PROMINENT IN AMERICAN WAR LEGISLATION
Senator G. M. Hitchcock
Chairman Foreign Relations Committee
(Harris & Ewing)
Congressman Claude Kitchin
Chairman House Ways and Means Committee
(Harris & Ewing)
Senator L. S. Overman
Senator F. M. Simmons
SCENE OF THE NEW AUSTRIAN OFFENSIVE
It is thus of most vital influence upon the operations going on along the Piave that the British on the Asiago Plateau, on June 15, and the French on Monte Grappa, the next day, and the Italians elsewhere even covering a diversion at the Tonale Pass, should have hurled back with severe losses the initial assaults of the enemy in the mountain regions. On June 18 the Austrians claimed to have taken 30,000 prisoners and 120 guns since the 15th; the Italians and their allies claimed 2,500 prisoners.
That the Greeks are certainly in the war was revealed on May 31, when the news was published that they had, with the aid of French artillery, captured some 1,500 Bulgar-German troops on the Struma front in Macedonia. Meanwhile, however, General Guillaumat, who succeeded General Sarrail as commander of the allied armies there in December, has returned to France to take charge of the defenses of Paris.
Advices from Constantinople, via Moscow and London, indicate that the Turks, having reached an agreement with the Caucasus peoples, are assembling troops across the Armenian-Persian frontier, so as to block the advance of General Marshall with the Anglo-Indian forces up the Tigris. The left wing of the Turks, on June 14, reached Tabriz and Lake Urumiah, in Persia, 200 miles northeast of Mosul on the Tigris. Marshall is 60 miles south of that place.
Captain Rizzo of the Italian Navy, who on the night of Dec. 9-10 sank the Austrian pre-dreadnought Wien in the Harbor of Trieste and put another ship of the 5,000-ton class, now known to be the Budapest, out of commission, again distinguished himself on June 10, when with two torpedo boats he cut through the destroyer convoy of two dreadnoughts of the Viribus Unitis class (20,000 tons) and sent certainly one and probably both to the bottom off Dalmatia—one being seen to sink before his eyes and the wreckage of the other being subsequently picked up. This exploit leaves only one of these mighty ships afloat, the first having been torpedoed in the Harbor of Pola on May 15.
Trying to Corrupt Italy's Troops
The Astounding German Order for Fraternization and Penetration on the Italian Front
The April issue of Current History Magazine contained the text of a German order for undermining the morale of Russian troops by fraternization. Early in May a similar order was found on a German prisoner captured by French troops on the Italian front. The order is as follows:
281st Division, First Section, No. 226.—Confidential.
Not to be communicated to troops in the first line.
First—Following the telephone order, Geroch No. 2,080, you are asked to intensify with efficacy the propaganda with the enemy army.
Second—The object of this propaganda is to disorganize the enemy army and to obtain information regarding it. The propaganda must be carried out in the following manner: (a) By throwing into the enemy's trenches newspapers and proclamations destined for the more intelligent elements; (b) by persuading the troops by oral propaganda. For that it will be necessary to utilize officers, under-officers, and soldiers who appear to be most adapted. The posts for making contacts with the enemy must be placed under the direction of the company commander, who must be in the first-line positions. These officers must ascertain the points where it will be the easiest to throw into the enemy trenches newspapers, proclamations, &c. At these points you must seek to gain contact with the enemy by means of our interpreters, and if the enemy consents then fix an hour for future conversations. You must then advise immediately by telephone the chief of the Information Bureau of the division of every contact with the enemy.
Only the chief of the Information Bureau will have the right to direct the conversations according to the instructions he has received. It is rigorously prohibited for any of our soldiers to enter into relation with the enemy except those who have received the mission to do so, for fear that the enemy may seek to profit by their ingenuousness. All letters and printed matter which the enemy may have on his person must be taken from him, and transmitted to the chief of the Information Bureau. Company commanders, above all, must seek to establish the points where the enemy's soldiers have received newspapers, the points where the newspapers were taken openly, and without precaution. There are posts of observation for the artillery, as it may happen that French officers or foreign army instructors are in these posts.
In these enterprises for obtaining contact with the enemy, success depends on the ability with which you operate. Good results can be obtained by calling in a friendly tone and indicating sentiments of comradeship or by reiterated promises not to fire and offers of tobacco. The tobacco for this purpose will be furnished by the company commanders.
Every evening, at 8 o'clock, the company commander must transmit directly to the information officer a report of the propaganda accomplished during the day. This report must contain the following indications: (a) Has the enemy picked up our newspapers and proclamations? (b) Have you endeavored to enter into relations with the enemy? (c) With whom have you had contact—officers, under-officers, soldiers? (d) Where and when were our newspapers and proclamations thrown into the enemy's trenches? (e) All other information of the enemy's conduct. At the same time, our interpreters will send to the chief of the Information Bureau a detailed report on all conversations they have had with the enemy. The enemy's positions where propaganda is under way must not be shelled by our artillery; they must indicate to the batteries the positions of these points to be spared. The enemy is perfidious and without honor, and it is necessary as a consequence to be careful that they neither take our propagandists prisoners nor kill them. Those of our soldiers who leave our lines for the purpose of carrying newspapers and pamphlets to the enemy must be advised. To protect them it will be necessary to constitute with care special detachments, who will mount guard in the trenches, and who will fire only on the order of the company commander who is directing relations with the enemy.—Signed, on behalf of the temporary commander of the division, the Major General commanding the 62d Brigade.
THE GERMAN OFFENSIVE
Third Month of Desperate Effort to Break the French and British Lines in France
By GEORGE H. PERRIS
Special Correspondent with the French Armies
[Copyrighted in the United States of America]
The May and June issue of Current History Magazine contained detailed descriptions of the first and second months of the great German offensive in France, which began with a terrific blow in Picardy, apparently with the object of driving a wedge between the French and British, and then shifted to a deadly attack on the British in Flanders, aiming to break through to the Channel ports. These phases of the great battle were described by Philip Gibbs. The new phases, sometimes called the third and fourth offensives, began May 27 and June 9, respectively, and are known as the battle for Paris and the battle of the Oise. The blow of May 27 was delivered between Rheims and Montdidier, with the evident purpose of breaking the French lines and clearing the way for a drive to Paris. The descriptions which follow are written by George H. Perris, a special correspondent with the French armies.
[This dispatch was written before the drive toward Paris was launched, and indicates that Mr. Perris had a clear and correct idea of the German plan]
May 26, 1918.—The delay of the third act of the German offensive was abnormal. The first was perhaps, in design and execution, the most powerful operation in the history of warfare. The second, the attack in Flanders in the middle week of April, almost certainly began as a diversion intended to draw the British reserves from the Amiens front and to fill the interval needed for the reorganization of forces.
Up to the middle of April the German armies not occupied in fighting could do little but commence the strengthening of their new fronts, as lines of defense and departure. Their staffs, high and low, must, however, have been already engaged upon plans for the next push. Six or seven weeks then have passed in constituting a new mass of attack, with its armament and transport, in constructing roads and railways, dumps and supply centres, in bringing forward batteries, airdromes, hospitals, and so on.
True, this is not as long as the time of preparation for the first phase of the battle, which may be broadly counted as from New Year's to March 21. But there should be a vast difference between the mounting of a wholly fresh offensive and its pursuit into the later stages. A relentless continuity of pressure is evidently of very great importance after the advantage of the initial surprise. It is the thing which a commander will most aim at.
If the Germans did not keep going on the main line of their attack north and south of the Somme after the middle of April, it was because they could not do so; and the partial success of their ex-temporized campaign in Flanders should not disguise from us this significant fact.
It would be useless at this period of the war, when all Germany demands a decision and nothing less, if the new offensive did not lead to the capture at least of some place of symbolic importance, such as Rheims, Verdun, or Nancy. But that would require a force so large as to cripple the major effort in the northwest. All the military virtue of the German strategy is against such a dispersal of effort.
CHEMIN DES DAMES LOST
May 28—The opening of the attack and the first day's results are thus described by Mr. Perris:
Hindenburg has scored another spectacular success. At dawn yesterday, after three hours' bombardment, composed largely of gas shells, a new German mass attack was thrown upon a twenty-five-mile front, extending from the Ailette near Vauxaillon to the Aisne-Marne Canal near Brimont.
It was four or five times as numerous as the defenders, and in other regards correspondingly stronger. In these circumstances, an attempt to retain the line of the Chemin des Dames would have meant that the French troops would have been massacred before reserves could reach them, and there was nothing for it but to fall back steadily and in good order, using successive lines of trenches and deep folds of ground to punish the enemy for every forward step he made.
As I anticipated in my last message, the method of the first phase of the German offensive was again employed with some improvements. This method rests upon two main elements—the prodigal expenditure of the large reserves obtained by the collapse of Russia and Rumania, and the skillful use of the great advantage of what are called interior lines of communication to throw a mass attack suddenly upon the chosen sector, and so to gain the further advantage of surprise.
The front now chosen was held till a day or two ago by parts of two armies belonging to the group of which the Prussian Crown Prince is the titular chief. General von Boehm's army, extending from the Oise at Noyon to east of Craonne, numbered nine divisions. In the sector of General Fritz von Below, extending across the Rheims front to Suippe, near Auberive, there were eight divisions. The whole twenty-five miles attacked yesterday had therefore been held till the eve of battle by only seven or eight divisions. The exact number of divisions engaged yesterday is not yet known, but it seems to have been about twenty-five, or over a quarter of a million combatants.
There is here a curious difference and likeness as compared with the first phase of the offensive on March 21. To the seventeen divisions already holding the sector of attack there were added another seventeen. This time the same number has been added where there were only eight. Two months ago the front of attack was about forty miles long. This time a rather denser force was employed, perhaps because the Aisne height constituted a formidable position, and it was intended to carry it at a single rush.
While the front keeps its present shape the German staff has necessarily a great advantage over that of the Allies in that it is acting from the centre of a crescent, and they are around and outside of it. If enough time can be given to preparations—and as my last message showed the pause had been abnormal—they must gain a certain benefit of surprise, and with this benefit such a mass of shock must win a certain depth of ground.
