9.

Under the Gun

Twelve of our men were taken prisoners and three were killed and two wounded. Some one told us that the Germans came two hundred strong in the night and got them. . . . The German prisoner, captured by the Americans, was nearly stripped of his clothes for souvenirs, and when they were amputating his arm, he bravely asked if they wanted that, too!

—American ambulance driver Amy Owen Bradley, describing in a letter home the first combat action of the war between AEF and German troops

ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1917, Pershing settled into his new headquarters in Chaumont, a bucolic town that gave, in Pershing’s words, “relief from the depression of Paris,” 170 miles to its west, where almost every woman wore black mourning and disabled soldiers hobbled around begging for food. Chaumont was located along a major railway connected to southern ports such as Saint-Nazaire, vital nodes for incoming American troops and supplies. The French were concentrated more in central France, to protect Paris, and the British were in the north, by the English Channel. Chaumont was also closer to the German lines. Pershing believed there were intelligence and communication advantages to being as near to the enemy as possible, within reason.

From the moment he arrived, Pershing was inundated with meetings and ceremonial duties. The local commanding general hosted a welcoming luncheon that included city officials and their families. Pershing was especially taken by the general’s blond-haired daughter, “a beautiful child of six,” he wrote, who no doubt reminded him of his own lost golden little girls. Pershing tried chatting with her in French, but she didn’t respond. After several more attempts, he finally asked, “Comprenez-vous?” With unabashed frankness, she told him, “Non.” Pershing’s language skills apparently hadn’t improved much since his West Point days.

On September 10, Secretary of War Newton Baker wired Pershing a confidential cable:

I am especially concerned that our troops should not be engaged in actual fighting in France until they are there in such numbers and have made such thorough preparation that their first appearance will be encouraging both to their own morale and to the spirit of our people here. I think it goes without saying that the Germans will make a very special effort to strike swiftly and strongly against any part of the line which we undertake to defend, in order to be able to report to their people encouragingly about our participation and also with the object of discouraging our soldiers and our people as much as possible. I have no doubt that this has all been present to your mind.

Pershing hardly thought of anything else. Every decision he made, every problem he had to overcome, related to training and supplying his troops. And he was keenly aware of public relations as well. American journalists in the States and those writing dispatches from Europe were almost unanimous in their desire to promote the heroism and sacrifices of AEF soldiers and Marines.

Three days before Baker’s cable, German warplanes bombed a field hospital, blowing to pieces a twenty-seven-year-old doctor from Kansas City, Kansas, named William T. Fitzsimons. Although not a combatant, Fitzsimons was the first AEF fatality of the war. By coincidence, former president Theodore Roosevelt was a contributing editor to the main newspaper in Kansas City (The Star), and Roosevelt used his death to honor the doctor’s humanity and demonize Germany. Roosevelt wrote:

There is sometimes a symbolic significance to the first death in a war. It is so in this case. To the mother he leaves, the personal grief must in some degree be relieved by the pride in the fine and gallant life which has been crowned by the great sacrifice. We, his fellow countrymen, share this pride and sympathize with this sorrow. . . .

As part of her deliberate policy of frightfulness, [Germany] has carried on a systematic campaign of murder against hospitals and hospital ships. The first American to die in our army was killed in one of these typical raids. We should feel stern indignation against Germany for the brutality of which this was merely one among innumerable instances. . . .

We are in the eighth month since Germany went to war against us; and we are still only at the receiving end of the game. We have not in France a single man on the fighting line. The first American killed was a doctor. No German soldier is yet in jeopardy from anything we have done.

Roosevelt’s impatience was felt by many, none more so than the man responsible for putting Americans onto that fighting line. This was Pershing’s predicament; he, his officers, his troops, the French, the British, and all the other allies were pushing for action. But the men weren’t ready.

