America’s entry into the war found Patton serving as acting aide to General Pershing. Escorted by George Marshall to the ferry at the pier on Governors Island, New York, he embarked with Pershing and the rest of the staff at the end of May 1917 on the voyage that would take him with Pershing to London, to Paris, and then to headquarters in Chaumont. Thirty-two years old, trim, and more than six feet tall, the fiercely ambitious cavalry officer who was the best swordsman in the U.S. Army would have been an ornament to any general’s staff. But his ambitions were for combat (“a fire-eater … longs for the fray,” noted Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the British commander, in his diary); and because Pershing was engaged to marry his sister, Patton naturally looked about for a situation independent of the general’s headquarters. As commander of the increasingly large headquarters company at Chaumont, Patton could have counted on promotion, but he wrote that he was “darned sick of my job.”
Thought was being given by the American army to the use of tanks: the newly developed Allied armored vehicles that were designed to cut a path across trenches or through barbed wire. Patton, though contemplating the offer of an infantry command, also put in an application to be considered for a tank command. The new vehicle had been imagined by Winston Churchill, then Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, in September 1914. It also had been thought of by a British army officer, Colonel Ernest Swinton, whose design proved workable when that of Churchill’s admiralty did not. But despite championship by Churchill as well as by Sir Maurice Hankey of the British cabinet’s secretariat, little had been done to prove the worth of the new weapon, the heavy tank—or of the light tank that the French army had developed on its own.
To confuse German spies, the designs for the new weapon had indicated that it was a sort of tractor intended to carry large quantities of water to troops on the battlefield. Using a term suggested by Colonel Swinton, it was labeled as a water “tank.”
The American army decided to take a chance on the new machine. On November 6, 1917, Patton wrote to his father that “I believe that with my usual luck I have again fallen on my feet. It is so apparently a thing of destiny that I thought I would discribe [sic] it.” He had been promoted to major and asked to start and head a tank school, to be located in eastern France at Langres, a fortified town of the Middle Ages. “Here is the sporting side of it. There will be a hundred Majors of infantry but only one of Light T. The T are only used in attacks, so all the rest of the time you are comfortable. Of course there is about a fifty percent chance that they wont [sic] work at all but if they do they will work like hell.”
To his wife, Patton wrote (November 9, 1917), “What do you think of me. I am detailed in charge of the School for Light Tanks. To begin with I will have to go to the French Tank school for two weeks then to the Factory for a week then start the school.… The proposition is this. I am doing no good here, that is to my self.… By starting the Tank School I am sure of getting command of the 1st Battalion of tanks.… The gamble is this. The light tank is a new invention and may not work at all. If it does not I … would only have lost my time.… I did not mention the tanks much before as I feared it might not come out but if it works I have pulled one of the biggest coups of my life so far.”
Although officers of higher rank were placed over him, Patton became the first American expert on tanks: how to build them, how to drive them, how to use them on the battlefield. At the end of 1917 he wrote his wife that “the Tanks were I truly believe a great opportunity for me. I ought to be one of the high ranking men one of the two or three at the top. I am fitted for it as I have imagination and daring and exceptional mechanical knowledge. I believe Tanks will be much more important than aviation and the man on the ground floor will reap the benefit.”
But no tanks were forthcoming; the attempt to produce them in the United States was proving to be a failure. At the beginning of 1918 he wrote to his wife that “I am feeling very low over the Tanks again to day. Every thing seems to be getting in the way and no one can tell when we will ever get any tanks. I am disgusted with the whole business.” The next day he wrote again that “unless I get some Tanks soon I will go crazy.…”
Though promoted to lieutenant colonel, Patton worried that the war, even if it lasted a few years more, might be over before the tanks arrived. General Pershing made a start at solving the problem by borrowing twenty-five tanks from the French army for Patton. As months went by, arrangements were made to borrow more from the Allies.
