Mile 47
La Fayette-- Nous Voici! The United States in World
War I, France and Missouri
On a
road leading out of the city of Versailles, two distinguished generals face
each other. On one side of the road, on top of a massive thirty foot high column,
a statue of General Gilbert Motier, Marquis de La Fayette rides his horse. Engraved
at the statue’s base are the names of the American Revolutionary battles that
he fought in: Richmond, James River, Newport, Monmouth, Brandywine, and
Yorktown. At the bottom of the column, a quote from him reads: “A l’instant ou
j’ai appris que l’Amerique luttait pour son independence mon Coeur s’est enrolé.”
(The moment that I learned that the Americans were fighting for their
independence, my heart was enrolled). As noted in previous mileposts, without
the aid and troops from France, the American Revolution would probably have failed.
The statue
which mirrors La Fayette honors General J.J. Pershing, the American commander
of the U.S. troops in World War I. His noted battles are Cantingy,
Villers-Cotterets, L’Argonne, Le Meuse, Canal de San Quentin, and St. Mihel. At
the base of his column, it simply reads “La Fayette—Nous Voici!” On July 4th,
1917, Pershing led a parade of American doughboys through Paris which ended at
La Fayette’s tomb. Once there, a senior staff officer with Pershing declared in
French “La Fayette—We are Here!” In 1917 and 1918, U.S. soldiers arrived to
repay the debt to La Fayette and to France.[1]
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| Statue of La Fayette at Versailles |
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| Statue of Pershing at Versailles |
In 1915, the Allies attacked at
Artois in May and Champagne in September but failed to break through the German
defenses. When their advance stalled on October 6th, an estimated
130,000 were dead. For that year, almost 500,000 French soldiers died.[5]
Time and again, throughout the war, generals on all sides sent their troops
over the top of the trenches into no man’s land where machine guns (firing up
to 450 rounds per minute) and artillery mercilessly mowed them down.
1916 brought additional massacres.
The Germans tried to break through at Verdun beginning in February and then for
ten months attacks and counterattacks flung men against the entrenched
positions. In the end, the Allies had halted the Germans but the French lost 162,000
men with over 200,000 wounded. The Germans had comparable casualties.[6]
On July 1st of that
year, Allied forces tried to crack the German line at the Battle of the Somme. Carnage
resulted as the combat dragged on. Causalities (killed, wounded, or missing)
just for the month of December totaled 498,000 for the British, 440,000 for the
French, and 414,000 for the Germans. As historian Yann Thomas notes: “…minimum
ground had been gained against maximum losses.”[7]
Such slaughter decimated a generation in Europe.
In 1917, the Eastern Front
changed the war dramatically. Russia collapsed into revolution and withdrew
from the Triple Entente. This freed up Germans troops to move to the trenches
in France for a final push to capture Paris and win the war.
In anticipation of a new offensive
against France, Germany targeted the alliance with the United States. The
German Foreign Office sent the “Zimmermann Telegram” to Mexico proposing that
if Mexico entered the war on the Central Powers side and attacked the U.S., it
could regain Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. Germany also declared unrestricted
submarine warfare in February to target the supplies coming from the U.S.
Provoked by these actions, President Wilson (who had won reelection the
previous fall on the slogan “He kept us out of war”) asked for and got the
Senate to declare war against Germany on April 6th.
The U.S. had been engaged in combat
before joining the Allies in Europe. On March 6th, 1916, General Pancho
Villa and his army had attacked the New Mexican village of Columbus and killed seventeen
people. In response, the U.S. Army invaded Mexico. Chasing Villa led to the
first combat uses of trucks and airplanes by the Army. While U.S. troops never
captured Villa, the combat experiences gained in Mexico proved useful for those
officers and soldiers who headed to the increasingly mechanized war in Europe.
In fact, the commander of the Villa pursuit, General Pershing, became the
commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe.
In all, 2,000,000 U.S. soldiers
shipped to Europe with 1,200,000 going into combat. Equipping the American
troops took a lot of items. They needed 5,000,000 overseas caps, 12,000,000
wool tunics, 22,000,000 wool shirts, 5,700,000 gas masks, 2,500,000 rifles,
1,960,000 bayonets, 2,710,000 steel helmets, 26,000,000 boots, and 10,700,000
canteens.[8]
The European allies provided additional materiel, especially machine guns and cannons.
At the Aisne-Marne American
Cemetery and Memorial, I luckily stumbled onto a talk that Superintendent James
Burtelson was giving. He presented an overview of the action around
Chateau-Thierry in the summer of 1918. The Germans, wanting to win the war
before the U.S. troops arrived in force, launched a surprise attack on May 27th.
