CHAPTER NINE
WHO WON THE WAR?
Despite the post-war protestations of German soldiers that they were ‘stabbed in the back’ by shifty politicians and Bolshevik agitators at home, the fact is clear that the army itself had been comprehensively defeated on the battlefield. It had been kicked out of every defensive line it had attempted to hold; it had lost huge quantities of the essential war material it needed to continue the fight, especially artillery; and it had suffered a major degradation of its industrial base. The allied naval blockade had taken a long time to make a difference, but by 1918 it was biting deeply into the domestic economy upon which the army depended. The only sense in which the German army could claim to be ‘undefeated’ was the technical point that it was not chased all the way back onto German soil, so it did not suffer the humiliation of being defeated at home.
For the allied armies, by contrast, the key question was not so much ‘did they win?’, since obviously they did, but ‘did they win against an effective enemy?’ Those who accuse the allied generals of 1915–17 of being ‘butchers and bunglers’ would tell us that these same generals were successful in 1918 only because the enemy had to all intents and purposes collapsed. Therefore the military efficiency of the allied generals was no better than it ever had been: like Frederick the Great's legendary mule, they ‘had participated in twenty campaigns but still learned nothing’.
On the other hand there are other commentators, including the present author, who believe that the allied generals did learn by experience, and had become better generals by the end of 1918 than they had been in earlier years. According to this critique the great allied assaults of the ‘Hundred Days’ would not have succeeded at all unless their commanders had achieved a marked improvement in technique. To take the most obvious example, Rawlinson's Fourth Army had made a most ghastly tactical mess of its attack on the Somme on 1 July 1916, but it charged triumphantly through all the German defences at Amiens on 8 August 1918. It was able to do this only because it had learned many new ways to use deception, artillery and tanks, which had not been understood or even imagined two years earlier. Beyond this, a whole additional set of techniques was required to keep the front line moving forward at the rate of one mile per day for all of three months. During 1915–17 the Western Front had been immobile, and all the practical lessons learned were based on static positional warfare. In 1918, by contrast, the fronts started to move much more fluidly, so a whole new art of war had to be invented. It cannot be stressed enough that the mere act of converting from static to mobile warfare represented a major technical innovation in its own right. It was not at all easy to arrange all the logistics, the signalling, the movement of artillery, the bridging, and a thousand other things that allowed the concept of ‘mobility’ to be translated from GHQ idealism into a realistic and practical method of daily operations. Unless the ‘butchers and bunglers’ had successfully risen to this particular challenge, they would have been doomed to leave the Germans, regardless of their particular level of combat efficiency, safely entrenched in their ‘Winter Line', their Hindenburg Line, or their Selle Line south of Le Cateau. If this had happened, the war would surely have continued well into 1919.
Regardless of whether we condemn the allied generals as ‘butchers and bunglers’, we also have to confront yet another interpretation, which is that it was the American intervention that tipped the scales. Recent commentators such as John Mosier have even gone as far as to claim that the USA won the war.1 However, this is a much more complex question than such writers have assumed, and to understand it correctly we have to go all the way back to the start of the war.
In 1914 the Americans, and their pacifist President Woodrow Wilson, were not at all anxious to become involved in what they saw as a typically degenerate European quarrel. The USA had been founded, among other things, as a safe haven for oppressed Europeans who wanted to escape from that sort of thing. In this new war her basic aim was to remain neutral while maintaining free trade with all the combatants, and freedom of navigation across all the oceans of the world. However, it soon became apparent that the allied navies were not going to allow quite those terms to apply. The conditions of their blockade meant that US ships could trade with other neutral countries or with the allies themselves, but not with Germany. This in turn meant that the American arms industries were forced to direct the fruits of their production towards the allies rather than the Central Powers, and in fact by the end of the war they had provided more powder and shell than all the native industries of Britain and France put together. To that extent it is profoundly true to say that the final victory on the Western Front could not have been achieved without the help of the USA.
