by G. J. Meyer
The mules come third because they are mostly white-eyed outlaws—so dangerous that the civilians sold them to the army to get rid of ’em. We have to take care of them before ourselves, which is all the way from disagreeable to impossible.
Our leaky clothes come fourth because only our steel helmets turn water—and they sit way up on our heads like pie-pans instead of coming down around our ears where they could do some good. Our wool clothes would be fine if they fit and were of a comfortable design and were protected by rain-coats that were rain-coats. Our feet are wet all the time….
The cooties come fifth….
The canned potato-meat hash comes sixth because it gives us heartburn. Our rations are half meat and the other half is made up of potatoes, bread, coffee, rice, dried carrots and too little fruit. We crave sweets, milk and fruit.
Homesickness comes seventh. Most of us have never been away from home before, and we’re so hungry for a little womanly affection that it’s awful.
The Germans come last, because if it wasn’t for them we could go home!
Yensen was hardly exaggerating in saying that the rain, cold, and lack of protection from both were sapping the life of the troops. Pneumonia and other respiratory ailments swept through the ranks, and they and influenza would ultimately account for four-fifths of the AEF’s fifty thousand illness-related deaths.
Fantasies about romantic encounters with French damsels had little chance of becoming more than that. Even encounters with members of the oldest profession became difficult and risky when Pershing forbade them and ordered strict enforcement. When Georges Clemenceau became French prime minister, he offered to help the Americans set up licensed houses of prostitution like those provided for his nation’s troops, with red lights marking establishments for enlisted men and blue for officers only. Pershing sent this offer to Raymond Fosdick, President Wilson’s agent in keeping the stateside army free of vice. Fosdick showed it to Secretary of War Baker. “For God’s sake, Raymond,” Baker said, “don’t show this to the President or he’ll stop the war!”
The thoughtful Private Yensen refused to judge the French nation on the basis of what the doughboys found when they went in search of “a little womanly affection.” “Ordinarily we get acquainted only with the lowest class here just as we did around Ft. Leavenworth or Kansas City,” he wrote. “So it’s my contention that we can’t judge the women of France by the scum we meet there any more than we can judge the women of America by the chippies that congregate around the army camps back home. If I had a daughter I wouldn’t trust her very far with the average man in this outfit, and I suppose the respectable French people feel the same way.”
Pershing was almost obsessive about the prevention of venereal disease, demanding daily reports on new cases reported and studying the latest data when visiting his divisions. His vigilance appears to have been effective. Though 57,195 cases were recorded by war’s end, they accounted for only about 4 percent of the days lost from duty as a result of disease.
It need hardly be said that VD was not foremost among the problems requiring the general’s attention. Among the bigger ones, and incomparably more urgent, was transportation. The men and matériel that were soon arriving in vast quantities from America had to be unloaded somewhere. For this purpose, Pershing requested and was granted the use of three ports on France’s Atlantic coast: Pauillac near Bordeaux, La Pallice to the north of it, and St. Nazaire farther north still. None of the three were important to the French or British, and troops and supplies could be transported from them to Lorraine without having to pass through the congested railyards of Paris. A further advantage was that ships crossing the ocean to or from these ports had to go nowhere near Britain or Ireland, where the U-boats most often prowled.
The War Department, having made a close study of the available shipping, replied that it would be able to send only 634,975 men to France by June 15, 1918. This would not begin to meet what Pershing had determined to be the need. In both Washington and Chaumont, this prompted a shift of attention to the one country that had a big enough transport fleet to make a difference—Great Britain. But David Lloyd George claimed to be unable to offer much help. His nation had barely enough merchantmen, he insisted, to feed its people and sustain its own war effort. Thus it remained unclear just when the AEF might become as big and as capable as Pershing said it would have to be in order to join the fighting. Britain and France continued to demand the amalgamation of the American troops into their armies. Pershing, under brutally intense pressure, continued to refuse.
One way to increase shipboard space for troops was to reduce the shipment of other things. One way to do that was to buy as many necessities as possible from European sources. Pershing, endowed with what amounted to an unlimited budget, set out to do exactly that. He had persuaded an old friend, the Chicago banker Charles Dawes, to join his staff and take charge of procurement. It was a wise move, Dawes being a brilliantly effective if personally rather unmilitary manager. His task was made possible by the fact that the war had had little impact on France’s production of a good many essentials including raw materials. Eventually the American supply organization, created “to relieve the combatant field force from every consideration except that of defeating the enemy,” would employ more than 650,000 men, and Dawes would become a general. His organization ultimately purchased ten million tons of European goods.
The Americans expressed amazement at how little the British and French governments and armed forces cooperated with each other or displayed any interest in doing so. “Our allies seem to hate one another,” Pershing’s chief of staff, James Harbord, wrote not long after arriving in Europe. This made everything more difficult, including the establishment of a rail system to connect the AEF’s ports to its base on the other side of France.
