The Illusion of Victory (36 page)

At 1 A.M. multicolored Very lights soared into the sky, signals for Bruchmuller’s gunners. In seconds, the colonel’s orchestra was in full crescendo, with 3,719 guns pouring gas and high explosives on the hapless poilus and Tommies trapped by Foch’s interference and Duchene’s overconfidence. At dawn the storm troopers surged forward, their ranks bolstered by mountain troops to handle the difficult terrain. On the Chemin des Dames, they found little but corpses and dazed survivors eager to surrender. The mutinous French division evaporated, and others swiftly imitated them. Only the British did any serious fighting, and they were soon driven over the Aisne River.

So swift was the German advance, scarcely a bridge over the Aisne was blown. A French army corps thrown in to restore the front found itself outflanked by hundreds of surging storm companies and was itself swiftly routed, causing its commander, General Joseph Degoutte, to burst into tears. In twelve hours, all the objectives designated by Ludendorff as the limits of the offensive had been taken. But the exultant storm troopers kept going. They crossed the swift and narrow Vesle River on May 28 and headed south for the Marne, chewing up division after French division as they debouched onto the battlefield.

A glimpse of the terror and despair created by the German onslaught is visible in the experience of a lance corporal in the Sixteenth Bavarian Reserve Regiment. Known to his comrades as “Adi,” adolf Hitler had been fighting on the Western Front since 1914. As a runner bearing messages between the front lines and headquarters, he had one of the most dangerous assignments in the German army. By this time his officers considered him an outstanding soldier. Their reports frequently mentioned the Austrian-born Hitler’s “exceptional courage,” his “admirable unpretentiousness,” and his “profound love of country.”

On the morning of the assault over the Chemin des Dames, Hitler was carrying a message to a battalion that had broken through and vanished on the chaotic battlefield. Spotting a French helmet in a nearby trench, Hitler whipped out his pistol and captured twelve dazed poilus. He marched them back to headquarters and turned them over to his colonel. A few weeks later the courageous corporal received the Iron Cross, First Class.
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Soon Fère-en-Tardenois, a key road junction in the center of Champagne, was in German hands. Premier Georges Clemenceau, who had rushed to the front, came very close to being captured; his car fled out the south end of Fère-en-Tardenois as the Germans entered from the north. Then Soissons, a vital rail center, fell. Only around Rheims, where the French had built a network of fortifications, did the poilus hold. By May 30, the storm troopers were on the Marne, having captured more than 60,000 men and eight hundred guns.

Suddenly, Paris, the original goal of the German invasion, was only forty miles away. Postponing his plan for a knockout blow at the British in Flanders, Ludendorff summoned every available soldier from other parts of the front to exploit this colossal breakthrough. But once more, the French and British, by headlong flight, had given themselves time to muster more reserves and throw up a new if shaky defense line. When a German battalion crossed the Marne on May 30, its men found themselves isolated by a rain of French shells that made reinforcement a form of suicide. The storm troopers would have to wait until German artillery came forward to support a renewed offensive.

On the right flank, the poilus and a British division also successfully resisted a German attempt to link the huge salient created by this third offensive with the bulge carved in the Somme Valley in March. By hanging onto the hinges of the new salient, the French and British narrowed the focus of the German advance. But this modicum of good news did little to minimize the menace of the immense breakthrough, with its forward echelons poised to leap the Marne and devour Paris.

On May 30, General Pershing had supper at Generalissimo Foch’s headquarters.“ It would be difficult to imagine a more depressed group of officers,” the AEF commander later said.“They sat through the meal scarcely speaking a word as they contemplated what was possibly the most serious situation of the war.” In Paris, people were fleeing the city by the thousands. The French government was packing records and talking of retreating to the Pyrenees.