Part of the problem concerned supplies. Pershing was especially irritated by the confusion in the States when it came to sending over provisions. Ships weren’t being filled to capacity. Items were broken due to careless packing. And many supplies seem to have been selected by an “antiquated desk soldier long since retired,” Pershing wrote. In one testy cable, he instructed the War Department to stop sending over floor wax, lawn mowers, bathtubs, window shades, and spittoons, which were absolutely unnecessary, and expedite the shipment of winter clothing, weapons, and similar matériel. (One of those spittoons did, for the record, end up in Pershing’s office.)

There was also a problem on the receiving end. Pershing had complained to the War Department that U.S. troops were pressed into service unloading cargo at the ports in southern France when these men needed to be preparing for combat. The French had lent them “a few prisoners and some women,” Pershing noted, but that was hardly satisfactory, and the docks were at risk of becoming “hopelessly congested” without the stevedores he had requested.

As confident as Pershing was in the fighting spirit of the AEF troops, they were untested. How they performed under fire for the first time would, as Secretary Baker reminded him, influence the faith the other Allied commanders had in him, and in whether the Americans could turn the tide of the war.

Ideally, each division would undergo at least three stages of training before engaging in any large-scale action. The first consisted of military basics, from digging foxholes to shooting a gun. Everyone, not only infantrymen, Pershing insisted, had to be proficient in using their rifles, including their bayonets.

Troops then moved on to learning their specialty skills. Artillerymen learned how to target mortars. Signal corps soldiers were shown how to lay telephone wires and establish other forms of communications between units and their commanders. Even a weapon as seemingly simple as a grenade required extensive instruction. Americans, raised on playing baseball, assumed it should be thrown overhand, like a pitch. But the Brits recommended an underhand method, based on how a cricket player would toss a ball. The trick was to give it a bit of an arc, so it would more likely drop into the narrow slit of a trench. The grenades were notoriously temperamental, and it was unnerving just to hold one; they were timed to explode after five seconds, but some detonated within three. If it was thrown too quickly, however, the enemy might have a chance to fling it back.

Having already been paraded before cheering citizens and military officials after they had arrived in Paris in early July 1917, 1st Division—the only division the United States had in France—was frequently put on display during its training period throughout September and October in Gondrecourt, thirty-seven miles north of Chaumont. French officers were getting anxious. The Americans were training too slowly, they felt, and weren’t focusing on trench warfare. They continued to plead that the soldiers be scattered into French regiments to replace their casualties, and Pershing still refused. The Americans would fight together, and they would be taught what Pershing referred to as “open warfare,” a more offensive approach to battle, rather than hunkering down in trenches and endlessly firing shells at the enemy while trying to avoid incoming artillery.

Pershing frequently visited 1st Division in Gondrecourt to see how it was progressing, and he was as anxious about its readiness as anyone. He had never been close with its commanding general, William Sibert, though they had attended West Point together. Sibert was a skilled engineer who had helped build the Panama Canal, but he had never led men in combat. He had been assigned to 1st Division before the war only because he happened to be one of the highest ranking generals in the Army. It was an appointment due more to seniority than to merit.

When Pershing visited Gondrecourt on October 3, the men demonstrated for him a new tactical maneuver that Major Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the former president’s thirty-year-old son, had devised to overtake entrenched forces. Pershing asked Sibert what he thought of the exercise, and Sibert gave a vague, fumbling reply. Pershing exploded. He tore into Sibert for his uninspiring leadership and blamed him for the division’s overall lack of preparation and professionalism. Deeply humiliated in front of his troops, Sibert was shocked into silence. But his chief of staff, Captain George Marshall, was so enraged by Pershing’s censure and the demeaning way it was conducted that he grabbed the AEF commander’s shoulder as he was walking away and blurted out, “General Pershing, there’s something to be said here, and I think I should say it because I’ve been here longest.”

Before anyone could stop him, Marshall unleashed a torrent of grievances. He railed at Pershing for how poorly the men were clothed and equipped, some without even shoes, and their insufferable living conditions, spread out as they were in unventilated barns and haylofts. He concluded by saying that all of these problems were more the fault of upper command than of General Sibert.

