By 7:00 a.m., the center thrust of the American attack, 2nd Battalion, was successfully sweeping through the orchard and the left half of Cantigny, dislodging Maxim nests hedge by hedge and evicting German soldiers house by house. But the battle’s bloodiest fighting was unfolding on the flanks. In 3rd Battalion, Company K was still driving forward, but Company M was spread ineffectively thin and on the far left, three of Company L’s four platoons had not even reached the enemy lines, leaving an entire German company firmly ensconced to rake the khaki-littered wheat fields with more machine-gun fire and survey the remaining battlefield for new targets. On the right flank, facing the longest open stretch of no-man’s-land the length of the attack, the three waves of 1st Battalion were still only halfway to their objective, and German defenders there were to prove just as stubborn as on the left.
Lieutenant Schuster of 1st Platoon, 3rd Company of the German 271st Reserve Infantry Regiment, had ridden out the hour-long bombardment huddled with his two dozen soldiers in the company command post, a dark, stone cellar on the southeast end of the village. Sprawled on a wooden table were maps of their positions in the village and aerial photographs of the American trenches. From down in their small eye of the steel hurricane, Schuster and his men had heard the remains of Cantigny pounded to rubble above them in concussive crashes of timbers and masonry. When the roaring drumfire finally lessened, fading into the sustained rumble of the creeping barrage denoting the American Zero Hour, Schuster led his platoon out of their cellar up into the hanging swirl of ash and smoke. There he and his men, badly shaken and doubtless shocked at the sight of the flattened village, took refuge in a fresh shell hole as the American barrage crept nearer.
“Nothing was seen any more of the other platoons located in other cellars,” the German War Diary would report. Third Company’s effective strength had been reduced by at least half, and there was no sign at all of 1st Company, crushed or entombed belowground. From their shell crater on the village edge, Lieutenant Schuster and his platoon could not yet see any approaching doughboys, but at the sound of machine-gun fire to their right rear—likely from the tanks rolling into the orchard with the American 2nd Battalion on the north side of the village—they fled east across the rising plateau to the cover of the distant wood lines.
The open ground south of the village fell off steeply into a pronounced ravine, ascending again to the Cantigny Woods, a long patch of trees that formed the southern boundary of the American salient. The low ground ran almost parallel with the wood line and ended suddenly at swiftly rising ground that led up to a ridge, along which a dirt road stretched southeast from the rear of Cantigny and on to the village of Fontaine, two miles deep into German territory. German trenches followed the road along the ridge and connected with troop positions back in the Fontaine Woods.
This stretch of German lines, manned by 2nd Company, was mostly untouched by the preparatory bombardment. Peering over parapets down into the ravine, Germans there had a commanding view of the Americans attacking “in dense masses.” Their lieutenant ordered up green flares, one after another as the rifle-wielding doughboys swept closer. “No artillery fire followed these signals,” the Regimental War Diary would later report. “More than likely, these signals were not seen due to heavy smoke and mist.” Cut off from artillery support, Maxim crews opened their ammunition boxes, fed canvas ammo belts into the receivers, and prepared to defend their lines.
In a shallow trench furrowed out through the web of healthy roots connecting the elms and tall oaks of the Cantigny Woods, Lt. Robert Banks Anderson stood to get a line of sight over the thick undergrowth and surveyed the smoking remains of the village through binoculars. The Wilson, North Carolina, native was only four years removed from his time as captain of the baseball team at Trinity College (present-day Duke University). One of five sons to a physician and Confederate Army veteran, Robert and his four brothers had all volunteered for Army service when America entered the war. In October, after attending officer training at Fort Ogle-thorpe with Sam Ervin and Si Parker, the newly minted lieutenant had walked the gangplank from his transport onto French soil on his twenty-fifth birthday.
Anderson had become a platoon leader in Company A down in the Seicheprey sector, after which he attended a British Corps combat school, graduating with honors in time to rejoin the company for the battle rehearsal days earlier. But a scourge of Spanish influenza had incapacitated his captain and two fellow lieutenants, and despite the fact that at the crucial hour Anderson was also feeling early signs of its symptoms, he took the reins as acting company commander for the battle. “Tomorrow we are going to attack,” he had written his mother on J-1. “I will be in command of my company, but we’ll be miserably handicapped with so many men, non-commissioned officers and three officers sick.”
