The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  Former presidents Roosevelt and Taft were among the prominent Americans who decried the murder and the trial’s result. Some newspapers did likewise, though even they seemed reluctant to hold the culprits to account. The Washington Post, after acknowledging that the lynching had to be classified among the “excesses” of “true Americanism,” added that “it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country.” President Wilson remained long silent. Not until late July did he issue a statement about lynching, and even then he may have been prompted mainly by the knowledge that the Prager killing—which he did not mention—was being used by the German government in its domestic propaganda. The war appears to have made lynching a subject of concern for the president in much the same way that it made woman suffrage tolerable to him: as a matter of wartime necessity.

  The tone of American public life was becoming as dark as the president’s rhetoric. Vice President Marshall, who a year earlier had been unable to muster a shred of enthusiasm for intervention, was now proudly proposing that Americans “not heartily in support of the Government in this crisis” should be deprived of their citizenship and property. John Sharp Williams, a Democrat from Mississippi, spoke for most of his Senate colleagues in declaring that “those who are not with us are against us, and let them take their medicine; and if the law does not give them their medicine, the people will.” Such open invitations to mob justice were not unusual and not often criticized. It has been estimated that some thirty-five Americans lost their lives in civil disturbances related to the war in the first half of 1918.

  A member of the House of Representatives entered into the Congressional Record a list of “crimes committed by German sympathizers against our government.” It was a curious hodgepodge, ranging from the sale in Kansas of plaster containing tetanus bacilli to the manufacture in Texas of poison for use by Germans in Mexico and the disabling of mules in Washington State. Also listed were strikes that factory owners and managers blamed on German agents. The dubious character of many such allegations did little to diminish their impact.

  They had to compete for headlines, however, with the fact that on April 9, just days after the petering-out of Operation Michael, the Germans attacked again. This time there was no strategic subtlety. Ludendorff was going for his ultimate objective, to clear the British out of Flanders. He was doing so with two armies, and again everything went brilliantly from the start.

  Background

  ____

  The War of the Air—and of the Future

  The least bitter irony of the Great War is that its most modern dimension, the war of the air, gave it a dash of old-fashioned military romance and flair that was otherwise almost entirely lacking.

  Hard as they tried, until the summer of 1918 the Allied propagandists found it impossible to wring much romance out of the war on the ground. Nor was it easy to find heroes there, except in the unhelpful sense that everyone who endured it might be considered a hero. Courage had nothing to do with whether an enemy shell blew you to bits as you huddled in the mud. It was not likely to save you from being cut in half by machine-gun fire when the whistles blew for an attack.

  How different it was when you looked to the sky! Men in flimsy flying machines, up among the clouds, engaged in single combat like knights of old. Bravery mattered up there, and skill could make all the difference. A touch of chivalry was permissible—expected, even. It was all so thrilling, so different from the stink and squalor of the trenches, that even enemy pilots could be admired. (But who in London or Paris could have imagined that Manfred von Richthofen, the fearsome Red Baron, was all of twenty-three years old when he scored his first kill, or that he wrote to his mother daily?)

  American pilots, too, became popular heroes when their turn came. Eddie Rickenbacker of Columbus, Ohio, was the most famous, a publicist’s dream. A race car driver before the war, he went to France as an enlisted man in 1917, where he managed to talk himself into pilot training in spite of having only a seventh-grade education. By the time the war ended he was a captain and the top American ace with twenty-six kills to his credit. Stories like his served as an antidote to the infantry’s appalling casualty lists.

  Rickenbacker himself called a much younger American, Frank Luke, “the most daring aviator and greatest fighter pilot of the entire war.” Nineteen years old at the time of America’s intervention, Luke joined the aviation sector of the Army Signal Corps and after pilot training was sent to France as a member of one of the AEF’s newly formed aero squadrons. He chose as his specialty the dangerous job of attacking German observation balloons, always heavily defended by ground artillery. In the last eight days of his life, in September 1918, he shot down fourteen balloons and four airplanes. Flying low after destroying his last three balloons, he was struck in the chest by a machine gun round fired downward at him from a hilltop. Upon crash-landing, he drew a pistol and prepared to fight rather than be taken prisoner, but died of his wound. A posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor was presented to his parents, German immigrants who had settled in Arizona.

  Luke’s first distinction had been to live long enough to die in combat. Of the 681 members of the U.S. Air Service killed during the war, almost three-fourths died in training accidents, 263 in the United States and 203 in Europe. Most of the remaining fourth perished in combat.

  The glory won by Rickenbacker, Luke, and their fellow American aces helped to obscure the awkward fact that they were flying French-built aircraft. What made it awkward was the prodigious sums spent on the creation of an American-made air fleet and the paucity of the result. The war would end with a billion dollars spent and not a single fighter plane of American manufacture going into action. But the headline-making scandal that this was turned into in Washington, and the howls of outrage emitted by members of Congress, were almost entirely bogus. The problem was less one of mismanagement, never mind of corruption, than of the Wilson administration promising too much as it set out to accomplish the almost-impossible.