After dinner Foch renewed his demand to amalgamate future American arrivals into the British and French armies. Pershing reiterated his opposition, but offered every division he had in France to meet the crisis. Foch accepted his terms, but insisted the Americans would have to fight under the command of French generals. Pershing reluctantly agreed to this arrangement.
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Major General Omar Bundy’s Second Division went into position west of Château-Thierry while Major General Joseph Dickman’s Third Division manned the banks of the Marne east of that strategic river town. The Forty-Second Division, popularly known as the Rainbow Division, because its troops came from all parts of United States, became part of the French Fourth Army, closer to Rheims. As the Americans moved up, thousands of beaten poilus streamed past them, shouting,“
La guerre finie!
”

Except for some lively skirmishing, the Germans did not attack the Americans. Their infantry went over to the defensive while the generals brought up the artillery and tried to decide what to do next. The option of another massive blow at the British army in Flanders was still on the table. But Paris remained a supremely tempting target, just over the horizon.

In the French capital, Premier Georges Clemenceau went before an almost hysterical chamber of deputies on June 4. Members shouted insults at him and screamed demands that he fire Foch and Pétain and negotiate peace. Even the deputy premier, Frederic Brunet, abandoned Clemenceau and made a menacing speech, asking if those in high positions should not be called to account for a failure to do “their whole duty.” why should the law come down with “crushing force” upon the soldier who fails to do his duty and spare the leader who is responsible for these “irretrievable defeats”?
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Clemenceau summoned all the considerable eloquence in his aged frame to answer these challenges. He asked the deputies if they wanted him to abandon men (Foch and Pétain) who “deserved well of their country” and sow doubts in the souls of the poilus at this crucial moment in France’s history. He rejected such an alternative as a crime “for which I would never accept responsibility.” He told them that only yesterday, the Supreme War Council, meeting in Versailles, had restated their “high confidence” in General Foch.
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The deputies called this nonsense. “It was you who made them [the War Council] do it,” one man shouted. Clemenceau ignored this accusation and asked them if they wanted to indict a man who was reeling from exhaustion, whose “head droops over maps.” were they going to add to his burden a demand for an explanation of why he did this and did not do that? Wild-eyed deputies responded by swarming onto the rostrum and driving Clemenceau into the hall. The chamber erupted into total anarchy, with Clemenceau backers wrestling and punching his attackers to clear the podium.

Order of sorts restored, Clemenceau emerged once more to speak of “tragic truths” and his responsibility to France. They were not fighting alone, he reminded them. The British and the French may be exhausted, but “the Americans were coming.” These words magically transformed the chamber. A cheer exploded against the ceiling. Catching fire, Clemenceau exhorted them to keep faith with “those who have fallen.” It was intolerable to surrender now and confess they had died in vain. More cheers were followed by a vote on whether to call Pétain and Foch to explain the oncoming Germans. A fight to the finish, sans explanations, won by 337 to 110.
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In his cell at the Prison de la Santé, Joseph Caillaux was no doubt thoroughly aware of the situation and was waiting tensely for Clemenceau’s fall. A former premier told Brigadier General James Harbord, newly promoted to command of the two U.S. Marine regiments in the Second Division, that in a secret session of the Chamber of Deputies, many members said that if “Caillaux were made premier and General Serrail given command of Paris,” the war would end in three weeks.
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On June 5, General Henry Wilson, the British representative on the Supreme War Council, journeyed to London to discuss the evacuation of the British army from France. General Wilson had no confidence in Foch. He was convinced that the generalissimo “could not see beyond his nose,” and the entire French army was on the brink of collapse.“It was a very gloomy meeting,” the secretary of the war cabinet, Sir Maurice Hankey, noted in his diary.
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General Joseph Degoutte, the French commander of the sector east of Château-Thierry, was, like Ferdinand Foch, an apostle of the school of attack that had done little thus far but pile up bodies in front of German machine guns. Finding himself in possession of fresh American troops, Degoutte ordered an assault on Belleau Wood, which stood on commanding ground about a half mile from the American lines. He found a willing collaborator in Colonel Preston Brown, the Second Division’s chief of staff, who was burning to demonstrate American fighting prowess. Brown accepted at face value French reports that the Germans held only the northern corner of the wood. In fact, its 1,000-yard width and 3,000-yard length were occupied to the last inch by infantry and machine gunners with interlocking fields of fire.
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At 5 P.M. on June 6, without sending out a single patrol to find out more information, Brown and Brigadier General Harbord ordered the two U.S. Marine regiments forward in a frontal assault. In the myths that have accumulated about the battle of Belleau Wood, the marines have been pictured as hard-bitten veterans of numerous battles in Haiti, Santo Domingo and other overseas combat assignments. In fact, 95 percent were new recruits, in the corps less than a year. Their officers were equally unprepared to fight on the Western Front. They led their men forward in massed formations unseen since 1914. Astonished German machine gunners mowed them down in windrows. The slaughter revealed the horrendous limitations of General Pershing’s version of open warfare.

