The Meuse-Argonne and the Somme Battle of 1916--The British had
four months of preparation--And a trained army--But a resolute
enemy--Our untried troops--Outguessing Ludendorff--Prime importance
of surprise--Blindman's buff--What it means to move armies--Fixing
supply centers--Staffs arrive--Their inexperience--Learning on the
run--Our confidence--Aiming for the stars--Up on time.
Comparisons with the Battle of the Somme, the first great British
offensive, which I observed through the summer of 1916, often occurred
to me during the Meuse-Argonne battle. In both a new army, in its
vigor of aggressive impulse, continued its attack with an indomitable
will, counting its gains by hundreds of yards, but never for a moment
yielding the initiative in its tireless attrition.
The British were four months in preparing for their thrust on the
basis of nearly two years' training in active warfare, with all their
arrangements for transport and supply settled in a small area only
an hour's steaming across the Channel from home. Behind their lines
they built light railroads and highways. They had ample billeting
space, and their great hospitals were within easy reach. They
gathered road-repairing machinery and trained their labor battalions;
built depots and yards; established immense dumps of ammunition
and engineering material; brought their heavy guns into position
methodically, and registered them with caution over a long period;
set an immense array of trench mortars in secure positions; dug deep
assembly trenches for the troops to occupy before going "over the top";
and ran their water pipes up to the front line, ready for extension
into conquered territory.
Their divisions had been seasoned by long trench experience, tested in
the terrific fire of the Ypres salient and trained in elaborate trench
raids for a great offensive. All their methods were as deliberate as
British thoroughness required. Units were carefully rehearsed in their
parts, and their _liaison_ worked out by staffs that had long operated
together. Commanders of battalions, brigades, and divisions had been
tried out, and corps commanders and staffs developed.
On the other hand, the Germans knew that the British attack was coming.
Their army was in the prime of its numbers and efficiency. They had
immence forces of reserves to draw upon to meet an offensive which was
centered in one sector, with no danger of having to meet offensives in
another sector. We were striking in one of several offensives, each
having for its object rapidity and suddenness of execution, over about
the same breadth of front as the British in 1916; and against the
Germans, not in their prime, as I have said, but when they had lost the
initiative and were deteriorating.
[Illustration: MAP NO. 3
OFFENSIVES OF SEPTEMBER, 1918. RELATION OF MEUSE-ARGONNE BATTLE TO THE
DECISIVE ALLIED OFFENSIVE MOVEMENT. ]
The increase of the skill of infantry in the attack, in their nicely
calculated and acrobatic coördination with protecting curtains of
accurate artillery fire, had been the supreme factor in the progress
of tactics. As a young army we had all these lessons to learn and to
apply to our own special problems. As we could not use the divisions
that were at Saint-Mihiel in the initial onset in the Meuse-Argonne,
we had to depend upon others from training camps and upon those which
were just being relieved from the Château-Thierry area. Two of them had
never been under fire; several had had only trench experience. They
had not fought or trained together as an army. Many of our commanders
had not been tried out. Some of the divisions were as yet without
their artillery brigades; others had never served with their artillery
brigades in action. By the morning of September 25th, or thirteen
days after the Saint-Mihiel attack, all the infantry, the guns, the
aviation, and the tanks must be in position to throw their weight, in
disciplined solidarity, against a line of fortifications which had all
the strength that ant-like industry could build on chosen positions.
We had neither material nor time for extensive preparations. We must
depend upon the shock of a sudden and terrific impact and the momentum
of irresistible dash. If we took the enemy by surprise when he was
holding the line weakly with few reserves, we might go far. Indeed,
never was the element of surprise more essential. We were countering
Ludendorff's anticipation that, if he withdrew from the salient,
we should stall our forces ineffectually in the mud before Metz:
countering it with the anticipation that he would never consider that a
new army, though it grasped his intention, would within two weeks' time
dare another offensive against the heights of the whale-back.
