My Grandfather and the Battle of Cantigny

John McNamara & photos from Cantigny

Today marks the 95^th 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 1^st Engineers, Company D, was assigned to accompany the 28^th 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 1^st 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.

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.