SURRENDER OF THE GERMAN FLEET
A most dramatic event was the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet. The British Grand Fleet, accompanied by an American battle squadron and French cruisers, steamed out before dawn in the morning of November 21, 1918, from its Scottish base to accept the surrender of the German battleships, battle cruisers, and destroyers. The point of rendezvous for the Allied and German sea forces was between thirty and forty miles east of May Island, opposite the Firth of Forth. The fleet which witnessed the surrender consisted of some 400 ships, including sixty dreadnoughts, fifty light cruisers, and nearly 200 destroyers. Admiral Sir David Beatty, commander of the Grand Fleet, was on the Queen Elizabeth. The German warships, strung out in a single column almost twenty miles long, were led into the Firth of Forth between twin columns of Allied ships which overlapped the Germans at each end.
The main Allied fleet, extending over a line fourteen miles long in the Firth of Forth, began to weigh anchor at 1 o'clock in the morning. The Scotch mist which for days had obscured the harbor was swept away by a stiff breeze, and the moon shone brilliantly out of a clear sky. The ships quickly took their stations in the long double line they held throughout the day. British battle cruisers led the way, followed by dreadnoughts. Admiral Beatty's flagship, the Queen Elizabeth, led the squadron in the northern column. Five American battleships, the New York, Texas, Arkansas, Wyoming, and Florida, commanded by Rear Admiral Hugh Rodman, fell into line behind Admiral Beatty's craft, balancing a British squadron similar in power in the opposite file. All the battleships of the Allies were ready for instant action in case of treachery on the part of the Germans.
The rendezvous was approximately fifty miles distant and the ships gauged their speed to arrive at the appointed place at 8 o'clock. At 5 o'clock a signal summoned the men to battle stations, and, except the officers on the bridges, the ships' companies were hidden behind bulwarks of steel. When dawn broke, the sea was again covered with mist, which reduced the visibility to less than 8,000 yards.
Eyes straining through the murky haze finally were rewarded. Off the starboard bow, the Cardiff, trailing an observation kite balloon, came steaming in. Close behind her came the first of the German ships, the great battle cruiser Seydlitz, which was flying the flag of Commodore Togert. After her came four others of the same type, the Derfflinger, Von der Tann, Hindenburg, and Moltke. They moved along three cable lengths apart.
Immediately following them were nine dreadnoughts, the Friedrich der Grosse, flagship of Rear Admiral von Reuter; the Koenig Albert, Kaiser, Kronprinz Wilhelm, Kaiserin, Bayern, Markgraf, Prinzregent Luitpold, and the Grosser Kurfürst. Three miles astern of the battleships came seven light cruisers, the Karlsruhe, bearing the ensign of Commodore Harder; the Frankfort, Emden, Nürnberg, Brummer, Cöln, and Bremen. Then came another gap of three miles and German destroyers came steaming in, five columns abreast, with ten destroyers to a column.
Every vessel steaming out to meet them flew battle ensigns and was ready for instant action, with its men at battle stations and guns in position.
Six miles separated the Allied columns, and squarely between them the Cardiff brought her charges, all steaming at the stipulated speed of ten knots. As ordered, their guns were in regular fore-and-aft positions, and, as far as powerful glasses could determine, there was no sign to provoke suspicion. Until all the major ships had been swallowed up in the enveloping Allied columns, the latter never for a moment relaxed their alert watch. Over the Germans circled a British dirigible, which acted as eyes for the Allied ships, which, although the fog had lifted, were still too distant for accurate observation.
When the leading German ship had reached the western end of the flanking columns the Allied ships put about in squadrons. Quickly re-forming their lines, they proceeded to escort the enemy into the Firth of Forth. By noon the last wisp of fog had dispersed and a splendid view of the vast array of war craft could be obtained. Holding steadily to its course, the great fleet reached May Island at 2 o'clock. The captive Germans were piloted to anchorages assigned to them and British ships from the northern column steamed on to the regular anchorages higher up the Firth.
Inspection parties from the Grand Fleet boarded the Germans to make sure that all conditions of the armistice were observed. The enemy vessels were to be interned in Scapa Flow. Part of the crews were to remain for maintenance work and the remainder were to be returned to Germany soon.
The total tonnage surrendered, exclusive of submarines, amounted to approximately 420,000, divided as follows: Battle cruisers, 121,000 tons; dreadnoughts, 225,000 tons; light cruisers, 43,000 tons, and destroyers, 30,000.
Even after the cessation of hostilities there was still plenty of work to do for the naval forces of the Allies. After the occupation of Constantinople, already described, Allied ships occupied Odessa on November 26, 1918, and on the same day anchored off Sebastopol, the Russian naval base in the Crimea. There they took over the Russian ships, then in the hands of the Germans, as well as some German submarines.
In the Baltic, too, British and other Allied ships made their appearance. On December 3, 1918, a British squadron, consisting of twenty-two ships and including destroyers, cruisers, mine sweepers, and transport steamers, were reported to have arrived in the port of Libau in Courland. At midnight on December 4, 1918, one of these ships, the British light cruiser Cassandra, of 6,000 tons, struck a mine and sank within an hour with a loss of eleven men. A few days later, on December 6, 1918, it was announced that some of these ships had successfully bombarded, from the Gulf of Finland, front and rear positions held by the Bolsheviki forces in Esthonia, stopping their advance.
AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENTS ON THE WESTERN FRONT
By FREDERICK PALMER
(LATE LT. COLONEL U.S.R.)
The glory of our accomplishment in France lies in the titanic energy and natural resourcefulness of our people which were applied with a unity of purpose which surprised even ourselves. It is possible for us to exaggerate our part in assisting the Allies to final victory, and it is also possible for us to underestimate our part.
If England had not entered the war in 1914, and if Italy and Rumania had not entered later, and if Canada and Australia and the British dominions had not put forth all their strength, and if the United States had not sent an army to France, the Germans would have won. The balance of victory and failure at times hung by a thread. While Americans must always realize that comparatively we suffered slightly beside Britain and France and Italy, and that the Canadians were the veterans of cruel and wicked fighting in holding the western front against the enemy in the height of his confidence, numbers, and efficiency, no one will gainsay that at the end of the conflict we were giving our lives as freely as our neighbors and Allies.
Any consideration of our accomplishment must include the fact that we were as unprepared in April, 1917, for any immense military effort as we had been in August, 1914. While the world witnessed the British making citizen armies out of raw material by slow and costly processes, our governmental policy, to the regret of many of our people, had not been to profit by the application of their experience in view of the emergency which seemed inevitable to many observers, but, as neutrals, to keep ourselves free from any imputation of militaristic aims.
Once we were in the war, the policy of our Government was to put all our preparations in the hands of the regular army and to assist the Allies in every way that was in our power. Our people had learned from observation of the European war that modern warfare required expert direction, and with a unanimity that was startling in a democracy which had always resisted any efforts to form a large army in our country we welcomed the national draft and a centralization of authority in the hands of the President and army chiefs which was out of keeping with all our precedents.
