The Illusion of Victory (37 page)

Mesmerized by Paris, and convinced that the storm troopers were an invincible weapon, the German high command decided to try to finish the war where they had almost won it in 1914—on the Marne. Quartermaster General Ludendorff was so overconfident, he sacrificed the key element in the storm troopers’ earlier successes: surprise. The Allies knew where the blow would fall—the only question was when. It was difficult, if not impossible, to keep a secret shared by hundreds of thousands of men. Trench raids brought in prisoners who revealed that the new offensive was scheduled to begin at ten minutes past midnight on July 15. The Germans were hoping the French would be sleeping off the July 14 celebration of Bastille Day, their national holiday.

Although some French generals still took Foch’s advice and jammed their men into forward trenches, others decided Pétain’s defense in depth made more sense. They left only suicide squads up front and targeted their artillery on their own front lines. The rest of their men went underground, into sandbagged dugouts. Precisely at 12:10, Colonel Bruchmuller’s artillery orchestra went to work, hurling destruction across forty-two miles of front. Four hours later, the storm troopers went forward—to disaster.

French and American artillery poured concentrated fire into their ranks. In the east, around Rheims, by the time the Germans reached the main defense line, their attacks were scattered, uncoordinated. “Their legs are broken,” exulted newly promoted Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur of the Rainbow Division, which was scattered across thirteen kilometers of the front, fighting under French commanders. This impromptu amalgamation was a grim commentary on French lack of confidence in the poilus’ staying power.
⁶⁸

Along the Marne, riflemen and machine gunners of the Third Division took a terrible toll on the attackers as they paddled through fog and gun smoke in rubber boats. On the Third Division’s right flank, a half dozen French divisions evaporated, abandoning a battalion of the Twenty-Eighth Division planted in their midst to strengthen them. But the Third Division stood firm, leaving the 20,000 Germans who had gotten across the river exposed to flank attacks and entrapment. By the end of the first day, the Germans knew the offensive had failed. Lieutenant Rudolf Binding wrote in his diary: “I have lived through the most disheartening day of the whole war.”
⁶⁹

A discouraged Ludendorff tried to tell himself and his staff that the effort was a success. They had pinned down the entire French army and most of the American army. Now was the time to launch the knockout blow at the British in Flanders. On July 16, after calling off further attacks,
he and his staff took a train north to plan the assault without delay. They had scarcely arrived when frantic telephone calls informed the quartermaster general of a totally unexpected development.

On the morning of July 18, out of the Forest of the Retz, south of Soissons, had stormed three divisions of the Allied army, two American and one French. They were biting deep into the exposed right flank of the Marne salient, threatening to trap a half million Germans along the river. A dismayed Ludendorff had to abandon his knockout dreams and rush reinforcements south to blunt this threat.
⁷⁰

In this climactic moment of their struggle to make the world safe for democracy, the Americans of the Second Division rode to the battlefield in trucks driven by Vietnamese from the French colony of Indochina. The First Division had already reached the Forest of the Retz after an exhausting three-day march. There the Americans discovered they would be attacking beside the French army’s Moroccan Division, which was a mixture of blacks from Senegal, Arabs and others from North Africa, and a regiment composed of the ex-criminals and lost souls who volunteered for the French Foreign Legion. Fortunately, irony was not a mode of American thought among the doughboys in 1918. They still saw the war as a test of their collective manhood. One member of the First Division wrote in his diary: “The troops which have been massed here are the best of the French army. That we are joining them is a sign that we have gained some prestige.”
⁷¹

The commander of the attack was General Charles Mangin, known to the poilus as the Butcher. In an army whose generals had already killed a million men in failed attacks, this was an ominous title. Mangin had decided that the only way to achieve surprise was to attack with no artillery preparation. In the frantic haste with which the offensive was organized, there was virtually no intelligence either. General Harbord and his chief of staff, Preston Brown, obtained a hastily dictated memo from a French staff officer, describing the terrain across which their men were to attack. They had to depend on this rudimentary document to write orders for infantry and artillery.

