After an initial success and high casualties, their great March 21 offensive was officially a failure. The German army chief Ludendorff had ordered the offensive halted on June 3. He was facing the reality that while he couldn’t replace the 200,000 men he had lost in battle, or the other half million that had been struck down by influenza, the French were replacing their losses with Americans. Twenty divisions of the AEF were already in or behind the front lines, with another fifty-five on the way—altogether some four million men.36
Time, as well as men, was running out on Ludendorff. On July 15 he would make one last throw of the dice in a fifty-division attack against the British in Flanders, preceded by a diversionary assault with no less than forty-seven divisions along the Champagne front, in a two-pronged push. One prong would head down toward Épernay to the south of Rheims, and the other would thrust toward Chalôns-sur-Marne in the east—where the Forty-second was standing exactly in Ludendorff’s way.
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Gouraud hosted a late-afternoon luncheon for the officers of the Forty-second on July 14, Bastille Day. When it was done, he rose to his feet and gave a speech that brought tears to everyone’s eyes, MacArthur’s included. “You all know that a defensive battle was never fought under more favorable conditions,” he told them. “You will fight on terrain that you have transformed into a redoutable fortress….None shall look to the rear; none shall yield a step….Each shall have but one thought, to kill, to kill until [the Boche] have had their fill.”
Gouraud had cunningly hosted the meal early, thinking the Germans might try to attack the day after Bastille Day, to catch the French after a long night of celebrations. Sure enough, as MacArthur and the other Americans returned to their posts in the early twilight they were met by news. A French patrol had caught some German prisoners, who had divulged the entire plan: the main barrage to begin at midnight, with infantry on the attack to follow four hours later.37 The Americans alerted their men, headed for their dugouts, and waited long, tense hours for the onslaught.
At 11:30 the silence of the night was shattered by the roar of artillery—not German this time, but French. Gouraud had taken advantage of his advance warning to use his own batteries to pound the attackers as they grouped for the attack. The effect, according to German sources, was devastating. Some units were so depleted they had to be replaced before even leaving their trenches. Nonetheless, the Germans answered back, as some 3,500 guns on both sides blasted away simultaneously. “The whole sky seemed to be torn apart with sound,” Father Duffy wrote, “while the whole southern [horizon] was punctuated by quick bursts of light.”38
MacArthur was in the same dugout as General Gouraud. As the German barrage opened up, the electric power went out. In the darkness the French general turned his face toward heaven.
“Thank God,” he muttered. He knew his plan was going to work.39
Some 2,000 German batteries—one gun every twenty yards—were firing in answer to the French. It was the most intense artillery concentration of the entire war. German shells landed in Châlons, twenty miles away. Someone later told MacArthur that one hundred miles away the roar of the guns had awakened Parisian families from their beds.40
Then the gray-clad Germans clambered out of their lines and rushed forward into the Fifth and Forty-second’s advance line, killing any survivors. Then they surged ahead again, over the withered and beaten ground, toward the intermediate line where MacArthur and the rest of the Forty-second were waiting for them.
At 4:17 French and American sentinels fired off red rockets, warning the main body that the Germans were coming. Artillerymen and infantry scrambled from the dugouts to take their positions along the firing line.41 MacArthur was standing on the trench firing step when suddenly the French and American artillery opened up again, as a fresh wall of fire “descended like an avalanche” on the advancing Germans. Another eyewitness said it was like a “boiling bank of smoke” had blanketed the Germans. This had been Gouraud’s plan all along: to let the Germans get out beyond the range of their own artillery and pound them as they wandered defenseless and stranded in between the advance and middle line.
