by G. J. Meyer
The war’s end would be followed, with mysterious promptitude, by the end of a pandemic that some doctors had thought might not end until the human race was wiped out. In the century since, researchers have been trying, despite the absence of satisfactory records almost everywhere, to calculate how many died. In the 1920s the agreed-upon answer was somewhat in excess of twenty million. Since then the estimates have continued to rise, and for more than a half century there has been general agreement that the total could be in the neighborhood of fifty million, possibly even a hundred million.
It is likewise agreed that by early 1919 some 675,000 Americans were dead who would have been alive if not for the pandemic. That looks almost negligible compared with the more than twenty million believed to have died in India, but it is thirteen times the number of doughboys who lost their lives fighting.
Chapter 18
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The Tide Turns
BY LATE JULY 1918 it becomes fair to apply the word desperate to the German situation on the Western Front and in the war generally. Between late March and the end of May, Erich Ludendorff had launched three of the biggest offensives of the war. All three had begun by shattering the Allied defenses, putting the British and French to flight, and wrecking a good many of their best divisions. But they had yielded nothing but vast expanses of territory of dubious strategic value, and had left the attackers exhausted, many of their best divisions in tatters. German casualties would ultimately total a staggering one million, including almost one hundred thousand dead. The superiority in numbers that they had enjoyed at the start of Operation Michael was gone. And the losses were concentrated among the elite young storm troopers who were all that remained of the cream of the German armies. Such men were no longer replaceable. Meanwhile the Allies were being reinforced with fresh troops from the United States at a rate of more than a quarter of a million monthly—more than three hundred thousand in July alone.
There were signs of a breakdown of discipline in the German ranks. The men, much like their families back home, were subsisting on little more than starvation rations, drinking coffee made from acorns and eating bread containing sawdust and sausages made of horse and rabbit flesh. They made cigarettes from the leaves of beech trees. The demands of the spring offensives made it impossible to rotate troops to allow them to rest and refit by turns, and the high command was angered by reports of men returning from home leave and “spreading high treason and incitement of disobedience.” Soldiers were displaying an increasing inclination to surrender, and there were echoes of the French mutinies of the previous year. Bands of deserters roamed the countryside behind the front lines, attacking supply trains and depots. In July, 375,000 troops would be out of action because of influenza.
On the other side, spirits were beginning to rise. Even the English officer Siegfried Sassoon was back on duty, having been discharged from the Craiglockhart mental hospital after changing his mind not about the legitimacy of the war, but about his own refusal to join his comrades. After a period in Palestine he was returned to the Western Front—where, almost immediately and with wild irony, he was shot in the head by a British soldier who mistook him for a German. The wound did no permanent damage, but Sassoon would spend the rest of the war recovering.
The Germans’ most pressing Western Front problem was the failure of their third offensive to capture the city of Reims with its crucial railway connections. This meant that they had only a single rail line, one leading southward out of recently captured Soissons, with which to send troops and supplies into the huge new salient that extended all the way to the Marne. Large French forces were near enough to threaten Soissons. If they retook it, the German forces to the south would be cut off and trapped. On June 9 an army commanded by Oskar von Hutier had begun an attack at the River Matz west of Soissons, its purpose being to relieve pressure on the city and widen the mouth of the Marne salient at its western end. It was another impressive early success, as the Germans pushed the French back six miles on the first day and took eight thousand prisoners. On June 11, however, a ferocious counterattack by General Charles Mangin’s Tenth French Army caught Hutier’s advancing troops in the flank and exposed on open ground. The Germans were thrown back so violently that the offensive had to be brought to an end. The Marne salient remained dangerously vulnerable.
Even as the Germans’ problems mounted and their prospects darkened, the Wilson administration’s grip on wartime America was growing subtly weaker. Congressmen’s questions about the administration’s management of aircraft production and other programs, and the White House’s disinclination to share information, led to hearings. President Wilson was fortunate to have as spokesman Secretary of War Baker, who when called to testify displayed good humor, calm self-confidence, and an obvious wish to cooperate. A diminutive, unthreatening figure, Baker smoked one cigar after another through days of harsh grilling, disgorging mind-numbing volumes of statistics. Ultimately he persuaded all but the president’s most determined enemies that the War Department’s management had rarely been less than thorough and conscientious.
The mere fact that Congress regarded hearings as necessary, however, had a corrosive effect on the public’s confidence in the administration. And though the Justice Department was by now devoted almost entirely to monitoring the acts and opinions of the citizenry and discouraging dissent, it was increasingly the target of complaints, in the press and elsewhere, that it should have been more aggressive in dealing with the supposedly disloyal.
With Clemenceau of France asking for a hundred American divisions, Theodore Roosevelt demanding an army of ten million men, and President Wilson promising “force without stint or limit,” the Selective Service System’s manpower needs threatened to outstrip the supply made available by the draft registration of 1917. In June 1918 there was a second registration drive, to bring into the system those who had become twenty-one in the preceding year. A third became necessary when, in August, Congress made all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five subject to conscription. This added thirteen million names to the Selective Service roster. It was beginning to seem possible that the army would take all of them.
