The Yanks Are Coming! (12 page)

The Germans pounded the regiment for two days and charged into the Surmelin Valley—to no avail; in fact, to the near annihilation of some German units, such as the Sixth Grenadiers, who entered the battle with 1,700 men and left it with 150. American rifle fire was deadly accurate, and as at Belleau Wood, the Germans were occasionally dismayed at the Americans' fearsome appetite for battle, an appetite that began with Colonel McAlexander himself, who issued orders stating, “Don't let anything show itself on the other side [of the Marne] and live.”
⁹

The Germans did breach the Marne and push forward as much as three miles, but their hopes of racing to Paris were thwarted—in large part by McAlexander's stubborn defense of the Surmelin Valley. The Germans' great dash, the
Friedensturm
(“Peace Offensive”) to end the war in Paris, was over. The American 3rd Division's valor, and the 38th Infantry's in particular, won it the battle moniker “the Rock of the Marne.”

“NO WAY TO TREAT A REGIMENT”

General Ferdinand Foch, the supreme Allied commander, or
generalissimo
, believed Ludendorff had shot his bolt. He ordered a counterattack against the bulge in the German line along the Marne. The Franco-American assault would be a western flank attack through the Retz Forest between Soissons and Château-Thierry. In the front line was the newly organized American IV Corps,
¹⁰
incorporating the 1st and 2nd Divisions, under the command of Major General Robert Lee Bullard. Bullard in turn would be serving under the direction of the French general Charles Mangin, commander of the French Tenth Army.

Mangin liked Americans and was the sort of French commander Americans liked—that is, he had a bit of imperial romance about him, from his Senegalese bodyguard and aide; to his reputation for personal courage, recklessly leading from the front; to his experience in colonial wars in Africa and Indochina; to his staff car, a captured German Opel the color of
les pantalons rouges
. No one doubted his tactical and strategic aggression either. Flashy personality aside, he was the Ulysses S. Grant of the French army: derided as a butcher by some, for his willingness to accept heavy casualties; respected for his tenacity by others, for his relentless desire to defeat the enemy.

Mangin acquired nine American divisions—more than three hundred thousand men
¹¹
—to support his offensive, launched on 18 July 1918. It was a tribute to the fighting prowess of the 1st and 2nd Divisions that they were at the far left of the line, pointed to lead the attack at Soissons. Between the Americans was the 1st Moroccan Division, a polyglot array of Senegalese, French Foreign Legionnaires, Arabs, and assorted international riff-raff who wore fezzes and knew how to fight. Behind Belleau Wood were the 26th, 42nd, 4th, and 77th Divisions. At Château-Thierry, marking the center of the German salient that was to be dissolved, were the American 3rd, 28th, and 32nd Divisions.

The American divisions hurried into their lines, hard marched, amid pouring rain, without much in the way of intelligence about the German dispositions before them, or even where they were going, and without much in the way of supplies, lacking ammunition, grenades, mortars, and machine guns; some hadn't slept or eaten for twenty-four or even forty-eight hours. Secrecy and last-minute haste were the watchwords. This was a French show, the battle plan depended on surprise, and the Americans were to be its shock troops, moving behind a rolling artillery barrage rather than a long preparatory bombardment. The big guns sounded off at 4:35 a.m. The Americans advanced, officers to the front, taking heavy casualties, including, before the battle was over, every battalion commander of the 26th Infantry. Junior officers and sergeants filled the breach, and the soldiers did not waver, even as the casualties stacked up to fifty thousand men. The tone was set by the famously hard-charging, demanding Major General Charles P. Summerall, newly elevated commander of the Big Red One. He rebuked a battalion commander who reported his advance had been stopped: “You may have paused for reorganization. If you ever send another message with the word
stopped in it, you'll be sent to the rear for reclassification.”
¹²
When stragglers were found, they were shoved back into the action.

