The U.S. First Army, created on August 10, 1918, consisted of three army corps—about 600,000 men—under General Pershing’s command. It would be joined on the left by the much-depleted French Fourth Army of about 135,000 men. The ground was exceptionally difficult, consisting of hilly country rising above two river valleys that the attacking forces had to negotiate. For four years the Germans had been creating a multilayered defense—including fortified positions and concrete pillboxes (small, low shelters)—to a depth of thirteen miles behind the front lines.
As an illustration of the dangers of trench warfare even in the rear areas, George Marshall came close to becoming “wastage” himself one day when he went to the dentist. In the brief interval between Saint-Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne battle, Marshall got a toothache and, while he was in the process of getting a tooth filled, “A German aviator dropped a bomb into the courtyard of the Intelligence Section of Headquarters, close by, and the explosion almost resulted in the loss of my tongue, as the dentist was a trifle gun-shy …”
The Meuse-Argonne attack was scheduled for September 26 at first light. George Marshall was one of the chief planners of the operation and, three days before the battle was to begin, he was tasked with the stupendous chore of moving 400,000 U.S. troops from the Saint-Mihiel battlefield to the Meuse-Argonne sector, sixty miles away, by night—and secretly so the Germans wouldn’t find out about it.
It was an almost unheard-of proposition. He would have to pull fifteen divisions out of line at Saint-Mihiel, replace them with 200,000 French troops, and then move everything sixty miles: the various headquarters, field kitchens, ammunition, and supplies, 3,000 artillery pieces—light and heavy alike—90,000 animals, hospitals along terrible roads, and, because of lack of motor transport, a third of the men would have to march afoot.
He went into his office, closed the door, and thought for a while, realizing that if he made an error it could cost him his career. Then he called for a stenographer and standing before a large map began dictating. In an hour he was done and sent the plan on to General Hugh Drum, who would present it to Pershing.5
Next morning, Marshall was told to report immediately to General Drum, who somberly announced, “General Pershing wishes to speak to you.” As they entered Pershing’s office, Drum remarked casually to him, “That order for the Meuse-Argonne concentration you sent over last night is a dandy. The general thought it was a fine piece of work.” Marshall was so flabbergasted that when he thought about it later he couldn’t remember a single thing Pershing had said to him.6
ARMED WITH A GREATER UNDERSTANDING of how his tanks and men would perform under battle conditions, Patton readied for the Meuse-Argonne attack. Patton again donned a French uniform, so as not to give away U.S. intentions, and went out on patrol to reconnoiter and discover if the ground he was to cover was suitable for his machines. He found the enemy trenches not as wide and the ground better than he had expected, although the German defenses were formidable. The Hindenburg Line had been constructed as a “defense in depth”; in this case, for twelve miles to the rear of its leading edges was a catacomb of bunkers, trenches, pillboxes with cannons, and mutually supporting concrete-protected machine-gun nests. The ground itself was pocked with innumerable shell holes, not a few of which were deep enough to envelope a tank.
Patton was given the responsibility of supporting (leading) two infantry divisions, the 28th and the 35th, in a northward drive up the valley of the river Aire that bordered the Argonne Forest. Patton situated Brett’s battalion on the west side of the river with the 28th Infantry Division and Compton’s battalion on the east with the 35th. The French battalion in support would bring up the rear.
His battle plan emphasized the offensive and presciently anticipated Germany’s armored Blitzkrieg two decades into the future. To counter the enemy’s defense in depth, Patton organized an offense in depth, in which the leading companies, after destroying the first line of enemy resistance, would hold the new line while the rear companies passed through and attacked the next enemy fortifications, and the French, in support, would pass through the whole in pursuit of the fleeing enemy. It was a dangerous, violent, hard-hitting stratagem.
