The Great War Crucible

The First World War has been so overshadowed by the Second that it seems largely forgotten. Arguably, however, it was the defining event of the 20th century. Certainly it was for the U.S. Marine Corps. Before the war, the Marines had been popularly regarded as a kind of colonial- era infantry, given over to exotic adventures in the Caribbean and Far East. Their role in World War I earned them recognition as a strategically important fighting force.

When the fighting began in 1914, the prospects of the United States entering a European war appeared unlikely. America was a very isolationist country. Europe seemed far away—five days by fast steamer. Indeed, Woodrow Wilson won re-election as president in 1916 largely on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.”

But events were pushing the United States into the conflict. In early 1917, the Germans resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, and suddenly American ships were being sunk. Then, the British intercepted a cable that indicated that the Germans were trying to spur Mexico into invading the United States. In exchange, Germany promised to help Mexico regain its lost territories in the U.S. Southwest. (That notion was not as absurd as it may sound; U.S. forces, including a brigade of Marines, had landed at Veracruz in 1914, and, in response to cross-border bandit raids, an Army punitive expedition had entered Mexico in March 1916 and was there until February 1917.) Such German provocations prompted Wilson to reverse his stance. At his request, Congress declared war against Germany on 6 April 1917.

Almost immediately, military missions from Britain and France arrived to tell Wilson’s government how American manpower should be used. The French suggested sending small U.S. units, perhaps up to regimental size, that could be melded into brigades with veteran French units. The British had an even simpler plan: Send American youths to England, where they would be channeled through British regimental depots and used to replenish British battalions.

To the United States, both were out of the question. Wilson wanted a powerful American army for political reasons—so the country would later have more influence in peace negotiations. U.S. Army Major General John J. Pershing, named commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, was adamant that U.S. troops be deployed under an American command for military reasons.

The mobilization of American manpower and industry for war was remarkably rapid, achieving in days or weeks what today would require months or years. The Army had to expand to 30 times its peacetime strength; it went from 130,000 men at the outbreak of the war to more than four million by the armistice, 11 November 1918. Some two million of those soldiers went to France, and a million fought in the Meuse-Argonne, the last great battle of the war.

By comparison, the Marine Corps grew fivefold, from 14,000 to more than 75,000.' The less-dramatic expansion carried some advantages for the Marines: It left them with a higher percentage of trained officers and NCOs, many of whom were veterans of expeditionary service in China, the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Santo Domingo.

In line with the Marine motto, “First to Fight,” George Barnett, the Corps’ major general commandant, insisted that a Marine regiment be in the first convoy to sail for France. Political strings were pulled, and Barnett got his way. A new regiment, the 5th Marines, was hurriedly activated—one battalion at the Philadelphia Navy Yard and two at the new Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia, which had been erected at breakneck speed near a fishing village on the Potomac River. Small companies of Marines were brought in from all over the United States and overseas, mainly the Caribbean, and filled to war strength with recruits. The 5th Marines, under command of Colonel Charles A. Doyen, sailed from New York on 14 June 1917 in the first convoy of troops bound for France.

Pershing did not quite know what to do with his Marines. Nominally, they were to be a regiment in the 1st Infantry Division, which was just being formed. At first, they were parceled out by companies as line-of-communications troops—that is, military police, guard units, and port companies. Not until the late summer of 1917 were they brought together as a regiment. By then another regiment, the 6th Marines, was being formed at Quantico. It would be sent to France battalion by battalion during the fall and winter. Pershing decided that the two regiments should be brought together as a brigade in the 2d Infantry Division, then being formed. The 4th Brigade of Marines was activated in October 1917, with Doyen, newly promoted to brigadier general, commanding.

The numbering of brigades and divisions in Pershing’s AEF was a very orderly business. These were “square” divisions—that is, each had two infantry brigades of two regiments. Each division also had a brigade of artillery, a regiment of engineers, and many other supporting troops. The square American divisions were very large—28,000 men at full strength, two or three times the size of the average war-worn British, French, or German divisions. General Pershing had two good reasons for their size: First, it gave them staying power, and second, he did not have enough field-grade and general officers to staff a multitude of smaller divisions. The size would prove both an advantage and a disadvantage.

