American Experiment (228 page)

On November 6, 1917, just three days after the first clash between German and American troops in Alsace, Lenin’s Bolsheviks had seized control of the Russian capital and declared the formation of a Marxist Soviet regime. Although he had only tenuous control of a few major cities, Lenin had taken immediate steps to secure the “just and democratic” peace the Bolsheviks had promised. Lev Davidovich Trotsky, a principal Bolshevik lieutenant, met with German representatives at Brest-Litovsk and reluctantly accepted the draconic terms that they imposed. Thereafter, while Russia lapsed into civil war between Lenin’s forces and various opposing factions, the Germans had been able to transfer a million men to the western front. With them General Erich Ludendorff hoped to win the war before America could make its weight felt.

On the morning of March 21, 1918, out of a fog of smoke shells and poison gas, sixty-three German divisions attacked the British forces near St. Quentin and Arras. Hitting the Allied line at its weakest point, the Germans broke through for the first time since 1914. Forced out of their trenches, the British reeled back, losing 100,000 men and a thousand cannon in a single week. German troops reached the rail center at Amiens, threatening to cut the British off from the French and drive them into the sea.

When the British checked his first thrust at Arras and Amiens, Ludendorff launched two more attacks. The first hit the British at Ypres; the second broke through the French lines at Chemin des Dames. In this moment of crisis, with the British in retreat and German columns only fifty miles from Paris, General Pershing relented his insistence on keeping the American divisions together to fight as an independent army. The American commander dispatched two units to support the British at Amiens and
sent a third to bolster the French at Château-Thierry. The U.S. 2nd Division, meanwhile, marched toward the Belleau Wood, there to meet the spearhead of the German advance on Paris.

The 2nd U.S. was a composite division, a brigade of doughboys paired with a brigade of Marines. The Americans reached Belleau Wood on June l, only to be told by French officers on the spot that they would have to retreat. “Retreat, hell,” replied Marine Captain Lloyd Williams, “we just got here!” The lone U.S. unit stopped five German divisions on the far side of the woods; then, on June 6, the Americans attacked. More than fifty percent of the American troops were killed or wounded in the frontal assault on the German positions, but the Germans were driven out of the woods and forced to retreat. The threat to Paris was over.

Ludendorff had been set back again, but he still had enough fresh troops to launch two more offensives. One drive, on Amiens, was quickly thwarted by a French counterattack. The other, however, thrust across the Marne, surrounding the 38th U.S. Infantry Regiment on three sides. Then the new Allied Supreme Commander, General Ferdinand Foch, counterpunched with a mixed force of Frenchmen, Americans, and Moroccans. Again the Germans were driven back; from then on, the strategic initiative belonged to the Allies.

The German spring offensive of 1918 may have been a blessing in disguise for the novice American troops. Pershing had originally believed that he could break the German lines with attacks by “stalking, stealthy” riflemen—the kind of tough, individualistic fighters he had commanded on the western plains, in Cuba, in Mexico. But against German artillery and machine guns, Pershing’s expert riflemen would have been slaughtered en masse, just as similar French and British assaults had failed from 1914 to 1917. Even at Belleau Wood, where the Germans had had little time to fortify their positions, that sort of impromptu attack had cost the Americans enormous casualties. In the open field, however, against German columns thinned from breaking through the Allied trenches, Pershing’s aggressive infantry tactics paid off.

The AEF also benefited from the “Iron Commander’s” emphasis on drill and discipline. “The standards of the American Army will be those of West Point,” Pershing declared in an early order. He put particular pressure on the junior officers, weeding out scores of volunteer and National Guard commanders who failed to measure up. As a result, the AEF was left with a cadre of superlative tactical leaders, young men of the caliber of Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, and George Marshall.

More than from marksmanship or discipline, the Americans drew strength from their brash self-confidence. These fresh divisions of
doughboys—each twice as large as the war-worn Allied and German units—marched to battle bedecked with flowers by the dazzled French. When one frightened peasant shouted to the Marines that the war was lost, a college linguist turned leatherneck shot back,
“Pas finie,”
thereby giving the Marne front its name.