Meanwhile, MacArthur was ordered to stage “a powerful double raid” in the Saint-Benoit sector to confuse the Germans into thinking the Americans were continuing their attack toward Metz. On September 25, one day before the Meuse-Argonne Offensive was to begin, MacArthur so effectively surprised the Germans that they were shelled out of their trenches and practically annihilated, while the American infantry were maneuvered “to make a lot of noise” but remained safely out of the line of fire. MacArthur, who had accompanied the raiders, earned his sixth Silver Star for his efforts. Afterward the Rainbow Division was ordered to the “vast and shifting” battlefield of the Meuse-Argonne.7
THE BEST-LAID PLANS of Colonel George Marshall, however, did not go always as intended. Patton fumed on September 23, three days before the battle was to begin, “One fine example of efficiency has just happened. 10,000 gallons of gasoline arrived in tank cars with no pump. Now we can’t get it out except by dippers!!! It is a good thing I have a cheerful disposition.”
That same day: “One whole battalion has failed to show up and I can’t find it. The battalion commander [Compton] spent the day looking for a house instead of getting his tanks.”
The following day he observed to his diary, “The Bosch took [aerial] pictures of us so I guess we shall be shelled or something,” and to Beatrice later that evening, “We had a very quiet day except that a shell took off a man’s foot for which I am sorry.”
Next day, September 25, the eve of battle, Patton reported to his diary that “one of our trucks full of [message] runners was hit by an artillery shell at 6:15 p.m.,” and to Beatrice, “If I wrote all night I could not tell you how much I love you,” and that he needed to eat and get to bed as “I shant be able to do [either] for the next few days.”
The furious 1,400-gun artillery barrage began at 2:30 a.m. and promptly at 5:30 Patton’s tanks, followed by tens of thousands of infantry, moved forward in the attack. “I am always nervous at these times,” he told Beatrice, “just as at Polo or Foot ball before the game starts.”8
ON OCTOBER 1, MacArthur’s Rainbow Division was carried in trucks driven by French army Vietnamese drivers to a dark and dismaying forest known as the Montfaucon Woods, where a desperate fight had recently concluded. The ground was torn with huge shell craters and the woods were “a mere graveyard of broken limbs and splintered stumps. Dead bodies, some of them in a bad state of decomposition, also littered the woods and slopes.”9 To make matters worse, it had turned bitterly cold.
America would send a million men into the Meuse-Argonne to attempt a breakthrough of the Hindenburg Line, known locally as the Krunhilde Stalling, a grim killing ground consisting of hundreds of machine-gun nests, concrete pillboxes, and barbed wire twenty-five feet deep, which the Germans thought to be impregnable.10
To the Americans’ advantage, the Germans clearly were not expecting an attack through the Argonne, and in fact had fortified Metz a few days after MacArthur had pleaded to be allowed to take it, so that “an entire American field army would not be able to take the city.” However, as soon as they perceived that the Allied attack in the Argonne was a major thrust and not a feint, the German High Command rushed twenty infantry divisions—200,000 more men—into the fray. Still, it was a high credit to George Marshall’s planning that moved a full American field army across the entire enemy front without detection and it managed to get into battle formation in less than a week.
If successful, the attack would in MacArthur’s view lead to the capture of Sedan and the defeat of Germany. This of course, like practically everything in the war, was easier said than done. The day after his arrival MacArthur watched from an old churchyard on a hill as the 79th Division unsuccessfully attempted a frontal attack on the German positions. It reinforced his conviction that frontal assaults in the
age of the machine gun were a thing of the past. A particularly bloody impediment to the American advance was a group of hills known as the Côte de Châtillon, where first the 32nd Division, then the 91st, and finally the First Division—the Big Red One of regulars—had broken their backs, taking appalling casualties and recoiling in horror from the ferocious enemy fire. The Argonne was turning into a giant corpse factory. Now it became the Rainbow’s time of trial.
MacArthur carefully studied the ground, the “desolate and forbidding terrain” of rolling hills and steep forested valleys where death lay everywhere behind the full horizon. He concluded that the Côte de Châtillon was the key to the entire enemy position in the Argonne; he proposed to capture it by concentrating his units in small batches directly at the center of the côte, rather than spreading them out on a line of battle in a full frontal assault.