On August 20, 1918, Patton was told of the attack on the Saint-Mihiel salient scheduled for September. It was to be the AEF’s first campaign. Patton was to have a tank command, leading his own men and a tank battalion loaned by the French army. The equipment was French and some of the troops were French, but the leadership was American, and the belief that the new weapon could change the hopeless pattern of trench warfare was held firmly by Patton.
THE AMERICANS BROUGHT to the war an enthusiasm for new weapons and for new tactics. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Robert Lovett, Billy Mitchell, and George Patton could hardly have been more different from one another as human beings, but in this they all were typically American.
Another trait that Americans brought from their egalitarian democracy into their conduct of warfare was a belief in leading by example. Generals, in this view, should share the hardships and the dangers with their men. No officer demonstrated this style of leadership better than Douglas MacArthur.
MacArthur, who was to play so conspicuous a role in the first American campaign in Europe, had been involved in the AEF’s affairs since its inception. As a major in the regular army serving as an aide to the secretary of war, it was he who had solved the politically treacherous question of which state’s National Guard unit should be the first sent overseas. He proposed combining the excess of guard units from twenty-six states into one division “that will stretch over the whole country like a rainbow.” Having inspired its creation and its name, he went on to serve with it gloriously. Promoted to colonel, MacArthur became chief of staff of the Forty-second Division—the Rainbow Division—and landed with it at the French port of Saint-Nazaire in November 1917.
The division encamped for training in the designated areas, where French instructors schooled it in the new and foreign techniques of trench warfare. “Though it is to be borne in mind that our methods are to be distinctly our own,” MacArthur told his troops in advance of the arrival of the French instructors, “it would be manifestly unwise not to be guided by their long practical and recent experience in actual trench warfare.”
In February 1918 the Forty-second was ordered to Lunéville, a lovely town in southern Lorraine where, a century and a half before, Voltaire had produced plays for the court of exiled King Stanislas of Poland. The division trained there behind the French army, which held the front line. The Americans were distributed along a sixteen-mile expanse of plain between the Moselle plateau and the Vosges Mountains, stretching from Lunéville, with its Versailleslike chäteau, to Baccarat, famous for it crystal. With its peaceful landscape of crops and livestock, it was a countryside whose appearances, as well as its associations of courts and crystal, were eerily at odds with the mass slaughter of armies that was taking place only miles away.
At the end of February, MacArthur became one of the few U.S. officers allowed by the French to accompany them on raids. Not content to merely observe, he plunged into the combat (of which he said, “the fight was savage and merciless”). He returned with prisoners. He was decorated with the Croix de Guerre, the first soldier in the AEF to be so honored; the United States awarded him a Silver Star, and his commanding officer told correspondents that “Colonel MacArthur is one of the ablest officers in the United States Army and also one of the most popular.”
Eventually the Americans were allowed to plan and execute raids on their own. MacArthur devised a brilliant costume for himself in which to lead such raids. It was a dandy’s outfit: a bright turtleneck sweater, a scarf around the ne
ck and tossed casually over the shoulder, a riding crop, shining leather leggings, and a cap reconstructed by him to look especially dashing. He was, to say the least, noticed.
It was a costume that went with the battlefield role that he created for himself, one that he was to play in one campaign after another. Apparently relaxed and indifferent to danger, he would stroll into enemy fire with nothing but a riding crop in hand. Such displays of reckless courage always caused him nausea; if after his return from the battlefield he fell prey to shaking and vomiting, there was no one to see it. To his men he seemed simply to be without fear. He ensured that his troops took precautions, but took none himself. He refused a helmet and a pistol in an assault on enemy lines March 9. He would not wear a gas mask March 11—and was gassed, receiving a Purple Heart. He made his subordinates do the division’s paperwork so that he could be free to fight.
At the end of March, MacArthur’s opportunities to fight were enlarged. Freed by Russia’s submission to the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, Germany’s army, reinforced by troops brought back from the east and now outnumbering the Allies, punched a hole through northern France that French troops from Baccarat were rushed off to fill. So the Rainbow Division found itself holding the Baccarat front on its own for three months, and stepped up its raids; there were ninety in the first two weeks of June alone.
