by G. J. Meyer
The Germans were dumbfounded. What left them flat-footed was the failure of the British to continue advancing until they were thinned out, tired, at the end of their lines of supply and vulnerable. Thanks to his new tactics, which would be called Bite and Hold, Plumer had captured a valuable piece of ground in a matter of minutes at little cost in lives. A few days later, as soon as he could move his artillery forward, he did the same thing again. And then again. It began to seem possible that the Second Army was going to nibble its way, a mile or two at a time, all the way to the Rhine. Ludendorff could find no answer except to abandon defense in depth, make his front line strong again, and accept the resulting casualties. His reversion to traditional tactics, and atrociously heavy rains heralding the approach of winter, finally brought Plumer to a stop.
The verdict was unanimous
“Everyone says the same” of the Americans, the philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin reported. “They’re first rate troops.”
But Bite and Hold was no panacea, either. The thing that made it unanswerable against a foe using defense in depth—its acceptance of severely limited gains—made it utterly unsuitable as a way of starting a major offensive. For that the Hutier Method, or something like it, was necessary. The great chess game of infantry and artillery, aircraft and gas, was growing more complicated by the month. The range of options available to armies taking the offensive and those on the defense was growing also, and making it ever more difficult for the generals to out-think one another.
Ludendorff in any case had been shown that defense in depth didn’t work as well as he needed it to work, while his new offensive system worked beautifully wherever it was tried. This helped settle the question of whether the Germans should take the offensive when the spring of 1918 arrived.
Pershing was looking on, from his headquarters in Lorraine, and becoming disdainful of his French and British counterparts. He was convinced that the war could be won only by movement and that Pétain and Haig and the other Allied commanders had become too accepting of stalemate, too intimidated by the machine gun.
With the doughboys, it was going to be different. Pershing was training them in marksmanship, making them sharpshooters. It was his expectation—in hindsight astoundingly naïve—that when his troops went into action, rifles at the ready, they would force the Germans out of their bunkers, restore the war of movement that had been brought to a bloody halt in 1914, and so bring the conflict to an end.
It does not appear to have occurred to Pershing that the Allied generals wanted movement, too, and always had. Every one of the great and tragic offensives of the preceding three years had been an attempt to restore movement, to force the Germans into the open and get back to the glorious sweeping warfare of Marlborough and Bonaparte and Moltke, the kind that men on horseback could win. And every attempt had failed because men attacking with rifles could never be a match for men firing machine guns through slots in concrete boxes.
Pershing had things to learn, clearly.
Chapter 16
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The Last Roll of the Iron Dice
WE DON’T KNOW how well Black Jack Pershing slept on the night of Wednesday, March 27, 1918, but it would not come as a surprise to learn that he slept hardly at all. He had gone to bed after an experience he would not soon forget—a meeting of the Allies’ recently created Supreme War Council at which he had found himself in solitary conflict with the president of France, the prime ministers of France and Britain, and both nations’ top military commanders. That was formidable opposition for a lone American soldier who had never been in a major or truly modern war and who, until less than a year earlier, had never commanded a unit as big as a division.
When he rose on Thursday morning, he was faced with the fact that none of the previous day’s quarrels had been resolved. Clemenceau and Lloyd George, and Generals Foch, Pétain, and Haig, had all refused to agree to his plans for the American Expeditionary Force.
This would have been distressing under any circumstances. But it was happening under the worst of circumstances, in the midst of the most terrifying crisis to have befallen the Allies since the German drive on Paris in the summer of 1914. A week earlier, just before five A.M. on the cold foggy morning of Thursday, March 21, 6,400 pieces of German artillery had erupted in unison along forty miles of front east of the old Somme killing ground, from Arras on the north past St. Quentin to the south. After a four-and-a-half-hour barrage in which torrents of high explosives alternated with shrapnel, poison gas, and long-range machine gun fire, a million German soldiers organized into three armies had begun their advance. Storm troopers trained in the Hutier Method took the lead, routing those British and French troops who had survived the barrage. With astonishing speed they demolished one British army and put two others to flight.
This was the start of Operation Michael (originally called Saint Michael, though the prefix was somehow discarded on the way to launch), the first of the series of do-or-die offensives that Erich Ludendorff had been preparing all winter. In the next two weeks it would inflict more than 160,000 casualties on the British and 70,000 on the French. (These totals include 90,000 men taken prisoner, an indication of the extent to which many Allied divisions had simply fallen apart.) Before it was over, the Germans would capture more than a thousand artillery pieces and mountains of desperately needed supplies and take possession of twelve hundred square miles of territory.
They would do so at enormous cost to themselves, hoping in the face of immense odds to force the war to a conclusion before the American horn of plenty made the defeat of the Allies impossible. “If the iron dice roll,” Chancellor Bethmann had said when war seemed inescapable in the summer of 1914, “may God help us.” Bethmann was gone now, and Ludendorff was throwing the iron dice for what he knew must be the last time. Without the Americans, he might have stood on the defensive and allowed the Allies to grind away until they had nothing left. With the Americans in the picture, that option did not exist.
