The Meuse–Argonne Offensive appears in this account through a sharply observed episode involving an American artillery battery caught in a confused night movement under German fire. The scene does not provide a full campaign chronology or an overall assessment of its military outcome. Instead, it follows a local crisis: a delayed withdrawal, panic in darkness and rain, and Harry S. Truman’s decision to remain when some of his men fled. The incident later acquired a comic-sounding name at reunions, though the account stresses that nothing about it seemed funny at the time.

Setting and Stakes

The battery had fired and was expected to move quickly to a new position before German guns could answer. That maneuver depended on horses being brought up from the rear so the guns could be hauled away. The first sergeant responsible for the horses was absent for nearly half an hour; the job rotated, and that night it belonged to Glen Wooldridge. His delay left the battery exposed while its men tried to make up lost time in a black, rain-soaked night.

The danger was immediate and difficult to read. The men feared a German gas barrage and put on their masks; some struggled to fit masks onto the horses as well. With visibility poor and faces obscured, even people close by were hard to identify. The battery needed to move, but the darkness, weather, missing horses and equipment turned the withdrawal into a scramble. The episode’s tension comes from the collision between a clear military requirement—get the guns out before the enemy retaliates—and the confusion that made orderly action difficult.

The Night Under Fire

When German shells began arriving, Truman was mounted, trying to see what was happening. One shell burst close by, and his horse was hit or slipped into a shell hole, rolling on top of him and pinning him down. A lieutenant, Vic Housholder, pulled him free; Housholder later recalled Truman “gasping like a catfish out of water.” The account makes the danger concrete without presenting Truman as untouched by fear: he had been trapped beneath the horse, nearly out of breath, while the battery’s movement disintegrated around him.

Elsewhere, half the horses and two guns charged off in the dark, went over a hill in the wrong direction, and became hopelessly mired in mud. Wooldridge, panicking, shouted for everyone to run because the Germans had a “bracket” on the battery, then ran himself. Some men followed. How many did so is uncertain: Private Walter Menefee later said that only Truman and perhaps three or four others stayed, and admitted, “I led the parade!” Vere Leigh, by contrast, thought that hardly anyone ran except Wooldridge. The accounts do not settle the count, and the uncertainty is part of the episode’s record rather than a detail to smooth away.

Truman stood his ground. After recovering his breath, he shouted at the men, using profanity with an effect intensified by the contrast with the reserved officer they thought they knew. He later remembered, “I got up and called them everything I knew.” The episode does not make the danger disappear: Truman himself was livid and terrified. Its decisive reversal is smaller and more immediate. Amid the panic, the officer who had just been pinned beneath a horse remained in place and challenged the flight around him.

The Story Afterward

At Kansas City reunions, with whiskey flowing, veterans returned to the incident in jokes and teasing, calling it the battery’s “Battle of Who Run.” The name turned a frightening and confused encounter into a shared story about who had stood and who had fled. Yet the narrative keeps the later humor separate from the original event: in the black night and pouring rain, with German fire coming in and men unable to see clearly, the situation had been perilous, not comic.

That contrast gives the episode its lasting shape. The delayed horses and lost guns expose how quickly a planned withdrawal could become disorder; the divergent recollections preserve disagreement over how many men ran; and Truman’s outburst became the memorable center around which the veterans’ retellings gathered. The official record surrounding the campaign is signaled by works on the 35th Division’s operations and losses in the Argonne, but this account offers no campaign-wide casualty totals or sequence of objectives. Its focus is the scale at which the danger was lived and remembered: one battery, one night, and a moment of command later retold as both a test of nerve and a source of barracks-room humor.

Place in the Campaign Record

The Meuse–Argonne Offensive is linked in the record to Truman’s service with Battery D and to the 35th Division’s operations. A congressional hearing addressed the division’s losses during the Argonne battle, and a separate official summary covered its operations in the war. Those titles establish a broader documentary frame for the local episode, but they do not, by themselves, supply figures or further details about this particular night.

The distinction matters: the battery’s story can illuminate the pressure and confusion of a combat movement without standing in for the offensive as a whole. In this account, the campaign’s human scale emerges through an interrupted maneuver, frightened soldiers in masks, horses and guns lost in mud, and a commander whose response became the episode’s durable memory.