The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I by Fleming Thomas

Author:Fleming, Thomas [Fleming, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Politics, War
ISBN: 9780786724987
Amazon: 0786724986
Goodreads: 23052301
Publisher: Not Avail
Published: 2003-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

III

More embarrassing was the plight of a battalion of the Seventy-Seventh Division, which had been assigned to the Argonne forest. Attempting to correct the rigid line-abreast advance his staff had decreed for the original assault, Pershing ordered all units to keep attacking “without regard to losses and without regard to the exposed conditions of the flanks.” Such tactics were worthy of Charles “the Butcher” Mangin; they were another index of Pershing’s desperation.

On October 1, the commander of the First Battalion of the Seventy-Seventh Division’s 308th Infantry Regiment, Major Charles Whittlesey, warned that further attacks would be disastrous. The French army that was supposed to be protecting the division’s left flank, west of the Argonne forest, was nowhere to be seen. The Germans could easily cut them off. The division’s commander, following Pershing’s orders, told Whittlesey to attack anyway. Within four hours, the entire force of 550 men was surrounded. Christened “the Lost Battalion” by reporters, it more than conformed to the name. The men had almost no food and little ammunition. Attempts to supply them from the air repeatedly failed. The tall, bespectacled Whittlesey, a Wall Street lawyer in peacetime, with a remarkable resemblance to Woodrow Wilson, stonily refused German demands to surrender.

The Germans attacked with mortars, machine guns, showers of hand grenades, even flamethrowers. The Americans beat them back. The Seventy-Seventh Division artillery tried to help with a barrage. Many of the shells fell on the Americans, killing and wounding 80 men. One shell struck the battalion’s sergeant major; only his helmet and pistol survived the explosion. For five nightmarish days, the battalion held out. At the end of the fifth day, a patrol from the Seventy-Seventh Division reached the battalion. The Germans, intimidated by the gains of the First Division east of the forest, had withdrawn. A grim Whittlesey led 194 exhausted survivors to the rear. He barely responded when the division commander told him he had been promoted to lieutenant colonel and was being recommended for the Medal of Honor.19

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