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

by Neil Hanson

  Trains taking troops to the front traveled at five miles an hour, each locomotive pulling forty-eight boxcars with a total capacity of nineteen hundred men, capacity that was routinely exceeded by 10 percent.12 Soldiers went to great lengths to avoid being jam-packed into the stinking boxcars, and orders had to be issued to train commanders to stop men from riding on the roofs. As the trains rattled nearer to the front lines, the landscape they passed through was cratered by shell fire “like microscopic pictures of the moon.” Once beautiful cities were “just heaps of brick and debris, not a living thing to be seen, even the trees all shot off, leaving nothing but stumps, which look like ghosts in the moonlight. The graveyards are turned upside down by terrific shell fire. The ground is covered with all the signs of a great battle—smashed guns of every caliber, wrecked tanks, dead horses and here and there a dead Boche overlooked by the burying parties.”

  The men of the 106th first realized that they were going directly into the line when the train rattled through war-ravaged Péronne, close to Saint-Quentin and Cambrai, where heavy fighting was still continuing.13 They passed through the war-scarred region around Albert and across the Somme, its banks pocked with shell holes and littered with barbed wire. The Germans had given up an area some fifty miles deep as they retreated to the Hindenburg Line, but they left behind a wilderness.

  The Germans cut down trees, not even sparing the orchards; they set villages on fire and gutted towns, using explosives to demolish the buildings that fire alone could not destroy. They poisoned the wells, destroyed every road and railway bridge, tore up the rails, blew in the embankments and tunnels, and detonated mines under every crossroads, leaving craters that made the roads impassable. The Germans also left booby traps: steel helmets, pianos, door handles, the steps of dugouts or houses. They exploded when touched, costing the advancing troops many lives. Only the hedgerows were left standing in this vast wasteland, to serve as cover for concealed machine-gun nests.

  Monk and his comrades eventually detrained at Tincourt after a fifteen-hour train journey. They then marched to Villers-Faucon, where they bivouacked under fire from enemy guns while a battery of their own howitzers roared back throughout the night. The next night they returned to the front lines, passing salvage corps hunting through the wreckage for any war matériel that might be retrieved. Scores of enemy dead lay strewn across this ground; the American troops had been warned not to touch them in case they had also been mined by the retreating Germans.14

  The 106th Infantry’s route to the front ran due east, through the village of Ronssoy. Just beyond it, they took over a position covering four thousand yards of the front lines. Facing them were the formidably strengthened and ferociously defended outposts of the Hindenburg Line, commanding a series of trenches running along a narrow plateau two hundred yards or so from the eastern bank of the Saint-Quentin Canal.15 A deep railroad cutting in front of the canal and a small river, both strongly fortified, commanded the line of advance and exposed attacking troops to fire from a warren of concrete machine-gun nests. The rising ground beyond the formidable outworks was the main Hindenburg system, “stuck full, like pins in a pin-cushion, of all types of automatic weapons of every caliber and breed.”

  Linking these fortified trenches were three strong points—Quennemont Farm, Guillemont Farm, and the Knoll—a thousand yards in front of the main Hindenburg Line defenses and connected to them by switch lines (sunken communication trenches) and deep, concrete-lined tunnels. These concrete bastions, with concealed dugouts and machine-gun nests every twenty to twenty-five feet, stood on a high ridge, bare of trees. Artillery was ranged onto the sloping, open ground in front of the strongpoints, where the densely tangled barbed-wire defenses were designed to shepherd attackers into preordained fields of fire so that they could be blown apart by shell fire and raked by light and heavy machine guns, Minenwerfer (mine-throwers), antitank guns, field guns, and powerful Flammenwerfer (flamethrowers). “To a depth of six miles extended this foreground, gullied and hollowed into spots where machine guns waited.”16

  An offensive could not be successfully launched against the Hindenburg Line itself until the outposts had been neutralized, but successive attacks by British and Australian troops had failed, with British troops suffering a casualty rate of 80 percent. The American troops of the 27th Division were now to attempt what their far more numerous and experienced British allies had failed to do. Already depleted by combat casualties over the previous three months, the division was also now losing men to the influenza pandemic, which had begun to affect American forces around the middle of September. Moreover, since most of the division’s fighting strength was being held back for the main assault against the Hindenburg Line, the 106th Infantry was to attempt this first herculean task alone; “in short, one regiment of the division was now to accomplish what five British divisions had repeatedly failed to accomplish.”17

  General O’Ryan had nominated the 106th Infantry to make the attack, a curious decision since, after its earlier losses, it was already the weakest of the four regiments that made up the 27th Division, with only 41 surviving officers and 2,037 men. By comparison, the 105th Infantry had 73 officers and 2,659 other ranks, and the 107th and 108th both had more than 80 officers and almost 3,000 other ranks. The objective of the attack, supported by tanks and a rolling barrage, was defined as the occupation of the rearmost trenches of the outer line of the Hindenburg system, a distance of about eleven hundred yards from the American lines.

