The shipping-amalgamation controversy continued through two phases, the period before the German offensive (December 1917–March 1918) and the period during which the Germans attacked and then lost the strategic initiative (March–July 1918). At the center of the controversy stood the stubborn commander of the AEF, John J. Pershing, who took his orders to create an independent army even more seriously than the civilians who gave him the orders. When Wilson and Baker wavered on the issue, influenced by the Allies and their own advisers, Pershing stood fast. He shared Wilson’s assumption that an independent army would be essential to the president’s war aims. He also doubted that Allied command procedures, operational concepts, training, and leadership would be acceptable to American troops. He knew that Allied charges of incompetence were unacceptable to the Army’s career officer corps.
The first phase of the controversy began with a British proposal to ship all the infantry battalions of ten divisions to France in British vessels. Although he had no objection to having his troops train with the British, as they were already doing with the French, Pershing insisted that this plan was unacceptable since the battalions would have to be amalgamated into the BEF to be combat-effective. After some heated conferences and cable traffic, the AEF and the British agreed to bring six full divisions to Europe on British vessels not already committed to carrying American troops. While the Americans trained with the BEF, American cargo vessels would bring their equipment, and the divisions would return to the AEF in the summer. Under this plan, although it was modified, ten American divisions served with the BEF at some time in 1918 under the control of the U.S. II Corps headquarters. From Pershing’s standpoint, the agreement had real advantages: It brought more troops more rapidly to Europe than he expected, and it seemed to end the amalgamation controversy.
Even before the six-division plan was well underway, the German March offensive drove the Allies back to the bargaining table with amalgamation on their minds. In a series of tense negotiations, Pershing agreed to postpone the formation of his own field army, but he would not accept anything but the emergency use of American troops by Allied commanders. He extracted agreement in principle that an American army would be formed and that it would have a sector of its own in Lorraine, the site of the AEF’s planned 1918 and 1919 offensives. Again, the key was British shipping. Diverting more vessels from other missions, the British proposed that the Americans bring nothing but infantrymen and machine gunners to Europe at a rate of 120,000 a month for three months for service in the BEF. Unbeknownst to Pershing, the War Department accepted this proposal in April 1918. Pershing and the unreinforced French viewed the pact with displeasure, and the negotiations continued. At a conference at Abbeville, France, in early May, Pershing insisted upon another modification of the shipping plans that would allow the shipment of full divisions. In exchange for French support, he argued that British vessels might bring these troops but that they should be shared with the French. Despite British pleas that they had thus far suffered the greatest losses in the 1918 battles, the new Allied high commander, French General Ferdinand Foch, argued that the French army also needed reinforcement. The temporary resolution of the dispute was that the infantry and machine gunners would receive priority shipment to Europe but would shortly be followed by the rest of the troops of six divisions. If the British released even more ships, they could carry more infantry. This agreement covered only the months of May, June, and July.
The final phase of the shipping-amalgamation controversy occurred against a background of French defeat and American assertiveness. Having restudied the shipping schedules, Pershing’s staff found that even though almost a million men were on their way to the front, the AEF would still be short the almost 400,000 support troops necessary for an independent army. In the meantime, the Germans had struck the French army and sent it retreating toward Paris. In another conference at Versailles (June 1–2, 1918) Pershing and the desperate French again collaborated to change the British-sponsored shipping schedules. In exchange for more British shipping, Pershing agreed to bring the combat troops of ten more divisions to Europe, but he also gained both British and American vessels to bring additional support troops. Essentially what occurred was that in May through July 1918 an average of 270,000 American troops arrived in Europe each month. The emergency deployment brought the AEF to more than 1 million men and included enough support troops to bring an independent army closer to reality. The AEF was not yet ready to fight as an independent field army, but it had avoided amalgamation and had gathered its units as full divisions, not as fillers in Allied divisions. This triumph for American policy was Pershing’s.
