For three days the field-gray battalions came hurtling across no-man’s-land, and in stemming their advance the Rainbow displayed what MacArthur called an “inspiring” defense “characterized by a degree of determination worthy of the highest traditions of our army.” Gouraud sent his compliments: “The German has clearly broken his sword against our lines. Whatever he may do in the future, he shall not pass.” MacArthur wrote afterward: “In a few spots they broke through, but in the main were repulsed and driven back. We launched counterattacks and . . . the outcome was clear—the German’s last great attack of the war had failed, and Paris could breathe again.”26
It had been his first big battle. By any standard, he had acquitted himself admirably. He could have stayed at Vadenay Farm with the other brass—fuming staff officers at Chaumont said that was where he should have been—but his divisional commander disagreed. Having done his paperwork in advance and delegated authority skillfully, the new brigadier had chosen to provide the doughboys in the chalk trenches with an example of leadership. Menoher said: “MacArthur is the bloodiest fighting man in this army. I’m afraid we’re going to lose him sometime, for there’s no risk of battle that any soldier is called upon to take that he is not liable to look up and see MacArthur at his side.” On his recommendation, the brigadier was decorated with another Silver Star.
That weekend MacArthur toasted the victory in Chalons with brother officers, embracing the French barmaids and singing “Mademoiselle of Armentieres,” but he “found something missing. It may have been the vision of those writhing bodies hanging from the barbed wire or the stench of dead flesh still in my nostrils. Perhaps I was just getting old; somehow, I had forgotten how to play.” Possibly he had begun to suspect that there were aspects of Missionary Ridge which his father had failed to mention.27
Foch planned to erase the Marne salient with a counterattack, but on the second day of the Allied drive Ludendorff decided to abandon his gains, falling back on the Vesle and Ourcq rivers. Dissatisfied with the 26th (Yankee) Division’s pursuit of the withdrawing Boche, Chaumont replaced it with the still-weary Rainbow. MacArthur found himself back in a dugout, this time within the tortured Dantean thicket of the Fere Forest. But the enemy was retreating from the wood, too, preferring to dig in atop the two-hundred-foot heights on the far side of the Ourcq. The 42nd’s advance was heartbreakingly slow, every step of it being contested by German aircraft, gas, and machine guns emplaced on the high ground. Moreover, as MacArthur explained to a GHQ courier at midnight on Saturday, July 27, the 42nd’s momentum had carried it beyond the range of friendly artillery and supply columns. He went without sleep that night, crawling from dugout to dugout to coordinate the next day’s drive. On Monday the strategic village of Sergy changed hands eleven times. MacArthur introduced Indian tactics remembered from tales spun in frontier forts during his childhood: “Crawling forward in twos and threes against each stubborn nest of enemy guns, we closed in with the bayonet and the hand grenade. It was savage and there was no quarter asked or given. It seemed to be endless. Bitterly, brutally, the action seesawed back and forth. A point would be taken, and then would come a sudden fire from some unsuspected direction and the deadly counterattack. . . . There was neither rest nor mercy.” By twilight of the following day they had finally wrested possession of the village from the enemy and were dug in on the cliffs. MacArthur received his third Silver Star.28
On Wednesday he acquired new responsibilities. The Rainbow’s infantry regiments were organized in two brigades, the 83rd and the 84th. Deciding that the 84th’s brigadier was “no longer fit,” Menoher relieved him and gave the command to MacArthur. For a week MacArthur also continued to serve as chief of staff— later the staff presented him with a gold cigarette case inscribed “The Bravest of the Brave”—and then he turned those duties over to his childhood friend, Billy Hughes. Meanwhile the 42nd had been trying, with little success, to advance northward from the Ourcq to the Vesle, which runs roughly parallel to it. A Boche deserter reported that the enemy was pulling back, but there was no sign of it. In the small hours of Friday morning, MacArthur crawled into no-man’s-land with an aide: “The dead were so thick in spots we tumbled over them. There must have been at least 2,000 of those sprawled bodies. I identified the insignia of six of the best German divisions. The stench was suffocating. Not a tree was standing. The moans and cries of wounded men sounded everywhere. Sniper bullets sung like the buzzing of a hive of angry bees . . . . I counted almost a hundred disabled guns of various size and several times that number of abandoned machine guns.”29
