It was “out of a clear sky,” George Marshall noted, that orders came “to prepare an operation for the capture of the heights of Cantigny, without the assistance of any French divisions.” Over the previous eleven months as the operations officer in the fishbowl world of Pershing’s favored unit, Marshall had revealed a matchless gift for planning. He had employed his organizational thoroughness to tackle one mammoth logistical challenge after another, from orchestrating the movement of tens of thousands of men and supplies to harmonizing training schedules with the French Army and planning raids on enemy trenches.
Now Marshall, whose name would forever be indelibly linked to a larger, farther-reaching plan, was ordered by Bullard to construct a plan to capture Cantigny from the enemy. But in the improvisational spirit of open warfare, which Pershing had been urging at every turn, Marshall’s assignment seemed almost unfeasible—an attempt to impose order and reason to the disorderly tumult of unpredictable combat. As a military proverb then still young but already growing in legend, that of the former German field marshal Helmuth von Moltke (the Elder), proclaimed: “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”
But Marshall’s assignment was no open-ended mandate, and the tactics applied would not be open warfare. “By direction, this was to be an operation with a strictly limited objective,” he would later write. The mission was “bite-and-hold”: capture Cantigny, moving the American lines one mile east, eliminating the low-ground salient by biting off the enemy’s high ground, then hold the new position against the inevitable counterattacks. It was a straightforward objective inspired by the straightforward Bullard, and Marshall was to plot the ground attack by the infantry and formation of new lines by combat engineers while General Summerall and his own staff planned the artillery support.
But for any stratagem to find success, Marshall needed a comprehensive picture of enemy dispositions. He needed to identify which structures in Cantigny had deep cellars, and of those, which were used as command posts and which were used for ammunition storage. He needed updated mapping of each German front-line, communication, and reserve trench surrounding the village, as well as those stretching north and south and the lines of barbed wire before them. And he needed the exact placement of each enemy machine gun and its field of fire to give Sitting Bull’s gunners accurate targets to neutralize. Finally Marshall needed the effective strength and location of each component of the enemy combat battalions holding the targeted positions, down to each company, platoon, squad, and outpost sentry, as well as locations of their reserve and rest battalions back in the thick woods beyond the village.
To satisfy the gargantuan appetite Marshall and his fellow staff planners had developed for such data, front-line infantry commanders were pressed for enemy intelligence, and the regiments in the trenches were stirred into action. “We have taken no prisoners since arrival in this sector,” the commander of the 26th Infantry told his subordinates, adding that, thus far, “[t]he information gained by us of the enemy has been practically nil.” He ordered patrols and raids to capture “One or more prisoners,” and his regiment and the 28th were soon launching nightly hunts for information.
* * *
“I’ve had a patrol out every night,” Cpl. Tom Carroll told his diary, describing his experience after a slow, painstaking crawl across no-man’s-land: “Got to main road, very dark, heard Boche talking. Peeked over road, could see nothing. Heard snap of grenade detonator. Grenade hit my back, but didn’t explode. Machine-gun opens up and we see gun right across from us. We each throw a couple of grenades, and as flares are going up we run like hell back to our side.” The next night, he and the others sneaked out to the same spot to capture the machine gun, but “ran into 34 Boche laying for us.” In a point-blank flurry of pistol and rifle fire, Corporal Carroll was grazed by a bullet in his scalp. “I saw two Boche go down before the blood started to run into my eyes, blinding me,” he wrote, “but we all got back safely. All we had was pistols. If we had an automatic-rifle or two we could have taken them.”
On some nights, two or three patrols explored different parts of the sector simultaneously. Platoon leaders and company commanders rotated the lead job, gathering six- to fifteen-man teams of two or three NCOs and volunteers—always including at least one soldier who could speak German in case they came close enough to enemy trenches to pick up conversation. With faces rubbed black with mud or burnt cork, they would climb over the top just after midnight and low-crawl through the wheat stubble, keeping a heading with a luminous compass. As on previous patrols, their instructions were to look for “enemy working parties, enemy strongpoints, breaks in wire, shell holes” and to note exact locations. If all went smoothly, they would return by two thirty or three a.m.—time enough to avoid getting trapped out in no-man’s-land by the light of early dawn. Officers would then fill out reports of what was observed and heard, sometimes with hand-drawn maps, and pass them to battalion intelligence officers for relay up the chain.
Stacks of these reconnaissance reports filtered back to Division Headquarters daily, most with valuable data for Marshall to plot on his planning map. In one report was the following: “A machine-gun fired on us from a point 50 yds south of the lone tree immediately in front of 4th platoon. A sniper’s post was discovered on my return.” In another: “moved towards enemy’s trenches about 200 yds when a series of flares sent up by the Boche drew machine-gun fire on the patrol. The enemy could be plainly heard digging and hammering as though driving stakes. Patrol moved to right and found evidence of former snipers’ posts in several shell holes.” And still another: “MG active and flash seen near [map coordinate] 218.321 at trees. Will identify spot later by daylight.”