The Americans lost their freshness, if not their insouciance, in the fighting at Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood. Ludendorff himself was forced to acknowledge the toughness of his new foes. On the Marne, five platoons of the 38th U.S. were all but annihilated in hand-to-hand fighting with rifle butts, grenades, pistols; still the regiment held, and broke up the German attack. When the first American division had marched through Paris the previous summer, Colonel Charles Stanton had stopped to salute Lafayette’s tomb with the cry, “Nous voilà, Lafayette!”—“Lafayette, we are here!” Now the hardened survivors of Ludendorff’s attacks quipped, “We’ve paid our debt to Lafayette; who the hell do we owe now?”

As late as January 1918, Wilson had not given up his hopes for a compromise peace based on the principles of democracy and international cooperation. He instructed Colonel House to assemble a panel of experts to advise him on peace terms. In consultation with Felix Frankfurter, House brought together a team of researchers and intellectuals that included Dr. Isaiah Bowman of the American Geographical Society and Walter Lippmann. This informal body, dubbed “The Inquiry” by the newspapers, assembled memos, testimony, maps—in all, more than 2,000 documents—on questions that might be discussed at a peace conference.

More than intellectuals, events in far-off Russia affected the lives of American soldiers, scholars, and President alike in 1918. Even before they made peace with the Germans, the Bolsheviks denounced and published the czarist regime’s wartime treaties with the Allies. As Lenin intended, these secret agreements, which contemplated the division of territories of the Central Powers among Russia and its war partners, seriously embarrassed the efforts of the British and French to depict their side in the war as just and nonimperialistic.

The publication of the secret treaties reinforced Wilson’s determination to stand aloof from the British and French, as an “associated” power rather than as a formal member of their alliance. It also put pressure on him to clarify America’s own terms for peace. The American people, he wrote House, had to be reassured that they were not fighting “for any selfish aim on the part of any belligerent … least of all for divisions of territory such as have been contemplated in Asia Minor.” With preliminary reports from
the Inquiry in hand, Wilson outlined the fourteen points of his tentative peace terms in an address to Congress.

Wilson took the Congress and the audience of Allied diplomats by surprise with his Fourteen Points speech. About half of the points were concrete terms for the territorial settlement of the war: evacuation of Belgium, Russia, France, and the Balkans; return of Alsace-Lorraine to France; self-determination for the peoples of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires; independence for Poland; adjustment of the borders of Italy. Six points, however, reached beyond the immediate conflict to address the problems that had troubled Europe over the past decades.

Wilson acknowledged the challenge posed by the Bolsheviks. “There is ... a voice calling for these definitions of principle and of purpose which is, it seems to me, more thrilling and more compelling than any of the many moving voices with which the troubled air of the world is filled. It is the voice of the Russian people….” The President then outlined a sweeping series of reforms: open diplomacy; freedom of the seas; an end to trade barriers between nations; international arms reductions; adjustment of colonial disputes in the interests of the native populations. In the fourteenth point he declared, “A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

The Fourteen Points formed the basis of what historians would later call the “liberal” peace program, the general set of ideals that progressives throughout Western Europe and America were agreed upon. The German government, however, responded with a sneer at the “demagogic artifices” of “this American busybody.” In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the Germans demonstrated their own idea of fair peace terms, stripping Russia of 34 percent of its population, 32 percent of its farmland, half of its factories, and virtually all its coal mines. The final German answer to the Fourteen Points was Ludendorff’s spring offensive in the West.

The ferocious German attacks in France sapped some of Wilson’s idealism. He targeted the German government as the enemy; the war had to bring the “destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can … disturb the peace of the world.” Otherwise, he warned a cheering crowd in Baltimore, “Everything that America has lived for and loved and grown great to vindicate ... will have fallen in utter ruin.” Wilson offered but one response to the German breakthroughs on the western front: “Force, Force to the utmost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world.”

