It did. So successfully, in fact, that the Germans dramatically overachieved their objectives every day. This might sound like a good thing; it was not. Have you ever gone to break down a door with your shoulder, only to discover, at the point of contact, that the aforementioned door wasn’t even latched? Probably not, but I have, and I can tell you that when the resistance you’ve prepared for isn’t there to meet you, you lunge ahead clumsily, and more often than not end up face-down on the floor. That, in essence, is what happened to Germany during their successful-beyond-their-greatest-hopes Spring Offensive of 1918. For one thing, they soon found themselves far ahead of their own supply lines, which can only move so fast. Worse still, they had advanced so quickly that they hadn’t had time to determine an objective beyond simply advancing; soon, they found themselves deep in enemy territory with no idea where to go next. Their offensive floundered, nowhere more colorfully than the town of Albert, where, stunned by the sight of stores full of food and wine—they’d been out of reach of their supply lines for days, and German stores had been all but empty for years—they stopped marching and instead ate and drank themselves into a collective stupor.
By this time, though, France was in a panic. The Germans were now within forty miles of Paris, the closest they had gotten to the French capital since the summer of 1914. Thousands of civilians fled the city, clogging the roads. The French government made plans to relocate to Versailles. The Allied high command feared the worst; among themselves, they agreed they were now confronting the gravest threat of the war. The French and, even more so, the British had been trying for months to force Pershing to throw his men into battle—berating him, belittling him, and when that didn’t work, going through diplomatic channels in an attempt to have him replaced. Pershing, though, had held firm; his men weren’t ready, he said, weren’t fully trained. He would not let the British and French use the Americans as they had the Canadians and Australians, the Senegalese and Moroccans. America had entered the war on its own terms; it would fight under its own command, when it was up to the task.
Now the Allies amplified their pleas, told him just how dire the situation was. And Pershing, moved—probably more by the French, who treated him with greater respect than the British did—committed two Regular Army divisions, the 2nd and the 3rd, to the fight: fifty thousand men, nearly all of whom, it seemed, were terribly excited to finally have their chance to get into the action. Numerous contemporary accounts have them marching to the front with chests swelled and chins thrust out, laughing and joking even as retreating French troops scurried by, warning them to follow suit. If there ever really were a time and place where the scene portrayed in the song “The Americans Come!” actually played out, this was probably it.
Slowly, the Allies started pushing back, though it wasn’t easy, as the Germans had taken care during their offensive to set up defensive positions at various points along the way. So when the 2nd and 3rd Divisions—the 2nd Division at that point comprised two Army regiments, the 9th and the 23rd, and two regiments of Marines, the 5th and 6th—managed to beat back the Germans at Château-Thierry, less than fifty miles northeast of Paris, the Germans fell back into their nearest fortified position, only a few miles away: Belleau Wood. And there the roulette wheel stopped.
Of course, it was the Germans who stopped there, and that wasn’t a matter of chance; the woods offered them an excellent defensive position. You only have to walk through a dense forest to understand why it’s not a good place to launch an attack on an entrenched and experienced enemy. Perhaps that’s why the French didn’t want to go in there themselves, why they asked the Americans to do it, instead. Some historians argue that America should never have undertaken that battle, that they should have known how costly it would be to fight in such conditions, that there were plenty of examples from the previous four years to warn them off. But the Americans were still new to the war and, I would guess, invigorated by the fighting at Château-Thierry, and by news of the 1st Division’s success at Cantigny a few days before that; they followed the Germans up to Belleau Wood, dug in, and withstood German attempts to break out. Again, French soldiers urged the Americans to retreat. The Americans would not. Their attitude was famously summed up by one Captain Lloyd Williams of the 5th Marines, who said: “Retreat? Hell, we just got here!”
Instead, they decided to go on the attack.
