“There’s nothing to it,” he said. “It will be a regular walk-over. It will not be as bad as some of the cross-country runs I gave you in your training period.”
Most of the men had never had that training period. They were young recruits fresh from the States, and they looked at this confident officer with amazement. They had heard about him long before arriving in the regiment, but here was the living reality, moving up and down the trenches, an officer unlike any other they had met.
“There’s nothing to it,” he said again and again. “It will be a regular walk-over.”
The young soldiers began to believe him. Five o’clock in the morning was H hour. Four-inch Stokes mortars laid down a smoke screen and, behind a rolling barrage, the battalion started forward in a skirmish line through the barbed wire. Donovan raced back from the front wave when he saw that the support companies were moving too slowly through the wire. “Get moving!” he shouted. “What the hell do you think this is, a wake?”
As a boy William Donovan swam beneath the Michigan Avenue bridge on Buffalo’s waterfront, where grain elevators rose beside turgid waters.
(Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society)
In the 1890s young Donovan often sauntered along Elk Street in the Irish First Ward, only a few blocks from his home.
(Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society)
Donovan entered St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute at the age of 14. He was captain of the school’s first football team and an altar boy at nearby St. Joseph’s Cathedral.
(St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute)
Captain William J. Donovan, the commander of Troop I, First Cavalry, New York National Guard, shown here in dress uniform. Although he grew up on the Irish waterfront, Donovan became the leader of Buffalo’s adventurous blue-blood troopers.
(Buffalo Cavalry Association)
In 1917, after the United States declared war on Germany, Donovan volunteered to serve as an officer in the 165th Infantry, better known as the historic Fighting 69th. To keep his men in trim, he led them on long runs over rough terrain, earning the lasting sobriquet of Wild Bill.
(Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society)
Seated before his tent, Donovan (center) and his aides study field maps near McAllen, Texas, during the crisis with Mexico in 1916.
(Buffalo Cavalry Association)
Donovan showed dauntless courage and keen military judgment under fire in action on the western front. Coupled with his charismatic leadership, these qualities made him one of the most admired field officers in the American Expeditionary Force.
(National Archives)
During a lull in the fighting, Donovan welcomes a French lieutenant whose patrol has just made contact with one of the 165th’s battalion outposts.
(National Archives)
The war over, Colonel Donovan (left), now commander of the 165th Infantry, stands with Father Francis Duffy, regimental chaplain, outside headquarters at Remagen, Germany.
(National Archives)
Donovan (right) looks on while Gen. John J. Pershing awards Brig. Gen. Douglas MacArthur with the Distinguished Service Cross at Bulligny, France, September 7, 1918. MacArthur never forgave Donovan for winning more combat awards than he did in World War I.
(MacArthur Memorial)
French General Gaucher pins the Croix de Guerre on the chest of William J. Donovan on March 16, 1918. When other officers congratulated him, Donovan with characteristic modesty had little to say. He wrote home to his wife that receiving such a high award for simply doing his duty seemed “absurd to me.”
(National Archives)
When the first caucus of the American Legion was held in Paris in March 1919, Donovan was an outspoken advocate of the enlisted man’s views.
(American Legion)
Back at the head of the advance, Donovan led his men on a sweep to the left of Bois de Remieres. German machine guns fired with deadly effect, but the assault troops coolly deployed and fired back. The automatic teams crawled ahead. Donovan shouted for action, urging his men forward, standing erect as the Germans shot at him. “What’s the matter with you?” he cried. “Do you want to live forever?”
Burdened with their ammunition and machine guns, crews got up and ran forward, stumbling beneath the heavy loads. They took new positions and fired point-blank at the astounded Germans. The infantry pushed ahead behind their leader at such a speed that they outran the rolling barrage, which had been set to advance 100 meters every four minutes. Snipping with wire cutters and blasting holes with bangalore torpedoes, the men charged through the old, rusty barbed wire that had held back the Allies for years. British and French tanks trying to assist them mired in the rain-sogged ground and were left far behind. The Germans fled, but Donovan and his men were on their heels, shouting, taking prisoners.
St.-Baussant fell to a bayonet charge. The next strong point was Maizeray. German troops firing from its walls pinned down Donovan’s battalion. He led 30 of his men down the Meuse River and crossed the shallow Rupt de Mad River out of sight of the German machine gunners and artillery. The attackers slipped through the woods around the enemy flank and opened fire. Enemy machine gunners fired back, and a battery of artillery only 500 yards away opened up. But they could not stop the attack.
“Kamerad!” cried the German infantry and gun crews, and threw up their arms in surrender. By the afternoon of September 12, the attack had gone beyond the first day’s objectives. French civilians crawled out of cellars in farmhouses and villages and stared at the Americans. Donovan’s men overran paneled dugouts fitted with electricity, running water, and dining and recreation rooms that had kept the Germans comfortable for several years. They ate food left in German field kitchens.
The Rainbow Division was moving up in force on all sides, and Donovan pressed forward. He established a prisoner park on a road into the village of Essey, where tanks helped to crush resistance. “Prisoners began to come back to us in droves,” wrote Donovan. “We had to press forward so fast that we could not keep track of them, but gave them a kick in the backside and sent them on their way.”
