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| John McNamara & photos from Cantigny |
Today marks the 95th
anniversary of America’s first major engagement of World War I --- the Battle
of Cantigny.
Although much smaller in scale than the epic battles of Verdun,
Ypres, and the Somme, Cantigny’s importance should not be underestimated. It
gave the Americans the confidence, not that they needed it, that they could
handle the seasoned and battle-tested German Army.
My grandfather, John McNamara, a member of the 1st
Engineers, Company D, was assigned to accompany the 28th Infantry Division
in the initial attack. In a sense, my grandfather was part of the first group
of American soldiers to go “over the top” and race across the crater dotted
landscape known as No Man’s Land.
Their objective was to build several strong-points
for the infantry to use as machine gun nests. They were successful in their
mission, but it was not without cost. The 1st Engineers would
sustain 30 casualties, including my grandfather, who was seriously wounded in
the leg by shrapnel. He would earn his first of two purple hearts that day.
After the engineers had completed their constructs, the
infantry captured Cantigny, a strategic town on high ground. They plunged a
mile-long salient into the German lines, and dulled the momentum of a larger
enemy offensive near the Aisne River. The Germans counter attacked several
times to take back the town, but were unsuccessful.
Cantigny was the first of a string of battles that would
thrust the Americans deeper into occupied France. My grandfather and his fellow
engineers would fight and defeat a stubborn German Army in places called Soissons,
St. Mihiel, Argonne, Mouzon, and Sedan. In early November, just as they entered
Germany, an armistice was reached and the war was over. They watched the German
Army, diminished but certainly not defeated, march back to Germany. Twenty
years later, that same German Army would be back.
Battered Europe had certainly enough of the five year war,
but many Americans soldiers, including my grandfather, were puzzled by the
hasty conclusion and the uneasy peace.
The First World War harnessed technology and unleashed a
nightmare of murder that would put 117,000 Americans in an early foreign grave.
For the returning soldiers, flashbacks of machine guns, poisonous gas, and
lethal artillery would haunt their nights and remain a constant and gnawing
presence for the rest of their days. It certainly never left my grandfather,
but when German tanks rolled through Poland in 1939, he was the first to try to
reenlist. Like many WW I veterans, he felt like the job was unfinished.
He was denied reentry into the army, but continued to work
at the Sacramento Southern Pacific Rail Yards, assisting in the massive
operation of transporting soldiers by rail to San Francisco where they would
board ships bound for battlefields in the Pacific.
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| The erroneous obituary |
He died in June of 1946 at the age of 50. On the same day, a
fellow veteran of the First World War committed suicide by jumping into a
drainage ditch with his coat weighted down by heavy rocks.
Although he lived by the seemingly sound creed of “never
trust a priest or a politician” he did have a funeral mass with many veterans
in attendance. The First World War was the seminal event of his life, but sadly
the newspapers referred to him as a veteran of the Second World War in his obituary.
Cantigny was a small battle in what was called the war to
end all wars, and soon it would be overshadowed by the apocalyptic Second World
War. I was told by my uncle that he remembers his father gathering the family
together so that he could regal them with stories of the First World War. With palpable
regret, my uncle shared with me how he and his siblings would giggle through
his presentations. They were children of the Second World War, and tales of the
First World War were simply ancient history.
The centenary of the First World War approaches, as well as the
attendant lectures, books and movies. Somewhere, deep in Washington, there is a
committee being formed to honor the heroes of that forgotten war. My only hope
is that the tribute is not made in granite, but in policy: a hope that our politicians
are worthy of the men and women that they send into combat. That would be the
best tribute to my grandfather and his fellow soldiers.
