The Yanks Are Coming! (15 page)

At the end of his teenage years, he became a school teacher, and showed a facility for facing down young toughs, and occasionally their parents—at least in the case of one rawboned farmer who came riding to the school swearing murder, packing a gun, and looking for vengeance against the teacher who had dared whip his son for kicking a dog. The stalwart Pershing presented himself to the farmer and convinced him to settle the matter mano-a-mano; Pershing, eighteen years old, took the farmer apart, and in the rough-and-ready fashion of the time, farmer and son came to see things Pershing's way.

When not laying down the law in the classroom, he was attending classes himself at a small local college, where he scraped together enough credits to be awarded a bachelor's degree in something called “scientific didactics.” When the chance presented itself to take the qualifying examination for West Point, he seized it, not because he wanted to be a soldier—he had his eye on practicing law—but because he considered it a free ticket to a quality education. He passed the preliminary qualifying examination and then crammed his way through the even more exacting entrance test into the Academy.

A NATURAL LEADER

Older than most of his fellow cadets—in fact at twenty-two Pershing was just under the age limit for entering the Academy—he took
naturally to command; and for someone often regarded as austere, unsentimental, and a bit of a martinet, he was surprisingly prominent at dances and popular with girls. Some looked askance at this, but among his fellows he was a soldier's soldier, and his interest in presenting an immaculate appearance was as military as it was social. His one unmartial characteristic—unexpected in one so self-disciplined—was that he was perpetually late. A middling student, he was nevertheless class president and captain of the cadet corps. He graduated and was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1886. Given a choice of branches, he selected the cavalry, hoping to get a shot at some Indian fighting.

His wish was granted on his very first assignment, when he was sent to New Mexico and skirmished against marauding Apaches. He later saw action against the Sioux in South Dakota. Throughout his years as an Indian fighter, Pershing distinguished himself as a tough, talented, and dedicated officer. He taught himself Indian languages; led a company of Sioux scouts; became an expert marksman with revolver and rifle; looked after his men to an unusual degree, ensuring they were properly provided with clothing, supplies, and equipment (especially during the winter campaigning in South Dakota); and almost invariably retired with a book in his hand. For him, soldiering was not tedium punctuated by hard drinking, poker, and occasional action. He did not mind the odd drink or card game, but he took his profession seriously, even if he still hankered after the idea of becoming a lawyer, and indeed he earned a law degree from the University of Nebraska in 1893 while posted there as commandant of the school's cadets. He taught mathematics, military science, and drill—and attended school dances, a rather dashing older man in uniform who was gracious with the girls and an admirably hard taskmaster with the cadets. His stiff discipline instilled an
esprit de corps
in what had formerly been a rather dispirited unit, admired by neither the students nor the administration. Indeed, seeing the transformation of the school's previously lackluster cadets, the university president noted Pershing as a remarkable man, “the most energetic, active and industrious, competent and successful [commandant] I have ever known . . . thorough in everything he undertakes, a gentleman by instinct and breeding, clean, straightforward, with an unusually bright mind; and peculiarly just and true in his dealings.”
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That was Pershing at age thirty-four.

Before he took up instructing duties at West Point in 1897, he commanded a unit of “Buffalo Soldiers,” black cavalrymen, in Montana. His mission was to catch and return renegade Cree Indians to Canada. He had already caught the eye of veteran Indian fighter General Nelson Miles, who made Pershing his aide-de-camp and then recommended him as an instructor to the Military Academy.

He was less successful with the cadets at West Point than he had been with the cadets in Nebraska. The West Pointers found him too strict by half. Behind his back they called him “Nigger Jack,” from his experience with the buffalo soldiers. What started as an insult became his
nomme de guerre
, for nothing better described Pershing's tough, hard personality than “Black Jack”—the sort one cracks over another's skull.

