Devil Dogs (World War I)

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.

Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

“Devil Dogs” (World War I)

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.

Casualties were high for the relatively short time the Marine Corps spent fighting in World War I, but the Marines left a legacy of courage, excellence, and esprit de corps that would endure forever. Flare, Front Line, Champagne … , Colonel John W. Thomason, Jr. USMC, ca. 1918-1928, watercolor on paper.

Library of Congress

Legend has it the name teufelhunden, or “devil dogs,” was given to the Marines by the Germans during World War I. It didn’t hurt recruiting.

Library of Congress

The camions screeched to a halt, discharging thousands of stiff-legged members of the 2d Division along the shoulders of the crucial Paris-Metz highway. Sergeants ordered their men off the exposed thoroughfare and into positions along both sides. The Leathernecks assumed responsibility for a long stretch of line to the north, the 5th Marines on the left, the 6th Marines on the right.

A half-mile away, through a ripening wheat field, lay Belleau Wood, dark and brooding. The few French pickets out front seemed overmatched.

On June 2, Ludendorff resumed his attack with a new fury. The already battered French Sixth Army began falling back.

The Marines watched in silence as the demoralized soldiers retired through their lines. A passing French officer suggested that they join the retreat. Captain Lloyd Williams answered for every Marine when he said, “Retreat, hell! We just got here.”

At last, the German infantry appeared, long lines of men approaching rapidly across the fields, shoulders hunched, weapons low. The rookies in the Marine lines swallowed hard at the sight; the veterans smiled grimly, adjusted the folding-leaf rear sights on their Springfield “‘03’s,” and settled into steady firing positions. Never again in this bloody war would the Marines have such lucrative targets.

The brigade opened sustained fire at 800 yards, more than three times the accepted combat range. The Springfield’s 30-06 bullet impacted like a mule’s kick, even at that extended range, and German soldiers spun and tumbled with the fusillade.

Incredulous, the survivors wavered, then went to ground. Their officers harangued them into resuming the attack; another hail of rifle bullets struck the exposed men with sickening thuds. [Major E.B.] Cole’s massed machine guns began raking the lines. A third advance fared little better, and the Germans, no fools, flowed back into the shelter of the woods. There would be no breakthrough along the Paris-Metz highway this day.

The assault of the 4th Marine Brigade against Belleau Wood would resemble the exposed, bloody landing of the 2d Marine Division against fortified Japanese positions on Tarawa twenty-five years later.

At Belleau Wood, with field artillery brave but ineffectual, infantry was forced to undertake a very long haul through the wheat fields in the face of a terribly relentless machine-gun fire. The Marines had not faced such a formidable force of combat veterans since Bladensburg and New Orleans in 1814-15. There they had delivered a hot defensive fire against advancing troops in the open. Now the tables were reversed.

The 1st Battalion, 5th Marines were the first to go “over the top,” spilling out of their foxholes for a dawn attack against Hill 142, an intermediate objective on the left flank.

Advancing the half-mile to their hill, and wresting it from the German defenders, took until noon and cost 410 casualties, a sobering first step in the prolonged battle to come. Harbord launched the main assault at 5 P.M. on June 6. Now German machine gunners feasted on the massed targets, enjoying a turkey shoot of their own. The first ranks of Marines fell in appalling numbers. The others hit the deck and, in the dubious shelter of the wheat, continued the advance on their hands and knees – junking their French training with the same cynical adaptability which would help them seize Pacific atolls in the war to come.

This improvised assault – one small group popping up to blaze away with rifles while another rushed forward a few dozen yards – also had its price. The veteran German machine gunners had the range and the deflection – and plenty of ammo. Bands of interlocking Maxim machine gun fire scythed down wheat and Marines alike. The final 50 yards seemed impassable.

War correspondent Floyd Gibbons lay surrounded by the dead, pinned down and terrified. At this critical point, one of the Old Breed Leathernecks leapt to his feet with a curse. Gibbons stared in awe as Gunnery Sergeant Daniel Daly, the double Medal of Honor awardee from the Boxer Rebellion and Haiti, swept by. “The sergeant,” Gibbons reported in his dispatch, “swung his bayoneted rifle over his head with a forward sweep, yelling at his men, ‘Come on you sons-of-bitches, do you want to live forever?’” With a roar, the survivors in the wheat surged forward and overran the first line of German machine gun nests in the woods.