  Though the world’s first heavier-than-air flying machine had been built by the Wright brothers of Dayton, Ohio, by the start of the war the United States was far behind Europe—behind France especially—in aviation technology. A grand total of forty-nine airplanes were built in the United States in 1914. In the years immediately following, even as the contest for air superiority led the Entente and the Central Powers to make astonishing advances and develop aircraft of an ever-growing number of types, American aviation remained barely substantial enough to be considered an industry. The nation’s aircraft manufacturers, numbering not much more than a dozen, were in some cases little more than hobby shop operations.

  But then, with the country at war and France’s Prime Minister Ribot demanding tens of thousands of aircraft, engines, and pilots, Congress and the administration appear to have decided that whatever could be imagined could be achieved. The War Department’s Technology Board recommended giving Ribot an affirmative response, and though he was not promised all he asked for, he was promised much. The Committee on Public Information told the press that aircraft were going to be produced by the scores of thousands, and as War Secretary Baker’s requests for aircraft program funding approached the billion-dollar mark, he continued to get every penny he requested.

  As must always happen, reality finally showed its frowning face. Hard questions could not be indefinitely ignored. What kinds of aircraft were needed, actually? Who in the United States was capable of designing them? Of building them? Of flying them? There were no easy answers, not even any hard but satisfactory answers, and backpedaling began on a massive scale. The administration issued a clarification: only 22,000 American-made planes could be in France and ready for action by July 1918. Only 22,000. No one in the government, evidently, knew enough about aircraft production to understand that even this number was utterly unachievable.

  The new Aircraft Production Board introduced a measure of sanity into the proceedings. Abandoning the idea of designing new aircraft
from scratch, it deployed engineers and manufacturing professionals to Europe to select a manageably small number of state-of-the-art Allied planes for production in the United States. In July four choices were announced: two fighters, one British and one French; a British day bomber and observation plane; and an Italian night bomber. Work began immediately on getting them into production. And almost as immediately it broke down, mainly as a result of trying to do too much more quickly than was feasible.

  Ultimately there were four investigations, all of them tangled in enmity and intrigue. One was conducted by the Senate, another by the House of Representatives. The third was an inquiry that the administration itself was pressured into launching. For reasons of credibility, and to President Wilson’s annoyance, it was put under the direction of the 1916 Republican presidential candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, who had made his reputation exposing utilities corruption in New York State. Still another, functioning at times on the level of comic opera, was headed by the sculptor and amateur aviation buff Gutzon Borglum, who would later become famous by carving the faces of four presidents (Wilson not among them) into the side of Mount Rushmore.

  While these investigations were in process, the administration created a Bureau of Military Aeronautics and a Bureau of Aircraft Production and made both independent of the Signal Corps. This eased some of the worst bureaucratic problems, but unified command of all aviation programs was not achieved while the war lasted. Hughes, in reporting his findings in October 1918, said he had found evidence of misconduct by a number of private contractors but only one incident involving a government employee. By that time, with the end of the war at hand, the issue was no longer generating much political heat.

  Though the aircraft program never developed into a true scandal, it also never came close to meeting expectations. The only American-built plane to see action was the D-4 day bomber, originally developed by De Havilland of Britain. Its arrival in France was delayed for months by the agreement to ship combat troops only during the Western Front crisis of the summer of 1918. By August, when the first American D-4s were at the front at last, they had been rendered obsolescent by the Allies’ ongoing introduction of newer, better designs. Aviation technology was so simple in those days that experienced engineers could often have new ideas in the air in a matter of weeks.

  American manufacturers learned just how difficult it was to mass-produce airplanes at a rapid rate while keeping abreast of the latest innovations. More than fourteen hundred French Nieuports and SPADs were in service with the AEF by war’s end, and the pilots to fly them had been trained, most of them, at airfields scattered across France. Pershing’s original goal had been to build an AEF Air Service of fifty-nine combat squadrons, each including about a dozen and a half planes. This was increased to 260 squadrons when optimism was at its height, then pared back to 202. All these numbers turned out to be fantasies. By November 1918 the AEF had forty-five squadrons available for action. Of their 740 aircraft, exactly one dozen had been built in the States.

  The situation would have improved sharply if—as everyone assumed early in 1918—the war had continued into 1919. When the Armistice went into effect, 270 American-built aircraft were being used for pilot training in France, 323 were in supply depots awaiting assignment, 415 were in transit, and more than 2,000 were ready for shipment overseas. American manufacturers had produced more than 3,500 combat aircraft and more than 6,000 trainers. The pipeline to Europe was full to bursting at last. If it all happened too late, it was an impressive achievement all the same.

  By the autumn of 1918 the AEF was engaging in air warfare on a scale, and at a level of sophistication, that would have been unimaginable a few years earlier. Chivalric single combat was giving way to complex operations in which masses of aircraft flew in unison and in careful coordination with the forces on the ground. A total of 1,481 aircraft took part in the first major American offensive, at St. Mihiel. Though half of them were flown by French pilots and 130 by British, strategy and command were in American hands. Only 842 planes were available for the much bigger Meuse-Argonne offensive, but that was sufficient for a numerical advantage over the Germans of nearly two to one and a full array of tactics from bombing behind enemy lines to the strafing of frontline troops.