In the 1st Infantry Division, the two infantry brigades were designated as the 1st and 2d Brigades of Infantry. In the 2d Infantry Division, the two brigades were the 3d Brigade of Infantry and the 4th Brigade of Marines. The latter was quickly shortened in everyday use to “4th Marine Brigade.” There were three kinds of divisions in the AEF: Regular Army, National Guard, and National Army divisions. But that did not mean there were many “Regulars” in the Regular Army divisions nor even a preponderance of National Guardsmen in the National Guard divisions. Increasingly all three types of divisions were filled with draftees. By contrast, the Marine Corps continued to recruit volunteers.²

In addition to the two infantry regiments, the 4th Marine Brigade included the 6th Machine Gun Battalion. Eventually, each infantry battalion would have a machine gun company armed with French Hotchkiss heavy machine guns, reliable but clumsy weapons. Previously, the Marines had Lewis light machine guns. The British used these guns throughout the war and liked them, but for mysterious reasons, the Lewis guns were taken away from the Marines. In their place, the leathernecks were issued Chauchats (Sho-shos), rather odd-looking and temperamental French automatic rifles. Not until after the armistice would the Marines be rearmed with superb Browning M1917 water- cooled machine guns and well-regarded Browning M1918 automatic rifles. It was said that Pershing had not wanted these weapons issued prematurely, for fear the Germans would copy them.

General Pershing still was intent on building an American army, which he planned to have ready to use in 1919 as the instrument that would win the war. Events caused him to change his mind, hut only slightly. The 1917 Russian Revolution led to the collapse of the Russian army, which in turn enabled the Germans to transfer a large number of seasoned divisions from the Eastern Front to the Western in early 1918. In the calculus of war, this gave the Germans the advantage of having 200 divisions in France—a full 20 more than the Allies. With the divisions came the powerful team of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff to direct the German effort in the West. They calculated that Germany could win the war—or at least a favorable peace—by launching an offensive against the French and British before the Americans could arrive in sufficient numbers to make a difference.

By early 1918, the 4th Marine Brigade had come together in a training area near Bourmont in eastern France. It numbered almost 10,000 men, the same size as many of the French and British divisions, but it was not yet combat-ready. Pershing was insistent on training in long marches and open warfare; the French were equally insistent that training concentrate on trench warfare. By March 1918, however, the 2d Infantry Division, under command of Major General Omar Bundy, was ready for some “on- the-job” training.

The division deployed to a quiet sector of trenches near Verdun, where the American battalions were paired off with French battalions. In theory, the process was to be gradual. As soon as the Americans were considered combat-ready, the French battalions were to depart and American regiments—and later American brigades—would take over. But it did not turn out quite that way.

During the third week of March, the Germans, in the first of their five 1918 offensives, came close to driving a decisive wedge between the French and British armies near Amiens. In desperation, the British and French agreed to a joint Western Front command. General Ferdinand Foch became the overall commander, but with limited powers. Pershing agreed to the temporary assignment of American divisions and regiments to the British and French armies.

The French thinned out their lines near Verdun, and briefly the Marines held a sector vacated by a French division. In early May, Brigadier General Doyen was sent home because of illness (he would be dead in five months), and Pershing gave command of the 4th Marine Brigade to an Army officer, James G. Harbord, who had been a close friend since the two men served together in the U.S. 10th Cavalry. As chief of staff of the AEF, Harbord had jumped from major to brigadier general in a year.

Within a couple of weeks the brigade was withdrawn from the front and moved with the rest of the 2d Division to an assembly area near Paris. Most of these long-distance moves were carried out using the French military railway system, which was much ridiculed by the Marines for its dinky boxcars, the “40-and-8s” that could carry 40 men or eight horses. The division had very few trucks of its own for motor marches. The French furnished trucks (camions). Many of the drivers were “Annamites.” A later generation of Marines would know them as “Vietnamese.”

By this time the German onslaught seemed to have halted, but on 27 May the Germans jolted the Allies with their third big 1918 offensive, breaking through the French lines on the Champagne front. This sector had been quiet since a failed French attack the previous year that had been so disastrous much of the French army mutinied. After 1917, the French army, now under General Philippe Petain, was reliable only for defense. Even then, the French had authorized a so-called “flexible defense”—essentially permitting their commanders to give up ground at their discretion.

For the Germans, their success on the Champagne front was unexpected. They drove toward the crossing of the Marne River at Chateau-Thierry, which, in turn, opened a route to Paris, only 40 miles away. On Memorial Day, 30 May, the 2d Division prepared to move to the front. It arrived west of Chateau-Thierry on 1 June, posting itself astride the Paris-Metz road. The Germans, meanwhile, poured through a four-kilometer gap torn in the French lines to their north. From 1 to 5 June, the Marine Brigade fought a defensive battle. On 6 June, the Marines attacked. Their principal objective was a small wooded area about a kilometer and a half wide and three kilometers long called the Bois de Belleau, which was the hunting preserve of the comte de Belleau. The battle for Belleau Wood lasted almost until the end of June. Nearly 90 years later, the forest remains an eerie place, seemingly filled with ghosts.

