The real man of the whole crowd is the ordinary garden variety of enlisted man, sgt., cpl., or private, the fellow who really does the work and the suffering,” an officer with the 77th Division wrote to his mother back in North Carolina after the war ended. “In the American Army it didn’t seem to make any difference whether he spoke Polish, Italian, Yiddish, Irish, or plain American, he was a wonderful soldier.” Sergeant Matej Kocak was the epitome of this wonderful soldier. By the end of September 1918, the Slovak marine was going on his tenth month overseas. He had fought at Belleau Wood, Soissons, St. Mihiel—every major engagement that the AEF had undertaken in France. He had killed and captured enemy soldiers with extraordinary bravery, rallied his men in battle, kept his wits about him under fire, repeatedly risked his life by taking the lead in assaults. Officers and soldiers alike recognized his heroism. “The fellow who really does the work and the suffering”—no one deserved these words more than Sergeant Kocak. He had seen virtually the entire American war effort—and he would see it through to the end—the end of the war or his own end, whichever came first.
Kocak was not a letter writer—at least no letters of his have surfaced—and by all appearances he was not a sentimental man. Though his parents were still living in his home village of Gbely (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and thus enemy territory), and though he had family in Binghamton, New York—brother, sister-in-law, nephew, cousins—Kocak had written “none” on the line of the military form asking for the name and address of “person to be notified in case of emergency.” He stated that he had no relatives or friends and listed his former residence as U.S. Marine Corps. On the night of October 1, when his unit was ordered into position for the assault on Blanc Mont Ridge near the cathedral city of Rheims, Kocak was 750 miles away from his parents and his childhood home. But clearly, the thirty-six-year-old marine had put his Slovak past behind him. His home was the 66th Company, 5th Marine Regiment, 2nd Division. In truth, since leaving Gbely twelve years before, the marines were the only home he had known.
Even if he had been a letter writer, mail was terribly slow—letters from the States took a month or more to reach soldiers at the front—so Kocak would not have known that three days before his unit entered the front lines at Blanc Mont, his cousin Paul had been discharged from the army. Drafted in Binghamton the previous September, Paul had been training at Camp Gordon in Georgia for a year while his cousin Matej fought in France. A prolonged stretch in boot camp was not uncommon, especially for foreign-born recruits. But when Paul Kocak was finally deemed sufficiently schooled in the ways of the American military to ship out to France, trouble arose. Somehow the awkward fact came to light that Paul’s father was serving in the Austrian army and thus Private Kocak was classified an enemy alien. This, in itself, would not necessarily have disqualified him from staying with his unit. Army regulations stipulated that loyal aliens, even those from enemy nations, could fight; it was only when an alien soldier made it clear to his officers that he “did not desire to serve” that he would be dismissed from the service with a general discharge (and thus lose all future benefits). Paul insisted that he never voiced this desire; he never petitioned his superiors to relieve him from service; he maintained that he was willing and able to fight for his adoptive country. But evidently there was some misunderstanding, because on September 27, while a million American soldiers, Matej Kocak among them, were massing for the assault on the Western Front, Paul Kocak was discharged from the army and put on a train back to Binghamton.
It was one of the ironies of this war that one cousin should be sent home in disgrace while the other marched heroically into battle. Such was the lot of the foreign-born in those times. With the massive Argonne campaign raging and the nation braced for a long winter of fighting, no one had the time or the stomach to ponder the irony of what befell the Kocak cousins or to rectify the misunderstanding that blotted Paul’s military record. But the implications of the events and decisions made during those darkening September days would haunt the Kocaks for the rest of that century and into the next one. The story of war is also the story of families struggling to shine a light into the abyss of the past.
The word that rippled down the line on the night of October 1 was that Blanc Mont looked like another bloodbath. As usual, the marines were being brought in to do a job that other soldiers had failed at. For four years the French had tried to dislodge the Germans from Blanc Mont—not really a mountain but a spinelike ridge, densely wooded at the top, that dominated the choppy white-clay Champagne countryside east of Rheims and west of the Argonne forest. As the most prominent rise south of the Aisne River, the ridge was key to the control of the Champagne sector. It was the same story as Montfaucon and the Hindenburg Line: a position previously considered unassailable had now, by some magic of strategy or wishful thinking, been reclassified as a feasible objective, to be taken in a matter of hours no matter what the human cost. That human cost was to be paid over the next five days by the men of the 2nd Division, including, first and foremost, the marines.
What Kocak and the other marines in the trenches did not know was how freely and heedlessly their superiors had been gambling with their lives. Early in September, as plans were being forged for the great Allied offensive that was intended to win the war, the French command had asked Pershing to lend them two American divisions to beef up their forces in the Champagne region—an arrangement similar to the loan of the 27th and 30th divisions to the British for the assault on the Hindenburg Line. The battle-hardened 2nd Division, to which the 5th and 6th Marine regiments belonged, was one of the divisions tapped for service with the French; the other was the raw 36th, which had just shipped out from boot camp in Texas and had yet to suffer a crease in their uniforms. On the eve of the battle of Blanc Mont, Major General John A. Lejeune, the 2nd Division’s commander, met with his French counterparts to iron out the details of how to coordinate their forces. Lejeune had been warned that the French intended to break up his division and feed the pieces into their own units—the American command’s worst recurring nightmare. Bent on avoiding this at all costs, the general agreed to a hasty and ill-considered bargain: if the French left his division intact, the American forces would undertake the impossible mission of storming Blanc Mont alone.
