by Barrie Pitt
The fourteen divisions of General Sir Julian Byng’s Third Army held the next twenty-eight miles – to face Mars, Michael 1 and the northern half of Michael 2 – from Arras down to the Welsh Ridge on the southern face of the Flesquières Salient.
And the remaining forty-two miles of the British front – from Gouzeaucourt down past la Fère to Barisis – was the responsibility of the twelve infantry and three cavalry divisions of General Sir Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army. Nearly ten of these forty-two miles were, however, partially guarded by the Oise where it flooded into a wide, marshy valley south of la Fère.
Eight divisions were held in GHQ Reserve.
Each infantry division was composed of nine battalions, and owing to such factors as leave, sickness and overdue reinforcements, each battalion could be considered to muster an average of only five hundred rifles. Obviously, some divisions of each army must be held in reserve inside the army area (as apart from GHQ Reserve) and the line divisions were in fact so disposed that some 36,000 rifles were spread out along twenty miles to face the Michael 1 and 2 attacks, while 31,000 rifles, along twenty-eight miles, faced the southern flank of von Hutier’s Eighteenth Army, on its Michael 3 sweep to the Crozat Canal and the Somme.
This in theory, gave one man to each yard along the defences of the northern sector, and one man to each five feet along the southern – but it would be an extremely foolhardy commander who placed his entire force in one thin line in the front trenches, quite apart from the fact that the Commander-in-Chief had expressly forbidden it. Defence in depth was the suggested technique – troops in the forward positions fighting until they were overwhelmed in an attempt to check the first onslaught, the main mass waiting farther back in the ‘Battle Zone’ to absorb the remaining momentum of the offensive and to launch (it was hoped) the decisive counterattacks.
As the depth of this Battle Zone was to be, in places, as much as four thousand yards and there was envisaged yet a further ‘Rear Zone’ behind that, it will be seen that there would be considerably less than one man to every five feet along any line facing the Michael attacks. Four manned lines, for instance – one forward, two in the Battle Zone and one in the Rear Zone – would give an average of one man to every twenty feet, which can hardly be called excessive, and although defensive fortification would help to economize manpower to a great extent, there was a point beyond which it would no longer be effective. No machine-gun, however efficient, will hold up the enemy unless there is a machine-gunner behind it. The men of the Fifth Army were thus likely to find themselves thinly dispersed – especially in view of the novel tactics which von Hutier’s Army intended to employ.
From Barisis on southwards and eastwards as far as the beginning of the Verdun Salient, were the Sixth, Fifth and Fourth French Armies, together making up the Groupe d’Armées du Nord under General Franchet d’Esperey. They held, in all, a front of seventy miles, while the whole of the Verdun Salient itself was occupied by the French Second Army. The French First Army held the southern flank of the St. Mihiel Salient, the Eighth the next thirty miles to the northern end of the Vosges, and the remaining seventy miles down to the Swiss frontier were held by the Seventh Army.
These last four armies made up the Groupe d’Armées de l’Est under General de Castlenau, both groups being part of the command of the French Commander-in-Chief, General Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph Pétain, the possessor of probably the most lucid – and certainly the most realistically inclined – mind among the Allied commanders.
It would be a mistake, however, to consider Pétain a defeatist: he had every intention of ensuring that the Allies defeated the Central Powers, but not at an inflated price. The smallest possible price was, in Pétain’s economical mind, the correct one to pay for purchases. If Britain or possibly America cared to act extravagantly, that was their own business (although he regretted to watch waste of any sort) but so far as his own country was concerned, Pétain was determined that no more of her blood should be poured out than was absolutely necessary for victory. France had, in his opinion, already paid out enough, and Britain had paid out so much of late that she was seriously weakened (not that this was any business of Pétain’s except in so far as it affected the total Allied effort). Therefore, to any man of logic and common sense, it was obvious that the correct strategy now to follow was to remain strictly upon the defensive, and to await the build-up of the American armies, which could then bear the burden of the remainder of the war. ‘I await the tanks and the Americans!’ he told his troops, to their immense relief.
To be fair to Pétain, it is probably true to say that so far as he was concerned, the American armies could also have all the immediate glory of victory, as well as its weight. Reserve, self-discipline and self-effacement are the indicative words in any description of Pétain, and he had sufficient faith in the future to believe that France’s contribution to victory would be recognized by history, irrespective of who led the celebratory parades.
But that was something in the far future. More immediately he believed that in the coming German offensive, Ludendorff’s main attack would be against his own Fourth Army in the country east of Rheims (the organizers of Ludendorff’s Roland scheme would have been flattered) and despite what the British believed, Pétain was to remain for a long time convinced that the Champagne country would be the scene of the greatest battle.
