The Yanks Are Coming! (14 page)

Some of that pain was assuaged, at least for the troopers, when they found abandoned blockhouses laden with almost unimaginable luxuries, including the odd piano, a wine cellar, and other signs of how well-supplied these long-standing German positions had been. The doughboys liberated a few bottles into the security of their packs, but they had to be careful—some abandoned German dugouts were booby-trapped—and their orders were to continually press forward the attack.

THE LOST BATTALION

Those orders—and the intrepid spirit of the doughboys—led Major Charles W. Whittlesey into an action that earned him a Medal
of Honor. Whittlesey, thirty-four years old, a battalion commander of the 308th Infantry, was in civilian life a New York lawyer and graduate of Harvard Law School notable for his round spectacles and gentlemanly demeanor.

Pressing ahead in the Argonne Forest, he was twice cut off by the enemy. The first time his men were without supplies or reinforcement for three days. On 2 October, he was on point leading another advance into the Argonne. Whittlesey had a reputation for coolness under fire and a steely aggression that sometimes showed itself in sardonic humor, yet he was no gung-ho enthusiast. He thought the attack he had been ordered to make was suicidal. But after delivering a formal protest, he did his best to execute his orders. Galloping Charlie, a nickname he had earned for his quick march, stayed true to his moniker. His was the only successful attack that day in the Argonne.

His “battalion” was a cobbled-together unit made up of six companies of the 308th Infantry, one from the 307th Infantry, and two from the 306th Machine Gun Battalion—all from the motley 77th Division, the “melting pot” division from New York, with replacements coming from western states. His objective was the Charlevaux Mill road. When he reached it, his men dug in on a slope facing the road and formed a defensive perimeter. He sent word to his regimental commander that they had taken their position. Whittlesey had advanced well beyond any units covering his flanks, but this was in keeping with Pershing's order that units of the 77th Division should push ahead “without regard of losses and without regard to the exposed conditions of the flanks.”
¹¹
Pershing refused to slow his timetable either to accommodate the lack of progress by the French, who were supposed to assist in the attack, or in deference to the difficulty of communicating with units in the Argonne. The best course was to press ahead.

The success of Whittlesey's advance, however, was more notable at division headquarters than it was on the patch of land occupied by his men. They were short on rations, short of ammunition, short of medical supplies (indeed these were rapidly used up as casualties mounted), ring-fenced by enemy mortars, and apparently surrounded by German troops. Two companies of men were missing, and attempts to find them only led to more casualties.

Division commander Major General Robert Alexander,
¹²
sensing Whittlesey had made an advance that should be exploited, dispatched an infantry battalion to reinforce him. Only one company of that battalion made it, and it confirmed for Whittlesey not only that he was surrounded, but that the Germans were tightening the noose, stringing new wire and planting new machine gun nests.

Whittlesey's second-in-command, Captain George McMurtry, a former Rough Rider and a fellow Harvard man and Wall Street lawyer, wrote an order for Whittlesey's approval and then delivered it to the company commanders: “Our mission is to hold this position at all costs. No falling back. Have this understood by every man in your command.” It was of a piece with an order that General Alexander had issued on 28 September at the beginning of the campaign: “Ground once captured must under no circumstances be given up in absence of direct, positive and formal orders to do so emanating from these headquarters.”
¹³
Whittlesey had no such orders. He would hold his position. He had 550 men.

Whittlesey communicated with headquarters via carrier pigeon. General Alexander knew where Whittlesey was, knew of his dire straits (at least as far as scraps of paper tied to a carrier pigeon's leg could describe them), but trusted that a Franco-American attack announced for the next day, to hit the Germans at the 77th's front from either side of the Argonne, might bring relief. The attack,
however, failed; and a subsequent artillery barrage on 4 October, instead of scattering the Germans, landed on Whittlesey's own men. Whittlesey released his last pigeon, named Cher Ami, with the message, “Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven's sake, stop it.”
¹⁴
The pigeon landed on a tree and had to be driven away by a trooper climbing up and shaking the branch. Whether through the pigeon's courageous flight or the artillery's schedule, the firing ceased. Aerial attempts to resupply the battalion dropped food, water, medicine, and ammunition to the enemy—and two planes and their crews were lost. Despite this, Whittlesey, McMurtry, and Captain Nelson Holderman, whose Company K had been the battalion's sole reinforcement, were exemplary in keeping the men steady. Whittlesey was intelligent and cool under fire; McMurtry was tough enough to ignore serious wounds and gregarious enough to roam the lines offering words of encouragement despite an injured knee; Holderman, a California National Guardsman with experience along the Mexican border, was wounded (as they all were), but maintained the command presence of a natural-born officer and doughty fighter.

