Castles of Steel (150 page)
The last British warship sunk was
Britannia,
a predreadnought battleship of the 16,500-ton
King Edward VII
class. Bound for Gibraltar on the morning of November 9, 1918—two days before the armistice was signed—the ship saw and managed to avoid two torpedoes before being struck by a third. She went down slowly and her crew was taken off by escorting destroyers. Three hours later, the battleship sank. From her resting place on the ocean floor, the nearest point of land is Cape Trafalgar.
CHAPTER 38
Finis Germaniae
The German gamble to win the war with an unrestricted U-boat offensive had failed. Britain did not starve and sue for peace, America joined the Allies, the blockade continued to reap its grim toll, and Germany was on the brink of physical and psychological exhaustion. Then, unexpectedly, the German Supreme Command was given one last chance. After the fall of the tsar, the provisional government had kept Russia in the war for another eight months, but the success of the Bolshevik coup d’état in November 1917 led to Russia’s surrender. A million German and Austrian troops including fifty divisions of veteran infantry were released from the Eastern Front, and Ludendorff was offered another opportunity. Through the winter, trains carrying hundreds of thousands of German soldiers and 3,000 guns rumbled west across Germany. In the spring, for the first time since August 1914, the German army would have approximate numerical parity with the Allies on the Western Front. But this equivalence would be only temporary. Once the masses of American infantry now assembling in their training camps at home were transported across the Atlantic, the advantage Germany had gained by the defeat of Russia would be eliminated. It was clear to Ludendorff that he must strike before the Americans arrived.
In January 1918, on the eve of this last great German offensive, 6.5 million men faced one another on the Western Front. Allied soldiers numbered 3.9 million: 2.6 million French, 1.2 million British and empire troops, and 100,000 Belgians. Facing them were 2.5 million Germans, but by March 1918, with the addition of the million soldiers brought from the Russian front, Ludendorff would have 3.5 million men. The date set for the attack was March 21 and the kaiser assumed a victory. “If an English delegation came to sue for peace,” he told his entourage, “it must first kneel before the German imperial standard, for this is a victory of monarchy over democracy.”
All Germans had ridiculed the idea that an unmilitary nation like America could produce a large army. In addition, Germany’s admirals had promised that, even if America adopted conscription, U-boats could prevent the passage of this army across 3,000 miles of ocean. In April 1917, when the United States entered the war, it seemed the Germans were right; there was then no unit in the U.S. Army larger than a regiment. In the first three weeks after war was declared, only 32,000 American men voluntarily enlisted. Then, on May 18, Congress passed a draft law, authorizing immediate expansion of the regular army to 488,000 men and the National Guard to 470,000. Nine million draft-eligible men registered on June 5; selection among them began on July 20, and 2,810,000 were ordered to report by September to training camps still being built. Meanwhile, on May 28, Major General John J. Pershing, the newly designated commander of the American Expeditionary Force, had left New York for Liverpool. On June 28, the first elements of his force—four regular army infantry regiments and one artillery regiment, newly combined into the 1st Division of the U.S. Army—landed at St. Nazaire and on the Fourth of July paraded before cheering crowds on the Champs-Elysées. Two days later, Pershing forwarded to Washington his appraisal of what would be required. “A force of about 1,000,000 men,” he cabled the secretary of war, “is the smallest unit which in modern war will be a complete, well-balanced, and independent fighting organization.” This might not be enough to win the war, Pershing said, but it was the number “which may be expected to reach France in time for an offensive in 1918.”
At first, the Americans came slowly. By early November 1917, there were only 87,000 American soldiers in France. By the end of December, there were 175,000, including four complete divisions. These American divisions were huge—each had 25,000 to 28,000 men, including 16,000 riflemen; in contrast, the rifle strength of many French divisions was now down to 5,000 or 6,000 men. But the American soldiers arrived poorly trained and woefully ill-equipped with modern weapons of war—“naked so to speak,” said a German staff analyst. Many units actually underwent basic training in France, learning from British and French instructors how to throw hand grenades, use machine guns, fire trench mortars and field artillery, do night signaling and wire-cutting, and prepare for gas attacks. Most of the heavy military equipment the Americans possessed was supplied by the French: 3,100 pieces of field artillery, 1,200 howitzers, 4,800 airplanes. By March 1918, when the United States had been at war for almost a year, the American army in France still numbered only 318,000 men. Only one division, the 1st, which had crossed the Atlantic the preceding June, was actually on line on the Western Front and it was assigned to a quiet sector of eastern France where its presence permitted the withdrawal of veteran French troops for use in the fighting zones.
