Donovan’s cool and firm leadership under fire had won him praise from higher-ups at 42nd Division headquarters like MacArthur—although MacArthur sniped he had been “running wild” during the September Saint-Mihiel offensive, racing his battalion ahead of slower-moving units on the front line. Soon, however, Donovan had become a legend in the entire AEF and a celebrity back home for his heroics. Ruth retyped his letters (editing out personal items) and sent them, with their vivid details of each battle, to New York’s influential senator, James Wadsworth, who was impressed and became an important Donovan political mentor. She also sent the letters to New York newspapers, which eagerly published them.
But Ruth was also desperately lonely once more, plunging again into bouts of depression and paralyzing fear that her husband would be killed in battle. She begged Donovan to let her travel to Paris so she could see him on leaves. Donovan wouldn’t hear of it. He had enough on his mind at the front without worrying about German shelling and aerial bombing of the French capital endangering his wife.
Ruth turned to Vincent for emotional support. She had leaned on Timothy during Donovan’s months on the Mexican border, but he was now in Europe with the Army Medical Corps. Friends believed Donovan’s caring brothers were better matches for Ruth than her always absent husband. The best Donovan could offer his wife was pep talks in his letters, praising her for her “pluck” and suggesting she take in the sea air “and read.” Unfounded gossip even spread during the Mexico expedition that the handsome Timothy, a ladies’ man himself who had been constantly at Ruth’s side for comfort, was having an affair with her. Now Ruth poured her heart out to Vincent, who became her confidant. A crisis of faith grew in her. “Religion is fine for those who need it,” she told Vincent. “I don’t feel I need it.” Vincent sent her books on Catholicism and long letters pleading with her not to abandon God.
Donovan eventually did give up his battalion and was made chief of staff of the 165th, but he considered it a plum assignment because he would be the forward ground commander for the entire regiment in the battle that would soon begin the morning of October 14. The overall commander, a competent low-key colonel named Harry Mitchell, remained at the headquarters dugout in the rear. Donovan would be at the front, leading his men into what he knew would be a meat grinder.
No sooner had Pershing disengaged his forces from the Saint-Mihiel battle than he mounted a final American offensive to punch like a battering ram through German lines on the Western Front between the Meuse River and the dense Argonne Forest with more than a million men. The offensive soon bogged down as cold rainy weather settled in over dense woods, deep ravines, and high ground that the Germans fiercely defended. Donovan’s 42nd Division was to relieve the 1st Division to the right of the Argonne Forest and break through the Kriemhilde Stellung, which consisted of belts of barbed wire, tank obstacles, minefields, cement pillboxes, machine gun nests, dug-in infantry, and artillery on high ground. The terrain was rolling and dominated by one hill, Côte de Châtillon, on the right. If the 42nd could break through the Kriemhilde Stellung and overrun the two heavily defended villages just north—Saint-Georges and Landres-et-Saint-Georges—the American army would have the less defended valley beyond to pour through forces.
Although Donovan did not realize it as he prepped that Monday morning, the inexperienced generals above him had crafted a tactically complex plan, which did not have much chance of breaching the Kriemhilde Stellung as quickly as they envisioned. Major General Charles P. Summerall, the new 5th Corps commander, was a hard-charging and vindictive artilleryman with little experience in infantry tactics. Summerall had approved a wildly unrealistic attack plan drawn up by the 42nd’s lackluster commander, Major General Charles Menoher. Menoher’s two brigades—the 83rd on the left, which included Donovan’s unit, and the 84th on the right now commanded by MacArthur, a newly minted brigadier general—lined up their four regiments to attack abreast even though the Kriemhilde Stellung was not a straight line. Brigadier General Michael Lenihan, who was popular with the Irish soldiers but indecisive in combat, commanded the 83rd Brigade, whose mission was to clear Saint-Georges and Landreset-Saint-Georges on the left. But before he moved out, MacArthur’s 84th Brigade on the right was to take Côte de Châtillon in three hours. If he had had no German guns pointed at him, MacArthur’s force could not have walked the distance in that short a time. But the can-do and overdramatic MacArthur did not protest. Neither did the taciturn Lenihan, whose brigade depended on MacArthur taking out the hill’s artillery and machine guns in time to protect Lenihan from enfilading fire on his right flank.