Junior officers in every company got at least one turn each at the perilous duty, the rotations at times meeting with uneven results, but there remained one constant: every night, in every type of weather, a patrol to the enemy lines was led by the 28th Infantry’s fearless 3rd Battalion intelligence officer, Lt. George Buchanan Redwood. A twenty-nine-year-old Baltimore native and Harvard graduate, Redwood was handsome, intelligent, and well liked. When war had first erupted in Europe, his widowed mother worked to persuade him—thinking mostly of his young brother for whom he had become a father figure—not to join the Canadian or English Army. But when America entered the war, Redwood left his advertising job, attended the first round of officer training, shipped off to France in September, and was assigned to the 1st Division.
A devout Christian, Lieutenant Redwood filled his spare hours with readings of his small Bible and books like A Good Samaritan and Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land, and after attending British scouting school, he studied German tirelessly until, as one soldier commented, he could speak it “like a Hun.” He won renown in late March down in Seicheprey when he led a ten-man raid in the driving rain of dawn across no-man’s-land, fought off an enemy force that outnumbered his two to one, and returned with four frightened Germans at the point of his Colt .45. It was the first American raid to capture enemy prisoners, and stories of Redwood’s daring made their way into the Stars & Stripes and back in the States in newspapers from coast to coast. He was awarded the French Croix de Guerre and the Distinguished Service Cross for his “extraordinary heroism,” but the humble Redwood was quick to deflect praise, calling the raid merely “our little adventure.”
His friend and fellow lieutenant Sam Ervin remarked that Redwood “did not know what fear was,” and described him as “the incarnation of the Christian soldier.” At the beginning of each patrol, he was known to kneel with his fellow soldiers and pray, and a member of the infamous Seicheprey raid later recalled that Redwood promised if they “took prisoners he would read us the Gospel on Easter Sunday.” So successful was he at the art of scouting, he would slip into enemy trenches in the dark, grab materiel—sometimes even snatching their rations and coffee—then slip back out without notice. “The joke of it,” one private remarked, “was that he captured them from under the Germans’ noses, and if any of them spoke with him he would reply in German and they would not know but that he was one of them.” One doughboy said Redwood had “the best reputation I ever heard a man get,” and another claimed, with pardonable exaggeration, that patrols led by Redwood always “brought something back that could walk.”
For a stretch of twelve straight nights, Redwood, the “scout officer,” as he referred to himself, patrolled out into no-man’s-land, often alone. “He would come in about daylight covered with mud from crawling around the trenches and under the barbed wire, and looking like anything but an officer,” a fellow soldier recounted. After grabbing a bite to eat and catnapping, he would “do the same thing the following night until the entire situation was clearly developed,” providing Division Headquarters with a bottomless fund of timely and accurate enemy intelligence. But over three miles away, where Marshall worked by gas-fired lamplight in his stale, wine-cellar workspace, the squiggly trench lines and penciled-in Maxim nests on his flat map board—all shaped by aerial photography and the patrol reports of Redwood and others—could still not accurately render the topographic folds and ridges of the landscape over which the attack would be made.
To gain a firsthand feel, Marshall and other staff officers began personally taking nighttime ventures to the front. They would depart after midnight, ride one mile by car, leaving their driver to wait in a shell hole while they found their way—by guide or by compass—through Death Valley and up the slope into the narrow communication trenches leading to the front lines. “During the night we could check up [on] most of the dispositions of the troops,” Marshall later recounted, “but it was only possible to size up the terrain in the short period at dawn just before sunrise,” when there was enough light to make out details of the village but still dark enough to conceal their movements.
One morning, Marshall crawled with two others into a level stretch of no-man’s-land, where, he would later recall, “we studied the lay of the ground until shortly after dawn.” The sun rose surprisingly quickly, and they were “confronted with the necessity of either remaining in that locality until nightfall or exposing ourselves in an endeavor to get back to Division Headquarters.” They low-crawled slowly back toward the ridge and found slight cover in a one-foot-deep ditch leading back to the division lines. But they were still four or five hundred yards from safety when an enemy machine gunner spotted them, and the Maxim’s dreaded rattle sounded. The three officers flattened out and inched their way back, “crawling with our hands and toes,” as Marshall described, while bullets gouged the earth all around them. Of the incident, where history came perilously close to being bent sharply by some anonymous German machine gunner, Marshall would later admit: “I think each of us was considerably disturbed over the possibility of being shot in a rather ignominious fashion and we were all very glad when we reached the cover of the ridge.”
With better familiarity of the lay of the land, Marshall and Summerall and their planners hammered out drafts of the attack plan, and gradually, from the daily and nightly clacking of typewriters, Field Order No. 18, “having for its object the capture of Cantigny,” took shape. The artillery support would borrow from the German artillerist Col. Georg Bruchmüller, whose tactics were being successfully employed in Kaiserschlacht. Instead of a long destructive bombardment of the targeted position—which would forfeit surprise and give the enemy time to prepare a defense and counterattack—a short but overwhelming preparatory bombardment of the village would precede the infantry attack.
