A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (106 page)

Much of the credit for organizing the finance and supply effort at home went to the secretary of the treasury, William McAdoo, who organized the War Finance Corporation (WFC). The idea was to facilitate the conversion of civilian production—such as Ford’s motor plants—into factories turning out war matériel. At first, however, even with McAdoo’s genius, the WFC’s effort was helter-skelter. Companies made too many of the same parts; there were no priorities established; and the government lacked an overall strategy concerning which items to buy, and in what order. To be sure, this fostered some profiteering (the infamous “merchants of death”), but in most cases the lack of direction caused redundancies and inefficiency. It took almost a year before McAdoo figured it out, handing the job over, in March 1918, to a new organization, the War Industries Board (WIB), under the direction of South Carolina millionaire and Wall Street tycoon, Bernard Baruch.

The new boss, who had come from the business sector and was not a lifetime bureaucrat, immediately perceived that besides priorities, what the government lacked was a business approach to procurement. He also knew that business leaders needed to take control of the production if it was to have any chance of succeeding. Reviving the successful productive practices of the Civil War, when government encouraged private enterprise to provide the weapons of war, Baruch “permitted industrialists to charge high prices for their products,” a feature that would be repeated yet again with equally stunning success in the next world war.
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He persuaded Wilson’s Justice Department to call off the antitrust dogs, exempting many businesses from investigation as monopolies, while at the same time chastising any companies that did not comply with WIB requests.

Baruch also persuaded successful corporate leaders to head up important procurement agencies and boards for a token fee of a dollar a year—hence their name, the Dollar-a-Year Men. The approach worked. In short order the businessmen had the war industry churning out supplies and machines, all according to a master plan Baruch and McAdoo had mapped out with Wilson and the War Department.

Raising a legitimate ground force capable of going toe to toe with the Germans presented a equally daunting challenge. The U.S. Army, except for the Civil War, had never been particularly large and had atrophied since the Spanish-American War. Total numbers, including reserves, reached perhaps 200,000. For perspective, one should consider that at the Somme offensive in 1916, the British lost more than 95,000 dead (including 20,000 on the first day); the French, 50,000; and the Germans, 160,000. Put another way, in just under four months the combatants had lost more men than even existed in the entire U.S. Army of 1917.

Not only was the army small, it was inexperienced, although many troops had fought in Cuba and the Filipino rebellion. But only a few commanders had had wartime experience in Cuba, the Philippines, or the Mexico expedition, most notably George Catlett Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, and Black Jack Pershing. Another Pancho Villa chaser who joined Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force was cavalry officer George S. Patton, already training in the revolutionary war vehicle known as the tank. Roosevelt, as he had in the Spanish-American War, offered to raise another regiment of troops, but Wilson politely refused.
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To meet the need for men, Wilson and Secretary of War Newton Baker pushed through Congress the Selective Service Act, or a draft. Three million men came into the army through the draft, and two million more volunteered for service. More than 240,000 black troops entered the armed services, with most of them serving in France. Blacks had a greater chance of being drafted, but a far smaller likelihood than whites of seeing combat. Nevertheless, one of the most famous black combat outfits—the 369th Infantry—was in the trenches for almost two hundred days, and the entire regiment received the Croix de Guerre for heroism from the French government. In addition, 171 individual soldiers and officers were cited for their courage under fire.

Other ethnic groups served in disproportionate numbers, especially German-Americans, and overall, 20 percent of the draftees were born in another country. A typical draftee was a second-or third-generation immigrant like Jean Pierre Godet, who enlisted in the army in November 1917. At the time of Godet’s enlistment, the young man’s unnamed father wrote to his sister the conflicting emotions that gripped every soldier’s parent at that moment:

 

