The Illusion of Victory

by Thomas Fleming

  In the morning, a long list of dead and wounded was in the newspapers. “The war has suddenly become a reality,” Baldwin told her correspondent. She went for a walk with a young American friend, Billy Tailer, who was on his way to a French flying school. Impatient for action, Tailer had joined the Lafayette Escadrille, a group of Americans flying for the French army. As yet the American Air Service was as nonexistent in France as Pershing’s army. Tailer told her the average life of an aviator at the front was six months. Half jocularly, he said he would arrange with friends to let her know if he “got it.”

  A few weeks later, Baldwin was telling her pen pal the Paris reaction to the news that gave Woodrow Wilson and John J. Pershing restless nights—the collapse of the Russian army.“Isn’t the Russian news fierce? I’ve never seen anything like the way it has taken the punch out of every one. I was down at the Gare du Nord yesterday doing a little work for the Red Cross, distributing cigarettes etc among the outgoing French soldiers. We couldn’t seem to cheer them, and I didn’t see any of the usual smiles. The ray of light which the U.S. troops brought when they began coming over has, for the moment, been completely obliterated.”6

  A few months later, Baldwin was in an even more somber mood:“Billy Tailer, the best of friends and the most splendid of men, has been killed while flying over German lines. I always knew in a vague way I would be terribly cut up if anything happened to him but I never knew it would be like this. Somehow I feel ten years older and the war has become a more hideous reality than ever.. . . Every street corner of this city [Paris] reminds me of Bill, and the whole place seems alive with memories of his radiant boyish face.”7

  III

  While some American airmen were in combat with the Lafayette Escadrille, Quentin Roosevelt and his vanguard of the American Air Service were having a miserable time at Issoudon, some 240 miles south of Paris, where they had set up a flying school. Chosen by the French, Issoudon was the worst imaginable site. The clayish soil turned to gumbo when it rained, making it impossible to take off or land. Rain and bone-chilling cold were constants. One night, Quentin awoke to find a thunderstorm sending a small river flowing through his tent. He was soon calling the place “a god-forsaken hole.”8

  Quentin and his friends, who included his Groton and Harvard classmate Hamilton Coolidge, discovered that the Curtiss Jenny, the plane in which they had learned to fly, had almost no resemblance to the planes they would be piloting at Issoudun, French-made Nieuport-28s. The French air service had discarded this second-rate fighter for faster, more maneuverable Spads, and sold the castoffs to the Americans. Among their many defects, Nieuports had a habit of shedding their wing fabric in a dive. The AEF high command had bought them because there was nothing else available. General Halsey Dunwoodie, the man in charge of army procurement, glumly admitted at the end of the war:“We never had a plane that was fit to use.”9

  Back in the United States, Flora Payne Whitney had become a constant visitor at Sagamore Hill. Even there she found pain. Every time she went up the road to the big rambling house, she remembered how happy she had been in the spring when Quentin was training at Mineola. She still hesitated to tell her parents about their engagement. “I never talk about you or mention your name,” she wrote. “I . . .will, though.”10

  Flora began to find the separation almost unbearable.“Oh Quentin, sometimes it’s all I can do to keep from just giving in and breaking down completely,” she wrote in November 1917.“It’s so hard and there is so little satisfaction. I want you so desperately. The hollow blank feeling that is a living nightmare almost kills me at times.. . . Why does it all have to be? It isn’t possible that it can be for any ultimate good that all the best people in the world have to be killed.”

  Her parents were not Flora’s only problem. She was still very much a member of society. At parties and dinners she met more than a few young men who were eager to woo her. One asked her point blank if she was engaged to Quentin and told her he thought it was “pretty rotten” when she declined to say yes or no. When she told Quentin about this exchange, he because upset. He did not want to think about Flora surrounded by amorous young men.

  Flora told Quentin that his father wanted to see them married and would do everything in his power to “fix it” with her parents. Quentin hesitated. He was afraid marriage would be “selfishness on my part and might cause you pain in days to come.”11

  He was telling her how dangerous the air service was.

