“The 91st had never been in any except a practice trench, or heard a bullet or shell fired in battle, when it went into position for the attack,” Frederick Palmer writes in his 1919 account of the Meuse-Argonne, Our Greatest Battle. Palmer had heard many bullets and shells fired by that time; an American war correspondent—like many reporters of the time, he jumped papers pretty frequently, as it suited him—he had seen a good bit of the war by the time the United States entered it, and managed to write and publish three books about it while it was still happening. In the last of these, 1918’s America in France, he predicts that a fight must take place in the Meuse-Argonne, and that an Allied victory there would be essential to an ultimate triumph over Germany. “The German must resist our advance or endanger his line of communications to Champagne and Picardy,” he explains. “The area from Verdun to Holland formed the mouth of a pocket, although a broad one, for all the German army on the soil of northern France. Steady pounding from Verdun to the Argonne must be a part of any great plan which sought, whether in the hope of swift results or in the deliberate expectation of slow results, to force the German army back to German soil, or to draw reinforcements from the Rheims-Flanders line under its threat.”
Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies, envisioned a “Grand Offensive” against Germany’s fearsome Hindenburg Line, its back-against-the-wall defensive position. It would take the shape of a trident, its three points being Ypres, in Belgium, where the Belgians, British, and French would attack; northern France, where mostly British and Australian troops would strike, abetted by two American divisions; and the section of Lorraine, northwest of Verdun, that encompassed the Argonne Forest and a stretch of the Meuse River, where ten American divisions (plus the 368th Infantry Regiment of the 92nd Division) and two French armies (including two regiments of black American troops, the 371st and 372nd) would attack. Ypres had been the site of four previous battles during the war, while northern France had been overrun by the Germans during their great offensive that spring; both were largely flat, and had been blasted clear in the course of four years of war. The Argonne Forest, though, was largely intact and quite dense, and the entire area was full of hills and valleys, with sharp heights above the Meuse. The landscape alone made the place a difficult one in which to launch an assault; the Germans had taken it in the opening weeks of the war, and had promptly augmented nature’s defenses with bunkers and trenchworks, barbed wire and machine-gun nests, tunnels and electric lines and narrow-gauge railroads and lots and lots of concrete. A great many French and Germans had died there in the succeeding four years—sniping and shelling, dropping bombs from aeroplanes or detonating them in subterranean chambers—but France hadn’t launched a major offensive there since 1914. The Germans’ defenses, natural and manmade, were just too formidable.
Now, though, with Germany weakened from its losses during the summer, the Americans would try it. Despite the fact that German defenses there were still very strong, perhaps even as tough as ever, Pershing wanted the Meuse-Argonne for his troops, and had fought hard for it; he’d even agreed to rush his men up there from Saint-Mihiel as soon as that battle was won, though this meant transporting hundreds of thousands of troops in the dark of night—surprise was seen as an essential element of the new offensive’s success—along with guns, tanks, ordnance, and all manner of supplies, all of it (and them) on just three muddy roads. That it somehow managed to succeed, without tipping off the Germans, says a lot about Colonel George Marshall, who planned the operation, and about the men he was moving around. As Frederick Palmer writes in Our Greatest Battle:
Officers who had hoped for a little sleep once the Saint-Mihiel offensive was under way received “travel orders,” with instructions to reach the Argonne area by hopping a motor-truck or in any way they could. Soldiers, after marching all night, might seek sleep in the villages if there were room in houses, barns or haylofts. Blocks of traffic were frequent when some big gun or truck slewed into a slough in the darkness.
Somehow, though, they all made it into place in time, including the Wild West Division, which hadn’t been put into the fight at Saint-Mihiel but was now installed in an important position in the line. Palmer held them in high regard from the first:
The Pacific Coast men had traveled far, clear across the Continent and across the Atlantic. Traveling was in their line. If distance had kept them from reaching the front as soon as some of the eastern divisions, noticeably those praised New Yorkers of the 77th, they would show that they could move fast and stick in the war to the end. The pioneer heritage was theirs; they were neighbors to Alaska, who looked toward Asia across the Pacific: big men who thought big and were used to doing big things. Their people depended upon them for great deeds worthy of their homes beyond the Great Divide. . . .
They had the stamina which their climate breeds. They were under no apprehension that their inexperience in battle would not enable them to take care of the Germans they met, once they were through the trenches and in the open. As men of the distances, they had imagination which applied all their training to the situations which they would have to encounter. No veterans ever went into action with more confidence than these draft men. The roar of the surf on Pacific beaches, of the car-wheels from the Coast to New York, of the steamship propellers across the Atlantic, was the song of their gathered energy suddenly released in a charge.
If I’d known that simply hailing from the West infused one with such a romantic persona, I would have arranged to have been born out there instead of in the land of the 77th. It’s a good thing that the men of the 91st didn’t read Palmer’s paean to them before they started forward on the morning of September 26, 1918; such effusive advanced press can be intimidating.
