The Battle of Belleau Wood

THE WOOD is so quiet. It is strange, almost crashing stillness of a battlefield after a great shelling has suddenly stopped. There is no one left to scream, no ringing shout of “Press On!” Only insects humming each other over the little purple and yellow flowers growing around the craters. Only the sun filtering through the trees, twinkling on the wheels of the old cannons, playing off the leaves of the trees like faces appearing and disappearing in the shadows – long gone faces in the shadows.

Belleau Wood is a pretty place, except for the still-wounded earth. And it is quiet now... so deadly crashingly quiet.

The Yanks were finally over there in the Great War, but the Germans had ripped to within 37 miles of Paris, trying to wind it all up before the Americans got properly cranked into the war machine. All that booming spring of 1918, the Germans launched serious offensives designed to finish off the staggering French and British by mid-summer.

Moving up the paris road toward the front near Chateau-Thierry, past lovely rolling wheat lands and forests not much scattered by battle, the popeyed new guys, the Yanks full of fight and ignorance about war, couldn’t believe their eyes. Their allies, the French looking totally fried, slouched past them, going the other way in ragged retreat – so ragged that some of them had thrown away their weapons and uniforms and changed into civilian clothes.

Paris had been under long-range bombardment for two months. By June 1, the great city seemed ready to crumble. The jittery government, hearing the rumble of Germany’s big guns growling ever closer, was preparing to evacuate and hundreds of thousands of Parisians were fleeing. Defeat seemed ready to burst full bloom into the spring air for many Frenchmen, who in their heads were already defeated.

When the French called on the Marines to dig trenches several hundred yards to the rear, for purposes of falling back, the Americans cockily responded that marines do not fall back: “The Marines will hold where they stand.”

Brave talk, and they would soon have ample opportunity to back it up. The 4th Marine Brigade, attached to the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division, had reached the bloody tip of the German thrust toward Paris. The Place: Belleau Wood, a square mile of trees and boulders, an old hunting preserve for the sporting set, now all set up with a network of interlocking fire from German machine guns, and zeroed in on by the artillery, which was ready to roar.

On June 3, the Germans went out to test the mettle of these hotshots called marines. They would find they were testing the wrong mettle. Attacking near the woods, they swarmed in waves through waist-high fields of rippling wheat toward the Americans. Marine sharpshooters mowed them down, sent them scurrying back to reassess.

On June 4, more retreating French soldiers (later French reserves would enter the battle and fight well) assured Marines that the Boche had not taken over the woods, But, the French were wrong. And the Americans, their greenness showing through, taking the word of the French at face value, failed to send out patrols to scout the forest.

Thus, early on the morning of June 6, it was the Marines who came attacking and it was the dug-in Germans, their firing lanes through the trees bristling with machine-guns, who could scarcely believe their eyes and hardly suppress their delight.

There came the brawny marines, filing toward them like helmeted ducks in a row, men five yards apart in four ranks, 20 yards between ranks, advancing with fixed bayonets and the Germans holding their fire... holding their fire... trigger fingers twitching with grim joy.

If this was the Americans contribution to the war... bring them on.

The marines came on in that slow, pretty sweep through the gently blowing grain, and the Germans prepared to cut them down and stack them up, like so much shredded marine wheat.

“It was a beautiful deployment, lines all dressed in and guiding true,” recounted one officer given to beautiful deployments. “It was pleasant in the wheat and the woods around looked cool and blue.”

“The platoons, assailed now by fury of small-arms fire, narrowed their eyes and inclined their bodies forward, like men in heavy rain and went on . Second waves reinforced the first , fourth waves the third, as prescribed. Officers yelled, ‘Battle-sight, fire at will!’ – and the leaders, making out green-gray clumsy uniforms and round-pot helmets in the gloom of the woods, took it up with Springfields, aimed shots.”

“Men crawled forward, the wheat was agitated, and the Boche, directing fire by observers in treetops, browsed the slope industriously. Marines were wounded, wounded again, as the lines of fire swept back and forth, and finally killed.”

