General Scott went as far as Tarnopol in Galicia to view the offensive which Kerensky, the loquacious young Socialist lawyer now in complete control of the Provisional Government, ordered Brusilov to attempt, largely to impress the American mission. Scott stumbled around through the wheatfields deafened by the heavy artillery and saw thousands of Austrian prisoners being herded to the rear. The offensive he was told was a success.
Back in Petrograd he noted that the disorganization of the city was worse. Mr, Root was complaining that he couldn’t get a response from Washington to his plea for a hundred thousand dollars to set up an American propaganda agency. Scott found the members of the mission bubbling with enthusiasm for young Kerensky’s energy and magnetism. “Too radically inclined to suit me” was the general’s comment.
Petrograd was being organized but not according to the hopes of the American Mission. They learned that Lenin and Trotsky, two German agents, as they were described, were influencing the soldiers of a machinegun regiment and the workers of the Putilov plant. Already they were said to control most of the workingclass quarters of Petrograd. Senator Root’s advice to Kerensky was to arrest Lenin immediately. “Any government would have arrested, tried, imprisoned and executed him,” he complained in a letter home. General Scott agreed. Kerensky would have been very glad to arrest Comrade Lenin but he couldn’t get his hands on him.
The American Mission did not wait to see the outcome of the Brusilov offensive. They all piled back into the Czar’s special train and were trundled across Siberia to Vladivostok again. The last news they had was that Brusilov had advanced forty miles towards Lemberg and that Lenin’s attempted insurrection—the July days of the Russian revolutionary legend—had failed. By early August they were back in Washington telling President Wilson and the State Department that Kerensky was the man who would not only promote democracy in Russia, but continue to fight the Germans.
Lansing was unconvinced. “I am astounded at their optimism,” he wrote in his neatly kept diary on August 8. “When I expressed doubts as to Kerensky’s personal force and ability to carry through his plans in view of the strong opposition developing against him, they assured me everything would come out all right … and that Russia would continue the war. I presume they know more about it than I do, and yet in spite of what they say I am very skeptical about Kerensky.”
Exit Kerensky
The Eastern experts on the German general staff, meanwhile, were biding their time. By the end of July Brusilov’s army was buckling under clever German counterattacks. These, combined with lack of supply from the rear, produced a sudden and complete collapse. Whole divisions turned around and started for home. The Galician front was no longer defended.
The moment had come to let von Hutier try out his experiment in front of Riga. After a three hour bombardment his army advanced in a spearhead behind a rolling barrage, crossed the Dvina River on pontoons and broke through the strong Russian positions on the eastern shore.
By September 3 the Germans had captured the city of Riga. From Riga they sent small expeditions to occupy some of the Baltic islands as a method of increasing the confusion among the Russians. They had no intention of risking large forces in an expedition into Russia proper. The aim of von Hutier’s experiment was to bring down Kerensky’s pro-Allied government. In that aim it was completely successful. Within two months the Bolsheviks had established the Soviet power.
Chapter 15
THE LINE OF COMMUNICATION
TRAINING and supply were General Pershing’s chief preoccupation during the summer and fall of 1917. “It was one thing,” he wrote in his Experiences, “to call one or two million men to the colors, and quite another thing to transform them into an organized instructed army capable of meeting and holding its own in battle against the best trained force in Europe with three years of actual war experience to its credit.”
At home General Wood had already laid down a preliminary system of training. Sixteen cantonments each to accommodate approximately fortyeight thousand men were being planned by the War Department for the instruction of the national draft army, and an equal number of camps under canvas for the reinforced National Guard.
In France, Pershing’s immediate problem was to get his 1st Division in fighting trim. Next, a system of instruction had to be set up for the reinforcements to be landed in France during the summer by the navy’s transport service, which under Admiral Gleaves had so successfully brought the first contingent across the Atlantic without loss.
Schoolteacher Pershing
Pershing started as a schoolteacher. He taught military subjects at the University of Nebraska and at West Point. He had confidence in the school method of teaching. Even before he moved his headquarters away from the beguilements of Parisian life, he set up a special section of his staff to supervise army schools. He and Harbord were impressed when they visited the British armies by their methods of instruction in trench warfare. One of the fruits of Pershing’s weekend at Blendecques was that Haig assigned to him a lieutenant general, and a group of officers for one reason or another incapacitated for frontline service, to help train his raw Yanks. Pétain did the same. In the end Pershing had to train his own teachers.
The trouble with the British and French instructors from the American general’s point of view was that their minds were bogged in trench warfare. “Therefore in large measure the fundamentals so thoroughly taught at West Point for a century were more or less neglected … It was my opinion,” he continued, “that victory could not be won by the costly process of attrition, but it must be won by driving the enemy out in the open and engaging him in a war of movement.”
Drive the squareheads out of their trenches and knock ’em off with rifles, was his plan. He wanted his men trained in marksmanship, rapid riflefire, the use of the bayonet, and oldfashioned field tactics. He claimed that handgrenades, machineguns, mortars, and trench artillery were all right for specific purposes, but he clung passionately to the dogma that the welltrained infantryman with rifle and bayonet would eventually emerge as master of the field.
