In tunics half-unbuttoned and stained with sweat and dirt, the men of Company E’s 4th Platoon dug their rear trench at the objective under increasingly heavy shellfire. Having survived the shock of arms in the previous morning’s raid, they had launched into this morning’s attack wearing the psychological armor of the initiated, and after driving across no-man’s-land, over enemy lines and through the village unscathed, many now digging among the hissing bullets and stomping mortar rounds believed themselves immortal.
Their twenty-four-year-old platoon leader, Lt. Wilmer Bodenstab, stood behind them with a Signal Corps photographer who had followed the company through the attack. Bodenstab was “laughing at the photographer who was taking the picture of his men digging in front of him,” another officer would report. Abruptly, a shell screamed in and killed them both. The soldiers pulled their limp lieutenant into the trench and laid him gently in the dirt. Bodenstab had died instantly from the concussion, as “there wasn’t a mark on his body of any kind.”
But most of Capt. Edward Johnston’s remaining soldiers still exhibited no fear. Their new trenches sat behind a natural crest of the plateau, giving them some measure of cover from the enemy-infested Framicourt Woods three hundred yards away. With automatic fire and timely flare signals for a supporting barrage, they had repelled a gray mass of enemy infantry that had formed in the wood line just after reaching the objective—an apparent early German counterattack. Now amid heckling Maxim bursts and sporadic shelling, the doughboys worked confidently in the open, digging their trenches deeper, uncoiling barbed wire, and disregarding the danger. “It was nature to ignore the bullets,” Lieutenant Wood later recalled, adding that “though many of our men were wounded, dead, or dying, and though the Huns were lying around in heaps, still it seemed more like a dream, a movie show or one of our many practice battles.”
Lieutenant Wood’s indifference to the peril would cost him a bullet wound to his hip, forcing his evacuation. And this “queer sense of unreality,” as he called it, must have also possessed Captain Johnston’s only remaining officer, Lt. John Curry. After smoking a cigarette with Johnston while they discussed possible German counterattacks, Curry trotted back over through the wheat chaff to his front-line trench, where his men were connecting shell craters and fortifying their line. As Curry jumped into the trench, immediately his tall, thin figure fell limp against a pile of newly upturned dirt. “I saw his body jerk and then fall back,” Captain Johnston would write Curry’s sister back in Plains, Pennsylvania. Johnston ran over to him and yelled for a medic, but young Curry stared expressionless at the sky, his blue eyes sparkling cold. “He had been killed instantly and painlessly by a bullet through the brain.”
* * *
To Company E’s left, topography and faulty maps were conspiring to inflict even heavier casualties on Company F. Artillery shorts that had caused so much damage to the company on its push through the orchard continued at the objective, and the commander, thirty-year-old Capt. James Anderson of Summit, Georgia, shot up a fountain of flares and sent runner after runner back through the bombardment to battalion and regimental headquarters imploring division artillery to lengthen the range. But the runners never returned, and given the thick smoke shrouding their position, the flares likely went unseen. High-explosive detonations grew so crushing that the company first sergeant, Samuel Ralston, personally sprinted back through the orchard and across the former no-man’s-land to Colonel Ely’s dugout. “He was in an exhausted position upon reaching this P.C.,” a staff officer noted, “and suffering intense shell shock and exhaustion.” Though wounded by a shell fragment, Ralston delivered his message, and the artillery was ordered to “lengthen barrage 200 yards,” lifting the shelling off Company F’s position.
Back up at the front, the friendly fire on Captain Anderson and his troops was replaced by enemy artillery and machine-gun fire. In contrast to Company E on the right, Company F’s new lines sat exposed beyond the crest of the plateau, on ground inclined toward enemy guns with no natural cover. “The slope of the plateau was not where shown on the maps in planning,” one officer determined, “and when [the company] tried to move past the geographic crest it came under heavy MG fire and light artillery fire from Bois de L’Alval.”
While supervising his platoons as they consolidated their positions, Captain Anderson was knocked down by Maxim fire. Before his men could check on him, a high-explosive shell hit almost directly where he lay, leaving little to bury. Lt. Norborne Gray, a twenty-nine-year-old platoon leader from Louisville, Kentucky, took command of the company, but enemy fire only grew heavier.
