CHAPTER XIITHE NAVY ON LAND
The American Navy did work important and memorable on land as well as upon the sea. Its Marine Corps fought in decisive battles with unsurpassed courage, daring, endurance and aggressiveness and some of its big guns were instrumental in more quickly bringing to pass, unexpectedly early, the order to “cease firing.”
The Marine Corps, the landing and fighting force of the Navy, added glowing pages to its already splendid record. As with every other fighting force of the United States, it had first to increase its numbers and train its new members. It had a total, when we entered the war, of 14,000 officers and men. At the end of the war it had 70,000, the new members having come, mainly by enlistment, from all classes of the community and including business, professional, working and college men. In one instance a whole college battalion enlisted together. Marine Corps service has always attracted young men of the highest quality and these new members were especially notable for their intelligence, spirit and fine soldierly character, qualities that shone brilliantly in their action in the lines of battle. More democratic than any other fighting force of the nation, the Marine Corps officers are mainly promoted fromits rank. Several officers’ training camps were held at which intensive, practical and competitive work gave thorough training in quick time and yielded a plentiful supply of officers chosen in accordance with the work and character of the men. Certain quotas of the Students’ Army Training Corps, which was hard at work when the armistice was signed, were designated for Marine Corps service. Recruiting and training stations for the Corps were increased and enlarged and intensive training of the recruits went on steadily, with such especial attention to rifle practice that when the Marines drove the enemy back at Belleau Wood over 90 per cent of the men in line had qualified as marksmen, sharp shooters or expert riflemen.
When the German Army, in its steady drive toward Paris in the last days of May, 1918, had reached its nearest point to the capital city and the Allied armies were facing a serious crisis. General Pershing offered to Marshal Foch whatever he had in men and material that the French Generalissimo could use and a division composed of regiments of Marines and of the Regular Army was thrown forward to block the German advance, which had been rolling steadily onward and driving everything before it at the rate of six or seven miles per day. The Marines blocked the advance in an engagement on June 2nd. Calmly setting their rifle sights and aiming with precision, they met the German attack and under their deadly fire, supported by machine guns and artillery, the enemy lines wavered, stopped, and broke for cover.
Then followed, a few days later, the fierce and stubborn attacks of the Marines upon the defenses which the Germans had set up and which they heldwith determination. Belleau Wood, a jungle of underbrush, heavy foliage and piles of boulders, they had filled with machine gun nests. The Marines attacked in wave formation, rushing, halting, rushing again, the rear waves plunging forward over the dead and wounded bodies of those who had fallen. It was almost a month before the Americans reached their final objectives and completely routed the Germans from Belleau Wood, to be known ever after as the Wood of the American Marines because of the valor and heroism with which it was won. They fought day and night, day after day, much of the time without sleep or water or hot food. Their officers sent back messages that the men were exhausted and must be relieved and were told that the lines must hold and if possible continue to attack. And the lines again went forward. They fought from tree to tree, they charged machine gun nests with the bayonet, wiped them out and turned the guns against the retreating foe. Some companies lost every commissioned officer, some that had entered the battle 250 strong dwindled to fifty or sixty. The Germans threw in fresh troops, their best Prussian Guards, with orders to retake the lost positions at whatever cost. But the Marines and their fellows of the Regular Army held on, repulsed the fresh attacks, and slowly advanced their positions. And at last, toward the end of June, with some reënforcements and following an artillery barrage that tore the woods into fragments, the Marines made their final successful rushes and with rifle and bayonet cleaned out all the remaining machine gun nests. The enemy had been turned back, Paris had been saved, the morale of the best German troops had been undermined and the Allied commanders andarmies had been shown what raw American troops could do. After the battle of Belleau Wood neither British nor French commanders had any doubt about sending American troops anywhere, no matter whether they had had much or little training and little or no experience.
At Soissons, in July, the Marines again showed their valor and at the battle of St. Mihiel, in mid-September, they took over a portion of the line and, attacking with two days’ objectives ahead of them, won them all by mid-afternoon of the first day. And early in October the Second Division, brigaded with the French and still composed of Marines and Regulars, swept forward in an attack on Blanc Mont Ridge, east of Rheims, the keystone of the German main position, for the possession of which German and Allied Armies had fought many bitter battles. The Marines and their companions attacked the rugged and wooded Blanc Mont, rushed the enemy before them across its summit and pushed him down the slope, repulsed counter attacks and forced the Germans to fall back from before Rheims and yield positions they had held for four years.
