Emmanuel Macron, the US Marines, and the importance of that little sapling from Belleau Wood

[txradioguy]

Many of the trees at Belleau Wood are new. A century ago, the quiet forest was torn apart and the trees splintered, uprooted, and exploded as two battalions of untested U.S. Marines counterattacked against an advancing German army and blunted the 1918 Spring Offensive. They were machine gunned and bombarded and gassed in a battle that historian James L. Stokesbury would later remember as “a small-scale Verdun.”

Marines have made what was left of the scorched wood Holy. Stories of heroism — like 1st Sgt. Daniel Day, who shouted “Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?" before plunging his attacking Marines into machine-gun cross fire — are part of the branch’s enduring mythology. The trees have grown back since and there is a memorial to them today.

It is well deserved. Years later, historian Alan Axelrod would rightly compare the small, outnumbered, and relatively inexperienced Marines at Belleau Wood “to the Spartans at Thermopylae.” Their battle didn’t turn the war. It did prevent a catastrophe.

Out of appreciation and admiration, the Commanding General of the 6th French Army would rename what was left of the little forest the “Wood of the Marine Brigade.”

On Monday at the White House, French President Emmanuel Macron and President Trump planted a scrawny sapling transplanted thousands of miles from Belleau Wood. Almost exactly a century from the date of the battle, as Reuters remembers, the two presidents planted the small oak tree and commemorated the moment the U.S. repelled the German ally.

“100 years ago, American soldiers fought in France, in Belleau to defend our freedom,” Macron wrote in a statement. “This oak tree, my gift to President Trump, will be a reminder at the White House of these ties that bind us.”

Most of Belleau Wood has regrown over the old trenches and artillery craters.. The trees on that French battlefield and now the sapling on the White House Southern Lawn are a reminder of the first time the U.S. repaid its oldest ally.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/emmanuel-macron-the-us-marines-and-the-importance-of-that-little-sapling-from-belleau-wood