With Their Bare Hands

When the US entered the war in April 1918, its military doctrine was embodied in the Infantry Drill Regulations of 1911 as amended to February, 1917. That manual, with few changes, would have made easy reading for Generals Grant and Sherman. It offered such dicta as:

An attack is bound to succeed if fire superiority is gained and properly used. To gain this superiority generally requires that the attack employ more rifles than the defense; this in turn means a longer line, as both sides will probably hold a strong firing line ... If the attack can be so directed that, while the front is covered, another fraction of the command strikes a flank more or less obliquely (an enveloping attack) the advantages gained are a longer line and more rifles in action; also a converging fire opposed to the enemy’s diverging fire ... To reap the full fruits of victory a vigorous pursuit must be made. The natural inclination to be satisfied with a successful charge must be overcome ...”¹

Artillery was virtually ignored.* Tanks, only recently introduced on the Western Front, were not mentioned, but neither were aircraft, which had been in action since 1914. Machine guns were virtually dismissed as “... weapons of emergency. Their effectiveness combined with their mobility renders them of great value at critical, though infrequent, periods of an engagement.”² Four brief paragraphs described attacks on fortified positions, giving such advice as:

If the enemy is strongly fortified and time permits, it may be advisable to wait and approach the charging point under cover of darkness ... If the distance is short and other conditions are favorable, the charge may be made without fire preparation. If made, it should be launched with spirit and suddenness at the break of day.³

* The artillery’s own service regulations, in three volumes, had one sentence on its combat role: “The reason for the existence of Field Artillery is its ability to assist the other arms, especially the Infantry, upon the field of battle.” (War Department, Provisional Drill and Service Regulation for Field Artillery (Horse and Light), 1916, Corrected to April 15, 1917, 3 vols, Document No. 538 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1917), p. 17.)

Such statements now seem quaint in light of the reality in Europe, where millions of soldiers, mired in continuous, elaborate, virtually static trench lines, were using the most modern machinery to kill each other with industrial efficiency. But to the Commander-in-Chief, the infantry attack with rifle and bayonet remained the sine qua non of warfare, particularly American warfare. Steeped in the mythology of the frontier; educated at West Point by Civil War veterans; and hardened by small-unit combat against Indians in the West, the Spanish in Cuba, the Moros in the Philippines, and Pancho Villa’s revolutionaries in Mexico; Pershing believed that the American soldier had a natural affinity for marksmanship and individual initiative. It was this essential characteristic that, in Pershing’s belief, distinguished the Americans from their allies. Only they had the morale, the numbers, and the proper offensive doctrine. For the duration of the war he bombarded the War Department with cables stressing this point; a typical one read:

Close adherence is urged to the central idea that the essential principles of war have not changed: that the rifle and the bayonet remain the supreme weapons of the infantry soldier and that the ultimate success of the Army depends upon their proper use in open warfare.⁴

Pershing was not ignorant of the nature of warfare on the Western Front. On the contrary, he had concluded that the stalemate was the product of wrong doctrine and training, particularly the French and British emphasis on trench warfare. Trench warfare, in Pershing’s view, was the antithesis of effective combat as practiced by Americans. A tactical manual written by his staff said:

Trench warfare is marked by uniform formations, the regulation of space and time by higher command down to the smallest details, absence of scouts preceding the first wave, fixed distances and intervals between units and individuals, voluminous orders, careful rehearsal, little initiative upon the part of the individual soldier. Open warfare is marked by scouts who precede the first wave, irregularity of formation, comparatively little regulation of space and time by the higher command, the greatest possible use of the infantry’s own fire power to enable it to get forward ... and the greatest possible use of individual initiative by all troops engaged in the action. (AEF Document 1348, “Combat Instructions,” September 5, 1918)⁵

Trench warfare drained troops of their aggressive instincts; it instilled in them a sense of dependency on their orders, on their superiors, on fortified positions, and especially on artillery support. Soldiers trained in this doctrine might capture a trench, even a portion of the enemy’s main line, but they would not know how to exploit a breakthrough if it occurred. They would dig in, waiting for orders and artillery, while the enemy re-formed his defenses.

