Then that night MacArthur had an unexpected visitor. It was Major General Charles Summerall, the new V Corps commander. Summerall had the reputation of being a tough man, headstrong and hard-driving, but that night when he dropped by MacArthur’s command post he looked “tired and worn, and I made him a cup of steaming black coffee, strong enough to blister the throat.”
Summerall glared across his cup at the younger man. A career officer, Summerall had known MacArthur’s father, and he had seen the Côte bleed his First Division in their desperate attacks already. He had no time for the Fighting Dude’s fine attitudes or (it seemed to him) insouciant confidence.
“You will give me Côte de Châtillon tomorrow,” he snapped, “or turn in a report of 5000 casualties.”
MacArthur’s smile faded and he stiffened to attention. “This brigade will capture Côte de Châtillon tomorrow, sir,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, “or you can report every man in it as a casualty. And at the top of the list will be the name of the brigade commander.”
Summerall was taken aback, and tears seemed to well up in his eyes. The general said nothing else, then opened the door and stepped out into the blackness.35
—
The Forty-second’s advance began just before dawn on October 14. The scene soon became a nightmare.
The Eighty-third Brigade had it worst. It ran straight into a curtain of fire that American artillery could do nothing to abate, and when men crawled forward to cut the wire, they were shot down one by one, their bodies left hanging on the wire like pigeons on a game line.
This part of the assault was supposed to be supported by tanks, but they quickly ran into difficulties. Twenty-five started out, of which sixteen actually made it to the front, but only ten managed to move forward over the rough, broken ground—and when the German shells zeroed in on their track they quickly turned around and went back. So the men of the Eighty-third, led by the redoubtable 165th, went ahead alone as the full weight of the German fire fell on them. A German counterattack followed, which the Irishmen of the 165th beat back, but they weren’t advancing any farther that day.36
On the right, the Eighty-fourth Brigade’s luck was just as bad. MacArthur, as usual, was in the first wave, and he remarked to one of his men as they climbed out of their trenches, “If this is good, I’m in it. And if it’s bad, I’m in it, too.” It was bad. The men of the Third Battalion, 167th got entangled in the enemy wire after advancing just 200 meters. They tried for three hours to get up the face of the Côte and failed, until their Lieutenant Colonel Bare called off any more attempts to get past that first line of wire. On the other side, the Iowans of the 168th managed, under very heavy machine-gun fire, to get almost to the crest of Hill 288 by 1:00 P.M. But when they tried to take the enemy trenches on the opposite slope with the help of men from the Thirty-second Division, they were bloodily repulsed. As darkness set in at 5:00 they were clinging to the southern slope near the crest, but barely clinging.37
Côte de Châtillon remained as defiant and impregnable as ever.
By that time an exhausted and frustrated MacArthur was back down at the command post on the telephone with Menoher.
“I will continue the attack during the night,” he barked over the phone. “I will give orders to do no firing but to clean up with the bayonet.” MacArthur had seen this done once before by the Alabamans of the 167th in the fight for Croix-Rouge, and figured it might clear the resistance off the Côte.
“Is it all right?” he asked.
“It is,” squeaked Menoher’s voice over the phone.
“All right, I will give those orders. Good night.”38
MacArthur’s plan was unorthodox and dangerous. The Alabamans, after all, had suffered 50 percent casualties. But that had been in broad daylight; this would be at night and might catch the Germans napping. Besides, if General Summerall would be satisfied only with a defeat that meant lots of corpses, this was one grim and sure way to do it.
The other officers in the Eighty-fourth, however, were appalled and said so. Lieutenant Royal Little of 167th’s Third Battalion thought “the order was so ridiculous that I immediately rushed to battalion headquarters to find out who had perpetrated this abortion.” Major Revee Norris of the same regiment told his commander, Colonel Bare, “No firing! It’s nothing short of murder to send men in on such an assault.”39 Ross of the 168th told MacArthur the order was physically impossible. To bypass the masses of machine-gun nests and wire by moving left toward Côte de Châtillon would leave them bumping into the 167th in the dark. Men might end up bayoneting one another instead of the enemy; and the overall commotion would mean the end of any surprise.
