Don Martin diary entry for Monday,
June 10, 1918:
Went to Meaux with [Edwin] James [New York Times] and took rooms at the Hotel Sirene. Sent a short cable to New York and
wrote a story for Paris. The censors have moved out here and we have courier
service to Paris.
Don Martin wrote a letter to his
daughter Dorothy dated June 10 as he was about to leave Paris for Meaux:
The big battle going on has made some rather abrupt changes in the
arrangements of the correspondents. First we all came in from Neufchateau,
expecting to have our headquarters here, and go each day in automobiles to the
important places along the front. Today we get word that we must all go to a
place some distance from Paris and stay there. We don’t like it but that makes
no difference, we must go anyhow.
For the next three months,
Don Martin was housed with the war correspondents in Meaux, a town 34 miles (54
kilometers) from Paris. It was possible to go to Paris on the train, and he and
the other war correspondents took advantage of that. Don Martin stayed
overnight in Paris or made day trips to Paris ten times in this three-month
period.
Getting to the front line
from Meaux required a long daily journey by motorcar, although it was shorter
than from Neufchateau. This was an active period when Don Martin wrote that he
got to see “many of the horrors” of
the war “at close range.” – the dead
and wounded, the prisoners, the “scores
of wrecked villages” -- and he was often in the midst of shelling including
with gas.
“Got a story!” was the main
theme of his diary entries in these months, in which he recorded that he
cabled 64,000 words (and many more were not enumerated). And what stories he
was getting! His stories about the doughboys at the front in the major battles were eagerly read back home.
During this
“Meaux” period, the AEF were engaged in three battles: the battle for Belleau
Wood; the second battle of the Marne, and the Marne counteroffensive.
The fight for the Bois de Belleau continued. In the morning of June 10, Major Hughes' 1st Battalion, 6th Marines—together with elements of the 6th Machine Gun Battalion—attacked north into the wood. It was stopped by machine gun fire. The Germans used great quantities of mustard gas.
Next, Wise's 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines was ordered to attack the woods from the west, while Hughes continued his advance from the south. At 04:00 a.m. on June 11, Wise's men advanced through a thick morning mist towards Belleau Wood, supported by the 23rd and 77th companies of the 6th Machine Gun Battalion, and elements of the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Engineers and were cut to pieces by heavy fire. Platoons were isolated and destroyed by interlocked machine gun fire. It was discovered that the battalion had advanced in the wrong direction. Rather than moving northeast, they had moved directly across the wood's narrow waist. However, they smashed the German southern defensive lines. A German private, whose company had 30 men left out of 120, wrote "We have Americans opposite us who are terribly reckless fellows."
Overall, the woods were attacked by the Marines a total of six times before they could successfully expel the Germans. They fought off parts of five divisions of Germans, often reduced to using only their bayonets or fists in hand-to-hand combat.
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