The Generals: Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, and the Winning of World War II

by Winston Groom

  Thus the sun, day by day and year by year, inched itself across the horizon of the new century silently marking the grim inevitability of a world at war.

  THE EXPLOSION CAME SOON ENOUGH WHEN, on June 28, 1914, a nineteen-year-old Serb nationalist named Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife as they paraded, against all good advice, through the streets of Sarajevo, Bosnia. The furious Austrians (the country Churchill called Germany’s “idiot ally”) believed that Bosnia’s neighbor Serbia had been behind the crime and delivered a series of “demands” on that seething nation that amounted to a humiliating ultimatum.

  To everyone’s great surprise, the Serbs acceded to all the demands except the last one, which would have in effect put Serbia under Austrian control. It would not have mattered, however, even if Serbia had acceded to the demand; the Austrians’—but, more important, the Germans’—minds were made up: Austria would declare war on Serbia. Even though Russia had sent a clear warning that if Austria attacked the Serbians she would mobilize her armies—as well as diplomatic warnings from France expressing dismay at such threats—on July 28, 1914, Austria declared war and two days later was bombarding Belgrade from gunboats in the Danube.

  As promised, Czar Nicholas II, cousin of the kaiser (in telegrams they called each other “Nicky” and “Willie”), began a partial mobilization of the Russian army (mobilization was tantamount to war) to prevent an Austrian conquest of Serbia. Germany delivered an ultimatum threatening to mobilize if Russia did not cease, and when she did not Germany ordered a general mobilization of its forces and the Schlieffen Plan was immediately set into motion. France mobilized.

  Coattails flying, diplomats from many countries rushed hither and thither but to no avail. On August 2, Germany invaded neutral Luxembourg and that evening sent an ultimatum to King Leopold saying that if neutral Belgium did not permit the German army to pass through its territory, Germany would declare war. Instead, the king of the Belgians ordered his army to mobilize.

  Great Britain, which had hoped to keep out of the fray and whose statesmen were frantically trying to defuse the situation, delivered an ultimatum demanding that Germany respect Belgian neutrality. It based these demands on an 1813 treaty it had signed with the Belgians promising to guarantee its neutrality. That was the ostensible reason, but since time immemorial British diplomacy has been governed by a single question: “But what is best for Great Britain?”

  In London and other English cities people took to the streets to get the latest newspaper headlines. German waiters by the tens of thousands and other German nationals packed up to board ships for home. Patriots waved the Union Jack and sang “Rule Britannia” and “God Save the King.” Peace marchers sang “The Internationale.” Soon fights broke out between them, while Britain waited in nervous excitement.

  When the Germans did not respond and the ultimatum expired at eleven the next night, Britain declared war, prompting the British foreign secretary Sir Grey to make this melancholy observation: “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

  FOLLOWING THE OUTLINE of the Schlieffen Plan, Germany sent a token force to back up the Austrian army while Russia continued its mobilization on their eastern frontier. At the same time, the kaiser’s main army of two million men smashed through Belgium and swooped into northern France with thirty-five army corps determined to envelop the French army and capture Paris. Instead, they ran into a buzz saw after the French unexpectedly amassed a new army just to the east of Paris and the fighting degenerated into a stalemate.

  To protect themselves from the merciless effects of artillery fire, both sides dug trenches in the ground—rude ditchlike things at first, but over the years they became more like a gigantic underground city shored up by timber, complete with bunkers for sleeping and dining, on a line extending nearly 500 miles from Ostend, in northern Belgium, to the foothills of the Swiss Alps.

  The British quickly sent their small, professional army of 250,000 men into the fight, but by the end of the first year it was nearly wiped out. That first year of the war became a kind of dreadful “learning exercise,” in which both sides, to their horror, came to realize the sort of slaughter they had become involved with. The French, for instance, time and again marched into battle “conspicuous on the landscape,” in the words of Churchill, “in blue breeches and red coats. Their artillery officers in black and gold were even more specifically defined targets. The cavalry gloried in ludicrous armor. The doctrine of the offensive raised to the height of a religious frenzy animated all ranks. A cruel surprise awaited them.”

  They were mown down or blown up by the tens of thousands—300,000 casualties in fact during the first several weeks of the war—operating under a battle plan that had been drawn up before the effects of modern armaments were fully understood.

  Nineteen fifteen saw the introduction by the Germans of poison gas, a loathsome weapon soon employed by both sides. That same year a German submarine torpedoed the Cunard passenger liner Lusitania off the Irish coast, killing more than a thousand people, including Americans. An outraged President Wilson warned the Germans, who then retracted their scheme of unrestricted warfare at sea. But the incident was still fresh in American minds when the Germans reinstated the practice a year and a half later.

  In February 1916 the Germans launched a million-man army at a French fortress known as Verdun—an attempt to “bleed the French Army white.” Instead, it was the Germans who wound up being bled white, but not until nine months later. When it ended, the battle had cost both sides somewhere between 750,000 and a million men. In July of that same year the British set in motion a vast attack they were convinced would break through the German lines and end the war. It became known as the Battle of the Somme and produced 60,000 casualties on the first day alone—some 24,000 of them killed in action. When at last it ended later that autumn, the casualty lists were equal to Verdun, and less than two miles of ground had been gained.

