On July 20, as a blindfolded War Secretary Newton Baker pulled a registration number from a jar in the Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, to begin the national draft, the 12,000 doughboys of the 1st Division’s four infantry regiments crossed the French countryside toward their first phase of training in Gondrecourt. By foot and by rail (in “forty-and-eights,” which could be crammed with either forty men or eight horses) they passed the picturesque landscapes that had once inspired Van Gogh, Renoir, and more recently, Monet. But the drafty barns in thatched-roof villages where the men quartered and the potent stench of stacked animal dung that carried through the hot country air did little to prompt inner artists. “The towns in which the division was billeted were dirty and uninteresting,” one lieutenant recalled. Officers slept in the spare beds of family farm homes, while enlisted men slept up in barn haylofts, described as “often dilapidated, always dark, and invariably cold.”
The doughboys spent their first month in France residing in cramped, inadequate wooden barracks hastily constructed by German POWs. The only extent of training possible was a daily march along the sandy shorelines where the Loire River Estuary met the Atlantic Ocean, good for physical conditioning but short on improving military deportment or learning to fight. Over these first weeks, even logistics presented great difficulty. “The nearest open ground, free from crops,” Captain Marshall noted, “was on the coast some nine miles distant.” Horses and draft mules had not yet been shipped, and the division had only one automobile, a three-passenger French sedan for use by the division commander, General Sibert. This “dearth of transportation,” as Marshall called it, forced the soldiers and officers, including both brigade commanders, to hike eighteen miles a day to get to and from the training area.
The division sent a battalion to march in the specially arranged July 4 parade through Paris, where General Pershing cast his exacting eye on the green troops and fretted over their “untrained awkward appearance.” Ten days later, the division’s top brass attended the Bastille Day parade, where the review of a perfectly drilled French unit threw into stark relief the experience gap between veteran French fighters and the fresh American troops. “It was a fine, fine sight,” General Bullard soon effused to his diary. “Everything was cocky and snappy. They were in full uniform, though just from the front, and horses and men were beautifully kept.” Military neatness and ceremony did not rank high in his dogma, and his candid remarks revealed not only his high regard for the striking appearance of the parading French poilu, but also an inner frustration with the state of his inexperienced troops. As one of two brigade commanders in the division, Bullard had seen little over those first three weeks in France to suggest that progress in molding these young Americans into fighting soldiers would be anything but slow.
As members of the only AEF division to land in France before the draft, each man there was a volunteer. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., serving as a major in the 26th Infantry, later wrote, “The men of the newly arrived division were as courageous as the men” who had already seen fighting on the Western Front. “Their intelligence was as good,” he insisted, “but they did not know the small things which come only with training and experience.” The average 1st Division soldier was twenty-four-years-old, had completed at least some high school, and could read and write. Excluding the old Regular Army veterans who filled leadership positions, most were unmarried and very few had children. Their prewar occupations varied from store cashiers and teachers to farmers and clothing salesmen. Stockbrokers from Manhattan marched, trained, and slept beside railroad workers from Nebraska.
All forty-eight states were represented, as well as the US territories of Hawaii and Alaska. The division offered a panoramic view of America, with an ethnic makeup as diverse as the proprieties of 1917 would allow, including Polish, Russian, and Italian immigrants; natural-born Irish, Mexican, and German Americans; as well as American Indians. “They call us the foreign legion,” one private remarked; “I don’t blame them, either. They expected American soldiers to be American, and we handed them an army made up of forty different nationalities.” And while the official 1st Division History published in 1922 boasted, “The Division was truly representative of America,” conspicuously absent were any black soldiers. In a sad testament of the times, while over 350,000 African Americans would serve in Army uniform during the war, most would be relegated to Services of Supply duty, and all would serve in segregated units. Only a few black regiments would ever see combat, most under French command. One in particular, the 369th Infantry (“Harlem Hellfighters”), would serve with such distinction that France would award 171 of its soldiers the Croix de Guerre, an honor greater than they would ever live to see from their own nation.
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The first stage of formal training began in late July at the well-worn drill grounds on the northern French plains near Gondrecourt, situated so near the front that the “troops lived daily and hourly with the sounds of the guns of St. Mihiel in their ears.” “There was a constant rumbling of guns from the distant front,” one lieutenant remembered of the persistent reminder of an un-waiting war that added urgency to the already abbreviated training schedule. “In the midst of war, we had to prepare for war,” General Bullard wrote of these rushed conditions, a challenge that would be met by what he called the “hardest, most uncompromising and intensive system of drill that the American Army has ever known.”
Through the summer months, with nearly every hour of every day filled with training, the soldiers got little rest. “There was nothing but drill every day and most of the nights,” Pvt. Ruben Nelson noted in his diary. Major Roosevelt, commanding a battalion of the 26th Infantry, described the typical day: “First call about 6 o’clock, an hour for breakfast and policing. After that, the troops marched out to some drill ground, where they maneuvered all day, taking their lunch there and returning late in the afternoon. Formal retreat was then held, then supper, and by 10 o’clock taps sounded.”
