"Retreat? Hell, we just got here!"

June 10, 2018 11:53 AM

The battle of the "Bois de la Brigade de Marine". One hundred years ago United States Marines fought the brutal Battle of Belleau Wood. As the Allies struggled to contain the German spring offensive (previously), a Marine force and a French unit turned back a German attack, then drove them out of a dense, small forest, suffering nearly ten thousand casualties. Ever since Belleau Wood has been legendary in American military culture.

The most famous quote from the battle is "Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?", hollered by sergeant Daniel Daly. Another classic phrase constitutes this post's title.

Supposedly one or more German officers referred to their American opponents as "devil dogs" ("Teufel Hunde", "Teufelshund", or "Höllenhunde"), a nickname the Marines swiftly embraced, as with this Devil Dog recruiting poster.

One map.
Three items from the Library of Congress.
One veteran's memoir.
Indy Neidell's video account. Another.
A marching band march composed not long after the battle.
The US memorial on site.

Most recently, from Wikipedia, "In April 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron gifted the United States a sessile oak sapling from Belleau Wood as part of his state visit." (linked source)

Previously.

posted by doctornemo (11 comments total)

I'm no historian, much less a military historian. So -- grain of salt, etc and etc.

Here goes -- the U.S. forces had just started onto these horrific killing fields. They had not learned the terrible lessons that the German, French, and British had already learned. (Though they didn't learn these lessons fast enough to prevent the unbelievable causalities in the first year(s) of that war. Battle of The Frontiers, anyone?) And what is it that they hadn't learned? They hadn't learned that you don't go running into machine gun fire. They hadn't learned what it is to fight against modern artillery. They hadn't learned that full-on charges against fortified positions was just insane. They hadn't learned about trench warfare, defensive warfare. They hadn't learned about barbed wire. They fought the way that the Germans, the French, and the English fought at the beginning of that conflict, which is to say they fought like fools.

The first world war was the first war that was fought with the new machines and tactics to use those machines. War just wasn't fun anymore, dang it, you couldn't just go out of a pretty afternoon and run at the other guys and then here comes your calvary and here comes their calvary and it's pretty much done inside of a week. The US should have known much of this, as the US civil war had many, many lessons to be absorbed. But -- now take the industrial revolution, and figure out what it could do from 1865 (the end of the US civil war) to 1914 (the start of WW1.)

These human beings were incredibly brave. They fought with an unreal intensity. They lost way, way more men than needed to be lost in this battle.

The first world was was, like all war, absolutely insane. The difference being that it was insane with all of the new weapons created in the industrial revolution, and all of the insane new tactics to use those weapons, and the willingness of nation-states to absorb the loss of millions of their best and brightest. And to bankrupt themselves in the process.

I'm going to just put down one dot. I don't want to fill the fourteen pages with all the dots it would take to recognize these men.

.
posted by dancestoblue at 1:22 PM on June 10, 2018 [15 favorites]

They hadn't learned that you don't go running into machine gun fire. They hadn't learned what it is to fight against modern artillery. They hadn't learned that full-on charges against fortified positions was just insane.

Did the Allies not tell them that?

I remember that there was a to-do over our insistence that US troops not be under foreign command; maybe they told us, but our donkeys did not listen.
posted by thelonius at 2:35 PM on June 10, 2018

From what I've read Pershing through trench warfare was a mistake, and that American troops could get beyond that with excellent shooting and sheer elan.
Throughout 1918 unit after unit had to learn better.
posted by doctornemo at 3:16 PM on June 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

I think, to be fair, it's one thing to hear about it or to be lectured about it, an another thing to traumatized by first hand experience after a week in a trench, and/or for your unit to be traumatized collectively and then adapt accordingly. For better or worse, the Marines engaged the Germans after the Kaiserschlacht had broken through the initial French lines, so they weren't caught up in the static network of trench warfare and the terrain was closer to the open battleground of The Battle of Frontiers or the Eastern Front. So it's not like the Marines were charging against the same deathtraps that had dominated The Somme or Ypres. It was, in some ways, more akin to the British defense of Mons in the early days of the war, where long range marksmanship could count because the trenches weren't quite as well developed and the barbed wire wasn't quite so thick.

