Russell Reese--Meuse-Argonne

Reese Russell, a tall, slender, fun-loving, and handsome young man with jet-black hair and dark brown eyes, was thirty-four years old when the United States entered World War I in April 1917. He came from the little Appalachian mill town of Cedar Bluff in Tazewell County, Virginia, a place of quiet mountain charm where community picnics, summer bandstand concerts, and church revival meetings were the order of the day. He and most of his friends had never been more than twenty miles from home. Why travel, people joked, when they already lived in the most beautiful place on earth? 

Russell registered for the draft in the summer of 1917, and the U.S. Army called his number soon afterward. Putting down his banjo and straw hat, he kissed his girl good-bye and joined the 317th Infantry Regiment of the 80th “Blue Ridge” Infantry Division, a unit made up of draftees from rural Virginia, West Virginia, and western Pennsylvania. 

He went to France and fought in the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne, at obscure places like Béthin-court and the Dannevoux. After less than a week in combat in the fall of 1918, he was evacuated to the rear, with poison in his lungs and demons in his mind. Neither ever left him. In 1919 he came home to Cedar Bluff to spend “the rest of his life,” as his daughter remembered, “traveling a lonely road, out of step with his family, his friends, and his surroundings.” His lungs ruined, he could no longer breathe properly and collapsed periodically into uncontrollable spasms of coughing. 

He never spoke of what he had seen in France, and forbade his family to mention the war in his presence. His uniform, helmet, gas mask, rifle, and bayonet stayed packed away in a trunk, strictly off-limits to his family. When he wasn’t looking, his children secretly opened the trunk and fingered the mementos. To them, he had become a remote presence. As they handled the items, the children tried to guess what their father had experienced in the foggy, shell-torn fields and forests of the bloodiest battle in American history, the Meuse-Argonne. 

Russell began drinking as soon as he returned home. He drank through the economic recession of 1919, when an ex-Doughboy could not find a job, and the boom years that followed. He drank through the Great Depression, and during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidential administrations, when the New Deal’s Promised Land always seemed just a step away. 

In 1941 America entered the Second World War, and Russell drank even more, as if in sympathy for the GIs about to die, or in realization that his war—the so-called War to End All Wars—had been fought in vain. And he never slept. He went through the motions—lying down in bed between midnight and 5:00 A.M.—but he never closed his eyes in sleep, “unless,” his daughter recalled, “one could call the stupor he fell into when he drank in his later years, sleep.” Perhaps he feared that his dreams would take him back to the war. He died a broken man at age sixty-one. As his daughter heard taps played over his lonely country grave, a sense of relief enveloped her. At last, her father’s torments had ended, and he could sleep.

The Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery and Memorial at Romagne, containing the graves of 14,246 soldiers who died in World War I, is the largest U.S. cemetery in Europe. Carefully tended by the American Battle Monuments Commission, the cemetery presents a splendid vista, with a beautiful Romanesque chapel overlooking rows of crosses and Stars of David on the green and gentle slopes of the hillside below. 

A beautiful spring or summer day that brings tour buses packed with tourists trundling out of Paris for the four-hour drive to the U.S. World War II cemetery at Omaha Beach, where crowds of teenagers giggle and banter while aged veterans and tourists walk among the graves, leaves the Meuse-Argonne cemetery quiet and largely deserted. Here and there couples or families stroll about, occasionally stooping to read a tombstone. Except for those making pilgrimages to the graves of great-grandfathers they never knew, or groups of soldiers on leave from nearby bases, the majority of these visitors are European, not American; and the civilian and military delegations that lay wreaths in the chapel, or children who lay roses or little bunches of wildflowers at graves, are most often French, Belgian, English, or German. The Argonne Forest has become a resort for nature lovers and hikers. Farmers till the surrounding fields, where over a hundred thousand American soldiers spilled their blood in the autumn of 1918. American veterans’ organizations have recently erected a few markers commemorating their regiments or divisions, but most monuments date from the 1920s or 1930s. They receive few visitors. 

The memorials at Montfaucon and Blanc Mont—the former a two-hundred-foot-high granite Doric column capped by a statue symbolizing liberty, and the latter an elaborately engraved yellow limestone tower sited atop a battle-scarred hill—are two of the most stunning American battlefield monuments anywhere. Though well tended by the American Battle Monuments Commission, they typically stand deserted. Two monuments erected by the states of Pennsylvania and Missouri near the towns of Varennes and Cheppy in the 1920s—the former a Greek-style structure beautifully situated overlooking the Aire River valley where thousands of Pennsylvanians died in 1918, and the latter a fine bronze sculpture of a triumphant female figure holding aloft a wreath—are neglected and in disrepair. 