Pershing glared at Marshall and said only, “Well, you must appreciate the troubles we have.”

“Yes, General, but we have them every day and many a day,” Marshall replied, his voice still rising in anger, “and we have to solve every one of them by night.”

After Marshall finished his tirade, the rest of the men stood there frozen, astonished by the confrontation they had witnessed and convinced that Marshall had just ended his military career.

But Pershing said nothing. He walked briskly back to his waiting automobile, marked “U.S. No. 1,” and returned to his headquarters.

Pershing made no mention of the clash with Marshall in his private diary, but the next day, October 4, he sent another secret cable to Secretary of War Baker:

I am making every effort to inculcate a strong, aggressive fighting spirit among our forces, to overcome a more or less perfunctory attitude engendered by years of peace. I hope you will permit me to speak very frankly and quite confidentially, but I fear that we have some general officers who have neither the experience, the energy, nor the aggressive spirit to prepare their units or handle them under battle conditions as they exist to-day.

Number one on Pershing’s enclosed list of generals to be relieved of command was General Sibert.

Pershing paid another visit to Gondrecourt three days later, on October 7, and sought out the brash young captain named Marshall. His intention was not to demote or even reprimand him, even if Marshall’s verbal broadside bordered on insubordination. Pershing was impressed with Marshall’s candor and grasp of details, and Pershing could certainly empathize with the pressures Marshall was under, although Pershing’s were exponentially more complex and demanding. Pershing recognized that at the very least he could count on Marshall for unvarnished reports of how the 1st Division was functioning and what assistance it needed. The 1st Division had been nicknamed Pershing’s Pets because it had been formed out of the Punitive Expedition in Mexico, and he admittedly had a special fondness for its soldiers. He also knew they were about to be the first Americans sent to the front.

George Marshall.

•   •   •

ALONG WITH ALL of the professional demands on Pershing’s time, the general’s personal life was proving to be complicated as well. In the middle of October, Pershing received a letter from Anne Patton, written from California:

It is just at the hour of dark when all the world seems to bow its head in prayer. If you were only here we would go out onto the porch and watch daylight fade, but because you are so far away I do not go alone. It would make me sad. The hurt of our parting would be too severe.

It was a Sunday evening when we kissed good-bye. So many weeks have gone since then. All kinds of things have happened. For you many wonderful things, experiences that have marked epochs in world’s history. But in it all our love has lain warm in our hearts. Just think if you had gone away before you asked me if I loved you. Unspoken love is such a feeble thing, a prey to so many doubts and fears. I thank God that He let us have those unforgettable weeks, that we could see each other and kiss away each other’s tears before we parted.

Anne soon realized, both from the tone of his response and the scarcity of letters, that Pershing was drifting from her. “Darling John,” she wrote several weeks later, “you seem very far away tonight, and detached from me. It is such ages since I heard from you. I feel as if you were a part almost of another existence. I do not like to feel this way.”

Anne was unaware that Pershing was already falling for someone else, a Romanian-born twenty-three-year-old living in Paris named Micheline Resco. Pershing had been introduced to her in June, three months before he moved out to Chaumont. A talented artist, she had met the general at a cocktail party and asked him if she could paint his portrait. He immediately agreed, and the two began to spend many private hours together.

His first letter to her was written on August 29. Resco had apparently been sick, and he jotted off a quick note in French to let her know that he was thinking of her. (His misspelling of the word mademoiselle is in the original letter.)

Madamoiselle, As I do not have the pleasure to see you today, I hope you are not suffering too much, which I would truly regret. Please accept, Madamoiselle, my respectful esteem and all my wishes for your speedy recovery.

JJ Pershing.

Pershing had to be discreet about seeing Resco. At first he told his chauffeur and other staff members that he was visiting her to sit for his portrait. Eventually he started telling them that she was teaching him French, which was, no doubt, at least partially true.