With rain pouring down, chilling the men in the summer uniforms they still wore, Donovan’s regiment moved out quickly Monday morning from the sunken road north of the forest of Maldah. Extra bandoleers of cartridges hung over their shoulders, which he knew they would need. A rolling artillery barrage cratered the ground three hundred yards in front of them. The terrain ahead (littered with American and German body parts from previous assaults) sloped up to the first line of barbed wire and was largely open and flat save for small clumps of trees. As poorly trained soldiers of the regiment bunched up at the first line of wire, however, enemy fire cut them down from the north and from Donovan’s right flank, whose enfilade was supposed to be suppressed.
“Where the hell is that coming from?” Donovan shouted to a battalion commander. MacArthur’s brigade predictably had not taken Côte de Châtillon in the three hours allotted. Germans from Châtillon aimed their machine guns cruelly low to strike Donovan’s men first in the feet, then their heads when they fell.
Donovan, often leading at the front of companies to get men to move, pushed his regiment on toward Landres-et-Saint-Georges, deciding it could not be as bad ahead as it was where they lay. Tactically it was rash to press forward when his right flank was so exposed, but Donovan had little choice. He did not know exactly what MacArthur was doing on his right (conflicting reports came in during the day on whether Côte de Châtillon had been captured) and he wasn’t about to give up ground paid for with so many casualties.
By afternoon, however, the advance had stalled. With more intense fire coming from two sides, the battalion commanders, unable even to shuttle their wounded to the rear, had their men crawl into shell holes for the evening, popping up to fire when they could. Donovan, who remained at the front as night fell for fear green troops might bolt in retreat, ordered another assault at the line of wire, hoping the German machine gunners would not see the wave coming in the darkness.
“The Germans remained silent until the front wave reached the first line of barbed wire,” recalled a company commander. Then “a terrific machine gun fire and artillery fire was suddenly let loose by the enemy, and German flares transformed night into day.” With his regiment perilously far ahead of the others, with MacArthur’s slow-moving brigade unable to halt the enfilade fire, and with no artillery support coming from his own Army, Donovan dug in for the night, five hundred yards from the German line. He munched a raw onion and chewed on hardtack for his dinner.
Charles Pelot Summerall was angry. The detailed plan Menoher had so laboriously crafted, to which the corps commander had given his stamp of approval, had not been followed. The 42nd, which was known as the “Rainbow Division” because it was an amalgamation of National Guard units like Donovan’s, was to have broken through the Kriemhilde Stellung quickly the first day. But by Tuesday morning, October 15, not a single brigade had breached the German defenses south of Saint-Georges and Landres-et-Saint-Georges. Donovan had advanced the furthest but he had conquered only a mile and a quarter of land, suffering an appalling number of casualties.
As a heavy mist hung in the air early Tuesday, Donovan sprinted from shell hole to shell hole realigning his forces and pumping up men exhausted and hungry. The regiment’s attack began promptly at 7:30 a.m. Ten minutes later, as German machine gun fire raked the field, Donovan raced back to the hole where his telephone man lay.
It felt to
him like someone had struck the back of his right leg with a spiked club. A machine gun bullet had slammed into his knee just below the joint, traveling clean through, shattering a hole in his tibia. Donovan fell like a log. He recovered a few minutes later from the shock and searing pain, clawing the dirt with his hands to crawl to his telephone hole. A machine gun lieutenant ripped open his breeches, poured antiseptic powder over his gaping wound, and bandaged it tightly to stop the bleeding.
