With Their Bare Hands

General Kuhn’s chain of command had collapsed, so he improvised. At around 1:00 a.m. a runner came in from Oury’s 314th Regiment headquarters; Kuhn sent him back with an order to attack and, if possible, to transmit the same order to Sweezey of the 313th. When General Noble, commanding the 158th Brigade, showed up at his headquarters at 2:00 a.m., Kuhn ordered him to take his 315th Regiment forward to the line of the 314th, and see if they had followed his orders to attack:

If, on arriving at the present location of the 314th Inf., you find that these instructions to its commanding officer have not been received or obeyed, you will take command of the 314th Infantry and will advance as rapidly as possible without regard to the progress made by the division on your right and left. Should you find that the 314th Infantry has moved forward, you will move forward in support of that regiment. You will take every possible measure to press the advance with the utmost vigor ... ¹

These actions had two effects. First, they cut the absent Nicholson out of the command loop and put Kuhn directly in contact with the 314th and (he hoped) the 313th. Second, they reorganized Kuhn’s brigades without altering the positions of the regiments: instead of one brigade in front and one behind, there would now be two side by side, as there should have been in the first place. The right-hand brigade, the Provisional 158th, comprising the 314th Regiment in the lead and the 315th following, was the one just assigned to Noble. The one on the left, the Provisional 157th, with the 313th ahead and the 316th in support, would be commanded by Nicholson if he could ever be found. Just before 5:00 a.m. Kuhn followed up his message to Noble with a stiff order to Nicholson:

Imperative orders from Commander-in-Chief require that the 79th Division advance at once to come in line with neighboring Division. Owing to your having broken liaison, it was necessary to place Gen’ Noble in charge of the 315th and 314th Regiments to make an immediate advance. You are directed to take command of the 313th and 316th Regiments and to push on with all possible speed. Location of these Regiments not definitely known.²

By this time Private Cain and his companion had made it back to Kuhn’s headquarters. Captain Edward Madeira, commander of the Headquarters Company, ran up to him. “General Nicholson has broken liaison, and we’ve got not a way on earth to reach him unless you fellows can do it.” Cain had found Nicholson’s PC once that night and figured he could do it again. Madeira dragged the private in to see Kuhn, who told him to deliver the order and report back to him in Malancourt. Cain vanished into the night in what he remembered to be the right direction.³ General Noble, now in charge of the right-hand brigade, had received his command only after the 79th had reached France. Officers who knew him from prewar days out West remembered him mainly as a drinker and poker-player and someone who wasted time on unimportant details. “His appearance and actions did not inspire confidence.”⁴ Concerned whether Noble would carry out the advance he had ordered, Kuhn, accompanied by Ross and a couple of aides, went forward from Esnes to Haucourt, the location of Noble’s PC, at 4:30 a.m. Fighting their way through the traffic jam, it took them an hour and a half to travel the two-mile distance. At Haucourt, Kuhn found to his dismay that Noble had not, in fact, attacked with the 315th as ordered. As Kuhn arrived, Major Samuel W. Fleming, Jr., adjutant of the 315th, was talking with Noble, who had just offered that it was a beautiful morning and that things were going well. Fleming described what happened next:

It was not a beautiful morning and things were not going well. Just then we saw the Division Commander, General Kuhn, and Colonel Ross his Chief of Staff striding, and I mean striding, down the trench apparently trailing Noble. As Kuhn reached us Noble put out his hand and greeted him with a cheerful, “Good Morning, General.” Kuhn paid no attention to him and jumped to the top of the trench followed by Ross, and said sternly: “General Noble, by virtue of the office I hold, I hereby relieve you of command.” That was all.

Noble’s head dropped and he walked slowly to the rear with an aide. That was the last of him. He should never have been sent to France in the first place. We learned later that it was a question of Noble’s scalp or Kuhn’s, as the latter had been ridden for slowing down the offensive by his Corps Commander, who in turn was being ridden by GHQ which meant General Pershing.⁵

Turning to Colonel Knowles of the 315th, Kuhn ordered him to push his regiment forward and to take over the new provisional brigade until Colonel Oury, who would command it, could be found. Knowles immediately ordered his 2nd and 3rd Battalions to prepare for an advance and the tank and brigade artillery to join him at the north end of Malancourt.

Day did not break on September 27. It dripped, it oozed, it flowed. A sullen rain—not hard, but cold and steady—soaked the ground, the men, their clothing. The pale sky shed a dim light on the brown, scabrous landscape. The clayey earth deliquesced into a gray-orange paste, slimy and tenacious. To keep one’s footing was an accomplishment, to make forward progress a struggle. Company F of the 314th occupied a winding trench formerly held by the German defenders. In addition to the rain, the men were sprayed with occasional bursts of machine gun fire from the nearby woods. The floor of the trench was littered with the bodies of German soldiers and a few Americans; to walk down it, one had to step on or over them.⁶

The two lead regiments, unaware of the reorganization, did not wait for orders from Kuhn or their brigade commanders to attack. Colonel Oury issued his instructions orally for an attack by the 314th at 4:00 a.m., the 3rd Battalion on the left and the 2nd Battalion on the right. The regiment, attacking up the Malancourt–Montfaucon road, met with heavy machine gun fire from straight ahead and also from the Ouvrage du Démon, a well-named German strong point on the left, as well as from the trenches around Cuisy on the right. Cries rang out: “First Aid! First Aid!” “Gas! Masks on!” “Break up! Deploy more, corporal! Keep apart and advance!”⁷ In the dark, the enemy could not see well to aim, but neither could the men of the 314th see their tormentors. As a result, the lead companies of both battalions bypassed machine gun nests in the dark that then had to be taken by the support companies. The enemy positions were built with overlapping fields of fire, so that they were impossible to flank. On their own initiative and under fire, some of the men discovered the rudiments of fire-and-maneuver tactics, the proper procedure to counter a defense in depth. A platoon, a squad, or an informally organized combat group would send a few men crawling through the mud to the side or rear of a machine gun nest, there to fire at the defenders while the rest of the unit moved into grenade-throwing range. After that, a quick rush with rifle and bayonet would usually take the position. This was repeated many times on the field.⁸

To the left, Sweezey of the 313th wanted more light so he delayed his attack. At 7:00 a.m. the regiment moved north out of the Bois de Cuisy, the 1st Battalion on the right, the 2nd on the left, and the 3rd in support. A company of the 311th Machine Gun battalion provided overhead fire from north of the Bois de Montfaucon; six light tanks and one battalion of 75s from the 57th Field Artillery Brigade accompanied the attack. The 57th Field Artillery shelled Montfaucon with its huge 9.2-inch guns. As the men went down the slope they met no resistance; but as they started up the hill toward the town, it was another story. Machine gun fire raked the advancing troops from above; according to a prisoner, 32 machine guns were defending Montfaucon. But resistance was visibly weakening; the machine gun fire was not nearly as damaging as it had been the previous evening. With fire-and-maneuver tactics and the use of hand grenades, the machine gun posts were gradually overcome.*

* The French tank officers, as usual, told a different story. Major Guillot, commanding the 14th Light Tank Battalion, personally observed his 342nd Company support the attack of the 313th on the western slopes of Montfaucon. The tanks destroyed several machine guns, losing three of their number to German artillery. But although the tanks made progress, the Americans did not follow because of the German barrage. The tanks ended up circumnavigating Montfaucon clockwise, eventually meeting up with elements of the 314th Infantry Regiment coming north. ([no first name] Guillot, “Report Required by Note of October 2d 1918,” October 30, 1918, 17 N 128, SHD, p. 2.) Neither the Americans nor the Germans report such a movement.

Both regiments faced difficulties similar to those of the previous day. The road between Malancourt and Cuisy, a single-lane, unpaved track that the 79th Division shared with the 4th, remained jammed with vehicles. Things were slowly getting better, however. The 304th Engineers worked all of the night of the 26–27th on the Avocourt–Malancourt segment and by 2:45 a.m. Lieutenant Colonel J. Frank Barber, the regiment’s chief of staff, reported that it was open for horse-drawn transport and that trucks would be able to use it at 8:00 a.m. Even the French liaison officers complimented the efforts of the engineers and their officers.⁹ By 6:00 a.m. the divisional trains had reached Malancourt; but there they immediately bumped into the trains of the 4th Division and things again came to a halt. With road traffic frozen solid, the only reliable transport was pack animals; a shortage of these prevented enough ammunition from reaching the infantry and artillery. For the same reason, runners and mounted couriers were the only means of communication. The liaison staff of the 79th could send messages to the neighboring divisions because their orderlies were on horses. The reverse was not true because the flanking divisions used motorcycles and sidecars, which could not negotiate the impassable roads. Telephone lines, once cut, could be repaired only with difficulty. This, offered a French observer, was probably because the telephone repairmen were not integral members of the regiments. They refused to work on the lines during bombardments and disappeared for hours at a time.¹⁰ Kuhn and his staff, in their inexperience, compounded the problem by operating their PC as if it were the location of the commanding officer himself, rather than the hub of his communication center. As Kuhn traveled all over his sector, messengers often could not find him. At one point on the afternoon of the 27th, according to the commander of the French liaison mission to the 79th, Kuhn and some of his staff, part of the intelligence staff, the chief of staff and the head of operations, and the chief of administration were in separate locations scattered over ten miles. He termed this “a new and unfortunate application of the principle of positioning in depth.”¹¹

Once again, the artillery advanced the barrage too fast for the infantry, giving sheltered Germans time to resume their positions in the trenches and machine-gun the advancing troops. The country in front of Montfaucon and the Bois de la Tuilerie, which bordered it to the right, was a rising slope over a mile in extent, unwooded and completely open to artillery and machine gun fire. As the highest point for miles around, it was fully visible to German guns as distant as seven miles to the east and west. The two regiments came under direct fire from heavy guns in the Argonne Forest to their left and on Hill 378 (the “Borne du Cornouiller”) across the Meuse River to their right. Indirect fire came from woods to the north. The only artillery available to respond was a single battalion backing up the 313th Infantry that had finally made it through the traffic jam; their 75mm guns were no match in range or weight for those of the enemy. The results were visible from a distance: Leo V. Jacks, an enlisted man in the 119th Field Artillery, noticed that the bodies on the hillside ahead of him were arranged in small circles and he knew what that meant. The inexperienced infantrymen were bunching up, so that a single shell would disable eight or ten of them at once instead of one or two.

Artillery support remained a problem throughout the day. German shell fire inflicted many injuries. One of the American artillery’s missions was to bombard the German batteries, and for once the regiments’ lead battalions were able to spot good targets for them. But although General Irwin ordered his 147th and 121st Field Artillery Regiments to advance, “[t]he absolute impossibility of moving cross country on account of the great number of shell holes and mud, the great delay in securing permission to use roads, and the immobility of traffic after this permission was secured, delayed the forward movement of the batteries to such an extent as to be exasperating.”¹² The regiments did not get into position until the afternoon. This left the work up to the heavies back at the 57th Artillery Brigade’s position, which had the range to reach the battlefield. But the rapid advance and the slowness of communication to the rear made the risk of shelling their own men very high, so little help arrived from the 57th. What feeble artillery assistance there was came from the mobile 37mm guns carried by the Headquarters Companies. They had not kept up with the first day’s attack, but came forward on the night of the 27th and were able to reinforce the infantry in the morning. Corps artillery and two French regiments attached to the 57th laid down “protective fire,” according to Irwin, but they could have had no target designation or observation of fire.¹³ Nor would army artillery be of any help. First Army’s orders for the day gave no firing assignments to army batteries, and the previous day’s order forbidding shelling below the Army Objective still stood.

