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CHAPTER 1
Preparation
The Thirty-fifth Division of the U.S. Army got into trouble — the division collapsed and had to be taken out of the line — during the first days of the battle of the Meuse-Argonne in 1918. The question is, How this could have happened? The men surely were good enough, these 28,000 soldiers, members of National Guard units from Missouri and Kansas combined into one division (14,287 were from Missouri, and 9,781 from Kansas, with the rest being mostly draftees from the two states). General John J. Pershing told the division's commander that without any disparagement of any other division of the American Expeditionary Forces he considered the Missouri-Kansas division the "best looking lot of men I have got in France," superb candidates for fighting the forces of Imperial Germany. At the outset the division was commanded by Major General William M. Wright, who later as commanding general of the Eighty-ninth Division presided over one of the four best AEF divisions; the Eighty-ninth was one of the two point divisions in the final, and immensely successful, attack in the Meuse on November 1, which rolled up the German opponents and may have been the Allied blow that brought an end to the awful war that opened in August 1914.
With such splendid human material, and a competent trainer of men in warfare, something went wrong, and the question is what.
1
It is a bromide of historical analysis to relate that some issue is complicated, that for this or that result there are several reasons, and then to let the reader agree with that conclusion, which after all is nothing more than a truism. The truism holds for this case, yet one must say that a signal reason in the combination that broke the Thirty-fifth Division was poor training.
The division's units — brigades, regiments, battalions, companies — came together for the first time in September 1917, when a tent camp opened at Camp Doniphan within the Fort Sill reservation in Oklahoma. From across the reaches of Missouri and Kansas, from the farms and towns and the two major Missouri metropolises of St. Louis and Kansas City, arrived the somewhat bedraggled National Guard units that were entering federal service. Perhaps their Guard origin was one of the factors in the poor training that followed. Regular Army officers would speak often of the division as "a National Guard division" and therefore, they implied, undisciplined and impervious to discipline. By that they meant that the men showed little respect for their officers and lacked the snap and polish, the ability to salute smartly and not question orders, that Regular Army troops displayed. In some measure this was true. The Guard did have the political background so often pointed out by the Regulars, especially West Pointers who felt that anyone who had not been to West Point knew nothing of the military arts. Guard troops assembled every two weeks for close-order drill and once a year attended summer camp, a week or two of nearly unadulterated fun. Harry S. Truman, a farmer near Grandview, Missouri, joined the Guard in 1905, when he was twenty-one years old (his parents, with Confederate sympathies, would not have allowed him to join before he came of age), and wrote to his cousins in Independence that during one of the camps it rained so much that the ground was covered with water, and the men dug holes so that officers would fall into them. Truman spent two enlistments, six years, in the Missouri Guard and achieved the rank of corporal. Another problem with the Guard, apart from its capacity for fun rather than military wisdom, was that in Guard units the men elected their officers, which put leadership on a basis of popularity. The Guard, one almost has to conclude, was not a good foundation for a division that would enter a serious European war.
The Guard had a little experience prior to the declaration of war, and that was along the Mexican border. It impressed a lad of seventeen in Sedalia,Missouri, William S. Triplet, who lied about his age to get into the Guard in 1917 and whose reason for entering apart from the opportunity for adventure was that his school principal promised a diploma to all volunteers, and young Triplet was failing a class in German. Although he never received the high school diploma, he did encounter the border veterans, who appeared once his company arrived at Camp Doniphan. The veterans impressed the youngster, especially with their stories, most of which were improbable. In fact, the border was no more of a training experience than the drills in Sedalia. Troops spent several boring months there in the sand and dirt, principally maintaining themselves, while six thousand Regulars under Brigadier General Pershing went into northern Mexico in a vain search for the ragtag troops of the Mexican renegade Pancho Villa.
Real training, such as it was, began on October 1 after the Guard arrived in camp. Alas, some of it was based on Cuban and Philippine experiences, rather than on those of Europe's armies.
