Tears running down his cheeks after a speech at the end of 1917, Woodrow Wilson exclaimed: “I hate this war! I hate all war, and the only thing I care about on earth is the peace I am going to make at the end of it.” Clearly that was what Lippmann felt, too. The vocation of others might be to make war; his was to make peace.
While those contemporaries for whom his classmate Alan Seeger spoke kept their rendezvous with death on the battlefields of France and Flanders, Lippmann in New York, like Bullitt and Roosevelt in Washington, kept an individual appointment with destiny—and they had every reason to believe that history would remember it as the one that mattered.
* Roosevelt had become acquainted with Lippmann’s friend Frankfurter long before, however, and the two began to know each other better during the war years. As young lawyers in 1906, they had been introduced to each other at a lunch arranged by a common friend. They also had dealings together at State, War and Navy in 1913, in Roosevelt’s first year at Navy and Frankfurter’s last year (during that stint of government service) at War.
PART FOUR
A SEPARATE WAR
14
A WAR OF OUR OWN
DAYS BEFORE AMERICA’S ENTRY into the war, the Navy Department sent Admiral William S. Sims to London to coordinate with the British admiralty. His instructions from William S. Benson, the chief of naval operations—the uniformed head of the navy—were: “Don’t let the British pull the wool over your eyes. It is none of our business pulling their chestnuts out of the fire. We would as soon fight the British as the Germans.”
Benson was known to be anti-British, but what he said was in line with views expressed by the President, who in 1914 had been privately pro-Ally but had become increasingly skeptical about Allied motives as time went on. At the end of 1917, when the American ambassador to Britain suggested that former President William Howard Taft and other prominent figures should visit England as part of a program to foster mutual understanding, Wilson objected, telling Taft that “he questioned the desirability of drawing the two countries too closely together. He said that there were divergences of purpose and that the United States must not be put in the position of seeming, in any way, involved in British policy.… He intimated that the motives of the United States were unselfish while those of the British Empire … seemed of a less worthy character.”
Even though the United States after April 6, 1917, was committed to fight, at least in some fashion, alongside the Allies, the President stressed his resolve to retain diplomatic independence. He made that clear to Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, when British and French missions arrived in the United States at the end of April 1917 to discuss coordination of war efforts. Wilson told Balfour that the United States reserved the right to make a separate peace, and Balfour recognized that if he were in Wilson’s place, he would insist on the same freedom of action.
The question to be resolved was how the United States would contribute to the war against the common enemy. Marshal Joseph Joffre, who headed the French mission, asked that one division of American troops be sent to France to show the flag. President Wilson agreed to his request, though it meant creating a division: the United States did not have one formed at the time. It remained an open question whether American participation in the war should include dispatching any additional soldiers to Europe. To recruit and train armies would take time; the war might well be over before it could be done.
An aide to Newton Baker, testifying at about that time before the Senate Finance Committee in support of the War Department’s request for appropriations, was asked by the chairman of the committee, Senator Thomas S. Martin of Virginia, what the money was going to be spent for. The department’s spokesman began: “Clothing, cots, camps, food, pay.… And we may have to have an army in France.”
“Good Lord!” said Martin, “You’re not going to send soldiers over there, are you?”
The administration knew it was going to ship a division of soldiers “over there,” but knew little more than that. When Baker appointed General John J. Pershing to command the division and whatever additional forces would be sent to France, he left it to the general to advise what additional level of forces, if any, should be sent. Pershing was to go on ahead to Europe immediately.
Wilson and Baker ordered Pershing overseas as commander of the American Expeditionary Force—the AEF—with broad powers. The President appeared to believe that he should leave military matters to the military. As Baker remembered them, Wilson’s parting words to Pershing were “I will give you only two orders, one to go to France and the other to come home.… If you make good, the people will forgive almost any mistake. If you do not make good, they will probably hang us both from the first lamppost they can find.”
Baker told Pershing that “the underlying idea must be kept in view that the forces of the United States are a separate and distinct component … the identity of which must be preserved.” Pershing believed that in telling him that, Baker in effect had answered his own question about force levels. Pershing had been ordered to preserve the American identity of his forces, and in his view, the United States could fight its own war in Europe only with an army of at least a million men. He therefore began to plan immediately for a force of at least that size.
THERE WAS AN EXCEPTION to the rule that American troops were to fight as a separate unit—and the exception showed the blind side of American democracy. Pershing provided France with four black infantry regiments, and alone among American troops, they fought the entire war under French command. Three of the four regiments were awarded the Croix de Guerre; and in one of them, the “Harlem Hell Fighters” of the New York National Guard, a number of officers and enlisted men individually won either the Croix de Guerre or the Legion of Honor.