When the Spanish-American War erupted in 1898, West Point instructors were charged with staying at their posts and training new officers. Pershing naturally wanted to see action. He pleaded his case, succeeded, and rejoined his Buffalo Soldiers, this time as a quartermaster of the 10th Cavalry Regiment. It wasn't the job he wanted, but amid the chaos of preparing for the invasion of Cuba, he ensured that his men were as well provisioned as possible. In Cuba, his conduct under hostile fire was exemplary. His commanding officer,
Colonel Theodore Baldwin, was so impressed he wrote Pershing a letter stating flatly, “I have been in many fights and through the Civil War, but on my word ‘You were the coolest and bravest man I ever saw under fire in my life.'”
²
Pershing charged up San Juan Hill, battled through malaria (which cut a swath through the Americans), and added to his duties that of regimental adjutant and commander of three troops of cavalry. Even with a fever, he relished his additional responsibilities.

MORO-TAMER

With the war in Cuba won, Pershing was sent to Washington to work in the War Department, where Secretary of War Elihu Root recognized him as a plain-talking, can-do officer who wasn't afraid of making a decision and who, like Root, had a law degree—useful in the War Department now that it was charged with governing the territories acquired in the Spanish-American War. There was still fighting to be had in the Philippines, however, and Pershing wanted part of it; Root granted Pershing's request to return to the field in 1899.

He was sent to Mindanao, where the challenge came not from Filipino insurrectionists, but from ever-restive Moro tribesmen who killed or enslaved Christian Filipinos who wandered into their territory. Pershing, as he had with the American Indians, made a study of the Moros, and decided that a Moro was made up of one part savage, one part Malay, and one part Mohammedan. He concluded, “The almost infinite combination of superstitions, prejudices, and suspicions blended into his character make him a difficult person to handle until fully understood.”
³
He noted that “The pride of the Moro” is his fighting blade, and “much as the Moro appreciates the
value of money, he will not part with his cherished weapons. . . .”
⁴
He liked using them, too. Many Moros took an oath to become blade-wielding assassins of infidels. They drugged themselves and wrapped themselves so tightly with binding cloths that they could charge right through rounds fired from an Army issue .38 caliber revolver. The Army responded by issuing .45 caliber pistols, which packed enough punch to stop a Moro, permanently.

Captain Pershing was an educated soldier. He studied Spanish and the Moro dialects, and as a budding Moro expert he was given the job of figuring out how to keep the peace with these island jihadists. The goal of the military was, if at all possible, to befriend the Moros, a task made more difficult because the Moros, a violent people, found the idea of friendship with strangers difficult to grasp. Pershing did not try to change the Moros; he did not campaign against polygamy or slavery or any other aspect of their culture; indeed, as his friendship with the Moros grew, he turned their culture to his advantage, asking them to deliver malefactors' heads, which they happily did. He also employed Moros to help build schools and level roads and bought Moro goods at the local market. Simultaneously, he drilled the troops under his command into a far higher order of discipline, both for their own sake and to impress the natives.

But while Pershing's success with the Moro tribes spread, not every chief was won over. His critics—among the Moros and his fellow officers—thought him too forbearing to be effective. He proved them wrong. Realizing he had to crush a tribe of taunting Moro rebels
pour encourager les autres
, he did just that, cutting a road through the jungle, using massive firepower to intimidate most of the tribe into flight, cutting down the recalcitrant chief, and burning his fortified encampment. Pershing succeeded as the Spanish
never had, and that deeply impressed the Moros; they even made him a Moro chief. It was not his last campaign against rebellious Moros, but it laid the groundwork for the success of his other campaigns, including a more-than-sixty-mile fighting march around Lake Lanao that helped make Pershing something of a legend on the island of Mindanao and a celebrity in the United States.