  As 1917 opened the Germans notified the Allies that they intended to resume the unrestricted sinking of ships in British waters. This was probably the greatest mistake of the war for Germany because it brought the United States into the conflict with a mobilized force of nearly five million men. By this time some thirty-two nations were involved. The Central Powers consisted of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), and Bulgaria. Everyone else was for the Allies including, before it all ended, such disparate players as Japan, China, Montenegro, Italy, Monaco, Guatemala, Brazil, and Chile.

  IN JUNE 1917 CAPTAIN GEORGE C. MARSHALL sailed the Atlantic with leading elements of the U.S. First Infantry Division, which was the first American combat unit to reach France. After a nervous seven-day trip zigzagging to avoid German submarines, they sighted Belle Isle at the mouth of the Loire. But these Americans arrived at an inauspicious time.

  Morale among the Allied troops and the French population as well was at an all-time low. Nearly every French family had a relative who had been killed or wounded in the fighting. Less than two months earlier, the French had launched their own, much-vaunted attack under General Robert Nivelle advertised to “win the war,” but it ended in disaster a week later. The French had estimated 10,000 casualties and a breakthrough of the German front. Instead they suffered 163,000 casualties and a continued stalemate. The British had endured a similar fate only a week earlier at the Battle of Arras, which cost them 158,000 casualties and no substantial gain of ground.

  Though it was kept from the public, the French army was in actual mutiny, with many of the poilus refusing to join in further offensives and others refusing to fight at all. In northern Italy, the Italian army and the Austrians were stalemated. The Russian Front was deteriorating badly; Czar Nicholas had recently abdicated and the country appeared on the verge of revolution and civil war. The Germans, as we have seen, at the beginning of 1917 reinstituted unrestricted submarine warfare and in just six months
so many ships had been sunk around the British Isles that the country was actually in danger of starvation.

  The one bright light amid all of this gloom was the arrival of the American army. The citizens of Saint-Nazaire, where Marshall’s ship finally put in, were lining the streets in force, expecting to see a crack American army outfit come marching down the gangway with the utmost military discipline. Instead, while a greatly “disturbed” Marshall looked on, the leading elements of the U.S. First Division disembarked as if “most of them were ignorant of the first rudiments of march-discipline and were busy looking in the shop windows and observing the French crowd.”1

  Many of these men had recently volunteered and had only a short time in various “camps” to gain military training and bearing. Immediately after Congress had declared war, General John J. Pershing was designated commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Forces. In turn, he had “hastily selected” four regular army infantry regiments from the Mexican punitive expedition against Pancho Villa, but in order to make up a full combat division of some forty thousand officers and men a number of untrained recruits and reservists had to be brought in. Presumably it was these who shambled off the troopship and so disappointed the French spectators on that warm June afternoon in 1917.

  It was little better in the coming weeks and months as the Americans undertook to adjust themselves and train for the arduous tasks that lay before them in the dangerous, squalid trenches of France. There was as yet no motor transport, and horses for the officers had not yet arrived. Thus units, as well as their officers, were compelled to march nearly twenty miles to training fields and then back again in the evening to their encampment. There were shortages of practically everything. The American army, for instance, had never been equipped with helmets, and thus had to wear the wide-brimmed “tin pot,” or “soup plate” helmet, supplied by the British. American pilots had no planes and were obliged to fly aircraft provided by the French. The same was true in many cases with small arms—rifles, grenades, machine guns, mortars—even tanks.

  The Americans were trained by French officers, first on training grounds and later by linking them with French units in the trenches. Being completely unprepared for a European-style war, there was much to learn: about “trench raids,” for instance, which both sides regularly conducted for reconnaissance, to capture prisoners, or just for the hell of it to keep their side in fighting shape and the other side on its toes. About “defense in depth”—lessons learned during the previous three years about protecting the rear areas as much as the front lines in case of a sudden enemy breakthrough. About telling the difference between incoming and outgoing artillery and what to do in a barrage (go to ground, get inside, pray). About avoiding otherwise harmless-looking terrain where deadly gas might be lurking in low-lying areas. And about a thousand and one other situations that American armies had never dreamed of: what the British army termed “wastage,” for example, was approximately one thousand deaths a day—from random artillery, snipers, lingering gas, illness, accidents, and other mortal causes not associated with a regular battle. It was the same in the French army. It was the same in the German army. And it would be the same in the American army.

  GEORGE PATTON WAS FURIOUS—which is to say he was in his customary mood—after learning that General Pershing had persuaded the War Department to issue an order banning all soldiers’ wives from France. After all, he’d already worked it out that Beatrice would come over and stay in the fine three-bedroom apartment he’d found off the rue Madeleine in Paris; she could shop while he went to war during the day. But it wouldn’t work out like that now. Pershing explained to the unhappy, newly promoted Captain Patton that having wives would create all sorts of chaos and also morale problems for those who couldn’t afford it. “You see,” Patton told Beatrice, “the British had to send back 60,000 women who came over with the Canadians.”2 To salve his wounded feelings, Patton purchased a twelve-cylinder Packard automobile that cost him $4,386—a whopping $80,000 in today’s money!