This was how Sergeant Kocak and a thousand other men in the 1st Battalion of the 5th Marines found themselves on the night of October 1 massed at the base of an incline that rose steeply into what one historian called “some of the best defended and nearly impregnable positions on the western front.” The men spent the following two days loafing on the region’s famous chalky white soil, muttering about the “endless trenches, barbed wire obstacles and entanglements, traps, pill boxes, tunnels, and dugouts” that awaited them behind the German line, and sampling dehydrated potatoes and dehydrated soup for the first time (the verdict, as one marine officer put it, was that “the potatoes were not worth the water required to prepare them,” but the soup “was delightful and quite interesting”). The attack finally broke on the morning of Thursday, October 3. The artillery barrage went off as planned starting at 5:30 A.M., and in the course of the day the infantry and the marines managed to storm the ridge. Kocak, with the 1st Battalion, was assigned to guard the battalion’s highly vulnerable left flank with the understanding that French forces would move up and advance beside them. When the French utterly failed to appear, officers in the field started firing off frantic messages complaining that their left flank was “in the air.” The ridge may have been in American hands, but the battle was far from over. By nightfall, with most battalion commanders hopelessly separated from their men and the exposed left flank an open wound, the advance was canceled. Major George W. Hamilton, the dashing young commander of the 1st Battalion, used the word “fiasco” to describe the state of things that night.
“The battalion had been in every engagement in which the regiment had participated up to this time, but the afternoon of the 4th of October, 1918, was by far the bloodiest and worst day of the entire war,” wrote one of the 1st Battalion captains after it was all over. Every marine who fought and survived that day shared this opinion. Casualties—appalling as they were—do not explain the trauma of those hours. Marines had died at Belleau Wood and Soissons—but at least they died in those battles pushing their shoulders against the wall. At Blanc Mont on October 4 they were trapped on a sloping, forested tableland, surrounded, penned in, and slaughtered.
Orders that day called for the three battalions of the 5th Marines to move north toward the village of St. Etienne starting at six in the morning—3rd Battalion in the lead, 1st next, 2nd in the rear—with a distance of five hundred yards to be maintained between each battalion. As soon as the Americans came into the open, the Germans opened fire. The 3rd Battalion took the brunt of it. Nonetheless, the three battalions managed to push about a mile forward before orders came in late morning to dig in.
There is no mention of Kocak’s name in the papers that survived the battle. Inevitably, the official documents—field messages and orders fired off in the heat of the battle, reports written in the months after the Armistice—concern the deeds, decisions, judgments, and fears of the superior officers. In the archived record, the hero of that gruesome day, if any man can be called the hero of a slaughter, was 1st Battalion commander Major George Hamilton. Handsome, athletic, worshipped by his men—one private in the battalion referred to him as “our motion picture captain”—Hamilton was an inspiring leader, and it’s clear from the messages he wrote that day that he was extraordinarily brave and cool under fire. Kocak was one of about a thousand men under Hamilton’s command—the 1st Battalion consisted of four 250-men companies, of which Kocak served with the 66th (the others were the 17th, the 49th, and the 67th). Since Kocak does not appear in the written record of that day, the scraps of paper that Hamilton covered with his blunt unhurried script will have to serve as a kind of proxy for Kocak’s experience.
By early afternoon, the 1st Battalion was on the move again, advancing north into wooded terrain, but about one thirty they hit what Hamilton described as “heavy machine gun fire . . . laid down from the left flank.” German artillery shells were also falling at a rapid rate on the advancing lines. A half hour of this punishment was all that the men could take. Marines had been through as bad or worse at Belleau Wood and Soissons and muscled through, so it’s hard to explain why they cracked now. Maybe it was because so many of the old Leathernecks—the regular career marines like Kocak—had been killed or wounded. Maybe it was because so many of the men in the field now were wartime recruits with limited training and experience. Maybe it was something more ineffable—a subtle ebbing of morale, a pervasive weariness of war, a chill they caught from the nakedness of the sloping topography. For whatever reason, by 2:00 P.M., some of the marines broke ranks and started running to the rear. Hamilton somehow found the time to compose a lengthy, disgusted message describing seasoned warriors, officers among them, going to pieces: “In some instances officers were leading in what appeared to be a grand rout. Among those whom I noticed particularly was Capt. [DeWitt] Peck, Capt. [David T.] Jackson, (2nd Bn.) and Major Messersmith [3rd Battalion commander]. There were also several lieutenants whom I did not recognize. Major Messersmith explained that he had lost all his officers, but didn’t show any initiative or leadership. Capt. Jackson was hopeless. When it became evident that the retirement had become a rout, Lieut. [James A.] Nelms ran out and endeavored to turn the men back. His task was a hard one and attempted at great personal exposure to machine gun fire and a violent artillery bombardment. We then were forced to draw our pistols, and it was only by this method that we were able to stop the retreat.”