Our training camps were to repeat under the draft the slow and wearisome business of training not only men but officers to command them at the same time that we were building new factories and plants to supply the army with ordnance and with ships to transport men and material to France. As the Allies had waited on England to become prepared, they must now wait on the United States; and in the crisis of their fortunes, when the Germans had had repeated successes, they faced the question of whether or not the resources of the United States in men and material could be transformed into a force that could be exerted by sea against the submarine or on the western front in time to prevent a German victory.
The sending of Major General John J. Pershing to France with a pioneer staff in May, 1917, had for its military purpose the huge and time-consuming task of preparing the way for the troops that were to arrive as soon as we had them trained, and the immediate object of assuring the people of the Allies that we meant to make active warfare on the western front. Although we had relieved the financial stress of the Allies by our loans, and with the removal of our interference with the British blockade we had strengthened the wall around Germany, we were incapable for the first eight months of striking any blow of account against the enemy except through the flotilla of destroyers which we had sent to cooperate with the British navy in combating the submarine. Considering that the French and British had over three million troops on the western front, the total of our regular army of one hundred thousand men, if all had been immediately dispatched to France, would hardly have been an important military factor. In a war where such enormous numbers were engaged, though we might have ten million able-bodied men in the United States, they were of no combat service against the enemy until they were in France, armed and trained.
The French offensive, in the early spring of 1917, had failed with the result that France was depressed and that all observers agreed that it was not in the power of the exhausted French army to undertake another offensive. The Germans, after their retreat across the old Somme battle fields, had stood firm on the Hindenburg line. Despite their losses they had sufficient force on the western front to assure, unless there was some unexpected break in their morale, their retention of their positions in face of the determined attacks of the British in their summer offensives, culminating in the bloody ridge of Passchendaele, which were made not in the expectation of any decision, but to hold German divisions off from the Italian front, from an effort to crush Rumania, an effort against Saloniki and from exploitation of their successes in Russia.
With Russia out of the war, Rumania crippled, the Servian army reduced to a small body of veterans and the Italian offensive making no decisive progress, it was evident that unless Germany could be starved into submission by the blockade, which seemed out of the question from the information in possession of Allied councils, we must have a fighting force in France which should be as strong as either that of the British or the French while its transport across the Atlantic through the submarine zone was by no means assured. Trusting to no adventitious event to make so large an army unnecessary, General Pershing and his staff, after they had studied the situation and conferred with the Allied command, decided that their duty as pioneers was to prepare for the operations in France of an army of at least one million men with the communications and plant for their support capable of expansion for the care of two million men.
As the Allies throughout the war had depended very largely for war material upon America and overseas countries, it was essential that we should be capable of largely providing for our army from the resources of our own country. With the French railway system strained to capacity, and France suffering from a shortage of labor behind the lines, owing to all her able-bodied males being in active service, we must furnish transportation as well as labor from home. Despite the strong influences brought to bear to have our soldiers introduced by regiments and battalions into the French and British armies, it was our duty, not only to our national spirit but to our conception of our duty to the Allies, to form an integral American army which should fight as a unit in the same manner that the British and French armies were fighting.
A glance at the map of the whole western front, in reference to the coast line and the harbors of France and its railway systems, will readily indicate to any observer the strategic character of the conception of General Pershing in 1917, which had its climax of success in November, 1918. The British army was on the left of the long battle line from Switzerland to Flanders, with its bases close to the Channel and home bases. The French army was to hold the center of the line, fighting for the heart of France, and on the right the American army, drawing its supplies three thousand miles across the sea and across southern and central France, was to face the Rhine.
For any great final Allied offensive, unless some unforeseen circumstance favored, the Allies must wait upon the formation of an army of American citizens who would be made approximately as capable in all the complicated technique of modern warfare as the French and British armies. That this achievement was possible we knew because of the success of the British new army, and particularly that of the Canadians, who had not even had as much military preparation as the Australians, but had learned at the cannon's mouth the lessons of experience which no amount of theory or practice can approximate.
As the early introduction of small American forces into the Allied armies must be of relatively small effect in their relation to the immense whole, ample time must be taken for the training and preparation in order to assure the exertion of a maximum of pressure when we should begin to fight in earnest. It was equally important both for the effect upon Allied and German sentiment that when we did begin active campaigning there should be no setbacks for our army. According to the promise which we had made to the French Government we were due to have by July 1, 1918, some five hundred thousand troops in France. Even that number, when you include all the men who were required along the lines of communication, seemed a small force on the continent of Europe, and, at the time that this program was arranged, the suggestion of a million men in France was probably considered seriously only by the officers who were on the ground.
The first American troops to arrive in France was the 1st Division of regulars (then under command of Sibert), including the brigade of Marines. They were very largely raw recruits, in no sense a highly trained regular division; they were to be followed by regular divisions and National Guard divisions, which were to be established in their drill grounds for periods of training before entering the trenches.
Indeed the history of our operations may be divided into three phases:
The first was the period of preparation and training and of trench experience of the earlier divisions and of the organization of our general staff, the instruction of our reserve officers in the various schools and in the actual work at the front, and inaugurating the immense constructive work required for our lines of communication. Through the winter of 1917-18, whether drilling in the muddy fields of Lorraine or holding trenches, our men, in the penetrating, moist, and cold climate, knew as great hardships as any veteran of the Civil War or of the Revolution, Lorraine was aptly called our "Valley Forge" in France. It was a winter of discouragement including the disaster to the Italian army, the increasing submarine ravages, the want of shipping to keep up the program of troop transport, the failure of supplies to arrive, the final collapse of Russia and Rumania, the depression among the French and Italian people, the severe food restrictions in England, and the gathering of the German armies with their superior numbers for the great offensives for the spring of 1918.
So serious did the Allies consider the situation that they were willing to offer Germany a very favorable peace, but Germany, confident that the Americans could not exert their pressure in time and that Allied spirits were depressed to a point when at any moment Allied disagreement might lead to an Allied collapse, refused to consider the offers. History offers nothing in the record of great wars in affording more contrast than the pessimism in the inner councils of the Allies in the winter of 1917-18, and the spring of 1918, in comparison with the complete victory which was achieved in the fall of 1918.
Our second phase came with the first of the German offensives on March 21, 1918, against the British army. The success of this offensive startled the people of the Allied world to a full realization of the perilous situation of their cause. It was an innovation in tactics in that the Germans had swept through the front lines and support lines of the trench system, capturing the guns whose answering artillery fire had hitherto been the main reliance of the defense in stopping the enemy's charges, and carrying the warfare into the open. We had then only four divisions which had been in the trenches, Bullard's 1st Regulars and Bundy's 2d Regulars and Marines and Edwards's 26th, or New England, and Menoher's 42d, or Rainbow, National Guard Divisions. The plan had been to put them into a permanent American sector in Lorraine, but in face of this new emergency they were to be turned over to the French for such use as Marshal Foch, the new commander in chief of the Allied forces, might decide to make of them.