The rush of Americans to France once again reduced War Department plans to shambles. At Versailles General Foch estimated that the United States must provide 100 divisions (big divisions by European standards) to ensure victory in 1919, and he persuaded the Allied political leaders to cable this demand to Washington. Pershing endorsed the new American program, in part to galvanize what he regarded as a halfhearted war effort. The Allied request confounded the War Department, and General March asserted he would “need an Aladdin’s lamp” to meet the demands for more troops. During June and July 1918, as the battle continued in Europe, the War Department and WIB studied the problem and concluded that in terms of shipping and supplies the United States could not provide more than 65 divisions. With additional promises of more British shipping and more Allied equipment, the War Department revised the ceiling to 80 divisions. From July until the end of the war, the 80-division program shaped the draft calls and equipment orders.
Although the amalgamation controversy and the rapid expansion of the AEF established the general shape of the American effort in France, General Pershing’s headquarters faced a wider variety of organizational problems. Most of them stemmed from the flaws in the American military system and interservice and Allied politics. For example, relations between GHQ AEF and the War Department General Staff deteriorated badly during 1918, and Generals Pershing and March ended the war as chiefs of rival factions. To some degree the problems rested in personality: Both men were hard-driving West Pointers with enviable combat records in the Philippines and vast staff and foreign experience. More important, their disagreements stemmed from the fact that each believed he was the principal commander of the wartime Army. They quarreled over shipping schedules, the training program in the United States, the assignment and promotion of officers, the management of the AEF’s supply system, and the procurement of weapons. Secretary Baker adjudicated their disputes but, characteristically, did not decide whether the chief of staff or the expeditionary force commander would be the Army’s dominant voice. That decision awaited another war.
Pershing’s problems in France did not end with the cables to the War Department, for his force lacked skilled officers at every level of activity. Unless Pershing improved the AEF’s leadership and staff efficiency, he faced more demands from the Allies to amalgamate American troops. Only one in every six of the 200,000 American officers who served in World War I had prewar commissioned service in the Army or National Guard. The level of professional competence among the AEF officer corps, particularly among the new officers, concerned Pershing throughout the war. Before the combat of 1918 swamped the AEF, Pershing established an elaborate system of officer schools in France, with courses ranging from weapons employment to staff functioning. These courses, however, stripped units of leaders during their training and could not meet all the AEF’s demands in 1918. The wide variety of professional competence in the AEF often meant that operation plans from higher headquarters allowed little flexibility and were executed with little skill, particularly in the use of supporting arms. The Army emerged from the war convinced that it needed a better system of training citizen-officers.
As demanding as he was with his officers, Pershing did not ignore his enlisted men. He insisted that the standards of the AEF would be the standards of West Point, and to the best of his ability he enforced rigid
standards of discipline, drill, military courtesy, and dress. It was largely a losing battle. In some ways Pershing kept his promise to run a “clean” army. He would not authorize supervised brothels (as the Allies did), and his medical officers waged a desperate (and largely successful) battle against venereal disease. The war against vin ordinaire and demon cognac was less successful; the friendly French, chill weather, and American drinking habits were on the other side. A more basic problem was relations between officers and enlisted men, relations characterized by mutual tolerance and familiarity and casual attitudes toward performance of duty, particularly behind the lines. French and British officers found the Americans warrior-like but unmilitary. They also noted the traditional American profligacy with equipment and supplies; logistical discipline was not an AEF triumph. American units exhausted cars, trucks, and horse-drawn transport at rates that amazed the Allies. From the AEF’s standpoint, it never had enough transportation, and its troops’ strongest memories were of long hikes under crushing packs.