Along a fifty mile front that stretched from Soissons in the west to Reims in
the east, the Germans advanced fourteen miles, and by June 5th, they
had entered the city of Chateau-Thierry on the north bank of the Marne River. If
they crossed the Marne, Paris beckoned only fifty miles away.[9]
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| Map of German Salient summer 1918 from the Chateau-Thierry Monument. |
The French commander, General
Foch, desperately asked for troops from Pershing who rushed all the U.S. forces
he could to stop the Germans. The 2nd Division, including the 4th
Marine Brigade, replaced the worn out French units in early June. On June 6th,
the Marines and the rest of the 2nd Division counterattacked in the
Belleau Wood and engaged the Germans for twenty days. A trailside marker in the
Wood described this as one of the most fiercely fought battles in U.S. Marine
Corps history. As a tribute to the Marines’ ferocity, the Germans dubbed them
the Teufelhunden-- Devil Dogs. In
clearing out the Germans, the 2nd Division took 10,000 casualties
with 1,800 dead.[10]
William A. French, one of the
Devil Dogs, later wrote:
I had my trench knife in one hand
and my rifle in the other, waiting to either be killed or captured…. We have
not closed our eyes for two nights…. We had planned on sleeping for a few
hours, but we could hear men in ‘No Man’s land’ calling for help. Finally each
call became faint, and finally stopped—they had died.[11]
Fighting in dense woods, often
at night and under artillery bombardments that included poison gas, Marines
continued to push back against the Germans.
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| Trenches and an artillery crater at Belleau Wood, 100 years later. |
A German intelligence report from interrogated U.S.
prisoners stated: “The various attacks by both of the Marine regiments were
carried out with vigor and regardless of losses. The morale effect of our
firearms did not materially check the advance of the infantry. The nerves of
the Americans are still unshaken…. A characteristic of one of the prisoners is
‘we kill or get killed’.”[12]
At Belleau Wood, the modern Marine Corps earned its stripes.
Stymied at the Wood, eight
divisions of German soldiers tried to outflank the Americans east of
Chateau-Thierry, but the 3rd Division repelled six successive
assaults, earning the nickname, “Rock of the Marne.” In this action, the 3rd
suffered 3,401 dead and 12,764 wounded. The Allies then went on the offensive and
eliminated the German salient by August 6th. Ten American Divisions
(310,000 men) participated in this offensive. The repulse of the Germans and
the subsequent Allied offense along this front cost U.S. forces 67,000
casualties.[13]
Superintendent Burtelson then
took us to a room where he showed us bullets and shrapnel that the ground
keepers had recently collected in the forest. He passed around a two foot long piece
of mangled shrapnel that weighed about fifteen pounds. If it hit a person, it would
tear apart a body. Then he said that military divisions aren’t buried at the
cemetery, that men are, and he took us to his office to talk about a couple of
the men who died at Belleau Wood.
Holding up a copy of a death
certificate, he said that he talks to the dead. He researches those who died by
reading documents obtained from military records. He introduced us to John
(Chick) Havden, who died in Belleau Wood but whose grave is unknown. Some 1,000
slain men were never recovered from this battle. Then he showed us a photo of
Jim Dean, a fifteen year old who enlisted by lying about his age. We read a
letter to Dean’s mother from someone who witnessed his death. Dean was second
in line on a patrol winding their way through the dark woods around 2:30 am.
They were wearing gas masks to protect themselves when a machine gun burst
killed the first man in the line who was the bugler and then Dean. The letter
assured his mother that he died instantly without suffering. Superintendent
James said that most letters assured such a painless death although many men
died in horrible ways.
As the Allied troops advanced
toward Germany, the Germans called for peace. In a clearing surrounded by woods
outside of Compiègne, the French, British, and Germans met in Foch’s railroad
parlor car to end the war. At the Armistice Clearing, the belligerents signed a
temporary halt to hostilities that took effect on the 11th minute of
the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th
month in 1918. We now call it Veterans’ Day; however, the British call it
Remembrance Day and the French Armistice Day. The railroad tracks that brought
the opposing sides to the meeting, the statue of Foch that guards the clearing,
and a railroad car similar to the one where the Armistice was signed still reside
there.
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| The Ainse-Marne American Cemetery, France. |
The
Treaty of Versailles, signed in the Hall of Mirrors on June 28th,
1919, punished Germany, blaming it as the sole aggressor for the war. In truth many
of the European countries were equally guilty. The treaty imposed excessively
harsh war reparations on Germany and mandated its army be reduced to only
100,000 troops, with no tanks and airplanes. The German, Austria-Hungary,
Russian, and Ottoman Empires all collapsed and even the overseas domains of
Britain and France struggled in the economic devastations of the war. The map
of the Middle East was redrawn by the victors which still impacts that region.
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| Europe after the First World War. From World War II Museum at Caen, France. |
In the
final reckoning, the harsh treaty that ended World War I begat World War II.
Germans, reduced to poverty due to the war reparations and run-away inflation
of the 1920s and 1930s, embraced a nationalist leader who railed against the punitive
treaty and rose to power. We will return to the rise of Nazism in the chapter
on the European theater in World War II.
In the
U.S., President Wilson, hailed as a savior in Europe, returned from the peace
negotiations to a hostile Senate which never ratified the Treaty of Versailles.