Today is November 3…and Jean Pierre was sworn into the infantry…. I cannot tell you the mixed sense of joy and pain I have felt upon his leaving for the war. I cannot withhold Jean Pierre and forbid him to take part in the army, for the importance of this war is hard to estimate. I feel a strange contradiction between my love for Jean Pierre and my love for America. It is difficult to surrender my son that my country may be free. On the other hand, without the willingness of all Americans to make these kinds of sacrifices neither the country nor the world would long remain free.
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Thousands more did not fight but served in, or worked to advance, the Red Cross, including Lewis Douglas, future budget director under Franklin Roosevelt; advertising executive Bruce Barton; and a budding artist named Walt Disney. Indeed, two of the men most responsible for the symbolic view of America that evolved by the 1960s, Disney and McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, crossed each other’s path in the Red Cross in France.
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Still thousands more “Plowed to the fence for national defense” on their farms and raised beef and sheep on their ranches.

Britain and France had few doubts that the doughboys would arrive and weigh heavily on the scale of battle. Their concern, however, was that the war at sea would be lost before the Americans ever set foot in France. America’s Rear Admiral William S. Sims, after meeting with Sir John Jellicoe in London regarding the shipping situation, admitted that the German U-boat campaign was succeeding. At the-then-current rates of losses, by fall of 1917 the U-boats would be sinking more vessels than could be built. Sims then helped design the convoy system (akin to the frontier wagon trains), making it easier to protect merchant ships.

The convoy system worked like a charm because it turned the chief strength of the U-boats—their stealth—into a weakness by forcing them to reveal themselves in an attack.
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Once they struck, U-boats could not escape the escort vessels easily. This turn of events and the addition of American ships had a decided effect, drastically reducing losses from submarines. In April 1917 alone, before the United States joined the war, the Allies lost nine hundred thousand tons of shipping, but by December the convoy system had cut that monthly number to four hundred thousand. Thus, even before American soldiers could make a difference on the ground, the U.S. Navy had ensured Germany could not win at sea.

With the seas under Allied control, American troops departed for Europe. In July 1917 the U.S. First Infantry Division left for France, where it was greeted by Pershing himself. Pershing, lacking oratory skill, sent Colonel Charles Stanton to meet the men, and it was he who uttered the famous phrase, “Lafayette, we are here.” Black Jack did not need flowery or emotional speeches. He had gained his fame in the Spanish-American War, charging San Juan Hill next to Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Pershing kept himself in almost robotlike control, and even his voice was monotone. But he was as fine a commander as any nation put in the field. Above all, the general understood that he could not allow the French to incorporate small untrained American units into French forces as mere reinforcements. He certainly did not intend for them to be chewed up in frontal assaults as the best of European manhood had been in the previous three years. Nor would a single division tilt the scales much. Pershing intended to deploy 3 million American troops in France by May 1918, but until then, the American Expeditionary Force had to resist sending brigade-sized replacements to the British or French. After 100,000 Yanks had arrived, they took up positions near the Swiss border, and on October 23, 1917, Alex Arch, an artillery sergeant, fired the first American shots at the Germans, and a few nights later the United States took her first war casualties.

By that time, virtually every aspect of the war was working against Germany. The U-boat war had failed and would never reach the level of effectiveness it had had in the spring of 1917. At the same time, the British blockade was starving Germany. In late 1917 the British unleashed a massive attack spearheaded by three hundred of the new wonder weapons, the tanks, gaining more ground in a single day than in months of fighting in previous battles. Although the Germans regrouped, the carefully deployed and supported tank units doomed trench warfare once and for all. This made the Germans increasingly desperate, accounting for their offensive in early 1918.

Pershing appreciated the delicate situation in which either Germany or France could collapse. Writing Wilson’s adviser, Colonel Edward House, he stated, “The Allies are done for, and the only thing that will hold them (especially France) in the war will be the assurance that we have enough forces to assume the initiative.”
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By midsummer 1918, French officers rejoiced at the sight of American armies: “Life was coming in floods to re-animate the dying body of France.”
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Indeed, that May, with the additional U.S. troops, the Allies now had about 3 million men on the Western Front facing 3.5 million Germans.