The first and primary focus was weapons training. “[T]here was no one with the command who had ever shot an automatic-rifle, thrown a hand grenade, shot a rifle grenade, used a trench mortar or a 37-millimeter gun,” Major Roosevelt lamented. “The closest any of us came to any previous knowledge was from occasional pictures we had seen in the illustrated reviews.” The rifle adopted by the US Army for use by its soldiers was the magazine-fed, bolt-action Springfield Model 1903—a reliable and accurate firearm even if there weren’t enough to supply the expanding AEF (shortages would be filled by British Enfield Model 1917 rifles, rechambered to take .30 caliber Springfield ammunition). But the Springfield rifle and the Colt .45 pistol carried by officers—the latter chosen for its “knock-down” power proven in the Philippines—were the only weapons the Americans brought with them. All else, to include automatic rifles, machine guns, grenades, and artillery, would be supplied by the French Army.
These first American troops trained under the 47th French Division of Chasseurs Alpins, nicknamed the “Blue Devils” for their reputation of brave, “devil-may-care” fighting in the most active sectors along the Western Front. “They had a magnificent fighting record,” Captain Marshall recognized, adding that they “made a wonderful impression on our men.” The doughboys and these veteran “stocky, tough old timers” soon fostered what the Division History describes as a “friendly rivalry,” and when the Americans beat the French in shooting contests, the “warmhearted Frenchmen were loud in their applause.”
To improve accuracy, 1st Division soldiers practiced during downtime and off days on paper targets set up at distances of one hundred, two hundred, and three hundred yards on the rifle ranges. Top scores at qualification were awarded marksmanship badges; at practice, with rum and free cigarettes. When unable to secure shooting-range time, some enterprising officers improvised. Twenty-eight-year-old Lt. Clarence Huebner set up empty tin ration cans on strings at fifty and hundred-yard distances to give his men extra practice.
Over the previous three years of constant bloodletting between two entrenched adversaries in subterranean cover without exposed flanks, the rifle had been sidelined by more powerful, destructive, long-range weaponry that best fit into the puzzle of the Western Front’s war by attrition. Artillery had dominated the fighting, but for front-line infantry, both the Allies and Germans were increasingly relying on grenades and automatic weapons.
In the large swath of open ground set aside for AEF training and dubbed “Washington Center,” doughboys dug a maze of practice trenches into the hardpan under the guidance of French instructors. Complete with command dugouts, sleep holes, and front lines with second-parallels connected by perpendicular communication trenches, the replicated Western Front landscape provided an ideal setting for doughboys to gain familiarization with the tools of trench warfare.
In Washington Center’s network of practice trenches, 1st Division soldiers learned how to properly throw grenades—not horizontally like baseballs, but on a high, lobbing trajectory to increase the chances of dropping into an enemy trench. Soldiers found the fuse timers to be unnervingly inconsistent. “Yeah, they tell you it is timed for 5 seconds,” Pvt. Maurice Becker of the 16th Infantry complained in a letter home, “and then one goes off in three seconds, and the next goes off in seven, so Fritz can dump it back on you.” Rifle grenades proved tougher to master and even more unpredictable. One young lieutenant later described them as “not too good—first military funeral I attended was that of instructor killed by one prematurely exploding.”
Doughboys were issued the French Chauchat automatic rifle (pronounced show-shat), capable of firing over two hundred rounds per minute. Despite its heft at nineteen pounds, and even though, as one lieutenant complained, the thirty-round banana-clip ammo magazine “jammed frequently” from rocks and dirt particles, the Chauchat could be effectively operated on close-range targets by a single soldier from a fixed position or while running forward in a tactic known as “walking fire.”
Automatic rifles and grenades were both products of the shifting realities of trench warfare, but no single infantry weapon had altered tactical decisions or shifted strategic realities for the armies on both sides of no-man’s-land as much as the machine gun. Its defensive capabilities rendered frontal infantry assaults on fixed positions futile and deadly, as the British had learned at the killing end of German Maxims on the Somme. Offensively, its long effective range and high rate of fire rendered it an efficient tool to support an attack with indirect barrages on enemy positions over the heads of advancing infantry.
The Americans were equipped with the French air-cooled Hotchkiss, a powerful and reliable machine gun even if, at over one hundred pounds, it was the heaviest then in use. It required an eight-man team: a loader to carry the fifty-pound tripod mount, five ammunition carriers to haul the wooden ammo boxes, a crew leader (corporal or sergeant) to carry the spare barrels and parts, and a gunner to lug the gun itself. But for all its cumbersome immobility, when operated by a well-trained crew it could send 450 rounds per minute on enemies up to two miles away. And with a mount that absorbed recoil and allowed for precise, repeated firing when properly “nested,” it could be used by troops in night fire on enemy targets fixed during daylight registration. Doughboys were instructed both how to effectively use the Hotchkiss to defend against infantry attack and to support an offensive, and as the Division History records, “French instructors were greatly surprised at the speed with which the Americans learned to operate and employ the gun.”
