Thirteen Soldiers

by John McCain

  MACKIN’S EDUCATION ON THE line was swift. He fought in or in support of attacks and counterattacks at Belleau Wood every day for several days until the bulk of the fighting shifted temporarily toward Château-Thierry. He had been shelled and shot at. He had known men who were killed. He had killed Germans. He caught a few minutes of sleep in a trench one afternoon while a German infiltrator wearing a purloined marine uniform pretended to stand watch next to him. Mackin’s sergeant came over and, without explanation, casually apprehended the man and had him shot by firing squad. He drew burial detail one night, and a dead man’s brains spilled onto his boots. Another night he spent in an outpost, where darkness and proximity to the enemy summoned new terrors of the night’s “threat of stalking, creeping death,” of “half seen shapes of trees at forest edge” that move and don’t move, and eyes that “grow tired and conjure things”: “It’s good to feel a comrade’s soldier then, to know that men like him don’t run away. It’s then you get the feel of soldiering.”

  He described how friendships formed in battle by writing about his close friendship with a private from Cleveland, Hiram Raymond Baldwin, “Baldy,” who had spent a couple years at Ohio State University. An educated man suffered most in war, Mackin thought. It was easier for a man like him, without “too much family or education,” to accept the stripping away of the veneer of civilization. An educated man was more reluctant to let it go. “They were pitiful sometimes,” he recalled, “these men who took clean sportsmanship and decency to France.”

  One night the marines fired their Hotchkiss guns into the darkness to soften up an anticipated German counterattack. The Germans responded with greater force, a prolonged artillery barrage as well as machine-gun fire. Mackin and Baldy shared a rifle pit, and Mackin was supposed to get some sleep while Baldy stood the first watch. It’s not easy to keep a good watch in the dark with shrapnel and machine-gun bullets flying all over the place. Baldy kept his head down when he needed to, but otherwise peered into the darkness for any sign of a German advance. Mackin, understandably, couldn’t fall asleep with all the noise and anxiety the German rounds were causing. He stood up next to his friend and tried to keep watch too, as best he could. This restricted Baldy’s freedom of movement to duck and dodge the flying ordnance. “Get down, you goddam fool!” Baldy shouted at him. “I’m watching out for us.” But Mackin refused to sit down. They argued about it until Mackin confessed he didn’t have “the nerve to stay down there and take it.” If he was going to die, he wanted death to find him upright. He was afraid that a shell would hit the top of the trench and bury him alive.

  Baldy understood the fear, and they shook hands. “Here was friendship formed and forming,” Mackin wrote. “Not a friendship of the soft and slushy kind in which the best of us sometimes engage in time of trouble, but a friendship based on the realization of the little human fears we, man to man, try so hard to conceal.”

  The marines survived constant shelling, poison gas, multiple counterattacks, well-directed machine-gun fire, and sniping. They fought with bayonets and fists, proved themselves superior marksmen, and staged attacks at all times of the day and night. After eleven days they had gained control of a considerable part, though not all, of Belleau Wood and were relieved by the army and given a few days’ rest in the rear. Mackin had eaten his first hot meal in a while, bathed in a nearby stream, and had just lain down in the shade when he was summoned by his platoon sergeant.

  Gunnery Sergeant David McClain was respected by veteran and replacement alike. The former called him Uncle Dave, the latter Sergeant Mac, though no marine called him either name to his face. “We were glad to soldier under him,” Mackin wrote. “He had a way of looking deep inside you, as though he read your very thoughts and fears, yet let you keep them hidden.”

  McClain told Mackin he had thought of him because they had the same nickname, and then proceeded to shoot the breeze, which puzzled the replacement since “gunnery sergeants don’t ordinarily hold casual chats with recruits.” As they talked, “the old soldier weighed and probed, making estimates,” before finally revealing his purpose. “Battalion wants a new runner,” he told Mackin. The prior occupant of the position, an unfortunate man called Itchy Fox, had been killed the night before.

