Following the Battles of Belleau Wood and Château-Thierry, the Germans reluctantly began winding down their great offensive but remained like a wounded and dangerous animal behind their fortifications on the Hindenburg Line. While German fortunes had changed for the worse, George Marshall’s were changing for the better. Though he had repeatedly asked for field duty, each request was denied on grounds, as General Robert L. Bullard wrote, that “[Marshall] has no equal [in staff work] in the Army today.” Instead, on August 21, 1918, he was promoted to full colonel and assigned to General Headquarters under Pershing himself.
That was just in time for what was about to become the first large American offensive of the war—the assault on the German salient at Saint-Mihiel. By this time Pershing had more than 1,600,000 American soldiers in France, with more pouring in at the rate of 10,000 a day. He had so far resisted pressure from Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch to put his divisions into battle piecemeal with the French, but held out until he was able to form a full U.S. army. Saint-Mihiel would be its battle test.
The salient had been a wedge-shaped bulge in the German lines that, since the commencement of the war in 1914, had jutted out to the French town of Saint-Mihiel and disrupted communications between Verdun, Nancy, and Paris. In other words, it was a general pain in the neck for the Allies. Salients, such as the ones at Saint-Mihiel and at Ypres, in Belgium, are difficult to attack because at some point the majority of the attacking force will come under fire from the front and the side; the French had expended 60,000 men over the past four years in finding this out. Salients are equally hard to defend since they are vulnerable to enemy artillery fire from three sides. Nobody liked them, but the Germans refused to give theirs up—apparently on the notion that “ground gained was ground earned.”
The Saint-Mihiel battle was to be conducted with fourteen U.S. divisions—more than 500,000 men—and had as its overall objective the capture of Metz, a critical German rail and transportation center. It would have to be done quickly, however, because larger plans were afoot for a more critical operation in the Meuse-Argonne region about forty miles to the north.
AS GEORGE MARSHALL DREW UP the battle plans for Saint-Mihiel—which included a ruse to deceive the Germans into reinforcing elsewhere—Patton was attending a lecture when a courier handed him an urgent note from General Rockenbach: Patton’s tanks were to take part in a large-scale independent attack on the Germans to eradicate the Saint-Mihiel salient. He was to command a 144-tank brigade plus a French tank battalion of 72 machines, and the attack was to commence on September 12, which was less than three weeks away.
Suddenly everyone and everything became animated like a hive of hornets. Working under the attack orders drawn up by George Marshall and others on Pershing’s operations staff, Patton planned an order of battle for his tanks. He of course decided he needed to reconnoiter the ground himself to make sure it was suitable for tanks. Dressed in French garb so as not to alert the enemy that Americans were spying on them, he went to the forward headquarters of a French division that fronted on no-man’s-land on the floodplain of the Woevre plateau.
Patton’s patrol, consisting of French officers and enlisted men, set out after dark and did the “burglar’s crawl” across no-man’s-land for about a mile and a half until they came to the German wire. Patton had worried that the ground would be too soft for tanks, but his patrol taught him otherwise. As Patton scooped up a handful of soil with some tiny flowers intending to send it to Beatrice, his troops cut the outer band of wire and kept on toward the German trenches when a whistle caught them. One of the Frenchmen whistled back. Patton was later told that the enemy whistle “meant that if the raid was pushed further the Germans would reluctantly be forced to fire.” (In this particular stretch—which had been a “quiet sector” for more than two years—the two sides as previously noted had adopted a live-and-let-live custom. The French sergeant’s return whistle acknowledged the first and indicated that the patrol would turn back, which it did—to Patton’s disgust.) He had hoped for “an encounter.”
Back at the tank brigade’s new headquarters near the front lines everything was still buzzing along: telephone wire was laid, homing pigeons acquired from the signal corps, the tanks were fine-tuned, guns and personal firearms were cleaned, plans rehearsed and rerehearsed, and then, ten days before the attack was to begin, the whole operation order was changed and Patton’s tank brigade would now support only the 42nd Division on different ground. The 42nd Division had never worked with tanks.
Once again Patton dutifully reconnoitered the area and found it suitable. Then rain came and threatened to foil all his carefully laid plans. Averaging (by his own estimate) three hours of sleep a night, Patton was highly aggravated when the artillery barrage for the attack awakened him at 1 a.m. on the morning of September 12, 1918.
THE VERY DAY BEFORE the Allied attack began, the Germans, on their own accord, had decided the salient was “a defensive embarrassment” and began a withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line. As a result, when the Americans (along with four French divisions) struck at daybreak on September 12, they initially gained ground all along a twenty-seven-mile front. At one point Patton encountered Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur, leading brigade of the 42nd Rainbow Division, walking upright on the battlefield through shot and shell and the whizz of German machine-gun bullets as their own “creeping barrage” rumbled inexorably toward them. Except for the general himself, MacArthur’s infantrymen were all hunkered down in shell holes waiting for the barrage to pass, while Patton’s tanks dashed hither and thither ahead seeking out enemy machine-gun nests. The two stood there making small talk, as Patton later wrote to Beatrice. “Each one [of us] wanted to leave but each hated to say so, so we let it [the barrage] come over us. It was very thin and not dangerous.”
