For most Americans, the bloodshed and thunder of the first two and a half years of the Great War was no more than a distant noise. Only tragedies that touched home—the death of 128 Americans aboard the Lusitania and injuries to two dozen more aboard the Sussex when each was torpedoed by German U-boats—raised voices of outrage, but still few desired war. This “lack of belligerence,” Woodrow Wilson’s biographer, John Milton Cooper, notes, “was not surprising. Newspaper and magazine coverage of the carnage on the Western Front and the recent use of poison gas left no room for illusions about the horrors of this war.” The British Army had suffered more casualties in just the first hour of the Battle of the Somme than America lost in the entire War of 1812, and in the first two days of that same battle had more deaths than the thirteen colonies in the American Revolution. Just nine months of defending Verdun had cost the French Army more casualties than either side in fighting the entire American Civil War. In the United States, daily news of bloodshed on such an incomprehensible scale left few clamoring for America to get involved.
For his part, President Wilson stressed that “[t]he United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these times that are to try men’s souls.” Through the crises that hit home, particularly times when there were public calls for military readiness or involvement, Wilson urged Americans to “put a curb on our sentiments.” But the need for some level of preparedness was a growing national attitude, and many wealthy, influential business leaders set up and funded military training camps, with Army Chief of Staff Gen. Leonard Wood’s encouragement, to train and prepare a large class of citizen reservists in case of war.
Most of these training camps were aimed at university men, and the one that attracted most established businessmen and prominent leaders was organized at Plattsburgh Barracks in Plattsburgh, New York. The camp was promoted by former president Theodore Roosevelt and attended by such notables as two of his sons, Archie and Theodore Jr., as well as the mayor of New York City. More than 20,000 young and middle-aged men of means attended in the summers of 1915 and 1916, spawning the “Plattsburg Movement” (the h in the town’s proper name was left off in most publications at that time) that stressed a “call to duty” and the “special responsibility of the privileged to exert leadership in the country.”
But it was not until Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa crossed the border and killed civilians in Columbus, New Mexico, in March 1916 that President Wilson and Congress, slowly and somewhat reluctantly, embraced the urgings of the “Plattsburgers.” Their official embrace took the form of the 1916 National Defense Act, which increased the size of both the active Army and the National Guard, provided federal funding for more military training camps (based largely on the Plattsburg model), and created the ROTC for colleges and universities. But with a five-year implementation period and much of the Army already getting deployed to the southern border to deal with Pancho Villa and his rebels, the United States military would still be far from prepared for any kind of involvement in what had become now the greatest war in mankind’s history.
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By the opening months of 1917, the Lusitania tragedy was twenty months gone, Wilson had been reelected to a second term on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” and the World War was still an ocean away. It seemed the United States might remain uninvolved, but across the Atlantic in the top-secret inner sanctum of the British Admiralty, Room 40, where German messages and telegrams were decoded by British Intelligence, the storm that would draw America into the war broke quietly. It was a coded telegram from the German foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, to the German ambassador in Mexico. Intercepted and decoded by British Intelligence, the telegram offered German support for Mexico to reclaim by force its former territory from the United States, an area comprising land in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. England eagerly shared this “Zimmermann Telegram” with President Wilson, and its public release in the United States, coinciding with the announcement of Germany’s renewal of unrestricted submarine warfare, raised the Americans’ call for intervention to a fever pitch.
War swiftly staked a claim on the nation’s passions, a sentiment encouraged by most newspapers. In Chicago, thirty-six-year-old Robert McCormick, the publisher and co-editor of the Chicago Tribune and an outspoken interventionist, had thus far used his newspaper over the course of the war as a vehicle to campaign in print for better preparedness. As his biographer, Richard Norton Smith notes, McCormick “never saw a fight he didn’t want to get into,” and he had recently been dividing his time between running his paper and serving as a major in the Illinois National Guard, a commission he had obtained from the governor. Early in the war, McCormick had traveled to both the Western and Eastern Fronts as a war correspondent. More recently, he had led a group of state guard volunteers down to patrol the border during the Pancho Villa episode, using his own funds to supply horses, uniforms, and weapons. Now with the recent developments, McCormick used his paper to loudly call for a Draft, conservation of food and fuel, and volunteers.