Squinting through his binoculars, Lieutenant Anderson could see the deep ravine cutting through the open ground between him and the village, and to his right, up on the commanding high ground behind a staked strand of barbed wire lining the dirt road, he could make out the coal-scuttle helmets of 2nd Company’s field-gray infantry waiting on the far sides of their Maxims, the bright morning sun rising behind them. To his left, he could see the churning wall of the barrage, behind which the khaki waves of Company B followed on a path that would take them through the ravine before him and up to the German lines crowning the ridge.
Anderson and his four platoons of Company A were the only portion of the attack force to not jump off at Zero Hour and join the waves marching across no-man’s-land. This wrinkle in the operations plan had formed only after George Marshall’s personal reconnaissance of the front lines had thrown the contours of the ravine into steep relief. To Marshall and the planners, this long strip of vulnerable low ground covered by the overlapping fire of German Maxims presented a deadly gauntlet for infantry, even behind the cover of a rolling barrage. The risk and its attendant casualties were believed avoidable by simply stationing the right wing, Company A, forward in the cover of the Cantigny Woods, where two of its platoons would swing out at H+14 minutes and join 1st Battalion’s assault waves nearer the objective.
Forty minutes prior, Lieutenant Anderson had sent his other two platoons to his right into the easternmost finger of the woods, where they were to dig new lines facing the Germans infesting the nearby Fontaine Woods. One platoon was led by a sergeant and the other by Lt. Jim Hartney, whose correspondence with his “beloved Margaret” back in Minnesota had not cooled a bit since his New Year’s profession of love. There they would, in their battalion commander’s words, “prevent the right flank being turned,” and act as the southern anchor of the new American lines. “The digging in woods was very difficult,” Hartney would later report of the thick undergrowth, one of the sector’s only patches of countryside still untouched by shell fire. Covered by three attached machine-gun teams, his men cut “about 50 yards of trench, 2 ½ feet wide and 4 feet deep” through the hardpan and a network of stubborn roots—a task that would occupy them past nightfall.
Out in no-man’s-land, leading a platoon in Company B’s second wave behind the barrage down into the ravine, was Lt. Neilson Poe of Baltimore, Maryland. At forty-one, he was the oldest platoon leader in the entire attack, though with his dark-brown hair still showing no hint of gray, his men all presumed him to be far younger. Known as “Net” to his friends, the former Princeton football player compared jumping off at Zero Hour to rushing “down the field under the kick-off of a Princeton-Yale game.” Between the Cantigny Woods to his right and the village to his left, Poe—together with his platoon and the rest of Company B—had so far advanced more than six hundred yards without a casualty. “The artillery laid a beautiful barrage in front of us as we advanced,” he later recalled, “and all we had to do was to follow it, keeping about 50 yards behind it.”
“We were to take a hill to the right of Cantigny,” one private would later recount. “We had a creeping barrage which throws a curtain of shell fire 50 yards continuously in front of the advancing forces.” As the waves of riflemen edged forward, the occasional off-pitch whistle signaled an incoming short, prompting men to brace or duck in futility. “Sometimes you would hear shells coming from behind and know they were going to fall short,” Poe later described, “but you have to look out for a few ‘shorts’ and be ready to drop.” To his left, one short blew a hole in the soldiers of Company D’s second wave just before they climbed into the village, seriously injuring two and blowing Pvt. George Dust of Chicago, Illinois, to unrecognizable pieces.
As part of Company D’s dash through the south side of Cantigny, Lt. George Butler led his platoon into the rubble-filled streets. “When we reached Cantigny it was only a pile of bricks and stones,” he soon described in a letter home. “The German machine-gun bullets were buzzing about like bumble bees, but our fellows did not pay any more attention to them than if they had been confetti.” Like Maxey’s 2nd Battalion to their left, sweeping through the orchard and northern half of the village, Company D’s infantry were closely followed by a third wave of French flamethrower teams assigned to “mop up” any lingering pockets of Germans in the village ruins. “It was the finest example of teamwork I ever saw,” Butler would add. “There was not a hitch anywhere.”
