Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos
A few days later in Polygon Wood on the edge of the Passchendaele Ridge seventeen thousand men were lost with small gains. On October 4, after suffering twentysix thousand casualties, Plumer’s army achieved a slippery foothold on the ridge in front of what was left of Passchendaele village. This was the occasion of the entry in Dawes’ diary about Haig’s splendid offensive. Pershing sent Haig a message congratulating him on this magnificent answer to “weak kneed peace propaganda.”
The rain had started again. On October 9 a new attack was attempted. Once more Plumer’s army was pinned down in the mud by enfilading fire from German pillboxes. ALL HAIG’S OBJECTIVES GAINED was the headline in the New York Times. The London Times had the British troops in sight of Bruges.
“G.H.Q. could not capture the Passchendaele Ridge but it was determined to storm Fleet Street and here strategy and tactics were superb,” was Lloyd George’s scornful comment.
By this time it was taking fourteen hours to evacuate a wounded man. German planes were strafing the bogged British with machineguns. German mustard gas was producing a new type of casualty. Shell shock was the order of the day. Supplies could only be moved up on duckboards. Tanks, trucks, mule trains wallowed in slime. Entrenchments filled with water to the brim. Field guns buried themselves by the force of their recoil each time they were fired.
Only the rats thrived; bloated rats swam through the muck feeding on the dead in the flooded trenches.
“Imagine a fertile countryside,” wrote Gough in justification, “dotted every few hundred yards with peasant farms and an occasional hamlet; water everywhere, for only an intricate system of small drainage canals relieved the land from the ever-present danger of flooding; a clay soil which the slightest dampness turned into clinging mud … Then imagine the same countryside battered beaten and torn by a torrent of shell and explosive … a soil shaken and reshaken, fields tossed into new and fantastic shapes, roads blotted out from the landscape, houses and hamlets pounded into dust so thoroughly that no man could point to where they had stood … and the drainage system utterly and irretrievably destroyed … Then came incessant rain (the wettest August for thirty years). The broken earth became a fluid clay; the little brooks and tiny canals became formidable obstacles, and every shell hole a dismal pond … Still the guns churned this treacherous slime … Every day became worse. What had once been difficult became impossible.”
On October 23 in response to Haig’s urgent request that he do something to relieve the German pressure, Pétain had his General Maistre conduct a small operation against the village of Malmaison a little to the west of the Chemin des Dames. The attack was made with the help of the French light tanks on a ten mile front. In spite of a six day preliminary bombardment the Germans were caught by surprise and lost their last foothold on the Craonne Plateau north of the Aisne. The French took twelve thousand prisoners and two hundred guns and resisted the usual violent counterattacks. Following Mort Homme, Malmaison did more than all Pétain’s pleading to restore the morale of the French Army.
November 6 the occupation of Passchendaele Ridge was announced by Haig’s headquarters as complete. Lloyd George sent him a telegram of congratulation. The Allied newspapers trumpeted the victory. German morale they said was broken: a German general was reported to have called it a disastrous day for the German Army.
After that the fighting in Flanders subsided in drizzle and sleet. Relieved of their onerous duties coordinating the staff work, generals from headquarters visited the front. Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot Kiggell, Haig’s chief of staff, as he looked out over the boggy mess which he was seeing for the first time, is reported to have exclaimed, “Did we really send men to fight in that?”
Return to Open Warfare
The German strategists were so pleased by the success of von Hutier’s experiment at Riga that they determined to repeat it. While his armies in Flanders were in their death grapple with the British in the mud around Ypres, von Hindenburg was supervising the formation of a new German-Austrian Army formed to break the stalemate between the Austrians and the Italians in the mountains north of Venice.
Military surprise plus civilian demoralization had been the formula for success in the north. German agents were reporting civilian warweariness and a mutinous spirit among Italian conscripts exasperated by scanty food, and by tales of warprofiteering in the rear, and by the fact that their officers were rarely, if ever, seen in the front line. An army under General Otto von Bulow was readied in the mountains for a sudden push across the valley of the Isonzo.
The Italian Intelligence reported the arrival of German units to the headquarters of their Commander in Chief General Cadorna. General Cadorna was said to have given orders for a defense in depth, but the general in charge of the Italian Second Army was absent from his command and no preparations were made. A serious gap between the defenses of two Italian armies was allowed to remain unfortified. The Germans struck at that gap.
After three hours of intensive shelling of the Italian network of communications and a saturating gas attack, in a dim dawn of mist and rain which was turning to snow in the high mountains, the German spearhead broke through at the village of Caporetto, crossed the Isonzo and outflanked the Italian line.
Though other units held until forced into orderly retreat the Italian Second Army broke and ran. The panic crossing of the Tagliamento, thirty miles to the rear, became a byword for defeat. It was largely because the unexpected extent of their gains threw the German and Austrian armies off balance that the Italians, under new generalship and stiffened by British and French reinforcements, were able in the first days of November to establish a line of entrenchments along the Piave, sixtyfive miles to the south on the dank Venetian plain.