Some young men, animated by the same national spirit as McCormick, did not wait for a declaration of war to enlist. On the first day of March, in New Castle, Pennsylvania, with the headline of his hometown paper reading “Wilson Confirms Fact of German Plot Against U.S.,” William “Billie” McCombs enlisted for service in the Army, and his brothers Thomas and Arthur soon followed. In Denton, Texas, seventeen-year-old Levy Wilson and his two younger friends, Orville Klepper and Emory Smith, both sixteen, also volunteered. All dropped school to enlist and soon dubbed themselves the “Three Musketeers,” a name their hometown paper would eagerly employ in subsequent stories covering their military service.
At long last, on the evening of April 2, 1917, the president who had won an electoral victory just five months earlier on his record of staying out of war submitted to his “distressing and oppressive duty” to ask Congress for war. In pin-drop silence before a joint session of Congress, Wilson declared, “the right is more precious than peace,” and resolved that the United States become “one of the champions of the rights of mankind” and join those already at war. He admitted it a “fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war,” but with his call to arms, the American citizenry was by and large now willing to enter what their president called this “most terrible and disastrous of all wars.” In conspicuously passive tones he declared, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” And to close the speech that would become one of the noblest passages in the American canon, Wilson intoned gravely, “[T]he day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured.” Paraphrasing Martin Luther, he closed, “God helping her, she can do no other.”
Four days later, on the morning of April 6, by overwhelming votes of 373 to 50 in the House and 82 to 6 in the Senate, Congress passed a joint resolution declaring that a state of war existed between the United States and Germany, authorizing Wilson “to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States” against Imperial Germany. In the early afternoon at the White House, President Wilson signed it, and America was at war.
With a population of 103 million, the United States entered the World War as the second largest power after Russia, which would be exiting the Allied forces by year’s end. But as they related to America’s armed forces, the numbers were far less encouraging. The Regular Army, currently scattered from the Mexican border and Panama to San Francisco, the Philippines, and China, had fewer than 5,800 officers and 122,000 men. Counting the existing National Guard and Marine Corps, the United States could muster a total land force of only around 220,000 men. In contrast, the massive Army of the German Empire, which united the armies of Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg, numbered over 5 million and was currently fighting on two established fronts where it had been at war for nearly three years.
President Wilson’s address had called for an “immediate addition to the armed forces” of “at least five hundred thousand men.” To raise the number needed, the War Department concluded a mandatory national draft would be necessary, but that would take legislation and time to implement. As the sun set on April 6, it was clear that the pressing need for manpower could be answered only by volunteers.
The next morning, the front page of Janesville, Wisconsin, newspaper, the Janesville Daily Gazette, carried an image of the flag with the headline, “Citizens of Janesville: The National Congress has declared that a state of war exists between the United States and Germany.” That same day, twenty-two-year-old Otto Hanson, who had emigrated from Denmark just four years earlier, entered Janesville’s Army recruiting office and became the first from his adopted hometown to enlist after the declaration of war. In Davenport, Iowa, Albert L. Agnew, only sixteen, lied about his age and enlisted without his father’s consent. He would later say it was his size that allowed him to pass for an older man.
Some volunteered together, bound either by blood or close friendship. Earl G. Simons, a nineteen-year-old only child from Altoona, Pennsylvania, applied for enlistment with his younger buddy, Harry G. Banzhoff, only seventeen. In Harthington, Nebraska, Carl M. Lange and eleven friends enlisted together. And in Burlington, Iowa, seventeen-year-old Vernon C. Mossman and his older brother, Ray, twenty-four, signed up together. By war’s end, five sons from the Mossman family would enlist.