As it was, they got off to a slow start that morning, having to contend with uncut tangles of German wire, but they benefited from a massive artillery barrage the night before, “so vast, so stunning,” the divisional history records, “and the noise was so overwhelming that no one could grasp the whole. The German trenches were marked in the darkness by a line of leaping fire, punctuated now and then by the higher bursts of some particularly heavy shell.” Hundreds of those shells contained phosgene and mustard gas; yes, America used them, too. By the time the men of the Wild West Division came upon those German front-line trenches, the next morning, they were empty.
Beyond them, though, the 91st ran into stiff resistance, first in the dense Bois de Cheppy (or Cheppy Woods), and then while crossing an open ravine raked by German machine-gun fire. Still, they advanced, knocking out machine-gun nests one by one, taking prisoners along the way. They took a lot of casualties, too, yet they advanced more rapidly than the 35th Division, on their left, and the 37th on their right. Fastest of all was Private Lake’s regiment, the 362nd, which advanced some five miles that day, and by late afternoon had reached the strongly defended village of Épinonville, an act that won them the praise of the regiment’s new commander, Colonel John Henry “Machine Gun” Parker, formerly of the 102nd Infantry Regiment, who had, in the space of four days that summer, been awarded two more Distinguished Service Crosses to supplement the one he’d earned at Seicheprey.
The Montana men now under Parker’s command had done well for themselves on the first day of the offensive. Unfortunately, they did so well that the troops on their flanks—the Wild West Division’s 361st and 363rd Infantry Regiments to their left, the 37th Division to their right—couldn’t keep up. The 362nd had thus created a salient in the German lines that proved difficult to defend; the Germans counterattacked, drove them back out of Épinonville, and promptly set about reinforcing their defensive positions all around the village. The next day, the Montanans tried to take the village again. And again. “Three separate assaults on Épinonville were made, but each was repulsed,” the divisional history reports. “When the attack moved forward it met an enemy reinforced and strongly located in a multitude of machine gun nests, supported also by a well-directed and cruel art
illery fire that grew in intensity throughout the day.” Under different circumstances they might have tried something less dangerous, instead, but they were ordered to push forward as hard and as far as they could in the hope of drawing German firepower away from two American divisions to their right, which were trying desperately to take Montfaucon, having failed in their attempt the day before. At eleven hundred feet, Montfaucon—its name translates to “Falcon Mountain”—was the high point in the sector; it commanded views of the entire area. Like everything else they held in the vicinity, the Germans had taken it in 1914, and had fought off determined French assaults in the months and years that followed. It was essential ground; Kronprinz Wilhelm used it as his personal lookout station, and the Americans knew they couldn’t move forward without it. They took it that second day. Today there is an American monument there, a stout column some two hundred feet high.
The 362nd spent the night of September 27 in the same spot as they had the night of the 26th, south of Épinonville. There were fewer of them this time. The following morning, the rest of the division joined the assault, extending itself out almost into other sectors in an effort to flank the village, which they finally took, and held. The 362nd was then given the unenviable task of keeping the Germans from encircling the Wild West Division’s other three regiments, the 361st, 363rd, and 364th. The farther they all advanced, the farther their salient stretched, leaving them increasingly exposed to German attacks, which in turn became more and more fierce as the Americans advanced, first into the Bois de Cierges—woods filled with barbed wire and machine-gun nests—and then the open fields approaching the village of Gesnes. “The [German] artillery fire had become much more severe from morning on; it continued throughout the night,” the divisional history recalls. “A heavy rain had also come on and increased as darkness closed in. The men had been fighting steadily for three days, had had no blankets to protect them from the cold September nights, and because of their rapid advance it had been impossible to serve them any hot food since before the jump-off.”
Those were the three days that the measles had spared Private William J. Lake.
He arrived at the front on the fourth day, September 29, 1918. His six weeks in that hospital in Liverpool had given him a view of the war that no one else in the Wild West Division had experienced, yet. As the lone American among ailing Tommies, he told me, “it was like a different universe. They talked different. And they told me, they didn’t seem to have any money; they was always asking me for money. Well, I didn’t have any money to give them guys. That’s the way it was—they was just left behind and broke.”
“Were a lot of them wounded?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I saw several of them with their arms and legs off.”
When he was deemed well enough to fight, he was put on a train for Southampton, then a transport for Le Havre, and then, he said, “I had to walk a day to get to the unit,” carrying a fifty-pound pack all the while. When he arrived, the first person to greet him was his captain, a man he and the rest of the Machine Gun Company held in very high esteem. Instinctively, he went to salute, but the captain caught his arm and stopped him; shook his hand, instead. Private Lake was perplexed. “He said, ‘Don’t salute me,’ he says. ‘You don’t know who’s looking.’ And so I didn’t. That’s true—you didn’t know,” he told me.
And then he added, softly: “And he was killed that night.”
“He was killed that night?” I repeated, a bit stunned. “How? By a sniper, or . . .”
