Armistice Day

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] 26^th 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 out 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 35^th 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  After seven months of such out-of-date training, they were shipped to France to fight veteran German troops.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 35^th Division and pored over files at the National Archives.  I wrote an 80-page book about my 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 100^th 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 hat my father had been in the 35^th 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 35^th for two days.  Many senior officers of the 35^th 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 Frenchman 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.