Soon after, Patton led his tanks toward Essey despite warnings from a Frenchman who said the enemy bombardment was too intense and suggested that they halt until it lifted. Regardless, Patton marched ahead of his tanks over a bridge not knowing if it was mined or wired with explosives and once more encountered MacArthur, who had come up into Essey with his infantry. Patton asked him if he could attack the next town, Pannes, about two miles ahead, and MacArthur assented, but before they could get there all but one of the tanks had run out of gas. Patton told the sergeant commanding the serviceable tank to enter the town but he hesitated given the sights of all the dead Germans and a smashed German battery with dozens of dead artillery horses still in their traces. Patton ordered him forward anyway, saying he was going to sit on the top of the tank as it went in to Pannes. The sergeant went forward.
As they got to the north end of town, Patton spotted some Germans who wanted to surrender and sent his runner and a Lieutenant Knowles to take them. Using their pistols only, the two returned with more than thirty German prisoners, whom they sent to the rear. When they passed out of Pannes toward the next town Patton, still sitting atop the tank, had what he described as a “horrible experience.” Hearing an enemy machine gun firing, he was unable to locate it when he “glanced down the left side of the tank and about six inches below my hand paint was flying off on the side of the tank.” This prompted Patton to instantly un-ass himself from the vehicle in order to make it “a less enticing target,” according to his own action report, and dive into a shell hole where he remained until the machine gun was silenced.
The tank personnel, however, were unaware that their high-ranking passenger had jumped off, and the machine continued forward with the support of the infantry. In a hurry, Patton found the infantry commander and asked him to go forward to protect the tank but the answer was negative. Patton then asked the commander if he would send a runner, several hundred yards away, to tell the tank to fall back—the answer to which was, “Hell no, it ain’t my tank.”
Disgusted, Patton himself went forward running “like hell” and soon found himself facing the fire of four German machine guns. As bullets “sang about him,” he managed to protect himself by dodging behind his tank where he beat on the hull with his walking stick. The tank stopped and the sergeant looked out, saluted, and asked, “What do you want now, Colonel?” Patton instructed him to turn back and walked ahead of him on the return trip, shielded by the tank, “quite safe” from enemy bullets.
By then the other tanks had refueled and returned to the battle area, capturing Pannes and a horde of German prisoners. Patton, meantime, was so hungry that he ate some crackers taken from the body of a dead German. Somehow in the confusion he had lost his haversack (it had been stolen by German prisoners), which contained among other things a bottle of brandy that he savored.
With Pannes occupied by Allied troops, Patton went to the left to see about his battalion under Brett. He found them at Nonsard, having taken that town with the loss of two officers and four men. But all twenty-five tanks were out of gas and Brett himself was crying in frustration and bleeding from a wound across his nose. Patton sent for fuel and comforted him, learning that Brett had personally shot two Germans out of a church steeple. “It was a most interesting walk over the battlefield,” Patton told Beatrice. “Like the books but much less dramatic. The [enemy] dead were [all] about, mostly hit in the head. There were a lot of our men stripping off buttons and other things but they always covered the face of the dead in a nice way.”1
Refueled after a delay of several hours, Patton’s force moved on and halted for the night at Vigneulles, learning from the prisoners there that the seeming ease with which they were taking ground was because the Germans were actually in the process of evacuating the Saint-Mihiel salient. This disappointed Patton who had expected a big fight against Germany’s best and most ferocious units. Still, he took solace in having learned a valuable lesson about tank battle tactics: a reliable fuel supply must be far more abundant and closer behind the fighting tanks.
AT THIS POINT, the tank brigade’s encampment was well beyond the stated objectives for the day, and the men took stock. Of 174 tanks that had gone into the fight that morning fourteen had broken down, three were destroyed, and twenty-two were ditched (stuck in trenches or shell holes). Nine American officers and men had been killed, fourteen wounded. Eighty American tanks and twenty-five French tanks would be ready to renew the assault in the morning. The Chicago Daily News and the Los Angeles Express carried stories with Patton’s picture and the headline: “Californian Perched on Tank During Battle.”2
General Rockenbach, however, was furious at Patton. A brigade commander was supposed to be at his headquarters or at least in close touch with it—to receive orders and transmit information—not running around on the battlefield. Patton was ordered—and he complied—to give a written statement in which he promised to remain at headquarters in future actions. Privately, however, he remained recalcitrant, if not defiant, writing to Beatrice, “At least I will not sit in a dug out and have my men out in the fighting.” He had proved to his own satisfaction, he said, “that I have nerve.” He further informed his wife that he had been the highest-ranked officer in the front line except for General MacArthur, “who never ducked a shell.” (“I wanted to, but it’s foolish because it does no good. If they are going to hit you, they will.”) He enclosed for her a gift of some cap ornaments he took off a dead German, adding, “Personally I never fired a shot except to kill two poor horses with broken legs.”3
BY EVENING MACARTHUR had nearly reached the town of Mars-la-Tour, seven miles from their jumping-off point—an amazing accomplishment on a battlefield where for four years gains had been measured in yards.
