Marine Corps Heroes 1918 Blanc Mont: Volume VI of a Marine Corps Biographical Encyclopedia Paperback – January 11, 2025

The Marine Corps heritage extends beyond its formal history to encompass its traditions and culture. Like the previous three volumes, this volume is about the junior officers and enlisted Marines who provide the bulk of that heritage. This volume continues the stories of World War I Marine Corps heroes that began in Volume IV, Marine Corps Heroes 1918 Toulon and Belleau Wood, which covers the five-week Battle for Belleau Wood, 1-26 June 1918. Volume V, Marine Corps Heroes 1918 Soissons and St. Mihiel; covers two multi-division offensive operations spanning just four days of actual combat: 18-19 July in the Aisne-Marne (Soissons) offensive, and 14-15 September in the St. Mihiel offensive. This volume covers the eight-day battle for Blanc Mont in the Champagne offensive, 2-9 October 1918.The Fourth Brigade entered the battle for Blanc Mont with recent combat experience and battle-tested leadership. Its rifle companies had a strong cadre of combat veterans, and were overstrength with an influx of untested replacements. On 3 October, the Second Division captured Blanc Mont Ridge in less than three hours, a feat the French Army failed to accomplish in four years. On 4 October, in what Marine Corps scholar James P. Gregory calls a “calamity of errors,” the Fifth Regiment continued the attack without artillery and air support, advanced into a fire trap, and was rendered combat ineffective by machine gun and artillery fire in less than five hours. For reasons that will become obvious to the reader, Marine Corps historians ignored the attack on 4 October until James courageously published his article on the battle in 2021. Some of the 128 Marine in this volume are mentioned in standard Marine history books for their heroic actions in combat, but no historian has written the full stories of their military service. Medal of Honor recipients Corporal John H. Pruitt and Private John J. Kelly are well-known Marine heroes, as General Leroy P. Hunt and Lieutenant Generals Henry L. Larsen, and Merwin H. Silverthorn. However, most Marines in this volume were “ordinary” and long-forgotten men who performed extraordinary acts of heroism in the Champagne offensive. Read more