The Illusion of Victory (19 page)

This dose of gloom became acute when Pershing visited General Henri-Philippe Pétain, the acting commander of the French army, at his headquarters outside Paris. Pétain gave him the details of General Nivelle’s failed offensive in April. Nivelle had claimed to have a formula for smashing through the German army in forty-eight hours. Instead, the Germans, forewarned of his attack, had inflicted 120,000 casualties on the massed French infantry before they even reached the main defense line. Whereupon the French army not only stopped fighting—it mutinied. One division attempted to march on Paris to overthrow the government.“Down with the war!” they shouted. The rebellion spread swiftly through sixteen army corps until there were only two divisions that showed any readiness to fight.

Pétain had raced up and down the battle line, arresting some of the more outspoken mutineers, placating others by promising better food, more leaves and an absolute end to mass attacks.“We must wait for the Americans,” he said. If Wilson had not declared war on April 2, a German victory would have been inevitable. Instead, the mirage of a vast American army on its way enabled Pétain to stabilize the situation—though he admitted to Pershing that many divisions were still mutinous and the whole army could be described as being in a state of “collective indiscipline.”
⁷³

There were signs that defeatism had also penetrated the French government. Pétain urged Pershing to cable Wilson, asking him to say something to the politicians that would “strengthen their resolution.” the general was not imagining things. A thirty-five-year-old Socialist named Pierre Laval had recently told the French Chamber of Deputies:“We are not here to lie to ourselves. There is in France a weariness of war and a pressure for peace.” the deputies had exploded into prolonged applause.
⁷⁴

Pétain relapsed into a morose silence, which continued at a lunch for Pershing and his staff. As the Americans struggled to make small talk with Pétain’s staff in spite of the language barrier, the French general burst out, “I hope it is not too late!” By this time, Pershing had no illusions about what he and Woodrow Wilson were confronting on the Western Front: defeat.
⁷⁵

Oblivious to the looming disaster in France, George Creel’s Committee on Public Information was hard at work creating the war will in America. By July he had assembled a small army of writers, editors, artists, actors and speakers who were churning out patriotic pamphlets, books, films and speeches for the American public. An upper echelon of former muckrakers, all ardent progressives like Creel, were given prominent roles. The CPI’s motto was “faith in democracy . . . faith in fact.” the Four Minute Men were urged to rely on facts and avoid “hymn[s] of hate.”

Ethnic groups were a major target. Creel put an idealistic social worker, Josephine Roche, in charge of a department that began creating “loyalty leagues” in ethnic communities. Within a year, she was working with no less than twenty-nine nationalities. Pamphlets were printed in the various languages, including German, to explain how the United States got into the war. On July 4, 1918, Irish-America’s favorite tenor, John McCormack, sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” while representatives of these groups stood in reverent silence outside Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon. This event is a good example of why Creel’s penetration of ethnic opinion on the war remained at the skin-deep level.
¹

The mailed fist was by no means eliminated from the government’s propaganda policy. A committee of university professors was organized to read ethnic newspapers looking for “material that may fall under the Espionage Act.” Although Creel did his utmost to conceal it, the propaganda chief was part of the Wilson censorship apparatus.“In no degree was the agency [the CPI] an agency of censorship, a machinery of concealment or repression,” he later declared in his usual take-no-prisoners style. In fact, Creel was a member of the Censorship Board, established by Wilson’s executive order on October 12, 1917, as a clearinghouse for censors operating throughout the government. The board had representatives from the Post Office, the War Department, and the War Trade Board, who conferred regularly with Creel.
²

Another government worry was the labor movement. Already, the flood of war money from Great Britain and France had sent prices into an inflationary spiral. Workers were restless, and the Germans’ idea that strikes could be induced by skillful agitators was by no means a fantasy. Creel had an enthusiastic supporter in Samuel Gompers, the short, pugnacious former English cigar maker who headed the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Well before 1917, Gompers had proclaimed his dislike of the radical union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Socialists, and others with negative attitudes toward American capitalism. When the war turned them into critics of J.P. Morgan, Charles Schwab and other bankers and industrialists who were making millions out of supplying the Allies, Gompers’s attitude became uncompromising detestation. In a shrewd move, Wilson gave the AFL boss a seat on the Advisory Commission of the Council of National Defense. Gompers felt he—and the labor movement—were halfway to nirvana.
³

A CPI department of industrial relations won Gompers’s unqualified endorsement. He warmly approved Creel’s policy of filling factories and offices with dramatic posters and slogans aimed at convincing wage earners that they had a stake in the war. Creel spun off a separate organization, the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy, to answer the attacks of the Socialists and the IWW and put Gompers in command of it.