Fired by the same sense of national duty, many college men dropped their books mid-semester and flocked to the colors. Twenty-year-old Samuel J. Ervin Jr. from Morganton, North Carolina, who would one day represent his state in the US Senate and gain acclaim as the chairman of the Watergate Committee, was a senior at the University of North Carolina. He and his classmate Samuel Iredell “Si” Parker, from Monroe, North Carolina, were both only one month away from completing their studies and two months from their planned graduation. Neither Sam nor Si postponed their service until final exams or waited to be drafted: both immediately volunteered, were selected for Army officer school, and by May were headed to Georgia for training.
A good portion of the privileged class offered itself over to service. Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick again donned his major’s gold-leaf rank and National Guard uniform, inviting volunteers to apply directly to him at his newspaper’s downtown office. And for any Tribune employees who signed up, McCormick offered to continue paying their current wages for the length of their service. The old “Plattsburgers” jumped in, men of education and means still united in the common cause. Some, like Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and his brother Archie, who had attended camps in 1915 and 1916, volunteered for front-line service. In all, 90 percent of those who attended Plattsburg camps over the previous two years would see service in the war.
Thousands of young and middle-aged men volunteered to fight, and they came, as historian Gary Mead notes, “[f]rom town and country, salon and factory, farm and schoolroom, they came in an apparently endless stream.” Their reasons for volunteering were as varied as their backgrounds. Young Emory Smith, one of the “Three Musketeers” from Denton, Texas, recalled it was being chased by a teacher that gave him the idea to serve: “I made such good progress in running from him that I thought I ought to do well in running after the Dutchmen [sic].” Twenty-year-old Herman “Dick” Dacus of St. Louis, a secretary in the city’s civic league applying for officer training, later reasoned, “We were at war, I was single and sympathized with the French and British and disliked the German sinking of unarmed merchant ships, etc.” Frank Groves of Lebanon, Oregon, later said simply he “wished to volunteer—Father signed for me without question.”
Once signed up for duty, each enlistee was quickly shipped off for physical exams then off to a training camp and thrust into military life. The diary of Ruben J. Nelson, a nineteen-year-old enlistee from Kennan, Wisconsin, reveals the common initial experience of early volunteers: “[A]pplied for enlistment on April 10, 1917. Left for Escanaba, Mich. April 12, 1917. Passed examination … Left for Chicago, Ill.… From Chicago, for St. Louis, Mo.… Reached Jefferson Barracks, Mo. April 17, 1917 and passed examination and sworn into regular Army Service on April 18, 1917. Clothes issued and soldier life begins. April 19th, 1917 drill. School of a soldier. Drill squads right & left. April 20th same thing over.”
Their training included marching, tent pitching, manual of arms, and guard duty. Enlistees were immersed in the rudiments of military structure, but there was little to no weapons or combat training. “None of the new weapons developed since 1914 were then available,” one volunteer noted, adding that the only rifles they had for training were “pre-war vintage.” Another trainee observed that “the training did nothing to equip us to take care of ourselves as a combat soldier.” For these thousands of boys with no previous military experience who were to make up the bulk of America’s fighting force, this initial bit of instruction gave them at least a minimal level of regularity and discipline. Adequate preparation would take more time.
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But for the armies of the Allied nations currently fighting the war, there was little time. A series of recent bloody winter offensives on the Western Front with little to no results had cost the French Army dearly in lives and morale, and nearly half its divisions currently in the trenches were, as historian Allan Millett describes, “in active mutiny or sullen noncooperation.” Barely capable of holding on defensively in many sectors, the French would be incapable of any offensive action without fresh troops, meaning Americans. It took only three weeks after the American declaration of war for the impatient French and British to deliver their pressing request to President Wilson in person.