For the next several hours the Germans charged, broke against the Allied line, and fell back, only to charge again. As the morning light came up over the horrible scene, the Germans still pressed on. MacArthur could see them coming on wave after wave, but “when they met the dykes of our real line they were exhausted, uncoordinated, and scattered, incapable of going further.” Yet every time they rushed toward the American line, the artillery, machine-gun, and infantry fire drove them back, leaving mounds of writhing bodies on the barbed wire.42
It was the Americans’ first full-scale battle. Yet “there was no flinching on the part of our men,” one officer said. “Wounded artillerymen in their gas masks continued serving their guns; infantrymen knocked down and bruised by shells, picked up their rifles again and continued firing.”43
Instead, it was the Germans who were at the end of their strength. “Their legs are broken,” MacArthur heard a French corps commander say, watching their increasingly feeble attacks. MacArthur passed the grim but triumphant message on to a cluster of American artillerymen whose guns were now so hot they had to be swabbed out after every shot.44
At around 11:00 A.M. there came a pause, and the smoke-filled, shattered air carried the shrill sound of whistles from the American trenches. It was time to drive the exhausted Germans back. With a bound over the parapet, still unarmed and still without a steel helmet, MacArthur led the first wave of counterattacks. Each grew more relentless than the last, until by afternoon the men of the Forty-second were back in their original advance line, rounding up prisoners and counting their dead.
The Americans had lost some 750 men—losses Douglas’s father had never experienced in a single battle for all his campaigns. To the west a few German units managed to shove back elements of the Fifth Army and had to be driven back over three days of intense fighting. But the battle had been fought, and won and lost. “The Germans’ last great attack of the war had failed,” MacArthur would write years later, “and Paris could breathe again.”
General Gouraud was ecstatic. His next bulletin to his army sounded a loud note of triumph. “The German has clearly broken his sword on our lines….We have in our midst in the most perfect fraternity of arms the Forty-second American division. We esteem it and are honored to rival them in courage and nerve.”
And MacArthur had earned his second Silver Star.45
A few nights later MacArthur and some fellow officers wandered down to Chalôns to celebrate. They picked out the AEF’s favorite tune, “Mademoiselle of Armentières,” on the piano. They poured down glass after glass of champagne, followed by brandy and Armagnac. But Douglas MacArthur was disquieted. He would go on to see many more battles, and more of the grotesque horrors the battlefield could offer. But the memory of those German body parts hanging on the wire and the smell of decayed human flesh that permeated the trenches would haunt him that night and for the rest of his life.
“Perhaps I was just getting old; somehow I had forgotten how to play.”46 The soldier who forty years later would speak of abolishing war forever was born that day.
Meanwhile, there was a lot more fighting to be done.
CHAPTER 7
FIGHT TO THE FINISH
The art of war is simple. Find where the enemy is, and get at him as quickly as you can. Then hit him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.
—ULYSSES S. GRANT
The men of the Rainbow had little time for rest or reflection. Just three days after their mammoth battle at Souain, the battalion and company commanders found this note waiting for them from Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur:
“Pursuant to orders from the 4th French Army, the 42nd Division…will, beginning on the morning of July 21st, proceed westward, by rail….The definite destination of the division is unknown.”1
With the Germans now on the defensive, Marshal Ferdinand Foch had
decided to move quickly to crush the so-called Marne salient, a forty-five-mile bulge of territory the Germans had taken in their massive attacks since March. The salient extended south to Château-Thierry, and stretched west of Soissons and just east of Rheims. The move meant bringing up the Americans under his command into the Château-Thierry sector, for the thrust north.
The Forty-second arrived shortly after the Germans had evacuated Château-Thierry and while their artillery and supply wagons were still pulling back across the Marne. MacArthur and Menoher assumed that their men, still recovering from the battle the week before, would be held in reserve, but on July 25 General Hunter Liggett, commander of I Corps, had grown unhappy with the performance of his Twenty-sixth Division and stuck the Rainbow in its place in the advance.
The two divisions traded places under a steady dismal rain, and the National Guardsmen didn’t get very far before they ran into German resistance. There was a savage hand-to-hand fight for control of a local landmark called Croix Rouge Farm that cost heavy casualties and won a corporal from the 167th a posthumous Medal of Honor. It wasn’t until the early evening of July 27 that advance elements of the Eighty-third Brigade passed through the last line of trees and looked out over the banks of a narrow, low-lying river.2
It was the river Ourcq, not much more than a trout stream, but with long sloping open fields on each bank that would make an easy crossing if there were no Germans—and absolute hell if there were.
That evening the order came down from Sixth Army headquarters to MacArthur’s command post: the Forty-second was to conduct a full-scale advance across the Ourcq the next morning. MacArthur had his doubts; still edgy after the brutal fight at Souain, he knew that no one was sure how many Germans, if any, were still lurking on the far side of the river. Bill Donovan at the head of his battalion of New York Irishmen thought the sector looked “too quiet,” and decided to make a quick reconnaissance.
As his men approached the tiny village on the near bank, they came under heavy German artillery that drove them back in the darkness to the far side of the hill overlooking the river. Even so, the fire was intense enough that while “kneeling down and talking to two or three officers a shell burst within ten feet of us, killing 7 next to me and smothering us with dirt.”3
While Donovan and his men were hunkering down under the shell fire, MacArthur was pointing out to Sixth Army HQ that the Forty-second still didn’t have any artillery to cover their advance. All the same, he barked into the field telephone, they would obey orders. The attack would begin at 4:30 on the morning of the 28th.
But if the artillery wouldn’t be there to help, at least MacArthur would be.
As the Americans moved forward in the predawn darkness, Donovan’s and MacArthur’s worst fears were realized. Far from pulling back, the Germans had put no fewer than three divisions in the line overlooking the Ourcq, along with what MacArthur that evening described as “one of the ‘aces’ of the German Army,” the Fourth Guards. Their machine guns were pointed straight down on the men of the 165th’s Third Battalion as they waded across the Ourcq.4
The moment they reached the water, the Germans opened up. The Third’s lead company, K Company under Captain John Patrick Hurley, took the brunt of the firestorm. Within minutes three of Hurley’s five lieutenants were dead, and another wounded. The Third Battalion’s commander, Major MacKenna, was killed, then Hurley himself took a bullet when he scrambled back to talk to his commander, McCoy. But McCoy had no choice. He had to order his other battalions forward, including Donovan’s.
MacArthur was close enough to the front to feel stray bullets whiz by as he watched the Irishmen stubbornly advance, then halt and wither under the hail of gunfire. The Second and Third Battalions finally dropped back, leaving Donovan and his men stranded at the crest of Meurcy Farm, with German guns firing at them from three sides and German airplanes strafing them mercilessly overhead. His battalion managed to hold its ground, but the rest of the assault that day stalled out. Alabamans and Iowans of the Eighty-fourth Brigade did manage to fight their way into the village of Sergy overlooking the crest three times, but each time they were driven out by a furious German counterattack.5
“A day of very fierce infantry fighting,” MacArthur wrote at midnight in his terse intelligence report. “Along our whole front the battle rolled back and forth all day.” The battle resumed before dawn and continued through the 29th, with groups of two or three soldiers crawling toward German machine-gun positions to toss a couple of hand grenades and then leap forward with bayonets. “It was savage,” MacArthur remembered years later, “and there was no quarter asked or given.”6 When the sun finally set, Donovan’s battalion was still holding on, although no one had any food or water—and every officer in his headquarters command except one was either dead or wounded.7
MacArthur meanwhile, passing from position to position to rally the men and coordinate attacks, received an unusual message. The ever-cautious General Brown of the Eighty-fourth Brigade had twice countermanded orders for artillery support, for fear it might land too close to his troops. Menoher had finally had enough. He had relieved Brown and told his chief of staff that he, Douglas MacArthur, was now in charge of the Eighty-fourth.8
MacArthur was too busy dodging shell and machine-gun fire to reflect on this signal honor, his first combat command. But that night he led his men on a bayonet charge into Sergy much as his father might have done, and that night the Eighty-fourth took the village and kept it.
