” Each of the companies gave dinners at the Remagen hotels with the money they had saved from their pay when they were far too busy fighting to spend it. Donovan attended every dinner and was always asked to make a speech.

  “He got in many a strong word of spirit and discipline,” recalled Duffy,
“which had better results in that environment than could have been produced on a more formal occasion.”

  When Bill Donovan’s promotion to full colonel came through, he used his higher rank to advance the other officers and noncoms of his command. He too gave dinners, and invited the officers of other regiments stationed in the occupation forces nearby to participate in what he called “our Metropolitan Hibernian hospitality.”

  On March 16, General Pershing drove to Remagen to review the Rainbow Division. When he came to the 165th, all drawn up proudly before him, he saw the silver battle furls that covered the flag staff from the silk of the colors to the lowest tip. The staff had been stretched beyond the regulation length to make room for an extra foot of furls.

  “What regiment is this?” demanded Pershing.

  “The 165th Infantry, sir.”

  “What regiment was it?”

  “The 69th New York, sir.”

  “The 69th New York. I understand now.”

  Almost every evening Father Duffy and Colonel Donovan walked along the river road beside the Rhine. They strolled to the place Lord Byron had described in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. There was a magnificent view of villages and vineyards where the Rhine swung to the right to pass through the Siebengebirge Gorge. “The companionship makes it all the more attractive,” Duffy wrote in his diary.

  This young Buffalo lawyer who was suddenly called into the business of war, and has made a name for himself throughout the American Expeditionary Force for outstanding courage and keen military judgment, is a remarkable man. As a boy he reveled in Thomas Francis Meaghen’s “Speech on the Sword” and his dream of life was to command an Irish brigade in the service of the Republic. His dream came true, for the 69th in this war was larger than the Irish Brigade ever was. But it did not come true by mere dreaming. He is always physically fit, always alert, ready to do without food, sleep, rest, in the most matter of fact way, thinking of nothing but the work in hand. He has mind and manners and varied experience of life and resoluteness of purpose. He has kept himself clean and sane and whole for whatever adventure life might bring him, and he has come through this surpassing adventure with honor and fame. I like him for his alert mind and just views and ready wit, for his generous enthusiasms and his whole engaging personality. The richest gain I have gotten out of the war is the friendship of William J. Donovan.