‡ A long pipe loaded with explosives designed to clear a path through barbed wire.
§ Thirty years later, as chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission, Marshall had these words inscribed on a new memorial erected for the first Americans killed in France.
ǁ This was the horrendous Battle of Passchendaele in the Ypres salient in Belgium. The British captured the town, which was reduced to rubble, and the Germans indeed made “terrible counter attacks,” which the British withstood, to the tune of 570,000 combined casualties.
a Plans were made for the Americans to produce a forty-three-ton Mark VIII tank with an eleven-man crew and speed to six miles per hour but a scandalous incompetence among Washington bureaucrats resulted in tank production beginning only in the summer of 1918 when the war was almost over.
b Nearly twenty times that in today’s dollars.
c Eddie Rickenbacker, America’s leading air ace in the war, had started a flock of rumors by escorting Elsie Janis to the elegant Farewell Dinner of his 94th Aero Squadron at the Waldorf. But the relationship went nowhere when she turned out to be a lesbian.
d Because of Beatrice’s great wealth, Patton had conveyed his considerable inheritance in Lake Vineyard to his aunt Nannie.
e A derogatory term for Germans used by the French, meaning “stupid head” or “blockhead.”
George Marshall as first captain at VMI, 1901
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George Marshall (second row, second from right) with the VMI varsity football team, 1900
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The wedding party of Lily Coles (second from left) and George Marshall (third from left), Lexington, Virginia, 1902
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Colonel George Marshall (right) and his boss, General of the Armies John J. Pershing, in France during World War I, 1917
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U.S. artillerymen fire a 14-inch railroad gun during the Battle of the Argonne Forest, France, 1918.
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George Patton, who was dyslexic, attended VMI for a year as a prep school before entering the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
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Patton’s marriage to Beatrice Ayer was one of Boston’s main social events in 1910.
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Lieutenant Colonel Patton beside one of the vehicles he led as commander of the First U.S. Tank Brigade
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Among the finest horsemen in the army, Patton sails over a fence on his favorite jumper, Hukupu, to become champion of the 1933 West Point horse show.
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American tanks head into the Battle of the Argonne Forest.
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American soldiers in France, 1918, fire a 37mm gun at the Germans.
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Douglas MacArthur, age five, poses with his father, Arthur, who would become a high-ranking army general; older brother, Arthur; and mother, “Pinky,” in San Antonio, 1885.
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MacArthur graduated West Point at the top of his class in 1903.
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Colonel Douglas MacArthur wore his uniform in jaunty fashion while commanding the 42nd “Rainbow” Division in France, 1917.
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MacArthur is decorated by General of the Armies John J. Pershing in World War I.
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MacArthur, as field marshal of the Philippine army, appears with Philippine president Manuel Quezon (left) in 1937.
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CHAPTER FIVE
COURAGE WAS THE RULE
Following the Battles of Belleau Wood and Château-Thierry, the Germans reluctantly began winding down their great offensive but remained like a wounded and dangerous animal behind their fortifications on the Hindenburg Line. While German fortunes had changed for the worse, George Marshall’s were changing for the better. Though he had repeatedly asked for field duty, each request was denied on grounds, as General Robert L. Bullard wrote, that “[Marshall] has no equal [in staff work] in the Army today.” Instead, on August 21, 1918, he was promoted to full colonel and assigned to General Headquarters under Pershing himself.
That was just in time for what was about to become the first large American offensive of the war—the assault on the German salient at Saint-Mihiel. By this time Pershing had more than 1,600,000 American soldiers in France, with more pouring in at the rate of 10,000 a day. He had so far resisted pressure from Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch to put his divisions into battle piecemeal with the French, but held out until he was able to form a full U.S. army. Saint-Mihiel would be its battle test.
The salient had been a wedge-shaped bulge in the German lines that, since the commencement of the war in 1914, had jutted out to the French town of Saint-Mihiel and disrupted communications between Verdun, Nancy, and Paris. In other words, it was a general pain in the neck for the Allies. Salients, such as the ones at Saint-Mihiel and at Ypres, in Belgium, are difficult to attack because at some point the majority of the attacking force will come under fire from the front and the side; the French had expended 60,000 men over the past four years in finding this out. Salients are equally hard to defend since they are vulnerable to enemy artillery fire from three sides. Nobody liked them, but the Germans refused to give theirs up—apparently on the notion that “ground gained was ground earned.”
The Saint-Mihiel battle was to be conducted with fourteen U.S. divisions—more than 500,000 men—and had as its overall objective the capture of Metz, a critical German rail and transportation center. It would have to be done quickly, however, because larger plans were afoot for a more critical operation in the Meuse-Argonne region about forty miles to the north.
AS GEORGE MARSHALL DREW UP the battle plans for Saint-Mihiel—which included a ruse to deceive the Germans into reinforcing elsewhere—Patton was attending a lecture when a courier handed him an urgent note from General Rockenbach: Patton’s tanks were to take part in a large-scale independent attack on the Germans to eradicate the Saint-Mihiel salient. He was to command a 144-tank brigade plus a French tank battalion of 72 machines, and the attack was to commence on September 12, which was less than three weeks away.