  It was also exhausting. Along with learning to fly the tricky Nieuports, Quentin was the supply officer. This job had him racing all over France for equipment to get the airfield up and running. His back tormented him and he was forced to take to his cot one day a week. He lay there, thinking of Flora, writing her letters.

  Theodore Roosevelt and his wife invited Flora to come to Canada with them to hear TR address the Canadian parliament. The invitation carried more than a hint that TR wanted to accustom Flora to becoming a political wife. There were other indications that he had selected Quentin as the son with the ideal combination of talents and personality to succeed him in this demanding career. Quentin’s sister Ethel explained the politics behind the trip—Canadians were debating whether to vote for a conscription law similar to America’s. TR planned to urge them to vote yes.

  Flora told Quentin she had “the most thrilling time” in Canada. She was “open-mouthed” at the enormous crowds, the gigantic receptions TR’s presence inspired. But the experience left her feeling inadequate.“Please don’t go into politics,” she begged Quentin.“My tongue gets paralyzed and my brain gets paresis [meeting so many strangers]. I can only say ‘what wonderful air up here.’”

  Quentin was nevertheless pleased that Flora had participated in a typical Roosevelt adventure. Incidentally, Canada voted yes for conscription.12

  In Issoudun, Quentin developed a perpetual cold and cough. By mid-November, he had pneumonia. The camp doctor sent him to Paris for a three-week leave. He stayed with Eleanor Roosevelt, where he soon encountered his brothers Ted and Archie. Ted, an all-too-typical oldest brother, regarded Quentin with disapproval because he had not performed well at the prewar Plattsburgh preparedness training camp. He began calling Quentin a slacker for hiding out at Issoudun while he and Archie and their other brother, Kermit, were on their way to the front.

  Quentin was enormously upset. He appealed to his father and wrote a tense, revealing “apologia” to Archie, defending himself and the American Air Service. No American pilots had been sent to the front, because there were no planes for them to fly. Only the two best pilots at Issoudun had been sent to England for advanced training. He was not one of them. “Father’s pull” had gotten him into the air service in spite of his bad back and poor eyes, but pull could not make him the best or second best flier in the service.13

  This brotherly imbroglio filled Quentin with a fierce desire to get to the front. It also paradoxically emboldened him to express his growing desire to have Flora come to Europe and marry him. His father’s letters repeatedly encouraged him to ask her. TR felt every young man should have his “white hour” with the woman he loved before he went into combat.14

  Flora shared Quentin’s wish, but found herself enmeshed in family and government complications. Pershing’s ukase had become a War Department regulation, barring relatives of soldiers and all Americans under twenty-one from entering the war zone. Flora had a brother in the air service, still training in Texas, and she would not be twenty-one until July 29, 1918. Considering how other women flouted the War Department regulation, there is little doubt that Flora, backed by TR and her wealthy parents, could have managed it. But her parents were still unenthusiastic about the match, and they worried about German submarines and the deteriorating military situation on the Western Front.15

  Flora still found it very hard to talk to her family about Quentin.“No one quite understands,” she told him. Quentin returned to Issoudun and was made a training squadron commander. His health continue
d to be bad. He had constant colds and a wracking cough. Once, he had a dizzy spell while performing acrobatics and almost crashed. On another flight, the motor of his decrepit Nieuport quit in midair and he landed in some trees, reducing the plane to kindling wood and badly wrenching his wrist. Yet he badgered his commanding officer with demands to be sent to the front. He extracted a promise that he would get the first available opening. His friend Hamilton Coolidge wangled a similar pledge.

  Quentin wrote letter after letter to Flora denouncing the climate and the muddled U.S. war effort, which had yet to produce a single fighter plane. He was haunted by a recurring dream.

  “I am coming back to the states wounded, one arm in a sling and my left foot gone. I have not been permitted to telephone from Quarantine to let you know I am coming. The steamer docks at Hoboken. I am planted there with my luggage and no way to carry it because of my arm. I am stuck in Hoboken. Freud says all dreams have meaning. I should like to have him translate that for me.”