This one-sided version of ‘free trade’ naturally incurred the wrath of the Germans, and in particular it attracted the attention of their submarines. As early as 7 May 1915 the proud British liner Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk while carrying munitions to Britain as well as passengers. Among the passengers 124 US citizens perished, and there was such a violent diplomatic storm that the Germans felt constrained to restrict the terms of engagement of their submarines for the next two years. Meanwhile Wilson attempted to put pressure on the western allies to make peace, although without success. Where he did succeed was in the presidential election of late 1916, when he was confirmed in office precisely because he had kept the USA out of the war. Paradoxically this stance did not survive for long, since Germany again declared unrestricted submarine warfare on 1 February 1917, and the intercepted ‘Zimmermann Telegram’ revealed that the Germans were plotting to support a Mexican attack on south-west USA, in clear contradiction of the Monroe Doctrine. Wilson and his government could no longer stand by as neutrals, especially since by this time the Western allies were so deeply in debt to the Americans that Wall Street could not possibly contemplate an allied defeat. In financial terms the USA was forced to throw her weight behind an allied victory, on pain of losing the value of her already vast investment in allied munitions and loans.
The Americans entered the war on the allied side on 6 April 1917, with an army that was absolutely tiny by European standards. It would take a very long time to build it up to a respectable size, and even longer to ship it to France. At that point it was obvious why the Germans had calculated that the benefits of stopping the huge flow of munitions to Europe by U-boat warfare greatly outweighed the risk of finding at best 100,000 US troops deployed on the Western Front in 1917 or early 1918.
As we have seen in previous chapters, there were some US troops already in action against the German spring offensives of 1918: at Villers-Bretonneux, Cantigny and then on the Marne, most notably at Château Thierry and Belleau Wood. However these actions, all most useful to the allied cause, were relatively small in scale, normally involving just a couple of divisions, although four US divisions would go into action together at the end of June in the Soissons counter-attack. But it was only around St Mihiel on 12 September 1918 that as many as seven divisions could be deployed together, that is, some nineteen months after the original declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare. The Germans were therefore quite right to believe that they would have all of that time to win the war in the west, and in the event they very nearly succeeded.
Apart from their massive shipments of powder and shell, the American contribution to victory consisted partly of the troops that they did deploy to France before the armistice, of which some 1,390,000 eventually saw active service at the front, and partly of the additional million that were still on the way, threatening to have as many as 3,000,000 troops available to join the battle in 1919. From the German point of view the US troops who were in action during 1918 were irksome and damaging enough, but the far more numerous troops who might have entered the fight in the following year would have been absolutely decisive. This was also the view of General Pershing, who was always insistent on keeping his American troops together in one army which could eventually win the war on its own. Indeed, he sometimes seemed to think that he could still win the war even if all his other allies had totally collapsed.
Besides the constant pleas from his allies to release troops piecemeal into the fighting line, Pershing's main problem was shipping. There were only so many ships available to bring American and Canadian men and munitions to Europe, not to mention food supplies to supplement the diet of the British people under U-boat blockade. By the end of March 1918 there were sufficient troops available in the USA for an accelerated programme of shipping to be arranged; 120,000 men were to make the voyage every month for four months, making almost half a million by the end of July. However these men were to be just the fighting elements of each division, excluding their supporting and logistic organizations, as well as anything by way of heavy weapons. Very few aircraft or artillery pieces would make the journey from the USA to France, and no tanks. This meant that the AEF would take on a very odd structure: short on logistics and other support troops, but exceptionally heavy on front-line infantry. In fact an American infantry division was almost 28,000 strong, at a time when allied divisions were usually something like 12,000 and those of the Germans smaller still. The American troops were also almost totally supplied by Britain and France. All their tanks and tin hats, and most of their aircraft, machine guns, artillery and transport were provided from European sources.
There was also a problem with training. The American troops were physically very fit and often impressively tall by comparison with their European comrades. They brought with them a breath of fresh air, because they had not experienced the grinding hecatombs of Verdun, the Somme, the Chemin des Dames or Passchendaele. Yet this ‘lack of experience’ could be seen as another name for naivety. On many occasions detachments of US troops were sent on training courses with the British or French armies, only to disappoint their teachers by their refusal to learn. ‘Don't worry, we'll do it in our own way’ was an often-heard mantra that invariably infuriated their allies who had seen modern battle at close range. The Europeans knew only too well what would happen, but they found themselves frustratingly powerless to impart this knowledge to their overconfident students.
