In a clearing in the woods not far from Seicheprey, in the region of Lorraine in northeastern France, you will find a section of German trench, complete with concrete walls and steps and iron handgrips. These are common in this part of the country, but this particular section is so well preserved that at some point in recent years someone thought to put up a kiosk commemorating the fighting that took place in and around it. Toward the bottom of that kiosk you can see an old greenish photograph; it looks very familiar: long rows of doughboys in puttees and tin hats, sitting cross-legged, kneeling, standing. It seems just like any number of official platoon or company portraits, those stretched-out panoramic shots you sometimes find in attics, their elongated frames caked in dust. Look closely at this particular photograph, though, and its strangeness starts to reveal itself. It’s a bit grainy, for one thing; the photographer probably wasn’t a professional. The soldiers aren’t in camp or the field, but sitting and standing in front of some sort of quasi-official-looking edifice. And none of them—not a single one—is smiling. Many are looking down at the ground; a few are even hiding their faces. Those faces that are clearly visible can fairly be described as hangdog.
Their stay in the Toul Sector had started inauspiciously. They had arrived at the end of March, wet and exhausted, to find the place quite literally a mess. They were replacing American troops of the 1st Division commanded by Major Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the former president. “He was found to be a pleasant, congenial fellow,” recalled Captain Daniel W. Strickland in his account, Connecticut Fights: The Story of the 102nd Regiment, published in 1930. “When the relieving officers came upon him he was busily writing at a make-shift desk in his dugout, with water up to his ankles, and he reached up occasionally either to scratch his back or tear a hunk from a loaf of stale bread.” As much of a treat as this encounter may have seemed, TR Jr. wasn’t quite ready to move his troops out yet, meaning that the men of the 102nd could not rest, but rather “must then rot in the decay of ancient, vermin-infested billets and shelters that had not been cleaned for years” for a while longer. “The sector,” Strickland explains, “had become known as ‘the American Sector’ or the ‘Toul Sector,’ and had achieved much notoriety because of being the first sector held entirely by United States troops.”
Seeing the words “American Sector” on a battle map must have given the AEF no small measure of pride, but the men of the Yankee Division no doubt would have rather been elsewhere just then. Strickland sets the scene:
When the Americans took over this sector one of the outstanding features was its run-down condition. Winter was just over; the rainy season was in progress. . . . The low country in which lay the forward positions was full of marshes and tiny streams. . . . Long stretches of trench contained water one or two feet deep, over soft mud, into which a man would sink nearly to the waist. . . . Thousands of yards of telephone wire were fastened to the trench walls—all unused—the evident principle having been that it was simpler to string new wire than to repair the old. . . . Often wounded had to be carried over the top. . . . In many places it was impossible to proceed for any great distance in a trench without climbing onto the parapet and walking there. . . . No latrine system was established, so that all trenches were polluted.
This is a side of that war you rarely hear about: the mess. Sure, there was the mess of getting shot by machine-gun bullets, of having your arm or leg or head blown off by an artillery shell, of having your intestines snagged on barbed wire or your lungs broken down and spit up after exposure to poison gas. But when you think of World War I, you don’t think of sinking up to your waist in a gumbo of mud and human filth and, for good measure, old telephone wire. Somehow, I imagine troops in such a spot would find that last ingredient particularly galling. What a tease.
Up to that point, the Americans hadn’t had much of a war. They had fired a few shots at the Germans, and the Germans had fired a few back. A handful had been killed; a few captured. But for the most part, American soldiers spent their first year of the war training and observing, both at a safe-enough reserve.
This was more than simply good luck. The French and British, delighted and relieved that America was finally getting into this thing, would have liked nothing more than to use the promised millions of fresh American troops the way they had used the Canadians and the Australians and New Zealanders, the Indochinese and Senegalese: to draw German fire away from them, to give them a break, some relief. A cynic might liken that type of assignment to being used as cannon fodder—Newfoundlanders, for instance, whose only regiment suffered 90 percent casualties during the first half hour of the Battle of the Somme. General Pershing, knowing that tale and so many others, refused to allow American units to be split up and deployed piecemeal under British or French command. This didn’t make Pershing terribly popular with the French and British high commands; they—especially the British—put a tremendous amount of pressure on him to change his mind. But Pershing held firm, and the British and French decided they’d rather give the Americans their own sectors than have them sit out the fight any longer. At this point—the early spring of 1918—there still weren’t all that many Americans in France; better to find out what they were capable of before the bulk of them showed up.
