Old-fashioned American innovation, adaptation, and, above all, individual autonomy made the Expeditionary Force a much different military unit from the cynical and hardened British and French armies it now joined. The level of preparedness was striking compared with that of the Europeans. Whereas Britain had gone to war with a general staff of 232 and Germany 650, the United States had only 41, and by law no more than half could be in Washington at the same time.128 By the fall of 1917, a million Americans had arrived in Europe to little fanfare. They were greeted by no bands, no flag-waving civilians—“a funeral,” as Captain George C. Marshall put it.129 Yet the disembarking Americans seemed different, described by one European as “emanating a powerful impression of ruddy, clean-shaven youth, of lithe, athletic bodies with strong, clean limbs—the only really youthful army in the field in 1918.”130
Teufel Hunden
At first, however, the results were mixed. Early skirmishes produced easy victories, but the Americans were confronted with the awesome reality of twentieth-century combat when ordered into Belleau Wood to support a French operation. From June 6 to June 26, 1918, American infantry and Marines (who earned the nickname “Devil Dogs,” or Teufel Hunden, from the enemy in the battle) fought against well-placed German positions arranged in kill zones, finally seizing the Wood, but not before suffering a shocking 5,200 casualties. Pershing’s version of élan underwent an instant evolution in the hands of sergeants and junior officers, who realized the “reckless courage of the foot soldier with his rifle and bayonet could not overcome machine guns well-protected in rocky nests.”131 Trusting this commonsense, bottom-up refinement of tactics, Pershing told a subordinate that Americans had developed “a type of manhood superior in initiative” to the Europeans’.132 Belleau Wood taught them that neither guts nor initiative alone would defeat the entrenched Germans; but it also showed that Americans could take a shot and persevere. Pershing therefore called Belleau Wood the most important battle for the American military since the Civil War.
Along with the education under fire came the official formation of the American 1st Army in August, consisting of fourteen infantry divisions, supported by French artillery, tanks, and trucks. France’s Marshal Foch, who had by then become Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies (Pétain was Commander in Chief of All French Armies), continued to press for dispersing American forces to plug gaps in Franco-British lines, but Pershing angrily refused, telling the marshal, “While our army will fight wherever you decide, it will not fight except as an independent American army.”133 What “Black Jack” lacked in tactical ingenuity, he made up for in his skill in dealing with the French.
Foch relented. In September 1918, the half-million-strong U.S. 1st Army assaulted the St. Mihiel salient, which was only lightly defended by the Germans. Nevertheless, it resulted in a reassuring success, and Pershing boasted, “We gave ’em a damn good licking, didn’t we!” But in the Meuse-Argonne offensive of September through November of 1918 they encountered a different German army, one of grizzled veterans instead of aged or very young reserves. Brimming with confidence, the American Expeditionary Force advanced toward its objectives. One survivor later recalled, “We were Power, and nothing could stop us. We were Americans!”134 Division after division slammed into German artillery, gas, machine guns, and wire, shredded in the process and gaining little ground. Troops advancing from the rear lines were appalled to see up to two hundred ambulances delivering wounded to a single medical station. However wedded Pershing was to the bayonet offensive before the Meuse-Argonne, he reconsidered tactics after five days of heavy losses. Colonel Billy Mitchell, who had promised to clear the skies of German aircraft, similarly reappraised his work when German planes repeatedly filtered through his patrols to attack Americans on the ground. Mitchell refused to criticize the air corps, but he knew it had failed to live up to his promises.
By the end of September, Germany’s defensive line had been breached, but with terrific American casualties and phenomenal psychological cost to those who had endured. As a pastor serving with the 80th Division wrote, “We became beasts lusting for blood and flesh. We were no longer normal, but abnormal…. Men swore who never swore before, men who taught Sunday School classes back home.”135 By then the American military force was too big for one man to lead while also commanding an army directly. Pershing replaced himself as commander of the 1st Army with General Hunter Liggett—a better tactician—and formed the 2nd Army under General Robert Bullard, thereby limiting his duties to Commander in Chief, American Expeditionary Force. The 1st Army had suffered somewhat under Pershing due to his being heavily involved in AEF matters and not having sufficient time to devote to it. His staff was fragmented, and a higher headquarters was long overdue, but Pershing wished to gain experience in army command. Fulfilling that desire had been a mistake, and now Pershing corrected it.