  The keynote order was summed up in five words: “The men must go forward.”18 All three battalions of the regiment were to attack together across the four-thousand-yard front. They were assured that the enemy troops defending the strongpoints would surrender, but “whether they do or not, the leading elements must go on, leaving to the mopping-up parties in the rear the task of dealing with them.” All ranks were also warned that neither heavy shelling nor enemy counterattacks would be regarded as justification for withdrawal. The line was to be held irrespective of casualties.

  The men of the 106th Machine Gun Company were given equally daunting orders. Their role would be crucial in slowing and halting enemy counterattacks, giving the American infantry time to prepare defensive positions or launch their own counterattacks. But every machine gunner knew that his life expectancy in a defensive action was estimated at just thirty minutes. He was expected never to “surrender his position or abandon his gun.19 He will disable it and defend himself to the last second of his life with every means at his disposal. These means are grenades, revolvers, clubs, stones, fists.”

  On the night of September 24 through 25, the 106th Infantry moved forward into the front lines, replacing the exhausted and woefully depleted British 18th and 74th Divisions. Monk and his comrades passed through the devastated town of Albert, reduced by constant shelling and bombing to a sprawling heap of rubble and dust. Beyond, rain had made the chalk roads slippery, and the shell holes were filled with stinking water, overlain with a film of mustard gas. The detritus of ferocious combat lay on every side: live shells and ammunition, bombs, rifles, shell craters so numerous that they pitted the ground like smallpox scars, collapsed trenches, twisted wire entanglements, endless rough graves, and many more bodies decomposing in the open for want of men to bury them. The Americans had to steel themselves against such sights and march on toward the baleful glow of shell fire and Very lights that marked the front lines.

  For forty-eight hours before the attack, a continuous barrage had fallen on the German positions. The guns of nine artillery brigades, firing every twenty to thirty seconds, launched an avalanche of mustard-gas shells—the first time the British artillery had used the gas, long a German weapon—followed by a barrage of high explosive, shrapnel, and more mustard gas. In total, three quarters of a million shells were fired, creating “noise such as no mortal ear ever heard before.”20 The results were revealed later, when the advancing troops “could not pass five feet without having to cross over the dead body of
a German.”

  17

  A SORT OF SACRIFICE

  The attack by the 106th Infantry was to be launched at dawn on September 27, 1918. During the previous night, the mud and gray chalk, exposed in places by shell bursts, was overlain with a network of pegged white tapes, marking the jumping-off places for each unit, while strong patrols were pushed out well in front to protect those doing the pegging and taping. Through the remaining hours of darkness, men “murmured in low tones of Broadway and Bedford Avenue [in Brooklyn] and places about Times Square where they knew many of their friends were enjoying light and warmth and pleasure, and speculated on their chances of getting back to join them.”1 At 3:30 in the morning, each company of the regiment, in one long single file, moved forward into the firing line. They could not use the main road, which was under enemy observation and regularly shelled, and instead followed a circuitous route along a less exposed road and across fields to the jumping-off point. Even then they were hindered by shelling and the difficulty of finding their designated places in the pitch darkness of a wet and moonless night.

  To avoid alerting the Germans to the imminent attack, the rumble of tanks moving forward to their start positions was masked by the noise of a squadron of aircraft flying overhead. Four tanks had been assigned to each frontline battalion, three to advance with the first line, and one to follow in support, loaded with barbed wire and tools for consolidation. One four-gun platoon from the regiment’s machine-gun company was also attached to each battalion. The infantry were approaching the assembly trenches when, alerted by noise or movement, the Germans fired a salvo of Very lights. Their blinding white light illuminated the American trenches, and seconds later German signal rockets went up, etching luminous pale green crescents across the sky. Almost simultaneously, an intense enemy machine-gun barrage began. “The momentary confusion is well nigh indescribable.2 Imagine men on the march, anticipating no opposition, suddenly thrown into bold relief, in a manner itself startling, and then, before recovering their equilibrium, exposed to withering fire.” In the confusion, a number of stragglers from K Company of the 106th mistakenly attached themselves to Company M of the 105th Infantry.

  By 4:30 that morning the broken battalions of the 106th Infantry were on their mark. Because they would have to advance rapidly under heavy German machine-gun fire, they had been ordered to leave their overcoats, blankets, and field kits at company headquarters and carried “only” a raincoat, assault rations, an extra water bottle, fighting equipment, four sandbags and a trench shovel, two hundred rounds of small arms ammunition, and five grenades per man. As dawn approached, all fell silent, checking and rechecking their equipment, fingering safety catches and testing the edges of bayonets, while drenching rain and mist soaked everyone.

  The First Battalion, commanded by Major Gillet, took the right of the sector, with Captain Blaisdell leading the Third Battalion on the left, directly opposite the Knoll, and the Second Battalion, under Major Kincaid, holding the center ground, with Companies F and H in the van and Companies E and G in support. Major Kincaid, the division’s judge advocate, had left his law books and gone out to command a battalion whose previous leader, Major de Kay, had been wounded within days of assuming command. Such was the shortage of officers after the losses in their previous battles that in many companies there were only sergeants in command, and the situation was made even worse by the bizarre practice of sending officers on detachment to training schools in aspects of military command, even as their units were about to enter the front lines to launch a crucial attack.