Our only notions of the Chemin des Dames were obtained in a time very different from the present emergency, the time of fixed fronts and of methods defensive and offensive that are already old-fashioned to those of us who have watched these blood-soaked hills and gullies for nearly four years through heartrending vicissitudes, who remember Haig's and Smith-Dorrien's first attempts to scale what seemed an impregnable fortress, who saw the French bluecoats rush forward last Summer till at length they stood firm on the cliffs of Craonne and Heurtebise, who explored the Dragon's Cave at Malmaison Fort and the vast Montparnasse quarry when they still stank from rotting flesh.
WITHDRAWAL NECESSARY
It is not a light thing that ground so full of tragic memories should be lost. It seems only the other day that I was adventuring along the Ailette by Anizyle-Château, sleeping in a dugout in Pinon Forest, and examining the outposts that then held the northern edge of the hills.
War pays little regard to sentiment, and it is not any spectacular stroke or sentimental score that will restore the falling fortunes of the Hohenzollerns.
Total Gains of German Drive
SHADED PORTIONS SHOW TOTAL GAINS OF THE GREAT GERMAN OFFENSIVE. THE NUMERALS INDICATE THE SEQUENCE OF THE FOUR BATTLES OR PHASES. THE DRIVE ON THE SOMME WAS LAUNCHED MARCH 21, THAT IN FLANDERS APRIL 9, THE CHAMPAGNE DRIVE MAY 27, AND THE OFFENSIVE ON THE OISE JUNE 9
No doubt the French command found it grievous yesterday to order a retreat to the Aisne. Feebler men might have temporized and lost in doing so many good lives which are, after all, more sacred than the most sacred earth.
The attack could not be anticipated. It was far beyond the powers of the small defending forces to ward it off. With sound tactical sense the heaviest assault was directed toward the eastern end of the Aisne Hills at Craonne as soon as it became evident that this corner could not be held, and that from here the whole line was in danger of being turned.
The German forces included some of the specially trained units that fought in von Hutier's army in the March attack—two divisions of the Prussian Guard and other crack formations. It was only at heavy cost that they got forward so quickly. The French retired from position to position without confusion, firing continuously. The fact that their losses are small in comparison with those of the enemy is an essential point.
THE SECOND DAY
May 29—There has been very severe fighting today, with results necessarily favorable on the whole to the enemy because the allied reserves are only just beginning to reach the front. A strong thrust toward Soissons and the road and railway from Soissons to Coucy-le-Château at the moment when the head of the columns of the offensive were striking south of the Vesle from Braisne, Bazoches, and Fismes suggests that the armies engaged have already been reinforced. [See maps in preceding pages.]
So far an almost insolent boldness has won through, but the French resistance is steadily increasing, and more prudence will soon be necessary. For instance, the River Aisne is a most awkward obstacle to have on your line of communications. The enemy was able to prevent the Allies from destroying all the bridges during the withdrawal, but it is not too late, and the bombarding squadrons of the Allies will doubtless find telling work to do in the early future.
Last evening when the enemy had got across the Aisne near Pontavert part of the British brigade was falling back. A group of French territorials, firing continuously upon the swarming graycoats, were taking refuge in Germicourt Wood and being gradually surrounded. Some Englishmen and older Frenchmen decided to make their last stand, to die there together or to beat the enemy off. A handful of territorials got away to tell the tale. The Englishmen fell to a man.
The French officer who told me of this episode of the battle spoke also of the gallant work of a British cyclist battalion fighting with the French before Fismes, and of the fate of some British officers who lost their lives in blowing up Aisne bridges near Craonne. There was no time to take the usual precautions, but the thing had to be done, and they did it. My informant showed that he felt all the nobility and pathos of these sacrifices, and he wished, as much as I, that the folk at home should hear of them.
The first reports seemed to indicate that the success of the German assault on the British sector led the defenders by a threat of envelopment to retreat from the Aisne heights. This was not so. The Germans first crossed the river further west, and the British left was therefore obliged to fall back.
TERRIBLE BOMBARDMENT
It was the left, and particularly the 50th Division, that had to bear the heaviest of the shock. The bombardment, which lasted three hours, was of indescribable intensity, the chill night air being soon saturated with poison gas, and when at dawn the German infantry, hideous in their masks, broke like a tidal wave upon the thin British line it was overwhelmed. The 50th is a territorial division.
A counterattack toward Craonne failed under a flank fire from tanks and machine guns, and step by step the heroic line was withdrawn through wooded and marshy ground to the Aisne.
The French on the left were resisting like masses with the same bravery; contact was lost with them for a short time, as also with the British 25th and 8th Divisions further east, and as the men fell back a front could be preserved only by a converging retreat toward the south by night. When the hills north of Vosle were reached the 50th Division had lost a number of its officers and other ranks.
The British centre, consisting of part of the 25th and 8th Divisions, was more fortunate. The 25th had been in reserve, and its support in the low and difficult ground at the east end of the Aisne Valley was most important. It and the 8th maintained their second positions till late in the afternoon.
On the right the 21st Division, together with the neighboring French division, had to defend the line of the canal from Berry-au-Bac to Bermericourt against the onset of four German divisions, aided by the strongest fleet of tanks the enemy has yet put into the field. This northwestern edge of the great plain of Champagne is very favorable ground for the use of cars of assault, and it was here that the French made their first experiments with indifferent results that have since been greatly bettered.
These two British and French divisions had the advantage of a line of heights with batteries and perfect observation behind them. They held out obstinately till the retreat of the left made it necessary to move southward.
DESTRUCTION OF SOISSONS
May 30.—During last night the enemy took Fère-en-Tardenois and drove the allied rearguards back to Vesilly, whence the line ran this morning northeast to the outskirts of Rheims. As the Marne is thus brought into the picture, it is pertinent to point out that in the famous battle of September, 1914, the Germans reached to more than thirty miles south of the river in this region.
This is at present their strongest push. The road from Soissons to Compiègne is closed to them, but further south they have got to the road Soissons-Hartennes.
Lest it be thought that the allied reserves are slow in coming into play, I may point out that the front of the offensive has been nearly doubled in length in the last three days. At the outset it was about thirty-five miles. It is now sixty. Merely to make good losses and to provide a screen of troops along this greater extent, with everything in movement, has required effort.
At midnight on May 26 the battlefront was ten miles away from Soissons. The few civilian inhabitants and the many hospital patients had settled down to sleep, the usual hour for airplane raids having passed.
An hour later they and the few army bureaus in the neighborhood were aroused by a sudden outbreak of bombardment, such as they had never heard before, and soon afterward shells began to crash upon the town.
With the wounds of four years of war upon it, the northern quarter completely destroyed and the cathedral grievously damaged, Soissons still possessed something of its old-time grace and air of substantial well being. It would be an exaggeration to compare it with Richmond, for the Aisne is not the Thames and the French woods are not English parks; but after the victory of Malmaison had put the boche back beyond the Ailette we hoped to see the great mansions repaired and the happy life of the shopping quarters gradually revived. Today the Germans are camped in the smoking ruins of Soissons.
INCENDIARY SHELLS
On May 27 at least 1,200 explosive and incendiary shells were fired into the place. The hospitals, including a special hospital for poison gas cases, were hurriedly evacuated, American ambulance cars doing good service in carrying away the wounded.
On Tuesday, the 28th, the bombardment continued, its purpose being, no doubt, to put out of service the most important bridgehead of the Aisne Valley and one of the most important lines of communication between the regions to the south and north, the town being a railway centre of some local consequence. That afternoon a good many houses were in flames, and during the night a large part of the town was involved in fire.
The enemy had now shouldered his way on the north of the Aisne westward from Pinon, Laffaux, and Vregny, and had reached the highroad running from Coucy-le-Château to Soissons. Yesterday he pressed still further west, and the road being thus covered, as well as the roads from Laffaux and Vailly, made a powerful direct attack upon the town.
It looked at first like being an easy success. The French, wearied with thirty hours of unceasing combat and impossibly outnumbered, fell back, and the Germans reached the centre of the town. In the narrow streets, however, the effect of superior numbers largely disappeared. The French fought fiercely from corner to corner, and at last, gathering themselves together, swept the enemy back to the northern and eastern suburbs. In the afternoon new German contingents were brought up and in a few hours gained complete possession of the place.
Soissons was, of course, in no sense fortified, and, the northern and eastern roads having been lost, it had no military value. The highway down the valley to Compiègne is bordered by the old French trench and wire systems and dominated by hills on either side of the river. The range on the south bank is covered for miles by the great forests of Villers-Cotterets and Compiègne.
[Another correspondent stated that 1,200 shells fell in Soissons on May 27. The Bishop of Soissons stated in Paris on June 7 that 100 churches had been razed to the ground by the Germans, and that at least 100 others had been pillaged and partially demolished. The famous cathedral in Soissons suffered severely. The Bishop added that the Germans knew neither faith nor law. They knew nothing but war and pillage. The Germans, he said, were stripping and carrying everything away methodically.
The Bishop also asserted that women, children, and old men had been brutally murdered by German aviators, who flew over and fired with their machine guns upon long lines of refugees on country roads.]
VON HUTIER'S METHOD
Something like forty divisions, most of them the best troops available, have now been thrown across the Aisne—400,000 men who might possibly have reached some vital part of the allied defenses in the north.
The von Hutier method is a prodigious invention, but it is as costly in fire and blood as it is impressive for force and speed. In the last week of March it was, in a purely military sense, properly employed, even though it failed, because the objective could be said to be of a vital or decisive character.
What vital objective is there in the present operation? The central part of the German line has been pressed a little further in the last twenty-four hours in the obscure region of scattered hamlets, large farms, and deep tortuous valleys, midway between the Aisne and the Marne. It now comes nearly down to the small market towns of Fère-en-Tardenois and Ville-en-Tardenois, thence running east-northeast to the Vesle just outside of Rheims.
The advance is meeting everincreasing resistance, and by the time the first week is out it will perhaps be definitely arrested. But suppose that it goes much further and reaches the Marne Valley, or even still further to the Montmirail Valley. Two useful highroads, with some country towns, would be lost to the Allies in these altogether unlikely contingencies, but nothing vital would be lost. The German Army would be no nearer than it now is to winning the war.
A TRAIN UNDER FIRE
In an evacuation station, where a number of British were waiting for the hospital train, the ragged fellows told me of adventures that only their scarlet, honest faces made credible. There was a young Lieutenant who was on a train that was sent up north yesterday toward Fismes. The exact whereabouts of the enemy was unknown. They ran right into the German lines.
