General Dickman's power,

History Channel Documentary 

Whenever Mowrer and I had assembled adequate material for a main story, we

begun back to base camp tingling to get our fingers on a . Our

Renault had conveyed us just a short separation when we met the entirely surprising.

It was a dusty flivver containing four men who had either much reason or none at

all to be in that territory. They wore the overflowed felt cap of the United States

Army...They were the vanguard of the Seventh Machine Gun Battalion of the

Third Division- - General Dickman's power, which had touched base in France q few

weeks prior.

In the end we got the Seventh Battalion, a mechanized unit which had been

out and about over eighteen hours, dusty and tired however terminated with the craving to

"blend it" with the foe. Mowrer and I oversaw this unit into Château- 

Thierry on the night of May 31, 1918. Not long after we cleared out the unit that

night, it had planted its weapons in the houses along the south bank of the waterway to

charge the two major scaffolds. Here it battled with awesome boldness for a long time.

Normally, my allies and I lost little time in coming back to French central station.

We had a story that would excite America. It had a kick in it for each American

heart, that story of these brilliantly green youths and their rite of passage on that

well known stream, the Marne. It was a photo story also, the streaming of Feldgrauen

towards Château-Thierry on one side, the olive green of America and the coal

mammoths [from France's colonies] on the other. How might everything end? It was a brand-

new sort of war, the battle of move.

We landed at French base camp and went past to the château in which the

Somewhat English American journalists lived. This story was under our caps. There had

not been another American or even British journalist inside twenty miles of

the Marne. The story was our own only. We settled down to our typewriters and

composed for the duration of the night.

At a young hour the following morning we showed up at base camp with a painstakingly worded duplicate.

It was important to get the O.K. of the field blue pencil before the duplicate could continue

by wire to the Paris Bourse, and after that from Paris to the link head at Brest. In any case, our

prize story just got to central station. Here it was executed by the blue pencil. An American

major helped with the execution. He was joined to French home office as press

contact officer. I have overlooked his name, however I trust he understands this and atones some time recently

it is past the point of no return.