Pershing’s position was excruciating because the AEF now included a quarter of a million men, among them all the foot soldiers and specialists needed to form six of the double-size American divisions. The rate at which still more were arriving would soon reach a quarter of a million a month. Many had been training for half a year or more, yet few had seen any action except what little had come their way as a result of brief postings in quiet sectors of the front. There had been scattered bursts of hard fighting, with scores of doughboys killed and wounded by German raiding parties and hundreds taken prisoner. But even now, at the peak of Operation Michael, the AEF remained an army in waiting. Nine months after a battalion of the American First Division marched to loud cheers through the streets of Paris, U.S. casualties did not yet total one thousand. With the exception of the Big Red One, Pershing still did not consider any of his divisions ready for action.
This was maddeningly frustrating for the Allies. Their impatience had worsened as the AEF grew steadily bigger and better trained and Pershing, with the Wilson administration’s support, continued to refuse to put it into action in any significant way or to allow the British or French to have any of its troops. Operation Michael turned frustration into boiling anger. Pershing’s stubborn refusals seemed inexplicable and intolerable.
This is what had made the March 27 meeting so difficult. Pershing was outranked by everyone there, he understood how desperate the situation was, and yet he remained convinced that the honor of the U.S. Army, the part that the army and the American nation were going to play in this epic drama, required that the AEF be held together, intact, until it was ready to take the field as a distinct and formidable force. That was what President Wilson wanted, too. Anything less would consign the United States to a supporting role in the war.
The Supreme War Council had been established at Lloyd George’s urging in November 1917, after the rout of the Italians at Caporetto. Its purpose was to correct a chronic lack of coordination among the Allied armies on the Weste
rn and Italian fronts, but in four months it had accomplished essentially nothing. Its only serious initiative, the attempted creation of a common reserve, came to nothing when both Haig and Pétain refused to contribute meaningful numbers of troops. But the prospect of hanging serves to concentrate the mind, as Dr. Johnson observed, and the shocking success of Operation Michael focused all the minds in the Allied leadership. It demonstrated just how urgently cooperation was needed.
The first day of the council’s March meeting brought an apparently modest change that would have far-reaching consequences. It happened when Sir Douglas Haig, whose troops were at that moment battling to keep the Germans out of the crucial communications center of Amiens near the point where the French and British sectors of the front connected, said he needed help. His French counterpart, General Pétain, said he had no help to offer, his troops being fully engaged. When Foch injected himself into the discussion, declaring that help had to be provided because the loss of Amiens would be catastrophic, Haig said he was prepared to do whatever Foch advised.
This was an about-face on Haig’s part, testimony to how nearly hopeless he believed his situation to be. His unwillingness to take orders or even accept guidance from the French had long been an impassable obstacle to unified or even coordinated operations. His offer was hungrily taken up by Lloyd George and Clemenceau, who immediately sensed an opportunity. In short order, it led to a resolution making Foch responsible for “the coordination of the action of the Allied Armies on the Western Front.” Just what this meant remained to be worked out. Most of those present understood that, considering the plight of the Allied armies and Foch’s aggressiveness and powerful will, it was likely to mean a great deal.
Ferdinand Foch
As supreme Allied commander, he repeatedly clashed with Pershing.
Pershing had not been present because he was not a member of the Supreme War Council. President Wilson had welcomed the creation of the council but kept it at arm’s length, declining to appoint a political representative on grounds that (as he himself continued to insist) the United States was not one of the Allies but their “associate.” As military representative, he had sent Major General Tasker Bliss, currently the American army’s chief of staff but close to retirement. This appointment was intended not as a rebuke to Pershing but as a way of keeping him free to focus on the AEF. It had been made clear to Bliss that he was to support Pershing and not compete with him, and he almost always did just that.
Bliss was at the March 26 session. When he learned that on the following day Lloyd George was going to resurrect the old question of how to get America’s troops into the fighting, he suggested that Pershing attend. And so Pershing was on hand when, in a conference room in the grandiose Palace of Versailles, Britain’s military representative to the council unveiled an unexpected proposal. Obviously speaking with Lloyd George’s approval, General Sir Henry Rawlinson suggested that thenceforth only American infantry—riflemen and machine-gunners—should be transported to France, and that all such troops should, upon arrival, be assigned to service with the British army. What made this startling was not the British bid for American recruits—Pershing had been rebuffing such suggestions since before coming to France—but the fact that, if adopted, Rawlinson’s proposal would cut off the shipment to France of artillerymen, engineers, transport experts, and the many other kinds of specialists needed for the formation of complete, fully capable divisions.
Pershing did not have to be paranoid to interpret this as a transparent scheme to make the AEF little more than a reservoir of manpower that the British could draw upon to replenish their own fighting units, gradually draining away the very possibility of an independent American army. As he put it later, the British aim was “to put the weight of the Supreme War Council behind the idea of maintaining Allied units by American replacements as a policy.” After voicing his objections, Pershing left the meeting, presumably in high dudgeon. The council’s members thereupon approved Rawlinson’s proposal with modifications that did little to address the AEF commander’s objections.
