The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  Such comments point not only to the courage of the American troops but to their newness to industrialized warfare, the deficiencies of their training, and the belief of overconfident senior commanders that they had nothing to learn from veterans of the long Western Front stalemate. They point finally to a waste of life. The AEF staff was not blind to this. Its training section would report that, although valuable lessons were being learned and applied, it remained true up to the end of the war that “assault formations had been too dense and lacked flexibility; scouts were seldom used; supporting arms were improperly employed; and junior officers displayed little initiative.”

  The early American victories would have come at even greater cost, and might not have been possible, if the doughboys had encountered the German armies of earlier years or even of March 1918. But by the time of Cantigny and Belleau Wood, most of the German divisions were at half their original strength or less, many of their troops were weakened by influenza (which would kill seventeen hundred people just in Berlin on the single day October 5), and their supply system was threadbare. Replacement troops, when replacements could be found, were often boys in their midteens or middle-aged men of dubious fitness. The more wretched the German situation became, the longer the troops had to stay in action—there were no more reserves to relieve them—and the stronger was the impulse to find opportunities to surrender.

  The AEF, by contrast, could rotate its troops freely and absorb heavy losses because replacements were pouring into its ports. As July ended, there were 54,224 American officers and 1,114,838 enlisted men in France. One hundred and seventy-five thousand of them were operating the supply system, leaving nearly three-quarters of a million for combat duty. And morale remained high despite the losses, because the doughboys and the Allies were clearly winning. Hindenburg, writing years later of the summer of 1918, paid tribute to the tenacity and self-sacrifice of his beleaguered forces. He added, however, that the situation had become hopeless, that “even heroism such as this could no longer save the situation; it could only prevent an utter catastrophe.”

  That was the most the Germans could hope for as 1918 entered its eighth month: to escape utter catastrophe. Ludendorff knew it, too. Though Mangin’s drive was stopped short of Soissons, the tide of the war had turned. From this point on, the Germans would always be on the defensive and almost constantly under attack. On July 21 the U.S. Third Division advanced into the center of Château-Thierry and found the city undefended, the Germans having withdrawn. The Twenty-Sixth Division, in carrying out orders to take control of positions beyond Belleau Wood, found the Germans gone from there as well. The two divisions set off northward in pursuit and ran into the heavily armed rear guard of an orderly German retreat. Behind them came the Thirty-Second Division. Lieutenant Charles Donnelly described the scene:

  Our recent companions in arms, the Yankee Division, had captured the area we had just entered only a few days before; there had not been time enough in which to clean up the battlefield. Dead men and horses littered the fields and putrefaction, aided by the warm weather, was well along. Of all the odors I have experienced, none is as repulsive as the sweetish, nauseating smell of rotting flesh, especially in hot weather. Up to that time I had never smoked but I needed something to help me cope with the stench. A field agent of the Knights of Columbus [an American Catholic fraternal organization that had sent volunteers to France] came by at about that time, giving away tobacco, writing paper and other things soldiers needed. I told him my problem and he gave me some cigars, Prince Albert, and a corncob pipe; I have been a cigar smoker from that day on.

  Just weeks earlier, thrilled by the gains of Ludendorff’s early offensives, the ever-more-irrelevant Kaiser Wilhelm had been boasting that he would soon be in Paris. Now he was reeling from exactly the same disappointment he had experienced in 1914: the news that his forces were overextended and had to be pulled back from the Marne. The challenge now was to get those forces, and as much of their equipment as possible, out of the Marne salient before another French offensive took Soissons and cut them off.

  On July 24 Foch assembled Haig, Pétain, and Pershing to decide what to do next, now that the front was becoming fluid for the first time in four years. Their spirits were higher than at any time since the first American troops marched down the Champs-Élysées one year and three weeks earlier. The German offensives were obviously at an end and had been survived. The territory lost in those offensives was being recovered. Everyone was eager to stay on the offensive, to prevent the Germans from forming new defensive lines.