Along with the Four-Minute Men, the centerpiece of Creel’s early propaganda effort was the
Official Bulletin,
an eight-page daily newspaper (eventually thirty-two pages) in tabloid format, which went to every paper in the United states, as well as to government agencies, military camps and the nation’s 50,000 post offices. Below its title were the words “Published Daily Under Order of the President by the Committee on Public Information, George Creel, Chairman.” Individuals could subscribe for five dollars a year, and the circulation climbed rapidly to a peak of 115,031. The paper published nothing but good news about the U.S. war effort. Wilson considered this hybrid creature his invention—which it was in some respects. Creel had initially opposed the idea. The president gleefully told Joe Tumulty that the
Official Bulletin
was an immense success. He added that Creel was astonished by the way it was being lapped up and reprinted by thousands of newspapers.
⁴

Score one for Philip Dru.

Not all reporters believed the
Official Bulletin
was trustworthy, in spite of its lofty origins. Not a few saw it as a government plot to co-opt their jobs and chafed under the restrictions imposed by the “voluntary” censorship that the newspapers had promised to maintain about war news. On July 4, this skepticism caught Creel in the first of many mistakes. The five regiments Pershing had selected, now called the First Division, arrived in France just in time to celebrate the Fourth of July in Paris. Creel decided the successful voyage merited a similar celebration in the United States. The CPI ground out a story of the soldiers’ perilous trip across the Atlantic, during which their escorting warships had fought off repeated attacks by German submarines, and several of the undersea “pirates” had been sunk. It made the July 4 front page of almost every newspaper in the country. Editorial writers burbled about this first proof of America’s fighting prowess coming on the nation’s birthday.

An Associated Press reporter in England interviewed the officers on the escort ships, who laughed out loud at Creel’s version of the voyage. They said there had been no attacks on the convoy and no submarines had been sunk. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels picked up the phone and scorched the ears of Melville Stone, the president of AP, demanding the story’s retraction. The thoroughly cowed Stone sent out a “kill” order. But across the nation, the presses were already rolling and thousands of dismayed editors were calling Creel picturesque names, few of them printable.
⁵

After more hugger-mugger, a new, mildly exciting version of the story was published on July 7. There were two minor brushes with submarines, both of which lasted only a few minutes.“No Attack in Force” said a subhead in the
New York Times,
although the paper tried hard to get some excitement out of the second encounter, claiming the submarine was “blown up” by a depth charge. In a nearby column, the paper reported that Republican Senator Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania called Creel’s overheated version a national disgrace and demanded an investigation of the Committee on Public Information. A
Times
editorial seemed to agree with the senator; it called Creel’s appointment a blunder. A few weeks later, the paper wryly referred to the CPI as “the Committee on Public Misinformation.” In many papers, a new word,“creeling,” became synonymous with government hot air.
⁶

With progressive reformers heading the army (Secretary of War Newton Baker) and the navy (Secretary Josephus Daniels) and with a late convert to progressivism in the White House, the U.S. government was determined to make sure the vast mobilization of the nation’s men had a positive moral outcome—in addition to winning the war. One of the by-products of progressivism was the social purification movement, which inveighed against saloons, brothels and the red-light districts that were tolerated in many cities. Wilson put an energetic thirty-three-year-old reformer, Raymond B. Fosdick, in charge of making the army and navy training camps and their neighborhoods “clean.”

The administration inserted a clause in the Selective Service Act that made it a crime to sell or give a drink to a serviceman. Fosdick ruthlessly closed down saloons and brothels in the vicinity of army camps and shipped some 15,000 women convicted of prostitution to detention centers, where most were held until 1920. By the end of 1917, Fosdick was boasting that he had wiped out 110 red-light districts. Much of the policing was done by women volunteers, formed into local Protective Leagues. These volunteers were equally tough on amateurs, arresting any woman who behaved promiscuously with soldiers and subjecting her to a physical examination to see if she had venereal disease.