The newspaper
Kölnische Zeitung,
sensing that Ludendorff’s offensive would be the last great battle of the war, called it the
Kaiserschlacht,
the Kaiser’s Battle. It was planned as a rolling series of blows designed to fall sequentially at different points along the Western Front. The first massive stroke, code-named Michael, fell on the British army on the northern part of the front on March 18, 1918. According to Winston Churchill, who was present behind the lines, “There was no surprise about the time or general direction of the attack. The surprise consisted in its weight, scale and power. . . . There rose in less than one minute the most tremendous cannonade I shall ever hear.” Ten divisions of the British Fifth Army were shattered. By March 26, Ludendorff had penetrated thirty-seven miles through the British lines and was close to rupturing the French and British fronts at their point of juncture; this done, he could choose between rolling the British back to the Channel or driving the French before him toward Paris.
[On March 23, 1918, the third day of Ludendorff’s offensive, a shell fired by a massive gun seventy-five miles away exploded on No. 6, Quai de Seine in Paris. This shell, which had soared twenty-four miles above the earth before descending, was the first of 367 projectiles fired at the French capital over the next four and a half months by a gun the Allies called Big Bertha and the Germans the Paris Gun. Its most spectacular success came on Good Friday, March 29, when a shell hit the Church of St. Gervais in central Paris, killing eighty-eight worshipers and wounding sixty-eight. The weapon had no military value; its purpose, like that of the zeppelin raids on Britain, was to inspire terror. Germans justified its use as retaliation for the blockade.]
With the integrity of the whole Allied front threatened, unity of command from the Alps to the Channel became an imperative. On April 3, Ferdinand Foch, Chief of the French General Staff, was asked “to coordinate the action of the British and French armies” and on April 14, he was formally appointed Supreme Commander of all Allied armies on the Western Front. In this crisis, Pershing offered his Americans: “Infantry, artillery, aviation—all that we have are yours; use them as you wish.” In fact, Pershing possessed little artillery or aviation, but he did have infantry and the Allies reached for it eagerly. By the end of April, 302,000 British soldiers, more than a quarter of the British army in France, had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner; German losses were equally heavy: between March 21 and April 10, the Germans lost 349,000 men.
In the days that followed, a glimmer of hope was provided by the arrival in April of another 119,000 Americans in France; by the end of that month, the American Expeditionary Force numbered 430,000 men. More arrived in May; by June 1, there were 650,000 American soldiers in France. In June, another 279,000 came and in July still another 250,000, so that by July 31, more than a million American soldiers were on the continent of Europe. And millions more were on the way; the success of Ludendorff’s spring offensive had inspired Wilson to authorize creation of an army of eighty divisions numbering 4 million men. The immediate question was how the American soldiers already in France were to be used. The British saw in the packed infantry of the large American divisions the replacements needed to rebuild the ten British divisions shattered by Ludendorff. Pershing, despite his impulsive gesture of March 26, was adamantly opposed to amalgamation. Unlike Sims, who was willing to use the American navy as a pool from which Allied navies could draw reinforcements, Pershing was committed to the creation of an independent American army that—once enough American divisions had been trained—would operate in its own sector of the line under his command. Field Marshal Haig, the British Commander-in-Chief in France, considered Pershing’s attitude “obstinate” and “stupid,” but Marshal Joseph Joffre—old “Papa Joffre,” the hero of the Marne in 1914—agreed with Pershing that attempting to mesh American troops into Allied formations would be a mistake. “There would be an adverse effect,” he told Per-shing. “American battalions would find themselves commanded by a British general with a British staff. They would resent orders received under such circumstances, [orders] which they would accept without question under an American commander. In case of a reverse, there would be the tendency to blame the command. There must also be considered the effect on the American people.” Nevertheless, as Ludendorff continued to hammer the Allied armies, and Allied generals and politicians pleaded desperately for the integration of arriving American manpower into existing veteran British and French units, Pershing gave ground, permitting American troops to be loaned to foreign commanders but only in units of at least divisional size. Always, he emphasized that once enough American divisions were trained and ready to fight, he wanted them back to fight under his command in a sector of the battlefront that would be strictly American.