Marshal Joseph Joffre, the revered former French commander who in the first months of the war had stopped the Germans and pushed them back to their current line, arrived in Washington in late April with France’s minister of justice and former prime minister, René Viviani. They were desperate for a visible sign of American presence in the trenches to cure the depleted morale, and they pressed Wilson to send what troops he could immediately. Wilson’s conversation with Joffre, who at war’s outbreak had overseen the mobilization and deployment of an army of a million in just days, turned to a detailed assessment of the logistics involved in organizing and shipping massive numbers of American troops across the Atlantic. This meeting followed one with a British delegation, sent to request American troops to fill gaps in the front caused by casualties, and for a stronger naval presence to protect shipping. “Wilson was,” in his biographer’s estimation, “getting a better idea of what waging this war would require.”
Wilson gave his new allies no immediate answer but privately decided to send a contingent of troops as soon as feasible, and he delegated the task of selecting a leader for this deploying force to his secretary of war, Newton D. Baker. Diminutive and bespectacled, the former mayor of Cleveland had no military experience, but his analytical mind and cunning discernment equipped him as a quick judge of character. Undaunted by bemedaled uniforms, Baker had in his thirteen months heading the War Department coldly and accurately assessed the Army’s senior generals. He bore well-founded worries about the insubordination and political ambitions of the senior Army leader, the aging former chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, and held a strong preference for someone with recent field command of large forces. Surveying the small field of generals, his objective left him with one choice: Maj. Gen. John Pershing.
Pershing was a Missourian whose first paid occupation was teaching school—experience that afforded him invaluable practice in leadership at a young age. He was twenty-one when he finally entered West Point, one class behind Robert Bullard, who later recalled him in his cadet days as “plainly the estate of man while most of those around him were still boys.” His fourth year he was selected class president and First Captain, the first of many honors to mark his ascending star. As a young lieutenant, Pershing led the African American “Buffalo Soldiers” of the 10th Cavalry Regiment, a job he performed so effectively he was selected to return to West Point as a tactics instructor. There the cadets under him, frustrated by his unbending manner, gave him a nickname that mocked his time with the 10th Cavalry, an epithet that would stick through his career—and which history would later sanitize—“Nigger Jack.”
Pershing sailed for Cuba at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, where his regiment and Theodore Roosevelt’s fought together in the 2nd Cavalry Brigade and where he was described by a fellow officer as “cool as a bowl of cracked ice” when under fire. In 1906, after service in the Philippines and Japan, Pershing was promoted by President Roosevelt from captain directly to brigadier general, leaping past more than 800 senior Army officers in rank.
Pershing was now at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, commanding the Army’s Southern Department at the border, having just returned two months earlier from a year-long mission leading the “Punitive Expedition” into Mexico. He and his force, which had expanded from 4,000 to 11,000 and constituted the largest American military detachment deployed since the Civil War, had trailed Pancho Villa through hundreds of miles in Mexico. Though their target was never captured, Pershing had shown adept leadership in keeping his growing organization together and diplomatic skill in avoiding an international clash with the existing Mexican government. While Pershing was ranked sixth in seniority among the Army’s major generals, none other had such recent field experience or had ever led a force so large.
In early May, pursuant to instructions from Secretary Baker, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Hugh L. Scott sent a telegram to Pershing with instructions to select “four infantry regiments and one artillery regiment” from his Southern Department “for service in France” and to report to Washington at once. Eight days later, in Washington, DC, on May 10, Baker’s personal meeting with Pershing confirmed his previous instinct that he was the right man for the job. Pershing was to form an expeditionary division, and the designated units would be expanded to “war strength” with immediate supplements of newly trained manpower. At the time of this meeting, the Selective Service Act, which would authorize conscription to supplement volunteers and reach the new goal of 1 million men, was still awaiting passage in Congress. Although this Draft Bill passed a week later, the service registration deadline was not until June, and the first selection lottery would not occur until mid-July, leaving the makeup of Pershing’s initial expeditionary force entirely reliant on volunteers.