“Marines never retreat,” insisted Elton E. Mackin, a private with the 5th Marines, in his memoir Suddenly We Didn’t Want to Die; but Mackin conceded that at Blanc Mont “for the first time, panic had its way, and a few men ran as the attack closed in.” Panic had its way. The fact that these veterans of Belleau Wood and Soissons had to be forced back into battle at gunpoint is a sign of how desperate the situation had become. The men could choose how to die—whether as coward or soldier—but for many of them death was certain and they knew it. Who was to blame? The men for refusing to do their duty—or Hamilton and his fellow officers for drawing pistols and forcing them into certain death? Or was General Lejeune at fault for letting the French manipulate him into this suicidal assault? It’s impossible at this remove to draw clear lines or pass simple judgments. It was a war in which slaughter invariably overwhelmed strategy. After the battle, General Lejeune proudly told the survivors that “to be able to say when the war is finished, ‘I belonged to the 2nd Division, I fought with it at the Battle of Blanc Mont Ridge,’ will be the highest honor that can come to any man.” Noble words. The panic that led some to choose the highest dishonor received no mention in the general’s speech. Hamilton’s message detailing the “grand rout” was slipped into a file and eventually deposited and forgotten in the National Archives. Marines never retreat.
At 2:15 Hamilton sent another, even more dire message back to regimental commander Lieutenant Colonel Logan Feland: “Absolutely impossible to carry out attack. Machine guns encircling us and reinforcements needed. It is doubtful if we can hold out here unless machine guns are cleaned out on flanks.” Mackin wrote that “the men were stunned” by the viciousness of the German fire; “lashed down to earth by flailing whips of shrapnel, gas, and heavy stuff that came as drumfire, killing them. There was no place in all our little world for us to go. The fellows bunched against the fancied shelter of the larger trees in little close-packed knots, like storm-swept sheep, and died that way, in groups. . . . Never in my time had I seen such a deadly, killing fury.” Hamilton, having said that to attack was “absolutely impossible,” did precisely that. His 1st Battalion went out in advance of the other two and descended the slope in the face of relentless German fire. Those who made it found themselves so deep into enemy territory that bullets were now coming at them from three sides. Mackin called this terrifying belt of woods “The Box”: “It was a place for men to die; a spearhead of out-flung battle line thrust deeply into the German front, exposed to fire from three sides, its line of communication cut off by enfilading Maxims firing from the flanks. It was a deadly place.”
There were now only about one hundred men left of the thousand in Hamilton’s 1st Battalion. The sole battalion officer still standing was a first lieutenant with the good Irish name of Francis J. Kelly Jr. Lieutenant Kelly took over the 66th Company, Kocak’s unit, and made a rapid assessment of the situation. The Germans holed up near St. Etienne were starting to intensify their artillery barrage in preparation for a counterattack—a classic move when the enemy’s initial attack surge flagged. Kelly had orders from Hamilton to pull his men back to a safer spot. But, in the words of marine historian George B. Clark, the lieutenant “did what any Marine would do in the same situation: he ordered his company to advance.” Kocak was among those who went forward with Kelly. The only account of Kocak’s role in this desperate push was written by Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who was then serving as the commander of the 1st Division’s 26th Regiment. It’s unclear how the president’s son came to know the story of the Slovak marine—Roosevelt’s division was nowhere near Blanc Mont and he was still recovering from being gassed and wounded at Soissons. But the details match up with the official documents, and his narrative has the ring of truth—so some eyewitness or buddy in the marines must have told him about it. Roosevelt wrote: “Sergeant Kocak’s battalion, the 1st, was ordered to meet it [the counterattack]. They did not wait for it to reach them, but drove out at it, meeting the counter-attack with attack. With a shock the troops came together. For a few moments with bayonet and rifle they fought hand to hand. Then the Germans wavered and in an instant were in full retreat into the woods from which they had come. Flushed with victory, the marines followed hard on their heels. They burst into the woods. Kocak’s company was held up by the sweep of a machine-gun. Without hesitation the sergeant started for it alone. He crawled, as he had at Soissons, to close quarters, then sprang to his feet and charged. Two Germans had seen him. Before he could reach them they fired and he fell dead.”
Kocak’s extensive military file contains a few additional details. After the body was recovered, a military clerk filled in information about the time, place, and cause of death on an army medical form; on the line marked “diagnosis” the clerk typed: “Wound, gunshot (multiple of body)”, after which someone wrote in by hand, the letters KA (presumably “killed in action”). Another form indicates that his left leg was fractured below the hip and knee. The final entry in Kocak’s service record book reads as follows: “While serving with 66 Co 5th Regt in France from July 1, 1918 to Oct 4, 1918. No offences. Oct 4, 1918. Killed in action by enemy gun fire in the Champagne Sector near Blanc Mont Ridge, France in line of duty. Date of burial, location of grave or grave number not known. Character: Excellent.”
Sergeant Kocak was one of 292 marines killed in action at Blanc Mont. Another 1,893 were wounded in the fighting. In his eleven years of service with the marines, Kocak had but a single blot on his record—the time he went AWOL from the Georgia in Norfolk, Virginia, back in 1910. Since then his record had been impeccable. He consistently received the highest marks on his “professional and conduct record.” His character was always rated “excellent.” He had been promoted twice and was cited for heroism at Soissons. Given all of this, there is no way in hell that Kocak would have turned tail and joined in the “grand rout” earlier that day. It was simply not in his nature to run from danger. In the absence of letters or interviews with his comrades, one can only speculate—but it seems fair to say that Matej Kocak, Slovak American, died in the belief that he was doing his duty for the country he had embraced in 1906 and had come to love more than life itself.
