Battle of Who Run

“Battle of Who Run” was Battery D’s name for its first encounter with German fire, on the night of August 29. A planned artillery barrage turned into a disordered retreat when the battery could not move promptly after firing and German shells arrived. Harry S. Truman, pinned beneath his horse by a nearby explosion, recovered, stood his ground, and used a furious outburst to bring the men back under control. The episode’s later, joking name preserves a sharp contrast: at the time, the darkness, rain, confusion, and fear made it a dangerous night, not a comic adventure.

The barrage and its purpose

Harry S. Truman had been ordered to move about a mile closer to the German lines and prepare to fire a gas barrage. The target was German artillery roughly four miles away. The planned fire was for neutralization: its purpose was to suppress enemy activity, not necessarily destroy the opposing position. After moving at night through rain and mud, the battery reached its new position the following afternoon. The men were exhausted from lack of sleep, but eager to fire in action.

At precisely 8:00 p.m. on August 29, four batteries of the 129th opened fire. The 75-millimeter guns fired for half an hour, and Battery D expended five hundred rounds. Private Leigh later remembered the men firing with exhilaration until they realized they had awakened the enemy. That recollection gives the opening of the episode an abrupt turn: the battery had completed its task, but the noise that marked its first sustained firing also announced its position.

Confusion under return fire

Once the barrage ended, the night fell quiet except for the rain. The battery was supposed to move quickly, bringing up horses from the rear and hauling the guns away before the Germans could return fire. But the first sergeant responsible for the horses, Glen Wooldridge, did not appear with them for nearly half an hour. Because the first-sergeant duty rotated, Wooldridge was in charge that night; his delay left the battery trying to recover lost time in darkness.

The men feared a German gas barrage and put on their masks. Some struggled to fit masks onto the horses as people, animals, and guns became difficult to distinguish in the rain. Then German shells began coming over. Harry S. Truman was on a horse trying to see what was happening when a shell burst less than fifteen feet away. His horse was struck—or slipped—fell into a shell hole, and rolled on top of him. A large, heavy-shouldered lieutenant, Vic Housholder, pulled him free; Housholder later recalled that Truman was gasping like a catfish out of water.

At the same time, half the horses and two guns charged off over a hill in the wrong direction and became mired in mud. Wooldridge panicked and shouted that the Germans had a bracket on the battery, then ran. Some others ran after him, but later accounts disagreed about how many. Private Walter Menefee said that only Truman and perhaps three or four others stayed; Menefee also admitted that he himself had run. Vere Leigh, by contrast, thought that almost no one fled besides Wooldridge. In the black night, with rain falling and masks obscuring faces, the number could not be established with confidence.

Truman takes control

Truman remained at the scene. After being freed and recovering his breath, he shouted at the men with a force that startled them because he had previously seemed proper and reserved. He later described the moment as having got up and called them everything he knew. The account does not make his response a calm or detached one: he was livid and terrified. But his verbal attack, joined to his own example of staying under fire, eventually brought the confusion under control.

The immediate outcome was costly. Two horses were dead, and two others had to be shot. The guns were buried in mud up to their axles, too difficult to move by manpower alone. Truman decided they could be recovered later rather than have the men struggle with them in the dark. He marched the battery back to its base position through the continuing downpour. At about four in the morning, after a hot meal, he went to his tent and slept for twelve hours.

A name that outlasted the night

In later years, reunions in Kansas City gave the incident a different setting. With whiskey flowing, Battery D veterans joked and bantered about the episode as the “Battle of Who Run.” The label turned the panic and disputed accounts of flight into a recurring subject of lighthearted teasing. Yet the later humor did not alter what had happened: German fire had caught the battery amid a muddled attempt to move, Truman himself had been pinned beneath a horse, and the men had lost animals and temporarily abandoned guns.

The episode is also a compact account of command under pressure. The plan required a rapid withdrawal after the firing; the delayed horses, darkness, masks, mud, and incoming shells made that plan collapse into confusion. Truman’s authority became consequential not through a formal order described in the account, but through remaining in place and making himself heard when others were running. The enduring name foregrounds the question of who fled, while the reported uncertainty about the numbers keeps the story from resolving into a simple tale of universal cowardice or solitary heroism. What the accounts agree on is narrower and more concrete: Truman stood his ground, helped restore order, and got the men back to base.