Before he could train an army he had to train his staff officers. He opened a General Staff College with a three months course in the old walled town of Langres a little south of Chaumont. Separate from that, he established a network of schools for corps, divisional and regimental staffs, for unit commanders, for noncoms, for recruits and replacements, for specialists in everything from bridgebuilding to the warehousing of o.d. uniforms. Most important in the early months were the schools for training teachers to teach in all these schools.
The Problem of Supply
While the troops were being trained arrangements had to be made for their supply. As soon as Pershing had dispatched his General Organization Project to Washington he set his staff to work to plan a line of communications to the American ports. Almost every day he cabled for fresh personnel. He needed railroadmen to run and recondition the worn-out railroads the French were placing at his disposal, canalboat men to operate the canals, trucking experts to handle shipment by road, carpenters, muleskinners, warehousemen, stevedores.
Most of his supply would have to come from America. Everything depended on shipping. Food and shells and powder and small arms ammunition produced in the States had to be shipped across the Atlantic. The British were proving closefisted about letting go any ships of their own. Not enough ships were being built to make up for the U-boat sinkings. In Washington a Shipping Board had been established and enormous new shipyards were in the blueprint stage. No new ships could be expected until the following year. There was a list of materials as long as your arm that Pershing needed right away.
To ease the strain on shipping he decided to set up a purchasing agency in France. To head it he picked Charles G. Dawes, a friend of many years standing whom he’d helped procure a commission in the Engineers. When as a lieutenant he taught military science at the University of Nebraska he’d known Charley Dawes as a fledgeling lawyer there. With a certa
in amount of envy he’d watched Dawes, who came of an Ohio family already firmly entrenched in railroad finance and banking, become wealthy and eminent in financial Chicago. Herbert Hoover tried to commandeer Dawes for his Food Administration but Dawes managed to slip through his fingers and to get himself sent overseas. He was hardly established as a major with an engineer regiment from Alabama reconstructing the docks at St. Nazaire when Pershing called him to Paris.
Major Dawes put up at the Ritz and hurried around to Pershing’s office. The general said at once he wanted him as General Purchasing Agent. “It’s a man’s work,” wrote Dawes in his diary, “but I am thankful beyond words that it is work that will count for my country in its hour of greatest trial.”
To make sure that the record he decided to keep of his trials and achievements with the A.E.F. should not fall into the wrong hands, he trotted across the Place Vendôme to the Morgan Harjes bank and rented a safedeposit box. Whenever he had a spare moment he sat in one of the little rooms they furnished their customers to cut coupons in, to jot down the events of the day.
“… Dear fellow and loyal friend,” he wrote of the general in an access of gratitude. “I hope I do not fail him. We have both passed through the greatest grief which can come to man …” He was thinking of the loss of his son Rufus drowned some months before Pershing lost his wife and daughters. These tragedies were a bond between them. His first day in Paris when Pershing and Dawes were being driven to the general’s quarters for lunch “there occurred an instance of telepathy which was too much for either of us. Neither of us was saying anything but I was thinking of my lost boy and of John’s loss and looking out the window, and he was doing the same thing on the other side of the automobile. We both turned at the same time and each was in tears. All John said was ‘Even this war can’t keep it out of my mind.’ ”
Dawes was accustomed to the millionaire’s life, but he liked to recall the days when he and John Pershing used to eat fifteen cent lunches together at the lunchcounter of a certain Don Cameron. He was flabbergasted by the Hôtel de Lannes. “As I looked around me I said ‘John, when I contrast these barren surroundings with the luxuriousness of our early life in Lincoln, Nebraska, it does seem that a good man has no chance in the world.’ To which John meditatively replied, ‘Don’t it beat hell?’ ”
The Education of Charles G. Dawes
The first problems Pershing put up to his purchasing agent were lumber and coal. He needed lumber immediately to build cantonments at Chaumont, where his staff was already outgrowing the barracks building they started with. American units were bidding against each other for scarce French supplies. The French were stuffy about cutting their national forests.
Coal was needed to heat the cantonments and offices and for the railroads that were to supply the A.E.F. There was plenty of coal in England, but the British were stuffy about parting with colliers to bring it across the Channel for their American allies. Dawes set his operatives to scouting the Great Lakes for freighters, he requisitioned tramp steamers.
He suggested to the French that American miners might teach them to increase production in their own mines but was told that was impossible; the trade unions would never allow it. The officials shrugged: “Les syndicate …”
Dawes began to learn that there were subtle shadings to war in Europe. Politicians had connections that crossed the frontiers. Certain places were never bombed. Certain ships were never sunk. In the business world certain tolerances and understandings had grown up between enemy states despite the daily massacre on the front lines.
Warweariness was the prevailing mood. Even the German Reichstag had passed a resolution urging a peace of understanding and the permanent reconciliation of the peoples. The call for a peace without annexations or indemnities, continually broadcast over the wireless by the firebrands of the Petrograd Soviet, re-echoed Woodrow Wilson’s old slogan: peace without victory. Socialist visionaries meeting in Stockholm hammered on the theme. The people of Europe were pricking up their ears. In France it wasn’t only the army that was mutinous. Alarmists kept whispering that unless sufficient coal could be found for heating in the coming winter the civilian population would rise in revolution.
