America's Deadliest Battle

Meuse-Argonne, 1918

Robert H. Ferrell

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780700618576
• eBook ISBN: 9780700624638
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

American fighting men had never seen the likes of it before.

The great battle of the Meuse-Argonne was the costliest conflict in American history, with 26,000 men killed and tens of thousands wounded. Involving 1.2 million American troops over 47 days, it ended on November 11—what we now know as Armistice Day—and brought an end to World War I, but at a great price. Distinguished historian Robert Ferrell now looks back at this monumental struggle to create the definitive study of the battle-and to determine just what made it so deadly.

Ferrell reexamines factors in the war that many historians have chosen to disregard. He points first to the failure of the Wilson administration to mobilize the country for war. American industry had not been prepared to produce the weaponry or transport ships needed by our military, and the War Department-with outmoded concepts of battle shaped by the Spanish-American War-shared equal blame in failing to train American soldiers for a radically new type of warfare

Once in France, undertrained American doughboys were forced to learn how to conduct mobile warfare through bloody experience. Ferrell assesses the soldiers' lack of skill in the use of artillery, the absence of tactics for taking on enemy machine gun nests, and the reluctance of American officers to use poison gas-even though by 1918 it had become a staple of warfare. In all of these areas, the German army held the upper hand.

Ferrell relates how, during the last days of the Meuse-Argonne, the American divisions had finally learned up-to-date tactics, and their final attack on November 1 is now seen as a triumph of military art. Yet even as the armistice was being negotiated, some American officers—many of whom had never before commanded men in battle—continued to spur their troops on, wasting more lives in an attempt to take new ground mere hours before the settlement.

Besides the U.S. shortcomings in mobilization and tactics, Ferrell points to the greatest failure of all: the failure to learn from the experience, as after the armistice the U.S. Army retreated to its prewar mindset. Enhanced by more than four dozen maps and photographs, America's Deadliest Battle is a riveting revisit to the forests of France that reminds us of the costs of World War I—and of the shadow that it cast on the twentieth century.

CHAPTER ONE

Preparation

Two immense tasks confronted the United States on April 6, 1917, when the nation entered the world war: industrial mobilization and preparation of the army to fight in France. Both ultimately affected the battle of the Meuse-Argonne.

The first, industrial mobilization, was nearly a failure because President Woodrow Wilson simply could not manage it. In the years before 1917, this highly regarded chief executive had displayed a mastery of domestic politics that had brought memorable, progressive legislation, including the Federal Reserve Act (long overdue) and the act creating the Federal Trade Commission. Wilson’s presidency was marked by moral leadership of a high order; no tincture of scandal—either personal or political—accompanied it. But for all his admirable qualities, Wilson was not the manager of mobilization that the country needed in 1917–1918. He could not put his mind to the great projects he had begun.

Wilson was a man of peace to the core of his being. After his election in 1912, he wrote to a friend that it would be an irony of fate if he ended up leading the nation into war. After a German submarine sank the liner Lusitania in May 1915, Wilson made a speech in Philadelphia in which he said there was such a thing as a man being too proud to fight—after the deaths of 1,198 men, women, and children, including 128 Americans. Former president Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson’s opponent in 1912, said publicly that if he had been president the ship never would have been sunk; he told military writer Frederick Palmer that he would have sent Germany an ultimatum and seized any German ships in American harbors. To explain his lack of action, Wilson told Palmer that people east of the Alleghenies would have supported war after the Lusitania, but those west of the Alleghenies would not have.¹ About the same time, he stated that war would not accomplish anything permanent. In the autumn of 1915 the president read in the Baltimore Sun that a group of army officers at the War College in Washington were planning for war, and he instructed the acting secretary of war, Henry S. Breckinridge, to find out whether this were true and, if so, to order all the officers out of the city. Wilson never ventured far from his antiwar position. He was never at ease as a war leader, regardless of what he said out of expediency. When he went to the peace conference in Europe, his generals and European leaders implored him to tour the battlefields, but he put it off for as long as he could and then devoted only a few days to the distasteful task. He did not find time to visit the Meuse-Argonne.