Along with police work came hours of exhortation to the new soldiers and sailors to resist sexual temptation. Spokesmen for the Committee on Training Camp Activities (CTCA) orated on the way venereal disease destroyed a soldier’s “efficiency.” Pamphlets asked: “You wouldn’t use another fellow’s toothbrush. Why use his whore?” they urged soldiers to stop thinking about sex.“A man who is thinking below the belt is not efficient.” The CTCA tried to help this process by running athletic programs and dances in “hostess houses,” where the soldiers could meet respectable women.

Supplementing these moral and social appeals were a series of films that drove home the horrors of venereal disease in the era before wonder drugs. Men and women in the late stages of syphilis were shown with sightless eyes and with noses, ears, and other organs rotting off their bodies. In case morality and terror failed, the army also lectured on the use of condoms and the importance of prophylactic treatment after casual sex.

The ultimate goal was the creation of what Secretary of War Baker called “moral and intellectual armor” that would sustain the soldiers when they went overseas and were beyond the U.S. government’s “comforting and restraining and helpful hand.” the reformers were acutely aware that the French and British governments had a very different approach to the problem of social purity. One of Premier Georges Clemenceau’s gestures of solidarity with France’s new ally was an offer to set up brothels for the American army, staffed by French prostitutes. When Baker heard about it, he gasped,“For God’s sake . . . don’t show this to the president or he’ll stop the war!”
⁷

Over in France, General Pershing was making big decisions and accumulating even bigger worries that went far beyond sexual purity. He had no difficulty persuading General Pétain to assign the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) to training camps in Lorraine, south of Verdun, where they could eventually launch attacks against key German railroads and important coal and iron mines. But Pershing was troubled by the lack of unity between the British and French. Their centuries-old antagonism had not been healed by their wartime alliance.

The French accused the British of fighting mainly to defend the part of France from which Germany could attack England. The British had a bigger army than the French, but they defended only a third of the front.
Fistfights between French and British officers were not uncommon in Paris cafés. One brawl involved eighty men and required several squads of gendarmes before it was halted.

As for the army of “brave little Belgium,” the French said it was good at only one thing: issuing communiqués. The British agreed. Even lower was the French and British opinion of the Italians. They could not even beat the Austrians. When the French Chamber of Deputies heard that a British warship had mistaken an Italian submarine for a German U-boat and sunk it, the legislators cheered. At the bottom of these strata of contempt were the Serbs, whose joke of an army had been chased all the way to Salonika by the Austrians and Bulgarians, with some discreet help from the Germans.
⁸

From the Eastern Front came even more dismaying reports. In July the revolutionary Russian government had launched a “liberty offensive” against the Germans and Austrians. By the first week in August, the attack had floundered into almost total disaster, with the Russian army virtually ceasing to exist. The specter of a vastly reinforced German army on the Western Front began taking nightmarish shape.

Pershing soon decided he could not rely on the general staff in Washington for anything. It took weeks to get a reply from them. Acting Chief of Staff Tasker Bliss wrote orders with the stub of a pencil and hid urgent telegrams under his blotter while he made up his mind what to do about them. Pershing decided to set up his own general staff in France—a far more efficient one than the fumbling team in Washington.
⁹

Alfred Thayer Mahan, the son of West Point’s famed military philosopher, Dennis Mahan, was fond of saying that war was business. As commander of the AEF, Pershing proved it. Until he took charge, each army bureau and department had its own supply officer with its own budget. Back in the United States, this compartmentalization caused immense confusion and duplication of effort and expense. Pershing organized the AEF’s purchases around a general purchasing board, headed by an old friend and future vice president, Charles G. Dawes. A canny businessman, Dawes had absolute authority to buy anything and everything the AEF needed from the French and British at the best possible price.

The decisions Pershing and Dawes made to prepare their men for battle were awesome. They placed an order for $50 million worth of French airplanes and did not report the purchase until it was too late for Washington to countermand it.“He did it without winking an eye, as easily as though ordering a postage stamp,” Pershing’s chief of staff, James Harbord, noted in his diary. Pershing and Dawes also bought French 75mm field guns for their artillery; English Enfield rifles, steel helmets, and French light machine guns (Chauchats) for their infantrymen; and, later, French light tanks (Renaults) for an embryo tank corps.
¹⁰

Pershing decided to make an AEF division 28,000 men, twice the size of an Allied or German division. He wanted an organization with the staying power to sustain an attack in spite of heavy casualties. Unfortunately, he did not double the size of the new division’s artillery, the first symptom of his inability to appreciate the lethal increase in firepower that had transformed warfare on the Western Front.
¹¹