MacArthur won his fifth Silver Star in the Saint-Mihiel assault, but essentially it proved to be only a matter of moving forward as the Germans moved out. In forty-eight hours, the salient disappeared. One hundred seventy-four American and French tanks had been engaged, of which 135 emerged intact; but Patton reported with chagrin that the weak German resistance had deprived him of a chance to prove the effectiveness of tank warfare.
For a year and a half, Pershing and his colleagues had worked away at creating the American First Army. For months they had counted on bringing it into action and demonstrating what it could do in the assault on Saint-Mihiel. But when the assault was launched, it proved to be an anticlimax. After all of that planning and training and worrying and hoping, when the Americans pushed, it proved to be against an open door.
WITHIN DAYS OF THE SUCCESS at Saint-Mihiel, the American First Army, on short notice, was shifted sixty miles northwest to fight alongside the Allied armies in a new offensive. The Americans were assigned a zone between the Meuse and Aisne rivers in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, which was launched September 26, 1918.
In this second operation conducted by the American First Army, AEF artillery opened fire at 2:30 a.m. and continued the heavy barrage for three hours. At 5:30 infantry and tanks attacked through a heavy mist. Soon troops lost touch with their units—and tanks with the infantry they were meant to support. Tanks got stuck in terrain that proved impassable. Patton eventually located these tanks and, under fire, directed men with picks and shovels in digging them out so that they could move. Then, sending the tanks ahead, Patton rallied about a hundred men in a charge over the crest of a hill, where machine-gun fire cut them down.
Waving a walking stick, Patton jumped up and charged, followed by six men. Four were dropped by enemy fire. Only Patton kept going, with his orderly, Private Joseph Angelo.
“Let’s go!” cried Patton.
“We are alone,” said Angelo.
“Come on anyway,” Patton urged—and then was shot through the leg and fell Angelo pulled him into a shell hole and bandaged his wound, but neither man could move without attracting fire.
They waited for a long time. When finally they sighted AEF tanks, Patton sent Angelo to tell them where the German guns were, and the tanks then went after them. Later one of Patton’s sergeants found him, and Patton ordered him back with a message turning over command to his number two and telling the unit not to send anyone to rescue him because they would be cut down by enemy fire. When all the German machine-gun nests had been cleaned out, stretcher-bearers came and carried Patton back to headquarters. From there he went to a hospital, where he remained for nearly five weeks.
MacArthur, too, continued to perform heroic feats as the Meuse-Argonne offensive rolled on. Twice, without wearing a mask as usual, he was gassed; he received another Purple Heart. In mid-October, after all attempts had failed to take German-held high ground at the Cöte-de-Chätillon, a position that dominated the open country below, MacArthur assumed personal command. In rain and mist on an autumn day, he took it. He reported that “officers fell and sergeants leaped to the command. Companies dwindled to platoons and corporals took over. At the end, Major Ross had only 300 men and 6 officers left out of 1,450 men and 25 officers. That is the way the Cöte-de-Chätillon fell.”
MacArthur was nominated for the Congressional Medal of Honor and promotion to major general, but was awarded neither, which further fueled his feeling that the authorities were unjust. He did receive a second Distinguished Service Cross (with Oak Leaf Cluster), and for action on the Meuse heights, a seventh Silver Star.
For all of the bravery of soldiers like MacArthur and Patton, the AEF campaign was less than successful. The terrain was difficult; the fighting was intense; the progress, slow. By mid-October, two and a half weeks after they commenced their attack, the Americans found themselves only halfway to their immediate objectives.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans—maybe even a million, depending on whose numbers one accepts—took part in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, and most of them were seeing combat for the first time. They still had much to learn. Officers were constantly being replaced, so that those in charge were new to their jobs. Bickering was endemic between regular army and National Guard officers, resulting in high casualties, and in the distintegration under fire of such units as the Thirty-fifth Division, in which among others, Harry Truman served bravely.
20
AN ARMY OF TOURISTS
IN HIS LATER YEARS Harry Truman used to claim that as a young man he had been “afraid of a gun and would rather run than fight.” At the age of twenty-one, he had enlisted in the Missouri National Guard nonetheless, believing that a man had to have some experience of soldiering if he were ever to become great—and the young middle western farmer and sometime bank clerk was determined to become great. Twelve years later, in the spring of 1917, he helped organize the National Guard regiment in which he would serve. Essentially it was a regiment of hometown buddies.
“I went to war,” he said later, because “all great men had.” When the war came, he and his fiancée, Bess Wallace, had been “ready to get married, but since I had to go I didn’t think it was right to get married and maybe come home a cripple and have the most beautiful and sweetest girl in the world tied down. I’ll never forget how my love cried on my shoulder when I told her I was going. That was worth a lifetime on this earth.”
