The AEF's Greatest Artillery Barrage: 1 November 1918 (Part 2) — the View from the 2nd Division

Open Fire

The barrage plan was so constructed that throughout the advance, the entire corps front of more than eight kilometers would be covered by a sheet of shell, shrapnel, and bullets to a depth of twelve hundred meters.

MG Charles Summerall, Commander V Corps

[Editor's note: Seven divisions of the First Army attacked on the morning of 1 November 1918.  I've selected the 2nd Division, recall they were a hybrid Doughboy-Marine formation, for a detailed look. The division was in the center of the action, shared responsibility for the most important first-day objectives, and—because its 4th (Marine) Brigade was the lead formation in the attack—Marine historians have done an excellent job in researching the event and I've drawn heavily on their work here.  Also, if you haven't read it yet, I would suggest reading yesterday's entry on Roads to the Great War before proceeding. MH]

Plan of Attack for the 2nd Division

Shortly after 2100 on 31 October, 2nd Division units received orders affirming that the attack would begin at 0530 on 1 November.  At H-hour (0530), the plan called for Marines of the 4th Brigade to attack on the left. On the right, soldiers of the 23rd Infantry, 3rd Brigade, were to clear the enemy positions in/around Landres Saint-Georges and Bois l'Epasse. When that was done, the 23rd Infantry was to reform with the 3rd Brigade in reserve. On reaching Objective 1, the 4th Brigade was to extend to the right and take over the entire 2nd Division front.

The field artillery brigades of the 1st, 2nd, and 42nd Divisions were to fire a two-hour preparation starting at 0330, followed by a rolling barrage beginning at H-hour. A special concentration of MG fire was to be provided by MG battalions of 2nd and 42nd Divisions. When advancing troops masked their fire, MG units were to revert to control of their parent units. Company D, 1st Gas Regiment, and a light tank detachment from 1st Tank Brigade also supported the attack. 2nd Engineers provided wire cutting details with the attacking infantry.

The 80th Division would attack on the 2nd Division’s left, the 89th Division on the right.

Before H-Hour

Prior to the opening bombardment, Corporal Vincent B. Grube of the 23rd Machine Gun Company, 6th Machine Gun Battalion, moved forward with his machine gun crew. Grube had arrived in France in August with the 1st Separate Machine Gun Replacement Battalion and had joined the 23rd Machine Gun Company on 23 October. In pitch dark, he and his crew trudged single file through forests carrying their heavy equipment. After traversing banks and “rough places where wire, mud, limbs, etc., would trip you,” they came to a field, where they dug in to set up their machine gun post. When Grube and his men began firing their gun, expecting that they would use up to 3,000 rounds during the pre-attack bombardment. When the barrage began, to Grube, it seemed as though the gates of hell had been opened, and all its fury had launched at the enemy. 

All through this my gunner showed the greatest coolness and bravery. The Germans tried to neutralize our fire. Shells landed nearer and nearer. The earth shook as though there was an earthquake. Now and then I could hear a wounded man calling for first aid, and could see the Red Cross men hurrying here and there to give first aid to the injured. Litter bearers hurried them to the rear, and all the time the firing continued. I tried to keep cool, and all the time I prayed for God’s protection. Thoughts of home came to my mind, and I asked God to have mercy and spare my life. It certainly was hell on earth.

When a shell hit 20 feet away, Grube saw “a piece of shrapnel hit my section sergeant right in the forehead, and split his head in half as though an ax had done it.” After Grube went “over the top,” he saw a captain blown to pieces by a shell, and he heard machine guns bullets zip by, “making a funny peeping noise like a sparrow. That’s just what they sounded to me—a sparrow chirping.” 

At 0330 on 1 November, Marines hunkered  down in their holes while the immediate preattack bombardment began. East Tennessee native Private Clarence L. Richmond served as a stretcher-bearer in the 43rd Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Regiment. He would later receive a Distinguished Service Cross for service at Blanc Mont because he “unhesitatingly went through the heaviest machine-gun and artillery fire dressing and carrying wounded. Disregarding his own safety, he refused to take rest or food while there were wounded needing attention.”

Richmond’s war diary described events the night of 1 November. He remarked that several American batteries of 75mm cannon fired nearby, and that the Germans replied with a counter-barrage, but “not near in proportion to ours. The noise was so great that I could only hear a few enemy shells which fell right near us.” Unable to sleep, Richmond “watched the horizon, which was a continuous flash of fire from the hundreds of guns taking part in the barrage.”

Impact

Captain James McBrayer Sellers, commanding officer of the 78th Company, 2nd Battalion, 6th Regiment, had already been wounded and received the Distinguished Service and the Navy Cross for his actions on 6 June at Bouresches in the Battle of Belleau Wood as a first lieutenant. As he recalled the bombardment on the night of 31 October/1 November, Sellers noted that “the artillery was brought up very close to us. It was the only time I ever felt nervous. The artillery was just a few yards behind us, firing all night, and I could not sleep very well. I did not relish the situation and really felt uneasy.

