As the Russian front disintegrates further, on the Western Front the Americans fire their first shots
In August 1917 the Pope had made his appeal for peace, declaring his neutrality to be ‘appropriate to him who is the common father and who loves all his children with equal affection’. It brought him little filial warmth in response. In February 1918 it would be the turn of the Kaiser to speak of sacred matters: ‘War is a disciplinary action by God to educate mankind,’ he told the citizens of Bad Homburg, gathered in the courtyard of the castle, his summer residence for thirty years and now the place of his February Kur.
He had good news for them: the new People’s Republic of Ukraine, detached from the Russian Empire in the wake of the Bolshevik takeover, had on the previous day signed a peace treaty. It signalled ultimate victory, he said, and in the meantime would bring them more bread, for Ukraine always had a surplus of grain. (In many parts of Germany, the flour was by now being supplemented with potato peelings and sawdust.) It was, indeed, the Brotfrieden – the bread peace. But he warned them too that Ukraine was ‘shaken by a civil war … [and] could be overrun by the Bolsheviks and large parts of the grain could be carried away by the Red Army’.
Indeed, at the council of war that followed, the recent armistice with the Russians would be temporarily overturned in order to force the hand of the new government. Since the middle of December, the guns had been formally silent from the Baltic to the Black Sea (and less formally since the November ceasefire), but the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk were being deliberately drawn out, said Richard von Kühlmann, secretary of state for foreign affairs. General Max Hoffmann, chief of staff in the east and the guiding brain of the Grosser Generalstab throughout the campaigns against Russia, was convinced that both German and Austro-Hungarian forces must immediately take to the offensive again, ‘otherwise these brutes [Bolsheviks] will wipe up the Ukrainians, the Finns, and the Balts, and then quickly get together a new revolutionary army and turn the whole of Europe into a pig-sty’.
The Kaiser agreed. There was, he told the war council, a worldwide conspiracy against Germany by Bolsheviks supported by President Woodrow Wilson, Freemasons and ‘international Jewry’.
Not only was his proto-fascism a faulty assessment, however, it was inconsistent with recent German policy. It was Berlin that had brought Lenin by train from Swiss exile to Petrograd, and Berlin that had given financial backing to the Bolsheviks, including secret subventions to their newspaper Pravda. As for the Jewish conspiracy, what of the (by general estimate) 100,000 Jews serving in the German army, 12,000 of whom were killed in action and 18,000 of whom were awarded the Iron Cross?
Hoffmann was given the green light nevertheless, and on 18 February some fifty-two German and Austro-Hungarian divisions crossed the ceasefire line in Unternehmen Faustschlag (Operation Fist Punch). They quickly occupied Dvinsk in Latvia and Lutsk in north-western Ukraine, and soon found themselves advancing along the Russian railway lines against virtually no opposition. ‘It is the most comical war I have ever known,’ Hoffman wrote in his diary. ‘We put a handful of infantrymen with machineguns and one field gun onto a train and push them off to the next station. They take it, make prisoners of the Bolsheviks, pick up a few more troops and go on. This proceeding has, at any rate, the charm of novelty.’
Lenin and his commissar for foreign affairs, Leon Trotsky, a Ukrainian Jew, gave in at once, telegramming Hoffmann to accept all the peace conditions demanded at Brest-Litovsk. With an open road before him, however, Hoffmann was not inclined to accept the capitulation, and prevaricated over the paperwork. On 20 February, German troops entered Minsk, the first city of Belarus and an important railway junction on the Warsaw–Moscow line, taking nearly 10,000 prisoners. ‘There is no fight left in them,’ wrote Hoffmann. ‘Yesterday one lieutenant with six men took prisoner six hundred Cossacks.’
Indeed, during the next two weeks German troops would take the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, and Narva, the easternmost city of Estonia, less than 90 miles from Petrograd. When a German plane bombed the Fontanka embankment close to the Summer Palace, the Bolsheviks’ governing council began quitting the city for Moscow, which was declared the new capital on 12 March. With the support, however, of the 39-year-old former editor of Pravda, Joseph Stalin, Lenin just managed to persuade his council to accept whatever terms the Germans offered, and on 3 March the Russian delegates at Brest-Litovsk were instructed to sign the punitive treaty that brought the war on the Eastern Front to an end, giving up Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus and the whole of Ukraine.
Erich Ludendorff, in effect the C-in-C of the entire German army, could now switch even more divisions to the Western Front for what he intended to be the decisive offensive. And they would take with them an extra 2,500 artillery pieces and 5,000 machine guns captured in the recent fighting.
Meanwhile, in London, matters were coming to a head over the terms of reference of the British representative at the new supreme war council at Versailles – in effect a generalissimo’s headquarters, controlling among other things the planned inter-allied reserve of thirty divisions. Although Lloyd George had been one of its chief proponents, the prime minister now found himself lumbered with three points of advice and decision – Versailles (where the permanent British representative was Sir Henry Wilson), GHQ in France (Haig), and the CIGS (Robertson). Maurice Hankey, secretary of the war cabinet, was at the council’s meeting at the end of January and recorded that ‘all gave different advice [creating] a worse state of chaos than I have ever known in all my wide experience’.