Another quality that accompanied the president’s views on war was his tendency to resort to oratory rather than action at a time when the ends were less important than the means. The president believed that words were vital; in the beginning was the word. This principle had taken him far in politics. Oratory had come in with Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun and did not go out until after the world war and the introduction of amplification (loudspeakers), radio, and eventually television. Wilson’s leading biographer and the editor of sixty-nine volumes of his papers wrote that oratory was the president’s principal attribute as a public figure.² Wilson believed that he could resolve problems by taking his listeners to the high places from which they could see the valleys and villages below.

Given the nation’s need to mobilize industry to produce ships and weapons to allow the army to get to France and fight on the western front, there was no time to waste in turning industry to this purpose. But despite the president’s announcement of this need, he did little or nothing to achieve it. He did not sense that leading such a great enterprise would require him to get into the details of the work; he had to know what was going on, and he needed to confer with experts and appoint them to supervise war production.

Warning signs were visible not long after the declaration of war, but the president paid little attention, with the inevitable result. The first failure appeared in shipbuilding.³ The situation had been addressed the year before the war when, to oppose Roosevelt’s urging of mobilization, the president had sponsored a program known as preparedness, one aspect of which was to increase the merchant marine. Wilson appointed a shipping board that was coheaded by the builder of the Panama Canal, Major General George W. Goethals. The general was a talented administrator, but he butted heads with his civil counterpart, William G. Denman, and little happened until the president dismissed them both and appointed two civilians. The more dominant was Charles M. Schwab, the head of Bethlehem Steel and a former assistant to Andrew Carnegie. Schwab followed the same course that Goethals might have taken, had he possessed support. But during this administrative confusion, precious time was lost in what proved to be a complicated effort.

The shipbuilding program was given the highest priority, for in 1917 there were hardly enough ships to carry more than a fraction of a large army to Europe. The total transatlantic tonnage was only 1 million, the same as in 1810. For a short time in the first part of the nineteenth century, tonnage had gone up, but by 1860 American ships carried only 65 percent of American commerce. During the Civil War, as a result of Confederate raiders such as the Alabama, tonnage fell to a quarter of the overseas trade, and in subsequent years it fell to less than 10 percent. With the invention of iron and then steel ships, the United States lost its advantage in the construction of wooden ships because of Europe’s cheaper metals and much cheaper wages (European ships cost 25 to 50 percent less than American). Then in February 1917 came the crisis: the German government engaged in unrestricted submarine warfare to prevent all commerce with the British Isles, which meant the sinking of all ships approaching British ports. In that month, submarines sank 536,000 tons of Allied shipping, followed by 603,000 tons in March and nearly 1 million in April. As the rate of sinkings to launchings approached two to one, if not three to one, among shipyards all over the world, the supply of shipping decreased dramatically.

After April 1917 the capacity of American shipyards increased sixfold under the government program; 1,284 ways were in operation, double the number in the rest of the world. The shipbuilding workforce rose from 45,000 to 380,000. The largest yard was at Hog Island, a muddy acreage near Philadelphia, where pile drivers produced what amounted to a shipbuilding city. It was larger than the seven largest shipyards in England. Hog Island turned into an enormous enterprise, assigned the task of producing, launching, and finishing two hundred ships. It had a projected production of fifty ships on the ways, with room for fifty at the piers. Each ship required 250,000 parts, and Hog Island had 250,000 piles of parts brought in by fifty miles of rail sidings. Cranes lifted the parts into hulls, and workers used the team method, moving from way to way. One did ribs, another bulkheads, and another decks, turning out 4,600-ton cargo carriers and 5,000-ton combination cargo and troop carriers. The speed of the cargo vessels was eleven to twelve knots; combination ships could travel fifteen to sixteen knots.

The prospect was exhilarating. At Hog Island, a ship could be built in eighty-seven days, requiring thirty-five more to finish. At this single yard, with all the ways working, a ship could be launched every other day. The national shipbuilding project was getting into high gear by early summer 1918, and on a single day, July 4, yards across the country launched 300,000 tons of ships.