The outposts received them with a volley of rifle shots and then came on with grenades. The engine driver stopped the train, jumped down, and took refuge in a ditch. While the fight waxed hotter he was induced to return, and they managed to steam backward just in time, carrying some wounded and three German prisoners with them. The Lieutenant's satisfaction in this last item seemed, however, to be marred by the impression that the Germans were not forcibly captured, but wished to surrender.
The civilian refugees are going south in processions of farm carts, high-ended wagons, and ancient traps, or footing it behind barrows and perambulators. I would not speak lightly of the temporary loss of their lands and homes, but in their ranks there was no sign of panic or fear for the final result.
Most of them were women and children, with a few gaffers, heading a family group or driving cows and big white oxen. Girls with umbrellas up against the hot sun and dust clouds, little children in their Sunday best, and old ladies in Scotch caps sat on piles of straw, amid bedding and furniture, on high wagons. Many of the younger folks had bicycles and many walked, with dogs and goats frisking about them.
EXTENSION OF THE BATTLE
On May 31 Mr. Perris described the extension of the battlefront during the preceding twenty-four hours. He wrote:
The battlefront now forms a vast triangle, the apex pointing markedly toward Château-Thierry and less markedly toward Dormans. The west side runs for about fifty miles from the Oise opposite Noyon to the Marne. The east side runs back thirty miles to Rheims.
The enemy goes on multiplying his objective and distending his lines. The military worth of this strategy is perhaps in inverse ratio to its shown appearance on the map.
On the opposite flanks of the battlefield the allied forces have here been drawn slightly back from the acute salient, marked by the two trivial points named in a previous message, Betheny and Laneuvillette. The ruins of Rheims thus become the corner of the allied defenses on this line. I have explained that the city lies exposed in a saucer at the southwestern corner of the Champagne and is completely dominated by the allied crescent of high positions on the mountains of Rheims.
FIRM ON THE FLANKS
In contrast with the further advance of the German centre, the French and British forces on the wings are holding firm. The great highroad from Soissons to Château-Thierry marks broadly the western limit of the offensive.
On the northern stretch of it there was hard fighting yesterday. In the morning the enemy crossed the road at Hartennes and attacked westward with a number of tanks, but was checked near the hamlet of Tigny.
Further north a well known French division made, with its traditional spirit, a thrust westward across the road and the little River Crise and reached the village of Noyant. It had to fall back, but here, too, the German advance was arrested. The Compiègne road is firmly held, and the disparity of forces is being rapidly reduced.
On the other flank of the battlefield the French and British divisions stand across the hills on the other bank of the Ardre, a small tributary of the Vesle, from Brouillet to Thillois, on the northern foothills of the mountain of Rheims, whence the front runs around the ruined city.
This French division struck out from Le Neuvillette along the canal and captured two hummocks, called Castalliers and De Courcy. It was a bold effort, intended to check the enemy rather than in the hope of retaining the position. This indeed proved impossible, but the French were slow to retire, and the lesson will not be lost upon their adversaries.
FIGHT TO THE DEATH
The news is gradually coming in of what happened on the front, submerged by the assault of Monday morning, (May 27.) Its most northerly part was the low ground beside the Ailette called the Forest of Pinon, which I described fully last Christmas, when I spent several days with the outposts by which it was held, in conditions somewhat reminiscent of Wild West warfare. The nearest trenches were on the hills a mile or two behind, this ground being too marshy to dig in. In the forest blockhouses were then being built, and were laid out while each side raided the other across the frontier on the stream and canal. Nothing then seemed less likely than an attack across such ground, but preparations were being pushed forward with the idea that a few groups of defenders would gather in and around the blockhouses and fight a delaying action, and then, if possible, escape back to the hill trenches.
The event turned out otherwise. When the surviving groups and outposts, amounting in all to three battalions, got together on Monday morning they decided to intrench themselves and to fight to the death. Carrier pigeons brought notes from them to this effect. The last note received was dated 2 P. M. on Tuesday. The best that can be hoped is that some survive as prisoners.
I think it may be said that there is now no danger of a break through toward any vital objective.
STRONGER RESISTANCE
Mr. Perris on June 2 gave the first hint of improved aspects of the battle in the following dispatch:
On Friday afternoon, May 31, General von Boehm's troops opened a new pocket beyond Oulchy of a depth of about five miles and on either side of the Ourcq Valley yesterday. In the course of stubborn fighting this salient was slightly extended, and at the same time a narrow bend was added to their gains between the Oise about Pont Eveque and the Aisne west of Soissons.
The main line of pressure was thus changed from south to southwest, and while the rest of the new front is relatively quiet, there have developed two bulges, which represent the acutest stress of the battle.
The first of these is between the Oise and the Aisne, directed toward the angle of the two rivers at Compiègne; the second, midway between the Aisne and the Marne, points westward along the Ourcq, toward the ancient town of Laferte-Milon.
In both these fields there has been a series of violent struggles this morning, with a notable increase of the power of resistance of the Allies. North of the Aisne the German assaults have been nearly everywhere broken. A slight advance by the Germans on the Ourcq has been won at the cost of very heavy losses, and the French are standing with splendid resolution along its small tributary, the Savieres, which marks the border of the forest region of Villers-Cotterets.
As the enemy has reached the heights northwest of Château-Thierry, where we watch them from the south side of the river, an attempt to push westward along the north bank of the Marne is to be expected.
THE ADVANCE CHECKED
On June 3 Mr Perris was more optimistic than at any time since the battle began. He wrote as follows:
There is a slackening in the violence of the battle. Yesterday's fighting was the most equal I have seen in this stage of the offensive. We lost Faverolles again—this village has since been recaptured—but regained Hill 163, just west of the village of Passy, and broke attacks against Corcy, Troesnes, and Torcy. It is to be expected that the enemy will make new efforts to destroy the French bastion on the bare plateaus between the Aisne and the Ourcq.
Local currents of fortune are also in the nature of things, according as one side or the other decides to throw its local reserves upon this or that point. So far as the intentions of the German command have been revealed, however, it may now be said that the position is in hand at the end of the first week of this third act of the German offensive.
What is the outlook? By lengthy preparation aimed at an unlikely sector the enemy gained ground to nearly as large an extent as in the first act. In the last week of March von Hutier pierced from St. Quentin to Montdidier, say, thirty-five miles. In the last week von Boehm advanced from the Ailette to Château-Thierry, about thirty miles, on a similar length of front. It is too early to attempt comparison of the cost of the two enterprises in losses and exhaustion.
The German staff seems to have counted on employing forty-five divisions in the Aisne offensive. Before the end of last week this figure had been exceeded. No essential objective has been attained, and none has been approached as nearly as in the two northern phases of the offensive. Concentration, not dispersal, of effort is the means to a quick decision. If Germany were not pressed for time and could be content with partial victories, she might be satisfied, but Germany is decidedly pressed for time, and only decisive actions now count.
The Americans are coming into the battlefront, and will presently be there in force. This front now extends over 200 miles. The superiority of aggressive force given by the collapse of Russia and Rumania is ebbing away.
FRENCH OUTNUMBERED
The question will have arisen in some minds why, if the defenses of the Chemin des Dames were as strong as I had represented them to be, last Monday's attack should have so quickly overcome them. Detailed narratives are being accumulated which throw light on this subject. I take the case of the division holding the French left a week ago. We all remember its front, which was naturally and artificially of the strongest. It had nearly twelve hours' notice of what was afoot.
In the first place, the German artillery preparation, though short, was of infernal violence. The rolling barrage was two miles deep. It destroyed the French telephone wires and filled the battery emplacements and machine-gun posts with various kinds of poison gas. Dust and artificial smoke clouds isolated groups of defenders and hid the waves of assault till they broke with a four-fold superiority of force. Many groups were thus surrounded, but fought on for a couple of hours, causing the enemy heavy losses. Many short counterattacks delayed advances and every line of trench wire was used.
But the next most important thing, since reinforcements could not arrive immediately, was that the mass of the division should be held together and drawn back gradually for the defense of more essential positions. These lay beyond the Soissons bridgehead. Reinforced last Tuesday night, the division defended the plateau southeast of Soissons for four days with obstinate heroism.
AIR SUPREMACY OF ALLIES
It may now be said that the allied airmen have established decided supremacy in the new battlefield. The Germans had a week ago, in this as in other respects, the advantage of their preparations and initiative, and they used it boldly, flying low in numbers, and machine-gunning our retreating ranks.
The balance could not be instantly redressed. The airplane seems to be the very type of mobility, but it devours petrol, demands repairs, and, in brief, must carry its camp with it.
Every day of this critical week has seen a larger concentration between the Oise and the Marne, and an increasing number of combats and expeditions. The first essential was to have constant information of the enemy's movements; and this scouting work, though less sensational than some other parts of the air program, remains perhaps the most important of all.
Then followed with growing vigor the development of the aggressive functions of the air service in which it became a sort of extension of artillery and cavalry and even of infantry. A single group in one day brought down six boche planes and three sausages, dropped seventeen tons of bombs in the region of Rheims, and tons on marching columns of the enemy in the neighborhood of Ville-en-Tardenois.
"Our pilots," said a group commander, "had orders not to come back with a single cartridge or bomb, and you may take it from me that they do not waste their munitions on clouds."
On Thursday another group commander, receiving news that an enemy column was stretched over three miles of a certain road, sent about fifty machines to deal with it. They charged as a squadron of cavalry would do, coming down to within twenty and even ten yards of the earth, and with bombs and machine guns effectually dispersing and demoralizing the graycoats.
Many enemy planes and sausage balloons have been brought down, but that is in the circumstances a secondary effort. Lines of communication and rear camps and centres of the enemy also have been harried. On Friday no less than seventy tons and on Saturday sixty-two tons of explosives were dropped by airmen on German bivouac troops.
IN THE MARNE VALLEY
I went down to the Marne Valley yesterday afternoon and from the edge of a wooded hill looked across over part of the north bank where the Germans are established. Established is hardly the word, for everything is floating and provisional in this phase of the war, and it is more than ever invisible except where infantry actions are in course, because there are no fixed intrenched lines. I could not find any trace of the enemy on the opposite amphitheatre of hills, but an observer hanging above at the tail of a sausage balloon may have seen something, for from time to time the French guns blazed angrily over my head and buildings were on fire in the villages.
