By Edward G. Lengel
In the 1970s, Henry Berry interviewed dozens of aged veterans about their role in the First World War. He asked one “very dignified gentleman” of eighty-two years for his feelings about the Meuse-Argonne.
“Now,” the veteran said, “do you want my frank opinion?”
“Absolutely,” Berry replied.
“Well, I think it was a fucked-up mess.”
That, recorded Berry, “was the general opinion of all the men I saw.”
***
It was the biggest logistical undertaking in the history of the U.S. Army, before or since. In two weeks, six hundred thousand men, four thousand guns, ninety thousand horses, and almost a million tons of supplies would move sixty miles from St. Mihiel to the Meuse-Argonne, and relieve 220,000 troops of the French Second Army. Colonel George C. Marshall, a thirty-seven-year-old staff officer, ran the whole operation. Marshall, a serious, aloof, and methodical man with fiery red hair, had started the war as a lieutenant on the staff of the 1st Division. He soon became divisional operations officer, and his efficient staff work at Cantigny in May 1918 drew Pershing’s attention. Two months later he joined First Army headquarters as an assistant in the Operations Section, and in August he was given the acting rank of colonel. He performed well during the St. Mihiel offensive, but had never demonstrated any aptitude for managing large logistical operations—especially nothing on the scale of the Meuse-Argonne offensive. He never could figure out why Pershing chose him for the job.
Marshall learned of his new assignment sometime on September 8 or 9 (he couldn’t remember which), when Brigadier General Hugh A. Drum, Pershing’s chief of staff, called him to his office. Drum —“Drummie” to his friends—was a prodigy. Thirty-nine years old, he was the son of Captain John Drum, who had been killed at San Juan Hill in July 1898. President McKinley appointed Hugh a first lieutenant shortly afterward, at the tender age of eighteen, and sent him to the Philippines, where he spent eleven years. While there he rose to the rank of captain, and on his return to the United States he joined the staff of the 2d Division. Querulous but extremely intelligent, Drum served as an instructor in military art at Leavenworth Staff College from 1914 to 1916 and organized the National Guard on the Mexican border as a member of Pershing’s staff during the expedition of 1916–17. By September 1918, Drum had in effect become Pershing’s right-hand man. Marshall listened respectfully while he spoke.
After tersely outlining the Meuse-Argonne offensive scheduled to begin in two and a half weeks, Drum told Marshall that he would be responsible for moving the troops to the new battlefront after the St. Mihiel offensive ended. Preparations must begin immediately; there was little time to spare. Marshall had to plan the withdrawal of American forces from St. Mihiel and provide for their relief by other Allied and American units; designate the roads to be used on the way north; schedule traffic timetables; arrange for motorized and horse-drawn transport for troops, guns, equipment, and supplies; lay out camps and billets on the road and at the front; and work with the French to replace their units on the Meuse-Argonne front with the nine huge American divisions that would lead the attack. All of this would have to be done as secretly as possible, preferably at night, lest the Germans observe the movement and bombard the packed roads with their formidable artillery.
After glancing at the map and the forces involved, Marshall saluted and left Drum’s office. A growing feeling of horror possessed him. Unable to work or even to think, he left headquarters and walked along a nearby canal. The more he tried to grasp the task before him the more confused he became, until his mind seemed frozen in a block of ice. Spotting an elderly French fisherman, one of those who “forever line the banks of the canals and apparently never get a bite,” the befuddled colonel sat down next to him.
They did not exchange a word, but after watching the fisherman for half an hour Marshall felt a little calmer. He returned to his office, “still without any solution of the problem, but in a more philosophical mood.” Starting with the principle that “the only way to begin is to commence,” Marshall called a stenographer, spread out a map on the table, and set to work. In less than an hour he had come up with the outlines of a plan. Still unsure of himself, he sent it to Drum through a subordinate and then made himself scarce. The next morning Drum summoned Marshall to a meeting with the commander in chief. “That order for the Meuse-Argonne concentration you sent over last night is a dandy,” Drum remarked jovially as they walked to Pershing’s office. “The General thought it was a fine piece of work.” Marshall proudly remembered the plan as “my best contribution to the war.”
On September 13, with the St. Mihiel offensive just under way, Marshall started moving troops toward the Meuse-Argonne. He had a system—the artillery would move first, then the reserve troops, and finally the frontline divisions—but he never figured out exactly how it worked in practice. “I often wonder,” he later wrote, “how in the world the concentration was ever put through in the face of so many complications.” Three dirt roads and three light railways bore the traffic of fifteen divisions and three corps headquarters.
Each division consisted of one thousand trucks carrying foot soldiers, ten-mile-long columns of horses and wagons hauling artillery and supplies, and masses of foot-slogging infantry and support troops dragging gun carts and carrying heavy packs. Vehicles, horses, and men moved at differing rates of speed, causing long halts and sudden surges in traffic. Accidents and breakdowns were common, and the logjams horrendous.