One observer of the Americans was Jesuit priest and corporal Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was a stretcher-bearer in the 1st Moroccan Division. He wrote, “We had the Americans as neighbors and I had a close-up view of them. Everyone says the same: they're first-rate troops, fighting with intense
individual
passion . . . 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.”
¹³

The American advance was swift—they had achieved surprise and struck in greater force than the Germans could have expected—and confused, as units became mixed in the chaos of fiercely contested battle, which included German gas,
¹⁴
artillery, and air attacks, over ground the Americans had not, of necessity, scouted beforehand. At least it was no battle of static trenches (though shallow trenches were dug and ducked into) but of open field maneuver, with French tanks in occasional support (they were lightning rods for German artillery); and the doughboys took a perhaps unwise pride in their ability to directly charge and overwhelm German machine gun nests when flanking them might have been less costly. But it was this aggressive spirit that made the doughboys what they were—and that made them think the French were often slow and unreliable. If
élan
had been beaten out of the
poilus
, it was still brimming over in the Americans.

The Germans remained disciplined, resolute opponents. They had given ground the first day of battle, but their fighting retreat stiffened on the second day. By the third, some doughboy units and
officers had been pushed to the point of exhaustion. General Summerall met with his regimental commanders to assess their situations and encourage them. Colonel Frank Parker of the 18th Infantry told him, “General, my regiment has lost 60 percent of its officers, nearly all of its non-commissioned officers and most of its men and I don't think that's any way to treat a regiment.” According to Parker, Summerall replied, “Colonel, I did not come here to have you criticize my orders or to tell me your losses. I know them as well as you do. I came here to tell you that the Germans recrossed the Marne last night and are in full retreat and you will attack tomorrow morning at 4:30.” Parker said he never again questioned Summerall's orders.
¹⁵

“BATTLES ARE WON BY REMNANTS”

The Battle of Soissons—wrapped up, at least in the history books, on 22 July
¹⁶
—was the turning point of the war. George Marshall called it exactly that; Pershing compared it to Gettysburg; and German chancellor Georg Hertling offered independent confirmation of how Soissons had changed the war: “At the beginning of July, 1918, I was convinced, I confess it, that before the first of September our adversaries would send us peace proposals. . . . We expected grave events in Paris for the end of July. That was on the 15th. On the 18th even the most optimistic of us knew that all was lost. The history of the world was played out in three days.”
¹⁷
Ludendorff could not lunge again to destroy the British army. He had used up his reserves extracting his men from across the Marne. The American experience of Soissons was not merely one of victory—but also of what victory cost. To the question what price glory, General Hanson Ely could answer, “Men must be trained that when they have been in battle for days and nights, when perhaps they have been badly handled by
the enemy and have had heavy casualties, yet when the signal comes to go they will go again to
the limit of their endurance. . . .
it is
the last five percent
of the possible exertion that often wins the battle . . . not the first attack nor the second or the third, but it was that last straggling fourth attack. . . . battles are won by remnants, remnants of units, remnants of material, remnants of morale, remnants of intellectual effort.”
¹⁸
The Americans had proved beyond doubt they had the grit to see things through.

CHAPTER SEVEN

SAINT-MIHIEL AND THE MEUSE-ARGONNE OFFENSIVE

T
he American Expeditionary Force not only had vigor and tenacity, it was building mass and strength, with 1.2 million men under arms in France, joined by more than 60,000 every week. It was the growing power of the AEF that gave Marshal Foch what he wanted—the opportunity to go on the offensive, not merely to halt Ludendorff on the Marne, but to drive the Germans back, perhaps even behind the Rhine. Experience had made Foch cautious, but a spring of near disaster had become a summer of hope for defeating the Hun.

Foch had a special assignment for Pershing's doughboys—to attack the German salient at Saint-Mihiel on the Meuse River, south
of Verdun. The Americans would go into action led by Pershing in a newly configured United States First Army.
¹
Pershing, if not Foch, had his eye on a bigger prize than reducing the salient; he wanted to liberate Metz, a French city on the Moselle, a little more than forty miles due east. That would be a battle honor worthy of his new First Army and would put it in a position to threaten the industrial Saarland of Germany.