For this purpose, the guns of the 1st Field Artillery Brigade would be augmented by thirty-seven batteries of French Corps artillery, all totaling 386 guns placed under Sitting Bull’s command. For one hour, these guns—ranging from 75s up to the immense 280s—would pummel Cantigny, the enemy lines surrounding it, and known enemy artillery and reserve troop positions back in the woods. Minutes before H-Hour—“Zero Hour” as most called it—the bombardment would cease and 75s would fire in unison to form a curtain of explosions out in no-man’s-land. At Zero Hour, a regiment of infantry, three battalions wide and augmented by three machine-gun companies and a company of engineers, would go “over the top” and advance in three waves toward the barrage line.
This “creeping barrage” was to advance punctually one hundred yards every two minutes, leading the first wave of attackers across no-man’s-land. The middle battalion of infantry, assigned to sweep through the village itself, would be supported by a battalion of a dozen French Schneider tanks to help overcome machine-gun nests and strongpoints, as well as a team of ten French flamethrowers to aid in “mopping up the caves and the undergrounds” of the enemy. Once the creeping barrage reached the village, it would pause, allowing the second and third waves of infantry to catch up, then advance every four minutes until reaching the objective on the far side. There new lines would be dug into open ground facing the pushed-back Germans, a point that was to be reached thirty-four minutes after Zero Hour if all went as planned.
Success would require the skillful choreography of aerial observers, artillery, infantry, engineers, tanks, and flamethrowers. It was uniform coordination of combined arms reduced to science—a first for American combatants—and there was no room for error. Riflemen were instructed to “follow the barrage as closely as possible.” Two and three miles away, the teams at each 75 firing the creeping barrage would be given charts for timed elevation adjustments, full of instructions “to absolutely prevent firing at the wrong range” and emphasizing that “all successive lifts must be absolutely by the synchronized time,” as even the slightest miscalculation could land an explosive shell in the middle of a fifty-man platoon up in the first wave.
But even if all parts were perfectly executed and the objective reached, victory would be far from inevitable. All along the Western Front was ground that had been captured then lost to heavy enemy counterattack, most recently Cantigny. Each shell-torn village or pockmarked hill that had slipped back into the grip of the German Army served as an object lesson for military planners—a series of cautionary tales urging a better way. Marshall and Summerall would not be herded into repeating the same mistakes, and thus they devised a second well-orchestrated phase to hold the ground gained.
If successful in reaching their objective, the troops would be exposed in an open field on the far side of the village, where they would have to dig trenches and string barbed wire within range of German artillery and machine guns in the wood lines. To protect this process, the heavy, long-range guns and howitzers of the French artillery would be needed. In the words of the plan, “the counter battery artillery must be extremely vigilant and ready to intervene energetically against any enemy battery” throughout all of J-Day and the days following. If every rifleman dug his line, if every platoon leader ordered well-placed outposts and machine-gun nests, if every artillery observer spotted enemy batteries and every French and American gunner adjusted their fire accurately—if every doughboy breathed life into his typed role in Marshall’s large blueprint, then the machinery of the 1st Division would, as Bullard envisioned months before, “work independently of the quality of the hand that turns the crank,” and the battle could be won.
And so the script for America’s first battle of the World War was written. It embodied the painstaking distillation of hard-won intelligence and application of a division-wide harmony of action first practiced down in the muddy trenches of Seicheprey. This was no visionary leap, and neither did it embrace open warfare, with flexible objectives and elbow room for low-level small unit adjustments to exploit local success. Rooted firmly in the tried tactics of trench warfare, this was a limited plan with a fixed objective, known enemy infantry and battery positions, heavy dependency on artillery support, and little perceptible room for adjustment. Its rigid structure left little to the vagaries of chance. Everything down to the number of rounds in each rifleman’s ammo pouches and the contents of each soldier’s pack was chiseled into the stiff division operations plan. As one officer later noted, this plan left “optional with the regimental commander the designation only of the particular individuals who should carry the long handled shovels.”
* * *
In a dirt bunker dug into the face of the slope ascending from Death Valley toward the front lines, seated on his dismounted horse saddle atop a propped-up ammunition box, was the leader of the 28th Infantry Regiment, Col. Hanson Ely. The fifty-year-old Iowa native was, in Bullard’s words, a “giant of a man.” When not hunkered in his cramped dugout, he stood six feet two inches tall and bore the type of broad-shouldered, barrel-chested physique that hatched wartime legend. He graduated West Point near the bottom of the class of 1891, where his feared reputation as a skilled boxer thwarted many fights among his fellow cadets, arming him with an effective metaphor he eagerly employed as a preparedness advocate before America entered the war.