No one but those present will ever know or fully appreciate what the battalion went through during the charge up this hill,” wrote 1st Battalion Captain LeRoy P. Hunt of the afternoon’s assault on Blanc Mont. “The rate of casualties was far above anything we had experienced, but the men kept on.” The fighting and dying went on well into the night, but to little avail. St. Etienne, the 5th Marines’ objective for the day, remained in German hands. The following morning, Saturday, October 5, after a harrowing night of enemy machine-gun fire and artillery, Hamilton sent a bitterly frank message to Colonel Feland: “It is hard to say ‘can’t,’ but the Division Commander should thoroughly understand the situation and realize that this regiment ‘can’t’ advance as an attacking force. Such advance would sacrifice the regiment.” Feland understood. The fighting continued, but the 5th Marines were “finished for this campaign,” in the words of historian George Clark. “No one had the gall to commit the 5th to any more engagements at Blanc Mont.”
On Sunday, October 6, the marines were finally relieved. Word came down through the ranks that a bunch of Texas and Oklahoma cowboys from the 36th Division’s 141st Infantry were being brought in to finish the job at Blanc Mont. Mackin described the scene of the two long columns of men, one battle-ravaged, the other clean and eager, trading places on the narrow French road. The marines, Mackin wrote, were “a battered, filthy, ragged crew; they did not look like soldiers. Beards—week-old, bristly growth ringed around thin-lipped, silent mouths—helped to frame weary eyes that had a glare of madness in their depths.” When the “fast-stepping column” of 141st infantry appeared coming toward them, the marines “fell out of ranks to rest and watch them pass by. They were tall, clean-cut fellows, walking rapidly toward the guns.” Inevitably the two groups of men began trading insults and jokes:
“Hey crumbs! Why don’t you wash your dirty necks?”
“—call them soldiers, son? Why that’s a bunch of tramps!”
“Why don’t you get some uniforms—and use some soap?”
They asked for it. We had answers by then for such as that.
“Hey, you—the loud-mouthed bastard over there. You’ll make a handsome-looking corpse, tomorrow!”
One saw sudden dread spread over his face, below a sickly smile that masked his fear. . . .
The effect of what was said went through the ranks and cut youthful banter short.
The silent column paced away toward the guns. We took to our own road and cursed beneath our breath.
Not all the Texas infantrymen striding toward the guns were as brash and green as Mackin supposed. At the head of the 141st Regiment’s Company A marched a squat, middle-aged first sergeant—eyes snapping, chest thrust out, every inch the professional soldier—who had been in combat of some kind nearly all his life. It was Sam Dreben, the Fighting Jew. Dreben and the boys of Company A may have been latecomers, but they were about to be scorched by one of the hottest baptisms by fire of the war.
The 141st Infantry had shipped out during the Aisne-Marne offensive at the end of July; they arrived at the port of Brest on August 6, and from there proceeded five hundred miles inland to a French training camp at Bar-sur-Aube, due south of the Argonne front. It was during those first weeks in France that the forty-year-old Dreben received a letter from his young wife in El Paso with the news that their infant daughter had died while he was crossing the Atlantic. Sam could have requested a hardship discharge and returned to Texas to comfort his wife, but he chose to remain with his men. He was Company A’s top kick and these raw recruits needed a seasoned veteran to break them in, now more than ever. By this stage in the war, training periods were being compressed to the vanishing point. Sam’s regiment had about six weeks to shape up before heading into action—and a lot of that time was spent dealing with an outbreak of influenza that ravaged the regiment. A new, intensely virulent strain of influenza had appeared at Brest just around the time that the 36th Division disembarked, and the men carried the infection to the training camp at Bar-sur-Aube. Twenty-three soldiers died of flu within a few weeks. The pandemic, which was exploding that summer and fall, would eventually kill upward of 50 million people worldwide, many more than the war that helped spread it.
In the first week of October, their training over, Dreben and the surviving men of the 141st Infantry were trucked to the Champagne sector and massed at Somme-Suippe, the same village where Kocak’s unit had jumped off to storm Blanc Mont. On October 6, the 141st marched into the lines past the filthy, stubble-faced marines coming off the bloody battlefield.
Aside from the fact that thousands of men on both sides were dead, gassed, or maimed, not much had changed at Blanc Mont since Kocak had jumped off a week earlier. The Germans, though weakened, remained in possession of the town of St. Etienne, which had been the objective of Kocak’s unit on October 4. The Americans had not altered their basic strategy of throwing fresh bodies at the enemy until they finally gave up. The one crucial difference was that those fresh bodies, with very few exceptions, had never been in battle before. Where the veterans of Belleau Wood and Soissons had failed, the callow cowboys of Camp Bowie and Bar-sur-Aube training camp were supposed to prevail, once their officers pried them out of their trenches. Top-kick Dreben had some kicking to do.