Up to this time the phrase "Too proud to fight" had haunted the minds of the Allied peoples when they thought of American troops. They considered that we had been very slow in beginning active warfare. Our losses in the quiet trenches that we had occupied had been thus far normally slight compared with those in an active battle sector. There was a disposition to think that probably America was not sufficiently in earnest to make any great sacrifice of lives. We were willing to loan the Allies money, to supply them with materials of war and to make some show of military force; but the contemplation of a nation three thousand miles away from Europe fighting with all the heroic disregard of life of the Allies on their own soil seemed a little out of keeping with the accepted traditions of military history to Europeans.
Never were soldiers watched with more critical interest or deeper appreciation of the influence of the result than our divisions when they were first engaged in violent action at Cantigny and in the Château-Thierry operations in the course of the trying months of the German offensives and the subsequent Allied counteroffensives. Not only had the Europeans wondered if we would fight, but they had grave doubts of our battle skill. The seriousness of the situation deepened their concern. Anyone who really knew America had no doubt that we would fight. At the same time thoughtful Americans, familiar with the increasingly difficult technique which was the accumulation of more than three years' experience, when they thought of how relatively little experience our citizen soldiers had had, saw them go into action beside veteran French and British divisions with misgivings lest their skill might not be in keeping with their valor. Their initiative and furious application led to more rapid learning than the most optimistic of their teachers had imagined.
The American army had been trained for the offensive. We had, at the start, the natural initiative which the Canadians had so abundantly shown, and which in the introduction of the trench raid they applied in the only innovation of tactics with the exception of the tanks which the British army developed. The Canadians, coming from a more sparsely settled country than ours, with a larger percentage of its citizens of English-speaking origin than we have, if we except the French Canadian population, had the advantage, in the views of many, over American forces which must include a large number of draft men unfamiliar with the English language who had had only a brief residence in the United States.
If the American army was to be the decisive army owing to its youth and its numbers, then there must never enter any thought into our minds other than that once we were prepared for action that action should be continuously one of attack. If the old German trench line were to be broken and the war of movement were again to lead to an Appomattox for the German army that could only be won by tactics which, with unwavering determination, would eventually capitalize German exhaustion after four years of war in the conviction on the part of German soldiers that resistance against the immense forces of American reserves that were coming was hopeless. In brief, America must show the Germans that millions of Americans, who had the spirit of the Canadians, were to follow the Canadians across the Atlantic.
The greatest difficulty that Allied commanders had had was keeping soldiers from falling into the habit of trench defensive, which was the result of the early days of murderous fighting, when all attempts either by the Germans or the Allies to "break through" had failed. Our hope was that our soldiers would have the good fortune to escape the fearful attrition of trench fighting and that our offensive spirit would suffer no setbacks in actual experience.
Where we had been in the trenches we had insistently kept the upper hand over the enemy, meeting his trench raids with better than he gave, answering his artillery fire with heavier artillery fire and pressing him at every point. No feature of war is more underestimated than psychology. The psychology of conviction that you are going to win, confirmed by actual victory in the first shock of arms, is one of the best guaranties of continued victory.
Happily, our divisions, which were transferred to the active battle front in western France, were able to apply their offensive spirit with immediate offensive results. At Cantigny, on the eve of the third German offensive, in our first attack we took all of our objectives skillfully, and when the 2d Division was thrown across the Paris road to resist the advance of the Germans which was then slowing down, our men, who were in the pink of youthful vigor, immediately attacked. They were on a comparatively short front, but their conduct thrilled all the Allied soldiers and people with the rallying conviction that the Americans had brought to France a telling new energy into an old war. The British who had stood out stubbornly against the mighty German thrusts felt more than ever confidence due to the presence of American divisions with their army. More important than generals or staff, the American individual soldier stood in no awe of his enemy, but, on the contrary, was confident of his personal superiority. It needed no urging from his officers for him to attack. When in doubt his idea was to charge. Again, the 3d Division in the defense of the Marne bridgeheads at Château-Thierry, though it had had no trench experience and had never been under fire before, simply confirmed the quality which the old divisions had exemplified as something that was a common trait.
Against the great fifth German offensive the 42d, or Rainbow Division, which was represented with the National Guard of our twenty-six States and was conscious of holding the honor of the National Guard and of the honor of America in its keeping, showed that if stubborn resistance was requisite as well as attack they could be depended upon. Dickman's 3d Division, against that same offensive, broke the German crossing of the Marne and then, when the front line battalions had lost one-third to one-half of its men, counterattacked with a dexterity and a viciousness that thrilled the most veteran and phlegmatic of military critics.
For the Allied counteroffensive, which was the turning of the tide against the German offensives, the French High Command chose that the 1st (now under command of Summerall) and 2d (now under command of Harbord) Divisions, should cooperate with the best of French divisions in the drive toward Soissons which was to force the gradual evacuation of the Germans of the Marne salient.
This operation and the operations that preceded it in resisting the German offensives were all known to the general public as Château-Thierry, which is the name of the town lying in the lap of the hills on the bank of the Marne. No American soldiers ever fought in Château-Thierry with the exception of the machine-gun battalion of the 3d Division, which was in the town very briefly in a rear-guard action before retiring with its French associates to the other side of the Marne to prevent the Germans from crossing. In the counteroffensive it was the French who retook the town without any fighting as it was no longer defensible once the surrounding hills had been taken, and in their taking we assisted. But for all the splendid work of our divisions in the second battle of the Marne, as it is sometimes called, Château-Thierry has become the accepted name. Any one of the eight divisions engaged in the operations which began with the defense of Paris and ended with driving the Germans back to their old line was at Château-Thierry in the accepted sense of the term.
General Pershing had been convinced that the Marne salient, which extended into the Allied line in an immense pocket, not only from its configuration invited attack, but that the Germans had so far extended themselves in their giant efforts that the tables could be easily turned. If he had been slow to enter his divisions into active sectors until they had been trained, he was now, in face of this opportunity, not only prepared to send in his trained divisions, but to send in divisions which had only recently arrived. By this time we were beginning to feel the accumulated results of the work of our training camps at home in forming our untrained citizens into battalions and regiments and divisions, and we were having the actual results in France of the full awakening of the American people and the Allies to the danger of defeat which the German offensives had brought, and the shipping which had been provided for at the Abbéville Conference of the Allied statesmen and commanders was rushing the men from our training camps to Europe with a speed that surpassed the transport program by two to one by midsummer.
Instead of five hundred thousand in July, 1918, we had a million; and the two million would soon follow.