In the South and elsewhere, there was widespread fear of inducting blacks into the armed forces and training them as soldiers. Neither the Wilson administration nor the U.S. armed forces were willing to confront the color issue. Both attempted to dodge it, hence the handing over of some of the black units to France. Secretary Baker, caught between his own brand of liberal politics and the prejudices of his countrymen, decided that it was not his official responsibility to deal with the matter. He stated that “there is no intention on the part of the War Department to undertake at this time to settle the so-called race question.”
IN A HEAVY RAINSTORM Captain George C. Marshall escorted General Pershing and his staff to the docks at Governors Island in New York Harbor on May 28, where they boarded the ferry that would convey them to their appointed rendezvous with an ocean liner headed for England and crossing to France.
Marshall had hoped to go with them, but the army could not spare him from Department of the East headquarters at Governors Island. The department’s commanding general was in the hospital, and Marshall, who had arrived from California only weeks before, found himself in effective command. Conditions were chaotic; it was a price the country was paying for its lack of military preparedness. There had been no adequate planning for war, for recruitment, or for the creation of a citizens’ army—not even of the single division that had been promised to Joffre and that was supposed to be following Pershing over to France.
Marshall coped as best he could. He also pulled strings, and within weeks had secured an appointment on the staff of the commander of the about-to-be-formed First Division. With other officers and men who formed the nucleus of the First Division, he boarded a converted fruit ship in June for the long, dangerous Atlantic crossing through submarine-infested waters; he overheard sailors rigging a gun on the foredeck, complaining that they had no ammunition. “My God, even the naval part isn’t organized …,” he exclaimed.
At the end of June, Marshall and his companions landed at the French shipbuilding port of Saint-Nazaire, at the southeastern tip of the Brittany peninsula where the Loire estuary meets the ocean. A small crowd had gathered to greet the Americans; almost all were women, and of these, most were dressed in black to
mourn their dead.
During the summer, as more troops arrived and Marshall took up his duties as chief of operations of the First Division, Pershing prepared and sent his reports to Washington. Commanding generals naturally want to increase the size and independence of their commands, but Pershing in addition had solid military reasons for desiring to do so. He asked for enough troops to wage a war of his own in Europe in part because he worried that the British and French generals had sunk into the mire of trench warfare. Like other Americans who had learned from Philip Sheridan and Stonewall Jackson, he believed instead in waging a war of movement. He was afraid, too, that if Europeans were in command, his troops might be sent “here and there” and employed for reasons of imperial policy in theaters other than the all-important western front.
Then there was the political aspect of it. As Pershing wrote to Secretary Baker, “When the war ends, our position will be stronger if our army acting as such shall have played a distinct and definite part.” So his initial request from Paris was for an AEF of a million men. Then he talked at length with the Allied generals—and learned that he had better double or triple or quadruple that number.
FROM CONTACTS WITH THE FRENCH in the summer of 1917, Pershing came to the conclusion that the Allies were on the verge of losing the war. The British commander, General Douglas Haig, was not of that view. But from the new French commander, Philippe Pétain, Pershing received a gloomy account of troop morale in the wake of mutinies in a French army that seemed no longer willing to fight. Felix Frankfurter, who was on a fact-finding mission of his own in Paris that summer, reported that the French were so demoralized that they no longer cared about their own war goals—liberating Alsace and Lorraine—let alone Wilson’s vision of designing a better world.
In the months that followed, the Allies staggered from one military crisis to another as German generalship proved superior, and as Russia went out of the war, allowing Germany to bring back her armies of the east to reinforce those on the western front.
Though Pershing had asked Washington to send several million more troops, this gratified the Allies less than it might have done, because the general continued to insist that the additional soldiers be dispatched to his independent command. By 1918 Britain and France recognized that they had exhausted their manpower, and both nations sought fresh troops to throw into their trenches. Pershing’s refusal to let them expend American lives moved them to seek his dismissal; but the general had his government’s full support.
AN IMMEDIATE QUESTION for decision was the choice of an area in France to be used as a training center. Pershing accepted a French suggestion that the Americans establish themselves in Lorraine in the east, in a relatively quiet area behind the lines. He set up headquarters in Chaumont in the Haute-Marne, not far distant; while in Lorraine, Marshall and other staff officers busied themselves in dealing with billets for the troops and other details.
In the summer of 1917 troop training was conducted by French officers, but by September Pershing had become critical of the emphasis they placed on trench warfare. Marshall insisted on first training the new troops in elementary drill, and Pershing ordered that training in marksmanship be emphasized.
Marshall, promoted to major, found his first six months in France so depressing that they amounted to a Valley Forge. There was the mud, the fog, and the constant effort to make do in the face of scarcity. By winter only about a quarter of a million American troops had arrived, and they were far from ready for combat.
Spring began with a German offensive that threatened to knock France out of the war before the Americans were ready. In the emergency Pershing relented and offered the four divisions he had to the French general Pétain: “All that we have are yours,” said Pershing.
Pétain started by moving the First Division to Picardy, opposite the German-held town of Cantigny. There the Americans dug in, as ordered, and defended themselves against German bombardment. It was not Pershing’s idea of how to fight a war. He ordered the First to attack and take the town.