  Foch wanted coordinated offensives at three distinct points along the front, to put the Germans under more pressure than they could withstand. The British were to strike in the west, in the area of Amiens, and drive eastward. The French would start at the Marne and push northward. And a newly constituted American army, under Pershing’s command at last, would clear the Germans out of the two-hundred-square-mile salient that had been protruding like a spear point into the French lines at St. Mihiel since it was first captured by invading Bavarians back in 1914. The ultimate objective in all cases was to capture the east-west rail lines, without which the Germans would be unable to maintain their position in France, and with which the Allies and Americans would be able to shuttle men, guns, and supplies back and forth along the front as never before.

  Foch’s plan was the best news that Pershing had received since taking command of the AEF. The supreme commander was not only acknowledging that there should be an American army distinct from those of the Allies, but approving the creation of that army now. He was not only giving it a mission equivalent to those of the British and French but giving it exactly the mission that Pershing had always envisioned. In 1917 Pershing had chosen to position the AEF where, in the fullness of time, it would be able to attack the St. Mihiel salient. He had done so for exactly that purpose, because once the salient was taken, strategically vital targets would be within reach. He foresaw a continued advance to Metz. The capture of that city’s junction of rail lines and roads would sever the communications arteries on which much of the German position in France depended.

  Upon returning to his headquarters, a quietly jubilant Pershing issued the orders necessary for the creation of an American First Army. Young Lieutenant Colonel George C. Marshall, who had been a captain when he crossed over to France with Pershing in 1917, was given responsibility for planning. He was told that seven divisions would be available, six American and one French. That was a challenge. Seven divisions were barely enough for an attack on just one side of the salient.

  Haig and Pétain were not confident that conditions were quite ripe for offensives on the scale that Foch wanted, but they were willing to go along. Their confidence was bolstered the day after their meeting, when Ludendorff, in a foredoomed attempt to escape the inevitable, launched a last attempt to encircle Reims. It failed quickly and completely. Haig and Pétain returned to their respective headquarters and put their staffs to work on ambitious new plans.

  Pershing was impatient to summon his far-flung divisions back to Lorraine and prepare them for St. Mihiel, but doing so was not possible quite yet. Some of them were being used by the French to harry the Germans withdrawing from the Marne. From July 18 to 24 the Twenty-Sixth (Yankee) Division was in the forefront of this pursuit, pressing the German rear guard and under constant fire. During this week, which ended with the Forty-Second (Rainbow) Division taking over, the Twenty-Sixth took four thousand casualties.

  The Rainbow found itself not pursuing the Germans but attempting to dislodge them from defensive positions in which they had entrenched themselves along the River Ourq (which the members of an Irish-American battalion from New York called the O’Rourke). Five days and nights of hard fighting finally forced the Germans to resume their retreat, but only after units from the American Fourth and Thirty-Second Divisions joined in. The bravery was extraordinary on both sides; the village of Sergy changed hands seven times in a single day. On July 30
the poet Joyce Kilmer was killed. When an American brigade commander suffered a breakdown, he was replaced by Douglas MacArthur, at age thirty-eight the youngest of a number of AEF colonels recently promoted to brigadier general. MacArthur was continuing his feats of frontline derring-do. By virtue of having won his first star, he now became the only American general to literally, physically lead troops in combat in the Great War. In doing so at the Ourq, he received another Silver Star. By the time the Rainbow Division was relieved on August 2, it had taken 5,500 casualties.

  The Germans halted their withdrawal for a second time two days later, digging in this time on high ground overlooking the River Vesle. Two American army corps created by Pershing earlier in the year came together here. The First was commanded by one of the most admired (and also most obese) officers in the U.S. Army, Major General Hunter Liggett. The Third’s commanding officer was Robert Lee Bullard, who had commanded at Cantigny and was, in keeping with his name, a southerner and a commander of considerable talent and aristocratic demeanor. Some of their divisions would remain in place at the Vesle for most of the following month. The French general in overall command of the sector left them in a riverside position so exposed to enemy fire that the doughboys came to refer to it as Death Valley.