While they were told to hold their positions, on the night of September 13–14 MacArthur and an aide sneaked through no-man’s-land and made for a high hill. With binoculars they could see the strategic city of Metz glowing in the distance at the end of the valley. It was perhaps ten miles away but, through his glasses, MacArthur perceived that the town was undefended, a breathtaking prospect. “There it lay, our prize wide open for the taking. Take it, and we would be in excellent position to cut off South Germany” from the rest of the country and “lead to the invasion of Central Germany and … bring a close to the war,” MacArthur concluded.
MacArthur rushed back to the division headquarters and reported what he’d seen. It was agreed that it was imperative to take Metz. It was the same at the corps headquarters and First Army headquarters as well. But Pershing had received orders from General Foch to halt the advance and move the troops south for the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Even though Pershing and his planning wizard George Marshall sided with MacArthur, orders-was-orders for Pershing, and he reluctantly called a halt to the battle. MacArthur thought it was one of the great blunders of the war.
“It was an example of the inflexibility in pursuit of pre-conceived ideas,” he wrote years afterward, “that is, unfortunately, too frequent in modern warfare. Had we seized this unexpected opportunity, we would have saved thousands of American lives lost in the dim recesses of the Argonne Forest.” In any event, MacArthur, for his role in erasing the Saint-Mihiel salient, was awarded his fifth Silver Star, the Croix de Guerre, and the French Legion of Honor.4
THE FOLLOWING DAY, there was little fighting and even less the third, since the salient at Saint-Mihiel had been erased with some 7,200 Americans killed, wounded, or missing and about the same number for the Germans. The fight had been good for the tank corps’ morale and good training for a far larger and more serious operation in the Argonne Forest known only to a few planning offices—including George Marshall’s—at Pershing’s headquarters.
The battle at the Meuse-Argonne was designed as a push along the Meuse River and through the neighboring Argonne Forest aimed at retaking Sedan (pronounced sa-da), a town of about 16,000 that in 1870 had been the site of the final, humiliating defeat of the French army by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War. Thus it held an added sentiment for the French.
The U.S. First Army, created on August 10, 1918, consisted of three army corps—about 600,000 men—under General Pershing’s command. It would be joined on the left by the much-depleted French Fourth Army of about 135,000 men. The ground was exceptionally difficult, consisting of hilly country rising above two river valleys that the attacking forces had to negotiate. For four years the Germans had been creating a multilayered defense—including fortified positions and concrete pillboxes (small, low shelters)—to a depth of thirteen miles behind the front lines.
As an illustration of the dangers of trench warfare even in the rear areas, George Marshall came close to becoming “wastage” himself one day when he went to the dentist. In the brief interval between Saint-Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne battle, Marshall got a toothache and, while he was in the process of getting a tooth filled, “A German aviator dropped a bomb into the courtyard of the Intelligence Section of Headquarters, close by, and the explosion almost resulted in the loss of my tongue, as the dentist was a trifle gun-shy …”
The Meuse-Argonne attack was scheduled for September 26 at first light. George Marshall was one of the chief planners of the operation and, three days before the battle was to begin, he was tasked with the stupendous chore of moving 400,000 U.S. troops from the Saint-Mihiel battlefield to the Meuse-Argonne sector, sixty miles away, by night—and secretly so the Germans wouldn’t find out about it.
It was an almost unheard-of proposition. He would have to pull fifteen divisions out of line at Saint-Mihiel, replace them with 200,000 French troops, and then move everything sixty miles: the various headquarters, field kitchens, ammunition, and supplies, 3,000 artillery pieces—light and heavy alike—90,000 animals, hospitals along terrible roads, and, because of lack of motor transport, a third of the men would have to march afoot.
He went into his office, closed the door, and thought for a while, realizing that if he made an error it could cost him his career. Then he called for a stenographer and standing before a large map began dictating. In an hour he was done and sent the plan on to General Hugh Drum, who would present it to Pershing.5
Next morning, Marshall was told to report immediately to General Drum, who somberly announced, “General Pershing wishes to speak to you.” As they entered Pershing’s office, Drum remarked casually to him, “That order for the Meuse-Argonne concentration you sent over last night is a dandy. The general thought it was a fine piece of work.” Marshall was so flabbergasted that when he thought about it later he couldn’t remember a single thing Pershing had said to him.6
ARMED WITH A GREATER UNDERSTANDING of how his tanks and men would perform under battle conditions, Patton readied for the Meuse-Argonne attack. Patton again donned a French uniform, so as not to give away U.S. intentions, and went out on patrol to reconnoiter and discover if the ground he was to cover was suitable for his machines. He found the enemy trenches not as wide and the ground better than he had expected, although the German defenses were formidable. The Hindenburg Line had been constructed as a “defense in depth”; in this case, for twelve miles to the rear of its leading edges was a catacomb of bunkers, trenches, pillboxes with cannons, and mutually supporting concrete-protected machine-gun nests. The ground itself was pocked with innumerable shell holes, not a few of which were deep enough to envelope a tank.