Under the zipping bullets and hissing shrapnel, Pvt. Edward White and Cpl. Arthur Wood were both digging their trench deeper “in order to shelter ourselves from shot and shell,” White later recounted. A high-explosive round struck and Wood slumped over, “rendered helpless there and then.” White checked his corporal, but “did not detect any life in him.” Another blast killed both Pvt. Guy Bell and Mech. Arthur Cole. Cole’s remains were buried in a shell hole, but nothing remained of Private Bell.
Twenty-year-old Pvt. Earl Simons was also digging when he caught the loudening whistle of an artillery shell. “I heard the shell coming and knew it was going to land somewhere near, if not over me,” he later wrote his mom back in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Simons rolled over and braced as the shell exploded and shot fragments into his right thigh, numbing his leg. “It felt like the leg was blown off,” he described, “but actually it made only two deep holes.” He called for a first-aid man, but none were around. So he lay bleeding in his shallow trench, yelling for a medic and hoping another shell would not find him.
The relentless German guns remained fixated on Company F’s exposed lines, and the task of evacuating the wounded was growing unmanageable, testing the limits of decimated ranks of exhausted medics and blister-handed stretcher carriers. “The large number of wounded the first day, and large casualties among the stretcher bearers overtaxed capacity of carrying parties,” Colonel Ely would report. And with no way to carry the deadweight of an injured soldier other than aboveground and slowly, it was the most dangerous job on the battlefield. “I had never imagined that carrying a man could be so hard, that a man could be so heavy,” noted correspondent James Hopper, who personally pitched in to help. “[I]f medals are given in heaven,” he added, “those given stretcher bearers must be wondrously big.” One fatigued medic lost both his canteens to the crushing treads of a French tank early in the attack and had to beg other doughboys for sips of water between sprints across the sunny battlefield. “Sure was an awful day,” he told his diary that night.
One medical officer, Lt. Eugene Hubbard of Utica, New York, and two privates under his charge, had been busy since Zero Hour removing the wounded from all points of the battlefield. Noticing the heavy shelling and automatic fire strafing Company F’s position, Hubbard led his two privates and their stretcher up to the lines just in time to see Lieutenant Gray, the acting company commander, and three members of a Hotchkiss crew get hit by machine-gun fire at an outpost. Hubbard and his team “went to the spot where the wounded men were,” one soldier would recount. But as they began to render aid, “another shell exploded in the same place killing all seven men.” Only the remains of four could be identified, carried out after dark and buried back near the orchard hedge. But Lieutenant Gray, in just his second hour commanding the company, had disappeared. “There was,” one private later reported, “nothing left to bury.”
* * *
Private Simons, bleeding and slowly draining of strength behind the scant defilade of a shallow trench, decided conditions were getting too hazardous to wait for a stretcher. “[I]n the face of the heavy fire, I crawled out on my hands and knee and made the nearest trench toward the rear,” he would write. “As I stopped for a drink from my canteen a shell punched a hole through it and all the water was lost. The canteen saved me from another wound, however.” In the trenches nearby, Pvt. Frank Kobin saw a mortar blast flay open the face of his platoon sergeant, Herbert Tobey, and Kobin rushed to carry him back for help. As he lumbered up out of the trench bearing the weight of his sergeant, Kobin felt a wound in his own leg—a shell fragment had torn into his thigh muscle. But he continued, shouldering Tobey all the way back through the orchard, across the plateau, and past the jumping-off trenches.
Arriving at the first-aid station in the side of the chalk cliff past Colonel Ely’s bunker, Private Kobin let down his sergeant’s body, then limped nearly a mile back up to his company’s lines, where he would help evacuate more through the day. For his brave actions, which seem almost routine among the valor of the day, Kobin was awarded the Silver Star. But Sergeant Tobey, forty-six and the longest-serving member of the 28th Infantry to fight in the battle, died of his wounds in the field hospital at 9:15 p.m. that night.
Still crawling on his hands and one good knee, Private Simons also made it to the first-aid station, where medics determined his wound required surgery. “I was taken on a two-wheeled dinky to another station some five hundred yards away,” he noted. “Then the ambulance took me. I was operated on at the field hospital and kept there three days.” The field hospital, one wounded private later noted, “certainly wasn’t a pleasant place that morning.” Though set far behind the lines, it was still within range of German artillery, and as one correspondent wrote, “[D]octors work to the noise of bursting shells and exploding shrapnel.” One man wounded by rifle fire later described his experience of being evacuated as “a series of more or less painful transfers through first-aid posts, dressing stations and French hospitals, with a Red Cross train and a ninety kilometer ride in an ambulance. I don’t think you have ever known the joy of a ninety-K ride on the upper deck of a pitching ambulance. It’s an experience. I appreciated the sensations of a pup with a tin can tied to his tail.”