Today, it is painful to read the naïveté with which those young marines advanced to their deaths. They seemed amazed to discover that machine guns killed people. One platoon was commanded by an army lieutenant named Coppinger.“Follow me!” he said and led them up a ravine raked by machine guns. At the top of the rise, he looked around and said, “Where the hell is my platoon?” Only six of the fifty-two marines were still on their feet. Even more appalling was the attack of a battalion led by Major Berton Sibley. They advanced in formation, under slow cadence, as if they were on a parade ground. Shells and machine gun bullets tore awful gaps in their ranks. The commander of the regiment, Colonel Albertus Catlin, declared the advance “one of the most beautiful sights I have ever witnessed.” Catlin stayed on his feet, admiring this performance, until a machine gun bullet tore through his chest, leaving him paralyzed.
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For the next twenty days, the marines, reinforced by the two army regiments in the Second Division and a regiment from the nearby Third Division, struggled to oust the Germans from Belleau Wood. The Germans fed elements of four divisions into the struggle, which began to acquire a “moral” dimension in their eyes. They were determined to prove that the American army was not the equal, much less the superior, of the German army. In the United States, headlines made the battle seem one of the most important of the war.“Our Marines Attack, Gain Mile at Veuilly, Resume Drive at Night, Foe Losing Heavily,” reported the
New York Times
.“Marines Win Hot Battle, Sweep Enemy from Heights Near Thierry,” shouted the
Chicago Daily Tribune.
Not a word about the fields carpeted with the bodies of dead and dying young marines.
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The Americans eventually captured the mile-square forest after the French withdrew the marines and treated the German defenders to a fourteen-hour artillery barrage that left only a few dazed survivors to contest the marines’ final assault. The marine brigade lost 126 officers and 5,057 men, more than 42 percent of its force. Until the marines attacked the Japanese on Tarawa, it was the bloodiest battle in the history of the corps. The Second Division’s two army regiments lost another 3,252 officers and men. Pershing rewarded Harbord by making him commander of the Second Division, replacing the overage Omar Bundy, who had stood around letting Harbord and Preston Brown make their reckless opening attack without saying a word. In his memoirs, Harbord, a thoughtful man, wrote with evident regret of “the insufficient information on which you are sometimes obliged to send men forth to die.”
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The desperate French trumpeted Belleau Wood as a major victory in their newspapers, and reporters followed suit around the world. Pershing went along with the hyperbole, because he was even more desperate for proof that his men could stand up to the Germans. The battering he had taken from Foch, Haig and others had narrowed his judgment of what constituted a battlefield success. The man who had once been proud of winning battles with a minimum of casualties had become a virtual convert to Field Marshal Haig’s HCI (high casualties inevitable) formula for victory.

Some historians of World War I have portrayed Belleau Wood as a turning point that “proved” americans could outfight the Germans. General Bullard, commander of the First Division, went even further, claiming that Belleau saved the Allies from defeat. But the German army’s subsequent battlefield performance against the Americans showed no decline in determination and ferocity. In his memoirs, Major General Joseph Dickman, commander of the Third Division, which had been in line beside the Second Division while Belleau Wood was consummated, deplored the operation as a waste of men and ammunition:“It was magnificent fighting, but it was not modern war.”
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