After teaching military science as a lieutenant, Ely drilled volunteer regiments for deployment to fight in the Spanish-American War, where he served as a supply officer. He saw action commanding mounted scouts in the Philippines, was promoted to captain for bravery under fire, and after observing maneuvers of the German Army and completing Army War College, he commanded a battalion in the Vera Cruz Expedition in Mexico. When America declared war, he was promoted to colonel and became one of the first AEF officers to arrive in France as part of the Baker Mission in May 1917. So extensive was his experience when he joined the 1st Division as chief of staff that Bullard would later write, “[F]ew officers of any army were as well prepared for the war as he was in both theory and practice.”
Physically, Colonel Ely was equally intimidating to eyes and ears, with a manner and tone that provoked fear rather than persuasion. His men called him a “steam-roller,” and General Bullard noted that he “smiled little,” his voice was “gruff,” and most of his words were forced out through flexed jaw muscles between clenched teeth. Because Ely “relied on the force of hard blows,” having “never cultivated the qualities of tactfulness,” Bullard felt his leadership style—often explosive and usually abrasive—was better suited for command than staff, and placed him in charge of the 3,700 men of the 28th Infantry before the winter move to Seicheprey.
As a commander, Colonel Ely had no gift for sustained analysis, and his decisions were sudden and firm, sometimes made without full facts. Back in Seicheprey, when he heard wind of a rumor that Lt. Sam Ervin had fallen asleep at his post, Ely ordered him out of the regiment. But the rumors were false, and even after the division’s judge advocate cleared Ervin of the accusation, Ely would not relent. Though Ervin had the option of serving as a billeting officer behind the lines, his sense of service had been inalterably wed to front-line duty with his buddies in the 28th. It took the lobbying efforts of Ervin’s friend Lt. George Redwood to convince the unforgiving Ely to accept Ervin back into the regiment, but Ely would not readmit him as an officer. Thus, so he could stay with the 28th Infantry, Ervin resigned his commission and enlisted as a private.
At Cantigny, in his fifth month of command, Ely had learned days earlier that his 28th Infantry would be charged with making the attack on the village. He would later remark that his regiment “was chosen, because of its splendid discipline, to bear the brunt of the attack.” But the true reason was less rousing. Bullard’s first choice had been the 18th Infantry, which had already completed a tour in the lines facing Cantigny, but the heavy casualties it suffered in the Villers-Tournelle gas attack removed it from consideration. And with the 16th and 26th only familiar with the south end of the sector, the logical choice was the 28th, whose soldiers had gained intimate familiarity with the landscape over which the attack would be launched. So from the confines of his bunker—which one officer noted was “about the size of a piano box”—with a handful of orderlies and a single field telephone from which lines led to the command posts of each of his three battalion commanders, Ely ordered that the twelve infantry companies of his regiment prepare for a move to a training area for “special instruction.”
After dark on Thursday, May 23, the soldiers of the 18th Infantry entered the front lines, relieving the soldiers of the 28th, who in turn shuffled down the communication trenches with their rifles and full packs, crossed Death Valley and loaded into waiting trucks for a twelve-mile ride to a training area. Lt. George Haydock noted it was “a long, hard, all-night pull,” after which he and his platoon “were greeted by a hot meal, which is a luxury in itself.” Troops billeted in nearby villages, and after welcome sleep away from the perils of gassing and shelling, by dawn they were assembled on the edge of a large plateau to rehearse Marshall’s plan.
“Ground was selected as near like the actual terrain to be operated over as possible,” Colonel Ely observed. The training area was a vast, open farm field, with low ground rolling up on a slight incline to a patch of trees on a hilltop, meant to simulate Cantigny. Off to the side of the field, on a twenty-by-thirty-foot sand-table with scaled models of the village structures, trenches, and surrounding battleground, company commanders and platoon leaders were shown the direction of their specific parts of the larger attack and the objective line each was to achieve. “In addition,” one platoon leader later recalled, “officers and non-commissioned officers were shown lantern slides of aerial photographs of the area over which the attack was to be made.”
From trenches on the edge of the field, dug to simulate the American front lines, junior officers walked through their platoons’ and companies’ lines of attack, complete with landmarks and compass headings. They were then joined by their NCOs to work out the part for each squad and supporting machine-gun team. Then a full walk-through was conducted, giving each soldier familiarity with the part he was to play in the assault. The eighteen platoons forming the first wave practiced moving forward from the trench at a brisk walk, keeping in line with the men to their right and left, and following closely the creeping barrage, which was, Colonel Ely noted, “represented by men carrying tree branches.” The second wave—infantry platoons and machine-gun teams—followed, then finally a third wave of carrying parties, who on J-Day would be loaded with ammo boxes, barbed wire, and wooden stakes.