Though he continued to use the more formal vous, rather than tu, when he addressed her, Pershing was falling deeply in love with Resco. “My dear Micheline,” he wrote on September 5, before departing for Chaumont,

Truly, today I am very very sad when I think that I cannot see you for many days. In fact it makes me feel ill. You are my dearest, isn’t it so? And your courage and devotion to high ideas of propriety have given me only the greatest respect for you.

Now I am all alone and truly nothing could make me more happy than to see you again. But I must wait with patience for the day when that happens. I care for you very much,

Your friend, J

Pershing added a postscript: “This letter is for you only and in total confidence.”

Pershing was mindful of another relationship in his personal life—being an attentive and caring father to his eight-year-old son, Warren. He frequently wrote to Warren in Nebraska, where the boy was being raised by Pershing’s sister, May.

My dear Warren,

I have just had a very pretty horseback ride along the Marne. It is a beautiful river and has a canal along its entire course. The banks of the canal are level and grassy and, usually, lined with trees. This morning I rode along the banks for about two miles and came to a point where the canal runs across the river and into a tunnel through a mountain. The bridge that carries the canal is very deep of course and is made of iron. I thought you would be interested to know about this.

I have a very good horse, a bay. He has a splendid trot, a nice canter, and gallops well when you want him to. The only thing that was lacking this morning in making my ride a complete joy was that you were not here to go with me. I often wish you were with me when I see beautiful things as I travel about the country. I would also like to have you with me always under all circumstances. I especially miss you at night.

I am just dictating this short note while I am eating breakfast, so good-bye. Write me very often.

With much love, Papa.

Warren also spent time with Senator and Mrs. Warren, who lived in Wyoming, and in late October he sent the following to his father:

Dear Papa,

I was at Cheyenne a week ago and had a fine visit with Grandpa we drove out over the ranches a great deal I did not get behind in school I went to Billie’s birthday party to-day and saw you in the pic-tures at the Orpheum they were fine. I think of you so much and would like to see you with all my love Warren.

Pershing’s letters to Warren were for the most part tender and loving, but the notoriously tough general didn’t hesitate to gently scold his old son if he felt it was necessary.

Warren’s handwritten letter to his father.

My dear Warren,

Your dear letter of October 27th came with Aunt Bess’ and I am more than pleased that you had such a satisfactory and delightful visit with your grand-pa, and that you had a chance to see the ranches and ride the ponies again.

I wish that I could see you in reality instead of looking at you when out in the audience as I appear in the moving pictures. You know I have not seen many of these moving pictures myself and have often wondered just how good they were.

Very confidentially, I am going to whisper this to you: please be a little more careful in writing your letters and be sure that you spell them out so they can be plainly read.

With many kisses and much love, I am

Affectionately yours,

Papa

•   •   •

BY MID-OCTOBER 1917, the 1st Division had been moved to Sommerviller, fifty miles east of Gondrecourt, to be put in actual trenches for the first time. Sommerviller had specifically been selected because it wasn’t very active. The French and German troops there had essentially come to an understanding that it was in nobody’s interest to run around trying to kill one another. Every so often their artillerymen would fire a shell, to keep their superiors happy, but they mostly hit empty fields or some faraway spot in no-man’s-land. The Americans were deployed to this quiet sector to ease them into combat by giving them at least a general idea of trench life.

For some it was too quiet. “The first thrill of service in the trenches soon passed with a realization of the mud and other discomforts and the dearth of excitement,” George Marshall later grumbled about the experience. But every few days, there was enough activity to enable the 1st Division to rack up a series of “firsts.”

A few minutes after 6:00 a.m. on October 23, Sergeant Alex Arch of Battery C, positioned just to the east of Sommerviller, fired the first American artillery shot of the war at the German guns less than two miles behind their trenches. (A war reporter who had talked his way into the 1st Division’s company of four artillery batteries retrieved the shell casing and held on to it for Sergeant Arch.)

