The original scope of Saint-Mihiel--A winter of preparation for a
spring campaign--Which is cut down to two weeks--The tide turning
for the Allies--The advantage of a general attack--And especially
of numbers--The tactician's opportunity--Why the Meuse-Argonne--The
whale-back of Buzancy--Striking for the Lille-Metz railway--All
advantage with the defense--The audacity of the enterprise--The
handicaps--A thankless task at best.
We were in the fever of preparation for our Saint-Mihiel attack.
Divisions summoned from the victorious fields of Château-Thierry, and
divisions which had been scattered with the British and French armies,
were gathering in our own sector in Lorraine. The French were to
assist us with ample artillery and aviation in carrying out our first
ambitious plan under our own command.
After cutting the redoubtable salient, which had been a wedge in the
Allied line for four years, we were to go through to Mars-la-Tour and
Etain, threatening the fortress of Metz itself. This was to be the end
of our 1918 campaign. Instead of wasting our energy in operations in
mud and snow, we should spend the winter months in applying the lessons
which we had learned in our first great battle as an army. Officers who
had been proved unfit would be eliminated, and officers who had been
proved fit would be promoted. All the freshly arrived divisions from
home camps and all the personnel for handling the artillery, tanks, and
other material of war which our home factories would then be producing
in quantity, would be incorporated in a homogeneous organization.
The spring would find us ready to play the part which had been chosen
for us in the final campaign. On the left of the long line from
Switzerland to the North Sea would be the British Army, striking out
from the Channel bases; in the center the French Army, striking from
the heart of France; and on the right the American Army, its munitions
arriving in full tide to support its ceaseless blows, was to keep on
striking toward the Rhine until a decision was won.
[Illustration: MAP NO. 1
AMERICAN OFFENSIVES AND OTHER OFFENSIVES IN WHICH AMERICAN TROOPS
PARTICIPATED, MAY-NOVEMBER, 1918. ]
In the early days of September, with our troops going into position
before the threatening heights of the salient, and with the pressure
of the effort of forming in time an integral army increasing with
the suspense as the 12th, the day set for the attack, drew near,
some important officers, at the moment when their assistance seemed
invaluable, were detached from the Saint-Mihiel operations. Their
orders let them into a portentous secret. They were to begin work in
making ready for the Meuse-Argonne attack. While all the rest of the
army was thinking of our second offensive as coming in the spring of
1919, they knew that it was coming two weeks after the Saint-Mihiel
offensive.
This change of plan was the result of a conference between Marshal Foch
and General Pershing which planned swift use of opportunity. The German
Macedonian front was crumbling, the Turks were falling back before
Allenby, and the Italians had turned the tables on the Austrians along
the Piave. Equally, if not more to the point for us, the Anglo-French
offensive begun on August 8th had gained ground with a facility that
quickened the pulse-beat of the Allied soldiers and invited the
broadening of the front of attack until, between Soissons and the North
Sea, the Germans were swept off Kemmel and out of Armentières and away
from Arras and across the old Somme battlefield.
The communiqués were telling the truth about the Allies' light losses;
at every point the initiative was ours. The Germans were paying a
heavier price in rearguard action than we in the attack. It was a
surprising reaction from the pace they had shown in their spring
offensives. All information that came through the secret channels from
behind the enemy lines supported the conviction of the Allied soldiers
at the front that German morale was weakening.
Ludendorff, the master tactician, was facing a new problem. That
once dependable German machine was not responding with the alacrity,
the team-play, and the bravery which had been his dependence in all
his plans. He had to consider, in view of the situation that was now
developing, whether or not the Saint-Mihiel salient was worth holding
at a sacrifice of men. He knew that we were to attack in force; he knew
that in an offensive a new army is bound to suffer from dispersion
and from confusion in its transport arrangements. If he allowed us to
strike into the air, he could depend upon the mires of the plain of the
Woëvre to impede us while the defenses of Metz would further stay our
advance, with the result that his reserves, released from Saint-Mihiel,
might safely be sent to resist the pressure on the Anglo-French front,
either in holding the Hindenburg line or in the arduous and necessarily
deliberate business of covering his withdrawal to a new and shorter
line of defense based on the Meuse River. The German war machine, which
had been tied for four years to its depots and other semi-permanent
arrangements for trench warfare, could not move at short notice.