“During next two days the entire Regiment was put through the entire operation,” Colonel Ely noted. “The marching up to and taking position on jumping off lines, jumping off, following moving barrage … keeping direction and rate of march, halting at the proper objectives and beginning to consolidate same, sending out of patrols and covering parties in advance of objective, organization and use of carrying parties and moppers up.” Ely was intent that every man in his regiment drill his own part until it became muscle memory. “[W]e practiced for the attack for three days,” one lieutenant later recounted, and another added that “[a]fter each rehearsal detailed critiques were held and errors pointed out.” Lt. Dick Dacus described a humorous moment at one such evaluation: “One French General gave a long critique to the assembled officers, in French of course. When he finished, General Bullard, wrapped up in his non-regulation black fur coat, thanked the French General, and turned to us and said, ‘Gentlemen, you have heard the suggestions of the General. Please give them your due consideration and act accordingly.’”
The next day, flamethrowers were added to the rehearsal, and a French soldier demonstrated the scorching reach of a flamethrower for the watching doughboys. “This demonstration was quite impressive,” twenty-five-year-old Lt. Welcome Waltz observed, “as the red flame, with a great roar and accompanied with a big cloud of very black smoke, shot out of the high pressure tank, which was strapped on the back of the soldier.” Five infantry companies designated to sweep through the village would each have two of these flamethrower teams attached to follow the platoons of their second wave, and here the soldiers practiced covering the crews as they simulated “mopping up” the village cellars of the enemy.
Most novel to these wide-eyed doughboys at the rehearsal were tanks, a new weapon most American troops had never seen in person. Top heavy with a pointed front and narrow, rectangular bodies, French Schneider tanks resembled tall, armored transport boats carried slowly atop caterpillar tracks. Armed with Hotchkiss machine guns that poked out from both sides in swivels, and a 75mm gun that rotated out the right in a ball-mount, Schneiders had been employed in the previous summer’s French offensive and recent counterattacks mainly to overcome Maxim nests and enemy strongpoints. The soldiers who would be advancing up the middle of the attack with the tanks learned how to advance in waves with the twelve Schneiders of the 5th French Tank Battalion, and a French officer gave instructions while General Bullard translated.
For the final run-through, a handful of war correspondents—all sworn to secrecy until after the battle—were invited to observe. “French machine gunners played the role of Germans,” Fred Ferguson of the UPI later reported. “They had their machine guns hidden in pits and elsewhere in the field.” The three waves of infantry and machine-gun teams ran through the assault in tandem with flamethrowers and tanks. “They were kept at it until they were letter perfect on every detail,” another reporter, Herbert Corey, noted. “They knew where they were to jump off from and where they were to go to. They knew the compass bearings of their prospective routes, and each had marked down a landmark to follow.”
“In the last day’s practice the entire Regiment, with flamethrowers, were used and was fairly satisfactory,” Colonel Ely approvingly noted. He understood the great weight placed on the soldiers of his unit, later recounting that “General Pershing said that ‘no inch was to be given up’ when we attacked the place.” Ely later complained that he would have preferred a day or two more slated for this training, so “a few rough edges could have been better smoothed off.” But satisfied they were as prepared for the battle as time would allow, he gathered his officers for a pre-battle pep speech, which Lieutenant Waltz later described: “In his characteristic, forceful way, he impressed upon us the necessity of driving hard and allowing no opposition to hinder us from reaching our objective.”
* * *
On Sunday, the troops of the 28th were given a day off. All were treated to a warm meal and, as Lt. George Haydock relished, “a big batch of mail.” Three days prior, the call to arms had fired in the doughboys emotions that were soon crowded out by the long hours spent on the battle rehearsal. Now the rare moments of quiet prompted the men to take inventory of their sentiments, and their disparate psychological approaches to impending battle—some fighting the anguish of uncertainty and others daydreaming of glory to come—incited a flurry of letters to loved ones.
“This isn’t the eve of battle but it is so close to it that if I don’t write now I won’t get another chance,” Lieutenant Newhall wrote his mother, Elizabeth, adding, “[p]erhaps my next letter can describe a battle.” Eighteen-year-old Pvt. Carl Fey wrote his mom back in Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania: “Mother I will stay with you if I ever get back.” Telling her he was headed back into the trenches again, he added a closing assurance: “I am under the lucky star. Don’t worry.”
Lt. Dan Birmingham tap-danced near the edge of his officer duty of self-censorship, writing his father: “Watch the papers and magazines for the efforts of the 28th Infantry.” Of the imminent battle, Lt. Vinton Dearing was not so candid with his sister Peggy, telling her simply, “Things are very different this time.” He wrote of the war-torn French villages he had seen, describing “roofless walls” and streets “ripped up with shells,” and revealed the higher cause he had applied to his role in the coming action: “I am here in France to save our own homes and parks from being ruined as they are ruined over here.”
* * *
Back up in the trenches facing Cantigny, the men of the 18th Infantry and 1st Engineers had been working at a fiendish pace adding the duplicate trench lines and supply points needed by J-Day. Because German artillery already had guns registered on the existing division front lines, and because, at Zero Hour, seventeen companies of riflemen would be packed into the length of a front normally held by only four, new lines had to be dug for jumping-off trenches. The labor of these troops—who still knew nothing of the planned attack their comrades in the 28th were rehearsing—was evidenced in the 18th Infantry Daily Reports: on May 25 alone, 265 men from two companies dug 450 yards of trenches, and 131 men from a single company dug 400 yards to a depth of four feet. One engineer recounted how he was sent forward “to help out on some rush trench digging … The trench I had to tape out was in a clover field on top of a flat hill and I was told a [German] machine-gun opened across it occasionally for luck and that my tape had to laid, while crawling, after dusk.”
But in the midst of this work, one incident threatened to derail the entire operation. Around eleven p.m., Saturday, May 25, a detail carrying sacks of heavy entrenching tools and led by twenty-nine-year-old Lt. Oliver “Judd” Kendall was up near the front lines when it came under artillery fire that scattered a few of its members into nearby trenches for cover. When the shelling ceased, Lieutenant Kendall tried to reassemble his men, but noting half were still missing, he ordered a member of the party to find them. Hearing a noise, Kendall told his sergeant to wait for his return and disappeared into the darkness of no-man’s-land. Only a single sound of shovels being dropped broke the silence that followed. As anxious minutes passed without Kendall’s return, the sergeant and another officer went forward, falling into a trench that, after being instantly fired on and seeing outlines of Germans in coal-scuttle helmets, they realized was an enemy outpost. They climbed out and ran back, and the officer returned fire with his pistol. But Lieutenant Kendall was missing, likely in the enemy’s hands.
Lieutenant Kendall did not know the specifics of the planned attack, but he knew one was imminent, and he was carrying a detailed map of the jumping-off trenches and newly constructed supply and ammunition points—enough to make high command “deeply concerned” about his likely capture. George Marshall and others at Division Headquarters feared the maps and entrenching tools “would disclose to the enemy our intentions, with the inevitable disastrous result.” The fear of losing surprise, the most vital of all fragile elements essential to success, was now immeasurably heightened—so much so that, according to one officer, they “considered suspending the operation.” But in another calculated risk, General Bullard decided to proceed.
* * *
Twelve miles away, where Colonel Ely’s doughboys were spending the contemplative stillness of Sunday writing letters or enjoying the quiet of the French countryside, a memorandum arrived from the division chief of staff: “J day will be May 28.” Thus Sunday became J minus 2, and by the schedule of Field Order No. 18, the countdown would begin with the middle of the attack force—the four infantry companies of 2nd Battalion and its attached machine-gun company—moving into the front lines after dark that night. The rest of the troops were to move up Monday night, just hours prior to the attack. Nighttime relief of troops in the trenches was a difficult task under normal conditions, and the movement of an entire infantry regiment, three machine-gun companies, a company of engineers, and a French flamethrower section into their specific jumping-off positions would create a trial of logistics the planners felt was better spread over two nights instead of one.
But many questioned the wisdom of the two-night move. “This was the subject of careful consideration beforehand,” wrote Colonel Ely, who later disagreed with the final plan: “it is believed that it was better to put it in on night of J-1 … rather than on J-2.” Lieutenant Waltz, whose machine-gun company was part of the early move, agreed: “This was wrong because it is the same as bringing a football team out on the field twenty-four hours before the game. Assault troops are dead on their feet, if they are required to wait this long.” But the planners disagreed and the orders were set, a decision that was to carry deadly consequences.
So as shadows lengthened with the setting sun, the soldiers of Companies E, F, G, and H of the 28th Infantry and Company C of the 3rd Machine-Gun Battalion packed their gear and lined up to fill wooden benches in the canvas-topped truck beds for the clattering twelve-mile ride back to the front. Young Capt. Edward Johnston rode “the dim white roads to the front” with his men of Company E. The drive was eerily quiet, and his troops said not a word. “[T]heir minds,” Johnston estimated, “were intent on their own problems, they were brooding on the probable events of the next few days in the troubled eddies of Cantigny.”
On the way, townspeople in each village through which the dusty convoy passed lined the roads to cheer on the American troops with shouts of “bon chance! [sic]” “All the French peasants in the nearby villages, through which we passed,” Lieutenant Waltz observed, “seemed to know of our attack and were lined up on the road as our trucks passed towards the front, to give us farewell. It made one think twice.”
All traces of dusk’s light had disappeared by the time the trucks arrived in the rear of the sector, and in the night’s pitch-black, the soldiers detrucked and began trooping forward in long lines by squad, toward Death Valley and the trenches. “All nights near the front lines were very dark, and certainly this was no exception,” Lieutenant Waltz later recounted. “One just had to feel his way along. I have often wondered whether the nights in France get black or whether they just appeared that way to us.”