Nonetheless, individual units of the army artillery attempted to support the infantry as best they could. Alden Brooks, an American officer serving with the French 81st Artillery Regiment assigned to the Aire grouping, tried to get target information from the 79th. Unable to reach Kuhn’s headquarters by phone, he commandeered a motorcycle and went forward. Eventually the road became too cut up for the motorcycle, so he continued on foot. “One glance at telephone wires trampled deep in mud and slop told why communications everywhere had broken down.” He finally reached Kuhn’s PC at Malancourt:

From their conversation, [Kuhn’s staff] seemed for the moment to know little of what was happening, more than that there was urgent need up front for artillery support. I introduced myself as coming from the Aire grouping, mentioned our long-range guns standing idle, said I would return at once with word of any objective that should be fired upon. Their reply was polite, and yet somewhat ambiguous ... To ask for artillery support is not sufficient; one must know on what objectives one wants it, and at what time.¹⁴

Kuhn, being out of touch with Nicholson at that time, had no idea where his front actually was or what targets were available.* The operations reports of the 57th Field Artillery told the story in numbers: on September 26, its massive 9.2-inch guns fired 695 shells, the heavy 155mm pieces 6,000, and the 75mm guns fired 39,102 rounds. On the 27th the 9.2s still managed 750 shells but the 75s achieved only 1,500 and the 155s fired a flat zero.¹⁵

* Elsewhere Brooks says that the heavy guns were unavailable because the Aire grouping, believing the false reports that Montfaucon had fallen on the 26th, had ordered them forward and they were still on the road. (Alden Brooks, As I Saw It (New York: Knopf, 1929), p. 258.)

Things were not much better to the left and right of the 79th. At 1:00 a.m. on the 27th, V Corps transmitted an order from First Army that the divisions were to advance independently to the combined First Army Phase Line, while keeping within their original zones of action.¹⁶ This unshackled the 4th and the 37th Divisions from the lagging 79th, although it did not otherwise allow them much freedom of maneuver. At 7:00 a.m. the 4th, which had spent the afternoon and evening of the previous day watching the 5th Bavarian Reserve Division pour men and guns unimpeded into Nantillois and the Bois de Brieulles, gamely attempted to take the town. But 75mm guns were the heaviest available for support, and the morning attack failed.† The 39th Infantry Regiment, on the division’s left, suffered the most. German resistance had greatly increased. The previous day one could walk upright; now one had to crawl or crouch. Because Montfaucon was still not taken, the regiment took heavy flanking fire from machine guns and artillery, which also came from the woods and defensive positions in front. (Much of the fire came from the battery of Captain Hollidt, the artillerist from the 5th Bavarian Reserve Division, who had helped thwart the attack of the 4th Division the day before.) Two battalions of the 39th Infantry got as far as the east–west road from Nantillois, at which point they were stopped at Hill 266 by heavy machine gun fire. But their positions were fully exposed to the German artillery, which pounded them until they retired behind the hill with severe losses. In their refuge, a depression south of the Nantillois road, they were an even more compressed target for the German artillery. So, despite the efforts of their officers, they continued to withdraw about a mile to the southern slope of Hill 295, where they dug in.¹⁷ The entire division spent the night in approximately the same positions from which they had started out that morning.

† The sources are contradictory regarding the advance of the 4th Division on September 27. According to Lanza, the division first failed to capture Nantillois; later in the morning, with support from army and corps artillery, they took it, only to lose it to a German counterattack (Conrad H. Lanza, “The Army Artillery, First Army,” unpublished manuscript in AHEC library, c. 1926, p. 225). Neither the operational summary by the ABMC, 4th Division: Summary of Operations in the World War, nor the divisional history (Robert B. Cole and Barnard E. Eberlin, The History of the 39th U.S. Infantry During the World War (New York: Press of Joseph D. McGuire, 1919), makes any mention of capturing Nantillois on the 27th. The history of the 47th Infantry (James E. Pollard, The Forty-Seventh Infantry, a History: 1917–1918–1919 (Saginaw, MI: Press of Seeman & Peters, 1919), p. 65) asserts that the regiment advanced all the way to the Bois de Fays (nearly two miles north of Nantillois) and spent the night there, although the ABMC puts the division no further north than the Bois de Septsarges, much to the south, on the same night.

The 37th Division attacked at 5:30 a.m. Major Roy V. Myers, an officer of the 55th Field Artillery Regiment supporting the 37th, described the morning advance of the 148th Infantry on Ivoiry, in the left of the division’s sector:

We stood at the forward edge of the woods on top of a ridge. The un-wooded slope descended to our front to a near valley; thence a steeper slope to the top of the next ridge which was parallel to and about level with the one on which we stood. The distance to the skyline of ridge to our front was a little less than one kilometer. Silhouetted against the sky on that ridge was our Infantry ... Shells were bursting over and among them. Planes were flying overhead. Just what part in the battle they were taking was not evident. American troops were going forward in the narrow valley between my position and the battle line ridge. These reinforcement troops were in single file combat groups of approach formation. Shells were falling perilously close to some of them. Only then did they break their formation, as the men, never before under fire, would run a short distance from the fountain of smoke, earth and flying missiles of death. It reminded one of young partridges running instinctively from a danger suddenly thrust among them. Then the young soldiers would give the heavy packs on their backs a heave to adjust them from an uncomfortable angle which they assumed during the momentary excitement. The men were not scratched. They reformed their line and marched forward again apparently with a consciousness of experience under fire which veteranized them within the space of a few seconds of time.¹⁸

By 9:00 a.m. they had taken Ivoiry and gotten 500 yards beyond. There they were stopped by a German counterattack and got no further that day.