As the French had behind this front – unlike the British behind theirs – ample room for withdrawal and manœuvre so long as they left a shield for Paris on their left flank, Pétain could arrange to keep a larger proportion of his troops in reserve than Haig could possibly have afforded. Of a grand total of ninety-nine divisions, he placed sixty in the line, retaining fifteen behind the Vosges front (he entertained suspicions that the Germans might try to force a passage through Switzerland, thus ending the war as they had begun it with a violation of neutrality), twenty divisions behind the central front spread between Soissons and Bar le Duc, and in accordance with his verbal agreement with Sir Douglas Haig, four divisions available to aid the British.
Two of these last divisions were deployed just west of Soissons, and two up in the northern sector of the front, behind the Belgian Army.
There remained the Americans – who could undoubtedly contribute an extra reserve of strength behind the French front, if only their Commander-in-Chief could be persuaded to throw them into the battle. Four large-size American divisions had so far arrived in France, and General Pershing had set up his headquarters at Chaumont, some sixty miles south of the point of the St. Mihiel Salient. The men of his command were undergoing training in the surrounding countryside interspersed with spells in the quiet sectors of the line, during which they were commanded by French officers while their own officers acted as observers.
These divisions were the 1st Division, a regular division made up to strength with a small proportion of war-time volunteers (of whom one had already been killed during the first American brush with the enemy), the 2nd Division, composed of both United States Marines and regular infantry, the 26th ‘Yankee’ Division, which had won the race to be the first National Guard division to be sent overseas – the men were from New England and had all been spare-time volunteer soldiers after much the same fashion as the British territorials – and the 42nd ‘Rainbow’ Division of National Guardsmen, drawn from every State in the Union. Each division consisted of one field artillery and two infantry brigades, which with supply and repair units made up to a total strength of nine hundred and seventy-nine officers and 28,050 men.
There were thus some 116,000 American soldiers in France, and it is not surprising that their Commander-in-Chief had to guard them jealously against the designs of the military and political heads of the other Allied nations, for they were very fine-looking troops indeed. They were young, they were fit, they were enthusiastic. Their bodies were not scarred by year-old wounds, neither had their nerves been stretched beyond endurance by never-ending months of mud, blood and a troglodyte
existence. As a result, General Pershing was able to insist at this time upon a standard of smartness and discipline to which the French had never aspired except with regular élite regiments, and which the British had been forced to abandon in all but the Guards Division and a few battalions of some of their more famous and old-established regiments.
Human nature being what it is, the French and the British were jealous of the Americans – with the jealousy which all men who had been through Verdun and Passchendaele felt for those who had not, with the jealousy of all men aged and embittered before their time by the chaos and disaster of battle, for those who still looked forward to the fray with eager confidence.
And if the Tommy and the Poilu were jealous of the Doughboy, the British and French Staffs were envious of the American Command. They were basically envious of the fact that America still had such men as these left, for when Pershing referred to his divisions as ‘the best damn divisions in any army’ it was no aid to his popularity that he may well have been right. His army in 1918 was composed of elements similar to those of the German Student Divisions which had perished in the ‘Kindermord’ of October 1914, of the divisions which held the flower of British manhood and were slaughtered on the Somme, and of those of the pride of French audacity which had been trodden into the plains of Verdun and Champagne. These had all been magnificent fighting armies, for in addition to physical attributes of note, the men comprising them had possessed those two inestimable military virtues – in the eyes of the Staffs – innocence and hope.
Now General Pershing’s army was the only one to possess those priceless gifts in abundance; no bitter memories of muddle and waste would hold his men back, no distrust of high-level strategy weaken their resolution.
They had in fact, already given evidence of this, for American Engineers had been engaged in work behind the British line since the end of 1917, and Edmund Blunden speaks of them as ‘men of splendid but risky ease of mind’. Their trench raids too, carried out by battalions training in the French sector, were pressed home with an eagerness and an élan which had been missing from the Western Front since late 1916, and one lately carried out by men of the Rainbow Division had even been distinguished by the presence of the Divisional Chief-of-Staff, Colonel Douglas MacArthur, wearing a turtle-necked sweater and an overseas cap, for he disdained the use of a steel helmet.
On another raid, hand-to-hand fighting developed in the pitch-black corner of a deep German trench, in the course of which an American corporal and a heavy-weight German grappled with each other at too close a range for either to use a weapon. A second American hovered on the skirts of the fray endeavouring to bayonet the enemy, his bafflement eventually expressed by the plaintive inquiry: ‘Homer, for Pete’s sake which is you?’
Such concern for another indicated a generosity of spirit which past events had ground out of most other troops – and generosity is closely linked with the spirits of self-sacrifice and trust. No wonder the American divisions were objects of envy.
But despite the most urgent pleas from Allied commanders, Pershing refused to yield up any of his fighting troops for incorporation into other armies – either as individual infantrymen fed into under-strength British battalions, or as battalions to fight in the line under British or French command.