Nauseated from the pain, Donovan refused to be evacuated and continued directing the attack, barking orders into the phone or scribbling them on a bloodstained message pad to be delivered to his battalion commanders. But the phone line to rear headquarters went dead. Messengers sent out were wounded or killed so messages remained undelivered. An enemy artillery shell exploded in a foxhole that had three men next to him, showering his hole with dirt and torn flesh. Thick, nasty clouds of gas poured in. The artillery barrage ended after an hour. Twenty-five tanks were supposed to arrive to roll over the barbed wire and make a hole for the infantry, but a combination of mechanical failure, hostile fire, and wounded drivers caused them to arrive late and eventually to turn back.
By 9 a.m., the assault had stalled once more. The corpses of two entire companies that had managed to advance near the barbed wire now lay dead before it or hung on the wire. MacArthur’s brigade still had not halted flanking fire from Donovan’s right and it now raked behind him, threatening to cut him off from rear elements.
With Summerall breathing down his neck, Lenihan at 10 a.m. issued a second order—a ridiculously unrealistic one considering the reality at the front. An artillery barrage would begin in fifteen minutes and end at noon when Donovan’s regiment was to resume the attack. Mitchell tried to relay the order to Donovan, but the phone line to him remained cut and runners were delayed in reaching him with a written message.
Meanwhile, Donovan, carried by men from foxhole to foxhole to continue his command, decided his position was untenable—which it was. He had to move his regiment back or be completely cut off and wiped out. Mitchell’s attack order finally reached Donovan at 12:05 a.m., but he considered it overtaken by events. The artillery barrage, which did not halt enemy frontal and flanking fire, had already ended. The remnants of the tank battalion had long since retreated. Donovan countermanded Mitchell’s order. He continued pulling back his infantry to a more defensible position for the Germans’ counterattack.
“I will assume the responsibility for you not going,” he shouted to a battalion commander preparing to move his force forward.
Growing groggy from loss of blood, Donovan finally turned command over to a major and allowed four men to lug him back, slung in a blanket. One of them was wounded along the way when a machine gun bullet ripped through the blanket and struck him.
At a battalion first aid station a medic treated his leg and tied a tag to his toe identifying him. Stretcher-bearers hauled him by foot to the regimental dressing station about a mile to the rear where his wound was rebandaged. Duffy found him among the rows of litters.
“Father, you’re a disappointed man,” Donovan said with what cheer he could muster through the pain. “You expected to have the pleasure of burying me over here.”
“I certainly did, Bill,” the chaplain answered, “and you are a lucky dog to get off with nothing more than you’ve got.”
Medics eventually hoisted his stretcher into an ambulance for a bumpy and painful ride over potholed roads to a rear hospital. Nurses there stripped off his uniform, gave him a tetanus shot, and rubbed his body with a warm sponge. It felt glorious.
At the operating table, surgeons decided they did not need to cut into him since the bullet had gone clean through and instead put his leg in a splint. Back in the ward, orderlies lifted him onto a bed with clean sheets. He could not remember the last time he’d slept in one. Beside him, an officer lay dying with a stomach wound; across from him, soldiers coming out of anesthesia asked nurses to hold their hands and smooth their brows. In the next ward was “a bedlam of delirium,” he later wrote Ruth, from men wailing with painful wounds.
There was bedlam, as well, back at Donovan’s unit. Enraged that for a second day the Kriemhilde Stellung had not been breached, Summerall on Tuesday evening stormed into the field headquarters for the 83rd Brigade and 165th Regiment and fired Lenihan and Mitchell. Both officers, Summerall concluded, had kept themselves too isolated in their command posts and had lost their aggressiveness to press the attack. (Ironically, Summerall did not find fault with the flashier MacArthur, who in this case had been a passive dugout commander.)
Would Donovan, who on his own halted the assault, have been fired if he had been at the command post? Summerall, who could be intimidating when he smelled indecisiveness in officers like Lenihan and Mitchell, probably would not have bullied the steely Donovan, who had faced far greater dangers in this war than a blowhard general and whose press clippings had earned him powerful political friends in New York.
But while Donovan lay in a hospital recovering from his wound, Menoher (who also conveniently escaped blame for his faulty battle plan) launched a formal investigation to determine whether the lieutenant colonel should be court-martialed for countermanding Mitchell’s attack order. Lenihan and Mitchell protested their firings and in affidavits blamed the failed offensive on MacArthur dragging his feet for two days in securing their right flank. Mitchell also took a swipe at Donovan, hinting in his affidavit that Donovan’s “painful wound” likely dulled his enthusiasm to continue the attack.