Moving up through the pitch-dark forest in a driving rain, the Americans encountered monumental confusion. Some machine-gun units became separated from their ammunition. Some infantry battalions attacked with-
out a single hand grenade. Most of the Second Division never got anything to eat. But at dawn on July 18, the 67,000-man assault went forward, stunning the Germans with its size and ferocity. The goal was the railroad that ran through Soissons and Fère-en-Tardenois. It was the main source of food and ammunition for the half million Germans in the Marne salient.

The first day was a sensational success, but on the second day, the Germans recovered from their surprise. Machine guns sprouted everywhere, and American casualties soon mounted to catastrophic proportions. Again and again, the doughboys advanced across open ground without concealment or cover, with predictable results. Typical was the experience of Private Carl Brannen of the Fifth Marine Regiment. It was his second day of the battle and the third without any solid food.“The morning of July 19, we formed our lines . . . for a charge across a sugar beet field. . . . In thirty or forty minutes, our regiment had been almost annihilated. The field which had been recently crossed was strewn with dead and dying. Their cries for water and help got weaker as the hot July day wore on.”
⁷²

In three days, the two American divisions lost more than 12,000 men. The Second Division, already bled by Belleau Wood, collapsed and had to be withdrawn after two days. The First Division, equally battered—its Twenty-Sixth Infantry regiment lost 3,000 out of 3,200 men—was withdrawn the following day. This was hardly the staying power Pershing had envisioned for his double-sized divisions. But he ignored the danger signs and told Harbord that even if the two divisions never fired another shot, they had made their commanders “immortal.”
⁷³

Harbord and Brown stood by the roadside near the Second Division’s headquarters and watched the survivors march past them, after their withdrawal. They were “only a remnant,” harbord admitted,“but a victorious remnant; no doubt existed in their mind as to their ability to whip the Germans. Their whole independent bearing, their swagger as they strode by, the snatches of conversation we could hear as they passed, proclaimed them a victorious division.”
⁷⁴

A general who has lost over 15,000 men in a month needed to see these things to keep up his own morale. A more realistic report of the aftermath of Soissons came from Marine Private Brannen:“The surviving Marines who left the battle line were a terrible looking bunch of people. They looked more like animals. They had almost a week’s growth of beard and were dirty and ragged. Their eyes were sunk back in their heads. There had been very little sleep or rest for four days and no food. . . . The boys were more despondent than I ever saw them after this last battle and no wonder. I was the only survivor of Overton’s platoon of about fifty men. There were eight able to walk away from the front, out of 212 on the company roster.”
⁷⁵

Yet it was a victory. Although the attackers did not cut the railroad line, they forced the Germans to abandon all thoughts of crossing the Marne to Paris. Instead, General Ludendorff was forced to shorten his lines—a euphemism for the ugly word
retreat.
In his war memoirs, Field Marshal von Hindenburg wrote:“How many hopes, cherished during the last few months had possibly collapsed at one blow! How many calculations had been scattered to the winds.”
⁷⁶

The American infantrymen who fought at Cantigny and Belleau Wood were constantly harassed by German planes. They frequently cursed America’s nonexistent air service. Their criticism added intensity to Quentin Roosevelt’s desire to reach the front. At first, from Flora’s letters, he thought they might be married before he headed for the war zone. For a while her parents seemed amenable to a trip to Paris. Influential friends were enlisted to approach the War Department.

