A Scene From Lost Battalion Tours – and A Father’s Proud Moment

One of the things we try to feature each year with Lost Battalion Tours is the chance to give our guests an ‘Indiana Jones Moment’, where we go explore something no one has ever explored, or at least something new to us. We do the basic background research, but once in the field we all discover the details together. These little excursions are always interesting and give the guests a taste of what we have been doing for years. Often times these ‘sidetracks’ involve what we call brush crashing; plowing through the forest in some pretty inhospitable spots. It can get pretty intense sometimes as the Argonne underbrush and surface is often thick, rough, and unforgiving, now as it was a hundred years ago. The guests therefore get a true experience of what it is to do intense field research.

For our 2022 trip, we had decided for our Indy moment that we would go out and try and locate Major Charles Whittlesey’s PC (Post de Command) from the early morning hours of September 26^th, 1918. Charles Whittlesey was the commanding officer of the 1^st Battalion/ 308^th Infantry Regiment/77^th Division. If you recognize the name, it is with good reason; in six days Whittlesey would be in command of a mixed unit of just under 700 men surrounded in a ravine some five and a half kilometers ahead of his present position. The event would be famously known as the siege of the Lost Battalion, for which Whittlesey would be the first man in the war awarded the Medal of Honor. It’s a story I have been intimately involved with for almost 25 years now.  I’ve written THE book on it, as well as two others, spoken professionally on it, consulted on it, and been on TV because of it. For years my house has been like a Lost Battalion museum. It is truly my life’s work.

That year, the position we were to seek out was the dugout where the 1^st/308^th Headquarters section waited to go over the top and launch the 308^th’s advance into the Argonne. This position was just about ¾’s of a kilometer north of the little hamlet of La Harazee up an all but abandoned road that ran up to the area that had long ago been the front lines. The road itself was little changed from what it had been in the war and gave us an easy navigation base to use with the period trench maps of the area I had. Understand that the area itself had been denuded of any and all vegetation for the four years of the war. The trenches that still remained – which was nearly all of them – and had once been visible, were now shrouded in forest.

On the map I had marked the coordinates of Whittlesey’s PC taken from messages his adjutant had sent back to the 308^th Regimental PC early that morning of September 26^th. I had briefly driven up the road itself a few days ahead of time in order to ensure we could indeed get back there and to make sure we wouldn’t be trespassing on private property. I found a passable road, public land, and deep trenches gashing their way through the thick forest. I did not, however, venture far enough up the road to the area we needed to explore as that would have ruined the adventure for everyone.

A few days later we showed up without guests, parked near a French war cemetery in town, and hiked up the road (marked 1 on the illustration below).

The day was hot and sticky and the insects were out in force. I had my map in hand and was keeping careful track of our distance traveled. When I had gauged we were about where we needed to be, I called a halt and explained what it was we would be using as directional guides going forward. To the left (west) of the road, we would find a deep trench within the trees. This was the north/south running Boyaux de Montauville, our starting point.

A Boyaux is the French term for a trench that connected one major trench line to another ahead or behind it. Often times these are referred to as communication trenches in English. We would follow this Boyaux north to a point where it was intersected from the left by Boyaux 6, coming up from the southwest at an angle. Then, facing east, directly across the road from this intersection would be a major trench line angling to the northeast that was part of what was known as Redan 4. A Redan is the French term for a field emplacement, generally V-shaped, with the point of the V facing the enemy and the rear open. A Redan might be manned with machine gun, infantry or trench mortar as circumstance dictated.

We would follow the Redan 4 main trench north for perhaps 15 or 20 meters to a spot where it intersected with the Boyaux de Nancy. At the intersection we would turn right and move down that Boyaux for about five meters. There we would come to a major trench intersecting from our left (east). This was the trench of Redan 3, which was formed in a large oval, and it was our target. By turning left at the T junction we had come to (marked 3 on the illustration), we would enter the Redan and by moving to our left as we entered the oval (marked 4 on the illustration) we would come to the northern tip of it where we would find the dugout that had been Major Whittlesey’s PC. As the forest was still awash in trenches, some of them in remarkably good shape and still 6 to 8 feet deep, and we had an excellent map, we figured there should be little trouble in maneuvering our way.