The indefatigable industry of our workers, in preparation for the reception of vast hosts which at the inception of the great plan seemed visionary, now appeared as the most practical kind of prevision, a prevision which was to play an important part in winning the war. By results we had answered the fears of all skeptics. All the way from the North Sea, over four hundred miles to Switzerland, the traveler saw American soldiers behind the line; and they were scattered through all the villages of France. We had ten divisions who had been assigned to the British, we had soldiers in training in the Ypres salient on the old Somme battle field, in Champagne, in the Woevre, in Lorraine, and in the forests of the Vosges Mountains in sight of the Alps. The transports were disembarking men by the thousands every day and railroad trains were dispatching our divisions here and there with a frequency that left it out of the question that any man or woman in France should not now realize by their own observation that America was in the war in earnest and she was bringing her man power to bear on the battle front.
Our project for an army of our own had been abandoned for the time being in order to meet the emergency due to the German offensives. The American effort in France had been that of many scattered divisions called to fill breaches and then sent into the attack in order to make the most of the turn of the tide. We could not have an American army in our own sector until these detached divisions had assisted in making sure that Paris was forever out of danger, and that there was not enough spirit or force left in the German armies to undertake an offensive of any kind.
The situation of our forces meanwhile was unique and amazingly difficult. The British had their line from thirty to seventy-five miles from the coast which was only an hour's ride away from England itself, and the French were in their own country wherever they went. But the nearest homes of our soldiers were three thousand miles away and the homes of some of them were five and six thousand miles. When they received "leaves" they could not go to visit their families as the British and French might. While the British were in their permanent sector with all the system of supplies regularly established, our soldiers might be one day serving with the British army and the next day with the French; they knew the weariness of long rides on railway trains, billets in barns and haylofts, and no home associations except that of their own companionship and that supplied by the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A., the Knights of Columbus, and the Salvation Army. They were under the strictest kind of censorship, their mail took weeks to reach France and then followed them about from place to place in trying to overtake them.
The rapidity with which they were being brought across the seas in unexpected numbers into a land which had suffered the strain of war for four years led to confusion and discomfort under the fearful pressure of the forthcoming tremendous effort which was to use all the will power, energy, and brains of every man that America had in France.
For we were now to know no rest until the armistice was signed. After the 1st and 2d Divisions had fought themselves to utter exhaustion in the drive to Soissons with a loss of nearly 50 per cent of their infantry, the work of reducing the salient fell upon the "Yankee" 26th Division, which had been hurried from a long tour in the mud and misery of the Toul sector, upon Muir's "Iron" 28th Division of Pennsylvania National Guard, coming fresh from the drill grounds back of the British front to the drive toward the Ourcq, upon the redoubtable 3d Division, which, despite its losses in resisting the German crossing of the Marne, took up the counteroffensive with a fiery zeal.
Then the 42d Division swung around to take the place of the "Yankee" 26th, after it had fought heroically to exhaustion in attacking through more forests and against more machine-gun nests, and Haans 32d Division of National Guard from Michigan and Wisconsin, "the Arrows," who always broke the line which came down the apron of the hills toward Cierges under artillery fire with the jauntiness of parade, conquered the wicked woods and heights of the ravines on the other side of the Ourcq in its first great action. Hersey's 4th Regular Division with but little experience lived up to the record of the other divisions by promptly becoming veteran and Duncan's 77th "Liberty" Division, of New York City, the first of the National Army divisions to arrive in France and the first to know active battle, pressed on to the Vesle. All these gave all the strength they had, all fought until in weariness they must accept relief, in that wonderful revelation of citizen America turned soldier.
There was not one of these divisions that did not regret that instead of being associated with French divisions they were not associated with American divisions. All were ambitious to be a part of our own army. They had finished their Château-Thierry job; they had done all that was expected of them; they had met the emergency. Château-Thierry had been an introduction, a preparation, a proof of quality for other and greater tasks which commanders had now learned that we could perform.
Now began the Hegira of our divisions toward our own American sector in Lorraine, where all but two, who were with the British, were to join them. With the assurance that by the first of December we should have more than two million Americans in France while the number of German reserve divisions were dwindling and the Germans could hope for no further reenforcements, the offensive of Château-Thierry was to be followed by the succeeding offensives with which, as opportunity offered, Marshal Foch was to conduct his final campaign. Germany had no hope now of winning the war. The question was how soon it might be won by the Allies.
With the attack on the Saint Mihiel salient our army entered upon its third and greatest phase, which was the cumulation of all the plans made in June, 1917. At that time it was considered that we should be ready for our first offensive operation as an integral force by the autumn of 1918, and the salient was considered as its objective; but, as I have said, we had not calculated upon a million men by midsummer of 1918, which our lines of communication would have to supply, let alone two million by November 1, 1918. The requirements laid upon transport and supply were more than doubled, while the emergency of scattering our divisions to resist the German offensives had introduced an unexpected feature, and the strain upon France and England, as the result of these offensives, had interfered with our receiving as much assistance from them as we might have originally expected.
As officers in France had foreseen, the promises of our ambitious program in the manufacture of aeroplanes, ordnance, and material of war at home, could not be fulfilled even by the most diligent application of energy and enterprise as soon as the War Department had hoped. We were still equipping all our divisions with British gas masks and helmets. Only in the last days of the Château-Thierry operations had a plane driven by a Liberty motor flown over our lines. All our artillery and machine guns were still French. The Browning machine guns were only just beginning to arrive; and we waited upon the American tanks and gas outfits and other weapons.
These handicaps made the successes which were to follow all the more remarkable. The increasing forces must all have their daily rations, and in the pressure of battle the artillery must not lack ammunition, and there must be at all times sufficient transport, whether railroad, motor, or horse, in order that the supplies should be delivered at the front. Therefore the development of the Service of Supply as a part of the whole project must keep pace in capacity and efficiency with the demands of the fighting forces.
Our army's activities were divided into three zones: the base, the intermediate, and advance, with that of the base and the intermediate in charge of the commanding general of the Service of Supply at Tours. Every harbor of western France not occupied by the British was teeming with American effort, while Marseilles, in the Mediterranean, was caring for our increasing business which the Atlantic ports could not accommodate. The recruits for the army of the Service of Supply must keep pace with those for the army at the front. Battalions of negroes had been brought from the Southern States to act as laborers and stevedores. We were using German prisoners for labor as fast as they were captured.
