A brief lull before the big battle

During a brief “period of stabilization” after the battle of St. Mihiel, Mike Hogg found time to write to Ima, describing with cheerful insouciance what had been a harrowing combat experience.

                           

                                                               Monday, September 23rd

         You should see me right now. Here I sit, just after having taken the most glorious bath I have ever had. Not that it was up to date, or that I had a good tub, or that I had lots of water. It was a bath--that is all. I am in an old, shell-torn town. The room here is about the only thing left of the house that is whole. The rest has been blown away by shells. This room, however, is great. It can’t rain in here. All my officers (four of us) are here.          You are wondering, no doubt, why that bath was so wonderful. Well, it is this way: I am just back from that big American “push”--St. Mihiel. We were in it up to our eyes. Almost two weeks, we dug, marched, fought and scrambled around in something I know was worse than Hell itself. But here we are, as happy as if we all had good sense --men and all.

         Captain Hogg and his Company D would soon be in the trenches again, in the greatest single battle in American history: the Meuse-Argonne offensive, with a battlefront 75 miles long, and involving more than a million U.S. soldiers, from September 26 until the armistice of November 11. 

Mike Hogg in Combat, September 1918

        

          On the night of September 11, 1918, the American First Army under General John J. Pershing prepared for the battle for St. Mihiel, a town on the Meuse River south of the Argonne Forest. It was the key to a vital railroad controlled by the Germans, and must be taken by Allies before a main assault on German lines could begin. . . .

THE ATTACK ON SEPTEMBER 12

         Promptly at five o'clock [a.m.] the irregular belching of the guns was replaced by the rhythmic roll of the 75's, shooting as though in cadence. The barrage had begun — the signal that the supreme moment had come! Simultaneously, the assault troops of the four regiments [one of them was Captain Mike Hogg’s] climbed from the trenches and took up their place in a continuous line that stretched across the divisional front, and formed a part of the 23-kilometer [about 14 miles long] wave of men in khaki that engulfed the entire salient. 

         There was no hesitating, no holding back, in all that long line as it moved uniformly across No Man's Land. On the other hand, such was the impetuosity of the supporting troops that they were with difficulty kept at their proper distance to the rear of the front wave, and restrained from joining their comrades on the fighting line.

         No one who has ever taken a look at No Man's Land on this front, and seen that twisting, treacherous maze of wire and the hundreds of pitfalls of ancient trenches, has failed to ask how it was possible for human beings to cross such obstacles in the face of hostile fire. French staff officers, sent by Marshal Foch, the Allied Generalissimo, gasped in astonishment when they heard of the facility with which American doughboys had surmounted such seemingly unconquerable difficulties. In fact, this achievement will always remain one of the most amazing features of the entire operation; and the modest heroes who accomplished it, on reviewing this land of desolation, themselves wondered just how they did it. But it is sufficient to say that these men from the Southwest were natives of barbed wire’s native states!

--excerpt from George Wythe, History of the 90^thDivision, in Virginia Bernhard, The Smell of War: Three Americans in the Trenches of World War I. Available from Texas A&M University Press or Amazon.com.

          The Battle of St. Mihiel was only the beginning.