About the Author
Elton E. Mackin (1898–1974) joined the Marine Corps in early 1918 and was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment on the second day of the battle of Belleau Wood, June 7, 1928. Mackin was awarded the U.S. Army Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy Cross, and two army Silver Star citations for his valor from Octoer 3-5, 1918, at Blanc-Mont.
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Introduction
This is the story of a young marine who fought in the Great War, told in his own words. It could just as easily be the story of any one of the two million men who joined the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in France during the years 1917 to 1919. Fortunately for us, Elton E. Mackin was an intelligent man who clearly and concisely set down his thoughts on paper. Mackin also left an oral account of his experiences in tape-recorded interviews with his son in the 1970s. Those tape recordings greatly assisted the editor in developing the annotations that are found in the text of Mackin’s book.
Elton Mackin was born 22 February 1898 in Lewiston, New York, a small town just north of Niagara Falls. When he was six weeks old, his father, Arnot Mackin, drowned while helping a friend reach safety after a boating accident. Elton’s mother later remarried and had four more children, three of whom were daughters.
Mackin’s formal education ended when he graduated from high school in 1917, a noteworthy achievement for a working-class youth in the early twentieth century. Innate intelligence, coupled with a more than adequate dose of common sense and service in the Marine Corps, completed Mackin’s informal higher education.
After high school, Mackin worked at various jobs until 23 December 1917, when he enlisted in the marines. He later said that a story in the Saturday Evening Post prompted him to do so. No personal record describing his early months as a marine survived, but we can guess that he was well trained for the ultimate role of any marine: “to kill or be killed,” as he so often liked to state.
Long before Mackin took the oath of enlistment in his local recruiting office, the Marine Corps, not wanting to be left out of what promised to be the biggest conflict since the Civil War, managed to convince Secretary of War Newton D. Baker that it could supply a regiment of trained infantry as soon as war was declared. The marine commandant, Maj. Gen. George Barnett, soon received assurances that the army, desperate for manpower, would gladly accept a regiment of marines for service in France should the need arise. The army was true to its word: the chosen regiment, the 5th Marines, sailed as part of the first U.S. troop contingent sent over to bolster flagging Allied morale. Unfortunately, Gen. John J. Pershing, commanding the newly created AEF, and his staff were more concerned with building a first-class army, literally from nothing, than they were about a single regiment of marines.
At first, the regiment was brigaded with several army regiments in the 1st Division, a regular army outfit. But, because the army’s tables of organization and equipment called for four infantry regiments in a division, not five, the marines were assigned other tasks—mostly construction and labor details. Pershing, facing mounting pressure to give the marines a combat job, decided in late 1917 to pull the regiment from the 1st Division and brigade it with several other army regiments then becoming available.
By February 1918, the 6th Marine Regiment and 6th Machine Gun Battalion had arrived in France and, together with the 5th Marines, combined to form the 4th Brigade (U.S. Marines). Shortly thereafter, the 3d Brigade, made up of two regular army infantry regiments and the 5th Machine Gun Battalion; the 2d Field Artillery Brigade, consisting of the 12th, 15th, and 17th Field Artillery battalions; the 4th Machine Gun Battalion; and the 2d Engineer Regiment were joined by the 4th Brigade to form the 2d Division, which quickly became known as a first-class outfit. Later, many said it was the best division in France, challenged only by the 1st Division.
The marines fit in well, becoming more and more like soldiers in appearance, if not in name. Because they were supplied from the same stores used to keep army units operating, the marines were forced to replace their trademark forest green uniforms with army khaki as the greens wore out. To avoid being confused with doughboys, the marines carefully transferred buttons and emblems featuring the Marine Corps’s distinctive globe, eagle, and anchor to their new tunics, caps, and helmets.