Patton was given the responsibility of supporting (leading) two infantry divisions, the 28th and the 35th, in a northward drive up the valley of the river Aire that bordered the Argonne Forest. Patton situated Brett’s battalion on the west side of the river with the 28th Infantry Division and Compton’s battalion on the east with the 35th. The French battalion in support would bring up the rear.
His battle plan emphasized the offensive and presciently anticipated Germany’s armored Blitzkrieg two decades into the future. To counter the enemy’s defense in depth, Patton organized an offense in depth, in which the leading companies, after destroying the first line of enemy resistance, would hold the new line while the rear companies passed through and attacked the next enemy fortifications, and the French, in support, would pass through the whole in pursuit of the fleeing enemy. It was a dangerous, violent, hard-hitting stratagem.
Meanwhile, MacArthur was ordered to stage “a powerful double raid” in the Saint-Benoit sector to confuse the Germans into thinking the Americans were continuing their attack toward Metz. On September 25, one day before the Meuse-Argonne Offensive was to begin, MacArthur so effectively surprised the Germans that they were shelled out of their trenches and practically annihilated, while the American infantry were maneuvered “to make a lot of noise” but remained safely out of the line of fire. MacArthur, who had accompanied the raiders, earned his sixth Silver Star for his efforts. Afterward the Rainbow Division was ordered to the “vast and shifting” battlefield of the Meuse-Argonne.7
THE BEST-LAID PLANS of Colonel George Marshall, however, did not go always as intended. Patton fumed on September 23, three days before the battle was to begin, “One fine example of efficiency has just happened. 10,000 gallons of gasoline arrived in tank cars with no pump. Now we can’t get it out except by dippers!!! It is a good thing I have a cheerful disposition.”
That same day: “One whole battalion has failed to show up and I can’t find it. The battalion commander [Compton] spent the day looking for a house instead of getting his tanks.”
The following day he observed to his diary, “The Bosch took [aerial] pictures of us so I guess we shall be shelled or something,” and to Beatrice later that evening, “We had a very quiet day except that a shell took off a man’s foot for which I am sorry.”
Next day, September 25, the eve of battle, Patton reported to his diary that “one of our trucks full of [message] runners was hit by an artillery shell at 6:15 p.m.,” and to Beatrice, “If I wrote all night I could not tell you how much I love you,” and that he needed to eat and get to bed as “I shant be able to do [either] for the next few days.”
The furious 1,400-gun artillery barrage began at 2:30 a.m. and promptly at 5:30 Patton’s tanks, followed by tens of thousands of infantry, moved forward in the attack. “I am always nervous at these times,” he told Beatrice, “just as at Polo or Foot ball before the game starts.”8
ON OCTOBER 1, MacArthur’s Rainbow Division was carried in trucks driven by French army Vietnamese drivers to a dark and dismaying forest known as the Montfaucon Woods, where a desperate fight had recently concluded. The ground was torn with huge shell craters and the woods were “a mere graveyard of broken limbs and splintered stumps. Dead bodies, some of them in a bad state of decomposition, also littered the woods and slopes.”9 To make matters worse, it had turned bitterly cold.
America would send a million men into the Meuse-Argonne to attempt a breakthrough of the Hindenburg Line, known locally as the Krunhilde Stalling, a grim killing ground consisting of hundreds of machine-gun nests, concrete pillboxes, and barbed wire twenty-five feet deep, which the Germans thought to be impregnable.10
To the Americans’ advantage, the Germans clearly were not expecting an attack through the Argonne, and in fact had fortified Metz a few days after MacArthur had pleaded to be allowed to take it, so that “an entire American field army would not be able to take the city.” However, as soon as they perceived that the Allied attack in the Argonne was a major thrust and not a feint, the German High Command rushed twenty infantry divisions—200,000 more men—into the fray. Still, it was a high credit to George Marshall’s planning that moved a full American field army across the entire enemy front without detection and it managed to get into battle formation in less than a week.
If successful, the attack would in MacArthur’s view lead to the capture of Sedan and the defeat of Germany. This of course, like practically everything in the war, was easier said than done. The day after his arrival MacArthur watched from an old churchyard on a hill as the 79th Division unsuccessfully attempted a frontal attack on the German positions. It reinforced his conviction that frontal assaults in the age of the machine gun were a thing of the past. A particularly bloody impediment to the American advance was a group of hills known as the Côte de Châtillon, where first the 32nd Division, then the 91st, and finally the First Division—the Big Red One of regulars—had broken their backs, taking appalling casualties and recoiling in horror from the ferocious enemy fire. The Argonne was turning into a giant corpse factory. Now it became the Rainbow’s time of trial.