Joining them on their trek forward was one officer and a dozen-man reconnaissance team from each of the companies of the other two battalions, tasked by Marshall’s plan with measuring out space in the new jumping-off trenches for each platoon of their companies “to avoid all possibility of error on the following night.” For Company L, the designated officer was Lieutenant Newhall, who led his small advance team forward “in the dark,” he would recount, “mostly cross country, because the roads were shelled.” Captain Johnston, leading not only the four platoons of his company but six machine-gun teams attached for the operation, also took note of the inky darkness: “There was no moon at all at this late hour, or mist and clouds hid it from view.” His own move to the front lines was painfully slow, because “the guns had to be carried forward by hand” a distance of three miles.
Johnston and his company and machine-gun teams lugged their guns, tripods, spare barrels, and ammunition boxes, snaking down “narrow trails winding through the wheat,” and as they moved closer to the front, skirting the edges of Death Valley, the boom of distant German batteries grew louder. “Now and then,” Johnston noted, “a crashing shock marked the use of a proportion of high-explosive shell.” The march to the front, in his mind, “seemed to go on interminably” as the “machine-gunners, overloaded, toiled ahead, burdened with guns and ammunition,” a journey broken only by rest breaks and frequent dives into the dirt at the sound of incoming shells.
After midnight, the soldiers of Companies E and H filed into the communication trench, relieving two companies of the 18th and taking over the front lines facing no-man’s-land. “The moon was veiled and the stars were hidden,” Johnston noted, as his Company E platoons “settled down for the remainder of the night.” Once relief was completed, around three thirty a.m., he and his number two, Lt. Irving Wood, climbed into a dirt bunker on the rim of Death Valley a few hundred yards behind the trenches and tried to find sleep on their canvas cots.
Behind the front lines, advance teams from 1st and 3rd Battalions worked through the night measuring and taping boundaries in the new jumping-off trenches for each of their platoons to use as guides when they moved into position the next night. Lieutenant Newhall and his team finally finished after four thirty a.m., at which point he curled up in a corner of a communication trench “with a view to getting a little sleep.” Back in a patch of woods behind the trenches, under tree trunks stripped of foliage and chewed yellow by shellfire, Lieutenant Waltz and his “quite fatigued” men slept on the dirt where they could find space to sprawl out among dropped guns and strewn equipment.
* * *
Dawn struggled to break through a morning fog. Around four thirty a.m., Lieutenant Waltz, grabbing some fitful sleep on the cold ground near his men, was awoken by “a real drum fire barrage of 77-mm shells” just in front of the woods. A few mortar shells whistled into the skeletal tree canopy above, but as Waltz noted, “they didn’t put them on us thick enough to do any damage.” Sporadic bombardments near the front lines were not uncommon, so at first Waltz and his men, now being stirred awake one by one, “thought little of it … but as it kept dragging on, we began to wonder whether it didn’t amount to more.”
Like a snowball rolling, the bombardment intensified. Still curled up in the communication trench, Lieutenant Newhall gave up on sleep: “At five fifteen, the Germans opened bombardment on that part of our line, and for an hour and three quarters I had more shell fire than I ever had before.” Hunkered not far from him was Lt. Si Parker, leading the advance team for Company K, and one of the blasts sliced a shard of hot metal across him as he dove for cover. “I got a little scratch on my left arm,” he noted. “It cut quite a slit in the sleeves of my coat and shirt, but only grazed the flesh.”
Two miles away, Sitting Bull’s gunners, always on standby to support their front-line infantry, were monitoring their phones while battery commanders squinted through field glasses, scanning the gray, foggy sky above the front lines for flares. They had just the night before been handed charts showing the new jumping-off trenches to be seventy-five to one hundred yards behind the existing front lines, along with a report that the troops would be moved back to these new lines at “H-1” (H minus 1 hour). But someone—exactly who is unknown—misread “H-1” to read “J-1.” So when Lt. Charles Avery’s flares signaled for a barrage out in no-man’s-land, the gunners, thinking Avery and his men had moved back in the jumping-off trenches, fired directly on his position. The fratricide that resulted from this misreading of a single letter threw into stark relief the exacting attention to detail required for the successful coordination of combined arms in the battle to come.
* * *
Over the front, the German bombardment shifted, forming a box barrage that surrounded a portion of the front trench and began pulverizing the rear trenches. Lt. Gerald Tyler and the advance team for Company M, resting in a communication trench, were lashed by the blasts. Sprinting with another officer between plumes of dirt and sprays of hot shrapnel, Tyler dove to the trench floor and looked back to see “a 105 hit the place we had just left and blew it off the map.” He and his comrade—their faces “blackened with smoke”—tried to escape the vortex by scrambling up to the front lines. “This minute I do not know how on earth we ever got there falling down over picks and shovels, knocking off corners of traverses and firebags.”
Lieutenant Tyler reached the front lines with his Colt .45 drawn, but immediately “huddled … in the bottom of the trench” to avoid “a steady hail of machine-gun bullets which combed our parapet.” Frantic word reached the troops near him that the “Germans were coming across just to our left.” It was the German raid. From his left, Tyler could hear the unmistakable crackle of Springfields and the violent chatter of a Hotchkiss, a medley of fire from Capt. Edward Johnston’s soldiers—among them the riflemen of Lieutenant Curry’s and Avery’s platoons and Cpl. Dickie Conover’s machine-gun crew—repulsing the fifty enemy raiders.
