The same day Marshal Foch and Weygand arrived at Pershing’s own private quarters at nearby Ligny-en-Barrois, and asked him to approve a completely new scheme of operations, which they claimed was the logical result of the unexpected speed of the British and French advance in Picardy.
The St. Mihiel operation was to be limited to pinching off the salient, and a number of Pershing’s divisions were to be placed under French command for a completely new offensive which, instead of moving northeast into industrial Lorraine as had been planned, would push to the northwest, through the difficult terrain between the Meuse and the Aisne rivers. Thus it would form the eastern fang of a pincers of which the western jaw would be an Anglo-French drive for Cambrai.
Pershing immediately flared up: “Well Marshal, this is a very sudden change,” he quoted himself as saying. “On the very day you turn over a sector to the American army you ask me to reduce the operation so that you can take away several of my divisions.”
The discussion became heated indeed. Foch suggested, with his scornful snarl, that perhaps General Pershing didn’t care to take part in the battle at all. Of course he did Pershing asserted doggedly “but as an American army and in no other way.”
Foch insisted. Both men rose from the table where they were seated. “Marshal Foch you may insist all you please,” Pershing remembered having said, “but I decline absolutely.”
Pershing described Foch as picking up his maps and papers and leaving, “very pale and apparently exhausted,” after placing a memorandum in Pershing’s hands for further study.
Pershing was determined that Americans should no longer be used as cannonfodder to spare the troops of other Allied commanders. Though on the whole they got on better with the French than with the British, his doughboys he knew were fed up with being ordered about by the frogs. He was bound he would run his American sector as he saw fit.
The upshot of this irate discussion was that he consented to limit his St. Mihiel offensive to pinching off the German salient and promised that he would, immediately afterwards, in spite of the difficulty of changing his transport arrangements at that late date, join the French in a sweep down the valley of the Meuse starting to the west of Verdun.
“Plans for this second concentration,” wrote Pershing, “involved the movement of some 600,000 men and 2700 guns, more than half of which would have to be transferred from the battlefield of St. Mihiel by only three roads, almost entirely during hours of darkness.”
A million tons of supplies would have to be accumulated along the Voie Sacrée back of Verdun while American transport was busy in getting materials up to the Neufchâteau area for the St. Mihiel operation. “When viewed as a whole,” wrote the general, “it is believed that history holds no parallel of such an undertaking.”
For the St. Mihiel offensive some three thousand guns of all calibers were brought in, not one of them of American manufacture. A little less than half were manned by the French and the rest by American gunners. Forty thousand tons of ammunition were placed in readily accessible dumps.
Communications, consisting of telegraph and telephone lines, radio and a carrier pigeon corps, had to be connected with a central switchboard at Ligny-en-Barrois.
Convoys of trucks, some American but most of them French, moved back and forth from nineteen railheads, to bring up food, clothing and equipment which had been shipped from the American ports.
Nearly thirty thousand beds were ready in field hospitals provided by the Medical Corps.
Colonel Billy Mitchell for the first time commanded a really substantial airforce, some twelve hundred planes including French and British reinforcements.
There was still a total lack of heavy tanks and a shortage of light tanks. That meant that the doughboys would have to cut their own way through the barbed wire instead of having passages opened up for them by the tanks.
The total strength of the fighting forces under Pershing’s command was 550,000 Americans and 110,000 French.
It had been hoped to attack on September 8. In spite of elaborate efforts to hoax the Germans by loud radio talk, and the setting up of a dummy headquarters to prepare an imaginary offensive in the Belfort region, the Germans were well aware of the American plans. The St. Mihiel offensive had for some time been the talk of the Paris cafés. Swiss and German newspapers started writing it up two weeks before it actually took place. The four day final delay gave the Germans a chance to pull a large number of their troops safely out of the salient.
This retirement had already begun when the American artillery barrage began an hour after midnight on September 12. A certain amount of shellfire was wasted on empty trenches. There’d been a heavy rain that night and at dawn the mist and drizzle shielded the movements both of the attacking Americans and of the retreating Germans.
