War Stories of the Infantry

Americans in Combat, 1918 to Today

Michael Green, James Brown

• Publisher: Zenith Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780760335697
• eBook ISBN: 9781616732486
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

"I love the infantry," famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle said, "because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can't be won without."

This book tells the stories of these soldiers. From the muddy trenches of France in World War I to the arid landscape of Iraq, War Stories of the Infantry immerses the reader in the immediate drama of combat as American infantrymen, Army and Marine Corps, have experienced it. In its pages, infantrymen tell of their struggles with the enemy, the terrain, and the weather, as well as their own fears and doubts in battle. In the humid heat of a faraway jungle, in the bone-chilling cold of a Korean mountaintop, we endure what they endure, see what they see--as they rout the enemy, open their eyes in a field hospital, or suffer the indignities of a POW camp. These are the stories of the largely unsung heroes who do the lion's share of fighting and dying for their country while protecting the freedoms and liberties that many of us take for granted. 

1 WORLD WAR I
(1914–1918)

Sgt. Charles Leo Boucher, U.S. Army

The April 1918 battle of Seicheprey was an early test of the relatively unblooded soldiers of the American Expeditionary Force. Veteran German storm troopers initially overran the American positions, but at the end of the day, Sergeant Boucher and his national guard comrades of the 26th “Yankee” Division held their line.

WE RELIEVED SOLDIERS FROM THE 1ST DIVISION, and although this sector was supposed to be a quiet one, it wasn’t long till it was turned into a “hell on wheels” for us. Replacements were now coming in, which had a tendency to boost our morale for the time being at least. Just before our taking over in the Toul sector, and on the last day of our hike from the Aisne front, we had quite an experience as we climbed the slope of a good-sized hill. We saw nothing out of the ordinary until a large opening on the side of this hill came into view. This proved to be one of the openings or entrances to the famed Chalk Mines of Soissons. As we marched down a slope, which led us into the mines, thousands of lights came into view, and routes leading in every direction. Allied troops were coming and going: British, French, and Italian. Guides from the French Army took over and led us into a section assigned to us until we moved on the next day. Four pieces of two by four [boards] were used, two long and two short, and after they were nailed together, heavy screening was attached. Then the forms were placed on sturdy legs, forming our bunks for the night. I began to explore our new surroundings. Well, it didn’t take long for me to get myself completely lost. I had located a French canteen, and as soon as I had made my purchase, I turned to go back to our location. Oh, brother! There were plenty of routes, but I wasn’t sure which was the right one. In the meantime, a French sergeant saw me and realized that I was lost, so with a little French I had picked up plus a bit of English he understood, he took me to his outfit first, where a good-sized party was underway. One of the noncommissioned officers had just been promoted, and a celebration was in order, and I was invited as their guest. Plenty of food and wine was consumed, and then I was guided back to my outfit. I was told that there were over twenty thousand troops billeted in this particular section of the mine, and without guides, one could travel all night without getting to his destination, so once again, I was just “Lucky Charlie.”

The entrance to the Mines of Soissons was well camouflaged so that enemy planes might not spot it from above. Come morning, we hiked out onto a country road, which was camouflaged for quite a distance. Like in previous occasions, when moving up into the front lines, we were greeted with heavy cannonading, and the horizon was a sheet of flames. When you’re dog tired, lousy, and hungry, the rat-tat-tat of machine guns and the booming of artillery just have a tendency to put you to sleep. Soldiers constantly under fire must snatch rest what and where they can as the circumstances may permit. Mother Nature takes over, and that is all there is to it.