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But it was here where the direction of American training began to run afoul of the preferences of the AEF high command, specifically General Pershing, who believed the bloody rigor mortis of the Western Front could be undone only through a tactical shift to “open warfare.” As he rationalized, the current murderous attrition of back-and-forth jabs could never achieve a decisive victory, which “must be won by driving the enemy out into the open and engaging in a war of movement.” There was little value in familiarization with the existing methods of trench warfare, Pershing believed, because a “new army brought up entirely on such principles” would not only be “seriously handicapped without the protection of the trenches” but would lack “the aggressiveness to break through the enemy’s lines and the knowledge of how to carry on thereafter.”
The US Army’s field regulations specified that “[t]he infantry is the principal and most important combat arm,” and its tools were what Pershing called “the essential weapons of the infantry,” the rifle and bayonet, not automatic weapons or artillery. Machine guns were deemed “emergency weapons” only, and the artillery was only a “supporting” arm—best when used for “the destruction of material objects, as buildings, bridges, etc.” These guidelines had been updated and revised that year, but they were rooted in the fighting of the Civil War and Indian Campaigns and ignored the realities of the past two and a half years of Western Front combat. Playing off this sheet music of nineteenth-century tactics, AEF instructors were teaching their trainees that “the ultimate act” of battle was “the bayonet charge,” a weapon one enlightened officer regarded “as obsolete as the crossbow.”
Among General Pershing and his staff, the primacy of open warfare training—rifles and bayonets, not machine guns or grenades—was quickly enshrined as unassailable dogma, creating fault lines that would soon run deeply through the divergent schools of thought in the Allied coalition. The head of the French Army, Gen. Henri Philippe Pétain, did his best to impart to the Americans “the benefit of our dearly bought experience” in trench warfare, and he instructed his own soldiers to use “constant patience and extreme tact” to “counteract the idea that we are inexperienced in open warfare.”
General Bullard, who received Pershing’s confidence with a new posting establishing training schools throughout France for newly arriving AEF officers, spied the chasms lurking between American and Franco-British doctrines, but he saw no reason to embrace one tactical preference at the expense of the other. His generalship was informed by fighting experience in the Philippines, where the “utter discouragement and spiritlessness” of his men after months in trenches left him determined to forever avoid “purely defensive ideas of warfare.” But while Bullard valued the offensive spirit fostered by the classic infantry training so urged by Pershing, his tours of the active British and French fronts confirmed the grim reality that flesh could not be thrown successfully against steel: the infantry could not achieve the first goal of open warfare, the breakthrough of well-fortified enemy lines, without the full support of heavy firepower—automatic weapons, grenades, and artillery.
This placed the man heading Pershing’s AEF officer-training program squarely on both sides of the tactical question. Bullard appreciated the fighting morale and confidence cultivated by open warfare training, but he entertained the heretical notion that the weaponry provided by the French Army and the practical knowledge gained by the chipper tutoring from French veterans would be essential when time to give battle. With measured judgment that would reveal itself to great effect in the higher role he would soon fill, Bullard tacitly determined that soldierly instruction include thorough schooling in both tracks of methodology, a precarious balance he was forced to strike “very tactfully.”
This underlying tension would define the AEF, and its resolution would determine success or failure when America’s best and brightest entered the fight. A balanced tactical doctrine was forming fragile, exploratory roots in these first few thousand doughboys. With millions of young troops following on their heels, the fighting methods practiced and eventually employed in the first clash of arms would decide the role played by the emergent US military in the Allied march toward an elusive end to this “war to end all wars.”
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With rival hands tugging at the wheel of the AEF’s ship, the course of tactical training had not yet crystallized. “Not only did no one know how to teach—no one knew what to teach,” an officer later bemoaned of the time. But with new AEF divisions arriving in France (the 42nd and 26th Divisions had each landed by late September), training could not wait, however disjointed the leadership’s visions. As one officer intuited, employing a simple metaphor: “Both tactics and equipment were tried on the dog with the First Division the only animal.”
For the time being, the urgency of the un-waiting war demanded that the AEF’s “only animal” gain experience in real trenches at the real front. Despite their completion of an exhaustive summer of training—“acclimatization and instruction in small units,” the first of three stages planned for AEF units—war remained an abstraction for the soldiers of the 1st Division. The next stage of prescribed schooling, to “serve with French battalions in trenches in contact with the enemy,” would send the doughboys up to a small portion of the 468-mile-long strip of actual war. Men packed up their gear from their cottages and barn lofts, were issued steel helmets to replace their soft campaign caps, and after a daylong truck convoy to the front lines at Sommerviller, the second stage of training began.
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“The enthusiasm of the infantrymen reached its highest point,” Captain Marshall noted of this passage, as doughboys rode trucks through “the final stage of their long journey from America to the front.” Located south of the bloody Verdun front in the “rolling and attractive country” of the Lorraine region of eastern France, the Sommerviller sector was considered a “relatively quiet” front. Its opposed armies, content to launch offensives elsewhere, had settled into years of static coexistence—barking and sniping across lines clawed out by the fighting of late 1914. “Serious operations in this section of France,” Marshall observed, “were not contemplated by either side.” But for all this “quiet,” gassing and shelling were daily, and any movement in daylight could draw fire.