In this winding stretch of the valley crests rise 500 feet above the broad, strong stream, and there are five or six miles between the two ridges. The French have guns and machine guns in position, and any considerable attempt to cross will be very costly.
Two hundred Germans came over yesterday morning and are now more or less contented guests of the French Republic. But the enemy does not seem to contemplate an immediate passage, if at all. It would probably be tried further west at some point where the northern hills are more dominant. The section of the important objectives appears to lie in this direction.
Immediately behind the zone of mutual observation, all the humming activities of arms are proceeding with a freedom unknown in the days of trench warfare, partly because this is the nature of the war of movement and partly because, like other services, the air squadrons are dispersed and the German airmen cannot obtain more than local and momentary equality. And amid all the flow of troops and guns, the pitching of camps, the laying of field telegraphs, shifting of hospitals and hangars, bringing up of munitions and supplies, there is an air of calm over the whole scene that would astonish those who see the offensive only as it is concentrated in a newspaper sheet.
FIERCE FIGHTING JUNE 3
In his dispatch dated June 4 Mr. Perris described the fighting on the 3d, which was the last desperate attempt of the Germans to advance in that phase. He wrote:
The battle blazed out afresh last night along and south of the upper Ourcq, and the struggle is raging with violence, due, in part, to the fact that both sides have brought up many guns and in part to the desperation of the Germans as once more they see victory slipping out of their hands.
Tactically, the chief feature today is the attempt of the enemy to support the attack on the Ourcq by a thrust further south along its tributary, the Clignon, a small stream following a marshy valley westward to the middle course of the Ourcq. There the most bitter combats have taken place and continue about the villages of Bouresches, Torcy, and Veuilly-la-Poterie. At the latter point the Germans tried to get around to the southward, but were effectually stopped in the Veuilly Wood, a mile south of the village, by Americans. In all this fighting the enemy's losses have been very severe, for in every case we had the best defensive positions, well supported by machine guns and 75s.
I spoke yesterday of the importance of the French stand to the southwest of Soissons, both as limiting the enemy's access to the Aisne Valley and as narrowing his approach to the Ourcq Valley. A slight withdrawal to the line of the villages of Pernant, Saconin, Missy, and Vaucastille yesterday did not materially weaken this buttress of the front. Nor is it seriously weakened by another short withdrawal this morning between Pernant and Missy, for which the enemy has had to pay dearly. We still hold Tresnes and Faverolles, and the prospects of von Boehm reaching Villers-Cotterets are not bright enough to cheer the drooping spirits of Berlin.
AMERICANS AT WORK
Another small warning of the rising power of American arms was given on the Marne yesterday morning, when a fresh band of machine gunners helped a French regiment to break an attempt to cross the river.
Between the Oise and the Aisne homeric conflicts are reported from the neighborhood of Carlepont Wood, in which the hill called Mont de Choisy, after having been lost and recaptured five times, remains in French hands.
In all fields, therefore, the equalization of forces produces a result more and more favorable. The defense of Mont de Choisy is the work of French colonials. These troops had already distinguished themselves, particularly at Douaumont, before Verdun.
Though the pressure upon the Franco-British line from Verneuil, on the Marne, to Rheims, has been much less severe than that on the western flank of the offensive, it is to be noted that the enemy has some of his best divisions in the former area.
French cavalry corps, generally dismounted, but sometimes playing their old part, have rendered excellent service during the battle. One of them after forming an essential element in the retreating line, had to meet Saturday and Sunday repeated attacks conducted by four—perhaps five—German divisions in the Malmaison and Trotte Woods, which crown the hills northeast of Verneuil, forming the buttress of the allied positions beyond the Marne. In the Ourcq Valley toward La Fierté-Milon another body of dismounted cavalry had to stand against some of the best Prussian troops, including the first division of the Guards.
ENEMY'S LONG PAUSE
In his dispatch dated June 5 Mr. Perris noted that a marked pause had fallen on the battlefield. His comment was this:
The pause in the enemy's adventure is a sign of weakness on his part and of advantage to us. Germany is fighting against time. The superiority she gained from the east is passing. The power of surprise has been her greatest asset. After that everything depends for her on speed in the exploitation of her success, and every delay is loss.
The next thing to remark is the great skill with which General Foch has pursued what may be called his provisional Fabian strategy. With surprise and superior reserves in the hands of the enemy, he had to face a situation of extreme difficulty. To weaken other parts of the front prematurely in order to defend the Aisne would have invited a fresh blow in those other parts.
Two needs rose supreme—that of economizing men so as to hasten the day when the Allies should have the superiority of forces necessary to victory, and that of barring the road of the enemy toward every vital objective. These objects have been attained, and if it should turn out that the third act of the offensive is finished, this will mean that, with all the unquestionable ability and daring of the German General Staff, Foch has beaten them for the third time in the two and a half months of their maximum power.
In any case, nothing of first-class importance has been lost. The allied front has not been broken. The roads to Paris, toward which the offensive was turned on the third day, are blocked. The ruins of Rheims are nearly indefensible, but the road to Châlons is barred. The plateaus between the Oise and the Aisne and between the Aisne and the Ourcq stand like bastions of a vast fortress. Château-Thierry is lost, and the eastern railway and the high road are locally interrupted, but the Marne and the Paris road beside it are covered.
Finally, the enemy has engaged fifty divisions of his reserves in this battle, and many of them have suffered very heavily.
AT CHATEAU-THIERRY
The attempt of part of the German 36th Division to cross the Marne at Jaulgonne was frustrated brilliantly by the Americans and French. It appears that a few men succeeded in getting across the river Thursday night [May 30] at this point, eight miles east of Château-Thierry, where the Marne makes a loop by the north.
They took shelter in the cutting and tunnel of the Paris-Châlons railway, which runs along the south bank, and though they lost seriously and their pontoons were destroyed, they got reinforcements over to the strength of a battalion.
An attack to clear them out was, therefore, organized, and this took place Sunday night, [June 2.] By that time the Germans had put twenty-two light bridges across the stream, of which four had been smashed by the French artillery, and had established a bridgehead with six machine guns and a hundred men in the railway station on the south bank opposite Jaulgonne.
This post was frontally attacked by a section of dismounted cavalry who, however, were held up by machine-gun fire until American machine guns came into action. Two sections of French infantry simultaneously fell upon the bridgehead and the Germans broke before them.
The prisoners, of whom there are a hundred, declare that their officers abandoned them at the beginning of the attack. A few men escaped by swimming, and thirty or forty others gained the northern bank by the pontoon boats. The rest of the battalion was wiped out.
The German losses in the action at the bridge of Château-Thierry were severe. It is estimated that a thousand bodies lay by and near the bridge, and the American machine gunners fired tens of thousands of cartridges.
HOW THE BATTLE BEGAN
In his dispatches on June 2 and June 5 Mr. Perris gave these further details of how the battle began:
As further details which I have received of their part in the beginning of the battle clearly show, these divisions, the 50th, 8th, 21st, and 25th, were, it will be remembered, tired from bitter and repeated actions in the course of the northern offensive. They had been on the front only seventeen days when last Monday's attack was made, and therefore had hardly had time to become thoroughly acquainted with the sector. The main force of the enemy assault fell on the front of the 50th and 8th Divisions, against whom there were four German divisions in line and two more in immediate reserve. The odds against the British on this day were two and a half to one.
The 50th Division on the left was doing well on the Craonne Plateau, when in the course of the morning they suddenly found that the enemy was behind them. Owing to this surprise, the neighboring brigade of the 50th Division suffered badly.
By afternoon General Fritz von Below's men had got to the line of the river, and in the evening the British were back at Guyencourt. By Wednesday evening they held a large crescent around Fismes from Lopeigne on the west through Coulanges and Lagery back to the Vesle at Muizon. By this time the fighting strength of the British units was greatly reduced, but reinforcements were coming up and the worst of the crisis was over. The full story of the splendid episode can hardly yet be told, but some day it will shine among the greatest achievements of the war.
Some time must yet elapse ere we can know fully and exactly what occurred on the Chemin des Dames at and after 4 A. M. on May 27. Many of the combatants have died a martyr's death and been buried by alien hands where they fell. Many more will long languish in prisoners' camps; but the remnants of some regiments have now come down from the front to rest, and by piecing together the narratives of these weary men it is possible to make the first outline of the story that will one day be told in all its pitifulness and terror.
One of them is the French infantry regiment which had long held the central sector of this front. For this last trial it had been prepared by months of trench raiding and strengthening its defenses. Submerged by a storm of fire and poison gas and by wave upon wave of assault, it went down in a single morning, fighting the hopeless fight to the bitter end. A small number lived to cross the Aisne in the afternoon, and these had to continue the struggle for four days and nights, practically without respite. Few are those, even in this war, who have survived such agony.
They were warned, and, so far as their local means allowed, were prepared for the attack. Gas masks, machine guns, grenade stores—everything was ready. The order was to hold ground between the second and third positions or to die in the effort, and it was carried out. It was to be expected that the telephone wires would be cut. There remained carrier pigeons. A rolling barrage two miles deep and of indescribable violence extinguished the poor efforts of the local batteries to reply. Thick clouds of artificial smoke, gas, and dust shrouded the assault, so that rocket signals were not seen at the rear and the enemy was invisible till he reached the parapets.
The line was almost immediately broken and the battle became a struggle of isolated groups, heavily outnumbered without the possibility of reinforcement, defending scraps of broken trench dugouts or quarries and still resisting long after the main tide of the conflict had passed south.
A copy lies before me of messages dated from 3:30 to 8:30 A. M. and sent back from these isolated groups by pigeon. No words could be so eloquent as their laconic brevity. When permission to retreat was given some officers refused to avail themselves of it.
The Colonel, with his staff papers, crossed the Aisne at 10 A. M. and organized the defense of the passage. The survivors of the regiment were re-formed on the south bank, and on the following day received a reinforcement of men, bringing it up to a quarter of its original strength. This handful had to meet the heavy attack southwest of Soissons on May 29, and a series of attacks on the following two days. No more was humanly possible, and they were withdrawn. They say that not a man had uttered a complaint.
