CHAPTER LIII
VAUX AND HAMEL
July, 1918, was a red-letter month in the annals of American belligerency on the European battle field. Events of historic moment, in which American soldiers, fighting shoulder to shoulder with the French, were irresistible protagonists, crowded one upon another. They had got into their stride; they were seasoned and in the pink of condition; no German heroics could withstand them.
As a sort of prelude to their memorable participation in General Foch's offensive stroke of July 18, 1918, the American troops undertook a little offensive of their own to the west of Château-Thierry, and accomplished their object with devastating results to the enemy.
The investment and capture of Belleau Wood to the northwest had completed a chain of operations designed to secure the American positions. But there remained an awkward loop or sag which it was deemed desirable to remove. Its straightening involved the occupation of a little village called Vaux, with its tap on the main railroad line into Château-Thierry, the capture of a knoblike crest of ground designated as Hill 192, on the edge of Clerembauts Wood, and also the routing of Germans from a sizable cluster of trees, midway between the two other points and known as the Bois de la Roche. The front of the attack was about two and a half miles, stretching from the village of Triangle, then north to the Bois Clerembauts, across the Paris road, and running south of Vaux. Vaux was an important objective, being considered vital to the Germans for holding Château-Thierry.
The Americans went over Vaux and established themselves just beyond the northern edge of the village, taking in the same rush the hills just to the west of Vaux. This eliminated the German wedge almost completely, the only remaining portion being at the wood of Clerembauts, where the Germans were in a pocket.
A merciless, methodical artillery fire was leveled at the German positions on the morning of July 1, 1918. American guns, big and little, hurled torrents of high explosive and gas shells on the village with a deadly accuracy of aim. By noon Vaux was on fire. Every house had been hit at least once. A shell would fall on some little habitation, a cloud of yellow smoke would arise, and the house was no more. The American guns continued to belch all day with an unemotional, matter-of-fact regularity from the depths of a score of leafy woods.
In the evening the infantry advanced. They swept through the enemy lines and, had their object been to continue the advance, they could have done so with the greatest ease, as virtually everything before them had been cleared.
"The advance started at 6 o'clock, and at 6.25 the first of our men entered the village of Vaux. By 6.40 they had gone through the wood, gaining all their objectives. Our stormy petrels took Vaux in clean-up style. Squads were ready with their hand grenades to clear the cellars, but many of these had been closed by our fire, and the Germans had been buried in them. From others the Germans came out and surrendered. In some there was difficulty, and in that case our men threw in hand grenades in great numbers. Generally, if there were any Germans left, they surrendered.
"Four hours after the men went over the top American telephone lines were working from Vaux back to our headquarters. By 7.30 our ambulances were running into the wrecked village.
"A wounded German brought in about 10 o'clock said that in the morning there had been 4,000 Germans in the village, but after the barrage started some had been withdrawn, leaving only those who could be sheltered in sixty-eight caves in the village. He said the cave in which he took refuge was wrecked by an American shell and that he lay wounded for six hours until the Americans came in."
For adroitness, dispatch, thoroughness, and sustained teamwork, the attack on Vaux was an undoubted triumph for American arms, though a small one. Each man moved to the particular post in the town to which he had been assigned to perform his allotted task. None failed, and the operation was completed with systematic smoothness; as though in a twinkling, it was all over.
With Vaux and the Bois de la Roche in their hands, the Americans took their machine guns to the edge of the wood, expecting a counterattack. It duly came, the Germans launching a fresh regiment upon the lost positions; but an hour later all was calm—the regiment was no more. A second counterattack broke in the small hours of July 3, 1918, accompanied by a heavy bombardment. The enemy lost heavily without regaining a foot of the ground won by the Americans. The Germans advanced in close formation from their trenches without being checked. In some cases they were allowed to approach close to the American line. Then the American gunners, from their hidden nests, mowed down the enemy ranks with showers of bullets.
Later came a fight for the possession of a hill known as 204, situated between Vaux and the Bois de la Roche. The Germans held it and the French, in essaying the task of wresting it from them, invited American detachments to lend a hand. The hill stood just outside the American sector and commanded Château-Thierry. Volunteers were many; most of them were new arrivals who had never faced the Germans. Practically none had been under fire. They were waiting their chance, some swimming in the Marne, others catching baseball, when the call came, and the response was five times the number needed.
American soldiers near a barricade in the Rue du Pont, Château-Thierry. The Germans were driven from the town in the First Battle of the Marne, 1914, and again in the Second Battle of the Marne, 1918.
A group of thirty Americans joined the French; they were pitted against hidden machine guns, camouflaged rapid-fire nests, gas shells, and the deafening roar of a heavy barrage. They were shot at by snipers hiding in trees, they were shot at by big and little cannon with a roar that deafened them; but they went ahead with the French veterans. They took machine-gun posts, they took trench positions. But the German resistance was too strong, due in part to their new device of fighting in ambush from the tops of high trees, where they escaped shells exploding on the ground, and obtained a good vantage point for pouring shot downward on the attackers below.
