by Neil Hanson
When the battle was finally over and the weary American troops were relieved, the casualty toll was fearsome. One company of the 107th Infantry, which had begun the battle with 212 men, emerged from the fighting with only 12 unwounded, and a similar casualty rate was reported by almost all the units involved in the battle. However, enemy casualties had been even heavier, and the loss of the supposedly “impregnable” symbol of German resistance and intransigence dealt a devastating psychological blow to the German troops. Captured enemy soldiers were all “broken in body, spirit and morale … the will to war had simply run out of them.”22 Their captors heard over and over again the same refrain: “The war is over, the Hindenburg Line is broken.”
19
THE PHANTOM DIVISION
The next day dawned dry and hot, and in the aftermath of the battle a stomach-churning smell hung over the battlefield, “an odor unexplainable that issues not from dead animals, birds or fishes, but issues only from dead men upon whom the sun shines.”1 Everywhere were dreadful sights that the soldiers would never forget. There were also other, hateful reminders of man’s venality and corruption. “Human vultures” had been active during the night, and the bodies of American soldiers had been looted as they lay strewn over the battlefield. Wallets and personal possessions were removed, and in at least one case a dead man’s finger was cut off to obtain the ring he had worn. Australian troops were strongly suspected to have been the culprits, but nothing could be proved and in the interests of inter-Allied harmony, the matter was dropped.
While the 3rd and 5th Australian divisions continued the advance beyond the Hindenburg Line, the 106th Infantry retired to Villers-Faucon during the night of September 30, though the last units did not arrive until the following day. Once more, these exhausted, shell-shocked, and battle-scarred men were quartered in elephant huts and broken-down billets. General O’Ryan remarked that “it is first depressing, then inspiring to see your units coming out after perhaps three or four days of continuous fighting, plastered with mud, more or less dazed from shell shock, many sick from gas fumes, all stiff from nights spent in shell holes, number slightly wounded who refused to be evacuated, and to note the dead, tired eyes flash with Division esprit the message—‘Give us forty-eight hours in the hay, some “vin blink” and plenty of eats and then let us at them again.’ ”2
While such tub-thumping comments no doubt boosted morale, a more sober evaluation suggested that the losses his men had suffered would have been lessened by better tactical appreciation. It was evident that the enemy tactics were to let the first wave of attackers pass through the defenses to a certain extent, and German soldiers would then emerge from emplacements, pillboxes, and dugouts, cutting off the first wave, who faced attack from in front and behind, as well as enfilading fire from the flanks. A critical Australian report claimed that the excitement of their first battle, together with the difficulty of locating all the dugout and tunnel entrances in the dense mist and smoke, made the American moppers-up move on without dealing with all the enemy who had taken shelter from the barrage during the initial advance and then emerged behind the Americans.3 When the smoke and mist at last began to clear, some troops, realizing how precarious their position had become, were able to pull back, but a considerable number were cut off and captured or killed.
Another observer also felt that the American moppers-up had been too anxious to join their comrades at the cutting edge of the attack, rather than completing the slow, tedious process of methodically clearing the ground and locating all the concealed dugouts and tunnel entrances. As a result, fierce resistance was still being encountered on ground over which the first wave had long since advanced. Even when battlefield experience had shown this to be a crucial flaw, attempts to remedy it were limited to vague, generalized orders to mop up thoroughly.
On October 2, the 106th Infantry began a brief rest period at Halle Wood, where its broken ranks were reorganized. It took some time for the regiment’s casualty figures to be collated and forwarded to divisional headquarters, but when complaints were made to Colonel Franklin W. Ward, he replied—with more tolerance and forbearance than many might have mustered in such circumstances—that in the majority of cases, the first sergeant and company clerk, responsible for compiling the figures, had been killed or wounded, or was missing in action. He did not add that, in any event, filling in forms to satisfy bureaucrats at headquarters was hardly a priority for a regiment that had been so ravaged by one of the most bloody engagements of even that sanguinary war. When the statistics were finally produced, it was revealed that the 106th Infantry had suffered 1,185 battle losses in the seven days between moving up to the front lines on September 24 and being relieved after the battle of the Hindenburg Line. The regiment was now a “mere skeleton” and, in addition to the killed, seriously wounded, missing, or captured, almost all its effectives were also carrying lesser wounds of some sort, or suffering the aftereffects of gas or shell shock.4
On October 3, the morning after their arrival at Halle Wood, burial detachments numbering two hundred men and accompanied by chaplains returned to the battleground surrounding the Hindenburg Line to begin the grisly task of identifying and burying their dead comrades. They were informed that they were to perform this duty as a tribute to their dead.5 The dead men’s shoes were removed to be salvaged if in good condition, and the bodies were then wrapped in twelve-foot lengths of burlap for burial. The brother of Corporal Porter of Company G had seen Porter killed during the 106th Infantry’s advance on September 27 and was almost deranged by it. He recovered his brother’s body and buried it himself.
