Don
Martin diary entry for Thursday, August 29, 1918:
Got up at 5:30. Found [Lt.] Delany had put McFall of the A.P. in car I
had engaged. Refused to go. Waited till 9 when [Edwin] James [New York Times]
and I started out with Fowle. Went to a quarry which is the headquarters of the
32nd division. It is a weird place – 40 feet underground, wired and
lighted with electricity -- more than
200 men working as efficiently as if they were in a Wall Street office
building. While there, lights were turned off and message brought that gas
shells were dropping nearby. Looked bad for a few minutes. I had my gas mask so
I didn’t worry much. Got story about the Americans – the boys from Wisconsin
and Michigan making slight progress. Germans are resisting vigorously here.
Returned by way of Fresnes and there saw the staff of the 3rd corps.
Quiet on the Vesle. Got back to Meaux – 100 kilometers – at 6. Had dinner with
Battersby of Reuters. Wrote 700-word cable and a column story for Paris.
Weather getting cooler.
Don Martin's August 29 'column' report for Paris on the battle front-including air battles-mentions the village of Juvigny, but he apparently did not know about the great struggle going on there. It was published in the Paris Herald on August
30.
AT VITAL POINT YANKS ADVANCE:
TAKE
PRISONERS
In Comparatively Small Numbers,
They
Wrest and Hold Ground North of the Aisne
(Special Telegram to the Herald)
By DON MARTIN
With the American
Armies, Thursday
With the French fighting
brilliantly on either side of them, the Americans, in comparatively small
numbers, to-day made an advance against the Germans and held their ground.
Since the Americans were put in the line at this vital point north of the Aisne
and northwest of Soissons they have advanced and have taken upward of 200
prisoners.
The Americans began a barrage at a
quarter to five o’clock this morning and continued it for forty minutes. It was
of savage character and caused havoc in the front German line. The Germans did
practically all their fighting with machine-guns. They used eight-foot rifles,
with cartridges an inch in diameter, to assail the tanks which were again used
in the assault. They are French tanks—baby tanks.
The Americans mopped out several
machine-gun nests on the outskirts of the village of Juvigny, where the Germans
were prepared, in their customary way, to pepper the enemy with machine-guns
placed at scores of points.
The machine gun fire of the Germans
was savage for a short time. Experienced, however, in assaults upon these pits
of death the Americans destroyed them with minimum loss.
To-day the Germans strengthened
their lines and put up a furious resistance. Prisoners admitted that the
American attack on Tuesday came as a complete surprise and a shock as well to
the Germans. They had been told that the French soldiers opposite were fatigued
and could not make another attack for several days. Then, at daybreak or
shortly after, the Americans, who had arrived in the line but three hours
before, leaped “over the top”—largely a figure of speech, since open fighting
took the place of trench warfare—and attacked.
There were many personal encounters
on Tuesday; there were but few to-day. The German prisoners were well fed. They
wore reasonably good clothes and their boots were in many cases new. There was
nothing to indicate that the German soldiers are faring badly for food. When
asked what they thought of the fact that many of the American soldiers fighting
at this point are of German ancestry, the German prisoners shook their heads
and intimated that they did not believe it. Such is the fact, however.
In the Voivre last night an
American patrol of nineteen men and one officer was encircled by a German
patrol. The Americans fought their way out, capturing three prisoners, causing
many casualties, and had no losses of any kind. Early this morning another
American patrol routed enemy detachments which were discovered to be occupying
at nighttime the same outpost the Americans were using by daylight.
Enemy airplanes were shot down
to-day northeast of Razonville. They attacked American observation balloons.
The record of one American air unit, consisting of an average of seventy-five
pilots, shows that during July it shot down twenty flight planes and one
balloon, eighteen more planes were sent to the earth, but their destruction was
never confirmed. These airmen fought 140 combats and went on 130 combat
patrols; they flew an aggregate of 2,017 hours; made a total of 1,840 flight.
The best days were July 16, when they destroyed six planes and one balloon, and
July 24, when they brought down five planes without suffering a single
casualty.
Along the Vesle, where the
Americans are holding the line, there was artillery and patrol activity.
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