Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery and Memorial

 memorial, military, cemetery, battlefield

Until the day the armistice went into effect, 11 November 1918, U.S. troops were fighting an offensive in an area still known as America's bloodiest battle. In 47 days, 26,277 U.S. military personnel were killed in this area.
(Almost 1,200,000 million Americans ultimately fought in the Meuse-Argonne.)
The bodies of many who died here were, at the expense of the U.S. government and in accordance with the wishes of the next of kin, returned back to the States, but 14,247 war dead, including 486 unknown soldiers, never left this 130-acre tract of land given in perpetuity by France to the U.S.
This is the largest American military cemetery in Europe, lying on the outskirts of the village of Romagne-sous-Montfaucon (population 172.)
These gently rolling fields, deep forests and a scattering of hills that were bitterly contested in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.
The French and Germans had fought in the area in 1914 before a long stalemate fell over the front line. For four years before the Americans arrived, Germans occupied the region, building first rate trenches with running water and electric lights.
Although comfortably ensconced, the Germans were not soft, and they fought back with an intensity that stunned Gen. John J. Pershing's 1st Army, when it mounted the Meuse-Argonne attack on 26 September 1918, the first major American-led offensive of the war. (That initial 600,000-man force was largely made up of green, barely trained recruits.)
Whole towns were razed. The barren, brutalized countryside was littered with barbed wire, bomb craters, land mines, poison gas canisters and corpses that were gathered in Romagne where a cemetery took shape even as the fighting raged.
Today it spans a small valley with eight rectangular grave plots, bordered by linden trees, climbing to a memorial on high ground.
South of the cemetery is a distant hill surmounted by a 200-foot American monument: Montfaucon, a principal U.S. objective.
It took the Americans three weeks to fight their way from there across five miles of farm fields to Romagne.
The centerpiece of the Meuse-Argonne Memorial is a chapel with stained- glass windows bearing the insignias of the divisions that fought in the Meuse-Argonne, including the (nearly all black) 92nd American Buffalo Soldiers and the "Bloody Bucket" 28th from Pennsylvania.
The tombstones are arranged in long parallel rows but placed in no particular order.
Bodies were buried as they arrived, except for the 18 sets of brothers, placed side-by-side when possible.
The stones show the deceased's name, rank, serial number, division, state of enlistment and date of death. In the case of unidentified remains, the marker says: "Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God."
Gold-leafed inscriptions mark the graves of nine of the 53 combatants who won the Medal of Honor in the Meuse-Argonne. Among them is Cpl. Freddie Stowers, a black soldier who died leading what was left of his platoon into German trenches, but who did not receive the nation's highest decoration until 1991, 73 years after he died.
The "Lost Battalion"
Eight members of the Lost Battalion, marooned without adequate food and ammunition for five days in a pocket of tangled woods, surrounded by Germans and ultimately cut down by "friendly fire," were buried in the cemetery.
(Of the more than 554 men who took part in the action, only 194 made it out, including the commander, then Maj. Charles White Whittlesey, who won the Medal of Honor and died three years after the war, an apparent suicide.)
Down a country lane east of Romagne is a Lost Battalion monument and a memorial path marking the route taken by Cpl. Alvin York, who won a Medal of Honor, got promoted to sergeant and inspired a Hollywood movie, "Sergeant York."