  After saying goodbye to Beatrice, Patton sailed from New York on the RMS Baltic as commander of Pershing’s advance headquarters staff on May 28, 1917. When the Mexican punitive expedition against Villa ended that winter, Patton had been assigned to command a troop in the Seventh Cavalry—George Custer’s old outfit—but he had no sooner got his unit into top form when word came from Pershing that he was wanted on the general’s staff. When he arrived in France, Patton became determined to learn the language, and while his comprehension was above the “parlez vous?” level, it wasn’t by much. Quickly, he decided that as long as Beatrice wasn’t coming to Paris he would install a French interpreter in his spacious three-bedroom apartment.

  However, he had begun to chafe at his job, which was essentially a glorified maître d’hôtel, arranging automobiles and billets for superior officers—many among them scorned reservists—and looking after the needs, wants, and behavior of fifty-odd enlisted clerks, drivers, cooks, and other low-ranked personnel—meantime always being attentive to commanding general Pershing. Patton was smart enough to stick it out, though, as he told Beatrice in letters, because he’d rather be in France, near the fighting, “doing a jobber’s work,” than in Texas commanding a troop of cavalry. Here, something might happen, and he had a premonition that it would.

  Patton had come to admire the French spirit but was appalled at their work habits; they took what amounted to a siesta for several hours in the afternoon during which “nothing could get done.” In the mornings Patton fenced with a Monsieur Hyde, one of France’s better swordsmen, who told him, “You have taught fencing.” When Patton asked how he knew, the man replied, “Because you have all the faults of a teacher—you have the habit of letting yourself be touched.” To Beatrice he reported, “If I go broke, or rather if you do, I can always teach fencing.”3

  In July, Patton was given an opportunity as temporary aide-de-camp to Pershing, who was planning a visit to the headquarters of the British commander General Sir Douglas Haig at Montreuil-sur-Mer, about 150 miles north. Patton was designated to prepare the best route for Pershing and thus in July began an arduous trip on muddy, troop-choked roads that took a full six hours. Of course for Patton it was worth it because at last he got to see for himself the horrendous scale of the fighting in northern France and Flanders. He saw the miles of mud, denuded forests, and no-man’s-land near Ypres and Arras where you could smell the battlefield miles before you reached it; the sordid ever present odor of rotting humans, horses, mules, rats, and food mixed with the stench of excrement, lingering poison gas, and the repulsive aroma of quicklime—used to decompose the dead—and the acrid stink of high-explosive artillery shells. It was a place where men lived like troglodytes in slimy underground trenches and fought and died with such consistency that even on “quiet days” casualties ran into the thousands.

  Patton looked on the bright side, however, telling a family friend about his “interesting trip,” where he “saw the workings of over a million men from the inside. It is stupendous and fine. The more one sees of war the better it is. Of course there are a few deaths but all of us must ‘pay the piper’ sooner or later and the party is worth the price of admission.”4 Whether this was braggadocio or not it at least seems odd that Patton would take such a cavalier attitude of the terrible fighting that had left millions of men dead over the previous three years.

  It was not long after this that Patton had another of his out-of-body experiences. He had been summoned to a secret meeting more than eighty miles distant and was riding in a staff car at night when he suddenly leaned forward and asked the driver if the camp they were going to wasn’t just to the right. “No Sir, our camp where we are going is further ahead, but there is an old Roman camp over there to the right. I have seen it myself.”

  They rode on in silence until they arrived at the headquarters to which Patton had been summoned. After the meeting, as Patton was leaving, he asked an officer, “Your theater is over here straight ah
ead, isn’t it?”

  “We have no theater here,” the officer replied, “but there is an old Roman theater only about three hundred yards away.”

  Later he wrote a poem about it; many of Patton’s poems show a want of literary technique, but this one has a haunting quality about it.

  So as through a glass and darkly

  The age long strife I see

  Where I fought in many guises

  Many names—but always me.

  And I see not in my blindness

  What the objects were I wrought

  But as God rules o’er our bickerings

  It was through his will I fought.

  So forever in the future,

  Shall I battle as of yore

  Dying to be born a fighter,

  But to die again once more.5

  It was but one of a number of experiences such as this that caused Patton to maintain a continuing belief that in some earlier incarnation he had been a part of powerful, ancient armies, even though he was not a mystic but a practicing Episcopalian.6

  Meanwhile, Pershing had become lovelorn regarding Patton’s sister Nita. Before leaving the United States, the two had spoken of her meeting Pershing in Paris, but considering the order forbidding wives to come to France Pershing now thought it would look bad and Patton, whom he had been consulting at length on the matter, agreed with him. “He has too much on his hands and it would make a bad impression at present,” he wrote Beatrice. At the same time, Patton’s own frustrations were giving him pause: “Don’t think I am having a roaring time and not thinking of you for it is not so. Paris is a stupid place without [you] just as heaven would be under the same conditions.”7