The Dark Truth About American Trench Raiders

At 3:00 in the morning on November 3rd, 1917, a German trench raiding party slipped through the darkness of no man’s land and killed the first three American soldiers to die in combat in World War I, shattering the illusion that the quietest sector of the Western Front would keep them safe.

The attack was precise and brutal. A box barrage of artillery fell on a stretch of French trench near the village of Bathelemy, not to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁, but to trap the men inside while German raiders closed in. When the shelling stopped, the Germans were already through the wire.

Some of the raiders spoke fluent English. One approached Corporal James Gresham and asked who he was. Gresham replied, “I’m an American.

Don’t shoot.” He was shot between the eyes. Private Thomas Enright had his throat cut while resisting.

Private Merle Hay, a 21-year-old store clerk from Glidden, Iowa, had his skull crushed.

Eleven more American soldiers were dragged back across no man’s land, lined up, and photographed with their captors. Those images were printed as postcards and distributed across Germany as propaganda, proof that the new arrivals from across the Atlantic were nothing to fear. The entire raid lasted less than five minutes.

Those three men were the first of 53,000 Americans who would be killed in action in the First World War. But something remarkable happened in the weeks that followed. The survivors of that same company did not retreat into fear.

They learned.

Three weeks after that night, the same American soldiers blackened their faces, stripped off anything that could rattle or identify them, and went out into the dark to do it back. They had absorbed a lesson that had taken the British two years and the Canadians about one year to master. The Americans did it in three weeks.

What happened to them that night had a name: a trench raid. By November 1917, both sides had been conducting these operations for three years. The tactic was born from the catastrophic failure of mass frontal assaults against entrenched machine guns and artillery.

Before the war, European military leaders believed in the power of offensive action with near-religious faith. French generals preached that sheer will to conquer could overcome any disadvantage. They rejected replacing bright red trousers with less visible uniforms on the grounds that it would hurt fighting spirit.

The bayonet stood at the center of this philosophy. Nations competed to create the longest possible rifle. The French Lebel Model 1886 had a bayonet blade 20 inches long, creating a weapon six feet in total length.

The Germans called it the French Needle.

Germany’s own Gewehr 98 with bayonet measured five feet nine inches, designed to allow infantry to bring down cavalrymen from horseback. This tells you how military planners were still thinking in terms of the previous century’s warfare when the war began in 1914.

The reality of industrial warfare was devastating. On August 22, 1914, in a single 24-hour period, 27,000 French soldiers were killed advancing in bright red trousers and blue coats, officers leading with drawn swords. Machine guns and artillery mowed them down long before they reached bayonet range.

The Germans suffered their own catastrophe at the First Battle of the Marne, where Crown Prince Wilhelm ordered 100,000 men to fix bayonets and charge in darkness. French 75mm guns opened fire. Two German units fired on each other at point-blank range.

The assault suffered about 15,000 casualties.

Those failed offensives led to attempts to outflank each other, but aerial reconnaissance made this impossible. Each side could see where attacks were coming and prepare. Infantry charging across open ground was slaughtered.

The survivors dug in.

The trenches soon snaked from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border, creating 440 unbroken miles of fortification. A revolution in firepower had not been matched by advances in tactics. The defender held every advantage.

Over four million men had been killed or wounded in just the first five months.

Three thousand miles away, the country that would eventually decide how this war ended had a regular army of about 127,000 men. That was the entire professional army of the United States, roughly what the British were feeding into a single corps. Nineteen months later, it would be nearly four million.

The answer to breaking the trench deadlock was not found in advancing weapons, but in going back to medieval methods of swords and body armor. The obvious question for commanders was how to break through. Their answer was massive artillery bombardments lasting days or even a week.

The most notorious example came at the Somme, where the British fired over 1. 5 million shells during a seven-day bombardment. Commanders ordered soldiers not to run but to walk, because the Germans would surely all be dead.

The first day of the Somme remains the deadliest in British military history.

The Germans had built deep dugouts, some 40 feet underground, reinforced with concrete. Soldiers waited out the heaviest bombardments in safety, then scrambled back to their firing positions to mow down the advancing infantry. Wave after wave died without real success.

Even when attackers captured a section of enemy trenches, there were always two or three more lines behind it. The attacking force would be so badly beaten that they would inevitably lose it in the enemy counterattack. Everything returned to where it started with nothing accomplished except thousands dead.

From this catastrophe emerged a different approach: small-scale raids, hit-and-run attacks at night, designed not to hold territory but to slip in, accomplish specific objectives, and slip back out before the enemy could respond. The Canadians perfected this tactic. Everyone eventually copied them.

The last army to arrive on this front would learn it the hard way. In the dark, in a sector someone had promised them was quiet. The conditions in the trenches were appalling.