The new men got their first taste of fire when they were heavily shelled while marching north on Monday, October 6. Captain Richard F. Burges, the El Paso attorney in charge of Company A, said that the shell fire “became so hot that it was necessary to order [the men] to lie down on either side of the road until the bombardment stopped.” It wasn’t until well after midnight that Company A finally reached its position at the front; German shell fire remained so intense and relentless that the men did little for the next twenty-four hours aside from dig themselves shelter pits. The word was that the renewed attack on St. Etienne was supposed to start the next morning, but as of 3 A.M. that morning Captain Burges had yet to receive written orders about his objective, timing, or position (the captain learned later that the runner carrying his orders had been blown up by a German shell). The only confirmation Burges got that the attack was in fact going ahead came shortly before 5 A.M. when the American artillery barrage opened—at which point “Sergeant Dreben and I roused our men,” wrote Burges, “and called them to get ready for action immediately as we were going over the top in a few minutes.”
If Sam Dreben had not been an actual person, he might have been concocted by some Hollywood hack. From the moment he stepped off the dock in the United States in 1899, everything he did smacked of big-screen epic—enlisting in the army because of the promise of a free uniform and a free funeral, defying death in his first tour of duty in the Philippines, blasting his way out of jams as a soldier of fortune in Central America, gambling in dusty cantinas with Mexican banditos, supplying arms to Pancho Villa and then joining Pershing’s Punitive Expedition against Villa, suffering the death of his only child while he was aboard a troopship to France. Thrill to the adventures of the Fighting Jew! Dreben’s next few hours at Blanc Mont play like another scene in his movie—the Fighting Jew battles the Boche!—but incredible as it sounds, what Dreben did on the battlefield is substantiated by a load of documentary evidence. Shortly after the war ended, officers of the 141st Infantry were instructed to record everything they could remember about Blanc Mont. Captains, lieutenants, the regiment’s Lieutenant Colonel Luther R. James wrote lengthy, vivid, hour-by-hour accounts of the fighting that occurred on October 8 and the days that followed. Everything in those documents, especially the account written by Company A’s Captain Richard Burges, agrees detail for detail with the three single-spaced typed pages headed “Relating My Experiences in Going over the Top with ‘A’ Company 141st Infantry” and signed “Sam Dreben, 1st Sgt. Co. ‘A’.”
Dreben noted that Captain Burges gave the order to go over the top at “exactly 5:15 A.M.” and within one hundred yards of jump-off his company encountered “strong machine-gun resistance.” For the next ten hours Company A inched its way forward through heavy German fire: as the hours of that autumn day ticked by, they advanced, took cover when enemy fire became intense, and advanced again. At one point, said Dreben, “we saw about 25 or 30 of the enemy advancing across an open space in the woods and advancing to meet them, in the open, we killed wounded or captured the entire party.” The climactic moment, at least for Dreben, came as dusk was gathering. His account of this skirmish offers not only a vivid soldier’s eye view of combat, but also a rare opportunity to hear the voice and feel the spirit of this amazing man:
About 4:00 P.M. that evening, one of our men on an outpost called my attention to some troops advancing in our direction and at the same time he fired a shot. I told him to stop firing as it was possible that the party advancing were French. However, after a close inspection with my glasses, (it was getting dark in the woods at this time) I satisfied myself absolutely that they were the enemy, and carrying several machine guns. I immediately called for volunteers to go out and attack them, for I realized that if they took up position on our right, they would command our position. From twenty to thirty responded to my call and we went on at double time to meet “Fritz”, shooting and shouting all the time while we were charging them, as we were only a little over a hundred yards from them. Here is where I realized the value of the Browning Automatic Rifle, as in less than ten minutes about 58 big huskey [sic] well equipped Boches were stretched out nicely resting in peace. We took two prisoners for information. We gathered up four machine guns and one instrument that appeared to be used for signaling or telegraphing. About this time I saw a red signal or flare directly in front of our position and about 300 or 400 yards away. I immediately gave the order to double time back and not to mind the booty, and we returned without the loss of a man. No sooner had we reached our positions when they did open a terrific barrage on us.
“Back of that vaudeville exterior was a cool, calculating brain,” Dreben’s fellow soldier of fortune Tracy Richardson once said of him, “a courage that nothing daunted. He seemed to take thousands of wild chances with death and emerge by fool bull luck. But when you knew him, you learned how carefully he planned every detail and how little he left to chance.” So it was at Blanc Mont the afternoon of October 8. That evening, during a lull in the German barrage, Captain Burges sent this message to regimental headquarters: “Enemy advance on our right repulsed. Sergeant Dreben has captured three machine guns, three prisoners, and killed fifty of the enemy.” To which the colonel responded: “Great work. Keep it up. Percentage between killed and captured is about right.” Soldiers on the scene attested that if it hadn’t been for Dreben’s raid, Company A would have been mowed down by those German machine guns.
The “great work” Dreben did on the right flank was about the only thing that went well for the 141st that day. It was a regiment of rookies and their inexperience showed. “Companies were disorganized, battalions were disorganized, everything was disorganized, and to add to our other pleasures the Boche proceeded to shell the woods at least three times daily,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel James in his account of the chaos that prevailed throughout the attack. Two ranking officers were killed or wounded in the first hour; a major lost his mind under the pressure and shot one of his own runners after mistaking him for a German; communication and liaison degenerated to the point where “the fighting resolved itself into a series of independent fights conducted by detachments of varying sizes, composed of men from different companies”; no one in command had any idea where the dispersed companies were fighting or even where the front line lay. That night, the 141st dug in under a heavy and continuous artillery barrage. The following day, October 9, “we remained in the same position,” wrote Dreben. “The night of the 9th we had a terrific machine gun barrage, from three directions, but we still held fast.” The 141st and 142nd infantry suffered some 1,300 casualties on October 8 and 300 more the following day.
Despite the terror and madness that crippled the 36th Division on its first two days of combat, somehow they succeeded in turning the tide. The Germans, having been hammered for six days straight by two American divisions, did not surrender so much as melt away. They lost control of the village St. Etienne on the night of October 8 and by the morning of October 10 they had withdrawn all but token resistance in the sector—just a few machine guns left behind to harass the American infantry. The following day they retreated rapidly thirteen miles north to the Aisne River. Finally the Texas and Oklahoma cowboys got their wish for a full-throttle war-whooping sprint—“a wild open field dash,” in the words of one historian, though in fact the cowboys were rushing through a gate that the marines had blasted open for them.
In retrospect, the capture of Blanc Mont stands as one of the great turning points in the war, a crucial victory that precipitated the general German withdrawal. But at the time, the cowboys, and the marines before them, were hurting too badly to savor the moment much. The accounts written by the officers of the 141st were remarkable for their absence of back-slapping or high-flown rhetoric. Blanc Mont Ridge had fallen, the “sacred city of Rheims” had been freed, as one soldier put it, the Germans were on the run in this sector, but still the war dragged on. Some 7,800 American soldiers died or were wounded on this chalky rise. “They had paid a price hideous even for this war,” wrote a marine who had survived. They, meaning the men on the ground. As for the generals who had sent the men up the ridge, all but the most vainglorious ultimately decided that the less said the better.
The burial of the dead began on October 11, the day the Germans started pulling back. Fifty men from the 36th Division were assigned to the burial detail and it took them four days to get all the bodies on the battlefield underground. Captain W. S. Montgomery of the 141st Regiment who was in charge of the burial detail reported that the corpses had been stripped of their valuables—no watches remained on wrists, no money in pockets, even the shoes and socks had been removed from some of the bodies. Sergeant Matej Kocak, killed eight days earlier, was among the soldiers that Montgomery’s men laid to rest on October 12. The remains of the fallen marine were wrapped in canvas, placed in a wooden coffin and buried in a field cemetery near the village of St. Etienne. T. B. Lugg, a chaplain with the 6th Marines, presided over the ceremony. When the prayers had been said, a plaque with the words “Kock. M. Sgt. M.C.” was attached to a peg and placed over the body. The grave was numbered 172.
Sergeant Kocak’s file was not closed yet. Grave Registration Service Form No. 8 circulated through the military bureaucracy with the lines marked “relative, relationship, and address” checked and this message typed in: “This man told that he had no relatives or friends whose names he might use.” As a result, no one would be notified that their heroic son, brother, uncle, cousin, friend had died in France.
It’s rare in a modern war that one soldier can be said to make a difference—but Kocak and Dreben did each make a difference at Blanc Mont Ridge. Their bravery and their sacrifice alone did not win the battle—but the battle could not have been won without them and others like them. Others who fought for an adopted country, who fought all the harder because it was a country they had chosen. “These men fought for America to be Americans,” wrote career soldier Peter I. Pellicoro (U.S. Army 11th Special Forces Group Airborne) of his Italian-born father and grandfather, both of whom served with the U.S. Army during World War I. The same could be said of Kocak and Dreben and thousands of others who fought and died alongside them in France and Belgium.
Without exception, these guys were having a hell of a time during those dark days of October 1918. The United States had been fighting with ever-increasing force since the late spring—long enough for individual battles, advances, victories, and retreats to lose their crisp edges and blur into one long nightmare of gas and bullets and blood. The Hindenburg Line had been broken, Blanc Mont Ridge seized and declawed—but to the men on the ground it seemed to make little difference. There was no end in sight to the violence. No matter how cunning the battle plan or how noble the name of the push, German bullets still killed, shell fragments still tore off limbs, gas still burned their throats and shriveled their lungs. All along the Western Front soldiers were muttering darkly about digging in for the winter.
By October 12, the day Sergeant Kocak was buried, the Argonne campaign that had opened sixteen days earlier with such an overwhelming display of American firepower was stalled just about everywhere. Meyer Epstein, having gone out on the first wave of the offensive with the 58th Infantry, was now stuck in a foul wood called Bois de Fays deep in the Argonne forest. No advance, no retreat—just day after day of being shelled and gassed from every side. One officer with the regiment wrote of the black despair that settled over his men in this quagmire: “It is said that the Bois de Fays means ‘Woods of the Fairies.’ Were I to name it, I would call it ‘The center of Hell.’ Any man who ever spent any time in those woods, from the 4th to the 17th of October, knows that even that term does not adequately express the true situation. The shell torn woods were wet and muddy; everything was wet and damp, raw, cold and clammy. Not a breeze blew to clear the gas laden air. The sun never shone, it was always dark and murky. Down the sides of our fox holes, water trickled or seeped through the walls. From all sides came the odor of death and decay. Mangled bodies of men were everywhere to be seen. Our bodies ached from the cold and wet. The foul surroundings made one sick at heart. We were hungry, yet unable to eat but little of the food which came up. For hours at a time we were forced to be without water, for to go after it was to gamble with death. The mental strain was maddening, the physical strain exhausted us. . . . Sleep was impossible.” Meyer was in even worse physical shape than most of the men because he was starving from lack of protein. Jewish dietary laws forbade all but kosher meat, so Meyer traded his meat rations with the non-Jewish soldiers—meat for bread. But he was steadily losing weight and strength. How was he going to fight when the order finally came for Company H to blast its way out of the “center of Hell”?