There are several ironies in Pershing’s system of beliefs. First, as an observer in the Russo-Japanese War, he had seen for himself the effects of massed machine guns and artillery on attacking infantry. At Port Arthur almost all of the many Japanese assaults failed with heavy losses. By the time the city surrendered, the Japanese had lost 65,000 men killed and wounded. The Japanese eventually succeeded because the corruption and incompetence of the Russian Army’s officers and the poor training of its men made a consistently effective defense impossible. But Pershing, along with most other observers, drew the conclusion that a sustained frontal assault by zealous infantry would, eventually, overcome the most intense machine gun and artillery fire, however heavy the casualties.

The second irony is that, at the time Pershing made his comments about the effects of trench warfare on infantry morale, he was right. A member of Pershing’s staff, analyzing the British collapse in the face of the German attack on March 28, 1918, quoted British infantry officers as saying, “[The men] get out into the open and act as though they were suddenly thrust naked into the public view and didn’t know what to do with themselves, as if something were radically wrong and that there ought to be another trench somewhere for them to get into.”⁶ During the German assault in April 1918 a “senior leader of the French Army,” otherwise unidentified, wrote:

The only formations which the infantry is now acquainted with are those of a rigid nature in lines or waves. It has lost the idea of maneuver. On the other hand, it has become accustomed to getting a degree of support from the heavy and light artillery which it is impossible to furnish to it in open warfare; it seems to be no longer able nor willing to do without such support. It is ignorant of its greatest power, of which maneuver makes it capable.⁷

At around the same time another French officer complained, “An infantry which, when it comes under the fire of a hostile machine gun, lies down and waits, inert, for something (just what, it does not know) to happen which may keep it along, is abandoning the battle; it refuses to display any will power or intelligence.”⁸

Pershing’s belief that the Europeans were wedded to a failed doctrine of trench combat while Americans properly believed in open warfare was, in the words of Russell Weigley, “a false distinction based on a misconception.”⁹ Far from being committed to trench warfare, the British and French commanders despised it. The problem, unrecognized by any of the armies at first, was that firepower and engineering—machine guns, quick-firing artillery, barbed wire, concrete fortifications—had far outdistanced the ability of even the most ardent cavalry to penetrate defensive lines and the most determined infantry to conquer them. The military history of the Western Front is largely a chronicle of their failed attempts to force their opponents out of the trenches and defeat them in the open field. Eventually, faced with the same problems, the armies in France would evolve their own variations on the same solution. The history of that evolution is worth reviewing briefly because the AEF, in its doctrine, training, and combat performance, would recapitulate virtually all of the troubles that its allies had endured. Had Pershing and his generals taken this history seriously, it is likely that the American Army could have avoided many costly errors and accomplished more in the field than it did.

For much of the war French military doctrine corresponded closely to the principles that Pershing regarded as uniquely American. As early as 1912 the French Army’s commander, General Joseph Joffre, issued a regulation that decreed, “The teachings of the past have borne their fruit. The French Army, reviving its old traditions, no longer admits for the conduct of operations any other law than that of the offensive.”¹⁰ As the Germans poured through Belgium and northeastern France, the French, in their offensive fervor, attacked eastward into Alsace and Lorraine. The infantry regulations of 1913 and 1914 had prescribed the bayonet as the “supreme weapon” of the infantry and relegated artillery to a supporting role. The infantry advanced accordingly, with fixed bayonets but without artillery preparation. A British observer wrote of these tactics, “They are very brave and advance time after time to the charge through appalling fire, but so far it has been of no avail. No one could live through the fire that is concentrated on them.”¹¹ Within six weeks, the French incurred 385,000 casualties, of whom 100,000 were dead. These were, in essence, the tactics that Pershing would prescribe for the AEF; what happened to the French is what would have happened to the AEF had the literal sense of Pershing’s doctrine prevailed.

Such losses were unsustainable, and the obvious advantages of defensive technology were such that, by November 1914, the front had solidified into a 450-mile-long line of trenches and fortifications from Switzerland to the North Sea. By late 1914, Joffre concluded that artillery preparation was essential and that slow, methodical attacks against successive enemy positions as advocated by General Ferdinand Foch would bring better results with fewer casualties.*¹²

* In fact, Foch’s offensive tactics at the Somme used many of the advanced techniques later credited to the Germans. Foch did away with repeated frontal assaults by lines of infantry—the formation the British were to use in that battle. Instead, small groups of infantry supported by artillery would advance against strong points by fire and maneuver, bypassing them when possible so as to maintain the momentum of the attack. Second-wave troops would mop up bypassed positions and any remaining pockets of resistance. As a result, on the first day of the Somme battle, the French with six divisions gained two miles at a cost of 1,590 casualties; the 14 divisions of the British lost 19,240 men killed and 37,646 wounded and missing while mostly failing to reach the German first line. (William Philpott, Three Armies on the Somme: The First Battle of the Twentieth Century, Knopf paperback edition of Little, Brown hardcover edition (New York: Knopf, 2009), pp. 146, 202; Robert A. Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 2005), p. 293.)