  A new pattern was emerging. Sorry as the state of the German army was, even under the most terrible circumstances its commanders could rely on a hard core to go on fighting to devastating effect. It remained capable of inflicting hard punishment on its advancing foes, not least on the Americans, with their fatal combination of fierce bravery and inexperience.

  Background

  ____

  Eggs Loaded with Dynamite

  History repeats itself, Karl Marx tells us, first as tragedy and then as farce.

  Regardless of whether one sees America’s involvement in the Great War as in any way tragic, the smaller military adventure that followed hard on its heels was definitely farcical—grimly so, and with tragic overtones.

  This smaller adventure was put in motion by President Wilson’s decision, in 1918 after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, to send American troops into the measureless vastness of Siberia. He insisted that in doing so he was not taking sides in Russia’s civil war or intruding into the Russian people’s business. If he believed what he said—we can accept that he did, having seen his ability to bathe dubious acts in a self-flattering light—he was wrong.

  What he accomplished was a poisoning of relations between the United States and the new Soviet Union for years to come, at frightful cost to the American soldiers he had injected into an impossible mess.

  The story can begin on August 2, 1918. On that day American General William S. Graves received what he would call, sardonically, “the most remarkable telegram that has ever emanated from the War Department.”

  Take the first and fastest train out of San Francisco, the telegram said, and proceed to Kansas City.

  Graves was stationed at Camp Fremont in northern California at this time, overseeing the training of draftees whom he expected to soon be taking to France as the newly formed Eighth Division. Upon arriving in Kansas City at the end of a two-thousand-mile train ride, he found Secretary of War Newton Baker waiting for him.

  The two men were friends. Baker, apologetically, informed Graves that he was to turn around immediately and speed back to Camp Fremont. There he was to make ready to depart for, of all improbable places, the remote far north of Russia. He would take command of what was being named the American Expeditionary Force, Russia. Baker said he was sorry that Graves would not be going to France as he had hoped, but neither he nor Chief of Staff Peyton March had been able to dissuade the president from ordering all this.

  Baker gave Graves a sealed envelope. “This contains the policy of the United States in Russia which you are to follow,” he said. “Watch your step. You will be walking on eggs loaded with dynamite.” With that, he boarded a train bound for Washington and was gone. The envelope, when Graves opened it, contained seven pages of text, typed personally by Woodrow Wilson. They were the president’s handmade copy of a memorandum to himself, an aide-mémoire dated July 16, 1918, that he had written after the Supreme War Council at Versailles asked him to join the Allies in sending troops into the maelstrom that Russia had become. In it he laid out his reasons for agreeing and his intention to ask all the participating nations to confirm publicly that they intended no “interference of any kind with the political sovereignty of Russia, any intervention in her internal affairs, or any impairment of her territorial integrity now or hereafter.”

  As guidance for a soldier being given a nightmare assignment in a distant place of which he knew almost nothing, Wilson’s typewritten meditation was essentially useless. But Baker and March had shown good judgment in choosing Graves for the job. From September 1, the day of his arrival at the isolated Siberian port of Vladivostok, he found himself knee-deep in a political, diplomatic, and military snake pit. Contingents from Britain, France, Japan, and several smaller Allied nations were already on the scene, all jostling for advantage and entangling themselves in the murderous ramifications of Russia’s civil war.

  Graves did not have the option of extricating himself, but he resolved not to get drawn in. He made it his policy to keep himself and his men out of the intrigues and maneuvers swirling all around them, and uninvolved in the resulting atrocities. He had the comfort of knowing that all the top men at the War Department, along with General Bliss at the Supreme War Council in France, shared his disgust. His restraint, good sense, and basic decency would save the United States from being more tainted than it eventually was by participation in an absurd, ugly, and painfully protracted affair.