Tony Pierro was also stuck in hell. The All-American Division had been held in reserve at the start of the Argonne campaign, but on October 5 they were ordered into the line in the western Argonne where the Aire River wound through dense enemy-infested woods. The All-Americans were mostly city kids, half of them immigrants, all of them green and unblooded. The couple of hours of blasting that Tony’s field artillery unit had done at St. Mihiel barely counted. This nasty dripping jungle in the Argonne was their first time in the real show, and it was a bad time and bad place to enter.
Since soldiers at the front didn’t see American newspapers, Tony may not have realized that he was going in just a few miles away from where the so-called Lost Battalion was trapped behind enemy lines. The story of how this group of soldiers got separated from their division and pinned down in the Argonne forest—and the question of what would happen to them—was one of those cliffhangers journalists live for. On October 2, parts of nine companies from the 77th “Melting Pot” Division—554 men in all, many of them Jewish and Italian immigrants from the Lower East Side of New York—advanced so rapidly into enemy territory that they had become surrounded by German forces and entirely cut off from the rest of their division. By October 7, when the All-Americans entered the sector, the Lost Battalion had been subjected to five days of incessant shelling and sniping. Food, ammunition, and medical supplies were nearly exhausted—and casualties were mounting. The situation was becoming more desperate by the hour.
The All-Americans were enlisted to take part in a massive coordinated assault just east of the “pocket” where the Lost Battalion was lodged. Tony’s artillery battery opened fire at 5:40 the morning of October 7, and Battery E kept up intermittent barrages and harassing fire over the next eighteen hours. In the course of the day, the All-American infantry managed to advance half a mile—not far enough to free the Lost Battalion, but far enough to put severe pressure on the German forces in the sector. Later that night, men from the 77th Division’s 307th Infantry finally broke through. Of the 554 men of the Lost Battalion who had been caught behind enemy lines four days earlier, only 194 were able to walk out on their own; another 144 had to be evacuated on stretchers. The other 216 were dead.
Retribution of a kind came swiftly. The following morning, Corporal Alvin York and a group of his buddies from the All-American’s 328th Infantry walked into a firefight with some Germans manning a machine gun. York watched six of his comrades from Company G, including his best friend Corporal Murray Savage, get shot to pieces. Armed with a rifle and pistol, the superb marksman from the hills of Tennessee exacted his revenge. York chose his targets carefully from among the surrounding German soldiers and began picking them off one by one. When York was done shooting, he began taking prisoners. Eventually, with the help of a captured German lieutenant who had lived in the United States and spoke English, York rounded up 132 prisoners and won himself a Medal of Honor.
York was a deeply religious Christian, and the bloodshed he had witnessed and caused on October 8 troubled him sorely. The following day, he asked to be excused from the line so he could return to that scrap of woods and search for survivors—American, German, anyone who might have been wounded in the exchange of fire. But there was no one. York would not leave the site before bowing his head in prayer. “I prayed for the Greeks and Italians and the Poles and the Jews and the others. I done prayed for the Germans too. They were all brother men of mine. Maybe their religion was different, but I reckon we all believed in the same God and I wanted to pray for all of them.” York prayed, but what he had seen and done on the field of death had nothing to do with God. “God,” he wrote afterward, “would never be cruel enough to create a cyclone as terrible as that Argonne battle.”
Over the next week, as Tony inched his way with the All-Americans through the fetid woods astride the Aire River, he came to regret that he had ever been tapped to work with horses. One of his jobs now was to drive the horse-drawn supply wagons to and from the front: going up to the line, Tony carried supplies and ammunition, going out he carried bodies. Tony never talked much about what he was thinking when he drove that cart with a load of corpses behind him; but it was probably no different from what another soldier told a reporter almost ninety years later when the country was at war again, this time in Iraq: “This is not easy to talk about. Part of our job, our duty, was that we loaded, you know, bodies. We were in charge of the airfield, and we would load these heroes into the aircraft. My platoon sergeant had a policy. He didn’t want lower-ranking soldiers involved. He told us, ‘You guys are going to carry this with you, whether you realize it or not, for the rest of your lives. If I can protect the privates, I will.’ I don’t know if I could ever explain what that was really like. I loaded these guys—and I know all their names—onto a plane. And you don’t know how heavy a guy in a body bag can be. It’s not just his weight. He may be 180 pounds, but it’s a lot more than just a 180-pound guy. You’re loading his entire life.” That was what Tony was doing with his horse and cart in the Argonne forest; like the soldier interviewed in Iraq, he carried it with him all his life.
On one of Tony’s trips to the front an artillery shell landed directly in front of his cart. The horse took the impact of the explosion and died instantly. Tony realized that his horse had saved his life—and he grieved as if he’d lost a buddy. He’d gotten to love that horse in all those trips back and forth to the line. Other guys felt the same about their horses, their dogs, any innocent living thing that kept them company through this horror. It might seem strange to mourn for a horse when men were dying all around, but that’s how it was.