Lacking tanks, teams of American engineers cut passages through the barbed wire with wirecutters. They laid down paths of chickenwire over the entanglements, a procedure which caused astonishment among the French, because nobody had thought of it before.
The attack, consisting of a twopronged operation, with more or less simultaneous assaults from the south and from the west, was carried out promptly and successfully. The Germans were outnumbered eight to one. In spite of spirited patches of resistance they were not able to get all their troops out before the mouth of the sack was closed on them.
In thirtysix hours two hundred square miles of French territory and a line of railroad were cleared of the enemy. The threatening height of Montsec, which had long terrorized the Allied entrenchments, fell with hardly a struggle. Something under sixteen thousand prisoners and four hundred and fifty guns of various calibers were taken at a cost of only seven thousand casualties.
On September 13 General Pershing, accompanied by General Pétain, made a triumphal entrance into the town of St. Mihiel which had suffered, by an odd fortune of war, very little damage. They were greeted by excited schoolchildren waving the tricolor and by the deputy mayor at the Hôtel de Ville. The inhabitants had been on the whole welltreated by the boche, they were told, except that all the ablebodied males had been carried off in the evacuation. News soon came that the Germans had to move so fast in their retreat that they had turned their prisoners loose ten miles out of town.
As the triumphant generals were leaving, they met Secretary Baker, who had a way of turning up when something important was going on, driving in unannounced with a bashful grin on his face. “I regretted,” wrote Pershing, “he could not have gone in with General Pétain and me.”
The following Sunday, Monsieur Clemenceau appeared at Pershing’s headquarters. It was his custom to visit the frontline troops every Sunday. He demanded to be taken up to Thiaucourt, which was the recaptured town closest to Metz. Pershing, who thought the place was still being shelled, and knew the road would be blockaded with truck traffic, because the move to the Verdun sector was already beginning, said he was sorry, “We cannot take the chance of losing a Prime Minister.” Clemenceau insisted. Pershing compressed his thin lips. When Pershing said no he meant no. The Tiger was furious. He made a try anyway and had to turn back.
To make things worse it turned out that President and Mrs. Poincaré, driving in a little later, had, in the course of a tour which included the ruined remains of a pleasant little country house they’d had on the heights overlooking the Meuse, been allowed to visit Thiaucourt.
At dinner at American headquarters Clemenceau bristled and would not be mollified. His distaste for Pershing turned into a fixed antipathy. All the way back to Paris he grumbled to his aides about the stupid way the Americans handled their military traffic. “They wanted an American army,” he growled. “Anyone who saw, as I saw, the hopeless congestion at Thiaucourt will bear witness that they may congratulate themselves on not having had it earlier.”
The Attack at the Pivot
The mopping up of the St. Mihiel triangle was hardly completed before Pershing moved his First Army Headquarters to Souilly on the V
oie Sacrée between Verdun and Bar-le-Duc. The mairie at Souilly had been the chief French command post during the period of the great defense. The American officers felt a catch in their throats as they trooped up the worn steps. Their objectives lay to the northwest of the hills and fortresses that had been so drenched in blood during the battles of the previous years: Mort Homme, Hill 304, Vaux, Douaumont.
To mask the enormous movement of troops and munitions into the Meuse-Argonne sector, preparations for the dummy offensive through the Belfort Gap were ostentatiously stepped up. A phantom of Pershing’s old plan for a drive into the Bassin de la Briey was projected into the press. Pershing’s communiqué spoke of American doughboys as advancing on Metz.
At Belfort an army headquarters was established under command of General Bundy and bona fide preliminaries set in motion for an eastern drive to coincide with the imaginary movement against Metz from Thiaucourt. Twentyfive heavy tanks were brought up by night and went clanking in and out of patches of woodland where they would be heard by boche sentries across the lines. Preparatory raids and reconnaissances were made. An American Intelligence colonel was careful to drop a brand new wellmarked sheet of carbonpaper, from a letter to Pershing describing how all was in readiness for the offensive, in the scrapbasket in his room at a Belfort hotel where it was promptly scooped up by the German espionage.
