A military machine impossible in human nature--Regular
traditions--National Guard sentiment--National Army
solidarity--Divisional pride--Our first six divisions unavailable to
start in the Meuse-Argonne--British-trained divisions--What veteran
divisions would have known.
The Leavenworth plan was to harmonize regulars, National Guard, and
National Army into a force so homogeneous that flesh and blood became
machinery, with every soldier, squad, platoon, brigade, and division
as much like all the others as peas in a pod; but human elements
older than the Leavenworth School, which had given soldiers cheer on
the march and fire in battle from the days of the spear to the days
of the quick-firer, hampered the practical application of the cold
professional idea worked out in conscientious logic in the academic
cloister. It may be whispered confidentially that all unconsciously
their own training and associations sometimes made the inbred and
most natural affection of the Leavenworth graduates for the regulars
subversive of the very principle which they had set out to practise
with such resolutely expressed impartiality. A regular felt that he was
a little more of a regular if he were serving with a regular division.
"We're not having any of this good-as-you-are nonsense in this
regiment," said its Colonel, talking to a fellow-classman who was on
the staff. "We're filled up with reserve officers and rookies,--but
we're regulars nevertheless. We've started right with the regular
idea--the way we did in the old --th"--in which the officers had served
together as lieutenants.
By the same token of sentiment and association the National Guardsmen
remained National Guardsmen. They also had a tradition. If they
were not proud of it they would be unnatural fighters. While the
average citizen had taken no interest in preparedness, except in the
abstraction that national defense was an excellent thing, they had
drilled on armory floors and attended annual encampments. Sometimes the
average citizen had spoken of them as "tin soldiers"; and they were
conscious perhaps of a certain superciliousness toward them on the part
of regular officers. Drawn from the same communities, members of the
same military club that met at the armory, they already had their pride
of regiment and of company: a feeling held in common with Guardsmen
from other parts of the country, who belonged to the same service
from the same motives. Should that old Connecticut or Alabama or any
other regiment with a Civil War record, and, perhaps, with a record
dating from the Revolution, forget its old number because it was given
a new number, or its own armory, because it went to a training camp?
Relatives and friends, who bowed to the edict of military uniformity
and anonymity, would still think of it as their home regiment. If
Minneapolis mixed its sons with St. Paul's, they would still be sons of
Minneapolis.
While all volunteers felt that they were entitled to the credit of
offering their services without waiting on the call, the draft men, who
had awaited the call, had their own conviction about their duty, which,
from the hour when they walked over from the railway stations to the
camp, gave them a sense of comradeship: while they might argue that
it was more honor to found than to follow a tradition. Their parents,
sisters, and sweethearts were just as fond, and their friends just as
proud, of them as they had been in the Guard. Aside from a few regular
superiors, their officers were graduates of the Officers' Training
Camps, who, as the regulars said, had nothing to unlearn and were
subject to no political associations. Yes, the draft men considered
themselves as the national army; and they would set a standard which
should be in keeping with this distinction.
All the men assembled in any home cantonment, with the exception
of the regulars, were almost invariably from the same part of the
country, which gave them a neighborhood feeling. The doings of that
cantonment became the intimate concern of the surrounding region. Its
chronicles were carried in the local newspapers. There was a division
to each cantonment; and in France the fighting unit was the division,
complete in all its branches,--artillery, machine-guns, trench mortars,
engineers, hospital, signal corps, transport, and other units. As a
division it had its training area; as a division it traveled, went into
battle, and was relieved.
Before a division was sent to France its men were already thinking
in terms of their division; they met the men of no other division
unless on leave, and met them in France only in passing, or on the
left or right in battle. In the cantonment the division had its own
camp newspaper, its own sports, its separate life on the background
of the community interest, without the maneuvering of many divisions
together on the European plan until they were sent into action in the
Saint-Mihiel or Meuse-Argonne offensive. Each division commander and
his staff, who were regular officers, conspired to develop a divisional
pride, thereby, in a sense, humanly defeating the regular idea of
making out of American citizens a machine which could be anything but
humanly American. Within the division, pride of company, of battalion,
of regiment, was instilled, and the different units developed rivalries
which were amalgamated in a sense of rivalry with other divisions.
Every cantonment had the "best" division in the United States before it
went to France, where rivalry expressed itself on the battlefield. The
record of the war is by divisions. Men might know their division, but
not their corps commander. Divisions might not vary in their courage,
but they must in the amount of their experience and in the quality of
their leaders. A division that had been in three or four actions might
be better than one that had been in ten; but a division that had not
been in a single action hardly had the advantage over one that had
been in several. Our four pioneer divisions, which had been in the
trenches during the winter of 1917-18 and later in the Château-Thierry
operations, the 1st (regulars), and the 2nd (regulars and marines), and
the 26th and the 42nd (both National Guard), were all at Saint-Mihiel.
