If any man through shell shock or other cause attempts to surrender he will remain here dead.
The men given this order obeyed. The order was found on the body of one of their dead.
In their spring offensives, the Germans also struck the French. Ludendorff, who planned the attacks, sent his troops to the Chemin des Dames sector, to the northeast of the Reims. There, they crushed a French army and advanced to the Marne River, threatening Paris. In June and July, the Germans, for the fourth and fifth time, again attacked. These attacks were less successful. Nonetheless, French forces had been battered. French troops were in retreat.
All along the front, German troops moved forward, inflicting a large number of casualties. In just the first forty days of combat, Sir Douglas Haig’s forces suffered more than 160,000 killed or wounded. French losses in the spring and summer reached 70,000. The British and French armies were bleeding, and bleeding badly.
As the casualties mounted, and the German advances continued, top Allied leaders realized that a change in the military-command structure was needed. Up to now the senior French and British field commanders, at the time Pétain and Haig, and earlier Nivelle and Haig, had acted independently. They consulted with each other, but neither could command the other. The German spring offensives changed that. All came to understand that a single field commander in chief needed to be in charge. Such was the urgency that Field Marshal Haig raised no objection to the appointment of French general Ferdinand Foch to the post (Pétain was considered too defensively oriented). The French general became, as Eisenhower would in the Second World War, supreme Allied commander. At first, he was simply to coordinate the three armies involved, the British, the French, and the American. But, as the German threat increased, Foch was authorized to give orders to their commanders. Only if Haig and Pershing considered these orders detrimental to the national interests of Great Britain or the United States were the two subordinate commanders allowed to appeal. Pétain had no such authority; he was told to follow Foch’s instructions. Despite disagreements, some rather testy, this new command arrangement proved satisfactory. Ferdinand Foch, the general who believed the only military course of action worthy of consideration was to attack, became commander of more than five million men. Given his preeminent position in the chain of command and his subsequent record of success, it’s not surprising that upon his death in 1920, his body was laid to rest in Paris near that of Napoleon.
As spring gave way to summer, the German offensives appeared to stall. Though inflicting heavy losses on their French and British counterparts, the Germans themselves suffered as well. By the end of April, after just two months, 492,720 of their soldiers no longer were able to fight. They were dead, in the hospital, missing in action, or had been taken prisoner. More German soldiers would be lost in May and June and into July, when, finally, after the fourth and fifth attack, the offensive came to a halt. In total, Ludendorff’s spring offensives cost the kaiser 800,000 of his soldiers.
Moreover, the British army, though roughed up, had not been destroyed. Sir Douglas’s men, by 1918 the most capable fighting force in Europe, had bent but not broken. So too the French. Pétain’s army, one that had experienced both victory and defeat in four years of conflict, still had some fight left in it.
As, of course, did the German army. Yet it was clear, especially to Foch, that the German spring offensives had failed. True, Ludendorff’s men had gained considerable territory. But no decisive victory had been attained, nor had the strategic picture changed much. The front, that tangled strip of trenches, barbed wire, and machine gun rests, had been moved to the west. Save for some worried souls in Paris, nothing much seemed to have changed.
In fact, two things had changed, both significant. The first was that the German army was running out of soldiers. A country can produce only a certain number of men capable of bearing arms, and by the summer of 1918, after fighting Russians and Romanians, the British and the French, Germany had just about reached its limit. And the later replacement troops were not as skillful as those who had fought earlier in the war. The second change, one even more ominous to Ludendorff and his field commanders, was that Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force was preparing to do battle.
***
The AEF’s first test of combat had come in late May. Assigned to the French First Army, the U.S. Army’s 1st Division was given the task of taking Cantigny. This was a small village on a ridge near Montdidier, a town some sixty miles north of Paris. The ridge enabled the Germans to observe what was taking place to the south and west of their positions. Planning the attack was the division’s Operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel George C. Marshall. Well conceived and twice rehearsed, the plan had the division’s 28th Infantry Regiment directly assaulting the town supported by artillery, tanks, and flamethrowers provided by the French.