  Runners, Mackin explained, were always volunteers since the job was so dangerous. “Runners didn’t last. Everyone knew that.” He could tell McClain he didn’t want it, and that would be that, “no questions asked. Suicide squad. That’s how the fellows spoke of it.” Mackin said nothing at first, just looked at McClain. “The noncom’s eyes were wells of patience,” he recalled. “He let you fight it out with yourself.”

  “Want the job, son?”

  “Sure, Sergeant. I’ll take it.” Mackin didn’t want the old man to think him a coward. “There are some things a fellow can’t admit. It makes for soldiering.”

  The marines returned to the line on June 22. The next night they began the final assault on the northern end of the Wood, which the Germans had recently reinforced. The first attack was a disaster, poorly planned and coordinated. Casualties were staggering: 140 marines were killed in machine-gun cross fires. Over two hundred ambulances were needed to evacuate the wounded. Very little ground was gained.

  The next day, June 24, the marines let American and French artillery resume the battle. A fourteen-hour barrage ended with the last German-held section transformed into a wasteland of shattered trees and dead Germans. The 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines led the final attack the night of June 25. The fighting lasted all night, but at daybreak the battalion commander, Major Maurice Shearer, could notify brigade headquarters, “Belleau Woods now U.S. Marine Corps entirely.”

  Over eighteen hundred marines lost their lives during the three weeks of fighting it took to drive the Germans from Belleau Wood, including Captain Lloyd Williams, who had derided the French order to retreat. Nearly eight thousand marines had been wounded. They had had to fight parts of five German divisions, some of the best soldiers the Kaiser had left. Every acre of the woods had been exposed to German machine guns and artillery. The attacks and counterattacks the marines staged were brave and determined but usually confused and poorly coordinated.

  The price for Belleau Wood might have been steeper than it should have been, but the hard-won victory deserves its exalted place in Marine Corps history. It was the biggest battle the United States had ever fought against a foreign enemy, and it marked a turning point in the war. French and British troops that had been badly battered in the Spring Offensive felt the tide turn to their advantage. The Germans would launch one last-gasp offensive, but after that the Allies would send them reeling backward as the war drew to its inevitable close. The French knew the value of the marines’ sacrifice. The brigade received the Croix de Guerre and forever after, Belleau Wood would be called the Boise de la Brigade de Marine.

  WELL BEFORE THE LAST attack on Belleau Wood General Ludendorff accepted that his offensive, begun in May, had run its course, and he began to deliberate his next move. He decided on another offensive, against the French along the Marne, hoping still the German threat to Paris would draw enough British divisions into the fight that he could renew the advance in Flanders.

  The final German offensive of the war, often referred to as the Second Battle of the Marne, began at midnight on July 14, 1918, with an artillery barrage that lasted through the night. In the morning all available German divisions advanced west and east of the city of Rheims. Germany’s First and Third armies attacked east of the city, and the Seventh and Ninth west of it, hoping to split two French armies. Before it was over the Allies would have nine American divisions in the fight, which would prove critical to stemming the German tide.

  The Germans east of Rheims were stopped on the first day, but the attack to the west made good progress initially. The German vanguard had crossed the Marne at multiple points between Épernay and Château-Thierry on July 15 and were still advancing, although their progress had been slowed by Allied resi
stance, most notably by the 3rd U.S. Infantry Division, which would be hailed afterward as the “Rock of the Marne.”

  The 4th Marine Brigade was located well to the rear on July 16, when it received orders to join other Allied forces in hurried night marches to the front and take up positions near the town of Soissons. The marines were to join the massive counterattack that Supreme Allied Commander Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch had been planning since Allied intelligence had reported German intentions before they launched their offensive. It began at daybreak on July 18 with the requisite artillery barrage, following which the 5th Marines and army infantry, supported by French tanks, swept the Germans from a forest, through wheat fields, and past ruined farms, driving them rapidly backward to lines west of the town of Vierzy, where they dug in. “One instant there was silence,” Mackin recalled of the moments before the attack. “Then the world went mad in a smashing burst of sound.” The 5th charged so far out in front of the Allied attack that it was exposed to horrific machine-gun fire on its flanks. The marines rested a bit before renewing the attack that afternoon, pushing the Germans west of Vierzy until, fatigued by two nights of marching in foul weather and a day of hard fighting, they could go no farther.

