Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military)

by Gordon Corrigan

  In the autumn of 1917 a number of officers were sent to Europe to see conditions for themselves, spending twelve days with the British, twelve with the French and six with the AEF, so that they could then return to America and train their divisions for the Western Front. Pershing was not impressed by many of them: ‘too old’, ‘in bad shape’, ‘infirm’, ‘very fat and inactive’ and ‘could not begin to stand the strain’ were some of the more charitable remarks written about them.15 One officer who was both too old – he was sixty – and too fat was Major General Hunter Liggett. Told by Pershing that he was quite unsuitable as a divisional commander, he faced the General down and was given time to prove the old curmudgeon wrong. To get fit and lose weight Liggett decided to take up riding. As he had never sat upon a horse before this was a precarious business, resulting in a series of horrific falls, many bruises and, on one occasion, concussion. Pershing relented and allowed him to stay. It was a wise decision, as Liggett turned out to be one of the most competent field commanders in the AEF. He rose, via a division and a corps, to command of the First American Army by the end of the war.

  Major General William L. Sibert, Commander 1 Division, was not so lucky. In October 1917 Pershing wrote: ‘Sibert. Slow of speech and thought...slovenly in dress, has an eye to his personal interests. Without any ability as a soldier. Utterly hopeless as an instructor or as a tactician. Fails to appreciate soldierly qualities having none himself. Loyal as far as it suits his purpose. Opinionated withal and difficult to teach. Has a very high opinion of his own worth...’16 Secretary Baker accepted Pershing’s assessment and Sibert was returned to the United States.

  As with the British army in the early days, there were difficulties in finding enough staff officers. The American army did have a General Staff, but it was very small and not highly thought of by ambitious officers. Far more staff officers were needed than could be made available under the peacetime system, and so British staff courses were expanded to include American students. Training in France was done by setting up schools of instruction and by getting the French and British to help. Pershing was not entirely happy with the Allied training: he thought that the French were war-weary and too defensively minded, whereas he found the British concept to be much more aggressive, and more suited to American soldiers. At the same time he did not want his soldiers to be pale imitations of the British; he was convinced that he should be training his men not for the trenches, but for open warfare. In that everybody on the Allied side wanted open warfare, and that the war did, in the final stages, develop into that, Pershing was right; but his insistence on concentrating on open warfare and marksmanship handicapped his men when they found themselves engaged in the hard slog of close-range trench fighting until the last few months of the war.

  Joint training with the British was generally regarded as a success. Americans preferred British rations to their own except that they preferred coffee to tea, and so coffee was supplied from America.17 The British habit of issuing their men with a rum ration raised eyebrows in the American headquarters, until Pershing decreed that it would be bad formorale if his men, when training with the British, were not to have the same perquisites as their hosts.18

  Winston Churchill once said that the British and the Americans were one people divided by a common language. There were misunderstandings. Prior to the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917, Pershing agreed to lend the British three engineer regiments (11th, 12th and 14th) to help. The Eleventh Engineers supported and fought with the British 20 Division; the 12th delivered artillery ammunition, and the 14th assisted with the operation of the light railway system behind the lines. One American engineer officer reported that he had detected a serious decline in British morale. A British officer had remarked to him that if the Germans wanted this particular bit of France they were welcome to it. Typically self-deprecatory British humour was not always understood.

  While the AEF was building up, training and being equipped, individual units did take part in a number of actions despite Wilson’s wish that they should not. Pershing, as a soldier, understood the military situation on the Western Front; and while he stoutly resisted continuing French pressure to incorporate American regiments in French divisions, he was prepared to lend troops to help out in emergencies, often under the pretext of training. While the Allies were more than happy to have American participation – indeed they constantly urged it – there were difficulties of organisation. The strength of an American division was 28,000 all ranks, twice the size of the French or British equivalent, so that divisional dumps of petrol, rations and ammunition established by the French and British could not cope with the demands of an American division.19 Most administration, therefore, was perforce left to the Americans themselves.

  In January 1918 President Wilson made his famous ‘Fourteen Points’ speech to Congress. He had not consulted the Allies, but on the face of it what he was proposing was entirely reasonable. Closer scrutiny, however, worried the Allies greatly. They could not agree to the abolition of secret diplomacy; nor were they entirely happy about the creation of an independent Polish state. Absolute freedom of the seas in peace and war was not acceptable to the British, who relied on blockade in the event of war; and for the French, that ‘the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine...should be righted’ was not strong enough. Both the French and the British disliked the suggestion that the wishes of the colonial peoples should hold equal sway with the views of the imperial powers, and the suggestion that the possessions of the Ottoman Empire should be allowed autonomy did not suit Allied perceptions of the postwar shape of the Middle East. It was perhaps as well that the Germans did not immediately accept the Wilson proposals, for had they done so the Allies would have found themselves on a hook from which it would have been difficult to escape.