At Bordeaux and Saint Nazaire, particularly, among the ports, we had built long expanses of wharves and the spur tracks which connected them with systems of warehouses. The plan had been always to have reserve supplies for forty-five days at the base ports; with thirty days' at the great intermediate depot of Gièvres, where another vast system of spur tracks and warehouses had been built in open fields, and fifteen days' supplies at the regulating stations with their systems of spur tracks and warehouses where the trains were made up to meet the immediate requisitions from the front. Without any prevision as to when the war would end, with nothing certain except that we must go on preparing as if it were to last for years in order the sooner to force the end, new construction, while requirements of the present were met, must keep pace with growth. We had car and locomotive assembling shops; motor repair shops; salvage depots, remount depots, and immense areas of hospitals, with as many as eighteen thousand beds in a single area, which had been building in grim expectation of the flow of wounded from the front when we began operations on a large scale. Nurses and doctors must be in sufficient numbers for the emergency.
Never had America had such a test of its organizing capacity as in its formation of the Service of Supply. Its problems, both in number and complexity as well as in the size of the task, the amount of material and personnel required, were far greater than those of the Panama Canal. The leisure which any undertaking permits in carrying out plans and the dependence which may be placed upon the receipt of tools and material in time of peace were both wanting under the pressure of war. Personnel for this enterprise was summoned from our engineers, our business men and experts, and from the ranks of skilled labor in every civil branch who were for the first time brought together in a national organization in foreign surroundings where they faced many difficulties with which they were unfamiliar, under the direction of the regular army, which had to reconcile all policies with the requirements of the front line, and which had to expand its imagination and its powers of organization from a quartermaster's business of a little regular army to the mastery of unparalleled forces in the direction of reserve officers who had been used to handling great business enterprises.
Next to the position of General Pershing that of the commanding general of the Service of Supply was the most important in France. It was proposed at one time from Washington that he should have authority coordinate with General Pershing's direct from Washington; but this was strongly opposed on the ground that the commander in chief of the fighting army must be supreme over every branch if he were to be responsible for the success of a campaign. Major General James G. Harbord, who had been the first chief of staff of the American Expeditionary Force and later commanded the marine brigade of the 2d Division and afterward the division itself in the Château-Thierry operations, was summoned from the front late in July, 1918, at a time when the rapid arrival of troops from America and the prospects of the terrific demands of the campaigns which would ensue made it vital that there should be administrative reform in the Service of Supply by some man not only of high organizing ability but with the personal quality that inspires coordination among his adjutants, if the Service of Supply were to be equal to the enormous demands which would be placed upon it in the next few months.
Whether it was the officers drawn from civil life without military training, or the laborers or the privates, every man in the Service of Supply wished that he were at the front. Hundreds of officers with combat training and thousands of soldiers who had been in the training camps found themselves, because of their particular efficiency in business organization, immured in some particular Service of Supply branch, doing long hours of prosaic work in the different camps and shops of the base ports and central France without hope, so far as they could see, of ever hearing a shot fired. It seemed to them frequently that the staff organization of the Service of Supply lacked the characteristics of energetic direction and team play with which they had been familiar in civil life. They had everything to make them discouraged. General Harbord, with the reputation he had won as a fighter, his magnetism, his understanding of human nature and his capability of promptly grasping the essentials of any problem, soon showed that he had the talent for transforming the spirit of the personnel by applying the indefatigable industry and the patriotic spirit of this vast force in a homogeneous corps, without which the victory of the American forces in France would not have been possible.
While General Harbord was reorganizing the Service of Supply, General Pershing was preparing in haste and under great handicaps for the direction of hundreds of thousands of men in battle. The division was the fighting unit of our army. It went into the trenches and into battle as a division; was transferred from one part of the line to the other as a unit which was complete in all its branches, with a personnel of twenty-seven thousand men, or about double the size of a British or French division. The command of many divisions in battle brought us to the question of higher tactics. We had to train officers for this high responsibility as well as for leading the battalions in the front line.
According to the original plan we were to have six divisions to a corps. Major General Hunter Liggett, as soon as we had four divisions in training, had been set the task of organizing our first corps. He had a high reputation in the regular army as a student and tactician, and he was a man of great poise and a most thorough student. The withdrawal of our divisions from our Lorraine sector, in order to assist in the defense of Paris and later in the counteroffensive of July, had allowed General Liggett little practical experience. With the rapid arrival of our troops other corps staffs were rapidly formed. Major General Robert L. Bullard, who had commanded the 1st Division in the Toul sector and in the attack on Cantigny, was given the command of the 3d Corps. For a brief period both General Liggett and General Bullard and their staff had some experience acting as corps commanders in the Château-Thierry operations. Not until the Saint Mihiel operations, however, had we ever had more than two divisions operating together under American command. Meanwhile we had organized our First Army, which was under the personal command of General Pershing.
With our new corps and army organization, we were now to undertake an attack against the fortifications of one of the most formidable positions on the western front with a shorter period of preparation than had been generally accepted as necessary by the veteran French and British armies whose staffs had had four years' training under actual battle conditions. The experts, whether in the gaining of intelligence, in the handling of traffic, or in the highly complex technique of the arrangements for the liaison of artillery and infantry and aviation and all the other branches of uniformity of operations between the divisions, were to apply in practice what they had learned in theory and by observation of the Allied armies. Their theory had been learned at the staff school of Langres, solving problems of combat organization and listening to lectures by staff officers of other armies; but theory is not practice.
Since 1915 there had been no important action from Verdun to the Swiss border. The wedge of the Saint Mihiel salient, which the Germans had won in 1914 with its commanding hills and ridges, had remained an eyesore on the map of the western front. Aside from its strong natural positions it was defended by the most elaborate of modern fortifications. By the criterion of precedents of previous offensives against front-line positions we should succeed in our undertaking only at an immense cost of life, should the Germans decide to make a determined defense. Until a few days before the attack we had every expectation that they would. The original plan was that we should go through to Mars-la-Tour and Etain until we were before the great German fortress of Metz. Marshal Foch changed this plan, as we shall see.
By the time we had finished the Saint Mihiel operations the chilling fall rains would have begun in earnest. These would not only expose the men, but would impede transport. We should use the winter months for applying the lessons learned in our first offensive in the forming of our organization for the greater offensive which was to begin in the spring of 1919 and continue until we had won a decision. For in 1919 it was the American army with its inexhaustible reserves and the vigor of its youth which was due to do the leading and to endure accordingly heavy losses. The artillery, the machine guns, the tanks, and all the other material which we had been manufacturing at home as it arrived through the winter of 1918 we should incorporate into our organization.
Marshal Foch, who desired the complete success of the Saint Mihiel offensive as a part of his plan, had assigned to the American army, under General Pershing's command, ample forces in addition to our own artillery and aviation. While French divisions were to mark time at the apex of the salient before following up our attack, the American divisions from right to left, the 90th, 5th, 2d, 89th, 42d, and 1st were to swing in on the eastern side of the salient, with the 82d as a pivot and the 26th Division, cooperating with French troops, was to swing in on the western side. For the first time our army corps and divisional artillery were to cooperate in a preliminary bombardment in cutting the barbed wire, encountering the enemy's artillery fire, and to prepare the way for the charge of a long line of American infantry in the first attack of an American army as an army on the continent of Europe. For the first time the responsibility for command all the way from the front line through all the headquarters up to that other commander in chief was ours. The French staff officers were at hand with their advice and information, but ours was the decision and the battle was ours.
