by G. J. Meyer
Mangin’s weary veterans continued to hate him for his aggressiveness—his initiatives made a major contribution to the hundred thousand casualties suffered by the French in the last three weeks of August—and had to be bullied into attacking. The men of the American divisions, by contrast, idolized him for that same aggressiveness. He offered the action that many of them were hungry for. One doughboy told him that at war’s end he should travel to the United States, where he was sure to be heaped with honors.
On August 21, the day after Mangin’s attack, Haig launched his Picardy offensive. The gains it made were small and unimportant, but it contributed to keeping the Germans under pressure and unable to regroup. Mangin’s taking of Soissons, meanwhile, had compromised the Germans’ defensive line on the River Vesle, forcing a pullback there. The Americans were thus freed to cross the river and leave Death Valley behind.
The Germans still had 197 divisions in the west, organized into five army groups. These formidable numbers concealed the deplorable state of almost every division. Many had seen too much action in the past four months, and taken too many losses, to be capable of more than standing on the defensive in relatively quiet sectors. Strong and weak divisions alike were now being hit by the second wave of influenza, so much deadlier than the first.
American civilians, accustomed by now to making allowances for the propagandistic nature of the war “news” they were allowed to see, had difficulty knowing what to make of the reports from Europe. Accounts of great defeats being inflicted on the Germans did not seem to be followed by corresponding changes in maps of the front. Readers had seen assurances that the Germans were on the brink of collapse before. In Congress and outside it, the two political parties stayed on plan, inviting voters to judge whether Woodrow Wilson should be rewarded for what he had done thus far and whether to believe his promise to bring the war to a conclusion that would justify the nation’s sacrifices.
The Republicans gave an added twist to these questions. To their complaints about mismanagement, they added expressions of fear about the terms on which President Wilson might allow the war to end. Ignoring his more recent comments about the need for force without limit and the extirpation of German tyranny, they reminded voters that this was the man who not so long ago had called for peace without victory. Only the Republicans, they declared, could be depended upon to reject anything short of total victory, unconditional surrender, and a Germany facedown in the wreckage it had made of Europe. With Wilson in charge, they said, peace talks might allow the nefarious Hun to win at the negotiating table what he had failed to win on the field of battle.
On August 23, on the floor of the Senate, Henry Cabot Lodge laid out a ten-point program that was in effect a repudiation of Wilson’s Fourteen Points. It called, unmistakably though not in so many words, for the restoration of what Europe had been before the war with one momentous exception: Germany would no longer be one of the leading powers. The things that had made her powerful would be parceled out among the victors and their friends. Things that Wilson regarded as essential to his program—free trade, disarmament, a postwar league of nations—were omitted altogether.
Three days later, speaking before an audience of a hundred thousand people observing the centenary of Illinois’s admission to the union, Theodore Roosevelt poured his own brand of scorn on what he called Wilson’s “internationalism”—a sorry substitute, he said, for old-fashioned American nationalism. “Professional internationalism stands toward patriotism exactly as free love stands toward a clean and honorable and duty-performing family life,” TR said. Republicans across the country took up the cry. The chairman of the party’s congressional campaign committee said the election of a Republican Congress was the only way to ensure that Germany would never again threaten world peace.
Widespread demands for total victory (voiced by people who rarely attempted to explain what the term meant) did not prevent venomous infighting. Roosevelt appeared at times to have lost his mental balance altogether, publicly demanding military censorship of the press, trial of dissenters in military courts, and the suppression of all German-language publications. Once a voice of sanity where mob violence was concerned, he now praised the acts of vigilantes and urged the ostracism of conscientious objectors. Perhaps he had been driven over some psychic edge by the death in combat of his beloved youngest son, the one he said was most like him. A fledgling fighter pilot, twenty years old and wildly in love with the beautiful heiress who was his fiancée, Lieutenant Quentin Roosevelt had had one kill to his credit when he was shot down over France on July 14.
When Pershing informed Washington that he was going to need eighty divisions by April 1919, the War Department calculated that to accomplish this, the number of soldiers sent overseas each month would somehow have to be trebled. Few questioned the objective even if no one knew how to meet it, but the air turned purple with vituperation all the same. Those who opposed the drafting of teenagers (a step made necessary by the lavishness with which local boards were handing out deferments) were accused of wanting peace without victory, which now ranked as equivalent to treason. A former mayor of Atlanta caught the spirit of the time when, at the end of a public flag-kissing ceremony (such things were held with increasing frequency), he told his audience that “hereafter disloyalists might expect to be branded on the forehead and on either cheek, and the rope would be the end of traitors, in legal process of law or otherwise.” The enthusiasm with which such comments were everywhere received heightened TR’s confidence that his own preachments were going to carry him back to the White House in 1920.
The Wilson administration, not to be outdone, followed September’s Labor Day weekend with the largest of its so-called slacker raids. Some two thousand armed soldiers and sailors and an assortment of federal agents, local police, and volunteers from the American Protective League spent three days scouring New York City and northern New Jersey, accosting any male who appeared to be of conscription age. More than fifty thousand were taken into custody upon being unable to present draft cards. A thousand of them were immediately inducted into the army, and fifteen thousand were reported to their draft boards for irregularities of various kinds. The others were set free—not, however, before being put through a day and night of humiliating and sometimes frightening experiences, and not until a fair amount of public outrage had been provoked.
