The Best Team Over There by Jim Leeke

Author:Jim Leeke [Leeke, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPO003030 Sports & Recreation / Baseball / History, BIO016000 Biography & Autobiography / Sports, HIS027090 History / Military / World War I
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

13

Euvezin

Come to the centre of the world’s red heart,

Amid the graves of those who’ve done their part,

Where blood-swept France is beckoning to-day

Through those who’ve given more than life away,

Before the last great valiant chance is gone,

Come on—come on—come on!

—Grantland Rice, 1917

After St. Mihiel much of the First Army pivoted for an immense new offensive in the Meuse-Argonne Sector. Before the Americans could launch their attack, Col. George C. Marshall, General Pershing’s chief of operations, first had to move half a million men, two thousand artillery pieces, and nearly a million tons of supplies and ammunition fifty miles northwest—all secretly, under cover of darkness. The monumental task made Marshall’s name in the army.

Coordinating with broader allied operations, the First Army was ready to go over the top early on September 26. The forty-seven days of combat that followed would end the war. “To call it a battle may be a misnomer,” Pershing later wrote, “yet it was a battle, the greatest, the most prolonged in American history.”1 The Eighty-Ninth Division, however, wasn’t involved in the initial assault. The Fighting Farmers instead maintained the positions they had held at the end of the St. Mihiel fight. The 164th Field Artillery Brigade stayed with the division it had finally rejoined after their long separation.

The area of northeastern France in which Cpl. Pete Alexander and his howitzer crew now found themselves bore various names. To the division it was the Limey-Flirey-Pannes Sector, extending some six miles northwest to southeast, from Lachaussée to outside Rembercourt. The 342nd Field Artillery (FA) called it the Euvezin Sector, for the village south of the front lines where the division had established its headquarters. The Americans here faced a portion of the Hindenburg Line, a strong German defensive position that stretched from the Belgian coast southeastward through France to the Swiss border.

The New York Times described the Hindenburg Line for readers: “It consists of an elaborate system of trenches, multiple lines of barbed wire entanglements, concrete positions for artillery, blockhouses for machine guns, and shelters for the infantry.”2 The Eighty-Ninth Division history adds that the formidable defenses “had been prepared by the German engineers in entire deliberation and after prolonged study both of the ground to be occupied by them and the ground to be occupied by us.”3

Beyond the Hindenburg Line and only twenty-five miles northeast of Euvezin lay the fortified German city of Metz. Situated on the east bank of the Moselle River, Metz was a road and rail hub that had been fought over since the days of the Roman legions. France had relinquished Metz and the rest of the Alsace-Lorraine region in 1871 following the disastrous Franco-Prussian War. The city then became the capital of German Lorraine, where French- and German-speaking residents had lived uneasily together ever since. Metz also was the gateway to the iron ore region of Briey, which the Germans had occupied at the start of the war. In September 1918, writes historian Mitch Yockelson, Metz was “a key to the entire German defenses along the western front.

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