Life and Death on the Western Front: Marine Private Charles Jefferson Rhea's World War I Memoir

Charles Jefferson Rhea, freshly graduated from high school, made a life-changing decision in the summer of 1918. With the Navy's quotas filled, he joined the Marines. An Idaho native who grew up in Texas, Charlie, as his friends and family called him, was soon in France with the Fifth Marines of the AEF's Second Division in the Great War, which one historian calls "perhaps the most important single event of the entire twentieth century." Quickly thrown into combat on the Western Front, Rhea's challenge was to stay alive as shelling and machine guns killed men all around him. He endured savage fighting at St. Mihiel, Blanc Mont Ridge, and the Meuse-Argonne offensive--and struggled to find food, water, and shelter--before the November 1918 armistice secured a successful conclusion to the war for the Allies. Sadly, he celebrated that victory in a hospital, felled by poison gas, exhaustion, and perhaps the Spanish Flu. Returning home, he struggled to find work and support a growing family, but he also wrote a compelling memoir of his wartime experiences. Historian James Presley later discovered this manuscript by pure serendipity, and he edited and annotated it. Thanks to him, and to Charlie and his family, readers now have not just another story of a Texas doughboy in World War I, but also a useful perspective on the debate over tactics, open warfare versus trench warfare, that continues today.