Biography | James G. Harbord — The Wood Was Renamed for the Brigade He Commanded

Belleau Wood is remembered as a Marine battle. The brigade was commanded by a US Army officer who had held the job for twenty-six days when it began.

James Guthrie Harbord took over the 4th Brigade, the Marine brigade of the 2nd Division, on 6 May 1918. He was a brigadier general; the second star came that summer.

On 1 June the brigade went into the line astride the Metz–Paris highway, and Harbord's own diary records the improvisation. One of his 6th Marines battalions was unloading rations from "some seventeen trucks in the edge of town"; he started three battalions up the road, had the rest of the rations thrown off, and used the emptied trucks to bring the last battalion forward.

Writing from La Loge Farm on 17 June, with the wood not yet clear, he set down a page about his men that ends: "I cannot write of their splendid gallantry without tears coming to my eyes."

The same entry carries his own count for the fortnight — seventeen officers and over four hundred enlisted Marines killed, nearly three thousand wounded and gassed, out of a brigade of eight thousand. Edwin McClellan's official Marine Corps history of 1920 puts the losses that made the name Château-Thierry famous at 9,063; the American Battle Monuments Commission gives about 8,100 for the division's June.

Then the record turns institutional. Order 6930/2 of the French Sixth Army, dated 30 June 1918 and signed by Général de division Degoutte, directed that in all official documents the Bois de Belleau would thereafter carry the name Bois de la Brigade de Marine.

It was addressed to the general commanding the 4th Marine Brigade. McClellan records that the maps were modified to match, and quotes a Sixth Army order of 9 August 1918 using the new name in the field.

Four weeks after the renaming, Pershing took Harbord off the front to run the Services of Supply at Tours. His aides, his cook, his mess-boy and his driver all asked to go with him, and he wrote: "so I said yes, and the whole retinue of retainers followed me to Tours. Perhaps some day I can again turn their faces to the front."

Where the road forks in the wood there is a black granite stele carrying a bronze relief of a Marine, put up by the Marine Corps in 1955, with a flagpole behind it and captured German guns ranged on the mown grass.

The commission's trail leaflet asks visitors not to pick anything up and not to disturb the soil. Unexploded shells are still in the wood, and so, it says, are more than a thousand men whose bodies were never recovered.

📸 Cover: General Harbord and his brigade staff at Le Bout de Bois near Gisors on 30 May 1918, two days before the move toward Château-Thierry, the plate's own caption naming every officer in it. From his Leaves from a War Diary (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1925), public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the monument clearing in Belleau Wood with the flagpole and the German guns, photograph by the American Battle Monuments Commission, CC0.