Southwest of Montfaucon, the 145th Infantry, the right-hand regiment of the 37th Division, attacked toward the town at dawn, but was immediately stopped. The 146th and 145th then renewed the attack using individual battalions. The 1st and 3rd Battalions of the 146th got the furthest, assaulting the ridge north of the Ivoiry–Montfaucon road; but it too was brought to a standstill by heavy machine gun and artillery fire. In the evening the leading regiments were withdrawn from what looked like an insecure salient. Like the 4th, the 37th ended the day in much the same position from which it had started.*

* In its divisional history and in affidavits and other statements after the war, officers of the 37th Division claimed to have sent at least ten patrols into or around Montfaucon on September 26 and 27, before the 79th Division took the town. The accounts vary in their detail and credibility and some contradict others.

Army group commander Gallwitz had spent the night of September 26–27 strengthening the position of his Maas Group West. He reversed the previous day’s withdrawal of his artillery, which had rendered it largely useless. The German 37th Division, which had arrived the previous evening, relieved the battered 117th of sector command. One battalion of its 151st Infantry Regiment was put north of the Bois de Beuge to hold the junction between the 37th’s subsector and that of the 117th. Its 147th Regiment went into line in the Bois de Brieulles, reinforcing the 10th and 12th Bavarians who were facing the American 4th division.¹⁹ What was left of the 117th was concentrated in Montfaucon facing Kuhn’s 79th, and was augmented with several artillery battalions. Gallwitz ordered more reinforcements forward—the 115th and 236th Divisions, both rated by American intelligence as third class but both relatively fresh.²⁰ Expected to arrive on the afternoon of the 27th, they didn’t reach the field until the next day. But although he had improved his line, Gallwitz still could not give up the idea that the entire attack west of the Meuse was a feint to cover a larger offensive against the Metz–Briey complex to the east. He therefore left considerable forces east of Verdun and out of the immediate action.²¹

At 5:00 a.m. the Germans took shelter as the Americans resumed their bombardment and at 6:30 a.m. they observed the infantry advancing, supported by tanks. They repulsed the first assault. To the surprise of the 11th Grenadiers the next attack, at 9:00 a.m., came from the west. (This was probably the battalion-level assault of the 145th and 146th Infantry Regiments mentioned above.) It was barely contained by a single company joined by the telephone technicians and regimental orderlies.* Major Stosch quickly transferred an infantry platoon and a heavy machine gun from his left flank to his right, all the while sending urgent requests to division and brigade headquarters for a reserve company.²² But things were going badly in the adjacent sectors. Hard-pressed by the (American) 37th Division to his right, the 151st Regiment of the (German) 37th Division and the 450th Regiment of the 117th were forced to withdraw, leaving the 150th Regiment to extend its line eastward to fill the gap between it and the 11th Grenadiers.²³ To his left, the advance of the 4th Division forced the regiments in the Bois de Brieulles to pull back as well.²⁴

* So says the regimental history of the 11th Grenadiers. The 117th Division’s war diary credits the repulse to the combined efforts of its 450th Regiment and the neighboring 151st Regiment of the (German) 37th Division. (“117th Division (Subordinate Units): Diary and Annexes,” September 25–30, 1918, RG 165, Army War College, Historical Section, Box 165, 117th Division, 22.3, NARA, p. 85.)

General von Gallwitz looked at the map, saw the same indentation in the front line that Pershing had, but drew the opposite conclusion: Montfaucon and its defenders were about to be cut off. “I ordered that Montfaucon be relinquished and a new line established, running from Epinonville, by way of the heights to the north of Nantillois to Brieulles.”²⁵ At 10:00 a.m. a motorcycle messenger reached Stosch’s headquarters with an order from Major General Hoefer, commander of the 117th: the 11th Grenadiers were to withdraw to a line running south of the Bois de Beuge and through Nantillois and, with the other regiments, form a defensive position. In the words of the regimental historian:

This order initially shocked the regiment to the core. Instead of ordering the other regiments [i.e., the 151st, 450th, and 147th] to resume their positions, the division ordered the 11th Grenadier Regiment to abandon the sector which they had defended with such great sacrifices and in such tenacious battles, when the allotment of a single strong reserve for the right flank would be enough to hold it. And to surrender in the middle of the day, when a new attack could be expected at any moment and a thrust into the retreating troops could lead to their utter destruction.²⁶

On the other hand, it was clear that the thinness of the front line made it impossible to transfer troops to the regiment’s right flank, which was too weak to withstand another assault. If the enemy broke through to Montfaucon now, only a fighting retreat would be possible. Stosch conferred with the artillery commanders attached to his regiment, then ordered the forward companies to withdraw from their positions quietly and assemble on the north slope of the hill. The 1st and 2nd Battalions were ordered to place their companies on both sides of Nantillois in line with the companies already there. The trickiest part of the withdrawal was the retreat of the 11th Company, holding the extreme western part of the line and in contact with American troops of the 37th Division; they were ordered to leave one by one using any available cover. The retreat was successful and, although it was noticed by American patrols, there was no attempt to interfere. “Doubtless the enemy himself did not believe that this entire area would be surrendered to him without a battle.” One month later a messenger arrived at the regiment’s headquarters. Major Count Stosch had been awarded the Pour le Mérite, the highest German military decoration, for his defense of Montfaucon.²⁷

To the right of the 11th Grenadiers one battalion of the 450th Regiment retreated into the Bois de Beuge and, with the 150th Regiment to its right, formed a defensive line. The two other battalions of the 450th were too badly shattered to continue as separate commands; they were reorganized into provisional Battalion Wehber, named after the cavalry captain who took command. Assigned to cover the road out of Nantillois where it forked westward to Cierges and northward to Cunel, the battalion was forced to withdraw even further by American artillery fire. This left a gap between the Bois de Beuge and Nantillois, which was plugged by the emplacement of a group of heavy machine guns, joined by bits and pieces of two pioneer companies and a Minenwerfer company.²⁸

All this was happening as Sweezey’s 313th Infantry Regiment struggled up the hill toward the town and Oury’s 314th, with the tanks of the French 340th Company, approached the Bois de la Tuilerie to its right. Those men not dodging machine gun bullets and hand grenades could admire the fireworks in the air above them:

Six planes, some with black Prussian crosses, the others with allied circles, were maneuvering and shooting streams of machine gun bullets, each aviator striving for a position deadly to an enemy “bus.” Like six big birds, some were climbing, others gliding in big curves, and others suddenly diving. Red hot tracer bullets marked the path of each stream of steel-nosed peace notes—the gunner’s guide to his mark. Suddenly an allied plane dropped, twisting and turning, apparently in a mad plunge to destruction. However, it didn’t strike terra firma, but righted itself and climbed to a good position. It was the false dive of a dare-devil aviator.²⁹

As the 314th advanced, the men had to step on or over the gray-green-clad bodies of German soldiers, and a few American ones as well. Lieutenant Joel in the 2nd Battalion noticed “the upturned face of a young German, about 16 years of age—an expression with something of the puzzle of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The innocent, child-like, questioning wonderment seemed to indicate that he had left this life puzzled as to what it was all about.”³⁰ Despite the aid from their 37mm guns, the 314th suffered heavy casualties as they passed over the Fayel Farm ridge on their way to the Bois de la Tuilerie. One of them was Captain Clarence Patton Freeman, commander of Company M:

The rattle of the rapid fire guns was the first warning the men received and the captain, badly wounded in the left thigh, went down headlong. Disregarding protection a number of his men ran to their captain, attempting to lift him up and carry him to safety. As they raised him to a sitting position, the Huns turned loose another blast of fire. Three bullets struck the already wounded officer, one passing through his head and effecting a mortal injury. Despite this hail of fire his men persisted and finally half-dragged, half-carried him to a shell hole where he lay until long after dark, when stretcher-bearers reached him and carried him back to the nearest field hospital. From there he was placed in an ambulance and taken to the mobile hospital, where he died early in the morning of September 30.³¹

Captain Freeman was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and just before sailing for France had been admitted to the Pennsylvania bar. Other officers and men were killed by shell fragments. It was common for wounded men, ordered to the rear, to refuse to leave their comrades and to keep up with the advance as best they could. They reached the Bois around noon; entering the wood, they captured four 77mm guns.

For the 313th the withdrawal of the 11th Grenadiers made their going considerably easier than it had been at first light. Lieutenant Joel later described the scene as Sweezey’s regiment climbed the hill:

With the buzz of tanks and aeroplane motors and the bursts of high explosive and shrapnel, the regiment started ahead in one of the most exciting fights of its history. It was an inspiring sight to see wave after wave of infantry following the advancing tanks, and the other troops in small groups coming behind and on the flanks; and to watch the shrapnel and high explosive shells bursting among the lines and over the heads of the khaki-clad files. Beyond the crest of the hill big things immediately began to happen. The storm of “H. E.’s” and “G. I. cans”—high explosive—increased in intensity, gas clouds became a great deal more concentrated, and the whining and snapping machine gun and sniper bullets added to the toll of casualties.³²

By 11:00 a.m. Sweezey’s lead battalion had reached the outskirts of the town; by 11:55 a.m. they had occupied it fully. The colonel wrote out the following message:

Took town of Montfaucon 11h 55 after considerable fighting in town. Many snipers left behind. Town shelled to slight extent after our occupation. Am moving on to Corps objective and hope to reach it by 16h.*³³

* Colonel E.E. Haskell of the Inspector General’s staff commented, “It was reported that the town was stubbornly defended and that there were many casualties. This latter report was not borne out by personal observation.” (Army War College, Historical Section, “The Seventy-Ninth Division, 1917–1918,” (1924), p. 38.)

The phone lines were dead, so Sweezey sent the message by a runner, who got to Kuhn’s PC at 1:30 p.m. Shortly thereafter, a wounded pigeon, dispatched at the same time as the runner, fluttered into Kuhn’s PC at Haucourt.

As it happened, Kuhn had already heard the news. Sometime after 11:00 a.m. Private Cain finally showed up in Malancourt. Kuhn was standing by the side of the road, “all smeared up and looking like hell.” Cain saluted and confessed that he had gotten lost and had not delivered the attack order to General Nicholson. But Kuhn did not have a chance to react because at that moment Nicholson himself suddenly appeared. He started to speak, but Kuhn cut him off.

“What do you mean by breaking liaison with me? And where have you been anyway?”

“Where have I been?” demanded Nicholson, “I’ve been taking that position, that’s where I’ve been. And I did not break liaison with you!” It turned out that Nicholson’s runners had stayed with his old PC. In their inexperience, they did not understand that their job was to follow him north and establish a link to his new position. Cain reported that a good deal of swearing ensued, “and the generals can outcuss the privates, I’ll say that for them.”* As Cain went off, he was approached by Captain Madeira.

* The following April, Kuhn sent his wife two newspaper articles written by Cain describing this incident. “Strange to say,” he wrote, “they are unusually accurate but what I am wondering at is how Private Cain got the dope. When I climbed Montfaucon on Sept 27, I went alone, leaving orderly and horses under shelter at foot of hill which was under heavy shell fire. No one saw me save Col. Sweezey and his surgeon Major Jackson and some of the 313th moving forward to the attack on some woods.” (Joseph E. Kuhn to Helen Kuhn, April 8, 1919, Kuhn Papers, Box 5, USMA.)

“You’re not the only one. It’s been a hell of a night and a hell of a day.”

Having taken the town, the Americans now had a chance to examine their prize. They found an amazing array of defensive works, some of them German-built and some adapted from pre-existing structures. Many of the hilltop homes had deep wine cellars with arched stone roofs; the Germans had connected these with galleries and used them as observation posts and machine gun positions. More than a hundred dugouts were eventually found in and around the town, as well as in the Bois de la Tuilerie. On the northern slope was a camp of about 30 buildings including barracks, storerooms, and officers’ quarters. Especially impressive were 17 concrete shafts, inserted into ruined buildings, the tops of which housed observation rooms. The most spectacular of these was a massive tower inside a three-story house on the western side of the hill, inside which was a telescopic periscope mounted on the ground floor and protruding through the roof, from where the entire countryside could be observed. At the moment of capture the periscope was intact; but shortly afterward someone stole the eyepiece for a souvenir, making it useless.*³⁵

* Many of the concrete shafts with their observation decks can still be explored on top of the hill of Montfaucon (the town itself was rebuilt at the southwestern foot of the slope). The large house containing the periscope has disappeared, although a commemorative plaque remains.

