by Neil Hanson
The instructions issued to the machine-gun companies show the absolute determination that in this ultimate test, the New York division should not be found wanting:
This position will be held and the section will remain here until relieved.4
The enemy cannot be allowed to interfere with this program.
If the gun team cannot remain here alive, it will remain here dead, but in any case, it will remain here.
Should any man, through shell shock or other cause, attempt to surrender, he will remain here—dead.
Should the gun be put out of actions, the team will use rifles, revolvers, Mills grenades and other novelties.
Finally, the position, as stated, will be held.
If the outposts could be neutralized, the main fortifications of the Hindenburg Line, built by the forced labor of thousands of prisoners and conscripted Frenchmen, would lie open to attack. But those fortifications were truly formidable. There were three deep trenches with concrete firing steps, each protected by a belt of barbed-wire entanglements twenty to thirty feet wide.5 If the first belt of wire was cut, there was another behind it, and still another beyond that. The trenches were as strong as human ingenuity and muscle could make them. Behind them was the Saint-Quentin Tunnel, built by Napoleon in 1811, now pressed into use as an underground barracks, a safe haven for fresh troops and a refuge for battle-weary ones. The tunnel formed an integral part of a multilayered defensive system, sited with such skill that it effectively denied the Allied artillery positions from which to attack it.
More than six thousand yards long, and ten to sixty yards belowground, the tunnel passed straight through a hill. The entrances at either end had been sealed with ferro-concrete walls four feet thick, containing upper and lower chambers, with machine gunners shielded from attack, firing through slits in the walls to cover the tunnel entrance. A series of barges moored on the canal inside the tunnel acted as barracks for the garrison, and passages and galleries had been cut through the rock to the firing trenches and the outpost positions, allowing reinforcements to reach them and wounded or exhausted troops to return to safety without being exposed to enemy gunfire or airplane observation. Nine separate galleries led to the fortified village of Bony alone, a stronghold immediately in front of the tunnel system. All the passages and their exits were heavily fortified and well camouflaged, concealing them from American observers and artillery spotters.
On either side of the tunnel, the canal ran through cuttings sixty feet deep in places, in the sides of which the Germans had built innumerable tunneled dugouts and concrete shelters. Concrete and armored steel machine-gun emplacements were concealed along the top edge of the cuttings. About four thousand yards behind the main trench lines was another double trench system, protected by huge barbed-wire entanglements and holding many more concrete shelters and machine-gun emplacements. The whole series of defenses, including several fortified villages, varied in depth from seven to ten thousand yards and formed a system thoroughly deserving of the formidable reputation ascribed to it. The Allied staffs had obtained a book describing the Hindenburg Line defenses and boasting that the section the New York troops were to attack was impossible for an attacking force to take.6 Even armed with the book, the Allied commanders did not know the half of it, for the book made no mention of the traps, mines, and secret tunnels that would prove so destructive to the American troops when the attack was launched.
During the night of September 28 through 29, despite heavy enemy fire, horse-drawn wagons brought forward rations, water, and ammunition. Supply dumps were set up just behind the lines, and pack animals were readied to carry fresh supplies forward as the troops advanced the next day. Assault rations were issued, and extra water canteens, pickaxes, shovels, grenades, flares, rockets, and great quantities of ammunition, carried in bandoliers and belts, were distributed, adding to the soldiers’ burden.
The sky was overcast and the blackness of the night was broken only by the tracks of rockets seared across the sky, and the flashes of heavy guns. The German guns roared in answer, and the artillery duel took an increasingly heavy toll as the night wore on. The provisional battalion of the 106th formed up in the rear areas at 10:45 that evening. They were given a hot meal at eleven and then moved out at midnight, up the Ronssoy road.7 At once they found themselves part of a jostling mass of men, horses, trucks, and tanks, all competing for road space and trying to make progress toward the front. At last, the battalion left the congested road and struck off due east over the shell-torn fields. Ahead of them, the outlines of groups of men faintly silhouetted against the first graying of the eastern sky marked the position of the front lines. Knowing that a fresh attack must be imminent, the Germans were firing salvos of flares and rockets that created “a pyrotechnic display of blue, green and red, terrible in its import.”