For our dense concentrations we had only two first-class roads leading
up to the twenty-mile front between the Meuse and the Forest's edge.
These were ill placed for our purpose. We might form our ammunition
dumps in the woods, but nothing could have been more fatal than to have
built a road, for to an aviator nothing is so visible as the line of
a new road. Where aviators were flying at a height of twelve thousand
feet in the Battle of the Somme, they were now flying with a splendid
audacity as low as a thousand feet, which enabled them to locate new
building, piles of material, even well-camouflaged gun positions;
and the minute changes in a photograph taken today in comparison with
one of yesterday were sufficient evidence to a staff expert that some
movement was in progress. An unusual amount of motor-truck traffic or
even an unusual number of automobiles, not to mention the marching
of an unusual number of troops along a road by day, was immediately
detected.
All our hundreds of thousands of men, all the artillery, all the
transport must move forward at night. To show lights was to sprinkle
tell-tale stars in the carpet of darkness as another indication
that a sector which had known routine quiet for month on month was
awakening with new life that could mean only one thing to a military
observer. With the first suspicion of an offensive the enemy's troops
in the trenches would be put on guard, reserves might be brought
up, machine-guns installed, more aviators summoned, trench raids
undertaken, and all the means of information quickened in search for
enlightening details.
It was possible that the German might have learned our plan at its
inception from secret agents within our own lines. If he had, it would
not have been the first time that this had happened. In turn, his
preparations for defense might be kept secret in order to make his
reception hotter and more crafty. He might let the headlong initiative
of our troops carry us into a salient at certain points before he
exerted his pressure disastrously for us on our flanks. Thus he had met
the French offensive of the spring of 1917; thus he had concentrated
his murder from Gommecourt to La Boisselle in the Somme Battle.
Not only had our army to "take over" from the French in all the
details of a sector, from transport and headquarters to front line,
but the Fourth French Army, on our left, which was to attack at the
same hour, must be reinforced with troops and guns. The decision that
the Saint-Mihiel offensive was not to follow through to Etain and
Mars-la-Tour meant that French as well as American units and material
must move from that sector to the Argonne. Immediately it had covered
the charge of our troops the heavy artillery, both French and American,
was to be started on its way, and, after it, other artillery and
auxiliary troops and transport of all kinds as they could be spared.
"It sounds a bromide to say that you cannot begin attacking until your
army is at the front," said a young reserve officer, "but I never knew
what it meant before to get an army to the front."
He had studied his march tables at the Staff School at Langres; now
he was applying them. Young reserve officers had a taste of the
difficulties of troop movements. They had to locate units, see that
they received their orders, and set them on their way according to
schedule, with strict injunctions from "on high" to see that everybody
was up on time. They had lessons in the speed of units and the capacity
of roads which, at the sight of a column of soldiers on the march, will
always rise in their recollections of anxious days.
When haste is vital, unexpected contingencies due to the uneven
character of men and materials break into any system. That is the
"trouble" with war, as one of these young officers said. Everything
depends upon system, and system is impossible when the very nature of
war develops unexpected demands that are prejudicial to any dependable
processes of routine. With urgent calls for locomotives and rolling
stock coming from every quarter to meet the demands of the extension of
the Allied offensive campaign over an unexampled breadth of front, the
railroads, which were few in this region, could not transport troops
and artillery which ordinarily would have gone by train.
Three road routes were available from the Saint-Mihiel to the Argonne
region. Artillery tractors that could go only three were in columns
with vehicles that could go ten and fifteen miles an hour. Field
artillery regiments, coming out from the Saint-Mihiel sector after two
weeks of ceaseless travail, were delayed by having their horses killed
by shell-fire. The exhaustion of horses from overwork was becoming
increasingly pitiful. They could not have the proper rest and care.
In some instances they made in a night only half the distance which
schedules required. When the deep mud, and outbursts of bombardment
from the enemy, retarded the relief of troops, motor buses, which
were waiting for them, had to be dispatched on other errands, leaving
weary legs to march instead of ride. Military police, army and corps
auxiliaries of all kinds, and various headquarters must be transferred.