The last move up took us to the base of Mount See, in the Toul sector, which was at the time occupied by the enemy. They were so well situated that we were exposed to their view day and night. Technically speaking, they could look right down into our trenches from the mountains. We had to do something about it as soon as humanly possible, so on the morning of April 19, 1918, our captain sent a runner to my dugout with orders to report to him immediately. As I entered the post commander’s dugout, I was seated at a long table that had been hastily improvised by placing long planks on trestles running the length of the dugout. Maps had been laid out on the table, and candles were sputtering at either end, and the rest of the dugout was in darkness. Some of our company officers and noncommissioned officers had been sent to Chaumont, General Pershing’s headquarters, for training periods. Lieutenant Johnson and Lieutenant Carruth were already seated, and the noncommissioned officers from the rest of the platoons also were seated. Then Captain Griswold stood at the head of the table, and he began to explain the plans arrived at for the takeover. He addressed me, personally, as I was senior noncommissioned officer of the 1st Platoon of C Company. He told us all that the French intelligence division had tapped the enemy’s wires and found out that an attack of “German shock troops” was in the making. They did not, however, find out when the attack was to take place, but they had decided it would take place tonight. He then pointed out on the map a position at the base of Mount See that I was to occupy with my platoon.

Our platoon, plus a platoon from Company B and one from Company D, was to relieve the 3rd Battalion of the 102nd U.S. Infantry. Then, the “skipper” explained that we were not to advance beyond a given point, and my men were to be deployed to the best possible advantage as a strongpoint, which, later, proved to be a suicide post. I was then ordered to keep the information of an impending attack away from my men and, furthermore, [told that] if the attack materialized, we were to hold our post until the very last man. Then my captain asked me if I had anything to say before the meeting broke up. I asked for additional men, as we suffered recent casualties, and I was left [with] between fifty-five and sixty men, including a couple of machine gunners. The group began looking at each other, but no one volunteered to give me any additional men. Finally, however, Lieutenant Carruth said he would give me a squad from his platoon and said I could pick out the squad I wanted, so I chose Corporal Gritzback and his men. In the fighting that took place during the night and the following day, I lost every one of them, killed in action.

As the day wore on and darkness began creeping towards us, I formed the men in single file alongside the Church at Mandres. The usual orders were passed along the line: no smoking, no lights, and no talking. I also ordered them to remove and sheath bayonets so as to avoid any accidents. We moved along a well-camouflaged and torn up road till we came to a garden gate that was still standing, and we dropped into a communication trench. We had to keep closed up so as not to lose contact with the man ahead. On our way in, we were considerably helped by the light of the moon, although it was tough in spots where we had to expose ourselves on account of rock formations.

When the enemy sent up Very lights or flares, we simply froze in our position, resembling trees or posts until the lights died out. We made record time in relieving the 3rd Battalion. Recognizing the point that had been designated on the map where we were ordered to make our stand, I placed one machine gunner at either end of our platoon. I also put a bayonet man on either side to challenge anyone coming near our position. The rest of the men were allowed to rest up as best they could in the bottom of the trench. Another noncommissioned officer and I crawled out on our bellies about midnight to inspect the barbed wire emplacements in front of our position. The wire had been cut in zigzag style, so when looking at it from the front, it seemed solid. We found out, however, that it had been cut to prepare for an attack. No sooner had we regained our position than the moon was clouded over, and it was so dark you couldn’t see your hand ahead of you, so I decided I should let my men know what we were in for. It hadn’t been easy keeping the news to myself, so now I ordered bayonets fixed and hit the parapet. No sooner was that accomplished than hell let loose as Austrian 77s and German 88s blasted away at us. It had been altogether too quiet while taking over our new position, with only intermittent shellfire plus an occasional rat-tat-tat from machine guns, but now we got the business. The barrage lasted until dawn began to show, and our first casualty was discovered. He was almost completely covered with earth, and the blood was pumping from his mouth, ears, and eyes. Nothing could be done for him, so he just choked up and passed on. We all knew what we could expect after such a heavy barrage, and since we were short of ammunition, I ordered our men to hold their fire until the Prussian shock troops hit the barbed wire. We hadn’t long to wait, and just as they arrived at the barbed wire, we opened up on them.

