Return to Cheppy,
Armistice Day
By James H. Johnston
Looking up
from his cell phone, Jean Lamorlette, mayor of Cheppy ,
France , said, in
French: “Your email mentioned a German
kitchen. I can show it to you.” My translating- partner and I were in Cheppy
to trace my father’s path in the Meuse-Argonne campaign in World War I. That happened 100 years ago. Dad had wanted to return to Cheppy, but never
did, so I was making the journey in his memory.
Lamorlette was
referring to an email I sent with this entry from Dad’s diary: “Stayed in ravine south of Cheppy all night
of [September] 26th and went into Cheppy next morning which had been
taken day before and there cooked our breakfast in Dutch kitchen.” The word “Dutch”
was soldier-slang for German. Remarkably,
the kitchen was still there after 100 years.
But as I would learn, although the French are still grateful for what the
United States did in World Wars I and II, they don’t hold the same views with
respect to our current policy toward Europe.
Caught up by
patriotism and a sense of adventure, my father, Harold Johnston, enlisted in
the Kansas National Guard soon after President Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany
in April 1917. Dad was a
nineteen-year-old high school senior and a farm boy. He had not traveled more than a few dozen
miles from the family farm near Salina , Kansas .
The Kansas
Guard was called to active duty that summer, merged with the Missouri Guard
into the 35th U.S. Infantry Division, and sent to Fort
Sill , Oklahoma , for
training. Captain Harry S. Truman, the
future president from Independence , Missouri ,
was in the same division. The troops
slept in Civil War era tents, practiced with dummy weapons, and drilled in
formations from Napoleon’s time. Measles
killed 46 men. After seven months of
such out-of-date training, they were shipped to France
to fight veteran German troops.
President
Wilson instructed the commander of the American Expeditionary Force in France,
General John Pershing, not to let American troops be fed piecemeal into the maw
of a war that had dragged on since 1914 at a terrible cost in lives. Therefore, Pershing held off committing
Americans to combat in great numbers until he had enough to turn the tide. That proved to be September 26, 1918 , when he launched the
Meuse-Argonne offensive. By this time,
he had 1.2 million Americans in France .
The result proved worth the wait: The Meuse-Argonne campaign was decisive; the
Armistice that ended the war came forty-seven days later.
I had
researched my father’s experience before going to France . In addition to his diary, I read books about
the 35th Division and pored over files at the National
Archives. I wrote an 80-page book aboutmy father’s experiences for my family.
Thus, I often knew exactly when and where Dad was in 1918. For example, he wrote that he passed through
Clermont-en-Argonne on the night of September 24 to within one kilometer of the
front line and moved into final position at 11:00
the next night.
The Division’s
mimeographed battle order indicated
Dad’s machine-gun company was on “Luzemont” to fire in support of the attack
the next morning. The spelling was
wrong; the hill is Buzemont. A heavy
Allied artillery barrage on the German positions began at 2:30 a.m. September 26.
Dad probably couldn’t sleep with shells roaring overhead. He wrote in his diary: “At 5:30 the machine-gun barrage started and
lasted 28 mins. Then 2 min pause then
‘dough boys’ went over there,” meaning the infantry left the trenches to cross
the no man’s land between the lines. The
battlefield was shrouded in fog that morning, adding to the other confusions of
war.
It was a
bright, warm afternoon when I stood on Buzemont on September 25, 2018 . It is not marked on maps or by signs. I found it only because a secretary in the
office of the mayor of the village of
Vauquois recognized it as the name
of a nearby farm. Looming ominously over
the area is the hill Butte Vauquois. In
1918, it was riddled with tunnels and heavily fortified by the Germans. Fortunately, the 100 or so Germans dug in
there surrendered once they saw they were under attack by 28,000
Americans. The wave of dough boys lapped
up the hill and flowed around the sides and then started across open fields
towards Cheppy, the day’s objective.
Before they
could reach the village, however, they encountered Buanthe Creek, where the
Germans had eight machine-gun positions.
An army doctor’s report after the battle lamented that the poorly-trained
Americans advanced into machine-gun fire with their heads down, like “cattle
facing a hail storm,” as though their helmets would deflect bullets. The American attack stalled. Captain Alexander Skinker of St.
Louis , Missouri , was awarded
the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously for leading a failed attack on
the guns.
Lieutenant
Colonel George C. Patton, who rose to fame in World War II, was in charge of a
battalion of tanks that were supposed to rescue the infantry if it bogged down,
and so he ordered his tanks to move forward.
But Patton, who was on foot, became so incensed at the sight of American
troops falling back that he ran to stop them and was shot by the
machine-guns. Mayor Lamorlette said that
a few years ago Patton’s grandson contacted him, just as I had, and he and
Patton’s grandson visited the field where it happened. Today, between where Patton fell and Buanthe
Creek stands the Missouri Memorial. The
state erected it in 1922 to honor its sons who fought there.