The doctrine of the continuous offensive was revived and modified by his successor, General Robert Nivelle, whose successful counterattacks at Verdun had catapulted him to leadership of the French Army. Nivelle, an artillery officer, concluded that firepower, coupled with a sustained infantry assault in a narrow sector, could break through the German line. Nivelle put his principles to work at an exposed German salient atop a ridge in Champagne named after a highway along its crest, the Chemin des Dames; the ensuing battle would in many respects foreshadow the experience of the AEF at the Meuse–Argonne. Nivelle’s plan was to saturate the entire depth of the German line with an immense bombardment. The artillery would then lay down a rolling barrage that would allow the infantry to pass unopposed through the shattered trenches and stunned defenders into the rear areas.* Fresh divisions would pass through tired ones to keep up the momentum. Once the breakthrough had been achieved, open-field warfare would commence. Troops were trained in the long-abandoned techniques of mobile operations, which emphasized rifle fire over grenades and mortars. On January 29, 1917, Nivelle sent his orders to General Micheler, commanding the army group that would carry out the attack:

I insist on the characteristics of violence, brutality, and speed that must permeate your offensive and, in particular, its first stage, the rupture, which must at the first blow conquer the enemy’s positions and the entire zone occupied by his artillery ... To set objectives for the Army Corps that are distant enough ... without limit; (it is necessary to go as far as possible on J-Day). [Italics in the original.]¹³

* The rolling barrage was a wall of exploding shells that advanced ahead of the attacking troops at a distance of 100 meters or less. Its purpose was to keep the defenders—particularly machine-gunners—in their dugouts and away from their weapons up to the moment the attacking infantry fell upon them.

In a six-day bombardment 5,350 guns fired more than 11 million shells on a 15-mile front. But the plan started to unravel as soon as the infantry moved forward on April 16. The troops, slowed by mud, rain, and the tortured ground surface, fell behind the barrage, which had been set to advance at the hopelessly fast rate of 30 meters per minute. German machine gun nests, many untouched by the bombardment, swept the French formations, keeping many attackers huddled in their jumpoff positions. The French reserves, as if on an unstoppable conveyor belt, were dumped into the forward trenches according to plan, congesting them still further. Rain gave way to snow and sleet. Visibility on the ground or from the air was nil. The artillery lost track of the infantry’s positions. Some batteries, hearing wrongly that the troops were still in their trenches, started their rolling barrages all over again, drawing the line of exploding shells back and forth over their own men. When the tanks appeared in the afternoon, German artillery was ready for them; they and their accompanying infantry were almost wiped out. In the mid-afternoon the Germans counterattacked, pushing the French advanced units, already crowding the battlefield, back into the regiments coming up from the rear. The roads leading to the front became impassable, jammed with reserves waiting to move forward. Within a day it became apparent that the infantry could make only local gains; by April 22 the operation was reduced to limited offensives and on May 9 it was called off altogether. The French incurred roughly 130,000 killed, wounded, and missing, the vast majority in the first few days of the operation.¹⁴

General Philippe Pétain, who succeeded Nivelle in May, put an end to major offensives for the time being. Appalled at the losses suffered in the French offensives of 1914–15 and in the defense of Verdun, and obliged to suppress the mutinies that followed the Chemin des Dames, he advocated limited actions that would be heavy on artillery and light on infantry. Each local offensive would end with consolidation of the positions gained, and not be followed up until artillery support could again be brought into position. Yet Pétain’s apparent conservatism was deceptive. He was the first to take tanks seriously as an element of offensive tactics and ordered many more into production, along with aircraft, heavy artillery, and smoke and gas shells. He emphasized the formation and training of combined-arms teams that integrated artillery, infantry, and tanks into highly capable units that would be supported by aircraft. Pétain’s combined-arms tactics paid off in three limited offensives culminating in the battle of Malmaison, fought between October 21 and 25, 1917, which finally captured the Chemin des Dames position. The Sixth Army took almost 12,000 prisoners, 200 guns, and 720 machine guns while suffering 12,000 dead, wounded, and missing, relatively light casualties in proportion to the gains.¹⁵ At that point, Pétain—in opposition to the British—refused to consider any more large offensives until attrition had so weakened the Germans that they could no longer defend their entire line.