The attack began early in the morning of May 28, 1918. By noon, the village was in U.S. hands. The Germans counterattacked several times, and the battle became what author David Bonk has called “a desperate slugging match.” Showing notable determination, the men of the 28th held on, despite the premature withdrawal of the French artillery. When the battle was over, the regiment had sustained more than nine hundred casualties. More importantly, Cantigny remained under U.S. control.
The town itself was of no overall strategic value to the Allies. But the fight for Cantigny was important. It demonstrated that the AEF could plan and execute a division-level operation. It also showed that, despite their inexperience, individual American soldiers would do just fine in battle. French and Britain commanders were uncertain how Pershing’s soldiers would respond to the ordeal of battle. So too were German commanders, who tried to convince their troops and themselves that Americans were no match for well-disciplined and battle-tested German soldiers. The fight for Cantigny put to rest such nonsense. For Foch and Haig it was reassuring. For Ludendorff it was cause for concern. For General Pershing and his troops, and for the folks back home in the United States, it was a signal that, once fully deployed, the AEF would have soldiers to be reckoned with.
As the 1st Division’s fight at Cantigny came to a close, the AEF’s 3rd Division was moving into action. Ludendorff’s May offensive, code named Blücher, had seen some success with the Germans reaching the Marne. The French, dispirited by their enemy’s advances, asked General Pershing for assistance. Recognizing the urgency of the situation, Black Jack put aside his objection to amalgamation and lent the 3rd Division to the French. They ordered it to Château Thierry. This was (and still is) a lovely little town on the Marne River, where today an American military cemetery resides. At Château Thierry the Americans held fast and Ludendorff’s troops advanced no farther.
Not far from Château Thierry, to the west, were two villages, Bouresches and Belleau. In between them stood a small forest. It was called Belleau Wood. In June 1918, it witnessed a fierce battle, one that for the United States of America would become legendary.
That same month, still needing to slow the German advance, Foch requested additional American help. However, he planned not just to halt the German drive. Foch planned to counterattack and wanted some of Pershing’s troops to participate. The AEF responded by lending Foch the 2nd Division, which the French deployed to Belleau Wood. This unit was unique in the American Expeditionary Force in that two of its four infantry regiments, comprising the 4th Brigade, were U.S. marines, not soldiers of the U.S. Army.
The 4th Brigade’s first task was to stop a German attack, which it did. The story is told that a retreating French officer said to an American that with the Germans advancing, he and his men should fall back. “Retreat, hell,” replied the marine, “we just got here.”
The second task assigned to the marines was to clear Belleau Wood of Germans and hold on to it. On June 6 they attacked. Their artillery was insufficient, their tactics flawed. But as the marines crossed a wheat field full of red poppies, their determination
and courage were in full view. The attack succeeded, although the cost was high. The brigade’s casualties that day totaled 1,087. The fight would continue for twenty more days, and at times the marines took no prisoners, and neither did the Germans. It was kill or be killed.
Toward the end of the struggle for Belleau Wood, the 2nd Division’s other brigade, the one consisting of two army regiments, went into action. It was ordered to capture the nearby town of Vaux. Quite competently, the brigade took control of the town, for its effort suffering 300 dead and 1,400 wounded. This battle at Vaux received little attention. In 1918—and even today—what captured the spotlight was the marines at Belleau Wood.
By the standards of the First World War, the engagements of Belleau Wood and Vaux were small affairs. In total, the casualty count for the U.S. 2nd Division showed 1,811 men dead and 7,966 wounded. For the armies of France, Great Britain, and Germany, these were numbers unlikely to raise alarm. For the AEF 9,777 in one division was a stiff price. It illustrated that inexperience on the battlefield costs lives. Nonetheless, Vaux and Belleau Wood were victories. As did Cantigny, the two battles bode well for the Allied cause.