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The four infantry regiments Pershing chose to make up the fighting line of this yet-unnamed expeditionary division were the 16th, 18th, 26th, and 28th, which were scattered at three camps in Texas and one in Arizona. Newly minted doughboys arrived at each garrison after abbreviated training, but most regiments remained at their prewar strength of fewer than 700 men each (three battalions of four 50-man companies, plus officers and staff). Pvt. Ruben Nelson, the nineteen-year-old from Wisconsin who had passed through physical exams in Chicago before training at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, described in his diary arriving at his new unit, the 18th Infantry, in Douglas, Arizona, in early May: “Find Co. of 70 men and one officer. All old soldiers.” With prewar military experience at a premium, half the existing men in these units had been promoted and parceled out to other new units and training camps, and fresh volunteers like Private Nelson were to beef up each regiment to about 2,400 men before deploying.
Word that a division was being formed for immediate deployment to France spread quickly through the ranks of the thousands of young men then in training, and many who were eager for front-line duty sought assignment to one of the chosen regiments. One of the “Three Musketeers” from Texas, Pvt. Emory Smith, later recalled his disappointment in discovering he “was not on the list of those to be transferred” when “sixty men were needed for the 28th, which we knew would go across.” Emory was determined to go fight. “I swapped places with a boy who did not want to go,” but then the boy “later decided he wanted to go and we swapped back.” Finally, Emory noted proudly, “I swapped a third time before I got permanently on the list.” Pvt. Orville Klepper, Emory’s fellow “Musketeer,” recounted his own commanding officer asking for volunteers to go to France. “Every man stepped forward,” Klepper recalled. His commander asked him his age. “Eighteen, Sir.” “Why do you wish to go to France? Don’t you think you are too young?” “No, Sir, that is what I enlisted for—to fight.” “All right my boy, I like your spunk.” “So,” Klepper proudly noted, “I became a member of the 28th Infantry.”
Far more challenging than training new recruits was the task of finding and training men to lead these thousands of enthusiastic volunteers and harness their unbounded confidence. Of the 5,800 commissioned officers in the standing Regular Army, nearly 2,000 of them had less than one year experience. Leaders—platoon leaders, company commanders, artillery battery commanders, staff officers—were needed and fast. It was mostly young men and middle-aged men of means who applied for commissions—college students, college graduates, and businessmen. “These volunteers,” Secretary Baker observed, “left positions of responsibility and profit, dropped their personal affairs and devoted themselves wholeheartedly to the new business of war.”
Those who had applied for officer duty in April and early May now reported to begin their training. Sam Ervin and Si Parker, the UNC seniors who had volunteered in April, arrived at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, to begin three months of instruction. Many of the old “Plattsburgers,” to include the Roosevelt brothers Theodore Jr. and Archie, returned to the Plattsburgh Camp to complete the same training as the new men. In all, 43,000 officer candidates, men ages twenty-one to forty-five, began their ninety-day training in mid-May at sixteen new reserve-officer training camps across the United States.
The precious field command and combat experience of senior Army officers and NCOs (non-commissioned officers: corporals and sergeants), soon to form the basic framework of the deploying forces, was for the time largely employed in training future officers. Robert Bullard, then a colonel, was placed in charge of the officer training camp at Fort Logan H. Roots in North Little Rock, Arkansas. “Like cadets at the U.S. Military Academy,” Bullard observed, “the student officers were largely relieved of the usual fatigue work of soldiers, devoting their time to study, care and understanding of their equipment, to drill and to practice in instruction of others less advanced.”
Bullard’s camp and the others each had 2,500 officer candidates drilling and training under veteran army officers and NCOs. These seasoned instructors impressed their educated but impressionable students. Richard Newhall, a twenty-nine-year-old Harvard PhD from Massachusetts, was receptive to his captain’s teaching: “He knows how to handle men and that is something which I would like very much to learn,” he observed, impressed that the captain’s “excellence” came “from personality and experience rather than from an encyclopedic knowledge of the different manuals.” The NCOs impressed as well. Officer candidate Herman “Dick” Dacus from St. Louis, in training at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, noted that he “learned quickly to obey acting non-coms” and “was fortunate in having an instructor who did a fine job of teaching us how to give commands so that they could be heard and understood.”