It happened that Secretary of War Baker was on a visit to France at this time, giving himself a firsthand view of problems he had been struggling with back in Washington, and so was able to inject himself into the dispute. After conferring with Pershing, whose concerns he shared, he cabled President Wilson. He proposed that the United States should accept the Allies’ demand that only infantry should be transported for the time being, but in doing so it should make clear that all American troops “will be under the direction of the Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces and will be assigned for training and use by him in his discretion.” Baker also asked the president to remind the Allies—as he would in fact do—of “the determination of this Government to have its various military forces collected, as speedily as their training and the military situation will permit, into an independent American army.”
Did Pershing feel vindicated by this rather one-sided compromise or defeated by it? Perhaps neither, perhaps both. In any case, something about the situation—perhaps his exposure to the Allied commanders at a time when their armies were in peril, perhaps something said by Secretary Baker—clearly affected his thinking. On the same day that Baker sent his message to the White House, the general summoned his car and ordered his driver to take him to Foch’s headquarters at Clermont-sur-Oise. There he found not only Foch but Pétain, Clemenceau, and other French leaders.
“I have come to tell you,” he said in what must have been barely comprehensible French, “that the American people would consider it a great honor for our troops to be engaged in the present battle. I ask you for this in their name and my own. At this moment there are no other questions but of fighting. Infantry, artillery, aviation, all that we have is yours. Use them as you wish. More will come, in numbers equal to the requirements.”
Pétain and Pershing
The French general supported the American in his conflict with Clemenceau and Foch.
And so the U.S. Army, just days short of the first anniversary of the nation’s declaration of war, at last really entered the fight against Germany. From that moment, every part of the AEF that could be considered at least conditionally ready for combat was at Foch’s disposal. All its units up to and including the division and army corps levels would remain under the command of their American officers, but those officers would, whenever Foch wished, take their orders not from Pershing and his staff but from the commanders of the French armies to which they were assigned. If Pershing’s decision was a wise one in terms of his own reputation—he could hardly have escaped condemnation if he had continued to keep his troops out of action at this time of crisis—it was nonetheless generous and courageous. It put in jeopardy his own highest aspirations, and over the next four months it would require him to remain on the sidelines as tens of thousands of his troops, under not his orders but those of the Allied commanders, would help turn the war around. Some of those troops would find themselves in the kind of war of movement that had always been one of Pershing’s goals, but not because of anything he, or they, had done.
Operation Michael came to a halt after little more than a week, not so much because the defenders stopped it as because it ran out of momentum, as all such offensives must do. In the speed of their advance the attackers had outrun their logistical support, and in due course they were left as exhausted as the British and French, with no clear sense of what to do next. One difficulty was that, finding themselves in possession of Allied stores of food and liquor, half-starved German troops would stop to gorge themselves and get wildly drunk. Another was the arrival in Europe of what would be called the Spanish Influenza, which put thousands of Ludendorff’s best troops more lastingly out of action.
It was not obvious that Operation Michael had been a success in any strategically significant sense. Ludendorff’s objective had been to destroy the British armies or, an equally satisfactory result, force them to withdraw across the Channel,
leaving the French unsupported and too vulnerable not to agree to talks. Therefore he would have preferred to launch his opening offensive up north in Flanders, where most of Haig’s divisions had spent the winter recuperating from the ordeal of Passchendaele. But there was too much danger of Flanders still being a sea of mud in March. In attacking near the Somme instead, Ludendorff expected his right wing to break through more decisively than the center or left, then turn north toward Flanders. This would have forced the British to move troops southward to meet them, thereby weakening them around the Channel ports through which ran their lifeline to England.
But not one major campaign had ever gone according to plan on the Western Front, and Operation Michael failed to break the pattern. It was not Ludendorff’s right wing that broke through most decisively but the left, under Hutier, whose expected role had been to protect the offensive’s southern flank. Faced with this unexpected development, and with the question of where to insert his reserves, Ludendorff decided to follow one of the oldest maxims of warfare: he would reinforce success, rather than put more muscle into the right wing in the hope that it could then begin to advance more speedily. When the British threw together a new front and it proved stable, the Germans found themselves in a deeply ambiguous position. They had neither driven a wedge between the French and the British nor weakened the British in Flanders.
Ludendorff had considered several possible locations for Operation Michael. A best answer not being obvious, he had ordered the generals commanding several sectors—not only the Somme and Flanders but Champagne and the area around Verdun—to make ready. This created a rumble of activity all up and down the front, so that although it became obvious to the Allies that something big must be coming, they were unable to figure out where. The outlook was little less uncertain in early April, after Operation Michael burned itself out. The Allies could only brace themselves for the next blow, trying to be prepared for it wherever it might fall. Their morale was not high. After the general collapse of March 21, they had limited faith in their ability to deal with whatever was coming.