Walking in loose tandem over the jumbles of broken beams and smoking rubble, Company D’s riflemen moved steadily through town, squads stopping here and there at debris piles covering cellars and lobbing grenades into any dark cavity where Germans might be hiding or entombed. “Our fellows threw grenades like baseballs and captured machine-guns,” Lieutenant Butler would recount. A few soldiers in the company’s first wave came upon an opening through which stone stairs could be seen leading down into a cellar. “Huns were called upon to come out,” an officer would later report, but from inside echoed only yells in German and the loud, brisk notes of a Maxim opening fire. The doughboys jumped back, sent grenades clattering deep inside, waited for the muffled detonations, then rushed down into the hanging smoke. A few pops of Springfield fire sounded, followed only by silence. “[A] general clean up took place—about 70 killed, no prisoners taken,” the report would continue. Combing through the dark cellar full of German dead, the soldiers retrieved the Maxim and lugged it out, carrying it forward through the narrow street like a war trophy.
Following with his platoon in the second wave, Lieutenant Butler noted most German soldiers put up no fight: “The enemy ran out of caves and dugouts very much scared. They held up their hands shouting ‘kamerad.’ It was a tough looking bunch of youngsters and old men. There was no fight in them.” Up in the first wave, troops found a cellar buried under the remains of the last house on the back edge of town—the command post abandoned by Lieutenant Schuster and his platoon just minutes before. Inside, as 1st Battalion’s intelligence officer would later report, Company D soldiers snatched the following gems: “Map of enemy’s positions of rear area’s found here with other company records and 5 aerial photos of our old positions.”
* * *
Down in the ravine, the barrage curtain again moved forward, sending Company B nearer the German lines and luring Company A’s two platoons out of the woods. “The men were rolling cigarettes as they took the level ground,” Pvt. John Johnston later recounted of the moment he casually crawled out of his tree-shaded trench, twisted through the undergrowth, and stepped into sun of the open field. Lt. Robert Anderson, pistol in hand and dangerously ill, led his two fifty-man platoons and attached machine-gun teams out of the woods and fell in line with Company B’s waves in the low ground of the ravine. Before them rose a sun-drenched carpet of tall green grass sprinkled with yellow buttercups and red poppies, climbing steeply to steel barbed wire and stacked sandbags lining a ridge dug with German trenches, an incongruous blend of nature and war.
“It was a great sight to see all those bayonets shining,” twenty-four-year-old Pvt. Ralph Loucks, advancing with Company A’s front platoon, would write his mom back in Janesville, Wisconsin, “but the further we advanced over No Man’s Land the smoke got so thick sometimes that you could hardly see.” The creeping barrage had scarred the field with shell craters, “big enough nearly to put a threshing machine into,” Loucks noted. Four more minutes passed and the barrage wall jumped forward again, this time beyond the German lines, and before the lingering smoke lifted from the ravine, the Maxims opened fire.
Bullets lashed the first wave, mowing through the doughboys headed up the steep ground from the ravine. “The platoon I was in was nearly up to the German trenches when the Germans started firing on us with machine-guns,” Private Loucks would write. “I heard something go through my arm like a red-hot iron. The bullet went through the upper part of my left arm through the muscle.” The soldier to Loucks’s left, twenty-one-year-old Pvt. Walter Daetwiler, also from Janesville, Wisconsin, fell in the same moment. Loucks grabbed his arm and checked on Daetwiler, who had multiple shots in the chest and faded quickly. “I guess he never knew what hit him: he died a few moments later,” Loucks noted. “The two of us were hit the same second and both fell together.”
Those not hit dropped into the short weeds. Desperate for cover, one handful of doughboys took refuge in a large shell hole. With Maxim and sniper rounds zipping overhead, they sought out comrades lying in the open ground nearby, pulling them into the safety of the dirt crater. They dragged in twenty-four-year-old Pvt. Andy Siler of Eagan, Tennessee, and found him lifeless, riddled with bullets. They also pulled in Private Daetwiler’s limp body, not yet stiff with death. Private Loucks, gripping his shot arm, spotted the crater and low-crawled to its edge. “I crawled into a shell hole and just barely had enough strength to get to it,” he noted; “the blood was pouring out of my arm like a fountain. Some of the boys pulled me in the shell hole and cut my pack off my back and my coat and put the first-aid bandage around my arm.”