BATTLE OF THE OISE
A fourth phase of the German offensive opened June 9 on a front of 20 miles between Noyon and Montdidier, which Mr. Perris describes thus:
A new phase of the German offensive opened this morning at 4:30 o'clock on a front of about twenty miles, extending from Montdidier to Noyon. The artillery preparation, which again was rich in gas shells, began at midnight, and covered not only the front, but a deep zone behind it, especially villages and roads where the enemy thought to catch the French local reserves.
There were evident reasons for the choice of this sector, and in particular for seeking control of part of it, for a successful push south along the line of the Roye-Compiègne railway would add another converging road to the four roads leading toward Paris by the Oise, Aisne, Ourcq, and Marne Valleys, which had already been tried. On the other hand, the enemy could not reasonably hope for any such surprise as was obtained in the first act of the offensive before St. Quentin and in the third act of that on the Chemin des Dames.
In general, the French are resisting with dogged courage in their covering positions, which are beyond range of the enemy mine throwers. Evidence accumulates of the heaviness of the German losses in the recent fighting and of the disappearance of the shallow enthusiasm with which the offensive was begun.
In describing the progress of this assault Mr. Ferris wrote on June 10:
The front of the attack was twenty miles in length, as compared with a front of thirty miles in the attack on the Chemin des Dames and fifty miles in the first phase of the offensive on March 21, and so far it is only on the central half of this smaller front that any considerable impression has been made on the French lines.
Whatever may have been the exact design, there had not been this time the same extreme scruple to conceal troop movements, and for some days past the exceptional traffic of convoys, the suspicious activity of the enemy batteries in the correction of ranges and other signs had given warning of what was afoot.
HEAVIER GERMAN LOSSES
One consequence was that, when the German infantry advanced yesterday morning, it had to meet a volume of fire very different from that which had answered the surprises of St. Quentin and the Aisne Heights. French gunners had thoroughly studied the ground before them and were all ready to deluge every path of approach directly that graycoat waves appeared. From the beginning, therefore, the German losses have been heavier than on the earlier occasions, and this must affect the development of the action.
In other respects the now familiar von Hutier manoeuvre appears to have been repeated, shock battalions carrying light machine guns and machine rifles concentrating upon local breaches in our line and leaving the task of cleaning up islands of resistance to the support troops while they pressed on rapidly to exploit the first success. It will probably be found that the operation was begun with about fifteen divisions in the line, approximately 150,000 men, giving a density of one division to a mile and a third.
Faced with a force superior in all arms, long resistance of the first line is impossible, but it is significant that at 8 o'clock yesterday morning, that is after four hours of a terrible storm of gas and explosive shells, followed by four hours of hand-to-hand struggle, our allies were still in a large part of the field fighting within what is called the zone of advanced posts, and only the centre had fallen back on the zone of principal resistance. Plemont Hill, overlooking Lassigny, was still holding out at that hour, although the front had lain immediately beneath it. The villages of Le Fretoy and Courcelles were lost during the morning, but were recovered by counterattacks, in which the French troops showed the highest spirit.
Up to late last night the only result that von Hutier could regard as in any degree justifying the effort made and the losses suffered was the capture of the villages of Ressons-sur-Matz and Mareuil-la-Motte, whereas on the French left before Ribecourt, by Le Tretoy to Courcelles, and on the right from Belval to Cannectancourt, the advance varied from one to two miles. At the centre it rather exceeded three.
This is a poor gain, judged by precedent, and was bought at an exorbitant price, but it has a certain tactical and perhaps superior consequence.
Later on June 10 Mr. Perris gave this further description of the progress of the fighting:
"This is the real battle," said a French staff officer, meaning to contrast today's fierce fighting between forces unequal indeed, but not crushingly so, with the attack on the Chemin des Dames. Here the French had a stronger line, their reserves were nearer, and they had sufficient notice to bring their batteries at every point into effective action. Effective, do I say? At many points it was a massacre of the columns of assault, and there is unanimity as well among the prisoners as among our own combatants that the ranks of the enemy have been torn and plowed with shot and shell. Never, perhaps, has the German Army paid so dearly for an advance which nowhere exceeds five miles.
This is the essential fact which governs all that follows; for if, as the German official press says with a measure of truth, the German objective is not a city or a port, but the complete destruction of the allied armies, so our objective is not to hold a certain geographical area, but to punish the advance so that the enemy forces will be exhausted, while ours are being constantly recruited from oversea for the last stroke that will give us the victory.
The smallness of the enemy's gains in this fourth phase of the grand battle is merely the sign that von Hutier found across his path an adversary prepared as far as was humanly possible, determined and able to contest every yard of ground.
Thus the village of Courcelles, only two miles from the old front, was lost, retaken, lost again, recovered, and remains in the hands of the French. Thus Plemont, a position insignificant as compared with the Aisne Heights, although encircled and covered with fire, was being defended till last evening. Since then no carrier pigeon has come in, and it must be presumed that the heroic handful of men who held this point of the front have been overcome. Their countrymen will not forget them.
The Turning Point of the Battle
By WALTER DURANTY
[Copyrighted]
The turning point of the great battle came on June 11, when the French delivered a desperate counterblow south of Montdidier and drove the Germans back from the Aronde River, regaining important ground along a front of seven and one-half miles, and capturing 1,000 prisoners and many heavy guns. This phase of the struggle is described by Walter Duranty, another special correspondent, whose dispatch is copyrighted for Current History Magazine. It is dated June 11, 1918.
As the battle continues it seems that the second week of June will rank as one of the bloodiest and most decisive periods in the world's history.
It is the veritable climax of four years of struggle. In the last twenty-four hours the violence of the fighting has increased still further. The limit of human endurance has been forced yet another notch higher. Along a front of nearly twenty miles the Germans are driving more than a quarter of a million men forward through a sea of blood. The defenders say that it is as though the whole of the German Army is engaged against them; no sooner is one battalion annihilated than another takes its place, and another and another.
Early yesterday morning a handful of dismounted cavalry, greatly employed for liaison work, fought their way back to the French lines from the surrounded hill of Plemont. They reported that the survivors of the French battalion occupying the position were still holding out when they left, and that no less than fourteen attacks had already been repulsed.
CARPETED WITH DEAD
The grassy slopes of the hill bore a hideous carpet of thousands of German dead, over which new forces still advanced with the same madness of sacrifice as the Carthaginians of old, flinging their children, their possessions, and themselves into Moloch's furnace. The bloody religion of militarism that Germany has followed for forty years has led its votaries to culminating orgies of destruction.
But the defenders are not appalled by the fury of the struggle, nor by numbers. Each position is held until every foot of ground has been paid for by German blood. Again and again a swift counterattack, delivered at the right moment, has wrested from the assailant the fruits of the success he won so dearly and forced him to pay a toll of lives twice over. In the villages thus retaken, the poilus say, gray-clad corpses lay heaped up as though they had been collected for a gigantic funeral pyre, and more than once the advancing enemy was screened from the defenders' fire by a rampart of his own dead.
The general situation of the battle has changed little. In the centre the French have retired slightly. On the left also there is a southward bulge in the line. The right is still held by a wooded massif above Drelincourt. On the right the towers of Noyon Cathedral could just be distinguished. To the left smoke haze marked Lassigny, half hidden in a hollow. It was a natural fortress with an infinity of cover for guns, men, and machine guns against which no fury of sacrifice might prevail. Well may the Germans try to turn that grim salient by an advance further south in the centre—clearly their immediate objective. They held it once before last year's retreat and they know its strength.
As I returned from the observation post I passed through a great natural amphitheatre in a sort of mountain. At one side the Germans had carved a huge eagle, colored blood red, on a slab of rock above a grotto that had been their headquarters. Beneath it in Gothic letters was the Brandenburg motto, "On, Brandenburg, on!" The artist who designed the bird that is the symbol of German violence was well inspired. The Kaiser's eagles are red, indeed, clotted and stained from beak to claw with the crimson of countless slaughters.
The latest information from the battlefront emphasizes still more clearly the difference between the results of the new German method of attack when applied on a weakly held sector and a front where the allied strength is normal. On two previous occasions Hindenburg's storm divisions gained sensational success right from the outset by literally swamping small forces by sheer weight after the defenders had been half-stunned by the terrific bombardment to which their inferiority of artillery permitted no adequate response.
Conditions are very different today. In the first place there was no strategic surprise—the German move in this sector had been foreseen. The utmost vigilance was everywhere maintained, and unmistakable signs, such as the movement of troops, convoys, and artillery registration, had been carefully noted. Precautions to meet the shock had been taken. Against attack in depth by successive waves a depth defense had been planned, with a front line of thinly held outposts to minimize loss, and successive lines of greater strength extending back for kilometers.
When the German artillery storm broke out it was answered by a perfect hurricane of French fire. Not only was every possible point where the enemy troops might advance or batteries be hidden thoroughly registered, but artillery held in reserve had its guns trained on targets offered further in the rear by each hill, wood, or valley that the enemy might assail as a vantage point or medium for infiltration.
The consequence has been that, in direct contradiction to the former drives, the enemy's initial losses have been enormous and his gains small; and the French losses were greatly decreased. Above all, there has been no penetration of the line of resistance. In places it bulged slightly under pressure, but only at the price of the most dogged fighting and heavy sacrifice, and withal very slowly. One fact marks the difference sufficiently:
HOW THEY WERE CHECKED
On May 27 the Germans had reached the Aisne—seven kilometers from the starting point, across difficult country—in four and one-half hours after the attack. In the first thirty hours of the present attack they had barely passed thinly held outposts. Along the whole thirty-kilometer front, from the Oise to Assainvillers—somewhat shorter than the area of bombardment—fifteen to twenty assaulting divisions were met by a galling machine-gun barrage and the terrible "75" fire curtain from quick-firers and batteries. Irreplaceable storm troops, whose training had taken months and whose existence was essential to the continuance of Hindenburg's new strategy, melted like snow beneath the August sun.
At Plemont—the scene of one of the most gallant actions in the checking of the March drive by the men of the same army—the Germans met a stubborn resistance, though their dead lay there thick as fresh-cut wheat but a few hundred yards beyond the line of outposts. Even in the centre, where the enemy's progress was deepest, an unbroken line of defense was constituted by the same troops that had withstood the attack from the beginning. Their spirit and numbers were still sufficient, though the Germans opposing them had sent forward fresh storm troops in wave after wave.
