The Doughboys Go to Hell The soldiers of the 79th were forced to fight for over three days and nights on a single meal and two canteens of water. In “With Their Bare Hands: General Pershing, the 79th Division, and the Battle for Montfaucon” Gene Fax masterfully recounts their nightmarish struggle. By Matthew J. Davenport
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-doughboys-go-to-hell-1487365697?tesla=y
Lt. Miller Johnson hugged the dirt of a shell crater in no man’s land, driven down by German machine-gun fire. He lifted his head just enough to orient himself in the thick morning fog, “and behold I was looking into the muzzle of a German gun two feet in front of me.” Johnson thought he had been deserted by his platoon, but then he heard a familiar voice: “Keep down, Lieutenant. There she comes,” followed by a blinding explosion. He came to, shaken, and saw that one of his men had taken out the enemy machine-gun nest with a grenade. Before pressing on, as the fog began to lift, Johnson gathered his troops and took a head count: Of the 50 soldiers he had led from the trench just an hour before, only 10 remained.
With Their Bare Hands
With Their Bare Hands: General Pershing, the 79th Division, and the battle for Montfaucon
Feb 21, 2017
By Gene Fax
Osprey, 495 pages, $32
The human cost of ending rubella; Europe at the crossroads; the doughboys go to hell; when America opened its doors; Stalin in your living room; the heroism of old age; the death of an all-American town; rebooting the Big Bang; and much more.
It was the morning of Sept. 26, 1918, the first day of a massive Allied offensive against the entrenched German army in northeastern France, one that would soon become—and to this day remains—the largest and deadliest battle in which American troops ever fought. Johnson’s platoon was just one of the nearly 200 infantry platoons of the U.S. 79th Division, each facing its own fight to conquer the German-occupied fortified village of Montfaucon. In “With Their Bare Hands: General Pershing, the 79th Division, and the Battle for Montfaucon” Gene Fax masterfully recounts, studies and dissects their nightmarish struggle.
From the time the U.S. had entered the war the year before, Gen. John Pershing, commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Forces, had fought inflexibly for American autonomy against overwhelming Allied pressure to split up his divisions and amalgamate them with veteran French and British units. But in the face of a series of devastating German offensives in the spring of 1918, he acquiesced temporarily, turning some of his few AEF divisions then in France over to Allied command. And after American success in combat at Cantigny, Belleau Wood and Soissons, Pershing won the approval of Gen. Ferdinand Foch, the supreme Allied commander, to launch an all-American offensive at St. Mihiel. But it came with a cost: Foch would only green-light the American offensive if Pershing would in turn furnish AEF divisions for a larger Allied offensive just days later between the Meuse River and the Argonne Forest. It was a decision from which dangled tens of thousands of American lives, forcing Pershing—whose best combat-tested, veteran divisions were committed to St. Mihiel—to send fresh, inexperienced divisions to the Meuse-Argonne front, among them the 79th.
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