* * *
German batteries that had begun sounding with a few distant rumbles after the withdrawal of the big French guns now joined in a sustained fusillade, and at 9:45 a.m., George Marshall made his third phone call in fifteen minutes to Brigade reporting enemy shells hitting around Colonel Ely’s bunker. Within just a few feet of the dugout, artillery fire killed an artillery liaison sergeant and four privates serving as regimental runners. Nearby, twenty-two-year-old Pvt. Harry Eschbach of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was “evacuating patients on litters from an advance dressing and aid station to ambulance dressing station” through Death Valley when, a fellow private observed, he “was killed by the explosion of a shell.” With mortar rounds whirring into the valley, nobody else risked carrying the dead to the division cemetery back in Villers-Tournelle, so bodies began stacking up under blankets outside the first-aid station near Ely’s dugout.
Up at his observation post, Lieutenant Sargent—who just minutes before had felt secure enough to stand—now found the onslaught so overwhelming that he dropped and stretched “as close to the ground as possible.” A mortar round hit his foxhole and left him rattled for a few seconds. “A splinter of it tore into my haversack, pierced my canteen of water, causing the water to run out and did not arrive at my ribs only because it was halted by the metal case of my Gillette safety razor on which it made a memorable dent.”
In the Saint-Eloi Woods behind the empty jumping-off trenches, twenty-two-year-old Cpl. Clifford Manchester of New Jersey and his four-man team were firing a Hotchkiss at a high angle over the heads of the distant front-line infantry. Their machine gun was one of sixty-four assigned by Marshall to provide “flank protection” for the attack. Crews at each gun had been ripping through box after box of ammo strips since Zero Hour, peppering “probable enemy strong points” in wood lines a mile distant. The machine-gun barrage was appreciated by the riflemen digging up at the objective, especially after the standing artillery barrage had ended. Captain Huebner noted it was “well worthwhile if only for the moral effect it had.”
But these machine-gun nests were spotted and relayed back to enemy batteries by enemy pilots, and since the single French observation plane had landed roughly an hour into the attack, the Germans had unopposed dominance of the skies. One officer noted that enemy planes “kept together and travelled in a large circle, first swinging over our position, then back over their own lines,” where they transmitted wireless reports and dropped weighted messages—typically scribbled maps of American gun positions. “I would like to state here that there is hardly anything so depressing to troops as to see the sky filled with enemy planes and none of yours in sight,” he added. For the doughboys on the ground, the constant buzzing above them was unnerving. One captain later recounted the “very active” enemy planes “flying close to the ground at times,” and though some troops fired up at the passing aircraft, “this apparently failed to do them any harm.”
Guided by such unobstructed aerial observation, enemy shells stomped closer to the Hotchkiss nests, but crews remained at their guns, firing as they braced at the whistle of each incoming. A single shell hit directly in the shallow fire trench of Corporal Manchester’s crew, killing all five in a single blast. Nearby, in charge of another gun, Cpl. Herman Evans was “struck by a shell splinter in the head and back,” his sergeant would report. “He died instantly.” PFC Ivan Stringer took charge of the crew, but in just fifteen more minutes, he was also killed. “He was holding his watch timing the fire of his gun when struck by fragments of a high-explosive shell and killed instantly.” Steel fragments also killed Pvt. Barney Liles as he fed ammunition into his Hotchkiss. Stringer, Evans, and Liles would each posthumously earn the Silver Star. Two dozen more members of their company would live to receive the same medal, each for staying at their guns throughout the day, hour after hour, under punishing shellfire.
Underneath one of the low-flying planes was Lt. George Stein, scampering back and forth among four machine-gun teams under his charge. His German-immigrant parents had died when he was young, and he was taken in by a foster family in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who taught him to speak English. He had volunteered for the first round of officer training, and after his recent promotion to first lieutenant, Stein wrote his foster father that he prayed “to God that whatever occasion may arise that I—in my position, do not jeopardize one single life of our men.” As Stein encouraged his Hotchkiss crews to ignore the buzzing airplane and crashing shellfire, the enemy pilot dipped low and dropped a “grass-cutter” bomb which detonated in Stein’s face, fracturing his skull and killing him instantly. Three years after the war, his body was returned to Mechanicsburg for burial, the first of three doughboys who would be killed by enemy planes through the course of the battle.