Now, years of trench warfare had taught the French, British, and Germans the value of softening up your enemy with a heavy-artillery barrage before you launched an attack against them; but General Pershing, who didn’t much care for trench warfare, also didn’t much care for tactical artillery, at least not at this point in the war. Neither did an old friend of his, James Harbord, who had initially gone to France as Pershing’s chief of staff. By June, 1918, Harbord had been promoted to brigadier general and put in charge of the Marine brigade that comprised the 5th and 6th Regiments. So the Americans launched their initial attack upon entrenched German defenses without the benefit of a prolonged artillery barrage beforehand. Not a good idea.
This would be the morning of June 6, 1918, twenty-six years to the day before Americans would launch another attack against fortified and skilled German defenders elsewhere on French soil (or, as it were in 1944, French sand). In order to get to the woods, and the Germans therein, the Americans had to cross a large, open wheat field. “They started us in waves towards the Belleau Woods,” Private Eugene Lee recalled eighty-five years later. “In four waves—we’d go along and jump the first wave as they go so far, then the next wave, they kept doing that till we reached the woods up there . . . You’d go so far, and you’d keep firing along there, into the woods until the next wave come along . . . We kept going so far, and then you’d lie down, and the next wave would come in back of them, jump each one until they got to the edge of the woods. And then they got in the woods, fighting.”
That day, and that field, are now iconic elements of USMC lore. First Sergeant Dan Daly, a forty-four-year-old native of Long Island who had been in the Corps for nearly twenty years and had already won two Congressional Medals of Honor—two!—is said to have rallied his squad in the open field that day by calling out: “Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?” That quote—or a toned-down version of it, anyway—was recorded by Floyd Gibbons, a dashing reporter for the Chicago Tribune who hurried up from Paris to be with the Marines that day. As he approached the field, a colonel urged him to turn back, warning him it was “damn hot up there.” Gibbons ignored his advice and started across a field “covered with a young crop of oats between ten and fifteen inches high.” When he was halfway across, a German machine gun opened fire; Gibbons, unarmed, flattened himself against the earth and started crawling forward. He didn’t make it very far. One bullet shot through his left bicep; a second nicked his left shoulder. And then a third tore into his left eye, exiting through his forehead. “Just how does it feel to be shot on the field of battle?” Gibbons wrote in his memoir, “And They Thought We Wouldn’t Fight,” published by Doran later that year. “I always wanted to know.” He found out that day, three times over. His judgment: No big deal. “It seemed hard for me to believe at the time, but . . . I was experiencing not any more pain than I had experienced once when I dropped a lighted cigarette on the back of my hand.”
In all, the Marines sustained nearly eleven hundred casualties on June 6, making it the deadliest day in the Corps’s history to that point. “I never saw men charge to their death with finer spirit,” Gibbons would recall in “And They Thought We Wouldn’t Fight,” but still: to their death. Things didn’t get much better once they made it into the woods, either. The good news for the Marines was that, if you must fight in a dense forest, it’s best to do so with sharpshooters, of whom the Corps had many; “The deadliest weapon in the world is a Marine and his rifle!” General Pershing boasted after the battle. The bad news was that the enemy had plenty of them, too. The Americans did manage to wrest Belleau Wood from the Germans,
but then the Germans, famous for counterattacking, did just that, and wrested the forest back. Then the Americans counter-counterattacked, and the Germans counter-counter-counterattacked, and before the Americans could claim victory—on June 26, with a report that stated, simply, “Woods now US Marine Corps entirely”—the forest had changed hands a dozen times. It took the Americans—Army and Marines—twenty days to take it and hold it. The price was 9,777 casualties, of whom 1,811 were killed in action. Among them was Captain Williams, whose refusal to retreat was already famous by the time he was killed on June 12.
Another casualty that day was one Private Eugene Lee, shot through the left wrist. “I was lucky,” he told me. “It didn’t hit the bone.”
“A bullet hit your wrist but didn’t break it?” I asked, not even sure how such a thing might be possible.
“No,” he said. “That’s why I was lucky all the while.”