In the summer Truman was elected a lieutenant by his fellow guardsmen, and was sent to a camp in Oklahoma for training. It was not until the spring of 1918—a year after America declared war—that he was ordered to the East Coast for shipment overseas. As it was to prove for so many who lived west of the Alleghenies, the trip east was in itself an adventure for the young Missourian; but at first sight the fabled and often reviled financial capital of the country did not please. New York, Truman wrote as he passed through the metropolis, was “a vast disappointment.” The hotels back home were better than the New York ones, he claimed; “Wall Street is an alley”; and “Kansas City can produce more good looking girls than two New Yorks.”
But France, where he was sent from New York, was something else. He found himself billeted in “a real Chateau with a park, a moat and a cute little picture book village out in front. There are marble stairs hand carved wood work and everything like you read about.…”
Truman was appointed a captain, and was placed in command of Battery B of the 129th Field Artillery Regiment of the Thirty-fifth Division: the combined Missouri and Kansas National Guards. Taking over his battery, Truman, peering through thick glasses like a schoolteacher, gave the sort of rousing speech to the troops that he imagined a commander ought to give, saying, “You boys stick with me, and I’ll bring you all back.” But as one of the men later remembered, Truman spoiled the effect of his exhortations: “His knees were knocking together” and “you could see that he was scared to death.”
It was a difficult and rowdy outfit, and indeed there had been talk of breaking it up. But Truman sensibly delegated the job of disciplining the troops to the noncommissioned officers, asking no questions about methods. Soon enough, the fists of the sergeants and corporals knocked the men together into some semblance of a military unit.
For most of the summer of 1918, they trained, and then in mid-August they were moved east to the Vosges. There, at the end of the month, the unit for the first time came under fire—and broke under it. The troops turned and ran, abandoning two guns and twelve horses.
In September the Thirty-fifth Division was ordered into the Meuse-Argonne offensive on twelve hours’ notice, to be supported by Patton’s tanks. But as later army investigations would show, the division of citizen-soldiers had not been organized for battle. Both the commanding officer and his chief of staff left headquarters as battle was joined, and they failed to establish any main post where communications could be centralized.
The attack by the Thirty-fifth began at 4:20 a.m. in the darkness of September 26, with
a barrage of American artillery fire. Truman told his artillery battery that “right tonight I’m where I want to be—in command of this battery. I’d rather be right here than be President of the United States. You boys are my kind. Now let’s go in!”
Truman and his battery performed well, and only one of his men died of wounds in the war. But the division itself fell apart for lack of command structure. By the third day of the Thirty-fifth’s offensive, the division effectively had ceased to exist as a unit. On October 2 it was pulled out of the fighting. After resting, Truman and his men were sent to Verdun, though the great battle was over long since; there they fired some barrages at enemy lines. Essentially, however, their battlefield days were over. They had been in combat for a week.
FOR ALL OF HIS SPECIAL QUALITIES, Truman in the First World War was in some respects an everyman. His experience of the war was similar to that of many other American civilian soldiers. He served in the army during the war for two years, yet saw only seven days of real combat. Even that was a lot. Of the 4 million men in the U.S. Army at the end of 1918, half—some 2 million—were still in the United States awaiting transport to Europe. Of the 2 million in Europe, somewhere between a third and a half had not seen combat; and of the million or more who had, most had participated only in one operation (the Meuse-Argonne offensive), and even in that operation, had fought for no more than a few days.
MacArthur and Patton were professional soldiers and exceptions; in general, the American experience of the First World War was either not very much, or not at all, an experience of fighting. It was instead an experience of waiting, of training, of serving in or dealing with staff bureaucracies—and of being bored by doing nothing. For the half of the army that had come to Europe, it was overwhelmingly one more thing: a tourist experience.
In that bygone era, before the advent of commercial aviation and mass tourism, travel overseas was only for the few who were rich. Had it not been for the First World War, the chances are that a Harry Truman would never have seen a foreign country until he was past middle age. In sending young Americans to France, and then in giving them free time to travel, the government provided them with an extraordinary and unexpected experience that affected them far more than the fighting (which few of them did, and of which none of them did very much).
A substantial number, Willard Straight and Walter Lippmann among them, were assigned to staff duties that were much like civilian occupations. Their schedules allowed them time to visit Paris, and their conferences often were conducted over elaborate meals at chäteaux.
Even those who did see some frontline combat, as Truman did, had plenty of time to explore the French countryside, and were also given leaves and passes to travel farther afield. A couple of months after his service in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, Truman, on a leave of absence, was in Paris. He had the leisure time and the opportunity to sample the principal tourist attractions of the City of Light, though not all were to his taste: he found the show at the Folies-Bergères “disgusting.” With friends, he made a tour of the Italian and French Rivieras, which he and his party did enjoy a great deal. He was thrilled to see the Princess of Monaco in a restaurant, but upset when she ordered beer: “It gave all of us common people a letdown,” he wrote.
Among American servicemen, there was a certain similarity of outlook that expressed itself in their accounts of travel and army experiences. A leading historian of the period has written that “thousands of men who had never before recorded in writing their daily doings, and never would again, faithfully kept journals while they were in the Army.… [E]ven a modest sampling … reveals common responses to the shared enterprise.” Much of what they wrote dealt with topics other than the war. Seeing old women in black as the only inhabitants of ruined towns in France, they came away with the impression that the French were “a tired people in a blighted land” who “pursued antiquated ways.” Those of the troops who came from farm country (and there were a great many of them, for half of the American population was rural at the time) were shocked to find the French peasantry still harvesting with cradles and sickles.