Suddenly everyone and everything became animated like a hive of hornets. Working under the attack orders drawn up by George Marshall and others on Pershing’s operations staff, Patton planned an order of battle for his tanks. He of course decided he needed to reconnoiter the ground himself to make sure it was suitable for tanks. Dressed in French garb so as not to alert the enemy that Americans were spying on them, he went to the forward headquarters of a French division that fronted on no-man’s-land on the floodplain of the Woevre plateau.
Patton’s patrol, consisting of French officers and enlisted men, set out after dark and did the “burglar’s crawl” across no-man’s-land for about a mile and a half until they came to the German wire. Patton had worried that the ground would be too soft for tanks, but his patrol taught him otherwise. As Patton scooped up a handful of soil with some tiny flowers intending to send it to Beatrice, his troops cut the outer band of wire and kept on toward the German trenches when a whistle caught them. One of the Frenchmen whistled back. Patton was later told that the enemy whistle “meant that if the raid was pushed further the Germans would reluctantly be forced to fire.” (In this particular stretch—which had been a “quiet sector” for more than two years—the two sides as previously noted had adopted a live-and-let-live custom. The French sergeant’s return whistle acknowledged the first and indicated that the patrol would turn back, which it did—to Patton’s disgust.) He had hoped for “an encounter.”
Back at the tank brigade’s new headquarters near the front lines everything was still buzzing along: telephone wire was laid, homing pigeons acquired from the
signal corps, the tanks were fine-tuned, guns and personal firearms were cleaned, plans rehearsed and rerehearsed, and then, ten days before the attack was to begin, the whole operation order was changed and Patton’s tank brigade would now support only the 42nd Division on different ground. The 42nd Division had never worked with tanks.
Once again Patton dutifully reconnoitered the area and found it suitable. Then rain came and threatened to foil all his carefully laid plans. Averaging (by his own estimate) three hours of sleep a night, Patton was highly aggravated when the artillery barrage for the attack awakened him at 1 a.m. on the morning of September 12, 1918.
THE VERY DAY BEFORE the Allied attack began, the Germans, on their own accord, had decided the salient was “a defensive embarrassment” and began a withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line. As a result, when the Americans (along with four French divisions) struck at daybreak on September 12, they initially gained ground all along a twenty-seven-mile front. At one point Patton encountered Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur, leading brigade of the 42nd Rainbow Division, walking upright on the battlefield through shot and shell and the whizz of German machine-gun bullets as their own “creeping barrage” rumbled inexorably toward them. Except for the general himself, MacArthur’s infantrymen were all hunkered down in shell holes waiting for the barrage to pass, while Patton’s tanks dashed hither and thither ahead seeking out enemy machine-gun nests. The two stood there making small talk, as Patton later wrote to Beatrice. “Each one [of us] wanted to leave but each hated to say so, so we let it [the barrage] come over us. It was very thin and not dangerous.”
Soon after, Patton led his tanks toward Essey despite warnings from a Frenchman who said the enemy bombardment was too intense and suggested that they halt until it lifted. Regardless, Patton marched ahead of his tanks over a bridge not knowing if it was mined or wired with explosives and once more encountered MacArthur, who had come up into Essey with his infantry. Patton asked him if he could attack the next town, Pannes, about two miles ahead, and MacArthur assented, but before they could get there all but one of the tanks had run out of gas. Patton told the sergeant commanding the serviceable tank to enter the town but he hesitated given the sights of all the dead Germans and a smashed German battery with dozens of dead artillery horses still in their traces. Patton ordered him forward anyway, saying he was going to sit on the top of the tank as it went in to Pannes. The sergeant went forward.
As they got to the north end of town, Patton spotted some Germans who wanted to surrender and sent his runner and a Lieutenant Knowles to take them. Using their pistols only, the two returned with more than thirty German prisoners, whom they sent to the rear. When they passed out of Pannes toward the next town Patton, still sitting atop the tank, had what he described as a “horrible experience.” Hearing an enemy machine gun firing, he was unable to locate it when he “glanced down the left side of the tank and about six inches below my hand paint was flying off on the side of the tank.” This prompted Patton to instantly un-ass himself from the vehicle in order to make it “a less enticing target,” according to his own action report, and dive into a shell hole where he remained until the machine gun was silenced.
The tank personnel, however, were unaware that their high-ranking passenger had jumped off, and the machine continued forward with the support of the infantry. In a hurry, Patton found the infantry commander and asked him to go forward to protect the tank but the answer was negative. Patton then asked the commander if he would send a runner, several hundred yards away, to tell the tank to fall back—the answer to which was, “Hell no, it ain’t my tank.”
Disgusted, Patton himself went forward running “like hell” and soon found himself facing the fire of four German machine guns. As bullets “sang about him,” he managed to protect himself by dodging behind his tank where he beat on the hull with his walking stick. The tank stopped and the sergeant looked out, saluted, and asked, “What do you want now, Colonel?” Patton instructed him to turn back and walked ahead of him on the return trip, shielded by the tank, “quite safe” from enemy bullets.