Elsewhere in the Meuse-Argonne, markers and monuments to American units like the all-black 371st Infantry Regiment were mutilated by the Germans in World War II and have never been repaired; French farmers destroyed others, finding them a nuisance to their plows, and many have disappeared under brambles and weeds. Many sites of heroism and agony in the Meuse-Argonne remain unmarked: places like Molleville Farm, where the 29th Division endured an inferno of fire and blood; the Bois de Fays, where the 4th Division suffered weeks of unremitting torment; the Bois des Ogons, where the 80th Division tore itself to pieces to defend a general’s reputation; and the Bois de Rappes, where regiments of the 5th Division dissolved as they repeatedly took and retook the woods during a few grim days in October. 

Farms, forests, and fields all remain essentially as they were in 1918, and the visitor may easily envision the events of over 100 years past. Sites where Americans won Medals of Honor remain unmarked—except for that of Corporal Alvin C. York, which researchers rediscovered nearly ninety years after the war ended. And while curio collectors have picked clean American Civil War battlefields and many World War II sites, visitors to the Meuse-Argonne can still trace individual trenches, rifle pits, bunkers, and craters and pick spent cartridges, rusted equipment, and (dangerously) unexploded ordnance out of the ground almost at will. 

Back in the United States the neglect is just as marked. In Europe, Australia, and Canada the dwindling few veterans of the First World War are counted one by one and publicly memorialized on television and in newspapers when they die; most Americans pay scant attention to the departure of the last Doughboys. The burning curiosity that drove Reese Russell’s children to ponder their father’s old rifle and uniform and read his diary is all but gone today. German World War II and American Civil War militaria fetch high prices at public sales; similar items from World War I go cheap. Print and manuscript letters, diaries, and memoirs of American veterans of World War I gather dust in attics or are sold cheap on Internet auction sites. Veterans’ papers and memorabilia, donated to national and local libraries and archives in hopes of enlightening future generations, typically go for decades without being examined by researchers. Johnny Reb, Billy Yank, and the GI live forever in the American psyche. The Doughboy has been forgotten. LESS than twenty years after the war ended, complained Brigadier General Dennis Nolan, who had served on General John J. Pershing’s staff, hardly anyone could name, much less describe, America’s greatest battle in the late war. “Veterans said to me in their speeches and in private that the American people did not know anything about the Meuse-Argonne battle,” he said. “I have never understood why.”

Fought over a period of forty-seven days, from September 26 to November 11, 1918, the Meuse-Argonne sucked in 1.2 million American soldiers, leaving 26,277 of them dead and 95,786 wounded. Almost all of these casualties came in a period of about three weeks of heavy fighting, and they amounted to about half of the total American casualties for the war. Twenty-two American infantry divisions participated in the battle, along with 840 airplanes and 324 tanks. About twenty-four hundred artillery pieces fired over four million shells, more than the Union army fired during the entire four years of the American Civil War. No single battle in American military history, before or since, even approaches the Meuse-Argonne in size and cost, and it was without question the country’s most critical military contribution to the Allied cause in the First World War.

And yet, within a few years of its end, nobody seemed to realize that it had taken place. The U.S. Army, distracted by downsizing and funding cuts, made no comprehensive attempt to digest all of the lessons it had learned from the largest and bloodiest battle in its history. It neither compiled a complete official history of America’s military role in the conflict nor sponsored full-scale studies of the Meuse-Argonne or any other battle. Instead, departments and individual officers independently examined various aspects of the conflict, such as the roles of artillery and tanks, and buried their findings in specialist publications. Young officers who entered the army in the 1920s and 1930s knew more about the Battle of Gettysburg than the Meuse-Argonne. 

By the time the United States entered World War II in December 1941, the army had hardly learned the lessons of the first war, let alone begun to comprehend the conditions of the second. In 1919, Frederick Palmer, a former war correspondent, wrote a chatty patriotic book titled Our Greatest Battle (The Meuse-Argonne). Since then, only two books about the battle have appeared in print, both of them brief academic studies focusing on its operational and strategic aspects.

So far as the American public is concerned, the Meuse-Argonne might as well never have occurred. Although the battle receives passing mention in popular studies of the United States during the First World War, it gets nothing like the attention it deserves as one of the largest and most critical military engagements in the nation’s history. The Doughboy, meanwhile, remains a mystery. Millions of Americans have relatives—fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers—who served in the war. Who were these soldiers? What did they believe in? What did they experience? And how did they change? 