Now that the Americans occupied the heights, they could turn the tables on the Germans. They were aided by a break in the weather. Private Jacks of the 119th Field Artillery described a scene worthy of a painting by Turner or Constable:

About four o’clock a gold flood of sunlight broke through the clouds and we saw the plain ahead dotted by thin lines of doughboys straggling forward ... The sky was serried with towering tiers of cloud, and the fields and plains were just feeling the first strokes of frost. The horizon was a violet mist, and distant clumps of trees seemed covered with a blue canopy.³⁶

Apart from its aesthetic merits, this meant that the division had good observation to the north. Three companies of the 311th Machine Gun Battalion emplaced their pieces on the hillside and shot up the retreating German columns. A squad from the division’s Headquarters Company was detailed to set up an observation post in the periscope tower. (A sergeant and two privates operated the post for three days while the Germans shelled the building; they were eventually awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.³⁷) In the process of securing the town, the 313th found several Germans who had been left behind to operate an artillery spotting post. With their capture, the enemy artillery quickly became less intense and less accurate. Kuhn made sure to secure the hill against a rumored German counterattack. The 311th Machine Guns and a battalion of the 316th Infantry formed a defensive line on the northern slope. To their right, the 310th Machine Gun Battalion and two battalions of the 147th Field Artillery were able to come forward through the traffic jam to reinforce the 314th Infantry, which was now holding the Bois de la Tuilerie. As it happened, the counterattack never materialized.

But the day was not over for the 79th; they were still short of the Corps Objective, which they were supposed to have reached the previous evening. This line ran along the north edge of the Bois de Beuge—over a mile away from the 313th in the left of the sector—and just behind Nantillois, a mile and a half beyond the position of the 314th on the right.

Sweezey’s message reporting the capture of Montfaucon had included a request for artillery fire on the Bois de Beuge, beginning at 2:30 p.m. and ending an hour and a half later. But the barrage lasted only half an hour and few shells were actually fired because, back at army artillery headquarters, no one knew exactly where the 313th was. “The Army Artillery has not sufficient information in regard to the location of friendly troops to open fire at that range. The Army Artillery Commander will be glad to open fire if he can get necessary information and instructions,” was the message sent back to V Corps.³⁸ Most of the division’s own guns were still stuck on the road.

Why was there so little support from army artillery, not just for the 79th but for the entire offensive? As we saw, the previous day First Army had forbidden its gunners to fire below an east–west line running about half a mile north of Nantillois. On the 27th they even extended the no-fire zone to a range of six miles beyond Montfaucon.³⁹ But it is clear that individual army artillery commanders were perfectly willing to support the infantry if they had current information on enemy strong points and batteries. That was the problem: most of the time, no one could give target coordinates to the gunners. The observation posts manned by the attacking divisions provided no data, balloons very little. Liaison officers gave some information but by the time it got to the artillery it was too late and conditions had changed. But had the guns been available, other problems would have interfered. According to Colonel Lanza, First Army artillery’s chief of operations, even such shelling as the army guns were able to provide at this time was generally ineffective. The artillery had not adjusted to the Germans’ defense in depth with its dispersed strong points; instead they assumed that the enemy was in continuous trenches and they bombarded the places the Germans should have been—such as the leading edges of woods—according to the prewar manuals.⁴⁰ In any event, firing on woods and hilltops was no replacement for counterbattery fire. The best way to protect the infantry was to neutralize the German guns, many of which were in the open; this was not done.⁴¹

Failing artillery support, the 79th should have been able to rely on assistance from the French tank battalions, which had finally caught up with the lead regiments after being stuck on the Malancourt road the previous day. Kuhn’s reorganization of the brigades, however, threw the French tank commanders into confusion. Major Guillot’s 14th Light Tanks had been assigned to the original 157th Brigade; he put his 340th and 341st companies on the right with the 314th Infantry. But as the tanks rolled forward with Oury’s regiment into the Bois de la Tuilerie, an officer from the 15th Light Tank Battalion arrived with an order announcing that the brigades had been reorganized and the 14th was now to support the 157th Provisional on the left, the 15th to take over with the 158th Provisional on the right. Having been dismissed from their sector, Guillot’s 340th and 341st companies tried to get orders from the headquarters of the 157th; but they found that Nicholson’s staff were ignorant of the reorganization. They spent the rest of the day trying to find someone to report to.⁴² In the meantime, the three companies of the newly arrived 15th Light Tank Battalion did not reach their assigned regiments, the 314th and 315th, until mid-afternoon.⁴³

Nonetheless, at 3:30 p.m. the 313th with several tanks of the French 342nd Company (which had not been affected by the reorganization) and two companies of the 311th Machine Guns started north. Kuhn watched from the north slope of Montfaucon: “Wave after wave of khaki clad infantry was pouring over the hill and down its northern slope in full view of the enemy while over their heads German shells were bursting, fortunately too high to inflict serious casualties.”⁴⁴ Kuhn was wrong about the casualties; the attack did not get far before it was stopped by machine gun and mortar fire from the Bois de Beuge, accompanied by heavy artillery from the Heights of the Meuse. Once again, Captain Hollidt of the 5th Bavarians was on the spot with his battery, firing at 500 meters range: three of the French tanks were destroyed and the rest retired. (Sweezey later credited the tanks with suppressing German machine gun nests and helping his regiment get as far as it did.⁴⁵ Hollidt and three of his NCOs were decorated for their actions on the 26th and 27th.⁴⁶) Officers and men fell dead and wounded. The losses among battalion commanders continued. Captain Effingham Morris of Company K took over command of 3rd Battalion from Captain Lloyd, who had commanded it only since the previous day and who was now wounded. Morris himself had already been hit in the leg, but insisted on remaining with his battalion. The medical officers of the 313th attended to the casualties on the field, even acting as stretcher-bearers to take men to safety in the rear.

