Lafayette We Are Here!

6th June 1918: The American Marines Attack Belleau Wood

Jean-Michel Steg

• Publisher: University of Buckingham Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781915054685
• eBook ISBN: 9781915054692
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: History

6th June 1918 saw more American soldiers fall on French soil than the famous 1944 D-Day landings. Why is this fact so little known?

As well as providing a detailed account of this funereal episode, Lafayette We Are Here! looks at the reasons behind American involvement in what was primarily a European conflict. Why did a neutral government in 1914, driven by a largely pacifist population, end up joining the Allies in 1917?

In this third instalment of his trilogy concerning the deadliest days of the First World War, Jean-Michel Steg investigates a cataclysmic battle for the American Marines in a small wood in northern France, and presents an informative and accessible overview of the military strategy and geopolitical context.

CHAPTER 1

BELLEAU WOOD, 6 JUNE 1918, DAWN

It is 03.30, and the men of the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment await the first glimmers of dawn to attack Hill 142, a ridge on the western edge of Belleau Wood. An old seignorial hunting preserve, this little forest is located a few kilometres west of Château-Thierry between two little villages in the département of Aisne, Torcy and Bouresches. At this juncture of the war, it constitutes the German offensive’s farthest point of advance on French soil – and its deepest since 1914. Paris is less than ninety kilometres away.

Launched on 27 May, the third wave of the German spring offensive had taken the French army by surprise due to its location on the Aisne front. Having expected the assault to take place at the junction of British and French troops farther to the north, the French high command had not stationed its best troops in this long-quiet sector of the Aisne. Under the impact of the German assault, they began to retreat, sometimes in disorder. In short order, the Germans had retaken the Chemin des Dames, which the French had conquered with such difficulty in 1917, and from there crossed the river Aisne. By 29 May, they had occupied Soissons, were threatening Reims and – for the first time since 1914 – had reached the Marne. Paris was threatened. As civilians began to flee the city, the government once again considered evacuating to Bordeaux, as it had done in September 1914.

Given the urgency of the situation, in April General Pershing had for the first time agreed temporarily to integrate his available units into the Allied military command.¹¹ The 1st Infantry Division was already fighting alongside French troops to the north of the new front, at Cantigny. Then training in Lorraine, the 2nd and 3rd Infantry Divisions were thus made available to the Allied command. They immediately set off by forced march, night and day, for Château-Thierry, south-west of Reims.

In the days leading up to this, however, the French soldiers of General Jean Degoutte’s Sixth Army had succeeded in slowing their retreat. Clinging to the ground they held outside Château-Thierry with help from units of the US 3rd Infantry Division, they attempted to slow the German advance via defensive operations. Though this handful of local successes prevented the Germans from crossing the Marne, they came at the cost of heavy casualties. They nevertheless allowed the units of the US 2nd Infantry Division, newly arrived from their position behind the Lorraine front, to start deploying to the right of the French Sixth Army.

This temporary respite made it possible to consolidate the Allied defensive positions more deeply so as to check the upcoming German assault once and for all. General Degoutte planned to counter-attack instead. At a 5 June meeting of Allied general staff, Pershing enthusiastically supported Degoutte’s plan. For months, Pershing had been waiting for an opportunity to demonstrate to the highly sceptical Allied generals that, however inexperienced it might be, the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) was a formidable fighting machine. He also knew that the Marine Corps was particularly motivated and wished to demonstrate its skill in combat. For many years, the Marine Corps’s autonomous status had been a subject of controversy in what was at the time a very tight-fisted American Congress. As their name suggests, the marines were originally intended as naval troops: loaded onto warships, they operated cannon, boarded enemy ships and sometimes took part in beach-landing operations. Over the course of the nineteenth century, this last role took on greater importance, with operations in Libya (1805), Mexico (1847), the Philippines (1898) and elsewhere.¹² Thanks to its growing role, the Marine Corps gradually grew in autonomy, eventually becoming the de facto third branch of the US military after the army and navy (the US Air Force did not yet exist). Its existence was threatened, however, with many congressmen demanding that it be integrated into the navy or absorbed by the army as a cost-saving measure.

On the evening of 5 June, Pershing thus gave the commander of the US Marine brigade attached to the US 2nd Infantry Division, Brigadier General James C. Harbord, the order to counter-attack the next day alongside the French 167th Infantry Division.¹³ The specific mission of the American soldiers was to take control of Belleau Wood. General Harbord had arrived in France as Pershing’s chief of staff. Despite having no experience in this role, a month earlier he had received his superior’s authorization to take an active command – in the event, that of the 2nd Infantry Division, consisting of one infantry and one US Marine brigade. For General Harbord, preparing the attack was to be his baptism of fire.

