History Pgs. 32-65
10/9/06
5:23 PM
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Army historian Gen. S.L.A. Marshall called the Marine Brigade in World War I “without a doubt the most aggressive body of diehards on the Western Front,” a reputation paid for in blood and sacrifice. Belleau Wood, Frank Earle Schoonover, ca. 1920s, oil on canvas.
The fighting in the last year of WWI – the American year – was everything the Marines were created not to do. Their expeditionary doctrine was thwarted. The immobility of bogged-down, mud-slogging trench warfare negated all hope of surprise and slashing maneuver. Barbed wire, the machine gun, and massed artillery turned shock tactics into mass graves. Yet the savage three-week Battle of Belleau Wood in that war eclipsed everything the Marines had achieved in their first 143 years. And that was just the beginning. The price in flesh and lost innocence was hideous, but it was the making of the Marine Corps as a lethal, murderously tenacious weapon in the big-unit battles of modern, protracted war. America went to war with Germany with an unprecedented 22,000 Marines under arms; the total would double before year’s end. The Leathernecks who sailed for France on June 14 with Army Major General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), were the 5th Marines, led by Colonel Charles Doyen. But when they arrived at St. Nazaire, Pershing assigned Doyen’s regiment the decidedly unglamorous task of rear-area security and labor details. It would take months of top-level intervention to get Pershing to relent and commit the Marines to the same pre-combat training being given Army troops by French veterans. General Erich Ludendorff, the German commander, had launched a massive new offensive, and the AEF would soon be called to play its first major role. Pershing assigned his chief of staff, Army Brigadier General James Harbord,
to take command of the Marines, saying sternly, “Young man, I’m giving you the best brigade in France – if anything goes wrong I’ll know whom to blame.” When Ludendorff reached the Marne at Chateau Thierry, he stood just fifty miles from the French capital. General Ferdinand Foch, the Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces in France, had little confidence in the largely untested American military. Foch and Pershing had clashed over the initial combat assignments of the AEF. Foch wanted to feed small units of American forces piecemeal to reinforce the shattered French and British divisions; Pershing fought to preserve the tactical integrity of the AEF, demanding the right to fight as an American army. But the crisis at the Marne demanded quick action. Pershing reluctantly released his five American divisions to Foch. On May 30, 1918, Pershing ordered the U.S. 2d Division to join French General Joseph Degoutte’s Sixth Army in desperate fighting along the Marne front. The Marines boarded camions – covered French trucks with seats along either side – and raced toward Chateau Thierry for their first major confrontation with the German Army and the greatest crossroads in their battle history. Ahead, the Germans had seized a line of villages – Vaux, Bouresches, Torcy – and in this sector the 461st Imperial German Infantry, a 1,200-man regiment reinforced with plentiful Maxim machine guns, occupied a wooded area for a brief rest before resuming their drive on Paris. The mile-square region, a game preserve, was known as Bois de Belleau, Belleau Wood.
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Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps
“Devil Dogs” (World War I)