Meanwhile correspondents were given false leads, a press bureau was set up in Nancy to cover the attack, and the Allied wireless, using an easily decipherable code, started talking about the formation of an American Tenth Army which was to spearhead the eastern offensive. Whether or not the Germans were completely taken in by this ruse de guerre, the threat was serious enough to cause Ludendorff to move several divisions into Alsace and Lorraine.
At dawn on September 26 nine American divisions, amounting to two hundred and forty thousand men, jumped off into the old nomansland of the defense of Verdun. They had quietly replaced the French holding troops during the night, while one of the heaviest artillery bombardments of the war combed the German positions. The front on which they were to advance extended twentyone miles from the Meuse to the western fringes of the plateau of the Argonne Forest where they were to keep contact with Gouraud’s Fourth Army advancing through the plains of Champagne east of Reims.
Pershing’s objective was to cut, in the vicinity of Sedan, the trunk line of railroad which furnished the Germans their chief lateral communication across their entire front from Metz to Valenciennes on the edge of Flanders. Giraud’s objective was the same railroad a few miles further west at the important highway center of Mézières.
The staffs of the hastily improvised American corps had hardly two weeks to lay their plans for the sort of operation that usually took months to prepare. Since the three seasoned divisions had not had time to struggle out through the overloaded roads from the St. Mihiel sector, the initial attack had to be made mostly by raw troops who had not learned how to protect their lives on the battlefield. They were attacking one of the most defensible regions on the western front.
The day dawned clear. For a while it looked as if the Allied airplanes would have the sky to themselves. The correspondents were invited up to watch the opening moves. From the shellshattered hump of Mort Homme they looked north and west down the Meuse valley which tapered funnelwise towards Sedan thirtyone miles away behind the misted hills. The whole great funnel was dominated by the heights on the east bank of the Meuse, where the German artillery, once it recovered from the pounding of the first bombardment, was ready to do deadly work. To the west the treecrowned promontories of the Argonne Forest cut into the valley with a series of steep ridges culminating in an occasional height. In the distant foreground, overlooking the first day’s objectives, was the ruined town of Montfaucon. Behind it was another ridge and behind that, fifteen miles away, was the hill village of Buzancy. Artillery in Buzancy would command the Meuse valley and the Sedan-Metz railroad.
At first everything seemed to go well. The Germans were almost as outnumbered as they had been at St. Mihiel. The main obstacle the American doughboys encountered was the mud in the shellchurned region of the old nomansland back of the heights that had defended Verdun. Roads had to be rebuilt foot by foot. Almost at once the infantry outran their field artillery and the tanks which were supposed to protect them.
The correspondents and the staffofficers up on Mort Homme watched with rapt interest through field glasses and telescopes olivedrab dots and lines moving forward according to schedule over the green land beyond the shellscarred area. The correspondents went back to Bar-le-Duc to write fanciful descriptions of a seven mile average penetration and of the taking of Montfaucon.
Some of them did have a qualm of suspicion before they left the observation post. A plane which they’d been admiring overhead as one of ours, made a sudden dive at them. When it opened up with its machine-guns there was no more doubt that it was a boche. Staffofficers and newspapermen crawled for cover among the pebbly shellholes.
The truth came out gradually as night came on. The Americans had broken the first German defenses, but Montfaucon was still in German hands and the American divisions were scattered helter-skelter over a terrain perfect for defense by groups of machinegunners. They had insufficient artillery and almost no tank support. Their transport was mired in the nomansland behind them. Communications had to be by runner or carrier pigeon. From an observation post in Montfaucon the Germans continued to direct withering artillery fire on the advancing skirmish lines. To the left what the doughboys called the Oregon Forest turned out to be another Belleau Wood, only on a larger scale.