Four days later, the AEF captured its first prisoner, a twenty-year-old German named Leonard Hoffman. Hoffman had wandered off too far from his own line and was spotted and shot. American soldiers took him to a field hospital, but he couldn’t be saved and was dead by the next morning. The medics who had tried to keep him alive later came to the macabre realization that they hadn’t recorded the event for history. Hoffman’s body was placed back on the operating table and posed to make it look as if he were being treated, and the doctors all stood around him with their surgical masks on as a photographer snapped a picture for posterity.

On October 28, Lieutenant D. H. Harden earned the distinction of being the first AEF officer wounded, after a shell fragment struck his knee. Major Theodore Roosevelt Jr., every bit his father’s son, rushed over to Harden and, although envious that he hadn’t been the first to be injured, congratulated Harden on his “achievement.”

While replacing the 1st Battalion of the 16th Infantry after their ten-day stint, the incoming 2nd Battalion was told that the area was essentially peaceful. “I shot six Germans sneaking up on me one night,” a private named Quincy Mills recalled, “and when daylight came they were all the same [tree] stump.”

During the predawn hours of November 3, all that changed. A heavy rain was falling and, with dark clouds shutting out the moonlight, the night was pitch black. A platoon of nearly fifty men, all from 1st Division’s Company F, were in the most forward section of trenches, approximately five hundred yards from enemy lines.

At precisely 3:00 a.m., the Germans commenced an artillery barrage that lasted for forty-five minutes. Company F’s platoon was boxed in by shell fire, preventing them from retreating or moving forward. The trapped platoon watched in horror as out of the swirling smoke came hundreds of charging Germans. Many of them had crawled up to the wire during the shelling and were virtually on top of the Americans. The AEF machine gunners opened up on the advancing troops, but they were coming at them from every direction and soon the Americans were outflanked on all sides.

The sudden onslaught of German soldiers caused confusion; some Americans assumed the hulking figures running by them were other AEF troops and let their guard down. Corporal James Gresham came face-to-face with a soldier who asked him in perfect English, “Who are you?”

Gresham replied, “I’m an American, too, don’t shoot!” The German instantly fired a bullet into Gresham’s head.

Private Merle Hay was also killed by a man he assumed was an American. And Private Thomas Enright was found the next morning bayoneted so forcefully through the neck that he was nearly decapitated.

Along with killing Gresham, Hay, and Enright, the Germans wounded several AEF soldiers and took eleven more as prisoners. The raid lasted for only fifteen minutes, but nearly half of the men in Company F’s platoon were casualties of the German assault. The French soldiers there had never before been hit with such a massive barrage—several thousand shells fired in less than an hour.

American journalists weren’t entirely certain how to cover the story. HUNS KILL 3 PERSHING MEN, a Chicago Herald headline blared in an eight-column banner. But in the accompanying story, the editors made it clear that in the larger scheme of things the incident was of “no particular military significance.” The German press, predictably, gloated about the “American defeat.”

Later in the morning after the raid, General Bordeaux and Captain Marshall walked through the trampled, shell-pocked area and into a nearby dressing station to speak with survivors and determine exactly what had happened. From the tone and content of Bordeaux’s queries, Marshall was beginning to sense that the general was questioning whether the American soldiers had put up much of a resistance.

Marshall, never one to hold his tongue if he believed his men were being insulted, said in a sharp tone, “General Pershing is going to be very much interested in that reaction of a French commander to American troops.” Marshall went on to remind Bordeaux that Bordeaux was the one who wouldn’t allow the Americans to conduct night patrols, which is what caused them to be taken by surprise. Having had his say, Marshall informed Bordeaux that he would not be returning to headquarters with him and, turning his back on the general, bid him farewell.

