Then suddenly in the early-morning hours of August 3, the Forty-second was relieved and dropped back as corps reserve, to the same battlefield they had fought across the week before. “In 8 days of battle,” Donovan wrote, “our Division had forced the passage of the Ourcq, taken prisoners from 6 enemy divisions, met, routed, and decimated a crack division of the Prussian Guards…and driven back the enemy’s line for 16 kilometers.” But it had come at a high price. The Rainbow had suffered some 6,500 casualties, both officers and men. MacArthur’s own brigade, the Eighty-fourth, had lost more than half of its effectives.16
Still, their success was due in no small measure to the Forty-second’s former chief of staff and new brigadier, with his soft cap and sweaters and riding crop, and foppish exterior that disguised the heart of a warrior. When HQ in Chaumont tried to pull him away to train and command a brigade of a new division, the Eleventh, in the States, Menoher put up a furious fight to keep MacArthur at his side. He called him “the source of the greatest possible inspiration” and told Chaumont his men “are devoted to him.”17
Pershing’s HQ relented and MacArthur was allowed to stay. They would need him at the fighting front, and the Forty-second, for the punishing campaign ahead.
For two weeks in the rear the division found rest and replacements; “cannon fodder,” as one cynical lieutenant in the 168th put it.18 Then on August 28 they were on the move back to the front, and prepared themselves for the main offensive on the St. Mihiel salient.
This was a cluster of German fortified positions 200 miles in area and 16 miles deep, centered around the town of St. Mihiel and located just south of the major rail hub of Metz. Capture of St. Mihiel and Metz would not only put a serious crimp in the German front, it would also provide a major junction for pushing the Germans out of France, possibly even ending the war.19 So Pershing was bringing almost a quarter million American and 110,000 French troops against St. Mihiel’s defenders, with his blooded veteran divisions—the First, Second, Twenty-sixth, and the Rainbow Forty-second—leading the charge.20
The Forty-second had arrived at its forward position on the night of September 10–11 after tramping for days through incessant rain, with sodden patches of forest and roads turned to squelching mud at every step, while taking more than a thousand German prisoners, who were hustled off to the rear. Pleased with their rapid progress though he was, physically MacArthur felt worse and worse. He was coming down with a severe fever, and when he arrived at their position he was almost prostrate.
For now, however, he returned to his troops as all the next day the Americans jammed themselves into the lines of trenches—“a hopeless labyrinth, full of mud and water,” future historian Walter Langer later remembered—facing the southern edge of the salient, with the Eighty-fourth Brigade tapped to lead the first wave of attack. The Rainbow learned that the scuttlebutt at Chaumont was that there could be as many as 75,000 casualties, and that the advance bombardment had been scaled back to catch the Germans by surprise.
MacArthur was as horrified as he was outraged. He consulted with his brigade artillery officers, who agreed they would pour on extra shells and not tell HQ. It was now that MacArthur quipped to Major Reilly the line that would become his trademark: “Sometimes it is the order one disobeys that makes one famous.” At the time, however, it expressed less cockiness than it did desperation and anger—not to mention a high fever.21
MacArthur was in the full grip of his illness and sicker than he had ever been in his life. Yet he absolutely refused to be left behind. He told his headquarters staff he was going forward with his troops, even if they had to carry him on a stretcher. MacArthur and his men then spent the remaining hours of September 11, 1918, waiting for the bombardment to begin.
It came at 1:00 A.M. on the dot. “A man-made aurora borealis shot out of the wall of darkness,” as Major Fred Palmer described it. “All the world, inclosed under canopy of night, was aflame.” The bombardment went on for four hours, until at 5:00 A.M. the men of the Eighty-fourth Brigade rose out of their trenches into the lifting mists with bayonets fixed, and advanced.22
And advanced. And advanced. To their amazement, the resistance the Forty-Second met was weak and sporadic; the tanks they were supposed to have in support were all hopelessly stuck in the mud, but they weren’t needed. The fact was, the Germans had gotten advance warning of the attack and were pulling out. Even better, the German artillery that was supposed to pound the Americans and French as they moved forward had been caught on the road by the American bombardment and virtually destroyed.