  The AEF provided engineer support to the British at Cambrai, and when the ‘Kaiser’s offensive’ fell on the British Fifth Army on 21 March 1918 on a fifty-mile front between La Fère and Arras, near the junction with the French Sixth Army, men of the 6th American Engineer Regiment who were employed on railway repair tasks swapped spanners for rifles and fought shoulder to shoulder with the British. Pershing offered three more regiments of engineers and two of artillery, which were gratefully accepted by Field Marshal Haig. At this time there were five American divisions in Europe. The Big Red One was put into reserve for the French First Army, and the other four relieved French divisions in quiet sectors, so that the French could support the sorely pressed British. Between 21 March and 6 April 1918, when the German offensive on the Somme tailed off, 2,200 American soldiers were in action, and another 500 fought on the River Lys between 9 and 27 April.

  During the March retreat by the British army Haig became increasingly concerned that the French were not supporting the BEF sufficiently. Reserves promised by Pétain did not appear, and it began to look as if the French might abandon the agreed priority of maintaining contact between the British and French armies, choosing instead to fall back in order to cover Paris. Haig feared that the British army might collapse if support was not forthcoming, and on 25 March asked that ‘General Foch, or some other determined general who would fight, should be given supreme control of the operations in France’.20 This led to the appointment of Foch as ‘Generalissimo’ of the Allied armies, which is often taken to mean that Foch was now the Allied Supreme Commander in the same way as Eisenhower in the European theatre from 1944. What Haig wanted was unity of command in the military sense, not by way of Lloyd George’s divide-and-rule ploy of the Supreme War Council. In fact Foch’s brief was only to coordinate the actions of French, British and American troops on the Western Front. As a French general he could give orders to Pétain, commanding the French army, but not to Haig, and certainly not to Pershing. Foch could get nothing done except by persuasion and force of personality; nevertheless, this was a great improvement on the previous state of affairs, and did much to counteract Pétain’s fear concerning the fr
agility of the French army and his reluctance to move troops away from defended localities. Even so, Haig had problems with French reinforcements, which were always slow in coming; but as the British army did not collapse, perhaps no great harm was done – except to Haig’s private opinion of the French.

  Haig and Pershing did their best to cooperate with Foch, but there were disagreements, particularly when Haig thought that the British army was being misused to bail out the French, or when Pershing detected attempts to dissipate American units to bolster Allied divisions.

  The first major action by the AEF took place on 28 May 1918. The German offensive that began on 21 March had driven the British Fifth Army back nearly forty miles before being halted at Cantigny, about four miles north-west of Montdidier. Cantigny was held by the French First Army, still with the American 1 Division nominally in reserve – nominally, because the agreement with Pershing was that the French were only to use the American division to take over parts of the line temporarily, to allow French units to rest and refit. In the event, the Americans found themselves holding the front lines when the Germans shelled them heavily on 3 May. Some 15,000 artillery shells, both high-explosive and mustard-gas, rained down on the 18th Infantry Regiment, which had 200 men killed and 600 wounded. The mix of French and American artillery supporting the division replied, and in the next twenty-four hours fired 10,000 shells. The divisional commander, Major General Robert Lee Bullard, now decided that he had had enough of passive defence, and ordered patrols into no man’s land and trench raids on the German positions; he was gleefully encouraged by the French. On 15 May the French asked Bullard to attack and recapture Cantigny. While this was not vital to the war effort, it was a limited objective and would be good practice for the Americans. Bullard asked Pershing, who agreed. The division spent thirteen days planning and rehearsing the attack.

  At 0445 hours on 28 May there was a two-hour artillery bombardment of the German positions, and at 0645 hours the doughboys of 1 Division left their jump-off lines supported by French artillery, twelve French light tanks and French and British aircraft.21 All the objectives were taken, and the Americans beat off three counter-attacks. The French, and perhaps more importantly Pershing, were now convinced that American troops could take part in offensive actions.

  Although the first thrust of the German spring offensive of 1918 had been stopped on the Somme, in April a further attack was launched on the British in Flanders and was only halted at Hazebrouck, twenty-five miles south of Dunkirk. The Germans then made a feint attack against the French, south of the River Oise, from the Chemin des Dames. The‘Kaiser’s offensive’ had made considerable inroads into Allied territory, but had so far failed to split the French and British armies. If this could be achieved, the French would move to defend Paris while the British would see their priority as being the Channel ports; the two Allied armies would diverge even further, and could be dealt with one after the other. The attack south of the Oise was designed to force the Allies to move their reserves south, and by 30 May the Germans had reached Château-Thierry, only fifty miles from Paris. Field Marshal Haig was less than happy about the French conduct of the defence – he had sent them three British divisions that had been mishandled and virtually destroyed. Four French divisions had been badly knocked about, and thirty-five other French infantry divisions and six cavalry divisions were scattered, with the French XVIII Corps falling back in disorder. General Foch, coordinating Allied operations, knewthat the German advance here was a feint – but now it looked as if the feint was turning into a success. Foch appealed to Pershing for help.

  While all this was going on Pershing was in the British sector, visiting army schools and units attached to the British for training. Amongst the five American divisions in the area was the regular 3 Division. The men were spread all over the place with different British units, but the infantry – 17,000 men – were all in one place and were the nearest Americans to Château-Thierry. Pershing agreed with Foch that these infantrymen could be put into position behind the French to bolster them up.

