The Illusion of Victory (43 page)

Pershing replaced decimated divisions with the veteran units he had left in Saint-Mihiel and tried to resume the attack. He was on the road constantly, visiting corps and division headquarters, urging generals and colonels to inject their men with more “drive” and “push.” But Pershing soon discovered that words could not silence a machine gun. Private First Class James Rose of the First Division later told of advancing across an open field to within fifty yards of the German line. Suddenly the air around the men “became a solid sheet of machine-gun and artillery fire. No words could possibly describe the horror of it. Body stacked upon body in waves and piles. . . . Our boys never faltered, they came, wave upon wave, climbing over the bodies of their fallen comrades with one obsession in mind, to reach and destroy every machine gun that was mowing down our advance.” These brave men were obeying the orders of the division commander, Major General Charles Summerall, who summed up his tactical thinking on how to deal with machine guns in two brutal words:“Charge ’em!”
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While the doughboys bled, they also began to starve. Monumental traffic jams developed on the few roads into the Argonne. Food did not get forward; the wounded lay unevacuated. Premier Georges Clemenceau, caught on one clogged road, lost half a day and went back to Paris vowing to get rid of Pershing. Stragglers were another problem. General Hunter Liggett estimated that, at the height of the battle, 100,000 runaways were wandering around the First Army’s rear. One division reported an effective front line strength of only 1,600 men. Early in October Pershing authorized officers to shoot any man who ran away—proof of his growing desperation.
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Worsening Pershing’s woes was a visit from Foch’s chief of staff, General Maxime Weygand, while the Americans were withdrawing the wreckage of the divisions that had opened the battle. The Frenchman announced that Generalissimo Foch thought Pershing had too many men in the Argonne and proposed shifting six divisions to nearby French armies. Pershing told him to go to hell, and Foch retaliated with a formal, on-the-record letter ordering the Americans to attack continuously “without any [further] interruptions.”

Behind the scenes, Clemenceau wrote a savage letter to Foch, urging him to call for Pershing’s replacement. “Our worthy American Allies,” he sneered,“who thirst to get into action and who are unanimously acknowledged to be great soldiers, have been marking time since their forward jump on the first day. . . . Nobody can maintain that these fine troops are unusable; they are merely unused.” this was too much even for Foch to swallow. He replied with a defense of Pershing’s problems.
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Killing fire from enemy guns east of the Meuse River stopped the veteran divisions when they attacked without artillery preparation in a vain hope of achieving surprise. German counterattacks drove them back again and again. Only the First Division, under grim-eyed General Summerall, gained some ground, plunging up the left defile for a half dozen miles, at the cost of 9,387 casualties. On October 8, Pershing sent two divisions east of the Meuse to join the French in an attempt to silence the murderous artillery. The attack faltered and collapsed into a pocket on the banks of the river, deluged by gas and shell fire.
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More embarrassing was the plight of a battalion of the Seventy-Seventh Division, which had been assigned to the Argonne forest. Attempting to correct the rigid line-abreast advance his staff had decreed for the original assault, Pershing ordered all units to keep attacking “without regard to losses and without regard to the exposed conditions of the flanks.” Such tactics were worthy of Charles “the Butcher” Mangin; they were another index of Pershing’s desperation.

On October 1, the commander of the First Battalion of the Seventy-Seventh Division’s 308th Infantry Regiment, Major Charles Whittlesey, warned that further attacks would be disastrous. The French army that was supposed to be protecting the division’s left flank, west of the Argonne forest, was nowhere to be seen. The Germans could easily cut them off. The division’s commander, following Pershing’s orders, told Whittlesey to attack anyway. Within four hours, the entire force of 550 men was surrounded. Christened “the Lost Battalion” by reporters, it more than conformed to the name. The men had almost no food and little ammunition. Attempts to supply them from the air repeatedly failed. The tall, bespectacled Whittlesey, a Wall Street lawyer in peacetime, with a remarkable resemblance to Woodrow Wilson, stonily refused German demands to surrender.