The artillery bombardment also included gas shells: “Summerall was in full agreement with Liggett that the fire plan drench the enemy with various kinds of gas, especially on the enemy’s artillery batteries and most powerful strong points.”  The task of setting up the gas attack fell to the 1st Gas Regiment’s 2nd Battalion, which supported V Corps. In the week prior to the final attack, the battalion’s Company D supporting the Marines installed 160 gas projectors 1.5 km south of Saint-Georges and 40 gas projectors a similar distance southwest of Landres-et-Saint-Georges. 

The gas projectors were tubes eight inches in diameter and closed at one end, resting on a 28-pound steel base plate. They came in three lengths—30, 33, and 48 inches—and weighed 65, 105, and 150 pounds, respectively. They were set up in groups of 20 in a 9.75m-long trench perpendicular to the line of attack. Covered with dirt so only a small amount of the tube stuck out of the ground, they were easy to camouflage. They fired cylindrical drums weighing 65 pounds and carrying 30 pounds of gas or high explosives for a maximum range of 1,850 yards. When the attack came, Company D shot 80 canisters of phosgene gas on enemy targets south of Saint-Georges. The 1st Gas Regiment’s chaplain, Army first lieutenant James Thayer Addison, recalled that “since the wind was south and carried through the village and down the ravine northward, enemy casualties were heavy. Prisoners later reported some 300 gas cases, and more than 20 bodies of men killed by gas were found on the position.” One minute before H-hour, “a group of 40 projectors discharged high explosive bombs upon the same targets, and still another launched the same number upon machine-gun nests southeast of Landres-et St. Georges.” 

Stokes mortars joined the barrage, firing 50 rounds of thermite bombs.  Stokes mortars were four inches in diameter and 48 inches long, firing a 25-pound cylindrical drum holding seven pounds of gas, high explosive, thermite, or phosphorus, for a maximum distance of 1,150 yards. Chaplain Addison concluded that “the weapons described can produce a far more concentrated cloud of gas than it is possible to produce with artillery. Hence the Special Gas Troops have a field which it is impossible for the artillery to fill. The artillery, of course, have a tremendous advantage in range.

H-hour+

A Rolling Barrage Supported the Advance

At H-hour, officers blew their whistles and the Marines moved quickly into a dense fog, behind a rolling barrage designed to fall roughly 100 yards ahead of them. Lighter guns would fire rounds to land just ahead of the advancing men while heavier weapons fired a few hundred meters farther on. In previous attacks, the Germans had rushed machine guns into the gap in no-man’s-land to mow down the first line of advancing troops. To counter this maneuver, John Lejeune’s chief of staff, Army Colonel James C. Rhea, devised yet another plan: the Marines would pull back 300 hundred yards just before the planned artillery bombardment began. The rolling barrage would then be calibrated to fall into the no-man’s-land, wiping out the enemy machine guns before the Marines advanced.  All this supporting fire was to be perfectly timed at so many meters per minute, depending on the terrain. To move the artillery forward, strict timetables, transportation paths, and new locations were planned.

A complement of nearly 100 troops from 2nd Engineers also charged forward with the Marines to blaze a path through the barbed wire. In addition, 15 light French tanks manned by Americans went forward; five tanks accompanied each of the 5th and 6th Regiments, with the other five serving initially to support the Army’s 23rd Infantry on the right, before falling back into reserve.

Mobile Divisional Artillery Supporting the Advance

The Marines moved forward through intense smoke caused by the rolling barrage. In dispatches at 0800 and 0900, Major Hamilton’s 1st Battalion, 5th Regiment, intelligence officer, Second Lieutenant Leonard E. Rea, notified Colonel Feland’s headquarters that the battalion had met its first objective, just south of Landreville. They had suffered five officer and “few” enlisted casualties. The battalion had captured a battery of 77mm cannon, but “few prisoners and no material.

The division's artillery, 75s and 155s moved forward with the infantry to support the advance. Captain Pell W. Foster’s Battery B of the 12th Field Artillery fired for six hours to support the 6th Marines in the attack. He remembered that, even though the artillery batteries were situated in plain view, the Germans failed to launch counter-battery attacks. To keep up with the rapid advance of the Marines, his battery moved forward to the Landres and Landres-et-Saint-Georges road to continue their rolling barrage just ahead of the Marines.

At the end of the day on 1 November, the 4th Brigade had captured its objectives and, in some places, had pressed slightly beyond to a line of exploitation. The brigade then dug in, anticipating that the 3rd Brigade’s 23rd Infantry Regiment would pass through their lines the next day as planned and lead the 2nd Division’s advance north toward the town of Fosse. 

Breakthrough: Advancing to Sedan

The Big Lesson of  1 November

Unassailable in its logic, however, was one conclusion of a key participant in the attack on November 1. If we are to be economical with our men, we  must be prodigal with guns and ammunition.

MG Charles Summerall, Commander V Corps

Source: Heroic Deeds, Heroic Men: The U.S. Marine Corps and the Final Phase of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive 1–11 November 1918, David J. Bettez, PhD; Maps from the American Battle Monuments Commission