First American soldiers killed in action

Early on the morning of 3 November 1917 a German detachment raided the trenches of the American infantry near the village of Bathelémont in Lorraine. Corporal James Gresham and Privates Thomas Enright and Merle Hay of Company F, 16th Infantry Regiment, were killed. They were the first soldiers of the American Expeditionary Forces killed in action at the front. They were not the first Americans in uniform to die in France: on 4 September German bombs had fallen on an American army hospital near Camiers on the English Channel, killing a doctor, Lieutenant William Fitzsimons, and three privates. Gresham, Enright and Hay were, however, the first to fall in the trenches, fighting the enemy.

A raid after the relief

From 20 October the battalions of the 1st Infantry Division had in turn been getting to know the front in a quiet sector of the French 18th Division between Nancy and Lunéville. On the night of 2–3 November the second battalions of the infantry regiments relieved the first. The 2nd Battalion of the 16th Infantry took over the trenches in front of Bathelémont, on the edge of a bare hill jutting out towards the Marne–Rhine canal. The soldiers were still finding their way around the maze of trenches when at about 3 a.m. violent German artillery fire fell on them. After a while the fire shifted and formed a so-called box barrage around one platoon: it cut it off from the rest of the battalion and prevented reinforcements from coming up or the men from withdrawing.

Under cover of the fire German stormtroopers approached the wire, blew gaps in it with elongated explosive charges and jumped into the trench. The Americans realised the enemy was among them only when grenades began to explode. The raiders fought with pistols, trench knives and bayonets. After a quarter of an hour or so, according to some accounts after about an hour, they withdrew, taking with them a sergeant and ten soldiers, several of them wounded. Three bodies were left in the trench. Gresham, a 24-year-old corporal from Evansville, Indiana, had been in the army since 1914. Thirty-year-old Enright, from Pittsburgh, was a veteran of the fighting in the Philippines and of Pershing’s expedition to Mexico. His throat had been cut. The youngest, 21-year-old Hay, a farm machinery mechanic from Glidden, Iowa, had volunteered in May 1917. The raid struck on the night of the relief, when the new garrison did not yet know the ground.

“The passer-by will stop and uncover his head”

The dead were buried at Bathelémont with military honours, according to the history of the 1st Division on the following day, according to other sources on 5 November. French and American soldiers stood in a hollow square around the graves. The commander of the French division, General Paul Bordeaux, said that the death of “this humble corporal and these privates” spoke to those assembled with extraordinary grandeur, and asked that their remains be left forever in the soil of Lorraine. The graves were to bear the inscription: “Here lie the first soldiers of the United States to fall on the fields of France for justice and liberty”. He ended with the words: “Corporal Gresham, Private Enright, Private Hay, in the name of France I thank you.”

In the United States the news of the first dead was received with emotion. Their names and portraits appeared on posters calling for war fund drives, and the road from Des Moines to the army’s Camp Dodge was named after Merle Hay. Contrary to General Bordeaux’s words, the bodies did not remain in France: in 1921 they were taken back to their home towns. The monument that the people of Lorraine erected at Bathelémont in November 1918 was destroyed by the Germans in 1940. The raid was a small episode, but it showed that the American soldiers, who had been training in France for only a few months, still had much to learn.