Voices of 1918; Captain Harry S. Truman’s Combat Experience in World War I - Part 4 of 5

From the Killing Fields of Verdun to the Armistice.

Life in the trenches at Verdun

After being pulled off the front at the Argonne Forest, the men from Battery D took a much needed rest for a few days.  “Every one of us was almost a nervous wreck and we'd lost weight until we looked like scare crows.”  (Truman, 23 Nov., 1918)  Baths were still difficult to take with most of the officers and men getting one only when pulled back from the front.  For the battery, this was the first opportunity in about a month.  Normally, they shaved and bathed what they could out of their canteen cups.

On 16 Oct., 1918, they were sent back to work but in a "quiet" sector to do a little “position warfare” where you shoot at the enemy occasionally and duck incoming rounds occasionally but mostly you’re time was spent drying out your boots and socks and just being bored.  The word “occasionally” being relative to their previous hellacious experiences.  Ironically, this “quiet” little sector had been one of the bloodiest battlegrounds in world history - the Verdun battle area.  It is still a sensitive subject between the French and the Germans.  In this engagement, it was the stated German directive to “bleed the French white” (to kill as many Frenchmen as possible to destroy the Allied war effort.)  As it often happens with this type of thinking, it didn’t work, but it did instill a hatred that has persisted.

Out of the mud for a break (Moore, 2007)

Battery D was assigned a sector somewhat near a little town of La Beholle just out of the city of Verdun.  CPT Truman wrote, “My battery position for 3 weeks was right between Ft. Tavannes and Ft. de Souville and about 3 kilos (three kilometers or almost 1.5 miles) from the famous Douamont.  The impregnable fort that saved Verdun and Paris.  I have already told you how we were shelled most every night and what a dreary desolate place it was.”  (Truman, 23 Nov., 1918) 

As Mr. Wooden said, they had been relocated "near to Verdun up on Dead Man's Hill. We moved it up there one night about 10 or 11 o'clock. It was the prettiest moonlight night you ever saw in your life. We put the guns in some old French gun pits. There were some dugouts there the gun crews got into.  I found a little old ammunition shelter right close to the guns. Well, I spread my blankets out and went to bed. I woke up the next morning; the sun was shining. I looked over on this shelf, and there was a skull there, a bullet hole right through there. Then, over here on this shelf, there was another skull, a bullet hole right through here. I looked outside and saw a blown-off man's leg sticking up out of the ground.”

An old French trench in Verdun: "Le Mort Homes"

It was a macabre sight and beyond a macabre place.  In oral histories, several members of the battery mentioned there were scattered pieces of more bodies all over the entire battleground.  Every time a German artillery shell impacted in their area, it disinterred at least one body that had been previously covered by the dirt of the battlefield.  CPT Truman said it best, “There is one field over west of me here a short distance where every time a shell lights, it plows up a piece of someone. I guess it must be Le Mort Homes.” (Truman, 1 Nov., 1918)  (If it were spelled correctly, “Le Mort Homes” would be French for “The Dead Men” or the “Place of the Dead Men.”

It is believed that it was possible that the Germans fired about a million shells a day at the French during the intense fighting around Verdun.  This resulted in what some theorists have calculated as a yard of soil from the entire battlefield being removed from the face of the earth during the artillery duels that ensued.

Shell holes and slaughter (Moore, 2007)

“I am still bearing that charmed life and… I attribute it to your prayers. Things that happened to us in the drive sure made believers out of most of us.”  (Truman, 30 Oct., 1918)  He had previously mentioned that he had enemy artillery impacting on either side of him as he was moving through the battlefield.  He went on to write about the huge forest which once was filled with the most beautiful trees that were now reduced to sticks with “naked branches sticking out, making them look like ghosts.  The ground is simply one mass of shell holes.”  He also said, "how when the moon rises behind those mere stumps, you can imagine that the ghosts of the ½ million Frenchmen who were slaughtered here are holding a sorrowful parade over the ruins.” 

It was a static front but the Germans were still doing their part in keeping up the appearance of a war.  "A German plane dropped some bomb not far from me last night and sort of shook things up.” (Truman, 10 Nov., 1918)  The war, for the Americans, was winding down.  Battery D stopped firing early in the morning of the last day.  They didn’t see the point and their heart wasn’t in it.  They didn’t know when the war would be over, but they knew it would be soon.  On the other hand, the French pumped shell after shell at the Germans in an unrelenting rage of revenge.  They seemed to be expending all of their ammo, firing round after round of high explosives and gas at the Germans.  They were firing as fast as they could and they absolutely wanted to fire off as much as they could.  When asked, the French replied that the Germans were filth and deserved to die because of what they had inflicted on the French Soldiers.  (Please note that this is a very sanitized version of what actually was said.)

Crippled gun and dead gunner

Of the ending of the war Mr. Wooden said, “Well, what I was going to tell you... That morning we fired 150 rounds in support of the infantry over there. They had a little attack, I guess about 7 or 7:30. Twenty minutes after 10 Harry came along. His office was down in the chat road about 100 yards. He said, 'McKinley, look here.' He pulled out a piece of white paper about as big as my hand. It said, 'Please cease firing on all fronts 11/11/11, General John J. Pershing.' Prettiest piece of paper I ever saw in my life. He went up and told the rest of the battery. We weren't firing. The French battery there did; they fired right up until 11 o'clock, and there was no need of it.  Well, sir, it was the damnedest feeling you ever experienced when that stopped. Words can't express it. Just a few hours before you were killing people, and all of a sudden, France was in peace for the first time in four years. Well, we just stood around there and looked at one another. Finally someone said, 'Why don't we go home?'”

“I am most awful glad it's over and I hope I never have to fight in another one. But it gives a fellow a kind of a satisfied feeling when he knows he's done his best.”  (Truman, 23 Nov., 1918)   CPT Truman’s best was pretty good, too.

Destroyed German Bunker and Dead German Soldier