This hope soon faded. Flora was told that the answer from the War Department was no. Flora’s pilot brother, Sonny, now scheduled to go overseas, was the ostensible reason. Mournfully, Flora wrote to Quentin:“It looked so cheerful, the prospects of my coming, it is really . . . mean they should be dashed away so suddenly.” Quentin’s response was a brash cable: “SO SORRY OUR PLANS IMPOSSIBLE . . . LOTS OF TIME YET. MOVING OUT AT LAST WITH HAM. LOVE, ROOSEVELT.”
⁷⁷

Quentin also cabled the news to his father, who responded,“My joy for you and my pride in you drown my anxiety.” He added it was “very hard” that Flora could not go to France.“I can’t help feeling a little more resolution on the part of the Whitneys would have done it.”
⁷⁸

By this time Quentin’s older brothers, Ted, Archie and Kermit, had all seen action. In March, Archie had been badly wounded by an exploding shell that smashed his knee and almost severed an arm. At Cantigny, Ted had been gassed and for a while was forced to sleep in a sitting position. In Mesopotamia, Kermit had commanded an armored car in fierce fighting against the Turks and won the British War Cross for gallantry. This news only redoubled Quentin’s desire to see action.
⁷⁹

On his way to the front, Quentin stopped in Paris and had a reunion with Archie, who was still in the hospital and deeply depressed. He had undergone a series of operations to try to connect the nerves in his shattered arm. Having seen the reality of the Western Front, Archie was convinced that all four Roosevelt brothers were going to die. Quentin scoffed at this possibility, telling Flora casualties in the air service squadrons already in action weren’t “terribly big.”
⁸⁰

Quentin and his friends were still flying second-rate Nieuports. German pilots were flying sleek, maneuverable Fokkers and Albatros DVs—far superior planes. Early American Air Service tactics resembled the naive optimism of the infantry vis-à-vis the machine gun. The Americans sent up three-and four-man patrols, which were constantly outnumbered by the Germans’ aggressive
Jagdstaffeln
(hunting flights) tactics. The Jastas, as they were usually called, put as many as twelve planes in the air, trained to fight as a team.

When Quentin arrived at the Ninety-Fifth Aero Squadron, the commanding officer made him a flight commander. Quentin immediately called together the three other pilots in the flight and said,“Any one of you knows more about [this] than I do.” As soon as they left the ground, the most experienced pilot would take command.
⁸¹

On June 25, Quentin told Flora about his first patrol, “a sort of private Boche hunting party.” They did not see any German planes but “Archies”—German antiaircraft shells—burst near enough “to turn me inside out.” On the ground, he found a big shrapnel hole in his wing.
⁸²

“Things are getting hotter,” Quentin told Flora a few days later. On a recent patrol, four planes tangled with six “Boche.” the Americans shot one down but lost two pilots. Off duty, Quentin spent most of his time resting his back and working on his Nieuport, which had a cranky motor. He frequently fell behind other members of his flight while on patrol. He found high-altitude patrols exhausting.“Four miles up is mighty high,” he said. Oxygen masks were a thing of the future.

Quentin was quartered in a nearby château, which overlooked some woods through which he sometimes wandered. The green shadowy silence made him think “however long the war lasts peace will come again and just you and I [will enjoy] our island. That’s what I almost forget over here. War is only an interlude.”

In another letter, he was brutally realistic.“If I do get it, Ham is going to take care of my things. I’m leaving a letter for you in my trunk. Of course this all sounds foolish. I love you too much not to come back, my darling.”
⁸³

Then came a letter charged with excitement. “I think I got my first Boche,” Quentin wrote on July 11. He had become separated from his flight and found himself alone over the front. In the distance, he saw three planes. Thinking they were friendly (an indication of how bad his eyes were), Quentin followed them over the German lines. Suddenly the leader turned, and Quentin saw the black crosses on his wings. A less daring flier would have headed for home. But Quentin “put my sights on the end man and let go. . . . He never even turned . . . all of a sudden his tail came up and he went down in a
vrille
(spin).” The other two Germans pursued Quentin, but he made it safely back to the American lines.
⁸⁴

French observers confirmed the kill, and Quentin stormed into Paris to celebrate with Eleanor and Archie. Quentin’s sister Ethel rushed a triumphant note to Flora.“You must be so happy. Those long weary hours at Issoudun are being gloriously repaid.” His father told Ethel,“Whatever now befalls Quentin he has had his crowded hour, his day of honor and triumph. . . . How pleased and proud Flora must be.”
⁸⁵