Review: To Conquer Hell (2)

I first ordered this book in 2011, and read it while I was deployed to Afghanistan. It was great book, but it was hard to follow the phases and the various divisions as they advanced north. As a result, I could understand the beginning and the end, but the middle was just a horrific morass of battlefield experiences.

Since that time, I’ve learned that I had three great-granduncles who fought in the Meuse-Argonne campaign. Thomas Jodon (1st Division, 18th Infantry Regiment), Lawrence Swenk (37th Div, 145th Infantry), and John William Smith (89th Div, 342nd Field Artillery, pictured below). With that knowledge, the battle “re-interested” me, so I bought the Kindle version, and started tracking what those divisions did. Given that -- for each phase of the action -- the author reports on each division, going from east to west, I used this map from the American Battlefields Commission. [Source] That made everything so much easier; when a division got bogged down and failed to advance, you can see the lack of progress in the phase lines. It’s also helpful to understand where the Meuse Argonne American Cemetery is with relation to the battlefield. There were no new revelations from reading the book a second time, but the actions seemed much more vivid now as I imagined my great-granduncles being in similar units, doing the same thing. For example, here's a passage about soldiers from the 89th Division dragging their 75mm field guns forward:

Half of Casey's men were already dead or wounded, along with many of his horses. Every little while a piece of shrapnel hit a horse, and the men stopped to unhitch the animal before moving on. The surviving horses had to pull twice as hard. Casey saw that one of the horses in the lead tema was bleeding from six wounds. "He had lost an eye, the remnants of which hung in an oystery mass over his nose. I felt like shooting him but he was still pulling and we needed his help."

I don’t have any stories of their experiences in the Great War –- there was nothing passed down through my family –- but if they went through anything similar, I could understand why.

One does not brag about conquering hell; one only tries to leave it behind.