They advanced in close formation, and soon the wire and the ground in front of us was covered with their dead and wounded. They then crawled over each other only to be mowed down by our deadly fire. The shouting and screaming of the wounded and dying wasn’t easy to listen to and very hard to forget. A friendly platoon had been captured in the Bois de Remieres on our right and another on our left, so now we were surrounded on all sides, and our casualties began to pile up on us. I had been wounded early in the morning by a hunk of shrapnel, so I used a shoelace and a piece of wood I cut from a duckboard in the trench to make a tourniquet and stop the bleeding and hobbled about the rest of the day, as best I could.

Corporal Gritzback was in charge of a machine-gun squad, and his gunner, Private Lilley, was hit on the head and killed, so Dodi Gritzback lifted his body off the gun and took over. He mowed them down as they kept on coming in on us and, finally, he was hit just below the brim of his helmet. The helmet was scooped off his head, and [it] hit one of his men on the face, opening up his cheek. Then Corporal Coe got a bullet in the guts, and we laid him on the parados [a bank behind a trench or other type of fortification, giving protection from the rear]. He kept hollering, “Charlie! Oh, Charlie, for God’s sake, do something for me.” I gave him some water from my canteen. Then, I ripped open his shirt, and there was a hole in his belly. Then a piece of shell hit him in the neck and decapitated him completely, so his misery was over. The enemy had overestimated our strength, because those of us who could stand up used the rifles and ammunition of our dead comrades to ward them off. About the middle of the afternoon, the hand-to-hand fighting died down, and “Fokker” planes flew low over our position. We lay still alongside our dead buddies, for at the least sign of movement, their Fokkers opened up with machine-gun fire.

I must have lost a lot of blood, for “Gwatsy” Mendillo, who was doing a fine job as a rifle grenadier, tried to cheer me up by saying, “Gee! Charlie! We got them good this time, and they’re running for the woods.” He didn’t have a scratch on him, so far, so I said, “For God’s sake, keep your head down, Gwatsy,” but it was already too late, for a hunk of shrapnel dug through our parapet, hit him in the chest, and opened it up, and he died almost immediately. How he succeeded in speaking, I still do not know, but his last words, to me, were, “Charlie! They got me.”

George Cooper, from Roxbury, Massachusetts, was one of our machine gunners [that] I had posted on the right end of our position. He was hit on the right shoulder early in the morning, and the enemy rushed him. I was on the point of throwing a grenade, only if I did, then he also would have been killed, so they captured him, and, as it turned out, he was the only one of our platoon to be taken prisoner, for we had decided we would fight to the end rather than be captured.

Just before darkness set in, I heard a noise in a gully that ran into our trench, so I figured it must be the enemy mop-up patrol. I only had a couple of bullets left in the chamber of my .45 [pistol]. The noise stopped, and a head popped into sight. When I was about to fire, I gave another look, and a white and distorted face proved to be that of George Cooper, so I grabbed his shoulders and pulled him down into our trench beside me. He must have had about twenty bullet holes in him, but not one of them was well placed enough to kill him. He made an effort to speak, so I told him to keep quiet and conserve his energy. I had a few malted milk tablets left, and I forced them into his mouth. I also poured the last of the water I had left in my canteen into his mouth. Then he asked me if I had any bullets left in my revolver and begged me, with tears rolling out of his eyes, to please, for God’s sake, kill him. He screamed, “Charlie! I just cannot stand the pains any longer.” It is an awful decision to make, but I just could not up and kill my buddy like that. “No, George,” I told him. “When night falls, we will crawl under the barbed wire, find the road, and crawl back to our lines.” Just then, a German Fokker flew overhead. As I turned to look, he grabbed my .45, as the holster was open, but before he could use it on himself, I got it away from him, and then night overtook us.

Now we began to crawl towards the road, and on our way out, he gained strength enough to talk. He explained how he was taken to an enemy first-aid station where his wounds were dressed, and then the doctor motioned to have him taken to the rear of their lines. But the sergeant major pushed him towards our side and No Man’s Land and pulled out his Luger automatic [pistol] and shot him down. Then, he began to crawl towards our lines little by little, being shot at consistently by the enemy snipers, until finally he arrived in our position.

