The Heroic Gangster_The Story of Monk Eastman, From the Streets of New York to the Battlefields of Europe and Back

by Neil Hanson

  As they worked together, attitudes began to change. The Americans grew to have more respect for their British mentors’ abilities and knowledge, and, whatever their tactical deficiencies, the American infantrymen had no shortage of spirit, which in turn communicated itself to the British. However, there remained a danger, as the U.S. Marines proved at Belleau Wood in that same month, June 1918, that reckless American bravery and the “profound ignorance” of the A.E.F.’s commanders at that time would lead to a profligate expenditure of American lives.11 After Belleau Wood it was remarked that “their dead, especially the dead of the Marine Corps, lay in beautifully ordered lines where the traversing machine guns had caught them.” They had died in the same way as the British and French had during the first years of the war: shoulder to shoulder, in neat rows. Even British officers, serving in the most conservative army of all, found the American tactics astonishing. The U.S. Army went into battle in 1918 as if the Great War had just begun, and they had to discover the terrible realities of trench warfare for themselves.

  There may even have been a subliminal feeling among American commanders that with Britain and France already having irrigated the battlefields with the blood of millions of their dead, an American blood sacrifice was also required. Perhaps only when General Pershing had laid down piles of American corpses like stacks of chips in a high-stakes poker game would he have earned the right to sit at the same table as his British and French counterparts Field Marshal Haig and Marshal Foch.

  U.S. casualty rates could have been even worse. The German army that the A.E.F. faced in 1918 was not the same irresistible force that had swept the Belgian, French, and British armies aside in the early stages of the war. Most German divisions were now at least 50 percent under strength, and the elite Stoss divisions—the shock troops that had led the last great German offensive, in March 1918—had suffered even more severe losses of men. It is arguable that American casualties would have been far worse had their attacks not been launched against enemy troops who were already war-weary and badly demoralized, as the estimated forty thousand Germans who voluntarily surrendered to advancing U.S. forces seemed to confirm.12

  On June 21, the 106th Infantry marched out of Gamaches-Moutiers and, over the next few days, pausing at Guessoy-le-Montant, Neuilly l’Hôpital, Gorges, and Montrelet, they moved on, always eastward, toward the distant rumble of the guns at the front lines.13 Monk and his comrades were billeted in “every kind of haymow and cowshed … in orchards, fields and woodlands … in half-wrecked hovels.” In the evenings they visited the local estaminets—British soldiers, unable to deal with French pronunciation, called them “just-a-minutes”—bars set up in the kitchen of a house, where beer, thin local wine, and a portion of the watery stew kept bubbling in a pot over the fire could be bought and letters home written while sitting on the rough wooden benches arranged against the walls. However, military police enforced a 9:30 p.m. curfew, clearing the estaminets and the streets.14

  At Montrelet, the men began the last phase of their combat training, before being sent into the lines for the first time. Much of the work done at Spartanburg was revisited, but new methods of warfare, developed since they left Camp Wadsworth, had to be learned as well. As a sign that they were nearing the front, enemy air raids took place almost every night.15 Beginning on June 29, still under the guidance and watchful gaze of seasoned British troops, the battalions were rotated into the reserve lines for brief periods, but returned to their billets to sleep. Military discipline still remained a problem, as was illustrated when, on their very first day in the trenches, despite having left their billets at 7:30 that morning, Monk’s Second Battalion did not reach their allotted places in the line until after they had stopped for lunch, prompting a furious officer to demand that it should never happen again.

  The following day, General O’Ryan circulated a letter to all the regimental commanders, expressing his disappointment with the performance of the division since its arrival in France, and in particular the shortcomings of its platoon and company commanders, which he blamed on a lack of the necessary sense of responsibility rather than any lack of knowledge.16 O’Ryan might have been genuinely aggrieved, but he might equally have been attempting to shake his men out of any complacency as they made ready to take their place in the firing lines.

  On July 2, the 106th Infantry decamped and marched to a railhead, from where they traveled north to Arques, near Arras, arriving at ten that evening, after a twelve-hour journey. Any hopes of rest were punctured as they were formed up and marched out of town at twenty minutes to midnight. As required by military standing orders, they marched at a pace that covered two and a half miles in fifty minutes.17 After every fifty minutes, the soldiers rested for ten minutes, then marched on again. The timing was rigidly enforced; “between ten minutes of the hour and the even hour, no American soldiers in France will march but always will be found resting off the road and to the right. The reason for this order is obvious. This is a war of vast numbers. If companies, battalions and regiments were permitted to rest when they pleased, succeeding detachments would be constantly overtaking preceding detachments and endless confusion would result.” General O’Ryan had remarked that for every week of fighting a soldier would normally average ten weeks of marching and army routine, but sometimes the marching must have seemed to occupy even more time than that. Stragglers with blistered feet or who became ill were left by the roadside to catch up whenever they could.