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General Pershing’s telegram from General Scott and meeting with Secretary Baker had left him believing that he was to organize and command only the first deploying division, but a subsequent phone call from Baker revealed he was being handed the colossal task of leading the entire American war effort in Europe. General Pershing was being sent to France as “Commander-in-Chief,” and he was to select a staff and prepare to sail as soon as possible. In a rare betrayal of his own emotions, Pershing would later admit that this weighty responsibility “depressed” him: “Here in the face of a great war I had been placed in command of a theoretical army which had yet to be constituted, equipped, trained, and sent abroad.” But his self-doubt quickly evaporated as he flung himself into the gargantuan task.
In what would become their one and only meeting during the course of the war, President Wilson had General Pershing to the White House on May 24. Of the president, Pershing was “impressed with his poise and his air of determination,” and found him “cordial.” “General, we are giving you some very difficult tasks these days,” Wilson said, following a brief conversation about shipping. “Perhaps so, Mr. President,” the general replied, “but that is what we are trained to expect.” Pershing was somewhat surprised that Wilson said nothing of the part the American forces were to play in the Allied lines, but the omission did not signal detachment so much as confidence. The president and his secretary of war were giving their new AEF commander-in-chief their full assurance of trust and support, so much so that Pershing would, over the course of the World War, enjoy unfettered autonomy—what Wilson’s biographer describes as “complete freedom in conducting operations.”
President Wilson’s single directive to Pershing was to “cooperate as a component of whatever army you may be assigned to by the French government” until the troops are “sufficiently strong to warrant operations as an independent command,” at which point he was to lead the AEF as “a separate and distinct component of the combined forces, the identity of which must be preserved.” Sure in his command of nuance, Wilson’s concise and carefully worded orders to Pershing embodied his clear response to the pleas of Britain and France for American forces. There would be no “amalgamation”—no folding of American soldiers and Marines into French and British units to plug holes in the weakened Allied lines. American forces would organize, ship to France, and fight in the trenches under their own officers and under the American flag, no other.
Now firmly in command and propelled by the president’s boundless confidence and his own broad mandate, General Pershing acted with a promptness and decisiveness that revealed his managerial genius and marked gift for organization. The pace of forward motion rapidly shifted from a glacial slowness to a frenetic speed as Pershing organized a headquarters staff and selected leadership for the expeditionary division, turning abstractions into institutional realities.
* * *
In a heavy rain on the foggy morning of May 28, General Pershing and his handpicked staff—in civilian clothes to avoid excessive press attention—walked the pier at Governors Island, New York, and boarded the British steamship RMS Baltic to sail for France. Among those at the pier to see them off was Capt. George C. Marshall. Like many other young Army officers, Marshall had desired a coveted place on Pershing’s staff but was not one of the forty-two selected. As he watched the general and his party set off to become the first American troops to land in France, he was left “in a most depressed frame of mind over being left behind.” Marshall now craved an assignment with the division then being assembled for immediate shipment to France, recently named the “First Expeditionary Division.” Ideally he wanted the job of Operations Officer, “but as this seemed out of the question” in his mind, he decided to “let fate determine my assignment.”
George Catlett Marshall Jr. was thirty-six and a native of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. Six feet tall, with intense blue eyes and brown hair unfrosted by any hint of gray, he was still boyishly youthful. Marshall already had fifteen years of service in the Regular Army, which he had marked with quiet professionalism. His father, George Sr., originally from Kentucky, had carried a rifle in his hometown militia and had been a prisoner of the Confederate Army during the Civil War. George Jr., the second son and youngest of three children, sought to gain his father’s favor and outshine his older brother by graduating from VMI and gaining what neither of them had: an officer commission in the Army.