The battle was not well fought. It was a confused crisscrossing of battalions and companies stumbling blindly through gas-choked woods and suffering horrendous losses from German machines guns and field artillery. The Marines lost almost half their men, but they beat the best the Germans had to offer.

After Belleau Wood, the battered Marine Brigade had only two weeks to prepare for the next major battle. During the brief interlude, Pershing sacked Major General Bundy, the 2d Division commander, and gave command of the division along with a second star to James Harbord. Colonel Wendell Neville, commander of the 5th Marines, got the Marine Brigade and a star.

The Germans launched their fifth and final offensive— the last throw of the dice—on Bastille Day, 14 July 1918. Anticipating the attack, General Foch had already prepared a counteroffensive. Attacking southwest of Soissons, the U.S. 1st and 2d Divisions and the French 1st Moroccan Division would be the spearhead. For the Marine Brigade, it was a two-day battle. On 18 July, the 5th Marines, led by Lieutenant Colonel Logan Feland, attacked, coming out of the Foret de Retz. The next day, the 6th Marines, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Harry Lee, passed through the 5th and continued the assault. It was a very violent battle, more violent than Belleau Wood had been. The casualties were half those of Belleau Wood, but they were incurred in just two days of fighting. By comparison, however, it was a well- fought attack, heavily supported by French, as well as American, artillery; by French tanks; and by French aircraft. French cavalry waited to gallop through any gap in the German lines in the best Napoleonic style. Such a gap did not open, but after Soissons, the Germans never again mounted an offensive.

By the summer of 1918, the Germans were short of infantry, but they had enormous numbers of machine guns and quick-firing field guns. Moreover, half of the shells the German artillery was firing contained deadly gas, mostly mustard gas. Attacks had to be carefully planned with very fixed schedules. Most artillery fire was prearranged from map data; very little was controlled by forward observers. Unfortunately, these carefully planned attacks almost always broke down into kind of a shapeless melee.

After Soissons, the 2d Division went into a rest area near Nancy to rebuild and refit. Marine Brigadier General John A. Lejeune had arrived in France at the end of June. He paid a call on Pershing, telling him he was authorized to propose the build-up of the Marine Brigade to a division. Another brigade and an artillery regiment were in training at Quantico, the command of which Lejeune had just left. Pershing said he would accept another Marine brigade, but he did not want the artillery regiment. As for deploying a Marine division, he reported to the secretary of war: “While Marines are splendid troops, their use as a separate division is inadvisable.”³ In fairness to Pershing, he knew that forming a Marine division would require pulling the Marine Brigade out of the 2d Division, where it was functioning very well. Moreover, a Marine division could not be combat-ready until 1919.

Lejeune was initially assigned temporary command of the 32d Division’s 64th Brigade. Cross-service assignments were not unusual. Harbord, an Army brigadier, had commanded the Marine Brigade, and numerous Marine field- grade officers had been assigned to the Army for duty; at least two commanded Army regiments. A number of new Army second lieutenants—90-day wonders—were detailed to duty with the Marines. Quantico also had been turning out second lieutenants, but by 1918, the brigade preferred to commission its own lieutenants from its sergeants, many of whom were then sent to Army schools in France.

Lejeune, after a short stint with the 64th Brigade, was transferred to the 2d Division. He briefly led the Marine Brigade, and then Harbord left to take over the troubled Service of Supply.⁴ With a promotion to major general, Lejeune became the commander of the 2d Infantry Division in late July, the first Marine to command a division.

Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt visited the brigade at Nancy. Back in January, General Pershing had ordered the leathernecks out of the green Marine uniforms they had worn to France and into Army olive-drab uniforms. As a mark of distinction, Roosevelt now authorized enlisted Marines to wear Marine Corps collar emblems, until then, an officer’s privilege. The emblems took the form of round disks with embossed eagle, globe, and anchor. To further distinguish themselves, some Marines also had eagle, globe, and anchor devices affixed to the front of their British-style helmets.

During the first week in August, the 2d Division moved to the Marbache Sector, a quiet 12-mile stretch of front south of the southern tip of what was called the St. Mihiel Salient, a deep penetration the Germans had held since 1915. The Marines had a rather pleasant time there, but something big was coming; Pershing was ready to take command of an American army in the field. He had organized his best divisions into two corps, and their objective would be the reduction of the St. Mihiel Salient. The attack began on 12 September. Lejeune’s 2d Division went into action the next day, and by the 15th, the Marine Brigade had met its objectives. It was an easy victory for Pershing’s army, helped considerably by the fact that the Germans had already begun to withdraw from the sector.