The Germans attacked with mortars, machine guns, showers of hand grenades, even flamethrowers. The Americans beat them back. The Seventy-Seventh Division artillery tried to help with a barrage. Many of the shells fell on the Americans, killing and wounding 80 men. One shell struck the battalion’s sergeant major; only his helmet and pistol survived the explosion. For five nightmarish days, the battalion held out. At the end of the fifth day, a patrol from the Seventy-Seventh Division reached the battalion. The Germans, intimidated by the gains of the First Division east of the forest, had withdrawn. A grim Whittlesey led 194 exhausted survivors to the rear. He barely responded when the division commander told him he had been promoted to lieutenant colonel and was being recommended for the Medal of Honor.
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Pershing drove himself as hard as he pushed his men. He stayed up until 3 and 4 A.M. reading reports and pondering maps. Rumors drifted into headquarters that Foch and Clemenceau were urging Wilson to replace him with Tasker Bliss. One day, in a car with his aide, Major James Collins, the exhausted general put his head in his hands and moaned to his dead wife, “Frankie, Frankie, my God sometimes I don’t know how I can go on.”
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No one else saw anything but the iron general, still in charge.“Things are going badly,” he told Henry Allen, commander of the Ninetieth Division.“But by God! Allen, I was never so much in earnest in my life and we are going to get through.” George C. Marshall considered this Pershing’s finest hour.
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Others think Pershing’s finest hour came a few days later. Reluctantly, ruefully, with that amazing objectivity about himself that was one of his most remarkable traits, Pershing realized he did not have the answer to the Argonne. On October 12, he gave Hunter Liggett command of the First Army and created a Second Army to operate east of the Meuse under Robert Lee Bullard. Pershing became the commander of the army group, a chairman of the board instead of a CEO.

The First Army continued to attack for another seven days, meeting fierce German resistance that inflicted heavy casualties. The Rainbow Division was in the thick of this carnage, and Douglas MacArthur continued to play a hero’s role. One of the chief obstacles to the American advance was the heavily fortified hill, the Côte de Chatillon. General Summerall, promoted to corps commander, visited MacArthur’s command post on the night of October 13–14. An attack on Chatillon was scheduled for the next morning. “Give me Chatillon or a list of five thousand casualties,” Summerall said.

MacArthur, who had been badly gassed the day before—he still stubbornly refused to wear a mask—replied, “If this brigade does not capture Chatillon you can publish a casualty list of the entire brigade with the brigade commander’s name at the top.” It took the Americans three nightmarish days and the loss of 4,000 men to accomplish—but Chatillon became American territory. In the thick of the flying bullets and shells virtually every moment, MacArthur won a second Distinguished Service Cross.

The capture of Chatillon was considered a breach, if not a breakthrough, of the Kreimhilde Stellung, the main German defense line in the Argonne. It had taken three weeks and 100,000 casualties to achieve what Pershing and his staff had thought they could do in a single day.
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At this point, the First Army was, in the opinion of one staff officer,“a disorganized and wrecked army.” Liggett promptly went on the defensive. When Pershing persisted in hanging around headquarters, talking about launching another attack, Liggett told him to “go away and forget it.” Pershing meekly obeyed.
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Shirley Millard was still working beside Dr. Le Brun in the French hospital near Soissons. But their relationship had undergone a probably inevitable change. Millard had met her fiancé, Ted, in Paris, on his way to the front and decided she still loved him. The surgeon accepted the news philosophically, and they remained friends and colleagues in the operating room.

But Millard had a new problem. She could not shake the dread that swept over her as American casualties poured into the hospital. On September 15, she went to a funeral for four Americans who had died the previous day: Donnelly, Wendel, Goldfarb and Auerbach. Millard wept so hard that her fellow nurses became alarmed, fearing a breakdown. An inner voice asked,
What’s the sense of it? Why did they have to be killed before they had even begun to live?