Mr. Perris's Description of the French Counterblow
The French counterblow described above by Mr. Duranty was of great importance in changing the entire aspect of affairs for the Allies. Mr. Perris, in a dispatch dated June 12, gave these further particulars:
Faces that wore a serious expression yesterday morning are decidedly cheerful today. The battle has, in fact, taken a better turn. It is a very dreadful struggle; no Frenchman can forget that fact, and in the fever of weighing and measuring results more distant observers should not for a moment overlook what they mean in flesh and blood. That being said, we may join in the satisfaction of our allies that on its third day the German onset has suffered a distinct check.
Following the front from west to east, the first thing to note is the series of French counterattacks on the left, carried to a considerable measure of success by skill in the direction and high spirit and fortitude in the ranks.
At 11 A. M. yesterday a movement began from a little east of the railway line between Domfront and Wacquemoulin. The infantry were supported by tanks, and along the whole line the Germans were swept back. A French contingent actually reached points which were within the German front. The French advance went well beyond Rubescourt and Le Fretoy, half way between Courcelles and Mortemer, and between Mery and Couvilly, beyond Belloy, and to the border of St. Maur.
Meanwhile the enemy had delivered a very powerful blow at the French centre and had driven a way, despite vigorous opposition, as far as the village of Antheuil, two miles south of the Matz. At 4 P. M. a further counterattack was therefore made from the French left centre, and the enemy advance was completely arrested. In these combats a certain amount of confusion was apparent in the German ranks, and the fact that 1,000 prisoners and some cannon were taken speaks eloquently. This was not the heaviest punishment. Eyewitnesses say that German corpses strew the battlefield in piles.
Three critical days of the offensive have then given the enemy at the cost of enormous losses a not very magnificent result. We now know that the program was to reach Compiègne on the second day. General von Hutier must be greatly disappointed.
The attack was begun with fourteen divisions, at full strength, in the line. They included at the centre divisions of the Prussian Guard and four other crack divisions. About twice as many divisions have now been thrown into this battle, ten already holding the sector and the rest being fresh reserves.
These figures may be measured by the fact that the total German forces in the west amount to 207 divisions, and that of these before the offensive only sixty-two were in the general reserve, the rest being engaged on the front. The more we consider in the light of material considerations like these what the German command essayed and what it has accomplished the more we shall appreciate the valor of the French armies and the qualities of their chiefs; and it is impossible to do justice to either without such reflection.
FRENCH HOLD GAINS
On June 12 Mr. Perris reported that the French were holding their gains and gave these further details of the counterattack the day before:
The French lines hold all the way round from the important position of Mery Plateau by the hamlets of St. Maur and Antheuil to Marest and Chevincourt. Time after time, last night and this morning, the gray-coated masses of General von Hutier came on, only to be mowed down by waves of fire from the 75s and machine guns, and their remnants dispersed with bayonet and grenade.
Yesterday's French counterattacks met great bodies of the enemy prepared to force another advance. Four divisions were found to be ranged in a space of two miles. Hence the frightful intensity of the combat and the abnormal slaughter.
The French tanks did very good service, and fleets of airplanes, British as well as French, swept down upon the battlefield before and behind our infantry, dropping bombs and raining down volleys of bullets wherever a group of enemy soldiers was seen. The numerical inferiority of the French was thus made good.
The block of wooded hills was very difficult to defend, even if the enemy had got no further than Mareuil. The woods prevented long views and open fields of fire; the deep ravines invited infiltrations; the Oise Valley at the back left supply and relief columns open to the German guns, and the Matz Valley, on the west, was the plain path of envelopment. These are the reasons why this corner was not held longer.
Among the wheat and beet fields of the gently rolling plateau further west, on the other hand, the defense had more advantage. There are folds of ground enough to hide its batteries and reserves, but in every direction there are open lines of fire, room for manoeuvre and nume rous railroads. Striking northeast from the Estrées Railway, the French threaten the German centre.
To continue the southward march, even if it were possible, before this pressure on the west had been disposed of would be reckless. Hutier has met his match.
First parade of United States National Army men in London. The photograph shows them rounding the corner at Hyde Park
(© Central News Photo Service)
General Philipot of the French Army decorating American officers who distinguished themselves in opposing the German advance in Picardy
(French Pictorial Service)
THE COMPIEGNE THRUST
On June 13 General von Hutier made a threatening thrust toward Compiègne, which was parried by the French and was practically the termination of further serious efforts in this phase by the Germans. Mr. Perris tells the story of it as follows:
South of the Aisne the high, bare farmlands extending from Soissons to the borders of the forest of Compiègne are cut by a valley running up from the other great forest of Villers-Cotterets to the river at Ambleny. This valley, with the villages of Laversine, Coeuvre, Cutry, Dommiers, and St. Pierre-Aigle, has constituted the front for the last fortnight, with French outposts on the east side, but the real line of resistance on the west.
Von Hutier having met with trouble beyond his expectations on the west of the Oise, his colleague, von Boehm, was sent yesterday morning to create a diversion on this flank of the battlefield. Five divisions, two of them fresh ones, were thrown forward on both sides of Laversine, a front of four miles.
Though outnumbered, the French have given a fine account of themselves, breaking repeated assaults of the enemy, who is reported to have got into the villages of Coeuvre and St. Pierre, a feat more than counterbalanced by the French advance at Damard, further south on the border of Villers-Cotterets Forest, and the admirable action of the Americans on the ground recently taken by them in Clignon Valley.
This, however, is not the best sign for the fifth day of the offensive. Von Hutier's thrust from the north toward Compiègne was by far the most threatening of the numerous lines of attack the German command has now opened. It has been brought to a stop by reactions of the French left and centre, and was this morning contained, as we may hope definitely, from the Mery Plateau and along the course of the Matz.
ENEMY'S FEVERISH HASTE
The feverish haste with which the enemy's attacks are multiplied as the field of the offensive is enlarged, speaks eloquently of the conscious need to bring the grand adventure to a speedy climax. But this haste involves heavy moral as well as numerical usury. Instead of a full normal period for refilling and new equipment, including rest at the rear, or in a quiet sector, and a course of fresh training being given to a division withdrawn from the line owing to its losses, it is hurriedly reconstituted and pushed back into the battlefront after as few days as possible.
Up to now the German armies have been sustained, not only by reinforcements from Russia, but by the long rest of the Winter months; otherwise they could not have accomplished what they have done. These sources of strength are being rapidly exhausted. The human material—cannon food—is failing in quality. The field depots have been emptied of recruits. Men from the depots in Germany are rushed to the front. Cavalry officers are dismounted to fill gaps in the infantry. Men detached for special work are called back to their units, and still the war god is unsatisfied.
Incorporation of the 1920 class began in April and May. Miners and mechanics are again turned into the fighting ranks, ill as they can be spared from industry. It is probable that not a division has been left in the east that would be fit for the western front. Wounded men and invalids imperfectly cured are pressed back into service. And behind the armies thus replenished there is the nation, hungry, enfeebled, terrorized, uttering words of despair even in its letters to the front. Ludendorff may well hurry!
DEFENSE OF COURCELLES
A very brief diary of the battle at a single point will give an idea of its bitter violence. The small village of Courcelles lies across the chief road of the western wing of the offensive, only about two miles from its starting point with the Montdidier-Estrées railway, and the same distance behind it. For these reasons, and because it stands on a spur of the Mery Plateau, it was certain to be a hardly contested position.
On Sunday morning, June 9, taking advantage of the cover afforded by broad fields of well-grown wheat, the Germans came up the slope from Rollot and rushed the village. At 9:40 the French re-formed and retook it, capturing 200 men and four officers. Forty minutes later a new wave was brought up from the north, but was thrown back. Some storm troops, however, got around by the rear. These were in turn repulsed.
Several hours passed in which the three streets of broken houses were put in order for a siege. At 3 P. M. a fresh attack was repulsed. Later in the afternoon the German success at Mery and Belloy resulted in Courcelles being beset on three sides, only a narrow alley of communication to the west remaining open.
The defenders now had their blood up. The reserves would soon arrive. This western flank of the battle was of the utmost importance. It had become a point of honor that the village should not be lost.
At 4:40 A. M. on Monday, after a preparatory bombardment, the next blow fell. In ten minutes its failure was evident, though the fighting about the barbed wire continued for an hour. Three more assaults followed in the afternoon and evening. In the last of these some Germans got into the village, but they were at last driven out. On Tuesday the heroes of this splendid defense reaped the only reward they desired. The great French counterattack definitely freed their little fortress.
TABLES TURNED
This time it was the turn of the French to win the benefits of initiative and surprise. Only a quarter of an hour was given to the French artillery for its preparation work. Tanks and infantry then went forward in alternate lines. An officer describes the advance of the tanks rolling over the green wheatfields, while shells burst around them, as having the appearance of a battle at sea.
The allied airmen, swooping above the moving line, not only sowed death in the enemy's ranks with their machine guns, but also raced forward and dropped bombs with effect on heavy batteries in the rear, killing their crews and putting the guns out of action.
In some enemy units during this battle the men fought well. In others there have been unmistakable signs of demoralization. Such inequalities are not surprising in this crisis. The total superiority of force which a few months ago was enough to have terrified us, and which is still sufficiently serious to require every effort that can be put forth, is ebbing away.
End of Fourth Phase—Two Expert Views
All correspondents on June 14 united in the conclusion that the counterblows of the Allies and the brilliant reaction of the French from Courcelles to Mery ended the fourth phase of the great German offensive. Mr. Perris summed up the situation as follows on June 14:
The front has subsided into actions of no more than local importance. The five days' battle west of the Oise has ended for the Germans, after an advance varying from two to six miles, in a very costly reverse, and for the Allies in a brilliant success of good generalship and indomitable spirit in the ranks.
Beside the losses of the enemy, the French loss of the Thiescourt hills and the wooded part of the valley opposite is of little importance. The offensive which was to give a decision against them is far from finished, but in relation to the resistance it encounters it shows a falling, not a rising, gamut of power.