Back up on a hilltop with the guns of the 7th Field Artillery, Lt. “Doc” Bedsole’s battery of 75s had also been spotted by an enemy pilot and shellfire began dicing his crews to pieces. Pvt. Abe Kauffman of Philadelphia lost a finger but still stayed at his gun, earning the Distinguished Service Cross for firing “until so severely wounded as to be unable to assist in serving his piece.” The plane returned, circling above and wiring back adjustments for German artillery. Cpl. John Flint ran to a nearby machine gun and took the plane under fire. The rest of the crew took cover, but Flint stayed at the Hotchkiss, shooting up at the circling plane “until severely wounded.” Seeing this, Lieutenant Bedsole rushed out from his own trench and into “heavy shell fire” to evacuate Flint to a field hospital, where he would recover.
* * *
Back up at the battle’s edge, discernable lines now linked shell crater to shell crater, loosely connecting the infantry along a one-and-a-half-mile-long front bulging around the east side of Cantigny. Gaps still existed, and clusters of sweaty troops, exhausted from digging, kneeled against parapets of turned earth under the late-morning sun, bunched in shell holes that provided only scant security from enemy fire. German artillery gunners stalked their prey, hurling shell after shell toward the new American lines, shifting from one cluster of khaki to another and marching the booming footfall back and forth among doughboys helpless to do anything but aim their rifles at the distant, enemy-infested wood lines—sobbing, praying, and cringing with each detonation.
Worried the Germans were due to counterattack, Company K’s Captain Mosher wanted another automatic-rifle outpost established, so he sent twenty-six-year-old Pvt. Jesse Gillespie of South Carolina and five others forward from the trenches. “We went forward about seventy-five yards,” Gillespie noted, “established ourselves in two adjoining shell holes that offered a measure of protection, and began filling bags with dirt to shield us somewhat from the enemy fire. In an hour or so, two of our men had been picked off by the Germans.”
Around 10:00 a.m., enemy shellfire again picked up, this time concentrated mainly on the outposts. Captain Mosher ran out from the trenches to check on the men and, noticing a wounded private in a shell crater, he dragged him “under heavy fire, back to a place of safety,” Lt. John Mays observed. As his soldiers hunched for cover, Mosher continued “walking from one place to another cheering his men,” Cpl. Marshall Sanderford later recounted. But with a deafening smash and zing of steel, Mosher fell. A shell fragment had sliced through his lower neck, partially severing it from his shoulder. “He was killed instantly,” Corporal Sanderford noted. Lieutenant Mays was close enough to catch Mosher when he fell. “I am glad I was there to have my old friend and captain die in my arms,” he would write.
Returning to his platoon’s trench, Lieutenant Mays could see Lieutenant Parker up at the haystack outpost, still holding his dozen-man team together “with great efficiency and coolness in the face of deadly enfilading fire and machine-gun fire.” Captain Mosher, just minutes before he was killed, had commented on Parker’s “marked gallantry under the most difficult conditions,” conditions that were getting no better.
Near another of Company K’s outposts, Pvt. Emory Smith still lay bleeding where he had been wounded over an hour earlier. “I fell where I lay and was bleeding profusely,” he later wrote. “I had to lay there all day and they thought I was dying.” In the fresh trenches behind him, his fellow doughboys peeked over the parapets between shell blasts, but distant rifle pops and zipping bullets kept them mindful of an invisible but watching enemy. Aiming his rifle over the top, Sgt. Thomas Peden of Gray Court, South Carolina, was “hit in the neck by a sniper’s bullet,” the company bugler, William Turner of Maine, would report. “He lived about five minutes and told me before dying not to stay around him for fear I might get killed by the same sniper.” In his final moments, Sergeant Peden muttered “something about writing,” Turner recounted, “but I could not understand him as he was about breathing his last.” Another sniper’s bullet zipped in and popped Cpl. Nathan Korngold, a nineteen-year-old immigrant from Russia, in the forehead. “He was conscious about thirty seconds,” a comrade noted. “His last words were, ‘O Mother,’ dying immediately afterwards.”
