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COMING SUNDAY: Another story from Sgt. Fritsch's scrapbook.
The Butler County Historical Society’s treasure trove includes a tattered black scrapbook from World War I, compiled by Hamilton resident Lawrence B. Fritsch.
The label says that Fritsch was a field artillery Sgt. Major, and the yellowed newspaper clippings that tell the stories of fellow Hamilton soldiers and their heroic actions overseas, including a first-person account of a six-day battle in France near the little town of Avacourt, published by the Hamilton Evening Journal on Nov. 8, 1918.
Capt. Wesley G. Wulzen was in charge of Co. F, 148th Infantry, known as “the Cleveland Grays.”
“My organization participated in the great offensive which began September 25th,” Wulzen writes. “I was in the battle six days and in spite of terrific fighting and hardships that I never thought flesh and blood could endure, I am still on top… not much the worse for wear and tear.”
He said that his company lay in the forest for two days in a sector that had been held by the French for four years, enough time to build elaborate dugouts and live in relative comfort.
The night of Sept. 24, the company took up its formation “facing ‘No Man’s Land’,” and the American artillery barrage started promptly at 2:30 a.m. that night.
“On either side of us as far as we could see there was a sheet of flame that lighted the heavens for miles and with a roar that shook the earth, the bombardment was on,” he wrote.
Wulzen looked through the fog and smoke to see a valley about 1,000 yards across that looked like a bottomless pit with streams of red fire raining down in all directions.
The barrage lasted for three hours, until just before sunrise, when Wulzen’s troops got the signal to “go over the top.”
“We were glad to go,” he wrote, “as the long period of waiting had made most of us a trifle nervous.”
The smoke and mist were so thick in the valley that his platoons had to use their compasses to find their way to a thick forest overgrown with underbrush where they encountered their first opposition, “Huns with machine guns.”
The enemy soldiers, however, had been so shaken by the bombardment that “they surrendered after a little persuasion.”
The brigade broke through the forest that afternoon and met with more machine gun fire and some cannons in a village on their right flank, but another brigade crossed their path, took care of the machine guns and cannons, and Wulzen’s men were able to make camp for the night.
The next morning, they moved on around 6:30 a.m. with orders to attack the village of Ivory without any artillery to prepare the way.
“As we topped a hill and started down towards the village, the Hun artillery opened on us and dozens of hidden machine guns showered us with bullets,” the captain wrote. “This is where we suffered our first casualties, but the Germans… suffered even more, as they finally broke and ran up the hillside with our boys taking shots at them as they ran.”
They were met with “withering fire” as they took the hill. Wulzen tried to reach his major, whom he later found out had been “gassed”, and lacking any further orders stuck to the plan to hold the hill.
“At 4 p.m., we received orders to withdraw,” he wrote, “and believe me — we didn’t waste any time doing it.”
The company took shelter in a ravine, but it was so cold that Wulzen couldn’t sleep. At 3 a.m., his brigade was moved back to join the reserves and until 4 p.m. the next afternoon “we did very little but march around and dodge shells” until they got orders to march through the town of Cierges and entrench on the other side.
He wrote that they weren’t expecting any trouble because American troops were already well beyond that point.
“Everything went well until well until we entered a woods near the town, when suddenly all Hades broke,” he wrote. “The German artillery dropped shrapnel, high explosives and gas shells around us… machine gunners opened up… the place was alive with the bloody Huns.”
It was getting dark by this time, and in the confusion the brigade became separated, and his company and one other took refuge in the woods “under constant bombardment.”
“I received a good dose of sneezing gas in this place,” he said, “but it didn’t make me sick.”
They got orders to withdraw to a hill and dig in, but half-way up machine gunners “poured a stream of bullets into us… We lost several good men here.”
The survivors dug in, each man in a hole to himself, and they held the hill for two days “through the worst bombardment of the battle” without any assistance from artillery. A heavy rain began to fall the third night and continued for two days, making the roads impassable.
“The last two days and nights that I spent on that hill were the most miserable it has ever been my lot to live through,” Wulzen wrote.
Between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. on the sixth day, Co. F was relieved by a new outfit and they marched for six hours to the rear.
The experience, Wulzen wrote, “will make a peace advocate of every intelligent man who took part in the battle.”
“War is horrible — there is nothing romantic about it, it is nothing more or less than murder,” he wrote.
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