The first push toward Amiens ended in ten days, having entailed upon the Allies the sacrifice of a tract forty miles deep and serious casualties. The following attack in the north lasted about as long, but with much slighter gains. The German success on the Chemin des Dames brought the Crown Prince's vanguard to the Marne, twenty-five miles from its starting point, but that it touched much less vital ground is proved by the transfer of its centre of pressure to the Ourcq Valley near Villers-Cotterets.
From these results to those of the present week's fighting there is a marked descent, and this failure occurs in what must be accounted one of the most critical directions the enemy can pursue. The ambitious character of his design is now clear. It is not merely to divide the British from the French army and then destroy one of them, but also by a single series of converging operations to destroy them both.
His approach to Amiens as the centre of their joint communications and to Hazebrouck as the door to the Channel ports has been followed by an approach along four converging lines to the region of Paris, the centre of French administrative life. In fact, the attainment of all these objectives would not end the war, for I am sure there is in France, and there probably is in the other countries concerned, a deadly resolution that it shall not be ended in any such way; that, if Paris should be destroyed—which heaven forfend—another capital shall be found, and that there shall be no surrender while there is an army on its legs.
This offensive has had two aims—to reach the crescent north and east of Paris, whence a general attack could be launched, and to draw down, disperse, and harry the allied reserves preparatory to the final "Kaiserschlacht," the crowning blow along the whole line. Its relative failure is a great encouragement.
PETAIN'S MASTERLY TACTICS
Walter Duranty, in reviewing the fourth phase of the offensive, sent the following cable dispatch to The New York Times on June 13:
It has been said that the secret of Pétain's rise in three years from the position of Colonel to Commander in Chief of the French armies is his knowledge of when to launch counterattacks. The ability to select the right place and time for a sudden stroke which nullifies the enemy's gains has been the attribute of great captains throughout history, and is one of the cardinal bases of successful strategy. In that one word, counterattacks, lies the explanation of the triumphant French resistance in the present battle against vastly superior numbers—that and the indomitable courage of the defenders.
The master tactician commanding the army whose sector has been assailed has so imbued his subordinates with his own principles that there is hardly a position in the whole range of operations that the Germans have not been forced to take two or three times over. For it is not only the counter-stroke on a grand scale, like that which has won back nearly all the Germans' gains on the left wing, which counts in a struggle of this kind, where the losses inflicted on the enemy are far more important than a hill or a village saved or abandoned. It is the unexpected change from defense to attack, at the psychological moment, that has maintained the spirit of the French troops and smashed their weakened assailants just as they were thinking their success was assured.
As the situation stands today [June 13] the Allies have won a great victory in one of the hardest fought battles of the war, and a carefully planned move in Hindenburg's desperate struggle against time has been met and nullified. The Germans have also learned to their cost that the American troops are already to be counted with. The enemy, whose morale is daily weakening under the strain of non-successes and never-ending calls upon his strength, has received a bitter reminder of the American menace, which more than any other factor is responsible for his convulsive striving after a speedy decision.
[M. Tardieu, in a cablegram June 18 to the French High Commission at Washington, stated that 80,000 Germans had been put out of action in the Noyon-Montdidier offensive, and that General von Hutier had failed completely to realize his objective—the capture of Compiègne.]
Austrians at Grips With Italians
By AUSTIN WEST
[Copyright, 1918, by The New York Times Company and Current History Magazine]
[See Map of Italian Front, Page 15]
An offensive was launched June 15, 1918, by the Austrians against the Italians with an army estimated to number 1,000,000 men. The attack was on a front from the Asiago Plateau to the sea, a distance of ninety-seven miles. The course of the struggle in the first four days indicated the failure of the drive. The details of the earlier stages of the battle are given herewith.
According to statements of prisoners, the Austrian objectives on the first day of the attack were Bassano, eight miles down the Brenta, and Treviso, eight miles west of the Piave. The attack along the Piave from the Venetian lagoons to Montello was aimed at possession of the main roads leading to Montebelluna, Treviso, and Mestre, five miles west of Venice, thereby cutting off Venice and thrusting toward the heart of the Venetian Plain.
In the meantime General Conrad von Hoetendorf's armies from Monte Grappa to Asiago were to sweep down upon Asolo and Bassano to prevent the retreat of the 3d Italian Army from the Piave and complete the march of invasion from the north.
Austria's hopes and aims are reflected very strikingly in an Order of the Day, dated June 14, compiled from Field Marshal Boroevic's proclamation and circulated among the troops of the 3d Regiment over Commander Mitteregger's signature. A copy has just fallen into Italian hands. It runs as follows:
From the Adige to the Adriatic the Austrian Army descends into the field against Italy. All the forces and all the material of the monarchy are for the first time massed against one single enemy as the outcome of preparations begun many months ago. Tomorrow the Italian command will learn this tremendous news from the mouths of our guns. The entire Italian front will be attacked, and to free himself from our iron grip, which will encircle his whole front, the enemy would be obliged to engage reserves far vaster than those at his disposal.
From trench warfare we shall pass to that of movement and shall occupy a country abounding in victuals and stores of every sort. Let us therefore press forward resolutely toward the City of Verona, where a century ago the august founder of our regiment stood victor against the combined armies of France and Italy.
Today, (June 17,) nevertheless, after forty-eight hours of fighting, the enemy still is held upon his first lines.
The British forces regained all the positions they held on the eve of the battle. The French contingents southeast of Asiago on Turcio Road recaptured Pennar in a bayonet charge and drove the Austrians back far beyond their starting point. Counterattacking at Cornone, our allies stopped effectually the enemy's dash toward Valstagna and took 500 prisoners. Fenilon and Moschin Mountains, overlooking the Brenta Valley, which the enemy overwhelmed in his first onrush, have also been retaken at the point of the bayonet, with 200 prisoners and forty machine guns.
Along the Piave enemy masses concentrated, chiefly on the eastern slopes on Montello and west of San Dona. In both districts passage across the river was facilitated by a heavy rain of tear shells and smoke bombs, and amid the smoke pontoons and rafts were taken down to the water's edge. Three divisions got across from Colfosco and Ilas, fronting Nervesa, but they were hemmed around at the foot of Montello, at Fagare and Zenson, where the Austrians had penetrated some way ahead. The Italians, after thrusting them from the latter place, encircled some detachments in the river bend.
Croce Village, west of San Dona, was rewon and lost twice over, and now rests in the possession of Italian bombardiers, Bersagliere, and cyclist corps. But the best stroke of luck on the Piave occurred in the Saletto sector. Taking advantage of numerous islets at this point, where the river is nearly two miles wide, one Hungarian battalion of the 96th Regiment had safely crossed, and was being quickly followed by another. Italian gunfire smashed its boats, flinging the occupants into the water. Many were carried away and drowned in the rapid currents, while over a thousand survivors, including a Lieutenant Colonel, a Major, and thirty other officers, out of the haul of 3,000 odd prisoners taken during the day, were made captives by the Italians at that spot.
The Austrians employed such a large amount of gases that the whole battleline was enveloped in dense, impenetrable clouds. Fortunately, a heavy rain fell in that region, which lessened to some extent the effects of the gases.
The Italians fought fiercely with great dash, glad to get at the enemy after so many months of forced inactivity and with an intense desire to regain the country desecrated by the enemy's invasion.
The Austrians kept the Italians under deadly fire, especially aiming at their second lines, to prevent the arrival of reinforcements. This bombardment has small effect in the mountains, as, owing to the limited number of men one can employ at one time, these are able to protect themselves in dugouts excavated in the solid rock.
Snow, which is still lying on the mountains, is heaped up into immense mounds by the bombardment. Italian troops, clothed in white overalls to prevent their being seen against the whiteness, slowly advanced to engage the enemy in hand-to-hand fighting.
Despite the rain, the work accomplished by the English and Italian aviators was above praise. Flying low over the enemy troops, they brought confusion and terror into their midst, intrepidly engaging the Austrians in aerial combats, and bringing down in twelve hours many enemy planes, while also collecting invaluable military information. The English and French contingents co-operated with the Italians in perfect accord and a splendid spirit of camaraderie.
Except for lack of secrecy, the Austrians organized this supreme effort of theirs better than might have been expected. It was well planned and resolutely delivered. The credit due the Italians is all the greater for repulsing it completely in many places, containing it in others, and nowhere allowing it to break through.
The sector on which the enemy gained most ground is on the Piave. There the Austrians made three principal crossings of the river and established three bridgeheads or salients into the original Italian line.
To make this possible they blinded the Italian artillery and airplanes by using great quantities of smoke shells which covered the river and the Italian trenches on its bank with a dense black fog. Thus hidden, the Austrian patrols hurried across the water in boats and on rafts under no more than a random fire from the defense.
Having reached the western bank they pulled pontoon bridges across and pushed reinforcements rapidly forward. The most notable of these crossings was the enemy's penetration in the Montello sector, the position which the British forces held all last Winter.
This sector is the hinge between the mountain and the Piave sectors; it stands at the angle where the Piave leaves the mountains and enters the Venetian Plain. It is an isolated hog's back, 700 feet high in the middle and seven and a half miles long, running almost east and west, with the foot of its northern and eastern slopes washed by the river, its surface undulating, dotted with farms and little woods—an unusual feature—crossed from north to south by no fewer than twenty-four roads. The value of Montello to the enemy would have been that it would dominate from the flank and rear all the Italian positions defending the line of the Piave in the dead flat plain to the south.
The British, after reconquering the advanced positions, momentarily abandoned on June 15 with a view of strengthening the line, not only resisted all Austrian attempts, but counterattacked in a fashion that caused an Italian superior officer to remark: "They are slamming the gates of Italy in the face of the invader."
In a dispatch on June 19 Mr. West recorded the fact that the enemy, while maintaining pressure on the mountain front and Montello district, was redoubling his efforts on the Piave especially west of San Dona. The dispatch continues:
The Austrian hold of the last-named vicinity, also in the Zenson bend and at Saint Andrea, southeast of Montello, is being considerably weakened by the Italian artillery fire and constant counterattacks.
Saint Andrea itself, with the adjacent villages of Giavera, Bavaria, and Sovilla, has changed hands ten times over. The railroad running thence toward Montebelluna is hidden under a litter of dead bodies for a length of several kilometers. The haul of prisoners has risen from 6,000 to 9,000, General Diaz announced last night—an almost unique fact in an offensive of this nature and undoubtedly the fruit of Italy's immediate readiness for an energetic reaction.
