by Neil Hanson
Guillemont Farm was deluged by shell fire as Company G and the rest of the Second Battalion bombed their way across the German trenches in hand-to-hand fighting, and once more Monk set an inspiring lead to his comrades.12 The Second Battalion briefly reached their overall objective, but there were many hidden dugouts and underground passages, and German troops and machine guns kept appearing in new or already cleared areas. One soldier of Company G reported that when German troops suddenly opened fire from a hidden tunnel, the concussion was so great that it tore the rifle from his hand.13
Claims that the German machine gunners had to be tied to their weapons to force them to remain at their posts proved to be false propaganda. “Don’t let anyone tell you they had to chain the German machine gunners to their guns,” said one American officer.14 “Those Germans fought to the last. Not one quit before he was killed or wounded so badly that he could not fight.” Yet the men of the 106th withstood repeated counterattacks and continued to try to advance in the teeth of the counterbarrage and the relentless machine-gun fire.
“Guillemont Farm and Quennemont Farm were hells.15 Our men died by squads trying to silence machine guns. Tanks went in to flatten out the nests, but were of no avail. A whole platoon of our men lay dead in a circle around the batch of nests. In the center their captain lay stark and cold.” More and more of the tanks spearheading the attack ran over mines or were hit by antitank artillery, until all twelve of them were out of action. They had also inadvertently severed communications to Monk’s Second Battalion; the telephone lines were torn out by the advancing tanks.
Even when the main advance had been stopped, individual soldiers and small groups continued to make their way forward, killing snipers and machine gunners and bombing dugouts. First Lieutenant William Bradford Turner displayed almost unimaginable—and ultimately suicidal—bravery. “Stumbling, groping in the dark through barbed wire entanglements in a veritable hurricane of machine gun bullets,” he sprinted across open ground to a machine-gun nest, where he wiped out the entire crew with his pistol.16 He then ran twenty-five yards to the next machine-gun nest and shot another German, while his men killed the rest.
Turner and his men continued to advance, using tactics calculated to deceive and frighten the enemy. They stormed dugouts with grenades and rapid fire, creating the impression that the number of attackers was far larger than the reality. Despite mounting losses, they fought their way through four lines of trenches, killing several machine-gun crews. Even when wounded and out of ammunition, Turner still picked up a dead soldier’s rifle and launched himself at another nest, bayoneting the gun crew before being overpowered and killed. His heroism later earned him the posthumous award of the 27th Division’s first Congressional Medal of Honor. Around his body, men died in scores, and the roads leading back from the battlefield were choked with stretcher cases and walking wounded.
The fighting was most bloody around the Knoll, which changed hands four times that day.17 Both sides knew that they were fighting for control of terrain that would confer a vital advantage in the greater battle to come. At 11:40 a.m. reports stated that the enemy was in Guillemont Farm and cemetery and in some force in South Guillemont Trench, and forty minutes later the men of the 106th were counterattacked and driven off the Knoll.18 They reorganized and in turn counterattacked, forcing the Germans back with the help of artillery and machine-gun fire, but a report timed at 2:35 p.m. again stated that the Americans had withdrawn from the Knoll. The surviving members of the Second Battalion were eventually forced to drop back and occupy Claymore Trench, short of their final objective. The losses they had suffered made them too weak to advance farther, but they held their ground and repulsed several counterattacks.
“Everybody thought we were in contact with the outpost positions of the Hindenburg Line,” Major Gillet later said, “but … we were up against the line itself.19 And a lousy, dirty, dangerous place it was.” In fact, the 106th Infantry did not reach the actual Hindenburg Line, but what he perhaps meant was that the outpost positions were continually reinforced, and counterattacks launched by men emerging from the safety of their shelters within the main Hindenburg Line defenses. Mopping-up parties sent forward to break down the machine-gun nests and clear the dugouts and trenches behind the advancing American troops were bombed and strafed by German aircraft and counterattacked by endless numbers of fresh German troops. They poured out through concealed tunnels from the main Hindenburg Line defenses and filtered through the ravines and communication trenches into dugouts that the artillery barrage had scarcely touched. Enfilading fire and attacks from the rear stopped the American mopping-up parties from pressing forward, and left many of the companies and platoons of the 106th isolated behind German lines.
Confusion was as marked at the headquarters of the 106th as on the front lines. Battalion commanders complained that they were receiving no information at all from their advanced units; at no time during the day was any communication established with them.20 Returning wounded men were often the only source of information on the progress of the attack. When messages were received from the front, they merely reiterated that the position was obscure or not clear, and those reports claiming that the objectives were in American hands, with only pockets of the enemy to be mopped up, proved premature.21
When General O’Ryan visited the headquarters of the First Battalion that afternoon to get direct information, he found that the battalion commander had lost touch with all his companies and had collected forty men to form a defensive line in the original frontline trench.22 Simultaneous reports from the Second Battalion indicated that the enemy was operating between the battalion headquarters and the advancing American troops. Consolidation of the earlier American gains was proving to be impossible. German counterattacks had regained at least partial control of the Knoll and Quennemont and Guillemont farms, and their machine gunners in the rear of the Americans were gradually forcing them to withdraw. As they did so, they left isolated groups of men holding out in shell holes.