The German advance of 42 divisions in mid-1918 swept away British troops and came within eighty miles of Paris, which began a general evacuation until American marines appeared on the roads. They were thrown into a gap at Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood, and when the marines took up their positions, they dug no trenches for fallback positions. “The Marines will hold where they stand,” said Brigadier General James Harbord, and they did, although the press misidentified the men as army doughboys, starting a friendly rivalry between regular army and marines, each seeking to outdo the other in military glory. American troops counterattacked on June twenty-sixth, driving the Germans out of the areas near Paris and stunning the German general staff, which had to reconsider its offensive. General Erich Ludendorff, in charge of war production, ordered aircraft production doubled to offset the Yankee units.

More desperate German offensives followed. Douglas MacArthur, an American officer facing the June-July attacks, witnessed one of the final German assaults on the Western Front. Despite a barrage of more than half a million gas shells, the Germans could not break through. German forces slammed into unbroken barbed-wire barriers defended by U.S. doughboys blazing away with machine guns. MacArthur, who would be criticized for his seeming absence of compassion in the Bonus Army charge, later recalled that he was “haunted by the vision of those writhing bodies hanging from the barbed wire.” When the Allied forces counterattacked, MacArthur found the enemy “exhausted, uncoordinated, and shattered.”
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Across the lines, one of those exhausted and shattered soldiers, Corporal Adolf Hitler, was awarded an Iron Cross Second Class for personal bravery by a Jew, Captain Hugo Gutmann. And at the time Gutmann decorated Adolf Hitler, the American assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, visited the battle zone and fired an artillery piece in Hitler’s direction. A few hours later Roosevelt watched 200 tired and wounded American soldiers moving to the rear—all that remained of a regiment of 1,000 that had advanced merely two days before.
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In Shermanesque fashion the American troops continued to advance, not giving the German army a chance to regroup. In early September, at Saint-Mihiel, American forces slammed into retreating German units and probably could have taken Metz. But Field Marshal Foch, the commander in chief of the Allied troops, had another strategy that shifted the American First Army west to the Meuse-Argonne forest along a massive, and broad, front. It was here that the greatest tale of American heroism from the Great War emerged. Sergeant Alvin York was a Tennessee turkey-shooting champion and conscientious objector when the war began, but he was persuaded by his pastor to join the war effort. Part of the 82nd Division, York’s platoon became separated from the main body, and fighting his way back with only a handful of men, York killed 25 enemy soldiers, took out thirty-five German machine guns, and took 132 prisoners. Germans’ heads, the Tennessean noted, were “so much bigger than turkeys’ heads.”
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Even York’s heroism paled beside that of Dan Edwards, whose arm was pinned beneath a tree by artillery fire. When he saw eight Germans advancing toward him, he shot four with his revolver and took the other four prisoner—his arm still pinned. Using his bayonet to cut off his crushed arm, he applied a tourniquet and, using one hand, herded the Germans back to his lines. When yet another explosion broke his leg, he ordered the Germans to carry him!

The offensive had broken the back of the German army, and Ludendorff knew it. Only months earlier French troops had mutinied, but now riots occurred in German shipyards and cities. In August the Austrian foreign minister informed the Germans that his nation would seek a separate peace negotiation. German troops were ordered to evacuate forward positions rather than face encirclement and death. As the kaiser’s inner circle grew more desperate for an armistice, they told the insecure Wilhelm that peace feelers they had sent to Wilson had been squelched by the demand that the kaiser step down as a precondition to an armistice. A shaken Wilhelm, whose cousin Czar Nicholas II had recently been executed by Lenin’s Bolsheviks, agreed to change the German constitution to allow for a parliamentary government. On November 9, 1918, a new republic was established in Berlin, and the kaiser boarded an imperial train for neutral Holland. Pershing warned that the fighting needed to continue until the Allies obtained an unconditional surrender, not a cease-fire. “What I dread is that Germany doesn’t know that she is licked. Had they given us another week, we’d have
taught
them.”
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But it was out of his hands. At 11:00
a.m
. on November 11, 1918, a silence fell over the bloody battlefields of Europe, ending the costliest war in human history.