All the same, enough artillery shells passed overhead that at one point the brigade took shelter in a row of shell holes—all except MacArthur. That’s where history stepped in. The colonel of the tanks supposed to support the Eighty-fourth came up on foot and found MacArthur alone, standing on a little hill and gazing ahead at the German lines. “I joined him and creeping barrage came along toward us,” the colonel wrote to his wife that night. “I think each one of us wanted to leave but each hated to say so, so we let it come over us.”
One shell did explode nearby, showering them with dirt but leaving them unhurt. The tank colonel told his wife he had flinched, but not ducked. MacArthur hadn’t moved a muscle. “Don’t worry, Colonel,” he told him, “you never hear the one that gets you.” They both laughed and shook hands. They never met again. But years later that colonel would command an army in the next world war.
His name was George S. Patton. He would set his own standard of courage under fire. But as he wrote to his family, in his opinion MacArthur was “the bravest man I ever met.”23
Meanwhile, mile after mile MacArthur’s men enveloped the Germans in their front from both flanks, as the prisoners headed back in droves, “with a doughboy in the rear prodding the laggards with a bayonet whenever necessary.” Early that afternoon they passed their day’s objective; before nightfall they had reached the objective for the second day.
On the second day the advance continued almost unhindered, and by afternoon MacArthur climbed a low hill and looked north. From the top of a small knoll on the third day, he could even see across the entire Woevre Plain to the hazy spires of Metz, barely a dozen miles away. “There it lay,” he later wrote, “our prize wide open for the taking.”24 But their orders were to halt and dig in. On all fronts, the advance had been an amazing success. Instead of the 50,000 casualties Pershing had anticipated, there had been not more than 8,000, barely 2.5 percent of the troops engaged. Even as roads for miles jammed with Allied vehicles headed for Metz, Pershing and his officers relaxed to digest their relatively bloodless triumph.
But not MacArthur. As night fell he tapped his adjutant Major Wolf on the shoulder and the two of them managed to sneak their way several miles to the outskirts of Metz. There was no sign of the Germans; they had all pulled back to other sectors. “Here was an unparalleled opportunity to break the Hindenburg Line at its pivotal point,” MacArthur believed, and he intended to convince his superiors of the same thinking.
But when he reached Pershing’s HQ in the morning he met only stony faces. They could be in Metz, he heatedly argued, in forty-eight hours—and from there Pershing could drive straight into central Germany. “The President will make you a field marshal,” he pleaded to Pershing himself. MacArthur was exhausted, still feverish, but above all exasperated at what he saw as the blind pigheadedness of the man.
Pershing, however, refused to change his plans. He had his Allies to think about; American unilateral action would trigger a fierce French and British reaction. Besides, what if MacArthur was wrong? He mentioned none of these things to MacArthur, but at last exasperated at being berated in his own office, Pershing barked, “Get out! And stay out!”
Outside, MacArthur shook his head ruefully. “I made a mistake,” he told Wolf. “I should have taken Metz and then asked his permission.”25
He may have been right, although the German commander in charge, General Max von Gallwitz, said after the war he
believed Metz’s defenses were strong enough to withstand any sudden American assault. On the other hand, Pershing’s own assistant operations officer at GHQ, Colonel George C. Marshall, agreed that Metz was ripe for the taking. “There is no doubt in my mind,” he later wrote, “but that we could have reached the outskirts of Metz by the late afternoon of the 13th, and quite probably have captured the city on the 14th”—which might have shortened the war by weeks, perhaps even a month. Marshall also dismissed the fear that the Germans might have had sufficient forces to mount a counterattack.26
Right or wrong in retrospect, for MacArthur it was a glaring example “of the inflexibility in the pursuit of previously conceived ideas,” which, he added, was “too frequent in modern warfare. All too often, final decisions are made not at the front by those who are there but many miles away by those who can but guess at the possibilities and potentialities.” His own frequent clashes with the Joint Chiefs during World War Two over strategy in the Pacific, and the final titanic clash with President Truman during the Korean War, all took first shape under the mist-covered spires of Metz.