It was Ferdinand Foch, appointed “General-in-Chief of the Allied Armies” in March 1918, who first recognized the opportunity for a full-scale campaign. The German Spring Offensives of March–June 1918 that had pushed back the French and British by now had run their course; the Germans were overextended, tired, and far from their strongly built defenses. From Verdun to Flanders their line formed a gigantic salient bulging westward into France. Foch reasoned that a series of limited attacks, delivered rapidly against different parts of the salient, would wear out the enemy, prevent him from concentrating his reserves, and eventually produce the conditions that could lead to a breakthrough. He therefore asked Pétain to write an order that would prepare the Army to resume the offensive. The result was Directive No. 5, issued on July 12. It said:

Henceforth, the armies should envisage the resumption of the offensive. Commanders at all echelons will prepare for this; they will focus resolutely on using simple, audacious, and rapid procedures of attack. The soldier will be trained in the same sense and his offensive spirit developed to the maximum.*¹⁶

The Directive went on to order that the soldiers’ training instill a “spirit of maneuver and an aptitude for movement”; that operational security be practiced, including concealment of attacking units until the last moment; and that senior commanders issue clear, concise orders that left the details of execution to the individual unit commanders. The offensive principles were to be surprise, rapid execution, deep expansion, and thorough exploitation of initial success, both immediate and long-distance. As Robert Doughty has pointed out, “After four years in the trenches and a year of preparing only for the defense, the French Army required much coaching before it could conduct a large offensive operation.”¹⁷ At Soissons the French surprised the Germans with two armies, 750 tanks, and a two-to-one artillery advantage. Instead of a preparatory bombardment there was an intense rolling barrage that landed one heavy shell every 1.27 yards of ground and three field artillery shells per yard.¹⁸ Objectives were unlimited. The operation was a complete success. Pershing kept insisting, long after the war, that the French and British had lost the offensive spirit and only the Americans were able to restore it; but Soissons showed this to be a gross misrepresentation.†

The British Army entered the war in a very different state than that of the French or Germans. Heir to the colonial small-war tradition, it numbered only 250,000 regulars in 1914; Parliament had kept it small so as to devote funds to the naval buildup, to paying off the debt of the Boer War, and to remedying the defects in the Army’s weapons and organization which that war had revealed. The expert Afrikaner gunners had taught the British to spread out in the advance, use terrain for cover, and suppress the enemy’s guns with one’s own. But those lessons were reversed by 1911, when a new infantry training manual stipulated that offensive tactics would be based on the massed bayonet assault supported only by direct artillery fire (that is, where the gunners themselves could see their targets). Machine guns, the proper use of which was not yet understood by any army, were relegated to local supporting roles. So far, Pershing would have said, so good.

The retreat from Belgium and subsequent battles in 1915 quickly showed that such tactics were obsolete. At Le Câteau (August 26, 1914), the exposed British guns were annihilated by German indirect fire. At Neuve Chapelle (March 10, 1915), two battalions totaling about 1,500 men were virtually eliminated by two German machine guns.¹⁹ The new British commander, Sir Douglas Haig, concluded that the only way to break into the German lines was to saturate them with heavy indirect fire for several days and then launch waves of infantry, unencumbered by supporting weapons except for machine guns, against the presumably helpless enemy. Artillery units, which could not communicate with the troops once the latter had left their trenches, were to fire according to a strict timetable, the initial bombardment against stationary targets becoming a rolling barrage that would precede the troops at a fixed rate of advance. It was up to the infantry to keep up with the barrage; if they stayed close behind it, they should be able to overwhelm any surviving Germans before the latter could emerge from their dugouts and regain their firing positions. This appeared to be the only doctrine that the new, volunteer army could execute, without extensive training that time did not permit. It became the British offensive method from Loos (September 25, 1915) through the Somme (July–November 1916), during which period 170,000 of their men were killed and 510,000 wounded.²⁰ It never succeeded—the German dugouts were too strong and indirect fire was too inaccurate to eliminate the machine guns and the defending artillery—but, given the army they were working with, it was the only doctrine the British had.*