Two categories of troops bothered AEF headquarters. The first were the Marines. Bowing to Navy Department pressure, Pershing had allowed two Marine infantry regiments and a machine-gun battalion to join the AEF by early 1918. Organized as the 4th Brigade in the 2d Division, the Marines proved excellent in discipline and, eventually, crack assault troops. The trouble was that they wanted to organize an entire Marine division, and they had powerful friends in Washington. Pershing would not allow a Marine division. Although his staff cited administrative problems as the principal barrier, Pershing’s primary concern was Navy Department meddling and the Marine Corps’ ability to publicize its own accomplishments and thus presumably demoralize the rest of the AEF.
A more vexing question was the role of black American troops in France. By the end of the war the Army had sent 200,000 black soldiers to Europe, most of them draftees. Three-quarters of these men served in labor units, where their work was essential to the AEF. For GHQ AEF these labor units presented one major problem: Fraternization with the French, particularly women. Following their own racial biases and fearing black-white clashes among American troops, AEF commanders established “Jim Crow” practices in France, much to the amazement of the Europeans and the distaste of black Americans. The question of black troops in combat—mostly led by black officers—proved even more tense. Largely as a convenience, Pershing assigned four black infantry regiments, built on prewar National Guard units, to the French army. These regiments fought with distinction throughout the war. Pressed at home by racial equalitarians, the War Department also forced the AEF to form the black 92d Division. Plagued by divisions between its white and black officers and the poor training of its uneducated men, the 92d Division did not perform well and poisoned Army attitudes toward all-black combat units.
Training the AEF brought further strain to the American war effort in France. After his exposure to Allied tactical techniques, Pershing stressed that the AEF should not adopt European “trench warfare” tactics, but should stress “open warfare” maneuvers. He urged the War Department to curtail the activities of the 800 Allied officers and enlisted men in American training camps, and he ordered his division commanders to minimize their dependence on Allied instructors. Pershing wanted his men to practice large-unit assaults with principal emphasis on rifle fire and artillery support, while the Allies stressed small-unit raiding with emphasis on grenades, mortars, and automatic weapons. Since Pershing planned to use the AEF to break through the German defenses, he wanted his troops prepared for battles in the open countryside. A student of warfare who appreciated the firepower of modern armies, Pershing knew the value of troop dispersion, fluid tactics, and punishing artillery support, but his own impatience and the amateurishness of many of his officers often led to a too literal interpretation of his tactical doctrine. Allied observers despaired in the AEF’s early battles when they found lines of dead Americans mowed down in windrows like their French and British predecessors of 1914 and 1915. Only late in 1918 did the veteran American divisions show the same degree of tactical skill as their Allied and German counterparts, and the lessons came by bloody experience.
Winning the War, 1918
Against a background of growing famine and political unrest and the serious attrition of the German armed forces, General Erich Ludendorff and his planners designed the great offensive of 1918 to force a negotiated peace before the Americans could affect the war on the Western Front. From March 21 until mid-July, the German army launched five separate major attacks and inflicted serious tactical defeats upon the Allies. Nevertheless, fighting with minimal American participation, the Allied armies proved sufficiently resilient to blunt the German attacks and set the stage for the final victory.
The initial German offensive struck two British armies in the valley of the Somme and drove a 40-by-60–mile salient in the BEF’s lines in one week’s heavy fighting. Although the Germans began the attack with a local superiority of three to one in artillery and 47 to 29 in divisions, the Allies eventually contained the assault. To draw off Allied reserves, the Germans launched a more modest attack in Flanders on April 9. After a week’s heavy fighting, which involved several hundred Americans training with the BEF, the second offensive also stalled. Both sides by now had over 250,000 casualties.
During the opening phases of the German offensive, General Pershing in a moment of high drama offered all he had to the Allied cause. “All” meant the AEF’s four divisions that had reached some semblance of combat readiness. One of these divisions joined the French army in Picardy holding the point of the German salient. In late May the 1st Division launched the first major American attack of the war and recaptured the village of Cantigny, impressing both the Germans and Allies with its skill and élan.