To their left, a machine-gun team jumped up from where they had dropped for cover, grabbed their equipment and ammo boxes, and pushed defiantly through the gunfire. Left behind was Pvt. Jacob Ciezielczyk of Milwaukee, thrown into the weeds by the first sweep of Maxim bullets. “He was hit several times, by machine-gun fire, but was not killed instantly,” a fellow soldier would report. “When he was offered first aid, he said: ‘I am done for, save it for someone who needs it.’” The rest of the crew pressed forward, making it up to a shell crater nearer the German trenches, where the sergeant decided they could set up the gun and lay down covering fire for the infantry. But their corporal, Thomas McCracken, and gun tripod he was carrying, were missing. The crew looked back down the slope and noticed him lying facedown in the weeds beside the dropped tripod a few dozen yards behind them. Twenty-four-year-old Pvt. Russell Goodwin dropped his rifle, ran back through the gunfire and found McCracken dead, a bullet through his head. Goodwin heaved the fifty-pound tripod over his shoulder and ran it forward through the flurry of bullets, somehow unscathed.
Flattened in the weeds, riflemen glancing up the endless field caught fleeting outlines of German helmets behind the barbed wire as the white muzzle flashes of Maxim barrels swung right and left above sandbagged earthworks. Goodwin’s crew finally got their Hotchkiss set up and added its reassuring chatter to the enemy’s incessant typing, giving the infantry enough cover to jump up and resume the charge up the hill.
A second crew, led by twenty-three-year-old Cpl. Walter Christenson, still another who was weak and feverish with the flu, trooped forward and began to set up their gun in another shell hole just seventy-five yards from the German lines. But an enemy sniper traced their movements, and while PFC Frank Caralunas was locking the gun on its tripod, he was shot through the neck and fell over the front edge of the crater. Pvt. John Eaves crawled forward to check on Caralunas, but the sniper shot Eaves in the head, killing him instantly. Corporal Christenson and other crew members pulled Caralunas back in. Fading swiftly, his eyes closing, he muttered quietly, “I am going to die.” The crew dressed his wound, but he died forty-five minutes later, never uttering another word.
Christenson, sweating profusely and flushed red with fever, kept working, leading his crew in getting their gun set up and putting more fire on the ridge, but the two German machine guns continued sweeping the hillside with bullets, only stalling here and there as the nettlesome fire of the two American Hotchkiss crews proved too heavy. Doughboys struggled to reach the high ground in episodic sprints between the deadly Maxim bursts, dropping for cover again at each recurring sight of more men shot down, leaving a grim trail of overturned helmets, dropped rifles, and bodies. Among the dead was tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed Pvt. Howard Stevens, who, until enlisting at twenty-two had worked on his father’s farm in Mill Shoals, Illinois; twenty-nine-year-old PFC Charles Digelman of Coshocton, Ohio, who enlisted two weeks after America declared war; and twenty-one-year-old Mech. Cecil Abels of Jackson, West Virginia, shot directly through the heart. And in a battle that would see only five fathers killed, two of them fell here, side by side: twenty-nine-year-old PFC Ray Brandow of Michigan, who left behind two small children, and nineteen-year-old PFC Paul Eskew of Kentucky, who left a seventeen-year-old wife, Zida, and their son, Paul Jr., not yet a year old.
As surviving doughboys in the first wave dove and hugged the steep ground for cover, the German Maxim crews cut through the second and third waves still exposed in the ravine’s low ground. Twenty-two-year-old PFC Clifton Eby of Detroit—big, husky, and popular in Company B’s Chauchat squad—was shot in the chest and thrown back. His buddy from Detroit, Pvt. Joseph Lukachonski, dropped to check on him. Shot through the lung, Clifton struggled with his final breaths, forcing out only: “Tell my mother I died like a man.”
Advancing along the edge of the woods in Company A’s rear platoon, Pvt. John Johnston noted the enemy fusillade reaching him was so heavy that “the bark could be seen peeling off the trees, and then I and some other fellows found a shell hole and we dropped into it.” Hugging the ground nearer the wood line, he and his platoon dug in where they were. The other Company A platoon did the same about fifty yards in front of them, stuck in the vulnerable low ground of the ravine near the northeastern edge of the woods, leaving a two-hundred-yard gap between them and Company B, then charging up the ridge.