Elsewhere on the western front American forces, linked with the British lines, aided a body of Australians to attack Hamel. It was an early morning advance, extending one and a half miles on a four-mile front, including the village of Hamel and the trench system beyond it, south of the Somme.
It was the first time Americans had fought with the British. They comprised only a few companies fighting as platoons among the Australians; but upon them rested the honor of the United States in the adventure. The date, moreover, was July 4, 1918.
"You are going in with the Australians," their officers told them, "and these lads always deliver the goods. We expect you to do the same. We shall be very disappointed if you do not fulfill the hopes and belief we have in you."
The Americans listened with a light in their eyes. They went in, with "Lusitania!" as their battle cry, celebrating the Fourth of July with "astonishing ardor, discipline and strength," the Australian officers said. If the Americans had any fault at all, the Australians commented, it was overeagerness to advance; they could hardly be restrained from going too rapidly behind the wide belt of the British shell fire as the barrage rolled forward.
The Hamel episode projected as a reminder that American forces were clinching with the foe on other parts of the front as well as on the Marne. But it was on the latter battle ground that the eyes of the world were presently drawn. There the American army swung into its greatest stride at this stage of the war.
CHAPTER LIV
ACROSS THE MARNE AND BACK
Officially Germany had refused to recognize the growing weight of American belligerency. If she could evade alluding to American forces specifically in reporting events on the battle field, she did so. "The enemy," to be sure, covered a multitude of enemies—more than half the world—so why designate which one, and why designate the one now most feared, of whose mounting strength it was not expedient to enlighten the beguiled people at home?
The pretense could no longer be sustained after her abortive drive against the eastern and southern flanks of the Soissons-Rheims salient on July 14, 1918. There was a reason. Germany might ignore the presence of American detachments operating with the French or British and be airily blind to the activities of American patrols along the Lorraine or Alsace fronts. They were merely "the enemy." But in making this plunge to widen the salient by way of encircling Rheims and cutting another way to Paris she crashed into an obstacle that compelled recognition. It was the First American Army Corps, numbering some 250,000 men, under the command of Major General Hunter Liggett. If Americans, in her self-deceiving view, had before been as needles in a haystack, here they had become the haystack itself, and it was all needles!
The American army skirted the southern arc of the salient, eastward along the Marne somewhere beyond Jaulgonne, westward through Château-Thierry to Torcy, where it joined the French. Germany's first operation was to make a feint of attacking the American lines northwest of Château-Thierry by way of screening her major operation, which was to break through the American barrier guarding the Marne. The assault was especially violent in the Vaux area, which was enveloped in a heavy barrage following the usual bombardment of high explosives and gas. Under the barrage storming parties attacked the village. The system of infiltration by groups was followed and some of the groups succeeded in penetrating one of the American outposts on the northeast. The Americans swarmed out and poured a withering rifle and machine-gun fire on the assailants, and counterattacked on the latter's right, where the penetration had taken place. It was a direct and flanking fire, held in reserve until the foe had approached the American front-line trenches, from which the troops had withdrawn. Its effect was to demoralize the attackers, who retired in disorder.
The counterattack brought the American lines 750 yards ahead and yielded a number of prisoners, whose capture was due to a barrage laid by the American artillery, which cut off the enemy's retreat.
The attack had an immediate sequel in the evacuation by the Germans of Hill 204, upon an advance by the Americans up its west side. The Germans had paid much to hold this hill, resisting many assaults, notably the one described in the last chapter, and now they chose to vacate it rather than defend the hill further. Their tenure of all this area was to be very brief, and perhaps they knew it.
Soon after the Vaux demonstration, the Germans attacked the American and French positions all along the Marne. Ordered to break through the Americans holding the line south of the Marne, and reach a line running eleven kilometers south of Jaulgonne, running through Montigny, they crossed the Marne under the protection of a severe bombardment, and pushed ahead three kilometers to a line through Crezancy.
The grand advance was signalized by a long-distance bombardment of towns in the rear of the American lines. Heavy shells from German naval guns fell in regions far behind the actual battle area, some reaching points twenty to thirty miles distant. It was mainly a night display, marked by a constant hurtling of projectiles from ten-and fifteen-inch naval guns, and canopied the whole countryside with a blaze of light. The German purpose was to batter towns and communication lines beyond the defense line and to harass the movement of supplies and reenforcements.
The Marne curls to a salient northward at Jaulgonne, and the peak of this bend provided the first crossing for the Germans. Descending upon this point in great force, they succeeded in crossing the river in the face of a destructive fire from American machine gunners and infantry, who fought and died where they stood. The salient could not be held, being exposed to fire from three sides. Westward of it toward Château-Thierry, and eastward toward and beyond Dormans, the German advance likewise could not be stayed, and there was a general withdrawal of American forces along the river bank.
