FREE ESSAY ON MEUSE-ARGONNE OFFENSIVE

MEUSE-ARGONNE OFFENSIVE

The Meuse-Argonne Offensive
Even as Pershing had been preparing and launching this first big American attack, Foch's
original plan had been growing by bounds. No longer was the offensive to be confined to a
British strike along the Somme and an American drive on Mezieres. The new plan also
included a Belgian-British-French attack along the Lys and French attacks in between
British and Americans. It was to be a grand assault all along the frontosaid Foch: Tout
le monde a la bataille!. The aim was to cut the enemy's rail line at Mezieres and
Aulnoye, the latter in front of the British, and thereby force the Germans to retire
inside their frontier before winter set in. For the offensive Foch had 220 divisionso160
in line, 60 in reserve. They included 42 of the big American divisions, although some of
these had only recently arrived and Pershing would be forced to cannibalize others to
obtain replacements. Ten American divisions would still serve with British and French
armies.
Assisted by the French Fourth Army on the left, the American attack was to begin first,
on September 26. It posed a tremendous logistical effort involving rapid transfer of some
800,000 men, 200,000 French moving out of the new American sector west of Verdun, and
600,000 Americans moving in. That it was completed in secrecy and in time for the
jump-off was attributable in large measure to the planning of a young officer on
Pershing's staff, Col. George C. Marshall. Again the British and French furnished most of
the artillery and tanks (190 French lights) and some of the 800 aircraft supporting the
attack.
The terrain over which the advance was to pass was studded with natural and man-made
obstacles. From high ground east of the Meuse River, which formed the right boundary for
the attack, and from densely wooded high ground of the Argonne Forest in the left of the
attack zone, German eyes could look down on much of the battlefield; and in the center,
between the forest and the river, the Germans held a hogback ridge replete with fortified
spurs and stone-walled villages. The Germans had established three lines with trenches,
barbed wire, deep dugouts, and concrete fighting posts, while a fourth was under
construction farther back. Particularly formidable were strongpoints at Montfaucon,
Cunel, and Barricourt.
In a sector approximately twenty miles wide, Pershing massed three corps, each to employ
two divisions forward, one in reserve. With a superiority in men of 8 to 1, he hoped to
make the ten miles through the first three German positions in one sustained drive.
The infantry began to advance before daylight after a 3-hour artillery bombardment.
Achieving surprise, they caught the Germans with only four divisions in the line. General
Bullard's III Corps on the right pushed five miles through both the first and second
German positions, but General Cameron's V Corps in the center ground to a halt before the
bristling defenses of Montfaucon, and General Liggett's I Corps on the left could advance
little more than a mile through the thick, almost trackless Argonne Forest.
During the next few days, the troops plodded slowly forward, at last carrying Montfaucon
and putting the V Corps through the second German line, but progress amid the trees and
dank ravines of the Argonne Forest still was slow. Flanking fire from east of the Meuse
and from uncleared portions of the Argonne harried units on the right and in the center.
Most of the supporting tanks succumbed to the usual troubles of mud and mechanical
failure. Congestion and muddy roads hampered resupply. Most serious of all was the
inexperience of the troops, for having used his experienced divisions in the St. Mihiel
salient Pershing had had to withhold them from the first assault. Units got lost, message
traffic broke down, some commanders failed.
Any hope that an advance by the French Fourth Army on the left might unhinge the Germans
in front of the U.S. troops went for naught, for the French were making no more rapid
gains. As September came to an end, Pershing had no choice but to pause to reorganize.
Elsewhere on the Western Front, progress was, with one exception, not much more
encouraging. The Belgian-French-British effort on the Lys bogged down in rain and mud, as
had every offensive in that region, while the French in the center of the Allied line
were not to begin their attack until British and Americans on their flanks had driven
deep enough to threaten the Germans opposite them with entrapment. Only the British along
the Somme provided any indication of decisive success, scoring a deep penetration of the
Hindenburg Line with the help of the 27th and 30th Divisions of the U.S. II Corps. The
penetration was soon expanded to create a gap all the way through the fortifications, but
the effort left British troops temporarily spent.
