Belleau Wood 1918: The Invented Devil Dogs and Dan Daly's Wheat Field

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The story that German soldiers called U.S. Marines Teufelhunden, or Devil Dogs, at Belleau Wood was invented by an American newspaper correspondent. The real battle grew out of Germany's 1918 spring offensive, launched with nearly 50 divisions freed by Russia's collapse, which reached the Marne and Chateau-Thierry within 60 miles of Paris. On June 1 Marines and Army infantry of the 2nd and 3rd Divisions made a forced night march of more than 10 kilometers to plug a gap, then refused French advice to dig in farther back and scraped shallow positions with bayonets and mess tins. On June 3 they held fire with their Springfield rifles until German lines in the wheat were within 100 yards, and Captain Lloyd W. Williams answered a French order to fall back with retreat, hell, we just got here.

The June 6 counterattack went into the woods with no reconnaissance, and lines advancing across open wheat were cut down by interlocking machine gun fire. First Sergeant Dan Daly, already a two time Medal of Honor recipient, urged his men forward by asking whether they wanted to live forever. For three more weeks the fight ground on through splintered trees and mustard gas, with the Army's 2nd Engineers fighting by day and digging by night and the 7th Infantry relieving exhausted Marines. After six attacks, Major Maurice Shearer reported on June 26, Woods now U.S. Marine Corps entirely. U.S. casualties reached 9,777, with more than 1,800 killed.

• Gunnery Sergeant Ernest Janson, serving as Charles Hoffman, earned the Marines' first Medal of Honor of the war fighting off a dozen Germans with a bayonet.
• On June 11 a battalion under Major Wise lost its way in the mist and broke through a southern German line by accident.
• A captured German report credited the Americans' naive assurance and quoted a prisoner's doctrine: kill or get killed.
• France renamed the forest Bois de la Brigade de Marine, and Felix de Weldon, later sculptor of the Iwo Jima memorial, made the Marine Memorial there.
• In 2018 Emmanuel Macron gave the United States an oak sapling taken from Belleau Wood.