As a young lieutenant, Marshall exhibited a military acumen that would later assume legendary proportions, quickly proving equal to any assignment. With an attention to detail that seemed instinctive, he commanded a cavalry force tasked with mapping two thousand square miles of the Texas badlands, resulting in an atlas the chief Army engineer called “the best one received and the only complete one.” While still a lieutenant, Marshall completed an advanced infantry course at Fort Leavenworth, where he graduated first out of a class of fifty-four captains and majors, one of whom was future general Douglas MacArthur.
Marshall served in the Philippines, where he witnessed with no small measure of disfavor the brutal American military reprisals against local guerilla attacks, disorder that helped form his measured approach to leading soldiers. “Once an army is involved in war, there is a beast in every fighting man which begins tugging at its chains,” he voiced at the time, adding that “a good officer must learn, early on, how to keep the beast under control, both in his men and himself.” It was a phrase that would reflect his professional touch throughout his career.
Now a captain and aide-de-camp to the Eastern Division commander, Maj. Gen. Franklin Bell at Governors Island, Marshall craved a place on Pershing’s staff, but he declined his boss’s offer to lobby for an assignment for him and left it to “fate.” This force of fate that was destined one day to mark Marshall’s career with a promotion to five-star general and place on him the mantle of Army chief-of-staff, defense secretary, and secretary of state, took its first providential turn here when he was chosen to ship for France with the First Expeditionary Division. Marshall received General Bell’s blessing and reported for duty at Penn Station.
While fate had thus far left Col. Robert Bullard down in Arkansas leading an officer training camp, on the very day General Pershing and his staff sailed for France a telegram arrived for Bullard summoning him to report to Washington “for extended foreign service.” Ever governed by an unquenchable thirst for front-line field duty, Bullard leapt at the chance and was on “the next train.”
Though not Pershing’s choice, the man selected to command the First Expeditionary Division was Maj. Gen. William Sibert, a West Pointer who had proven his own organizational skill as an engineer officer in the construction of the Panama Canal. The division under his command would consist of the four infantry regiments Pershing had selected, which were then on their way to Hoboken, New Jersey, by train from their camps in Texas and Arizona. On arrival, the regiments would be combined to form a “square division,” with two brigades of two regiments each. On Colonel Bullard’s arrival at the War Department, he learned he was promoted to brigadier general and was assigned to command one of the two infantry brigades. When Captain Marshall reported to General Sibert, he was granted the role he most desired: division operations officer.
The four regiments of fresh soldiers arrived in a steady stream over the course of three days. Each arriving group was held away from the Hoboken pier until nightfall when, under cover of darkness the lines of fresh khaki and duffel bags and brown boots shuffled slowly onto the waiting transport ships. One night their newly appointed operations officer, Captain Marshall, stood at the shipping-office window “watching the endless column of infantry pouring slowly through the courtyard into the covered docks.” As he would later recall, “Except for the shuffle of their feet there was little noise.” The silence gave him pause, and he remarked to another officer, “The men seem very solemn.”
The officer replied, “Of course they are. We are watching the harvest of death.”
* * *
At long last, on June 14, as Pershing and his staff had done two weeks before and as 2 million American troops would over the coming seventeen months of war, the four regiments of the First Expeditionary Division weighed anchor and sailed from Hoboken for France. The soldiers rode on twelve transports divided into three groups of four, each group escorted by a battle cruiser and six destroyers. Private Nelson noted in his diary: “Set sail for France. Big game starts. With three other transports convoyed by Battle cruiser Charleston as flagship and six Destroyers … everyone is seasick but myself.” General Bullard, in the same convoy, noted in his own diary: “About 1 p.m., June 14th, we put to sea with convoy naval vessels—the cruiser Charleston and three torpedo-boat destroyers, with one collier.”