And indeed, within a week the Germans had brought up reinforcements and the opportunity to take Metz was lost. In his memoirs Pershing had to agree.27 But what he did not tell the brash young brigadier general was that Metz, tempting target though it was, no longer played a part in his plans. Pershing’s mind was already fixed on his next objective, one that had been his final goal for weeks—and one in which Mac himself would play a major, even decisive, part.
This was the Argonne Forest.
—
On August 30 Supreme Commander Marshal Foch visited Pershing’s HQ. The Germans were disorganized and on the retreat, he said, after the collapse of their last offensive. “We must not allow them an opportunity to reorganize,” Foch urged. What he now proposed was that while the British continued to push toward Cambrai and Saint Quentin, and the French toward Mesnil, the Americans would bring their troops into the Aisne sector, far to the west of Verdun, for a decisive battle there.
Pershing thought for a moment and then said, “Why not have the Americans take the entire sector from the Meuse to the Argonne?” It was an unexpected, if not exactly strange, idea. It would prevent American troops from being split apart in the push forward, and allow the First Army to concentrate its forces on a single objective. Foch agreed, and on September 2 the plan was confirmed. This meant that when MacArthur confronted Pershing with his idea of sweeping on to Metz, the AEF commander had already made up his mind. The Americans’ decisive push would not be toward Metz, but into the Argonne Forest.28
Unfortunately for Pershing’s men, the forest formed a natural fortress bounded by two rivers and covered with thick woods and steep ridges, some rising as high as 750 feet above the valley. An American who fought over it described it as “a bleak, cruel country of white clay and rock and blasted skeletons of trees, gashed into innumerable trenches and scarred with rusted acres of wire, rising steeply into claw-like ridges and descending into haunted ravines, white as leprosy in the midst of that green forest, a country that had died years ago in pain.” It was against this natural stronghold that Pershing would now commit his million-man force, a stronghold that Germany had fortified for four years with bunkers and hundreds of machine-gun nests and mortar outposts, not to mention miles of staked barbed wire.29
The decision was ratified on September 2, yet Pershing had gone ahead with his headlong assault on the St. Mihiel salient, which meant his most battle-toughened divisions, including the Forty-second, wouldn’t be there to open the assault on the Argonne. Instead, he would have to rely on troops freshly arrived from New York State, like the Seventy-seventh, to crack open the German line.
Meanwhile, the Forty-second regrouped around St. Benoit for three weeks, where the magnificent château served as Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters. German artillery was intermittent but menacingly accurate—one shell burst almost hit the room in which he was sleeping. But it wasn’t until he learned from some German prisoners that a “big gun” was being brought up to bombard the château that he decided prudence demanded he shift headquarters. The next day, September 24, a massive 280 mm shell slammed squarely into the château, “leaving a smoldering heap of stone and a jagged mass of wall,” one awed eyewitness, an Alabaman from the 167th Infantry, recounted, “its pink and blue draperies…its music room; its old tapestries hanging in its stone hallway—all gone.”30
MacArthur’s luck, or destiny, had held again. The story that he told officers of his staff, “All of Germany cannot fabricate a shell that will kill MacArthur,” is almost certainly apocryphal—or a bad joke. But his stoic belief that when his time to die had come, it would come and not before, also prompted him to join in a particularly dangerous night raid on September 25—and earned him his sixth Silver Star.
When MacArthur and his men returned from the raid, far to the west they could hear what sounded like the distant rumble of thunder. It was in fact the rumble of the guns of war. Pershing’s Argonne offensive was about to start.
—
Pershing’s push into the Argonne opened on September 26 with 2,700 guns, 189 small tanks, and 821 airplanes flying in support, and quickly ground to a halt. The Americans soon discovered that they had, in historian Geoffrey Perret’s words, “walked into a buzzsaw.”