Pershing’s insistence on an independent American command had alienated the British and the French, but in truth, from the outset both allies hoped to use American men piecemeal as replacements for their own losses without permitting a separate American presence. His doggedness in demanding an American Expeditionary Force separate from the British and French no doubt saved thousands of American lives. Americans would have been hurled piecemeal into action as part of British or French commands, negating their own training and unit élan. It also ensured that the United States had the most powerful army left in the field—a significant advantage to Wilson at any postwar bargaining table.
In the summer of 1918, eight divisions of American forces had seen their first actions at the Second Battle of the Marne, and then in the Meuse-Argonne offensive in September–November 1918 punched forward through the Argonne and pinched in on both German flanks. The U.S. advance was bloody and hard-fought with horrendous casualties and saw the debut of the famous Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR). And while German resistance didn’t show it, the Kaiser’s army in the Meuse-Argonne was out of reserves after expending everything it could scrape up to hold back the Americans. It is a wartime myth that the Germans were ready to surrender when the Americans arrived on the scene. In part, postwar French and British writers fed the tale in order to explain the doughboys’ success, although progress had come at a fearsome price. Some divisions were at one-quarter strength; others were cobbled together from broken units. On the other hand, as New Left historians began to dominate the academy, they swung in completely the opposite direction, arguing that the Meuse-Argonne offensive was relatively insignificant. All the revisionism aside, the advance clearly demonstrated that the Americans—if not significantly better than the British, French, or German forces—were certainly no worse, and that now there were a lot of them. German hopes for victory all but faded with the offensive, as mutinies and riots spread back home in response to the death and stagnation at the front.
Optimistic stories, spread with the help of reporters, reached eager eyes back in the United States. And no greater heroic exploits could be reported than those of Alvin York. A deeply religious, barely literate Tennessean, whose conversion to pacifism came after a saloon fight that resulted in a friend’s death, “Sergeant York” (a corporal when the battle of Meuse-Argonne began) had registered for the draft and answered the question, “Do you claim exemption from the draft (specify grounds)?” with “Yes. Don’t Want to Fight.”136 He later denied having ever stated he was a conscientious objector and was drafted in November 1917. A year later his battalion was involved in actions north of Chatel-Chéhéry, France. During the advance on October 8, 1918, York and 16 others had moved behind enemy machine gun positions, capturing a headquarters unit and taking several Germans prisoner, when they themselves came under machine gun fire from a hillside. York happened to be in a perfect shooting position to pick off any machine gunner who raised his head to sight the guns. Or, in York’s parlance, he “jes teched him off.” He estimated there were 30 Germans with machine guns firing at him, and he responded “as fast as I could. I was sharp shooting…. All the
time I kept yelling at them to come down.”137 After killing several, York found himself being charged by six Germans across a twenty-five-yard clearing, and he “teched off” the six one at a time with his pistol, killing the last one in line first so as to not alert the men in front. He then returned to sniping the other machine gunners with deadly accuracy. All the while, York was yelling at the Germans to surrender, telling them he did not want to kill them. Finally, the German lieutenant who had already surrendered was so stunned at York’s shooting that he crawled up near him and said, “If you won’t shoot anymore, I will make them give up.” When York and his comrades finally returned to Allied lines, he had 132 prisoners and had killed at least a dozen more.138 Promoted to sergeant, York was awarded the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Cross, and France bestowed on him the Croix de Guerre and the French Legion of Honor.
