As members of the Military Order of Devil Dogs, perhaps many of us know little to nothing about what happened in June in the year 1918.. What happened over the following days , brought the United States Marine Corps to the forefront as an elite fighting force for the first time as well as a demonstration of military fire-power that was viewed by all nations.

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Just before 5 P.M. on June 6, 1918 three companies of Marines led by Major, Benjamin S. Berry approached Belleau Woods, with lines of steel helmeted Marines with fixed bayonets. Their quest was a mile square hunting preserve, with its dense underbrush, huge boulders and trees. It made great cover for the game and birds along with.the German machine guns and their gray-uniformed crack troops, considered at that time, as the “Worlds Finest.”

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As the attack started at 5 P.M. forty-four year old First Sgt. Dan Daly, recipient already of two Medals of Honor, crouched with his men of the 73rd Machine Gun Company in a wooded grove at the edge of the wheat field.

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Floyd Gibbons a war correspondent described in the Chicago Tribune what he observed. The bullets nipped the tops of the wheat and ripped the bark from the trees, three feet from the ground, on which the Marines lay. An old Gunnery Sgt. commanded the platoon in the absence of the lieutenant who had been shot and was out of this fight. This old Sgt. was a Marine veteran, and his cheeks were bronzed with the wind and the sun of the seven seas. The service bar across his left breast showed that he had fought in the Philippines, in Santo Domingo, at the walls of Peking and in the streets of Vera Cruz …

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As the minute for the advance arrived, he arose from the trees first. He jumped out onto the exposed edge of the field that ran hot with lead. The field where the Sgt. and his men were about to charge across. Then he turned to give the charge orders to the men of bis platoon, his mates, the men he loved. He said, “Come on you sons-of-bitches, do you want to live forever?”

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Those first waves were severely slaughtered. Most of the Marines who survived were pinned down in the wheat field, and after dark crawled back to the safety of the edge of the original Marine line.

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In the advance, Major Berry was severely wounded in the left forearm and correspondent Floyd Gibbons trying to help the Major took three bullets. Gibbons sent to Paris a dispatch reporting that the Marines were entering combat. The censor hearing that the reporter was wounded and apparently killed in action, passed the story unchanged. Though against the rules to identify units in combat, the censor’s sentimentality allowed the world to know that the Marine Corps was in action at Belleau Wood.

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WITH THAT FLUKE CAME GLORY.