In any case, MacArthur’s plan had to wait because Menoher decided to try an extensive artillery barrage that evening instead, to see if that would dislodge the Germans. It did not, although Lieutenant Little’s company saw two men killed and several wounded in the darkness from the friendly fire.
The next day the Eighty-fourth tried five times to take Hill 288, but each time the heavy machine-gun fire from Châtillon drove them back. Each time MacArthur rallied his troops and led them up the hill again—only to see the assault break down as men prostrated themselves on the hillside to avoid the incessant fire.
As the sunlight faded to twilight the men returned to their trenches, waiting for darkness and the dreaded bayonet charge. MacArthur summoned Bare, Matthew Tinley of the 168th Iowa, and Major Cooper Winn, commander of his machine-gun battalion, to his dugout to discuss the plan. They had barely gotten started when the phone rattled. It was Summerall, checking in on the progress in taking Châtillon. He had already fired the commander of the Eighty-third for poor performance; now he wanted to know if the Eighty-fourth planned to do any better.
His voice was so loud that Bare could make out every angry syllable. Châtillon was the key to the entire show, Summerall kept saying; he wanted it taken by six o’clock on the 16th.
“We will take the Côte de Châtillon by tomorrow,” MacArthur barked back, “or report a casualty list of 6000 dead. That will include me,” he added and slammed the phone down.40
Then Mac turned to the sober little group. Any ideas? his grim face said.
Now Bare spoke up.
“I have been up there forty-eight hours,” he said. “I am to make the attack. Am I to have nothing to say about it?”
“Well, what have you got to say about it?” MacArthur wanted to know.
Bare explained that his Lieutenant Little, in storming the slopes of the hill, had noted that the wire along the northwestern side of the Côte was brand-new and barely completed. In fact, an aerial photograph (one of the few they had from Colonel Billy Mitchell’s wing, which was focused more on bombing than reconnaissance) showed a gap in the German wire to the northeast, close to the hillside hamlet known as Musarde Farm.
MacArthur pondered. Maybe this was the opportunity he had been looking for: a double envelopment with his two regiments, the 167th and the 168th, swarming through the weakest parts of the German lines and then converging at the crest. He decided to call off the bayonet charge; a deeply relieved Bare told him there was an open ravine between Hill 263 and Tinley’s 168th. If Bare could put a battalion in there, he said, with machine-gun fire from Winn’s battalion keeping the Germans pinned down, his men could scramble up the northeast face of Châtillon and into the gap in the wire.41
Tinley enthusiastically agreed. “I will be delighted not only to cooperate in any way I can but will take orders if necessary from Colonel Bare.” Then Winn spoke up. A massed machine-gun fusillade could pin down and distract the Germans; this was exactly the opportunity he was looking for, to prove his machine gunners’ mettle. MacArthur agreed to the plan; the mood went at once from somber to enthusiastic, even ecstatic. The officers headed back to their units, and Bare picked Major George Glenn’s Third Battalion to lead the way into the dark ravine.
That night MacArthur organized his own reconnaissance, leading a patrol along in the dar
k until they confirmed what Little had reported: the German wire, almost twenty feet thick and impenetrable at the center, dribbled out at the ends. A strike “with my Alabama cotton-growers on the left, my Iowa farmers on the right” with “every machine gun and every artillery piece as covering fire” just might work.42
Suddenly out of the darkness came a surprise German artillery barrage. The shells exploded around as men slithered into every available shell hole. The flashes of explosions lit up the battleground, the tangles of wire, the men lying silent in their shell holes. Then when it lifted, MacArthur went from hole to hole to rally the rest of the patrol. “Follow me,” he whispered to each shaking the man’s shoulder; “we’re going to go back to the Rainbow lines.”
No one moved. MacArthur shook one of his men harder. The figure slumped over in the darkness. Then MacArthur realized the truth: each and every man in his patrol was dead. All except him. Somehow he had been spared.