In Paris, sitting on November 3 in the quiet of the Morgan Harjes bank, Dawes, groggy from his struggle to free shipping space for essential items, described the Italian reverse as sobering. He noted that eightyfive thousand British and French troops were speeding to the Piave. He had just lunched with Pershing, whom he found both depressed and stimulated by the Italian news. Dawes’ nephew, who was a private, drove the two friends out to a secluded place where they could take a long walk on a country road together. Their conversation was solemn.
“To help the Commander in Chief, my dear friend carry this his burden, to help my country in this time of need …” wrote Dawes, “all this is my weary but happy lot. But it is not difficult to be happy when one feels the sense of progress … With the latitude John gives me I feel as if I were exercising the powers of one of the old monarchs. To negotiate singlehanded with governments comes to but few men.”
Pershing, while shaken by Caporetto, felt privately stimulated, as a professional of warfare, by the German successes at Riga and on the Isonzo. It seemed to foretell the end of trench warfare. Here was convincing proof of the correctness “of the doctrine of training for open warfare … It simply proved that nothing … had changed this age-old principle of the art of war.”
Tanks at Last
About ten days after the Austro-German advance into Italy had settled down to a war of waiting along the Piave, the correctness of Pershing’s doctrine on the art of warfare received fresh confirmation, this time from the British. On November 20 the British tanks broke through the German lines at Cambrai and led the infantry on a four mile advance with casualties light indeed for the western front.
The eager young officers of the British tank corps had been much chagrined by their failure to score any gains during the first days of the offensive at Ypres. Almost tearfully they had tried to point out, while the battle was still in the planning stage at G.H.Q., that the terrain there was impossible for tanks. They had prepared careful maps indicating the most dangerously flooded areas and had been told to forget that nonsense. Now in front of Cambrai, between Lens and St. Quentin, on hard rolling ground which had not been made impassable by constant shelling, they were given a chance to see what they could do.
The British and F
Winston Churchill, being an imaginative fellow, was struck with the idea of landships from the first moment he heard of them. When Lloyd George became Minister of Munitions he followed up Churchill’s suggestions. In September 1916 General Haig allowed some Mark I tanks to be deployed on the Somme, to bolster morale he somewhat apologetically explained. Of fortynine primitive types on hand only thirtysix reached the scene of the engagement before breaking down.
At that time the fastest speed tanks could make was four miles an hour. Even so, a couple of the clumsy vehicles made a name for themselves. The first tank to go over the top flushed out a pocket of German resistance before a shell put it out of business. Another, followed by a company of infantry, captured a trenchful of startled Heinies. Their greatest achievement came later in the Somme campaign when a pair of tanks, although hopelessly stuck in the mud, forced the surrender of four hundred men.
At Cambrai the tank corps rejoiced in the possession of three hundred tanks of their latest improved model. The tanks were hidden from the enemy in an undamaged piece of forest. When they took off before dawn, in spite of their slow motion, the surprise was complete. Advancing in groups of twelve followed by infantry, they flattened the barbed wire entanglements and crossed the concrete trenches of the Hindenburg Line with the greatest ease. Two German divisions were routed and a hundred and twenty guns and seventyfive hundred men were captured.
The catch came when it was discovered that the only preparations made by Haig’s G.H.Q. for following up a breakthrough was the deployment of some units of Haig’s beloved cavalry. German machinegunners from their pillboxes slaughtered the horses and their riders. A few days later German counterattacks wiped out the British gains.
The success of their counterattack proved to the satisfaction of the German High Command that tanks were a failure. For the benefit of German civilians the cumbersome machines were ridiculed as unmanly devices of the degenerate English and unworthy of the brave Teutonic soldier.
Pershing was present at the headquarters of General Byng who commanded the Cambrai show during the first part of the engagement. His staff was already at work on arrangements for the furnishing of French light tanks and British heavy tanks to the American troops, but nothing that he said or wrote indicated that he felt H. G. Wells’ “land ironclads” in any way threatened the infantryman with rifle and the bayonet, whom he trusted to dominate the war of movement he looked forward to in the coming year.
The Bridge of Ships
Meanwhile the buildup of the A.E.F. continued with gradually increasing tempo. By the end of November something like a hundred thousand men had been landed in France. Brest became the chief disembarkation port. A little more than half the American troops crossed the Atlantic on British ships, a small percentage on French and Italian ships, and the rest on transports officered and convoyed by the U. S. Navy.
Early in the summer the destroyers had learned to refuel at sea. That meant that even the smaller types could make the full voyage to Europe with their convoys instead of having to turn back halfway.
The first few convoys reached home ports intact in spite of continual forays by U-boats off the Brittany coast and in the far Atlantic in the latitude of the Azores. On the eastbound course not a ship was lost during that year.