By the morning of September 12, 1918, the Germans, in view of the strength of our forces and of the pressure on other parts of their line, had decided not to make strong resistance in the Saint Mihiel salient. Indeed, they contemplated a rear-guard action in withdrawal, but not expecting that we would attack on the 12th, owing to rainy weather, we practically caught them before their withdrawal had begun, with the result that the impetuosity of the attack of our men, who forced their way through stretches of barbed wire which the artillery fire had not cut, cleared both the first and second lines of defense on schedule time and gathered in prisoners and guns out of all keeping to their losses. On the morning of the 13th, troops of the 26th Division and the 1st Division, swinging in from the east and west, had come together and the Saint Mihiel salient was no more. Our success had been complete and inexpensive. It thrilled the Allied armies with fresh confidence in our arms when they saw that the angle on the old line of the map had been straightened and the German people, to whom the Saint Mihiel salient had become equally a symbol, were accordingly depressed.
Already, instead of looking forward to months of preparation for the next offensive, our army had begun preparations for another offensive which was to begin only thirteen days after that of Saint Mihiel. Marshal Foch had decided before the Saint Mihiel attack to change his plan, and instead of going through to Mars-la-Tour and Etain, only to cut the salient, withdrawing surplus troops for action elsewhere. In conjunction with the Fourth French Army, which was to attack from the left, we were to attack from the Argonne Forest to the Meuse River in the greatest battle in which Americans had ever been engaged. Following the success of the Château-Thierry offensive in which our troops had played a part, the British Canadians and the French had had continuing success in their offensives beginning on August 8, 1918. Our 32d Division had increased the reputation which it had won in the fighting on the Ourcq by assisting the French in breaking the old front-line positions northeast of Soissons.
The Allies had now regained practically all the ground that the Germans had won in their spring and summer offensives. In places they had penetrated the Hindenburg line. The Belgian as well as the British and French armies were about to take the offensive. The German losses in prisoners and material in the last month indicated a decline in German morale. Information confirmed the idea that Hindenburg, with his rapidly weakening reserves, was contemplating a withdrawal to the line of the Meuse. Every consideration called upon the Allied armies to stretch their resources in men and material to the utmost in order to take advantage of the situation. For the first time since the war had begun on the western front they completely had the initiative.
The next step was to broaden the front of the Allied attacks, further confusing Ludendorff in his dispositions, and breaking through the Hindenburg line and all the old front-line positions which the Germans had held for four years, to force the offensive in the open, where rapid maneuvers could harass the effort of the Germans in withdrawing their forces and the material which they had accumulated through four years, and by repeated blows continue to weaken their morale until a positive decision was won.
If Ludendorff were given leisure for a deliberate retreat to a shorter line which he could fortify during the winter while his army recovered its spirit, this shorter line would give him all the advantage which serves the defense in deeper concentrations of troops to the mile with less room for the offensive to maneuver for surprises.
All the Allied offensives—Champagne, Loos, the Somme, Arras, and Passchendaele—had been made to the west of the Argonne Forest, because of the advantage of ground. To the east, facing the Rhine, the Germans had their great fortress of Metz, and the positions in Lorraine and the Vosges Mountains and the wedge of Saint Mihiel, which had seemed unconquerable. The Meuse River winds past Saint Mihiel through the town of Verdun, then northward where it turns westward toward Sedan. All the way from Saint Mihiel, including the hills of the forts of Verdun, which look out on the plain of the Woevre with the fortress of Metz in the distance, runs a rampart of heights clear to the great bastion of the Forest of Argonne, where the country becomes more rolling, and therefore better ground for military operations.
The line of our second offensive was to be from the Meuse River just west of Verdun to the western edge of the Argonne Forest. Anyone who looks at the map of the old line of the western front and of the enemy's railroad communications would say at once that this was the obvious line for an offensive. The Metz-Lille railway line, two-track all the way, and in places four-track, runs through Sedan and Mézières, following the Meuse Valley where it turns westward. This was the most important southern transversal line that the Germans had for supplying their armies in eastern France and connecting them with the coal fields of northern France. Northeast of the Meuse-Argonne positions were the famous Briey iron fields on which the Germans were dependent for their supplies of ore for the Krupp works. A blow toward Mézières and toward Briey was a blow at the heart of German military power.
The Germans fully realized the danger in this direction and knew, as our generals knew, how thoroughly it was protected. They had all the advantage of rail connections in hastening their reserves to this point if the Allies had made an advance in this direction. In 1916 or 1917 the Germans would have welcomed the Meuse-Argonne offensive, in the confidence that the Allied attacks would have suffered as bloody repulses as the Germans suffered at Verdun against the same kind of positions. The front German line was in the southern part of the Forest of Argonne with its ravines and hills covered with dense undergrowth. And back of this was still another great forest, that of Bourgogne. Offensives against even small patches of woods had proved the hopelessness of any frontal attack against forests.
East of the Argonne Forest is the little river Aire, its valley forming a trough between the hills, and between that and the Meuse for a distance of about ten miles the German line, which had been placed in the retreat from the Marne, had at its rear a whaleback of rising heights which reached their summit in the neighborhood of Buzancy. From this summit it was downhill all the way to the Meuse River. It was this summit which the American army must gain in advancing over ground in which nature seemed to have had in mind the possibilities of modern warfare in defense. The heights would give observation for the enemy guns which were hidden on the reverse slopes. Numerous patches of woods and tricky ravines made ideal positions for machine-gun nests. One position gained, the victor still looked ahead to higher ground. The enemy could always bring his reserves up under cover while those of the attacking force would be in full view.
The soldiers of our new army had shown that they had the spirit of attack. Marshal Foch was to give them the opportunity to display it to the utmost, and in the conference which he and General Pershing held before the battle of Saint Mihiel one of the great decisions of the war was made. We were to send partly trained divisions into a conflict in winter rains and under incalculable hardships in the faith that our courage, exerted to its utmost in the fall of 1918, might break the weakening German army before it could recover its spirit, while the losses which this effort entailed would save us from far greater losses in the spring and the prolongation of the war. Though we should never reach the summit of those heights, the threat which we should make against the German line of communications must withdraw more and more German troops from other parts of the line, and keep on increasing the confusion of Ludendorff's dispositions.
The only American comparison for the Meuse-Argonne Battle was the Appomattox campaign which lasted much longer and consisted of a series of separate actions with nothing like the concentration and continuous fighting which the Americans of another generation were to endure. Grant had no lack of supplies, he had more guns than he could use and was fighting on his own soil with ample resources in reserve within easy reach. Pershing's army was not relatively as ready for the task that it was to undertake as McClellan had been for his Peninsula campaign.