The 42nd Division cracked the Kriemhilde Stellung on October 16. Duffy and the soldiers of the Irish Regiment remained bitter over Summerall’s shabby treatment of them. After forty-seven days, Pershing finally drove through the Meuse-Argonne defenses, but at a cost of 120,000 casualties; the Irish regiment suffered another 1,110 killed or wounded. Germany’s will to continue fighting soon broke; an armistice was signed November 11. Lenihan and Mitchell did not get back their commands. But the Army dropped its investigation of Donovan, concluding that he had received Mitchell’s attack order too late to carry it out.
March 1919
DONOVAN, who had recovered from his leg wound by January, took his evening stroll with Father Duffy. He now walked with just a slight limp. The two men sauntered along the road paralleling the Rhine, which wound ahead through the gorge of the Siebengebirge mountain range near Bonn. The ruins of the Drachenfels castle looked down upon them and vineyards terraced along mountainsides.
Occupation duty the past four months had been boring. Donovan had been stuck in a staff job with the AEF’s provost marshal general, which made him a glorified cop, managing military police and keeping idle American soldiers out of brothels and other assorted trouble spots in Germany. The martinets now put in command over the Irish Regiment and other fighting units showed little regard for the men who had survived such horrible combat, Donovan complained in letters to Ruth. He joined several dozen other officers in Paris to organize the American Legion, which would lobby for veterans’ benefits and advocate a strong national defense. Donovan realized the allies had won the World War by the slimmest of margins. The German army that marched back to the Fatherland and surrendered its rifles numbered more than two hundred divisions “and they are in general the Prussians who do not approve of the armistice and who wish to continue the war,” he wrote Ruth. He worried they would bide their time to fight again.
War had brought Donovan and Duffy together as close as brothers. They would often tease each other, as they did again during this evening’s walk, over who had the most news stories written about him back home (both had a lot). Donovan thought Father Duffy was as close to a saint as he would ever see, a man of God who had braved dangers as great as any infantryman to minister to his flock on the battlefield. Father Duffy thought Donovan was the bravest leader he had ever met.
The chaplain maneuvered to have higher headquarters make Donovan, who had just been promoted to full colonel, the commander of th
e Irish Regiment. Duffy also mounted an intensive lobbying effort behind the scenes to have Donovan awarded the Medal of Honor for the controversial battle at Landres-et-Saint-Georges. He collected affidavits from more than a dozen regimental officers and noncommissioned officers attesting to Donovan’s heroism on October 14 and 15 and submitted them to AEF headquarters.
The Army thought otherwise. In previous wars, more than 2,600 Medals of Honor had been passed out like candy, but by World War I the service had elevated the standard for the award considerably. It could now go only to an officer who had “performed an extraordinary act of heroism, above and beyond his duty, of such brilliancy that the gallantry of the deed stands out clearly and strikingly above those acts of his comrades.” Donovan’s performance October 14 and 15 did not reach that bar. He had fought heroically and as a senior officer had led from the front instead of from the safer rear, refusing to be evacuated after a painful wound. But that was his job. Donovan had performed no more heroically than other soldiers in the regiment who made that bloody assault and did not turn back. (Pershing blocked a similar move to have MacArthur awarded a Medal of Honor for his leadership at Côte de Châtillon, which the AEF commander considered unremarkable.) Donovan also had the cloud of the countermanded order hanging over him. Instead of the Medal of Honor, Pershing approved another second highest decoration, an Oak Leaf Cluster for the Distinguished Service Cross he had earned at Ourcq River.
Donovan was ready to go home. Ruth had sent him news stories that floated his name as a future candidate for governor of New York. That possibility excited her and at first intrigued Donovan. Ruth “would be a very attractive and gracious” first lady of New York, he wrote her. But not now, he decided.
Wild Bill Donovan Page 4