A day out of Brest on the return voyage in mid October the small transport Antilles was hit square in the engineroom by a torpedo. The ship sank in six and a half minutes, but due to carefully worked out abandon ship routines only sixtyseven men were lost out of two hundred and thirtyfour on board. The radio electrician stuck to his wireless room and continued sending out SOS signals until the ship sank and he drowned. The skipper who insisted on being the last man off the ship was saved by a hair.
In spite of very rough seas, the converted yachts of the escort picked up the survivors and took them back to Brest. The rules were that as soon as a ship was attacked the merchantmen in the convoy should scatter and that only shallow draft yachts and destroyers, which were poor targets for torpedoes, should engage in rescue work.
Back in Brest, the crew and passengers from the Antilles were placed on the Finland, which had just unloaded and was preparing for the return trip. They had poor luck. The Finland was hardly out of Brest before a torpedo struck her under the bridge.
These transports had civilian crews. The crew of the Antilles, described by the naval officers as “the sweepings of the docks, a low class of foreigners of all nationalities,” had come on board in a state of shock from their previous experience. They communicated their terrors to the civilian crew of the Finland with the result that there was a general panic when the torpedo hit, which the officers had to quell revolver in hand. In the rush boats were lowered carelessly, some capsized. Men jumped overboard.
“The engineroom and fireroom crews left their stations and rushed on deck, which was contrary to orders,” wrote Admiral Gleaves. “These men were finally driven below, with the aid of a revolver and a heavy wooden mallet, and the engineers’ stations again manned.”
When discipline was restored it was found that only one cargo hold was flooded. The men in the water were picked up and the Finland made her way back under her own steam through the submarine nets into the harbor of Brest.
Officers and crews were learning that the submarine was not an unbeatable foe. As the autumn advanced coordination kept improving between merchantships and their escorts.
The great day for the American destroyers came in November when the U.S.S. Fanning was escorting a tardy merchantman to its position in the westbound convoy out from Queenstown. The coxswain sighted the small “finger” periscope of a submarine which seemed to be taking aim on one of the larger merchantmen. No sooner seen than gone. The Fanning took a wide turn to pass over the spot where the periscope had vanished. At the same moment her companion destroyer the Nicholson bore down on the spot from the other side of the convoy. They both dropped depth charges.
Nothing happened. They cruised around hopefully for fifteen minutes. No oil, no timbers. They were about to rejoin their positions in the convoy when all at once the stern of a submarine broke the water between them. The stern rose so high that the men could see the rear torpedo tubes.
Soon the whole submarine lay on the surface, seemingly without a scratch. The destroyer crews could read the inscription: U-58. Both destroyers were shelling it when the conning tower trap opened and out popped a German officer with his arms in the air crying “Kamerad” at the top of his lungs. He was followed by the crew, all with their arms in the air. Fearing it was a trick both destroyers approached queasily with their machineguns trained on the men. The Fanning went alongside and threw the Germans a line. At that moment the submarine sank. The Germans had opened the seacocks. The Americans had a job saving the crew. One kraut was so exhausted that he died.
When the German commander was hauled out of the water, all dripping as he was he clicked his heels and saluted Lieutenant Carpender who was in command of the Fanning. He explained in tolerable English that he was a minelayer. The ashcans had wrecked his motors, jammed his rudders and broken the fuel lines. He was sinking so fast there was nothing to it
The Germans were given dry clothing and fed and placed below under guard. According to the crew of the Fanning what impressed the captured squareheads most was their soap. It was the first soap they had had in three months.
The Policy of the Wedge
Colonel House spent the hot months of the summer of 1917 as usual on the North Shore of Massachusetts. His summer home at Magnolia constituted a port of entry for the stream of European envoys such as Northcliffe, the English press lord, Tardieu, the French High Commissioner, and Sir William Wiseman, the very astute head of the British secret service. All of them were trying to thaw their way through the ring of ice that surrounded the President in Washington.
Besides being liaison man with Paris and Westminster the confidential colonel was trying to keep what he and Wilson referred to jokingly as his friend’s “one track mind” from concentrating too exclusively on military efforts “to knock the Kaiser off his perch.”
House had to remind the President that the purpose of war was peace.
House wanted to prepare for the day when Woodrow Wilson would be in a position, like Philip Dru setting the troubled republic to rights as Administrator in his fantasy, to dictate to the prostrate nations of the world a peace which would inaugurate a golden age.
House well knew that through all the massacres and countermassacres of that summer’s campaigns, the word peace would not down. The people of Europe were tired of being killed. Peace was the slogan that toppled the autocracy in Russia. All the revolutionary parties there sympathized fervently with the aims of the conference of the world’s socialists which the Second International, recovering from the paralysis into which it had been thrown by the martial ecstasy of the early years of the war, had called in Sweden. Wilson’s answer to the Stockholm convocation, like that of the British and French governments, was to refuse passports to the Socialist leaders invited. Bakhmetief, Kerensky’s envoy to Washington, had been camping on Colonel House’s doorstep in Magnolia in an effort to convince him that Mr. Wilson was making a grave mistake.