by G. J. Meyer
By 1903, the year Douglas graduated first in his class from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Arthur had had another good war. His performance in the Spanish-American War had vaulted him first to brigadier general and major general of volunteers, then, more important, to brigadier general in the regular army. By 1901 he was a regular army major general and military governor of the Philippines. In the following years he became the army’s only lieutenant general, but in 1906 he was passed over for chief of staff because of the opposition of Secretary of War William Howard Taft, with whom he had clashed when Taft headed the civil government of the Philippines.
Douglas, by virtue of the eminence his father had finally achieved and his own superlative record first at West Point and then in the Philippines, was from the start of his career a member of the army’s innermost elite. By the time of America’s entry into the Great War, he was a thirty-seven-year-old major on the staff of army headquarters in Washington, incomparably well connected and with a reputation for dash and daring. Early in his career he had gone to the Russo-Japanese War and seen much of Asia as an aide to his father. From 1906 to 1908 he was an assistant to President Roosevelt.
He was never hesitant to make use of his status as a prince among junior officers. His father, then retired, died of a heart attack in 1912, and in 1913 the unmarried Captain MacArthur wangled an assignment in Washington so that his mother, who was in his care, could be near the Walter Reed Army Hospital. (A decade earlier, during her son’s years as a West Point cadet, Mrs. MacArthur had lived in a hotel overlooking the academy’s grounds.) In 1914 he got himself assigned to the expedition dispatched by President Wilson to Veracruz, Mexico. The commander of that operation, Frederick Funston, had been a protégé of Arthur MacArthur’s, and had been nominated by him for the Medal of Honor he received for capturing the leader of the Philippine insurgency.
Captain Douglas MacArthur got his own first nomination for a Medal of Honor in Mexico. Upon deciding that locomotives were needed to support the base established by the Americans at Veracruz, he set out with a small party to steal three of them. He was successful, but the train ride back to Funston’s headquarters turned into a running gun battle in which MacArthur shot several attackers with his revolver and got bullet holes in his shirt. The committee that reviewed his nomination decided not to award him the medal because he had undertaken the raid without the knowledge of his superiors. Members feared that rewarding such conduct might encourage other junior officers to embark on ill-judged adventures of their own.
When the United States went to war in 1917, then-Major MacArthur proposed to Secretary of War Baker the creation of a division made up of National Guard units from across the country. This Forty-Second Division, soon famous as the Rainbow Division, was commanded by a major general, but MacArthur became its chief of staff and immediately moved up two ranks to temporary colonel.
The Forty-Second, because it was made up largely of men with some military training, was one of the first four divisions sent to France. When after months of waiting the division was finally sent to the front, MacArthur began doing things that staff officers were expected never to do, starting with his nighttime raids on enemy trenches. He made himself colorful, removing the metal grommets from his hat to give it a slouch, never wearing a helmet except when it rained, going into No Man’s Land without a weapon, wearing a seven-foot scarf knitted by his mother and a bulky wool sweater displaying the big letter A he had earned playing baseball at West Point. One night he was arrested by soldiers from a different division who thought this odd character must be some bizarre kind of enemy spy.
He won his first Silver Star in February, and his first Distinguished Service Cross not long afterward. By war’s end, he would have two of the latter and seven of the former. In June 1918 he was the youngest by far of a number of colonels promoted to brigadier general—presumably the letters his mother had written to General Pershing and Secretary Baker urging his promotion were not a factor—and was commanding a brigade with his usual bravado.
From the time of Ludendorff’s spring offensives onward, the Rainbow was in heavy combat, taking many casualties. Though MacArthur was always in the thick of things and usually in the lead, he seemed untouchable. One night a raiding party he was leading was pinned down by artillery fire. When the barrage lifted, he moved among his men, shaking them, telling them to wake up because it was time to move on. No one responded. He was the only one still alive.
During the attack on the St. Mihiel salient, another future legend, George S. Patton, crossed paths with MacArthur on open ground. The two stood talking as explosions from enemy artillery drew closer. Patton wanted to take cover but felt he could not do so with MacArthur standing there, calmly talking. The barrage passed over them safely, and Patton later called MacArthur “the bravest man I ever met.”
To the AEF’s headquarters staff, MacArthur was a glory-seeking show-off and an interfering, string-pulling nuisance. Pershing himself was annoyed when MacArthur, going over his head, wrote to Secretary Baker and got a reversal of plans to break up the Rainbow Division and distribute its troops among understrength divisions. Nor was he impressed by MacArthur’s frontline heroics. He complained that “the days for brigadier generals to rush forward in the firing line waving their hats and yelling ‘Come on, boys!’ are in actual warfare at least a thing of the past.” It was for this reason, apparently, that he refused to endorse the Medal of Honor nomination that would come to MacArthur for his actions during the Meuse-Argonne offensive.
