On May 30, General Pershing had supper at Generalissimo Foch’s headquarters.“ It would be difficult to imagine a more depressed group of officers,” the AEF commander later said.“They sat through the meal scarcely speaking a word as they contemplated what was possibly the most serious situation of the war.” In Paris, people were fleeing the city by the thousands. The French government was packing records and talking of retreating to the Pyrenees.
After dinner Foch renewed his demand to amalgamate future American arrivals into the British and French armies. Pershing reiterated his opposition, but offered every division he had in France to meet the crisis. Foch accepted his terms, but insisted the Americans would have to fight under the command of French generals. Pershing reluctantly agreed to this arrangement.57
Major General Omar Bundy’s Second Division went into position west of Château-Thierry while Major General Joseph Dickman’s Third Division manned the banks of the Marne east of that strategic river town. The Forty-Second Division, popularly known as the Rainbow Division, because its troops came from all parts of United States, became part of the French Fourth Army, closer to Rheims. As the Americans moved up, thousands of beaten poilus streamed past them, shouting,“La guerre finie! ”
Except for some lively skirmishing, the Germans did not attack the Americans. Their infantry went over to the defensive while the generals brought up the artillery and tried to decide what to do next. The option of another massive blow at the British army in Flanders was still on the table. But Paris remained a supremely tempting target, just over the horizon.
XIV
In the French capital, Premier Georges Clemenceau went before an almost hysterical chamber of deputies on June 4. Members shouted insults at him and screamed demands that he fire Foch and Pétain and negotiate peace. Even the deputy premier, Frederic Brunet, abandoned Clemenceau and made a menacing speech, asking if those in high positions should not be called to account for a failure to do “their whole duty.” why should the law come down with “crushing force” upon the soldier who fails to do his duty and spare the leader who is responsible for these “irretrievable defeats”?58
Clemenceau summoned all the considerable eloquence in his aged frame to answer these challenges. He asked the deputies if they wanted him to abandon men (Foch and Pétain) who “deserved well of their country” and sow doubts in the souls of the poilus at this crucial moment in France’s history. He rejected such an alternative as a crime “for which I would never accept responsibility.” He told them that only yesterday, the Supreme War Council, meeting in Versailles, had restated their “high confidence” in General Foch.59
The deputies called this nonsense. “It was you who made them [the War Council] do it,” one man shouted. Clemenceau ignored this accusation and asked them if they wanted to indict a man who was reeling from exhaustion, whose “head droops over maps.” were they going to add to his burden a demand for an explanation of why he did this and did not do that? Wild-eyed deputies responded by swarming onto the rostrum and driving Clemenceau into the hall. The chamber erupted into total anarchy, with Clemenceau backers wrestling and punching his attackers to clear the podium.
Order of sorts restored, Clemenceau emerged once more to speak of “tragic truths” and his responsibility to France. They were not fighting alone, he reminded them. The British and the French may be exhausted, but “the Americans were coming.” These words magically transformed the chamber. A cheer exploded against the ceiling. Catching fire, Clemenceau exhorted them to keep faith with “those who have fallen.” It was intolerable to surrender now and confess they had died in vain. More cheers were followed by a vote on whether to call Pétain and Foch to explain the oncoming Germans. A fight to the finish, sans explanations, won by 337 to 110. 60
In his cell at the Prison de la Santé, Joseph Caillaux was no doubt thoroughly aware of the situation and was waiting tensely for Clemenceau’s fall. A former premier told Brigadier General James Harbord, newly promoted to command of the two U.S. Marine regiments in the Second Division, that in a secret session of the Chamber of Deputies, many members said that if “Caillaux were made premier and General Serrail given command of Paris,” the war would end in three weeks.61
On June 5, General Henry Wilson, the British representative on the Supreme War Council, journeyed to London to discuss the evacuation of the British army from France. General Wilson had no confidence in Foch. He was convinced that the generalissimo “could not see beyond his nose,” and the entire French army was on the brink of collapse.“It was a very gloomy meeting,” the secretary of the war cabinet, Sir Maurice Hankey, noted in his diary.62
XV
General Joseph Degoutte, the French commander of the sector east of Château-Thierry, was, like Ferdinand Foch, an apostle of the school of attack that had done little thus far but pile up bodies in front of German machine guns. Finding himself in possession of fresh American troops, Degoutte ordered an assault on Belleau Wood, which stood on commanding ground about a half mile from the American lines. He found a willing collaborator in Colonel Preston Brown, the Second Division’s chief of staff, who was burning to demonstrate American fighting prowess. Brown accepted at face value French reports that the Germans held only the northern corner of the wood. In fact, its 1,000-yard width and 3,000-yard length were occupied to the last inch by infantry and machine gunners with interlocking fields of fire.63
At 5 P.M. on June 6, without sending out a single patrol to find out more information, Brown and Brigadier General Harbord ordered the two U.S. Marine regiments forward in a frontal assault. In the myths that have accumulated about the battle of Belleau Wood, the marines have been pictured as hard-bitten veterans of numerous battles in Haiti, Santo Domingo and other overseas combat assignments. In fact, 95 percent were new recruits, in the corps less than a year. Their officers were equally unprepared to fight on the Western Front. They led their men forward in massed formations unseen since 1914. Astonished German machine gunners mowed them down in windrows. The slaughter revealed the horrendous limitations of General Pershing’s version of open warfare.
Today, it is painful to read the naïveté with which those young marines advanced to their deaths. They seemed amazed to discover that machine guns killed people. One platoon was commanded by an army lieutenant named Coppinger.“Follow me!” he said and led them up a ravine raked by machine guns. At the top of the rise, he looked around and said, “Where the hell is my platoon?” Only six of the fifty-two marines were still on their feet. Even more appalling was the attack of a battalion led by Major Berton Sibley. They advanced in formation, under slow cadence, as if they were on a parade ground. Shells and machine gun bullets tore awful gaps in their ranks. The commander of the regiment, Colonel Albertus Catlin, declared the advance “one of the most beautiful sights I have ever witnessed.” Catlin stayed on his feet, admiring this performance, until a machine gun bullet tore through his chest, leaving him paralyzed.64
For the next twenty days, the marines, reinforced by the two army regiments in the Second Division and a regiment from the nearby Third Division, struggled to oust the Germans from Belleau Wood. The Germans fed elements of four divisions into the struggle, which began to acquire a “moral” dimension in their eyes. They were determined to prove that the American army was not the equal, much less the superior, of the German army. In the United States, headlines made the battle seem one of the most important of the war.“Our Marines Attack, Gain Mile at Veuilly, Resume Drive at Night, Foe Losing Heavily,” reported the New York Times.“Marines Win Hot Battle, Sweep Enemy from Heights Near Thierry,” shouted the Chicago Daily Tribune. Not a word about the fields carpeted with the bodies of dead and dying young marines.65
The Americans eventually captured the mile-square forest after the French withdrew the marines and treated the German defenders to a fourteen-hour artillery barrage that left only a few dazed survivors to contest the marines’ final assault. The marine brigade lost 126 officers and 5,057 men, more
than 42 percent of its force. Until the marines attacked the Japanese on Tarawa, it was the bloodiest battle in the history of the corps. The Second Division’s two army regiments lost another 3,252 officers and men. Pershing rewarded Harbord by making him commander of the Second Division, replacing the overage Omar Bundy, who had stood around letting Harbord and Preston Brown make their reckless opening attack without saying a word. In his memoirs, Harbord, a thoughtful man, wrote with evident regret of “the insufficient information on which you are sometimes obliged to send men forth to die.”66
The desperate French trumpeted Belleau Wood as a major victory in their newspapers, and reporters followed suit around the world. Pershing went along with the hyperbole, because he was even more desperate for proof that his men could stand up to the Germans. The battering he had taken from Foch, Haig and others had narrowed his judgment of what constituted a battlefield success. The man who had once been proud of winning battles with a minimum of casualties had become a virtual convert to Field Marshal Haig’s HCI (high casualties inevitable) formula for victory.