All along the Western Front, the Germans were falling back to a line of prepared positions that the Allies called the Hindenburg Line. Foch, now a full-fledged marshal, ordered a general offensive in which the AEF was given the Meuse-Argonne Sector. Americans were coming to France at the rate of a quarter-million men a month. In the haste to build up rifle strength, the new divisions were arriving without their artillery or combat-support units. With his most experienced troops still at St. Mihiel, Pershing had to begin the Meuse-Argonne offensive with half-trained divisions and soon found that commanding both the AEF and a giant field army was too much for his headquarters. The field army was divided into the First, Second, and eventually Third Armies. In effect, Pershing had become an army group commander.

The 2d Division, meanwhile, was detached for service with the French Fourth Army. By the end of September, the French had been stopped near Somme-Py in the Champagne Sector. The key terrain there was Blanc Mont— the “White Mountain”—a low ridgeline held by the Germans since 1914. The Fourth Army’s commander, General Henri Gouraud, wanted to break up the 2d Division into brigades or regiments to support his weakened French divisions—or so he said. Or perhaps he tricked Lejeune into saying the 2d Division could take Blanc Mont if it remained intact. The 2d’s attack began on 3 October. The Marine Brigade made a frontal assault against the ominous ridgeline; the 3d Infantry Brigade came up on the right flank. It was costly, but it worked. By 6 October, the 2d Division had taken the ridge and the Marines had moved on to the village of St. Etienne.

After Blanc Mont, the 2d Division returned to the U.S. First Army and was assigned to the V Corps, commanded by Major General Charles P. Summerall. Lejeune got along well with most of his Army peers and seniors; he was a graduate of the Army War College, and many of the ranking generals were his classmates and friends. Summerall, however, was the exception.

The 2d Division was given a narrow front, just two kilometers wide, and the mission of driving a wedge into the German lines. By now, the division knew its business well. It attacked on 1 November, with the Marine Brigade out front. The offensive went like clockwork, and the Germans retired behind the Meuse River.

Elsewhere the German army was in full retreat, but in front of the Americans it exhibited a streak of stubbornness. And then Lejeune was ordered to make a night crossing of the Meuse. He protested; everyone knew that an armistice was imminent. Summerall nevertheless ordered that the attack be carried out on the night of 10 November. Footbridges were thrown across the Meuse, and the crossing was made under heavy German fire. The armistice came at 1100 the next day. Some Marines were still fighting at 1400, and a patient German officer had to tell them that the war was over. The Marines blamed the costly attack on Summerall, but it was not really his fault. Pershing had ordered his field armies to capture the best possible defensive positions in case the Germans continued to fight after the scheduled armistice. And Pershing, in turn, had received his orders from Foch.

So the war ended, and the Marine Brigade marched into Germany as part of the Army of Occupation.’ During the war, the strength of the Corps had grown to just over 75,000, about 32,000 of whom served in France. Casualties there, nearly all of them in the 4th Marine Brigade, totaled 11,366. Of these 2,459 were killed or missing in action.⁶ Only 25 Marines were taken prisoner. The Corps had made its mark.

The “Embedded” Floyd Gibbons

Long before “embedded” journalism became the norm in the Gulf wars, Floyd Phillips Gibbons, war correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, was plying his trade by being up front where the action was. In 1916 he rode with “Black Jack” Pershing into Mexico pursuing Pancho Villa. In February 1917 he was a passenger on RMS Laconia when she was torpedoed. Half an hour after his rescue and arrival in Liverpool, he had cabled his story to the Tribune.

When the Marines first went into Belleau Wood on 6 June 1918, Gibbons, cocksure on how the assault would go, had already filed his first dispatch. German machine-gun fire cut him down, with wounds in his head, shoulder, and arms. Army press censors, thinking he was dead, let his dispatch go through as written, and the American public, ignorant of the unreported hard fighting done at Chateau-Thierry by Army doughboys, seized on his hyperbolic story that the Marines had saved Paris. Army resentment colored Army-Marine relations well through World War II. (Some say that resentment still persists in certain corners of the Army.)

The indomitable Floyd Gibbons continued to file dispatches while in the hospital, emerging in mid-July, the white eye patch that became his trademark covering where his left eye had been, in time to report from the front lines at Soissons. The end of the war did not slow him down.

In 1929, he pioneered national radio news with a daily 15-minute summary that brought his machine-gunlike delivery into millions of homes, a voice also heard in many of the newsreels made possible by the new talking pictures. His narration of the 1930 film With Byrd at the South Pole earned him an Academy Award.

The ’30s also saw him covering Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and China’s war with Japan. In Shanghai and Peking he renewed friendships in the U.S. Marine garrisons with some of the officers and men he had known in France. Ironically, in September 1939—just as World War II began—he died of a heart attack on his farm in Pennsylvania at age 53, thus missing out on the second act of the Big Show.

E.H.S.