By one o’clock in the afternoon of the second day, Donovan and his men were in the town of Pannes. The First Battalion command post was in a dugout. Donovan sat within, giving orders to his men and taking reports as officers and noncoms came in and out of a drizzle that had begun. The officers debated whether to move the artillery forward with the assaulting infantry, something that had not yet been done. Donovan cut off the talk.
“Well, we have not done it before, but we’ll give it a whirl this time,” he said.
The Germans reeled from the shock of the 42nd Division’s attack, but they recovered and fought back. The battle line rolled back and forth, and the outcome of the war had come to depend on this terrible struggle.
Donovan’s next headquarters was in a forester’s house on the road to Haut-Mont. Sergeant Moore of B Company brought in a German prisoner to be interrogated. The prisoner said he was a sentinel at a machine-gun post manned by an officer and eight men. He offered to lead the Americans to the post and promised that all would surrender but the officer and a noncommissioned officer. Donovan distrusted the man, but he finally suggested that a rope be put around his neck and he be allowed to guide a patrol to the machine-gun position. So restrained, the man led the Americans to the post, which did indeed surrender, except for the officer, who died rather than give up.
Donovan advanced his headquarters to a hut near Hassavant Farm. Lieutenant Richard Allen came off of a patrol, hungry and tired. Donovan’s orderly put a roast beef sandwich and cup of coffee on the table before him. Before he could eat it, a soldier brought in two prisoners, a Romanian boy of 16 and a tall old German soldier, who had become lost in the woods during the German retreat. They had surrendered to a patrol. Donovan grabbed the sandwich with one hand and the coffee with the other. He handed the sandwich to the surprised boy and the coffee to the old soldier.
Lieutenant
Allen was dismayed. “Colonel, it is against regulations to feed prisoners,” he protested, “before they have been questioned at Division. You should not feed these men.”
“Allen, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. This poor little boy has been wandering around in the woods for two days with nothing to eat,” said Donovan.
“Besides, that was my sandwich,” insisted Allen.
“And you, a great big healthy man, would take his meal away from him!” finished Donovan.
The Rainbow Division’s advance drove the Germans out of villages, forests, and ridges. Other U.S. divisions attacked in support. After two days the Germans withdrew behind the Hindenburg Line. Three days after Donovan led the first skirmish line into action, the St. Mihiel salient, held since 1914 as a dagger thrust at Paris, had ceased to exist.
Donovan’s last objective was St.-Benoît. The Germans had set fire to the town before they fled. “One group discovered the church ablaze,” Donovan wrote in his journal, “and ran in to save what they could. They carried out pictures of St. Anthony of Padua and of the Holy Virgin, as well as some sacred vessels. A scout found a bag of potatoes which the Germans had left behind, so while the men worked in relays putting out the fire, those off duty roasted their potatoes in the embers.”
The Rainbow Division was kept in the line until September 17, when it was relieved. Orders soon arrived for Lt. Col. William J. Donovan to report for duty at the Staff College. There would be a promotion. At Donovan’s insistence General Menoher, commander of the 42nd Division, and General MacArthur did their best to keep him with the 165th Infantry. Because the provost marshal general of the division wanted a soldier and lawyer with a knowledge of French at headquarters, they could only win assurances that Donovan would not be transferred until after the next battle. The American Army was getting primed for the Argonne offensive, and it was agreed that nothing should be done to weaken the assault. Donovan was undeniably the most impressive combat officer in the division.
“The outstanding figure in the mind of every officer and man was Lt. Colonel William J. Donovan,” Father Duffy wrote in his diary. “Donovan is one of the few men I know who really enjoys a battle. He goes into it in exactly the frame of mind that he had as a college man when he marched out on the gridiron before a football game, and his one thought throughout is to push it through.”
The German Kriemhilde Stellung consisted of three lines of trenches, each defended by barbed wire that ran east and west past the villages of St. Georges and Landres-et-St.-Georges in the Argonne Forest.
“We were suddenly ordered forward to relieve another Division, the First,” Donovan wrote to Ruth. “The same old jumble of troops and caissons and trains on the road, only now the roads more slippery and more in need of repair. Our way led past freshly killed and yet unburied Germans, through unmistakable smell of dead horses to a farm in a valley where we parked our wagons and disposed of our men. The farmhouse had been used as a dressing station for one of the regiments of the other division. Outside was a huge collection of torn and bloody litters, broken salvaged equipment, reddened underclothing and discarded uniforms, all of our own men—the cast off of the dead and wounded.”
A “nice fat Y.M.C.A. man in a suit of blue overalls and a sombrero” served hot cocoa from a big cauldron and beef on bread. “There could have been no better meal,” said Donovan.
He slept that night in an ambulance. In the morning Donovan established the regimental commander in a cellar. Since he had been chosen to lead the assault when the battle began, he then went to the front to survey the position that the 165th was going to occupy.