  On that night march, as they entered the city of Saint-Omer, a “mysterious, uncanny atmosphere seemed to grip the marching column; this was a dead city—repelling, silent as the grave.18 The unbroken rhythm of hobbed boots on rough cobbles, the absolute silence in the ranks and a full moon creating a shadowy regiment keeping step with the 106th, transformed the living into a ghost army on some unearthly mission.” They passed through a labyrinth of twisting narrow streets with no light to guide them, not even a reassuring glow from the heavily boarded house windows. At intervals British patrols emerged from the shadows to challenge them, their bayonets flashing in the moonlight.

  Beyond Saint-Omer, the regiment left the road and crossed the fields to a canal, which they then followed for miles. Hospital barges “moored to improvised docks bore mute testimony of their mission in those parts.” The sight of rank upon rank of wounded soldiers was a sobering one for novice troops who knew that they would soon be in combat themselves. One group passed a hospital train and saw through the windows of each car wounded French soldiers swathed in bandages, many of which were bloodstained. “These soldiers were silent, motionless, staring out the windows and right through us.19 It was like we were not there or were wax figures.” All that one of the Americans could say was, “Oh my. Oh my.” For the first time he and his comrades were “face to face with the bloody facts of war.”

  The march continued until first light—3:35 a.m. on July 3—when the men of the 106th reached their billets at Lederzeele.20 Later that morning they marched eastward again, toward the front lines, hearing the menacing rumble of artillery growing louder with every step. It was a burning-hot day and their boots threw up suffocating clouds of dust from the road. As the sun rose higher and the heat grew more intense, their packs seemed to be getting heavier, the straps biting into their shoulders and their boots striking sparks as the soldiers dragged their feet over the cobblestone road.

  At the end of that grueling two-day march, the 106th were quartered in tents at Oudezeele, and began deploying in the East Poperinghe reserve area, alongside British and Australian forces, under overall British command. They were now within range of the German heavy artillery and were repeatedly shelled. As they dived for shelter, they marveled at the Flemish farmers who continued to cultivate their fields despite the constant bombardment—old men and women, young boys and girls, all working in the fields seemingly as unconcerned by the shelling as if they were miles behind the lines, seeking shelter only when a shell fell very close to them.21

  The
27th Division had been allocated a three-thousand-yard sector of the reserve lines at East Poperinghe, where the trenches scarred the ripening wheatfields. Monk’s Company G were billeted in an area that included a schoolmaster’s garden, and he promptly complained that his fence had been broken, fruit stolen from his fig and cherry trees, and his currant bushes stripped. The sight of so much fresh fruit after weeks of army rations must have been an overwhelming temptation, though the captain of Company G denied any involvement by his men and blamed local children for the thefts.22 The men of the 106th were also instructed not to damage the farmers’ crops, but it was an almost impossible command to obey when they were simultaneously ordered to lay a thick belt of defensive wire entanglements in front of their trenches. In any case, orders for establishing firing pits required crops to be immediately leveled to provide a field of fire of at least 250 yards in every direction.

  Each of three regiments—the 105th, 106th, and 107th—had a one-thousand-yard section of the lines to defend, with the 108th in reserve. These American troops were holding the third and last line of defense which, if breached, would mean the almost certain loss of the Channel ports of Calais, Dunkirk, and Boulogne. The front line ran down the valley east of Scherpenberg; the second line, barely deserving the name, was a series of concrete pillboxes and machine-gun emplacements, but the system of defenses was unfinished and until now had never been occupied by troops.23 Dug by the labor of Chinese “coolies,” the trenches were so shallow that they gave minimal protection, the machine-gun positions existed only on the map, and the barbed-wire defenses were also nonexistent.

  Along with their divisional comrades, the entire 106th Infantry would now be occupied in constructing or completing these defenses, and the battalions alternated between digging, sentry duty in the trenches, and training and rifle practice on a range in the reserve area. Continuous detachments were also sent from each unit to the front lines for observation and tactical study. They marched beneath the British observation balloons floating overhead on their wire cables, tethered to winches on trucks parked alongside the Scherpenberg road, and passed through Steenvoorde along a cobbled narrow street, lined with smoke-blackened brick houses. The brick-built church in the town square, its spire still undamaged by shell fire, had the same grimy, weathered look.

  Between Steenvoorde and Abeele the men of the 106th crossed the Franco-Belgian border and were astonished to see customs officers of the two countries still presiding over the border from little huts and raising and lowering their barriers to allow the troops to pass through.24 The principal route for troops and supplies moving up to the front lines, the blood-soaked Steenvorde-Abeele road, was under artillery fire day and night. The surface was pocked and cratered, constantly repaired and as constantly cratered again. To minimize losses, intervals of five hundred yards were set between battalions, two hundred yards between companies, and one hundred yards between platoons.25 In the pitch darkness the infantrymen picked their way around the shell holes, marching in single file with ten to fifteen feet between individual men. Certain danger points were crossed at a run but, whatever the precautions, there were inevitable casualties, with several men killed or wounded by German shrapnel.

  Beyond the village of Abeele, Mount Kemmel, “that metal-beaten, scarred old eminence which commanded a view of the North Sea,” reared its “flat, sawed-off torso, once a proud peak, but four years of pounding by German and British artillery had given it a flat top.26 Up there along the skyline where Mount Kemmel stood, the smoke was rising from the battle front … The more we looked at that hunk of earth, the more menacing it became.”