But the program got started too late, and few yards launched ships in time to assist the war effort. Hog Island launched its first, the Quistconck (Indian for “Hog Island”), on August 5, 1918, and delivered it on December 3. The program faltered, and tonnage went up only because of the commandeering of German ships that had taken refuge in American harbors at the outset of the war, as well as those of neutrals that had stayed in port because of the threat from submarines. A few ships came from the Great Lakes, bisected and taken through the Welland Canal. An attempt to build composite ships, with steel frames and wooden plates, failed because of the ships’ structural weakness. They proved suitable only for coastal runs, where they freed a few ships capable of transatlantic passage. The total new tonnage was 664,000 in 1917 and 1.3 million in 1918—a miserable performance. The entire shipbuilding program produced only 107 steel, 67 wooden, and 4 composite ships.

The lack of ships in 1917–1918 adversely affected the American contribution to the war, and when the Allies realized this (belatedly), they did something about it. Early in 1918, fearful of a great German offensive, the British government removed ships from Mediterranean runs and other employment and sent them to the United States to bring over American divisions. Half of all troops in the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) were brought over by the U.S. Navy; the rest were transported by Allied ships. For the navy, this meant packing the men into holds and assigning bunks on twelve-hour shifts—doubling the capacity of transports.

Getting the men to France was just part of the problem. Creating an infrastructure to receive them proved daunting. Ports in France were insufficient and needed to be enlarged and new ones constructed, if possible. The rail network from the ports up to the Lorraine sector, where the Americans were supposed to deploy, was as primitive as the port structure. French resources were few; the years of war had starved industry of steel and other necessities. The Americans lacked the ships to bring over the necessary materials, and the problem continued until the end of the war.

The effects of the shipping crisis were felt in all directions. The AEF needed trucks—or if not trucks, then horses and mules—to carry the men and their baggage. American industry could have turned out trucks in huge quantities, but there was no space aboard ships to carry them. Thus, truck transport ceased in January 1918. Animals could not be sent from the United States because of the same space problems, and animal transport likewise ceased the same month. Army procurement officers sought to purchase horses and mules in Europe, but they were in short supply and expensive, costing up to $400. The animals that were available were often of poor quality, having been rejected by the French army. Few American divisions were able to obtain enough animals to fill their tables of organization. Moreover, caring for the animals they did have was time-consuming. They had to be fed, meaning that oats and forage had to be found in large quantities. They also had to be curried. And when they went to the front, their high silhouettes made them vulnerable to artillery and machine gun fire, and those that were killed had to be buried. Owing to this lack of trucks and animals, many divisions went to the front with insufficient transport, and many men, mostly infantrymen, had to walk the fifty miles (eighty kilometers) between St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne carrying eighty-pound packs, leaving them in less than optimal physical condition when they entered battle.

Like the shipbuilding program, airplane production was also ineffective.⁴ Failure occurred in the details. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker was the initial enthusiast for a production program, and he let it be known that $600 million would allow the building of the greatest air fleet ever devised. The president’s adviser, Colonel Edward M. House, told the nation’s chief executive that all he had to do was give the word. Wilson gave the word, Congress appropriated $640 million, and the details intervened. One problem was acquiring the lumber to build frames—five thousand feet were needed to get five hundred feet without a cross or spiral grain. Flax from Ireland to cover the frames was unavailable, and cotton needed different dopes that were hard to come by. Motors were also a problem, and only after many changes did the government decide on the excellent twelve-cylinder Liberty motor, resulting in the production of 13,547 engines, of which 4,435 went overseas. Few planes ever went overseas. Baker originally promised twenty thousand, but the figure decreased to seventeen thousand, fifteen thousand, two thousand, and finally, thirty-seven. On February 21, 1918, the War Department announced that the first American-built planes were en route to the front; in reality, a plane had gone from the factory to an aviation field (in America) for a radiator test. The commander of the AEF, General John J. Pershing, received 1,213 American-made British DeHavilland 4s, known as flying coffins because the fuel tanks exploded on landing. Most AEF planes were foreign built. Of the 6,364 used by the army in France, evenly divided between service and training types, 4,874 were French, 258 British, and 19 Italian.

Airplanes in quantity were unavailable from the Allies until the summer of 1918 (shortly before the Meuse-Argonne), and never in sufficient numbers. Air service pilots had only a short period of instruction before having to oppose the skilled German pilots. There was also little time for training with the divisions in artillery spotting, which is so essential to the forward movement of troops.