From the time of the attack of Saint Mihiel on September 12, 1918, until September 25, 1918, we had thirteen days to prepare for an offensive which, as it was made by a new army, could be likened to the great Somme offensive of the British in 1916. Then the British had taken five months in which to build roads, dig assembly trenches, prepare ammunition dumps, and bring up necessary engineering material. But it must be borne in mind that at this time the enemy was in the prime of his numbers and confidence. Moreover, such elaborate arrangements were then considered necessary in order to take powerfully intrenched lines. They had the fault of warning the enemy in ample time of any concentration which enabled him to mass men and material for defense. Later, the French had developed a system of limited objectives of brief artillery preparations, followed by the rolling barrage which preceded the advance of the infantry, while the enemy's strong points and gun positions were smothered with shells. The Germans, however, in their great offensive against the British in March, 1918, had taken ample time for preparation while they made the innovation of driving through for sufficiently great depth to become masters of all the trench defenses and of the opposing artillery.
In the counteroffensive toward Soissons on July 18, 1918, and again in the Anglo-French-Canadian offensive of August 8, 1918, and the succeeding offensives, the Allies had depended on either a very brief artillery preparation or upon not opening fire until the moment of the infantry's advance while they followed through in the German fashion. In our Meuse-Argonne offensive, we had all these precedents and the experience of the officers in directing them for our guidance. But very veteran and skilled armies had carried out the later style of offensive, and they had the advantage which comes from long experience that the units, used to keeping their uniformity in battle action, did not become dispersed after they had made a certain advance as was supposed to be the case in any extensive offensive where new divisions were engaged.
The most disastrous example in throwing an untrained division into a violent attack was that of the British 21st Division in the fall of 1915 at Loos, which in trying to apply its drill-ground training under fire, became disorganized and failed to take its objectives. Later, after it had had more experience, this same division, though no more courageous than in its first battle, proved itself masterful in the complicated technique of modern attack which it had learned in diligent application in smaller actions after Loos, and by applying the lessons learned at Loos by thorough drilling.
Practically all our pioneer divisions which had had long experience in France were either engaged at Saint Mihiel or else they were occupied elsewhere. For the new offensive we must therefore depend upon new divisions which had been a shorter time in France than the 1st or 2d or 26th or 42d Divisions.
Following the attack by the American army on the Meuse-Argonne line and the 4th French Army on its left with their threat toward the lines of communications, the British and French were to strike the Hindenburg line in the St. Quentin-Cambrai region on September 29, 1918, and on October 2, 1918, the French were to attack to the east of Rheims. Thus a succession of offensives were to broaden the whole front of operations in an effort to break through the old trench line, all the way from the Meuse to the North Sea, and bring the Allied armies into the open where they would be forever free of trench shackles. This was a most audacious enterprise which was warranted by the information which the Allies had of the state of the German army. The Bulgarian army was beginning to disintegrate and the Italians had turned the Austrian offensive on the Piave into a disaster from which the Austro-Hungarian armies could not recover. Throughout the months of August and September, 1918, the Germans had been yielding large numbers of prisoners and an immense quantity of material, while the Allied losses had been comparatively light.
The German cards were now on the table; the number of German divisions in reserve were known; and in the arrival of American divisions the Allies had a vast store of man power. We had become the dependable quantity of a mighty growing reserve force.
Marshal Foch chose to put us in the very hinge of the whole movement and he set for our objective in a swift series of advances nothing less than the heights of Buzancy—the heights of the whaleback itself. Had we gained that within three or four days, we would have threatened the retreat of the whole German army, indeed, the capture of a hundred thousand or more Germans would have been fairly certain. No one considered such a success except in the category of a military miracle until German reserves were more depleted than they were at the end of September.
Ludendorff, on his side, knew that he must hold the hinge of the door. He might yield toward the west, if necessary, but must not yield in front of Mézières and Sedan. The neck of the bottle must not be closed. The measure of our initial success, whatever the intrepidity of our attack, must depend largely upon how far we were able to take the Germans by surprise, and the depth of our advance must depend upon our ability to bring up our artillery and ammunition and food for our men. To the rear of the line from the Meuse to the Argonne Forest there are literally only two roads of approach. If we attempted to build more, they would immediately be visible to the aeroplane observers of the enemy. We could not build more when our engineers and our laborers were occupied at Saint Mihiel.
If we arranged elaborate dumps of ammunition, these would inevitably be seen by the enemy or their presence would be communicated in some way as past experience had proved. To move long columns of troops and transport by day was equally an advertisement of our plan for an enormous attack which was the thing that we wished to conceal when the success of the attack was to depend upon secret mobilization and a swift blow. If we were to repair the old roads across the broad area of the shell-crushed no-man's-land and through the trench systems after our attack, this also required the assembling of a great deal of material in view of the enemy.
No part of a modern army's arrangements is more difficult than the handling of the necessarily dense vehicular traffic behind the immediate front, even if ample supplies are brought to the railheads. The numbers of motor trucks and ambulances required were incredible. Our Service of Supply, which had been concentrating all its energies and material toward Saint Mihiel, now had to prepare for another equally great offensive. New railheads, new railways, new hospitals, new headquarters, and new routes of transport had to be established. With the certainty that the Saint Mihiel sector, if it became violent, would consume large quantities of ammunition we had to provide for the immense consumption of ammunition which would undoubtedly be required in the Meuse-Argonne.
The continued fighting throughout the summer, with additional and unexpected requirements for the new offensive campaign, had made increasingly heavy drafts upon transport and animals. It was no use to say that more horses were coming from Spain and from America; they were needed now. All the tanks and aeroplanes and the light and heavy artillery which were in the making at home or on the docks at New York would be of no service unless they were in the battle. The lack of sufficient railway lines and shortage of rolling stock required accordingly more travel on the limited roads approaching the area of concentration east and west of Verdun.
When artillery, in course of being withdrawn from the Saint Mihiel front to go to the Argonne front, had their horses killed, the weary survivors who were now to draw the guns could not be forced through according to the usual schedule. They had to cross the streams of traffic running to the Saint Mihiel front. At night all the roads were solid columns of men and vehicles that had to keep at the uniform pace of the slowest of its units lest motor transport, which could go fifteen miles an hour, in trying to pass tractor-drawn heavy artillery that could go three or four, should become imbedded in the mud and thus stall the whole column for hours.
Thus the unprecedented strain of the Meuse-Argonne Battle, which was to endure for six weeks, began with the difficulties of mobilization. During the Château-Thierry operations we had had summer weather, when men could sleep in the open with comfort, when it was easy to repair broken roads and when motor trucks which got off the road did not sink into the mud. Now we had already entered the period of chill fall rains which made the ground porous and wet marching soldiers to the skin. Instead of time for reflection and reorganization, in applying the lesions of the Saint Mihiel salient, every officer and man was straining his utmost to make sure by improvisation, when organization failed and by sheer sleepless industry, of meeting with forced smiles each new contingency as it developed.