Up at the third outpost Captain Mosher had established, Private Gillespie and two surviving soldiers were stacking dirt bags into a higher parapet when a high-explosive mortar round struck beside them, and shell fragments hit Gillespie and one of the others. “A good sized piece of the metal had gone through my right leg breaking it about six inches above the knee,” Gillespie later described, adding that his “left leg was slightly injured, and the right hand and wrist were shattered by another fragment of shell that had ploughed its way through.” Gillespie used a bootlace to cinch a tourniquet around his leg, and a fellow private bandaged his wrist. But machine-gun and rifle fire continued strafing their position, and in minutes, that private was also killed. Now in the small dirt foxhole, of the six men sent forward by Mosher, only two—Pvt. Jesse Gillespie and his buddy nineteen-year-old Pvt. Willie Drager, also badly wounded—remained alive.
* * *
Beyond the gap that remained to the right, the troops of Lt. Gerald Tyler’s two-platoon wide front of Company M were digging their second new trench of the morning. The runner Tyler had sent to the right to make contact with Company F returned to tell him “that Captain Anderson and all other officers of the company had been killed and that he could not find anybody in command.” Tyler scrambled from one end to the other posting automatic rifles to cover the company’s flanks. “By this time machine-gun bullets were filling the air and snipers were active,” he wrote home. Running up the edge of the trench, he was shot in his right thigh and knocked down. “It was the sniper’s bullet,” he noted. “I crawled to the hole a couple of men were digging and not a minute too soon for the Huns played a machine-gun right over the top of it nearly all day.”
With the lone officer in Company M’s lonely trench now hobbled by an enemy bullet, Cpl. Louis Abend, twenty-three and a four-and-a-half-year Regular Army veteran from Brooklyn, took charge of the platoons even as sniper, machine-gun, and artillery fire pummeled their line. Worried about counterattacks, Abend coaxed the men up to the parapet with rifles pointed over the top, putting fire on the distant Framicourt Woods. One of them was twenty-five-year-old Pvt. Archie Lackshire, a short, blond-haired, mail truck driver from Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. Under the overwhelming clamor of shell and Maxim fire, Lackshire’s grip on his Springfield loosened, his head drooped, and he slumped back into the trench. He was “hit by a sniper,” Corporal Abend noted, and “died about six hours later,” one year to the day after enlisting with his brother, who was also serving in France. His brother would survive the war, after which, at their single mother Birdie’s request, Archie’s body would be shipped home for burial in his hometown’s Bayside Cemetery.
Abend also saw twenty-seven-year-old Pvt. Emery Dean, a two-year Army veteran from West Virginia, “slim, very quiet, dry and very well liked,” fall just feet from the trench while running back from an outpost to retrieve more ammunition. Drilled by machine-gun bullets, he “died instantly.” With enemy fire too heavy for his fellow soldiers to risk retrieving him, Private Dean lay lifeless in front of the parapet, cruelly tossed and rolled by the stomps of mortar rounds until after nightfall when his comrades finally pulled in his body.
* * *
About one hundred yards behind Lieutenant Tyler’s two platoons, amid shell-torn rows of broken marble headstone in what was once the small village cemetery, a Company I platoon and six machine-gun teams worked to fortify their strongpoint. Pvt. Sam Ervin had already made two more trips back across no-man’s-land with his team, hauling out the wounded and returning with boxes of ammunition and pickets for barbed wire. “The work of this carrying party was particularly commendable due principally to the courage and perseverance of Pvt. Ervin who continued carrying under heavy fire,” the company commander would report.
Plastered by shot and shell, Ervin’s dozen-man team had been halved by casualties—one killed and six wounded by midmorning. On a third trip back through the open to retrieve more ammo, they entered a patch of tall grass, where one of them tripped on a German soldier, lying flat with a broken arm. “And so I got down and took a pasteboard box or something he had there and a stick and tried to tie his arm up,” Ervin noted. The wounded man was babbling nervously, and one of Ervin’s men translated. Apparently he thought they were British (“He refused to believe they were Americans because, he said, German submarines would not permit them to get across the Atlantic,” Ervin’s biographer would explain). A distant German machine gun, apparently having traced their movements into the plateau, opened fire and a bullet speared clear through Ervin’s left foot. Embarrassed, the German apologetically muttered, “Wir sind verdammte Schweine” (We are damned swine). Ervin hobbled back beyond the old front lines and to the first-aid station, then was taken to a hospital, where he would recover and rejoin his company within the month. For “exceptional courage and perseverance” in making “several trips from the rear to the front until wounded,” Sam Ervin was awarded the Silver Star.