His intention was to build an American Army and then to direct it in battle; in co-operation with those of his Allies, certainly, but as a separate and distinct component of the total force. In this he had the legal warrant contained in the first part of the fifth paragraph of his official instructions, received by him from the American Secretary for War, Mr. Newton D. Baker, which read:
In military operations against the Imperial German Government you are directed to co-operate with the forces of the other countries employed against that enemy; but in so doing the underlying idea must be kept in view that the forces of the United States are a separate and distinct component of the combined forces, the identity of which must be preserved. This fundamental rule is subject to such minor exceptions in particular circumstances as your judgement may approve. The action is confided to you and you will exercise full discretion in determining the manner of co-operation.
This was the part of his instructions which General Pershing staunchly upheld at many a formal and informal discussion of the developing military situation. He also stubbornly countered the attempts by the voracious (and increasingly worried) Command Staffs of his allies, to nullify the effects of this part of his instructions by political manœuvre or administrative adjustment.
He assured President Wilson and Secretary Baker, for instance, that the imminent danger was by no means so great as Lloyd George and Clemenceau would have them believe, adroitly pointing out that if the British were as short as they claimed of men along their section of the front, they could hardly afford to keep so many army units abroad in such places as Palestine and India. He had also been gratuitously provided with one excellent argument against the amalgamation of American with British units, by the ever-helpful Marshal Joffre. Even inside the British Army, the Marshal pointed out, the Canadians and Australians, and even the Scots and the Irish, were kept together in their own corps and divisions.
And when Sir William Robertson (still CIGS at that time) stated that Britain would be willing to forgo shiploads of essential supplies in order to bring over one hundred and fifty American infantry battalions, without their administrative divisional ‘tails’, Pershing suggested that the same space could better be used to bring over complete divisions.
There was of course, no reason why Pershing should have courted popularity with his allies. He was convinced – rightly – that the armed strength under his command would exercise the decisive force on the field of battle, but he also seems to have believed that it would be able to do so even in the event of a collapse of the British or French armies. When at a crucial phase of the battle to come he was asked by an indignant and vociferous Foch whether he was prepared to risk the French being driven back behind the Loire, Pershing answered crisply and unequivocally ‘Yes!’ – and his certainty that the Americans would still be able to retrieve the situation would have been admirable in less precarious circumstances.
Few people are sufficiently objective in their view of their own condition to be able to appreciate when their commendable determination passes over the peak of increasing value and slides down the other side into stubborn obstinacy. To expect such objectivity of ‘Black Jack’ Pershing seems on the face of it like hoping for gold from granite, for there had been little occasion in his life of action and ambition for the development of powers of self-examination. To European eyes, Pershing appears as the embodiment of the American military tradition – although from the perspective of the ’sixties one must wonder whether he was not, in fact, its originator.
He had been born in 1860 of poor parents in what were then the frontier lands of Missouri, and his life presents the popular picture of the rise to fame and fortune of the possessor of aggressive pertinacity in the land of opportunity. He was very much a self-made man. When young, he had supported himself by teaching at a children’s school whilst taking a law course at the Normal School at Kirksville, but a competitive examination for entrance to West Point offered and in due course gave to him the opportunity of a career in which he would be fed and clothed whilst being trained. He passed out high on the list and by 1887 was riding as an officer with the United States Cavalry against the Apaches. Three years later he was in charge of Indian Scouts during the crushing of the Sioux rising.
Later, he served in Cuba and there attracted the attention of Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote: ‘I have been in many fights, but Captain Pershing is the coolest man under fire I ever saw in my life.’ This was a most fortunate impression to make upon one who was soon to have the political power to aid the careers of promising officers, although some years were to elapse before it bore fruit. In the meantime, Pershing went to the Philippines where he occupied his spare time studying the ways
of the savage Moros to such good effect that when an emergency arose he was called upon to take a general’s role, and to act as administrator of the district in which lay the Moro country.
During all this time, his reputation had been growing as a man of stubborn determination, physically tough, morally of indestructible fibre. He went straight for anything he wanted, regardless of physical, social or military barriers: slackness in the ranks (there was never insubordination) he had in certain circumstances cured with his fists, and when on one much publicized occasion he queued up with the men for beans and coffee, it is fair to surmise that it was because he was hungry and not for any notions of democracy – a concept for which he cannot be said to have shown much more than lip service. His nickname ‘Black Jack’ was a reluctant tribute to his aspect of soldierly implacability.
He accompanied the Japanese forces as observer during the Russo–Japanese War, and then Roosevelt, impatient with Congress, used a singular power which had been granted to him for the creation of brigadier-generals, and Pershing suddenly found himself promoted over the heads of eight hundred and sixty-two of his seniors. It was as well that he had by now become impervious to unpopularity.
He was commanding a brigade in San Francisco in 1916 and was thus favourably positioned when trouble flared up on the Mexican border as a result of the activities of Pancho Villa. By 1917, owing to the death of the original holder of the command, Pershing was the Major-General in control of the only American troops engaged in hostilities and thus the only ones to be prominent in the eyes of public or politicians. He was also – to his personal tragedy, but to his professional advantage – the widower of the daughter of the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, and possibly as a result of this had received from him on the morning of May 3rd, 1917, the following telegram: