The 35th Division's collapse

     Now that this blog nears its end,  I want to tell the sad story of what happened to Dad's 35th Division composed of the Missouri and Kansas National Guards.  After five days of fighting, it was counterattacked by a veteran German division.  Inexperienced, poorly led, and poorly trained, the 35th collapsed and was taken out of combat for the rest of the war. On its final night of battle, September 30, only 300 men, out of 28,000, formed an organized resistance along the Balny-Charpentry line a few miles north of Cheppy and Varennes.  Their stand was a 20th century Thermopylae except this time the Spartans, the 35th, won.  They were replaced by the First Infantry Division.

The 300 holding the line

     After the war, a memorial to the Meuse-Argonne campaign was erected on the top of Montfaucon, a hill an estimated ten miles north of where the campaign started on September 26.  The circular staircase inside the memorial appears in an earlier post.   A plaque in the building has the map below of the Meuse-Argonne campaign.  At the bottom of the map, you can see where the 35th stopped and the 1st took over.
     When relieved on the morning of October 1, only 4,700 men of the 28,000 in the 35th Division answered muster.  A picture in the Division's history book of the demoralized troops that morning is captioned, "Surely you remember that day."

Surely you remember that day

   

Memorial on Montfaucon

   

       

Meuse-Argonne campaign

     This is how the ridge line between Balny and Charpentry looks today.  It is roughly where the 300 men made a stand to protect the rest of the Division, which was strung out to the south to below where they had started on September 26.  And I should add that the 1st Division, also known as the Big Red One, was in the Normandy landing at Omaha Beach in World War II.  It is now stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, near where my father grew up.

From Balny looked east toward Charpentry in that depression