When they were on the defensive at Villers-Bretonneux, Château Thierry and elsewhere, American troops performed very well. In the attack, by contrast, they displayed much less certainty of touch. At Belleau Wood, for example, the marines made very heavy weather of their assaults. Admittedly the light resistance offered to the US advance into the St Mihiel salient may possibly have created an excessive confidence in the American art of attack, but if so, disillusionment would not be long delayed in the Argonne.
THE MEUSE-ARGONNE
The battle of the Meuse-Argonne, which started on 26 September and lasted for all the rest of the war, would cost 117,000 US casualties as well as a large number of French (which seems to be as unspecified in US sources as the French losses on the Somme are unspecified in British sources). Initially some fifteen US and twenty-seven French infantry divisions were committed, as well as four French cavalry divisions, although the large size of the American divisions made them the equivalent of some thirty French infantry divisions. The dividing line between the French and the Americans was the western edge of the Argonne forest, which meant that the US troops had the unenviable task of clearing this dense and heavily defended terrain, although admittedly they had the benefit of some clearer and more open ground to the east of the forest.
The first day of the battle went reasonably well, but problems soon arose thereafter. In particular the American logistics collapsed and there were fantastic traffic jams, on a scale that no one had ever seen before. There were reports of officers attempting to get the traffic moving by discharging their revolvers but, unsurprisingly, this technique did not appear to work. Many symptoms were encountered of the same type of tactical naivety that the British had displayed on the Somme and the French in 1915. Not only were there many instances of sacrificial frontal attacks which had not been properly prepared, but reported ‘gas casualties’ were running at about ten times the level known on any other battlefield. This entitles us to suspect that most cases were just bad smells that were misinterpreted by inexperienced troops, rather than actual poison gas. By 5 October the US offensive had ground to a halt in the enemy's second defensive line, until a new impetus and reorganization could be imposed.
By the time the war ended, the battle had been pushed forward in two major new impulses: one on 14 October that made little progress, and another on 1 November that made much better headway. Sedan was liberated to the French on 6 November, and it can be said that by that date the US armies had learned many things about modern warfare that they had not suspected in September. Nobody thought he understood this better than Pershing himself, and just before the armistice he raged that his single-handed American victory had been dashed from his hands by the cessation of hostilities: ‘If they had given us another ten days, we would have rounded up the entire German army, captured it, humiliated it . . . Had they given us another week, we'd have taught them.’2 This perspective was excessive in the extreme and it is notable that the BEF, who had surely pushed forward harder and faster in the last three months of the war, did not display any comparable euphoria. Haig and his generals knew exactly how big and formidable the German army still remained, even if ‘Black Jack’ Pershing apparently did not.
What Pershing really meant, we must suppose, was that if the war had continued into 1919, then the Americans might well have been in a position to take the lead in an advance into Germany. He may have been right, except that the city of Metz was the first target he had in mind, just as it had already been before the St Mihiel offensive in early September. Pershing seemed to be mesmerized by the thought that Metz was very close to the area of operations of the AEF and was also technically inside Germany. It was a major city in the part of Lorraine that had been occupied in 1871, and as such it formed a significant element in the casus belli of 1914. It would have made a famous symbolic victory if he had captured it. However, what Pershing overlooked was the fact that ever since 1871 Metz had been fortified by the Germans to at least the same standard that the French had applied to Verdun during the same period. To attack Metz in 1919 would have been equivalent to selecting the very strongest point in the enemy line upon which to beat one's head. Success would not by any means have been guaranteed, as General George Patton would discover in late 1944, when he in turn attempted to capture the Metz defences with a quick attack, only to find himself bogged down in a fruitless struggle that lasted several months.
