Collapse at Meuse-Argonne: The Failure of the Missouri-Kansas Division by Ferrell Robert H

Author:Ferrell, Robert H.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Missouri Press

From CO 1st Bn., 110th Eng. at Foret Argonne 03.3.77.64, 29 Sept. 9:35 a.m. I am moving this bn. forward to draw one kilometer south of this post. P.C. will be at 030.780.19

Things shortly were so well in hand that Sergeant Sam W. Cobb of the headquarters detachment, 110th Engineers, from St. Louis—who when at Cheppy had worked through the night on a heavy machine gun the Germans left, disabled, until he could use it the next day against enemy airplanes—took his detachment forward, above the line, to show the stragglers that the line was in depth. By the next morning, September 30, with fifteen hundred men on the line, there was no question of its strength. A message went back from Hudson that used a Missouri simile: “We can hold this hill until the cows come home.”20

The engineers and the others held until the night of September 30–October 1, when the Big Red One, the First Division, the pride of the AEF, under Summerall, came up.

The crisis had been so severe that the First Corps alerted its reserve division below the Twenty-eighth, the Eighty-second. The danger of the Thirty-fifth’s caving in appears in the diary of the artillery brigade commander of the Eighty-second, Charles D. Rhodes, an attractive man, a West Pointer, who on the morning of Sunday, September 29, was writing letters when the word came.

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