Despite his injury, Private Lee helped evacuate more seriously wounded Marines. “I helped get them back where they could take care of them, get them to an ambulance,” he recalled. It was an act that won him the military’s third-highest decoration. “The Silver Star,” he said. “I don’t know why they give it to me.”
“I think they gave it to you for bravery under fire,” I told him, “and for helping carry other wounded soldiers out even though you were wounded yourself.”
“Well,” he replied, “you didn’t think about that.”
Both the Army and the Marines fought at Belleau Wood, yet the battle is today remembered solely as a triumph for the Marine Corps. Responsibility for that fact resides with Floyd Gibbons. General Pershing had instituted a strict prohibition against naming specific units, or even branches of the military, in association with any particular action or location; he didn’t want the enemy to have any intelligence about which units were where. But Gibbons, in writing up his coverage of that day’s fighting—three bullet holes, one eye, and all—mentioned that Marines had been in the fight, and the military’s censors, reckoning that Gibbons was dying, decided to leave intact what they figured to be his final dispatch, as a tribute. Of course, Gibbons did not end up dying, at least not until 1939, but since no one else had been allowed to mention any Army units, the public celebrated Belleau Wood as a victory for the USMC, and the USMC alone. By the time the histories started being published, it was too late. The concrete had set in America’s national consciousness.
This didn’t help relations between the Army and the Marine Corps, which had never been all that good to begin with; the matter of who deserved credit for Belleau Wood, which General Pershing afterward called “the most considerable engagement American troops had ever had with a foreign enemy,” generated no small measure of ill will between the two. Ninety years later, I spoke with several historians who felt very strongly that the Army had been denied its due. One of them even asserted that Belleau Wood was the reason that Marines were kept out of the European Theater in World War II.
The French, though, see no controversy. Their feelings about Belleau Wood are summed up by the fact that, immediately after the battle, they renamed the forest—what was left of it, anyway—the Bois de la Brigade de Marine. And they’re crazy about the place; over the decades, they’ve picked it dry, stripping away everything in sight and, with the help of metal detectors, most of what wasn’t in sight. The French government long ago banned the use of metal detectors in such circumstances, but ardent collectors still use them anyway. Sometime around the turn of the new century, one even dug up, in the woods near the village of Lucy-le-Bocage, an old American mess-kit cover with the original owner’s name scratched into the side: WILLIAM E. LEE. 51 CO. US. Delighted, he did some research and was astonished to learn that William E. Lee was still alive and living in Syracuse, New York, though no longer going by his first name.
Private Lee had presumably dropped it—the canteen, not the first name—in those woods on June 12, 1918, when a German bullet drilled through his wrist. And though he considered himself lucky that it hadn’t shattered his bone, the wound was still serious enough to land him in a hospital for four months. He didn’t seem to mind; for one thing, no one was shooting at him there. He even got to play some baseball. Back home, he’d played third base, but at the hospital, he explained, “they got me pitching.”
“Were you good?” I asked him.
“I didn’t have a lot of stuff on the ball,” he said, “but I had good control. I could throw where I wanted to throw.”
“Did you ever bean anybody?”
He laughed. “Yeah . . . one time . . . they had a second lieutenant playing with them, and I hit him on purpose.”
In the hospital, he met another wounded Marine, a fellow named Joe Winook; at least it sounded to me that day like “Winook”—I didn’t ask him for a precise spelling. “He was from the 6th Regiment,” Private Lee, of the 5th Regiment, recalled; they met not while playing ball, but while throwing dice. “He got in a crap game, and he won so much . . .”
“What’d you do with it?”
“Oh, we traveled.” They went to Paris, a good place to spend money, and became fast friends. Eighty-five years later, it was clear that Eugene Lee still thought about his old pal Joe Winook from time to time; he mentioned him often during our visit, spoke of their time at the hospital and in Paris, their return to the front once they’d healed.