Their units were complete; their artillery had had long practice with
their infantry; they had had long training-ground experience in France,
had known every kind of action in modern war, and had kept touch under
fire, rather than in school instruction, with the progress of tactics.
If they were not our "best" divisions, it was their fault.
Of the two other divisions which had been longest after these in our
army sector, the 32nd had just finished helping Mangin break through at
Juvigny, northwest of Soissons, and the 3rd was at Saint-Mihiel. These
six formed the group which General Pershing had in France at the time
of the emergency of the German offensive in March, which hastened our
program of troop transport.
Now we were bringing to the American army five of the divisions which
had been trained with the British, the 4th, 28th, 33rd, 35th, and
77th. From the British front the 77th had gone to Lorraine, whence
it was recalled to the Château-Thierry theater. The 4th and the 28th
were ordered from the British front, after the third German offensive
in June, to stand between Paris and the foe, and then participated,
along with the 77th, in the counter-offensive which reduced the Marne
salient,--or as the French call it, the second Battle of the Marne, a
simple, suggestive, and glorious name. Château-Thierry had thus been a
stage in passage from the British to the American sector, and the call
for the defense of Paris had been serviceable to the American command
as a reason for detaching American divisions, which the British had
trained, from Sir Douglas Haig, who, as he is Scotch, was none the less
thriftily desirous of retaining them.
The 33rd Division, remaining at the British front after the other
divisions had departed, gained experience in offensive operations,
as we know, which approximated that of the others at Château-Thierry,
when, fighting in the inspiring company of the Australians in the Somme
attacks beginning August 8th, the Illinois men took vital positions
and numerous prisoners and guns. Though these four divisions, the 4th,
28th, 33rd, and 77th, had not had the long experience of the four
pioneer divisions, they had had their "baptism of fire" under severe
conditions, they knew German machine-gun methods from close contact,
and they had the conviction of their power from having seen the enemy
yield before their determined attacks. To Marshal Foch they had brought
further evidence that the character of the pioneer divisions with
their long training in France was common to all American troops. The
National Guard divisions which had arrived late in France, though they
had been filled with recruits, had, as the background of their training
camp experience at home, not only the established inheritance of their
organization but the thankless and instructive service on the Mexican
border, where for many months they had been on a war footing.
According to European standards none of the divisions in the first
shock of the Meuse-Argonne battle was veteran, of course; and the
mission given them would have been considered beyond their powers.
Indeed, the disaster of broken units, dispersing from lack of tactical
skill, once they were against the fortifications, would have been
considered inevitable. A veteran or "shock" division in the European
sense--such divisions as the European armies used for major attacks and
difficult operations--would have had a superior record in four years
of war. Its survivors, through absorption no less than training, would
have developed a craft which was now instinctive. They were Europeans
fighting in Europe; they knew their enemy and how he would act in given
emergencies; they knew the signs which showed that he was weakening
or that he was going to resist sturdily; they knew how to find dead
spaces, and how to avoid fire; and they had developed that sense of
team-play which adjusts itself automatically to situations. All that
our divisions knew of these things they had learned from schooling
or in one or two battles. We had the advantage that experience had
not hardened our initiative until we might be overcautious on some
occasions.
The battle order of our divisions for the Meuse-Argonne battle was
not based on the tactical adaptation of each unit to the task on its
front. We must be satisfied with placing a division in line at a point
somewhere between the Meuse and the Forest's edge where transportation
most favored its arrival on time. One division was as good as another
in a battle arranged in such haste. The French Fourth Army was to
attack on the west of the Argonne Forest; on its right a regiment of
the 92nd (colored) Division, National Army, with colored officers, was
to form the connecting link between the French and the American forces.
For men with no experience under heavy fire, who were not long ago
working in the cotton fields and on the levees of the South, this was
a trying assignment, which would have tested veterans. Never before
had colored men under colored officers gone against a powerful trench
system. All the British and French colored troops had white officers,
and our other colored division, the 93rd, which was attached to the
French Army through the summer and fall of 1918, had white officers.
We come now to our divisions in place on the night of September
25th, with whom will ever rest the honor of having stormed the
fortifications. When I consider each one's part I should like to write
it in full. I shall mention them individually when that best suits the
purpose of my chronicle, and at other times I shall describe the common
characteristics of their fighting: in either case mindful of the honor
they did us all as Americans.