Planning for the offensive was handed to Lieutenant Colonel George C. Marshall, tapped to join Pershing's staff as an assistant operations officer. Marshall was known as a master at organizing, supplying, and preparing men for combat, though this was easily the biggest assignment of his career. He and Pershing's staff had similar ideas about how to crack the German nut, but on 30 August 1918 Foch told Pershing to scrap his planned assault. Instead, Foch wanted a massive coordinated attack along the length of the Allied line north of Verdun, all the way to Belgium. The American Army was to be parceled up as needed to assist the British and the French. Pershing, having just organized his United States First Army, was not about to see it piecemealed into a supporting role; nor was he prepared to fold up his battle maps and forget his planned attack at Saint-Mihiel. He refused to accept Foch's plan. The American Army, he assured the generalissimo, would fight wherever Foch wanted it to fight—
but only as an independent army
. That was Pershing's right and duty, given him by President Wilson.

Pershing finally won the argument with a compromise. Foch agreed to let Pershing assault the German salient at Saint-Mihiel; and Pershing agreed to launch, only two weeks after his planned attack at Saint-Mihiel, an offensive in the Meuse-Argonne sector sixty miles to the north. The Americans would be the right flank of Foch's big push. Even on paper, let alone in action, with the inevitable friction
of war, the plan for the American Army looked audacious. It would be one huge attack followed immediately by another, more than six hundred thousand troops pivoting from Saint-Mihiel to engage the enemy in some of the toughest terrain in one of the most fortified sectors of the Western Front. There could be no greater test for the doughboys. Pershing was eager to set them to it.

THE TRAINING GROUND OF SAINT-MIHIEL

If Foch had begrudged Pershing his attack on Saint-Mihiel, the French nevertheless were generous in supplying the Americans with artillery, tanks (more than four hundred organized into two battalions, with the crews trained by Lieutenant Colonel George S. Patton), and air support. Never before, in fact, had so many artillery pieces, more than 3,000, including 5 American naval guns mounted on railway tracks,
²
and so many planes, nearly 1,500, been available to a British or French commander directing a battle. The planes were commanded by Colonel Billy Mitchell, Pershing's talented and aggressive air officer, who intended to use his aircraft as other commanders might use artillery, hitting the enemy's rear areas, suppressing the enemy's own air power, and, when the infantry could supply him with adequate coordinates, striking against German machine gun emplacements. Once the army started rolling up the German line, Mitchell's planes would take on the role of cavalry, harassing the German retreat. When the battle was over, Mitchell's pilots claimed to have downed more than fifty German planes.

The Americans also tried their hand at counterintelligence, setting up a fake headquarters—even the faux headquarters' commanding officer, Major General Omar Bundy, didn't know it was a fake—to convince the Germans that the Americans would attack about 125
miles farther south, in an area that the general dutifully scouted, that Pershing visited, and where an intelligence officer intentionally left behind a carbon copy of fake orders, which were duly intercepted by German agents. The Germans prepared to meet this immaterial challenge, but they were not surprised when the real attack came at Saint-Mihiel.

The French assumed Pershing's attack would be an easy, morale-boosting American victory; and they were right. Unknown to the Americans, Ludendorff had ordered a withdrawal from the more lightly defended front line (the Wilhelm Line) to the stiffer defenses of the secondary line (the Michel Line), which meant that Pershing's attack was directed, initially, at a phantom.

The salient, in relation to the German line, looked a bit like the base of the number 2, with Saint-Mihiel at the forward point of the base. The Americans intended to flank the base and leave the actual liberation of Saint-Mihiel to the French II Colonial Corps, almost fifty thousand men, who were incorporated into the United States First Army. The greatest risk to the Americans' initial assault was expected from German artillery on the high ground at Montsec, which the Americans hoped to simply skirt by launching their attacks farther east. The American line, left to right, along the base of the 2, led with the 1st Division, moving out from Seicheprey, followed by the 42nd and the 89th from IV Corps, and from I Corps the 2nd, the 5th, the 90th, and the 82nd, which was as far east as the Moselle River. Striking down from the north would be the 26th Division of V Corps. It intended to meet the 1st Division at the approximate midpoint of the salient, the town of Vigneulles. In the process, the salient would be crushed.