Already tired by the forced march that night and by the aftereffects of their battle, Monk and the rest of the provisional battalion arrived at their start position as support for the first wave just before zero hour on a bleak and rain-swept autumn day. However, one company became detached from the rest as they moved into the line, and had still not arrived at the jumping-off point as the attack began. The troops awaiting the signal to advance knew that many of them would soon be counted among the dead. The British gave all the American troops half a tumbler of rum before the charge: “a little of it will make a rabbit stand up and fight a bear.”8 Then, at 5:50 on the morning of September 29, 1918, the big guns burst into life, said to be the most terrifying shellfire of the war.
Accompanied by tanks, the infantry was to advance behind a creeping barrage that would move forward twenty-five hundred yards and then remain static for fifteen minutes four hundred yards east of the tunnel, to allow time for mopping up and to interdict German reinforcements moving up from the rear. It would then creep forward again for another twenty-five hundred yards, and then continue falling on that point, a curtain of fire that—if the supply dumps of shells had not already been exhausted—would continue until the attacking troops had consolidated their gains and the inevitable German counterattacks had been repulsed.
Aerial reconnaissance had shown that pockets of soldiers of the 106th were still holding out in shell holes and isolated positions, and concerns had been voiced that, having survived the battle on September 27, the men occupying those positions ahead of the jump-off line would be shelled by their own men. However, the barrage tables had been predicated on the 106th achieving its objectives on September 27; the starting line for the shelling was the objective line that they had failed to reach, rather than the actual front line, one thousand yards farther back. It was claimed that it was impracticable to change the barrage tables to allow for this, and a request for a twenty-four-hour postponement of the attack to allow the revisions to be made was refused by the British.9 As a result, the barrage was laid down eleven hundred yards in front of the advancing troops’ jump-off point, and actually fell on the far side of the hotly defended German strongpoints of the Knoll, Guillemont Farm, and Quennemont Farm. The only modest concession that could be wrung from the artillery commanders was that the barrage “lifts” would now be a hundred yards in four minutes, instead of a hundred yards in three minutes.
Between two barrages, their own well in front of them and the enemy’s fifty yards behind them, and with machine-gun bullets spattering all around them, the American troops began to advance in a haze that was half mist and half smoke. The scene that confronted them was one of utter desolation: a wilderness of shell holes and collapsed trenches; ravaged earth; twisted and mangled thickets of barbed wire; abandoned rifles, helmets, and other equipment; and mangled corpses, all testifying to the terrible power of the Allied barrage. Yet the majority of the Germans had once more escaped the shelling in their deep shelters. They emerged so rapidly to take up the fight that some of the advancing Americans encountered the first enemy troops in force only about twenty-five yards from their starting tape.10 Despite this, prisoners c
aptured in the early stages told their interrogators that the attack had been a surprise. Even if that was really true and not simply telling their interrogators what they wanted to hear, the Germans were soon directing withering fire at the advancing Americans, a hail of bursting shells, shot, and shrapnel, and continuous enfilading fire from machine guns on the flanks.
Just as on September 27, the early progress of the attack was deceptively rapid, although smoke from shell bursts and guns lay so thick over the battlefield that it was all but impossible for commanders to see what was happening. The fighting was some of the most bloody and ferocious of the entire war. Millions of machine-gun bullets raked the advancing troops, and by 9:10 a.m. there were reports that the Third Battalion of the 107th Infantry was suffering heavy casualties at Guillemont Farm.11
Mark 5 Star tanks, the heaviest used by the British Army, each mounted with small cannon and six machine guns, were again spearheading the assault but, just as in the preliminary action, they were found to be virtually useless. Within ten minutes of the opening of the barrage, nine tanks had been destroyed.12 More were quickly put out of action, threatening the infantry’s ability to get through the German barbed wire, but the 27th Division’s engineers rushed forward and laid closely woven wire netting over the top of the wire entanglements. The infantry then pushed on over the barbed wire and toward the Hindenburg Line. As they advanced, the men of the 108th Infantry reported passing over small groups of the 106th Infantry, who were indeed still holding what ground they had gained in the fighting two days before.