Officers who had hoped for a little sleep once the Saint-Mihiel
offensive was under way received "travel orders," with instructions
to reach the Argonne area by hopping a motor-truck or in any way they
could. Soldiers, after marching all night, might seek sleep in the
villages if there were room in houses, barns, or haylofts. Blocks of
traffic were frequent when some big gun or truck slewed into a slough
in the darkness.
The processions on these three roads from Saint-Mihiel represented only
one of many movements from all directions to the Argonne sector. French
units had to pass by our new front to that of the Fourth Army. A French
officer at Bar-le-Duc, who had charge of routing all the traffic, was
an old hand at this business of moving armies. He perfectly appreciated
that curses were speeding toward his office from all four points of
the compass where traffic was stalled or columns waited an interminably
long time at cross-roads for their turn to move, or guns or tanks
or anything else in all the varied assortment were not arriving on
schedule time. By telephone he kept in touch with American and French
units in the process of the mobilization, while he moved his chessmen
on the rigid lines of his map.
The "sacred road" from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun coursed again with the full
tide of urgent demands; only this time the traffic turned off on the
roads to the left instead of going on to the town. With each passing
day, as the concentration increased, daylight became a more portentous
foe. "No lights! No lights!" was the watchword of all thought which
the military police spoke in no uncertain tones to any chauffeur who
thought that one flash of his lamps would do no harm; some of the
language used was brimstone and figuratively illuminating enough
to have made an aurora borealis. Camouflage became an obsession of
everyone who had any responsibility. Discomfort, loss of temper and of
time were the handicaps in this blind man's buff of trying to keep the
landscape looking as natural by day as it had in the previous months of
tranquil trench warfare.
Traffic management was only one and not the most trying or important
part of the problem. If the demands upon the Services of Supply
were not met, failure was certain: our army would be hungry and
without ammunition. In no department was the additional burden of the
Meuse-Argonne more keenly felt than in this. New railheads must be
established, and additional vehicular transport sent forward to connect
up with the new front. Though the mastering of the objective in the
Saint-Mihiel operation released a certain surplus, it was disturbingly
small. The line established after the salient was cut had become
violent. It would require large quantities of supplies as long as we
should hold it; and it was already evident that the Meuse-Argonne
offensive was to be a greedy monster which could never have its hunger
satisfied.
Every hour that we kept the enemy ignorant of the strength of our
concentration was an hour gained. The one thing that he must not know
was the number of divisions which we were marshaling for our effort.
They were the sure criterion of the formidability of our intentions.
The most delicate task of all was the taking over of the front line
from the French. Not until the stage was set with the accessories of
the heavy artillery, the new depots, and ammunition dumps did the roads
near the front, cleared for their progress, throb under the blanket
of night with the scraping rhythm of the doughboys' marching steps,
infusing in the preparations the life of a myriad human pulse-beats in
unison. Our faith was in them, in the days before the battle and all
through the battle to the end. Their faces so many moving white points
in the darkness, each figure under its heavy equipment seemed alike in
shadowy silhouette. In the mystery of night their disciplined power,
suggestive of the tiger creeping stealthily forward for the spring on
his prey, was even more significant than by day.
The men were prepared in the red blood that coursed young arteries,
in their litheness and their pride and will to "go to it." They had
their rifles, their belts full of ammunition, their gas masks, and
their rations. It was not for them to ask any questions--not even if
the barrages which would cover their charges would be accurate, if
the tanks would kill machine-gun nests, if the barbed wire would be
cut, and if their generals would make mistakes. Suspense, not of the
mind but of the heart, lightened at the sight of their movement, so
automatic and yet so stirringly human. The gigantic preparations of
dumps, gun positions, and trains of powerful tractors became only a
demonstration of the mighty energy of our industrial age beside that
subtler endeavor which had formed them for their task and set them down
as the pawns of a staff in a gamble with death. Might the big guns that
the troops passed, grim hard shadows in ravines and woods, do their
work well in order that the empty ambulances at rest in long lines
might have little to do!