Before darkness had set in, Art Hubbard had skirted the Bois de Remieres and gotten back to our outfit. I had asked him, on leaving, to have reinforcements sent up to us, but in the meantime, a box barrage had been dropped around us, and as a result, no one could get through to us. Our regiment had given us up, since we were known to have been completely surrounded, and they assumed we were all killed or captured. When we hit the road, it was pitch dark, and when flares lit the sky, we searched for the steeple of the church at Mandres, but it had been destroyed by shellfire, so now we had to decide if we should turn to the left or to the right, as there remained nothing to guide us. To make things worse, a heavy gas attack was sent over with chlorine shells. Our gas masks had been torn by shrapnel, and what was left of our uniforms was torn into shreds and was muddy and bloody. Out of our original platoon of over sixty men, there were only eight of us still alive, and all were badly wounded.

Our orders to hold our suicide post had been carried out. But, Oh God, at what a price! We finally decided to follow the shoulder of the road to our right. We kept crawling along on our bellies, as we had no food and we were weak from loss of blood. Soon, the road was being splattered by rifle fire, but the sound was that of our good old 30-06 Springfields [rifles], for we had been taken for an enemy patrol. With what strength we had left, we hollered, “For God’s sake, let up.” So they came towards us and scooped us up in their arms and carried us into a first-aid station. We were given hot drinks and also were given shots in the arm to deaden our pains, and then we were placed on stretchers to wait for the ambulances to take us to the 101st Sanitation Train.

George Cooper’s stretcher was placed next to mine, and then we talked. He cracked a joke about when he borrowed my rifle when we were on guard duty along the Mexican border. We both had a good laugh, and then George straightened out and died.

In order to get to the field hospital, it was necessary to go through “Dead Man’s Curve,” which was full of deep shell holes and was under constant bombardment. Another gas attack had been launched, and the Klaxon horns were shrieking and blasting all along the lines. I was alone on the floor of the ambulance, and the driver stopped and asked me if I had a gas mask. I said, “No, but for God’s sake put yours on, and I will cover my head with my blanket.” Dead Man’s Curve was one hell of a place, but our good old Ford ambulances plowed through the shell holes and bombardments and didn’t let up till we arrived at the field station, where I was given more shots, a cup of hot cocoa, and cigarettes.

I was placed in a squad tent to await further transportation to the evacuation hospital at Toul. I was constantly drugged to kill the pains, and as soon as the effects of the drugs began to wear off, I opened my eyes, and all that I could see were lights all around me, and I was on the operating table. I could barely see the doctor, and then, off in the distance, as my left inner ear drum was fractured, I dimly heard the doctor asking the orderly when I was brought in from the field hospital. The last words I could hear were “I’m afraid we may be compelled to amputate his leg.” Then I was gone again, this time with ether.

When I came to, I was sitting up in a bed in a large ward of the Toul Hospital. Although I was half-cocked from the effects of ether, I was cussing to beat hell. For I thought I was back up in the front lines, and I was hollering at my men, “Give ‘em hell, the SOBs!” until I felt the hand of an orderly on my shoulder, and he was saying, “Take it easy, soldier, there are women around.” He was referring to our army nurses. I then lay back and calmed down a bit. Then I remember a well-built elderly nurse with gray hair bending over me, and she said, “Try and be as quiet as you can, as you have just had a severe hemorrhage of your wounded leg, and since you’ve lost so much blood already in the trenches, you need every drop of blood you have left.” And then she bent over me and scooped me up in her arms from the blood soaked sheets and put me in another bed, nearby. She gave me a shot and left me to rest.

Cpl. Frank L. Faulkner, U.S. Army

Overshadowed by the better-known exploits of the 2nd Infantry Division’s 4th Marine Brigade, Corporal Faulkner and his fellow soldiers of the division’s 3rd Infantry Brigade served just as valiantly alongside the marines in blunting and then counterattacking against the seemingly overwhelming Third German Offensive.

