WWI history fascinates Marv Levy
In 1918, father survived Battle of Belleau Wood
Marv Levy has a display case in his den. It’s filled with game balls and other mementos from a Hall of Fame life. Each item carries special meaning for him, though none means more than the Purple Heart his father earned 100 years ago.
Sam Levy was poisoned by mustard gas and struck by shrapnel at the Battle of Belleau Wood, a brutal encounter in northern France that raged for most of June 1918. This month, Sam’s son has been thinking a lot about the famed battle where family history and world history intersected so poignantly a century ago.
“I’m into history anyway,” says Levy, who’s 92, “and the fact that my father was in the battle, the iconic battle that turned the tide of World War I, makes me very proud.”
Levy’s life is all about history — making it (his Buffalo Bills played in, and lost, four consecutive Super Bowls) and studying it (he earned a master’s degree in English history from Harvard). If you don’t know much about this crucial piece of World War I history, well, Levy thinks you should.
“The Germans were advancing on Paris and the Marines were rushed to the front,” Levy says. “My Dad’s group, the 4th Marine Brigade, when they got to Paris there weren’t any American vehicles. So a bunch of French taxi drivers drove them out there.”
Army Gen. John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, ordered U.S. troops to Belleau Wood to blunt the German advance, though Pershing worried about the mettle of the Marines. He needn’t have: They would soon establish their worldwide reputation for bravery in battle.
“Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?” 1st Sgt. Dan Daly reputedly yelled as his attacking Marines plunged into German lines. The Battle of Belleau Wood would become a turning point in the war and a defining moment for the Corps.
“That battle was really the modern Marine Corps coming of age,” Marine Col. Jon M. Lauder says. “That was sort of the first iconic battle that brought the Marine Corps forward, beyond being just provisional shipboard Marines and infantry deployed across the globe supporting the Navy, but really as this modern, middleweight force, if you will.”
The fierce fighting began in early June and persisted through June 26. Al- lied forces, at long last, managed to contain German troops in their push toward Paris, but not before weeks of fearsome combat, sometimes hand-to-hand with bayonets amid clouds of mustard gas and shells exploding in the dark, overgrown woods.
Sam Levy would recuperate from the gassing and his wounds — shrapnel in his back, arm and hand — in a French hospital. He was 17. “He lied about his age when he enlisted,” Levy says.
Levy would do something similar decades later. He told Bills owner Ralph Wilson he was 58 when interviewing for head coach in 1986. Levy was really 61 but figured he’d shave off a few years to get under the psychological threshold of
60.
Levy got the job. And when he retired, in 1997, he was 72. The only other
72-year-old man to coach an NFL team is George Halas, the late Bears legend whom Levy grew up admiring.
‘Be a good one’
Levy learned his love of sports from his father, who was among his era’s best high school basketball players in Chicago, or so Levy’s been told. But his father would skip his senior year of high school in order to enlist.
After the war, Sam Levy ran a wholesale produce business in Chicago’s South Water Street Market. Levy admired his father’s work ethic: up before dawn six days a week, hauling crates of fruit and 100-pound sacks of potatoes all day. But Levy learned this wasn’t the sort of work for him when he toiled there for a time as a teenager.
One day his father recognized his reticence. “He said, ‘Marv, go on home and play football,’ ” Levy says. And he did just that. Life, like war, has its turning points.
Levy was a high school football player when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps the day after he finished high school. He later found he could not be a pilot because he had less than 20/20 vision so he went to weather school and served stateside at a glider base.
After the war he played football at Coe College in Iowa and then it was off to law school at Harvard on the GI Bill. But Levy quickly realized he didn’t like lawyering so he called his father and said he was going to transfer to a master’s program in English history. And then he told his father he planned to find work as a football coach.
“Thirty seconds of painful silence followed,” Levy said in his Hall of Fame induction speech in 2001, “and then the old Marine said simply, ‘Be a good one.’ ”
The real must-wins
Once, at a Super Bowl news conference, Levy was asked about it being a must-win game. No, Levy famously responded, “World War II was a mustwin.”
The same goes for World War I, of course. It is a point of pride that he and his father both served in the military during world wars.
His father was born in England and moved to the U.S. at age 6. Levy’s mother was born in Russia and moved to the U.S. at age 4. Levy thinks about that amid the furor over children being separated from their families at the border.
“It’s terrible to do that with the little kids,” he says. “Hey, if they want to get rid of all immigrants who’ve ever come here we should go back to the country being populated only by Native Americans.”
Solemn ceremony is held at Belleau Wood yearly. Levy attended with Lauder in 2012. The colonel says Levy is the only person he’s known in his 24 years in the Marines who is the son of a soldier who fought at Belleau Wood.
“There aren’t a lot of people who’ve had access to that kind of firsthand information,” Lauder says. “He’s in a unique position.”
Levy wanted to attend the ceremony again this year. “I came down with some kind of problem,” he says. “No big deal, but it’s a balance thing I’m working on and I couldn’t travel.”
The ceremony at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in late May featured wreath laying, poems and the national anthems of France, Germany and the U.S. More than 2,000 Americans are buried there; some were his father’s friends.
“When you walk through that cemetery,” Levy says, “it’s heart-wrenching.”
French President Emmanuel Macron gifted the American people with an oak sapling from Belleau Wood on his visit to the White House in April. Levy, who turns 93 in August, is moved by that — new life from the old woods where his father fought 100 years ago.