The division preceding us had a terrific fight just three days before, and the ground was a stew of dead—Boche and American. One attack had evidently been made in the morning mist and as it cleared an entire company was caught on a little rise. The bodies were laid out in rows. It was easy to determine the formation and the plans of the different leaders. In one hole we found a wounded German who had lain there three days afraid to come out—in another, a wounded German and wounded American who had crawled in the same hole, shared their water and cigarettes, and then, rolling into the German’s blanket, had gone to sleep.
The support line was in rear of a long ridge running some three kilometers. This was the ridge the Germans had held commanding the valley. I went to their machine gun positions. Gun after gun was there with the gunners lying beside them, dead. From these positions I could look back across the valley and then it was easy to see how heavy a toll could be demanded for entrance there. Over this ridge and into the next valley. Here the Germans had a prison camp. The shacks of the officers had been on the northern slope of the ridge and had evidently been well equipped. Now they were shell broken, full of gas, and in pitiful disorder. Near some of them were the bloody torn bodies of what were evidently orderlies. In the valley itself were the prison buildings similar to all such in all armies. The wooden shacks with bunks and small bit of land enclosed with barbed wire some ten feet high. On the other side of the valley were two knolls which were the westerly continuation of the ridge. This was our advanced position.
Donovan observed more American dead than German, showing the determination of the Americans to go forward regardless of cost. He reported his findings to his own regiment and went with the First Battalion when the Rainbow relieved the First Division.
“I decided to occupy the whole of the Côte de Maldah so as to prevent the Germans from getting any part of it and thereby perhaps making the reverse slope untenable.” Donovan recognized that the Côte de Maldah was the key to the whole situation and must be firmly in American hands.
It rained for a week, making the front a morass of mud, but on October 12 Donovan moved into an attack position. He established his command post on the long ridge that was called the Côte de Châtillon.
“I slept two hours that night under a shelter tent,” he wrote, “and except for a few telephone interruptions had a good rest. With the telephone lying beside you, it is not bad. I was on, as were all the men, the reverse slope, well under the top. Our only danger was from splinters.”
On the morning of October 14, very early, he received orders that the attack would be made at dawn.
“There were a multitude of things to do, and the orders coming so late they could not be done properly,” he complained to Ruth.
“Instead of taking off all signs of rank, as officers are supposed to do to avoid being made a mark for sharpshooters,” Father Duffy noted, “he had donned a Sam Brown belt with double shoulder straps so that none of his men could miss knowing who he was; that the enemy also would pick him out was a matter of serene indifference.”
“Another thing I did was to provide for extra bandoleers of ammunition and extra canteens of water,” Donovan wrote.
Besides having both sent up from the rear, I arranged to have men collect the bandoleers from the dead and wounded after the advance began, and the canteens from the dead. Much to our disgust, some of the canteens sent up from the rear were uncovered French ones, the metal of which reflected the sun, so that, of course, no one wanted one of them anywhere near him.
That night I sent out a patrol to look over the sunken road we had chosen for a jumping off point. Their leader, whom, as I remember, was Knolles, reported to me on his return that he had gone beyond the sunken road and found nothing on the way out, but that on the way back they had fallen over a small German outpost. His patrol fired at the outpost and the outpost fired at them. However, he ran into no other Germans than this one outpost. From this I concluded that the Germans had no position south of the sunken road.
German shells thundered down on the sunken road as Donovan prepared to take the 165th Infantry into action. “Come on, fellows!” he cried when zero hour came. “It’s better ahead than it is here.” To the right and left, commanders new to fighting and green troops still clung to cover. “Come on, we’ll have them on the run before long!” he shouted.
Donovan put a stro
ng arm around a scared boy. “Come on, old sport, nobody in this regiment was ever afraid!”
He leaped from the trench, and the men followed him on a wild charge into no-man’s-land, where the machine-gun bullets were spitting and shells bursting. Reaching a jumble of shell holes, Donovan waved his men to take cover in them. Nonchalantly he stood before them in the open, unfolding a map of the terrain and studying it while machine-gun bullets rattled and spattered. His demonstration of cold nerve broke his men’s fear.
“Come on now, men,” he said at last. “They can’t hit me, and they won’t hit you.”
Donovan recounted how he sent men to get a platoon of machine guns whose fire he hoped would keep down the German fire. “We moved further forward, going across the stream on which were the little woods and up the slope on the other side. Some of the leading men got into the wire at the top of the hill. Men were dropping all over. It was a pretty difficult place. Those who got into the wire were killed or wounded. The rest finally came to a halt on the slope running up from the stream along which there was some cover here and there but not much.”
German shells began to spray shrapnel on the Americans. By now it was noon of the first day, and at last the machine guns were brought up and put into action. When night came, Donovan ordered his officers to have their men collect all the wounded and carry them back.
He kept his command post on a hillside even though it was exposed to enemy fire. “I decided to stay where I was,” he explained, “because while it was not the position from which I could best command the assault and support battalions, I did not want any of the men to think that I was quitting them when they were in such a difficult position. The telephone worked some of the time so that I was not entirely out of communication with the rest of the troops under my command.”
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