His Fourteen Points, including self-determination for colonial people, an end
to secret treaties, and the creation of the League of Nations, suffered first
from unsympathetic Allies who wanted revenge against Germany, and then from
recalcitrant U.S. senators from both parties who objected to parts of the
treaty. In campaigning to gain public support for it, Wilson suffered a stroke
and served his last year in the White House disabled and isolated.
The 1,200,000 U.S. soldiers who
engaged in combat for 200 days held a quarter of the Western Front. Of these soldiers,
117,000 were killed in action with 139,000 wounded or missing. Nonetheless,
their contributions are recognized at the Chateau-Thierry Monument: “With many
German units exhausted and 9,000 new American soldiers pouring into France each
day, the balance had tipped.”[14]
The United States’ entry into World War I proved decisive in the Allied victory.
In justifying the graphic images
by the artists and photographers who documented the war, art critic Adeline
Adams said: “It must be told, the pictured story of our country’s past in the
World War…. We are of a forward looking habit; we have such a wealth of
tomorrows on our mind that we forget our yesterdays, their glory and bitter
cost.”[15]
Remembering the horrors of the war and the young lives lost continues to be
vital. In fact, in almost every French village, town, and city, a memorial
lists the names of the local men killed. For example, on plaques inside the
Cathedral in Versailles, I counted over 500 names that died from that parish
alone. Often the names of those who also died in World War II are attached to a
memorial, a reminder of how World War I led to World War II.
World War I consumed not just
Europe, but battles raged in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The human cost
dwarfed previous wars with 9,500,000 military deaths, 21,000,000 wounded, and 4,000,000
prisoners or missing[16].
In this increasingly mechanized war, most casualties came from artillery,
machine guns, and poison gas. For civilians, some 13,000,000 died from
starvation, massacres, or as collateral damage. An influenza epidemic towards
the end of the war killed an additional 20,000,000 and 50,000,000 people
worldwide.[17]
The Great War ushered in a new type of combat which destroyed millions of young
lives as well as the old world order. The twentieth century never quite recovered
from it.
The Pershing-La Fayette Monument was erected in 1937 by
France which “symbolizes the mutual gratitude of the two nations for the help
each gave to the other in their struggle for freedom.”[18]
The Chateau-Thierry Monument was dedicated in 1929 to commemorate the American
contribution to stopping Germany’s last offensive in the summer of 1918. The Aisne-Marne
and the Oise-Marne American Cemeteries are managed by the American Battle Monument
Commission which Pershing directed after World War I. The Armistice Clearing
was constructed in the 1920s, and Arthur Henry Fleming, an American
industrialist, financed the museum there which opened in 1927. Hitler used the
clearing and the railroad car where the armistice was signed to stage the
abdication of France in 1940. The Nazis destroyed the museum that year, which
was reconstructed in 1950. The U.S. National World War I Museum in Kansas City
was opened in 1926.
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| From the exhibit at the Chateau-Thierry Monument, France. |
Armistice Clearing and Museum
60200 Compiègne, France
+33 3 44 85 14 18
Aisne-Marne American Cemetery
02400 Belleau, France
+33 3 23 70 70 90
Chateau-Thierry American Monument
This monument is managed by the Aisne-Marne Cemetery.
Oise-Aisne American Cemetery
02130 Seringes-et-Nesles, France
+33.(0)3.23.82.21.81
National World War I Museum and Memorial
2 Memorial Drive
Kansas City, Missouri
64108
(816) 888-8100
[1]
Exhibit text at Chateau-Thierry American Monument, France.
[2]
Exhibit text at Chateau-Thierry Monument.
[3]
Exhibit text at the Armistice Memorial Museum, Compiègne, France.
[4]
Exhibit text at the Armistice Museum.
[5]
Yann Thomas, World War I: From
Mobilization to the Armistice (Bayeux, France: OREP Editions, 2017), 11; exhibit
text at Musée
de l’Armée—Invalides,
Paris.
[6]
Thomas, World War I, 15.
[7]
Thomas, World War I, 16.
[8]
Exhibit text at the National World War I Museum and Memorial, Kansas City, Missouri.
[9]
Exhibit text at Chateau-Thierry Monument.
[10]
Exhibit text at Chateau-Thierry Monument.
[11]
Exhibit text at Chateau-Thierry Monument.
[12]
Report from the German IV Reserve Corps intelligence officer, accessed at Aisne-Marne
Cemetery, France.
[13]
Conversation with James Burtelson, superintendent at Aisne-Marne Cemetery; exhibit
texts at the Chateau-Thierry Monument and the 3rd Division Memorial
in Chateau-Thierry; American Battle Monuments Commission brochure for
Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial.
[14]
Exhibit text at Chateau-Thierry Monument.
[15]
Exhibit text at Chateau-Thierry Memorial.
[16]
Exhibit text at Musée de l’Armées—Invalides, Paris.
[17] http://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-I/killed-wounded-and-missing;
http://www.bing/profile/history?FORMS=EDGEHS.
[18]
Exhibit text at the Pershing La Fayette Monument, Versailles, France.
