It wasn’t until an Alsatian deserter was brought into headquarters during the night of June 21 and pointed out the German defenses on the map that Harbord’s staff got a clear idea of their location. The garrison, they learned, was under the command of a Major Bischoff who had a reputation for the skill in bushfighting he had gained in colonial wars. He had suffered heavy losses from the fury of the marines’ assault but his positions were impregnable to infantry.
Clearly this had been all along a job for the artillery. On June 25 the northern fringe of Belleau Wood was shelled for fourteen hours. In the late afternoon the marines advanced again behind a rolling barrage. “Come on you sonsofbitches do you expect to live forever?” the sergeants yelled. This time the losses weren’t too heavy.
They found the great trees blasted to splinters, the German defenders stunned and helpless. By 9:30 that night Belleau Wood really was in American hands. Two hundred and fifty German prisoners and many machineguns. The Germans fell back on a defensive line along Clignon brook, and gave little more trouble in that sector.
The commanding officers of the 2nd Division had learned a great deal about warfare, at a cost as high, in proportion to the number engaged, as at Gettysburg or Chickamauga. During the month of June they lost roughly a third of their effectives in dead, wounded, and gassed.
The French lavished citations on the survivors. Since the American censorship deleted the identifying numbers of the infantry regiments, the American press gave the impression that a brigade of marines had stopped the German drive on Paris singlehanded. Actually two divisions had distinguished themselves. The French added to the misapprehension by courteously renaming le bois de Belleau, le bois de la Brigade de Marine.
Even the Germans were impressed. Ludendorff remarked that the Americans attacked bravely, “but they were unskillfully led, attacked in dense masses and failed.” Hindenburg wrote with grudging admiration of the quality of the American troops which he described as being “clumsily but firmly led.” A staff report described the 2nd Division as a very good one which might possibly be rated as a storm troop. “The moral effect of our gunfire cannot seriously impede the advance of the American infantry.”
Pershing smiled his thinlipped smile. “Our first three divisions to participate in active operations had all distinguished themselves,” he wrote. “The First at Cantigny, the Second at Belleau Wood, the Third at Château-Thierry.” He started pressing Foch and Pétain for the formation of an American corps under which the divisions that had proved their mettle might be grouped in the neighborhood of Château-Thierry in preparation for the counterattack south of Soissons, which he was already talking up with Pétain’s staff.
The warmhearted Harbord, closer than Pershing to the blood and guts of the fighting front, let himself go in notes he jotted down in the ramshackle fieldstone and mortar farmbuilding bedded between batteries of one hundred and fiftyfive millimeter-howitzers, where he made his brigade headquarters: “What shall I say of the gallantry with which these marines have fought? I cannot write of their splendid gallantry without tears coming to my eyes. There has never been anything better in the world … Literally scores of these men have refused to leave the field when wounded. Officers have individually captured German machine guns and killed their crews. Privates have led platoons when their officers have fallen … We are some 3400 fine officers and men less than we were a month ago … It is a dear price to pay for a bit of French territory but somewhat compensated for by the fact that the little bit of lovely France was at the very apex of the German push for Paris and that we exacted a toll from four German divisions that outbalanced our own losses … There are hundreds of cases of individual heroism and not one of misbehavior.”
The American counterattacks were not the only factors that threw Ludendorff’s plans into disarray but they surely helped. His new strategy, hastily improvised at a conference with von Hindenburg and the Kaiser in the first heady days of victory in the Chemin des Dames, was to encircle Paris with a pincers movement. He was meeting with increasing resistance from the French along the necks of his salients. The British were showing their usual obstinacy. The Americans cost him time and irreplaceable manpower. The dash and youthful recklessness of the American assaults, combined with news of the hardly believable speedup in the transportation of American troops to Europe, which the U-boats were proving helpless to hinder, had an impact on the German will to fight more far reaching than the results of a few tactical successes. Cantigny and Belleau Wood and the Marne bridges were seen by the German strategists as the first gusts of a coming storm. If the war were to be won it had to be won quickly.
Chapter 19
LUDENDORFF’S BLACK DAY
AMERICANS celebrated July 4, 1918, in various ways.
In Washington President Wilson, accompanied by Mrs. Wilson and the customary covey of relatives, by members of the cabinet and of the diplomatic corps and by a group of leaders of foreignlanguage societies, carefully picked by Creel and Tumulty in view of their usefulness in the forthcoming congressional elections, proceeded to Mount Vernon on the Mayflower.
The afternoon was a furnace. There was no air even on the river. The President showed his popular touch by moving among his sweating guests and urging them to doff their frockcoats and silk hats. Ferried ashore in launches they found a crowd of two thousand people trampling the shrubberies of George Washington’s old plantation. Wilson addressed the throng from a stand set up beside Washington’s tomb.
He spoke poetically of the quiet of the spot “serene and untouched by the hurry of the world.” When he excoriated the central powers his eyes flashed with cold anger behind his noseglasses. There must be no peace of compromise. He proclaimed four more principles to reinforce his Fourteen Points:
“The destruction of every arbitrary power everywhere that can, separately, secretly and of its single choice, disturb the peace of the world.”
The settlement of questions of territory and sovereignty “upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned.”
Government of nations “by the common law of civilized society.”
The establishment of an international organization to preserve the peace.
“… The blinded rulers of Prussia have aroused forces they know little of,” —his voice rang through the little Virginia burying ground in the hollow among the trees by the riverbank—“forces which, once roused, can never be crushed to earth again.”
“Four more nails in the coffin of German militarism,” proclaimed Creel’s propagandists.
The representatives of the European minorities, who had climbed back into their frockcoats to listen to the President’s speech, expressed themselves as delighted: each man heard in those tolling words the call of his national aspirations.
Meanwhile the new shipyards, having applied massproduction methods to the construction of oceangoing freighters, were managing on that glorious Fourth to launch ninetyfive ships. “The great splash.” Their target had been a hundred.
In the Amiens salient four companies of the recently disembarked 33rd Division, made up of Illinois militiamen, some of them wearing Australian uniforms in complete disregard of General Pershing’s orders, joined the Aussies of General Richardson’s Fourth Army in a successful coup de main against Hamel and were saluted by their allies as “fighting fools.”