Peleliu 2018 (1944)

 The Nazi refinery, code-named Badger 1, was built with slave labor from the death camps in just 8 months.  Thousands were worked to death in horrid conditions of extreme cold, pain, and hunger.  This pic gives a sense of the awesome scale of the place.

My first book was a detailed study of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 in which Prussia, guided by Bismarck and Moltke, defeated the Austrian army on this very spot, forcing the dissolution of the Austrian-led German Confederation  and its conversion into a Prussian-run state that would become the German Empire after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. The battlefield is little changed, you can stand where the Austrian and Prussian commanders stood and feel the battle unfold.

2016 was the 150th Anniversary of the climactic Battle of Koeniggraetz and the city fathers of Hradec Kralove held an outstanding international conference to reconsider the impacts of the war on history and Europe.  Having written my dissertation on the war and first visited Hradec Kralove under Communism, this return was a gratifying experience.

In Chapter 9 of my book Sons of Freedom I call this "one of the more affecting American memorials in France."  In these fields careless American officers launched storm attacks against entrenched  German machine guns.  Depicted are men of the Alabama National Guard, whose two battalions lost 825 killed and wounded in the fight.  Ultimately the Doughboys saved Paris and the faltering Allies in June-July 1918.

 In the Chemin des Dames you can descend into the limestone quarries and visit the old positions of the Germans -- where they shattered the Nivelle Offensive in 1917 and provoked the French army mutinies.  After the Germans withdrew, the newly arrived Americans occupied the quarries.  It is fascinating to read their graffiti today, like this one:  "Bob Jones, Company K, 102nd Infantry, Thompsonville, Connecticut, March 1, 1918."

I shot this from the American monument on the Montsec, a height dominating the crucial Saint-Mihiel salient.  The Germans overran it in 1914 and held it until the Americans evicted them in September 1918.  Saint-Mihiel, the subject of two chapters in Sons of Freedom, was crucial because it projected across the Meuse and gave the Germans a foothold in the rear of Verdun.  The battlefield is largely unchanged after 100 years.

France lost 50,000 troops after 1914 trying to retake Saint-Mihiel from the Germans who installed themselves in concreted trenches like this.  In some parts of the salient, the enemy trenches are just yards apart.  The French needed the place to guard Verdun, which was the keystone of the French defense line on the Western Front.  The Americans took the salient in just two days from German rearguards who were evacuating back to the Hindenburg Line.  The battle is discussed in detail in Sons of Freedom.

Across the fields behind me, the Doughboys struck on September 26, 1918.  It was the decisive battle of World War I, smashing the German army's "vital pivot" and lifeline in the space between Metz and Sedan, compelling the surrender of Hindenburg's 3-million man  army on the Western Front.  Sons of Freedom has five detailed chapters on the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne.

Petain and Nivelle guided the Battle of Verdun in 1916 from this desk and Pershing moved in here in 1918 to command the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne from this office in the Town Hall of Souilly.  I am grateful to Mayor Christine Habart who gave me the run of the mairie and let me sit at the fabled desk.

To drive on the critical hub of Sedan, the U.S. First Army had to clear the Germans out of the Argonne Forest, where powerful German bunkers remain, like this luxurious army headquarters of Crown Prince Wilhelm. 

For a nation that quickly forgot about WW1, the U.S. had a mania for monuments immediately after it.  Every state vied with the others in the 1920s  to place its monuments in the most prominent sites, the Army only belatedly and ineffectively intervening to control the pell-mell process.  The result, elephantine monuments like this one, completely overwhelming the little village of Varennes-en-Argonne, where the U.S. 28th Division -- the Pennsylvania National Guard -- had its bloody baptism of fire in September 1918.

The ground behind me is the Champagne sector, rolling up from Reims to the summit of the Blanc Mont, a tactically vital ridge which the post-mutiny gun-shy French army could not take from the Germans.  The U.S. 2nd Division, Marines and Doughboys, took it at the cost of 8,000 casualties in early October 1918, propelling the French forward.  The bloody battle is described in detail in Sons of Freedom.

I was fortunate to attend the 200th Anniversary of Waterloo reenactment outside Brussels, and it was magnificent.  Waterloo is one of those pivotal battles that underscore the importance of military history.  Had the French won, and they very nearly did, Napoleon would have had time to reorganize the French Empire, save his throne, and manage the shifting balance of power.