America At War - Concise Histories Of U.S. Military Conflicts From Lexington To Afghanistan (19 page)

If America’s army required months and months to prepare for battle, it’s navy did not. On May 4, 1917, just twenty-eight days after the United States declared war, six American destroyers dropped anchor in Queenstown Harbor on the southern coast of Ireland. They and the others that followed would provide needed protection to the merchant ships sailing to and from Britain. Heavier naval firepower arrived in December. Five battleships of the United States Navy, all commanded by Rear Admiral Hugh Rodman, joined the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet. Significantly, they served under British command and were present when Germany’s High Seas Fleet surrendered.

The U.S. Navy’s role in the First World War is overshadowed by that of Pershing’s army. For most Americans the image of the conflict is that of soldiers in trenches surrounded by mud and barbed wire. The navy’s contribution receives little notice. Even less is given to Admiral William S. Sims, who throughout the war was in charge of American naval operations in Europe.

In addition to dispatching destroyers and battleships to England, America’s navy established a special task force consisting primarily of cruisers that escorted the ships transporting the AEF to France. The navy also provided its air service to the war effort. This comprised some five hundred aircraft distributed among twenty-six naval air stations located in Britain, France, and Italy. And, rather remarkably, the navy sent five very heavy, large naval guns mounted on railroad cars to France, where, in the Allied offensives of September 1918, they pounded German positions near Soissons.

One other achievement of America’s navy in World War I deserves mention. As part of the effort to stymie German submarines, the Royal Navy proposed to lay a barrier of mines from northern Scotland across the North Sea to southern Norway. This would seal off the northern perimeter of the North Sea (a similar barrier was to be laid down across the English Channel near Dover). The project would deny the U-boats free access to the Atlantic Ocean. This was to be an enormous undertaking. Two factors initially delayed its start: the Royal Navy had few ships to spare, and, perhaps more important, British mines were defective. Enter the United States Navy. In June 1918, it began laying its own mines. In total, the Americans put 56,571 mines into the water. Britain’s navy laid 13,546. Together, they were strung along an underwater belt some two hundred miles long. Jellicoe’s successor, Admiral David Beatty, opposed the project. He said it would hinder operations of the fleet and consume resources better spent elsewhere. He had a point. The barrier, the Northern Barrage, to use its customary name, accounted for the destruction of only six U-boats.

Most German submarines operated in the waters around Great Britain and in the Mediterranean. Few made war patrols to North America. One that did was U-156. On July 19, 1918, off the coast of Long Island, the cruiser USS
San Diego
sunk, having struck a mine laid by the German submarine. The cruiser was the only major American warship lost in World War I.

***

In returning to unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917, Germany had gambled that it could force Great Britain out of the war before America’s involvement made much of a difference. The gamble failed. In 1914 Germany had gambled that it could destroy the French Army in forty days before having to move east against the tsar. This gamble also failed. Four years later, in 1918, Germany would take one last gamble.

Hindenburg and Ludendorff, by now running the government as well as the army, decided on one final offensive in the west. It would be a massive affair, employing specially trained storm troopers and army units no longer needed on the Russian Front. The attack began on March 21 with a thunderous barrage. Three separate German armies struck hard, crushing the British Fifth Army, one of four units under Sir Douglas Haig’s command. That first day, the kaiser’s men killed seven thousand British soldiers and took twenty-one thousand prisoners. The attack was a stunning success. The Germans advanced forty miles, a significant distance, before the British were able to stop them.

A second offensive took place in Flanders, the Germans attacking early in April. Here too they made progress, forcing the British commander in chief to issue his famous “backs to the walls” directive. Sir Douglas instructed his soldiers not to retreat, to hold on whatever the cost. His order was taken to heart. Here are parts of the written orders a young Australian officer issued to his men:

1. This position will be held and the section will remain here until relieved.
   
2. The enemy cannot be allowed to interfere with this program.
   
3. If the section cannot remain here alive it will remain here dead, but in any case it will remain here.
   
4. If any man through shell shock or other cause attempts to surrender he will remain here dead.
   

The men given this order obeyed. The order was found on the body of one of their dead.