It seemed to me that Eugene Lee was a man who didn’t mind revisiting the past on a regular basis. His walls, as I mentioned, were covered with old photographs—pictures of friends and relatives, of girls peering through old tennis rackets, and one of himself, alone and in uniform, labeled: “April 1917, Philadelphia.” The picture that commandeered my gaze, though, didn’t have any people in it at all; it was of a massive airship, broken and resting atop a stand of young trees: a zeppelin. “It’d only landed just a little way, a couple of miles from where we were,” he explained. “Crashed. Next morning, they marched the whole company over to that zeppelin there. And I got a piece of it. I tore [it] off, and I got it somewhere in a bunch of things I got.” This particular zeppelin, the LZ-49 (aka L49, or LZ-96—who understands these things?), was returning to Germany from England, where it had dropped more than two tons of bombs, when, on October 20, 1917, French planes shot it down near the town of Bourbonne-les-Bains, in the region of Lorraine. The German crew escaped unharmed, but soon found themselves nearly surrounded by angry Frenchmen; it’s hard to crash-land a zeppelin without attracting attention to yourself. The crew was supposed to set the airship on fire, but decided they’d better just flee, instead. And so the Allies captured their first intact zeppelin. They inspected it thoroughly, took copious notes; zeppelins had been terrorizing civilian populations in England and France for three years. After the war, the US Navy patterned its first rigid airship, the USS Shenandoah, after the LZ-49.
Seeing my fascination with the picture of the zeppelin, Jim Casey dug out a photo of that recently unearthed mess kit, the one marked “William E. Lee,” and told me about it. And here’s where things start to get hinky.
In the movies or a feel-good newspaper story, the fellow who had dug up that artifact, having discovered that its original owner was, incredibly, still living eighty or so years later—that fellow would magnanimously return his find to the aforementioned original owner, who would pass it on to his overjoyed children, or maybe the Smithsonian. In real life, however, the treasure-hunter, realizing that this astonishing historical quirk made his find all the more valuable, put it up on eBay, instead. Jim didn’t know what happened to it after that, but he recommended that, if I ever got to France, I should look up a fellow named Gilles Lagin. He might know something about it.
Five and a half years later, I did look up Gilles Lagin. A swarthy man built like a shipping crate, Gilles lives in the nigh-unpronounceable town of Marigny-en-Orxois, near Belleau Wood, and grew up hearing tales of the battle fought there nearly half a century before he was born. He also grew up digging for artifacts there, eve
n before the ban on metal detectors; over the decades he found a great many, enough for a little museum, which he established in the upper floor of an old barn next door to his house. He graciously received me there and showed me around.
It’s not exactly what you think of when you hear the words “French museum.” Gilles’s place is actually quite small, just a few rooms, and extremely cluttered. Much of his collection is still in boxes, labeled “1995” and the like, waiting to be organized. Most of it is covered in rust—a lot of rust. Some is arrayed in crannies under eaves, so that you really have to bend over to view it. All of that said, the man has just about everything you can imagine, American and German: helmets, bombs, artillery, gun carriages, grenade launchers, rifles, machine guns, pistols, bayonets, trench knives, gas masks, uniforms, cartridge belts, bandoliers, flags, banners, canteens, mess kits, first-aid kits, cigarette cases, keys, whistles, insignia; and not just one of each, but dozens. He has at least a platoon’s worth of identification disks.
The front room—the only one that doesn’t look like a hoarder’s garage sale—features mannequins in uniform and glass cases filled with carefully labeled objects. All of it, fascinating and even oddly beautiful as it is, though, is upstaged by two very large objects that at first glance seem out of place there. One is a segment of tree husk, stretching from floor to ceiling, in the middle of which is a hole large enough, if not quite wide enough, to stick your head through; that, Gilles explained, came off a tree that was hit by a shell that did not explode. Next to it stands an actual tree—or at least a five-foot-tall chunk of one. Carved into its trunk are the words “USMC, 5th Marines, July 17th, 1918,” surrounding a rough approximation of the Corps’s symbol, an eagle perched atop a globe and anchor. A placard tacked to the top of the trunk reads:
The Last of the Doughboys Page 23