A generalization might consider the war on the Western Front as
two great battles and one prolonged siege. For the first six weeks
there had been the "war of movement," as the French called it, until
the Germans, beaten back from the Marne, had formed the old trench
line. Throughout the four years of siege warfare that had ensued,
the object of every important offensive, Allied and German, had been
a return to the "war of movement." After a breach had been made in
the fortifications, the attacking army would make the most of the
momentum of success in rapid advances and maneuvers, throw the enemy's
units into confusion, and, through the disruption of the delicate
web of communications by which he controlled their movements for
cohesive effort, precipitate a disaster. The long preparations which
had preceded the offensives of 1915, 1916, and 1917 had always given
the enemy ample warning of what to expect. He had met concentrations
for attack with concentrations for defense. The sector where the
issue was joined became a settled area of violent siege operations
into which either side poured its fresh divisions as into a funnel.
Succeeding offensives, in realization of the limitations of a narrower
sector,--which only left the advance in a V with flanks exposed,--had
broadened their fronts of attack; but none had been broad enough to
permit of vital tactical surprises after the initial onset. The
attrition of the man-power of the offensive force had so kept pace
with that of the defensive that the offensive had never had sufficient
reserves to force a decision when the reserves of the defensive were
approaching exhaustion. Moreover, the Allies had never had sufficient
preponderance of men, ordnance, and munitions to warrant undertaking
the enterprise, which was the dream of every tactician, of several
offensives at different points of the front at the same time or in
steady alternation.
Now from Soissons to the sea the French and British were developing a
comprehensive movement of attacks, now here and now there, in rapid
succession. This drive was not a great impulse that died down as
had previous Allied offensives, but a weaving, sweeping, methodical
advance. Not only was German morale weakening and ours strengthening,
but attrition was now definitely in our favor. Ludendorff's reserves
were all in sight. His cards were on the table; we could feel assured
that we knew fairly well how he would play them. Our own hand was being
reinforced by three hundred thousand men a month from the immense
reserves in the American training camps. We could press our initiative
without fear of being embarrassed by serious counter-attacks taking
advantage of our having overextended ourselves.
Thus far, however, the Germans were still in possession of their old
trench system, except at a few points; our counter-offensive had
only been recovering the ground which the Germans had won in their
spring and summer offensives. Now that the tide had turned against
him, Ludendorff, if his situation were as bad as we hoped, had two
alternatives, and a third which was a combination of the two. One was
to fall back to the proposed shorter line of the Meuse. This would give
him the winter for fortifying his new positions. As a shorter front
would allow him deeper concentrations for defense and the Allies less
room for maneuvers in surprise, it must be their purpose to prevent his
successful retreat by prompt, aggressive, and persistent action. The
other alternative was to make a decisive stand on the old line, where
for four years the Germans had been perfecting their fortifications. If
we should overwhelm them when he was holding them rigidly, we should
have the advantage of a wall in fragments when it did break. The third
plan was to use the old fortifications as a line of strong resistance
in supporting his withdrawal. Broadly, this was the one that he was to
follow.
Everything pointed to the time as ripe for the fulfilment for the
Allies of the tactical dream which had called Ludendorff to his own
ambitious campaign in the spring of 1918. Marshal Foch would now
broaden his front of alternating attacks from Verdun to the North
Sea, in the hope of freeing the Allied armies from trench shackles
for a decisive campaign in the open. The American part in this bold
undertaking was to be its boldest feature.
If a soldier from Mars had come to Earth at any time from October,
1914, to October, 1918, and had been shown on a flat map the fronts
of the two adversaries, he would have said that the obvious strategic
point of a single offensive would be between the Meuse River and the
Argonne Forest. This would be a blow against the enemy's lines of
communication: a blow equivalent to turning his flank. If the soldier
from Mars had been shown a relief map, he would have changed his mind,
and he would have perfectly understood, as a soldier, why all the
offensives had been in the north, from Champagne to Flanders, where
breaking through the main line of defenses would bring the aggressor to
better ground for his decisive movement in the open. He would also have
understood why the front from the Argonne to the Swiss border had been
tranquil since the abortive effort of the Germans at Verdun.
When Ludendorff undertook his great offensive of March, 1918, he did
not repeat Falkenhayn's error, but turned to the north, where the
Allies had made their attacks. In that Lorraine-Alsatian stalemate
to the south, with the Vosges mountains and interlocking hills from
Switzerland to the forts of Metz as the stronghold of the Germans,
and the forts of Verdun, Toul, Epinal, and Belfort as the strongholds
of the French, the odds were apparently too much against an offensive
by either side to warrant serious consideration. Yet a watch was
kept. Over the French mind was always the shadow of a possible German
offensive toward Belfort; and, when the sector which our young army was
to hold in Alsace and Lorraine had been first discussed in July, 1917,
the French excluded the defense of a portion of the front opposite
Belfort, with the polite explanation that they preferred to hold that
themselves. But the Germans never did more than make the feint of an
offensive in the south, which Ludendorff used in the winter of 1918 to
draw off French troops and guns from the north: for the army with the
numbers and the initiative of offense can always force the defense to
waste movements to meet threats of attack. This was another advantage
which the Allies could now use in keeping Ludendorff in doubt as to
where our real blows were to be struck.
