The cool morning of September 26, 2018, found me standing on Buzemont hill in northeastern France looking at Butte Vauquois, a hill two thousand yards away. Exactly a hundred years earlier, my father had been in the same spot firing a machine gun at German positions on the Butte. It was the beginning of the Meuse-Argonne offensive that would end World War I. His experiences as told in this blog explain why I prefer to call it Armistice Day.
My dad, 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 who had never traveled more than a few dozen miles from the family farms near Salina, Kansas.
The Kansas Guard was called to active duty in the summer of 1917 and merged with the Missouri Guard into the 35th U.S. Infantry Division. They were sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for training. Harry Truman was an officer in the same division. The United States was so ill-prepared for world war that the trainees slept in Civil War era tents, practiced with dummy weapons, and drilled in formations from Napoleon’s time. Dry and dusty Fort Sill bore little resemblance to the cold rains they would encounter a year later in France, and their antiquated training didn’t prepare them to fight a German army that had been at war since 1914.
Their commander, General John Pershing, did not want the Americans to be fed into the war piecemeal and refused to commit Americans to combat in great numbers until he had enough to turn the tide. That proved to be September 26, 1918. By this time, there were 1.2 million American soldiers in France. It was worth the wait. The armistice came just forty-seven days later.
I had prepared for the trip by studying my father’s diary, but it only covered his training at Fort Sill. The Army confiscated such diaries upon a soldier’s arrival in France. However, Dad did add short summaries of the intervening months from memory when he got the diary back. I also read books about the 35th Division and poured over the division’s records at the National Archives.
The division’s mimeographed battle order for the offensive indicated Dad’s machine-gun company was to be on Buzemont on the morning of September 26, 1918 and was to fire on Butte Vauquois. The Allied artillery barrage was to open earlier at 2:30 a.m. Dad probably didn’t sleep that night 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.” He meant the infantry climbed out of their trenches and began to cross the no man’s land between the lines. Americans began dying. It was a battlefield shrouded in fog that morning, adding to the other confusions of war.
A wave of doughboys more than a mile wide swept up and around Butte Vauquois, which proved lightly defended, and on towards the villages of Varennes and Cheppy. Before they could reach Cheppy, however, the infantry encountered Buanthe Creek, where the Germans had eight machine-gun positions. An army doctor’s report at the National Archives lamented that the poorly-trained Americans advanced into machine-gun fire with their heads down, like “cattle facing a hail storm,” seemingly believing the thin helmets would stop bullets.
Lieutenant Colonel George C. Patton, of World War II fame, 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. Patton, on foot, was incensed by the sight of American troops falling back. He ran to stop them and was seriously wounded by machine-gun fire.
Dad’s unit moved off Buzemont around 10:00 a.m. 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.
Before my trip to France in 2018, I had exchanged emails with the mayor of Cheppy, Jean Lamorlette, and he met me when I got there. We exchanged pleasantries with my partner translating. Then, after checking my email on his cell phone, the mayor looked up and said, in French: “Your email mentioned a German kitchen. I can show it to you.”
He 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 for me to see.
Mme. Saunier inherited the property from her parents who had owned it when the war broke out in 1914. They evacuated to Belgium, and the house was destroyed that same year. The Germans took over the property and built a large, reinforced concrete bunker in an “L” shape into a hill in the backyard. One leg was an army mess; the other was a hospital. I stood in the “Dutch kitchen” where my father had breakfasted on September 27, 1918. It looked no different from how Dad must have seen it. Even the 100-year-old electric wiring worked.
Dad continued on through Cheppy after breakfast and turned north towards the next objective, the village of Charpentry. He wrote his unit “lay on the road between Cheppy and Charpentry under heavy art. [artillery] fire.” That road, straight as an arrow and on an exposed ridge, was laid out 2,000 years ago by the Romans. The exposed road may have suited a Roman army to prevent it from being surprised by ambushers with swords, but it was a deadly route for Americans facing 20th century artillery.
Dad’s unit followed the first wave of infantry into Charpenty around 5:00 on the afternoon of the second day. Then his chronicle stops with “We wandered around all nite trying.” The abrupt ending puzzled me for a while. What had happened?
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 of Meuse-Argonne. I jokingly exaggerated that there were more Americans in town in 2018 than there had been in 1918. I met a group of American Army chaplains from a base in Germany. When I told them 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.” That is what had happened.
The Germans 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 terrified 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.
The entire division of 28,000 men collapsed as a fighting unit. It was pulled out of combat after four days. On the last night, 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 men 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’s history book has a picture of men milling around that last morning with the caption “Surely you remember that day.”
But Pershing had amassed such a large American force in France that the 35th was quickly replaced and forty-three days later the German generals agreed to an armistice. It was only an agreement to cease fighting. The guns went quiet, and both sides breathed a huge sigh of relief. But there was no peace treaty.
So, Pershing’s army stayed in Europe in case the war resumed, and the 35th got the training it had not gotten in Oklahoma. According to division history:
"[T]he rigorous training schedule laid down by G.H.Q. [general headquarters] was followed. [A]ll units received splendid tactical training and the entire command was brought up to a very high state of efficiency. Beginning in early 1919 a comprehensive athletic schedule was amended by providing a period each afternoon to be devoted to mass athletics… Teams of all kinds were organized and competitions within the Division and with other divisions were of frequent occurrence. The football and basketball teams made a splendid showing in their contests, while the fighting stable and wrestling teams defeated many of the stars of other organizations of the A.E.F. [American Expeditionary Force]."
Once peace negotiations began in January 1919, Pershing could relax. Dad’s diary, confiscated upon arrival in France, was returned and his narrative resumed. Pershing himself reviewed the 35th Division, in a drenching rain, on February 17, 1919. Dad and his buddies were able to take short trips around France, once finding “Beacou[p] mademoiselle of every kind,” before boarding the boat for home on April 13. The Versailles Treaty that officially ended the war wasn’t signed until June 1919.
In 1947, the veterans of World War II began lobbying for the holiday to be renamed to honor them as well as the dwindling number of veterans from the First World War. Congressman Edward Rees of Kansas, who was not a veteran of either war, introduced a bill to rename the holiday “Veterans Day.” It was signed into law in 1953. But to my father, who served in both wars, it was always Armistice Day. Among the sports Pershing devised to instill a fighting spirit in the 35th was boxing. As a result, when I was growing up, some thirty-two years later, my father made me take boxing lesson, so I also think of it as Armistice Day.
 |
| Roman road to Charpentry today |
 |
| Cemetery at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where my father is buried. The 35th Division is headquartered at the fort. |