The Germans succeeded in crossing at ten points between Château-Thierry and Dormans. They threw many pontoon bridges over to bear their troops. Shoals of canvas boats were also brought into requisition. These proved more serviceable than the bridges, the laying of which was repeatedly thwarted by American fire. Protected by the heavy bombardment, the boats managed to carry the members of the kaiser's famed Tenth Guard Division, twenty to each boat; but very few of them got back.
American guns foiled their passage three times. Machine gunners clung to their posts on the river bank here and there till the last moment. They poured deadly streams of bullets into the enemy, and only withdrew when their guns were so hot that they could not be fired. One group happened to be in a place where the Germans were anxious to erect a bridge, but their efforts were fruitless. The American bullets piled up the German dead on the opposite side of the river every time the enemy started to cross.
South of Jaulgonne the enemy crossed the Marne on six pontoon bridges, hurriedly thrown over the stream, and masses of infantry swarmed forward. The artillery constantly had the bridges under the heaviest fire, and at least two direct hits were made, two of the bridges being blown up. The task of preventing German swarm, despite these checks, proved too great, and the Americans fell back to the base of the salient made by the river.
Once on the southern bank of the Marne, the German masses, augmented by numbers of machine gunners, proceeded to force the Americans farther back toward Condé. They had succeeded in landing a force estimated at 15,000 men in the river sector abandoned by the Americans. This force promptly started to fight its way south, having a point about nine miles distant as its objective. The Americans and French held up this advance to such an extent that two hours after the time set by the enemy for reaching his objective, he was still far away from it. The Germans specially suffered heavy losses in the woods forming the triangle from Fossoy to Mézy and Crezancy. There the Americans were overwhelmed by such large numbers that the line could not hold; but nevertheless they refused to retreat where they could possibly hold a place in the woods. This sent the German advance sweeping over large numbers of nests which sheltered ten, five, or two Americans, and sometimes one, who held on while the Germans passed by and then opened fire on them.
It was manifest that the advance could not be allowed to continue. The enemy by noon had driven forward over two miles on a front of about three and a half miles south of the Marne through the American positions; but he got no farther. Even while fighting in the open continued, the Americans organized a counterattack in the region of Condé, below Fossoy, about the time the German advance had apparently eliminated the salient. There, because of their heavy losses, they seemed content to stand, and there they remained for four hours. Meantime American reenforcements came up. Light artillery was hurried into position. It concentrated a heavy fire at short range, and when this fire ceased, the augmented American infantry dashed from cover. Machine gunners moved forward, and, lying on the ground, poured a stream of bullets into the enemy. The fierceness of the fire brought the Germans up short. They would not face the steel, and, retiring, hesitatingly at first, finally broke and fell back.
Points that had fallen to the Germans—Fossoy, La Chapelle, St. Agnan, Bois de Condé, Crezancy, and Mézy—were recovered with French aid. By 4 o'clock in the afternoon the Germans had been driven to the railroad track skirting the south bank of the Marne. There they took up positions; but there was no pause for them. The American gunners got the range of the landing places, where the Germans had stretched cables by which they hauled boats across the swollen stream, and there was no retreat in the way they had come. The Americans pursued them behind the railroad embankment. Slowly the graycoats were forced back. Some of them swam the Marne to safety, but their number was few. Many of them were drowned in the river. The Americans in front were on open ground, making the best use of whatever shelter offered. German forces were on the hills on the opposite side of the river, showering high explosives and gas shells upon them, but the Americans went forward, nevertheless, with gas masks adjusted, and crawling at times for a considerable distance on all fours. In this way they advanced bit by bit, and when they came within range close enough they drove the enemy back.
The Germans retained some precarious positions south of the Marne; but they were completely swept back across the river between Château-Thierry and Jaulgonne. They were driven where they were before the advance began. They vented their wrath the next morning by sending thousands of high explosive and noxious gas shells into the American lines. They had set out to swing their line northeast of Château-Thierry; but it still swung northwest, and presently it was to swing much farther back.
The American losses were serious, as was to be expected in the most important action in which the Americans had yet engaged. In return, however, they exacted a toll from the Germans that made their losses seem light. It was estimated that they killed, wounded, or captured 20,000 of the enemy. Hundreds of the latter were slain while retreating across the Marne. One battalion of the 6th German Grenadiers, according to prisoners, was annihilated in the woods, and of the other battalion only one company survived. The south bank of the Marne was lined with German dead, while in the woods south of Mézy, through which the Germans advanced and retreated, 5,000 enemy dead lay, some bodies three and four deep where they had dared, in close formation, the American machine guns.
There were sporadic counterattacks, which were readily repulsed by the Americans and French. The lines wavered back and forth, and then came a sudden shift of the pivot of the entire German action in the Soissons-Rheims salient. The Marne was no longer an object to be gained, but rather a danger to flee from.