Pershing returned stateside in the summer of 1903 and swiftly met the girl of his dreams. She was Helen Frances Warren, twenty years his junior, the wealthy daughter of a U.S. senator. They were married in January 1905. After his honeymoon, he was sent to Japan to observe the Russo-Japanese War. President Theodore Roosevelt promoted Pershing to brigadier general in 1906, leaping him over more than 860 senior officers. Pershing, in succession, commanded Fort McKinley in the Philippines, just south of Manila; toured Europe (including Germany, which impressed him with its military prowess); and spent a brief period stateside before returning to the Philippines in 1909 as civil governor and military commander over the Moros, who were again proving restive. He settled one dispute with a baseball game. The Moros were surprised they lost; they had, Pershing noted, been practicing. He settled others by embedding soldiers throughout the Moro province to act as peacekeepers. He formed columns of bandit hunters, buried slain jihadists with pigs so that they faced the prospect of going straight to hell (according to their Mohammedan beliefs) and as a warning to other would-be jihadists that a paradise of virgins might not be theirs, and instituted a legal system of local Moro (rather than Filipino) courts. Pershing also took up the white man's burden of building schools, medical clinics, roads, and trading posts and stringing telephone lines. Most Moros regarded the Americans as a useful buffer between them and the hated Filipinos. Taking advantage of that, Pershing tried to turn
Moro swords and knives into ploughshares, seeking to convert the Moros to a life of farming and demanding, most audaciously, that they disarm. It is a tribute to his stature that the vast majority did. The others—the jihadists and hardened bandits—he then campaigned to destroy, always with the goal of losing as few of his own men and killing as few of the enemy as possible (in all his Moro campaigns, he was careful to leave open an escape route for women, children, and Moros disinclined to fight to the death; he measured victory in terms of conciliation, not body counts). The fighting was hard but crowned with victory. Pershing proved himself a clever and successful military commander and a top-notch colonial administrator.

In January 1914, he returned to the United States to take command at the Presidio in San Francisco, though by that spring he was on the Mexican border at El Paso, guarding against raids from Pancho Villa. He hoped to have his family join him at Fort Bliss, but his wife and his three daughters (aged six, seven, and eight) died of smoke inhalation when their house at the Presidio burned down; the lone survivor was his five-year-old son, Warren. Pershing's family life had been tremendously happy; now the hard man became inevitably harder; he remained in a state of suppressed mourning for the rest of his life.
⁵

FROM THE BORDER TO THE MARNE

On 9 March 1916, Mexican rebel leader Pancho Villa, angry at American support for his nemesis Mexican president Venustiano Carranza and hungry for supplies, raided Columbus, New Mexico, killing eighteen Americans and leaving more than two hundred of his own banditos behind as casualties. Pershing's mission was to
track him down (with the help of Apache scouts), punish him, and avoid provoking the Mexican government, which was itself at war with Villa but did not welcome gringos across the border. Pershing's column traversed hundreds of miles into Mexican territory. While Villa avoided capture, Pershing's troopers bloodied Villa's banditti (and Villa himself) and effectively ended the guerrilla threat to America's southern border. It was, de facto, a tremendous training exercise. Pershing had under his command the largest American army in the field since the War Between the States. The fact that Pershing's men had skirmishes with Mexican troops, which fell short of escalating into war, only added to the vigor of the exercise—useful experience when, just two months later, the United States was officially at war with Germany.

Secretary of War Newton Baker narrowed the competition for command of the American Expeditionary Force to two candidates—Leonard Wood and Pershing. Wood, though the senior of the two, had the disadvantage of being highly political, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, and a possible Republican presidential candidate. All that leapt Pershing to the top of the list—and Baker stayed resolutely loyal to his chosen commander. Pershing needed loyalty because his task was formidable. He had to create, from the barest of essentials already in existence, a massive new army that could join the fighting line in Europe. He would, at least, have very little interference from the White House. The president disdained military matters, and his one instruction to Pershing was entirely to the general's liking. Pershing's first—and near constant—battle was to prevent America's infantry from being parceled up into replacement units for the French and the British. This Anglo-French tack had behind it the logic of speed—it would get American combat troops to the front faster. From the Western Allies' point of view, it had the additional
advantage of expediting American casualties, which they assumed would heat up the blood of the American people for jumping into the fray.