Among the problems was the fact that after three years of war, France’s rail network was worn out. It had almost no serviceable locomotives to offer the AEF. Meanwhile between six and seven hundred high-quality locomotives were sitting unused in Belgium, the government of which was hoarding them for use in reconstruction and the revival of commerce whenever the war ended. Dawes managed to pry them loose—the United States had leverage with the Belgians, thanks to years of civilian relief work—and immediately handed them over to the French. That was one problem solved, but more remained unsolved than anyone could count.
Even within the various Allied governments, the failure to communicate and coordinate could be astonishing. By summer’s end France was aquiver with rumors that the country’s supplies of mined coal were nearly exhausted. It was feared that if winter came and people had no coal, there would be riots, and once riots began in a France thoroughly sick of war, there was no saying what might follow. AEF headquarters naturally took all this seriously; quite apart from the awful prospect of their being a foreign army in a nation on the verge of an uprising, Dawes estimated that by February Pershing’s forces were going to need 150,000 tons of coal every month.
He looked to the British and was told that although they had coal in abundance, they had no way of getting it to where it was needed. He proposed importing American miners to increase the output of France’s coalfields, drained of skilled workers by the war, and was told that this was likely to cause as much anger as a general coal shortage. Finally an American war correspondent named Hubbard was commissioned an army major and sent out to determine the actual state of France’s coal inventory. With surprising speed, he returned to report that there was no cause for concern. How had he learned this so quickly? By calling on the most obvious source of reliable information, the economics section of the French intelligence service. The staff there was delighted to see him. They possessed complete and up-to-date information on the coal situation and could prove that available supplies were sufficient to meet all needs. But they had been unable to get anyone in their own government to pay attention.
The soldier’s second-best friend
After his rifle, his trench
ing tool.
As of mid-October the number of AEF combat casualties stood at a virginal zero. Units of the First Division, however, were now being given brief periods of duty in quiet sectors of the front. They were under the supervision of French officers and allowed to take no action without permission. October 23 brought the first wounding of Americans by enemy artillery; the injured were treated at a field hospital and returned to duty. Days later First Division gunners cautiously fired their first round of artillery, and an unlucky German soldier became the Americans’ first prisoner of war.
Then, in the predawn hours of November 3, a force of German trench raiders came across No Man’s Land some ten miles east of Nancy. Under cover of an artillery barrage, they rushed an American platoon in a normally quiet part of the line. When they departed, after a short sharp bout of hand-to-hand fighting, they took with them a dozen prisoners and left behind the dead bodies of the first three AEF members to be killed in combat. They were Corporal James B. Grisham, a twenty-seven-year-old former factory worker who had joined the army in 1914; Private Thomas F. Enright, who had enlisted back in 1909 and was thirty at the time of his death; and Private Merle Hay, twenty-one and a green recruit.
It cannot be said that the three did not get their share of glory. They were buried, originally, with full military honors near the place where they died, with a French general giving a speech. A monument was erected over their graves. After the war, in a departure from standard practice, their bodies were returned to the United States and solemnly reinterred in their hometowns with dignitaries presiding and reverent crowds looking on. Hay, the young Iowan, achieved a distinctly American kind of immortality. Not long after his death a highway running northward out of Des Moines was renamed Merle Hay Road. Decades later, when the city’s largest shopping mall was constructed along that road, it became Merle Hay Plaza. It is doubtful that one-tenth of 1 percent of the people shopping there know the origin of the name.
The AEF grew by year end to 125,000 men. Many had been in France for half a year, training incessantly, still living in barns, but Pershing continued to insist that they were not ready for combat. To say that this was unacceptable to the Allies, for whom the war was not going at all well, is to understate the case. The doughboys were settling in for a winter that would turn out to be so dark, cold, and wet, so riddled with disease, that they called it “the Valley Forge of the AEF.” Back in the States, the human pipeline was full to bursting. The Selective Service System had met its target of getting one and a half million men into uniform by December 31.
Background
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Buffalo Soldiers
In the summer of 1917, a nightmare out of the darkest recesses of the American subconscious suddenly seemed to come howlingly to life.
Race riots. Race war. Retribution for the primordial sin of slavery, demanding to be atoned for at last.
It began on the first day of July, in East St. Louis, Illinois, a rough-and-tumble riverfront town of railyards and stockyards across the Mississippi from St. Louis. A party of armed white men, probably drunk and out for a jolly time, drove through the streets of the “nigger district” shouting insults and firing their guns. No one was hurt, but many were frightened. When quiet returned, residents peered out cautiously through the windows of their homes. Those who had guns checked that they were loaded and waited for the revelers to return.
Another carload of white men appeared. It stopped, and the men got out; they, too, were armed. Questions were called out, answers were shouted back, and by the alchemy of fear an uncertain exchange of words escalated into a gunfight. Two of the white men were killed. It turned out that they were police detectives.