The difficulty started however when we crossed the road. That section of the forest east of it had at some point within the last 20 years or so, been clear cut of trees. All the trees over there now were young growth with a firm, tangled bed of scrub below; mostly berry bushes, stinging nettles, and some sort of barbed ivy that was like wire from the war and just as sharp. Old logging roads making fire breaks intersected the woods about every 50 meters. Most disturbing was the fact that when the loggers had done their work, they had erased much of the earthworks in that tract of land – which was right where the spot we wanted was located.

The group fanned out and tried to locate any trenches over there that might yet remain. Faint, shallow vestiges of Boyaux de Nancy and Redan 4 could be found here and there, but there wasn’t anything we could really follow for any distance. It became a sort of blind man’s bluff as we tried to disseminate between trench remains and minor paths left from the wheels of the logging equipment. After some time, everyone was confused and we had made no progress.

Regrouping on the road, we took a look at the map again and decided on another track. We would go back to the left side of the road and relocate to the intersection of Boyaux de Montauville and Boyaux 6. From that intersection we would follow the Boyaux de Montauville north for perhaps 20 to 25 meters more where we would meet the major trench line of Redan 4 on this side of the road, again angling up from the left (marked 2 on the illustration). At this intersection we would face due east and walk out of the woods to the road. From the road we would walk some 20 meters into the woods and then try and locate any vestige of the Redan 4 trench, cross that, and then begin a search for the intersection marked 3 on the illustration. From there we would hunt for any indication of Redan 3.

In an hour of difficult brush crashing the area, we felt we had come to the correct spot where the number 3 illustrated intersection should be, but it didn’t seem to be. Again, we found vestiges of trench, but nothing near as beautiful as across the road.

We were running out of our allotted time to spend on the adventure and it looked like we were doomed to failure, when my son John called out. He was a short distance behind us and some way deeper into the woods. He was facing east, squatting in a shallow depression and pointing at the ground ahead of him.

“You see it, Dad?”

I crouched down and peered in the direction he indicated. He had pushed the brush aside for some meters and there it was: a shallow depression about three feet wide but of no more than 24 or 30 inches deep, leading in a graceful curve to the left. We carefully followed it, John leading, and came to a T junction, with the same shallow depressions running away to the left and right. He hooked around to the left and continued a short way until he came to a wide bowl in the ground that the depression hooked around and stopped.

“What do you think dad? At first I thought it was a shallow impact crater. But the rest of it adds up…” He was smiling, so I knew what he thought. I looked at the map and we followed the depression back the way we’d come, then turned around following it back in again, my finger tracing along the map as we moved. Then we went back and fanned out into the brush looking for any other depressions or tracks. The rest of the group was with us now and joined in, double checking what John had found. There was nothing else out there; nothing that would refute what John had found, and we followed the track of the depression around behind the bowl. It all fit, and in the end everyone felt we’d been as successful as we could be. Everything almost exactly matched the map. What we’d found was clearly all that remained of the trenches we were looking for. John looked at me again with a big grin on his face.

“Well, I think you found it kid,” I said grinning, too. “You found Whittlesey’s PC. Well done!”

It was John’s second trip into the Argonne with the company and his first major success. He had been anxious to contribute and learn as much as he could in order to find a place for himself in the organization. He paid particular attention when told about battlefield hazards and spent hours pouring over maps and photos so he would be familiar with the areas we were going into. He was liked and popular with the guests. He read the books and the stories and I’m sure being surrounded his entire life by the story and artifacts of the Lost Battalion had made more than a dent. The men of the Lost Battalion are like family in our house, and Whittlesey’s picture stares down into our living room.

And now another generation of the Laplander clan has become part of the story, too.

External Web Site Notice: This page contains information directly presented from an external source. The terms and conditions of this page may not be the same as those of this website. Click here to read the full disclaimer notice for external web sites. Thank you.