  The 105th Infantry was to support the 106th and cover its flanks, and the machine-gun battalions of both regiments were to provide a machine-gun barrage, while Stokes mortars would add their firepower. On reaching their objectives, the troops were to fire success flares—rifle grenades bursting into three white lights.3 Allied reconnaissance aircraft flying overhead would also sound the Morse letter A—a short and long blast of a klaxon—as a signal for men in the frontline positions to fire red ground flares, lay groups of rifles parallel across the trench about a foot apart, and flash their polished tin discs, sewn on the insides of their respirator flaps, so that the observers could establish the position of the front line.

  Sensing an attack, the enemy was still sending up rockets, while over the battleground, already pitted with shell craters, star shells were casting a lurid light. Stretched out, six feet apart, along a white tape line for a distance of four thousand yards, some eighteen hundred men, all with bayonets fixed, stood waiting for the moment to advance. They were laden with ammunition and grenades, gas masks hanging at their necks and steel helmets pulled low over their faces.

  Though it was still only September, the morning was cold, with low clouds and a heavy mist. It was unusually quiet, the silence broken only by intermittent firing in the distance. Then, just as dawn was breaking, a single gun fired as a signal and then, with a thunderous roar, all the other guns opened up, right along the line. At once, colored lights and rockets could be seen going up from the enemy lines, SOS signals calling for a counterbarrage to protect them from the advancing American troops.

  The artillery exchange created “the heaviest hail of fire any of us had ever seen or heard.”4 “All along the front coalescent sheets of exploding flame bounce, seethe and creep forward, at the rate of one hundred yards every three minutes.” Some 50 percent of the barrage was shrapnel, 35 percent high explosive, and 15 percent smoke to screen troop movements. Through it all “twangs and whines the wasp-like buzz of a barrage of copper-nosed bullets from ninety-six machine guns, each of which fires two hundred rounds a minute.”5 The machine guns became so hot from constant firing that the gunners wore asbestos gloves and the cooling water in the jackets surrounding the guns continually boiled off and had to be replenished.

  As the barrage lifted and crept forward, the 106th Infantry began to advance, shouting their battle cry, “Mineola! Mineola!”6 Almost at once they were enveloped in the smoke screen and lost to view. Some thought the concealing smoke, “so dense that a compass could not be read,” was more damaging to the attackers than the enemy, and some of the American officers and men became almost totally lost for a time as they tried to advance.

  Even though day was breaking, it was still dark enough for the flashes of shell bursts to be clearly visible and, as the men of the 106th advanced, “the sickening, whirring whine of machine gun bullets” was added to the din of explosions.7 “There is no sound in the world like it; with it comes death and wounds on every side.” The reaction from the enemy had been instantaneous, and the near-simultaneous artillery barrage fueled later rumors that the Germans had been tipped off about the attack by a spy. Many American men and officers were killed before they had advanced even one stride; the First Battalion “jumped off on time and fairly melted away.”

  Half blinded by the smoke, the line officers of the 106th tried to lead their men forward with the aid of luminous compasses. The infantrymen fought their way from shell hole to shell hole under withering machine-gun fire. “All the strength and power and morale of the German army lay behind these points and their orders were to hold the line at all costs.8 They fought with every deadly weapon and contrivance known to modern warfare.” Man after man of the 106th fell to the ferocious cross fire of German machine guns, but the advancing line kept moving forward through a blizzard of bullets and shells. “Rushing forward in an impetuous line … with their own barrage before them like a curtain of fire, it seemed as if nothing could stop them—as if they must win their objective.”

  The advancing American troops stormed and destroyed machine-gun nests, bombed and cleared enemy trenches, and moved with such speed that within an hour the Third Battalion had reached its first objective, and by 6:46 a.m. it was firing its success rockets to show that the Knoll had been taken. As one jubilant soldier of the 106th claimed, “When the time to charge came, we drove the Dutchman [Dutch and Dutchman—probably a corruption of the German Deutsch—were o
ften used instead of German] out of the trench.9 When he saw us coming he ran for his life, but he ran right into his own barbed wire and we just mowed them down like flies on a wall.” The First and Second Battalions also succeeded in reaching their first objectives, but although the 106th had gained a foothold in the three fortified outposts, they were not strong enough in numbers to completely drive out the defenders, and would now have to withstand the inevitable counterattacks.

  Some troops were well into the German trenches in places, but in others they were held up by the barbed wire, and cut apart. Many companies had suffered terrible carnage among their men and were entirely without officers—almost all were killed or wounded.10 One observer was reminded of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. Once more, nothing had apparently been learned from four years of warfare against Germany; massed ranks of men with bayonets fixed again advanced in orderly ranks to be blown apart by shell fire and shrapnel or cut down by machine guns.

  As the fighting continued, that fire came not only from the front and from the flanks, but increasingly from the rear, as German gunners emerged from concealed dugouts, communication trenches, and tunnels behind them. A disgruntled officer of the 105th Infantry complained that machine guns were being operated from areas that the troops assigned to mopping up were supposed to have cleared.11 Isolated on the battlefield and often confused about their position and their objectives, the remnants of the 106th dug in where they could and tried to hold the ground they had gained.