* Haig has long been castigated for repeatedly using attrition tactics at the Somme that resulted in immense casualties. Whether such tactics were the only ones available is hotly debated by historians; but what Haig could not do was stop fighting—the possibility of a French defeat at Verdun required him to keep as many German divisions occupied as possible. The judgment of historian Michael Howard on the commanders of a later world war would seem to apply here: “[T]he only ‘lesson’ that a historian would be justified in deriving from these events is that in war, in any war, this is the kind of thing that armed forces may find themselves having to do; not necessarily through the stupidity of their leaders, but because all other options seem to be foreclosed or appear demonstrably worse.” (Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (New Haven, London: Yale UP, 1991), p. 10.)

Pershing in his memoirs unjustly accused the British General Staff of wanting to “[win] the war by attrition, with isolated attacks on limited fronts.”²¹ On the contrary, all of the General Staff’s efforts during the war were dedicated to achieving a breakthrough; in every one of his battles Haig had a mass of cavalry assigned to rush through the expected gap into the enemy’s rear. Throughout the war, elements of the British command understood the need for breakthrough tactics and pursued their development. E.D. Swinton, a British officer and prewar tactical authority, upon returning from the first battles in France advocated the development of armed, armored vehicles based on the American-built Holt farm tractor, which ran on caterpillar treads. They were to attack with infantry in mutual support, with aircraft neutralizing enemy artillery positions that otherwise would threaten the armor. Swinton’s recommendations could not be implemented for some time because of their unfamiliarity, the inability of the troops to execute such tactics, and the time it took to develop tanks that were even minimally effective in combat. His innovation was to recognize the need for mobile, armor-assisted tactics and then to develop them even before any tanks had been designed, let alone built.

The Somme itself was the cradle of many innovations that ultimately led to combined-arms warfare. Two weeks after the battle opened the staff of Fourth Army surveyed divisional commanders to elicit their wisdom as to how weapons and men were best to be used. Some topics were basic: the proper role of infantry weapons, how to overcome enemy strong points, how to mop up after an attack, how to assault obstacles such as woods, trenches, and villages. Other subjects required more advanced development: How to integrate artillery with the infantry assault, how to communicate effectively with the attacking units, and the proper role of the staff. Many of these themes were picked up later by General Ivor Maxse, whose division was the only one to penetrate the German positions at the Somme and inflict more casualties than it suffered. In early 1918 he was made Inspector General of Training for British forces in France. In a memorandum analyzing the failed Passchendaele offensive of the previous year he emphasized the importance of training in combined arms, particularly in the interaction of infantry, machine guns, artillery, tanks, and aircraft. With regard to enemy strong points, Maxse advocated using flexible combined-arms tactics to allow some soldiers, aided by tanks, to provide covering fire while others worked to the enemy’s flanks and rear—the “fire and maneuver” method that has remained the bedrock of modern infantry tactics to this day.

The first full-scale use of tanks took place in the assault on Cambrai on November 20, 1917. Haig abandoned the usual days-long bombardment in favor of a 370-tank force supporting the infantry. The attackers were divided into teams consisting of three tanks supported by a small detachment of infantry advancing in open order. By the end of the first day, the British had advanced five miles on an eight-mile front. (Failure to consolidate their gains allowed the Germans to recapture most of the ground in a counterattack ten days later.) Pershing observed the attack and admired the tactics.

The culmination of British open-warfare tactics was General Sir Henry Rawlinson’s August 1918 counterattack at Amiens to roll back the German gains from their Spring Offensives of earlier that year. Rawlinson’s plan was based on principles developed by General Sir John Monash, commander of the Australian Army Corps. At the battle of Hamel the previous month, Monash had eliminated a German salient in two hours using surprise and close cooperation between infantry, artillery, aircraft, and armor—“a fully realized application of combined arms doctrine” in the words of David Trask. ²² Monash wrote, “The true role of infantry was not to expend itself upon heroic physical effort, not to wither away under merciless machine gun fire, not to impale itself on hostile bayonets, but on the contrary, to advance under the maximum possible protection of the maximum possible array of mechanical resources, in the form of guns, machine-guns, tanks, mortars, and aeroplanes.”²³ Rawlinson assigned 2,070 guns, 800 aircraft, and 540 tanks to support 13 infantry and three cavalry divisions. On August 8 the attackers achieved their objectives by 1:00 p.m. But British casualties were still heavy, 189,000 men between August 8 and September 26.