June 6, 1918, had become the bloodiest single day in the Corps’ history. The 4th Marine Brigade had suffered 1,087 casualties, losing more men in a single day than in all preceding 143 years combined.

During the night and into June 7, the Marines inside Belleau Wood repeatedly challenged the German defenders in savage, close-in combat. But closing to bayonet range took countless Marine lives. They had few grenades, no signal flares, and little experience coordinating with divisional artillery, and were still unhappy with their overweight Chauchat automatic rifles.

Then, just when it appeared the Germans were on the ropes, Ludendorff ordered a major counterattack.

At dawn on the thirteenth of June, the Germans clobbered the American positions with heavy artillery fire, saturated Bouresches with mustard gas, and sent fresh storm troops into the smoldering ruins. The arrogant newcomers had much to learn about these unknown American Marines.

German infantry approaching the embattled woods began to drop by the score to uncannily accurate longrange rifle fire. The 2d Division’s field artillery, rapidly gaining combat proficiency, shredded the ranks of the survivors with hot shrapnel.

In the reeking woods, Major John “Johnny the Hard” Hughes and his 1st Battalion, 6th Marines withstood the loss of 450 casualties to poison gas and high explosives, then rose up to greet the attackers with a fury, their bayonets bristling like the quills of an enraged porcupine.

“Johnny the Hard” (another Medal of Honor awardee from Veracruz) held the bloody ground, his eyes swollen shut by the gas. His laconic message to Harbord at the height of the counterattack should have given the Germans pause: “Have had terrific bombardment and attack … everything is OK … Can’t you get hot coffee to me?”

Legend has it that the survivors of the 461st Imperial German Infantry, who had fought the Marines tooth and nail since the third of June, had a fitting, one-word description of their relentless foe: Teufelhunden or “Devil Dogs.”

In the end, the Devil Dogs triumphed. On June 26, twenty days after his battalion had stormed across the terrible wheat field to begin the battle, Major Maurice Shearer of the 5th Marines wiped out the final German strong point and sent a crackling message: “Woods now U.S. Marine Corps entirely.”

“The grateful French, convinced the Marines had removed the threat against Paris, renamed the milesquare wood Bois de la Brigade de Marine.

Belleau Wood gave the Marines invaluable confidence and experience. Among the survivors were men who would lead the Corps in distant battles for the next four decades, including future Commandants [Wendell] Neville, [Thomas] Holcomb, [Clifton] Cates and a lionhearted young lieutenant named Lemuel Shepherd.

The Marines’ war pressed on. General Ludendorff launched one final German offensive on July 15, 1918. This time the Marines fought as part of the French XX Corps.

Ludendorff’s offensive created a huge bulge in the Allied lines. General Foch decided to counterattack in the Aisne-Marne region, near a place called Soissons.

The 2d Division Marines joined the XX Corps veterans – Moroccans, Senegalese, Foreign Legionnaires – in the Forest of Retz. It was urgent that the Americans reach their line of departure before daybreak. The Marines executed a nightmare of a forced march in a driving rainstorm – some rifle companies having to double-time the last mile to kick off the assault in time.

Soissons was two days of desperate fighting. The 5th Marines, under Colonel Logan Feland, led the way the first day; the 6th Marines, now commanded by Colonel Harry Lee, took over the second. In effect the attack forcibly throttled the final offensive spasm of the Imperial German Army. Both units fought bloody, exhausting battles.

At Soissons, Private First Class Carl Brannen, a replacement in the 2d Battalion, 6th Marines after the Belleau Wood brawl, experienced the terror of his first combat this hot July day in the wheat fields. “The Germans turned loose everything they had,” he said. “It seemed to rain shells.”

Brannen eventually linked up with Lieutenant Clifford Cates, but the incessant shelling and machine gun fire had ripped the 6th Marines to fragments. Cates refused to give in to despair. In a message since immortalized in Marine legend, Cates reported, “I have only two men left out of my company and twenty out of others … I have no one to my left and only a few to my right. I will hold.”

Held Cates and his Marines did, and the 2d Division and the XX Corps drove the Germans from the field.