“Everybody, Germany included, except America, seems ‘fed up’ as the British say,” Dawes put down somewhat dolefully in the privacy of his diary. The men on Pershing’s staff seemed to fear their war might be taken away from them before they could show what they could do.
Dawes worked like a beaver. He had set up his office in Paris in early September. By the first week in October he could tell the general with some confidence that coal was on the way. He had agents established in Switzerland and Spain for purchasing a long list of scarce items obtainable in those countries. Sitting in the quiet of Morgan Harjes’ one Saturday he found the leisure to note a few general deductions from his experience so far: “When the source of main military supply is so far distant from the point of use, as is the case with the United States and its army in France, the importance of coördination increases in proportion to its difficulty.”
The principle that Pershing and his staff were trying to inculcate in the War Department was that the flow of supplies should be managed and controlled from the point of use, which meant the headquarters of the A.E.F. “Priority in shipments, route of shipment (ports of disembarkation), and relative necessity of material should be, barring exceptional emergency, determined here and not in America,” wrote Dawes. “If we fail … in this war it will be because we do not coordinate quickly enough. Pershing and all of us see this. We are working for it night and day.”
Two days later Dawes was able to note that the first of his coal was actually being loaded on a requisitioned ship at an English port.
“The war has resolved itself in a large degree into a freight tonnage situation for the present.” His optimism overflowed. While “the mighty work of American preparation,” in which he was so happy to have a part, went on, “Great Britain is making a splendid offensive.”
The Splendid Offensive
Haig’s great offensive, glowingly described as a series of victories in the dispatches of gullible war correspondents schooled by the same General Charteris who invented the story about the German corpse factory—Charteris was Haig’s Intelligence officer—was forcing the Germans to concentrate divisions in Flanders, but at the cost of enormous expenditure of munitions and men.
The operation started just a week after Pershing visited the Fifth Army, and was shown the relief map of the terrain to be captured, and lunched to the sound of bagpipes with jolly General Gough. It had been planned for early in the summer, but Lloyd George’s opposition, the hesitations of the French and the complications of supply, caused it to be put off from week to week. It was a race with the treacherous Flemish weather. Zero hour came the day the short dry season ended.
Haig’s delays gave the German general staff time to organize a defense in depth and to prepare troops fresh from the walkaway on the Russian front for the sharp counterattacks on which they relied so heavily. “I had a certain feeling of satisfaction when this new battle began,” von Hindenburg reminisced in his memoirs. “… It was with a feeling of absolute longing that we waited for the wet season … great stretches of the Flanders flat would then become impassable.”
The wet season began the very day of the attack. In spite of the threatening sky Haig ordered his Fifth Army to go over the top anyway. The weeks of bombardment had so pitted the swampy ground in front of Ypres it would have been difficult to negotiate in dry weather. In rain it proved impassable. The tanks bogged down. The German pillboxes proved impregnable. The slight gains made to the north of the city merely brought the British troops into a dangerous salient where they were enfiladed by artillery fire from the higher ground between Passchendaele and Gheluvelt. By noon of the first day it was obvious to everyone except Haig and his staff that the offensive was a failure.
The Commander in Chief, who was making his advanced headquarte
rs in a railway car, went over to visit General Gough. It was raining heavily. “This was a fine day’s work,” Haig noted in his private journal. “I told Gough to carry out the original plan.”
“Heavy rain fell this afternoon and aeroplane observation was impossible,” he added later. “The going also became very bad and the ground was much cut up. This has hampered our further progress and robbed us of much of our advantage due to our great success.”
The younger officers were doubtful about the quality of this success. After three days of struggling to force men and equipment into machinegun and artillery fire, through mud so deep the wounded often drowned in it, the attack was called off. The Fifth Army was so badly shattered that the attacks on Passchendaele Ridge which followed had to be entrusted to General Plumer’s Second Army. The hoped for breakthrough to the Channel ports was no more spoken of at G.H.Q.
Haig reverted to the old step by step methods which were supposed to be wearing down the German will to fight. By the end of August the British and French had lost seventyfour thousand men on the Flanders front with only occasional gains of a few hundred yards. General Charteris reported a hundred thousand German casualties. The British and American press was completely bemused. On August 25 the London Spectator in its weekly summary proclaimed, “This has been for the Allies the greatest week of the war.”
In spite of what the newspapers printed disillusionment was spreading in England. The wounded men’s stories could hardly be said to gibe with the journalists’ reports. Hospital trains began to be routed into London late at night so that the stretcher cases could be hustled away to hospitals before they were seen.
When the weather improved in mid September the Australians and New Zealanders advanced nine hundred yards along the Memin Road. Twentytwo thousand casualties. Another victory. When someone inquired where the German prisoners were General Charteris replied, “We are killing the enemy, not capturing him.”
Mr. Wilson's War Page 38