At 6:30 that evening, one officer, brimming with misguided confidence, categorically stated that when he left the front line at 5:00 p.23m., the Knoll, Guillemont Farm, and Quennemont Farm were in American hands, with only pockets of the enemy remaining to be mopped up. Another claimed that the Germans were occupying a small portion of the Knoll, but Guillemont Farm and Quennemont Farm were in American hands. In reality, most of the surviving remnants of the 106th Infantry’s three battalions had reassembled in the original frontline trench, and at nightfall, while many of their comrades were still in trenches and shell holes ahead of them, the strongpoints of the Hindenburg Line were more or less back in enemy hands, although around them later were found German dead “thick as flies.”
Some of the units of the 106th who had fought their way through the forests of barbed wire and the mazes of trench systems to break through to the German outposts were now holding a tenuous defensive line in isolated positions and were in urgent need of support. Among them was a platoon of Company F, by now numbering just twenty-five or thirty survivors, who had penetrated the German defenses east of Guillemont Farm.24 There, completely surrounded and with enemy troops bombing their way down the trenches toward them while others came through the communications trenches behind them, they held out until dark. At 7:30 p.m., the relieving troops of the 107th and 108th Infantry sent out four combat patrols to make contact, where possible, with these isolated units and establish a hop-off line for the next day’s attacks, but they failed to find any men of the 106th Infantry and were met by such intense fire that minimal ground was gained.25
Before going into action that morning, the men of the 106th had been given one final chilling instruction: “No man must be taken as a prisoner, but must fight to a finish”; “the supreme rule was kill or be killed.”26 Such orders flagrantly contradicted instructions issued by the adjutant general just one month before, on August 26, 1918, following German press reports that some American soldiers had refused to gi
ve quarter to Germans who had offered to surrender. The adjutant general pointed out that such reports would only increase enemy resistance by instilling in their minds that they would be killed even if they tried to surrender. He then restated the policy of the United States Army: “An offer to surrender on the part of enemy soldiers not guilty of treacherous conduct will be accepted and these soldiers given food, shelter and protection strictly as laid down in the ‘Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land.’ ” But in the battleground before the Hindenburg Line, very few prisoners were taken on either side, and the fighting had cost the 106th dearly.
Dead and wounded men of both sides lay everywhere, strewn across the battlefield. Some wounded were brought in by the patrols of the 107th and 108th, but others remained out in No Man’s Land all night, their cries weakening as the night went on and falling silent, one by one, as death claimed more victims. Many of the living wounded were again treated by British and Australian field ambulances and field hospitals; once more, there were simply not enough of the 27th Division’s own medical personnel to cope with the casualties.
After they were relieved at three in the morning on September 28, Monk’s Second Battalion faced a long, weary trudge back out of the lines before they could even think about rest. They marched to Villers-Faucon, where they were quartered in “elephant huts” [huts roofed with corrugated-iron sheets] and shelled billets.27 It was understandable that, though dog-tired, they were “proud to think that they had licked the stuffings out of the enemy and paved the way for the major operation of the 29th of September.” The Second Battalion’s war diary for that day also claimed that the objective had been reached and held successfully, and a counterattack repulsed with heavy enemy casualties. Certainly it was true that the 106th had shaken the morale of the German forces, claimed large numbers of enemy lives, and significantly weakened the German position, but the three strongpoints had not been taken and held. The front line was practically the same as it had been that morning.
There was no disgrace in the 106th’s failure to achieve its objectives; far stronger British forces had repeatedly failed to capture the Knoll, Quennemont Farm, and Guillemont Farm. The 106th’s lack of success might also have been partly due to its inexperience, but it was primarily the result of an unnecessarily complex and overambitious battle plan produced by the Allied commander of that sector, the Australian General Monash, and approved by the British General Rawlinson.28 It demanded a farther advance from the Americans than Monash had ever expected his Australian troops to achieve, and yet he had committed far too few troops to it. The three battalions of the 106th were allocated a front of about four thousand yards. They were well below strength even before beginning the attack and could hardly have been expected to make much of an advance even if they had all been at full battalion strength and fighting in open battle, rather than when the enemy troops were shielded by trenches and concrete fortifications. When the attack was resumed on September 29, the same front was occupied by two numerically stronger regiments—the 107th and the 108th—on the front line, with the 105th Infantry and what was left of the 106th in support, almost three times as many troops as had been committed on September 27.
There had also been a significant failure to learn the lessons drawn from observations of German tactics that were circulated to officers of the A.E.F. in May and June of that year, months before the battle of the Hindenburg Line. They drew attention to the use of infiltration and small columns in which the enemy advance guard would slip through any chinks in the defenses, with the infantry following force to exploit any breakthrough.29 Against poorly organized defenses, these tactics could succeed with only modest artillery support, or even without any artillery. The enemy would also use natural features like ravines and streambeds to penetrate the defenses and then turn right or left to roll up the defensive line. The comments on methods of attack make equally sobering—and prophetic—reading in the light of the 106th Infantry’s experiences: “Advance by waves, even preceded by the creeping barrage is no longer enough, when the objectives to be taken are well defended, and could not be sufficiently destroyed previously by the artillery.”