In the original battle plan, the 106th Infantry had been scheduled to follow the 3rd Australian Division across the canal tunnel, but their losses in the preliminary attack had been so severe that this part of the plan was abandoned. Instead, the provisional battalion of the 106th was ordered forward behind the Third Battalion of the 107th Infantry, to assist in mopping up the Hindenburg Line, tunnels, and exits. After he had advanced with his men about seven hundred yards, Major Gillet was wounded by machine-gun bullets for the second time and, badly hurt, was stretchered to the rear.13 By eleven that morning the rest of the provisional battalion had reached the edge of Guillemont Farm, fighting their way through with ferocious determination, bombing enemy machine-gun nests and trenches.
Their losses were again substantial; out of the provisional battalion’s fourteen remaining line officers, nine, including Major Gillet, were killed or wounded, and another was missing in action. One officer, engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a much bigger German, gouged out his opponent’s eye and pinioned him with a finger hooked into the eye socket and a thumb clamped in his mouth until he could reach his knife and dispatch him.14 The 106th’s Colonel Franklin Ward described the fighting as “murder, hell-to-breakfast carnage.” In one sector the Germans formed a human chain, passing grenades forward to the lead men, who threw them in a constant stream. Yet no matter how many American soldiers fell, there were always others to take their places. The composite battalion of the 106th caught up with the 107th Infantry near Willow Trench and joined its fight, occupying trenches between Guillemont Farm and the Knoll, including the Knoll Switch Trenches, where the body of Lieutenant Turner still lay.
Information from the front lines was again obscure, confusing, or practically nil, and some reports were still claiming advances while others were citing withdrawals under heavy fire. The machine-gun fire was “thicker than flies in summer,” so heavy that “a field mouse could not have crossed alive.”15 One American corporal called it “a slaughter.”
At 11:25, Lieutenant Brandt of the 106th Infantry, already wounded in the fighting, reported that the advance had halted, held up by machine-gun fire. Half an hour later an intelligence officer was still reporting that the Knoll had been captured, though, just as with the 106th’s initial attack, the advance had actually stalled, with the 107th also pinned down by machine-gun fire from Guillemont Farm. Thick smoke and fog made it almost impossible to locate the machine guns that were wreaking such havoc. Throughout the rest of the morning they could make little progress against sustained enemy fire; they also faced German counterattacks, enfilading fire, and attacks from the rear by troops armed with machine guns and bombs, emerging from the concealed entrances of the underground passages of the tunnel. Orders before the battle had stressed the need to prevent this, and the Americans made repeated attempts to mop up the ground over which they had advanced, but the constant infiltration of fresh German troops behind them made it a thankless task.16
By 2:15 the enemy was advancing from Bony, and the 106th and 107th were pulling back from the Knoll and Willow Trench. Yet within an hour the American troops were pushing forward again and, though the enemy counterattacked several times by bombing along the trenches, each time the Germans were driven off with very heavy casualties. As Australian and American troops tried to press forward again, machine-gun fire from Bony and Guillemont Farm to the west, the Macquincourt Valley, and the steep slopes east of the canal and north of Gouy brought such a heavy enfilading and cross fire to bear that it was impossible to advance against it. At four that afternoon a liaison officer was reporting that there were very few line officers still alive on the battlefield.17 Another twelve hundred American walking wounded were counted on the roads leading away from the front. As usual, troops had been ordered to advance without stopping to care for their wounded, who were to be evacuated by stretcher parties. They never appeared, and it was not until the following day that the regiment’s medical officers and the regimental chaplain at last evacuated the large numbers of wounded men who had been lying, untreated, on the battlefield all night.