MacArthur carefully studied the ground, the “desolate and forbidding terrain” of rolling hills and steep forested valleys where death lay everywhere behind the full horizon. He concluded that the Côte de Châtillon was the key to the entire enemy position in the Argonne; he proposed to capture it by concentrating his units in small batches directly at the center of the côte, rather than spreading them out on a line of battle in a full frontal assault.
The night before MacArthur’s attack, the corps commander, Lieutenant General Charles Summerall, who had served under MacArthur’s father, appeared out of the cold, dark, and rain in the doorway of MacArthur’s headquarters in an old French farmhouse dripping wet and “looking tired and worn.” MacArthur gave him a cup of steaming hot coffee, which he drank—then the general turned abruptly on MacArthur and said dramatically, “Give me Châtillon or a list of five thousand casualties.”
“All right, General,” the startled MacArthur replied. “We’ll take it, or my name will head the list.”11
Later that night, MacArthur was slightly wounded by shrapnel while conducting a final reconnaissance of the approaches to Châtillon. It was worth it, however, as he discovered something he’d expected all along: the Germans tended to give great strength to the center of their positions but often neglected the flanks. Châtillon was no exception. From the center, the deep belt of wire entanglements and entrenchments “dribbled out at the ends.”
“There was where I planned to strike,” said General MacArthur, “with my Alabama cotton growers on the left, and my Iowa pig farmers on the right.”
The attack got off in a misty daybreak with MacArthur, white-faced and ill with some kind of bug, out of his sickbed to lead it. Within the hour, however, the advance had broken down and MacArthur, ironically, found himself in the same position as his father in Tennessee half a century earlier—at the base of a steep precipice preparing to lead his men in a grave and glorious uphill attack.
He sent the men forward in small units that “sneaked, crawled, side-slipped” from cover to cover; then, “when the chance came,” they would form squads or platoons and spring up to envelope the enemy machine-gun nests and put them out of action. It was desperate, savage business, but as the sun sank over the Côte de Châtillon that day amid a field of dead bodies that a man could walk across without touching ground, the 168th Iowa clung by its fingernails to one of the position’s main hills.12
AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME MacArthur launched his attack, Patton’s tanks and soldiers began making their way across the greasy shell-pocked mush of no-man’s-land. Earlier, as four tank companies—some eighty tanks—tried to cross a bridge, a German counterbarrage killed the MPs who were directing traffic and caused the tanks to be delayed. From his command post, Patton peered impatiently into the gloom where his men were fighting and dying.
Finally he could stand it no longer and at about 6:30 took a captain, a lieutenant, and twelve runners carrying baskets of homing pigeons, telephones, and wire and stalked out of the CP northward toward the sound of the guns. After about two miles near a small town called Cheppy, Patton stopped his entourage in a railroad cut and took stock. The battle was still raging ahead of them; they could hear it clearly now, and Patton sent a pigeon back giving his location and situation as he understood it.
Half a dozen tanks appeared, which had encountered trouble navigating German trenches, and after a chat with Patton they moved on toward the fight. Suddenly enemy machine-gun bullets began kicking up dirt and Patton ordered his people back into the safety of the rail cut, then sent his orderly Joseph Angelo to scout for Germans or other trouble. Next, groups of American infantrymen began to appear, walking, running, disorganized toward the rear. They told Patton they had become separated from their units in the fog. Patton ordered them to join his group and soon the machine-gun fire became intense.
By now Patton had nearly a hundred stray soldiers in the cut. Evidently in the fog the tanks and infantry had unwittingly bypassed German machine-gun nests, which were now coming alive as the mist thinned. Patton noticed a small hill about one hundred yards to the rear and ordered everyone to make a dash for the reverse slope where they would be sheltered from the fire. No sooner had they done so than a breeze swept away the last of the fog and machine guns seemed to open on them from every direction.
Patton then saw several of Compton’s tanks another hundred yards away at the base of the slope and sent his captain to order them forward immediately. When he didn’t return, Patton sent his lieutenant to repeat the message, and after a while, frustrated, he marched himself down to the scene of the inaction. This was the storied moment when Patton as warrior emerged.
He discovered that one of the French machines, a Schneider (heavier and somewhat larger than the Renaults the Americans were driving), had got itself stuck at the only suitable crossing place of an enormous trench formerly occupied by the Germans. A French crew had begun digging at the banks but every time shells or bullets came near they dove back inside the trench for safety. Patton remonstrated with the French tankers and they resumed work; he then went to the American tanks and got them digging also. It was here that, when bullets or blasts frightened the Frenchmen, Patton stood on the parapet of the trench roaring, “To hell with them—they can’t hit me!”
When a suitable passage had been excavated, Patton and others chained together several tanks for better traction and then he stood in front, backing up and leading the big machines with hand signals across the chasm the diggers had created in the enormous German trench. With about twenty of his men hit with bullets or shrapnel, Patton followed the tanks up the slope to where the stray American soldiers were waiting and told them to spread out in combat formation and follow him.
Shouting “Let’s go get ’em—who’s with me!” Patton started forward waving his large walking stick like the drum major of a college marching band. The soldiers jumped to their feet and followed Patton’s orders until they had gone about a hundred yards over the crest of the hill where they were met with withering machine-gun fire from numerous German nests.