American, French, and Indochinese truck drivers—the latter, according to bigoted Doughboys, “sun-burned, almond-eyed, square-cheeked Chinks” who drove like “madmen”—teamsters, troops, and officers disagreed over who deserved priority at every intersection. Marshall carefully distributed military police to manage traffic and settle disputes, but the young and inexperienced MPs struggled to keep vehicles and troops moving. They screamed and gestured ineffectively while vehicles collided and drivers cursed or started free-for-all fights that spread along columns like cinematic barroom brawls. Driving along a road one night to observe the operation, Marshall witnessed a chaotic scene:
a solid mass of transportation, mostly motor-drawn. There was no light of any kind, except occasionally from the exhaust flames of the large tractors hauling heavy guns. . . . The roadside was fairly well littered with broken trucks, automobiles—particularly Dodge cars—and motorcycles. I saw one aviation truck, from which a long hangar beam projected, sideswipe two machine-gun mules, incapacitating both and injuring the driver. Near Void there was a jam resulting from one busload of soldiers being driven into the river and the following truck wedged on the bridge. At this same point the following night another busload of soldiers crashed through the railroad gate and was struck by an engine, several of the men being killed and a number injured.
Yet for all the accidents, traffic jams, rerouting, intermingled units, and fights, the troops did get there, on time and generally in one piece. And, miracle of miracles, the Germans didn’t notice.
***
Colonel William “Billy” Mitchell, a thirty-eight-year-old Wisconsin native who had served in the U.S. Army for twenty years, had responsibilities almost as onerous as Marshall’s, but his personality was very different. Outgoing, independent, arrogant, intelligent, and hardworking, he never shied from a fight. Aviation fascinated him, and as a staff officer in 1916 he had taken flying lessons in hopes of becoming an army pilot. The army rejected Mitchell because of his “erratic” flying, but in March 1917 he became an observer with the Allied air forces in France. He logged hundreds of hours of flying time as he studied British and French methods of aerial combat.
In the summer of 1917,Mitchell rose to the rank of colonel and became Pershing’s chief air officer. Increasing power and influence made him insufferably cocky, alienating Pershing’s staff officers—particularly Drum and Nolan—and, over time, even the commander in chief. Sporting a walking cane because he thought it made him look dapper, Mitchell emblazoned his aircraft with his personal symbol, an eagle in a circle, in a bid to pose as an “intrepid airman.” More substantively, Mitchell feuded with Pershing and his staff over the role of the air service. He demanded its independence, while Pershing insisted on its subservience to the army. This dispute fed Mitchell’s deepening contempt for the army in general and the infantry in particular, whose officers he treated like a bunch of narrow-minded lunkheads. Pershing appointed Mitchell to a series of commands, finally making him chief of air service for First Army just before the St. Mihiel offensive, but never really trusted him.
Pershing and Mitchell held similar views of their British and French allies. Mitchell’s observations of Allied aerial tactics had convinced him that they were too defensive in nature. He wanted his own fliers to be more aggressive, attacking in large concentrations and taking the fight to the enemy. Mitchell especially prized the principle of mass attack. The German fliers, he knew, tried to disperse Allied airmen by testing the whole front, and especially the flanks of any Allied ground advance. Mitchell told his fliers not to attempt to challenge the Germans everywhere. Instead, they must concentrate for maximum punch. By bombing and strafing only at critical points, he believed, they would have a decisive effect on the ground.
When the United States entered the war, the army had 131 air officers, including only 56 pilots. Mitchell and his fellow believers did a great deal to reverse that weakness, drawing on veteran pilots of the Lafayette Escadrille and sifting eager young recruits from the army and artillery. They flew French planes, which proved so excellent that the pilots quickly forgot the American-built Jennies that they had flown during training in the United States. By the fall of 1918, the American air arm, though not yet formidable by European standards, at least had some bite to it. At St. Mihiel, Mitchell successfully commanded over a thousand planes and quickly established American aerial supremacy. Yet although German aerial resistance at St. Mihiel was weak, the American planes suffered significant wear and tear. By battle’s end, Mitchell had 845 airplanes left, but only 670 of them were fit for combat. Fewer aircraft would take part in the Meuse-Argonne offensive than in the much smaller St. Mihiel offensive that preceded it.
