Within the French Army, the four new regiments were to be integrated into an Allied army that was already multiracial. There, they would be given the full and intensive combat training that the US Army had been patently unwilling to offer them. Pershing would later claim that his transfer of the regiments had been intended as a temporary expedient – but there is no documentary evidence to substantiate his claim.23 On 10 March 1918, the 369th US Infantry Regiment (Colored) became the Trois-cent-soixante-neuvième RIUS of the 16th Division of the French Fourth Army. Major Arthur Little, one of the white officers of the 369th, described the unit’s strange experience: ‘we are “les Enfant perdu” [sic], and glad of it. Our great American general simply put the black orphan in a basket and set it on the doorstep of the French, pulled the bell and went away.’24
At the French training camp of Connantre, south of Reims, the 93rd were transformed into an international hybrid force – American troops under French officers, fighting in French attacks. Their uniforms became the symbol of their new internationalism. While retaining their American tunics, greatcoats and trousers, they were equipped with French helmets (the famous casques Adrian), along with French pouches, ammunition belts and gas masks. Their American Springfield rifles were exchanged for French Lebels with their long sword-like bayonets. The Americans adjusted to French rations and benefitted from French wine rations: two quarts a day of the rough, red table wine known as pinard. Now under French instruction, they had to learn to read French military maps, with their numerous codes and unfamiliar symbols. They had to master enough rudimentary French to understand military orders, and they were given additional training in the use of heavy machine guns, grenades, grenade-launchers and trench mortars. This training was administered by highly experienced French officers, who had mastered the details of trench warfare. Just as importantly the instructors knew how to make life bearable – if not exactly comfortable – within the trenches, lessons learnt over three years of war.
Despite this heightened level of instruction, the units of the 93rd Division were warned by their officers that their training might not be completed before they were required at the front. The week preceding the transfer of the 369th Infantry to French control, Lenin’s new Bolshevik government in Russia had formalized Russia’s exit from the war when it acceded to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Under the draconian terms of that agreement, Russia’s western border retreated eastwards and Germany took control of a new continental empire that was three times the size of the Second Reich itself. Russia lost almost 90 per cent of its coal reserves, one-third of its agricultural output and over a quarter of its population. Most significantly, victory on the Eastern Front allowed Germany to redeploy forces to the Western Front, which brought a numerical advantage over the Allies in the spring of 1918. Despite the deployment of soldiers and labourers drawn from the empires of Britain and France, and despite the arrival of the first American units, the fifty new German divisions that now appeared in the West in early 1918 tipped the balance in Germany’s favour. Along with these new divisions came thousands of artillery pieces and machine guns. The question was whether Germany would be able to exploit this advantage before the influx of US troops tipped the scales back towards the Allies, for each week thousands of Americans were landing at St Nazaire, Brest and Bordeaux. The German High Command, dominated by Ludendorff and Hindenburg, knew that there would come a time when their window of opportunity would close shut.
The inevitable and long-anticipated German offensive came just eleven days after the men of the 369th Infantry Regiment had begun their training within the French Army. In the early hours of 21 March the Germans launched Operation Michael, the opening attack of what they called the Kaiserschlacht – the Kaiser’s Battle. It began with an artillery barrage of awesome intensity against the British Fifth Army’s positions south of Flesquières, in Picardy. A vast tempest of high-explosive shells devoured the front-line trenches. The explosives were intermixed with thousands of gas shells, which released enormous clouds of lachrymatory and poison gases (chlorine and phosgene). The tear gases acted as an irritant, which caused men to rip off their gas masks, leaving their eyes and lungs exposed to the poisons. In just five hours a million shells were hurled at the British. Then, through the gas, which had combined with the morning mist to form a heavy toxic smog, came seventy-six German divisions, spearheaded by storm-troopers in their gas masks, with their terrifying flame-throwers and new light sub-machine guns, and using ‘infiltration’ tactics to swarm around enemy positions. Across a front of fifty miles they drove back the Fifth Army, before erupting into open country. The British were pushed back to the abandoned battlefields of the Somme, where Kitchener’s volunteer army had suffered so terribly two years earlier.
By the end of the first day, the Germans were seven miles behind the British lines. The advance storm-trooper units had penetrated so far that they were beginning to stumble across ammunition depots, warehouses and rest areas. Exhilarated at the news, the Kaiser declared, somewhat prematurely, Day Three of the attack to be a Victory Holiday. As the Germans pushed westwards, the French capital came within the range of ‘Long Max’, a special long-range howitzer whose quarter-ton shells began to roar down on Paris even though it still lay seventy-five miles away. Two-hundred-and-fifty-six Parisians were killed in the bombardment, and the confidence of the French nation was noticeably shaken. By Day Seven, the Germans had driven a ten-mile wedge between the British and French forces. Yet, just two weeks after the launch of Operation Michael, and as with all previous attacks since the start of trench warfare in 1914, momentum began to wane. It was as if each attack were halted by some invisible but universal law. But some of the reasons Operation Michael stalled were unique to the circumstances of 1918. Exhausted German troops who came across food depots halted and gorged on luxuries they had not seen for years; some re-equipped themselves with British kit, and all saw for themselves the sheer weight of materials being assembled against them. Their own army struggled to bring up their meagre rations and supplies across the still-devastated landscape.