The next occasion in which the AEF went into action involved far more men than had fought at Vaux and Belleau Wood. Once the German spring offensive came to a halt, Ferdinand Foch was keen to strike back. He wanted to recover territory lost to the Germans, and he also wanted to damage Ludendorff’s army, which he believed by then to be under considerable stress. He directed Pétain to prepare a plan of attack, which the French army’s commander in chief did. The plan included substantial participation by the Americans.
Two U.S. divisions, along with a French Moroccan unit, spearheaded the attack. They were part of the French Tenth Army. Pershing had once again agreed to allocate American units to Pétain’s forces. Three other AEF divisions were assigned to the French Sixth Army, while a further three were part of the force held in reserve. Ultimately, some three hundred thousand American soldiers were involved. The attack, along a twenty-five-mile front in the vicinity of Soissons, began on July 18. It was over by August 2. Approximately thirty thousand Germans were taken prisoner. Such was the success that afterward the kaiser’s son wrote his father that the war was lost.
This battle is usually referred to as the Second Battle of the Marne. One key result of this battle was Ludendorff’s decision to call off a major attack against the British in the north. The German commander had hoped once and for all to crush Field Marshal Haig’s forces in France. That had been the decisive victory Ludendorff had designed his spring offensives to achieve.
Meanwhile, Sir Douglas had planned an offensive of his own, one to which Foch as Supreme Commander readily agreed. On August 8, the British Army attacked near Amiens. Among the assault troops were Canadians and Australians, whom the West Point Military Series account of World War I says were “generally regarded as the finest infantry fighters on the Allied side.” The outcome was a stunning success for British arms. Haig’s losses were light, suggesting that the British, at last, had mastered the art of trench warfare. German losses were substantial. Some seventy thousand troops were out of action. Of these, thirty thousand had surrendered without much of a fight. In his memoir, Ludendorff, who offered to resign after the battle, termed August 8 “the black day of the German army.”
The British victory at Amiens was one of the more decisive battles of the First World War, but not because of territory gained or men lost. Rather, it was important because of its psychological impact on the Germans. After Amiens the German high command realized that defeat was now likely. For Germany, the war was lost once its generals believed the war was lost. After their drubbing by the British in August 1918, that’s exactly what they began to believe.
Two days after the British launched their attack from Amiens, the American Expeditionary Force established a new combat organization. Previously, the AEF had organized divisions as its primary fighting units. As we’ve seen, these went into battle as components of various French armies. By August, however, the number of American divisions had increased so as to warrant a larger combat unit. On August 10, 1918, the First American Army was brought into being. It was comprised of fourteen divisions organized into three corps. Its commander was John J. Pershing, who remained in charge of the AEF, of which First Army became the principal American combat unit.
By early October, the number of American soldiers justified the establishment of the U.S. Second Army. Its commander was Major General Robert Lee Bullard, who had been in charge of the 1st Division at Cantigny. By then, First Army had a new commander. He was Hunter Liggett, also a major general. Both Liggett and Bullard reported to Pershing, who then was at the same level as Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig and General Philippe Pétain, each of whose command encompassed several separate armies. Above Haig, Pétain, and Pershing was the supreme commander, Ferdinand Foch.
In early September Foch had been content to have Allied troops conduct limited offensives along the entire Western Front. For the AEF this meant the elimination of the St. Mihiel salient.
In military terminology, a salient is a wedge, a protrusion in the battle line often shaped like an arrowhead. In 1914, the Germans had created such a wedge sixteen miles deep into the French lines, with the tip of the salient at a small town well to the east of Paris. Several times, the French army had attempted to eliminate it. Each time the army had failed.