According to one American officer, “Raids became almost as popular as going for the mail to a country post office. Everybody must have part in one.…” Father Duffy, the division’s senior chaplain, said that “some older heads” thought MacArthur had no business going on these raids himself. Certainly MacArthur’s style of leadership from the front was foreign to the European war. A popular historian was later to write that “in earlier wars, and in the Second World War, generals, even marshals, also ran risks and died in action. In the First World War they led comfortable lives. [Other than Lord Kitchener, who drowned, no] … outstanding military figure on either side … came to a violent end.”
Admirers argued that boldness such as MacArthur’s was an inspiration to the troops. Major William J. Donovan, a National Guard officer of the Rainbow Division, claimed that “it would be a blamed good thing for the army if some General got himself shot in the front line.” Donovan, a New York lawyer who had been a classmate of Franklin Roosevelt’s at Columbia Law School, was the only officer in the division to win more medals in the war than MacArthur, and was awarded the highest of all, the Congressional Medal of Honor.
In retrospect it seems especially odd that MacArthur’s mother continued to pull strings on his behalf at this period in his career even though he was so noticeably winning life’s prizes on his own. Her stream of cables, letters, and pleas for promotion of her boy to brigadier general appear to have been a particular trial to General Pershing. Pershing’s staff was already irritated by MacArthur’s self-promotion; after MacArthur escorted Secretary Baker on a battlefield tour, the secretary—presumably briefed by his guide—called MacArthur the AEF’s “greatest fighting front-line” officer. At headquarters at Chaumont, where George Marshall served, MacArthur was known simply as “the show-off.”
In turn MacArthur was convinced that those on the staff at Chaumont—the “Pershing faction”—were conspiring against him. If so, they were meeting with little success. At the end of June the American press reported that he had been promoted to brigadier general; and The New York Times reprinted a release from the secretary of war saying that MacArthur “is by many of his seniors considered the most brilliant young officer in the army.”
That was the summer the Americans allowed themselves to be pulled away from their own front to help the French stave off Ludendorff’s march on Paris: the summer of Belleau Wood and Chäteau-Thierry. Near Chälons-sur-Marne, MacArthur earned another Silver Star and high praise from his commander: “MacArthur is the bloodiest fighting man in this army.”
In a battle to storm German-held heights near Chälons, joined early July 28, MacArthur again distinguished himself. It was a seesaw struggle in which a town below the heights changed hands seven times July 28, and four more times July 29. MacArthur won his third Silver Star July 29, and was promoted to command of a brigade. The battle continued, and he went on to gain a Distinguished Service Medal. Later the brigade’s staff were to give him a gold cigarette box inscribed “The bravest of the brave.”
At 3:30 a.m. on August 2, MacArthur, accompanied by only one aide, set out through no-man’s-land to scout out German forces remaining on the heights. He found only corpses—about 2,000 of them. Returning to his own lines, he reported that the Germans had withdrawn. Not having been to bed for ninety-six hours, he then fell asleep. He was awarded his fourth Silver Star.
As soon as MacArthur awakened on August 2, he led his forces forward four miles—an enormous advance in war in which territory had been changing hands by the inch. From the field, MacArthur reported to headquarters in his usual style: “Have personally assumed command of the line. Have broken the enemy’s resistance on the right. Immediately threw forward my left and broke his front. Am advancing my whole line with utmost speed.”
Having been in combat for nine days, MacArthur’s brigade was then relieved. MacArthur received his second Croix de Guerre and was named to the Legion of Honor. On August 3 The New York Times reported that MacArthur had been ordered back to the United States to train troops—a plot by Pershing, MacArthur of course suspected, that was thwarted when the commanding officer of the Rainbow Division protested that MacArthur could not be spared. So MacArthur returned with the rest of the troops to the staging area in Lorraine from which the first American offensive of the war—the long-awaited assault on the Saint-Mihiel salient—was to be launched in early September.