Our three corps in line were, the first under General Liggett on the left, the fifth under General Cameron in the center, and the third under General Bullard on the right. The corps headquarters were established only four days before the attack. Unfamiliar except in theory, and from what they had learned at Saint Mihiel, with the problems of directing an army in a prolonged battle, they had not a quarter of the time for preparations which they ordinarily should have received even if they had had long experience. They did not know the division commanders or the divisions which were to serve under them, and the divisions did not arrive until the last moment.
Artillery brigades, fresh from the training grounds where they had only received their guns, marched up to be assigned to divisions with which they had never cooperated in action. Batteries that had no horses depended upon batteries that had horses to be drawn into position. The coordination of infantry units for the attack was dependent upon coordination by paper directions rather than previous association.
We had an enormous concentration of artillery and of aviation, thanks to assistance from the French, but our aviation and much of that of the French sent us was new. Our aviators lacked experience as observers in keeping their liaison in directing artillery fire and in informing the infantry of the movements of their units and of the enemy's. Infantry and artillery commanders who had had little previous battle experience, were not always fortunate in their efforts to keep liaison with one another and with the aviation in view of the aviation's inexperience. To say that the American army was ready for such an offensive as that of the Meuse-Argonne would be unfair to the men who began the battle and detracting from the glory of their achievement. Her courage, eagerness, adaptability, and industry were merits which were to overcome the handicaps in a way that made results even more glorious in the greatest battle of our history.
Aside from the fact that two of the divisions in line were going under fire for the first time there was not one of the divisions which was not handicapped in some way for their effort, either for want of artillery or because they had had no time to rest after hard marches or previous battles. In the space of this brief review it is impossible to tell of their actions in detail which reflected credit on each one of the Regular, National Guard, or National Army divisions, and which, taken together, reflected credit upon the army as a whole.
On the right was Bell's 33d Division of Illinois National Guard. At its back was the famous Mort Homme, or Dead Man's Hill, where Frenchmen and Germans had struggled in the battle of Verdun, with its shell craters now fringed with weeds. The 33d had to cross the Forges Brook and swing in toward the Meuse River protecting the right flank of the whole movement which rested on the river. On the left of the 33d was the 80th, Cronkhite's Blue Ridge Division, trained at the British front and come from Saint Mihiel. Next in line was the 4th Regular Division, which, coming fresh from the British front, had fought magnificently in the Château-Thierry operations. On its left was Kuhn's 79th, the National Army Division from Camp Meade, which had never heard a shot fired until it marched up amidst the roar of guns and artillery preparation. Then we had Farnsworth's 37th, National Guard of Ohio, which with unconquerable persistence was to take the wicked Malancourt Woods; and then the 91st Division of the National Army from the Pacific slope which was to give such a remarkable exhibition of continued and determined advance. Next we had Traub's 85th Division, National Guard from Kansas and Missouri, which was set the dreadful task of taking the heights on the west of the Aire river and of crossing the Exermont ravine. Next was Muir's 28th, or "Iron" Division, National Guard of Pennsylvania, which was in the valley of the Aire and faced the wooded heights of the Argonne which were thrust out Gibraltarlike into the valley. Finally, on the extreme left was the 77th, National Army from New York (now under command of Alexander), facing the heart of the formidable Argonne Forest.
Some of these divisions had more difficult obstacles than others to overcome. Their relative position in line was due less to a strategic arrangement, with any view to their experience or to their exhaustion in relation to their objectives, than to the relation of their positions to the roads by which they had had to travel in reaching the front. Up to this time the 4th, the 77th, and the 28th had probably seen the most fighting. They had just come from the Château-Thierry operations and in common with all the other divisions, were short of transport and had to make forced marches.
All the men of all the divisions had either been sleeping in box cars on railroad trains or they had been in the miserable crowded billets of small villages, getting what rest, after marching at night, they could during the day, in the midst of the rumble of traffic. No corps, divisional, regimental, or battalion commander, no chief of one of the staff sections who had anything to do with the direction of traffic, could say quite how this was accomplished, except by sleepless vigil and grim, sweating effort, but the fact was that the miracle had happened; for on the night of September 24, 1918, every division was in position, with a thin fringe of the French remaining in the front line in order to prevent the Germans, if they took any prisoners, from identifying the number of American divisions which were present.
Marshal Foch had now postponed the attack until the 26th; this gave the men a day in which to rest as much as they could, and a little more time for the artillery and staff to make its preparation.
General Pershing, who was to direct the battle in person, had taken up his headquarters in the city hall of the village of Souilly on the "sacred road" from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun where the French commanders had planned the defense against the great German offensive of 1916.
On the morning of the 26th, after six hours of artillery preparation, the waves of infantry of these nine divisions which had now assembled in the front-line trenches, relieving the French, went over the top in beginning the greatest battle in American history. The fortifications which they attacked represented the result of all the experience which the Germans, in their antlike industry, had applied in preparing their defenses. No-man's-land had been pummeled by four years of shell fire until the rims of shell craters joined. The weeds which had grown up hid the rims, slippery in the morning mist, and made footing more uncertain on the soft turf. The barbed-wire entanglements were deep, in keeping with the formidability of the German trench system. When they built these works, the Germans rightly considered them impregnable. The story of every battalion that attacked that morning, as well as every battalion that participated in the Argonne Battle, is worthy of a lengthier description than I am giving to the whole operations of the American Expeditionary Force.
It is usual in such attacks that, at many points of the line where the enemy's barbed wire has not been cut by the artillery fire, or where machine-gun nests are strategically placed, portions of the advancing wave of infantry are held up with the result that succeeding portions push on until they are caught in salients in enfilade fire. This leads to confusion and frequently to arresting the whole attack, or at least to interfering with the plan, thus giving the enemy time to bring up his reserves and profit by his opportunity. This had happened in the Somme offensive, at Loos, at Passchendaele and in the fifth and last German offensive and, indeed, in every big offensive on the western front. There was every reason why it should happen this time to the eye of any experienced observer who had not the youthful enthusiasm of our soldiers, who in their ingrained American offensive spirit, attacked in a manner as confident as if they were used to breaking first-line trench systems as a part of their routine of drill.
It was this spirit, on that memorable morning, that carried the fortifications at every point. By every rule, by every precedent, after they had gone through the barbed-wire and in and out of the maze of trenches and then over the shell craters of No-man's-land they ought, even if they had not been under fire, to have lost their uniformity of line and formed into irregular groups. But instead of this they kept on going, overcoming the enemy's machine-gun nests and gathering in prisoners, when sheer fatigue ought to have stopped them. By night some of them had reached objectives five and six miles beyond the front line.