The St. Mihiel salient was in the American sector of operations. Not surprisingly, General Pershing decided to have his First American Army remove the wedge. Initially, he planned to have the army continue on to Metz, then a heavily fortified German stronghold. Such a move, if successful, would have had strategic consequences, threatening the position of all German forces on the Western Front. Foch, however, intervened. He wanted Pershing to abandon the attack on St. Mihiel and strike northwest into the Meuse-Argonne rather than northeast towards Metz. The Supreme Commander also wanted to insert a French army into the attack and place some of the American troops under French command. Pershing reacted strongly to both proposals, and the conversation between the two commanders became heated. The net result was a compromise. The American army would move against the salient but not proceed beyond it. And it would do so with fewer troops. But, acceding to Foch’s desires, the American First Army, with a large number of soldiers, then would advance into the Meuse-Argonne, striking northwest as the supreme commander wished.
The attack on the salient began on September 12 with an artillery barrage from 3,010 guns. Then, seven U.S. infantry divisions struck from the east. One American division attacked from the west, while French units advanced at the tip. In total, five hundred thousand American soldiers went into battle along with one hundred thousand French troops. Within two days, the salient was reduced. Pershing’s men took thirteen thousand prisoners and captured a large number of enemy guns. American casualties numbered approximately seven thousand.
Among the artillery pieces employed were the fourteen-inch naval guns. Mounted on railroad cars, they shot a projectile up to twenty-three miles and, if on target, were devastating to the enemy. The challenge, of course, was in correctly aiming the gun and properly gauging the ballistics of the projectile. At first the gunners had difficulty in hitting some of their targets. Help came from a young army captain. Edwin P. Hubble, who understood mathematics and the science of trajectories, provided the solutions. He later became an astronomer of note, winning a Nobel Prize. When in 1990 the American space agency, NASA, placed a powerful telescope in low earth orbit, the instrument was named for Dr. Hubble.
St. Mihiel was an American victory and celebrated as such. Once again, as at Cantigny, Château Thierry, and Belleau Wood, the AEF troops had fought hard. Indeed, the German high command took note of the Americans’ aggressive spirit. But the sense of victory from St. Mihiel must be tempered. It is generally conceded that a more experienced army would have taken a greater number of prisoners.
In addition, the German army, aware of the forthcoming assault and of its vulnerability within the salient, had begun to withdraw. The fight was not as fierce as it might have been. Nonetheless, the American First Army had gone into battle and won.
Next time, at the Meuse-Argonne, the fight would be far more difficult.
***
Noteworthy in the attack upon the salient at St. Mihiel was the widespread use of aircraft. More than fourteen hundred airplanes took part in the operation. They were flown by American, British, and French pilots (and a few Italians). In command of this aerial armada was Colonel Billy Mitchell, who, postwar, would become a leading advocate of American airpower.
The airplane came of age in the First World War. Armies and navies alike saw opportunities in the use of aircraft. They pushed aeronautical technologies such that planes became faster, more versatile, and somewhat more reliable. They also became weapons of war. Machine guns were carried, though at first their impact was slight. But when interrupter gears were developed so that machine guns could be fired safely through spinning propellers, airplanes became deadly killing machines.
These machines were called pursuit planes, what today are termed fighters. They carried a crew of one, the pilot, and could attain speeds of up to 140 mph. In Germany and Britain, in America and France, and in other countries as well, pursuit pilots became national heroes, especially those who destroyed five enemy aircraft, thus winning the coveted (but unofficial) title of ace. Famous still today is the German ace Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron. His score of eighty kills was the highest tally of any pilot in World War I. The leading American ace was Eddie Rickenbacker who, flying French-built aircraft, knocked down twenty-six German planes.
Despite the fame associated with pursuit pilots, they and their aircraft did not play a decisive role in the war. Nor did the bombers. These were larger machines, multiengine, with a crew of three or four. From 1915 on, they were heavily engaged, bombing enemy troops and installations. But the size and number of bombs they could carry were slight and the accuracy of their aim uneven. So they too played a secondary role.
America at War: Concise Histories of U.S. Military Conflicts From Lexingtonto Afghanistan Page 17