  The weather was hot and very humid, and Monk and his comrades spent their detachments on the exhausting work of deepening trenches, digging machine-gun emplacements, setting up and clearing fields of fire, and stringing barbed wire. There were other, even less pleasant tasks. One group had to bury the stinking, bloated bodies of mules, which, killed by shell fire, had been lying in the hot sun for about three days. They borrowed a steel cable from one of the British observation balloon crews, dropped a loop over a mule’s leg, and then hauled it over the ground to a shell crater deep enough to hold the bodies. Then one of the unfortunate soldiers had to retrieve the cable and make it ready for the next mule. When all the bodies had been moved in this way, while his comrades began shoveling dirt on top of them, he “sank to the ground, about as ill as any man could be … I could taste and smell that odor for several days.”27

  The stench of putrefaction and the clouds of flies swarming everywhere should have been warning enough, but strict orders were issued to avoid drinking the groundwater from the streams, wells, ponds, and shell holes, which was so contaminated that it was unfit for any use. The men were warned of the consequences of an epidemic of diarrhea and dysentery and cautioned that a small percentage of men who had suffered dysentery remained infected, even though they were seemingly cured.28

  All Allied military activity in the area was under direct observation from the Germans on Mount Kemmel and the ridges that flanked it, and vulnerable to harassing artillery fire. At night American soldiers without dugouts slept in shallow scrapes they had made in the heavy clay soil, giving a little extra protection against shrapnel, though none at all against a direct hit. They soon learned to distinguish the different sounds of outbound shells from Allied guns and incoming projectiles from the German side and to tell roughly where shells would land and whether they needed to take cover. The long-range shells had “a peculiar plopping sound like they were slowly turning over and over in the air and traveling at a speed slow enough for one to see them.”29 By contrast, the “whizzbangs” fired from a 77mm field piece had “landed and exploded before you could hear the sound of its approach. A barrage of these shells could throw the fear of God into any group of men and wreck their morale faster than any weapon in the German arsenal.”

  On the afternoon of July 14, the 106th Infantry was relieved and the Second Battalion marched back to Winnezeele before entraining once more on a narrow gauge railway, where a shortage of boxcars compelled them to travel on open flats in driving rain. They detrained and marched to Saint-Martin-au-Laërt.30 Although they were close to Saint-Omer, there was no possibility of any recreation in the town, the only nearby one of any size. No officer or enlisted man could visit Saint-Omer without the permission of his commander, approved and endorsed by headquarters, and even those few who did receive permission were warned that all brothels, whether licensed or unofficial, were out of bounds to officers and enlisted men alike.

  Final training under the direction of the British continued, including practice maneuvers with battalions and companies, but whether the men of the 27th Division were yet ready for frontline combat was questionable. A report from divisional headquarters drew attention to a series of defects.31 Although officers had a considerable theoretical and technical grounding, their knowledge of their duties was less complete, and they often didn’t even know what their responsibilities were. There were also innumerable complaints about their men having bayonets fixed and magazines loaded when away from the front lines; wearing caps instead of steel helmets; undermining trenches by digging into the face to create small dugouts; failing to care for their rifles; leaving their posts without authority; and showing a disregard for sanitation. Almost the only positive comment was the note of the troops’ marked keenness when going out on patrol. The American chief gas officer also expressed alarm at their poor knowledge of and lack of preparedness for gas attacks. Some claimed they had not been told about mustard gas, and many officers and men were not carrying gas masks, even though they were in the danger zone and a gas attack could occur at any time.

  No such reservations were expressed about Monk. It had been “a long trail from the saloons of Chrystie Street to the front line in France and in traveling it, a man’s soul may undergo strange transformation.”32 “An honest-to-God man … a real soldier,” selfless, fearless, resourceful, cool under fire, and deadly with bomb
, bayonet, or even bare hands, Monk was the finest soldier in his battalion. His commanders must sometimes have wished for a whole unit of his cohorts from the streets of the Lower East Side. Men like Monk, Gyp the Blood, Kid Twist, and Crazy Butch might even have frightened their own officers on occasions, but they would certainly have terrified the enemy.

  14

  THE NIAGARA OF SHELLS

  On July 23, the 106th Infantry began a two-day march back to the front lines. In the early hours of July 25, carrying only light battle packs and no blankets or pup tents, but laden with ammunition and equipment, they entered the trenches. In pitch darkness, led by a trench guide, they sloshed through the mud “over dismal wastes and trails made slippery by constant rains.”1 There was no smoking or talking, and they followed one another at five-pace intervals, keeping their eyes fixed on the man ahead to avoid getting lost in the darkness.

  It was just as they had trained to do at Camp Wadsworth, but now they did so to the accompaniment of the ceaseless roar of shell fire, the crash of trench mortars, and the crack and whine of rifle bullets, while their nostrils were filled with the stench that told of the unseen, half-buried dead all around them. There was a constant stream of casualties, one of the first, Private Isadore Cohen of Monk’s Company G, suffering a severe shrapnel wound in his right arm.2 At Hallebast Corner and again at La Clytte, the shelling was continuous, and they had to take their chances and run in ones and twos through the showers of shells.