As the first battalions entered the Sommerviller trenches for inaugural ten-day tours of front-line duty in late October, their electric sense of high adventure was palpable. One of the battalion commanders, Maj. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., admitted that on their way into the front lines, he and his men “were all very green and very earnest.” But this romantic notion of the Western Front was unmatched by the dirty, monotonous reality of the sector. “The first thrill of service in the trenches soon passed,” Marshall noted, “with a realization of the mud and other discomforts and the dearth of excitement.” Even Roosevelt, whose eagerness for combat duty was renowned and whose enthusiasm, according to Marshall, “knew no bounds,” later depicted the frustrating minutiae of the experience like a repressed fighter: “During the ten days we spent in the sector,” he fretted, the thousand-plus men of his battalion were reduced to “shoveling mud the color and consistency of melted chocolate ice cream from cave-ins which constantly occurred in the trench system.”
Eager doughboys anticipated—and many hoped for—a taste of front-line excitement matching the colorful war stories painted by their British and French instructors over the summer months: artillery clashes and trench raids and patrols through no-man’s-land. But the tedium and dreariness of the first few days were barely broken by any action. “The artillery on both sides contented itself with a few ranging shots each day,” Marshall noted, “and these were so directed as to avoid causing casualties.” Furthermore, the Americans were prohibited from venturing beyond their own barbed wire, trapping them day and night in the muddy trenches, where an impatient thirst for a break in the monotony drove many uninitiated young soldiers to conjure up Germans where they did not exist.
“It is quite true,” Lt. Richard Newhall later wrote of this time, “that when you have been peering out into the dark for a while the posts in the entanglement begin to put on German helmets and to creep towards you.” Like many other recent graduates of the first round of ninety-day officer-training schools, twenty-nine-year-old Newhall was a brand-new lieutenant, a “90-day-wonder” or “shavetail.” Less than a month in France, he was thrust into the responsibility of learning to lead the fifty men of his newly assigned platoon. “My own experience in the trenches was that my chief job was to restrain the men from senseless firing,” he soon wrote his mother. Hearing automatic-rifle fire from his men’s positions in the dark of night, he would discover they had fired on “a noise in the wire.” “Do you think you can hit a noise in the dark?” he would inquire. “No, sir.” Newhall would then send up a flare revealing no Germans in the wire or anywhere in no-man’s-land, and “so the men calm down and things remain quiet.”
Day after sleepless, muddy day slowly passed in this unnerving “quiet” until finally broken by the arrival of the American artillery. The 9,000 men of the three field artillery regiments that formed the 1st US Field Artillery Brigade had arrived in France in early August after shipping out from their home stations in Texas and Arizona. For an Army branch that spent half a century with a primary mission of coastal defense, and for gunners accustomed to 1885 model field cannon, the two months of schooling at the French artillery training grounds at Valdahon presented new guns and a steep learning curve. Equipped with the modern 155mm howitzer and the celebrated French 75mm—a gun with a hydropneumatic recoil that allowed rapid fire of over twenty shots per minute on the same target without reaiming and widely regarded as the greatest light artillery piece on either side of the Western Front—the American artillery took daily target practice, learned the effects of wind and temperatures on shell trajectories, and as the unit war diary recorded, made “rapid progress” before joining the division infantry at the front.
With orders to “generally reinforce the French Artillery behind trenches occupied by our Infantry,” the first battalions of each of the three regiments of the 1st Field Artillery Brigade marched along dusty country roads behind their new guns, drawn by teams of sickly looking emaciated horses whose strongest days were long-before spent in years of service at the French front. On arrival at battery positions in the Sommerviller sector, the doughboy gunners received a warm welcome. “The enthusiasm of the French was tremendous when they saw the American artillerymen bringing up their guns. The poilus shook every man by the hand,” the unit history noted.
After the first few days of desultory small-arms fire, shot aimlessly from the front line trenches by skittish doughboys at noises in the dark, Captain Marshall noticed that “[t]he enthusiastic activity of the newly-arrived American artillery tended to break the calm and stirred the enemy to retaliatory measures.” The shot that cracked “the calm” was fired by twenty-three-year-old Sgt. Alex Arch of South Bend, Indiana, who pulled the lanyard of his 75 just after six a.m., October 23, and sent a sixteen-pound, three-inch-diameter shell—the first American shot of the World War—over the heads of the infantry, across no-man’s-land into the enemy lines. More shells followed, “going over with a long, slow swishy sort of sound,” one lieutenant described in a letter home.