ON THE 12TH OF MARCH, 1918, traveling in our usual manner, we embarked for the front. We traveled to Dugny, a place about five kilometers from Verdun. From here we hiked about eight kilometers to a place called Genicourt, just back of the trenches. It was here that I saw my first view of shell-torn towns and also my first air battles. At that time, it was quite a novel sight, but it soon grew familiar, as they were a daily occurrence.

On March 17th we went in the trenches; of course, we had to travel in the dark. We had full packs, and much of the travel was over the hills and through the woods, so when we reached there, we were pretty well tired out.

We relieved the French, so we did not know much about what sort of a place we were in, but we were told the direction to look for the Germans. It was in a wood; most of the trees had been broken off by shellfire, and only the stumps were left. They looked much like the forms of men, so we spent the rest of the first night shooting up the stumps. That night sort of put us on our feet, and shell-fire lost some of its terrors to us. In fact, we soon became able to enjoy a siesta in spite of heavy artillery fire. To say that it does not give you a queer feeling any time when the shells are landing close about you is stretching it a trifle. I went through some mighty heavy barrages afterwards, but I never felt so apprehensive as on that second night.

We were relieved in about twelve days. We came out to a little village just back of the front called Montharon. Here we drilled some days, but since there was considerable shelling there, it was necessary to be careful. From there we went back to Genicourt and stayed a few days, and then [we] went back in the lines near Rupt-em-Woerve. This time the trenches were in bad shape, and it had rained. The water was sometimes quite deep, and one’s feet were wet at all times. The dugouts were in very bad shape: damp; dirty; full of cooties, rats, and other vermin. We were all mighty glad to get out of there.

It was in this sector that the first Distinguished Service Cross was awarded to a member of the regiment. It was given to a fellow by the name of Frank Alekno, who ran two hundred yards for help after receiving a fatal wound. [The story] was published in the papers. It went something like this: there was a patrol of seven Germans, including one officer, a sergeant, and a corporal. Alekno, with the assistance of the help he summoned, attacked them and killed the officer and fatally wounded the corporal. From the papers on the body of the officer and the statements of the wounded corporal, some very valuable information was obtained. The rest of the Germans escaped, but I think one was wounded. Both the corporal and the sergeant who went to Alekno’s assistance were wounded more or less seriously. I was about 250 yards from where the action occurred. I heard the shots but did not know what had happened afterwards. I knew Alekno well, as he was in our company. It was [in] this sector that we had our first shell gas attack. Several of the fellows were gassed, but fortunately I escaped.

When we came out from this sector, we went to Woimbly and stayed there several days—three I think. It was there that I spent my first and only time in the brig; we had just come out of the trenches the night before, and our clothes were all wet and muddy, especially the leggings. Since the town was a shell-torn place and contained only a few French soldiers guarding some wine stores, I did not think it amiss if I allowed my leggings to dry while I went across the street to the kitchen for some grease for my shoes. On the way over, I met the officer of the day, and he requested the pleasure of my company. Not being accustomed to be so highly honored, and thinking perhaps I might be of service to him, I went along cheerfully. When we had progressed down the street a ways, he turned me over to the guard and told me I was a prisoner. I asked him what the idea was, and he told me that next time that I appeared on the street, perhaps I would have my leggings on. I just laughed and went in, because I could not feel very guilty.

From Woimbly we went into reserve again at a place opposite Fort Tryon toward the front. Here...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: World War I (1914–1918)
• Chapter 2: World War II (1939–1945)
• Chapter 3: Korean War (1950–1953)
• Chapter 4: Vietnam War (1965–1975)
• Chapter 5: Grenada and Panama (1983–1989)
• Chapter 6: Operation Desert Storm (1991)
• Chapter 7: Somalia (1993)
• Chapter 8: Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003–2004)
• Index
• Copyright Page