The German attacks continued with mortars, flamethrowers, grenades, rifles, and machine guns—and still there was no relief, no food, no water (drinking from a nearby stream was perilous because the path to it was raked by German fire; the Americans relied on rainwater in shell holes), and no clean bandages for the wounded. But on 7 October, units of the 82nd Division were sent on an attack to pry the German grip off Whittlesey's trapped battalion. This attack succeeded, the Germans fell back, and the survivors of “the lost battalion,” as the press had dubbed them, emerged from their position in the Argonne where they had been trapped for five days; there were only 194 of them who staggered out.
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Whittlesey was
promoted to lieutenant colonel, and he and McMurtry and Holderman were awarded the Medal of Honor, as were four others. Cher Ami, wounded in action, won a Croix de Guerre among other awards, and was later stuffed and put on exhibit at the Smithsonian, the most famous pigeon of the war. Whittlesey, celebrated as a war hero, went aboard a ship bound for Cuba in November 1921 and was lost at sea, a presumed suicide. McMurtry became a millionaire Wall Street lawyer. Holderman, regarded as a soldier's soldier by his men, retired a colonel in the California National Guard and served as commandant of the Yountville Soldier's Home.

TO THE END

On 8 October, the day Whittlesey's men were rescued, President Woodrow Wilson responded to a note from Prince Maximilian von Baden, Germany's new chancellor, seeking an armistice on the grounds of Wilson's Fourteen Points, which put forward a liberal program of open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, free trade, freedom for Belgium and France (and Alsace-Lorraine) from German occupation, disarmament, borders drawn on the basis of nation-states rather than multinational empires, and the establishment of a League of Nations. Prince Max, as he was known, did not agree with everything in the Fourteen Points, but offered to accept them as the basis for negotiations. A democratically inclined aristocrat, he had clipped some of the powers of the Kaiser, brought Social Democrats into the government, and removed Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff as the de facto leaders of Imperial Germany. Hindenburg and Ludendorff had towered over the civilian government, but they now conceded that the war was lost and that Germany must seek terms. Their goal was an orderly retreat to Germany's western borders in exchange
for Britain, the United States, Italy, and France accepting Germany's territorial gains in the east.

Wilson took four days to respond to Prince Max—and then it was through Secretary of State Robert Lansing. Lansing sought assurances that the prince did in fact speak for the German government and stated flatly that no negotiations could begin while the Germans occupied Belgium and France. Nothing came of the overture, and the war continued.

West of the Argonne, the American 2nd and 36th Divisions—the former a collection of Marines and soldiers, the latter made up of cowboys and Indians from the Texas and Oklahoma National Guard—took over a position from the French and on 4 October seized the Blanc Mont Ridge in tough fighting. The Americans then led the French in driving the Germans to the Aisne River, so that by 27 October the French Fourth Army could finally take its place alongside the American First Army.