The heights of the Saint-Mihiel salient, which look directly across the
plain of the Woëvre to the fortress of Metz, may be said roughly to
have formed the left flank of the Lorraine-Alsatian stalemate. They
continue onward in the hills which are crowned by the forts of Verdun,
and then across the Meuse River for a distance of twenty miles through
the bastion of the Argonne Forest, where they gradually break into the
more rolling country of Champagne. The Meuse winds past Saint-Mihiel
and through the town of Verdun, and then, in its devious course, swings
gradually to the northwest until, at Sedan, it turns full westward.
Our new offensive was to be between the Meuse River and the western
edge of the Argonne Forest. East of the forest is the little river
Aire, and between its valley and the valley of the Meuse rises back of
the German front a whale-back of heights, as I shall describe them for
the sake of bringing a picture to mind, though the comparison is not
absolute. The practical summit of the whale-back is to the eastward
of the village of Buzancy. We may use Buzancy as a symbol: for it is
only in a highly technical history that the detail of names, confusing
to the general and even the professional reader, is warrantable. The
summit of the whale-back gained, you are looking down an apron of
rolling ground and small hills toward the turn of the Meuse westward
past Sedan, where the German Army surrounded the French Army in the
Franco-Prussian War.
To the northeast, readily accessible to attack, are the Briey
iron-fields, which were invaluable to the Germans for war material.
Along the valley of the Meuse after it turns westward, and along the
Franco-Belgian frontier runs the great railroad from Metz to Lille,
which is double-track all the way and in large part four-track.
Incidentally this connected the coal fields of northern France with
Germany, but its main service was to form the western trunk line of
communication for the German armies in Belgium and northern and eastern
France. It was linked up with the railways spreading northward into
Belgium and southward toward Amiens and Paris in the arterial system
which gave its life blood to the German occupation. If this road were
cut, the German troops in retreat would have to pass through the narrow
neck of the bottle at Liége.
The dramatic possibilities of gaining the heights of Buzancy and
bringing the Lille-Metz tracks under artillery fire had the appeal
of a strategic effect of Napoleonic days. The German staff had been
fully aware of the danger when, in their retreat after their repulse
on the Marne, which the world saw only as the spectacle of the French
Army inflicting a defeat on an advancing foe, it used its tactical
opportunity for choosing, with comparative deliberation, advantageous
defensive positions from the Argonne Forest to the Meuse at the foot
of the whale-back.
For future operations it was depending upon more than the elaborate
fortifications of that line. Every hundred yards from the foot of
the whale-back to the summit was in its favor in resisting attack.
Higher ground leads to still higher ground, not in a regular system
of ridges but in a terrain where nature cunningly serves the soldier.
Nowhere might the defense invite the attack into salients with a better
confidence, or feel more certain of the success of his counter-attacks.
All roads, and all valleys where roads might be built, were under
observation. Heights looked across to heights on either side of the
two river troughs, heights of every shape from sharp ridges and
rounded hills to peaked summits crowned by woods. Tongues of woods ran
across valleys. Patches of woods covered ravines and gullies where
machine-gunners would have ideal cover and command of ground. Reverse
slopes formed walls for the protection of the artillery. The attack
must fight blindly; the defense could fight with eyes open.
Had the Allies attempted an offensive in the Meuse-Argonne sector in
the first four years of the war, the long and extensive preparations
then regarded as requisite for an ambitious effort against first-line
fortifications would have warned the Germans in time to make full
use of their positions in counter-preparations. All the advantage
of railroads and highways were with them in concentrating men and
material. It might not be a long distance in miles from the Argonne
line to the Lille-Metz railway or to the Briey iron-fields, but it
was a long distance if you were to travel it with an army and its
impedimenta against the German Army in its prime. When attrition was
in his favor in the early period, the German might well have preferred
that the Allied offensive of Champagne, or Loos, or the Somme, or
Passchendaele, should have been attempted here: thus leaving open to
him, after he had inflicted a bloody repulse in this sector, the better
ground in the north for a telling counter-offensive.
Thus an Allied effort toward Mézières, Sedan, and Briey would have
been madness until the propitious moment came. Had it really come now?
Anyone who was familiar with the history of warfare on the Western
Front might ask the question thoughtfully. Bear in mind that we had not
yet taken Saint-Mihiel and were not yet certain of our success there;
and that from Soissons to Switzerland the old German line was intact.