In their spring offensives, the Germans also struck the French. Ludendorff, who planned the attacks, sent his troops to the Chemin des Dames sector, to the northeast of the Reims. There, they crushed a French army and advanced to the Marne River, threatening Paris. In June and July, the Germans, for the fourth and fifth time, again attacked. These attacks were less successful. Nonetheless, French forces had been battered. French troops were in retreat.

All along the front, German troops moved forward, inflicting a large number of casualties. In just the first forty days of combat, Sir Douglas Haig’s forces suffered more than 160,000 killed or wounded. French losses in the spring and summer reached 70,000. The British and French armies were bleeding, and bleeding badly.

As the casualties mounted, and the German advances continued, top Allied leaders realized that a change in the military-command structure was needed. Up to now the senior French and British field commanders, at the time Pétain and Haig, and earlier Nivelle and Haig, had acted independently. They consulted with each other, but neither could command the other. The German spring offensives changed that. All came to understand that a single field commander in chief needed to be in charge. Such was the urgency that Field Marshal Haig raised no objection to the appointment of French general Ferdinand Foch to the post (Pétain was considered too defensively oriented). The French general became, as Eisenhower would in the Second World War, supreme Allied commander. At first, he was simply to coordinate the three armies involved, the British, the French, and the American. But, as the German threat increased, Foch was authorized to give orders to their commanders. Only if Haig and Pershing considered these orders detrimental to the national interests of Great Britain or the United States were the two subordinate commanders allowed to appeal. Pétain had no such authority; he was told to follow Foch’s instructions. Despite disagreements, some rather testy, this new command arrangement proved satisfactory. Ferdinand Foch, the general who believed the only military course of action worthy of consideration was to attack, became commander of more than five million men. Given his preeminent position in the chain of command and his subsequent record of success, it’s not surprising that upon his death in 1920, his body was laid to rest in Paris near that of Napoleon.

As spring gave way to summer, the German offensives appeared to stall. Though inflicting heavy losses on their French and British counterparts, the Germans themselves suffered as well. By the end of April, after just two months, 492,720 of their soldiers no longer were able to fight. They were dead, in the hospital, missing in action, or had been taken prisoner. More German soldiers would be lost in May and June and into July, when, finally, after the fourth and fifth attack, the offensive came to a halt. In total, Ludendorff’s spring offensives cost the kaiser 800,000 of his soldiers.

Moreover, the British army, though roughed up, had not been destroyed. Sir Douglas’s men, by 1918 the most capable fighting force in Europe, had bent but not broken. So too the French. Pétain’s army, one that had experienced both victory and defeat in four years of conflict, still had some fight left in it.

As, of course, did the German army. Yet it was clear, especially to Foch, that the German spring offensives had failed. True, Ludendorff’s men had gained considerable territory. But no decisive victory had been attained, nor had the strategic picture changed much. The front, that tangled strip of trenches, barbed wire, and machine gun rests, had been moved to the west. Save for some worried souls in Paris, nothing much seemed to have changed.

In fact, two things had changed, both significant. The first was that the German army was running out of soldiers. A country can produce only a certain number of men capable of bearing arms, and by the summer of 1918, after fighting Russians and Romanians, the British and the French, Germany had just about reached its limit. And the later replacement troops were not as skillful as those who had fought earlier in the war. The second change, one even more ominous to Ludendorff and his field commanders, was that Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force was preparing to do battle.

***

The AEF’s first test of combat had come in late May. Assigned to the French First Army, the U.S. Army’s 1st Division was given the task of taking Cantigny. This was a small village on a ridge near Montdidier, a town some sixty miles north of Paris. The ridge enabled the Germans to observe what was taking place to the south and west of their positions. Planning the attack was the division’s Operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel George C. Marshall. Well conceived and twice rehearsed, the plan had the division’s 28th Infantry Regiment directly assaulting the town supported by artillery, tanks, and flamethrowers provided by the French.