The casualty list of the Marine Corps amounted to about 6,000, of whom only 57 were captured by the enemy. They lost approximately half of their numbers who entered battle. But they took more prisoners than they lost, all told, of their own men, and they inflicted more casualties than they received.
The big guns sent by the Navy to France for land warfare played an important part in the decisive battles of the last few weeks of the war. These huge, 14-inch guns, 66 feet long, had been intended originally for the new battle cruisers, but a change ofship design had made them available for other uses and the Navy Bureau of Ordnance suggested that they be put on railway mounts and used on land. They were first offered to the British authorities for use behind their lines, but they doubted the effectiveness of the guns and delayed final answer until General Pershing asked for them. At the end of December, 1917, not a drawing for the mounts had been started. Four months later one of the guns was rolling on the wheels of a completed mount for long range tests at the Sandy Hook Proving Ground. At the end of hostilities forty-four guns and mounts had been sent over in various steps of preparation for the front and six of the monsters had been in action, throwing their destructive shells far behind the German lines.
The railway mounts, designed for this particular purpose, were built and covered with armor plate by the Navy according to plans and designs prepared by its Ordnance Bureau, while the locomotives and the twelve cars for the operating forces of each gun, including berth and kitchen cars, armored ammunition cars, machine shop cars containing everything from a forge and anvil to a handsaw, crane and wireless cars, were all built and equipped especially for the purposes of these land batteries of naval guns. Intensive training was given to the men, all of them taken from naval forces, who would operate the huge batteries in France and serve the guns in action. The whole battery was so mobile that even if it were in action when the order came to move, the gun, personnel and entire train of cars could be put under way in an hour.
The first gun to be sent landed in France in thelatter part of June but did not go into action against the enemy until mid-September, when, placed near Soissons, it fired on the railroads entering Laon. It had been intended for use against the German “Big Bertha” that had been dropping shells upon Paris from a distance of over seventy miles, but on the day in August when the American gun was ready to begin action “Big Bertha” retired and was heard of no more.
The German long range guns which bombarded Paris and Dunkirk and other places were set on permanent steel and concrete foundations, and therefore were immobile, and the military efficiency of their shells was reduced by the fact that they were small and made for long flight. The enormous shells of the American guns had a range of thirty miles, weighed 400 pounds each, seven times as much as the German, and could penetrate eight feet of solid concrete. Each gun, without its mount, weighed more than a hundred tons. They fired heavier projectiles and had a greater range than any mobile land artillery that had previously been used. Their chief usefulness was in the destruction of ammunition dumps and of railroad yards and rolling stock and the consequent demoralization of the enemy’s transportation system. When the shells from one of the guns were directed upon the railroad stations and yards of Montmedy and Longuyon they stopped all traffic there and one which struck the German headquarters killed twenty-eight members of the general’s staff.
Cruising through France like battleships on wheels, demonstrating their perfect mobility and proving their usefulness by cutting the enemy’s lines of communication and seriously obstructing his transportation,these big naval guns on railway mounts proved their value so triumphantly that the Navy had been requested, when the end came, to provide as many more as it could rush quickly to the front.
The Navy also removed a number of 7-inch guns from battleships, the changed conditions of warfare demanding a lighter and quicker firing gun, and devised for them, at General Pershing’s request, a new type of mount, utilizing the principle of the caterpillar belt and thus making it possible for them to travel directly over any kind of ground. So satisfactory were the first tests that the Army asked the Navy to furnish 36 such guns and mounts as quickly as possible and these were being rushed to completion when the armistice was signed.
The Navy maintained a large personnel and carried on considerable operations on shore both in Great Britain and France. On the coast of each of these countries was a series of bases for the repair and upkeep of escorting and patrolling ships, from cruisers to converted yachts. In many cases it was necessary to construct complete repair plants. At every naval base overseas there was a fully equipped hospital. In Scotland the Navy took over an entire watering place whose hotels, bath-houses and other structures were converted into large hospital buildings wherein were cared for many British as well as our own sick and wounded.