Before the AEF could make any additional dispositions, the Germans mounted another major offensive against the weakly held Allied lines between Noyen and Reims. In one week (May 27–June 5, 1918) two German armies of seventeen divisions drove fifteen weak French and British divisions away from the Aisne River and then back across the Marne River. The point of the German attack reached Chateau-Thierry and access to the roads to Paris, only forty miles away. In Paris elements of the French government and civilian population began to evacuate the city as the Allied high commanders hurriedly shifted scarce reserves to contain the German offensive. Among the available troops were the American 2d and 3d Divisions. For three weeks these two American divisions helped hold the Marne River line. The 2d Division actually launched a local counterattack that recaptured Belleau Wood and Vaux, and the 3d Division met the fifth German offensive (July 15) and prevented any serious penetrations south of the Marne in its sector. In both division sectors the Americans fought with such suicidal stubbornness that the Germans began to revise their low esteem of the AEF.
If training the AEF concerned Pershing, the American army’s logistical requirements dazzled AEF planners with their scope and complexity. The manpower requirements of the Services of Supply (SOS) taxed American resources; at the end of the war there were as many soldiers, civilians, and prisoners supporting the AEF as there were soldiers fighting the Germans. Even this million-man force had difficulty moving the tons of supplies the AEF needed. Most of the AEF’s supplies came from ports between Brest and Bordeaux, and these ports suffered from crowded facilities and problems of accounting for all the shipments. Supplies moved forward by rail to a series of depots that maintained levels of supplies for forty-five, thirty, and fifteen days of operations. Matching the flow of supplies to the needs of the fighting divisions demanded ingenuity and administrative skill. As the AEF burgeoned in 1918, the Allies complained that Pershing’s staff and the SOS headquarters could not manage their supply system. After the War Department suggested that it send General Goethals to France to run the SOS as an independent command, Pershing gave SOS more independent authority and appointed Major General James G. Harbord, a trusted associate, to command it. Harbord’s drive and intellectual gras
p helped improve logistical management, but the key reforms came from sheer experience, a reduction of reserve supplies, more careful management, and more realistic estimates on troop usage of different types of supplies. As with so many other aspects of the AEF’s experience, the American army learned by doing and did not reach its full potential until near the end of the war.
The problems of combining skilled men and effective equipment in France found no more dramatic expression than the formation of the Air Service, American Expeditionary Forces. Early in the war the Allies told the Wilson administration that it would have to provide 5,000 pilots and as many planes if the Allies were to hold air superiority over the Western Front. Such a program was staggering and beyond America’s capacity before 1919. Yet, for all the agonies of the aircraft production program, the United States almost met all its goals. By the end of the war the Army Air Service, a branch nominally under Signal Corps direction, numbered 12,000 pilots and 183,000 officers and men in aircrews and ground support roles. Of this aerial host 58,000 were serving in France. This massive air effort, however, produced only forty-five operational squadrons in contact with the Germans, and the burden of combat flying fell upon only 1,500 aviators. The Air Service, not really committed to combat until the spring of 1918, included 740 planes, one-third of them made in the United States, the others in Europe.
The organization of the Air Service posed special problems for Pershing. Still in its infancy, Army aviation had no senior officers and no institutional base. Until early in 1918 three strong-willed men dominated AEF aviation development: Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell, Brigadier General Benjamin D. Foulois, and Colonel Raynal C. Bolling. All young for their rank, Mitchell, Foulois, and Bolling had immense talents, but personal diplomacy was not among them. Plagued by contentiousness, the Air Service buildup led the AEF in waste and confusion until Pershing appointed Major General Mason D. Patrick, an elderly engineer, to the senior Air Service post. Bolling died in 1918, but Mitchell remained as the air combat commander and Foulois as Air Service, AEF, logistical administrator. Unlike Foulois, who learned to fly from the Wright brothers, Mitchell was a latecomer to Army aviation, but his energy and personal magnetism made him a popular commander and primary spokesman for the AEF’s aviators.
For the Common Defense Page 48