By battalions and companies the marching columns separated, taking
by-roads and paths, as their officers studied their maps and received
instructions from French guides who knew the ground. By daylight they
were dissipated into the landscape. The hornets were in their hives;
they would swarm as dawn broke to the thunders of the artillery.
Attacks were always at dawn; and dawn had taken on a new meaning to
us since the morning of July 18th, when our 1st and 2nd Divisions, in
the company of crack French divisions, had started the first of the
counter-offensives.
The success of Saint-Mihiel had developed corps staffs which must now
direct the Meuse-Argonne, while others took over the arrangements
at Saint-Mihiel. Major-General Hunter Liggett, pioneer of corps
commanders, with the First Corps was to be on the left; Major-General
George H. Cameron, with the Fifth Corps in the center; and
Major-General Robert L. Bullard, with the Third Corps on the right.
Groups of officers making a pilgrimage in automobiles to the new sector
were to be the "brains" of the coming attack; for our corps command was
an administrative unit which took over the direction of a different
set of divisions from those under it at Saint-Mihiel.
The corps staffs had only four or five days for their staff
preparations for the battle. It was Army Headquarters in the town hall
of Souilly which set the army objective, the corps limits, and the
tactical direction of the attack as a whole, while the corps set the
divisional limits and objectives to accord with the army objective.
At our call we had French experience of the sector, and in this war
of maps we had maps. Our prevision in this respect was excellent. The
French furnished us with millions of maps in the course of the war; we
had our own map-printing presses at Langres; and we had movable presses
in the field for printing maps which gave the results of the latest
observations of the enemy's defenses. A snowstorm of maps descended
upon our army, and still the cry was for more. Not only battalion and
company, but platoon and even squad commanders needed these large-scale
backgrounds marked with their parts.
Yet maps have their limitations. They may show the ground in much
detail, but, even when the blue diagrams and symbols are supposed up to
date, not the bushes where the enemy's machine-gun nests are hidden,
or what the enemy has done overnight in the way of defenses. Nor are
maps plummets into human psychology. Even when they have located
machine-gun nests they cannot say whether the gunners who man them will
yield easily or will fight to the death. If the British on the Somme,
after months of preparation and study of the defenses of the sector,
had more elaborate directions for their units than we, it does not
mean that, considering its inexperience, our staff did not accomplish
wonders.
Our corps commanders may have known their division commanders in time
of peace, but they had never been their superiors in action of any
kind. Their artillery groupings and aviation arrangements included
French units as well as their own. There was no time for considering
niceties in dispositions. Division commanders who had to arrange the
details of their coöperation had never served together. They had scores
of problems, due to the haste of their mobilization, to consider; for
the burden of apprehension that pressed them close was of apprehension
lest they should not be up on time. They and their officers went over
the ground at the front, but they had not the time to make the thorough
observation that any painstaking and energetic division commander would
have preferred.
A division with all its artillery, machine-guns, and transport is a
ponderous column in movement, with every part having its regulation
place. One day in one set of villages and the next in another, the
communication of orders and requirements down through all the branches
is difficult, and the more so when you are short of dispatch riders,
and there is a limit to what can be done over the field telephone.
The unexpected demand for wires for our second great offensive must
not find the signal corps unprepared; or a people as dependent on
telephones and telegraph as we are, and so accustomed to having them
materialize on request, would have been helpless in making war. The
deepest tactical concern was, of course, the coördination of the
artillery with the infantry advance. It is only a difference of a
hundred yards' range, as we all know, between putting your shells among
your own men instead of the enemy's.
Reliable communication from the infantry to the aviator and his
reliable report of his observations to the artillery and infantry is
one of the complicated features in that team-play, which, in the game
of death, needs all the finesse of professional baseball, a secret
service, and a political machine, plus the requisite poise, despite
poor food and short hours of sleep, for worthily leading men in battle.
