With Their Bare Hands by Gene Fax

Author:Gene Fax [Fax, Gene]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Military, World War I, United States, Modern
ISBN: 9781472819239
Google: 990CDgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1472819233
Publisher: Osprey Publishing
Published: 2017-02-21T06:00:00+00:00

* Postwar accounts differ as to exactly how the 4th Division was authorized to attack westward. General Hines remembered that it was in a phone conversation with Bjornstad, as did Bjornstad himself. (Hines to Booth, December 30, 1920, p. 1; A.W. Bjornstad to Christian A. Bach, December 24, 1924, RG 120, Historical Section Reports, Box 3, NARA, p. 3.) Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Parker, Hines’s chief of operations, recalled that Bullard himself authorized the movement while visiting Hines’s headquarters. (H.A. Parker to E.E. Booth, December 14, 1920, Hugh A. Drum Papers, Box 16, File 4th Division-Montfaucon, AHEC.) This narrative follows Hines’s version, with which most of the officers of the 4th appear to have agreed after the war.

By 4:00 p.m., Hines had issued his orders. His 8th Brigade, hitherto in reserve, would advance to the front line, attack westward, “take up a position on the American Army objective and establish a line of outposts along the general lines Cunel–Bantheville–Romagne, establishing liaison with the 7th Infantry Brigade on the right, the center [37th] division of the Vth Army Corps on the left and the 79th Division in its rear.”32 In other words, the 8th Brigade was to establish a line spanning the sector of the 79th Division but four miles beyond Montfaucon. This would cut the German division defending Montfaucon off from its communications and pinch the stalled 79th out of the American line. Hines sent word of his intentions to Kuhn, who at 7:30 p.m. acknowledged receipt and promised to alert his units “to the end that confusion may be avoided.”33 By 4:20 p.m. the 8th Brigade was already on the move and by 8:00 a.m. its units were reporting that they were in place to begin the westward attack. At about midnight Hines approved the arrangements that his chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Booth, had made for the assault, which would take place the next morning.34

Then things fell apart. Sometime between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m., a telephone call came to Hines’s headquarters from III Corps ordering the movement of the 8th Brigade to be stopped and the brigade to be held within the boundaries of the 4th Division’s sector.35 For what reason and on whose authority the attack order was countermanded were either not stated or not recorded at the time. With regard to the reason, the officers of the 4th later attributed the cancellation to III Corps’ over-eagerness to comply with an order received from First Army around 7:30 p.m.:

The General directs that your Corps continue to advance to the army objective, and in pushing forward he wants the advance to be covered by strong covering detachments in advance and to your left flank. The 5th Corps has not advanced as far as you are and it has been directed to advance as soon as it can to the army objective.36

This order suggests that First Army was unaware that a westward move was being planned or even considered by III Corps. It certainly didn’t prohibit such a move, at least not explicitly.

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