As operations officer, Major Marshall did much of the planning for the assault, working out what each soldier in the lead Twenty-eighth Regiment should do. On May 28 the Twenty-eighth Regiment of the American First Division went over the top, charged across no-man’s-land, and stormed the town, holding it against seven German counterattacks. It was a victory not merely for Americans but for American military doctrine. Pershing cabled the War Department, “Our troops are the best in Europe and our staffs are the equal of any.”
Pétain next took 45,000 soldiers and marines of the Second and Third American Divisions and threw them into Belleau Wood and Chäteau-Thierry to make a last stand in front of Paris to stop Ludendorff’s armies. The Americans bore the brunt of the fighting, bayonet to bayonet, and halted the Germans.
The crisis having been managed, the Americans returned to Lorraine to continue building their own army—and from the point of view of the Allies, taking much too much time to do it.
15
THE AEF IS TOO LATE
IN 1918 the Germans launched climactic offensives on the western front that threatened to prove decisive. Though America had declared war in the spring of 1917, she would not have an AEF that could launch its own offensive until the spring of 1919. So Wilson’s decision to wage a separate war meant that his armies did not arrive in time. France and Britain, backs to the wall, had to fight the final battles largely on their own.
Perhaps a different administration could have done it more quickly. After the United States declared war, the government wasted time in trial and error. For this, Wilson was blamed by his critics, but the task would have been a daunting one for anyone. Total war, in which whole populations and industrial economies clash, requires a big government, but the United States in 1917 had a small one. World wars require an ability to transport large armies across the globe, and America lacked that as well.
Creating a manpower registration and selective service system for a continentwide country of civilians was challenging enough; with the shipping bottleneck added to it, the task of getting a mass army to the other side of the ocean in time to shift the tide of battle proved to be overwhelming.
Alliance politics contributed to the problem. Only Britain had a large enough merchant navy to transport the millions of American conscripts overseas, but she wanted the Americans sent to Britain’s sectors of the battlefield rather than France’s. Then, too, there was the haggling over costs: in the end the United States paid Britain $81.75 a head to carry American soldiers to France, and somewhat more than half of the AEF was brought over to Europe in British ships.
A year after the United States entered the war—and a year in the life of a war is an immensely long time—the AEF still was not ready to take the field: only half of the million troops that Pershing needed to create an American army had arrived in France. In the next six months a million and a half more disembarked, but another 2 million army troops were still in America awaiting transport.
Even when soldiers arrived from the United States, their war matériel did not. As late as 1918 the American forces still had to buy most of what they needed from the Allies. Of the AEF’s 3,500 artillery pieces, only 500 were made in the USA.
As a learning experience, Pershing planned to launch the first independent American action of the war as a carefully defined operation, with limited objectives, in a sector next to the one in which his troops were assembling and training. He decided to have his army attack a German-occupied wedge of territory in Lorraine called the Saint-Mihiel salient. But the army would not be ready to undertake the operation until the late summer or early autumn of 1918.
Meanwhile the Allied armies soldiered on in the killing fields of France and Flanders, with no more reserves of manpower to provide replacements for their depleted ranks, and with none forthcoming from their American cobelligerents.
WAGING A MODERN WAR posed a challenge that the Wilson administration was not ready to meet. It was not un
til 1918 that the President had his men and measures in place.
The amount of money needed to pay for such a war was staggering. The entire expense of governing the United States from its foundation in 1789 until the declaration of war against Germany on April 6, 1917, had been $24 billion, and that is less than what World War I was to cost: perhaps $22 billion in 1917 dollars, or more than a million dollars an hour through 1918 only, with more to come. In the 1970s one historian added in the later expenses of the war as well, including veterans’ benefits, and came up with a total figure in 1970 dollars of $112 billion.
Taking charge of the economy and of railroad transport, solving labor disputes, building ships and airplanes, and administering prices proved to be formidable tasks. The key officials who emerged were Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo, who oversaw finances and the railroads; Bernard Baruch, a financier from South Carolina who took effective charge of war industries in 1918; and Herbert Hoover, who administered the output, distribution, and price of food and all that concerned it, while Harry Garfield, president of Williams College, exercised similar powers with regard to fuel.
Their preference was to rely on voluntary means wherever possible, to keep dislocations of the economy to a minimum, and to take the easy way. As a general rule, organized interests were bought off while unorganized ones were disregarded; and costs were passed on to the consumer. As administered by the government, the railroads and other industries benefited from a suspension of the antitrust laws and began to function with the efficiency of monopolies. For socialists and Progressives such as Walter Lippmann, this realized a prewar ideal of a rational economy that eliminated the wasteful duplication inherent in competition, that realized the economies that come with scale, and that was regulated in the public interest. Still, there was always a danger that the administrators would serve private or special interests instead.
In the Time of the Americans Page 19