Meanwhile, the French were developing the Renault light tank that was intended for reconnaissance and protection of the infantry by breaking up enemy machine-gun nests.a These were the tanks Patton would command. Known as TF-17s, they weighed six tons and had a top speed of ten miles per hour. Plans called for twenty light tank battalions (each containing seventy-seven tanks), but as of November 1917 there were not only no tanks but no one in the AEF knew how to operate one either.
Earlier, the British massed some three hundred tanks along a six-mile front at the Battle of Cambrai, which lumbered across no-man’s-land and into and through the German trenches for more than four miles, the largest Allied advance of the war. Two German divisions were left in ruins and some four thousand Germans taken prisoner as well as a hundred enemy guns. Unfortunately, the British celebrated while the Germans developed one of their “terrible counter attacks” that took back much of what had been gained and the British were unable to exploit their breakthrough.
Nevertheless, Cambrai proved that tanks were a highly valuable asset on the battlefield, a fact in no way lost on George Patton, who was attending the French tank school at Chamlieu. There he was learning about tanks from the ground up, studying and testing the machines from the standpoint of mechanics, gunnery, maneuver, and tactics. He became experienced in every aspect of a tank, as they crawled over hill and dale “in a most impersonal manner. They are noisy … [and] rear up like a horse and stand on their head with perfect immunity … The thing will do the damdest things imaginable,” he told Beatrice.20
AFTER FINISHING THE MONTH of November at the French tank school, Patton produced a fifty-eight-page paper entitled “Light Tanks” that in his own words “became the basis of the U.S. Tank Corps.” The paper was “a masterpiece of originality and clear thinking,” which detailed every aspect of armored warfare including organization, training, equipment, and tactics of the Tank Corps. Biographer Carlo D’Este calls it “an astonishing reflection of the visionary aspect of Patton’s mind.” Patton documented everything needed under every conceivable condition, even a list of tools and spare parts “down to and including extra wire and string.”21
Despite his elation at having produced such a profound document, Patton’s underlying inferiority complex began to dog him as he struggled to set up the new tank school for Americans. “Actually I’m in quite a funk,” he told Beatrice, “for there is nothing but me to do it all. I am sure I will do it but just at this moment I don’t see how … If I fail it will be only my fault. I won’t even have you to pick on.”
In mid-December Patton received official orders assigning him to organize and command the U.S. Light Tank School, using French Renaults to begin with. He wrote, “This is my last day as a staff officer. Now I rise or fall on my own. I have always talked blood and murder and am looked on as an advocate of close up fighting. I could never look myself in the face if I was a staff officer and comparatively safe.”22
Patton selected the town of Langres to set up his tank school. He was to report to Colonel Samuel D. Rockenbach, Pershing’s chief of tanks (light and heavy). He visited with the British at Cambrai and the French at Flers to find out what lessons had been learned from their tank action. Patton concluded that the basic unit of his tank organization would be the platoon, which consisted of five tanks: one with a three-inch gun, two with six-pounder guns, and two with Hotchkiss machine guns—a total of five tanks and fifteen men. A company would consist of three platoons and a company headquarters—five officers, ninety-six men, twenty-five tanks, and twelve vehicles.
From what he had learned so far of the French and British in action, tanks were most successful when they were employed with infantrymen. It was when they outran the infantry that they got into trouble. In Patton’s view, “The proper conception of a tank is as a heavily armored infantry soldier.”
MONTHS EARLIER, THE NEWS FROM the front had already proved unsettling. The fighting in Flanders had been so debilitating that the British army was a hundred thousand men short and there were not enough men left in the empire to clear the deficit; the French, also without replacements, were disbanding battalions by the score. The Bolsheviks, having seized power in Russia following the October Revolution, were now actively engaged in armistice talks with the Central Powers. Pershing projected that this would free a million German troops by spring to supplant those already on the Western Front, 260 divisions to the Allies 160 divisions—an unacceptable ratio. He soon would have five operational divisions and one training division in France but he still needed the additional eighteen divisions promised by Washington. Time was not on Pershing’s side, and the Germans were getting set to prove it.
German commander Erich Ludendorff, his forces engorged with the vast influx of German soldiers from the Eastern Front, had concluded that only a mighty all-or-nothing offensive would prevent Germany from losing the war. The unlimited U-boat campaign, in which so many high hopes of starving England out of the war had been placed, was foiled when the British discovered the value of putting heavily armed convoys of destroyers around their ships.
On the other hand, the British blockade of Germany was working splendidly. The German people were on a rationing system bordering on outright starvation. What was known as ersatz food was being offered, concocted by German chemical companies. Ersatz coffee, for instance, consisted of fine grains of acorns ground up with caffeine added. Bread was made with straw or sawdust; meat was almost unheard of. A year earlier the potato crop had failed and German civilians were forced to eat turnips—the “turnip winter,” they called it. Demonstrations, strikes, and riots broke out. Already a million German soldiers had been killed and no end was in sight. With Americans arriving now at the rate of 240,000 a month, Ludendorff realized that the situation had become desperate.