Here it is necessary to say that the U.S. Army, the Regular Army, on April 1, 1917, consisted of 5,791 officers and 131,797 enlisted men. The rolls of the National Guard listed an additional 181,620 officers and men, of whom 80,446 had been called to federal service. The U.S. Army stood seventeenth in numerical estimates of the world's armies, behind that of Portugal. It had no experience of modern war. The last of the Civil War veterans, Colonel John Clem, who had been a drummer boy in the great war of 1861–1865, retired in 1915. The Indian fighters were much in evidence, a prime example being the army's chief of staff, Major General Hugh L. Scott, who was accustomed to showing visitors his collection of Indian headdresses and relating the importance of the individual feathers. Most of the officers, and a few of the men, had been in the Spanish-American War, that conflict where the principal campaign was against the Spanishheld port of Santiago. For this attack the army fielded 27,000 men, less than the size of a division in World War I. Many officers had seen service during the Filipino insurrection, a series of small engagements in jungle country that went on for years after the Peace of Paris of 1898. The army also assisted with pacifications in a few Central American and Caribbean countries.
In the training of the Guard units of the Thirty-fifth there was a marked inattention to what had been happening in Europe. The guns of August 1914, which inaugurated the historical twentieth century — even though the nineteenth century ended numerically on December 31, 1899 — were far distant from the officers and the garrison army of the United States whose camps and posts spread, usually by political design, across the country. The army sent officers to observe the fighting in Europe, some of them assigned to the German Army, but the reports of those officers came back to Washington only to be unread. In 1915 an officer or two began to look at the pile, but a jurisdictional dispute arose in which the dispatches finally were allotted to the president of the War College in Washington, who was to disseminate anything that it was possible to draw from them. That officer did little or nothing with what might have been prime knowledge.
The European war was far removed from the officers who instructed the Thirty-fifth Division, and they could trust only the manuals for training that the War Department in Washington sent to the field. The manuals were not fascinating reading, and were careful in their conclusions. They acknowledged the existence of war in Europe and instructed readers to learn the details of trench warfare, for, they asserted, the European war in 1914–1917 was fought from an array of trenches.
Thus, officers in training positions across the country in the dozens of cantonments emphasized trench warfare. But that was not what the men were going to encounter in France. They would discover, belatedly, that most of the training was useless — Sergeant Triplet years later, when he was a graduate of West Point, a retired Regular colonel who had been up for brigadier general at the end of World War II, never believed his World War I platoon in the Thirty-fifth was untrained, but that was not true of most of the units of the division. Triplet was smart and did all right in the Argonne with his platoon of fifty men, part of the 140th Infantry Regiment. Unfortunately the 140th was the only regiment in the Thirty-fifth that held together, and he was unable to see what happened to the others under the training that the Regular officers gave them. It was totally unimaginative, considering that the German Army, the best trained army in the world, at that time was going over to a new concept of war, using Stellungen, or positions, rather than trenches. This involved shrewd placing of machine-gun nests, with reserves behind, and support by well-sited artillery batteries, and in the attack a subtle mixing of annihilating artillery fire with groups of trained troops that bypassed strong points in favor of moving through lines to the back areas where they could spread destruction and turn order into chaos. These were, indeed, the tactical dispositions of World War II. The only things lacking were effective tanks (the tanks of World War I were so primitive and slow that they were of very limited use, moving at only five or six miles an hour, lightly armored, with inside temperatures of 120 degrees Fahrenheit or more, armed with 30-caliber machine guns or 37-mm one-pounder guns) and planes that could effectively rake troops with machine guns and heavy explosives.
The Allied armies, those of Great Britain and France, which in 1917 were barely managing to hold the front lines, were without knowledge that the German Army was changing its tactical dispositions and believed that what had prevailed, trench warfare, would continue; perhaps for that reason the Americans could be forgiven for believing the same. Not long after the American declaration of war, the British and French sent military missions to Washington, and their advice to the American military was to prepare the new divisions about to be raised so that those masses of men, to be trained beginning in the autumn, would know how to act when they arrived in the trenches and took up their portion of the line. Pershing went over to France with a small group of officers in May 1917, and among his initial inquiries that summer was whether the War Department in Washington had translated French manuals for dissemination to commanders and troops, once training began. The department replied that it had translated twenty-three manuals and would see to their dissemination.
After the war the War College undertook a study of tactics in the AEF, and one of its first ambitious projects was to make a study of the Thirty-fifth Division's training and performance. Here it is evident that trench warfare was what the men of the Thirty-fifth encountered in training. Members of the Allied missions to Washington had stressed the importance of the trenches. Some of them were heard to say that trench warfare had come to stay, superseding the older forms; they remarked, seriously, that if the Allied armies ever reached Berlin it would be from trench to trench. This influence in the summer of 1917 was probably controlling. In any event, the War Department accepted the doctrine and on August 26 issued training bulletin number 656, entitled "Infantry Training." The first sentence read: "In all the military training of a division, under existing conditions, training for trench warfare is of paramount importance." The second paragraph made one of the first duties of a division commander the laying out of a trench system, to be constructed without delay and used as the focus of all training.