The sailing was smooth with gentle seas. They ran lifeboat drills by day, and after dark, to avoid detection by German subs, portholes were covered and no lights or smoking was permitted on deck. The first few days were unremarkable, though not without discomfort for those unaccustomed to nautical life. “Everyone was ill,” Pvt. Frank Groves later remembered, “Troops got dysentery from eating spoiled meats.” The adjustment curve for most was steep. “Everyone was new to everything,” George Marshall observed, “the men to their organizations, the sailors to the ship, and the officers of the Headquarters to each other.” But these land-based Army soldiers settled in, and many found some pleasant moments in their passage. A series of Pvt. Ruben Nelson’s journal entries reads: “On 19th day we run into school of porpoise. June 20, 1917 I see a big shark. Some fish. From now on there is no one seasick aboard and everything is a pleasure.”
“On the 24th we run into a sub zone and I get job in observation,” Private Nelson wrote, marking their entry into the danger zone known to be patrolled by German U-boats. “We were soon zig-zagging as though we were among hostile submarines,” General Bullard noted. At night, all lights on deck were extinguished and men took shifts on sub watch duty. When the first submarine alarm sounded and shots were fired by the destroyers, the men were all ordered above deck to stand by. “Immediately all the ships changed their course, increased speed, and began to zigzag off in different directions,” Captain Marshall, riding up in the lead transport, noted. Fortunately it proved to be a false alarm, though not without giving a fright to most on board. Bullard admitted in the privacy of his diary that he “slept little until 1 a.m., and then with all my clothes on. I was badly scared; we seemed so helpless.” But the brief, tense crisis revealed to him the “absolute obedience of the troops” on his vessel, evidence of military discipline which he found “most encouraging.”
After twelve days sailing across the mine-littered Atlantic, the shores of France became visible to the men in the lead convoy. As they stood on deck and squinted to see the emerging outline of houses and details on the shoreline, their untapped enthusiasm—to land, to fight, to do something to be part of the action—revealed itself in loud cheers. Private Nelson described the scene in his journal: “June 28th 1917. Big day. We see land early in morning. Mademoiselles to wave at. The Battle Cruiser Charleston steams alongside and we give three cheers for the Navy.” Of seeing the French shoreline, General Bullard noted “the thing that impressed these unaccustomed eyes was the cleanness, neatness, and especially the finish of the villages and houses along the banks.” Captain Marshall shared Bullard’s view, effusing that “the green hill slopes and little cottages along the northern shore gave us all an agreeable impression of what France was to be.”
One by one the transports docked at Saint-Nazaire, were tied to the pier, and the ramps were lowered. The French populace gathered to greet the doughboys. “There was not a cheer,” Captain Marshall noticed, “and the general aspect was that of a funeral.” Drained by almost three years of war and the loss of so many sons and brothers and husbands and fathers, the crowd was mostly women and children and seemed to be “in mourning.” “There was an air of grimness and sadness among the onlookers,” one lieutenant observed; “The garb was universally black, for everyone had lost relatives.” Here on display were the broken people Field Marshal Joffre referenced in Washington two months before when he had urged President Wilson for an immediate American presence in France. These men walking down the gangplanks were Wilson’s answer, America’s first offering: the first 12,000 soldiers of what would by war’s end number over 2 million.
No metaphor is too large to encompass the scene and all that it represented. As the four regiments of soldiers emptied from their dozen transports and gathered on the piers at Saint-Nazaire, France, the infantry of the 1st Division stood as one for the first time. Since that day, the division has remained on continuous active duty without interruption. The institution would distinguish itself over the coming century in action in the Argonne Forest, North Africa, Normandy, the Bulge, the Tet Offensive, Desert Storm, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The doughboys who first landed on French soil that sunny June day in 1917 embodied not only the “Fighting First” and “Big Red One” in its earliest form, they symbolized America’s promising beginning as a world power on the global stage. They were, in General Pershing’s words, “the advance guard of America’s fighting men.”