As preparations for the Meuse-Argonne began, Mitchell had to supervise the construction of new airfields, hangars, and billets in the terribly scarred terrain of the old Verdun battlefields, and the laying of hundreds of miles of wire for a new telephone system. He also had to arrange for the flow of needed fuel, spare parts, and other equipment and supplies to the area; all at night, on clogged roads, and under a tight schedule. Most of Pershing’s officers hated Mitchell too much to commiserate with him. At times it seemed that his only ally in France was Eddie Rickenbacker, a daredevil race-car-driver-turned pilot who in 1917 had served as Pershing’s and Mitchell’s chauffeur. Rickenbacker and Mitchell were kindred souls, both enamored with speed and the thrill of flight. Gone were the days, however, when they could drive like maniacs around the Paris streets, scattering pedestrians before them. The Meuse-Argonne demanded patience, foresight, understanding, and a willingness to cooperate with the forces on the ground. The Doughboys counted on their planes to protect them from above. It remained to be seen whether Mitchell would be able, or willing, to do everything they hoped.
The Doughboys’ concerns were less complex than those of Marshall or Mitchell, but no less trying. Constant rain soaked their uniforms and plastered them with mud as they marched toward the Meuse-Argonne. Field kitchens disappeared in traffic jams, forcing famished soldiers to scrounge the countryside for food. Above all, they craved sleep. Will Schellberg, a machine gunner with the 79th Division, carried a pack weighing almost a hundred pounds, sometimes along with a fifty-seven-pound machine-gun tripod and a forty-seven-pound gun, and rode in a railway car so packed with soldiers that he “could hardly move.” He slept in a leaky tent at night, woke up underwater, and drank stolen beer until he and his comrades could hardly stand. On reaching the reserve trenches he fell asleep immediately, only to wake up in the middle of the night almost swallowed in mud. Although the Germans were “shelling the hell out of us,” he felt “so tired and played out that I wish one of those shells would hit me.”He slept again, only half aware of the cat-sized rats running back and forth over his body. In the morning he discovered that they had eaten an entire bag of rations he had used as a pillow. On other nights the voracious creatures would eat through a can of corned beef and then eat the can too.
After sleeping off their fatigue, the soldiers took stock of their surroundings. Veterans smirked at the trenches full of skulls and bones left over from the Battle of Verdun, the smells of gas, cordite, and rotting flesh, and the constant flash and rumble of gunfire. Green troops found the same sights grotesque and terrifying. Lieutenant Colonel Ashby Williams’s battalion of the untested 80th Division arrived in the evening and camped in a harmless-looking field. After pitching their tents they discerned the crosses of an adjacent graveyard. Trucks soon roared in, bearing corpses from the front. “The foul odor of the trucks as they passed and their destination and evident mission sent a thrill of horror through me that I never felt before or since that time, although I have seen many horrible sights,” he remembered. Private James M. Cain slept in a folded tarpaulin next to a pile of supplies he had unloaded in the rain. Sometime during the night the rain stopped, and he woke to see the entire sky lit with “orange flashes like heat lightning—the guns of the western front.” A trooper who had fallen asleep next to him also awoke and watched the lights. Cain heard him sobbing. A few Doughboys drifted away toward the rear in the darkness, but most just shuddered and pulled their overcoats and blankets a little tighter around their shoulders. Not all the fireworks exploded in the distance. One enemy salvo hit Lieutenant Colonel Williams’s battalion as it waited in the woods for orders to move.
We could hear the explosion as the shell left the muzzle of the Boche gun, then the noise of the shell as it came toward us, faint at first, then louder and louder until the shell struck and shook the earth with its explosion. One can only feel, one cannot describe the horror that fills the heart and mind during this short interval of time. You know he is aiming the gun at you and wants to kill you. In your mind you see him swab out the hot barrel, you see him thrust in the deadly shell and place the bundle of explosives in the breach; you see the gunner throw all his weight against the trigger; you hear the explosion like the single bark of a great dog in the distance, and you hear the deadly missile singing as it comes towards you, faintly at first, then distinctly, then louder and louder until it seems so loud that everything else has died, and then the earth shakes and the eardrums ring, and dirt and iron reverberate through the woods and fall about you.
This is what you hear, but no man can tell what surges through the heart and mind as you lie with your face upon the ground listening to the growing sound of the hellish thing as it comes towards you. You do not think, sorrow only fills the heart, and you only hope and pray. And when the doubly-damned thing hits the ground, you take a breath, and feel relieved, and think how good God has been to you again. And God was good to us that night—to those of us who escaped unhurt. And for the ones who were killed, poor fellows, some blown to fragments that could not be recognized, and the men who were hurt, we said a prayer in our hearts.
Excerpted from To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918 The Epic Battle That Ended the First World War
Copyright © 2008 by Edward G. Lengel.
Reprinted with permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the publisher.
EDWARD G. LENGEL is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several books on military history, including To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918 The Epic Battle That Ended the First World War and General George Washington: A Military Life. A recipient, with the Papers of George Washington documentary editing project, of the National Humanities Medal, he has made frequent appearances on television documentaries and was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize.