Fired on from time to time by the enemy, the men went about their melancholy work. Where the dog tags of the dead had survived, one was buried with the body, placed outside the undershirt but under the jacket to protect it from damage, and the other nailed to a peg, inscribed on both faces, and then placed at an angle of forty-five degrees, so that the inscription on the underside was shielded from the weather.6 If there were no pegs, burial parties were told to write the dead man’s details on any piece of paper or cardboard, put it in a bottle or a tin can, and bury it almost its full length in the ground. In theory, the tag would later be retrieved by a graves register service officer, but in practice, shelling and fighting often obliterated all trace of the tag and the gravesite it marked, adding yet more to the millions of unidentified dead who had no known grave.7
Units were to bury all soldiers, American, Allied, or German, but in fact, there was inevitably less appetite for burying the bodies of the enemy, and many were either left lying where they fell or were dumped in abandoned trenches or shell holes.8 Alongside the burial parties, salvage details including two officers and sixty-five men from the 105th Infantry were also at work, gleaning rifles, ammunition, grenades, and any other reusable equipment from the battlefield and the bodies of the dead.
On the afternoon of the fifth day, the burial and salvage details completed their work and set off to rejoin the rest of their comrades. Sorely depleted and with no prospect of any replacements, the 106th Infantry and the rest of the 27th American Division had begun the move back to the front lines on October 6, 1918. All this time the enemy had been in slow retreat, and a week’s marching was required before contact was again made. The 106th Infantry first moved up to Tincourt Wood.9 Arriving at nightfall, during a heavy downpour, the men blundered through the dark forest and took whatever shelter they could find in caves and hastily improvised foxholes. The following afternoon they marched on to the shell-battered Hargicourt area, where the First Battalion bivouacked in the ruins of the town, while the Second and Third halted in and around Templeux, where their comrades from the burial details at last caught up with them.
On October 9 they began another night march, setting out for Bellicourt at dusk. The city lay directly behind the Hindenburg Line and the regiment had to pick its way through a morass of craters, tangled barbed wire, and shell-torn terrain. Persistent drizzle added to the misery of the t
roops and made conditions underfoot treacherous. Horse-drawn transport struggled even more than the infantry in the slippery, cloying mud. Wagons slid off the road and had to be hauled back by the sweating, cursing infantry, and when a medical cart overturned it had to be abandoned. When they finally reached the end of that march, the weary, mud-encrusted men again had to bivouac in the open fields.
Ahead of the 106th, the American 30th Division was still making advances against fierce German opposition. Enemy aircraft were very active, and to protect themselves from bombing, on this as on many other occasions, each man dug a shallow trench like an open grave and lay in it, safe from shrapnel, though not from a direct hit. At daybreak the shivering men emerged, cold and wet but otherwise unharmed.
While awaiting orders to again take their place in the firing line, some of the men of the 106th explored the now empty and abandoned Hindenburg Line. They found a scene of total devastation and desolation. The graves of some American soldiers lay practically on the jump-off line, the men having been killed before taking more than a few steps. Quennemont Farm had been completely demolished, and the trees in the orchard had been reduced to stumps that were so studded with shrapnel and bullets that they rang like iron when struck. The camouflaged machine-gun nests and strips of machine-gun ammunition were still in place around Guillemont Farm. Mountains of empty shells showed the extent of firing by the German defenders before they were overwhelmed, and the still-unburied bodies of German soldiers on the Knoll proved that it had also not been given up without a fearsome struggle.
Around the strongpoints, discarded first-aid packets, gas masks, and other American equipment revealed where the U.S. troops had occupied trenches as they fought their way forward. There were numerous concrete-lined passages leading down into the Saint-Quentin Tunnel, most of them blocked by the bodies of dead German machine gunners, and on the ravaged grass slopes lay the unburied bodies of hundreds of German infantrymen, intermingled with the as yet unburied remains of British and Australian soldiers.10 There was also evidence of how ineffective the artillery barrage that preceded the assault had been; engineers discovered only one destroyed machine-gun post along the entire length of the defenses from Bony as far as Bellicourt. Every other post was still intact.
After almost four years of static warfare, fought from trench systems that stretched, uninterrupted, from the Channel coast to the Swiss border—it was said that you could walk the entire distance without ever once coming aboveground—the “war of movement” that had characterized the opening months of the conflict had now been resumed. The aim of the Americans and their allies was now simply to maintain relentless pressure on the German armies, driving them back with continual attacks, giving them no rest or chance to regroup. The Allied commanders, seeing the daily returns of ground gained and German casualties, prisoners, and deserters, knew that the enemy forces were close to the point of collapse; there were no more troops on which they could call. One final push, one last rolling Allied offensive, might be enough to decide the war and force a German surrender.
Just after noon on October 10, the 53rd Brigade, including the 106th Infantry, received orders to move at once to the Montbrehain-Brancort area, and then be prepared to move farther into action on one hour’s notice.11 Leaving behind the ravaged area around the Hindenburg Line, they began a long march eastward across open country and through the battered towns of Neuroy, Joncourt, and Ramicourt, to Montbrehain, where they bivouacked for the night. It was a brief rest; their orders, again underlined, required them to move on at daybreak.