By July, more than a million American soldiers had been sent to France.
In August, the Allies turned to attack all along the front. At Amiens the British broke through with four hundred tanks, the mechanical “land battleships” that Churchill had sired for the Royal Navy. The Americans too had tanks—a single brigade of borrowed French Renaults, led by a young cavalry major named Patton. With this handful of lightly armored vehicles Patton spearheaded an assault on the German salient at St. Mihiel. The Germans were already beginning to withdraw, so the Americans advanced with ease, clearing the enemy positions in just two days.

The tanks of the First World War were unromantic offspring of the industrial revolution. Slow, squat, underarmed, almost unbearably hot, they nonetheless accomplished their purpose of cutting through enemy trench lines. The same could not be said, however, of the other grand technical innovation of the war, the airplane.

Aviation was the one genuinely romantic service in this otherwise businesslike, butcherous war. René Fonck of France, Canada’s William Bishop, the von Richthofen brothers of Germany, Raoul Lufberry in the Lafayette Escadrille—these were the conflict’s truly glamorous figures, the handful of men who could literally rise above the mass carnage of the trenches and engage each other in single combat. To be sure, the march of military technology injected more and more prosaic elements into the lives of flyers: their planes began to mount more and better weapons with which to kill their fellow aviators from “the other side of the hill”; photo reconnaissance gave way to bombing missions against enemy troops and, for German zeppelin pilots, against enemy cities; ground artillery began to take its toll on the flyers, supposedly killing even the legendary Red Baron, young Manfred von Richthofen. The wartime public, however, and many of the flyers too, chose not to look beyond the knightly façade. Winston Churchill was learning to fly during the war. Theodore Roosevelt, too, might have given it a try if Wilson had not explicitly barred him from military service. Roosevelt’s son Quentin did join the army’s Aviation Section (still officially part of the Signal Corps) and died in his second week of action over the Marne.

For all the attention they received, however, the aviators had relatively little impact on the war’s course. When the Americans mounted their first independent bombing mission of the war, they could muster only eight borrowed British planes, six of which were downed and none of which bombed its assigned target. Later raids had many more planes and proportionally fewer casualties, but the results of air bombardment remained disappointing.

In the end, Pershing’s riflemen carried the brunt of the fighting for the Americans. After the relatively easy conquest of St. Mihiel, Pershing
massed almost his entire force before the Argonne Forest, a tangle of fortified ridges and woods that formed the hinge of Germany’s Hindenburg Line. The Americans jumped off on September 26, quickly gained three miles, and then ran into the main line of the Germans’ defenses. Thereafter the battle degenerated into a welter of individual fights, with small units on each side lunging through the smoke-filled woods, trading grenades and machine-gun bursts, attacking and defending individual strong points. Once again the freshness and numbers of the doughboys outweighed their relative inexperience. Slowly the Germans were driven back toward the vital rail center of Sedan.

Even before that city fell, the will of the German leadership broke. Ludendorff, meeting with Kaiser Wilhelm on September 29, was forced to admit that his armies were in retreat all along the western front. Caught between a starving civilian population and a collapsing army, abandoned by the generals who had frog-marched him through the war, unnerved by Bolshevik agitators in his fleet and desperate calls for peace from his formerly docile Reichstag, Wilhelm gave up. On October 6, Wilson received a telegram, relayed from Berlin, requesting an immediate armistice.

The Germans had directed their appeal to Wilson in the hope of securing peace on the relatively generous terms of the Fourteen Points. The British, French, and Italian leaders gave their general consent to a settlement along those lines, with a few reservations designed to protect their special interests, only after House had rushed to Europe to threaten them with the prospect of a separate American peace. However, Foch and the other Allied military commanders—including Pershing—were agreed that the Germans had to be prevented from using a truce to regroup for further resistance. Foch persuaded the Allied governments that, as a precondition to negotiations, the German army had to evacuate Belgium, France, and the Rhineland, and that it must turn over to the Allies vast stores of military equipment. The generals would leave the Germans with enough arms to put down any Bolshevik-inspired uprising at home, but not enough to continue the war.