As the AEF prepared for the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives, a task force of the 2nd Battalion, 20th Engineers was attached directly to 1st Army--the only time an element of the 20th Engineers was directly attached to a combat unit.

The task force (the Ippecourt Detachment) consisted primarily of the 15th Company (Company C, 5th Battalion, 20th Engineeers) and 38th Company (Company A of the 41st Engineers).

The detachment left August 28th, 1918, for their new camps near German-held territory. Their duties were to consist of many small and temporary operations, located with respect to the strategic situation, and following immediately behind the front lines of the American First Army and French Second Army. The duties of the Ippecourt Detachment brought several of the camps under intermittent enemy artillery fire, sniper fire, and aircraft attacks. Both at Menil-la-Tour and Marbache, bombardments occurred repeatedly. The latter camp was the recipient of about forty German shells in one afternoon, several of which exploded in the yard. Three French soldiers were killed by an exploding bomb, just in front of the mill, but the Twentieth escaped without casualties.

The Ippecourt Detachment suffered the only deaths of the 20th Engineers due to direct enemy action (besides the torpedoing of the Tuscania), when Captain Harry Henderson Macpherson, who served in both the 15th Company and 38th Company, and Lieutenant Wilford Andrew Fair, Medical Detachment, were killed by German forces while reconnoitering for a new portable mill site in support of the French near Varennes, October 5th.

Captain Macpherson	Lieutenant Fair

Captain Macpherson was crossing an open area when he was targeted and mortally wounded by a German machine gun crew.

Lieutenant Fair rushed to assist Captain Macpherson without regard to his own safety; the machine gun also shot and killed the brave medial officer.

The area was contested by Allied and German forces for several days afterwards. It wasn't until days later that the bodies of Macpherson and Fair were recovered.

They were both buried in expedient graves in the Argonne Forest.

For his bravery under enemy fire and supreme sacrifice to save the life of a fellow soldier, Lieutenant Fair was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross--the highest award given to any soldiers of the 20th Engineers in World War 1.

Captain Macpherson was disinterred from his forest grave in November 1924 and returned to his mother in California in April 1925. He is buried at the Holy Cross Cemetery in San Mateo County.

Lieutenant Fair was exhumed from the Argonne and buried in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery.