During the Aisne-Marne campaign, MacArthur continued to embellish his hero image, repeatedly exposing himself to German shells and bullets to inspire his men. At one point, between directing attacks and exploring no-man’s-land at night, he went without sleep for ninety-six hours. The fighting was frequently ferocious. The town of Sergy on the Ourcq River, defended by the crack Prussian Guards division, changed hands seven times in a single day.
Relieved after nine horrendous days, the men of the Rainbow stumbled to the rear. Father Francis Duffy, the division’s chaplain, described them: “Our decimated battalions . . . marched in weary silence until they came to the slopes around Meurcy Farm. Then from end to end of the line came the sound of dry suppressed sobs. They were marching among the bodies of their unburied dead.” MacArthur’s brigade lost 2,835 men out of 5,135 in its ranks when the offensive began.2
Again and again, the Rainbow and other American divisions found their flanks lethally exposed by the failure of a French division to keep pace with their attack.“For Christ’s sake, knock out the machine guns on our right,” begged one anguished battalion commander. “Heavy casualties. What troops should be on my right and left and where are they?”
The French repeatedly ordered the Americans to make attacks that were close to suicidal and gave them objectives they could never reach. Major General Robert Lee Bullard, now a corps commander of two American divisions, fretted about the casualties but could do little else. He had to take orders from General Joseph Degoutte, commander of the French Sixth Army.3
By August 27, 1918, the Germans had retreated to the northern bank of the Vesle River. A French order sent two understrength companies of the Twenty-Eighth Division (about 200 men) across the river to seize the hamlet of Fismette. An appalled Bullard tried to withdraw them—they were the only troops on that side of the river, surrounded by some 200,000 Germans. General Degoutte, with the same indifference to casualties he had displayed at Belleau Wood, revoked Bullard’s order. The Germans attacked in overwhelming force from three sides, using every weapon in their armory, including flamethrowers. They killed or captured all but 39 of the isolated Americans.
Bullard reported the disaster to Pershing, who met him a few days later and asked him why he had not disobeyed General Degoutte’s order.“I did not answer. It was not necessary to answer,” Bullard wrote in his memoir, implying all too clearly that he considered Pershing the man at fault for the messy Aisne-Marne experience.4
While the Americans struggled, on August 8, 1918, the British army made a successful attack on the western flank of the salient the Germans had created with their rout of the Fifth Army in March. Supported by tanks and swarms of planes, the British advanced almost twenty miles and captured thousands of prisoners. Foch, the apostle of the offensive, was suddenly the right general in the right place at the right time.“Tout le monde a la bataille!” became his mantra. Everyone fights!5
By this time, five American divisions—more than 150,000 men—were serving under Field Marshal Douglas Haig. Pershing had permitted these divisions to go directly into British training areas when they arrived in Europe. These semi-surrenders of control were the price Foch and Haig wrung from Pershing, with the help of Ludendorff ’s storm troopers. But the AEF commander never stopped insisting on an independent army.
On August 10 Pershing opened First Army headquarters, and on August 15 he handed Foch a plan for an attack on the Saint-Mihiel salient, another huge bulge in the French lines, south of Verdun. He extracted three of his five divisions from a choleric Douglas Haig and withdrew his other divisions from French control.
On August 28, as the Americans moved into the lines around Saint-Mihiel, Foch descended on Pershing with one last attempt to steal his army. The generalissimo announced the whole German battlefront was one huge salient and should be attacked from the north, the south and the center. Foch wanted Pershing to more or less abort the Saint-Mihiel operation, limiting it to a few divisions while the rest of the American army was transferred back to French control for attacks in Champagne and the Argonne valley.
A stupendous argument erupted. At one point both men were on their feet screaming curses at each other.“Do you wish to take part in the battle?” Foch shrilled, the ultimate insult one general could throw at another.6
“As an American army and in no other way!” Pershing replied.
“I must insist on the arrangement!” Foch shouted.
Pershing stuck out his granite jaw.“Marshal Foch, you may insist all you please but I decline absolutely to agree to your plan. While our army will fight wherever you decide, it will fight only as an independent American Army.”7
After another week of wrangling, Pershing accepted a dangerous compromise. He would attack the Saint-Mihiel salient on September 12 as planned and then transfer the bulk of his 500,000-man army west of the Meuse River to attack through the Argonne valley on September 26 as part of the overall Allied offensive. It was a staggering assignment for a general who had never commanded more than a single division in action and whose staff had yet to plan a major battle. Only a man with Pershing’s self-confidence would have tried it.
On September 5, Pershing, disturbed by AEF casualties in the Aisne-Marne offensive, made a stab at defining open warfare. In a general order, he contrasted it to trench warfare, which he claimed was “marked by uniform formations, the regulation of space and time by higher commands down to the smallest details and little initiative.” Open warfare had irregular formations, comparatively little regulation of space and time, and the greatest possible use of the infantry’s own fire power to enable it to “get forward . . . [with] brief orders” and “the greatest possible use of individual initiative.”
It was much too late for this condensed version of storm-trooper tactics to filter down even to division staffs, much less to the captains and lieutenants leading companies. The instructions also omitted some vital components of the storm-trooper innovations—a reliance not on rifles but on grenades and flank attacks to deal with enemy machine guns, coupled with a precise use of artillery and mortars.8
At first, Pershing’s luck seemed to hold. The Saint-Mihiel offensive was the walkover of the war. The Germans were withdrawing from the salient when the Americans attacked. Resistance was perfunctory. The bag of prisoners and captured guns was big enough to make headlines, although the take was not nearly as large as originally hoped.
Historically speaking, the most noteworthy side of Saint-Mihiel was the first appearance of Americans in tanks. The machines were all French, built by the Renault Motor Company. The Wilson administration had been as feckless in tank production as in aircraft, with a net output of zero, in spite of the usual tens of millions spent. The commander of one brigade, which totaled 174 tanks, was a former Pershing aide, Colonel George S. Patton, Jr.
The top speed of these lumbering vehicles was four miles per hour. Their mission was to precede the infantry and knock out machine-gun nests. Communications were primitive. The tanks had no radios. Attempts to use signal flags were an instant failure; machine-gun fire shredded them. Lead tanks were equipped with carrier pigeons in a basket, but in the excitement of battle, the baskets—and the birds—were soon squashed. In lieu of any better communications system, the captains in command of the companies walked from tank to tank to deliver firing instructions.
Colonel Patton disobeyed the orders of the titular commander of the tank corps, General Samuel D. Rockenbach, and followed the tanks into action on foot. “I will not sit in a dugout and have my men out in the fighting,” he told his wife. At one point, Patton mounted the turret of a tank to encourage the crew to attack a village. When German machine-gun bullets struck the tank, the daring colonel reluctantly took cover in a shell hole. At another point, Patton encountered MacArthur on the chaotic battlefield. A German rolling barrage moved toward them. Both refused to take cover, although Patton wryly told his wife they had trouble keeping track of their conversation as the shells got closer.9
&n
bsp; On the battlefield Patton’s tanks encountered a squadron of the Second U.S. Cavalry Regiment. The horsemen had captured a sizable number of German prisoners and were contemptuous of the sluggish, clanking tanks. By this time, forty of the iron steeds had gotten stuck in the mud. Incensed, Patton ordered a patrol of three tanks to attack the main German defenses, the Michel Line, at the bottom of the salient. The tankers fought a pointblank duel with German artillery and returned with the breech block of a knocked-out 77-millimeter gun. That night, Patton excitedly discussed with his officers the possibility of tanks becoming independent of the infantry and smashing through fortified lines to wreak havoc in the enemy rear. It was the first glimmer of the armor tactics of World War II.10
II
Pershing and his staff now tried to imitate the Germans and gain surprise in the Argonne. They left most of their veteran divisions in the Saint-Mihiel lines and shifted largely green units west. No significant bottlenecks developed on the few available roads, thanks to the planning genius of Colonel George C. Marshall, now a key deputy of Brigadier General Hugh Drum, the First Army’s chief of staff. Fellow toilers at headquarters nicknamed Marshall “the Wizard” for managing the sixty-mile move in wretched, rainy weather. The thirty-seven-year old Virginia Military Institute graduate had obviously not compromised his career by talking back to Pershing in Lorraine a year ago.11
On September 26, after a 4,000-gun artillery barrage, Pershing threw 250,000 men in three corps at an estimated 50,000 German defenders in the twenty-mile-wide Argonne valley. A massive hogback (a ridge with steeply sloping sides) ran down the center of this rugged landscape, forcing the attackers into defiles on both sides. It was, Major General Hunter Liggett said, a natural fortress that made the Virginia Wilderness of the Civil War seem like a park. Yet Pershing’s plan called for no less than a ten mile line abreast advance on the first day to crack the Kreimhilde Stellung, the main German defense line.
Five of Pershing’s nine divisions had never been in action before. The rush to get an army to France had left tens of thousands of soldiers with little or no training. Even experienced outfits such as the Seventy-Seventh Division, which had been blooded under the French in Champagne, were full of raw replacements. On the day before they attacked, the Seventy-Seventh received 2,100 men who had never fired a rifle.12
Everything imaginable proceeded to go wrong with Pershing’s army. The Germans fell back to well-prepared defenses, and machine guns began mowing down charging Americans. Massive amounts of enemy artillery on the heights east of the Meuse and along the edge of the Argonne forest, which loomed a thousand feet above the valley floor on the west, exacted an even heavier toll.
