John J. Pershing: General of the Armies

A Biography

Frederick Palmer

• Publisher: Eschenburg Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789125399
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Erster Weltkrieg

This is the authoritative biography on General of the Armies John Joseph "Black Jack" Pershing (1860-1948), a senior United States Army officer during World War I. His most famous post was serving as the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) on the Western Front from 1917-1918.In John J. Pershing: General of the Armies, author Frederick Palmer focuses primarily on General Pershing's experiences as Commander of the AEF of the First World War. Here is a biography, history and a tribute to a great general, written by a World War I correspondent who served on his staff. Palmer traces his background, his boyhood in Missouri, his switch from law to West Point, later taking law and teaching at the University of Nebraska, fighting Indians, and Moros, serving in the Spanish-American War, the troubles in Mexico, and his promotion to Brigadier-General. Then the First World War, in minute detail—battles, campaigns, offensives, planning and strategy; conferences with other war leaders; insistence on high stands of discipline and morale; determination on separate American troops; his vision, insight, and gift for organization.An invaluable addition to any WWI library!

 

1—The Approach

USUALLY WE HAVE to wait on posterity to say whether or not the fame of a man in his time will endure or whether he will receive only a nod from the next generation in passing him on to oblivion. The rare exception is one whose name will always be associated with a mighty event or movement of undying memory as its spearhead.

It was certain that Washington after Yorktown, Nelson after Trafalgar, Wellington after Waterloo, and Grant and Lee as well as Lincoln after Appomattox, would live in history, each in his distinctive character. So, in his strength and limitations, must the man on his headquarters railroad car on a November afternoon, 1918, at the city of Treves, which had been in Germany a fortnight ago and was now in France.

Ahead of the car, which had the right of way in enemy country, his troops were marching on to the occupation of the Rhine. Color was back in his face, which had had ä stony pallor in his unrelenting determination in the crisis of the fifty days of the Meuse-Argonne Battle, after the strain of the preceding hundred days of continuous fighting.

Destiny had made him commander and ambassador, an American king in France, in an astounding crusade across the Atlantic ocean of two millions of American soldiers, to whom “J.J.P.” on a piece of paper was the law for all.

When the signing of the Armistice set crowds surging in jubilant frenzy from the Vosges to San Francisco he had shown no outward emotion. His feelings were too deep for display. He had already discounted the last step in reaching the goal. The plan he had made eighteen months ago had been fulfilled, the victory won.

As he put it, “There’s the record”—that of achievement. But the myriad dancing typewriter keys of modern administration do not include in their detail the oral councils in which policies are formed or a chief’s reasoning which leads to a vital decision. General Pershing’s own part in the achievement is not altogether revealed in the confidential cablegrams and letters between headquarters in France and Washington and the vast cordage of documents, to which I have had access.

This biography would enable us to know the living man, absorb the atmosphere in which he worked through his significant remarks and what those close to him were saying and thinking about him at the time and in later years of reflection. The general, whom I first knew as a captain, developed into a man of many parts.

There was the Pershing who seemed most cautious and then most daring; the Pershing of insistent deliberation in coming to a decision and then flashing the word for speedy action; the Pershing of the “thin-lipped” smile who exasperated Premier Clemenceau and of a variety of smiles and a hearty laugh when many of his soldiers wondered if he ever smiled; the Pershing of steel and stiff exactions and the Pershing of “If he were more human he would be happier” and “I do wish he had more sense of humor”; the Pershing who seemed to lack any form of words except an explicit order and then could be most lucid in his expositions; the Pershing of brimstone bursts of indignation and canny diplomacy against sieges of intrigue; and the Pershing of “That’s politics, the statesman’s business,” and of whom a British officer said, at first sight of him, “What a soldier!”

What distances he had traveled in more than miles from Laclede! Yet, in a sense, he was never far away from the little Missouri town. His feet were always on the mother soil from which his young roots had drawn their sap.

2—Boyhood

“BUT THE NAME IS PFERSHING,” as Alsatians reminded us; and so spelled and borne to America by the ancestor, Frederick Pfershing from that buffer land, neither truly French nor German, but inherently Alsatian.

The Alsace he knew was under French rule in the expansive reign of Louis XIV who held the Rhine as his eastern boundary by divine right. At the time young surveyor George Washington had yet to cross the eastern wall of the Shenandoah Valley on his first wilderness mission; a revolution in the American colonies was no more dreamed of than a revolution in France; Napoleon was not yet born.