So here they were, the Yankee Division, having shipped across without orders, the first American division to arrive in full, taking over the newly rechristened American Sector. In addition to the mess, they had to deal with other nuisances no Americans had faced to date in France, like a German Army that was quite close by and eager to terrify, humiliate, and demoralize them. The Germans had been entrenched in their positions since 1914; they held, for the most part, the better ground, and took shelter in trenches and bunkers that were made of concrete, not dirt. (They had much better drainage and latrine systems, too.) They had built a large yet efficient network of infirmaries, hospitals, and rest camps, all of it electrified, connected by tunnels and supplied by narrow-gauge railroad. On the other hand, the French, who’d been trying to take the territory back since 1914, refused to build anything permanent, for philosophical reasons: Constructing concrete trenches, not to mention hospitals, implied that it might take you a while to recover what you’d lost. This was considered to be bad for morale—worse, apparently, than crumbling trenches and greatly delayed medical care. The new troops had to adjust to this prevailing mindset, and their surroundings, very quickly; they were facing an enemy with much more experience and much greater knowledge of the area, an enemy who was better rested than they were and eager to attack before the YD could get established there.
And attack the enemy did, almost immediately. On April 1 they began a withering artillery barrage; for more than two weeks they fired H.E. and gas shells at the Americans day and night. They jabbed at the American lines at Bois Brulé and Apremont. They ambushed American patrols, bombarded American field kitchens when they knew meals were being prepared, and even hijacked an American supply wagon, shooting all the mules and a couple of soldiers, carrying off the rations and a wounded American sergeant, and leaving that day’s mail delivery scattered in the mud. “Much is said about men who face the enemy in hand to hand conflict,” Strickland writes, “but too little is recorded of those men on the escort and ammunition wagon who with black snake whip in one hand, reins in the other, with a smothering gas mask on, with foot on the brake and without lights of any kind save the glare of shell and battery guns, lashed their teams through the teeth of the barrage, or drum fire to bring grub, hot coffee, and grenades to their dependant comrades up forward.” No one in this “safe” sector was ever really safe.
Not even in camp. “An irritating feature of the sector,” Strickland writes with measured understatement, “was the constant belief that enemy spies were moving freely among the troops.” Everyone, it seemed, had a story about someone—a French officer or American soldier, always from a nearby unit, close but not so close as to be familiar—who showed up asking questions about which units were in t
he area, what their strength was, who was in charge, the state of fortifications, and anything else they could find out. Often, no one considered the matter suspicious until after they had left, although just enough spies did get caught to foment a certain level of paranoia. “Germans had put on American uniforms and mingled freely with our men at mess and in the rear areas,” Strickland explains; the source of this knowledge was captured German soldiers. “Some of our men captured were called by name and nickname by the Bosche. They then knew that, posing as telephone men and runners from other units, the Germans had been able to pass freely and gather any information they chose. . . . On one occasion two strangers, one uniformed as a colonel and the other as a major, passed up and down the front line trenches for an entire forenoon unchallenged, the troops believing them to be inspecting officers until an American officer, noticing that the colonel’s eagles were pinned on upside down, reported the pair to regimental headquarters and they were apprehended and passed back to higher authority for examination. No one ever learned what became of the case.”
Men became wary about talking even to one another. Clearly, something big was in the works.
“Midnight of the nineteenth–twentieth of April was as clear and quiet a night as one could ask for on the Toul front,” Strickland writes. “One of those clear, dreamy moonlight nights when the war seemed far away.” When someone writes something like that, you know it won’t last:
Then at 3:16 o’clock all hell was let loose! Just as the mist and fog had begun to settle along the bottom lands the Boche tore out with his barrage, the most terrific the 102nd had yet faced. A belt of artillery fire was laid on the front line fire trenches to annihilate the defenders there. Another belt cut off the front lines from support, while the trenches occupied by support platoons were pounded so unmercifully that almost every man was killed or wounded. Another band of fire swept the lateral road along Beaumont Ridge to prevent regimental or division reserve from coming to the assistance of Seicheprey. Still other bands of enemy fire were directed between the front line units to prevent communication. . . . It was a wonderfully planned piece of artillery work by the Germans . . . which made it impossible for troops or even messengers to pass through alive.
The men of the 102nd—under the command of Colonel John Henry “Machine Gun” Parker, so nicknamed because, as Taylor put it, he “had achieved a wide distinction as an exponent of advanced ideas on the tactical employment” of that weapon—were isolated and boxed in at Seicheprey; the only way out was straight forward, into the German lines. But that gap was quickly filled by a dense column of German troops, at the head of which were a frenzy of the dreaded Stosstruppen, German storm troopers, hundreds of them. The literal translation of Stosstruppen is “shock troops,” and that was their job: to charge without warning (unless you consider a massive artillery barrage a warning) into an enemy area, shrieking and throwing grenades everywhere and firing off rifles when they weren’t throwing grenades, their objective being to shock and disorient the entrenched enemy, thus softening them up for the much larger force of infantry following close behind. On this particular morning, they charged in before dawn after more than an hour of H.E. and gas shells raining down from above, many of them armed with flamethrowers. The Americans had never seen Stosstruppen or flamethrowers before; it’s safe to say the Germans achieved their initial objective—to stun the doughboys of the 102nd. It was bedlam, shrieking chaotic death with guttural accents. And it was everywhere.
Strickland:
Through the mist and fog overhead droned a black enemy plane, almost touching the house-tops, with absolute precision signaling the enemy artillery the location of each little group of defenders.