A further document drawing similar conclusions had been circulated in July, but if the officers of the 106th Infantry had read those reports—issued to all officers down to company commanders—there was little sign of appropriate measures being put into effect on the battlefield that day, though that is not to denigrate the courage of the enlisted men sent over the top. The fact that lacking any worthwhile support from the tanks, the 106th Infantry had still broken through the defenses and gained a foothold in the three enemy strongpoints, thus disorganizing the enemy’s defense, was, General O’Ryan later said, “an extraordinary feat.30 The valor of the officers and men of the regiment is well indicated by the location of the bodies of their gallant comrades who fell in the battle and by the large number of enemy dead about them.” His men had “fought like wildcats. I’d like to talk it over with some of the enemy who may still be alive who faced us on that day and see just what they thought of our advance.”
The surviving soldiers of the 106th Infantry were “tired, spattered with mud, stiff and lame and scratched by barbed wire, of times half-dazed with shell shock,” and they were stunned by the losses they had suffered. On the night before the attack, Monk’s Second Battalion had reported 10 officers and 515 men present for all duty. Twenty-four hours later, just 5 officers and 241 men remained. The Third Battalion saw its numbers shrink from 12 officers and 484 men to 4 officers and 210 men, and the losses of the First Battalion were even more catastrophic. The night before the attack it had 6 officers and 491 men. When relieved twenty-four hours later, there were 4 officers and 98 men—a casualty rate of almost 80 percent. Only one of the line officers—those involved in the actual fighting—of the Third Battalion had survived; all those of Monk’s Second Battalion were either dead or wounded; and all but one of the line officers of the First Battalion were killed or wounded. In total, 956 men of the 106th had been killed or were missing in action, wounded, or gassed, and a further 8 officers and 259 men had been captured.
Soldiers had to be quite seriously injured to be officially classified as wounded, and almost all the surviving men were carrying wounds of varying severity, so that at eleven o’clock the next morning, the 106th Infantry had just 9 officers—only 2 of them line officers—and 252 men present and ready for duty. Some of those survivors must have shared the mixed feelings of a soldier who declared, “The end of the world came today and yet here I am … I never was so happy and so proud in all my life and I never was so sad as I am now over all who died and showed wounds I shall see in dreams if I ever sleep again.”31 So formidable had been the opposition and so insufficient in numbers the attacking troops that one officer pondered whether the 106th had been sent out as “a sort of sacrifice company to feel and prepare the way for future attacks on a grander scale.”32
18
THE HINDENBURG LINE
On the morning of September 28, 1918, without sleep since September 26, hungry and filthy, the men of the 106th lay in their billets in a stupefied state, completely exhausted from the ordeal they had endured. “They were quiet, perhaps with a feeling that they had done everything that could have been expected of them; yet they were aware that they would undoubtedly be called back into the lines.”1
Although now forty-four years old, Monk had never sought nor expected any concessions because of his age. He had fought as long and as hard as any of his comrades, and if they had to fight again, no one doubted for a moment that Monk would again be where the fire was hottest. However, there was no well-deserved rest for Monk, or for any of the exhausted men around him. The bloodied and battered remnants of the 106th Infantry—all of its available troops—were now to be organized into a provisional battalion of moppers-up, to follow the attack by the 107th and 108th over the top at dawn the next morning.2 Led by Major Gillet, in addition to the remnants of the fighting t
roops, “every officer and man of the 106th capable of shouldering a rifle … noncommissioned staff officers, cooks, clerks, teamsters and survivors lately relieved,” were formed into three companies, X, Y, and Z, with a total strength of just 350 men—“the LAST offering of the 106th Infantry.”3
Immediately after issuing the order that might spell “the complete annihilation of the 106th Infantry,” General O’Ryan appeared before the survivors to urge them to “finish the job. The response to this harangue was nothing more than the blank stare of men stunned by what appeared to them as brutal audacity.” Noting their reaction, the general, “with great tact and apparent feeling”—not to mention a certain callous calculation—asked if they were happy to abandon their wounded comrades, who at that very minute were lying where they had fallen on the battlefield. The men of the 106th at once rose to his challenge. A good general is often said to require three characteristics above all others: intelligence, ruthlessness, and luck. No one had ever doubted O’Ryan’s intelligence; now they would not doubt his ruthlessness, either. Whether he would prove to be lucky, too, would be decided by the events of the next forty-eight hours.
The regiments relieving what was left of the 106th—the 107th and 108th—had attempted to complete their job on the morning of September 28, pushing combat patrols forward to dislodge the enemy, but these attempts had resulted only in savage fighting and severe casualties without worthwhile territorial gain. The first objectives for the troops preparing to assault the main fortifications of the Hindenburg Line on the morning of September 29—part of an Allied assault along a front of approximately a hundred miles—would now be to complete the capture of the outpost strongpoints, which had cost the 106th so dearly.