00:00It is October 1918.
00:03You are shivering in a muddy hole filled with freezing rain.
00:07You haven't eaten in three days, and your uniform is soaked through to the bone.
00:13Every time you crawl toward the nearby stream for a drink,
00:18a German sniper takes the life of the man next to you.
00:21You are completely surrounded in the dense Argonne forest, with almost no ammunition left.
00:28Then, the heavy artillery starts.
00:32These shells are coming from the American side.
00:35Your own command believes your unit is already dead,
00:39and is now dropping a massive barrage directly onto your coordinates.
00:44Surviving this combination of starvation, a German siege, and friendly fire
00:50meant abandoning modern tactical hardware and relying on a single, desperate lifeline.
00:58Major Charles Whittlesey led the men of the 77th Division.
01:03These weren't career soldiers.
01:05They were largely drafted civilians from the streets of New York City,
01:09suddenly thrust into one of the war's deadliest forests.
01:14During a massive offensive, the 77th pushed ahead much faster than the units on their flanks,
01:21creating a vulnerable pocket.
01:23They had marched blindly into a geographical trap,
01:26and were now pinned at the bottom of a deep ravine, surrounded by steep ridges.
01:32The Germans occupied the high ground above them.
01:35From the ridges, they could lob stick grenades directly down into the American foxholes,
01:41without ever showing themselves to the men below.
01:43In this terrain, the forest itself became a weapon.
01:48The ravines and thick brush stripped away the Americans' numerical advantage,
01:53turning the battle into a series of isolated, close-quarters fights.
01:57As the siege entered its fourth day, the battalion situation became critical.
02:03They were entirely out of food, their water was contaminated, and their bandages were gone.
02:09To stay alive, the men crawled between foxholes to strip unspent ammunition and dirty bandages off their dead comrades,
02:18digging deeper into the mud to evade the constant sniper fire.
02:22Despite losing over 60% of their strength to wounds and starvation,
02:27the unit flatly refused multiple formal German demands to surrender.
02:32This stubbornness forced the German command to divert massive amounts of manpower and grenades to crush this one pocket.
02:41Because the Germans were so preoccupied with Whittlesey's men,
02:44they couldn't reinforce other sectors,
02:47which allowed the rest of the American offensive to finally break the main German line.
02:52While the men held the line, the American heavy artillery continued its barrage,
02:58dropping shattering explosions directly onto the battalion's foxholes.
03:02They had no way to tell their own side to stop.
03:06In 1918, radio technology was too heavy and unreliable for infantry to carry deep into a dense, wet forest.
03:14Every human runner Whittlesey sent back to headquarters to update their position
03:19was either captured or killed in the woods.
03:22Without runners or radios, the battalion essentially vanished from the Allied maps.
03:27Their own commanders had no idea they were firing on their own men.
03:31With no other options, Whittlesey turned to his very last carrier pigeon
03:36to deliver a message through the chaos.
03:39The bird, named Cher-A-Me, took flight directly into a hail of German machine gun fire
03:45that filled the forest canopy.
03:48During the flight, the bird was shot through the chest,
03:51blinded in one eye, and had one leg hanging by a tendon.
03:56Still, it flew 25 miles back to the division's loft.
04:00Cher-A-Me delivered a blood-stained note that read,
04:04Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us.
04:07For heaven's sake, stop it.
04:09The message got through.
04:11The artillery lifted, and the surviving men held their position with bayonets
04:16until American lines finally broke through the forest to rescue them.
04:21Out of the original 500 men, only 194 walked out of that ravine.
04:26The survival of the lost battalion didn't come down to superior technology.
04:32It was the result of civilians who simply refused to break.
04:36Subscribe to Heroes and Arsenals right now for more tactical history.
04:42Next time, we're looking at a shocking tactical matchup.
04:45What happens if you give the precision rockets of a modern HIMARS system
04:51to the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae?
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