Frontline trenches were typically seven feet deep and six feet wide, built in zigzag patterns so a single shell could not explode down the entire length.

In these cramped, twisting corridors, infantry rifles became the main problem. Armies had spent decades making them longer. Bolt-action rifles designed for shooting at enemies 300 yards away were useless when fighting happened within arms reach.

Bayonets often got stuck in bodies.

One Australian soldier watched the man next to him put a bayonet through a German and into a hardwood beam behind. He could not pull it out. The bayonet had to be released, leaving the man pinned there until he died.

Two soldiers were found dead having stabbed each other at the exact same moment.

Out of these situations, soldiers on both sides reached for clubs, knives, and sharpened shovels. Weapons that would have been perfectly familiar to their medieval ancestors. The shovel proved the most effective of all due to its weight.

Soldiers sharpened the edges so it did terrible damage wherever it landed.

Unlike the bayonet, it would not get stuck. This return to medieval times extended beyond weapons to armor. The Germans issued steel breastplates weighing over 20 pounds, only practical for stationary positions.

The Americans experimented with the Brewster body shield, a 40-pound chrome-nickel steel thing that could stop a rifle round but was never used on the battlefield.

The American army in 1917 was designing armor for a war none of them had actually seen yet. When the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, its regular army was about 127,000 men. There was no general staff, no divisions as European armies understood them, no doctrine for the kind of war being fought in France.

There was no domestic production of machine guns, modern artillery, aircraft, gas equipment, or tanks. Most of the weapons Americans would fight with had to be handed to them by the people they had come to help. General John J.

Pershing arrived in France in May 1917 with a small staff and the job of building a two million man army.

The French and British wanted American men fed into their divisions as replacements. Pershing refused. The American army would fight as an American army under American command or not at all.

Every man now had to be trained from zero in France in the middle of a war by an army that did not know how to fight it.

Pershing believed the allies had gone soft. He thought four years in a trench had turned their armies into defensive instruments. What this war needed was aggressive infantry out in the open with the rifle and the bayonet.

He called it open warfare. The manual American infantry took with them gave five pages to trench warfare and 25 to how to march in a parade.

French instructors assigned to American training areas tried to hand over everything three years had cost them. Pershing’s staff worried these instructors might pollute the men with their ideas about trench warfare. Luckily, nobody in the training areas was listening.

The 16th Infantry Regiment trained with the 47th Chasseurs Alpins, the Blue Devils, French mountain infantry who were some of the most experienced close-quarters fighters in Europe. They taught how to listen in the dark for German patrols forming up in the wire, how to read the rhythm of enemy flares, how to strip a raiding party until nothing could rattle.

But the Americans were not there yet. One private from this early period, Quincy Mills, said later, “I shot six German sneaking up on me one night, and when daylight came, they were all the same tree stump.” A veteran knew what a rat sounded like in the wire.

He knew the difference between a man crawling and a rabbit startled by moonlight. These men had to learn all of that from experience. On the night of November 3rd, 1917, before they had learned it, a German raiding party found them.

Gresham, Enright, Hay, and 11 men in a photograph.

Three weeks later, the survivors of Company F blackened their own faces and went out through the wire to do it to somebody else. That is not a long time to go from being the victim to being good at it. Later in the war, when the Germans took American prisoners, one of them is supposed to have said something that stuck.

“If only we could have met you in 1915, when we too were young.” Every army that walked into 1914 believed the next war would be decided at range, that the rifle had made everything older irrelevant. They spent 30 years making that true.

They were correct right up until two men were standing in the same six feet of ditch.

At that range, none of it mattered. What mattered was a shovel with the edges filed down. The most advanced societies on Earth spent four years and a generation of men discovering that the shortest way to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 somebody was the one their great-grandfathers had used.

Armies gradually developed purpose-built weapons for trench fighting. The pistol became essential. The Colt M1911 was highly prized by Americans.

Some men carried a captured Luger as a second pistol. The MP 18 submachine gun, chambered in 9mm and firing at 400 rounds per minute, gave German stormtroopers devastating firepower.

The American contribution to trench weapons was the infamous Winchester Model 1897 trench shotgun. It had a feature called slam fire. Unlike modern pump-action shotguns, it fired every time the action closed as long as the trigger was held down.

A trained soldier could fire all six shells in about two seconds.

At that range in a trench, everything in front got hit. It was fitted with a perforated steel shield over the barrel and an adapter to fix a bayonet to a shotgun. Soldiers called it the trench sweeper and the trench broom.

Winchester delivered just under 20,000 of them.