There were nobility and gentry, peasants, craftsmen, tradesmen in class distinctions as rigidly set in Alsace as in France or in Germany. What the father was the son became almost inevitably in the social scale. Talk came over the Vosges from Paris about France’s great holdings in hot Louisiana and snowy Canada and from over the Rhine about how some Germans had set up a community in a part of the new world which had a more temperate climate.

The sparse emigration to America from the continent of Europe went usually in groups promoted by some enterprising leader. That from France to French territory originally had been distinctively led by the French nobility under royal favor and regimentation. Young Frederick Pfershing was no leader of a group; he waited on the companionship of no group in collective, gregarious daring for the adventure which broke free of the provincial fold of inheritance.

The Rhine flowed to the sea, and across the sea was America where the tales had it—at least he would find if the tales were true—land did not descend from seigneur’s son to seigneur’s son, but a common man might earn the possession of a plot of virgin soil to hold as his own. Frederick lacked the passage money, but he had faith that he could work his way, which he did on the little ship Jacob in the fall of 1749.

His was not to be a case of “from immigrant to millionaire,” which was quite rare even in later days when the much trumpeted phrase stirred the ambition of boys born in log cabins whose mothers did not look toward the Presidency for them but great wealth. In fact, there were no millionaires in America then. But Frederick got on well enough to enable him to be married within a year after his arrival to a Pennsylvania German girl. He owned and tilled his own land and supported a family. He had achieved in America what he sought in America.

It was not until the third generation, when the post-Revolution movement over the Alleghenies and the Cumberlands was spreading the pioneering march in a burst of speed, that the migrant spirit of Frederick reappeared in the Pershings. The f had been dropped from the name as many other immigrant names had undergone change, sometimes owing to the simplified spelling with which a clerk wrote a deed.

An American army had been to Mexico City, adding Texas to the Louisiana Purchase and annexing California, which soon sent the electrifying summons to the gold rush of forty-nine. Steamboats plied the western rivers, the railroad was advancing behind the wheels of the covered wagons across the Mississippi. Horace Greeley’s “Go west, young man” was no provocative phrase to awaken youth from lethargy but expressed the call of improved communications to the restless and ambitious.

John Fletcher Pershing, Frederick’s grandson, worked his way down the Ohio as Frederick had worked his way across the Atlantic. He had become enough of a river man to get a job piloting a raft of lumber down the Mississippi to New Orleans. He was up and down the river in the fascinating days of racing steamboats and Mark Twain’s tales, up and down and then ashore, wherever inquiring opportunism led him when individual freedom on the frontier or near frontier was unrestricted except by the laws against assault, arson and theft and personal attitude toward the Ten Commandments.

Men had not yet settled into occupational grooves. There was a desirable proficiency in being able to turn a hand at anything. A man might try many occupations in his search for one to his profit or liking and practice several at the same time. He scattered the investments of his energy and adaptability as a capitalist scatters his in money.

The girl John Fletcher married had her part in their settling in Linn County, northwestern Missouri, near the little town of Laclede. She came of the old Virginia stock which had migrated westward after the Revolution. Some had gone over the Alleghenian wall to the Ohio and beyond. Her ancestors were among those who crossed the Cumberland wall to the Mississippi.

Pennsylvania, by way of Pittsburgh and the Ohio River, and Virginia, by way of Tennessee, were united. On September 11, 1860, the first of nine children was born and named John Joseph. The Alsatian strain in the melting pot mixture of John Joseph’s blood represented one-fourth.

He rarely went further than a pleasant acknowledgment in France of references to his Alsatian origin. His pride in that great grandfather’s gallant adventure was that with it he ceased to be Alsatian and became American. At the time of his birth John Joseph’s father was a section foreman on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad.

The Presidential campaign of 1860 became warmer day by day. There was fuel to make it white hot in a region where northern and southern strains and the Germans who had come to Missouri after the Revolution of 1848 were neighbors.

With northern Missouri inclined toward the Federal side and southern Missouri toward the Confederate in the Civil War, communities and families were divided in their passionate sectional loyalties and traditions. John Fletcher Pershing became a sutler in a Federal regiment.

The son’s first memories began in the atmosphere of war, with the news of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, with soldiers home on furlough, with the final battles and the return of soldiers who had been with Grant and Sherman in the western campaigns and under Sherman on his march to the sea.

Today communications and standardization have made American towns far more alike than in the eighteen-sixties and seventies. Then the Pershing’s home town of Laclede was very different from a town in longer settled regions. It was not only western but distinctly Missourian. Today one who landed from a place in a neighboring field and walked down the main street of Laclede would not know, barring a tell-tale local sign, whether he was in a town in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Illinois or Ohio. The same kind of stores, soda fountains, cars and filling stations and people in the same kind of clothes!