Dad wrote that
his unit moved out from its initial position, on Buzemont, around 10:00 on the morning of the attack. Pulling their heavy machine-guns in carts,
they made the three or four miles to the Buanthe Creek ravine where they spent
the night. Harry Truman wrote that his
artillery battery spent its first night around Butte Vauquois but stopped at
the ravine the next morning. Truman remembered
seeing a line of thirty American dead, cut down by the machine-guns.
A short
distance beyond the creek is the German kitchen. Mme. Saunier owns the property today, but her
parents owned it during the war. They
evacuated to Belgium ,
and the house was destroyed in the fighting.
The Germans took over the property and built a reinforced concrete
building in an “L” shape in the backyard.
One leg was an army mess; the other was a hospital. Her parents returned home after the war and lived
in the structure while they rebuilt the house.
The Germans came again in World War II, Mayor Lamorlette said, pointing
to handwritten markings in German on the stone over the door of the old
commandant’s office with the date “1940” clearly visible.
The mayor then
took us to the German army cemetery outside of Cheppy. He said 6,165 bodies, or body parts, are
buried there. We noted the unexpected irony
of markers with Stars of David and Jewish names.
Dad continued
on through Cheppy after breakfast of the second day and turned north towards
the next objective, the village of Charpentry . Dad wrote that his unit “lay on the road
between Cheppy and Charpentry under heavy art. [artillery] fire.” We drove the same road, a road laid out 2,000
years ago for a Roman army. Dad’s unit
followed the first wave of infantry into Charpenty around 5:00 the afternoon of the second day. At this point in his
diary, his chronicle stops with “We wandered around all nite trying.” The
abrupt ending puzzled me for a while.
The village
of Varennes is a mile west of
Cheppy. The day I visited, it was filled
with Americans. Like me, they were in France
for the 100th anniversary. I
joked that there were more Americans in town in 2018 than there had been in the
Meuse-Argonne campaign. My partner and I
bought chicken sandwiches from the boulangerie on the town square and lunched
outside the nearby church with a group of American Army chaplains. They had come to tour the battlefield from a
base in Germany . When I told the group that my father had been
in the 35th Division, a colonel grimaced: “Those boys got roughed up pretty bad. The Germans counterattacked with a whole
division.”
The German
division had been fighting for four years, the 35th for two
days. Many senior officers of the 35th
were killed or wounded in the initial fighting.
One colonel was found cowering in a shell crater. The division was disorganized and spread over
fifteen or twenty square miles. The few
roads were destroyed or clogged. Food,
ammunition, and medical supplies could not be brought forward. Artillery support failed.
The entire
division of 28,000 men had collapsed as a fighting unit. It was pulled off the line after four
days. On the last night of combat, only
300 men could be organized into a defensive line to protect the rest. When relieved on the morning of October 1,
just 4,700 answered muster. The casualty
rate ran as high as 40% in the combat units.
The division never fought again. Although it had been in France
since June, almost all of its 1,057 battle deaths occurred in the four days of
fighting. Little wonder Dad’s narrative
stopped so abruptly. The Division
history book has a picture of men milling around that last morning with the
caption “Surely you remember that day.”
Dad had wanted
to return to Cheppy in 1963. My brother
was in the Army in Germany
and invited him to do just that. But our
mother was not in good health, and Dad wouldn’t go without her. If he had gone, I thought, he would have seen
that the “Dutch kitchen” was still there. The idea of how amazed he would have
been and of the kindness of the mayor and Mme. Saunier brought tears to my eyes
when I thanked them.
I would
explain my pilgrimage to the French I met and would always get a warm
reception. One man contrasted the
relationship between the United States
and France
during World War I with the relationship today:
“We were defeated then. America
saved us. But now, we are alone.” He did not like the idea the United
States ’ threatened retreat from NATO. At a rental car counter, I told two Frenchmen
that my father had fought in World War I in the Meuse-Argonne campaign. Although both World War I and World War II
were things they had only read about, they shook my hand and thanked me for
what my father had done for France . The attendant who drove up with my car did
the same. I was a minor celebrity.
I hadn’t
expected this spontaneous outpouring of emotion for something that happened 100
years. I visited the Argonne
American Cemetery
where 14,000 of the 50,000 men who died in combat in World War I are
buried. It is the largest American
military cemetery in Europe . Each grave was marked for the anniversary
with an American and a French flag to remember that these men made the ultimate
sacrifice for the two countries.
What motivated
these soldiers? Like Dad, patriotism and
a sense of adventure may have been at work.
Then too, this was the war to end all wars. They were brave and self-sacrificing and
valued honor. But what of the United
States today? The comment that France
stands alone was comparatively mild. The
French also respected what the United States
did in World War II. At the Normandy
beaches, we met two women who actually saw the landings and talked about the smiles
on the men’s faces. These generations are
what made America
great in the minds of the French. It is sad
to see how that respect has been squandered lately. If you want to know what made America
great, you need to return to Cheppy.
La Maire in Cheppy |
Cemetery at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where my father is buried. The 35th Division is headquartered at the fort. |