On September 19, 1918, the American Secretary of State received a cable from Berlin. The German government protested the use of shotguns and gave notice that every American prisoner found in possession of such a gun was to be sentenced to death. The American answer came back short.

If the German government carried out that threat in a single instance, the United States would make such reprisals as would best protect American forces. The nation that had introduced chlorine gas, phosgene, and the flamethrower had decided the pump-action shotgun was the weapon that crossed the line. The Germans dropped the protest.

The first American trench knife was the M1917, a triangular spike designed to punch through thick winter uniforms mounted on a cast iron knuckle duster grip with spikes. On paper, it was exactly right. In practice, the joint between blade and handle was not strong enough.

The handles broke in the middle of using them.

Soldiers did what soldiers always do when gear fails. They made their own out of files and cut lengths of rebar or got French knives off units next door. The Ordnance Department’s own paperwork describes the demand for “hundreds of thousands of murderous blades backed by the momentum of heavily weighted handles.”

The replacement was the M1918 Mark I. They studied the French knuckle bow trench knife and rebuilt it the American way: longer handle, a single piece of cast brass threaded the entire way through so there was no joint to snap, and a heavy reinforced cap on the end so the knife still worked as a weapon when you did not want to use the blade.

It had none of the elegance of French or Italian blades. It was an American answer to a problem: find the fault, overbuild the fix, then make a hundred thousand of them. There was never an official American trench club.

Regimental carpenters and individual soldiers just made them from broken timber, pick handles, barrel staves with hobnails driven in.

As the war ground on, both sides realized that small-scale raiding would never win the war by itself. What was needed was a way to apply those same principles of speed, surprise, and close-quarters violence on a much larger scale. The Germans created stormtrooper units.

Instead of attacking the whole width of the front, stormtroopers attacked key points only. They bypassed strong points, leaving them for follow-up waves, and seeped into the enemy rear to overrun artillery batteries and command posts. The idea was to cut frontline troops off from headquarters and supply depots.

This required a complete change in how commanders thought about battle. Junior officers were encouraged to lead through personal judgment rather than waiting for orders. Independence, quick thinking, and resourcefulness made it work.

The men were volunteers, mostly under 25 with athletic backgrounds.

When Germany ended the war with Russia in March 1918, nearly 50 divisions were transferred west. For the first time since 1914, Germany outnumbered the Allies on the Western Front. The spring offensive began with over a million shells fired in five hours, the biggest artillery barrage of the entire war.

Fog on the morning of March 21 allowed stormtroopers to slip deep into British positions unseen. They achieved the deepest advances on the Western Front since 1914, pushing forward 40 miles in two weeks. Warfare became mobile again for the first time in years.

But the Germans had not expected such success. Stormtroopers moved faster than their own artillery could follow. Supply lines collapsed over the cratered wasteland.

The best men had been pulled out of regular units and concentrated into storm units. These elite soldiers suffered disproportionately heavy casualties that could not be replaced.

The offensive stalled. This failure was part of why Germany ultimately lost the war. By the spring of 1918, Americans were landing in France at over 5,000 men a day.

By June, it was 10,000 a day. An American division was 28,000 men, nearly three times the size of a typical Allied division.

Even when their tactics were clumsy, and they often were, there was a weight behind the Americans that German planning had not accounted for. But it was not the numbers that unsettled the German army. It was something else.

These men were not tired. Nobody on the Western Front had seen a soldier who was not tired in four years.

The Germans found that out properly in June 1918 at Belleau Wood. The Fourth Marine Brigade attacked across open wheat fields into German machine guns with no artillery support and no accurate maps. In one battalion, more than half the men were killed or wounded within a few hours.

Those who reached the tree line found themselves in a wood where you could see about 15 to 25 meters. At 15 meters, everything applied. Bayonets and knives were used.

It took six major attacks over nearly a month to clear that wood. The Germans started calling them Teufelshunde. Devil Dogs.

A lot of the men in American National Guard divisions had grown up in the rural South and West, hunting difficult country with firearms around the house years before anybody handed them a uniform. When it came down to one man in the dark trying to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 another from a few feet away, some of them had been practicing for it their whole lives.

Major Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the former president, led a textbook trench raid near Cantigny on June 26, 1918. His battalion went in at 3:15 in the morning through the wire, through the German trenches, and back out with 33 prisoners and the paperwork from a command post.

Lieutenant William Bradford Turner led a platoon near Ronssoy on September 27, 1918. What started as a trench raid turned into something else. They took one trench line, then the next, then the next.

Turner was wounded three times. He was killed in the fourth German trench line holding against a counterattack.

Corporal Alvin York from Fentress County, Tennessee, on October 8, 1918, in the Argonne Forest, found himself alone against multiple machine guns. He had spent his life shooting turkey. He found a firing position where German guns could not depress enough to reach him.