The War Department announced that, with the start of the 1918–19 school year, all qualified male students would be made privates in the army, receiving compulsory military training as a supplement to their other studies and wearing uniforms. This brought thousands of the nation’s best-educated young men into the manpower pipeline—and, with a fine irony, into the administration’s crusade to rid the world of militarism.
Those young Americans already in France were being drawn deeper into the fighting and were having unexpected experiences along the way. Among the first illusions to be shattered had to do with an idealized France and its delightful females. What the doughboys found along the Western Front was a landscape stripped of vegetation, pocked with shell holes from horizon to horizon, covered with the detritus of war, and literally stinking of death. One new arrival described it this way: “The whole country is littered with rubbish or as we call it salvage—guns and ammunition, trench mortars, equipment and so on—all the litter of war: tanks derelict and desolate by the roadside, and lorries upside down.” The only women to be seen, a doughboy wrote, “were haggard and emaciated with hardship,” many of them dressed in mourning. The Americans generally got along well with the French troops with whom they served, even though the pay an ordinary doughboy could draw while in France—thirty dollars a month—was ten times that of a French private.
Relations between Americans and the British “tommies” who were often their instructors in training, by contrast, tended to be disagreeable. “Our men seemed to take at once a violent dislike for everything that was British,” an American battalion commander wrote. “It is difficult to analyze the reasons for this first impression. It was doubtless due in large part to the fact that the British Tommy had been at the game a long time and he assumed a cocksure attitude toward everything that came his way;
perhaps to the fact that most of the Britishers with whom the men came in contact were old soldiers who had seen service and had been wounded in the fighting line and sent back to work in and about the camp, and they looked with some contempt on these striplings who had come in to win the war. Perhaps it was due to the fact that on the surface the average Britisher is not after all a very lovable person, especially on first acquaintance. At any rate our men did not like the British.”
The French didn’t much like the British, either, perhaps especially at the highest levels of command. No doubt it was fortunate that, as American divisions went into action, they most often did so jointly with French forces and under overall French command. If the worn-down and often cynical French were not very impressed with the battlefield savvy of the newcomers from across the sea, they were often in awe of the eagerness and courage with which the doughboys would throw themselves into danger.
Weeks of relative quiet in most sectors of the front—a quiet resulting from the Germans’ need to reposition their troops and guns and shift their lines of supply—ended on July 8 with the launching of Ludendorff’s next offensive. The aim this time was to expand the salient that Operation Michael had created at Noyon-Montdidier, merge it with the Marne salient, and so add a threat to Paris from the north to the existing one from the east. Unlike the earlier offensives, this one made little headway even at the start and came to a halt after a few days. Ferdinand Foch deduced that the Germans were at the end of their resources. His suspicions were confirmed when, just a week later, the Germans attacked again, this time on the Marne well to the east of Château-Thierry in the Champagne region, and were again soon stopped.
Short though it was, the Champagne offensive subjected the Americans to their next major trial by fire. The Germans’ objective was to capture Reims by enveloping it on its east and west sides, thereby taking possession of the Reims-to-Château-Thierry rail line, without which they could have little hope of holding the Marne salient. As earlier at Château-Thierry, they needed to get across the Marne. The only place where a crossing was feasible, in this case, was at the mouth of a valley through which the River Surmelin flows northward to join the Marne. The job of defending this valley, the only gap in a row of hills that dominates the south bank of the Marne and therefore a highway to open country if the Germans could fight their way through, fell to the American Third Division. Its Thirtieth and Thirty-Eighth Infantry Regiments were placed directly in what was expected to be the Germans’ line of advance.
The attack came on July 15 and turned into a fight as bitter as anything seen at Verdun or elsewhere. The Thirty-Eighth Regiment was left in an exposed forward position, under attack from three sides, after the Thirtieth on its left and the French troops on its right were forced back. Its commander, a fifty-three-year-old West Point colonel with the splendid name Ulysses Grant McAlexander, had been ordered not to yield an inch of ground and was prepared to die rather than do so. When the battle ended after three days of ferociously bloody toe-to-toe combat, the Germans were at a standstill and the defending American units were in a wrecked state. One of McAlexander’s battalions had lost twelve of its thirty-two officers and 461 of its 930 enlisted men. The others were similarly ravaged. The German Sixth Grenadiers, when the shooting stopped, could muster only 150 of the seventeen hundred men with whom they had begun the attack.
“Never have I seen so many dead men, never such frightful battle scenes,” a German lieutenant wrote in his journal. The doughboys, he said, had shown not only impressive “nerve” but a “roughness” that, he implied, bordered on the inhuman. “ ‘The Americans kill everybody!’ was the cry of terror of July 15, which for a long time stuck in the bones of our men,” he wrote. The Third Division’s contribution to foiling what would prove to be Germany’s last offensive had been conspicuous and important. The division won, or perhaps bestowed upon itself, the title “Rock of the Marne.” It set a pattern that would become common in future encounters with the enemy, holding its ground in the face of attacks that had forced the French to withdraw, standing firm even while suffering ruinous losses.