After three and a half months of training, on February 13, 1918, the Rainbow Division moved to a “quiet sector” of the front, near Luneville in Lorraine, for a month’s on-the-job training with a French corps. This sector, which was “strikingly similar” to the terrain of the Argonne Forest, was marked by steep ravines, sandstone ridges, and rocks and other debris washed down in the rivers Meurthe and Moselle from the Vosges Mountains twenty miles to the east. It was peopled by livestock farmers, basket weavers using river willows, and pottery makers using river clay, and had not been particularly active since the first year of the war. All that was about to change.23
By this point the division had acquired a new commanding officer, Major General Charles T. Menoher, an experienced artilleryman who had been Pershing’s classmate at West Point. An able officer and thoroughly capable administrator, Menoher, noted MacArthur, preferred to supervise the division from his field headquarters where he “was in constant communication” with higher headquarters, “relying on me to handle the battle line.” Father Duffy of the Fighting 69th characterized Menoher this way: “If he were out of uniform he would impress one as a successful businessman—one of the kind who can carry responsibility … and still find time to be human. He is entirely devoid of posing, of vanity, or of jealousy. His only desire is to see results.”24
On February 26 MacArthur had his first encounter with the Germans. He had persuaded a French general to allow him to participate in a night trench raid to capture enemy prisoners. With blackened faces the patrol crawled across no-man’s-land near Réchicourt beneath the overcast skies, unobserved until right outside the German trench a guard heard them and all hell broke loose. Flares went up; machine guns opened, a preregistered artillery barrage came crashing down—but the raid went on. The Frenchmen leaped savagely into the trench, killing a number of Germans while others fled.
Triumphantly they returned and delivered their quota of prisoners while MacArthur received slaps on the back, Cognac, absinthe, and the Croix de Guerre pinned on his tunic by none other than General Georges de Bazelaire himself, the French division commander. Moreover, American headquarters awarded him the Silver Star—the army’s third highest decorati
on for valor—for “extraordinary heroism and gallantry in action,” which, he later wrote, “seemed a bit too much,” though he was nevertheless “glad to get it.”
DURING THE FIRST MONTH THAT the Rainbow Division was in the front lines, the soldiers had endured German raids and gas attacks, and on March 7 the Fighting 69th had its first men killed in battle when a German artillery barrage collapsed a dugout in the Rouge Bouquet sector, suffocating nineteen men. Corporal Joyce Kilmer composed one of his last poems to commemorate the tragedy, which Father Duffy read at a service held at the site of the dugout where the slain men remained entombed.
In a wood they call Rouge Bouquet
There is a new-made grave today
Built by never a spade nor pick
Yet covered with earth ten meters thick
There lie many fighting men
Dead in their youthful prime,
Never to laugh or love again
Or taste of the summer time;
For Death came flying through the air,
And stopped his flight at the dugout stair,
Touched his prey and left them there
Clay to clay.
He hid their bodies stealthily
In the soil of the land they sought to free
And fled away.
By then MacArthur had become almost legendary for his unorthodox choice of uniform—a gray turtleneck sweater and long, drooping scarf knitted by his mother, his jaunty officer’s cap with the grommet removed and carrying, for some reason, a riding crop. He neither wore a helmet nor carried a pistol, but steadily walked the trenches giving pep talks to the men and their officers.
He was doing just that as he prepared for a retaliatory raid that involved a battalion of the 168th Infantry Regiment in the Salient du Feys. Zero hour was 5:05 a.m. MacArthur watched it approach from the top of the trench in the graying twilight as “pillars of flame shot skyward” over the enemy lines and the concentrated fire of sixty American artillery batteries unleashed their fury. Then, as the minute hand on the watch hit time and the artillery reached its most violent crescendo, MacArthur shouted into the ear of Captain Charles J. Casey, the battalion commander, “All ready, Casey.”
The whistles blew and everyone scrambled over the top and into the inferno of no-man’s-land. For a few moments, MacArthur felt that he was alone and his soldiers had failed to follow him. But before he could turn to check “they were around me, a roaring avalanche of glittering steel and cursing men.”25
As they neared the German trenches they encountered “a hornet’s nest of machine gun fire.” MacArthur was everywhere, giving advice, orders, supervising the operations until the enemy position was carried. For this he was given the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second highest award for valor, citing his “conspicuous courage.”26
Two days later MacArthur might have regretted spurning a gas mask when the Germans retaliated for the previous raid with a poison gas attack. He accepted treatment only from a first aid tent and refused to go to a hospital in the rear, requesting instead that his name not be included in the list of casualties. But the incident was serious enough to sideline him on his cot blindfolded for ten days. For this he received a purple heart and a heap of purple praise from Secretary of War Baker, who visited MacArthur’s division and, after learning of his exploits, embarrassingly proclaimed him “the D’Artagnan of the AEF,” and, somewhat prematurely, America’s “greatest fighting front-line general.”