The Australians and Canadians, the shock troops of the British Army, used combined-arms tactics to the end of the war; but the rest of the Army did not. Rawlinson, anxious for the War Office to keep sending men, insisted as early as August 29 that infantry was key to winning and that overinvestment in planes and tanks would be a waste of manpower. As a result, the BEF largely reverted to “semi-traditional” warfare when it reopened the offensive in late August. Artillery remained a major actor, firing immense bombardments; Lewis guns, trench mortars, and machine guns were used to deliver more fire than previously, and surprise and deception were employed. But the idea of combining infantry and artillery with tanks and planes was dropped.²⁴ Nevertheless, Pershing’s judgment—reflected in a memorandum by his training chief, Colonel Fiske—that “the offensive spirit of the [British Army] has largely disappeared as a result of their severe losses” was greatly in error.²⁵

By the time the United States entered the war, the Germans had mastered offensive techniques that could penetrate the trench lines and lead to open warfare. Historians differ as to the origins of the German offensive methods, which are variously referred to as stormtoop tactics, infiltration tactics, or Hutier tactics. In fact, they appear to have resulted from several developments, some infantry-based and some artillery-based, that started out independently but eventually coalesced. The first stage was an attempt in 1915 to find a way to move guns forward across heavily shelled No-Man’s Land to support advancing infantry. It was assigned to Captain Willy Rohr, former commander of a company of the Garde-Schutzen-Bataillon, an independent, aggressive, mobile light infantry battalion equipped with its own machine gun company. Rohr’s mission was to train his detachment in whatever tactics he thought appropriate. In addition to the light infantry Rohr was given a platoon each of machine guns, mortars, and flame throwers, to which he added a light, portable field gun. The effect was to create a multiple-weapon, flexibly organized battalion that operated as a set of interrelated weapons teams. Rohr found that the best protection for his assault troops was speed and violence in the attack. He therefore replaced the traditional extended skirmish lines with an attack by squad-sized units of stormtroops (Stosstruppen, Sturmtruppen), supported by some of his light weapons. After a few weeks’ training Rohr’s detachment was ordered to take a French position in the Vosges Mountains; it was completely successful. Within seven months of the formation of Sturmbataillon Rohr, Erich von Falkenhayn, Chief of the German General Staff, ordered the diffusion of its methods to all of the armies in the West. Each army was to send small detachments to be trained by Rohr; these would then train their own armies, which were to form assault groups in every unit down to the level of companies. Within six months, over 30 divisions and many other units from corps down to company had their own Sturmabteilungen.²⁶ Rohr codified his doctrine in a manual that was disseminated throughout the Army. At Verdun in the first half of 1916, Rohr and his Sturmabteilung spent most of their time to the rear of the lines, training the assault groups assigned to the infantry battalions. Infiltration tactics played an important role on the Verdun battlefield, particularly in countering the defense in depth that the French adopted to take advantage of the cut-up terrain.²⁷

The second strand of German tactical innovation was in artillery. Lieutenant Colonel Georg Bruchmüller, a previously undistinguished artillerist called back from retirement in 1914, observed that an extensive preparatory bombardment gave away the element of surprise. He therefore developed the “predicted fire” technique in which guns were aimed on the basis of their targets’ map coordinates (provided by aerial reconnaissance) rather than by using preliminary registration fire. To make this system effective, however, required that command of the artillery be taken away from the individual divisions, where it normally resided, and centralized at the army level. In April of 1916, at Lake Narocz, his system pulverized the Russian forces; Bruchmüller’s division alone took 5,600 dazed and shattered prisoners. He soon repeated his success in various counterattacks against Russian offensives.²⁸

Bruchmüller’s doctrine developed as the war progressed but its central features remained the same. Before the attack, the artillery of the assaulting units was heavily reinforced. Control of the artillery was centralized at the army level, with close-support missions being delegated to divisional artillery commanders and far operations being assigned to the corps artillery. The preparatory bombardment was no longer intended to destroy the enemy defenses; it was to neutralize them long enough so they could not interfere with the infantry and to create gaps through which the infantry could advance.²⁹ Preparatory fire would last only a few hours instead of the usual days or weeks, making up for it in extreme intensity and surprise. High explosive shells would be supplemented by gas to incapacitate key enemy positions and to protect the flanks of the attacking infantry.