Ludendorff had calculated in March that the Americans could not reach the front in sufficient numbers to make a difference until midsummer. At the beginning of May, he still believed that he had three months, May, June, and July, to win the war. On May 27, he hurled another thunderbolt, this time at the French sector of the front, advanced forty miles, and reached the Marne east of Château-Thierry. On May 31, the Germans crossed the river and seized a bridgehead fifty-six miles from Paris. Soissons fell and Amiens and Rheims were threatened; on June 1, the French government began preparing to leave Paris for Bordeaux. In this new crisis, when General Henri Philippe Pétain asked Pershing for help, two American divisions were ordered to the front. Suddenly, in Churchill’s words, “the roads . . . began to be filled with endless streams of Americans . . . [an] inexhaustible flood of gleaming youth . . . crammed in their lorries . . . singing the songs of a new world at the tops of their voices . . . arriving in floods to reanimate the mangled body of a France bled white by the innumerable wounds of four years.” On June 2, the American 2nd and 3rd Divisions joined in an Allied counterattack along the Marne. At Belleau Wood, an overgrown former hunting preserve, the 2nd Division, which contained a brigade of U.S. Marines, cleared a square mile of dense wilderness that seemed to have a machine gun behind every tree. The Marines suffered 5,200 casualties, but earned a compliment from a staff officer of the German Seventh Army: “The moral effect of our own gunfire cannot seriously impede the advance of the American infantry.”
By the end of June, time was running out on Ludendorff. American divisions were regularly being fed into the active battle; by mid-July, six were at the front and another twelve were in the line or in reserve in quiet sectors. Seven more were in training in France and fifty-five were assembling in the United States. And given the dense mass of American infantry in these units, the twenty-five American divisions already in France equaled fifty British, French, or German divisions.
The final blow of the
Kaiserschlacht
was launched on July 15, when Ludendorff attacked between Rheims and Soissons. Six German spearheads crossed the Marne and advanced four miles, but then were stopped in their tracks. Two days later, Foch counterattacked on the western side of the Marne salient with twenty-three divisions including five double-strength American divisions. On the night of July 18, Ludendorff ordered the German troops that had crossed the Marne three days before to retreat across the river. Three weeks later, in the north, the British army, which had not been heavily engaged in three months and now was reinforced to a strength of sixty divisions, began its offensive. On August 8, a British, Canadian, and Australian attack, spearheaded by 600 tanks rolling through fields of ripening wheat, advanced seven miles the first day and captured thousands of prisoners and hundreds of guns. German morale was shattered; retreating troops shouted, “You’re prolonging the war,” at fresh units coming up. “August 8 was the black day of the German Army in the history of this war,” Ludendorff said later. In the 120 days following March 21, the German offensive had inflicted 448,000 casualties on the British army and 490,000 on the French. The Americans had lost 9,685 dead and wounded. But the German army, which had no reserves on which to draw, had suffered 963,000 casualties. “The war,” Ludendorff announced, “must be ended.”
During July, the American army in France had increased by another 306,000 men, bringing the total in France to 1.3 million. On July 24, Per-shing finally achieved his personal goal, command of an American army in the field, when he signed an order creating the First Army, American Expeditionary Force, which would become operational on August 10. On September 12, fifteen American divisions and five French and French colonial divisions, all under Pershing’s command, attacked the Saint-Mihiel salient, a 200-square-mile protrusion jutting thirteen miles west into the Allied line south of Verdun. The Germans already were abandoning the salient and the Americans captured it within two days, along with 13,000 prisoners. On September 26, Pershing launched the largest American offensive of the war: 550,000 Americans and 110,000 French and French colonial troops plunged into the woods, ravines, streams, and gulches of the Meuse-Argonne, driving north toward Sedan. Meanwhile, in September, 257,000 more Americans arrived in France; another 180,000 were due to arrive in October. Ultimately, 2.08 million men of the AEF crossed the Atlantic.