The First Army, meanwhile, had continued to slog its way through the Meuse-Argonne. As Laurence Stallings, a Marine veteran of Belleau Wood, put it in his own history of the war, “From now until the end . . . it was to be five weeks of unremitting pressure all along the front, and for the Doughboys in the line, of ‘one damn machine gun after another.'”
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In front of them lay the still unbroken
Kriemhilde Stellung
, reinforced by the Germans, who now had forty divisions in the Meuse-Argonne. Organized both by terrain and by its grid of trenches into interlocking fields of defensive fire, the
Kriemhilde Stellung
allowed the Germans to move from one strong point to another, which meant the Americans' only strategy could be tenaciously repeated assaults. It was now the French who were demanding that the Americans move more quickly. The Germans were everywhere falling back, while in the Meuse-Argonne the Yanks
were clawing their way forward against stiff resistance. But they were making progress. By mid-October, the Argonne Forest had been cleared, which put the American main thrust between the River Aire on the left, just east of the Argonne, and the River Meuse on the right. The chief objective was the area surrounding Romagne, about five miles north from Montfaucon, bracketed by the Côte de Châtillon and the Côte Dame Marie on the one side and Cunel on the other. The Côte Dame Marie was considered the key to unlocking the
Kriemhilde Stellung
. On 14 October, the Americans seized it and Romagne, but they could advance no farther until they reduced the Côte de Châtillon, with its newly rewired trenches and perhaps two hundred machine guns. It had to be taken, and in the undaunted assault, as General Douglas MacArthur remembered, “Officers fell and sergeants leaped to the command. Companies dwindled to platoons and corporals took over. At the end Major [Lloyd] Ross [leading one of the attacking battalions] had only 300 men and six officers left out of 1,450 men and 25 officers. That is the way the Côte-de-Châtillon fell. . . .”
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The United States was now fielding two armies. The Second Army, with more than 175,000 men under General Robert Lee Bullard, was east of the Meuse River, covering the American right flank. The First Army, more than a million strong, under the capable General Hunter Liggett, held the center. Having cracked the Hindenburg Line, Liggett paused to reorganize his exhausted troops, and then paused again waiting for the French to catch up to him. Allied war planners had assumed that they could drive to victory in 1919. But now it seemed possible that if they were aggressive enough, they could pummel Germany into a far more rapid defeat. Pershing was bullish, and Colonel George C. Marshall reckoned that in ten days, if the American advance could be maintained,
“about a million German soldiers in front and to the west of us would either have to surrender or disperse as individuals.”
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The attack timetable Pershing had originally drawn up for his army of supermen at the beginning of the Meuse-Argonne Campaign took on a new realism in this great charge of the First Army. Again, the Americans lined up three corps, left to right, I Corps, V Corps, and III Corps, with V Corps taking the lead. The goal was to press ever harder, expanding each day's gains as the Germans lost their artillery and were forced into an ever more debilitating retreat—and that was what happened. The attack commenced on 1 November. By 5 November, the Americans had cleared a broad swath of territory to the River Meuse; the Meuse-Argonne sector was theirs. But Pershing pressed on—first making a move to capture Sedan in the French sector to the North (until French protests had him rescind the order) and then crossing the Meuse against German artillery bombardments. An armistice was arranged to take place at 11:00 a.m., 11 November, but Pershing kept his men fighting to the end—and regretted that he had not been given a few more days to drive the American Expeditionary Force into Germany, not for glory, but to put a formal mark on Germany's defeat. As it was, the forty-seven day battle of the Meuse-Argonne marked the end of the First World War.

PART III

THE GENERALS

CHAPTER EIGHT

JOHN J. PERSHING (1860–1948)

T
he General of the Armies, John J. Pershing was born in Missouri a year before the War Between the States. One of his earliest memories was of his proudly Unionist, anti-slavery father barricading the house and holding off pro-slavery raiders (when Pershing was four).

His father, whose family had emigrated from Germany in 1749, was a successful businessman. Starting as a railway track foreman, he had married a Southern girl and turned shopkeeper and farmer—until the depression of the 1870s, when he became a traveling salesman. As a boy, Pershing ploughed his father's fields with singular dedication—he spent hours ensuring that every furrow was straight—and
ploughed through the family library of classics, while also entertaining himself with dime novels. He loved adventure stories and in due course became as strapping a young man as any dime novel hero. As a schoolboy he was a scrapper, a gamecock in schoolyard fights; and he liked to hang around the town's army supply depot, where a kindly sergeant would give him a chunk of hardtack. Proud, young Pershing considered it his daily ration.