German “retaliatory measures” began quickly, and a series of historic but unfortunate firsts followed. The same day America’s first shot was fired, Field Hospital No. 13 reported the division’s first injuries from enemy artillery. Two days later, the first officer, Lt. De Vere Harden of Burlington, Vermont, was injured when a German shell fragment struck his knee (Major Roosevelt, nearby when the blast occurred, ran to congratulate Harden “on having the honor to be the first American officer hit while serving with American troops”). Within a week, doughboys captured their first German after he ventured too close to the 18th Infantry Regiment’s trenches on a night patrol. And then, after the first ten-day tour had drowsed to an end without loss of life, came the tragic but inevitable: America’s first combat deaths.
The blow struck just after the second battalions of each regiment relieved the first, taking positions in the front lines during the dark, wet early morning hours of November 3. As with their comrades ten days earlier, the men of Company F, 16th Infantry Regiment—part of the very battalion that had marched in the Paris July 4 parade four months earlier—settled into muddy lines on the rim of a bald hill, “tense with the novelty and the sense of danger.” At three a.m. came a “blinding flash and a crash and a roar” of a German box barrage, trapping over two dozen doughboys in the front-line trench and cutting them off from support. Most soldiers—heeding the advice of their French and British instructors—opened their mouths wide while the shells exploded, so their eardrums would not burst, yet many were deafened and a few were knocked unconscious. “Nothing but the boom of big guns and explosion of big shells could be heard,” Pvt. Ruben Nelson, lying in a nearby trench, soon told his diary. From outside the barrage, he and the men of his platoon felt powerless to help. “The only thing we could do,” Nelson noted, was “to flank the boxed sector with machine-gun fire.”
Gray-clad, Mauser-wielding Germans in coal-scuttle helmets materialized in the smoke shrouding no-man’s-land. Private Nelson noticed “about 300 Germans making our lines. We knew what was coming,” he wrote of the moment: “Three hundred against thirty.” Grenades exploded and rifle fire crackled and yells in German and English punctuated the clamor of the barrage. Although doughboy rifles and machine guns “burnt themselves up” to repel the raid, German attackers proved too many and swarmed the American trenches. The spur of first combat erupted in a bloody clash of rifles, pistols, and bayonets. Rookie defenders fought back in fits of unregulated adrenaline, their actions finding order only in reloading rifle clips and unjamming automatic-rifle magazines—involuntary flashes of muscle memory acquired in their summer of training. At the sound of a high-pitched whistle, the Germans leaped back out of the trench, disappeared as one into the darkness beyond the wire, and the confusion and noise ended as abruptly as it had begun.
The dead calm of the inky-dark night returned, but adrenaline was still flowing. “Our men were some nervous when it was over,” Private Nelson confided to his diary, adding, “I’m wondering, What next??” Five Americans lay wounded, waiting for stretcher bearers to evacuate them for treatment. Eleven were missing—the first Americans captured by the Germans as prisoners of war. And three, Cpl. James Gresham, Pvt. Merle Hay, and Pvt. Thomas Enright, lay dead in the muddy trench bottom. Two had been shot, and one had his throat sliced open so deep his head was nearly severed. Captain Marshall, who happened to be with the French Army sector commander, Gen. Paul Bordeaux, when he heard the melee, made his way through tangles of collapsed trenches to the front lines and watched with men solemnly lining both sides of the approach trench, heads bowed and helmets removed, as the blanket-covered bodies were carried by stretcher bearers to the rear.
The next day, under a warm midafternoon sun, the first three Americans to fall in combat in the World War were buried with full military honors in a pasture edging the nearby village of Bathelémont. Companies of American and French troops stood in loose formation surrounding the fresh graves. A French chaplain stood in his trench coat and Adrian helmet and spoke a prayer from a small Bible. In his immaculate sky-blue uniform and visored coffee-can cap, General Bordeaux stepped forward and spoke in English through a thick French accent, adding inspiration to the solemnity.
“Men! 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,” Bordeaux began. Their sacrifice confirmed “the will of the people and Army of the United States to fight with us to a finish,” and he asked that “the mortal remains of these young men be left here, be left to us forever.” Envisioning an eternal monument to their memory, he crowned their eulogy with the gratitude of unborn generations:
We will inscribe on their tombs: ‘Here lie the first soldiers of the famous Republic of the United States 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 the 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 hastily assembled seven-man rifle squad from the 16th Infantry Regiment stood in rumpled khaki tunics and boots splattered with the dried mud of the trenches. At the sergeant’s quick command, they chambered rounds with slams of their bolts, aimed their Springfields toward the cloudy sky above the fresh graves, and fired a volley. Then a second. And finally a third. As the crackle of shots faded across the countryside, a bugler played “Taps.” It was the first performance in eulogy on French soil of the three-note melody that would stir emotions for fallen comrades thousands of times through the present World War and the one to follow.
In 1921, at their families’ requests, the remains of all three soldiers were disinterred and shipped back across the Atlantic for reburial in hometown cemeteries in Iowa, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. A granite memorial, rebuilt after its 1940 destruction by occupying German forces, still marks where they were first laid to rest. Casting permanence to General Bordeaux’s stirring but fleeting words from that brisk afternoon now a century gone, the gold-leaf inscription reads: “Ici en terre Lorraine, reposent les trois premiers soldats américains tues a l’ennemi le 3 novembre 1917” (Here on Lorraine soil rest the first three American soldiers killed by the enemy on November 3, 1917).