Many have heard the exploits of Sergeant York, but few know of the amazing courage of Daniel Richmond Edwards, a machine gunner with the 1st Division, at the Battle of Cantigny in May 1918, and at the Battle of Soissons in July. The details are sketchy, but sufficient to have him nominated for two Medals of Honor. In one episode, according to a somewhat enhanced story by writer Lowell Thomas, an artillery shell exploded near Edwards, leaving him with a shattered right arm. Edwards shot several advancing Germans, and others threw down their weapons. Military rules prohibited more than one Medal of Honor award in a single action, so Edwards received the Distinguished Service Cross and the Medal of Honor consecutively.139
The Final Push
In heavy fighting from October 16 through October 31, the 1st Army finally took the ridgeline over the Aire Valley, breaking the western wing of the German defensive perimeter, the Kriemhilde Stellung. Once again, it came at a terrific cost to the American forces, but Germany was out of men, and as one German officer put it, “The Americans are here. We can kill them but we can’t stop them.”140 At the same time that the Germans were acknowledging the inevitability of American advances, the British cabinet received a scathing report saying that the “American Army is disorganized, ill-equipped, and ill-trained with very few non-commissioned officers and officers of experience. It has suffered severely through ignorance of modern war and it must take at least a year before it becomes a serious fighting force (emphasis in original).”141
The British were right about learning how to fight in a modern war. Liggett, addressing his corps commanders, impressed on them the need to change tactics and abandon the clumping up, massed lines, and frontal assaults, all things the British themselves appeared never to learn. The United States needed to keep casualties to a minimum with five thousand miles between the front lines and the replacement centers.142 With his address, Liggett elucidated the first formal recognition of a deeply embedded American tradition that has now found its way into official doctrine, namely the concept of sanctity of life. In most ways the U.S. military essentially epitomized the “Western way of war” already seen in British and French forces, but with Liggett’s declaration, widely referred to as the “casualty issue” after the war, the American military made economy of soldiers’ lives an official policy.143 Civil War–level losses would no longer be tolerated. America’s military leaders would look to training and firepower as “equalizers” for countries using the bodies of their young men to achieve victory. In the next war, while the G.I.s’ reliance on overwhelming firepower would fail them at times, no one ever regretted sending an artillery shell—instead of a soldier—over a hill.
The American Army underwent another change in the formation of units and loss replacement. In earlier wars, citizen-soldiers were recruited by companies from specific towns or areas, often by a single leader. Counties and states formed the regiments, which were placed in brigades and divisions under a commanding general from the home state. This greatly increased unit cohesion, and in part accounted for the remarkable staying power of veteran regiments in the Civil War. In World War I, the Army experimented with larger units (roughly 20,000 men per division versus 5,000 men during the Civil War). America’s Rainbow Division was made up of units from different states, whose object was to spread casualties out more evenly among the United States geographically so as not to risk the destruction of entire towns’ male populations. The experiment appeared to work satisfactorily, and henceforth all units other than National Guard units would be filled by draftees from all parts of the nation. Replacements would be distributed almost randomly and sent to combat units direct from distribution centers, and if the unit was actively engaged in combat, the new arrival would be thrown into action with no prior training or association with the others in his unit. Over time, American unit cohesion suffered greatly and casualties increased due to the lack of in-unit training—but towns and counties no longer needed to fear losing all their young men in a single action.
Liggett also insisted that frontal assaults had to be replaced with fire and maneuver and combined arms—not that the Army hadn’t already preached this, but with so little training time, no units had successfully coordinated themselves. Billy Mitchell also quietly changed his focus from strafing and bombing rear support and supply areas to hitting the front lines in coordination with advancing infantry. By November 1918 the Americans had as many airplanes as the Germans, although only one in five of them was American-made; in addition, for the first time they had ample artillery ammunition. With battle experience surfaced the autonomy of American fighters who, unlike the British and French soldiers, were allowed to trust their instincts. Squad-level tactics to take out machine guns by flanking developed as veterans discovered what worked.