A Marine friend of mine had a great grandfather who fought in the Bois de la Brigade de Marine, and so I wished him a "Happy" Belleau Wood Day, and he said it was nicest thing anyone's said to him all year.
posted by bl1nk at 3:18 PM on June 10, 2018 [11 favorites]

The French and British high command wanted the enthusiastic but amateurish Americans to be fed into veteran units piecemeal so they could learn the ropes from veterans. Pershing was concerned that too much time spent hanging out with the Tommies and Poilus would see the Doughboys infected with their, shall we say, fatalism. He wanted his troops to keep the pep up. Whether that was the right decision is an open question.
posted by BWA at 6:46 AM on June 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

205 comments in a thread about interrupting. 5 comments in a thread about the most disastrous global war in 100 years.

WW1 was the first war in which humans didn't understand the level of which technology could improve killing. It was planned by generals who matriculated with swords and horses and fought by men using airplanes and poison gas to kill each other.
posted by lstanley at 8:28 AM on June 11, 2018 [5 favorites]

WWI is a very quiet subject even in the centenary, lstanley . Americans are especially uninterested.
posted by doctornemo at 12:47 PM on June 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

Nobody wants to talk about it because it's insanely difficult to talk about. It's just so far beyond the comprehension of modern people (and presumably even of those on the "home front" who weren't there to witness it contemporaneously) to dig a trench across an entire continent and designate it a killing zone for years, while the entire industrialized world is turned solely to the manufacture of murder tools and murder tool accessories.

It doesn't help that the war is mainly taught (at least in US history textbooks) as a failure: stupid politicians and diplomats blundering into tangling alliances, a "stupid" flashpoint as one Austrian guy is killed in Sarajevo, stupid generals fighting with obsolete weapons and tactics they didn't understand. A prideful aristocracy drive by antique notions of honor, a gullible citizenry riled up by jingoistic rhetoric and propaganda. The vengeful victors who exacted too much in reparations and so sowed the seeds of Hitlerism.

There are notes of truth to all of this, but the reality is of course far more nuanced, and difficult to teach at the middle school level (where it was in my curriculum as a student).

Essentially, it is treated as a dress rehearsal for WWII, which is much easier to sell: For one, there is a relative wealth of film and photographic evidence. The songs and movies make sense to the modern ear, and the recordings aren't shellac 78s, so they sound decent. With the Holocaust, it's easier to paint as a "moral war," and the world order that grew out of the later war seems to have been more lasting, permanent, and relevant to "modern" people, those living either during the Cold War or in the Pre-Trump, Post-Fukuyama Globalist order.

Perhaps that will change. We are in some ways moving away from the post-WWII world order, back to an older "great powers" model. In some ways, we're also once again playing with weapons we don't understand, but instead of machine guns and gas, it's information technology, mass surveillance, weaponized news, drone warfare.
posted by LiteOpera at 1:32 PM on June 11, 2018 [9 favorites]

In the '70s there were still WWI veterans around to talk to. In my hometown in Pennsylvania there were people who had fought on both sides. In particular there was a retired German professor who had spent a lot of time in an observation balloon basket. He became acquainted with an American vet around the corner and after comparing notes of where they had been fighting they realized that the American had almost certainly been trying to shoot down the German's balloon.
posted by lagomorphius at 6:06 PM on June 11, 2018 [5 favorites]

posted by LiteOpera at 3:32 PM

Great comment, LiteOpera, favorited, flagged as fantastic. Really thoughtful, accurate. In a good world your comment gets side-barred.
posted by dancestoblue at 11:16 PM on June 11, 2018

Well said, LiteOpera. WWII is really the easier war to teach and recall.

But it's even harder than that.

For example, when you mention "to dig a trench across an entire continent and designate it a killing zone for years", that's the western front (and to an extent the Italian, and perhaps the Salonica). But it leaves off the huge eastern front and wars raging around Istanbul's battered empire (which overlap). That brings in the Russian revolution, the collapse of the Ottomans, different questions of nationalism, the extraordinary and epic Russian civil war (which includes Lenin's invasion of Poland, aimed at Berlin!). Heck, it's still hard to get westerners interested in eastern European history and politics for all kinds of reasons, starting with religion.

In the US, there's also the fact that we didn't get in until 1917 - really, 1918. So our role is relatively minimal, even though the mobilization was immense and the battles horrific.

The thing is ginormous, and ramifies in complexity the more one looks at it. At least for me.
posted by doctornemo at 10:38 AM on June 13, 2018 [2 favorites]