Well aware of how tenuous and important relations between French and American commanders were, General Bordeaux went out of his way to make amends. He organized an elaborate military funeral to honor the three young AEF combatants killed in Sommerviller, and personally presided over the ceremony, giving an impassioned eulogy. “In the name of the Eighteenth Division, in the name of the French Army, and in the name of France, I bid farewell to Corporal Gresham, Private Enright, and Private Hay, of the Sixteenth Infantry, American Army,” he proclaimed.

These graves, the first to be dug in our national soil, at but a short distance from the enemy, are as a mark of the mighty hand of our allies, firmly clinging to the common task, confirming the will of the people and Army of the United States to fight with us to a finish. . . .

Thus the death of this humble corporal and of these two private soldiers appears to us with extraordinary grandeur. We will therefore ask that the mortal remains of these young men be left here—be left to us forever. We will inscribe on their tombs: “Here lie the first soldiers of the United States Republic to fall on the soil of France for justice and liberty.” The passerby will stop and uncover his head. The travelers of France, of the allied countries, of America, the men of heart who will come to visit our battlefield of Lorraine, will go out of their way to come here—to bring to these graves the tribute of their respect and of their gratefulness.

Corporal Gresham, Private Enright, Private Hay: In the name of France, I thank you. God receive your souls. Farewell!

A twenty-one-gun salute shattered the reverential silence, and then the sad, soulful notes of “Taps” played out across the countryside.

Captain George Marshall, the sole senior AEF officer who attended the service, was deeply impressed with General Bordeaux’s eloquence and the effort he and his men had put into paying tribute to Gresham, Enright, and Hay.

Pershing had been attending a series of high-level meetings in Paris at the time of the funeral, which had been quickly arranged, but word got back to him through Marshall about the ceremony. Pershing later wrote how touched he was by Bordeaux’s “beautiful oration” and the “large number of French troops [who] also came informally to pay their final tribute. This joint homage to our dead, there under the fire of the guns, seemed to symbolize the common sacrifices our two peoples were to make in the same great cause.”

Both the French and the Americans had a vested interest in sustaining a strong alliance. But whether it was in the gilded palaces where the commanding generals met and dined or in the flooded trenches in which AEF and French troops shivered side by side, tensions were beginning to surface. Regarding those “high-level” meetings that Pershing had to participate in during early November, at the end of the day he was frustrated by the lack of unity among the Allies. “The undercurrent at the moment, as nearly as could be learned, showed a continued lack of accord among the different nations,” Pershing wrote. “Each nation has its own aspirations and each sought to gain some advantage over the others.”

General James Harbord, Pershing’s chief of staff, noted in his diary that after having spent months in France he’d come to the conclusion that the French were “the most delightful, exasperating, unreliable, trustworthy, sensitive, unsanitary, cleanly, dirty, artistic, clever and stupid people the writer has ever known.” Harbord then wondered “if we do not feel as much like fighting them as we do the Germans before the war is over.” Behind closed doors, French generals were grousing about their American counterparts, too.

Despite the lofty sentiments of fraternité and common cause that were spoken at the funeral for Gresham, Enright, and Hay, the strain between the French and American soldiers at Sommerviller manifested itself only days later. Major Theodore Roosevelt and his younger brother Archibald, also an officer in the 1st Division (“Archie” was a captain), wanted to organize a retaliatory raid. General Bordeaux and General Sibert signed off on it, and George Marshall assisted with the planning. The Roosevelt brothers trained with French troops to assault a building in the sector they believed German patrols frequently passed through in the evening.

Archie led the small detachment of mostly French soldiers, and when they arrived at the building, they found it was empty. Archie wanted to stay, and tempers flared when the French insisted on retreating. There was also an acrimonious dispute about which direction they should go. The jolly, one-for-all-and-all-for-one band of warriors that had taken off into the night hours earlier returned disgruntled and snapping at one another.

“This was the first American raid in the World War,” Marshall later noted, “and what Theodore [Roosevelt] said to me at this time about the French will not bear repeating.” The grand partnership was only just beginning.