The attack began early in the morning of May 28, 1918. By noon, the village was in U.S. hands. The Germans counterattacked several times, and the battle became what author David Bonk has called “a desperate slugging match.” Showing notable determination, the men of the 28th held on, despite the premature withdrawal of the French artillery. When the battle was over, the regiment had sustained more than nine hundred casualties. More importantly, Cantigny remained under U.S. control.

The town itself was of no overall strategic value to the Allies. But the fight for Cantigny was important. It demonstrated that the AEF could plan and execute a division-level operation. It also showed that, despite their inexperience, individual American soldiers would do just fine in battle. French and Britain commanders were uncertain how Pershing’s soldiers would respond to the ordeal of battle. So too were German commanders, who tried to convince their troops and themselves that Americans were no match for well-disciplined and battle-tested German soldiers. The fight for Cantigny put to rest such nonsense. For Foch and Haig it was reassuring. For Ludendorff it was cause for concern. For General Pershing and his troops, and for the folks back home in the United States, it was a signal that, once fully deployed, the AEF would have soldiers to be reckoned with.

As the 1st Division’s fight at Cantigny came to a close, the AEF’s 3rd Division was moving into action. Ludendorff’s May offensive, code named Blücher, had seen some success with the Germans reaching the Marne. The French, dispirited by their enemy’s advances, asked General Pershing for assistance. Recognizing the urgency of the situation, Black Jack put aside his objection to amalgamation and lent the 3rd Division to the French. They ordered it to Château Thierry. This was (and still is) a lovely little town on the Marne River, where today an American military cemetery resides. At Château Thierry the Americans held fast and Ludendorff’s troops advanced no farther.

Not far from Château Thierry, to the west, were two villages, Bouresches and Belleau. In between them stood a small forest. It was called Belleau Wood. In June 1918, it witnessed a fierce battle, one that for the United States of America would become legendary.

That same month, still needing to slow the German advance, Foch requested additional American help. However, he planned not just to halt the German drive. Foch planned to counterattack and wanted some of Pershing’s troops to participate. The AEF responded by lending Foch the 2nd Division, which the French deployed to Belleau Wood. This unit was unique in the American Expeditionary Force in that two of its four infantry regiments, comprising the 4th Brigade, were U.S. marines, not soldiers of the U.S. Army.

The 4th Brigade’s first task was to stop a German attack, which it did. The story is told that a retreating French officer said to an American that with the Germans advancing, he and his men should fall back. “Retreat, hell,” replied the marine, “we just got here.”

The second task assigned to the marines was to clear Belleau Wood of Germans and hold on to it. On June 6 they attacked. Their artillery was insufficient, their tactics flawed. But as the marines crossed a wheat field full of red poppies, their determination and courage were in full view. The attack succeeded, although the cost was high. The brigade’s casualties that day totaled 1,087. The fight would continue for twenty more days, and at times the marines took no prisoners, and neither did the Germans. It was kill or be killed.

Toward the end of the struggle for Belleau Wood, the 2nd Division’s other brigade, the one consisting of two army regiments, went into action. It was ordered to capture the nearby town of Vaux. Quite competently, the brigade took control of the town, for its effort suffering 300 dead and 1,400 wounded. This battle at Vaux received little attention. In 1918—and even today—what captured the spotlight was the marines at Belleau Wood.

By the standards of the First World War, the engagements of Belleau Wood and Vaux were small affairs. In total, the casualty count for the U.S. 2nd Division showed 1,811 men dead and 7,966 wounded. For the armies of France, Great Britain, and Germany, these were numbers unlikely to raise alarm. For the AEF 9,777 in one division was a stiff price. It illustrated that inexperience on the battlefield costs lives. Nonetheless, Vaux and Belleau Wood were victories. As did Cantigny, the two battles bode well for the Allied cause.