* * *
Nearly one mile north, with Company M digging in shy of the Cantigny Road and three of Company L’s four platoons strewn throughout no-man’s-land far short of their objective, Company K was the only part of 3rd Battalion still pressing forward. Having already passed the first and second line of enemy trenches and taken more than a dozen prisoners, Lieutenants Parker and Drumm and their men arrived at a series of shell holes left by the creeping barrage, forming ragged starting points for the new line they were to dig. Captain Mosher directed two teams forward to establish automatic-rifle outposts and ordered the rest to start digging. “On reaching the objective,” Parker would report, “outposts were immediately put forward and the platoon began to dig in.”
But they came under fire from an enemy machine-gun nest hidden behind a haystack about fifty yards to their front. Automatic riflemen provided covering fire while Lieutenant Parker, his platoon sergeant, and about a dozen men from his platoon rushed the strongpoint. “The enemy saw me rush-in,” Parker would recall. “One big burley cuss, with whiskers, thought he would stay us off. He threw a grenade between my sergeant and me, but it did not explode until we had rushed past.” As Parker led the charge toward the gun pit, the husky German jumped up with his hands raised yelling, “Kamerad” repeatedly. Parker’s platoon sergeant said, “Yes, a Hell of a Kamerad,” and, as Parker described, “shot his bayonet clear through him.” Fifteen more gray-clad soldiers climbed from the slit trench, hands up in surrender. Parker added: “I will never forget the expression of one of them. He was scared plum to death. His hands were just about as near to heaven as he could get them. He cried out in English, ‘I have a wife and five children.’ I took him prisoner. Didn’t have the heart to shoot him.”
Following Captain Mosher’s directive, Parker and these dozen-odd soldiers began establishing an outpost at the haystack for one of the attached Hotchkiss crews, and Lieutenant Drumm began establishing another. Their work was protected by helpful covering fire laid down by 4th Platoon doughboys with a captured German Maxim. The platoon leader, twenty-six-year-old Lt. Irwin Morris of Lexington, Missouri, had captured the gun with his sergeant and three privates. “The gun was then slewed around and we commenced firing at the enemy who could be seen on the reverse slope of the hill, just in the edge of the woods,” Morris noted. The team he left on the gun fired at Maxim positions in the l’Alval Woods as well as fleeing Germans, providing valuable but brief cover for the company until the ammunition was exhausted. “The enemy,” Morris would report, “left about 300 dead and wounded in front of us.”
* * *
Beyond the smoke-filled gap on Company K’s right, Pvt. Sam Ervin and his dozen-man carrying team had paused in their advance, kneeling in no-man’s-land, trying to match the shelled and tangled landscape to Ervin’s map. Their objective was a small cemetery to the left of the orchard, where they were to help an infantry platoon and six Hotchkiss teams construct a strongpoint, but there was no sign of the platoon or gun teams—or the cemetery, for that matter. Then out of the hanging smoke walked the one man who knew this ground better than anyone, the 3rd Battalion intelligence officer and Ervin’s good friend, Lt. George Redwood.
Redwood, as Ervin would later recall, “directed me to the exact location—the ground being so torn by shell fire as to render it exceedingly difficult to ascertain the same.” With bursts of Maxim fire sweeping the ground, Ervin and his soldiers kept low as they scampered to the cemetery. But heedless of his own safety, Redwood walked upright, scribbling in his patrol notebook and ignoring the bullets. “I remarked to him that he was somewhat recklessly exposing himself to machine-gun fire,” Ervin would recount. “He merely smiled in his quiet, cool way and said he had already been ‘slightly wounded.’”
Redwood had indeed been injured, shot in his right shoulder by an enemy bullet sometime in the attack’s first minutes. As the platoon and machine-gun teams arrived at the cemetery, led by tall, twenty-two-year-old Lt. Charles McKnolly of Missouri, Redwood allowed them to bandage his wound but demurred at advice to go to the first-aid station. “Instead of doing what is ordinarily expected of a wounded soldier,” Ervin noted, “he gallantly continued to gather information as Intelligence Officer.”