Abruptly a Very flare blazed overhead, and he and his aide hit the dirt. In the flickering light MacArthur saw, dead ahead, “three Germans—a lieutenant pointing with outstretched arm, a sergeant crouched over a machine gun, a corporal feeding a bandolier of cartridges to the weapon. I held my breath waiting for the burst, but there was nothing. The seconds clicked by, but still nothing. We waited until we could wait no longer.” Watching the Germans’ position, the aide “shifted his poised grenade to the other hand and reached for his flashlight. They had not moved. They were never to move. They were dead, all dead—the lieutenant with shrapnel through his heart, the sergeant with his belly blown into his back, the corporal with his spine where his head should have been.” Returning at dawn, he went directly to Menoher, whom he found conferring with Major General Hunter Liggett, the corps commander. Except for a few snipers, he said, the enemy had fled north. Leaving him in a chair, Menoher and Liggett were poring over maps when they were startled by the sound of snoring. It was MacArthur, who had not slept for four days or nights. Liggett said, “Well I’ll be damned! Menoher, you better cite him.” It was MacArthur’s fourth Silver Star.30
By noon he was awake and back with his command, outdistancing the 83rd Brigade, which was advancing through woods on his flank. The Germans were on the run now, and a 12:10 P.M. dispatch from MacArthur to Menoher fairly throbs with his excitement: “Have personally assumed command of the line. Have broken the enemy’s resistance on the right. Immediately threw forward my left and broke his front. Am advancing my whole line with utmost speed. The enemy is immediately in front but am maneuvering my battalions so that he can not get set in position . . . . I intend to throw him into the Vesle. I am using small patrols acting with great speed and continually flanking him so that he can not form a line of resistance. I am handling the columns myself, and my losses are extraordinarily light.” Menoher called this lunge “an example of leadership and the high qualities of command which I considered unique.”31
That night the exhausted brigade was relieved, having lost 44 percent of its strength since the opening of the drive. For a week the Rainbow rested in grim surroundings while the Germans clung to the Vesle until, with the Allied capture of Soissons to the northwest, they were outflanked. Ludendorff’s Marne salient, which had reached its high-water mark at Châteâu-Thierry, had been wiped from the map. The grateful French, recognizing MacArthur’s contribution, decorated him with a second Croix de Guerre and appointed him a commander in the Legion of Honor. His own government had other plans for him. On August 3 the New York Times noted “it was officially learned today” that Brigadier MacArthur was being ordered home to train a new brigade in Maryland. MacArthur protested to Chaumont. Menoher pointed out that the brigadier was “the source of the greatest possible inspiration” to his men, who were “devoted to him,” and the orders were rescinded. On August 11 the 42nd’s commander was instructed to “retain Brigadier General MacArthur on duty with your division and in command of Brigade.” A week later he was given permanent command of the 84th.32
By now everyone in the AEF knew who MacArthur was. His bizarre toggery, which he now enhanced with a plum-colored satin necktie, was as much a part of his charisma as the hair-raising expeditions into no-man’s-land. So was his insolent attitude toward Chaumont, and no one was greatly surprised by his response to an order directing the veteran Rainbow to participate in ten days of training m
aneuvers northeast of Pershing’s headquarters. What his men deserved, he decided, was leave in Paris. He himself never saw the capital—never took a day off during the war, despite two gassings—but now, on his own authority, he signed forty-eight-hour passes for 10 percent of the brigade. Their comrades, he let it be known, would have their turn when the first batch returned. Actually the two hundred reappeared almost immediately, and none followed them. MacArthur had exceeded his authority. MPs sent them back as soon as they left the brigade area. Yet his gesture had won the gratitude of his men—and intensified the emnity of GHQ.33
Brigadier General MacArthur and his 84th Brigade staff
Brigadier General MacArthur just before the Armistice
It is doubtful, however, that Pershing himself ever heard of this incident. His mind was on larger matters. He had a million doughboys in France now, and was about to use the cream of them in the first offensive led by Americans. The new Allied strategy was to smash in all enemy salients, improving communications for a final victory campaign. One of those lumps, cutting the main railroad between Paris and Nancy, had been a Boche threat since the early days of the war. The French had lost sixty thousand men trying to take it in 1915 and had called it “the hernia of Saint-Mihiel” ever since. The American commander stalked it now. His plan was to feint toward Belfort and then strike hard on September 12 with nine crack divisions, one of them the Rainbow.