Rigid orders, issued by Pershing’s staff, held up divisions at crucial moments. The Fourth Division could have captured the key height of Montfaucon on the first day, but it stood still for four hours, waiting for the green Seventy-Ninth Division, which had been assigned the objective, to come abreast of it. By the time Montfaucon fell the following day, the Germans had poured five first-class divisions into the Argonne and the American advance stumbled to a bloody halt.13
To the north, where the British and French were attacking, the Germans could give ground for 60–100 miles before yielding anything vital. Only 24 miles from the American jump-off point in the Argonne was the Sedan-Mézières four-track railroad, which supplied almost all the food and ammunition to the kaiser’s northern armies. In the Argonne, the Germans were fighting to protect their jugular, and by October 4, they had elements of twenty-three divisions in line and local reserve. Ferocious counterattacks demoralized green American divisions. At one point, the Thirty-Fifth Division, farm boys from Missouri and Kansas, teetered on the brink of rout. They were rescued by direct fire from their artillery, including a battery manned by Captain Harry S. Truman. With casualties of more than 50 percent, the division was withdrawn.14
Pershing replaced decimated divisions with the veteran units he had left in Saint-Mihiel and tried to resume the attack. He was on the road constantly, visiting corps and division headquarters, urging generals and colonels to inject their men with more “drive” and “push.” But Pershing soon discovered that words could not silence a machine gun. Private First Class James Rose of the First Division later told of advancing across an open field to within fifty yards of the German line. Suddenly the air around the men “became a solid sheet of machine-gun and artillery fire. No words could possibly describe the horror of it. Body stacked upon body in waves and piles. . . . Our boys never faltered, they came, wave upon wave, climbing over the bodies of their fallen comrades with one obsession in mind, to reach and destroy every machine gun that was mowing down our advance.” These brave men were obeying the orders of the division commander, Major General Charles Summerall, who summed up his tactical thinking on how to deal with machine guns in two brutal words:“Charge ’em!”15
While the doughboys bled, they also began to starve. Monumental traffic jams developed on the few roads into the Argonne. Food did not get forward; the wounded lay unevacuated. Premier Georges Clemenceau, caught on one clogged road, lost half a day and went back to Paris vowing to get rid of Pershing. Stragglers were another problem. General Hunter Liggett estimated that, at the height of the battle, 100,000 runaways were wandering around the First Army’s rear. One division reported an effective front line strength of only 1,600 men. Early in October Pershing authorized officers to shoot any man who ran away—proof of his growing desperation.16
Worsening Pershing’s woes was a visit from Foch’s chief of staff, General Maxime Weygand, while the Americans were withdrawing the wreckage of the divisions that had opened the battle. The Frenchman announced that Generalissimo Foch thought Pershing had too many men in the Argonne and proposed shifting six divisions to nearby French armies. Pershing told him to go to hell, and Foch retaliated with a formal, on-the-record letter ordering the Americans to attack continuously “without any [further] interruptions.”
Behind the scenes, Clemenceau wrote a savage letter to Foch, urging him to call for Pershing’s replacement. “Our worthy American Allies,” he sneered,“who thirst to get into action and who are unanimously acknowledged to be great soldiers, have been marking time since their forward jump on the first day. . . . Nobody can maintain that these fine troops are unusable; they are merely unused.” this was too much even for Foch to swallow. He replied with a defense of Pershing’s problems.17
Killing fire from enemy guns east of the Meuse River stopped the veteran divisions when they attacked without artillery preparation in a vain hope of achieving surprise. German counterattacks drove them back again and again. Only the First Division, under grim-eyed General Summerall, gained some ground, plunging up the left defile for a half dozen miles, at the cost of 9,387 casualties. On October 8, Pershing sent two divisions east of the Meuse to join the French in an attempt to silence the murderous artillery. The attack faltered and collapsed into a pocket on the banks of the river, deluged by gas and shell fire.18
III
More embarrassing was the plight of a battalion of the Seventy-Seventh Division, which had been assigned to the Argonne forest. Attempting to correct the rigid line-abreast advance his staff had decreed for the original assault, Pershing ordered all units to keep attacking “without regard to losses and without regard to the exposed conditions of the flanks.” Such tactics were worthy of Charles “the Butcher” Mangin; they were another index of Pershing’s desperation.
On October 1, the commander of the First Battalion of the Seventy-Seventh Division’s 308th Infantry Regiment, Major Charles Whittlesey, warned that further attacks would be disastrous. The French army that was supposed to be protecting the division’s left flank, west of the Argonne forest, was nowhere to be seen. The Germans could easily cut them off. The division’s commander, following Pershing’s orders, told Whittlesey to attack anyway. Within four hours, the entire force of 550 men was surrounded. Christened “the Lost Battalion” by reporters, it more than conform
ed to the name. The men had almost no food and little ammunition. Attempts to supply them from the air repeatedly failed. The tall, bespectacled Whittlesey, a Wall Street lawyer in peacetime, with a remarkable resemblance to Woodrow Wilson, stonily refused German demands to surrender.
The Germans attacked with mortars, machine guns, showers of hand grenades, even flamethrowers. The Americans beat them back. The Seventy-Seventh Division artillery tried to help with a barrage. Many of the shells fell on the Americans, killing and wounding 80 men. One shell struck the battalion’s sergeant major; only his helmet and pistol survived the explosion. For five nightmarish days, the battalion held out. At the end of the fifth day, a patrol from the Seventy-Seventh Division reached the battalion. The Germans, intimidated by the gains of the First Division east of the forest, had withdrawn. A grim Whittlesey led 194 exhausted survivors to the rear. He barely responded when the division commander told him he had been promoted to lieutenant colonel and was being recommended for the Medal of Honor.19
The Illusion of Victory Page 34