Some divisions that went into this action had not yet received their
artillery; or again their artillery arrived from the training camp,
where the guns had just been received, barely in time to go into
position, so that an inexperienced artillery commander reported to an
inexperienced division commander with whom he had never served. There
were batteries without horses, which the horses of other batteries
pulled into position after they had brought up their own. Battery
commanders received their table of barrages and their objectives of
fire, and, without registering, had to trust to observation by men
untried in battle or by aviators who had never before observed in a big
operation. Aviators had been trained to expect the infantry to put out
panels, and they might say that the infantry did not show their panels,
while the infantry would deny the charge. Such things had happened
before. They would happen this time. They happen to the most veteran
of armies, whose long experience, however, may have an excellent
substitute in other qualities which we had in plenitude, as we shall
see.
All our own guns were of French make, with the exception of a few
howitzers. The gun-producing power of the French arsenals supplying us
with our artillery and our machine-guns--the Brownings were only just
beginning to arrive--in addition to supplying all their own forces over
the long front of their offensive was one of the marvels of the war and
an important factor in victory. The majority of our planes were also of
French make: not until August had the Liberty motors begun to arrive.
The French had supplied us with additional aviation and tanks, as well
as artillery, from their own army; but much of this was new. All the
Allies, indeed, were robbing their training camps for the supreme
effort that was about to be made from the Meuse to the Channel.
While the public, which thinks of aviation in terms of combat, admired
the exploits of the aces in bringing down enemy planes, which they
looked for in the communiqués, the army was thinking of the value of
the work of the observers, whose heroism in running the gamut of fire
from air and earth in order to bring back information might change the
fate of battles. Training for combat, perhaps, more nearly approximated
service conditions than training for observation. A fighting aviator,
with natural born courage, audacity, and coolness, who goes out
determinedly to bring down his man, makes the ace. These qualities were
never lacking in our fliers. They went after their men and got them, in
a record of successes which was not the least of the honors which our
army won in France. The observer had no public praise; he was always
the butt of the complaint that he did not bring enough information, or
that he brought inaccurate information. His complex responsibilities
were singularly dependent upon that experience which comes only from
practice.
Instead of applying the lessons of Saint-Mihiel at leisure, as we had
hoped, to the whole army, we had to apply them on the run in the rapid
concentration of divisions which had not been at Saint-Mihiel. Yet the
supreme thing was not schooling. It was a seemingly superhuman task in
speed. It was to have the infantry up on time even if the other units
were limping. In this we succeeded. On the night of September 24th,
from the Meuse to the Forest's western edge every division was in
position. We had kept faith with Marshal Foch's orders. We were ready
to go "over the top."
The Marshal postponed the attack for another day. Rumor gave the reason
that the French Fourth Army was not ready; possibly the real reason,
or at least a contributory reason, was in the canniness of such an old
hand at offensives as Marshal Foch. Ours was a new army under enormous
pressure. Veteran armies were always asking, at the last moment, for
more time in which to complete their preparations before attacking.
Possibly the Marshal had set the 25th as the date with a view to
forcing our effort under spur of the calendar, while he looked forward
to granting the inevitable request for delay. At all events the respite
was most welcome. Our staff had time for further conferences and
attention to their arrangements for supplies, and our combat troops a
breathing spell which gave their officers another day in which to study
the positions they were to storm.
When I considered all the digging necessary for making the gun
positions, or had even a cursory view of the parks of divisional
transport, of the reserves crowded in villages and woods, of the
ammunition trains, and of the busy corps and division headquarters,
I wondered if it were possible that the Germans could not have been
apprised that a concentration was in progress. Not only did pocket
lamps flash like fireflies from the hands of those who used them
thoughtlessly, but despite precautions careless drivers turned on
motor lights, and some rolling kitchen was bound to let out a flare of
sparks, while the locomotives running in and out at railheads showed
streams of flames from their stacks, and here and there fires were
unwittingly started. An aviator riding the night, as he surveyed the
shadowy landscape, could not miss these manifestations of activity.