At 6:00 p.m. Sweezey called a halt to the advance and ordered the men to bivouac for the night.* But rest was not to be had; other divisions’ artillery fire fell on the front line of the 313th, and an officer had to be sent to the rear with an order for them to cease. Most of the regiment spent the night of September 27–28 on a line about half a mile north of Montfaucon; some units got as far north as the south edge of the Bois de Beuge. Despite not having reached their objective, largely because of the lack of artillery, the 313th had some accomplishments to show for the day. It had taken Montfaucon and advanced two-thirds of a mile beyond, in the face of heavy opposition. Sweezey later estimated that the regiment had captured about 75 machine guns and 11 field guns and had taken 300 prisoners.⁴⁷ These had come at the cost of 21 dead, including those of the 311th Machine Gun Battalion; as usual, no one counted up the wounded.⁴⁸

* The war diary of the German 117th Division reports a further attempt on the Bois de Beuge by tank-supported infantry at 6:00 p.m. that was broken up by artillery fire. (“117th Division (Subordinate Units): Diary and Annexes,” p. 86.) The histories and combat reports of the 79th and 37th Divisions, the only American divisions in the vicinity, do not attest to such an attack. The history of the 7th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment describes repelling, sometime after 7:00 p.m., a large attack northward from Montfaucon toward Nantillois, supported by eight tanks. (Otto Schaidler, Das K.B. Reserve-Infanterie-Regiment 7, Erinnerungsblätter Deutscher Regimenter (Munich: Verlag Max Schick, 1934), p. 212.) This is hard to credit. No American accounts mention such an attack and it would have been dark at the time; sunset was at 5:38 p.m.

Early in the afternoon, as Sweezey and the 313th were reorganizing for their push toward the Bois de Beuge, Lieutenant Colonel H.J. McKenney took over the 314th from the promoted Colonel Oury and prepared for an attack on Nantillois. He called up one battalion from the 315th, formerly in support, to fill out his line. His orders for the advance read:

Invade One [the 315th Infantry] will advance on Nantillois, enveloping West and South of that town. Invading [3rd Battalion] will advance to Nantillois attacking South edge of town. It is imperative that all troops cross shelled area south of Nantillois without further delay. Artillery will shell Bois de Beuge southwest of Nantillois. Invaded [2nd Battalion] will follow in support. Make every effort to get N. of Nantillois. This is an imperative order to Bn Commdrs. Request Instruct One [314th Infantry] to give close support. You are covered by our artillery firing on Nantillois.⁴⁹

The details of the attack out of the Bois de la Tuilerie are obscure. It is clear from the American accounts that it was immediately met by ferocious German artillery fire. According to Major Richard, the French tank battalion commander, his 343rd Company led the advance into Nantillois but the infantry failed to follow any closer than 1,500 meters. The tanks even passed through Nantillois without meeting any Germans (who at that time had retired just north of the town). His 344th Company then advanced from the southeast corner of Fayel Farm and mopped up the ground south of Nantillois as well as the area to its east and southeast. The infantry still did not move from its position 1,500 meters to the south.* After losing several of their number and without infantry support, the tanks had to withdraw. Had the infantry followed the tanks and occupied the captured positions, Richard wrote, they could have advanced three kilometers on a two and a half kilometer front.⁵⁰ The American and German reports essentially confirm the French version. Once again, the Hollidt Battery contributed to the repulse of the attack.⁵¹

* The American soldiers did not know much about working with armor, but they did know that tanks were magnets for artillery and machine gun fire. In the absence of training in joint operations, they reasonably declined to be in their vicinity. Given the heavy German bombardment and the general lack of progress of the 158th that day, the French report appears to be accurate.

Exhausted, unsupplied with food or water since the initial attack the previous day, and unsupported by artillery, the 314th made little progress by nightfall. Colonel Oury called off the attack and the men dug in, a third of a mile north of a line Montfaucon–Bois de la Tuilerie, a mile and a half south of Nantillois. To its right, the 310th Machine Gun Battalion emplaced its guns in former German trenches north of the Montfaucon–Septsarges road.† They found no shelter from the German artillery. A battalion commander in the 315th sent a message to Oury, “Under terrific bombardment and should have counter-artillery ... Heavy machine gun fire on both flanks.”⁵² Sergeant Davies of the 315th described what it felt like:

About 8:30 the Germans started to shell us. My God, it was awful, we lost men right and left. Poor Pritchard got his tonight, had his head blown off. Just a kid too. The cries of the wounded and dying was awful and I can never forget them. Everywhere you could hear them crying for “First Aid.” The hospital men did their best, but every time a shell landed we lost men ... I am wondering if any of us will be alive by morning.⁵³

† Thus the divisional history. The American Battle Monuments Commission puts the bivouac position of the 314th at least half a mile further north, after a withdrawal of a third of a mile. (ABMC, 79th Division: Summary of Operations in the World War (Washington, DC: GPO, 1944), p. 17.)