In the end, ‘Wully’ Robertson, who had never been a supporter of the idea of a supreme war council (he called it ‘the Versailles Soviet’), resigned, whereupon Lloyd George made General Sir Henry Wilson CIGS, and appointed in his place at Versailles – double-hatted as deputy CIGS for supposedly greater control – Sir Henry Rawlinson, lately commander of 4th Army. This would do little to ameliorate the problem of differing advice, but it did at least remove one thorn from Lloyd George’s side, for he had found Robertson increasingly difficult to work with of late.
For the rest, February on the Western Front continued as quietly as January, with just raiding and local attacks. For the Americans, however, it was the opportunity to see a little instructive action at last. In mid-January, the 1st US Division had entered the line in the St-Mihiel salient (French sector), the first complete division to do so. On discovering this, the Germans had launched several raids, killing, wounding or capturing a number of US troops. ‘This thing of letting the Boche do it all is getting on the nerves,’ noted one officer in his diary: it was certainly not ‘the American way’.
On 13 February the AEF got its first opportunity to strike back, albeit in a limited way, when several artillery batteries took part in a six-hour bombardment prior to a French attack at Butte de Mesnil in Champagne. Then, ten days later, just south of Laon, two officers and twenty-four enlisted men took part in a raid alongside French troops, capturing several dozen Germans. In its report of the action, The Times commented that although ‘the actual occasion was not of much importance, February 23 is one of the dates that will always be remembered in the history of the war’.
Another memorable date would be the fifth, but for a more melancholy reason – the loss of the former luxury liner Tuscania, pressed into service as a troopship, to a German torpedo off the north coast of Ireland, and with her of 166 US servicemen, the first to be killed on their way to Europe, together with 44 of her British crew. The German submarine UB-77 had sighted Tuscania’s convoy during the day and shadowed them until early evening, then under cover of darkness had fired two torpedoes, the second of which struck home, sending her to the bottom in four hours.
Elsewhere on the Western Front, one of the most famous – and certainly most controversial – American soldiers of the twentieth century was about to become the first to be decorated by the French. On 26 February, Colonel Douglas MacArthur, chief of staff of the US 42nd Division – ‘the Rainbow Division’ – had sought permission of the general commanding the line at Réchicourt to accompany a trench raid that night. His dress surprised both the raiders and one of the 42nd Division’s ADCs who had slipped away to join in ‘the picnic’ as he called it. Instead of a steel helmet MacArthur wore his service cap, and rather than pistol, knife or club – the preferred weapons of a trench raid – he carried his riding whip. ‘It’s the orders you disobey that make you famous,’ he told the ADC.
He was right. The raiders had a hard fight, but they returned at dawn with a large bag of prisoners, including a colonel whom MacArthur had taken in his personal charge and prodded back to the trenches with his riding whip. Though the seat of MacArthur’s immaculate riding breeches was left behind on the wire, General de Bazelaire greeted the 38-year-old trench-raider with a kiss on both cheeks and pinned on him a Croix de Guerre. The story made the New York Times the following week, together with the opinion of the Rainbow Division’s commanding general that ‘Colonel MacArthur is one of the ablest officers in the United States Army and one of the most popular’. A fortnight later MacArthur would win the US Distinguished Service Cross in one of the 42nd Division’s own raids, and by the end of the war was commanding the division whose name he himself had suggested – ‘Rainbow’ because it was made up of militia units from across America, rather than, as most of the others, recruited from a single state.
The AEF, for all their greenness, not least among the officers, were certainly creating an impression; and at the time of lowest ebb in allied morale – after the fruitless losses of 1917, and facing a massive and desperate German offensive – the impression alone was reassuring. When General Pershing visited GHQ at the end of December, Haig had been particularly impressed by his ADC, ‘a fire-eater, [who] longs for the fray’. He was Captain (later General) George S. Patton.
As for the ‘doughboys’ themselves, they had, wrote Vera Brittain in Testament of Youth, ‘an unusual quality of bold vigour in their swift stride’. While serving as a nurse at the British base at Étaples she saw for the first time a contingent of them marching down the road:
They looked larger than ordinary men; their tall, straight figures were in vivid contrast to the under-sized armies of pale recruits to which we had grown accustomed. At first I thought their spruce, clean uniforms were those of officers, yet obviously they could not be officers, for there were too many of them; they seemed, as it were, Tommies in heaven. Had yet another regiment been conjured from our depleted Dominions? I wondered, watching them move with such rhythm, such dignity, such serene consciousness of self-respect. But I knew the colonial troops so well, and these were different; they were assured where the Australians were aggressive, self-possessed where the New Zealanders were turbulent.
Then I heard an excited exclamation from a group of Sisters behind me. ‘Look! Look! Here are the Americans!’
I pressed forward with the others to watch the United States physically entering the war, so God-like, so magnificent, so splendidly unimpaired in comparison with the tired, nerve-racked men of the British Army.
Yet Pershing was still determined to take his time, and to keep the AEF as a discrete force rather than – except for training – integrating its divisions in allied corps. Notwithstanding his accommodating response to Haig’s question when they had met on 28 December, he continued to stand aloof from allied planning, and would certainly not commit troops to the inter-allied reserve.
In mid-December, the French high command had noted a ‘crisis of pessimism’ among its poilus, and by mid-February the postal censors were reporting growing doubts about the Americans, and the poilus’ ‘anxiety’ as to whether US cooperation would ‘shorten the war or prolong it’. The late-February morale report observed bleakly: ‘The depth of weariness is obvious.’