Next day the 313th Infantry, Marylanders from the 79th Division, did sure enough take Montfaucon, at very great cost, but it was late afternoon before the cellars and ruins of the town and the adjacent woods had been cleared of the enemy. Even then the German strong points turned out to be on the next ridge behind. The delay in getting up artillery, due to traffic snarls on the almost impassable roads, gave the German General von Gallwitz the chance he needed to deploy his reserve divisions and to reinforce his great guns which carried on an enfilading fire from the heights east of the Meuse. To make things worse the weather became rainy.
The days that followed were hideous for the Americans. German crack divisions were brought in to mount their usual skillful counterattacks. The troops were plagued with influenza, which throughout the army was killing almost as many men as machineguns and shrapnel. The roads up into the fighting areas were hopelessly inadequate. There were never enough tanks. Food and ammunition came up by fits and starts. The posts of command kept losing touch with their advance units. By the last day of September progress had stopped. General Bullard in command of the III Corps operating in the battlescarred regions along the River Meuse, remembered it bitterly as a time of “wavering and standstill.”
Meanwhile Gouraud’s Fourth French Army, which had made a good start the first day, was slowed to a crawl by a carefully fortified German position on a chalky hill known as Blanc Mont, which dominated the western fringes of the Argonne Forest, as Montfaucon had dominated its eastern defiles.
Further west French armies were beginning to make progress in the Chemin des Dames section, the combined British and French moves towards St. Quentin and Cambrai were doing well, and in the extreme north the British and French and Belgians were meeting with light resistance as they advanced through the boggy lands in front of Ypres.
It began to be apparent that the German defenses, which the American divisions were battering themselves to pieces to break, were the pivot on which the whole German line from Sedan to the Channel was executing a gradual retirement. The manoeuvre was to pull back the armies step by step to a shorter line along the whole length of the Meuse as a door closes on its hinges.
The High Command was determined to hold the pivot at all costs.
The Wavering and the Standstill
Headquarters at Souilly was a grim place during the last days of September. A
stream of orders that lashed like whips issued from the office of Pershing’s Chief of Staff. Drive forward. Drive forward. There must be no yielding in the face of counterattacks. Brigade and divisional command posts must be continually moved up to keep in touch with the fighting lines. Woe to the officer who weakened at the task.
General Pershing himself gave no air of flurry. Bullard described him as visiting his corps headquarters and inquiring “about things in a very good-humored, agreeable, almost careless way; yet I knew that underneath his easy manner was inexorable ruin to the commander who did not have things right.”
As the fighting dragged out from day to day, with little result but confusion and casualties, generals lost their commands; field officers or “ninety day wonders” who proved timorous or incapable of leadership were ordered to the rear. Constant dismissals and the high mortality among the firstrate officers and noncoms in the fighting meant that the command in all the units involved was constantly changing. This added to the difficulty of attaining the tight organization needed in such difficult country and against such a skillful enemy. Straggling and desertion became the problem of the day.
“The hardest work I did or saw done in France,” noted Bullard, “was the holding of men to duty in service and battle. In the early days some of our military theorists who had been little at the front, desired to reduce the military police … As our fighting increased these military police had, on the contrary, to be augmented in every way possible. An unbroken line of them now followed our attacks.”
Besides the difficulty of keeping an army, made up at least half of raw recruits, decently led and supplied, and headed in the direction of the enemy, Pershing had other battles on his hands.
By letter and cable he was carrying on a continual skirmish with the War Department in Washington for more trucks. He was in desperate need of horses. He didn’t have enough locomotives. He was still dependent on his allies for tanks, for most of his airplanes and, except for a few naval guns, for ordnance. “After nearly eighteen months of war,” he wrote, “it would be reasonable to expect that the organization at home would have been more nearly able to provide adequate equipment and supplies, and to handle shipments more systematically.”
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