Together the 314th Infantry and the 310th Machine Guns ended the day with 22 dead, three of them officers.⁵⁴ The toll for the division as a whole was three officers and 59 men, many fewer than the previous day because the Germans spent much of the time withdrawing from their forward positions, including Montfaucon.*

The traffic jam behind them was beginning to take its toll on the men. No supplies of any description had reached the regiments of the 79th since they had left their trenches the previous morning and the front-line troops had long exhausted their food and water. At 3:50 p.m. Tenney Ross sent an officer with a message to the division’s chief of administration in the rear, “Push ammunition forward with all speed together with water & food. Ammunition to lead.”⁵⁵ That officer was trying his best; he replied:

Procured 130 donkeys from the French, sent them forward with limited amount of supplies to Malancourt at 17 h. under command of Major Miller and Lt. Clark, 304th Ammunition Train ... The horse drawn ammunition section, 107th Ammunition Train of 57th Brig. attached to the 79th Div. cleared Avocourt with remainder of trains. 13 truck loads of small arms ammunition at this time still blocked in Avocourt.⁵⁶

The little food those donkeys carried was welcome, but even that small amount could not be distributed efficiently because the regimental supply companies were under constant artillery fire. (Behind the lines, a well was found that sustained the troops in Montfaucon and was a great solace to the wounded.⁵⁷) Nor were the roads going to be clear any time soon. South of Malancourt, where the engineers had had time to do their work, the roads were hard-packed, well drained, and gravel-surfaced. But north of there the rain had turned the ruined tracks into a sticky soup. Even beyond Montfaucon, where the bombardment had not been as severe, the situation was dire. The Germans, it became clear, had relied on narrow-gauge railroads for supply and had neglected repair of the roads. They had, however, seeded them generously with mines, some of which exploded, leaving large craters. The ground was soft, and rock was hard to come by; it was carried in on wagons and pack mules, even on stretchers.⁵⁸ A few hours after Montfaucon fell, the Avocourt–Malancourt road segment was declared one-way going south. Northbound traffic for both the 79th and the 4th Divisions was now to use the Esnes–Malancourt road. This meant that the trains of the 79th, stuck south of Malancourt, had to turn around, retrace their steps to Avocourt, find their way east to Esnes, and then proceed north. Colonel Billy Mitchell, flying over the front, looked down and was horrified, realizing that a concentrated air attack—or artillery attack directed by air observers—on the mass of vehicles below could crush the offensive. As air commander in the zone of advance, he ordered his bombers to concentrate on the enemy airfields, drawing the observation planes away and keeping them in the German rear.⁵⁹ And indeed, with notable exceptions, there are few reports of German air attacks on ground units in general or on the roads in particular.

Those who suffered most from the ruined roads were the wounded. As the 119th Field Artillery made its slow way forward, Lieutenant Jacks noticed the columns of ambulances facing the other way, pulled over to the side of the road to let the artillery (which had priority) pass:

From time to time our men would glance curiously into the ambulances, at the shattered and bleeding forms, many of them blackened, disfigured, and torn beyond recognition, as if trying to decide what they themselves would look like shortly. Their own mothers could never have recognized most of the bloody wrecks that lay in the ambulances.⁶⁰

William L. Hanson, an Illinois physician with past service in the Royal Army Medical Corps, was adjutant of the 304th Sanitary Train. His responsibility was to evacuate the wounded of the 79th to a field hospital about 25 miles to the rear. But he had 200 men to transport and few ambulances, and the road blockages meant that ammunition trucks came first. So Hanson commandeered all the empty ammunition and supply trucks around, loaded up his wounded, and shipped them south.* Hanson’s urgent requests for help resulted in a full field hospital being sent to the 79th the next day. As soon as their tents were set up, they were filled with patients still awaiting evacuation. Soon more physicians and ambulances arrived, and the situation came under control.

* Long after the war Hanson wrote, “I was, frankly, rather pleased at the efficiency of that maneuver if I say so myself. It wasn’t until a half-century later that I learned it almost backfired on me. When those truck-ambulances arrived at the field hospital, the commanding officer was most unhappy and critical of my move. He let that be known to several other physicians within earshot. My old friend, Dr. O.C. Snyder, happened to be one of them. He immediately advised the commanding officer that he (Dr. Snyder) had served a year with me at the Dartford War Hospital, that I was an efficient and level-headed physician, and that if I had deemed using the trucks an expedient and necessary procedure, then it damn well was. Dr. Snyder was so effective in his presentation that there was no further comment.” (William L. Hanson, MD, World War I: I Was There (Gerald, MO: The Parice Press, 1982), p. 79.)

Back on Montfaucon things were getting warm for Kuhn, too. Soon after the hill had fallen he had moved his PC to its southern side, below the crest; but the German guns found the range. At 5:18 p.m. he asked V Corps for counterbattery fire. “I wish Army and Corps artillery would begin to fire as soon as possible because the enemy is shelling Montfaucon very heavily and our people are in that vicinity and beyond.”⁶¹ As the evening wore on his tone grew more urgent: “They have been pounding Montfaucon for the last three hours. A battery is reported by Balloon just south of Nantillois. I suggest that the Bois de Burge [sic] and the known battery positions on the road therefrom to Nantillois be bombarded by army and corps artillery as soon as possible. Our troops are not, I think, close enough to be in danger from such artillery fire.”⁶² Of course, “just south of Nantillois” was hardly precise enough for accurate aiming. V Corps later reported, “Orders were given the Corps Artillery Commander to fire on the above points as requested, intermittently until 12 o’clock, and then again early in the morning. This fire was later called off upon request of 79th Division.”⁶³ This bombardment was probably the one that discomfited the German 11th Grenadiers, who were in their new position just north of Nantillois.

That night the supporting regiments came forward to take the lead, Charles’s 316th relieving the battered 313th and Knowles’s 315th replacing the 314th. As the men of Company F of the 314th marched to the rear, they welcomed the prospect of a hot meal, the first since they had left their bivouac two days earlier. They arrived in the Bois de Montfaucon around dawn and found that:

... our mess Sergeant Vought had been killed the night previous. Faithful to duty he had slept under the kitchen to see that all would be well with the horses. But when the cooks tried to wake him in the morning, the mangled animals and the wound on the sergeant’s head showed what had happened. A piece of an exploding shell had added one more to the total of millions already claimed by the war. Had the soldier worn his helmet the piece would almost undoubtedly have glanced off. As it was the man whom soldiers figure had a safe job was among the first killed.⁶⁴

Company F never got its hot meal; orders soon arrived to advance again, this time in support of the 315th. Loaves of bread were quickly torn apart and distributed as once more the men got to their feet and picked up their weapons.