Sibley:
Almost immediately all telephone wires were cut by the artillery fire; the radio station at Seicheprey was knocked out, and trench shelters all over the front were caved in. Batteries and support positions were thoroughly gassed, besides being shelled.
Strickland:
Screams and screeches that made the blood run cold came from the throats of half drunken Germans as they hurled their deadly “potato masher” grenades at every American that appeared.
Sibley:
After the first rush, the entire fight at Seicheprey was a matter of small group combats. Nowhere did more than a platoon fight in one body, and in most places there were not more than twenty men in a bunch.
Strickland:
From the right of the town came screams and groans of agony as the Boche poured a stream of liquid fire into a “pill box” of 102nd machine gunners. Boxes of high explosive set off at dugout doors and alongside shelters brought down tons of mortar and debris on helpless doughboys.
Sibley:
The combat group in the extreme left of the Sibille trench was captured intact. A young officer, in charge of this group, put his men into the trench shelters when the bombardment began. The Germans came so suddenly that they caught the platoon napping.
Strickland:
Chunks of stone and mortar, picks and shovels, clubbed rifles, were being used for weapons, while here and there grey clad forms rolled over and over in the death-lock with khaki.
Sibley:
The next group to the right fought until every man was either killed, wounded or captured. . . . Captain Locke of Company M . . . fought straight on, even after he was summoned to surrender. He managed to get three revolver clips of cartridge home, one after the other, in the faces of the Boches before they dared rush him; he was reloading for the fourth time when they closed in and killed him.
Strickland:
Carl Jacobs, the mess sergeant of Company “D”, and his kitchen police . . . fought off the crew of the liquid fire gun with cleavers and butcher knives.
Sibley:
The crew of the kitchen were all dead or wounded; they had fought to a finish with the Germans, even when so surprised that one man fought with a cleaver. He did good work with the weapon, splitting a German right down through the head to the very shoulders.
Strickland:
The sector ammunition dump was afire so that cartridges, trench mortar shells, rockets and other combustibles were exploding in every direction.
Sibley:
Private Parker L. Polson of the 101st Signal Corps . . . was at the wireless station of the 102nd Infantry, and the aerials kept getting themselves shot away. Three times Polson climbed up into the tree which supported them, thirty feet up in the shower of flying fragments of steel, to repair the aerials. It should be remembered that Fritz paid constant and particular attention with his artillery to this wireless station, whose position and importance he knew very well.
Strickland:
Men were dying for lack of surgical attention, because the entire medical platoon had been killed or captured save one man, John R. Cannon. Several runners were killed in attempting to get more information back to Colonel Parker.
Sibley:
[Colonel Parker came across] two men of the 102nd Machine Gun Battalion, dead across their gun. . . . They had sold out dearly; there was a ring of dead Germans in front of them, scattered in the gully. At the end, they had evidently been killed in hand-to-hand fighting. In front of one of them lay two dead Germans, in front of the other three.
Strickland:
Both [companies] “C” and “D” had received orders that in case of attack . . . there was to be no falling back. And there had been no falling back. The men of Connecticut held the line until annihilated! There they were, dead—in windrows almost, out in front of the fire trenches that which by reason of the mud made poor places from which to fight. The heavy shock had been met by those that survived the awful shelling and grenading, and they accounted for themselves as men do who know that there is to be no retreat.
Taylor:
In Remieres Wood . . . were found two men of a machine-gun crew, killed—one with his finger on the trigger, the other with a feed strip in his hand, all ammunition exhausted, but with a heap of dead Germans in fron
t of them, stopped by the two in their attempt to rush the gun. . . . In other centers combat groups were killed, fighting to the last man, at their posts. Surrounded, there was many a lad who, summoned to surrender, fought with clubbed and broken rifle, and when overpowered, still struggled with his captors—as was told by the Germans themselves months later. For every prisoner taken, the enemy paid in good measure.
His leadership of the 102nd on that day earned Machine Gun Parker a Distinguished Service Cross, a decoration second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor. Even so, after Seicheprey, the Yankee Division was criticized—for giving up ground, no matter how briefly (“By 6 a.m.,” Sibley writes, “the enemy was entirely out of Seicheprey, having stayed less than forty minutes”), and for failing to follow up with a strong counterattack (generally blamed on the dithering of one officer, the ironically named Major Gallant, who afterward, Sibley reports, was promptly “arrested and tried by court-martial for disobedience of orders, and the Division never saw him again”). But mostly, they were criticized for their losses: not for the two hundred or so men who were killed, or the six hundred or so who were wounded, but for that third category. “The Germans said they considered our men crazy because when surrounded and outnumbered they refused to surrender and continued fighting, regardless of odds, until physically overpowered or killed,” Sibley relates with pride. And if you peruse the accounts, you can’t help but notice that the Germans went to an awful lot of trouble to overpower and capture Americans when it would have been much easier just to kill them. If the Germans didn’t achieve their primary objective of taking and holding Seicheprey, they did manage to achieve another type of victory: They captured 150 fresh doughboys, most of them from Connecticut.
The Last of the Doughboys Page 8