It was the bad luck of the Justice Department and the Bureau of Investigation to have their dragnet witnessed by people of influence. Joseph Sherman Freylinghuysen, a Republican senator from New Jersey, was one. He reported seeing “soldiers armed with rifles, with bayonets fixed, hold up citizens, compel them to stand waiting while there were crowds around jeering at them, and when they failed to produce their registration cards were put in motor trucks and driven through the streets amid the jeers and scoffs of the crowd.” He said they were held in armories with no opportunity to contact relatives and thereby obtain proof of their innocence. A Democratic senator from New York, William M. Calder, said that “in one place I saw a street car stopped and an armed sailor go into the car and take men out of it, in some cases where they were escorting ladies. They were taken out of their places of business and crowded into vans, perhaps fifty or sixty packed in like sardines and sent to the police station houses.” There is no way of knowing how many actual draft evaders there may have been. Estimates run as high as three million.
Those Americans who had already been inducted, gone through basic training, and been sent to France remained the objects of an international tug-of-war. On August 30 Ferdinand Foch, recently made a marshal of France, called on Pershing at his headquarters and announced a change of plans. The St. Mihiel attack was to be sharply reduced in scale so that most of Pershing’s new army could be diverted elsewhere. American divisions would form the right wing of a French advance northward along the River Meuse and in the Argonne Forest. These things had been proposed to Foch by Sir Douglas Haig, whose view of the Allies’ prospects had been greatly
brightened by his breakthrough at Amiens earlier in the month.
Having believed at the start of 1918 that there should be no Allied offensives that year, Haig now thought that much might be accomplished before winter. He proposed two massive and nearly simultaneous offensives, one by the British with Mézières as its objective, the other by a Franco-American force aiming for Sedan. The capture of these objectives would sever the communications arteries on which the German forces in France depended, leaving them with no choice except to retreat. Foch liked this plan and agreed with Haig that it made Pershing’s proposed advance on Metz through the St. Mihiel salient unnecessary and even pointless. The Americans would be far more useful as part of the French advance.
Foch is unlikely to have been surprised by Pershing’s angry rejection of the whole idea.
“I must insist,” Foch said.
“Marshal Foch, you may insist all you please,” Pershing replied. “But I decline absolutely to agree to your plan. While our army will fight wherever you may decide, it will not fight except as an independent American army.” He knew, and showed Foch a letter proving, that he had the support of President Wilson.
The dispute continued for three days, with General Pétain being drawn in and generally supporting Pershing. Finally a compromise was reached. The attack on St. Mihiel would go ahead as planned, its size not reduced, but the sector of front for which the AEF was responsible would be extended northward to the Argonne Forest. Immediately upon securing the salient, the whole American attack force with its six hundred thousand troops was to shift to the west and north and advance up the Meuse River valley. It would be to the east of the French attack force, advancing with it but in no way subordinate to it. This was a victory for Pershing, but in winning it on Foch’s terms he committed his staff and his troops to launching two distinct offensives, separated by sixty miles of ruggedly hilly terrain, in two weeks. He was coming perilously close to promising the impossible.
But not quite. Again the planning burden fell on Lieutenant Colonel George Marshall and his small operations staff. Even before Foch’s visit, Marshall had been struggling to complete arrangements for the assault on St. Mihiel and encountering difficulties that might have driven a less capable man mad. His original plan had had to be extensively revised when the number of divisions to be involved was increased from seven to ten. Then he was told to plan for fourteen, finally for twenty-two (six of them French, made available by General Pétain). With each increase, the whole approach had to be rethought, the support system reconfigured. Twenty-two divisions made the operation massive, an invasion of the salient from two sides involving nearly half a million U.S. and French troops, 3,000 artillery pieces, and 1,500 aircraft, many of them provided by Pétain. The logistics challenge was correspondingly daunting, requiring first the assembly, then the transporting under combat conditions, of 50,000 tons of ammunition and 200,000 tons of other matériel.
Marshall was aware that his future was on the line. He knew, as everyone on the First Army’s staff did, that Pershing had no compunction about ordering promising young officers to do what could not be done in the time provided or with the resources available, then destroying their chances for advancement when they failed. Marshall would write later that the history of the AEF was marred by the “personal tragedies” of the men to whom this happened. His own situation was doubly irksome because this planning assignment had required him to pass up an opportunity to take command of a regiment and be promoted to full colonel.
Fortunately for everyone involved, Marshall was more than merely a promising young officer. He was a miracle of competence, and he handled the burden that Pershing had laid upon him in a way that presaged his rise to chief of staff of the army twenty-one years later, secretary of state eight years after that, then secretary of defense and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
The St. Mihiel offensive, beautifully executed though it was, proved to be the great anticlimax of the war. When it kicked off on September 12, the 448,000 troops of eleven American and French divisions advanced against 75,000 defenders. Not only were the Germans vastly outnumbered, but they were members of fourth-rate, worn-out units that had been sent to St. Mihiel because it was considered safe. And they were caught off balance, midway through a planned withdrawal about which the Americans had known nothing. Their response to the attack was not to try to stop it but to hurry to complete their shift to the sector of the Hindenburg Line that ran along the eastern edge of the salient. To the extent that they resisted, they did so not to hold their ground but to keep their withdrawal from degenerating into a rout.