A second German attack, Operation Georgette (also known as the Battle of the Lys), was launched on 9 April, but it took place further north, between Dixmude in Flanders and La Bassée in France. This attempt to extinguish the Ypres Salient – and if successful, press on to the Channel ports – also ran out of steam by the end of the month, but not without inducing a sense of severe crisis among the Allies. On its first day, the Germans attacked over the old battlefield of Neuve Chapelle, retaking the ruined village that had been won by the Indian Corps in March 1915. The Portuguese, who now held the sector with 20,000 men under the command of the nation’s future President General Gomes da Costa, were overwhelmed by 50,000 German attackers. Suffering 7,000 casualties, the men from Portugal were routed and pushed back five miles. They left behind many of the dead whose remains now lie in the Portuguese Cemetery; it stands near the memorial to the Indians killed in the same area in 1915.
After the crises of March and early April, the British and the French managed to reconnect their lines and the tide began to turn against the Germans. In the middle of the month, the African-American troops of the 369th Infantry cut short their training and were moved to a relatively quiet sector near Melzicourt, on the edge of the Argonne Forest in Champagne, where they took control of a stretch of line a little under four miles long. Although they represented only around 1 per cent of the American combat force then in action, the 369th in April 1918 were manning 20 per cent of the proportion of the line held by Americans. It was in this period, while acclimatizing to the realities of trench warfare, that the most famous incident in the story of African-American troops in the war took place.
While many a First World War battle is known by the name of the general who devised it, Henry Johnson of the 369th Infantry is probably the only sergeant whose name is attached to a ‘battle’. The ‘Battle of Henry Johnson’ took place on 14 May 1918 in the Argonne Forest. Sergeant Johnson
and Private Needham Roberts were on sentry duty when, at around 2am, they heard the sound of German troops in no-man’s land cutting the French barbed-wire defences in preparation for a raid. Johnson and Roberts raised the alarm and began to throw hand-grenades at the Germans. Private Roberts was injured almost immediately by a German grenade. As Germans attacked, Roberts lay prone in the trench and passed grenades up to Johnson, who fended off the oncoming troops. After he ran out of explosives, the Germans attempted to rush Johnson, who turned to his French Lebel rifle; it jammed when he attempted to reload it with incompatible American ammunition. At this point Johnson, a rather diminutive figure just out of his teens, fought off the Germans using his rifle as a club. Seizing a Bolo knife he repelled his attackers; at one point he was reduced to fighting with his fists.*6 As American reinforcements arrived to drive off the Germans, Johnson famously spared the life of a German attacker who had been left behind. Enemy casualties in the ‘Battle of Henry Johnson’ were estimated to have been in excess of thirty, including four dead. The eponymous hero had received twenty-one wounds: a bullet had grazed his head, he had been shot through the hand and through the foot, through his lips, and he had received wounds to his flank too.
Most descriptions of the encounter read like the citation for a posthumous medal – yet Johnson survived both the ‘battle’ and his injuries. He and Roberts were awarded the French Croix de Guerre, and overnight Johnson became an African-American superstar. The legend of Henry Johnson – ‘The Black Death’ – began in Stars and Stripes, the US Army’s own newspaper. On 24 May 1918 it ran the headline ‘Two Black Yanks Smear 24 Huns’ and described Johnson and Roberts as ‘two strapping Negroes, a station porter and an elevator boy’. The New York World, which coined the phrase ‘The Battle of Henry Johnson’, made Johnson even more famous, describing in grim detail the slaughter he had rained down upon the Germans with his Bolo knife.25 In the Harlem Home News, Marcus Garvey of the Universal Negro Improvement Association predicted that it was going to require ‘the black man to stop the Kaiser’s soldiers’ and reflected that there was ‘not a more glorious record in the story of the war than the record of those two boys from the New York 15th’ – the pre-war designation of the 369th Infantry.26 The sensational exploits of Johnson were heralded by African Americans as a vindication of their demands that black men be permitted to take part in the war as combatants, on equal terms with white men. That they had only been permitted to do so, thus far, within the ranks of a foreign army was – for the moment – put aside.
