part0012

T he year before we entered the war, the United States had a small army of barely 100,000 men. The President, Woodrow Wilson, had mixed feelings about committing our country to the conflict. Many American citizens were European immigrants that had fled the New World, partly to avoid wars just like this. Not to mention, a sizable proportion of America's immigrants were from Germany. This complicated any decision about which side to support.

In January 1917, German military commanders decided to allow their U-boats to sink any ship found in British waters. This caused the destruction of American cargo ships and the occasional passenger liner. This shifted public opinion from wary neutrality to a completely anti-German outlook.

President Wilson guessed the time was right. So, on April 17, the United States finally joined the war on the side of the allies. Once we joined the conflict, we set out to prove ourselves to the world.

We were an enthusiastic, prosperous and upcoming nation. After the war in 1918, we had over four million US citizens in the armed forces and three and a half million of them had been transported over to Europe. They came in packed like sardines vis ocean liners hurriedly transformed into troop ships.

We slept in bunk beds made of steel and wire stacked four high on top of each other. The journey was so uncomfortable that many soldiers, including me, found the trenches more comfortable.

The Germans knew that America joining the Allies would make their own victory almost impossible. But in 1917, the war was going Germany's way, Russia was in the throes of revolution and desperate to make peace and end the fighting on the Eastern Front.

Germany wanted to annihilate the sapped French and British soldiers with the full force of their army. At the beginning of 1918, American troops ships with newly trained soldiers began to arrive in France. But still, at that time, there were only a few thousand American troops in Europe.

It was going to take time to raise and prepare a fighting force, almost from scratch, and then to transport the huge numbers of men across the Atlantic. The German generals knew that to win the war in the West, they would have to strike hard and fast before the Americans came in overwhelming numbers. So, at the end of March, the Germans launched a carefully planned attack, known as the Ludendorff offensive.

The German troops used a new tactic and smashed through the Allied front lines. They employed surprise attacks to discover weak spots and by using overwhelming strength when they found them.

All spring, the German troops made a series of remarkable advances, which caused panic in the British Empire and among the French forces. In April, the British commander in chief, Field Marshal Haig, issued the desperate order:

Allied command feared the loss of the channel ports, from which troops and supplies were brought over to the Western Front from Britain. The danger to the French was much more severe. By the beginning of June, the German army had reached the river Marne and they were within 40 miles of Paris. The roads became congested with French civilians escaping from the fighting.

The French troops were depleted and discouraged, unable to find the will to fight the gigantic German army arranged before them. With these desperate circumstances, the British and French generals turned to the American Expeditionary Force. They were the first wave of American troops that arrived in Europe to save the day.

The command of the AEF was under John J. Perishing. He understood the British and French Allies had all but lost the will to wage war. This meant the burden of winning the war was now on his shoulders with his fresh and enthusiastic troops. He found commanding his army in Europe to be frustrating. We were not welcomed as equal partners. The Allied generals talked down to Pershing and his staff. They guessed the Americans were inexperienced and naive, which of course, we were to an extent.

In particular, the Europeans believed the American soldiers didn't have the will or motivation to fight. I remember hearing a story of the Commander in Chief General Pershing banging his fists on the table in a rage and shouting :

The fault for this lack of understanding and trust between the three sides didn't entirely lie with the Europeans. Throughout the war, the British and French fought together as allies. The Americans on President Wilson's insistence didn't wish to be considered allies. They preferred the term co-belligerents. We came to fight alongside the Allied French and British, not underneath them.

During the Ludendorff offensive, drastic combined action was called for. For the entire duration of the crisis, the Allied forces were placed under the command of one of the veteran French commanders.

It was May 1918, when we first engaged the German army and heavy fighting began. It was at a small village near the river zone. Over a third of American forces were killed or injured in just three days of intense combat. It was more than enough to prove that we were capable of fighting with as much determination as anyone.