The night before MacArthur’s attack, the corps commander, Lieutenant General Charles Summerall, who had served under MacArthur’s father, appeared out of the cold, dark, and rain in the doorway of MacArthur’s headquarters in an old French farmhouse dripping wet and “looking tired and worn.” MacArthur gave him a cup of steaming hot coffee, which he drank—then the general turned abruptly on MacArthur and said dramatically, “Give me Châtillon or a list of five thousand casualties.”
“All right, General,” the startled MacArthur replied. “We’ll take it, or my name will head the list.”11
Later that night, MacArthur was slightly wounded by shrapnel while conducting a final reconnaissance of the approaches to Châtillon. It was worth it, however, as he discovered something he’d expected all along: the Germans tended to give great strength to the center of their positions but often neglected the flanks. Châtillon was no exception. From the center, the deep belt of wire entanglements and entrenchments “dribbled out at the ends.”
“There was where I planned to strike,” said General MacArthur, “with my Alabama cotton growers on the left, and my Iowa pig farmers on the right.”
The attack got off in a misty daybreak with MacArthur, white-faced and ill with some kind of bug, out of his sickbed to lead it. Within the hour, however, the advance had broken down and MacArthur, ironically, found himself in the same position as his father in Tennessee half a century earlier—at the base of a steep precipice preparing to lead his men in a grave and glorious uphill attack.
He sent the men forward in small units that “sneaked, crawled, side-slipped” from cover to cover; then, “when the chance came,” they would form squads or platoons and spring up to envelope the enemy machine-gun nests and put them out of action. It was desperate, savage business, but as the sun sank over the Côte de Châtillon that day amid a field of dead bodies that a man could walk across without touching ground, the 168th Iowa clung by its fingernails to one of the position’s main hills.12
AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME MacArthur launched his attack, Patton’s tanks and soldiers began making their way across the greasy shell-pocked mush of no-man’s-land. Earlier, as four tank companies—some eighty tanks—tried to cross a bridge, a German counterbarrage killed the MPs who were directing traffic and caused the tanks to be delayed. From his command post, Patton peered impatiently into the gloom where his men were fighting and dying.
Finally he could stand it no longer and at about 6:30 took a captain, a lieutenant, and twelve runners carrying baskets of homing pigeons, telephones, and wire and stalked out of the CP northward toward the sound of the guns. After about two miles near a small town called Cheppy, Patton stopped his entourage in a railroad cut and took stock. The battle was still raging ahead of them; they could hear it clearly now, and Patton sent a pigeon back giving his location and situation as he understood it.
Half a dozen tanks appeared, which had encountered trouble navigating German trenches, and after a chat with Patton they moved on toward the fight. Suddenly enemy machine-gun bullets began kicking up dirt and Patton ordered his people back into the safety of the rail cut, then sent his orderly Joseph Angelo to scout for Germans or other trouble. Next, groups of American infantrymen began to appear, walking, running, disorganized toward the rear. They told Patton they had become separated from their units in the fog. Patton ordered them to join his group and soon the machine-gun fire became intense.
By now Patton had nearly a hundred stray soldiers in the cut. Evidently in the fog the tanks and infantry had unwittingly bypassed German machine-gun nests, which were now coming alive as the mist thinned. Patton noticed a small hill about one hundred yards to the rear and ordered everyone to make a dash for the reverse slope where they would be sheltered from the fire. No sooner had they done so than a breeze swept away the last of the fog and machine guns seemed to open on them from every direction.
Patton then saw several of Compton’s tanks another hundred yards away at the base of the slope and sent his captain to order them forward immediately. When he didn’t return, Patton sent his lieutenant to repeat the message, and after a while, frustrated, he marched himself down to the scene of the inaction. This was the storied moment when Patton as warrior emerged.
He discovered that one of the French machines, a Schneider (heavier and somewhat larger than the Renaults the Americans were driving), had got itself stuck at the only suitable crossing place of an enormous trench formerly occupied by the Germans. A French crew had begun digging at the banks but every time shells or bullets came near they dove back inside the trench for safety. Patton remonstrated with the French tankers and they resumed work; he then went to the American tanks and got them digging also. It was here that, when bullets or blasts frightened the Frenchmen, Patton stood on the parapet of the trench roaring, “To hell with them—they can’t hit me!”
