The Argonne Forest was the destination of the September 1918 march that carried Captain Harry S. Truman and his artillery battery toward the Meuse-Argonne offensive, the largest American military action yet undertaken. In the campaign’s opening days, the forest was not simply a landmark: it gave direction to a massive, concealed movement of troops and equipment, then lay beside the devastated ground across which artillery had to be dragged toward the German lines. The approach made the scale of the offensive tangible in mud, exhausted horses, crowded roads, and the slow labor of getting guns into position.

Strategic Setting

The American sector of the offensive extended from the Meuse River, north of Verdun, to the Argonne Forest, a distance of twenty-four miles. The objective was to cut German rail lines at Sedan. Planned as an all-out attack along the Western Front, the operation required fifteen divisions—600,000 men—along with nearly 3,000 artillery pieces, trucks, tanks, supply wagons, and more than 90,000 horses. The scale of the force turned the roads themselves into a central problem of the campaign.

The artillery and infantry could not move at the same pace. Large trucks carried troops and ammunition, while horse-drawn guns advanced more slowly; the order of march therefore had to be mixed to keep the columns together. Three roads carried the movement forward, often in both directions as French troops being relieved came back from the front. To conceal the operation from the Germans, traffic moved only under cover of darkness. Congestion could become so severe that officers brandished revolvers to keep the roads moving. After the first moonlit night, rain turned them to mud, and horses in poor condition collapsed in their harnesses and had to be destroyed. The forest thus stood at the end of a logistical undertaking whose success depended on thousands of units reaching their appointed positions on time.

The Forced March

The 129th was initially held in reserve short of Saint-Mihiel, ready to move at a moment’s notice. The American victory there came swiftly: the Germans were overrun in two days, and orders changed. On the night of September 16, the regiment began its march toward the Argonne Forest. The route meant marching through the night, sleeping for a few hours, and setting out again. Truman later described the journey as a forced march of nearly 100 miles; despite the congestion and weather, the enormous movement arrived on schedule, with no unit missing its assigned place.

Truman’s battery had to fight its way onto the main road with its equipment intact. He took the firing battery and only the men needed to operate the guns, who were allowed to ride for the first time. A caisson became stuck as the column left the woods; prayers and curses did not move it, so the men attached ropes and hauled it free. The column comprised twelve carriages: four guns, six caissons, and two wagons, one carrying instruments and the other food. On the road, trucks repeatedly tried to cut through the battery. Truman rode along the line to keep the guns and wagons together, pushing ahead of traffic when he could. Rain had made the road slick, and the battery had to maintain a trot or gallop to stay with the advance.

Hill 290 and the Opening Attack

The 129th Regiment’s assigned position was Hill 290, a gradual slope about half a mile from Neuvilly, a crossroads village whose ruined stone church would serve as a field hospital. Truman and his battery reached a stand of saplings near a wood at three in the morning, in darkness and rain. The men and horses were exhausted. Each gun required twelve horses, and the whole crew had to push to get all four guns into place by daylight. Across the open ground lay the German strongpoint at Boureuilles.

The following three days were spent preparing for the attack. The men dug trenches, stacked ammunition, and cleared trees to make a field of fire while German shells occasionally passed overhead. One shelling struck the place where Truman had slept on the first morning; he had moved before the shells hit. On the evening of September 25, the battery commanders received their orders in Karl D. Klemm’s dugout. The attack would begin at 5:30 the next morning. Each battery was to fire 1,000 rounds an hour: six rounds per gun per minute, with ten minutes each hour allowed for cooling. First came preparation fire against the German barbed wire; then the guns would lay a rolling barrage, advancing its range by 100 meters every four minutes ahead of the infantry. A small error in timing or range could bring fire down on American troops.

The Battlefield Beyond the Forest

After the barrage, the infantry entered a charred, cratered landscape without visible landmarks and disappeared into dense fog. The German defenders held high ground, including a wooded hogback, and had spent four years strengthening their positions. Many American divisions had never faced an enemy in combat. The advance that followed was therefore both a contest against German defenses and a punishing test of movement across broken ground.

The 129th Field Artillery was ordered forward behind the infantry. Truman and Major Gates went ahead to search for enemy gun positions and were pinned down on a road by machine-gun fire. The distance to the shelter of woods across No-Man’s-Land was only about a mile and a half, but hauling the guns through shell-blasted mud, craters, and tangled wire took twelve hours and continued into the night. Men and horses pushed and pulled under nearly constant fire; German shells arrived with a sound like air brakes and exploded in showers of dirt and iron. As the hours wore on, some men were so tired they fell asleep standing.

The following day, after confused orders, the battery moved forward again. Near Cheppy, the men encountered seventeen American infantrymen piled at a crossroads, and a dozen more lying head to heel down the road. Truman surmised that they had been shot in the back after passing the position; the sight silenced his men until a sergeant bluntly reminded them that they were at war. Farther west, the battery entered a peach orchard. Truman and several men went ahead to establish an observation post, laying telephone wire and unknowingly advancing several hundred yards beyond the infantry. From a hill at dusk, Truman spotted a German battery setting up across a small river on the flank of the 28th Division, outside his assigned sector. Standing orders restricted fire to enemy batteries facing the 35th Division; he chose to disregard them. In these episodes, the Argonne campaign appears not as a single charge through a forest but as a succession of difficult movements, uncertain views, and decisions made under fire.