  In later versions of the dream, he met a huge military policeman with a red brassard on his arm. The man ordered him onto an outward-bound transport. “Just as I realize . . . with awful despair I shall never come back, I wake up.”16

  In New York, an anxious Flora wrote:“Quentin I am so worried about you. I am sure you are not a bit well and I wish—oh so much—you could get away somewhere . . . in the south of France. . . . I hardly dare say this but . . . I think with your bad back you ought not even to be in aviation. . . . At the bottom of your heart don’t you think there is a good deal of sense in that?”17

  IV

  The boom of 6,000 artillery pieces drowned out Flora’s loving voice. On March 21, 1918, Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff launched Germany’s massive attempt to win victory on the Western Front. The Kaiserschlacht (kaiser battle) began at dawn with a stupendous bombardment on the thirty-four divisions of the British Third and Fifth Armies along a forty-three-mile front south of Arras. The Fifth Army was guarding the “hinge” between the British and French fronts, always an inviting target. An officer called the rain of shells “more like a convulsion of nature than the work of man. The noise was so immense, it was impossible to hear an order beyond a few yards, even when shouted through a megaphone.”18

  Unlike previous bombardments on the Western Front, the German artillery was on target from the first round. Thanks to ingenious artillerymen and painstaking mapmakers, the Germans had figured out how to fire the big guns accurately without the messy business of “registration,” which had previously consumed days and eliminated all surprise from French and British attacks. The man in charge of the rain of destruction was Colonel Georg Bruchmuller, whom black humorists on the general staff called Durchbruchmuller (Breakthrough Muller). After almost four years of study, he had composed a deadly symphony, called a fire waltz, that combined precise combinations of poison gas and high explosives, carefully orchestrated to wreak specific havoc on different sections of the battlefield.19

  Mustard-gas shells were aimed at the flanks of the enemy defenses, because mustard dispersed slowly and could hinder attackers as well as defenders. Odorless phosgene gas was for the forward trenches, the immediate target of the attack. Huge quantities were also fired into the enemy rear to immobilize their artillery. These shells were mixed with shells containing diphenyl chloramine, which fouled gas masks and forced men to breathe the deadly phosgene.

  Undetected by Allied spies, patrols or aircraft, Ludendorff had managed to concentrate sixty-seven divisions on the forty-three-mile front, giving him a 2-to-1 manpower advantage. For a final touch, the German high command unveiled a new set of tactics. Certain units had been designated Angriffdivisionen (attack divisions); they had been trained as Sturmtruppen (storm troopers) with a radically different approach to the battlefield.

  Instead of trying to seize specific objectives, storm troopers were given what are now called mission-oriented orders. They were equipped with light machine guns and mortars and told to break through the weakened British defenses in squads and companies, leaving to the rest of the army the job of mopping up holdouts in the forward battle line. Previously, storm troopers had been elite units, trained to bring off trench raids. The Germans were betting they could imbue whole divisions with their reckless ardor. Experiments on the Eastern Front had convinced Quartermaster General Ludendorff this could be done.20

  At 9:30 A.M., after five hours of merciless pounding by Bruchmuller’s guns, the storm troopers emerged from the ground fog. Their rifles remained strapped to their backs; their favorite weapon was the hand grenade. Lieutenant Ernst Junger, who commanded a company, urged his men forward with wild emotion, convinced they were about to win the war.“They . . . had gone over the edge of the world into superhuman perspectives,” he later wrote.21

  He and other companies rolled up trench after trench of British officers and men dazed and panicked by the bombardment. Thousands of other Tommies fled. Others were stunned to discover Germans attacking their strong points from the rear.“I thought we had stopped them,” recalled one machine gunner, “when I felt a bump in my back.” The bump was a revolver in the hand of a German officer.“Come along, Tommy, you’ve done enough,” he said.22

  So swiftly did the storm troopers advance, they were soon in rear areas where bacon sizzled on the stoves of abandoned mess halls. They paused to eat, stuffed their haversacks and kept going. By nightfall, they had burst through the center of the Fifth Army into open country.