Consequently, the American advance on November 1, 1918, was a crushing defeat for Germany’s defenders; now gains came in miles instead of yards. For the first time, American units saw entire columns retreating, and the doughboys set up their own kill zones to ambush the enemy, crossing the Meuse on November 3–4. In a four-week period, 1.2 million American soldiers and Marines conquered the Meuse-Argonne and drove out the Germans. The American victory, however, had come at a terrible cost—26,277 dead, 97,786 wounded, accounting for half of all U.S. wartime casualties. American troops had inflicted 100,000 casualties on the Germans and had also taken 26,000 prisoners, but it was far from a draw, as the last of the Kaiser’s frontline combat veterans were gone. No one could oppose the Allies now, and General Liggett thought that a few more days of fighting would have “reduced [the German Army] to a mob.”144 British historians later noted that Americans had suffered disproportionate losses compared with the British advance farther north, but the territory over which the Americans fought was far more difficult, and the enemy fought tenaciously, with forty-four divisions thrown into the fight.145 Therefore it is fair to say that while the Americans certainly did not win the war, they tipped the scales for Allied victory. Arriving in large numbers—untrained or not—the fighting men of the United States snatched the last glimmer of hope from the heart of Imperial Germany.
The farther toward Germany the Allies moved, the more it became apparent to the commanders on the ground that they had limited time to achieve decisive results before the politicians negotiated an unsatisfactory peace. When the Kaiser abdicated on November 10, everyone knew that time was even shorter, and indeed, emissaries were dispatched from Spa immediately to inquire as to terms. Allied military commanders Foch, Pétain, Pershing, and Haig, sensing the end was near, had met on October 25, 1918, at Senlis to discuss what the terms for an armistice or cease-fire should be if there was to be an armistice. Pershing suggested that all U-boats and their bases be surrendered, but British Field Marshal Haig said, “That is none of our affair. It is a matter for the Admiralty to decide.”146 Since the conference was only about an armistice, Pershing said nothing about what he really favored—unconditional surrender. However, after receiving instructions from Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, Jr. that seemed to indicate he was authorized to bring up alternatives to an armistice, Pershing laid out the case for unconditional s
urrender to the Supreme War Council in a memo on October 30. “It is the experience of history that victorious armies are prone to overestimate the enemy’s strength and too eagerly seek an opportunity for peace…. I believe the complete victory can only be obtained by continuing the war until we force unconditional surrender from Germany.”147 Pershing’s words would ring prophetic over time, in light of Adolf Hitler’s convincing “stab-in-the-back” theory of the war’s end. Germany, however, also knew that its time was short, and its leaders began discussing the prospect of an armistice after Allied successes in the Battle of Amiens on August 8, 1918, or what Ludendorff called the “black day of the German Army.” Soon, no other choice was possible. Mutinies at home convinced German war leaders that Germany needed to extract itself from the war before it was occupied—and before Pershing’s unconditional surrender was imposed on it.
Although the United States had celebrated its heroes in previous wars, after the Great War attitudes changed. Glorifying combat and warriors was not a priority for Progressives—often the returning veterans were simply ignored. Returning troops might receive a parade upon their homecoming, but then they rapidly disappeared into the general population. There they sometimes experienced acceptance, regaining their old jobs or civic positions, but other soldiers returned to find their jobs had been taken and people were uninterested in what had happened in Europe. Unemployment shot up to nearly 9 percent by the end of 1921—almost double what it had been at war’s end. Moreover, unlike after the American Civil War, there was no presumption back home that merely fighting in the war qualified a man for positions of political leadership. For the first time in American history a major American war did not generate a president from a top commander: the Revolution produced Washington; War of 1812—William Henry Harrison; Mexican War—Zachary Taylor; Civil War—Ulysses S. Grant; Spanish-American War—Theodore Roosevelt; but Pershing would not make the list. Only once more would the previous pattern emerge—Eisenhower from World War II. The Korean War, Vietnam, and the Middle Eastern wars would not produce presidents, although a number of veterans would be contenders. Times had definitely changed.
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