It was, MacArthur told a friend afterward, like a revelation. “It was God, He led me by the hand, the way he led Joshua.” God had spared him as a matter of destiny—and that destiny was to lead the final charge the next morning.43
At dawn, MacArthur moved out for a last word with Ross, Bare, and the other commanders. Then at 5:30 he watched Ross’s First Battalion of the 168th Iowa make their move out from Tuilerie Farm. A battalion from the 167th Alabama drawn from eight different companies was not far behind, moving right toward the opening in the wire.44
Then a deafening machine-gun barrage of sixty guns opened up on the German lines, sweeping their positions with more than a million rounds as the Germans hunkered down in their bunkers. Meanwhile, Ross’s men had found the gap, and were pouring around the German flank; the Alabamans were doing the same on the left side of Châtillon, as men rose up and dashed forward across open ground, then dropped down as German bullets whizzed overhead.
“Officers fell and sergeants leaped to the command,” MacArthur wrote, describing the scene. “Companies dwindled to platoons and corporals took over.” Lieutenant Little and his fellow Alabamans found themselves pinned down on the slope from heavy machine-gun fire, but after conferring with one another, Little and the other officers agreed to give a whistle blow in unison and then “rush all forward together. It worked.” The Germans panicked and pulled back, while Little’s captain chased them up the hill. Little himself led one hundred men around to the southwest, where they found a passage through the wire into the German flank. In moments the trenches were theirs, as men scrambled to the crest.45
Meanwhile, Ross’s men had found a similar breach on their side, slithered through, and reached the top of the Côte de Châtillon, only to see the Alabamans coming up in a frenzy from the other side. The Germans, overwhelmed by the Americans suddenly sweeping up from their flanks and rear, began throwing down their rifles and abandoning their machine guns.46
MacArthur’s men had little time to celebrate their success. The Germans launched two desperate counterattacks to retake the hill. A well-timed artillery barrage by the Field Artillery Brigade broke up one; massed rifle fire from the Iowans and Alabamans drove off the other. By nightfall, Châtillon had been taken. Major Ross had only 300 men and 6 officers left out of 1,450 men and 25 officers.47 Some of MacArthur’s battalions had suffered 80 percent casualties; more than one-third of the Forty-second Division’s total riflemen were either dead or wounded.
But Summerall and Pershing had their prize, and MacArthur, who had not slept for nearly four days, sent a terse message to HQ: “I have taken Hill 288,” meaning the Côte, and then sank into a dreamless sleep. He remained comatose to the world for the next sixteen hours.48
Later, historian Robert Ferrell would question whether MacArthur or Ross or Lieutenant Colonel Bare really deserved the credit for the capture of Côte de Châtillon, and whether capturing the salient was as important as Pershing (and MacArthur) later claimed.49 Without question, however, as brigade commander, MacArthur could take credit for a victory won by a brilliant bit of soldiering no matter who was the plan’s original author. And certainly no one who was there doubted his resolve and courage under fire that had rallied his brigade for three straight days and made final victory possible.
A grateful Summerall, for one, had no doubts; nor did Menoher. “This brigade under the command of Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur has manifested the highest soldierly qualities….With a dash, courage, and fighting spirit worthy of the best traditions of the American Army, this brigade carried by assault the strongly fortified Hill 288 on the Krunhilde Stallung [sic].” He added, “The indomitable resolution and ferocious courage of these two officers”—meaning both MacArthur and Ross—“in rallying their broken lines time and again, in re-forming the attack and leading their men…saved the day.” Menoher recommended that MacArthur be promoted to major general “for his field leadership, generalcy and determination during three days of constant combat in front of the Côte de Châtillon”—and also recommended the Medal of Honor.50
Ironically, it was the same medal his father had won for taking a similar fortified height, Missionary Ridge in 1863—but Douglas did it while facing weapons with a firepower and lethality that Arthur MacArthur could never have conceived. Indeed, in the course of those deadly days of fighting, MacArthur learned many lessons about command that would serve him well later—even though he would sometimes ignore them himself.
