I Will Hold: The Story of USMC Legend Clifton B. Cates, from Belleau Wood to Victory in the Great War
352
I Will Hold: The Story of USMC Legend Clifton B. Cates, from Belleau Wood to Victory in the Great War
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Overview
Cates knew that he and his small band of marines were in a desperate spot. Before handing the note over to a runner, he added three words that would resound through Marine Corps history: I WILL HOLD.
From the moment he first joined the Marine Reserves of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, Clifton B. Cates was determined to make his mark as a leader. Little did he know what he would truly accomplish in his legendary career.
Not as well-known as his contemporaries such as Alvin C. York, his fame would not come from a single act of heroism but from his consistent and courageous demeanor throughout the war and beyond.
In the bloody second half of 1918 with the 6th Marine Regiment, he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Purple Heart, and the Silver Star; was recognized by the French government with the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre; and earned the nickname “Lucky.”
I Will Hold is the inspiring, brutally vivid, and incredible true life story of a Marine Corps legend whose grit and unstoppable spirit on the battlefield matched his personal drive and sage wisdom off of it.
Winner of the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation 2017 Colonel Joseph Alexander Award for Biography
INCLUDES PHOTOS
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780698196735 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/06/2016 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
OCTOBER 3, 1918
He has already spent one night sleeping almost atop the bodies of dead men, French and German, dead for days and weeks and thankfully unseen now in the blackness, though there was no mistaking their odious, putrid smell. And so, when the whistles shrilly pierce the early-morning air, it is something of a relief to be up and off, although in the first rays of daylight, at least until he and his men are greeted rudely by the whistling of Minenwerfers and the zip-zip-zip of machine-gun bullets and, soon enough, the familiar, dull slapping sound of metal encountering flesh and bone, the accordant screams of the wounded, and the muffled coughing of those already dying.
Quickly out of the trench and up the hill, he pushes past blasted dugouts and through and over the wire, red with rust after four long years of war but still a prickly impediment to reaching the crest. Before too long he is almost to the top, almost there, through the wafting gray smoke and the squeezing pup-pup-pup of the machine guns and through the long brown grass and the shell holes pocking the hill like vacant black eyes and past the blue-green bodies of the dead, marine and German, and still he pushes on, almost laughing, almost floating from the sheer bloody wonder of it all; keep going, keep going, keep going. . . .
Artillery rounds plop at random here and there, sending black geysers of soil high into the air, and more men fall; keep going, keep going past deep redoubts and blasted, crumbling trench lines in which dead men lie splayed in their deathly innocence, and through the wafting acrid black smoke that stings the eyes; keep going.
Men scream; men die. He finds himself almost laughing. It is not so horrible to him, not so bad; he has done something like this before, at Belleau Wood and Soissons, and he knows it is something he will do yet again before this war is done.
His right hand oozes sweat, coursing slippery and wet down the handle of his .45, and more streams from his brow under his deeply dented helmet; a shadow at his side tumbles forward and lies still; keep going, keep going.
Almost at the top, he sees one of them racing away. He follows instinctively at a run and fires, almost laughing. Marines all along the line now reach the main trench and begin the work of the bayonet, or swing their rifles like baseball bats, or fall on the enemy with fists and knives, even, if that is what it takes.
A German officer suddenly appears from the dank recesses of a dugout. They eye each other, just for a split moment and pistol to pistol, as if they were gunslingers on the streets of old Laredo, each waiting for the other to draw. Suddenly, the German fires; he fires back. The German tumbles into his hole, a look of surprised horror on his face and a deep red stain spreading over his heart.
Keep going.
And as he does, he takes it all in, the chaos and the shouts and the shots and the smoke and the chattering guns and the wails of the wounded. He feels somehow impervious, almost immortal, as he moves now along the hilltop trench, tossing grenades and shooting until the brow of the massif is finally taken, and long lines of the enemy slouch down the hill even as ever more marines come up.
It is almost comical sometimes, he thinks; this war-making, these bloody, glorious, horrible, life-taking battles sometimes almost make him laugh.
God, he loves this war.
God, he loves this awful, tragic, soul-grinding, terrible, wasting, wonderful war.
LUCKY
Faster, goddamnit, faster!
Bleak figures bundled against the snow and leaning forward into the sleety wind, blanketed horses pulling the wagons of street vendors, gnarled immigrants wrapped in blankets and shoveling ice-clogged sidewalks, gaggles of truants heaving snowballs from tenement rooftops crisscrossed with a cat's cradle of wires; his taxi passed all of these things on the morning of January 22, 1918, speeding from Herald Square for the harbor, where the transport, the USS Henderson, either was, or was not, waiting at anchor.
And as the taxi raced on, twenty-four-year-old Clifton Bledsoe Cates fretted in the back, chain-smoking furiously and ignoring all of these varied sights of Lower Manhattan, his mind spinning gloomily as it obsessed on one overriding concern: that his career in the United States Marine Corps had died even as it was aborning, and he was finished.