  The United States ended the war an incipient major power in military aviation, vastly ahead of where it had been a year and a half earlier. Starting with almost nothing, it had learned how to mass-produce military aircraft and had turned tens of thousands of foot soldiers and civilians into pilots. In France the commanders of Pershing’s Air Service, and of the AEF generally, had seen the potential of aerial warfare in operations large and small. When they returned home, they carried with them the knowledge that when the next war came, aviation was going to be at the heart of it.

  Chapter 17

  ____

  Deadlocked No More

  BY THE END, Ludendorff had thrown ninety German divisions into Operation Michael. Many were so badly mauled in the later stages of the offensive that they were no longer effective fighting units. Many more were simply exhausted, used up, and in urgent need of rest and refitting.

  The wise thing, at that point, might have been to put aside all plans for further offensive action. The next step was supposed to have been a pair of massive attacks—St. George One and St. George Two—in which thirty divisions were to hit the British in Flanders and force them to surrender or flee to England. But now, in the aftermath of Operation Michael, Ludendorff had only eleven assault divisions intact and available for use. St. George One had to be abandoned. St. George Two was reduced to such an extent that it was renamed Georgette.

  The objective was still the expulsion of the British Expeditionary Force from the Western Front. Just how this was to be accomplished was now less clear than it had been earlier. Asked what was to happen when Georgette achieved a breakthrough, Ludendorff shrugged. “We make a hole, and the rest will take care of itself,” he said. “That’s how we did it in Russia.” But Flanders was not Russia, the BEF was not the Russian army, and Ludendorff was no longer the man he had been earlier in the war. Something more than wishful thinking was required, and Ludendorff was no longer supplying it with his old firmness. He was a chronically lonely man, with no talent for relaxing or for making or keeping friends, and he had been under a crushing burden of responsibility for more than three years. In the prewar years, his austere life had been brightened by marriage to a divorcée with three young sons whom Ludendorff came to love. Two of those boys were dead now, killed in action. He would slip off to visit the grave of one of them, a pilot shot down not far distant from his headquarters, and was seen weeping in his office.

  He had lost his resilience. In its place was a fixation—entirely justified—on the relentless growth of the American Expeditionary Force, on what was certain to happen when all those hundreds of thousands of fresh troops entered the fight, and the need to bring the war to a conclusion before that happened. And so on April 9 Georgette was launched. As with Michael, it went exactly according to plan at first, with two armies advancing rapidly on a thirty-mile front. They forced the British back ten miles, then twenty, and appeared to be on the verge of a rout. For the British, the situation became so dire that Douglas Haig, a man with little gift for dramatic utterance, sent out a message that would become one of the most famous of the war. “Every position must be held to the last man,” he said. “There must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one must fight on to the end. The safety of our home and the freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.”

  This was hyperbole. The BEF was in jeopardy, but there was no threat to its homeland. Even if the Germans had driven Haig and his armies back across the Channel—even if the BEF had been annihilated—the Germans would have been little more capable of invading England than of invading Mars. And contrary to Haig’s heroic words, a good many positions would be abandoned
, a good many withdrawals ordered, before it was all over. But in the end the British line did not break. With every mile the Germans advanced their own losses mounted, their momentum slowed, and they grew more distant from their sources of supply. When they came to a system of canals and found the British dug in on the other side, Georgette, too, was at an end. Strategically it was as empty as Michael.

  By this time General Pétain, commander of the French armies, was beginning to make use of the AEF troops that Pershing had put at his disposal. He moved the First Division, Pershing’s pride, out of the quiet Ansauville sector at the southern edge of the Germans’ big St. Mihiel salient south of Verdun. He shifted it westward to Montdidier, a potential hot spot at the point where Operation Michael had penetrated deepest before running down. There the Big Red One became, in effect, part of the French Fifth Army. Into its former slot at Ansauville went the Twenty-Sixth Division, called the Yankee Division because it was made up of New England National Guardsmen; Pershing had offered it to Pétain in spite of regarding it as not yet adequately trained. As a result of this shift, ironically, the Twenty-Sixth rather than the First became the first American division to fight a bona fide battle nose to nose with first-rate German troops.

  A live-and-let-live attitude had long prevailed in the Ansauville sector, part of the hilly and wooded St. Mihiel salient that the Germans had captured in 1914 and fortified heavily. The French, seeing no point in trying to take it, used it as a place where battered units could rest and recuperate. The Germans, for their part, saw no point in trying to expand the salient and were content to stand on the defensive. It was in this spirit that Pétain had inserted the American First Division there, then the even greener Twenty-Sixth. But during its time at Ansauville, the First had refused to follow the French example. It was much more aggressive, and its troops began learning the dangerous game of raiding enemy positions under cover of night. Doing so cost 143 American lives, with another 403 wounded, during the First Division’s two months at Ansauville.