North of Soissons we had broken into it at only a few points. In the
event that they had had to make a strategic withdrawal, the Germans had
always followed the tactical system of a full recoil to strong chosen
positions, where they resisted with sudden and terrific violence and
held stubbornly and thriftily until they began one of their powerful
counter-thrusts.
Thus they had fallen back after their defeat on the Marne, from
before Warsaw, and from Bapaume to the Hindenburg line. Again and
again their morale had been reported breaking, and they had seemed
in a disadvantageous position, only to recover their spirit as by
imperial command and to extricate themselves in a reversal of form.
The German Staff was still in being; the German Army still had reserve
divisions and was back on powerful trench systems with ample artillery,
machine-guns, and ammunition. Whether Ludendorff was to stand on the
old line or withdraw to a new line, either operation would be imperiled
by the loss of those heights between the Argonne and the Meuse. He must
say, as Pétain had said at Verdun: "They shall not pass!"
In my "America in France" I have told of our project, formed in
June, 1917, when we had not yet a division of infantry in France and
submarine destruction was on the increase, for an army of a million men
in France, capable of the expansion to two million which must come,
General Pershing thought, before the war could be won. That far-sighted
conception and the decision which was now taken are the two towering
landmarks of the troublous road of our effort in France. By July 1st,
1918, we had a million men in France, or nearly double the number of
the schedule arranged between the French and American governments. We
should soon have two millions.
[Illustration: MAP NO. 2
WHERE AMERICAN DIVISIONS WERE IN LINE, FROM OUR ENTRY INTO THE TRENCHES
UNTIL THE ARMISTICE.]
When the Allies called for more man-power, in the crisis of the German
offensive of March, 1918, the British had supplied the shipping that
brought the divisions from our home training camps tumbling into
France. They were divisions, not an army; and in equipment they were
not even divisions. They had been hurried to the front to support the
British and French as reserves, and they had been thrown into battle
to resist the later German offensives. There had been no niggardliness
in our attitude. We offered all our man-power as cannon-fodder to meet
the emergency. Across the Paris road behind Château-Thierry we had
given more than the proof of our valor. In the drive toward Soissons
and to the Vesle we had established our personal mastery over the
enemy. We had pressed him at close quarters, and kept on pressing him
until he had to go. The confidence inherent in our nature, strengthened
by training, had grown with the test of battle. We had known none of
the reverses which lead to caution. More than ever our impulse was to
attack.
Château-Thierry had taught Marshal Foch that he could depend upon any
American division as "shock" troops which would charge and keep on
charging until exhausted. Now he would use this quality to the utmost.
To the American Army he assigned the part which relied upon the call of
victory to soldiers as fresh as the French on the Marne, and, in their
homesickness for their native land, impatient for quick results. If a
Congressional Committee, knowing all that General Pershing knew, had
been told of the plan of the Meuse-Argonne, they would probably have
said: "No leader shall sacrifice our men in that fashion. We will not
stand by and see them sent to slaughter."
The reputation of a commander was at stake. Should we break through
promptly to the summit of the heights, then we might take divisions,
corps, even armies, prisoners; but that was a dream dependent upon a
deterioration in German staff work and in the morale of the German
soldier which was inconceivable. The great prize was the hope of an
early decision of the war; in expending a hundred or two hundred
thousand casualties in the autumn and early winter, instead of a
million, perhaps, during the coming summer. At home we should be saved
from drafting more millions of men into our army; from the floating
of more liberty loans; from harsher restrictions upon our daily life;
from the calling of more women and children to hard labor; from the
prolongation of the agony, the suspense, the horror, and the costs of
the cataclysm of destruction.
There were more handicaps than the heights to consider: those of our
unreadiness. If we had failed, this would have meant the burden of
criticism heavy upon the shoulders of the commander-in-chief, who would
have been recalled. Dreams of any miraculous success aside, it was not
the example of the swift results in a day at Antietam, or the brilliant
maneuver of Jackson at Chancellorsville, but the wrestling, hammering,
stubbornly resisting effort of the men of the North and South in the
Appomattox campaign which was to call upon our heritage of fortitude.
In that series of attacks which Marshal Foch was now to develop, our
part as the right flank of the three great armies was in keeping with
the original plan of 1917: only we were facing the Meuse instead of
the Rhine. Without sufficient material or experience, we were to keep
on driving, not looking forward to the dry ground and fair weather of
summer but toward the inclemency of winter. There against the main
artery of German communications we were to launch a threat whose power
was dependent upon the determined initiative of our men. Every German
soldier killed or wounded was one withdrawn from the fronts of the
British and French, or from Ludendorff's reserves which must protect
his retreat; and every shell and every machine-gun bullet which was
fired at us was one less fired at our Allies. It was to be in many
respects a thankless battle, and for this reason it was the more honor
to our soldiers.