The nature of the war they fought remains a mystery too. Some books and movies portray it as a grand parade, with intrepid Doughboys flying planes, firing a lot of guns, sending the Germans packing home, and saving Europe. Others present the war as an endless charnel nightmare, with innocent men reduced to mud-soaked automatons, slaughtered en masse on a static battlefield of trenches and barbed wire. The story of that generation, and its greatest fight in the Meuse-Argonne, is a tale of heroism—of untested draftees and recruits who went up against the best-trained army in the world, and drove it from some of the strongest defensive terrain in France. 

It is also a chronicle of tragedy—of thickheaded nationalism and military ineptitude that sent thousands of men uselessly to their deaths. More than anything, it is a story of transformation. In the Meuse-Argonne, over a million American soldiers learned that modern war had nothing to with the waving banners and glorious cavalry charges that stocked the pages of the books they had read in childhood. They saw thousands of comrades killed or disabled. They learned how artillery could blow a man to pieces, how machine guns could slash down dozens of soldiers at a time, and how poison gas could dissolve lungs. They witnessed all the stupidity, bravery, cruelty, kindness, and pathos of which humanity was capable. They discovered the meaning of comradeship on a deeper level than they had ever thought possible. They were physically and mentally stunted—and yet they grew. 

Many men took their first steps toward greatness on the battlefields of the Meuse-Argonne. Flamboyant young Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur led his brigade of the 42d “Rainbow” Division from the front. He promised to take a critically important hill even if it cost every drop of his men’s blood, and survived an artillery bombardment that killed everyone around him. Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, commanding the U.S. Army Air Service, claimed to have proven airpower’s potential, although the Doughboys claimed his fliers never showed up when it mattered. Colonel George C. Marshall single-handedly managed the biggest exercise in military logistics that the country had ever seen. Lieutenant Colonel George S. Patton led tanks in battle for the first time, saw a vision of his past-life “ancestors” in the clouds above the enemy lines, and split the skull of a terrified American soldier with his shovel. Captain Harry Truman distinguished himself under fire, even as the infantry division that his artillery battery supported collapsed. Private James M. Cain’s harrowing experiences as a runner provided the material for one of his first stories. War correspondent Damon Runyon watched the exhausted, haunted men of the Lost Battalion stagger out of the Argonne Woods, and reported one of his first newspaper articles. 

Other men became heroes in an instant, and then drifted into obscurity. Corporal Alvin C. York killed 32 German soldiers and helped to capture 132 more, along with thirty-five machine guns. The next morning he wandered over the empty battlefield, tormented with guilt and desperately seeking someone, American or German, to save. Private John Lewis Barkley occupied an abandoned French tank behind the German lines and single-handedly crushed an enemy counterattack. Lieutenant Samuel Woodfill put the marksmanship that he had honed on moose and grizzly bears in Alaska to use on the Germans, although he had to finish off his last two victims with a pickax. Major Charles Whittlesey led a composite battalion of Doughboys from Brooklyn and the western plains states through five days of hell, and emerged tormented by demons that made the remainder of his short life a misery. For each man who found fame during or after the battle, there are thousands whose tales of valor, cowardice, death, and survival have been largely forgotten. Private Joe Rizzi, an Italian American fiercely loyal to his adopted country, left his parents and girlfriend with tears and simple ideals and learned to become a killer. Private Ernest Wrentmore, at age thirteen the youngest soldier in the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), killed Germans in hand-to-hand combat and nearly died from shrapnel wounds and gas inhalation. Lieutenant Farley Granger watched the Wild West Division dissolve in a frenzy of reckless gallantry and blood. Captain William J. Reddan led his company into a ravine reminiscent of the Valley of Death, losing all except thirteen of his original two hundred men. Lieutenant Colonel Channing Delaplane formed a rear guard of one against an overwhelming German counterattack. Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt Jr. played a leading role in perhaps the most boneheaded battlefield maneuver in American military history. And Lieutenant General Hunter Liggett, who spent the first hours of every attack playing solitaire, led the American army to final victory in the biggest battle in its history. Unlike Pershing, MacArthur, Patton, and others, he—like the thousands of officers and common soldiers who followed him—is practically unknown today. 

After the battle ended, American soldiers—and the legions of men and women who tended their needs in sickness and in health—acquired new understandings of their relationships with country, government, society, family, and friends. No two men came out of the Meuse-Argonne exactly the same. Some changed their political outlook. Some grew more idealistic or embittered. Some found God; others lost their faith. All, however, had changed. The country would never be the same.