Rock of the Marne: The American Soldiers Who Turned the Tide Against the Kaiser in World War I by Harris Stephen L

Author:Harris, Stephen L.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2016-06-15T11:04:35+00:00

I was at the river bank when she started. Have been back about ½ hour. Much gas, some chlorine and a bit of tear gas. They are not shelling the river bank yet.

I believe every one is standing it well. We will hold them.

Rowe

Rowe then ordered F Company’s Captain Reid to get three of his platoons up on the Moulins Ridge east of the Surmelin River and occupy McAlexander’s fire trenches. His right flank had to be protected. Rowe kept Reid’s Fourth Platoon under his direct command.

—

Paul Plough and Jefferson Healy, the second lieutenants in Herlihy’s company, both of whom had been ordered by Rowe back to a village to rest up, hadn’t yet gone to sleep when a shell hit the house they were in. They ran down into the wine cellar. Healy said he’d try to get back to the company. Plough opted to stay in the wine cellar until the barrage lifted, knowing the Germans wouldn’t attack across the river until after the artillery attack. There was nothing either could do while shells dropped down on them.

But the six-one, 188-pound former captain of the Columbia football team, a Latin scholar with a reputation as an orator, was determined to rejoin his company. With gas mask on, Healy started running as if he were back on the gridiron, dodging shells and machine-gun bullets ripping up the ground around him.

“Healy tried to get through,” Plough recalled, “but was killed.”

He was struck by a bullet and mortally wounded. He lingered until August 11. When a Delta Gamma fraternity brother heard that Healy had died, he wrote about how “Big Jeff” had a spectacular way of catching passes. “I can see him now tearing up and down the football field at Columbia, using every inch of his six feet and every ounce of his weight in perfect abandon to bring victory to Columbia.”

Captain Harold W. James from Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, and a West Point classmate of Dwight Eisenhower, reported that “many acts of heroism and bravery were performed by these messengers who went from one post command to another through the hail of shell and shrapnel when it was so dark that one could not see his hand before his face.”

He pointed out the night was so dark in the woods where most of the 38th’s troops were hidden and wearing their gas masks, it was “almost impossible to move anywhere. There was nothing for the infantry to do but wait for daylight to come.”

—

Thus the long night wore on,” Rowe later wrote, “with no news from the front. No news is supposed to be good news, but at such a time one wonders if he hasn’t forgotten some vital provision, and thoroly [sic] longs for just a message that all is well.”

“For hours that seemed weeks,” Captain Wooldridge wrote, “we huddled in our tiny splinter proofs [a shelter against shell fragments] or open slit trenches in the horrible confusion of it all, but we lovingly patted, as yet, cold steel

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.