Beyond Pershing's personal frustration that the Meuse-Argonne battle was terminated by the armistice just as the AEF was finally getting into its stride, there was another and deeper frustration that would mark the US armed forces for much of the twentieth century. This may be simply expressed as a frustration that the Americans were never really allowed to demonstrate what they could do. They had been participating in this war on a large scale for just two months before it ended. They had lost ‘only’ about 52,000 dead and 255,896 total casualties, almost half of them in the Meuse-Argonne. This was fewer even than the Canadians' 59,000 killed in the whole war, out of 208,700 total casualties, whereas the French had been fighting for four years and had lost 1,385,300 dead, and the UK had lost 702,410.3 Also in the Meuse-Argonne, the major American effort of the war, their troops had not obviously distinguished themselves. They had become entangled in the traffic jams, in the forest, in the wire, in the supposed ‘gas clouds’, and in the notoriously interlocking fields of fire of the German machine guns. All in all, it was not a glorious performance, and this would have two main consequences.
In the first place the Meuse-Argonne experience meant that the First World War as a whole somewhat slipped out of the American military consciousness. It had been a major national effort, but it had ended as something of a damp squib. People like Pershing might have blustered that the whole German army lay at their mercy, but the ordinary American soldier saw only a futile exercise in hardship, deprivation and danger. Nor did the hardships stop when the war ended and the army was demobilized, since many of the troops found it hard to find a job in the bleak civilian landscape of the 1920s. US historians have subsequently tended to dismiss the whole sequence of mobilization, combat and demobilization as ‘futile’, without enquiring very much further, and have echoed the Wilsonian critique of 1914–16 that the war was never really any of America's business anyway. Perhaps it would be best to forget all about it. The US political classes made an even swifter decision in the same direction, by voting Wilson out of office in 1920, while refusing to ratify his beloved plans for the League of Nations.
Secondly, the Meuse-Argonne battle seems to have imprinted the myth of the ‘ten-foot-high German’ into the American military consciousness. In Britain the experience of being shot down in thousands on 1 July 1916 seems to have created a belief that their own generals were butchers and bunglers. In the USA, by contrast, the experience of being shot down in October 1918 seems to have created a belief that the Germans facing them were remarkably fine soldiers and the epitome of all military virtues. During the remainder of the twentieth century this idea, which would be reinforced in many hard battles during the Second World War, bored its way into so much of American military literature that by the 1980s it had become axiomatic that anything the Germans ever did was fantastically wonderful, while anything done by any other nation's army was distinctly mediocre. So far did this bizarre cult go that the US Army even adopted a version of the German pot helmet for its infantry, although no one apparently stopped to ask if the Germans had actually won either of their two world wars. To the present author it seems that this whole movement can be traced back, precisely, to the Meuse-Argonne battle. Before that, apart from the influence of the German von Steuben during the revolutionary war, it had always been France that had filled the role of ‘the USA’s most admired military nation’. It was certainly apparent during the Great War that the Americans' commanders, if not perhaps their men, preferred to fight alongside their French rather than their British allies.
However that may be, there was also a third, and arguably no less important set of lessons that the US Army took away from the Meuse-Argonne offensive. These consisted of the much more personal and specific experiences of its officers who would later rise to occupy eminent positions during the Second World War and thereafter, most notably George C Marshall, Douglas MacArthur and George Patton. These men would come away from the war with very different perspectives upon it, since they had each held very different posts within the army's chain of command. Marshall had been a key figure on Pershing's planning staff throughout hostilities, whereas MacArthur, despite Pershing's specific disapproval, had started as chief of staff to the National Guard ‘Rainbow Division’ (the third US division to arrive in France), and thereafter won fame as a pugnacious and effective brigade commander in the front line. Patton was different again, since his career had begun in Pershing's beloved cavalry, but he had then progressed into tanks, which Pershing distrusted deeply. He became a leading pioneer of armour but, along with the future president Dwight D Eisenhower (who did not serve in France but conducted tank training near Gettysburg in 1918), he soon discovered that enthusiasm for tanks was not a career-enhancing characteristic in the post-war army. Two other Second World War leaders should also be mentioned here. In common with MacArthur, lieutenants Mark Clark and Omar Bradley both fought in the front line, and both were critical of the tactics being employed. Thus the lessons they took away from the Meuse-Argonne were of the ‘how not to do it’ kind.