Despite the disappointing progress of the grand offensive from an Allied viewpoint, it
was enough to start a collapse within the German High Command. On September 28,
Ludendorff mused at such length on the miseries besetting him that he worked himself into
a rage, foamed at the mouth, and fell to the floor. That evening he called on Hindenburg.
The situation, the two agreed, was infinitely worse than in August when they had first
urged the kaiser to seek peace, advice that had produced no results. They had no
alternative now but to agree to surrender all conquered territory in the west and try to
negotiate a peace on the basis of President Wilson's Fourteen Points.
On October 4 the German chancellor cabled Wilson asking for an armistice. Without
informing the Allied governments, Wilson answered with a request for clarification. The
German chancellor replied on October 12 that the Germans agreed to all Fourteen Points;
but by this time word of the peace feeler had reached the French and British, who for
their part were in no mood to accept Wilson's unilateral actions. Furthermore, Ludendorff
himself had recovered
from his convulsive fit, had seen that the Allied offensive had imposed no rout, and had
come to believe the Germans could get terms that would allow them to withdraw behind
their own frontier, reorganize their armies, and resist any peace proposals they deemed
unacceptable.
Yet events were taking place that were destined to tie Ludendorff's hands and harden
Wilson's resolve. Not the least of these were continued fierce German resistance and the
revelation, in those areas where the Germans were forced to retire, of wanton destruction
and a barbaric disregard for human life more flagrant than those excesses of 1917 when
they had left behind a wasteland in retiring into the Hindenburg Line.
On the Meuse-Argonne front, Pershing's First Army renewed its offensive on October 4
after inserting experienced divisions into the line, but during the brief pause in
operations Ludendorff had brought in reinforcements. The fight to clear the rest of the
Argonne Forest and pierce the third German line progressed no more swiftly than before.
In the Argonne a lost battalion', of the 77th Division was surrounded for five days
before other troops could break through to free 194 survivors out of an original 600. In
the Argonne, too, an American patrol took about 75 Germans by surprise and was herding
them toward the rear when German machine gunners opened fire, killing and wounding 9 out
of 17 in the patrol. When a German lieutenant led a charge aimed at the survivors, Pfc.
Alvin C. York, a Tennessee sharpshooter, cut down 15 Germans one by one until at last
surviving members of this group too surrendered. When a count could be taken, it revealed
that York had captured 132 of the enemy.
To dispense with the troublesome German flanking fire from heights on the other side of
the Meuse, General Pershing broadened his attack to include the east bank. To control
that phase, Pershing created the Second Army under General Bullard. Relinquishing command
of the First Army to General Liggett, Pershing himself moved up to the level of army
group.
Despite the added strength on the east bank, the fight continued slow and costly, for
Ludendorff looked on the offensive as such a threat to the vital railroad through
Mezieres that he eventually committed 27 of his reserve divisions to this sector. Some
help developed on the left when on October 5 the U.S. 2d Division, attacking with the
French, captured high ground known as Blanc Mont, prompting a slow German withdrawal
before the Fourth Army back to the Aisne River. On the 10th, the I Corps finally cleared
the last of the Argonne Forest, but bitter fighting continued through the rest of the
month for the fortified hills between the forest and the Meuse. Not until the last day of
October was the third German position broken all along the line.
The British in the meantime had renewed their offensive, driving forward inexorably as
the Germans fell back grudgingly from one prepared position to another. It was in this
section that much of the evidence of German destruction and barbarity was found.
At the same time, continuing activities of the U-boats also helped to crystallize Allied
resolve. On the 10th, a submarine torpedoed a passenger steamer off the coast of Ireland
with a loss of 300 lives. A few days later another U-boat sank an Irish mail boat taking
the lives of 520 passengers, mostly women and children.
Affected by the public outcry over these incidents, President Wilson made clear in his
reply to the second German note that the Allied military leaders would set the terms of
the armistice, that there was no other way to deal with a government that persisted in
illegal and inhumane acts. The note concluded that if the United States had to deal with
the military masters and the monarchial autocrats of Germany now, or if it is likely to
have to deal with them later in regard to the international obligations of the German
Empire, it must demand, not peace negotiations but surrender.