Every time a head came up, he shot it.

When six German soldiers came at him with fixed bayonets, he drew his Colt and shot them in sequence, back to front, so the men in front would not see the ones behind them fall. A German officer offered his surrender. York walked 132 prisoners back to the American lines.

Marshal Foch, the supreme Allied commander, told York afterward that it was the greatest thing accomplished by any soldier in all the armies of Europe. This was a man who had commanded at Verdun, where 300,000 men died over 10 months. He had seen everything this war had.

What he was pointing at was that four years of the most intensive military training the European powers had ever attempted had not been able to produce on demand what that man had walked in already having: patience, an eye, an instinct for cover and line of fire that you cannot teach an adult in a training camp in three months.

The Argonne Forest had been in German hands since the opening months of the war. In those four years, they had turned it into one of the most heavily fortified positions on the entire Western Front. The canopy was thick enough to make aerial reconnaissance almost useless.

Visibility was 15 to 25 meters on a good day.

Machine gun nests were sited to cover each other. Attacking one brought fire from another. Wire was laid in belts inside the undergrowth, invisible until your boot found it in the dark.

You could not break a place like that with a mass assault. You could only get into it in small groups, take terrible casualties, and keep going.

On October 2, 1918, 554 men went into a narrow valley called the Charlevaux Ravine. They were from the 77th Division, raised off the streets of New York City, where the men spoke 42 different languages and dialects. They called it the Melting Pot Division.

They were commanded by Major Charles Whittlesey, Williams College, Harvard Law, corporate law on Wall Street. The units on his left and right did not keep pace. By nightfall, the Germans had closed in behind him.

Whittlesey was cut off with no food, no water, no way to be resupplied.

What followed was five days of snipers, grenades, trench mortars, and flamethrowers. American artillery received the wrong coordinates and shelled Whittlesey’s own position for two hours. The message he sent on a pigeon read, “Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us.

For heaven’s sake, stop it.”

The pigeon got through, badly wounded. The bombardment stopped. Then the Germans sent a blindfolded American prisoner under a white flag carrying a surrender note.

The note said the suffering of his wounded men could be heard from the German lines. It ended with, “The bearer is quite a soldier. We envy you.”

Think about that against the postcards from the start of this story. Whittlesey did not reply. He pulled in the white signal panels his men had been using to talk to Allied aircraft.

That evening, relief broke through. Of the 554 men who went into the Charlevaux Ravine, 194 walked out unhurt.

The armistice came five weeks later on November 11, 1918. Whittlesey came home one of the most celebrated soldiers of the war. He received the Medal of Honor.

He was promoted. He was wanted everywhere for speeches, parades, honorary degrees. Every single one required him to describe those five days again.

He went back to his law firm. He went to the funerals of his own men at a rate of two and three a week. He visited the wounded.

He found them jobs. He lent them money. He did their legal work for nothing.

He said to a friend, “Not a day goes by, but I hear from some of my old outfit. I cannot bear it much more.”

On November 11, 1921, the third anniversary of the armistice, Whittlesey was a pallbearer at the burial of the unknown soldier at Arlington. Two weeks later, he boarded a steamship bound for Havana. He had dinner at the captain’s table.

The captain said he seemed in good spirits.

Whittlesey left the smoking room at quarter past 11, said good night, and went to his cabin. In his cabin were nine letters he had written to his parents, his brothers, his closest friends, and his second in command. With them was the original German surrender note from the Charlevaux Ravine, which he had kept for three years.

He was never seen again. His body was never recovered. His friends said they had suspected for years that he was suffering from what people then called shell shock, and that he had hidden how bad it was with exactly the same discipline he had shown in that ravine.

There was no framework in 1921 for what he was carrying. There was no treatment for it. Post-traumatic stress disorder was not formally recognized in medical literature until 1980.

Whittlesey had been dead for 59 years by then.

Europe in 1914 was considered the pinnacle of modern civilization, the most technologically advanced society the world had ever seen. Yet this modern war spiraled into the most primal and savage form of combat known to man. Despite artillery, machine guns, airplanes, submarines, warships, and tanks, it all eventually ended with clubs and sharpened shovels.

For the Americans, it began with three men in a French trench at 3:00 in the morning near a village nobody had ever heard of. James Gresham, Thomas Enright, and Merle Hay were buried two days later in the ground behind the trench they had died in. In the summer of 1921, all three were dug up and shipped home.

What the French put over them in the meantime called them the first soldiers of the American Republic to fall on French soil. The dark truth about American trench raiders is that they learned violence in the dark from men who had been practicing it for three years, and they learned it so fast that within weeks, they were the ones doing the teaching.