Back in their woods down the slope, Lieutenant Waltz and his men knew only what they could hear, that “[o]ver an hour had gone by and still the 77’s were pounding our lines just above us.” Waltz walked forward to investigate, when an excited private came running out of the fog from the front, yelling, “Retreat, they have broken through!” Panic spread like a wind-fed fire, and the machine-gun crews scattered in sprints down into Death Valley. Waltz chased after them waving his pistol, suddenly finding himself under the iron rain of another bombardment. As he rushed to reassemble his troops, he “took one look at those huge geysers of dirt going up all over the floor of that valley and just knew that [he] was ready for [his] last run.”
Adding to the mayhem, a shell hit the ammunition supply point on the edge of the woods, detonating stacks of grenades, mortars, and flares. “It made quite a show as the smoke and flames shot skyward,” Waltz observed. Lt. Dick Dacus, leading the advance team for Company I, had just sought cover by dropping into a trench beside the ammo point. “We were,” he would later recount, “in the midst of the biggest 4th of July fireworks I ever saw, with shells, ammo of all kinds and rockets of all colors around us.” The eruption, one officer later noted, sent men “scurrying to escape the grenade fragments and pyrotechnic flames.” But after getting far enough away to avoid the danger, as one company commander noted, all the soldiers “promptly reformed in order.”
The popping of rifle and pistol fire trickling from the front lines faded, and after a final few scattered artillery thuds, the air fell silent. As the rising sun finally burned through the fog, adding some color to the gray morning, news of the German raid spread at viral speed. Medics and reserve troops rushed to the front with stretchers against a tide of limping, injured, and shell-shocked men flooding out of the communication trenches down the slope. Field Hospital No. 12, set up behind the lines on the far edge of the valley, received three dozen patients, with injuries ranging from machine-gun wounds to shrapnel gashes. Among them was the jittery Lieutenant Avery, listed on his chart as “buried and shell shocked,” still drawing on a cigarette to calm nerves frayed from partial paralysis and near suffocation after three hours buried in a trench collapse.
Also arriving on a bloody stretcher was twenty-year-old Pvt. Clifford Ledford of Cincinnati, Ohio, a member of Lieutenant Dacus’s advance team. His entire left side had been flayed open by shrapnel, and his leg was dangling at the thigh by a few strands of flesh. He was given morphine and trucked to a French field hospital, where his leg was amputated and his arm stitched up and bandaged. Young Clifford clung to life the rest of the day and through the night, finally letting go the next morning, becoming the thirtieth doughboy killed in the enemy raid.
* * *
The raid on the American trenches facing Cantigny had been planned by the German 18th Army command a few days earlier. The operation was code named “Tarnopol,” and had been well coordinated, with a swift, destructive artillery bombardment (two hours of high-explosive rounds) followed by an infantry assault protected by a creeping barrage. The raiding force was a team of fifty Jagdkommando (hunting command), who like Stoßtruppen were handpicked, volunteer troops in their physical prime who received additional training and double rations. For the assault, they were well armed, each man carrying a Mauser with fixed-bayonet, eight potato-masher grenades, and four egg grenades. Their mission had been to cross no-man’s-land, enter the American trenches, gather any materiel they could find, capture one or more prisoners cut off from retreat or reinforcement by an accurate box barrage, and return to their own lines.
That the Germans targeted a stretch of trench taken over just hours earlier by doughboys who knew every detail of the next day’s planned attack was pure chance, but it added incalculable weight to the actions of Captain Johnston’s men. Had a single prisoner been captured—had Lieutenant Avery not recognized the signs of impending attack and prepared his platoon to defend their line; had Lieutenant Curry and his men not made the awful but unavoidable decision to kill one of their own who had surrendered to the enemy; and had Corporal Conover not climbed over the parapet and sniped German captors to free his comrades—surprise might have been lost and the entire operation placed in jeopardy.
“Raid was repulsed with heavy casualties,” Captain Johnston matter-of-factly reported of the morning his company saved the Cantigny operation. But a fellow company commander, Capt. Charles Senay of Company C, would later give praise where it was due: “I do not believe that the Second Battalion, 28th Infantry, and E Company in particular, has been given full credit for the magnificent manner in which they annihilated a group of fifty German troops.” Still, although the dogged resilience of the soldiers up in the front line had thwarted the enemy’s assault and prevented the worst—the capture of any Americans—more than sixty casualties had been suffered—manpower that would not be replaced before Zero Hour.
Those given the luxury of hindsight can easily call the decision to bring up one-third of the attack force one night early a mistake. But perhaps Lieutenant Parker, bandaging his own bloody arm, assessed the most lasting effect of the German raid accurately: “Their efforts failed, and worse than that, it put more red blood in the boys’ eye for the next day.”