19
THE AEF MAKES ITS MOVE
FOR FOUR YEARS the Germans had held the Saint-Mihiel salient, a sort of dagger some sixteen miles in depth and 200 square miles in area that plunged into French territory below Verdun. Ever since Pershing’s arrival in France, it had been understood that destroying the salient was to be the AEF’s first undertaking. Pershing scheduled the attack for summer’s end in 1918. Yet when the moment arrived, doubts arose.
The French High Command had come to believe that the salient no longer was of primary importance. The locus of combat had shifted farther north, and there was a possibility that the Germans would withdraw from the salient in any event to shorten their line.
Within American ranks there were doubts as well. It was not just that the Americans were still obliged to use Allied tanks, airplanes, artillery, and other military equipment rather than weapons of their own manufacture. It also was because the troops were not yet ready. In their emergency service alongside the French during the summer, the Americans had suffered heavy losses of trained soldiers, whose places had been filled with relatively raw recruits. The fearless and much-decorated “Wild Bill” Donovan was one of those who worried that the Rainbow Division was not yet prepared to mount the planned operation; in his battalion 65 percent of the men and 75 percent of the officers were untried, untrained new replacements.
Douglas MacArthur, who spent weeks trying to whip new recruits into shape, was appalled to discover how little they had been taught in the United States before being shipped over. At one point he saw about a hundred troops out of formation, gathered about a sergeant, and was about to issue a reprimand when the sergeant explained: “Sir, I am teaching them how to load rifles.” MacArthur backed off quickly. “When an army is in the fix we are,” he said to the sergeant, “the knowledge of how to load and fire a rifle is rather basic.”
AT 1 A.M. THE NIGHT of September 11–12, the AEF artillery suddenly opened fire on the Saint-Mihiel salient. Its almost 3,000 guns fired more than a million shells during the next four hours. It was the most intense concentration of artillery fire in history, according to the War Department, but was not highly effective. The outnumbered German defenders promptly began a withdrawal they may have planned in advance.
> At 5 a.m., almost 600,000 strong, the American First Army moved forward. This, at last, was its battlefield debut, yet it advanced uncertainly. “Get forward, then!” shouted Donovan at the New York Irish recruits of his battalion. “What the hell do you think this is, a wake?”
The American troops advanced under an umbrella such as had never been seen before. Overhead, under the command of Billy Mitchell, flew the largest air armada ever assembled: almost 1,500 airplanes. Mitchell took instant control of the skies from the outnumbered Germans who, within a short time, were down to 243 aircraft.
Leading his Eighty-fourth Infantry brigade in the assault on the German fortification, Douglas MacArthur was the first man over the top at 5 a.m. He and his troops quickly overran the positions as the Germans fled.
At 6:30 a.m., from a command post on a hill, George Patton sighted a couple of his tanks that had bogged down, and walked forward two miles to get them dug out. He continued onward, and at 7:30 reported that sixteen tanks were actively engaged. At 8:30 he learned that five tanks were out of action. At 9:15 a runner brought word that some of the French tanks were being held up by terrain, so Patton went forward under fire to consult with the French commander dealing with the problem. Going farther past infantrymen seeking cover in shell holes, and nonchalantly smoking a pipe despite the deadly fire, Patton saw MacArthur standing on a small hill. He went over to join him.
The two officers chatted together as the Germans fired upon them. It was a comedy of demonstrated courage, as each tried to appear the more oblivious of danger. A creeping barrage of enemy fire moved steadily toward them. “I think each one wanted to leave,” Patton wrote, “but each hated to say so, so we let it come over us. We stood and talked but neither was much interested in what the other said as we could not get our minds off the shells.” MacArthur told the story differently. He claimed that at one point Patton, at the sound of fire, involuntarily flinched, and then immediately looked annoyed at himself, whereupon he (MacArthur) had remarked, “Don’t worry, Major, you never hear the one that gets you.”
In the Time of the Americans Page 23
