Charles B. MacDonald, PC '42, American Hero

Charles B. MacDonald: Company Commander


By: Grant Jones
Location: Kansas, United States

In 1947 Charles MacDonald published Company Commander. It is his story of leadership under fire from the Siegfried Line to Czechoslovakia. In September 1944 Captain MacDonald was given command of I Company, 3rd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division. The lives of nearly two-hundred men were his responsibility; MacDonald was twenty-one years old.

MacDonald received his baptism of fire in a squalid, captured German pill-box part of the captured Siegfried Line his men were ordered to hold. Five days before the massive German attack in the Ardennes, MacDonald’s 2nd Division was relieved by the 106th Infantry Division. As a result of the German offensive that began on 16 December 1945, two of the three infantry regiments of the 106th Division would be surrounded and captured.

MacDonald’s unit was moved north for an attack into, and through, the Siegfried Line aimed at taking the Roer Dams. The jumping off point for this attack was along the north flank of what was to become “The Bulge.” On the evening of 16 December, MacDonald was ordered to quickly deploy with the other companies of 3rd Battalion to hold a vital crossroads “at all costs.” Nobody knew it at the time but elements of two German Divisions, the 277th Volksgrenadier and the 12th SS Panzer, were headed for that crossroads.

The 17th would witness concentrated hell in the forest in front of the crossroads. MacDonald’s men held off six successive attacks by German infantry. The Germans got closer to the American foxholes with each successive attack. MacDonald’s men were getting low on ammunition and had received no artillery support. Except for two M4 Shermans somewhere behind their position, I Company had no anti-tank defenses. At that moment five Tiger Tanks rumbled up the road. The German tanks began to systematically blast the Americans in their foxholes. After approximately thirty minutes of that I Company broke for the rear. The Shermans got two of the German tanks before being destroyed.

MacDonald arrived at the battalion headquarters only knowing where a handful of his men were. As he states he was disgusted with himself feeling he had failed to hold the crossroads and by allowing many of his men to be killed or captured. He wondered if he would be court-martialed and if it would not have been better to have been killed in the battle. The first thing his battalion commander said to him was, “nice work, Mac.” The 3rd Battalion had held the crossroads under impossible conditions just long enough for the 2nd Division’s other regiments to get into position. MacDonald received the Silver Star.

Richard E. Cowan was a machine gunner from M Company assigned to MacDonald’s unit during the battle. For staying at his gun and covering the other men in their retreat, Cowan became the subject of both German infantry and tanks. Nevertheless, Cowan held his position and was the last man to pull back. He was killed the next day. For his efforts on 17th December he received the Medal of Honor.

Jose Lopez, another machine gunner who was attached to the neighboring K Company, also received the Medal of Honor for his courage on 17th December. Fortunately, Lopez survived the war and lived to a ripe old age. Reading the award citations gives some indication of the ferocity of the German attack.

A month later leading his company in a counterattack MacDonald was wounded. After two months of recuperating, MacDonald was given command of G Company of the 2nd Battalion of his old regiment. MacDonald led this company from the Rhine to Leipzig and into Czechoslovakia by the war’s end.

The book isn’t all blood and gore there are moments of humor and dialogue right out of a movie. For example, MacDonald reports the following comments by his troops who had just witnessed a P-47 fighter-bomber attack on German positions:


“Well, their work’s done for the day,” someone said. “Yeah,” a mortarman answered, reaching for a shovel, “they’ll go home now and have a short Scotch and a hot bath and shack up with some mademoiselle or some Limey wench. What a life!” “Yeah, and draw a double salary for it,” a headquarters man put in. “That’s the life for me.” Willie Hagan said, “Oh, dry up. You never had it so good.”

In passing MacDonald notes that the 3rd Battalion surgeon was Edward T. Matsuoka of Honolulu. Matsuoka received his medical degree in 1941 and was awarded the Bronze Star for his efforts during the Battle of the Bulge.

MacDonald was wounded on 17 January 1945. The final volume of the Green Series on the European Theater, The Last Offensive, takes off from around that time and concludes with the war’s ending. This volume of the series was written by Charles B. MacDonald who retired as Deputy Chief Historian, U.S. Army in 1979. MacDonald also wrote or co-wrote two other books of the Green Series, The Siegfried Line Campaign and Three Battles: Arnaville, Altuzzo, and Schmidt. He also contributed to Command Decisions.

After retiring, MacDonald wrote A Time for Trumpets (note the title). This, I believe, was his last book. It is the history of the Ardennes Offensive and concentrates on the first two weeks of the struggle. Needless to say, this was a deeply personal work for him:

I approached the work with a kind of messianic zeal, for I wanted to tell the story to my own satisfaction (the battle had shaped my life, and I have always felt that I left a little something of me in the Ardennes).