For the soldiers still up in the trenches, and for the battalions that followed through mid-November, news of the first casualties kept them on edge day and night, and the second and third ten-day tours passed slowly. “Our losses were slight during the remaining days which seemed like years,” Private Nelson told his diary. “We were from the night of Nov. 2 always looking for a raid and it would be hard for a surprise attack to be pulled off.” There were no more raids, but the Americans and Germans sent patrols forward each night, their paths crossing occasionally in no-man’s-land in frantic, backpedaling clashes of pistol fire. And American casualties continued. Eleven more were killed and three dozen wounded—almost all at the hands of German shells, more of the “retaliatory measures” prompted by the division artillery’s assertiveness—before finally leaving the sector.
“Must say [we] were glad to get out,” Private Nelson scratched in his diary after he and his platoon, a “bunch of worn out and hungry Americans,” crawled through a muddy communication trench away from the front lines, instilled with new confidence. “At the end of the ten days we were relieved,” Major Roosevelt later wrote of his battalion, who “hiked back veteran troops, as we thought, to the training area.” Lieutenant Newhall noticed the same fresh poise in the men of his platoon as they returned to Gondrecourt: “The men thought that now they were veterans. They had been to the front and returned safely. They knew shell fire or thought they did.” With more American units landing in France every week to add to the ever-expanding AEF, 1st Division troops were proud to finally belong to a “veteran” outfit “actually at war at last.” From Newhall’s perspective as a platoon leader, it seemed that the proving grounds of the Sommerviller trenches had elevated both cohesion and morale: “From that time forward the esprit de corps was unmistakable.”
“The Division Commander wishes to congratulate the soldiers of the Division upon their excellent conduct and cheerful demeanor during the past month at the front,” read Major General Sibert’s General Order to his troops as they returned from the Sommerviller trenches in late November. Entering the final stage of instruction, “training of the combined division in the tactics of open warfare,” Sibert announced his confidence in them, his sureness to “depend on every individual soldier to meet the situation with the same fortitude and resolution” displayed in the first two stages.
But in Sibert as a commander, General Pershing did not share the same confidence. As other divisions arrived through the fall and winter months, the men of the 1st Division became known as “Pershing’s Darlings.” The Big Chief believed it “highly essential” that the first battles fought by American troops be successful to build Allied faith in the AEF, and it was widely accepted that the troops of his favored 1st Division would be the first to fight. But over the course of seventeen inspections stops at the division since June, Pershing had found Sibert to be absent or sick for most of them. And in the qualities Pershing held highest—drill, discipline, bearing—his “darlings” were still lacking, responsibility for which he laid at the commander’s feet. “He is without much training since cadet days,” Pershing’s chief of staff noted of Sibert in his diary, “and has let his division run down.”
In mid-December, after sending a message to all his division commanders imploring them to avoid the “note of deep pessimism” that was rumored to have invaded the morale of certain “general officers,” Pershing replaced Sibert—the unspoken target of his message—with the man who had not only had a proven record leading citizen soldiers in battle but had also demonstrated effective leadership in quickly establishing a complex network of AEF officer-training schools throughout France—Maj. Gen. Robert Bullard.
If Ralph Waldo Emerson was correct in asserting that an “institution is the lengthened shadow of one man,” the man casting the 1st Division’s shadow for the remainder of the war would be Robert Bullard. While still en route in a sedan provided by AEF Headquarters, he impressed the enlisted driver by helping change a flat tire in the wet, frigid December air. Immediately upon arrival at Division Headquarters, Bullard gathered his brigade and regimental commanders and staff and announced: “If we cannot do the job, we will be replaced.” His tone left no doubt that he would not be the first to go.
The division’s lot in the war would henceforth be directly cast by Bullard’s command decisions, each one thoughtfully pragmatic and rooted in his mostly self-cultivated abilities. He was no academic—he had graduated twenty-seventh in a class of thirty-nine from West Point. And although he could speak fluent French, had taught Latin and trigonometry for money before college, and had published articles in the Journal of Military Service, Atlantic Monthly, and Field & Stream, he was no intellectual. But he was a studied calculator of the motives that govern men, and readings of Colmar von der Goltz’s Conduct of War and biographies of Confederate generals filled his spare hours and contemplative mind. His greatest teacher was experience, and his first decision as division commander stemmed from his most lasting lesson of combat, learned nearly twenty years before in the throes of fighting in the Philippines.
It was back in 1899, when a regiment of volunteer infantrymen led by then Colonel-of-Volunteers Robert Bullard entered battle with insurgents in the Philippine jungle. An artillery battery led by a thirty-two-year-old lieutenant named Charles Summerall effectively discharged the enemy from their positions, opening a path for Bullard’s riflemen. “Under rattling fire from the enemy,” Bullard noticed, the lieutenant “stood boldly forth in the open, directing the fire.” So impressed was Bullard by this young artillery officer that twice more in the Philippines he would specifically request the support of his battery, and in subsequent action would find Summerall’s service as good as he “saw rendered by any officer or man.” Bullard, a career infantryman, took lasting note of such effective gun support, and seventeen years later, his first move as 1st Division commander was to replace the existing leader of his 1st Field Artillery Brigade with Brigadier General Summerall.