“I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is he got killed.” He shook his head. “Well, that hurt me. He was a good guy. He was easy to get along with, but he wanted you to do what [he told you to do] . . . He was one of them guys who wasn’t afraid of nothing.” He added: “He wouldn’t ask you to do anything that he didn’t.”
“Do you remember his name?” I asked.
He was quiet for a moment, pursed his lips. “No,” he said softly. “I cannot remember his name.” It seemed to pain him as much as not being able to remember his father’s.
“So what was it like when you got to the front?” I asked him. “What did it look like?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said as he closed his eyes and shook his head again. “Bullets zipping around you all the time. You just never knew when you was going to get hit. But I was lucky . . .”
He was. The corps commander’s orders for the 91st Division on September 29, the day Private Lake arrived at the front, were to advance and advance, “pushing the attack with utmost vigor and regardless of cost.” For the 362nd, that meant leaving the cover of the Bois de Cierges, crossing a mile or so of open fields, and taking Gesnes. Since the American divisions on their left and right were still way behind them, those fields would be subject to German fire—artillery, machine gun, rifle, mortar, poison gas—from three sides. Machine Gun Parker, who is said to have strongly questioned the wisdom of the orders, nevertheless led the attack himself.
He didn’t make it to Gesnes.
Colonel Parker displayed great gallantry and fearlessness in leading and directing his front line with utter disregard for personal safety and urged his men forward by his personal example, all under heavy machine-gun, high-explosive, gas-shell, and shrapnel fire. He was abreast of his front line until he fell, twice wounded, but thereafter remained in active command for a period of five hours, when he was relieved by the lieutenant colonel of his regiment.
So reads the citation for his fourth Distinguished Service Cross (a record for that war, by the way); it was not awarded posthumously, which implication makes him more fortunate than many of the men under his command that day, who died somewhere in that mile between the woods and the village. More fell in and around Gesnes itself. “This attack was very costly to the 362nd Infantry,” the divisional history offers, with typical understatement. “Colonel Parker and Major Bradbury of the 362nd were wounded, a number of valuable officers were killed, the total loss of regiment in killed and wounded being at least five hundred.”
Still, by day’s end, the 362nd had, somehow, found a way to attain their objective, slowly advancing against terrible resistance to take Gesnes. By nightfall, though, their position was deemed indefensible, and they were ordered to retreat. At least they could get a hot meal, since a few rolling kitchens had finally caught up with them, though they had to be set up in the cover of the Bois de Cierges, and even there could only operate at night. “It was impossible to use these kitchens in the daytime without exposing the vicinity to heavy shell fire,” the history explains. “Some of the men serving the kitchens were killed and wounded, and some men going to the kitchens for hot coffee were wounded.”
The history ends its account of September 29, 1918: “In four days the Division had lost 8 field and 125 company officers and 3,000 men.” Two days later, the figure was 150 officers and 4,000 men. And they would be there nearly another two weeks beyond that.
As he said time and again eighty-five years later, Bill Lake was lucky. He was not among those thousands of casualties. The Germans sure did try to include him, though. Like artillery, machine guns were high-priority targets for the enemy because of the damage they did. (“That machine gun was a wicked gun, that machine gun,” Private Lake recalled. “Oh, man.”) But there are only a few ways to silence a machine gun, since you can’t really assault them directly without exposing yourself to their terrible fire. One is to hit them with artillery; for that you have to know exactly where they are, and you have to be able to hit them quickly enough that they can’t just scuttle away once they figure out what you’re up to. Another way is to crawl up on their flanks undetected—and already you’re getting into a high level of difficulty, as machine-gun nests were often well-protected—and blow them up with grenades. Or, finally, you could kill the guys who run back and forth between the machine gun and its supply depot, fetching ammunition.
Private Lake was one of those guys.
“That’s what they were after,�
� he told me, “they” being the Germans. “After the guys hauling the machine-gun ammunition.”
“They wanted to keep you from—”
“Getting ammunition in there.”
“So what would you do?” I asked. “You would have to ride back and forth between the front line and the ammunition depot?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But we did that at night. We didn’t do it during the daytime.” Too dangerous.
He was given the job, I imagine, because of his experience driving teams of horses. “They didn’t have this mechanized stuff at that time at all,” he explained.
“So when you would go back and forth between the front and the ammunition depot, you were driving a horse cart?” I asked.
“Mule,” he said.
“What were the mules like with the artillery? Did they get spooked?”
“They would get killed once in a while.”
“How did you find your way?”
“Well,” he said, “we knew about where our front line was. And we’d haul it up there so far, and they’d come and get it and carry it in by hand. Because it came in belts.”
“How many belts would you bring back at a time?”
“Oh, maybe four or five.”
“And how many bullets on each belt?”
“A hundred and fifty, I think it was.”
A machine gun can go through 600 or 750 rounds pretty quickly in the heat of battle. Private Lake had to make quite a few runs every night, and flashlights—and lighters, and matches, and anything else that might help illuminate the way—were, of course, forbidden. “Was that difficult?” I asked him.
The Last of the Doughboys Page 41