MEANWHILE, THE U.S. LIGHT TANK SCHOOL at Langres began to take shape. Young officers, many from the Coast Artillery, were either transferring or ordered to sign up for armored service, which no one at that point (except perhaps George Patton) even dreamed would one day become its own branch of the service. The school itself would assume the structure of a battalion, and Patton, with help from his able assistant Lieutenant Elgin Braine, sent in a requisition for supplies and equipment totaling some $20 million.b But still, they had no tanks, so Patton borrowed tools from the quartermaster and secured an old Atlas truck for his tankers to take apart and put back together again to get a better notion of what made it run.
Patton ran a tight ship at the tank school. When officers failed to salute him, he stopped them and made them do it. He also reported a reserve lieutenant for profanity. “I expect some of them [reserve officers] would like to poison me. I will have to eat only eggs like Louis XI,” he told Beatrice.27
Patton hadn’t known it before, but an officer passing through told him that on December 15 he had been promoted to major (though as of February 17 the official promotion orders had not yet arrived). Patton didn’t let that stop him; he took the captain’s bars off his uniform and pinned a major’s gold oak leaves on his shoulders and collar. “In spite of my increased rank I still love you,” he wrote Beatrice, “I want you to be the same age when I get back as when I left.”
By this time hundreds of enlisted men were arriving at what was now styled the U.S. Army Tank Center, and to Patton’s delight he was getting all sorts of applications from officers wanting to join. But they still had no tanks, even though the French had long ago promised to send some. So Patton set the men to drills—in particular tanker signals consisting of the gunner kicking the driver in the back and head (gestures that told the driver when to turn, stop, go forward, or back up)—in addition to mapping, aiming, gas engines, reconnaissance, intelligence, and gunnery. As for himself, he composed a lecture on “obedience” and “discipline,” which he was convinced were necessary qualities to win the war. Alluding to Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great, the legions of Rome, and the ancient Greeks, Patton informed his startled subjects that without “instant, cheerful, and automatic obedience … you will die for nothing! With DISCIPLINE you are IRRESISTABLE.”28
At last, on March 23, ten light Renault tanks arrived at Bourg by railroad flatcar. Patton backed them off himself because no one else knew how. They had arrived by design at night, camouflaged beneath tarpaulins, and would stay hidden in a wood away from the prying eyes of enemy observation planes. Having watched the procession of the tanks across the field in the moonlight, Patton wrote Beatrice almost as if he were again a proud father: “They are certainly saucy little fellows and very active. Just like insects from under a wooden log in the forest.”
The tank school at that point had grown to several thousand men and several hundred officers. Barracks sprang up overnight, complete with latrines and company messes. The YMCA even opened a canteen, which pleased Patton because there were no amusements in town for the men. Patton was ambivalent about this last, for while it kept down venereal disease he felt that “men who are apt to be killed are entitled to what pleasures they can get even if it is not considered chic by some.” The American singer and troop entertainer Elsie Janis gave a performance and afterward Patton took her and her mother out to eat. “She is not pretty but quite amusing though common in her pronunciation,” he reported to Beatrice. “She wore an artificial leopard-skin coat.”c,29
On April 20 Patton went to Pershing’s headquarters in Chaumont to have some teeth filled, and when he entered the officers’ dining room for lunch a general, to Patton’s astonishment, addressed him as “Colonel Patton.” Behind him was the adjutant general who confirmed that orders had just come in from the States promoting Patton to lieutenant colonel. “How do you feel being a Mrs. Colonel?” he wrote to Beatrice. “We never thought to reach it so soon, did we?”
By this time—late April 1918—Patton was able to stage exercises or maneuvers on the field at Bourg simulating the tank in battle, supporting columns of infantry. These were very realistic and attended approvingly by high-ranking staff officers who followed the action on their mounts. Patton wrote about it later: “The enemy was unintentionally represented by members of the General Staff College who attended mounted … The horses objected to the tanks, and one officer was seen leaving the final objective on foot, after having been thrown five times. He held the record but the competition was close
and general.”30
On April 25 Patton held an amateur night in the YMCA tent where there was a stage and a piano, with boxing matches, skits, and speeches, capped by a song that the men had written about Patton saying, “We will follow the Colonel through hell and out the other side.” “I don’t see why they like me,” he told Beatrice, “as I curse them freely on all occasions.”
On April 28 Patton formed the First Light Tank Battalion with himself as commander and Captains Sereno Brett, Joseph Viner, and Earnest Herman as company commanders. He appeared everywhere, encouraging and bawling out his men. He wished to make them mirror images of himself, “ruthless, daring and dash.” His words were powerful, theatrical, and memorable and the soldiers repeated them with embellishments that cultivated his legend.31
Patton laid down this law: “It must never be forgotten that boldness is the key to victory. The tank must be used boldly. It is new and always has the element of surprise. It is also very terrifying to look at, as the infantry soldier is helpless before it.”32
AT THE END OF MAY PATTON jumped at an invitation for a close-up look at the front by friends he had made in the French army. Simply going to the front was a highly dangerous adventure, and before leaving he wrote a letter to Beatrice that was to be sent in the event of his death here.
Of course if I am reported killed I may still have been captured so don’t be too worried. I have not the least premonition that I am going to be hurt and feel foolish writing you this letter but perhaps if the thing happened you would like it [better that I had written] …