Life and Death on the Western Front

A Texas Marine’s WWI 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 grep 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 gun fire killed men all around him. He endured savage fighting at St. Mihiel, Blanc Mont Ridge, and the Meuse-Argonne offensive before the November 1918 armistice secured a successful conclusion to the war for the Allies. Sadly he celebrated the 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 a 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.