The Yanks Are Coming! (9 page)

Although there was a wave of enlistments in the days immediately after Congress declared war, to put a sufficient number of men in uniform and behind rifles—of which there was inevitably a shortage—the Wilson administration resorted to conscription, the president signing the Selective Service Act into law on 18 May 1917. By the end of the war, the Army had more than 3 million men, more than 2 million of whom had been drafted. Just as the administration resorted to conscription so too did it ditch laissez-faire in favor of a state-directed economy. It created a War Industries Board (founded 28 July 1917), a federal Food Administration (10 August 1917), and a variety of other bureaucratic interventions. Wilson's liberalism thus became statism, as was perhaps inevitable with a professor who wanted to establish a policy curriculum for the country.

Even with a war on, Wilson was not much interested in military affairs. It was still domestic policy that moved him; or, in his increasingly grandiose moments, he focused on shaping the postwar world. But when it came to achieving that world on the battlefield, Wilson was largely disengaged. He met with Pershing only once before Pershing embarked for France, and vaguely envisioned the Army working with the French and the Navy working with the British. The commander in chief delegated military matters to his secretary of war, Newton Baker, the former pacifist whose ignorance of military affairs had been lifelong. Even as a boy, Baker confessed, he had not
played with toy soldiers. Now he had an ever-growing number of real ones to uniform, train, and ship—not to a battlefield of the counterpane, but to a real battlefield, a bullet- and artillery-blasted no-man's-land, a Western Front that was contested by armies numbering 6.5 million men.
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While Wilson and his bureaucrats felt the great thrill of power and assumed that because they were in command, great things were being done and great decisions were being made, this was not immediately apparent to the man in uniform who might have wondered why he was wearing a British helmet and throwing British grenades. It wasn't until the final months of the war (in July 1918) that General Clarence C. Williams took over as the Army's chief of ordnance and put the bureaucrats in their place, declaring, “If the fighting men want elephants, we get them elephants.”
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Williams was ably supported by Pershing's head of military procurement, Charles Gates Dawes, an enormously successful fifty-two-year-old financier and trust president, who was commissioned as a lieutenant of engineers and given orders to buy whatever the doughboys needed in Europe (thus saving the time, cost, and space of transporting supplies from America). When a congressional committee rapped Dawes's knuckles after the war for allegedly tossing around taxpayer dollars like confetti, he burst out, “Damn it all, the purpose of an army is to win the war, not to quibble about a lot of cheap buying. We would have paid horse prices for sheep if they could pull artillery to the front. It's all right to say now we bought too much vinegar or too many cold chisels, but we saved the civilization of the world. . . . Hell and Maria, we weren't trying to keep a set of books. We were trying to win a war.”
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Only 3 percent of U.S. Army artillery pieces used in combat during the war had been made in America.
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For ammunition it was closer to 1 percent. When it came to light machine guns (or
“automatic rifles,” as the Americans deemed them), the doughboys were handed troublesome, temperamental French Chauchats. In the First World War, it was Britain and France that were the arsenals of democracy. What the United States supplied was masses of raw materials—including, most important, men—and officers who could get things done, like Charles Gates Dawes.

Pershing arranged to have de facto control of the railway lines that supplied his troops in France—an advantage the British didn't have—by importing three hundred American locomotive engines that fit French gauges (and that the French would inherit after the war), along with railway men to do track repairs. The trains were put under the control of Brigadier General William Wallace Atterbury, general manager (and later president) of the Pennsylvania Railroad and a veteran of Pershing's punitive expedition against Pancho Villa. In this creative use of civilian expertise in the rapid construction of ports, hospitals, delousing stations, and supply depots in France, the Americans exhibited the kind of practical can-do spirit captured in the phrase “Yankee ingenuity.”

Not all Yanks, however, were created equal. A shocking number of conscripts were deemed unfit for service (about a third). But those who eventually landed in France had an electric effect on the population. The American soldier was big, he was confident, and as he gained experience of the “wind-pipe slitting art,” he became sardonic. What he lacked in training he made up for in
élan
, something the French, of all peoples, could well appreciate.

“LAFAYETTE, WE ARE HERE!”

First to arrive were Pershing, his staff officers, and a smattering of sergeants and other ranks, a grand total of 187 men, including
Lieutenant George S. Patton and a former race car driver named Eddie Rickenbacker, now a sergeant and a chauffeur for the general. They disembarked at Liverpool on 5 June 1917—“the first time in history,” Pershing noted, “that an American Army contingent was ever officially received in England”
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—and then on 13 June landed in France at Boulogne-sur-Mer. Two weeks later, the French port of Saint-Nazaire (which the Americans made their own as part of their line of supply) greeted fourteen thousand American troops. On 4 July 1917, Pershing and a battalion of doughboys marched through Paris, the men so garlanded with flowers (not to mention smacked with kisses and sprayed with cologne) by ecstatic Parisians, some of whom marched arm in arm with them, that Pershing thought the column “looked like a moving flower garden.”
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Standing before the tomb of Lafayette, Pershing, not the speechifying kind, turned to Captain C. E. Stanton to address the crowd. “
Nous voilà, Lafayette!
” the captain declared: “Lafayette, we are here!” Pershing was cajoled into saying something as well, to appease the baying crowd, but it was Stanton's phrase that marked the great comradely handshake between America and France.

Pershing met with General Philippe Pétain, the new commander in chief of the French army who had just averted disaster on the Western Front. In April 1917, his predecessor, General Robert Nivelle, had launched a massive offensive, deploying some 1.2 million soldiers and 7,000 artillery pieces, with which he promised to break the German line within forty-eight hours. More than three weeks later, he had gained 70 square miles at a cost of some 187,000 men. He had achieved no breakout, no rush to victory; instead, it was the long-suffering
poilus
who broke, with mutiny flaming through the French divisions. Nivelle was relieved, and “on the day when France had to choose between ruin and reason,” as Charles de Gaulle wrote,
“Pétain was promoted.”
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Pétain was a friend of the common soldier and had been an open critic of Nivelle's plan. He believed in fighting firepower with firepower and in protecting the lives of his men. He made a personal inspection of the front lines, visiting nearly every battalion, reassuring the
poilus
that he would not waste their lives in futile offenses, he would clean up the trenches, he would give them more generous leave; and now he could also promise them that help—in the form of American doughboys—was on the way.

Pétain and Pershing shared a sense of professionalism, duty, and verbal brevity—and they got on splendidly. With Pétain's approval, Pershing targeted a section of northeastern France where he could build up his army and eventually have a place in the Allied fighting line. Pétain told Pershing he only hoped the Americans were not too late.

The situation for the Allies was dire, even beyond the bombed-out muck and mire of France and Belgium. The war at sea, where German U-boats prowled, had the potential of terminating American support for Britain and France before it could effectively begin. In April 1917 Britain's First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John Jellico, told American Rear Admiral William Sims—former president of the United States Naval War College and Wilson's naval representative in London—that the Germans' unrestricted submarine warfare had so devastated British merchant shipping that Britain was “within measurable distance of strangulation,” that measurable distance extending only to 1 November 1917.
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The British saw no solution to the U-boats. Sims did. Over the objections of the British Admiralty, he instituted a system of convoys that gathered merchant ships together under the protection of cruisers and destroyers, which together plowed the seas free of U-boats.
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The German stranglehold was broken. The U-boats went from
monstrous menaces to slinking underwater serpents, fearful of American guns, mines, and depth charges. The British had depth charges, too, but it was the Americans who showed how to use them properly (shooting them into the sea with the American-invented Y-gun). The U.S. Navy also made enormous advances in the detection of enemy submarines with an early form of sonar, the “hydrophone,” developed by mathematician and future University of Chicago president Max Mason, and in U-boat–exploding mines. The U.S. Navy fought the U-boats wherever they could be found, from the Atlantic coast to the Azores to the Mediterranean.

But if the United States could help the Royal Navy win the battle at sea, it could, for now, contribute little to the Eastern Front, where Russia was convulsed by revolution. The new government of socialist Alexander Kerensky was committed to staying in the war, but the Kerensky Offensive of July 1917 collapsed. The Russian army was rent by massive desertions, the rising menace of Bolshevism, and Kerensky's hostility to the conservative officer corps. In October, the Bolsheviks toppled Kerensky, replacing a democratic socialist regime with a Communist one—and civil war. The Bolshevik government negotiated a truce with the Central Powers on 2 December 1917 and marked Russia's official exit from the war with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which surrendered more than 290,000 square miles of formerly Russian territory, a quarter of the Russian Empire's population, and the vast majority of its coal mines, as well as a good deal of its industry. But in return it freed up the Bolsheviks to concentrate on what they really wanted to do, which was to kill Russian reactionaries. For the British, French, and Americans, it meant that some of Germany's best divisions were going to be moving to the Western Front.

American troops were eager to meet the challenge, though some of the initial arrivals had never even fired their weapons. Pershing would not be rushed; the men must be trained; and he was unimpressed by the British and French instructors available to him; he thought they taught tactical defeatism. American soldiers, he argued, should be riflemen and fight a war of mobility—not hide in trenches, ducking artillery rounds. Through the fall and into the winter—a harsh one for which they were unprepared, reviving historical memories of Valley Forge—they trained for a war of rifle-led firepower.

Men of the 1st Division began moving into a quiet sector of frontline trenches in northeastern France on 21 October 1917. The first American-fired artillery shell was sent crashing into the German lines two days later, though the sector remained relatively quiet. It was a week before an American soldier was wounded (a lieutenant on the twenty-eighth, a private on the twenty-ninth).
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The first real action was at Artois on 3 November 1917 when a German artillery barrage was followed by a trench raid that captured eleven Americans, killed three, and wounded another five. Small beer by Great War standards, but for the doughboys it marked the beginning of serious engagement with the enemy. The war became real to the folks at home as well. The three American dead were noticed in papers across the country. They became heroes in their hometowns. In the grim toll of the Great War, they were statistics.

At first the Americans' fighting was done under the watchful eyes of French commanders—who could in fact be blamed for the American casualties at Artois. Distrustful of their inexperience, the French general Paul Bordeaux had issued orders that American troops were not to patrol the no-man's-land between the trenches—with the inevitable result that the no-man's-land belonged to the Germans.

That restriction didn't last.
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Under French instructors, the doughboys learned trench warfare and approached fighting with an ardor long lost by their European colleagues. The 167th Regiment, Alabamans who were part of the 42nd “Rainbow” Division (so named because it was made up of National Guard regiments that spanned the country), became particularly adept at raiding enemy lines. They hung a sign on the German wire as a friendly warning: “Germans, give your soul to God for your ass belongs to Alabam.”
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THE REAL DEAL

On 21 March 1918, Ludendorff launched an offensive with which he meant to win the war. He knew he had miscalculated the effectiveness of German U-boats to stop the Americans. The Americans had now amassed six divisions in Europe, about 325,000 men, with more on the way. Germany, Ludendorff recognized, must seize immediately on its advantage in defeating Russia; it must fall on the Western Front with a scythe, dividing the British from the French; it must open a gap for a massive and final German invasion leading to French capitulation. Unless the German army could do that, the game was up. Ludendorff thought he had the men—and the new tactics—to make it work. He would not waste time with lengthy artillery barrages; instead they would be relatively short, concentrated, and of unsurpassed ferocity. Allied lines would be penetrated by fearsome storm troops armed with light machine guns, flamethrowers, and other havoc-wreaking weapons. Gains made by the storm troopers would be followed up by masses of infantry, supported from the air. A cousin of Ludendorff's, General Oskar von Hutier, had employed these tactics with immense success on the Eastern Front.
Ludendorff had his Western divisions trained to inflict them on the French and the British.