Everyone, Patton included, hit the dirt, but once on the ground Patton had a revelation about his ancestors, in which his grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-uncles from long ago wars appeared to him in a vision, watching him from a cloud over the distant German lines. This had a strange calming effect and Patton immediately got to his feet shouting, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” He began his forward march again, but only six of the men followed him this time, his orderly Angelo among them. By the time they had reached the forward battle area only Angelo remained, the others having been shot down.
Then a machine-gun bullet ripped through Patton’s thigh, near his hip, and tore halfway through his body leaving a fist-size hole in his buttock. Patton tried to march on but soon stumbled and fell.
Angelo helped him into a shallow shell hole where he examined and bandaged the wound with what gauze he had and some he took from the body of a dead soldier. They were alone, the two of them, utterly pinned down by enemy machine-gun fire near the village of Cheppy. The Germans had reoccupied the railroad cut about forty yards distant and, every time Patton or Angelo showed their heads, would unleash a furious burst that skimmed the dirt rim of the shell hole. In the intervals they could hear the Germans chattering with one another.
Presently some of Patton’s tanks came up, causing an immediate cessation in the German fire. Patton sent Angelo to tell the tankers where the German positions were and in no time at all two of the 37mm gun tanks had blown the enemy gunners out of the rail cut. It took the tanks more than an hour, however, to destroy all the German machine-gun nests in the area—at least twenty-five of them by some estimates. Meanwhile, one of Patton’s sergeants, who had stayed behind the crest of the hill with other unarmed staff members, came forward. Patton sent him back with word that Major Brett was to command the brigade and under no circumstance was anyone to attempt to rescue him until the fire had died down. Men ran to find a stretcher, and a pigeon was released to headquarters telling of Patton’s wounding. One of Patton’s tanks stayed by the shell hole that he lay in, guarding him, he said, “like a watch dog.”13
When at last it was possible to put Patton safely on a stretcher and carry him to the rear he insisted on being taken to the division headquarters to give his report before going to the hospital.
One doctor told Patton he “couldn’t see how the bullet went where it did without crippling me for life.” The doctor said he could not have run a probe “without either getting the hip joint, the sciatic nerve or the big artery. ‘Fate’ again.”14 But the wound turned septic and the doctors had to leave it open and insert drains that were uncomfortable. Patton was removed by train—(“cattle car,” he said, where they were “put in racks three high”)—to a recuperation hospital away from the front, where he languished in bed receiving visitors, reading, and answering mail.
ALTHOUGH THE AMERICANS HAD THE MEN, only a few were trained—let alone battle tested—by the time the First U.S. Army plunged into the forests and valleys of the Meuse-Argonne.
The Germans seemed utterly surprised, a tribute perhaps to Marshall’s ability to secretly move that 400,000-man army and all its accoutrements in three days across the very face of the German front. At first the Germans gave ground—nearly three-quarters of a mile—but their resistance soon stiffened. As Marshall explained it, the problem was that inexperienced company and field-grade commanders lost control of their units after reaching their objectives and failed to exploit the gains by continuing the attack with the enemy on the run. In addition, the fast-moving armies had outrun their supplies and artillery support and needed time to regather.
Thus some of the political class (which rarely missed an opportunity for exploitation) began to grouse that the American army was failing and in some cases had already failed. Though there was no foundation for the scurrilous rumormongering, it soon found its way into newspapers, giving rise on Pershing’s staff to speculation that these were actually political attacks centered on who would wield the power should a surrender or an armistice conference be declared. To some, it even appeared the gossip was mired in jealousy or envy that an upstart army could arrive after nearly four years of catastrophic war and claim credit for being in on the end. Marshall appraised it later as an even more sinister plot “that grew by leaps and bounds and like a snowball continued to gather weight and size … apparently for the purpose of depreciating the American [war] effort in order to weaken Mr. Wilson’s powerful position.”
Marshall also vented his anger at America’s unpreparedness in not raising and training a large army much earlier on. “Everywhere on the battlefield individuals were paying the price,” he said. “They paid with their lives and their limbs for the bullheaded obstinacy with which our people had opposed any system of training in time of peace.”15
Meanwhile, the Central Powers had already begun crumbling as the attack in the Meuse-Argonne pressed on. The Germans gave ground grudgingly as casualties mounted heavily on both sides. Bulgaria had already signed an armistice with the Allies, and Austria was now threatening to seek one. The Turks had been driven by the British “in wild flight” from the Middle East, and Ludendorff was recommending to the kaiser that Germany seek some kind of peace agreement through the Americans, whom he thought would give them a better deal than the British or French.
By the first of October the French Fourth Army was lagging behind the fast-moving Americans, leaving the Americans’ left flank “in the air,”* a situation the battlewise Germans quickly exploited by cutting off what came to be famously known as the “Lost Battalion.” For five days this forlorn unit of the U.S. 77th Division lay benighted and besieged by the Germans, who had them surrounded and trapped in the wilds of the Argonne Forest. Gallantly, the approximately 555 men under Major Charles Whittlesey, a New York Wall Street lawyer, held their own against superior German forces until they were at last rescued on October 7 by the 82nd Infantry Division; the battalion, however, had lost some 350 men in the fray.