But fifty years after he had left Laclede to go out in the big world John J. Pershing was sure that he would know he was in Missouri anywhere in Missouri. Throughout his career he never missed a chance to return to Laclede.

In his boyhood the Pershings had their modest share of the post-Civil War good times in the late ‘sixties which carried over into the first two years of the ‘seventies. Riverman and railroadman, army sutler, the versatile father also farmed, contracted and kept a country store. More important than his occupations was the standing of the Pershing family in the community.

In the early settlements in America and on westward there were two types. These have been referred to as the God-fearing and the Godless, and also as those whose gathering place was the church and the saloon. It was the division—prevailing in old communities and sharpened in the new—between the self-respecting, self-reliant, stable and industrious and others whom they carried along in their progress. And the Pershings were of the first class which gave us the leadership and the direction that kept us on the high road. As the soldier son once remarked, “That is sufficient aristocracy of origin for anyone.”

In the late sixties and seventies this division was very sharply drawn in northwestern Missouri, neighbor to “bleeding Kansas,” to the outlawry on the borders of the then Indian territory, now Oklahoma, where the building of the railroads had brought a rough element, and the bandit James brothers and the guerrilla Quantrell flourished. Hold-ups and train robberies had a Robin Hood glamor in certain circles. Drinking bouts led to lawless sprees and shooting scrapes. One night in John Joseph’s childhood a gang of bushwhackers sacked Laclede. His first teacher in the district school of the three R’s was the daughter of a man who had been killed in a raid.

Neither the father nor mother brooked any compromises by the children with the basic moralities. The lesson of life was to stand on your feet and go straight. There was little danger of Jack becoming a spoiled child, and none, with the rapid increase of the family, of his becoming a spoiled only son. The makers of legends who like to dwell on incidents of boyhood forecasting the man will find little evidence of Jack’s predestination for high command unless they make a point that the boy had the same compact head, without a bump on it, and close-set ears, as the man. He did not play with toy soldiers or organize his fellows into a rigidly saluting military company. The influences of his boyhood which he never ceased to apply in his career were those common to his environment.

Plentiful food he had—the Pershings grew their own mostly—before we knew about vitamins and calories; and no lack of fresh air and exercise in doing chores, in the boyish games and the annual delight of roasting ears when field corn was in the milk. He was just another sturdy country boy in a comfortable, modest home—under the spell of the father’s irrepressible optimism in caring for his growing family—keeping his pace well in front of his classes at the district school. The parents planned that John should go to college. The father foresaw that he could afford it. John looked forward to going and planned to study law.

He heard the talk in his little world, reflecting that of the big world at the turn of the ‘seventies, about rising land values; about how more railroads were building to bring to the growing markets of our east and Europe more grain and meat from the west, factories building in the growing cities, immigration pouring in at Castle Garden, more mouths to feed, more subdivisions everywhere into town lots. Yesterday’s high prices were still higher today and bound to be higher tomorrow to continue the boom in our continental breadth of endless room for expansion.

The father had caught the epidemic fever. He had bought land at high prices in speculative anticipation they would go higher. He was hit hard by the ensuing depression after the panic of 1873, when John was fourteen, which brought the same collapse of values as sunk that of western farms, bought for two hundred dollars an acre and mortgaged for a hundred in the nineteen-twenties, down to fifty in the nineteen-thirties—if a purchaser could be found. Mortgages were foreclosed on the father’s land. This was a lesson to be applied by young John who was never given to counting his chickens before they were hatched.

Any visions he had of going to college were out of the reckoning in the days before the largess of endowments held out a generously beckoning hand on an easy road. Big brother must help carry on until the return of good times which were to pass Laclede by in the prosperity of better located towns. That meant farmwork for John Joseph, and when he was a little older, a grip of the plow handles making a straight furrow.

A boy brought up in Laclede, where everybody rode, did not have to wait for coaching in the riding hall at West Point to learn how to ride. John had his initiation on a horse’s bare back when his legs stuck out at right angles. He knew how to break a colt and mend a harness.

The remote figure to the soldiers of the AEF had the reputation in the community of being what is called a “good mixer.” Everybody in the country around knew young Jack Pershing. He did not take himself too seriously. He was liked. It was good to see him approaching in anticipation of his happy greeting—his genuine and hearty “How are you?”—with a beaming friendly smile fo...