The son of a Confederate soldier and grandson of a Florida slave owner, Charles Pelot Summerall was, like Bullard, a product of the Deep South. As a boy he picked cotton and helped his father sell produce, and as a young man he taught school to support his parents and two older siblings. At nineteen, he beat out eleven others in a competitive examination sponsored by his local congressman, earning a ticket to West Point, where he graduated in the top third of the class of 1892 and, like General Pershing six years before, as First Captain. As a young lieutenant, Summerall sought out front-line service, and reports of his exploits under fire in the Philippines earned him an invitation to return to West Point as a senior instructor of artillery tactics. There his fire demonstrations impressed such visitors as Lord Kitchener of England and Princeton president Woodrow Wilson, and his students included cadet (and future general) George S. Patton.
Fiery and diminutive, Summerall stood five feet eight inches tall, and his short legs, long torso, and barrel-shaped waistline made him seem shorter still. But his unimposing frame had already cast a long shadow in a growing Army. He positioned himself perpetually on the tactical cutting edge, helping to spearhead the Army’s move from an era of dated muzzle-loading cannon to modern, rapid-fire, breech-loading field guns. By America’s entry into the World War, his career had spanned what he called a period of “marked changes,” and in the early days of mobilization to France, his expertise earned him a spot as colonel on the Baker Commission’s panel of experts, where he asked inconvenient questions and assertively sought to define a pivotal role for artillery in the AEF.
But General Pershing and his staff at AEF General Headquarters were still holding an inflexible adherence to the romantic notion of a rifleman’s war, which artillery could only profane. In his role on the panel and with little deference or tact, Summerall professed “the infantry would pay in losses for lack of artillery.” He pushed for a 75mm gun for every fifteen yards of American front, and a 155mm for every hundred yards, more than twice the number AEF planners were advocating. According to his later recollection of events, he was “viciously attacked” for even suggesting so much artillery, and Pershing—in Summerall’s estimation, “furious”—privately admonished Summerall to “get together” with his staff’s ideals. Dangling his point precariously near the line of insubordination, the undaunted Summerall responded, “Your staff was wrong,” adding that he intended to return to Washington “to fight for what I know is best for our artillery.”
Back in DC, Summerall tirelessly advanced the artillery cause, was appointed by the War Department to prepare the AEF field artillery instruction program, and was promoted to brigadier general and shipped back to France by September. Whether General Bullard knew of the early summer clash with Pershing is unknown, but it likely would not have mattered. Since his fighting experience with young Summerall’s artillery in the Philippines, Bullard held a deep appreciation for combined arms even if, in practice, he exercised more subtlety than Summerall. As head of AEF officer schools, Bullard had exhibited a deft touch in harmonizing the opposing dogmas of Pershing’s staff with those of the British and French. Now as division commander, he continued to contemplate large decisions through the lens of a tactical pragmatist, and his renewed collaboration with Summerall was set to bridge a wide gulf between his infantry and artillery—two arms at historic odds.
From the first moments of General Summerall’s arrival at Division Headquarters on the bitterly cold afternoon of December 22, Bullard could tell the “influence of a master artilleryman and commander was felt.” Now fifty years old, gray had started frosting Summerall’s dark brown hair, but his warm eyes and handsome features remained youthful and disarming. He had the rare ability to issue “the severest reprimand in the quietest words,” was unsparing in praise and recognition for the deeds of men under his command, and in them he quickly inspired what Bullard described as “almost fanatical support.” It was “the hand of destiny,” in Summerall’s own estimation, that he had been chosen, and it would prove Bullard a master talent scout in a single move.
* * *
By the third week of December, the mercury dipped below zero, and “sunny France” was invaded by ice and snow flurries. “We have been enjoying a large quantity of snow recently,” Lt. Sam Ervin wrote his “mama” back in Morganton, North Carolina, from the farmhouse where he billeted with two other officers. “In fact,” he added, “the ground has been entirely covered for almost a week and the temperature has been quite low for some time.” The doughboys had endured difficult conditions during their time in France—rain, mud, fear, homesickness—but never had they been tried so severely by the weather. George Marshall later remembered: “When we were not cursed with mud, we were frozen with the cold.” Supply issues caused a shortage of gloves and winter coats, and the men, still sleeping in drafty barns under thin blankets, woke up each morning with feet so swollen they found difficulty putting their boots on. One soldier noted that these tough conditions “inured the men to withstand the worst exposure of campaign without weakening,” and another quipped, “[T]he father of his country and Valley Forge had nothing on us.”
