Meuse-Argonne campaign
TrumanThe Meuse-Argonne campaign was the largest military action in American history up to that time, a massive offensive intended to cut the German rail lines at Sedan. Its immense mobilization and costly fighting framed Harry S. Truman’s experience as an artillery officer: a forced march through darkness and mud, exhausted horses and men, and the arrival of his battery at its assigned position just before the attack began.
Strategic Aim and Scale
After the American victory at Saint-Mihiel, orders changed and the 129th Field Artillery Regiment was sent toward the Argonne Forest. The Supreme Command had settled on an all-out offensive extending along the Western Front from Verdun to the sea. The American sector ran for twenty-four miles, from the Meuse River north of Verdun to the Argonne Forest; the objective was to cut the German rail lines at Sedan.
The scale of the movement was unprecedented. Fifteen divisions—600,000 men—were moving toward the front, accompanied by nearly 3,000 artillery pieces, trucks, tanks, supply wagons, and more than 90,000 horses. Colonel George C. Marshall had worked out the logistical plan. Infantry and ammunition traveled in large chain-drive trucks, while slower horse-drawn artillery complicated the order of march. Three roads carried the advance, often in both directions as French troops returned from the positions they were leaving. To conceal the operation, movement had to take place under cover of darkness. Congestion became severe enough that road officers sometimes brandished revolvers to keep traffic moving; after the first moonlit night, rain turned the roads to mud, and exhausted horses that collapsed in their harnesses had to be destroyed.
The March to Hill 290
The move tested the artillerymen as well as the transport system. To spare the horses, cannoneers were ordered not to hold onto guns or caissons as they walked behind them. But the men were nearly exhausted, and the caissons offered a tempting support along the march. Truman’s own battery faced a different difficulty when one caisson became stuck in the woods. He eventually got it out by attaching ropes and setting the men to pull.
Truman took only the firing battery and enough men to operate the guns. His column comprised twelve carriages: four guns, six caissons, and two wagons, one carrying instruments and the other food. On the crowded road, trucks repeatedly tried to cut through the battery, forcing Truman to keep it moving at a trot or gallop and ride along the line to keep the formation together. The rain continued, and the road was slick.
The forced march covered nearly 100 miles, yet the whole movement succeeded: every unit reached its appointed position on schedule. The 129th Field Artillery Regiment was assigned to Hill 290, near the crossroads village of Neuvilly. Truman and the 129th Field Artillery Regiment D Battery reached a clump of saplings near a wood at 3:00 a.m., exhausted and in pitch darkness. Across an open stretch of No-Man’s-Land lay the German strongpoint of Boureuilles. It took twelve horses to each gun, along with every man pushing, to get all four guns into position by daylight.
Preparation, Fighting, and Cost
The days before the offensive were spent digging trenches, stacking ammunition, and clearing trees to open a field of fire. German shells occasionally came over. One night, several landed exactly where Truman had slept on the first morning; he had moved, and later reflected that he would otherwise have been killed. In Colonel Klemm’s dugout on the evening of September 25, battery commanders received orders for the attack, set to begin at 5:30 the next morning. Each battery was to fire 1,000 rounds an hour. The first hour’s preparation fire was intended to destroy German barbed-wire entanglements; a rolling barrage was then to accompany the infantry’s advance.
The offensive did not produce the swift, smashing victory that had followed Saint-Mihiel. Sedan was eventually taken, but the price was appalling. Infantry casualties reached as high as 50 percent in the 35th Infantry Division. At the dressing station at Cheppy, hundreds of wounded arrived; fourteen ambulances carrying casualties were sent to the rear from that one station in a single day. Thousands of men were being fed there on September 30, many wounded or gassed, while Father Tiernan buried the dead under fire. One ambulance company alone suffered more than fifty casualties.
Across 47 days, American casualties totaled 117,000. The campaign also became associated with the infantry unit known as the Lost Battalion, trapped for five days and suffering nearly 70 percent casualties, and with Alvin York, who captured 132 Germans in one day. At the battlefield’s center, the military cemetery on Romagne Heights would hold 14,246 American dead, making it the largest American military graveyard in Europe.
Truman’s Experience and Its Legacy
When the regiment was pulled back to rest, Truman had lost 20 pounds. He wrote to Bess Truman that the fighting was bad, and that the heroes were in the infantry. The men in his battery looked like scarecrows, but their respect for him had grown. Fellow artilleryman Vere Leigh later recalled that Truman was treated as the head man because he had earned that standing, not because he was a dramatic or showy soldier. Truman himself regarded the campaign as the most intense experience of his life and took pride that his men had come through alive and in one piece.
The experience remained part of how Truman understood military service and public authority. He was proud of his field-artillery service in France in 1918, and later insisted that control of the war effort remain in civilian hands. In 1942, as a senator investigating military procurement, he warned that the influence of generals and admirals over industry and agriculture could shape the country’s political and economic structure after the war. The campaign’s scale and its human cost thus became more than a passage in his wartime biography: they formed part of the experience behind his insistence that military power answer to civilian government.