The next day, after a night of electrifying tension, there came another invasion. It was hundreds of white men this time, armed vigilantes bent on taking revenge and imposing order on their own terms. What followed was a wild melee that had nothing to do with order on any terms. At least thirty-three of the town’s black residents were killed, by some accounts more than a hundred. Eight whites died as well. Hundreds of houses were set ablaze as police and National Guardsmen either looked on passively or joined in the rampage.
The story was a national sensation. Theodore Roosevelt condemned the actions of the whites, but his was a solitary voice. Official inquiries were undertaken but were too cursory to accomplish anything. Investigators took less interest in the testimony of survivors than in rumors of how the trouble had been caused by labor agitators, or German agents.
All this was bad enough, especially as it was followed by similar though smaller outbreaks of racial violence in other places. It brought visions of Armageddon to both sides of America’s black-white divide. It moved the War Department, in response to southern hysteria, to suspend the induction of black draftees. But in August something even more terrifying happened. This time it was black soldiers of the U.S. Army, men trained in warfare, engaging in a pitched battle with white police and troops.
It took place in the racial tinderbox of Houston, Texas. Deeply southern in their attitudes and culture, the white citizens of Houston had long been uncomfortable with their city’s being the home base of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry, which since the Civil War had been one of the regular army’s four black regiments (the officers of which were, of course, unanimously white). On the night of August 23, Houston police raided a craps game in which all the players were members of the Twenty-Fourth. In the scuffle that followed, one of the soldier-gamblers (himself a military policeman) was injured and arrested. A black woman was apparently subjected to rough treatment by the white police.
When news of what had happened reached the Twenty-Fourth’s barracks, it sparked a furious reaction. Men long fed up with how they were treated by white Houston—and perhaps given an exaggerated account of what had transpired at the craps game—decided that they had had enough. Bizarrely, almost suicidally, they took up their weapons and started for the central city. Whether (as would be alleged) they were intent on a killing spree is unproved. What is known is that they moved on the city’s police station, gunfire broke out, and white army troops were dispatched to intervene. By the time the fight ended, fifteen whites and Hispanics including five police officers had been shot dead along with four of the black soldiers. An entire battalion of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry was under arrest.
Enraged black men, armed and intent on mayhem: it was the deepest fear of millions of white Americans, and not of southern whites only. Retribution came swiftly. Sixty-four of the arrested soldiers went before a hastily arranged court-martial, and in short order twenty-nine were sentenced to death. Nineteen were hanged so quickly that appeal was impossible.
The Inquirer, a black newspaper in San Antonio, published a letter in which a Mrs. C. L. Threadgill Dennis expressed regret for the tragedy but told the black soldiers that “we would rather see you shot by the highest tribunal of the United States Army because you dared protect a Negro woman from the insult of a southern brute in the form of a policeman, than have you forced to go to Europe to fight for a liberty you cannot enjoy.” The paper’s editor, who claimed that he had been away when the letter was published and knew nothing about it, was convicted of encouraging mutiny and sentenced to two years in prison. Clearly, complaints were not going to be tolerated.
White America had for centuries been uneasy about the use of soldiers of African descent in a society most of whose black members were slaves or serfs. Virginia prohibited blacks from serving in its militia as early as 1639, and other colonies, not all of them southern, soon did likewise. Such rules were sometimes relaxed in times of crisis, especially when white volunteers were in short supply, so that freedmen served as soldiers and even officers in the Revolutionary War. They served in the War of 1812 as well, but in 1820 Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, a South Carolinian, imposed a ban on black enlistment that remained in effect until the Civil War. Then the Lincoln administration, under pressure from abolitionists and in need of recruits, began accepting
black volunteers and organizing them into segregated units.
Ultimately twenty thousand black soldiers served in the Union army. They performed well and endured high casualty rates. By the end of the war, even the Confederacy, desperately short of manpower, was promising freedom to slaves in return for military service.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, it became a tradition that the regular army would always include four black regiments. Under white officers, these regiments served in the Indian Wars (where they came to be called buffalo soldiers), the Spanish-American War, and the suppression of the Philippine insurrection. The men whom “Black Jack” Pershing led up San Juan Hill on the flank of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders were members of one such regiment.
This was accepted even by the South’s powerful congressional delegation because of the marginal position of the military in the American society of the time. The enlisted ranks of the regular army were made up largely of immigrants and misfits, ill-paid men many of whom had rejected or been rejected by the civilian world. They were a suspect group, stationed mostly in the distant West, and the black regiments were merely somewhat more marginal than the others. They accepted being led by officers who, this being nineteenth-century America, often regarded them as not quite human.
The Great War impacted the American racial situation long before intervention. First it brought immigration from Europe to a halt. That created a shortage of unskilled labor, a problem that conscription would later make worse. Employers started sending recruiters into the South with promises of a better life elsewhere. Neither the owners of the land on which freed slaves had long toiled nor the white factory workers of the industrial states were happy about this. Companies sometimes used black migrants as strikebreakers, pitting poor whites against poorer blacks, generating the tragedy of East St. Louis and later of cities as large as Chicago. It is estimated that a third of a million southern blacks moved to the North and West between 1910 and 1920.