The stern Pershing was also offended by MacArthur’s irregular dress and indifference to spit and polish. To the fighting men who served with and under him, however, MacArthur was both a genuine hero and a respected, even loved leader. The fact that he had been twice wounded and twice gassed, in one instance requiring hospitalization for two weeks, carried great weight with his troops. So did MacArthur’s treatment of them. “With us he was a soldier’s soldier,” a Rainbow Division veteran would recall. “He talked beautiful then just like he did later, but there was no ego in him. He was natural and friendly, though he insisted on the attitude of a soldier from all of us. His first thought was always for the soldier, looking out for supplies, trying to check frozen feet and trench foot, getting hot food to them in the line and taking care of everything. I was near him for a year and a half and he never did anything wrong as a soldier.”
Even Pershing, who once threw MacArthur out of his office for refusing to stop arguing for something he wanted (“Out! Get out and stay out!”), yielded in the end to the undeniable fact that this was an officer of extraordinary gifts. He approved his appointment as commander of the Rainbow Division and recommended him for promotion to major general. That promotion never went through, because the war ended first. Upon returning home, MacArthur was slated to revert to his regular army rank of major. Before that happened, however, fate and the War Department smiled on him once again. He was appointed superintendent of West Point. That was a brigadier general’s post, so he got to keep his star.
Chapter 20
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In at the Kill
EASY VICTORIES ARE good for green armies, providing experience without exacting too painful a price, helping to build confidence. St. Mihiel, however, may have been too easy to be of much use. It certainly provided no forewarning of what the Americans were going to encounter upon launching their offensive into the Argonne Forest and up the valley of the Meuse, where the enemy was determined to hold his ground. What lay ahead was the last great convulsion of the Great War, a fight in which the tenacity of the German defenders combined with the mistakes of the Americans to produce horrendous losses and a sadly ambiguous though indisputably decisive victory.
The Battle of Meuse-Argonne began for the Americans with the same high hopes that the British and French commanders had felt earlier in the war when launching their first doomed offensives. And they had reason for optimism. The attacking force would include ten American divisions, more t
han a quarter of a million well-equipped combat troops with more than 200,000 more in reserve. It would face at most 125,000 defenders belonging to divisions that were understrength and rated as of middling quality or worse by the German military authorities. The advance would take place across a twenty-four-mile section of front, supported by staggering masses of artillery: nearly 150 guns for every mile. Enough aircraft were on hand to guarantee control of the skies.
With so much force at his disposal, Pershing is perhaps not to be faulted for making the Germans’ main defensive line, the Kriemhildestellung (a name taken from German legend), his objective for the first day of the attack, September 26. That was ten miles distant, absurdly ambitious by the standards of the past but not unreasonable if judged by what had happened at St. Mihiel. The ultimate objective, the four-track railway that connected Metz to Lille in the west, was twenty-four miles from the offensive’s starting point. It was a great prize, one that if taken could seal the Germans’ fate. The First Army could advance much more slowly than it had at St. Mihiel and still cut the rail line in under a week.
Again following the pattern of the Allied armies earlier in the war, Pershing’s timetable became irrelevant almost as soon as his troops set out across No Man’s Land. They did not start until the enemy’s forward position had been saturated with high explosives, shrapnel, and gas, but the Germans were defending ground that they had held since 1915 and that their engineers had turned into a hornet’s nest of stoutly built and interconnected trenches, dugouts, and pillboxes. There were four defensive lines, each designed to make maximum use of a hilly landscape studded with woods and cut with deep ravines. Machine gun emplacements were everywhere, positioned so as to lay down overlapping fields of fire. From various high points, artillery spotters were able to direct the fire of batteries concealed by camouflage from the Allies’ aircraft.
Advancing against all this was like picking a fight with a buzz saw. In the space of a few days, after never advancing at much more than a crawl, Pershing’s lead divisions bogged down in a state not far from disorder. Dirt roads became almost impassable as the rains of autumn turned them to mud. All forms of transport were in short supply, partly because the Allies’ insistence on maximum transatlantic shipments of soldiers had limited the import of motor vehicles and animals, partly because horses and mules promised by the French were never delivered. It became impossible to move the artillery or even the ammunition. The whole supply system seized up. The frontline troops had to fight on without food and relied for water on what fell from the sky.
Furious with frustration, desperate for a breakthrough, Pershing issued an order for all officers up and down the line to stay on the offensive “without regard to losses and without regard to the exposed conditions of the flanks.” This degree of aggressiveness, of apparent indifference to the rate at which lives were being expended, had rarely been displayed except by the likes of Butcher Mangin or Britain’s Haig at the height of his ambition. It was also all too typical of Pershing. Such to-the-last-man tactics, when imposed on troops not facing a high-stakes crisis in which even temporary withdrawal might mean ruin, bordered on irresponsibility. In a campaign like Meuse-Argonne, where the worst Pershing had to fear was not reaching excessively ambitious objectives, his approach deprived officers in direct contact with the enemy of essential flexibility. He appears to have been prepared to pay whatever price in lives was required to show the world that his army, the one that he had built, was invincible at every moment and in every circumstance. This is one reason why, in spite of his managerial competence, Pershing has never been considered one of history’s, or even one of the First World War’s, great generals. The severity of his first order, the difficulties that it created, undoubtedly made necessary another that shortly followed—the one authorizing officers to shoot any man who tried to run away.
