Our Arklahoma Heroes: A Hackett resident was among the 26,277 American casualties at the Battle of Argonne
On October 20, 1918, Private Robert Jesse Hendrix of Company E, 38th Infantry Regiment, was killed in action during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. That day the 3rd Division, to which the 38th Infantry belonged, was pressing forward on the right of the American First Army’s front.
The division had spent October 19 preparing for a limited attack ordered by III Corps. The mission was to drive in German outposts and develop the Freya Stellung, a secondary defensive line the enemy was organizing roughly along a line from Cote 261 west of Clery-le-Petit toward Aincreville.
Elements of the 38th Infantry took part in the fighting. A provisional force that included men of the regiment moved against Cote 299 from the eastern side of Clairs Chenes wood while other troops attacked La Mi-Noel wood. The advance began around 12:15 p.m. and gained ground on the left. Support companies of the 38th were later sent forward to consolidate the positions taken on Cote 299.
Elsewhere that same day the regiment’s depleted First Battalion, already reduced to six officers and fewer than 250 men, helped clear the wooded ravine of Claire Chenes. By nightfall the battalion had been further reduced and was ordered to join the 5th Brigade for continued operations. Machine-gun fire, shelling from the heights, and stubborn German resistance made every yard costly.
The 38th Infantry’s total casualties in the Argonne-Meuse fighting would eventually exceed those it had suffered earlier at the Marne.
Hendrix, born April 24, 1891, in Oklahoma City to Charles Jefferson Hendrix and Melinda Ozella Stroud Hendrix, was 27 years old when he died. No individual account of the precise moment or place of his death has been found, and no posthumous decoration appears in the available records.
By 1906, the familt had relocated to the Hackett area and several of his siblings were buried in the Stroud Cemetery in Greenwood . He was reared in a family of eight brothers and sisters that maintained residency in the south Sebastian County area
One brother, Pvt. Sam Hendrix, later served in the US Army in WWI, then moved to Houston after marriage and lived until 1984.
His parents survived him by many years. Charles Jefferson Hendrix, born April 24, 1862, died December 27, 1950, at age 88. Melinda Ozella Stroud Hendrix, born March 14, 1865, died March 22, 1961, at age 96. Both are buried with their son at Forest Park Cemetery in Fort Smith.
The 38th Infantry had earlier earned its nickname, Rock of the Marne, for its defense in July 1918. By mid-October it was committed to the grinding attacks that broke the main German Kriemhilde Stellung and continued the advance toward the Meuse.
Private Hendrix’s death on October 20 occurred in the midst of that sustained pressure, one day of the long series of assaults that carried American forces through the Argonne Forest and helped bring the war to an end three weeks later.
His remains were returned to the United States and interred at Forest Park Cemetery, where the headstone records his rank, company, regiment, and the fact that he was killed in the Argonne Battle.