His ship had been slated to leave port more than an hour beforehand, and he knew if he wasn't on board when it sailed, he'd be court-martialed for desertion.
"There is no question about it," he would recall with a comfortable laugh years later.
The old Henderson, carrying the 2nd Battalion of the 6th Regiment of marines, had sailed from Philadelphia on January 20. The next day it heaved to in New York Harbor, and the officers on board were allowed shore leave-with the understanding they would be back on board by eight a.m. So Cates headed to shore with his mates for the bright lights of the city. After some hours of carousing, he decided at two a.m. he'd had enough.
A heavy snow caressed the dark night in rippling currents, blanketing the streets, and there wasn't a taxi in sight. So he took a room at the grand McAlpin Hotel at Broadway and West Thirty-fourth Street instead, and left instructions with the night clerk to awaken him at six a.m.
He crawled into bed, not even bothering to take off his uniform.
When he awoke, it was well past nine a.m.
"I was frantic," he would recall.
He raced downstairs to the lobby and paused only long enough to colorfully tell the hapless clerk some of what he thought of him, and then hurried out of the hotel, quickly hailed a cab, and was soon speeding toward the docks, hoping against hope that the Henderson would be there, hoping against hope that this new life he was learning to love hadn't ended abruptly on the streets of New York on this cold and miserable morning, hoping that he could rejoin his men before they sailed into a world war and endure with them whatever was to come in the trenches that split France like a heaving sidewalk crack.
Faster, he told the hack. Faster . . .
Certainly more veterans would come out of World War I more famous than Clifton Bledsoe Cates, some of them becoming heroes for great exploits performed over the course of a minute, ten minutes, or a few hours. Some of their names would spill from the history pages in perpetuity: Alvin C. York, Cates's fellow Tennessean, was of course the most famous of these, and Sam Woodfill would have his measure of fame, as would Michael "Mad Dog" Ellis, wildcat marine John Joseph Kelly, Charles Whittlesey of "Lost Battalion" notoriety, and many others.
Clifton Bledsoe Cates was not destined to share as bright a spotlight. His acclaim, such as it was, came not for one single act-single-handedly capturing one hundred prisoners, bravely knocking out twelve machine guns with but a bayonet and a hand grenade-but for his body of work in World War I.
He would be knocked out, knocked down, gassed, nicked, pinged and dinged numerous times, and still rise to lead men; he would by force of example show men what they could do, what they needed to do; his bravery, his pluck, his sheer bursts of illuminating optimism would shine daily in the worst of circumstances during the second half of 1918, from Belleau Wood to Soissons to Blanc Mont and, finally, to the last days in the Meuse-Argonne; and it would be no coincidence that his unit-the 96th Company, 6th Marine Regiment-would suffer more casualties than any other American company in the Great War.
Cates did his work quietly, with almost unearthly confidence and a dash of derring-do; ordered forward over and over again, he would lead his company into the thickest of battles, and against all odds, and though his men fell dead and wounded all around him, he would emerge safe and alive and sometimes even laughing, as if protected by some divine providence.
Other marines could only shake their heads in wonder at him.
Cliff Cates, they all said. The luckiest man in the Great War.
He would become one of the most famous of United States marines, a Corps legend, and, on his way to becoming the nineteenth commandant of the Marine Corps in 1948, he would lead a platoon, then a company, then a regiment, and, finally, a division, into battle.
It was a somewhat unlikely destiny, perhaps, considering his origins were pastoral rather than martial to much degree. It had been expected that young Cliff Cates, born to some wealth at a long-held family cotton farm known as Cates Landing, Tennessee, at a spot where the broad Mississippi River dips south and then violently north again as it meanders toward the onetime earthquake epicenter at New Madrid, Missouri, would someday become a yeoman farmer and businessman like his father and grandfather, or an attorney, handling civil cases instead of ammunition boxes, under a shingle to be hung in Memphis, Knoxville, or maybe Nashville.
But as with some of the nation's other notable military commanders who came from the soil-Clarence Huebner comes to mind, as do Dwight Eisenhower and Ulysses S. Grant-Cates would find his calling as a lifer in the United States military. A world war that had not even been a shadow as Cliff gamboled among the fields and along the riverbanks of the Mississippi as a boy would provide the setting for a permanent career change, and provide as well the battlefields on which he would display the utter fearlessness and coolheadedness that would make him a Marine Corps legend.
Anderson Cates, his grandfather, had been born in North Carolina, but, like many restless souls of the time, meandered west, arriving in northwest Tennessee in 1836 with but two dollars to his name. He went to work as an overseer on a local plantation, and, by the late 1840s, had saved enough to purchase the riverfront acreage that would come to be known as Cates Landing.