  In 1916, on the Somme, Field Marshal Haig had lost 500,000 men fighting across these same woods and fields, to gain a grand total of 98 square miles in six blood-soaked months. On March 21, 1918, the Germans gained 140 square miles in twenty-four hours, at a cost of 39,329 casualties. While John J. Pershing talked about it, Ludendorff and his fellow generals had invented a type of open warfare that worked.23

  Bluff Irish-born General Hubert Gough realized his Fifth Army was in imminent danger of a rout. He pleaded for reinforcements, but Field Marshal Haig, jittery about the rest of his battle line, sent him only a single division. (Haig, out of touch as usual, thought the Fifth and Third Armies were holding their own and sent them warm congratulations.) Gough turned to the French, who were supposed to rush men across the hinge if the British got in trouble (and vice versa). The French sent only a handful of riflemen. The day before the attack, the Germans had leaked disinformation that convinced General Pétain that an assault on Rheims was imminent.

  On the third day of the battle, the British Third Army also began to crumble. Their commander had crammed most of his men in forward trenches. They put up a strong defense at first, but when the storm troopers finally broke through, there were no reserves to stop them. An appalled Haig realized there was no alternative but to retreat south of the Somme River.24

  It was a devastating humiliation for the British army. Having paid a half million men to win this part of France, they presumed they would stay. Huge fuel and ammunition dumps had to be destroyed, entire hospitals and airfields evacuated. Soon Gough’s fear of a rout became reality. As thousands of beaten Tommies, many of them wounded, trudged south in a disorganized mob without officers, a cry went up: “German cavalry!” In seconds the panicky infantrymen stampeded down the road, flinging wounded men into ditches, throwing away packs, rifles, gas masks.25

  Ironically, this headlong retreat was probably the best tactic the harried British could have devised. It kept at least part of the disintegrating Fifth Army and the crumbling Third Army out of the grasp of the oncoming Germans. By this time, some 90,000 British soldiers had surrendered and were on their way to prisoner-of-war camps. Ludendorff ordered one of his armies to seize Amiens, a vital rail center. Another army was told to keep smashing its way down the hinge, to separate the French and British. The Germans encountered some French troops, finally sent by the cautious Pétain, but they were too few and too late.

  Inexplicably, the German drive began to run out of steam. Lieutenant Rudolf Binding, a division s
taff officer, saw one reason on March 28.“Today the advance of our infantry suddenly stopped near Albert,” he wrote in his diary.“I began to see curious sights . . .men driving cows before them . . . others who carried a hen under one arm and a box of notepaper under the other. Men carrying a bottle of wine under their arm and another one open in their hand . . . Men staggering. Men who could hardly walk.”26

  Binding described the British back areas as “a land flowing with milk and honey.” along with seeking food, not to mention wine, that was better than they saw in their own army’s blockade-shriveled rations, the storm troopers also stopped to equip themselves with warm English boots, jackets and raincoats. They fed their half-starved artillery horses on “masses of oats and gorgeous foodcake.” an unanticipated problem was getting their artillery across the devastated battlefield to keep up with the advance, which neared 40 miles by the end of March. The sheer distance, and the added burden of the loot the infantrymen were carrying, were the main reasons why, on April 4, the first phase of the Kaiserschlacht came to a halt, with Amiens uncaptured. Still the Germans had acquired another 1,200 square miles of France, inflicted 164,000 casualties on the British and 70,000 on the French—and thrown panic into the ranks of both the French and British armies.27

  Only two companies of American engineers, who happened to be working temporarily with the Fifth Army, participated in this great battle. They suffered seventy-eight casualties. The rest of the AEF was still earnestly training for open warfare in Lorraine. Their brief tours in quiet sectors of the front lines had no impact whatsoever on the war. The stunning success of the Kaiserschlacht made many people wonder if John J. Pershing’s refusal to amalgamate his army with the French and British was a ruinous mistake.28