From the outset, the American attack was handicapped by Harbord’s lack of personal experience of battle command and the complexities entailed by the resumption of the war of movement.

Late in the afternoon of 5 June, Harbord thus received the order to attack. After nearly a week of constant movement over unfamiliar roads and terrain, his troops were exhausted and famished. Their movement was slowed by the more or less disorderly retreat of French troops and civilians who, as in September 1914, were fleeing ahead of the fighting. This caused logistical problems, particularly in relation to resupply.

All the same, Harbord rapidly threw together a very basic plan of attack. It consisted of two phases: his troops would first take Hill 142, a high point adjacent to Belleau Wood; they would then attack the wood itself and occupy the villages of Torcy and Bouresches, located on the far side of the wood. At 22.25 on the evening of the 5th, he transmitted his plan to Colonel Wendell Cushing Neville, commander of the 5th Marine Regiment, putting him in charge of the operation and ordering him to attack at 03.45 the following morning, or just before dawn.

At 00.35, Neville in turn transmitted the orders to the commanders of the various battalions of his regiment. They thus received them in the middle of the night, barely three hours before the attack was to begin. The troops had still not received their provisions and many had yet to take up their positions, which they struggled to find in this completely unfamiliar sector.

In both quantitative and qualitative terms, the artillery support provided for the attack was minimal. Six batteries of French 75-mm cannon operated by mixed French and American teams were to support the attack. ‘So as not to alert the enemy’, however, there would be no initial artillery preparation.

According to French military intelligence supplied to the staff of the 2nd Division, in any case the enemy was ‘hardly present or not present at all’ in the forest and its immediate surroundings. Given the planned schedule of attack, the American high command did not consider it necessary to conduct reconnaissance operations.

In fact, an elite regiment of Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria’s army containing several machine-gun companies had taken up position in the forest, a rectangular area of roughly one by two kilometres. The forest’s dense foliage had not been thinned by fighting. It concealed a steep and furrowed floor containing a number of rocky caves – for the forest’s defenders, so many natural bunkers. In short, the forest offered ideal defensive terrain over which the Germans, aware that their advance was slowing, established an in-depth defensive position equipped with a series of machine-gun nests. These were positioned in such a way as to ensure that each machine gun could cover two others with its crossfire.

General Harbord thus distributed roles to his various units stationed around the little village of Lucy-le-Bocage outside Belleau Wood. The job of attacking Hill 142 was given to the 1st Battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment. Just before launching the attack, the battalion commander, one Colonel Terrill, was confronted with the following problem: he was unable to locate two of the four companies under his orders and was thus unable to give them the order to attack. Relying upon inadequately detailed maps drawn up in French, the American units had been on the move for three days without stop. No one had had time to set up telephone communications. Couriers thus set off to comb the surrounding area for the missing companies.

Assuming that the missing units would ultimately turn up, Terrill decided to launch the attack with just half of his troops. The machine-gun company meant to support the advancing infantrymen was also nowhere to be found.

The marines attacked at the break of dawn – at 03.45, to be precise. The American soldiers advanced as they had been taught to do while training in France: in line and divided between four successive waves. They marched in step with bayonets fixed, their bodies upright.

The battalion’s formation – several successive lines separated by regular intervals – was inspired by the French tactical manual. It reflected a desire to maintain troop cohesion as far as possible as soldiers advanced under fire, especially when they were inexperienced. An additional advantage of this formation was that a soldier who has to concentrate on the pace of his officer’s step and keep a certain distance from his comrades has less time to think about the fact that someone is shooting at him.

Spared the fighting since the summer of 1914, the Belleau Wood zone had not been affected by the war’s bombardments and various depredations. Alternating with copses in full leaf, wheat fields (soon to be trod under foot) already stood tall at the foot of Hill 142 on this June day. It was over open ground, however, that the US Marines began their advance.

The first fifty metres were relatively harmless. In his memoirs, one Captain Thompson mentions a sergeant under his command advancing while chewing on the contents of a tin of tuna he had just opened with his bayonet. Another soldier – a corporal – bent down to pick a scarlet-red poppy, which he neatly fastened to his helmet.¹⁴

Unfortunately for them, the copses and fields of tall wheat efficiently concealed the German machine-gun nests at the forest’s edge. Given the progress made in armaments since the middle of the nineteenth century, however, particularly in what concerned the concentration of fire and the extension of its range, it was now impossible to attack entrenched positions over open ground, no matter how disciplined or spirited the assailants. Like the French soldiers of August 1914 in their madder-coloured trousers, the US Marines were thus about to be brutally initiated into the reality of modern weaponry in all its deadliness.