Some historians of World War I have portrayed Belleau Wood as a turning point that “proved” americans could outfight the Germans. General Bullard, commander of the First Division, went even further, claiming that Belleau saved the Allies from defeat. But the German army’s subsequent battlefield performance against the Americans showed no decline in determination and ferocity. In his memoirs, Major General Joseph Dickman, commander of the Third Division, which had been in line beside the Second Division while Belleau Wood was consummated, deplored the operation as a waste of men and ammunition:“It was magnificent fighting, but it was not modern war.”67
XVI
Mesmerized by Paris, and convinced that the storm troopers were an invincible weapon, the German high command decided to try to finish the war where they had almost won it in 1914—on the Marne. Quartermaster General Ludendorff was so overconfident, he sacrificed the key element in the storm troopers’ earlier successes: surprise. The Allies knew where the blow would fall—the only question was when. It was difficult, if not impossible, to keep a secret shared by hundreds of thousands of men. Trench raids brought in prisoners who revealed that the new offensive was scheduled to begin at ten minutes past midnight on July 15. The Germans were hoping the French would be sleeping off the July 14 celebration of Bastille Day, their national holiday.
Although some French generals still took Foch’s advice and jammed their men into forward trenches, others decided Pétain’s defense in depth made more sense. They left only suicide squads up front and targeted their artillery on their own front lines. The rest of their men went underground, into sandbagged dugouts. Precisely at 12:10, Colonel Bruchmuller’s artillery orchestra went to work, hurling destruction across forty-two miles of front. Four hours later, the storm troopers went forward—to disaster.
French and American artillery poured concentrated fire into their ranks. In the east, around Rheims, by the time the Germans reached the main defense line, their attacks were scattered, uncoordinated. “Their legs are broken,” exulted newly promoted Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur of the Rainbow Division, which was scattered across thirteen kilometers of the front, fighting under French commanders. This impromptu amalgamation was a grim commentary on French lack of confidence in the poilus’ staying power.68
Along the Marne, riflemen and machine gunners of the Third Division took a terrible toll on the attackers as they paddled through fog and gun smoke in rubber boats. On the Third Division’s right flank, a half dozen French divisions evaporated, abandoning a battalion of the Twenty-Eighth Division planted in their midst to strengthen them. But the Third Division stood firm, leaving the 20,000 Germans who had gotten across the river exposed to flank attacks and entrapment. By the end of the first day, the Germans knew the offensive had failed. Lieutenant Rudolf Binding wrote in his diary: “I have lived through the most disheartening day of the whole war.”69
A discouraged Ludendorff tried to tell himself and his staff that the effort was a success. They had pinned down the entire French army and most of the American army. Now was the time to launch the knockout blow at the British in Flanders. On July 16, after calling off further attacks, he and his staff took a train north to plan the assault without delay. They had scarcely arrived when frantic telephone calls informed the quartermaster general of a totally unexpected development.
On the morning of July 18, out of the Forest of the Retz, south of Soissons, had stormed three divisions of the Allied army, two American and one French. They were biting deep into the exposed right flank of the Marne salient, threatening to trap a half million Germans along the river. A dismayed Ludendorff had to abandon his knockout dreams and rush reinforcements south to blunt this threat.70
XVII
In this climactic moment of their struggle to make the world safe for democracy, the Americans of the Second Division rode to the battlefield in trucks driven by Vietnamese from the French colony of Indochina. The First Division had already reached the Forest of the Retz after an exhausting three-day march. There the Americans discovered they would be attacking beside the French army’s Moroccan Division, which was a mixture of blacks from Senegal, Arabs and others from North Africa, and a regiment composed of the ex-criminals and lost souls who volunteered for the French Foreign Legion. Fortunately, irony was not a mode of American thought among the doughboys in 1918. They still saw the war as a test of their collective manhood. One member of the First Division wrote in his diary: “The troops which have been massed here are the best of the French army. That we are joining them is a sign that we have gained some prestige.”71
The commander of the attack was General Charles Mangin, known to the poilus as the Butcher. In an army whose generals had already killed a million men in failed attacks, this was an ominous title. Mangin had decided that the only way to achieve surprise was to attack with no artillery preparation. In the frantic haste with which the offensive was organized, there was virtually no intelligence either. General Harbord and his chief of staff, Preston Brown, obtained a hastily dictated memo from a French staff officer, describing the terrain across which their men were to attack. They had to depend on this rudimentary document to write orders for infantry and artillery.