For the first time, Millard found wisdom in Pershing’s decision to ban relatives and fiancées of soldiers from France. Every wounded man she saw made her imagine Ted with similar wounds.“It required enormous effort to perform tasks that had been easy before,” she told her journal.

On September 20 came news that multiplied her dread tenfold: Ted was wounded. Dr. Le Brun gallantly arranged for Millard to make an emergency trip to Paris. In a hospital there, she found Ted with a fractured leg and a wounded left arm suspended in a frame. “Oh darling,” she gasped. “Thank God you’re not hurt!”

It took some doing to soothe an outraged Ted into accepting her explanation that “hurt” meant a wound to the head, the chest or the stomach. Those were the ones that often proved fatal. A thoughtful nurse drew a screen around Ted’s bed, and soon Millard’s greeting became something they would joke about for the rest of their lives.

Back in the hospital, Millard found she could concentrate on her work again, with Ted in relative safety. But the anguish of seeing Americans with mortal wounds was still acute. One man, a sergeant in the Second Engineers named Charlie Whiting, came very close to breaking her heart. He had been shot in the spine and was totally paralyzed.“He is so loveable, clean and sweet as spring water,” Millard told her journal. “He cannot speak more than one or two words at a time, in a gasping whisper, but he manages to say Thank you and smiles with his eyes whenever anything is done for him.”

The doctors put Whiting in the
salle de mort,
the death room. There was no hope.“He cannot move a muscle except his eyes and two fingers of his left hand,” Millard wrote in her journal. One day Whiting tried to say something to her. She bent her head close to his lips and heard “My mother . . .” with his two fingers, he managed to direct her to his pocketbook, where she found his mother’s name and address.

Millard promised to write to her. Tears filled Whiting’s eyes. It was the first time he had cried. Millard realized he was weeping not for himself but for his mother.“I patted his hand and busied myself, fighting back my own tears.”
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On September 17, 1918, YMCA canteen worker Marian Baldwin confided exciting news to her American correspondent. Her life was about to undergo a dramatic change. She had been invited to join another woman in a permanent connection with the 148th Infantry Regiment of the Thirty-Seventh Division. She and her partner, Alice, were given a camouflaged Ford camion, “chuck full of supplies” and orders for each day with “official looking road maps” to tell them where to go. They also got a one-eyed driver who had grave doubts about women getting mixed up with a war.

Ideally, they were supposed to reach a town ahead of the regiment and set up their canteen, laying out cigarettes, chocolates and writing paper for letters home. At their first stop, a little room at a convent in the town of Moyen, they were swamped when the regiment arrived.“The boys sat all over the floor and on the window sill and we had a very merry time until well after dark, when taps sounded and they all disappeared in the most amazing manner,” Baldwin wrote.

A few days later, on another move, they lost the regiment and drove all night down bad roads, with their YMCA driver cursing and “Lizzie,” as they called their camion, close to running out of gas. At a crossroads, an officer stopped them. A huge truck convoy was just behind them. Where in the #%&@ did they think they were going? he asked. He was stunned when a woman’s voice answered him. Alice used her flashlight to show him their map and he gasped with surprise.“Alice!” he said.

“Jim!” exclaimed Alice. They were old and close friends, thousands of miles from “God’s country.”

After getting directions, they found themselves in a huge column of trucks heading for the Argonne. Whenever they passed a truck, they waved and the doughboys in it came alive.“Honest-to-God American girls!” they shouted and waved their helmets. In Fains, they caught up to their regiment and set up shop in a French barracks with a dirt floor. It was quickly jammed with their “boys.”

Two nights later, the women were part of the final massive movement toward the jump-off point for the Argonne attack. At the town of Revigny, they went to Fifth Corps headquarters to ask where their regiment was camped. The major general in charge took one look at them and wrote on their orders:“These two ladies are to be returned at once to their Y.M. C.A.
headquarters at Bar le Duc.” the general told them he could not allow them to stay in Revigny. It would soon be under bombardment from German artillery. He had two daughters at home just their ages.“I admire the work you are doing but this is no place for women,” he said.