By then the other tanks had refueled and returned to the battle area, capturing Pannes and a horde of German prisoners. Patton, meantime, was so hungry that he ate some crackers taken from the body of a dead German. Somehow in the confusion he had lost his haversack (it had been stolen by German prisoners), which contained among other things a bottle of brandy that he savored.
With Pannes occupied by Allied troops, Patton went to the left to see about his battalion under Brett. He found them at Nonsard, having taken that town with the loss of two officers and four men. But all twenty-five tanks were out of gas and Brett himself was crying in frustration and bleeding from a wound across his nose. Patton sent for fuel and comforted him, learning that Brett had personally shot two Germans out of a church steeple. “It was a most interesting walk over the battlefield,” Patton told Beatrice. “Like the books but much less dramatic. The [enemy] dead were [all] about, mostly hit in the head. There were a lot of our men stripping off buttons and other things but they always covered the face of the dead in a nice way.”1
Refueled after a delay of several hours, Patton’s force moved on and halted for the night at Vigneulles, learning from the prisoners there that the seeming ease with which they were taking ground was because the Germans were actually in the process of evacuating the Saint-Mihiel salient. This disappointed Patton who had expected a big fight against Germany’s best and most ferocious units. Still, he took solace in having learned a valuable lesson about tank battle tactics: a reliable fuel supply must be far more abundant and closer behind the fighting tanks.
AT THIS POINT, the tank brigade’s encampment was well beyond the stated objectives for the day, and the men took stock. Of 174 tanks that had gone into the fight that morning fourteen had broken down, three were destroyed, and twenty-two were ditched (stuck in trenches or shell holes). Nine American officers and men had been killed, fourteen wounded. Eighty American tanks and twenty-five French tanks would be ready to renew the assault in the morning. The Chicago Daily News and the Los Angeles Express carried stories with Patton’s picture and the headline: “Californian Perched on Tank During Battle.”2
General Rockenbach, however, was furious at Patton. A brigade commander was supposed to be at his headquarters or at least in close touch with it—to receive orders and transmit information—not running around on the battlefield. Patton was ordered—and he complied—to give a written statement in which he promised to remain at headquarters in future actions. Privately, however, he remained recalcitrant, if not defiant, writing to Beatrice, “At least I will not sit in a dug out and have my men out in the fighting.” He had proved to his own satisfaction, he said, “that I have nerve.” He further informed his wife that he had been the highest-ranked officer in the front line except for General MacArthur, “who never ducked a shell.” (“I wanted to, but it’s foolish because it does no good. If they are going to hit you, they will.”) He enclosed for her a gift of some cap ornaments he took off a dead German, adding, “Personally I never fired a shot except to kill two poor horses with broken legs.”3
BY EVENING MACARTHUR had nearly reached the town of Mars-la-Tour, seven miles from their jumping-off point—an amazing accomplishment on a battlefield where for four years gains had been measured in yards.
While they were told to hold their positions, on the night of September 13–14 MacArthur and an aide sneaked through no-man’s-land and made for a high hill. With binoculars they could see the strategic city of Metz glowing in the distance at the end of the valley. It was perhaps ten miles away but, through his glasses, MacArthur perceived that the town was undefended, a breathtaking prospect. “There it lay, our prize wide open for the taking. Take it, and we would be in excellent position to cut off South Germany” from the rest of the country and “lead to the invasion of Central Germany and … bring a close to the war,” MacArthur concluded.
MacArthur rushed back to the division h
eadquarters and reported what he’d seen. It was agreed that it was imperative to take Metz. It was the same at the corps headquarters and First Army headquarters as well. But Pershing had received orders from General Foch to halt the advance and move the troops south for the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Even though Pershing and his planning wizard George Marshall sided with MacArthur, orders-was-orders for Pershing, and he reluctantly called a halt to the battle. MacArthur thought it was one of the great blunders of the war.
“It was an example of the inflexibility in pursuit of pre-conceived ideas,” he wrote years afterward, “that is, unfortunately, too frequent in modern warfare. Had we seized this unexpected opportunity, we would have saved thousands of American lives lost in the dim recesses of the Argonne Forest.” In any event, MacArthur, for his role in erasing the Saint-Mihiel salient, was awarded his fifth Silver Star, the Croix de Guerre, and the French Legion of Honor.4
THE FOLLOWING DAY, there was little fighting and even less the third, since the salient at Saint-Mihiel had been erased with some 7,200 Americans killed, wounded, or missing and about the same number for the Germans. The fight had been good for the tank corps’ morale and good training for a far larger and more serious operation in the Argonne Forest known only to a few planning offices—including George Marshall’s—at Pershing’s headquarters.
The battle at the Meuse-Argonne was designed as a push along the Meuse River and through the neighboring Argonne Forest aimed at retaking Sedan (pronounced sa-da), a town of about 16,000 that in 1870 had been the site of the final, humiliating defeat of the French army by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War. Thus it held an added sentiment for the French.