  Château-Thierry sits on the north bank of the River Marne. To the north of the town is a range of hills, and the old chateau itself dominates the town. At about 1700 hours on 31May the first contingent of American infantry – Lieutenant John T. Bissell and fourteen men of the 7th (Motorised) Machine Gun Battalion – came up from the south and approached the bridge leading into the town across the Marne. They met a scene of utter chaos. The Germans were on the hills above and confused fighting was going on within the town. The roads leading south were clogged with retreating soldiers, stragglers and civilians trying to haul their possessions away from the advancing Germans. Bissell left his vehicles short of the bridge and, with his two Hotchkiss guns, crossed the bridge and disappeared into the narrow streets. The rest of the battalion were close behind: there was no question of their bolstering up the front line – they were the front line.

  Halting on the Marne, the battalion executive officer placed eight machine guns to cover the road bridge, and nine to cover the railway bridge 500 yards upstream(to the east). By last light on that day the Commanding Officer, Major James G. Taylor, had arrived, and by midnight all guns were in place.22 The crews dug three alternative positions for each gun team, and another that was ‘secret’ and known only to the crew. Unfortunately all these positions, including the ‘secret’ ones, could be seen by the Germans from the heights. During the next day, 1 June, the French withdrew from the town as the rest of the US infantry trickled in and took up defensive positions along the south bank of the Marne. There was no sign of Lieutenant Bissell and his band.

  The troops that had been holding Château-Thierry were from a Senegalese colonial division. The Senegalese were famous as looters, information that had not percolated down to the Americans; as the French troops left, heading south, they helped themselves to the contents of the Americans’ vehicles and packs that had been deposited along the road. At 2200 hours on 1 June the Germans reached the north bank of the river, and the last French troops withdrew. As they were halfway across the bridge the French engineers blew it up, sending most of the rearguard to kingdom come. Next day nothing very much happened – the Germans had been instructed to halt on the Marne – but that night Lieutenant Cobbey, of the machine-gun battalion, heard his name called from the opposite bank. He crossed by the railway bridge, which had been blown but not entirely demolished, and found Lieutenant Bissell and thirteen men. He had lost both his guns and one man, but had done well to get anyone at all out of the shambles that was now Château-Thierry. On the same night Lieutenant Flannery heard moaning from the north bank. With the unthinking courage of the young and inexperienced, Flannery stripped off all his clothes, tied his Colt revolver on top of his head with a bandanna, and swam across the river. He found a wounded French soldier, whom he brought back to the American bank. He later received the French Croix de Guerre for his action.

  The Americans were now spread along the south bank of the Marne, and were mixed in with French units and generally messed about until mid-June. Then the rest of 3 Division arrived and they were given their own sector, about seven miles of the south bank of the Marne running from Château-Thierry to Varennes. The Americans had arrived just in time and in just sufficient numbers to dissuade the local German commanders from exceeding their orders and pushing on over the Marne. West of Château-Thierry the Marne turns south-south-west for about six miles before once more flowing westwards, and so to the west of the town the Germans were still pressing on to reach the river. While 3 Division were placing themselves as the cork in the bottle of Château-Thierry, more pleas for help from the French persuaded Pershing to agree to the US 2 Division being placed behind the French to the west of the town. Probably the most experienced division in the American army at that time, 2 Division had one regular army brigade and one Marine Corps brigade. The division left Paris on 30 May in stifling heat and moved to Meaux by train in the traditional French cattle wagons. From Meaux t
o La Ferté-sous-Jouarre the men and their kit were transported by a twelve-mile column of French lorries driven by Indo-Chinese who spoke not a word of any familiar language. The division spent the night in La Ferté, where the Marines found a brandy distillery. With a generosity not normally found between leathernecks and doughboys, the Marines shared their discovery with the army, and the entire division completed a jolly evening by looting the town.23 It was a very cheerful division that marched the six miles to Montreuilaux-Lions next morning; it was well provided with trussed-up chickens, and many soldiers sported booty in the formof ladies’ hats. On 1 June the division, under command of the French XXI Corps, began to take up an eleven-mile front astride the Paris road, east of Coupru and behind the French. A German attack on 2 June broke through the French, but ran out of steam and withdrew when it hit the American front. The French had, however, lost Belleau Wood. By 4 June the US 2 Division were all in place but the situation was confused, not least because the French had neglected to issue the Americans with any maps. Disorganised French units were retreating through the Americans, and nobody seemed to know where German or French positions were. A French aviator saw troops on the ground running back and thought they were Americans. The French Corps Commander, General Degoutte, telephoned Colonel Wendell C. Neville, commanding the US Marine Corps Brigade, to ask why his men were withdrawing. Neville in turn telephoned Major Thomas Holcomb, Commanding Officer 6th Marines, the forward battalion, and received the reply, ‘When I do any running it will be in the opposite direction. Nothing doing in the fall-back business.’ Colonel Neville’s message to General Degoutte has gone down in Marine Corps legend: ‘Retreat? Hell – we only just got here.’