There, the pioneer Anderson Cates finally put down roots, taking a wife, Alice Jane Emily Peacock, in August 1848; she soon died, and he remarried, this time to Susan Box, and together they farmed and produced nine children between 1851 and 1868.
A biography would note that while Mr. Cates was a Methodist, he was also "a Democrat"-among whose ranks were, as the historian James McPherson would put it, "yeoman farmers in the upcountry or backcountry who disliked city slickers, merchants, banks, Yankees, or anybody who might interfere with their freedom to live as they pleased."
Anderson Cates's fifth child, Willis Jones Cates, was born in 1860. He would spend his life improving on and prospering from his father's hard work, operating three cotton gins, farming the land, overseeing a general store at the landing, and also serving on the board of directors of the Farmers & Merchants Bank in Tiptonville, ten miles south.
Willis took as his wife a local girl from a prominent family-Martha "Mattie" Darnall Bledsoe, whose maternal grandfather, Henry McKinney Darnall, at the age of thirty in 1838, had been made captain of the local militia. From then on he was known in accordance with peculiar Southern tradition as "the General," despite declining a commission with the Rebs, and despite being just one of only two men in Obion County to vote against Secession.
With one hand on the plow and another on a ledger, Willis was regarded as one of Lake County's most stolid citizens. "While not hasty in reaching a conclusion, his mind when once made up was unchangeable," his obituary in the local paper would read. "Modest and retiring of disposition and slow to put himself forward, nevertheless he possessed that force of character and strength of purpose that enabled him to face every situation squarely and to do 'justice though the heavens fall.'"
The first of two children born to Willis and Mattie Cates-a daughter, Katherine, would arrive in 1896-Clifton Bledsoe Cates was born at the family's riverbank home on August 31, 1893. As he grew, his cherubic face and soft features belied an inner strength developed through a childhood that rivaled that of Tom Sawyer, as his parents allowed young Cliff Cates plenty of room to roam, and plenty of time to explore the woods and the waters of the Mississippi, in which six-foot-long catfish still lolled at the bottom, and where the canebrakes and old-growth forests spreading east and south were still rife with targets.
Davy Crockett years before had hunted the same land, and on one single day, it was said, had killed twenty-five black bears within the borders of Obion County. Wild hogs, leftovers from Hernando de Soto's early explorations of the area, still posed a threat to a young boy, and water moccasins and the remaining bears and other fauna also taught any youngster wandering the woods to keep his wits about him at all times-or suffer the consequences.
Cliff Cates roved, he hunted, he trapped, he fished the river like a latter-day Huck Finn, and he learned how to work a shotgun-with dubious early results. On one occasion, he nearly blew his head off when he placed his weapon on a bottom fence post and it discharged upward, singeing his very eyebrows. On another, he endured a whipping at the hand of Willis Cates after shooting the prized family hog that he may have mistaken for the wild variety.
Attending first a country schoolhouse, he was bright but not particularly studious. His mind and body often roamed from his reading and recitations and mathematics to the lures of the nearby wilderness and Reelfoot Lake, a favorite of his uncles Council and Reuben. Though they farmed nearby, each year they spent a month drifting the lake's shallow waters, trapping and hunting and fishing. They also consorted with a rough-and-ready brand of outdoorsmen who were "a law unto themselves," as a newspaper story from 1893 would have it.
The lure of the wilderness and his testing of himself within it would remain constant themes in Cliff Cates's life. Combat, at heart, is a test of one's courage, will, and stamina-and the battlefield itself is a wilderness of dangers known and unseen, a place where heightened senses, learned responses, and sometimes plain old instinct could be the difference between life and death.
The wilderness and its tests imbued in the young Cliff Cates a lifelong self-confidence, and an independent streak that on a few occasions was rubbed raw against the strict discipline of the military. But his carefree ramblings, his life among the Indians, as it were, also imbued in him a certain cocksureness, while his family's modest wealth, and his parents' preaching, instilled in him a generosity of spirit and-perhaps oxymoronically for a Corps lifer-a compassion that would help him quickly endear himself to the men who followed him into hell on many a battlefield.
Table of Contents
October 3, 1918 1
Lucky 4
What is a Marine, Part One 14
Prison Island 23
Swacked 37
A New Dance 44
"La Guerre Est Finie" 58
"Do You Want To Live Forever?" 69
Boches 77
Into the Wood 84
Bouresches 92
Besieged 103
Hellwood 114
"My Company Is Defunct" 123
"Vive Les Marines!" 135
A Bon Fight 144
A Bad Dream 159
Dead Men 175
Well and Sane 188
Moselle 192
No Man's Land 203
The Hill 216
"Raus Mitten!" 228
Zombies 241
The Valley of Death 252
Beginning of the End 260
To the River 269
Eleventh Day 277
Pretty Well Shot 288
What is a Marine, Part Two 299
He Liked the Work 307
July 29, 1943 318
Bibliography 321
Sources 325
Index 333
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