Still the fighting went on, day and night, for the next forty-eight hours. “The enemy made strong efforts to force us back beyond the Ourcq but failed at all points,” MacArthur wrote in his intelligence brief. “Shell fire during the morning was heavier than the day before and [a] large proportion of gas was used.”9
Meanwhile, at the crest of Meurcy Farm, Donovan still fought on. On the night of July 30–31, “I had no more than one and a half hours sleep all night,” Donovan wrote to his wife later. In most of his companies the only surviving officers were second lieutenants.10 It was not until the early-morning hours of the 31st that headquarters was able to get Donovan’s men out of their positions at Meurcy Farm and down to Sergy, which MacArthur had captured two nights before. They had taken 600 casualties out of 1,000 men. The hearts of the other two battalions had also been cut out. More than half of the 165th Regiment, the old Fighting Sixty-ninth, were either dead or wounded. But the division was now firmly established across the Ourcq, and for his leadership and endurance in the battle Donovan would earn a Medal of Honor.
MacArthur, though, was worried what might happen next.
He knew the terrible price the 165th, and his own battalions, had paid. “The dead were so thick in spots we tumbled over them,” he wrote later, remembering the path that led out from Sergy. “The stench was suffocating….There must have been 2000 of those sprawled bodies. I identified the insignia of six of the best German divisions.”11 But the Germans were still out there, still ready for a fight or even a counterattack. Securing what had been won now depended on a steady advance forward along the entire heavily wooded four-kilometer front. MacArthur raced from “regiment to regiment, urging, pleading…for one last push” to consolidate the line.
All refused. They were exhausted and licking their wounds; they had no official orders to advance. Instead, rumor had it they were about to be relieved by the regulars of the Fourth Division, anyway. It wasn’t until MacArthur reached Frank McCoy just before dawn and explained the situation—that if McCoy could get his men moving, the rest of the division might follow—that he got the answer he wanted.
McCoy summoned Meaney, commander of the 165th’s Third Battalion now that MacKenna was dead, who listened stoically to MacArthur’s plea. They had just buried Joyce Kilmer, the famous poet, who had been Donovan’s acting sergeant major before he caught a German bullet in the brain.
Then Meaney said, “My men are few and they are tired, but they are willing to go anywhere they are ordered and,”
he added with a half smile, “they will consider an order to advance as a compliment.” In a few minutes the weary survivors of the 165th rose to their feet and started cautiously forward. As MacArthur predicted, the other units saw them moving in the dim early light and began moving as well.
“By God,” he swore to McCoy, “it takes the Irish when you want a hard thing done!”12
Back at headquarters the weary MacArthur met Menoher and Liggett, the corps commander. He explained what he had done, with difficulty. “I had not slept for four days and nights, and was so drowsy everything was beginning to black out.” As Liggett spoke to Menoher about how to get his artillery across the river, MacArthur sank into a chair and fell fast asleep.
Liggett gazed down at the commander of the Eighty-fourth.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Menoher, you better cite him.”13
Menoher did. “In advance of orders,” he wrote later, “and without delay he galvanized the entire division into a prompt pursuit….General MacArthur personally instructed each of the infantry regiments of the division, moving along the entire divisional front of four kilometers and swung the artillery and supporting arms into immediate accompaniment despite a terrain which hardly offered a road.”14
Mac had won not only his third Silver Star for his bravery in the fighting on July 28, but his fourth for his actions on the night of August 1, which had given the Allies control of the entire sector. It also brought them to the edge of the Vesle River, the Marne salient’s last redoubt.
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MacArthur’s fifth Silver Star came a little over a month later.
In the days after Ourcq the Forty-second found itself in a furious chase north to the Nesle Forest and beyond. “Have personally assumed command of the line,” ran MacArthur’s breathless communiqué to Menoher marked 12:10 P.M. on August 2. “Have broken the enemy’s resistance on the right. Immediately threw forward my left and broke his front….I am using small patrols acting with great speed and continually flanking him…I am handling the columns myself, and my losses are extraordinarily light.”15
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