Nothing if not organized, the War Department system of training provided for a complete organization of schools, dealing with all specialties. The instruction of troops was to take place over sixteen weeks. This in turn was to be only the first period of training. The second period offered generalinstructions, to continue in more detail the work begun in the first. The War College investigators searched a large miscellany of papers in the adjutant general's office. Not only those of divisions but also those of higher headquarters, corps and army and General Headquarters, came back from France in a terrible confusion, and some of them, important papers, doubtless never turned up. They managed, however, almost by a miracle, to find a series of weekly drill schedules for the Thirty-fifth, covering a period of fifteen weeks, from October 8, 1917, to January 19, 1918. The only schedule not found was probably that for the first week. It was clear that the division trained in close accordance with the War Department program set out in bulletin 656.
The first inspection of the division was made by an inspector from the inspector general's office, Colonel F. M. Caldwell, between November 24 and December 7, and consisted of two weeks of careful combing of what the division was about. The War Department schedule at that time was only halfway finished. Caldwell was much impressed with the men individually. He rated their physique as "excellent" and the average of intelligence as "high." He was less satisfied with the way in which the human material was handled. But perhaps it was too early for him to have been sure of very much.
The commander of the Thirty-fifth at that time, General Wright, and the division chief of staff were not present to speak with Colonel Caldwell, as they were in France. Pershing had asked the War Department to bring over the highest officers to let them see what the front looked like, and when they went to the British part of the front the commander in chief asked for evaluations from their hosts, some of which were not complimentary. A few of the division generals were obviously tired and sleepy-minded, past their primes if they ever had been in them. The ambitious and politically sensitive and very able Major General Leonard Wood, a former chief of staff, was in the group, and Wood was not bashful in offering his opinions, so much so that later there ensued a contretemps in which Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, with the backing of President Woodrow Wilson and, in the background, Pershing himself, denied Wood the privilege of taking the well-trained Eighty-ninth Division to Europe and relegated him to an administrative command in San Francisco; it was this arrangement that permitted Wright, after holding several corps commands, nominal posts at that time, to take the Eighty-ninth.
As head of the Thirty-fifth, Wright went over with the other generals, and the Thirty-fifth was under temporary command of its artillery brigadier, General Lucien G. Berry, the nemesis of the then Lieutenant Truman, who described him with special malice as an old fuddy-duddy who, when angered, which was often, rattled his false teeth at opponents. Berry brought up Truman for promotion to captain but kept him and two other lieutenants standing outside a mess hall for an hour or two in the intense Camp Doniphan cold, which forced Truman to miss reveille the next morning, and meanwhile grilled him, shouting at him that like all lieutenants he knew nothing, could know nothing. (When the lieutenants arrived in France it was to learn that they all had been promoted.) Berry was an uncertain, one must say unskilled, artillery commander who at the beginning of the Meuse-Argonne did not believe in airplane spotting of German guns and told anyone who would listen, including a young lieutenant from the corps inspector general's office, who recommended Berry's relief, that planes were "no damn good." Berry's presiding over the drill schedule could hardly have been a plus, although there is no evidence that Caldwell noticed his unsuitability.
General Wright returned from his European trip in December, and it is uncertain what he brought back, beyond what was plainly visible — trench warfare. The great German spring offensives were to commence with the massive onslaught of March 21, 1918, in which everything about trench warfare became plainly obsolete. When abroad Wright and the other commanding generals were hearing rumbles of Pershing's unhappiness with British and French instruction. The commander in chief had been absurdly busy in the preceding months, for he had to organize his headquarters, at the old French garrison town of Chaumont, from the very foundation. He also had to arrange a sector where his troops coming over in the spring — only the First, Second, Twenty-sixth, and Forty-second divisions arrived prior to that time — could be bivouacked and, he began to say, trained. In addition to such tasks, Pershing was beyond question one of the U.S. Army's most devoted micromanagers. He could not avoid getting himself into any and all details; wanted everything, pertinent to his high office or not, sent up to him; and spent his days sitting in his ornate Paris residence, or as soon as he could his Chaumont office, chewing tobacco and using a rubber tree or two in the office as a spittoon.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Collapse At Meuse-Argonne"
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