Production of artillery was another mobilization failure.⁵ Army officers urged the production of a three-inch gun known as the French 75, wrongly believing that this fine artillery piece was superior to the army’s similar gun, the Model 1902. Mass production of the 75 proved impossible. The gun had been made by artisans and demanded rigid tolerances. Too late, officers went back to the Model 1902, but Pershing had to use 1,828 French 75s. Similarly, no American-made six-inch (155-mm) howitzers or guns (a howitzer has a lower muzzle velocity than a gun and delivers curved fire) reached France before the armistice.⁶ The War Department obtained plans for 155-mm howitzers from Schneider in France, and by October 1917 it had changed the specifications from metric measurements to the American system. It awarded separate contracts for tubes, carriages, and recoil mechanisms. The American Brake Shoe and Foundry Company of Pennsylvania received a contract for three thousand tubes, and seven months later, twelve a day were coming down the line. Maxwell Motor Company and Ford Motor Company both produced carriages, Ford turning out 4,373. The difficulty was the recoil mechanism, or recuperator, which needed forgings weighing 3,875 pounds. Companies shied away from the task. A contract eventually went to Dodge Brothers, and at the time of the armistice, Dodge was turning out sixteen a day. In contrast, for 155-mm guns, the Midvale Steel Company was already making tubes and carriages for the British army, and all the War Department had to do was place an order. The department bought French blueprints for the recuperators, and they proved to be more difficult to manufacture than the mechanisms for howitzers; Dodge Brothers had made only one by the time the war ended.

It is impossible to know what the failure to produce three-inch guns and especially 155-mm howitzers and guns meant for the Meuse-Argonne. Nevertheless, it seems certain that if American-made artillery had been available, the army would have used all of it, which would have drastically reduced casualties. In the summer of 1917 the War Department sent a mission under Colonel Chauncey Baker to consult with AEF officers and establish tables of organization for the divisions’ supporting units. A member of the Baker board was Colonel Charles P. Summerall, an artillerist, who became a corps commander in the Meuse-Argonne. He argued vociferously and undiplomatically for more artillery but was voted down. The board and the AEF officers allotted each division one artillery brigade, no more.

In the Meuse-Argonne, Summerall’s position proved correct. If more 75s and 155s had been available, the AEF’s attacks might have gone very differently. In the first weeks of battle, the divisions needed more artillery. The 75s provided barrage fire ahead of advancing troops, and those walls of fire saved lives. But the 75s were short-range guns, and it was difficult to get them forward. They could not get up the poor roads, and taking them through open terrain was awkward; even though the 75 was nominally a light gun, it weighed four tons with its carriage and required six horses. The army could have used many more 155-mm howitzers and guns with their longer ranges. When Summerall’s two divisions became the point units in the attack of November 1, 1918, the First Army was under a new and imaginative artillery commander, and with the corps commander’s delighted assent, he gave the 2nd Division three artillery brigades and the 89th two. The guns took out everything in front of them, and the infantry lines swept forward without opposition.⁷

The country’s production of tanks was as inconsequential as its production of ships, planes, and artillery, although for a different reason. There was not so much a failure in production as a lack of direction from either the army’s leaders in Washington or the commander of the AEF, Pershing, about what should be done. Employment of tanks in dramatic if not always effective numbers had come late in the war. The British used them at Cambrai in November 1917 with devastating effect; they did not anticipate their success, and there were no follow-up troops. In just a few days a German counterattack took back the territory that had been gained. On August 8, 1918, the British tank force struck again at Amiens, this time with the infantry following up.

At the outset of U.S. entry into the war, the War Department considered the production of tanks, and the AEF organized a provisional tank brigade. The pro...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Preparation
• Chapter 2: The American Expeditionary Forces
• Chapter 3: First Days
• Chapter 4: The 35th Division
• Chapter 5: Ending the Enfilade
• Chapter 6: The Kriemhilde Stellung
• Chapter 7: Reorganization
• Chapter 8: Breakout
• Chapter 9: Victory
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Gallery
• Back Cover