Moving up through the pitch-dark forest in a driving rain, the Americans encountered monumental confusion. Some machine-gun units became separated from their ammunition. Some infantry battalions attacked with-out a single hand grenade. Most of the Second Division never got anything to eat. But at dawn on July 18, the 67,000-man assault went forward, stunning the Germans with its size and ferocity. The goal was the railroad that ran through Soissons and Fère-en-Tardenois. It was the main source of food and ammunition for the half million Germans in the Marne salient.
The first day was a sensational success, but on the second day, the Germans recovered from their surprise. Machine guns sprouted everywhere, and American casualties soon mounted to catastrophic proportions. Again and again, the doughboys advanced across open ground without concealment or cover, with predictable results. Typical was the experience of Private Carl Brannen of the Fifth Marine Regiment. It was his second day of the battle and the third without any solid food.“The morning of July 19, we formed our lines . . . for a charge across a sugar beet field. . . . In thirty or forty minutes, our regiment had been almost annihilated. The field which had been recently crossed was strewn with dead and dying. Their cries for water and help got weaker as the hot July day wore on.”72
In three days, the two American divisions lost more than 12,000 men. The Second Division, already bled by Belleau Wood, collapsed and had to be withdrawn after two days. The First Division, equally battered—its Twenty-Sixth Infantry regiment lost 3,000 out of 3,200 men—was withdrawn the following day. This was hardly the staying power Pershing had envisioned for his double-sized divisions. But he ignored the danger signs and told Harbord that even if the two divisions never fired another shot, they had made the
ir commanders “immortal.”73
Harbord and Brown stood by the roadside near the Second Division’s headquarters and watched the survivors march past them, after their withdrawal. They were “only a remnant,” harbord admitted,“but a victorious remnant; no doubt existed in their mind as to their ability to whip the Germans. Their whole independent bearing, their swagger as they strode by, the snatches of conversation we could hear as they passed, proclaimed them a victorious division.”74
A general who has lost over 15,000 men in a month needed to see these things to keep up his own morale. A more realistic report of the aftermath of Soissons came from Marine Private Brannen:“The surviving Marines who left the battle line were a terrible looking bunch of people. They looked more like animals. They had almost a week’s growth of beard and were dirty and ragged. Their eyes were sunk back in their heads. There had been very little sleep or rest for four days and no food. . . . The boys were more despondent than I ever saw them after this last battle and no wonder. I was the only survivor of Overton’s platoon of about fifty men. There were eight able to walk away from the front, out of 212 on the company roster.”75
Yet it was a victory. Although the attackers did not cut the railroad line, they forced the Germans to abandon all thoughts of crossing the Marne to Paris. Instead, General Ludendorff was forced to shorten his lines—a euphemism for the ugly word retreat. In his war memoirs, Field Marshal von Hindenburg wrote:“How many hopes, cherished during the last few months had possibly collapsed at one blow! How many calculations had been scattered to the winds.”76
XVIII
The American infantrymen who fought at Cantigny and Belleau Wood were constantly harassed by German planes. They frequently cursed America’s nonexistent air service. Their criticism added intensity to Quentin Roosevelt’s desire to reach the front. At first, from Flora’s letters, he thought they might be married before he headed for the war zone. For a while her parents seemed amenable to a trip to Paris. Influential friends were enlisted to approach the War Department.
The Illusion of Victory Page 29