On 27 May 1918, the Germans mounted their third offensive of the spring, this time at the ridge of the Chemin des Dames, where they had decimated the Tirailleurs Sénégalais in 1917.*7 Another whirlwind of shells, this time totalling 2 million, was fired at the French. Outnumbered more than two to one, they were driven back. By the end of the month the Germans were on the River Marne, just fifty-five miles from Paris and close to where the war had pivoted in September 1914. In the Allied counter-attack at Belleau Wood, the US Marines sustained appalling casualties in some of the most brutal hand-to-hand fighting of the whole war. Nearby, but fighting as part of the French Army, the 369th Infantry also attacked. By now they were coming to be recognized by the French as a highly capable elite unit.
In June 1918, after a fourth German offensive between Montdidier and Noyon had been halted, the Allies counter-attacked with a force led by Charles Mangin, ‘the Butcher’, whose forces were spearheaded with an armada of new French tanks. A fifth and final German offensive, in mid-July, was thrown against the defences in front of the towns of Reims and Epernay in the heart of the Champagne region. But the French had learnt the details of the German plans directly from the mouths of German deserters and prepared tactically sophisticated defences, while massing troops for the counter-attack. On 18 July Mangin, once again in favour with the French High Command, led the attack. It was North African units, fighting under the author of the Force Noire theory, who led this critical assault.
Six days later, having suffered 900,000 casualties in the various operations of the Spring Offensive and having failed to break through to Reims or Paris, Ludendorff ordered a retreat. The German Army had fired its only arrow and failed to strike the target; it was an exhausted and spent force. Despite having raided British and French stores, materials were running short. It was now that reports of the Spanish Flu among the German ranks reached the Allies. As the Germans were literally emaciated after years of privation, they were more prone to the infection than the better-fed British, French or US soldiers. Ludendorff’s army was fast approaching the end of its capacity to fight on. The British had suffered heavy losses – 200,000 men in June alone – but by then the Americans were landing 250,000 men in France each month. Germany had no choice but to take up defensive positions.
AE.F. HEADQUARTERS, CHAUMONT, EARLY AUGUST 1918. Colonel Linard, the French Military Attaché at AEF Headquarters in the Haute-Marne, receives instructions to draft a document that will be entitled Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops. It is intended to be distributed among French officers and the French civil authorities alike. As a secret military document, not intended for publication and produced for the attention of a foreign army and civilian authorities, it is a clear statement of official US policy on matters of race.
The document – effectively a series of instructions – reminds those ‘French officers who have been called upon to exercise command over black American troops, or to live in close contact with them’ of the exact ‘position occupied by Negroes in the United States’. While conceding that the ‘Negro’ is ‘a citizen of the United States’, the document explains that he:
…is regarded by the white American as an inferior being with whom relations of business or service only are possible. The black is constantly being censured for his want of intelligence and discretion, his lack of civic and professional conscience, and for his tendency toward undue familiarity. The vices of the Negro are a constant menace to the American who has to repress them sternly.
French officers are to be further informed that:
American opinion is unanimous on the ‘color question,’ and does not admit of any discussion. The increasing number of Negroes in the United States (about 15,000,000) would create for the white race in the Republic a menace of degeneracy were it not that an impassable gulf has been made between them. As this danger does not exist for the French race, the French public has become accustomed to treating the Negro with familiarity and indulgence. This indulgence and this familiarity are matters of grievous concern to the Americans. They consider them an affront to their national policy. They are afraid that contact with the French will inspire in black Americans aspirations which to them (the whites) appear intolerable. It is of the utmost importance that every effort be made to avoid profoundly estranging American opinion.
With this background clearly set out and explained, French officers are, in conclusion, issued with three instructions:
1. We must prevent the rise of any pronounced degree of intimacy between French officers and black officers. We may be courteous and amiable with these last, but we cannot deal with them on the same plane as with the white American officers without deeply wounding the latter. We must not eat with them, must not shake hands or seek to talk or meet with them outside of the requirements of military service.
2. We must not commend too highly the black American troops, particularly in the presence of (white) Americans. It is all right to recognize their good qualities and their services, but only in moderate terms strictly in keeping with the truth.
3. Make a point of keeping the native cantonment population from ‘spoiling’ the Negroes. (White) Americans become greatly incensed at any public expression of intimacy between white women with black men… Familiarity on the part of white women with black men is furthermore a source of profound regret to our experienced [white French] colonials who see in it an overweening menace to the prestige of the white race.
Milita
ry authority cannot intervene directly in this question, but it can through the civil authorities exercise some influence on the population.
In the first days of August 1918, the French, British and Americans were assembling on the Western Front the forces with which they now intended to break the German Army. On the old battlefield of the Somme, the British had amassed 400 tanks, and between them the Allies had assembled 10 divisions of attack troops – British, French and American men, along with forces from the British and French empires. The Canadians and Australians were to have key attacking roles. The French had been hoarding men for the coming offensive, and Mangin intended to throw his North African and West African troops at the German lines. In the upper echelons of the American Expeditionary Force, something else was brewing too.
The World's War Page 39