To believe in the redemptive mission of the United States in Europe was far easier an ocean away than it was up close. One had to be a strong Wilsonian indeed to think that France could or would help the United States build a shining tomorrow after encountering the people of the French countryside, who seemed to be so set in their ways and to belong so much to the past.
On the whole, the men of the AEF appear to have had a good time, and certainly a stimulating and exciting one. For most of them, service overseas seems indeed to have been the big event of their lives. But although they enjoyed themselves and were glad they had been sent to France, they were convinced by their firsthand acquaintance with Europe—or at least many of them were—that it was no concern of theirs what happened on the Continent. They reverted to the original American view that the United States should not involve itself in the politics of Old Europe. But while Englishmen and Germans and Russians were embittered once they came to believe that it had been a mistake for their country to have entered the war, American soldiers were not. They did not object to having been given a trip to Europe, but now they wanted to go home.
Harry Truman kept up his travels until the very end of his tour of duty in the spring of 1919. In March he was in Paris and caught a glimpse of President Woodrow Wilson, who had come over to talk peace. Though a passionate and partisan Democrat, Truman wrote that “I am very anxious that Woodie cease his gallivantin’ around and send us home and quickly. As far as we’re concerned most of us don’t give a whoop (to put it mildly) whether Russia has a Red Government or no Government and if the King of the Lollypops wants to slaughter his subjects or his Prime Minister it’s all the same to us. The Hun is whipped … so why should we be kept over here to browbeat a Peace Conference that’ll skin us anyway.”
TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD aspiring novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his friend and mentor Edmund Wilson on September 26, 1917, to ask “what effect the war at close quarters has on a person of your temperament. I mean I’m curious to see how your point of view has changed or not changed—.” But Wilson, serving in the Hospital Corps, had to reply that he had gotten no nearer to the front than the Detroit State Fairgrounds.
Fitzgerald himself took (and passed) exams to become an officer in the regular army in order to see combat more quickly. In the autumn of 1917 he reported to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for three months of training as an officer. The officer in charge of Fitzgerald’s platoon was Captain Dwight Eisenhower. For professional reasons both Lieutenant Fitzgerald and Captain Eisenhower desired intensely to serve in battle. Eisenhower was too good at his job to be replaced, but his lack of combat experience was to cast a shadow over his future career as a professional soldier.
Fitzgerald thirsted for war experience as material for his writing. He was sure that he was going to be sent overseas to fight. He was ordered to Camp Taylor, Kentucky; to Camp Gordon, Georgia; and to Camp Sheridan, Alabama. He was being trained for combat service in the AEF, and the units in which he served were being organized into what eventually became the Ninth Division. From Camp Gordon in May 1918 he wrote that “we’re probably going inside of two months and, officers and men, we’re wild to go.”
At a country club dance in Alabama in July, Fitzgerald met beautiful seventeen-year-old Zelda Sayre. They fell in love—as they were to do everything—madly; yet he willingly bade farewell in order to do battle overseas. At Hoboken he boarded a troop transport to Europe, but then was ordered to disembark. The orders to reembark never were issued.
In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald pictures himself (in the guise of the protagonist, Dick Diver) as haunted by the Great War in which he did not fight. Dick, “his throat straining with sadness,” guides two companions in visiting a battlefield in France. Filled with excitement, Dick tries to communicate his sense of the enormity of what had taken place on that spot to the other two. One of his companions had
fought in the war and no longer thought about it; he had put it behind him. But Dick, who had not lived it, remained fascinated by it. “ ‘This land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer,’ he said.… ‘See that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead.…’ ”
But the experience that Dick Diver was describing and that so seized the imagination of Fitzgerald was not the American experience of the First World War: it was that of Old Europe. Oddly, writers who, unlike Fitzgerald, did reach the battlefield did the same thing: they described the ordeal of Europeans at war, not Americans at war. Malcolm Cowley, a chronicler of that literary generation, explained that it was due to the branch of service many of them had chosen. “It would be interesting,” he wrote, “to list the authors who were ambulance or camion drivers in 1917.” In addition to himself, he named “Dos Passos, Hemingway, Julian Green, William Seabrook, E. E. Cummings, Slater Brown, Harry Crosby, John Howard Lawson, Sidney Howard, Louis Bromfield, Robert Hillyer, Dashiell Hammett.… [O]ne might almost say that the ambulance corps and the French military transport were college-extension courses for a generation of writers.”
Some of the lessons they learned might have been learned in any army or service. But according to Cowley, “ambulance service had a lesson of its own: it instilled into us what might be called a spectatorial attitude.” The war became “a spectacle which it was our privilege to survey.…” Cowley believed that “this spectatorial attitude, this monumental indifference toward the cause” for which soldiers were risking their lives, eventually expressed itself in their literary works.
In the Time of the Americans Page 24