  The purpose of the intervention, as stated by Wilson in his memo, was to secure and keep out of German hands the million tons of war matériel that the Allies had sent to tsarist Russia and was now stockpiled in the ports of Archangel, Murmansk, and Sebastopol, thousands of miles from the European war. The Supreme War Council, in agreeing to such a mission and requesting American participation, had stipulated that no nation should send more than ten thousand troops, so that none could dominate. The British and French were eager to proceed, hopeful less of retrieving lost supplies than of overthrowing the Bolsheviks and getting Russia back into the war. Japan was even more eager and paid no attention to the manpower limit. Ultimately the Japanese would pour eighty thousand troops into Siberia, their purpose being to grab a hefty chunk of the collapsed Russian Empire.

  Graves found some three thousand American troops waiting for him at Vladivostok. More than half had been sent from the tropical Philippines, without winter clothing. Hundreds more would land at the port of Archangel a few days later. Many were raw recruits who had had absolutely no training; they were equipped with Russian rifles that had bayonets permanently attached and were so inaccurate that the men said they could shoot around corners. Graves himself, as he later wrote, had “no information as to the military, political, social, economic, or financial situation in Russia.” He also had little idea of what he or his men were supposed to be doing. He allowed some to guard railway lines under British supervision. Others guarded the ports, where they found mountains of munitions, food, fuel, automobiles, trucks, machine tools, and steel, copper, and brass. All of it had been delivered by Allied shipping while Russia was still in the war, but never moved to places where it might have done some good.

  By October a colorful assortment of soldiers was on the scene: a thousand French, sixteen hundred British, four thousand each from Romania, Serbia, and Canada, and twelve thousand Poles. Numerically they were overwhelmed by the Japanese and, most bizarrely of all, by the 120,000 men of what was called the Czech Legion. This last force, sent to Russia in 1917 to shore up the tsar’s battered forces, had been left stranded by the Bolshevik takeover. Now, wanting to get to the Western Front but prevented from leaving by the Bolsheviks, it had taken over much of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Its members were living aboard 190 trains on
which they shuttled back and forth, making war on the Bolsheviks and any civilians who threatened to get in their way. They were a tough outfit, always ready for a fight.

  Eventually there were nine thousand Americans, too. Though all the foreign troops were officially neutral so far as the civil war was concerned, only the Americans, thanks to General Graves, never became engaged in supporting the Bolsheviks’ White Russian rivals. Helping the Whites required a strong stomach and deep reserves of cynicism; they were a savage lot, slaughtering so many Siberians that their “campaign” became something akin to genocide and won many friends for the Bolsheviks. Graves, a decade later, would write that “I am well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia, to every one killed by the Bolsheviks.” He recalled that the Whites, “in roaming the country like wild animals, killing and robbing the people,” were under the protection of the Japanese. He believed that the aim of the Japanese was to create a situation so intolerable and hopeless that the Europeans and Americans would withdraw, leaving them permanently in control.

  Cossacks were a significant part of the Siberian population. They were on a killing spree of their own, never attacking the Americans but showing contempt for them. In this mad chaos, Graves could only have kept his men safe by confining them to barracks. That would have been as pointless as their being in Siberia in the first place, and so trouble was inescapable. The first U.S. casualties came in Murmansk only sixteen days after Graves’s arrival at Vladivostok, when four Americans were killed and four wounded in a clash with Bolsheviks probably seeking to pillage warehouses.

  Things went from bad to worse after that. It is always harder to extract troops from an unstable situation than to inject them in the first place, and so it was not until 1920 that President Wilson ordered a withdrawal, and not until 1922 that the last American was out. The official toll was vanishingly tiny by the standards of the Great War but deplorable nonetheless: 137 Americans killed in action, with another forty-three later dying of their wounds. One hundred and twenty-two died of disease, forty-six of accidental causes. Five committed suicide.