The plan was for a double thrust through the forest on either side of the main redoubt, the Romagne Heights. But too many of Pershing’s divisions were still green, and the inexperienced troops simply dropped and hugged the ground in the face of withering German fire. Thousands of others fled to the rear. Only a few tried to press forward, and when they did they became disoriented and cut off. One of those units was the legendary Lost Battalion, six companies of the 308th Infantry and one company from the 307th from the Seventy-seventh Division, along with a machine-gun detachment, who held out surrounded for five days without food or water while the Germans pounded their position with machine-gun and mortar fire, and even flamethrowers. When relief came, half of those still alive had to be carried out by stretcher. It was heroic, but not the way to win a war.31
Finally, on October 1 Pershing decided he needed to refocus the attack around his veteran divisions, and take the Romagne Heights by frontal assault. He had run out of ideas, and options. “There is no course but to fight it out,” he wrote in his diary. That meant the Forty-second was going into action again, and so MacArthur and the Eighty-fourth Battalion set out for the Romagne Heights and the Kriemhilde Redoubt.
The Germans called it the Kriemhilde Redoubt, or Kriemhilde Stellung, after one of Brunnhilde’s sisters. Like the Valkyries of legend, it was broad, strong, and impregnable. It consisted of miles of barbed wire and concrete pillboxes, with hundreds of enfilading machine-gun nests and fortified bunkers. And at the heart of the complex was a cluster of fortified hills, one of which was known simply as Hill 288, while to its northeast sat the biggest, known locally as the Côte de Châtillon.
The Forty-second arrived at the foot of the Romagne Heights in a dismal rain on October 11. MacArthur could make out Hill 288 through the misting rain, and to its right the Côte, rising abruptly from the valley for several hundred feet. The Rainbows were taking over from the First Division. The men of the Big Red One had given their everything in attacking the twin hills and gotten nowhere. Decomposed bodies in olive drab lay on every side, and the Germans greeted the new arrivals with a withering gas attack.
MacArthur, who was up front with his troops as usual, caught a full whiff of the gas and for a while his adjutant, Major Wolfe, thought MacArthur’s luck had finally run out and his part in the war was over. But MacArthur had seen that the position the 168th Regiment was supposed to start from would come directly under the next day’s artillery fire.32 There was no time to worry about himself. Instead he spent the evening going from point to point, moving the 168th to a safer position before he finally collapsed on his cot, ill and vomiting.
�
��I carry no gas mask because it hampers my movements,” MacArthur later explained when an army board of inquiry asked about his unorthodox methods, adding, “I don’t wear an iron helmet because it hurts my head. I go unarmed because it is not my purpose to engage in personal combat, but to direct others.”33 Maybe so, but MacArthur paid the price again the next day, with yet another dose of gas even as the Forty-second prepared for the main assault, as they relieved elements of the Thirty-second Division on their right and their main artillery came up. The plan was brutal and simple. The Eighty-third on the left would advance a mile across open ground to take the villages of St. George, where three separate lines of staked barbed wire with machine-gun nests in between awaited them. The Eighty-fourth’s line of advance was slightly easier, but in order to take Hill 288 and the Côte from their jumping-off point they would be moving straight uphill.
MacArthur knew the hardship that was coming. On the march up he had watched the Thirty-second trying unsuccessfully to take the heights of Montfaucon, and had seen the terrible price it paid. The mistake, he was beginning to realize, was trying to break the enemy by attacking his center, instead of finding a vulnerable flank. He began to have a growing sinking feeling as he looked around along the “heavily wooded valleys of death between…endless folds of ridges,” all of them under incessant heavy fire. Many men would die if he tried to get them around the German flank; but many more would die if he didn’t.34
By evening the men of his brigade were as ready as they could be. Yet MacArthur told Menoher he had “many misgivings” about what would happen the next day. Menoher asked him point-blank if his brigade could take the Côte. MacArthur answered, “As long as we are speaking in the strictest confidence, I am not certain.”
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