  The 6th Marines renewed the attack the following day, paying a terrible price. German observer planes helped direct artillery and machine-gun fire, decimating the regiment as marines advanced over open fields. The entire brigade was taken off the line that night. Casualties in all American units involved in the fighting were the highest the American Expeditionary Force had yet suffered and on par with the staggering losses borne by the French and British in earlier battles. The Allies lost about 125,000 killed and wounded, of which twelve thousand were Americans. Germany suffered nearly 170,000 casualties.

  By the end of the day on July 19 the Germans had been pushed back across the Marne. By August 3 they had been driven back to the lines they occupied before the Spring Offensive. The German offensives were finished. From that point on the initiative was with the Allies and would remain so until the armistice.

  THOUGH THE JOB WAS every bit as dangerous as advertised, being a runner suited Mackin. He liked the independence it gave him. Wearing a red band that identified him (to friend and foe alike) as a runner, rushing orders and reports between battalion headquarters and company command posts by whatever route he deemed best, he could not be detained by noncoms or officers or even questioned. “You were a trusted man if you were a runner,” he explained. “You didn’t have to answer to a colonel, unless it was your own colonel.” Despite potshots from snipers and other hazards, Mackin soon earned a reputation for being a resourceful runner and a new nickname, “Lucky,” on account of his longevity in the job after coming through some of the worst scraps the marines experienced in France. He was one of four runners, “three Irish and an Ozark mountaineer,” who called themselves the “Four Aces” and were, according to Mackin, “the favored ones of all our kind” because they escaped the fate of most runners. “Fate, death . . . passed us by, and in passing sometimes brushed us gently, warning us.”

  Fate in those parts was rarely gentle. During the fighting in the woods outside Soissons, Mackin was running a report from a company commander back to battalion past an overrun German position strewn with fallen timber and corpses, where he heard a voice cry out, “Kamerad.” Fearing a trap, he ran wide of the spot and circled back carefully. He found a German with a shattered leg, “helpless, harmless, pitiful,” lying in a foxhole. The wounded man motioned him for assistance, which Mackin refused. He “had a job to do,” he explained, and left the German to his fate, whose cries of “Kamerad” “followed him a long, long way.”

  He saw a friend charged with marching a group of captured Germans to the rear shoot a prisoner who was too hurt and tired to continue. He heard a story of a runner, “an honest lad, too young . . . for war,” shot by an officer of the “older military school” because he had failed to deliver a message to a company under intense artillery bombardment. He was darting through an abandoned German trench when he found a mortally wounded young German, who posed no threat. Struggling to his feet, the dying boy grasped Mackin’s hand and made it known he needed assistance to reach another part of the trench, where his identical twin lay dead. Mackin did as he was asked and left after watching the boy drop “a hand in slow caress across the brow” of his dead brother.

  He and the other Four Aces as well as the battalion clerks, who, like the runners, were armed only with pistols, were ordered by a visiting army colonel from division to join an undermanned assault on a German position at Vierzy. When their battalion commanding officer protested that they were just a few, barely armed runners and clerks, the colonel retorted, “I don’t give a damn if you only got twenty of them, they are marines, . . . and I’m ordering you to take that goddamn town!” With that, Mackin observed, they knew their “old man would take us and our pistols into town.”