He learned, for example, the importance of up-close leadership instead of leadership from miles behind the lines. He learned that “the commander on the spot must have flexibility and a certain power of decision” as Ross and Bare had shown when they convinced him to rescind the bayonet charge order, and that once again there was no substitute for seeing the battlefield in person as opposed to relying on intelligence reports from others.51
Above all, as he told Major General Rhodes (destined to be Menoher’s replacement), he learned at Côte de Châtillon that a general has to lead his men not just with orders and commands, but with “precept and example.” It was that example that the men of the Eighty-fourth Brigade best remembered in their three-day fight. As Reginald Weller, liaison officer of the battalion, later put it, “The courage of General MacArthur was the outstanding feature of the battle…he alone made victory possible.” Weller remembered how on the fourteenth the sick and shaken MacArthur had gone out at 5:30 to lead his men “and made his way through a heavy interdiction fire of gas and shrapnel” and how he “joined his troop and took command of the line.” Those at least were the words Weller wrote down in his personal deposition for MacArthur’s Medal of Honor.52
In the end, MacArthur did not receive it. It was Pershing, and Pershing alone, who finally blocked the award. When a board of officers from the Forty-second Division unanimously put MacArthur at the head of the list of their men who deserved a Medal of Honor, Pershing turned them down flat.53 Pershing did, however, approve a second Distinguished Service Cross for MacArthur. He also let the promotion to major general go through.
Later, MacArthur claimed to have been satisfied. He would be the youngest major general in the army’s history (another record of his father’s had been broken), and he could quote the citation for the Distinguished Service Cross almost from memory, as he did in his memoirs:
As a brigade commander, General MacArthur personally led his men, and by the skillful maneuvers of his brigade made possible the captures of Hills 288, 282, and the Cote de Chatillon….On a field where courage was the rule, his courage was the dominant factor.54
Still, the fact that he had been denied the Medal of Honor, and knowing who had denied it, must have rankled. Pershing’s action made their already rocky relationship even rockier. It did nothing to endear MacArthur to his commanding general or to his protégé George C. Marshall, who was about to commit a mistake that brought near catastrophe to the AEF and almost cost MacArthur his life.
—
After a week of recuperation on the summit of Côte de Châtillon, the Forty-secon
d painfully resumed its forward progress. It had a new commanding general, General Charles Rhodes; Menoher had been promoted to take over VI Corps. Before he left, Menoher wondered seriously if the thinned ranks of gaunt scarecrows he now commanded were up for more fighting. They had taken almost 4,000 casualties; they were 100 officers and 7,100 men short of authorized strength.55 He held a conference with MacArthur and Reilly, now commander of the Eighty-third, at his headquarters at Neuve Forge Farm near Estremont, to get their opinion.
The meeting wasn’t in MacArthur’s office but his bedroom, with its built-in bed, red-hot woodstove, and rough plank floorboards. They sat at a rickety table with three wooden chairs, while the small windows let in the fading light of late afternoon.
Menoher told his brigade commanders of Pershing’s plan to renew the general advance on November 1. What did they think? Was the Rainbow up for it? MacArthur immediately sprang to his feet and delivered a speech that, Reilly said later, both he and Menoher agreed it was a shame there was no stenographer present to take it all down.
MacArthur “soon showed that there was no phase of the matter which he had not thoroughly considered from every possible point of view,” not just the Forty-second’s current state but Pershing’s strategy, how it fit into the French and British plans, and how it would fit into the final course of the war. The Kriemhilde Stellung had been the main pivot of the German line in France, he explained, and their last stand. Now that it had fallen, German resistance in the Argonne was bound to collapse.
“It only remains,” he exclaimed excitedly, “to gather in the fruits of victory” by pushing the Germans back across the Meuse River. “The 84th,” he proudly told his commanding officer, “is fully capable of playing its part in such an advance.”56
Reilly agreed. His men were not only ready but eager to keep going—and now they had sufficient artillery and machine guns to smother German strongpoints in a November 1 attack.
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