During this time George Marshall roamed over the battle area, cajoling, urging, ordering commanders, in the name of the commanding general, to reorganize and move forward.
Marshall put himself on hand to see that they followed those instructions. He was particularly concerned that he and his staff workers should share the privations of the front so that they would understand what it was like when “Life became a succession of dangers, discomforts and hungers, with a continuous pressure being exerted on the individual to do more than he felt himself or his organization capable of accomplishing.”16
MEANWHILE, THERE WERE STILL 230 German machine-gun nests on the Côte de Châtillon and it “seemed almost impossible to move without getting shot.” Ever since the offensive began, men had fallen around MacArthur but he appeared so magically untouched that his soldiers began to say he was “bulletproof.”17
The battle had a profound effect on MacArthur. One night he was reconnoitering the German flank for a thin spot in the wire after the brigade had been held up all day on the Côte de Châtillon and his patrol suddenly came under a terrific enemy shelling and machine-gun fire. The men fell into craters to wait out the barrage and, when at last the flares had burned out, MacArthur crept from shell hole to shell hole whispering for the men to follow him. Getting no response, he shook the soldiers, thinking they had fallen asleep from exhaustion. But they were “all stone dead.”
The journalist Frazier Hunt of the Chicago Tribune was hanging around outside MacArthur’s headquarters when the general briefly returned during a slight lull in the action. Noticing a bullet hole in the sleeve of MacArthur’s sweater Hunt asked, “When did brigadier generals get to be expendable?”
MacArthur laughed, embarrassed. “There are times when even generals have to be expendable,” he said. “Come inside and we’ll rustle up some coffee.”18
The next day, MacArthur’s brigade fought and clawed its way up one hill and around the other until at last, as night was falling, the 167th Alabama stealthily worked its way through a gap in the German wire. Every moment it seemed would bring a burst of machine-gun fire, or blasts from hidden German 77s, or a deadly explosion of enemy mortar shells from hidden positions.
Then out of the mists would suddenly appear Americans with bayoneted rifles, grim faced and bloodshot. On October 16, after three days of slaughter, Captain Thomas H. Fallow observed three companies’ soldiers from the 167th Alabama pinned down by German machine-gun fire. He had had enough. He rose up and “jumped out in front of the men,” leading a mass charge on the machine-gun nests. This produced an unexpected reaction in the German gunners, who, seeing the Americans “swarming down the hill in droves,” jumped up and ran away, leaving even their guns behind.19
It was charges such as this that dispatched the Bosch until, as dusk fell, MacArthur’s 84th Brigade had silenced the last German resistance and the Bois de Châtillon and the Tuileries Ferme were in American hands. The price was high, however—awful, really. Of the Iowa regiment’s original twenty-five officers and 1,425 men, only 300 men and six officers were still standing, and the 167th Alabama took similar casualties. “That is the way the Côte-de-Châtillon fell,” MacArthur said afterward, “and that is the way those gallant citizen-soldiers won the approach to final victory.”20
MacArthur’s breakthrough at the Krunhilde Stalling put the Americans in rear of the Hindenburg Line, an untenable position, and the entire German army began to evacuate to the Meuse River, leaving behind tons of supplies and equipment that were invaluable and irreplaceable.
FOR HIS PART, the kaiser was waffling about abdicating his throne—which obviously would have been a condition of any armistice request—proclaiming that “a successor to Frederick the Great does not abdicate.” He blamed Germany’s present woes on Jews and Communists, a dubious elucidation that was quickly seized upon by a woebegone Austrian-born corporal named Adolf Hitler somewhere in the lower ranks of the German army.
On October 4, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson received a telegram through German diplomats remaining in New York asking him to intervene with the British and French to call an armistice. Ferdinand Foch, now convinced that victory was in his grasp, was aware of this and determined to crush the German army before such a thing could happen. Thus racing against an armistice he now feared, Foch ordered an enormous assault by both French and American armies set for November 1.
Within two hours of the initial push, it was reported that the Americans had punched through the German line and were fanning out across the countryside. This sent the Germans into a general retreat while a mutiny convulsed the German navy and socialist riots broke out in almost every large city in Germany. Clearly the end was near and Foch was determined at least to capture Sedan. Because of the laggard French Fourth Army, it now lay squarely in the path of the Americans and Marshall had issued orders to take the city. But Pershing generously overruled his operations officer so the French could have the satisfaction of reconquering this emotional and symbolic landmark.
Marshall was in the process of issuing further orders for the Meuse-Argonne attack when word came down that the Germans were negotiating with the Allies and an armistice was declared beginning on November 11, 1918.