As they formed up again at first light, enemy artillery launched a sudden barrage. Several men were hit by shrapnel before the regiment escaped the town, making for Premont. Australian troops had recently fought their way through Montbrehain, and in an attempt to slow their advance the Germans had saturated the town with heavy concentrations of “Green Cross”—tear gas—which affected the 106th as well. On the night of October 11 through 12, they marched on, following a British guide, and at daybreak they rested in Butry Wood west of Busigny, but hardly had they thrown off their packs than the enemy began to shell the area with gas and shrapnel.
The Second Battalion continued their advance from the wood and completed the march to their position in the reserve trenches that morning, relieving the 30th Division. It had been a difficult, frustrating march, taking nine hours to cover nine kilometers, for the Germans had blocked all approaches to Busigny by felling trees and telegraph poles, and, in the absence of pioneer troops to clear the way, Monk and his fellows had to pick their way through tangles of wire, poles, tree trunks, and improvised barricades.12
Alongside the 105th Infantry, the 106th deployed along a fifteen-hundred-yard front, in close support of the 107th and 108th in the firing line. They remained there for four days, during which their working parties and formations were so regularly and so accurately shelled that it seemed as if “some sinister agency informed the enemy of every movement within the American lines.” The duration and intensity of the shell fire increased each day, and it was almost a relief to the troops when, on the night of October 16, they were ordered to move up to the Selle River, where the retreating German troops had now dug in on the far bank. Normally a modest waterway, the Selle was swollen by heavy fall rains, and the enemy had blown up the bridges and dammed the river downstream, flooding some of the low-lying lands on the western bank.
Once more, the German artillerymen seemed to have sensed the impending battle, for the afternoon of October 16 saw such ferocious shelling that the men of the 106th were forced to huddle in slimy trenches in the marshy ground. Despite constant enemy shelling with high explosive and gas, the regiment advanced that night to take its place on the jump-off line, supporting the 105th and 108th. As an anti-gas precaution, all American soldiers were required to add two teaspoonsful of bicarbonate of soda to the water in their canteens, which could be used to clean off and neutralize any gas or liquid residue adhering to their gas masks, skin, or clothes.13
The 106th Infantry now had a rifle strength of just four hundred men, and the 27th Division as a whole was so depleted by the loss of men killed or wounded—reduced to about twenty men per company, one fifth of its strength little more than a month before—that it was now nicknamed the “Phantom Division.” As the infantrymen groped their way forward in the dark, slipping in the mud and stumbling over ruts and potholes, shell bursts claimed a steady toll of yet more dead and wounded. A high-explosive shell burst immediately behind one company, wiping out most of a platoon.14 Casualties had to be left where they fell, for others to treat, and once more Monk and his comrades had to harden their hearts and close their ears to the screams and cries of wounded comrades writhing under the terrible effects of gas poisoning.
German shelling continued all night, interspersed with gas attacks, but by 4:20 on the morning of October 17 the 106th had formed up on the white tape stretched across the ground. They deployed in artillery formation with greatly extended intervals between platoons and companies, waiting in a downpour that had turned the chalky ground into gray mud, while a thick mist made having any sense of location or direction virtually impossible.
The task of the infantry spearheading the attack was to cross the river and assault the heavily defended German positions at the top of the slope leading up from the far bank. The river had been reconnoitered during the previous night and was found to be fordable, except for a few deep holes in the riverbed.15 But General O’Ryan was in no doubt about the serious obstacle presented by the river, with its steep approaches, absence of bridges, and high embankments on the far side, bristling with machine guns, antitank guns, and Minenwerfer, supported by artillery.16 The terrain in that area was also unusual in that all the fields were bordered by hedgerows, which provided perfect cover for machine gunners.
After a sixty-minute silent period before zero hour, an hour-long barrage, launched at 5:20 a.m. on October 17, breached the enemy barbed-wire defenses in several places. At 6:20, a
s the barrage lifted and began to creep forward, the infantry started over the top, the first wave wading the river while the engineers began trying to place light bridges for the use of the second wave.
The heavy fog and rain that had rolled in at two that morning showed no sign of clearing, and the infantry advanced into an almost impenetrable murk of mist and yellow smoke; once more the smokescreen proved as much of a hindrance as a help to the attacking troops. It was impossible to see more than a few feet, and compass bearings proved unreliable.17 Almost at once the first wave began to fall behind the barrage. The 106th Infantry moved up in reserve, so that when the 105th Infantry started to advance from the first objective, the 106th was just west of the Selle River and ready to cross. The mist was so dense that a machine-gun nest on the ridge to the east of the railway was completely missed by the first wave and not discovered until it began firing on the supporting troops, delaying their advance until the 106th Machine Gun Company eliminated the problem.
Ten heavy tanks were to cross the Selle after the infantry and advance in support of them, but the much-vaunted tanks again proved of very limited value. Having moved south to cross the river, they then lost their way in the fog, and only two tanks joined the battle at all—both of which were soon destroyed by shell fire.18 One of them had reached the village of Arbre Guernon before it was disabled, where it lay blocking the crossroads and drawing fire.