Within sight of the cemetery, Company M’s Lt. Gerald Tyler and his two-platoon front continued digging a new line, short of their objective. They had been at it for a few minutes when a French tank officer approached and suggested they move forward a couple hundred yards for a better field of fire. “I told him I thought it inadvisable, because my front had been extended so much that the line was now very thinly held,” Tyler noted, “and that I had not the slightest idea where the Companies on my right and left were, also that we would certainly be isolated from the rest of our troops and would probably come under their fire.” But the French officer kept pressing, and seeing Lieutenant McKnolly and Private Ervin and their men digging in the cemetery ruins to his right front, Tyler “decided to follow his advice” and ordered his platoons “to stop digging and to move forward again.”
After lugging their packs and rifles and picks and shovels forward another two hundred yards through machine-gun fire, Tyler’s surviving men dropped into a series of shell holes for cover, squirmed out of their packs, grabbed their shovels, and on hands and knees began connecting the craters into a new line. With enemy Maxims still rattling, a newly bandaged Lieutenant Redwood appeared at Tyler’s shell crater and asked for an update. “I gave him what information I could,” Tyler would recall, “and advised him to get under cover because the area was being subjected to heavy machine-gun fire.” Noticing Redwood clutching his wound, Tyler inquired if he was OK, to which Redwood “replied that he had already been wounded and intended to proceed at once to Bn. Headquarters to make his report.” With that, the intrepid Lieutenant Redwood disappeared back into the smoke hanging over no-man’s-land, and Tyler and his men, still under fire but finally at their objective, dug in.
* * *
Back down south of the village, in Company B’s first wave, twenty-six-year-old Lt. James Lawrence of Atlanta led his platoon in a pell-mell rush out of the ravine and up to the ridge of the German trench. “I had nearly reached it when things began to get too warm for comfort,” he soon recounted. “A bullet chewed up my right ear.” But it slowed him only slightly, and he jumped up and led the charge over the crest of the hilltop. With Springfields leveled, doughboys slipped through the piled scraps of barbed wire left cut up by the creeping barrage and finally the Maxim’s fire stopped. Its last burst got twenty-two-year-old Pvt. Otto Hanson through the ankle. His hometown buddy from Wisconsin, Pvt. Harry Gums, pulled him forward into a shell hole at the top of the hill, and began bandaging his wound.
The nine-man Maxim crew of skinny teenagers and scrawny older men in ill-fitting gray tunics and oversized helmets stood with arms held high and yelled “Kamerad” in surrender, their eyes filled with fright. Nineteen-year-old Pvt. Ralph Amundson was nearest them, but just as he relaxed his grip on his rifle to take them prisoner, the German in the rear shot him dead. “Then I saw red,” one of Amundson’s buddies soon recounted. “I took my knife and tried it first on a wounded German and found out it worked and then I tried it on four live ones.” Other doughboys leveled their rifles and shot the survivors into a heap of field gray. Pvt. Charles Basel of Illinois began to take the surrender of three more Germans climbing from their trench, but one of them shot him in the head, killing him instantly. “These men were also killed,” Basel’s commander, Capt. Clarence Oliver, would dryly report.
With a pistol in one hand and map in the other, Captain Oliver supervised his company’s takeover of the enemy lines. Twenty-nine and the eldest of four sons, Oliver hailed from the small town of Chemung, New York, just above the Pennsylvania border, where he had worked as a bridge layer before volunteering for the first round of officer school. He had taken command of Company B down in Seicheprey, and whether on patrol, in a raid, or with the first wave of this morning’s attack, he always led from the front.
As Oliver’s troops began clearing the newly captured trench, another Maxim opened up and raked the ridgeline with enfilading fire, dropping every doughboy flat or into the trench for cover. Flopping next to Captain Oliver was Cpl. Lewis Kowaski, who immediately began unclipping a small grenade—or “lemon” as soldiers called it—from his pack strap, took to one knee, and threw it toward the machine gun. “I was a pretty good baseball pitcher before I went in the army,” Kowaski would soon explain, “and I seemed to have a knack of putting the lemons over the plate.” At the sound of the lemon’s detonation, Corporal Kowaski grabbed his Chauchat, and he and Captain Oliver jumped up and charged the machine-gun nest. “The ‘lemon’ did so much damage,” Kowaski would recall, “that I figured the chance of getting the whole bunch was too good to miss so I pulled out an automatic and aimed for them.”