MacArthur spent two weeks whipping replacements into shape. Some had left Hoboken with virtually no preparation for combat. Once he noticed a hundred men huddled around a sergeant. He was about to reprimand them when the sergeant explained, “Sir, I am teaching them how to load rifles.” MacArthur left them with the ironic observation that “when an army is in the fix that we are, the knowledge of how to load and fire a rifle is rather basic.” Menoher, aware of Pershing’s conviction that no man should go into battle without comprehensive training, didn’t want to use nine thousand of the newcomers at all; he changed his mind only after MacArthur promised to have them ready before they went over the top.34
On the morning of September 9 the Rainbow trudged toward the southern tip of the salient in a driving rain, and the following night they entered the trenches. At daybreak fourteen hundred planes, led by Billy Mitchell, scouted enemy positions and a wedge of tanks, commanded by George S. Patton, lumbered into position while MacArthur told his men what was expected of them. It was, by the standards of the western front, a great deal: five miles of gains on the first day and four miles on the second. At H hour, 5:00 A.M. the next day, MacArthur was the first man to leap over the parapet and lead the 84th’s assault columns toward the enemy’s works. How seriously the Germans meant to defend the salient is a matter of some controversy; afterward they said they had been preparing to withdraw anyway, but captured orders seemed to contradict that. In any event, MacArthur’s Iowans and Alabamans quickly overran their objectives, despite the fact that Major Patton’s tanks, in MacArthur’s words, “soon bogged down in . . . mud.” Being the men they were, a macho duel between the two was inevitable. It came in the midst of enemy shellfire. Both stood erect, eyeing each other as the crumps crept closer. According to Patton, “We stood and talked but neither was much interested in what the other said as we could not get our minds off the shells.” According to MacArthur, Patton flinched at one point and then looked annoyed with himself, whereupon the brigadier said dryly, “Don’t worry, major; you never hear the one that gets you.”35
That was at Essey, where MacArthur won his fifth Silver Star for gallant leadership. Arriving moments after the village fell, he found near a château “a German officer’s horse saddled and equipped standing in a barn, a battery of guns complete in every detail, and the entire instrumentation and music of a regimental band. “ The salient had been wiped out. Entire Lehr, Saxon, and Landwehr regiments were being herded into prisoner pens. In Saint-Mihiel embarrassed doughboys were being embraced by French patriarchs who toasted them with hoarded kirsch and displayed American flags copied from photographs, the stripes all black. It was a great triumph, and MacArthur should have been jubilant. He wasn’t: “In Essey I saw a sight I shall never quite forget. . . . Men, women, and children plodded along in mud up to their knees carrying what few household effects they could. . . . On other fields in other wars, how often it was to be repeated before my aching eyes.” It was that vein of compassion which set him apart from the Pattons of the army. He could be ostentatious and ruthless, and as he had demonstrated in the Visayas and in Mexico, he was a killer. Yet his attitudes toward war would always be highly ambivalent, exulting in triumph while pitying the victims of battle. One cannot help speculating what might have become of him if his parents hadn’t raised him to be a soldier.36
The night after the taking of Saint-Mihiel, MacArthur, accompanied by his adjutant, slipped through no-man’s-land, through the enemy lines, across an old Franco-Prussian War battlefield at Mars-Ia-Tour, and up the slope of a hill. On the summit he raised his binoculars and peered eastward toward the stronghold of Metz. There he saw lights betraying heavy traffic in and around the fortress. The very fact that the Germans were not observing the blackout revealed their vulnerability: “As I had suspected, Metz was practically defenseless for the moment. Its combat garrison had been temporarily withdrawn to support other sectors of action. Here was an unparalleled opportunity to break the Hindenburg Line at its pivotal point. There it lay, our prize wide open for the taking. Take it and we would be in an excellent position to cut off south Germany from the rest of the country; it would lead to the invasion of central Germany by way of the practically undefended Moselle Valley. Victory at Metz would cut the great lines of communication and supply behind the German front, and might bring the war to a quick close.”37