If he shut off his engine he might hear above the low thunder of
transport the roar of the tanks advancing into position, of the heavy
caterpillar tractors drawing big guns. When the air was clear and the
wind favorable, the increasing volume of sound directed toward the
front must have been borne to sharp ears on the other side of No Man's
Land. All this I may mention again, without reference to observations
by spies within our lines.
On our side, we might try to learn if the enemy knew of our coming,
and how much he knew. A thin fringe of French had remained in the
front-line trenches, with our men in place behind them. Thus our voices
of different timbre, speaking the English tongue in regions where only
French had been spoken, might not be heard if we forgot the rules
of silence, which were as mandatory by custom as in a church or a
library; and besides, if the Germans made a raid for information they
would not take American prisoners. They did make some minor raids,
capturing Frenchmen who, perhaps unwittingly when wounded or in the
reaction from danger, and subject to an intelligence system skilled in
humoring and indirect catechism, told more than they thought they were
telling. Information that we had from German prisoners left no doubt
that the Germans knew at least that the Americans were moving into
the sector, but did not expect a powerful offensive. This, as we had
anticipated, was discounted as being out of the question on the heels
of the Saint-Mihiel offensive. Our new army, the Germans thought, had
not the skill or the material for such a concentration, even if we had
the troops.
In our demonstration that we did have the skill and the energy, and
that in one way and another we were able to secure the material
even though it were inadequate, we were peculiarly American; and we
were most significantly American in the adaptable exercise of the
reserve nervous force of our restless, dynamic natures, which makes
us wonderful in a race against time. We strengthen our optimism with
the pessimism which spurs our ambition to accomplishment by its
self-criticism that is never satisfied.
On all hands I heard complaints by officers concerning lack of
equipment, of personnel, of training, and of time. But no one could
spare the breath for more than objurgations, uttered in exclamatory
emphasis, which eased the mind. I could make a chapter out of these
railings. Yet if I implied that the unit, whether salvage or aviation,
hospital or front-line battalion, tanks or signal corps, or any other,
would not be able to carry out its part, I was assailed with a burst
of outraged and flaming optimism. And optimism is the very basis of
the psychologic formula of war. Americans have it by nature. We lean
forward on our oars. Optimism comes to us from the conquest of a
continent. It presides at the birth of every infant, who may one day be
president of the United States.
Confidence was rock-ribbed in a commander-in-chief's square jaw; it
rang out in voices over the telephone; it was in the very pulse-beats
of the waiting infantry; it shone in every face, however weary. We
had won at Château-Thierry; we had won at Saint-Mihiel; we should win
again. The infantry might not conceive the nature of the defenses or
of the fire they might have to encounter. So much the better. They
would have the more vim in "driving through," said the staff.
The objectives which we had set ourselves on that first day, after the
conquest of the first-line fortifications, which we took for granted,
were a tribute to our faith in Marshal Foch's own optimism. On the
first day we were striking for the planets. In our second and third
days' objectives we did not hesitate to strike for the stars. This plan
would give us the more momentum, and if we were to be stopped it would
carry us the farther before we were. Of course we did not admit that
we might be stopped. If we were not, the German military machine would
be broken; and any doubts on the part of generals were locked fast in
their inner consciousness, for uttered word of scepticism was treason.
On the night of the 25th, when all the guns began the preliminary
bombardment, stretching an aurora from the hills of Verdun into
Champagne, our secret was out. From the whirlwind of shells into his
positions the enemy knew that we were coming at dawn. With thousands of
flashes saluting the heavens it no longer mattered if a rolling kitchen
sent up a shower of sparks or an officer inadvertently turned the gleam
of his pocket flash skyward. Along the front our infantry slipped
forward into the place of the French veterans, who came marching back
down the roads.
"Gentlemen," said the French, "the sector is yours. A pleasant morning
to you!"