The grenade blast had killed a few and left nine dazed survivors. Kowaski “banged away” with his automatic rifle, killing a few before Captain Oliver stopped him. Inside were two fully operational Maxims and a supply of ammunition. Another soldier from Kowaski’s squad arrived to help capture the guns. “[H]e covered the Fritzes and I swung the two machine-guns around,” Kowaski noted. “We didn’t know how to operate the things, but we made the Germans show us how at the point of our pistols.” For his actions in conquering the strongpoint and capturing the Maxims, Corporal Kowaski would be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
At 7:30 a.m., Captain Oliver dispatched a runner to tell the 1st Battalion commander that the objective was reached. To their left, trickling through the village ruins and entering the open fields east of Cantigny were the first waves of Companies D and H, who had dropped their packs and were digging with picks and shovels into the flinty soil. The scene repeated in gathering waves to the north beyond them, as Companies E and F finally punched through the orchard and stopped at clusters of shell holes to drop their equipment and start digging new lines. “We took Cantigny on schedule time, thirty four minutes,” Lt. Irving Wood reported, “and then dug in quickly to meet the Germans’ counter attacks.” Before them, beyond the protective barrage that now stood stationary in the open plateau, the heartening detonations of high-explosive shells hurled by those big French guns was keeping the German Maxim nests and artillery batteries under a rain of steel and out of the fight, giving doughboys much needed protection as they began to dig trenches out in the wide open.
* * *
Still at his observation post, Lt. Daniel Sargent surveyed the scene before him. With doughboys and French tanks infesting every corner of the battlefield visible from his position, he felt secure enough to stand. “And now our men were walking through what had once been Cantigny and now they were beyond it. They had taken Cantigny,” he would later recount. “How easy it had been!”
In Colonel Ely’s command bunker, with German prisoners filing past in a growing stream, and with a flurry of “Objective reached” messages from companies at the front, the mood was exultant. But the battle map was not yet clear, and the officers crammed into Ely’s dugout had no way of knowing that the left flank was wide open and a large gap jeopardized the right flank between the Cantigny Woods and Company B’s new position. Leaning on his crutches and the only information he had, George Marshall trusted that the “bite” phase of his bite-and-hold operation had been realized. “The success of this phase of the operation was so complete and the list of casualties so small that everyone was enthusiastic and delighted,” he would later write.
Over three miles away, General Bullard returned from his brooding stroll back down in his cellar headquarters at 8:00 a.m., in time to get a phone report from Colonel Ely relayed through Brigade: “Over 100 prisoners from two different regiments being sent back. Everything going fine according to schedule. All objectives taken. Very little loss.” General Pershing arrived for his scheduled visit anxious for an update, and Bullard buoyantly reported the attack was “most successful.” The ever-stoic Big Chief seemed satisfied but exhibited no excitement “with the wonder of the performance,” in Bullard’s estimation. “He seemed to take the capture, as I took it, as a simple affair.”
Perhaps. But most likely Pershing was apprehensive about the coming challenge—holding the conquered ground. As a close follower of the frequent ebbs and flows along the Western Front, Pershing understood that holding newly captured territory had proven the toughest part of all operations for veteran armies over the past three years of fighting. And with the vital French artillery now scheduled to exit the sector to help repel the renewed German offensive down south, victory at Cantigny was not at all inevitable. Pershing lingered long enough to see 140 German prisoners brought in, and though still anxious, he nevertheless extracted himself—and his unavoidably distracting presence—from the scene, leaving the battle’s outcome in the capable hands of Bullard, Sitting Bull, and the Fighting First.
* * *
“We took the hill—and held it,” Company A’s Pvt. Billie McCombs would write home. At Zero Hour, McCombs had been consumed with fear over “losing our nerve.” But forty-five minutes into the battle, Billie’s nerve had held, as had the nerve of all who found themselves back at a field hospital having their combat wounds treated, or lying in tall wheat still calling out desperately for a medic, or digging in at their objective, having pushed their small corner of the Western Front east, forcing the kaiser’s soldiers of the 82nd Reserve Division a mile closer to Germany.