When a suitable passage had been excavated, Patton and others chained together several tanks for better traction and then he stood in front, backing up and leading the big machines with hand signals across the chasm the diggers had created in the enormous German trench. With about twenty of his men hit with bullets or shrapnel, Patton followed the tanks up the slope to where the stray American soldiers were waiting and told them to spread out in combat formation and follow him.
Shouting “Let’s go get ’em—who’s with me!” Patton started forward waving his large walking stick like the drum major of a college marching band. The soldiers jumped to their feet and followed Patton’s orders until they had gone about a hundred yards over the crest of the hill where they were met with withering machine-gun fire from numerous German nests.
Everyone, Patton included, hit the dirt, but once on the ground Patton had a revelation about his ancestors, in which his grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-uncles from long ago wars appeared to him in a vision, watching him from a cloud over the distant German lines. This had a strange calming effect and Patton immediately got to his feet shouting, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” He began his forward march again, but only six of the men followed him this time, his orderly Angelo among them. By the time they had reached the forward battle area only Angelo remained, the others having been shot down.
Then a machine-gun bullet ripped through Patton’s thigh, near his hip, and tore halfway through his body leaving a fist-size hole in his buttock. Patton tried to march on but soon stumbled and fell.
Angelo helped him into a shallow shell hole where he examined and bandaged the wound with what gauze he had and some he took from the body of a dead soldier. They were alone, the two of them, utterly pinned down by enemy machine-gun fire near the village of Cheppy. The Germans had reoccupied the railroad cut about forty yards distant and, every time Patton or Angelo showed their heads, would unleash a furious burst that skimmed the dirt rim of the shell hole. In the intervals they could hear the Germans chattering with one another.
Presently some of Patton’s tanks came up, causing an immediate cessation in the German fire. Patton sent Angelo to tell the tankers where the German positions were and in no time at all two of the 37mm gun tanks had blown the enemy gunners out of the rail cu
t. It took the tanks more than an hour, however, to destroy all the German machine-gun nests in the area—at least twenty-five of them by some estimates. Meanwhile, one of Patton’s sergeants, who had stayed behind the crest of the hill with other unarmed staff members, came forward. Patton sent him back with word that Major Brett was to command the brigade and under no circumstance was anyone to attempt to rescue him until the fire had died down. Men ran to find a stretcher, and a pigeon was released to headquarters telling of Patton’s wounding. One of Patton’s tanks stayed by the shell hole that he lay in, guarding him, he said, “like a watch dog.”13
When at last it was possible to put Patton safely on a stretcher and carry him to the rear he insisted on being taken to the division headquarters to give his report before going to the hospital.
One doctor told Patton he “couldn’t see how the bullet went where it did without crippling me for life.” The doctor said he could not have run a probe “without either getting the hip joint, the sciatic nerve or the big artery. ‘Fate’ again.”14 But the wound turned septic and the doctors had to leave it open and insert drains that were uncomfortable. Patton was removed by train—(“cattle car,” he said, where they were “put in racks three high”)—to a recuperation hospital away from the front, where he languished in bed receiving visitors, reading, and answering mail.
ALTHOUGH THE AMERICANS HAD THE MEN, only a few were trained—let alone battle tested—by the time the First U.S. Army plunged into the forests and valleys of the Meuse-Argonne.
The Germans seemed utterly surprised, a tribute perhaps to Marshall’s ability to secretly move that 400,000-man army and all its accoutrements in three days across the very face of the German front. At first the Germans gave ground—nearly three-quarters of a mile—but their resistance soon stiffened. As Marshall explained it, the problem was that inexperienced company and field-grade commanders lost control of their units after reaching their objectives and failed to exploit the gains by continuing the attack with the enemy on the run. In addition, the fast-moving armies had outrun their supplies and artillery support and needed time to regather.