By October 1 the situation had deteriorated to such a point that orders to fight on could accomplish nothing. The doughboys had advanced perhaps four miles at their farthest points of penetration, and were now stuck in place. In the four days ending on September 29, the First Army had taken 45,000 casualties, putting the start of their campaign among the costliest of the war. The commander of the First Corps, Hunter Liggett, estimated that 100,000 men had become detached from their units and were wandering aimlessly in the rear, adding to the confusion and congestion. More soldiers had to be evacuated because of influenza than because of wounds. More than 70,000 flu victims would be hospitalized by the time the fight ended, and thousands of them would die.
These problems were almost minor in comparison with those of the Germans. Not only were they hard-pressed in all sectors in the west, they were facing disaster in other theaters of the war. Late in September a French army that had long been bottled up in Salonika in Greece began advancing northward against Bulgaria. The Bulgarians asked Berlin for help and were told that none was possible. In short order they were out of the war, as was the Ottoman Empire as a result of British victories in the Middle East. With the remains of Austria-Hungary’s armies barely capable even of defending themselves, the Germans found themselves open to attack from the southeast. By September 28 Ludendorff, now little more than a nervous wreck, had finally looked squarely at the facts and seen what they meant. It was over. He went to Kaiser Wilhelm and the kaiser’s relative by marriage Prince Max of Baden, the liberal nobleman who had just been installed as chancellor at the insistence of an increasingly rebellious Reichstag. He told them that Germany’s only hope was an armistice, a suspension of hostilities. One had to be arranged immediately.
The kaiser was incredulous. Twice in the previous six months, first after Operation Michael and then after the Noyon-Montdidier offensive, he had boasted that he would soon be in Paris. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had made him master of Russia and the whole of eastern Europe. And now it was necessary to sue for a cease-fire? How could that be? Prince Max was shocked for a different reason. He had long been an advocate of a negotiated settlement, and had agreed with Bethmann’s opposition to unrestricted submarine warfare. But now he was taken aback by Ludendorff’s naïveté, his belief that an armistice could be arranged virtually overnight.
But Ludendorff was adamant. Speed was essential; Germany’s defenses might collapse at any hour, and at home civil order was disintegrating. And so Prince Max got to work, preparing a note addressed not to the Allies or to the United States but to Woodrow Wilson only. He hoped that the president, the man who had once spoken of peace without victory and later shared with the world his Fourteen Points, would be easier to deal with than the British or the French. Three days later, on October 1, the note was delivered to the government of neutral Switzerland for forwarding to Washington. It informed Wilson that Germany was prepared to accept a cessation of hostilities and discuss a permanent settlement based on his Fourteen Points. Four more days passed before it reached the president’s hands.
It was also on October 1 that Pershing, with extreme reluctance but eminent good sense, suspended all combat operations to provide time for restoring order, getting supply lines sorted, and figuring out how to resume the attack. His rage was fed by the knowledge that the French on his left, and beyond them the British, were advancing almost smoothly. That they were more experienced, and had not been obliged to hurry into action immediately after completing anything like the St. Mihiel operation, did nothing to ease his chagrin. Neither did the fact that the Allies were fighting on easier terrain where the Germans were more willing to retreat because they could do so without jeopardizing anything as crucial as the Lille-Metz rail line. What mattered was that the French and British appeared—at least to Pershing—to be outperforming the Americans. That he found intolerable.
The revelation that Germany was looking to end the fighting, supposedly on terms that he himself had laid out, complicated President Wilson’s situation. For almost a year and a half now, he had focused almost exclusively on the great task of winning the war and on enforcing loyalty to that end. D
oing these things had carried him a long way from his prewar advocacy of peace without victory, but the single-mindedness with which he pursued them reduced his differences with the Allies to a manageable level. As an end to the fighting became a real possibility, however, those differences became a challenge and a problem. They were going to give the Republicans new opportunities to accuse him of being soft.
He needed to make a public display of toughness, and did so on the evening of September 27. His witnesses were New York City’s social and financial elite, assembled at the Metropolitan Opera House to mark the start of a fourth Liberty Loan drive. It was a festive occasion: the government’s reliance on borrowing rather than taxes was good news for the elites of every city, and the president’s presence added a gala touch. He told them what many and perhaps most Americans wanted to hear in the autumn of 1918: that “there can be no peace obtained by any kind of bargain or compromise with the governments of the Central Empires” because those governments “have convinced us that they are without honor and do not intend justice.” In short, when the war ended, it would do so on terms imposed by the United States and the Allies. And those terms would mean the end of militaristic Germany.