In the middle of March 1918, the 2d Division entered the lines in the Toul sector. The sight of their first casualties convinced the division’s doughboys and marines that they were in a real war, indeed. In mid-May they moved to an area slightly south and west of Bar-le-Duc and Vitry-le-François. During this period the 4th Brigade lost its commander, Brig. Gen. Charles Doyen, who was succeeded by army Brig. Gen. James G. Harbord. It was an interesting phenomenon: a marine officer replaced by a soldier. But the marines took it well and never gave Harbord anything less than their complete loyalty. The reaction to their new commander is best illustrated by the fact that, after the war, the brigade’s officers commissioned a portrait of Harbord to be hung in the Army and Navy Club in Washington.
Harbord held his marine counterparts in similar high regard. He knew he was getting command of a crack outfit. The story is told that Pershing called Harbord, then serving as AEF chief of staff, into his office and advised him that he was being given command of “the best brigade in the army, and if it fails I’ll know who is to blame.”
By the spring of 1918 the war was well into its fourth year. The Germans, realizing that the rapid American buildup would soon tip the scale irrevocably in favor of the Allies, launched a series of massive assaults at various portions of the Allied line. The Boche moved rapidly westward as the stunned British and French armies gave up ground.
The French high command begged Pershing, who was patiently husbanding his forces until he could field a separate American army, to send them all available AEF units to help stem the German advance in the Aisne-Marne area, where the French army had fought the Boche to a standstill in 1914. This time, however, there were no fresh French troops on hand to work another miracle. Pershing approved the request, offering the French “all that we have.” To have done otherwise would have been tantamount to betraying the Allied cause.
The 1st Division was already in the lines in the Montdidier sector and, when the German advance stalled there, the division gave the Boche a bloody nose with an assault on Cantigny on 28 May. Pershing offered the 2d and 3d divisions to the French command and promised to send additional units as fast as they were deemed combat ready.
The 2d Division started along its path to glory on the morning of 31 May 1918, when its troops began boarding French trucks for the trip to Meaux, a village about twenty-five miles east of Paris on the Marne River and some fifteen miles west of the Germans’ front-line trace. It was a race against time as the Boche were rapidly rolling westward and the French command was so confused by the situation that it was sending reinforcements all over the map. Leading elements of the 4th Brigade were ordered to dismount at a town named Lizy, a little north and east of Meaux. But the marines were just one of the division’s units, which were scattered all over the area. The story of how each unit found its parent and subordinate headquarters would make a chapter in itself. It is enough to say that the division was in a chaotic state and took several days to assemble. There was no divisional artillery and no supply trains, and none became available for more than a week.
Fortunately, the Germans were also in disarray and had stopped to reorganize in and around the small town of Bouresches, a few miles north and west of Château-Thierry. The Boche especially wanted to take the town of Belleau.
The 3d Division’s 7th Machine Gun Battalion was the first unit to arrive in the sector, setting up on the south bank of the Marne across from Château-Thierry. Like a latter-day group of Horatios, the battalion’s men bravely held the bridge there as elements of the 2d Division began to arrive and sort themselves out. The result was that the 4th Brigade occupied the northern part of the division’s front and the 3d Brigade dug in along the southern half. This meant the brigades’ positions were the reverse of those specified in the division’s operations order. The confused trip and assembly resulted in chance determining the ground the two brigades finally occupied. No one knew then that Belleau Wood, which lay across open ground in front of the marines’ positions and was only a small portion of the Château-Thierry sector, would soon become an important—and ultimately very bloody—segment of that part of the front.
It was there that a rift began to develop between the doughboys and marines. For security reasons, the AEF refused to allow reporters to identify units by their numerical designations. The restriction did not apply to names, however, and American newspapermen—most notably Floyd Gibbons of the Chicago Tribune—identified the 4th Brigade as the “Marine Brigade” in their dispatches from the front. This meant that Americans, hungry for news about what their boys were doing in France, learned that “the marines are fighting at Château-Thierry,” or that “the marines have taken Belleau Wood.” Needless to say, their army comrades did not appreciate the publicity and loudly complained about “those damned headline-grabbing sonofabitching gyrenes,” adding a few unprintable expletives for good measure.