Once the Americans had advanced fifty metres and the lines of their four successive waves were perfectly visible, the Germans opened fire with their machine guns. Many of those in the American first wave collapsed; the rest threw themselves face down on the ground, where they were quickly joined by the men of the second, third and fourth waves. After a moment of hesitation and spurred on by those of their officers and NCOs who were as yet unscathed, the American soldiers resumed their advance, walking or, more often, crawling forward as casualties mounted. In this way they advanced to within fifteen metres of the first German machine-gun nests. They then stood up and, making use of their bayonets, knives and rifle butts, threw themselves into hand-to-hand combat. In little time, the German defenders who had not surrendered or fled to the rear had been killed. The marines then resumed their march – or, rather, crawl – to the next machine-gun nest.

This sequence was repeated up and down the American line and ever deeper within the German positions.Paradoxically and despite the casualties it entailed, the tactic of frontally charging the machine-gun nests doubtless proved more effective than remaining prone under the unremitting fire. One had to have the courage to do so, of course, and all of the troops had to follow, with none remaining on the ground or attempting to retreat. Spurred on by their officers or, failing that, their NCOs and despite their lack of experience, the Marines gave proof of the bravery and aggressiveness for which the corps had traditionally trained them.

They thus ultimately reached their objective, the crest of Hill 142. A small group of them led by a simple corporal even continued beyond the objective and started down the opposite slope. Not meeting any resistance, they pursued their forward momentum until they reached the village of Torcy below. There, they came upon the German troops, who were already preparing for immediate counter-attack in keeping with their military doctrine. After having sent back one of their number to warn of this imminent counter-attack attack, they dug in at the entrance to the village and were killed on the spot.

On the crest of the hill, the battalion’s sole surviving officer, Captain George W. Hamilton, attempted to prepare his troops for the coming attack. Nine of the ten lieutenants under his orders had already been killed. Most platoons had been reduced to a few men under the command of a corporal or sometimes a sergeant. They hastily dug shallow trenches and got into firing position.

Preceded by a short artillery barrage, the German counterattack then began. In keeping with the latest tactical methods, the German troops advanced in small infiltration groups rather than attacking in line formation. Due to the difficulty of distinguishing friend from foe, the German soldiers advanced slowly. The result was a multitude of individual engagements in which small groups of men fired at one another at close range, threw grenades and ultimately killed one another with knives in hand-to-hand combat. The US Marines once again proved more aggressive than their adversaries in this type of action, and rapidly repelled the attackers, who fled in the direction of Torcy.

It was nearly five in the morning on 6 June when the out-ofcontact 1st Battalion companies that had failed to participate in the initial attack began to appear at the foot of the hill.

They were met with relief by Captain Hamilton, whose troops had been decimated. His exhausted US Marines, many of them wounded, were holding precarious positions. He sent one message after another to his superior, Colonel Terrill, begging for reinforcements as well as medics, water and (above all) ammunition. For the supplies with which these men had set off in their packs a few hours earlier were nearly exhausted.¹⁵ Hamilton feared they would soon have to face a new German counter-attack and realized that he was isolated on the crest and potentially vulnerable to encirclement: the French regiment that was supposed to cover his left flank was far behind, having chosen – rationally enough – not to rush forward into enemy fire. By this stage of the war, French units confronted with dense enemy fire had learned to halt their advance and wait for effective artillery support before once again setting off under its cover. And the US Marine battalion that was supposed to protect his right flank had moved much farther right, completely losing contact with Hamilton’s men. Not only had the attack been poorly prepared but, on top of that, there was hardly any coordination among the various units. There were no telephone links and groves of trees prevented visual communication. Foot couriers, finally, had a hard time finding their bearings.

Captain Hamilton’s message summarized the situation with sober clarity:

We are digging trenches and have four machine guns in place. We have been counter-attac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction ‘Lafayette, We Are Here!’
• Chapter 1 Belleau Wood, 6 June 1918, Dawn
• Chapter 2 6 June 1918, 17.00 The Attack
• Chapter 3 The Battle of Belleau Wood Rages On
• Chapter 4 Early 1917 The State of the Conflict on the Eve of the United States’ Entry into the War
• Chapter 5 Why Didn’t the United States Enter the War in August 1914?
• Chapter 6 The American Army before It Entered the War
• Chapter 7 The United States Slides into War
• Chapter 8 The German General Staff’s Strategic Gamble
• Chapter 9 Preparing the American Intervention
• Chapter 10 The German Spring Offensive of 1918 and the American Baptism of Fire
• Chapter 11 What Was the True Military Impact of the Battle of Belleau Wood?
• Chapter 12 The Last Hundred Days of the War
• Chapter 13 After the Armistice, then the Treaty of Versailles
• Chapter 14 War’s End for the United States
• Post-Mortem
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Endnotes