Peter Thompson, Leonardo Costantino, and the rest of the Wild West Division were in no better shape. Though the Wild West boys had acquitted themselves admirably in their first couple of days in the Argonne, by October they were slogging miserably along with everyone else. Leonardo’s log entries, brief though they are, capture the sense of sinking hopelessly, blindly into a never-ending battle:
Sept. 30 One more long night spend in a trench seem like a year. All of us are tired and sick. No sleep, no eats, no water for 84 hours.
Oct. 3 No relieve for us, so Had to go back on the line at 6:30 last night. Can’t advance, for the boys are all in and sick. Our clothes are all wet and torn. I have now a blanket thank God. I’m freezen. Had some stew and Bread, that safe my life.
Oct. 4 Feal very tired and Hungry. Try to locate Archi but was impossible. War is worst than “Hell.” That is all I have to say
Oct. 5 Had my shoe off first time in two weeks. Poor feet of mine are certainly sore. Had a hot meal, first time in two weecks but I can’t even eat that now.
Wet clothes, sore feet, long nights freezing out in the rain, never enough to eat: that was the reality of the soldier’s life in war. If there was progress on any given day, Leonardo was mostly oblivious to it. He made no mention of objectives or strategy, battle plans or liaison—but no mention of fear either. For Leonardo the war was the immediate sensation of his living flesh and the fate of buddies. He might not ever win a medal, but he was going to make damn sure he survived the war. San Diego suited him fine and he had every intention of going back there.
Andrew Christofferson was also hungry that October, even hungrier than he’d been as a boy growing up poor in Norway. He was slight of build—five feet, seven inches, never broke 140 pounds—and so he had less in the way of reserves than the huskier guys. Andrew had also had less time to get broken into the army. Drafted on June 25 from his Montana homestead and sent down to South Carolina to train with the 81st “Wildcat” Division, he was in France by August and in the trenches by the middle of September. Andrew’s regiment—the 321st Infantry—had been assigned to a relatively static sector in the Vosges Mountains not far from the German border, about a hundred miles southeast of the main action in the Argonne. It was a cushy berth compared to the worst of the Argonne; nonetheless, for the month he was stationed there, Andrew endured sporadic shelling and machine-gun fire from the enemy and chronic short rations from his own side. Things got so bad he took to following the bread wagon that supplied the front and scrounging for whatever fell off. If a loaf landed in a pile of horse manure, he would just brush it off as best he could and eat it. Drinking water was scarce enough that on occasion Andrew had to get down on his stomach in the mud and sip from the puddles that collected in the horses’ hoofprints.
There was a guy from Chicago in Andrew’s company, a banker’s son who never quit boasting about how rich his family was and how luxurious his life had been before he got drafted. One day a bunch of the men sat together under a tree sharing a single loaf of bread that one of them had scavenged. The guy with the loaf tore it into chunks and passed them around. It tickled Andrew no end when the banker’s son accepted his shred of dirty stale bread and murmured ruefully, “Oh, if my family could see me now!” He ate the bread all the same, Andrew noted, and was happy to get it—same as the freckled, sandy-haired country boys from the Carolina hills, same as the bantam-weight immigrant from the west coast of Norway who had always thanked God for every blessed morsel of bread that came his way.
No regiment stayed in a quiet sector forever. By the middle of October, new orders came down for the Wildcat Division. Andrew, the banker’s son, and the rest of them packed up and started on the long march to the Argonne.
Among the infinite variety of suffering on the battlefield, there was a special torment reserved for the soldiers of German descent: the fear that they might be fighting one of their relatives. Charles Minder, a New Yorker of German blood serving with the Melting Pot Division, gave voice to this anxiety in a letter to his mother written not long after he arrived in France: “I wonder about the enemy. They are the same as me, I have German blood in me, I never know when I might be shooting at one of my own cousins or uncles. We don’t want to shoot each other, but we are forced to.”
By the time Minder was fighting in the Argonne, this fear had become a kind of mania. In another letter, he unburdened himself of an encounter with a dying German soldier that had driven him to the brink of insanity:
I walked up to the machine-gun nest and there were the two Germans stretched out on their backs. One of them was unconscious and the other opened his eyes very weakly as I came up to him and when I looked into his face, I felt like dying. I had a ghastly fear that he was Uncle Franz, for he looked like him. I lifted his head, and blood spurted from the wounds on the side of his neck. I asked him, Sint sie nicht Franz Barg, von Bremen aus? He opened his eyes very slowly again and looked at me; then his eyes closed, and he was still. He gave one slight gasp and passed on. I knelt there for a little while just dumb. I couldn’t think or do anything. Of course, he was not Uncle Franz, but I kept thinking of him in the German lines and my cousins there, too.
An officer came along and started hollering at me: “What the hell are you doing there? This is no time for souvenir hunting! Don’t you know we are advancing? Leave those dead Germans alone! Come on!” I gathered up the ammunition boxes and followed on. I was so heartsick I couldn’t talk. . . .
This is about the worst place that we have ever been in. This day has been like a dream to me, a terrible nightmare. I can’t write any more tonight.
“If there is a God, why doesn’t he put a stop to this?” Minder asked his mother. “Is this evil force, War, more powerful than God?” How many soldiers of every nationality and religion must have wondered the same in those darkening October days.