Who won the Battle of Belleau Wood?
The Americans won. From 1 to 26 June 1918 the US 2nd Division, spearheaded by its Marine Brigade and supported by Army units and French artillery, fought to take Belleau Wood, a tangle of forest and rock near the Marne where German troops had halted during their spring offensive. The fighting was savage and often hand to hand, and it cost the Americans 9,777 casualties, but on 26 June the wood was reported to be entirely in Marine hands. The battle announced the arrival of American power on the Western Front and earned the Marines their enduring reputation.3
In the spring of 1918 Germany's last great offensives were rolling across France, and the Western Front hung in the balance. Into a gap in the line, 35 to 39 miles from Paris, came the newly arrived Americans, and in a small French wood the US Marines fought the battle that would define them for a century.4
Germany's last push
By 1918 World War I had bled Europe white. Russia had dropped out of the war, freeing German divisions in the east, and the United States, at war since April 1917, would take a year to raise, train and ship an army to France. Germany's leaders resolved to win before American strength could tell, and in the spring they launched a series of great offensives in the west.5
The third of them, Operation Blücher, opened on 27 May 1918 in a quiet sector between Soissons and Reims. It caught the French by surprise and drove them back to the Marne, 35 miles from Paris. France appealed for help, and the Americans rushed two untried divisions forward. The US 3rd Division took position on the Marne at Château-Thierry, and on 1 June the 2nd Division relieved French troops astride the Paris to Metz road. In front of it lay the Bois de Belleau, a dense former hunting preserve about a mile and a half long, held by the Germans.6
The 2nd Division was unusual: one of its two infantry brigades, the 4th, was made up of Marines, the 5th and 6th Marine Regiments and the 6th Machine Gun Battalion, some 10,000 men, under an Army officer, Brigadier General James G. Harbord, the former chief of staff of General John J. Pershing. Its other brigade, the 3rd, held the regular Army's 9th and 23rd Infantry Regiments.7
Retreat? Hell, no
On the night of 2 June the division was ordered by its French corps commander to hold its line at all costs. As French troops fell back through the positions of the 5th Marines, a French officer suggested to Captain Lloyd Williams that the Marines should retreat too. Williams replied, by the account the American Battle Monuments Commission prints, “Retreat, hell! We just got here!”8
In the wood, the German 461st Infantry Regiment dug in among the rocks and thickets with machine guns, mortars and light artillery, and shelled the American line with high explosive, shrapnel and gas. On 4 June German attacks around Lucy-le-Bocage and Les Mares Farm were thrown back with heavy losses. The Germans had in fact halted Operation Blücher on 5 June, and the division holding most of the wood, the 237th, was a trench division rated fourth class.9
6 June 1918
On 6 June the Americans attacked. In the morning the Marines, with the French 167th Division on their left, fought for Hill 142, west of the wood. There Gunnery Sergeant Ernest Janson won the first Medal of Honor earned by a Marine in the war. Near Lucy-le-Bocage, First Sergeant Dan Daly of the 6th Marines is said to have led his men forward with the cry, “Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?”10
At 5 in the afternoon came the attack on the wood itself, by a battalion of the 5th Marines from the west and one of the 6th Marines from the south, supported on the right by the Army's 23rd Infantry. The Marines advanced in lines across open, waist-high wheat strewn with red poppies, after little reconnaissance and scant artillery preparation, straight into the German machine guns. They took the village of Bouresches and a foothold in the south of the wood. By nightfall the Marine Brigade had lost 1,087 killed and wounded, more casualties in a single day than the Marine Corps had suffered in its 143-year history.11
Three weeks in the wood
What followed was close and brutal. On 10 June the 6th Marines attacked the southern half of the wood and the 5th Marines the northern half, but in the broken terrain bypassed German units and infiltrators struck from behind, and by 11 June the Germans still held the north of the wood. On 13 June a German counterattack on the east side of the wood and on Bouresches was thrown back. Gunnery Sergeant Fred Stockham gave his gas mask to a wounded man and later died of gas himself; he received the Medal of Honor after his death.12
Both sides drenched the wood with high explosive and gas, including mustard gas that burned the skin where it clung to men and clothing. In the final stages the fighting was hand to hand, with bayonets and trench knives. On 16 and 17 June exhausted Marine companies were relieved for a time by the Army's 7th Infantry Regiment and 7th Machine Gun Battalion of the 3rd Division. The Marines attacked the wood six times before they could drive the Germans out, and in all they fought parts of five German divisions.13
Woods now Marine Corps entirely
Between 22 and 24 June the Marines and Army machine gunners returned to the line. After a day-long barrage on 25 June, the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines under Major Maurice Shearer attacked and fought well into the evening, took the northern end of the wood and captured more than 500 Germans. German counterattacks the next day were beaten off, and on 26 June Shearer sent a report of a single line: “Woods now U.S. Marine Corps entirely.”14
The cost was heavy. The United States suffered 9,777 casualties at Belleau Wood, by the ABMC's count; Marine Corps Times gives 1,811 dead and 7,966 wounded for the Marines and the Army together. Two Marines and two Navy officers received the Medal of Honor and 152 Marines the Navy Cross. In gratitude the French renamed the wood the Bois de la Brigade de Marine, the Wood of the Marine Brigade.15
Myth and meaning
Belleau Wood is often said to have saved Paris. The historian David Zabecki argues that it did not: Paris was not the German objective that summer, the Germans lacked the means to reach it, and Belleau Wood was a hard but contained tactical fight on a long front. What it did do was show the Germans, who had doubted the Americans, that these new troops would attack with relentless courage whatever the losses. A German report described the enemy as stubborn and not afraid of his losses. The Army's own historians quote General Robert Bullard's verdict: the Marines did not win the war there, but they saved the Allies from defeat.16
Within weeks the Allies went over to the attack for good, in the counteroffensive of 18 July and then the story of the Hundred Days Offensive, in which the Americans fought their greatest battle of the war in the Argonne.17 › Meuse-Argonne Offensive, 1918
The Devil Dogs
According to Marine tradition, the Germans at Belleau Wood called the Marines Teufelshunde, Devil Dogs, and the name went straight onto recruiting posters. The National Museum of the Marine Corps is frank that there is no proof it came from German troops. The posters spelled it Teufel Hunden, which is not correct German, and the Boston Globe ran a story about the nickname on 14 April 1918, weeks before the Marines met the Germans at Belleau Wood. Whatever its origin, the name stuck, and the battle became a founding legend of the modern Marine Corps.18
Visiting Belleau Wood
The wood lies about 6.5 miles northwest of Château-Thierry, near the village of Belleau. The American Battle Monuments Commission puts it about 50 miles (80 km) from Paris by road and 35 miles from the capital as the crow flies; David Zabecki gives 39 miles. The battlefield has been left largely untouched since 1918, and the remains of more than 1,000 American, French and German soldiers that were never recovered still lie in it. Shell craters, foxholes and trench lines run beside the trail, and a sculpture of an advancing Marine by Felix de Weldon, who also made the Iwo Jima Memorial, stands in a clearing. Unexploded shells, including gas shells, are still found in the woods.19
At the foot of the wood lies the 42.5-acre Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, a wartime burial ground made permanent by Congress in 1921 and dedicated on 30 May 1937. The commission that cares for it quotes General Pershing's promise that time will not dim the glory of their deeds. For more on the American war in France, see the greatest battles in American history and the World War I era page.20 › John J. Pershing
