War Hero: The Unlikely Story of A Stray Dog, An American Soldier and the Battle of Their Lives (Kindle Single) by Stephan Talty

Author:Stephan Talty [Talty, Stephan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-05-13T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine: Gray-clad Giant

The battle for St. Mihiel was scheduled to begin at dawn on September 12. The First Division was placed on the left of a three-pronged attack, facing eight German divisions. A rolling barrage moved ahead of the advancing troops as more than half a million Americans, plus 110,000 Frenchmen, massed on the battlefield. It was the largest assemblage of American troops in the history of the Republic.

Donovan had been reassigned to an infantry battalion that day. He traded his field kit for a rifle. Pushed by Pershing’s punishing timetable, most of the troops around him hadn’t slept in days, rushing to get to St. Mihiel in time for the assault. They were bone-tired even before the battle began.

Dawn came. Guns roared, shells whistled down, and the landscape ahead exploded into fiery light. Rags tagged close to Donovan, who sometimes ran and sometimes crawled. They were just behind the leading edge of American troops. The artillery barrages had damaged the German trenches and taken out some of the enemy’s artillery batteries, but not the machine-gun nests. The lethal guns — spitting 600 rounds per minute — “stitched soldiers throat to groin,” as a writer said about another war. They were hidden everywhere: in small ravines, in shell holes, just below ridges.

Donovan’s battalion, advancing on its hands and knees to avoid the Maxims, reached a barbed-wire fence. He crawled under it and Rags followed, tearing off some of his fur and leaving it on the barbs. Just ahead was a German trench. Donovan dashed for it behind his fellow doughboys. Unlike many of the German positions, this one was still occupied, but the Americans took it in a rush of hand-to-hand fighting, Rags barking and nipping at any black boot he saw.

Once the doughboys cared for their wounded, they spotted an abandoned artillery gun thirty or forty yards ahead. Donovan called out and ran toward it — it would be the first enemy weapon he’d captured in the war, his first piece of war booty. But a sound stopped him, the rasp of a Maxim gun. He hadn’t seen the nest, placed cleverly in a hollow just in front of the artillery piece.

With bullets cutting the air above his head, Donovan ducked and gestured to the other soldiers that he was going to flank the nest. While the other doughboys fired their rifles at the lip of the nest, Donovan, followed by Rags and a few infantry troops, painstakingly made their way to the left, executing a wide circle around the nest.

When they were out of the sight line of the gunners, Donovan and his squad rose up and charged the emplacement. He barreled into the nest and was immediately grabbed by a “gray-clad giant” of a German who shoved Donovan to the ground and fell on top of him, pointing a Mauser at his face.

Just then, Rags, who’d never left Donovan’s side, leaped for the soldier’s wrist and clamped down hard. The German lost his grip and dropped the pistol.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.