Paris was in a panic at the end of May 1918. Once again, as in 1914, the German armies threatened the city. A million people fled. The dazed soldiers of seven French divisions, outnumbered two to one, cried, "la guerre est finie!" as they tumbled back in wild disorder. When Pershing took supper at the headquarters of the supreme Allied commander, Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the French generals were so demoralized "they sat through the meal scarcely speaking a word." It seemed that nothing could stop the Germans.
But there was something. On May 31, the United States Army entered the battle for Paris in a memorable way. The 3rd Division went into the line at Château-Thierry. Its 7th Machine Gun Battalion put its guns across the roads and bridges of the Marne, and the Germans got no farther. On June 1, the 2nd Division, made up of Marines and Army regulars, went into position to the west of the village across the Paris-Metz highway.
There was a price. The Americans had to learn a whole new battlecraft. The Marines attacking German positions in the village of Bouresches advanced into machine gun fire in regular ranks, five yards apart, 20 yards between each rank, and fell in regular lines like wheat before a thresher. A British reporter observed: "Nothing had been seen like it, in mass innocence, in hope and at the end in unavailing heroism and self-sacrifice, since the British attack on the Somme in 1916." Only 20 Marines in the attacking battalion survived unscathed. But Belleau Wood fell on June 25 after 19 days of hell and if its strategic value was slight there was again a psychological impact, this time on the German commanders. The Yanks were coming, they were fresh and fearless and they could win battles.
Pershing had released troops only reluctantly for combat under Foch, preferring to hold them back for integration in the American army he was assembling. He got into blazing rows with the Allied leaders because he insisted on saving shipping space for the support services and equipment to complete a full American division. "You are willing to risk our being driven back to the Loire?" challenged Foch. "Yes," responded Pershing, "I am willing to take the risk." They threatened to refer the dispute to Wilson. "Refer it to the President and be damned," retorted Pershing. French Premier Georges Clemenceau urged Foch to fire the "invincibly obstinate" Pershing; but in the end, they all compromised. The British cut down their food imports and made hundreds of ships available, Pershing agreed that 310,000 of the troops to be shipped in June and July would go into battle, with 190,000 held back for support and supply, so that he could continue to build up his integrated army. The German high command had calculated that such an acceleration was not possible. It was astonishing. Only 84,000 troops were shipped in March, but in April 118,500 arrived, in May 246,000, in June 278,000, and in July 306,703.
There was another crisis before the integrated American Army first went into action on its own on September 12, two months before the end of the war. A force of 550,000 Americans and 110,000 Frenchmen neatly excised Foch's "hernia," the salient at St.-Mihiel, but Foch proposed a late change of plan, for good strategic reasons, that would have split up Persh-
ing's precious army. For a mad moment, Pershing was tempted to strike the generalissimo. The quarrel was patched up,
but at the cost of Pershing agreeing to disengage quickly from St.-Mihiel to launch another attack 60 miles away in the Meuse-Argonne sector. It bogged down. By this time, though, the Germans had had enough. On October 4 the new German chancellor, Prince Maximilian von Baden, asked President Wilson for peace. The Kaiser, fleeing to Holland in his pajamas, abdicated on November 9. The armistice was signed on November 11.
What was the American contribution to victory? In 1918 the British captured 188,700 prisoners and 2,840 guns; the French captured 139,000 men and 1,880 guns; the American Expeditionary Force captured 48,800 soldiers and 1,424 guns. But the American contribution must be measured more broadly-by its role as munitions maker from 1914 to 1917, without which Britain and France would have been defeated; by its part after 1917 in defeating the U-boats; by the battlefield inspiration provided by the doughboys-but above all by the gleaming potential of men and steel that the Germans could see on an endless horizon. No one country "won" the war. The French stopped Germany from winning in 1914. The Russians drained manpower. The British on land and sea made victory a possibility from 1916 on. The United States made it a certainty. Captain Liddell Hart, the British historian, summed up the achievement of Pershing and his men: "It is sufficient to say there was perhaps no other man who would or could have built the structure of the American Army on the scale he planned. And without that army the war could hardly have been saved and could not have been won."
The scale of the American effort by three divisions (equal in number to six Allied divisions) was small on the vast panorama of the western front, where the Germans deployed 192 divisions, but the psychological impact of the glowing young Americans, singing "Hail! Hail! The Gang's All Here!" at the top of their voices as they marched east to battle, was quite prodigious. "We all had the impression," wrote Jean de Pierrefeu, an officer on the staff of General Henri Pétain, "that we were about to see a wonderful transfusion of blood. Life was coming in floods to reanimate the dying body of France."
THE LAST DAYS OF INNOCENCE
by Meirion Harries and Susie Harries