The extreme cold hampered the final stage of training, made all the more important by the addition of new draftees. The first crop had recently arrived, anxious boys and middle-aged men of little discipline and uneven potential. “There were many Poles and Russians and Jugo-Slavs of various sorts,” one officer noted, adding that “several could speak no English whatever.” Eyeing these new conscripts, Major Roosevelt spotted a manifest need for crash training: “A large percentage had never shot any firearms, and still a larger percentage had never shot the service rifle.” The rookie doughboys were spread among the veteran troops, and along with more fresh lieutenants from the second round of officer-training schools, they swelled each company to the AEF target complement of 250 men. And the division as a whole—now with the artillery brigade and newly arrived engineer regiment—reached Pershing’s planned strength of 28,000 soldiers. It was a number twice as large as French, British, or German divisions, an immensity chosen for “staying power” on the battlefield.
These final days leading to Christmas and the New Year were spent in large-unit training, where, as Lt. Richard Newhall described, commanders and staff got swift practice “in handling men by the thousands, and accustom the men to act as parts of a large force.” Leading one of the nearly 150 sixty-man platoons conducting the massive division maneuvers, Newhall wrote home, describing the “very bad, unusually cold and exceedingly wet” weather as “a test of endurance,” a trial he rated as “harder than any front-line experiences before the big advance.” In his own letter home, Newhall’s bunkmate and fellow platoon leader, Lt. George Haydock, wrote of three straight days he and his men spent in “long hikes on slippery roads,” getting only an egg and a piece of ham for supper, then an entire night manning simulated outposts on frozen ground in the biting cold. “It was the first time I had to handle the men alone,” the twenty-three-year-old wrote, excitedly adding that he “learned a great deal.” Even Haydock, a Massachusetts native and Harvard alum who knew the bone-deep chill of New England winters, was struck by the night’s harsh cold: “We were on a high ridge with the coldest wind I have ever known blowing about thirty miles an hour straight on us.”
This was as General Bullard wished. He embraced such arduous conditions, believing they hardened his soldiers, mentally preparing them to meet even the worst that could be thrown at them when the time came to enter combat. And events elsewhere were conspiring not only to move that time nearer but also to make Allied reliance on his division’s eventual success even greater.
* * *
That fall, the French front had remained stagnant and British offensives in Flanders had resulted in a quarter million Allied casualties. The small bit of bright news—gains by the British at Cambrai, a first with the effective support of tanks—turned dark again by late November as German counterattacks recaptured the ground gained. But the darkest news came from the Eastern Front. A large part of the Italian Army, holding the Allied line at Caporetto, had recently crumbled under a joint German/Austro-Hungarian offensive, resulting in the capture of more than 300,000 troops and 3,000 artillery pieces. And Russia, now under Bolshevik rule following the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II and the recent takeover of the Kerensky provisional government, was negotiating a separate peace with the Central Powers. Though the treaty terms would not be finalized until March, the cease-fire withdrew the massive Russian Army from the war, effectively ending the fighting on the Eastern Front and releasing more than sixty German divisions to pack up, board trains, and join the fighting in the west.
“Seemingly in an instant the cause of the Allies had been dealt a master blow,” General Pershing would later lament. Since the first shots of the war had been fired three Augusts before, the prospects of victory had never seemed bleaker. Based on Allied Intelligence, Pershing had recently estimated German strength in the west at “a present total of 150 divisions”—a force the 170-odd Allied divisions had been unable to defeat and had barely been able to hold off defensively. Suddenly, on top of the loss of five British and six French divisions “rushed to Italy to save the situation” at Caporetto, five dozen German divisions were rushing west to tip the scales of the precarious balance at the front, endeavoring to knock the Allies out of the war before the slowly waking American giant arrived in force.
With only four AEF divisions in France, General Bullard understood that his 1st Division, the only one fully trained and deemed “fit for open warfare,” would be the first American unit to face the German Army in pitched battle. His thoughts turned to his men—store clerks and farmers-turned-infantrymen, bending their minds sharply to fit into military routine, a life as foreign to them as the land they now populated, each soldier learning to lean ever more on those sharing his misery beside him, every tough step of every painful march in frozen boots through snow and ice fusing them together as teams of dozen-man squads within sixty-man platoons, led by college-students-turned-lieutenants still learning the difficult art of leading men in the dark of war.
Of all that the United States would throw at the German Empire, these men would be the first. Just a month previous, Bullard had confided to his diary a fear that “I think we came too late,” and more recently he added concern over the slowness of training: “It is a very remote preparing.” But with his soldiers on the brink, satisfied that preparations were finally “going at a high rate of speed,” he gave no more voice to pessimism. “This was the stimulus,” Bullard later revealed, and the rigorous drill schedule that carried his 28,000 doughboys into the New Year prompted no further nervous diary entries. From his perch as field commander on the fighting edge of America’s forces, Bullard recognized that “the eyes of all the Allies and of all the world would be especially on” the doughboys of his 1st Division, and “if they failed the world would say that America would fail.”
The year 1918 approached, and time marched ever onward. An even larger German Army loomed, threatening. Robert Bullard did not know where or when, but he knew it was his men who would bring a decidedly American production into the theater of war. Until that time and place was decided, he was resolute: “They must not fail.”