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The capture of Bouresches, and Belleau Wood, the capture of Vaux on July 1st, the gallant help which an American machine-gun battalion gave the French in covering the French retreat across the bridge at Château Thierry, before it was blown up, and foiling the German attempts to cross, and the German move towards Paris, were perhaps, writes a British military authority, "the most splendid service, from a military standpoint, the Americans rendered to the Allied Cause.
"Lieutenant Siddons, you seem to be a most excellent map flyer. You find your way here alone, and you tour this part of France with admirable ease. To-morrow morning, if the visibility is good, you will take off at dawn, cross the line above Bouresches, push on toward Bonnes and as far inland as the railroad crossing on the Ourcq if possible. Is that clear?" "Perfectly, sir."
"Men fell like flies," the expression is that of an officer writing from the field. Companies that had entered the battle 250 strong dwindled to 50 and 60, with a Sergeant in command; but the attack did not falter. At 9.45 o'clock that night Bouresches was taken by Lieutenant James F. Robertson and twenty-odd men of his platoon; these soon were joined by two reinforcing platoons.
The fact is or so it seemed to me that while the British Army salutes with all its heart, the glorious record of that veteran Army of France which bore the brunt of the first years of war, which held the gate at Verdun at whatever cost in heroic lives, and inscribed upon its shield last year the counter-attacks in the Marne salient, and the superb stand of General Gouraud in Champagne; and while, at the same time, it realises and acknowledges to the full the enormous moral and military effect of the warm American tide, as it came rushing over France through the early summer of last year, and the gallantry of those splendid American lads, who, making mock of death, held the crossing of the Marne, took Bouresches and Belleau Wood, fought their hardest under General Mangin in the Soissons counter-attack of July 18th, and gallantly pushed their way, in spite of heavy losses, through the Argonne to the Meuse at the end of the campaign there is yet no doubt in any British military mind that it was the British Army which brought the war to its victorious end.
The battle of Château-Thierry was therefore not won and could not be won until Belleau Wood had been cleared of the enemy. It was June 6 that the attack of the American troops began against that wood and its adjacent surroundings, with the wood itself and the towns of Torcy and Bouresches forming the objectives.
From the 6th to the 11th of June, American troops, among them marine regiments, struck viciously, concentrating against the railroad embankment at Bouresches and the hill of Belleau Woods.
In view of the brilliant conduct of the Fourth Brigade of the Second United States Division, which in a spirited fight took Bouresches and the important strong point of Bois de Belleau, stubbornly defended by a large enemy force, the General commanding the Sixth Army orders that henceforth, in all official papers, the Bois de Belleau shall be named "Bois de la Brigade de Marine."
Without regard for men, the enemy hurled his forces against Bouresches and the Bois de Belleau, and sought to win back what had been taken from Germany by the Americans. The orders were that these positions must be taken at all costs; that the utmost losses in men must be endured that the Bois de Belleau and Bouresches might fall again into German hands.
The Marine casualties at Belleau Wood and Chateau-Thierry appalled The Laird; he read that twenty survivors of a charge that started two hundred and fifty strong across the wheat field at Bouresches had taken Bouresches and held it against three hundred of the enemy led by Sergeant Daniel J. O'Leary, of Port Agnew, Washington! Good old Dirty Dan!
With their backs to the trees and boulders of the Bois de Belleau, with their sole shelter the scattered ruins of Bouresches, the thinning lines of the marines repelled the attack and crashed back the new division which had sought to wrest the position from them. And so it went.
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