At the end of May, General Pershing was asked to send soldiers to plug weak spots in the Allied front lines as the German army approached. French troops fled alongside with a desperate stream of terrified civilians that clogged the roads away from town. The nearest American soldiers, the second and third divisions, were over 100 miles away. We had to make an exhausting overnight journey, and then we were expected to begin fighting as soon as we got there. As we approached our destination, the roads became thicker with fleeing French troops and civilians. They kept shouting at us; you're too late. You're too late. It didn't really help to boost my confidence. When we arrived at the almost deserted town on June 1, we found a small number of African troops defending it. They were left behind by their French colonial masters to fight and die in an impossible situation.

Now they were joined by our 17,000 troops from both the Army and the Marines. The battle for the town was intense, but we held on, and the fighting spilled into the nearby small towns close to the Belleau Wood. It was a dense, almost impregnable area of forest and rock that was around a mile long. Belleau Wood had no strategic value. The German troops were dug in and had set up defensive positions there in early June. It was going to be an effective base from which to harass us. Allied commanders decided that the Germans must be destroyed and driven out, especially because of their machine-gun fire from cleverly hidden positions in the thick undergrowth.

The whole time we'd been in the Belleau Wood, it hadn’t stopped raining. Artillery fire fell on us constantly. German planes swooped down from the sky and strafed us, it was difficult to shake off the feeling that we were facing a superior enemy in strength and experience.

We were out to prove ourselves.

We were fighting fresh, well-armed and determined to win. When a French senior officer suggested to a Colonel of the fifth Marines that we should withdraw, he spat, and said:

We had a particularly difficult journey to the battlefront and for many of us, it was our first time in combat. We'd been dropped about 20 miles from the fighting and had to march for over two hours uphill. All around us, French artillery fired a constant barrage over the German lines and the ground constantly shook .

Our men were exhausted, drenched and hadn't been able to wash or shave for at least five days. We finally arrived at the rendezvous point and were transferred to trucks, which carried us to the front. Once there were sent to a small town right next to the Belleau Wood. Above the woods, we spotted German observation balloons, which we nicknamed sausages because of their shape.

This wasn't good news.

Certainly, we'd been spotted, and they were waiting for us. The Germans began to shell us hard and practically destroyed the town. There was a building on my right burning, and the flames lit up the ground around me. All I saw was dead Marines lying in this narrow road.

Then they ordered my battalion into the Belleau Wood. At three o'clock we started for the front trenches. We were supposed to reach the front lines before daylight. The Woods were so dense; it seemed almost impossible to make our way through. The limbs of the trees kept hitting us in the face. Men were cursing. After a depressing night of trekking, we reached the frontline trenches. The Germans continued to shell us, a shell hit close caving in our dugout and killed a friend of mine by the name of Burke.

The piece of shrapnel just took his whole head off.

The trenches I found myself in were barely waist-high. After a thoroughly exhausting day, we had to try to sleep while crouching in ankle-deep water. Over the next few days, the Germans launched night attacks on us. Once, when a soldier threw a grenade at approaching Germans, it bounced off a tree and landed back in his trench. I saw it just in time to hit the bottom of my trench to keep from getting killed. I laughed like a fool while the soldier on the other side of me cursed like a sailor, he came close to getting killed by one of our own men .

On June 6, we were involved in a particularly costly assault on the woods. We were ordered to charge against well-defended German positions over an open field. We were pinned down by heavy fire during this attack. A marine veteran, Sergeant Dan Daly, coined his forever winning phrase:

Luckily, there was a journalist on hand to capture the moment. Daly’s immortality and Marine Corps folk law was assured from that moment. It was that type of gung-ho bravery in the face of daunting odds that the Marines were supposed to be all about. Sergeant Daly survived the attack and the war, although he was wounded in the fighting at Belleau Wood.

What followed this battle was the worst single day of fighting in Marine Corps history. There were over 1,080 men killed or wounded. Fighting for possession took on a claustrophobic grizzly quality. Inside the combined battleground, dense underbrush obscured the ground between the trees with huge boulders complete with their own little nooks and crannies. The entire battle was fought in an atmosphere of chaos. So dense were those woods.