  After they formed their skirmish line and helped take the town, Mackin, armed with a German rifle, was put in charge of a party of captured Germans. Their captain started to approach Mackin, smiling, and announced in English that he was from Chicago. He had been in Germany on business when the war broke out, he explained, and been forced into the Kaiser’s army. Mackin ordered him to halt, sensing the man had something other than a casual chat with a fellow Yank in mind. But the German from Chicago kept coming and smiling and talking and ignoring orders to stop until he made a grab for Mackin’s weapon as the marine stepped back and slammed the butt of his rifle as hard as he could into the German’s head. “Two of his lads came to drag him in,” Mackin remembered. “I hope he didn’t die. I liked the man.”

  In September 1918 Pershing had at last an American Army under his command ready to launch an offensive of its own against a bulge in French lines south of Verdun that the Germans had occupied since 1914. It was called the Saint-Mihiel salient. The American First Army that attacked it comprised four corps, including a French colonial corps. Two American corps, I and IV, led the attack on September 12. The 2nd Division, which included the marines, was part of I Corps and advanced on the right of the American lines.

  The advance was swifter and easier than Pershing expected. By the end of the first day the Americans had exceeded their initial objectives and captured over thirteen thousand prisoners. Their success was due in part to the fact that the Germans had decided to abandon the salient and were in the process of retreating when the Americans attacked, which is probably why Mackin referred to the three-day battle as a sham. That’s not to say it wasn’t a real battle. The Allies suffered seven thousand casualties; the marines alone lost almost seven hundred men killed and wounded.

  The offensive was notable too for the introduction of the first American tank corps, organized and commanded by a young army colonel, George S. Patton Jr. And despite Germany’s cooperation in the attack’s success, Pershing had established that Americans could fight as a single, powerful force, capable of beating the Germans without orders from French generals. But two weeks later the marines and the rest of the 2nd Division would find themselves again at the disposal of the French Fourth Army, assigned to take a white limestone ridge northeast of Rheims in the Champagne region that had been occupied by the Germans since the first year of the war.

  The British were rolling back the Germans in Flanders and the American Expeditionary Force was advancing to the east in the first days of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. For the French Fourth Army, in the center of the Western Front, the attempt to clear the enemy from the old Somme battlefield was blocked by a heavily fortified and entrenched German force atop Blanc Mont Ridge, which the French had tried and failed to dislodge over three days. Field Marshal Foch asked Pershing for help. He sent the 2nd Division, now commanded by a Marine Corps general, the legendary John Lejeune, and another infantry division in reserve, the 36th, composed mostly of green National Guard regiments.

  On their way to the front, Mackin’s company stopped to rest in a
village, and an old woman approached him. One of the marines mocked, “Why didn’t y’ pay ’er las’ night? Now she wants her franc.” The grandmère hung around Mackin’s neck a little crucifix on a piece of twine. “My son, you won’t die,” she said.

  The attack jumped off at six o’clock on the morning of October 3, preceded by the largest Allied air attack of the war. Over two hundred planes bombed German trenches, machine-gun nests, and batteries on the ridgeline. When the planes finished, French and American artillery started in on them. Ten minutes later the 6th Marines poured out of their trenches and led the charge up the ridge, just behind the rolling artillery barrage, which now and again sent shrapnel flying into the American ranks. The marines advanced quickly and in good order by columns of battalions on a mile-long front. Their flanks were supposed to have been protected by supporting French columns, but the French had remained in their trenches, and German machine gunners and artillery tore into the exposed American columns. Despite heavy losses, the 6th Marines reached the crest of Blanc Mont a little more than two hours after the attack began, clearing German trenches at bayonet point but with their flanks still unguarded and Germans still in possession of the western side of the ridge.

  The first German counterattack came from the west, a place called the Essen Hook, in what was supposed to have been the French sector of the attack, where a veritable thicket of German machine-gun nests poured enfilading fire into the marines. The 5th Marines, which had been in support of the 6th, rushed to close the gap and meet the counterattack. They would succeed, but after taking heavy casualties in fighting that was often hand to hand. The marines turned the Hook over to the French, who had to be summoned by a marine runner. But the Germans took it back with their next counterattack, and the French fell back again.