But the Marines at Soissons paid another fearsome price for their part in this victory, sustaining 2,000 more casualties. Occurring so shortly after Belleau Wood, this meant that the original 4th Marine Brigade, which had hurried up the Paris-Metz Highway in such high spirits on June 1, had lost in seven weeks just about its total original number.

General Pershing gave [Major General] John Lejeune command of the 2d Division, with its depleted 4th Marine Brigade, on July 29.

Lejeune’s first combat operation in France was the two-corps assault against the German salient at St. Mihiel. While Army troops spearheaded the attack, the Marines rushed forward on the second day to take out a powerful series of fortifications along the Hindenburg Line. Doing so took four days of stubborn fighting. The salient fell. So did 700 Marines.

Lejeune’s 2d Division now supported the French Fourth Army, commanded by General Henri Gouraud. The Germans retreated sullenly, taking full advantage of the rugged terrain and excellent observation afforded by their prepared defenses along the heights above both sides of the Meuse River.

By late September they had slowed the French advance to a crawl. The strongly fortified position at Blanc Mont (“White Mountain”) blocked further progress.

On October 3 the 2d Division demonstrated to the skeptical Allies that its replacements had been imbued with the same fiery vigor as their fallen predecessors at Belleau Wood, Vaux, and Soissons.

Following a violent, five-minute bombardment by 200 guns, the division surged forward on the run, the 3rd Infantry Brigade on the right, the 4th Marine Brigade on the left. Harry Lee’s 6th Marines claimed the crest of the dominant ridge by noon; the soldiers swept the right shoulder. On the left, with the French flattened by German defenders in the Essen Hook, the 5th Marines of Logan Feland wheeled and took the position from the flank.

The following day, October 4, proved to be one of the bloodiest in Marine Corps history. The 5th Marines took the lead, advancing briskly toward the village of St. Etienne, just as the Germans launched a fierce counterattack. The Marine regiment soon came under galling fire from three sides, topped by the fiercest artillery bombardment they had ever experienced in the war.

One battalion of a thousand Marines charged through a fire-storm of enormous explosives to drive the enemy back to the town. Nine hundred men fell in this endeavor. By day’s merciful end, 1,100 Marines lay killed or wounded.

Four days of bitter fighting followed before St. Etienne was taken and the area secured. In the action, the Marines had suffered more than 2,500 casualties; one company lost 90 percent of its men. Even the seemingly indestructible Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly fell wounded.

By the tenth of October the Germans were in full retreat.

The French government awarded the 5th and 6th Marines (and the 6th Machine Gun Battalion) their third citation for gallantry, thereby entitling members of those outfits to wear the scarlet and green fourragere on the left shoulders of their uniforms. (This distinction, won at such a painful cost, continues today among the Marines of those historic regiments.)

Imperial Germany was clearly on the ropes. Politicians frantically negotiated to attain an armistice. But the killing continued.

Fighting proved particularly bitter in the Argonne Forest and along the Meuse, the river of death. On November 1, 1918, Black Jack Pershing’s First Army surged forward, the Marines with them.

The 4th Marine Brigade was by this time a combatcagey outfit, despite its heavy losses and constant replace- ments. The Marines assaulted, expertly hugging a “rolling barrage” of heavy artillery, and hit the Germans in their trenches just as they began lifting their heads from the bombardment.

Whether their de Havilland DH-4s were “Flaming Coffins” or not, Marine aviators were not going to be stopped from fighting in the air war. Two Marine aviators earned the Medal of Honor for their actions during the very first bombing raid, on Thielt, Belgium. Raid on Thielt, 14 October 1918, James Butcher, 1985, oil on canvas, 30” x 40”. Gift of British Aerospace Inc., in Commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of Marine Corps Aviation, 1986.

Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

The battalions leapfrogged forward, helping each other smother the German strong points, and maintained the assault. By mid-afternoon Marines swarmed over the dominant Barricourt Heights. The Germans bailed out, abandoning the Hindenburg Line, scuttling across the Meuse, blowing the bridges behind them.

At Letanne, on the night of November 10, 1918, the one hundred and forty-third birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps, the 5th Marines stormed across bridges successfully floated by U.S. Army engineers and prepared to assault the Germans along the high ground beyond.

The rest of the Marines took a deep breath the next morning and prepared to make their mad dash across the narrow spans, when – in a final spasm of artillery fire – the armistice went into effect. It was eleven o’clock on November 11 – the war was over.