* * *
For the Germans, every minute that passed without launching a counterattack was another minute the Americans used to dig deeper, position their automatics and strongpoints better, and ensconce themselves firmer. But because their combat battalions in the village had been mostly killed or captured, neither the 271st or 272nd German Reserve Infantry Regiments had sufficient manpower nearby to counterattack in force immediately. Their rest battalions were eight miles away and had just been notified to return to reserve positions—a march that would take them until early afternoon. Until these eight infantry companies arrived and organized a push-back to their old lines, the Germans were leaning on their artillery and automatics to weaken the doughboys in between loosely devised infantry “counterstrokes.” Two reserve companies of the 272nd had trooped out of the l’Alval and Framicourt woods about an hour into the attack toward the new lines of Companies E and F, but were driven back handily by the doughboys’ small-arms fire and Summerall’s guns. Now the reserve battalion of the 271st down in the Fontaine Woods on the south end of the village prepared a “counterstroke” of their own, this one planned with artillery support, and it was Lieutenant Sorensen’s Company D that would face the brunt of it.
Sorensen’s four platoons had suffered ten killed and twice more wounded to shot and shell in just the first few minutes of digging, but as Sorensen would report, “action had quieted down considerably by ten a.m.” Down two officers to machine-gun fire, the remaining platoon leaders still had their troops deepening their ditches. Parts of the trenches, particularly up in the first line, where men under constant fire had been forced most of the morning into deep shell holes for cover, had not yet been completed. Lieutenants John Church and Ross Gahring were coaxing their two front-line platoons up out of their craters to dig connecting lines, and to extend rightward for a connection with Company B and leftward with Company H when a curtain of enemy artillery descended in front of them.
“‘[A] big one’ exploded within a yard of me blew me about 10 ft.,” Lieutenant Church would write home. “God was with me and was not badly hurt.” He landed back behind his platoon’s trench, unconscious. As the drumfire continued, Church came to, and in actions for which he would be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, “staggered forward as soon as he regained consciousness and insisted on resuming command, thereby giving a striking example of fortitude to his men.” But one of the shards had sliced his forehead, and under the daze of a concussion and with blood dripping into his eye, he too was forced to leave the battlefield.
Steel chunks from another shell blast hit Lieutenant Gahring in his left hip, spun him around, and knocked him to the dirt. Lying dazed and defenseless, six machine-gun bullets tore into his legs before his platoon sergeant could pull him back into a shell crater for safety. Gahring lay bleeding in the dirt, refusing evacuation until nightfall, he too “giving a striking example of fortitude to his men,” as his Distinguished Service Cross citation would read. Machine-gun fire lashed the crater lip above him, and he yelled for his platoon—bunched in the holes on either side of him—to fix bayonets and stand prepared to defend against what might be a German counterattack. A bullet from one of the Maxim sweeps pierced the heart of Pvt. William Phillips, a draftee out of West Virginia in just his second day with the company, killing him instantly. Another one zipped in just under Pvt. Edward Joholski’s helmet, nicking his skull and embedding in his scalp. Joholski was evacuated to a field hospital, where the bullet was removed, after which he made a full recovery.
Lieutenant Sorensen was down to one able-bodied officer, the leader of 3rd Platoon, Lt. Max Buchanan. The thirty-seven-year-old Brockton, Massachusetts, native had served in the Regular Army since 1899, seeing action in the Philippines and on the Mexican border before he earned his commission and sailed to France with the 1st Division. The nineteen-year-veteran gauged the uptick in enemy fire as an omen of impending counterattack, and he ran back and forth encouraging his soldiers in their second-line trench—now on average three feet deep along its length—to dig deeper and fill sandbags faster.