“It helped to bag the Germans in the trees; there were men in that (Marine) line who could hit at 750 yards three times out of five.”

“Sweating, hot, and angry... the Marines worked forward,” the officer wrote. “They were there and the Germans were there, and there was nothing else in the clanging world.”

The battered Marines, even when they made it in to the trees, would feel less comfortable there. Somehow, their training manuals had neglected to cover how to fight in forests. Said a stunned battalion commander: “Nothing in all our training had foreseen fighting like this. If there was any strategy in it, it was the strategy of the Red Indian. The only thing that drove those marines through those woods in the face of such resistance was their individual, elemental guts.”

That and the elemental shift of tactics. No longer cooperatively tromping into the sheets of machine-gun fire like toy soldiers in beautiful formation, the Marines got down to earth – darting and low-crawling and slithering on their bellies through the shattered trees that were alternately under devastating artillery bombardment from both sides, slipping like Indians from rock to rock, from burning tree to smoldering stump, into the bloody holes of German lines, where they went at it bayonet steel against steel.

At times it appeared the Marines didn’t know where they were going, or where they had gotten exactly in that chaotic, smoking tangle now littered with stinking corpses and smashed equipment.

Yet the Marines kept attacking, like blind, beaten, dogs who didn’t know how to let go.

“We have Americans opposite us, who are terribly reckless fellows!” a German soldier exclaimed.

But the reckless fellows, learning the hard way, were indeed brave, and the quality of their marksmanship and the ferocity and stubbornness of their attack got awed Germans to calling them: Teufelhunden– “Devil Dogs.”

The Germans, fangs bared, fought like devils themselves, fighting on even after they had supposedly surrendered. Charging a German machine-gun nest that had chopped them up badly, a group of Marine leaped, bayonets flashing, at the soldiers inside. The Germans immediately threw up their hands.

“The Marines took them all prisoner,” noted a Marine account. “Not one German was killed. At that minute, another German machine-gun opened up on their flank. The marines left their prisoners, charged the second gun and captured it. The minute they got among those Germans with bayonets, every one of them surrendered. At that minute, the captured gun crew they left behind opened fire on them again. The marines couldn’t play back and forth like that all day. They bayoneted every man of that second German gun crew, charged back and captured the first gun all over again, and bayoneted every man before they went on.”

There was nothing push-button nothing sanitized, and not much proceeding according to gentlemanly code in what had been lovely Belleau Wood.

On through June 9, after some relief by the Army’s untried 7th Infantry Division, the Marines took over the front again and smashed, whacked and ripped their foe, often with fists, bayonets and rifle butts, knocking them yard by yard backward through the rocks and ravines, even as the Germans fought back with attacks of mustard gas.

At 5 p.m. on June 25, following a massive all-day barrage, the Marines began to push the last Germans, still bitterly fighting (most of them, anyway) from the forest.

Near the end, a lone Marine private, stumbling into a German position, was asked by their commander if there were many more of those Teufelhunden behind him. Yes, many, many more the Marine assured him . After a hasty conference with his fellow officers, the commander decided enough of this was too much, and the private found himself escorting 82 German prisoners to the rear.

By 7a.m. June 26 , Belleau wood belonged to the U.S. marines. Neither side had really needed this patch of French countryside. It was just there, on the road to Paris, and the Marines paid for it with more than 5,000 casualties.

In their honor, the Bois de Belleau would be renamed Bois de la Brigade de Marine — The Woods of the Marine Brigade.

Unfortunately, note military historians, the Army (some of them were Over There and even In There too, the Army pointed out) would bridle all the glory and publicity heaped upon the relatively small group of marines, leading to a not always happy rivalry between the services for years afterward.

Nevertheless, historian S.L.A. Marshall, an old Army man, wrote that the “little raft of sea soldiers in an ocean of Army was without doubt the most aggressive body of die-hards on the Western Front.”

The French were enraptured. Marshal Foch, commander of Allied Forces, would call Belleau Wood, the patch of hunting preserve for sporting gentlemen that became a square mile of historical fury, “the cradle of victory” in World War I.