The Polar Bear Expedition by James Carl Nelson

Author:James Carl Nelson [Nelson, James Carl]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2019-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

K Means Kodish

In another life, he’d been a metalworker at the Fisher Body Company, Building Number 14. But when the draft, and duty, had called, thirty-year-old Bernard Grewe had left his family’s comfortable home at 415 Philadelphia Avenue in Detroit and gone to Camp Custer, where he was assigned to Company K.

On December 30, 1918, now-sergeant Bernard Grewe was killed as he moved among his men in that open field just south of Kodish, Russia; he lay out on the field as the battle between American and Bolo raged into the night. His death, and that of other “steady and courageous and loyal pals” who had been through so much together, made Kodish “a place horrible, detested, and unnerving to the small detachment that held it,” Company K’s Lt. Jack Commons would write.

It was the same back in Detroit, where Theresa Grewe had mourned ever since receiving word of her only son’s death. “Everything in the Philadelphia Avenue house reminded her of her son, and added to the poignancy of her grief,” the Detroit Free Press would report the following November. Unable to stand it any longer, Theresa induced her husband, Frank, to sell the haunted home, which he would, relocating his wife and four daughters to a new house, not far from the Detroit River.

Back at Kodish on that last day of 1918, with the rest of the world at peace for the previous seven weeks, there was to be little movement. Col. G. Lucas, commander of the railway front, had seen no point in holding on, and recommended withdrawal; but the British high command overrode him, and told Maj. Mike Donoghue: “Hold what you have got and advance no further south; prepare defenses of Kodish.”

But holding the line there would prove difficult. Newly energized, the Bolos probed the lines held by the frozen, shivering men of Companies E and K, who lay low under the constant fire of Bolo machine guns and exploding bits of shrapnel. Holding Kodish, Moore et al. would write, meant the men “were to be penalized for their very desperately won success.”

At eight A.M., the Bolos charged up and over a bank in front of a part of the line held by a combined platoon of Company K and Company E men. After pausing to reorganize, the piercing, harrowing sound of a whistle was heard, and the Red line “came dashing forward at us to make a bayonet charge,” Company E’s Fred Kooyers wrote.

The Bolos, Kooyers would claim, were 450 in number, the Americans’ force just thirty-five. Company K’s Lt. Alexander Batsner, in charge of the combined force, steadied the men, yelling to them: “Give us hell, boys, or they will get every one of us!”

Lewis guns and rifles scythed through the Bolo line, while Headquarters Company’s Pvt. Vincent Barone, manning the sole mortar the Americans had, spent much of the rest of the day sending hundreds of shells at the throng of Bolos. Barone then turned his attention to the Bolo machine guns at the edge of the field, silencing many of them before he fell with a bullet in a leg.

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