Lieutenant Sorensen also anticipated a German attack and walked from his command post in the brick ruins on the village edge up to Buchanan’s platoon to check on the lines, which he found “in good condition.” Over the loudening thunder of shellfire, Sorensen yelled orders “in regards to action to be taken in case of enemy counterattack” to Buchanan, who was standing a few yards away with one of his soldiers, Pvt. Frank Beck. Bunched in their shallow trench, Buchanan’s men could hear the sharp whistle of an incoming. “We were digging in when we heard the shell coming,” the platoon sergeant would report, “we all dropped down, but the shell hit between Lt. Buchanan and Beck, killing both of them instantly.” The round detonated at head level, and the steel fragments took the heads off both men.
Sorensen, his face covered “with a thick poultice of blood and brains” of his last lieutenant, was correct about a German counterattack. A few minutes earlier, Major Roosevelt’s troops with the 26th Infantry Regiment manning the south end of the sector had spotted “about 100 men marching on road” toward the Fontaine Woods. The message was relayed back to General Summerall’s headquarters, where word had just arrived from a runner that the German machine guns in Fontaine were “doing us more harm than ever.” Orders were phoned to batteries of the 5th Field Artillery to hit the wood line with gas and high-explosive shells.
Company’s D’s doughboys were driven down into cover as the field-gray shapes of German infantry began emerging from the wood line behind a loosely coordinated covering barrage of artillery and Maxims. “When the Germans started their counterattack, we all took cover in shell holes from the German barrage,” Cpl. Ira Huddleston later recounted. With no platoon leaders left, NCOs took charge, and Huddleston noted that his platoon sergeant, John Pooler, was “trying to keep the other men down in holes, when he was struck by a machine-gun bullet killing him instantly.”
Another platoon sergeant, James Whalen, led two automatic-riflemen forward fifty yards to a shell hole, where they were able to put down some automatic fire on the attackers. Enemy machine-gun bullets pelted the crater, wounding Sergeant Whalen, who kept firing on the approaching Germans until another sweep of Maxim fire seriously wounded one of his gunners. Whalen picked his wounded man up and “carried him through heavy machine-gun fire to the rear” to safety, but before reaching cover, Whalen was shot again. He made it into the trench with his wounded comrade, where both were evacuated to a field hospital and made full recoveries.
Alone out in a shell crater with his rifle, Pvt. Jerome Angell had been providing covering fire for the company’s digging since arriving at the objective. Popping through one five-round clip after another, he sniped approaching Germans until a whiz-bang made “a direct hit,” killing him “instantly.” In his posthumous Silver Star citation, he was credited with killing “seven of the enemy before he, himself, was killed.” And more covering fire came from the German Maxim captured earlier back in the village—three soldiers dragged it up to a shell hole and turned its lethal typewriter racket back on the Germans until running out of ammunition.
Up in the woods, gas shells fired by the 5th Artillery pinged through the treetop canopy, silencing the German Maxims. Only the chatter bursts of Chauchats and popping of Springfields filled the air until 179 high-explosive shells hurled by American 155s tore into the wood line in splashes of orange flame, sending enemy attackers retreating back through the woods. Reportedly, the Germans “dispersed” and “took to the fields to the south at the double time.”
The first series of enemy counterattacks, isolated and uncoordinated, had failed, undone by the 1st Division’s combined arms. The doughboys, according to German records, were “too combat strong” by the time of the counterstrokes. By noon, with rest and reserve battalions marching toward the front to launch an operation to retake Cantigny, the German 18th Army ordered “concentrated fire” to be placed on their American adversaries, and reported, “A counterattack is under preparation.”
* * *
For the time being, under a hot noon sun, the doughboys were still holding. The overwhelming blueness of the spring sky was filled with buzzing biplanes and clouded by a tempest of German lead and steel, portending an enemy hell-bent on retaking the high ground of their prized village. Another far stronger counterattack was surely coming, but all along the 1st Division’s new front lines, the swift decisions of company commanders, platoon leaders, and NCOs were joining to tighten their grip on a narrow but glaring purchase of enemy territory. Whether covering unexpected open flanks with automatic fire, sending Germans into full flight with the fire of captured Maxims, or employing machine-gun teams to provide temporary cover for infantry advancing through a ravine, improvisation was proving a vital weapon. Among corporals and sergeants thrust by enemy fire into command of platoons or whole companies, or lieutenants finding themselves and their platoons isolated and surrounded only by smoke and confusion, there was no more reliance on the battle plan. As General Pershing had told these young officers six weeks earlier, “[T]he main reliance after all must be upon your own determination, upon the aggressiveness of your men, upon their stamina, upon their character and upon their will to win.”