In some so-called quiet parts of the Western Front there was wild celebrating with German and Allied troops meeting in no-man’s-land to trade caps, badges, and other souvenirs, and some French troops were said to have festooned their uniforms with flowers. But in those parts of the line where the fighting had been heavy there were still bad feelings and the Germans lay resentfully behind their fortifications with some weeping and much ugly muttering. In the British sectors, the mood was somber as well, and little was heard save an occasional rendition of “God Save the King” by a regimental band. Many on both sides merely poked their heads up above the trench line and looked around, as larks and other birds wheeled overhead, astonished that they weren’t shot at.
THE AMERICANS, IT WAS SAID, cheered wildly, which seems a bit odd considering that they had sustained more than 122,000 casualties—26,227 of them killed since the Battle of the Argonne Forest began six weeks earlier.† Many of them were from Patton’s division. Of the officers, Patton had two majors, seven captains, and thirty-six lieutenants in the fight. Of these, both majors and all but one captain were hit, as well as seventeen of the lieutenants—plus himself. Almost all the tanks were either destroyed or rendered inoperable. On October 1 alone, fifty-nine of eighty-nine tanks that went into the battle were lost. Finally the outfit was reduced to a company-size “provisional” unit assigned to the 42nd Rainbow Division, consisting of twenty tanks, ten officers, and 140 men—all that was left of Patton’s First Tank Brigade. And by the end of that day only 80 men remained of the original 834 who had started out the week.
On October 17 Patton received word that he had been promoted to full colonel and had been put in for the Distinguished Service Cross, America’s second highest medal for valor. He told Beatrice he’d rather have the medal than the promotion.
One of his friends, a major in the French army, visited Patton at the hospital and said this: “My dear Patton, I am so glad you are wounded. For when you left I said to my wife that is the end of Patton. He is one of those gallant fellows who always gets killed.” Patton wrote his father, “You know I have always feared I was a coward at heart but I am beginning to doubt it.”
The battle for the Meuse-Argonne roared on for forty-seven days, until the war ended, inflicting 122,063 American casualties, the highest casualty rate of any U.S. battle, before or since. Patton finally got rid of his bandage the day that peace was declared, which was coincidentally his thirty-third birthday. To celebrate, or commiserate, he wrote a poem entitled “Peace—November 11, 1918,” the last stanza of which is fraught with insolence and as much awful meaning as a Greek tragedy.
Then pass in peace, blood-gutted Bosch
And when we too shall fall,
We’ll clasp in yours our gory hands
In High Valhalla’s Hall.
THE RAINBOW DIVISION WAS PULLED OUT of the fighting to rest, heal its wounds, and receive replacements. It remained on the deadly killing ground near the Krunhilde Stalling and the Côte de Châtillon and was there when the armistice was announced. There was no cheering, for the men were “glad beyond expression,” according to the regimental historian. The regimental chaplain of the 167th Alabama held an impromptu service in a half-ruined church. One of the members of the band played a doxology on the old organ, while more than three hundred men poured out their thankfulness by singing “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.”
Afterward they were told to march to the Rhine River and occupy a sector of Germany on its border with France. It took three days of walking but on December 16, 1918, the brigade marched down the valley of the Rhine with the regimental bands playing “The Star-Spangled Banner”—except for the 167th Alabama, whose band played “Dixie” for the curious and bewildered German spectators who lined the roads. During this procession, almost magically, the regimental historian said, a giant rainbow appeared over the valley of the Rhine.21
The Rainbow Division was largely MacArthur’s creation and he would soon be appointed its commanding officer when General Menoher was given a corps to command. Secretary of War Baker continued to be fulsome in his compliments of MacArthur, calling him “the greatest American field commander produced by the war.” Menoher was probably closer to the truth when, in citing MacArthur for promotion, he wrote, “On a field where courage was the rule, his courage was the dominant factor.”
The Rainbow Division continued to rankle Pershing and other martinets but the soldiers remained oblivious. By comparisons such as ground gained, prisoners taken, enemy killed, days in combat, and decorations awarded, the 42nd Rainbow Division was second only to the Second Division, half of which was composed of marines. “They couldn’t salute worth a damn and cared less what they looked like. The only thing they did superbly was fight.”22
MacArthur was put in for the Medal of Honor but Pershing’s headquarters disapproved the recommendation.‡ Instead he received a second Distinguished Service Cross and his seventh Silver Star, which “more than satisfied my martial vanity,” MacArthur said.23
FOR HIS PART, George Marshall had missed coming out of the war with a general’s star by only a hair, but he would face a long wait—sixteen more years, to be exact—a stern test in the backwaters for a man who could have resigned and entered civilian life at any point very high on the hog. But George Marshall was a soldier, and he was determined to rise as high as possible in the service of his country.
* Both flanks need constant protection and security lest an enemy get into the unprotected rear of the formation.
† This was by far the nation’s deadliest battle. By comparison, at the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War the combined total of battle deaths of both Union and Confederate soldiers was 7,863.
‡ Pershing did not think that officers, and especially general officers, should get the Medal of Honor, and furthermore he believed it should be awarded only in specific cases of uncommon valor.