It was, he argued after his return through his own barbwire, an opportunity which should be quickly grasped. After the war Pershing concurred: “Without a doubt an immediate continuation of the advance would have carried us well beyond the Hindenburg Line and possibly into Metz. “ But at the time no one agreed with MacArthur. His superiors were guilty of what Napoleon called the unforgivable sin of a military commander: “forming a picture”—assuming that the enemy will act a certain way in a given situation when in fact his behavior may be very different. Hughes told the young brigadier that Chaumont’s orders to the Rainbow were “definite and came from the highest authority”; the 42nd had no alternative to halting where it was. Like the Germans introducing poison gas at the first battle of Ypres and the British using massed tanks at Amiens the month before Saint-Mihiel, the Americans lacked the imagination and logistical skill necessary to exploitation of a breakthrough. At the end of his life MacArthur would insist that “had we seized this unexpected opportunity we would have saved thousands of American lives lost in the dim recesses of the Argonne Forest. It was an example of the inflexibility in the pursuit of previously conceived ideas that is, unfortunately, too frequent in modern warfare.” He might have added that, having learned the lesson, he used it in the next war to spare the sons of the men he had commanded in France.38
Soon, he said, the Boche “brought up thousands of troops from Strasbourg and other sectors, and within a week the whole Allied army could not have stormed Metz.” MacArthur spent that week living in unaccustomed luxury. One of the prizes acquired in pinching off the salient was Saint Benoit château, which had been the headquarters of the 19th German Army Corps. The enemy had departed so hastily that doughboys found a fully set dining room table and a prepared meal. Each day enemy barrages crept closer to the mansion, but the brigadier insisted on living in it. According to one story, he was dining with his staff when a missile exploded in the courtyard. The staff hit the floor, but their leader remained erect, murmuring, “All of Germany cannot make a shell that will kill MacArthur. Sit down again, gentlemen, with me.” He was uncommonly fearless, but he was not foolhardy. When captured prisoners revealed that heavy artillery was being brought up to demolish the château, MacArthur
quickly moved his command post. The following day, September 24, 280-millimeter shells demolished the building.39
MacArthur’s paperwork was heavy now. Foch was charting an “arpeggio” of drives against the Hindenburg Line, to start the next night. “Everyone attack as soon as they can, as strong as they can, for as long as they can,” he said, and “lédifice commence à craquer. Tout le monde à la bataille!” The fulcrum of the plan was the American army. Pershing’s troops held the extreme right of the Allied line. In the center were the French, with the British on their left and King Albert of Belgium on the sea. Much was expected on Albert’s end, less from the other. Pershing was to be the Allied anchor. He had used his veteran divisions at Saint-Mihiel, and they needed time to reorganize. Moreover, he faced the toughest link in the Hindenburg Line, the one part the Germans could not yield and retain any hope of winning the war.
Before him lay a twenty-four-mile front. In its center was the fortified alp of Montfaucon, from whose height the Imperial Crown Prince had watched the siege of Verdun in 1916. On the right were the entrenched heights of the river Meuse; on the left, the fantastic Foret d’Argonne, a wild Hans Christian Andersen land of giant trees cunningly interwoven with the nests of machine guns. German strategists had prepared four defense positions behind one another in this vastness, stretching back fourteen miles and manned by double garrisons. The reason was the Sedan-Mézieres railroad in their rear. It was their only line of escape to Liége and Germany. Once it was broken their army couldn’t be withdrawn; it would lie at the mercy of the Allies. Foch knew how strong Ludendorff’s defenses were here; that was why the chief American mission was to hold. The Yanks would join in the tattoo of attacks, but their big job was to crack the whip, with the Belgians swinging free on the other end. Pershing, preferring the offensive, rushed all available troops to the front in camions and threw nine fresh divisions against the Germans on the misty morning of September 26. The enemy was stunned. He hadn’t thought anyone would dare attack here. His forward positions were overrun, and the doughboys surged up Montfaucon and took it. Then the Germans’ center stiffened. They retired to their third defense line, named the “Kriemhilde Stellung” for the Nibelungenlied heroine, and held.40