As the infantry started forward, the preparatory bombardment would give way to a rolling barrage that proceeded slightly ahead of the foot soldiers, who followed it at a distance of a few tens of yards. It would pause at a series of planned “phase lines” to allow the infantry to catch up and to mop up whatever defenders survived. Gas and the rolling barrage were not new; Bruchmüller’s innovation was to integrate them with centralized artillery control and the short, intense preparatory bombardment. Also new was his attention to detail: assigning the mix of guns and ammunition that was perfectly suited (according to his own experiments) to the job at hand; personally explaining his artillery plan to the attacking troops; and conducting artillery drills to maximize the reliability of the rolling barrage so that, in the words of Bruce Gudmundsson, he could “convince the infantry that following fifty meters or less behind a curtain of exploding shells was a good idea.”³⁰

The two channels of tactical innovation, infantry and artillery, first came together in the German attack on Riga, the Baltic anchor of the Russian line, in September 1917. The 13 attack divisions of General Oskar von Hutier’s Eighth Army trained for ten days 75 miles behind the front. Only on the night before the attack did they enter the forward trenches. At 4:00 a.m. on September 1 a five-hour bombardment dropped over 560,000 shells on top of the Russians, first concentrating on the artillery and then switching to the infantry positions. After crossing the Dvina River on boats, Hutier’s infantry advanced behind a rolling barrage, the speed of which they could regulate by signaling to the rear. Riga was taken in two days; the Germans suffered only light casualties. Within three months Russia was out of the war. By that time, Hutier and Bruchmüller had been transferred to the Western Front to work their magic against the British and the French.

In early 1918 the Germans in the West faced a threat and an opportunity. The threat was the impending arrival of millions of fresh, well-armed, and well-supplied American troops on the battlefield. The opportunity was the availability of up to 45 veteran German and Austro-Hungarian divisions that were no longer needed in Russia.* General Erich Ludendorff, First Quartermaster General (in reality, de facto commander in chief) of the German Army, resolved to use the methods of Hutier and Bruchmüller to force the French and British to sue for peace in the spring, before enough trained American divisions had arrived to turn the tide. He commissioned a new tactical manual that married trench warfare techniques with those of open warfare to bring about a breakthrough. The German method combined two elements: tight central control in setting objectives and coordinating the activities of major units, and a high degree of local initiative and rapid exploitation of a break in the enemy’s front.³¹ Additionally, Ludendorff designated a portion of his divisions as “attack divisions” (Angriffsdivisionen); these received the highest-quality replacements, weapons, and training. The remaining divisions (called Stellungsdivisionen) were assigned to defense. This two-track system, as we shall see in Chapter 9, eventually caused more problems than it solved.

Ludendorff’s plan of attack began with an artillery preparation à la Bruchmüller: A short, heavy bombardment to demoralize and isolate the defenders; random start-and-stop shelling to conceal the infantry’s jumpoff time; training the junior artillery and infantry officers in the new technique; and assigning the best weapon to each kind of target. The rolling barrage would be laid down by howitzers at the corps level rather than by divisional field guns, because the howitzers were more accurate and thus safer for the advancing troops. Fire would concentrate on strategic points: observation posts, command posts, radio transmitters, phone exchanges, bridges, approach roads. Artillery officers and observers would go forward to adjust fire based on activities on the battlefield. The effect would be to cut off the enemy’s communications, prevent reinforcement, and fragment the opposing units.

As the preparatory fire gave way to the rolling barrage, the storm battalions of each regiment would move forward. Supported by trench mortars, mobile artillery, flame throwers, combat engineers, and additional machine guns, the storm battalions would use infiltration tactics, moving in groups as small as sections* and bypassing strong points by advancing in ravines or between outposts. Bypassed positions would be mopped up by conventional infantry following the main attack. In the final phase, the infantry would attack the enemy’s rear echelons, disrupting communication and command centers, overwhelming artillery batteries, causing enemy commanders to lose control of their troops, and precipitating the complete collapse of resistance.