The Americans were fortunate to be up against such a halfhearted defense. A German noncommissioned officer, writing home at this time, said that his men were “so embittered that they have no interest in anything, and they only want the war to end, no matter how.” Among them were survivors of the savage fight with Colonel McAlexander’s regiment weeks earlier. Some were so eager to surrender that at times the offensive took on a comic aspect. When Lieutenant Maury Maverick of Texas, alone and on horseback, inadvertently ran into a platoon of German troops, he expected to be shot to pieces. Instead the Germans threw down their weapons and put up their hands. Maverick, who had ridden out in search of a route for bringing ammunition forward, had no time for escorting prisoners. He pointed in the direction of the American rear and told his captives to go there. They begged him not to abandon them, saying that if they were left without an escort, other Americans would shoot them. Maverick was moved to pity—some of the Germans were mere boys, crying—and did as they asked.
Sergeant Harry Adams, when he saw a German soldier run into a dugout, fired the last two rounds in his pistol through the closed door and shouted for the man to come out. The door opened and several Germans emerged, followed by more and then still more, all of them surrendering and addressing Adams as Kamerad, Kamerad. In the end, the sergeant and his empty revolver took more than three hundred prisoners.
As soon as the salient was secured, Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur raced off by automobile in the direction of Metz, still a tantalizing possible objective. He went all the way to the city’s outskirts, far enough to see that it was undefended. He radioed headquarters, asked Pershing for permission to take possession, and was told to get back where he belonged. “I made a mistake,” he said later. “I should have taken Metz and then asked his permission.”
The Americans took sixteen thousand prisoners that day and captured 450 guns. That they took seven thousand casualties in doing so probably says less about the defense than about the mistakes of inexperienced troops—a failure to make use of available cover, and a tendency to cluster together and advance directly against enemy machine guns rather than working around the flanks.
Though the American and Allied newspapers reported a great victory, what had happened was barely a major engagement in terms of its costs. As the First Army began its ponderous shift to the Meuse-Argonne, struggling against the clock to get its masses of men and masses of artillery and ammunition and supplies properly positioned, it had not yet been really tested.
The test was, however, at hand.
Background
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“A Soldier’s Soldier”
It used to be said, back when wars could seem glorious and glamorous and had clear beginnings and ends, that a man could have “a good war.” This was said of soldiers who saw plenty of action and had escapades that could be turned into dinner party stories, won their share of promotions and medals, wound up on the winning side, and returned home either unscathed or marked just enough to create an air of distinction.
American doughboys had a better chance of having a good war than the soldiers of other nations. By the time they went into combat in great numbers, the long-frozen Western Front was beginning to break up. No Americans had to spend years huddled in rat-infested trenches hoping that death wouldn’t crash down on them in the form of a German shell or come creeping in a cloud of poison gas. Not
only was theirs a war of movement, but they were moving against exhausted, outnumbered, outgunned, and starving enemy troops.
Sergeant Alvin York, U.S. Army
Denied conscientious objector status, he went on to win the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Some Americans had very good wars indeed. Some even became legends. Probably the most celebrated example was Alvin York, who was drafted out of the Tennessee hill country at age twenty-nine after unsuccessfully filing for conscientious objector status. Among his many decorations was a Congressional Medal of Honor, awarded for an action of October 8, 1918, in which he was credited with killing twenty Germans and putting dozens of enemy machine guns out of action. He also was lauded for single-handedly taking 132 prisoners, but this happened just a month before the end of the war, when many German soldiers were looking for a chance to put up their hands. Be that as it may, exploits like Alvin York’s were celebrated back home as proof of just how superior “our boys” were to the despicable Hun—and to Europeans generally. York’s ultimate accolade was to be played by movie star Gary Cooper in the Hollywood version of his story.
No one, however, had a better First World War than a man who would be one of the giants of the Second. An adventure story based on Douglas MacArthur’s experiences in 1917 and 1918 would be laughed off as too far beyond belief. So would any fictional character based faithfully on MacArthur the man.
Good wars ran in the family. MacArthur’s father, Arthur, joined the U.S. Army during the Civil War while still a schoolboy and went on to win the Medal of Honor for leading his men uphill against entrenched Confederate troops at Missionary Ridge. At the war’s end in 1865, he was still only nineteen years old and famous as the “boy colonel.” He then reverted to being a mere captain in the peacetime army. It was not until 1889 that he received his next promotion: he and his wife and sons spent that long quarter-century at dreary posts in Pennsylvania, New York, Utah, Louisiana, Arkansas, and New Mexico (where the onetime teenage colonel, now a forty-year-old captain, took part in the war with Geronimo’s Apaches). Douglas, the youngest member of the family, would one day write, “I learned to ride and shoot even before I could read or write—indeed, almost before I could walk and talk.”