ARGONNE FOREST, 1918: THE LOST BATTALION

The doughboys numbered only 550 men -- the remnants of four battalions -- and were surrounded by Germans. Then they were given the order to attack.

The Lost Battalion

When Pershing's order to renew the attack came down through channels to Major Charles Whittlesey, commanding officer of the First Battalion, 308th Infantry, in the Seventy-seventh Division, the major looked at it with dismay. He talked it over glumly with Captain George McMurtry, the acting commander of the 308th's Second Battalion, which was to advance in close support of Whittlesey's men the next morning.

Heavy casualties had already cut their battalions down to half strength; between them, they had only about eight hundred men instead of the regulation sixteen hundred. Moreover, their troops were exhausted. They had been moved into the Argonne sector from combat on the Aisne River with no rest and had experienced little sleep during the past month. The Seventy-seventh Division was a New York outfit, known as "The Times Square Division," with a Statue of Liberty emblem on its shoulder patches. But many of its original troops from Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx had recently been replaced by draftees from the Middle West who had had little or no basic training. A few days earlier one of them had been found calmly smoking behind some shrubbery during a battle. By way of explanation he gestured toward his rifle, saying, "I can't make the bullets go into this thing."

Along with his other worries, Whittlesey was particularly annoyed by the stipulation in Pershing's attack order that his battalion had to keep going forward even if its flanks were left exposed to the Germans. As Whittlesey's riflemen advanced along the extreme west side of the Argonne Forest, chronically laggard French troops moved through the open fields of the Aisne River Valley on their left flank. Only two days before, in the same area, German infiltrators had slipped around behind Whittlesey's left and had surrounded two of his companies for several hours. He was sure that it could happen again.

Whittlesey was not a field officer who could accept what seemed to him a dangerously illogical combat order without complaint. He was a stern and upright New England Yankee from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a graduate of Williams College, a tall, slim man who wore glasses and looked rather like President Woodrow Wilson. He was also a precise Wall Street lawyer who had given up his practice to take the reserve officers' refresher course at Plattsburg when the war broke out. George McMurtry, his fellow battalion commander, was a Wall Street attorney, too, but their resemblance ended there. McMurtry, a husky and cheerful New Yorker who later made a million dollars in the stock market, had served with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War battle of San Juan Hill. But he agreed with Whittlesey that carrying out the order seemed impossible.

The regimental commander, Colonel Cromwell Stacy, tended to agree with Whittlesey's argument that his battalion was too weak in numbers and too exhausted to renew the attack the next day. The colonel also saw the danger of an outflanking movement by the Germans. He passed along Whittlesey's complaints to the brigade commander, Brigadier General Evan M. Johnson, who thought enough of them to ask his division commander, Major General Robert Alexander, if the attack could at least be postponed to give the troops a little more rest. Alexander was the type of ramrod general who had urged his Seventy-seventh Division before the start of the September 26 offensive to "Fight hard, keep your spirits high and your bayonets bright!" He sent word back to Stacy that the attack would start the next morning as scheduled.

When Stacy passed the order on to Whittlesey, the major saluted and said, "All right. I'll attack, but whether you'll hear from me again I don’t know."

It's an epic story about wartime snafus, combat, survival and heroism.  I strongly encourage everyone to read the article in it's entirety.  And please also watch the video all the way to the end.  It's really great!