The situation on the Western Front was now radically different from what it had been at the start of Operation Michael. Foch decided that the time was ripe to take the fight to the Germans, and for the Americans to play a major part. Ludendorff was at Tournai in the north, conferring with the headquarters staff of the German army group in Flanders about yet another offensive, when, on July 18, word reached him of a new crisis. The French Tenth Army, led as before by Charles Mangin and including four American divisions, had again come pouring out of the woodlands and plunged into the west side of the Marne salient. Soissons was threatened, and with it all the German troops to the south. Ludendorff returned to his train and sped south.
Mangin, hated by his troops, called “the Butcher” because of the freedom with which he spent their lives, was possibly the most maniacally aggressive senior officer of the Great War. In 1917 he had been removed from command because of his excessively enthusiastic part in the Nivelle Offensive, the disaster that sparked mutinies. Upon becoming supreme commander, the almost equally bellicose Foch had returned Mangin to the front as an army commander. Mangin saw the advantages, not least as a way of repairing his own reputation, of allowing the Americans assigned to his army to take on a full share of the dying. Thus he had put the AEF’s First and Second Divisions, now an army corps under Pershing’s former chief of staff James Harbord, at the center of his July 18 attack. It fell to them to take the next step in showing what the AEF could do. They would pass the test, but at as high a price as the Third Division had paid on the River Surmelin.
Signs of weakness, signs of woe
Their hopes of victory dying, German troops displayed an increasing readiness to surrender.
In preparing Mangin’s attack, Foch had been able to pull together twenty-four divisions, twelve hundred guns, eleven hundred aircraft, and five hundred tanks. When these massed forces advanced on twenty-seven miles of front, they quickly overran the first two German lines. The objectives for the first day were taken by 5:35 A.M., and by day’s end the attackers had advanced five miles. But an entire German army was now moving to the defense of Soissons, and the French and the Americans had to advance across ground broken by deep and wide ravines that provided excellent cover for the German machine-gunners in their fighting retreat.
Things got almost impossibly difficult after that first day. German field artillery fired point-blank at the French tanks, virtually all of which were soon out of action. The Second Division spent the whole of the second day without food or water, pushing forward under machine gun and artillery fire and bombardment by German aircraft. When relieved on the night of July 19, it had advanced six and a half miles, captured seventy-five artillery pieces, and taken 2,900 prisoners. It had also suffered four thousand casualties, among them Major Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., who had shown extravagant courage until being gassed and taking a nasty bullet wound to the leg. It had failed to reach its objective for the second day, but the French troops who replaced it would need almost two more weeks to do so, succeeding only when the Germans voluntarily withdrew.
The First Division, which had faced less difficult conditions than the Second at the start of the offensive, remained in action for three days more. It was not relieved until it had taken the heavily fortified village of Berzy-le-Sec, important because on high ground commanding the highway from Soissons to Château-Thierry. By then the First, too, had advanced six and a half miles, capturing seventy-five guns and almost 3,400 enemy soldiers and taking 7,317 casualties. When they were able to re-form their ranks, an officer would recall, the American “battalions looked like companies and companies looked like squads.” The Twenty-Sixth Infantry Regiment, having lost all its more senior officers, was commanded by a captain. Some companies were commanded by noncommissioned officers, one by a private.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and paleontologist who one day would
write The Phenomenon of Man, was a corporal and stretcher-bearer (he had declined a captain’s commission) with the First Moroccan Division. This was a tough, battle-savvy colonial outfit that had earlier served with the Big Red One in the Ansauville sector, had helped acquaint them with the demands of trench warfare, and then fought beside them in this Second Battle of the Marne. “We had the Americans as neighbors and I had a close-up view of them,” Teilhard wrote. “Everyone says the same: they’re first rate troops, fighting with intense individual [italics in original] passion (concentrated on the enemy) and wonderful courage. The only complaint one would make about them is that they don’t take sufficient care; they’re too apt to get themselves killed. When they’re wounded, they make their way back holding themselves upright, almost stiff, impassive, and uncomplaining. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such pride and dignity in suffering. There’s complete comradeship between them and us, born fully fledged under fire.”
Another writer observed that “the Americans perished in the same way that all the parties involved in the war had perished during the first years of the war: side by side and wave after wave….At the risk of exaggeration, it can thus be said that the army of the United States set off to battle in 1918 as if the Great War had just begun, and had to discover the hard reality of trench warfare all over again.”
Still another noted of the Americans that “after their great fight at Belleau Wood it was remarked how their dead, especially the dead of the Marine Corps, lay in beautifully ordered lines where the traversing machine guns had caught them.”