Enemies passed within inches of each other. We couldn’t see our fellow soldiers and had to be careful to not to shoot our own men. Both Germans and Americans poured into this confined place. The ground between the trees were thick with fallen bodies. You could see the personal debris of these dead soldiers, knapsacks, letters from home, tattered uniforms, they all blew around in the wind. It was the pathetic remnants of their young lives and dark omens for those who were still alive. Hand grenades, machine guns, explosive shells, gas, all stripped the leaves from the trees.

When we met the enemy, it was often in that most dreaded form of fighting hand to hand combat. We fought with brass knuckles bayonets in a hideous device, we call it a toad sticker. It was a long triangular blade attached to a knuckle handle. A friend of mine, a marine private, who'd been in the thick of the hand to hand fighting for over 15 minutes before surviving all his German opponents. He wrote in a letter home about the awful psychological strain that that combat caused with him. After the fighting was over, he sat down and just cried. Having to hold on to such a tightly confined space was an unnerving experience.

Shells steadily fell on our positions. Machine gun and rifle fire continually sprayed through the trees, bringing down chunks of rock, earth, and splintered wood on us. The Germans fired trench mortars at us to black projectiles over four feet long packed with high explosives. We call them aerial torpedoes. Gas shells also landed in the woods, leading pockets of highly Noxious Fumes that lurk low in the ground. The gas would often be harmless, but it would catch sleeping, resting Marines lying in shallow foxholes, and leave them choking and retching.

There was one occasion in the middle of a gas attack when a Gunnery Sergeant gave his gas mask to a wounded marine. That Gunnery Sergeant died a painful death a few days later, his lungs destroyed by the gas. The shell blasts hammered our eardrums in the woods until my ears sang in a constant, disorientating hum. But often, the shell fire was ineffective. The concentration of trees and vegetation muffled the blast of the shells. The visibility was poor, and we were on the edge of the woods.

We followed the course of the battle by listening to the ghastly procession of noises. From time to time, there'd be a rapid ripple of machine gunfire. This could only mean that Marines were attacking a machine gun nest. They were surely dying as they rushed it, followed by an ominous pause. Then, the machine gunners would be killed by bayonets and trench knives, the silent weapons of hand to hand fighting.

By June 11, we'd captured two-thirds of the woods, but we were now close to physical exhaustion. The Germans counter-attacked and the intense fighting continued. Corpses piled up inside the woods, and Marines picked their way past the bodies of the enemy.

Occasionally, a German soldier would hide in the heaps of dead and rise behind to shoot one of our men in the back. Belleau Wood was packed with snipers, hidden in the high trees and undergrowth. These brave men handpicked for a job that promised almost certain death, or an ever-present hazard. When the machine-gunning and shelling died down in the woods, it took on a sinister silence. As if this wasn't enough, it was easy to get lost in such thick woods. There were few landmarks in a man could lose all sense of direction. Soldiers had to carry a compass to make sure they returned to their own lines rather than the enemy.

On June 23, we withdrew our troops and bombarded the forest for a full 14 hours. Then we entered again in force and fought for another two full days to try to rid the Belleau Wood of German troops. Fighting was so heavy that over 200 ambulances were needed to carry away the wounded. Eventually, on June 26, Belleau Wood finally fell into our hands.

It had taken an agonizing 25 days, but and Belleau Wood was one of the most significant battles of the war. If we hadn't halted the German advance, they could have carried on to Paris.

But for our victory, we paid a terrible price.

A third of all men who took part in this battle were killed or wounded. One company lost 235 of its 240 men. Belleau Wood showed that the American military meant serious business. We would fight a hard war and casualties would be high. By the time the war ended, over 150,000 American soldiers and marines had died, and over a quarter million were wounded. Our Marines were immensely proud of their victory at Belleau Wood.

Now, over a century later, the battle is still a cause of resentment. Some historians feel marines should never have been sent into the woods. Similar fighting between British and German soldiers in heavily wooded areas resulted in high casualties.

Today, the forest looks beautiful and is a popular spot for family picnics. The sun shines through the branches, giving a luminous glow to the green moss growing on the trees. And still, a hint of fleeting warmth lingers over the dark brown carpet of leaves that cover the ground.