On March 21 at 4:40 a.m., 6,000 guns opened up on the British Third and Fifth Armies ranged on either side of the Somme River. Seventy-one German divisions attacked 26 British, some of them under strength and recovering from combat. British units fragmented; headquarters lost control; Fifth Army virtually disappeared. By April 5 the British had lost 164,000 casualties, 90,000 prisoners, 200 tanks, 1,000 guns, 4,000 machine guns, and 70,000 tons of ammunition, and had a hole in their front 40 miles wide and 40 miles deep. But as the Germans expended their trained storm troops, command and control broke down and the intricate attack system fell apart; assaults were poorly prepared and troops tended to advance in waves.³² Furthermore, the Germans were outrunning their supplies; exhausted troops stopped to loot captured towns and British supply dumps for food and wine. On April 6 the campaign was called off.

Ludendorff mounted four more offensives against the British and French in May, June, and July, all of them using the principles perfected by Hutier and Bruchmüller. Everywhere the Germans met with initial success; everywhere their advance bogged down as the troops outran their artillery and supplies and succumbed to hunger, exhaustion, and disorganization. Between March and July they incurred almost one million casualties, of whom 125,000 had been killed and 100,000 had gone missing. Morale suffered, as evidenced by looting of Allied supply dumps and increased desertions. These developments, as well as half a million cases of the flu, caused the German Second Army to report on August 1 that out of 13 divisions two were combat-ready, five were capable of defense only, three were of dubious quality even in defense, and three needed to be taken out of action.³³

In fact, the German methods carried the seeds of their own failure, once the enemy declined to collapse at the first blow. Although they were ideally suited to gain a breakthrough, Ludendorff’s tactics could not achieve a breakout. Having penetrated the defensive line, there was no guidance as to what the infantry should do next; they tended to dig in and wait. As a result his five offensives, rather than reinforcing each other, became a series of limited, diverging attacks. But even had they broken out they would have been self-constrained; as at Caporetto, the lack of roads and the poor condition of the terrain restricted the Army’s mobility and made it hard to supply. Eventually, the assault would congeal into a new, static position. As it was, by leaving his assault divisions depleted, exhausted, and in hastily dug defenses, Ludendorff opened the door to an Allied victory.

Pershing was unreserved in his admiration of the German achievement, which, he believed, vindicated his faith in open warfare. But he persisted in drawing only the lessons he wanted to learn. In July he wrote:

Two of the main characteristics of the successful German offensive were: The intelligent initiative of junior officers and superiority of fire. Americans have inherent qualities in both these respects far superior to those of the Germans ... All infantry officers must pay especial and constant attention to perfecting the instruction of the infantry soldier in the use of the rifle and to increase his reliance on that weapon as his only indispensable arm.³⁴

He thus ignored the true reasons for German success, the same reasons that applied to the French victories at Malmaison and Soissons and those of the British at Cambrai and Amiens. These were: the use of massive, sophisticated, and flexible artillery support, both before and during the operation; a multitude of different types of infantry weapons at the squad and platoon levels; flexible teams, operating semi-independently, to penetrate weak spots and bypass strong points; close support by aircraft and (in the case of the Allies) tanks; and above all, intensive training in combined-arms tactics, especially infantry with artillery. Without that last element, the technical expertise and the crucial cooperation within infantry formations and between the infantry and the artillery would be absent. In his concentrated antipathy toward what he considered to be trench warfare—rolling barrages, phase lines, timed advances, limited objectives—Pershing neglected any means of getting through the trenches to the open country in which he wanted to fight.³⁵ Worse, by objecting to American troops being trained by French and British officers, he closed off access to a year or more of his allies’ most recent experience.* Pershing’s stubbornness in this regard would cause confusion and waste when it came to the training of American divisions. What problems his attitude would produce once the AEF actually reached the field of battle was yet to be seen.

* Pershing’s disdain for French tactical thought is demonstrated in his note of July 12, 1918 on a memorandum by the Allied Commander-in-Chief, General Ferdinand Foch. Foch’s memo gave a thorough and accurate analysis of Ludendorff’s offensive methods and how to defend against them. Pershing transmitted it to his subordinates with a proforma endorsement that read in its entirety, “Commanders will show by their attitude that they give full, loyal and sympathetic support to the execution of the above instructions of the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied armies.” (Department of the Army Historical Division, USAWW, 17 vols (Washington, DC: GPO, 1948), vol. 3, pp. 335–36.)