Confidence restored, Ludendorff called on his government to reject the terms; but the
government was by this time listening to the voices of a disillusioned people, the noise
of riots in the streets, and to the threat of Marxist revolution. On October 27 the
kaiser dismissed Ludendorff, who repaired in disguise to Sweden, and events strode
swiftly toward a climax. The German naval commander tried to take the High Seas Fleet to
sea in a last bid for glory, but the crews mutinied and brought the ships back into port
with revolutionary flags flying. Revolutionary councils formed among the soldiers in the
trenches. Bulgaria in late September had already dropped out of the war; Turkey followed
on October 30; Austria-Hungary on November 3. On November 6 Ludendorff's successor,
General Wilhelm Groener, urged the government to conclude an armistice within three days
or face chaos.
All along the front, meanwhile, the Allied armies had renewed their offensives in what
became a general advance. In the far north two U.S. divisionsothe 37th and 91stofought
with the Belgian-French-British force under the Belgian king. Haig's British troops
entered their objective of Aulnoye on November 5, while the French armies maintained
steady pressure against the German center.
Beginning on the first of November, the U.S. First Army renewed the attack with the V
Corps in the center driving six miles the first day to take heights just south of the
fourth German line near Barricourt. This feat assured success of the whole operation, for
it prompted German withdrawal behind the Meuse. On November 5 the III Corps forced a
crossing of the Meuse, and
three days later American troops held high ground overlooking the city of Sedan, a few
miles east of Mezieres, and brought the lateral railroad under artillery fire. There the
advance stopped as Marshal Foch shifted the American boundary eastward to allow the
French the honor of retaking Sedan, scene of a disastrous French defeat in 1870.
The Meuse-Argonne was the greatest battle yet fought by the U.S. Army. Almost 1,250,000
American troops had participated during the course of the offensive. Casualties were
higho120,000 of all typesobut the results impressive. Until the last, this battle had
worried German commanders most; unlike other sectors of the front, here they had little
space short of a vital objective that they could afford to trade for time.
The German Surrender
Under pressure of continuing Allied attack and of public agitation at home, the Germans
early on November 8 sent delegates to a railroad siding in the Compiegne Forest west of
Soissons to discuss armistice terms. The next day the kaiser abdicated, fleeing to the
Netherlands in exile, and the Germans proclaimed a republic.
Under terms of the armistice, the Germans were to withdraw from all occupied territory,
including Alsace and Lorraine; retire all armies to the east bank of the Rhine; provide
the Allies with bridgeheads beyond the Rhine; and relinquish specific amounts of military
equipment that would preclude their continuing the war.
The fighting ended at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918.
Men died right up to the last, but finally, after more than four grim years, it was over.
Of the men of all nations in uniform, more than 8,500,000 died, and total casualties
exceeded 37,500,000, a price that would forever invite criticism of the way commanders on
both sides fought the war. American casualties alone totaled 320,710.
So ended the first adventure of the United States in departing from its traditional
policy of noninvolvement in European affairs. That the nation could make such a decisive
contribution in so short a time hardly could have been conceived in advance.
That there would be mistakes, blunders, shortcomings under such a rapid expansion and
commitment was perhaps inevitable. Until mid-1918, for example, when separate replacement
training camps were at last established, units both in the United States and overseas had
to be broken up to provide replace-
ments. This practice was damaging to morale and damaging too in that it sent many poorly
trained men into the lines. So close did the American supply system in France come to
breaking down that in the summer of 1918, under threat of intervention from Washington,
Pershing had to exert special efforts to rescue it. Pershing himself was overburdened
with command responsibilitiesotheater, line of communications, and tactical. The
dependence on the Allies for air, artillery, and tank support, however inevitable in such
a rapid deployment, did nothing for efficiency on the battlefield. On the home front some
Americans vented their hostility on other Americans for no more valid reason than their
ancestry.
Yet countless other things were done effectively. The nation handled conscription with
minimum friction and without disruption of the economy. The Army expanded with almost
incredible speed while still maintaining efficiency. The Navy performed invaluable
service in defeating the submarine and, with British help, in getting the Army safely
overseas. Although the war ended before American industry could demonstrate its full
wartime potential, the record, with some exceptions, was impressive nevertheless.
Most important of all, the nation and its Army had provided a force that reached
embattled Europe in time to rejuvenate flagging Allied fortunes and provide sufficient
advantage to assure victory for the Allied side.