Americans attack at Belleau Wood

On 6 June 1918, the day the German offensive on the Aisne was petering out, the American 2nd Infantry Division went over to the attack for the first time near Château-Thierry. The blow was struck by its 4th Marine Brigade, which for several days had been defending the road from Paris to Metz. At dawn the Marines took Hill 142, and in the afternoon they advanced on the wood near the village of Belleau and on the village of Bouresches. By evening they had taken the hill, Bouresches and the edge of the wood, but they paid for it with losses such as their corps had never before suffered in a single day: 31 officers and 1,056 men killed, wounded and missing. Facts and times are given after the guide of the American Battle Monuments Commission (1938), the British official history and American histories of the Marine Corps. Details, especially the casualty figures of individual battalions, vary from source to source.

Before the attack

The 2nd Division came up to the front by lorry in the last days of May, when the Germans already stood on the Marne, and from 1–2 June it held the line north-west of Château-Thierry, from the Triangle farm buildings on the Paris road through Lucy-le-Bocage to Hill 142. It belonged to General Jean Degoutte’s French XXI Corps. For several days it repulsed attacks by the German Seventh Army, until on 4 June the Germans gave up their advance in this direction and dug in on a line from Vaux through Bouresches and Belleau Wood to Torcy. American histories state that the German command, on learning of the Americans’ presence, ordered that they be denied any success and be dealt the heaviest possible losses.

Degoutte wanted to exploit the exhaustion of the enemy’s advance and improve his line. The order for 6 June provided for two phases. In the morning the French 167th Division was to attack on the Americans’ left, and the Marines were to take Hill 142, from which the Germans could have enfiladed the French. In the afternoon the 2nd Division was to occupy Belleau Wood, Bouresches and the ridge above Torcy. The wood, a former hunting preserve of about 2.5 km², with dense undergrowth, boulders and rocky clefts, looked innocent from a distance. No one had reconnoitred it properly. It was assumed to be lightly held, whereas units of the German 237th Division had dug in there with a dense network of machine-gun nests, supported by artillery.

Hill 142

At 3.45 a.m., after a short artillery preparation, Major Julius Turrill’s 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment went into the attack. Only two of its companies were at the jumping-off positions; the rest were still coming up. The Marines advanced in waves, with fixed bayonets, across an open wheat field swept by machine-gun and artillery fire. The commander of the 67th Company was killed almost at the outset, while Captain George Hamilton’s 49th Company fought its way from copse to copse and even went beyond its objective. Hamilton lost all his junior officers. Before noon the hill was in the hands of the Americans, who had advanced about a kilometre and were beating off one counter-attack after another. During one of them Sergeant Charles Hoffman (real name Ernest Janson), with a few men, broke up a party of twelve Germans with five light machine guns who had crept up on the company’s flank. For this he received the Medal of Honor, according to American histories the first awarded to a Marine in this war. The battalion lost several hundred men within a few hours.

The attack on the wood

At 5 p.m. the second phase began. Major Benjamin Berry’s 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment advanced from the west, through waist-high wheat, on the western edge of the wood, and to its right Major Berton Sibley’s 3rd Battalion, 6th Regiment struck the southern part of the wood from the direction of Lucy. According to the account of the Chicago Tribune correspondent Floyd Gibbons, who went in with Berry’s battalion, Sergeant Daniel Daly, a veteran twice decorated with the Medal of Honor, roused his men with the cry: “Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?” The first waves, advancing in even lines, were cut down by machine guns. Berry was wounded, and his battalion’s attack collapsed in the open field. Gibbons, badly wounded in this attack, lost an eye.

Sibley’s battalion managed to break into the southern part of the wood. There the Marines fought among rocks and fallen trees against hidden machine-gun posts, often hand to hand and with the bayonet, under fire from German snipers. By evening they had won a foothold on the southern edge of the wood, but the rest remained in German hands. A sniper badly wounded in the chest the commander of the 6th Regiment, Colonel Albertus Catlin, who was watching the attack from the front line.

Bouresches

On the right flank, Major Thomas Holcomb’s 2nd Battalion, 6th Regiment (Holcomb was later Commandant of the Marine Corps) attacked Bouresches, a village south-east of the wood. It too advanced across fields under fire from the wood and lost many men. In the evening a handful of Marines from the 96th Company, led by Lieutenants Clifton Cates and James Robertson, broke into the village and drove the Germans out. Reinforcements followed them. According to the Battle Monuments Commission guide, the Americans held Bouresches despite five determined German attempts to retake the village in the following days.

The day’s balance

On the evening of 6 June the 2nd Division held Hill 142, Bouresches and a scrap of Belleau Wood. The 4th Marine Brigade had lost 1,087 men. These were the heaviest losses in a single day in the history of the Marine Corps up to that time, and some authors stress that more Marines were killed that day than in the corps’ entire previous history. Many wounded lay in the fields until nightfall, and the Navy corpsmen’s dressing stations near Lucy could not keep up. The British official history notes briefly that the Americans took Bouresches and occupied the southern part of the wood.

The attack was carried out in amateurish fashion: without reconnaissance, with a short and weak artillery preparation, in waves across open ground, as in 1914. It showed the French and the Germans, however, that the Americans were ready to attack regardless of losses. Gibbons’s dispatch, passed by the censor together with an explicit mention of the Marines, made the Marines famous in the United States within a few days, to the considerable resentment of Army soldiers. The fighting for Belleau Wood was only beginning. It was to last almost three weeks and end only on 25–26 June, when the Marines secured the last scrap of the wood.