This leads to the question, can someone with such an intense personal involvement write an objective history? I believe he did. It is the best work I’ve read on the battle (not that I have read them all). Perhaps, MacDonald had a personal need to understand what had happened and therefore, he wrote an honest account because of his personal involvement.

The title of the work is of interest because of the ongoing debate about “Drums and Trumpets” military history that focuses on battles, leaders, weapons and campaigns and the future and direction of the field. This may be what MacDonald had in mind when he penned the closing paragraph of A Time for Trumpets:


Hitler saw the American soldier as the weak component (the “Italians”) of the Western alliance, the product of a society too heterogeneous to field a capable fighting force. Bouck, Crawford, Tsakanikas, Umanoff, Moore, Reid, Descheneaux, O’Brien, Jones, Erlenbusch, Goldstein, McKinley, Mandichak, Spigelman, Garcia, Russamano, Wieszcyk, Nawrocki, Campbell, Barcellona, Leinbaugh. Black men, too, although their color was hardly reflected in their names. The heterogeneity was indeed there, but at many a place – at Krinkelt-Rocherath, at Dom. Butgenbach, in the Losheim Gap, behind the Schnee Eifel, at St. Vith, atop Skyline Drive, at the Parc Hotel, Echternach, Malmedy, Stavelot, Stoumont, Bastogne, Verdenne, Baraque de Fraiture, Hotton, Noville – the American soldier put the lie to Hitler’s theory. His was a story to be told to the sound of trumpets.

A Little About the Ardennes Offensive

After studying the US Army account of the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, I picked a few significant paragraphs to publish:

On the morning of 16 December General Middleton's VIII Corps had a formal corps reserve consisting of one armored combat command and four engineer combat battalions. In dire circumstances Middleton might count on three additional engineer combat battalions which, under First Army command, were engaged as the 1128th Engineer Group in direct support of the normal engineer operations on foot in the VIII Corps area. In exceptionally adverse circumstances, that is under conditions then so remote as to be hardly worth a thought, the VIII Corps would have a last combat residue-poorly armed and ill-trained for combat-made up of rear echelon headquarters, supply, and technical service troops, plus the increment of stragglers who might, in the course of battle, stray back from the front lines. General Middleton would be called upon to use all of these "reserves." Their total effect in the fight to delay the German forces hammering through the VIII Corps center would be extremely important but at the same time generally incalculable, nor would many of these troops enter the pages of history.1
A handful of ordnance mechanics manning a Sherman tank fresh from the repair shop are seen at a bridge. By their mere presence they check an enemy column long enough for the bridge to be demolished. The tank and its crew disappear. They have affected the course of the Ardennes battle, even though minutely, but history does not record from whence they came or whither they went. A signal officer checking his wire along a byroad encounters a German column; he wheels his jeep and races back to alert a section of tank destroyers standing at a crossroad. Both he and the gunners are and remain anonymous. Yet the tank destroyers with a few shots rob the enemy of precious minutes, even hours. A platoon of engineers appears in one terse sentence of a German commander's report. They have fought bravely, says the foe, and forced him to waste a couple of hours in deployment and maneuver. In this brief emergence from the fog of war the engineer platoon makes its bid for recognition in history. That is all. A small group of stragglers suddenly become tired of what seems to be eternally retreating. Miles back they ceased to be part of an organized combat formation, and recorded history, at that point, lost them. The sound of firing is heard for fifteen minutes, an hour, coming from a patch of woods, a tiny village, the opposite side of a hill. The enemy has been delayed; the enemy resumes the march westward. Weeks later a graves registration team uncovers mute evidence of a last-ditch stand at woods, village, or hill.

The story of the units that were retained under tactical control and employed directly by General Middleton in the attempt to form some defense in depth in the VIII Corps center has been partially recorded and therefore can be narrated. The effect that these units had in retarding the German advances, a course of action evolving extemporaneously, must be considered along with the role played by the uncoordinated front-line formations in the haphazard sequence of their delaying actions from east to west. For convenience sake the VIII Corps action is recounted here in independent detail.

With the very limited forces at his disposal prior to 16 December the VIII Corps commander found it physically impossible to erect any of the standard defenses taught in the higher army schools or prescribed in the field service regulations. The best he could do to defend the extended front was to deploy his troops as a screen, retaining local reserves for local counterattack at potentially dangerous points. In effect, therefore, the main part of Middleton's reserve consisted of the battalions and companies assembled in or close to the villages which formed the strongpoints of the screen. Under the circumstances there could be no thought of an elastic defense with strong formations echeloned in any depth behind the forward positions. In the event of a general attack in great strength delivered against all parts of the corps front simultaneously, Middleton had little choice but to carry out the general directive to "defend in place." With four engineer battalions and one small armored combat command as the only corps reserve behind an elongated and brittle linear defense Middleton's commitment of this last reserve would turn on the attempt to plug a few of the gaps in the forward line, slow the enemy columns on a few main roads, and strengthen by human means two or three of the natural physical barriers deep in the corps rear area.
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