As attempts to advance continued, the number of casualties was still rising, and even the positions already taken or retaken were again under fire from machine gunners who had once more emerged from tunnels behind the attackers. When the Germans also launched a counterattack from the left flank, General O’Ryan sent in the 105th Infantry to support the 107th. Together with the remnants of the provisional battalion of the 106th, and with the 108th attacking the southern end of the tunnel, they held off the enemy and advanced a little farther. The lead battalion, now composed of survivors from all four regiments of the division, advanced as far as Gouy, far beyond its original objective, but brigade headquarters reported that the fighting in the Saint-Quentin Tunnel had been a massacre.
At sunset, the American front line, running almost north to south, passed through Knoll Trench with outposts in Knoll Switch and Willow Trench, on the western edge of Guillemont Farm, South Guillemont Trench, Claymore Trench, and south along the Hindenburg Line. By seven that evening, reports were coming in that things had begun to quiet down, but fighting continued long after nightfall and fresh casualties were still being reported well into the night. Attempts to resupply the fighting troops with ammunition, food, and water met with mixed success. When ration parties did not arrive, small details of men from regimental headquarters did their best to distribute food and water, but extra canteens sent up during the night arrived so late that it was impossible to fill them. Ammunition was also in short supply, though in some instances where Lewis-gun ammunition was exhausted, troops were able to use captured German machine guns and ammunition.
Before dawn the next morning more “iron rations” were served to the German defenses from artillery that had been advanced a mile and a half from the firing positions of the day before. The Australian artillery had so many guns in position that there was only thirty-five feet between each one. They were fired every thirty seconds for three quarters of an hour, with the result that seven guns burst from the intense heat, killing their crews.18 Fighting went on all morning, and at ten minutes to twelve another barrage was fired. Under its cover, the infantry advanced another four hundred yards. After holding a section of trench seven hundred yards in advance of the Hindenburg Line all night, under heavy shell and machine-gun fire, the remnants of the provisional battalion advanced still farther, mopping up another five hundred yards of trenches i
n desperate fighting.
Yet again Monk led by example, bombing machine-gun nests and wielding his bayonet in close-quarters combat with deadly effect. In an incident that left his fellow soldiers and officers openmouthed with astonishment, Monk also went over the top alone, on his hands and knees, carrying grenades with which to destroy an especially annoying German machine-gun nest.19 The German machine gunners spotted him, and their fire was so intense that Monk’s pack was sheared from his back by the streams of bullets, but he kept on crawling forward until he was within reach of the machine-gun nest—and then silenced it and wiped out the occupants with a fusillade of grenades. “These incidents are told by Eastman’s officers. He himself refuses to talk of his war experiences.”
The unrelenting pressure was finally telling on the enemy, and at 1:50 that afternoon the aerial observers reported that the Germans seemed to be preparing to retreat. That prompted a third barrage at 2:30, when they “got all the hell on earth that any man could look for.”20 An advancing American officer then found the tunnels leading from the trenches to the Saint-Quentin Tunnel “still as wine caves, dark and uninviting. Not a soul was in them. A few of our men went through them but the masses went over the hill above them.” The retreating Germans were spewing out of the ground in hordes, and aircraft over-flying the battleground reported that the areas behind the tunnel were thick with running men. The remaining defenders trapped in the tunnel were bayoneted or bombed or taken prisoner, and by five past three, an observer dropped a note into the American front line: “The Hindenburg Tunnel is ours.”
Australian troops were now relieving the 27th Division, but even though they had been cut to ribbons by the enemy machine-gun fire, many of the surviving American troops—whether driven by bloodlust, vengeance, or the desire to finish the task they had been set—refused to abandon the fight and continued to advance alongside the Australians. Among them was Monk, who was “in action throughout the entire Hindenburg Line show.”21 The cooks, orderlies, and other miscellaneous men of the division thrown into the fighting had also advanced alongside the trained infantry, after the infantrymen spent five minutes showing them how to pull the ring of a grenade and how to throw it. Even the divisional chaplain, Father Kelley, went over the top three times, carrying a prayer book instead of a gun. His hair was said to have turned gray during the fighting.