Stupendous acts of heroism are recorded. Gunners of an Alpine regiment stationed at the foot of Montello Hill, after being twice driven from their batteries, united themselves to some storm troops, fought the foe in a hand-to-hand encounter with daggers, and, recovering the cannon, readjusted the breechlocks, which they had taken away with them, and then fired pointblank into the adversary's ranks.
At Fagare two Hungarian battalions were annihilated amid the ruins of houses where they had taken refuge. At Candelu an enemy machine-gun corps, which had transformed the village into a fort, were killed by Italian mountain artillery, and in the neighboring sector of Salettuol the 3d Austrian Division lost 60 per cent. of its effectiveness.
Many of the prisoners at the moment of capture present the appearance of Bedouins, being clad merely in tattered shirts, with their rifles slung over their shoulders and a dagger in their hand. Nearly all carried postcard maps marking out their journey, with a program inscribed: "June 15, halt at Treviso. June 16, occupation of Venice." They also carried little packets of money coupons printed in Italian for spending in those cities.
A German View of Germany's Effort
The Recent Offensive
[By the Cologne Gazette Editor at German Headquarters]
The task confronting us before the offensive seemed monstrous. What the combined and many times superior armies of the Napoleonic School and Kitchener's Army, young indeed but drawing its supplies from the resources of a world empire, had failed to accomplish against a force of almost Frederickian inferiority in numbers, this task was to be performed by the German Army, which, even after the absorption of the eastern units, was scarcely equal in strength, much less superior to the enemy. The big hammer had failed to beat down the little hammer; it was now the turn of the little hammer to pit itself against the big hammer. The German hinterland, diminutive in comparison with the continents working for the coalition, was not only to hold its own, but also to help to conquer in battle against the raw materials and industries of half Europe, America, Africa, and Asia. The German victory at Cambrai, which in a sense represented a transition from the old to a new era in the history of the war in the west, had already illuminated the difficulties that a brave and numerically superior enemy could oppose to our attack.
In contrast with the victorious confidence of our veteran defense troops—a confidence that at times excited the amazement of their own leaders—the enemy continued to contemplate the German undertaking with inveterate skepticism. British and French prisoners captured during the Winter months indeed held out to us the prospect of achieving an initial success similar to that which their own offensive had achieved. But nowhere in the world did any one reckon upon more than the customary initial success for our enterprise.
The German High Command decided from the very outset not to fight a "battle of matériel," but to build up success upon a more ideal foundation. Numerical inferiority was to be compensated by the warlike and moral qualities peculiar to the German Army organism. The same virtues that had proved the essential cause of the enemy's defeat were to form the surest guarantees of German victory. To the undeniable bravery of the English and French storming troops was to be opposed the utmost bravery of the German tribes; the good quality of the enemy leaders was to be met by better leading on the German side, and the thorough preparation of our adversaries by one still more thorough.
As the Supreme Command could confidently reckon upon the two first as given quantities, there remained as the chief task the preparation of the attack. Unity of command and of forces, the latter non-German only in respect of a valuable group of Austrian batteries that had been placed in the line, facilitated the tremendous work. Frictions and impediments that are inherent even in the best organized coalition armies were spared us. It is impossible to picture what was accomplished in the map rooms of the German staffs by experienced specialists in defensive warfare, who worked in silence for months, at the highest nervous pressure, in the face of the confident expectation of the homeland and growing tension and impatience abroad. But it is certain that an altogether enormous expenditure of organizing energy was required in order to impart the method of attack; to ascertain and control the situation of the enemy; to supply the striking force with munitions and provisions; and finally to produce that masterpiece, the veiled march into line.
Addresses by the Kaiser
He Extols Militarism and Defines the Issues of the War
The German Kaiser in two telegrams acknowledging congratulations on the thirtieth anniversary of his accession to the throne made announcements of historic interest regarding the issues of the war and the uses of militarism. On June 17 he telegraphed to the German Chancellor, Count von Hertling:
I express cordial thanks and kind good wishes to your Excellency and the State Ministry on the day on which, thirty years ago, I ascended the throne. When I celebrated my twenty-five-year jubilee as ruler I was able, with special gratitude, to point out that I had been able to do my work as a prince of peace. Since then the world picture has changed. For nearly four years, forced to it by our enemies, we have been engaged in the hardest struggle history records. God the Lord has laid a heavy burden upon my shoulders, but I carry it in the consciousness of our good right, with confidence in our ship, our sword, and our strength, and in the realization that I have the good fortune to stand at the head of the most capable people on earth. Just as our arms under strong leadership have proved themselves invincible, so also will the home land, exerting all its strength, bear with strong will the sufferings and privations which just now are keenly felt.
Thus, I have spent this day 'midst my armies, and it moved me to the depths of my heart, yet filled with the most profound gratitude to God's mercy.
I know that Prussian militarism, so much abused by our enemies, which my forefathers and I, in a spirit of dutifulness, loyalty, order, and obedience, have nurtured, has given Germany's sword and the German Nation strength to triumph, and that victory will bring a peace which will guarantee the German life.
It will then be my sacred duty, as well as that of the States, with all our power to see to healing the wounds caused by the war and to secure a happy future for the nation. In most faithful recognition of the work hitherto performed, I rely on your approved strength and the help of the State Ministry. God bless our land and people!
In an address at Main Headquarters on June 15 he said that the war was not a matter of strategic campaign, but a struggle of two world views wrestling with each other. "Either German principles of right, freedom, honor, and morality must be upheld," he added, "or Anglo-Saxon principles with their idolatry of mammon must be victorious."
The Anglo-Saxons, he asserted, aimed at making the peoples of the world work as slaves for the Anglo-Saxon ruling race, and such a matter could not be decided in days or weeks, or even in a year.
The Emperor emphasized the fact that from the first he had realized that the trials of war would be great. The first outbreak of enthusiasm had not deceived him. Great Britain's intervention had meant a world struggle, whether he desired it or not. He said he was thankful that Field Marshal von Hindenburg and General Ludendorff had been placed at his side as counselors. Drinking to the health of the army and its leaders, the Emperor said:
The German people and army indeed are now one and the same and look up to you with gratitude. Every man out there knows what he is fighting for, the enemy himself admits that, and in consequence we shall gain victory—the victory of the German standpoint. That is what is in question.
The Emperor referred to the period of peace, which he described as "twenty-six years of profitable but hard work, though they could not always be regarded as successful in a political respect and had brought disappointments."
His interests had been centred in the work connected with the development of the army and the effort to maintain it at the level at which it had been intrusted to him. Now, in time of war, he could not better celebrate the day than under the same roof with the Field Marshal and his faithful, highly gifted Generals and General Staff. The Emperor continued:
In peace time in the preparation of my army for war my grandfather's war comrades gradually passed away, and as the German horizon gradually darkened, many a German, and not the least I, hoped with assurance that God would in this danger place the right man at our side. Our hope has not been disappointed.
In your Excellency and in you, General Ludendorff, Heaven bestowed upon the German Empire and the German Army and staff men who are called upon in these great times to lead the German people in arms in its decisive struggle for existence and the right to live, and with its help to gain victory.
He sent the following telegram to the Crown Prince:
Under your leadership the armies of Generals von Boehm, von Below, and von Hutier have severely defeated the enemy and shattered the storm of his hurriedly brought-up army reserves. Eighty-five thousand prisoners and more than 1,000 guns are the outward signs of this tremendous battle success. To you and the participating commanders and troops I express my thanks and those of the Fatherland. The fighting spirit and fighting strength of my incomparable troops guarantee our final victory. God will further help.
Field Marshal von Hindenburg, in congratulating the Emperor on behalf of the army, extolled the Emperor's "wise care for peace" during the first twenty-six years of his reign and Germany's brilliant progress in all works of peace in that period. If the German Army and people had been able for nearly four years in the face of a world of enemies to show such proof of their strength and right to existence as never yet in history had been demanded and given in such measure, he added, they also owed this to their war lord, who had indefatigably watched over the fighting efficiency of his armies. The Field Marshal renewed the unswerving loyalty until death of Germany's sons at the front, and concluded:
"May our old motto, 'Forward with God for King and Fatherland, for Kaiser and Empire,' result in many years of peace being granted to your Majesty after our victorious return home."
Demoralization and Crime in Germany
Evidence that the war has brought a great increase of crime in Germany is forthcoming in many forms. At a conference held in Berlin early in 1918 to discuss "public insecurity" in all parts of Germany, it was stated that most of the burglaries and other crimes were committed during the nights between Friday and Monday. Statistics were given of the payments made by companies which issue insurance policies against burglary and theft. Payments on account of burglaries increased from $400,000 in 1914 to $1,100,000 in 1916, and to about $5,000,000 in 1917. Compensation for stolen goods to the amount of nearly $15,000,000 was paid by the Prussian railways in 1917, as compared with a total of only $1,050,000 in 1914.
Owing to the constant thefts of food in Berlin an official order has been issued that no wheat or flour is to be moved through the streets after dark. The theft of letters is becoming more and more common. One night nineteen letter-boxes in Charlottenburg were broken open, and the letters were destroyed after the postage stamps had been torn off. Owing to frequent thefts of letters at a small town named Mittenwalde, the Postmaster laid a trap for the thief, with the result that his own wife has been sent to prison for six months.
The U-Boat Raid in American Waters
Twenty Vessels, Mostly in the Coastwise Trade, Sunk Off the New Jersey and Virginia Coasts
One or more German submarines—the number was not definitely established—appeared off the coast of the United States on May 25, 1918, and began sinking merchant ships on a large scale. Up to June 20 more than twenty steamers and sailing vessels, mostly of American register, had been sent to the bottom.
This was the second visit of an armed German submarine to the American side of the Atlantic for hostile action. In October, 1916, before the United States entered the war, the U-53 held up coastwise traffic off Nantucket and sank four British, one Dutch, and one Norwegian ship. The U-53 had been preceded by the merchant submarine Deutschland, which arrived at Baltimore on July 9, 1916, from Bremen and returned with a cargo of nickel and rubber. The Deutschland made a second trip, arriving at New London, Conn., in October.
The appearance off the American coast of the unidentified submarine, or submarines, which made the raid on American and neutral shipping in May and June, 1918, was not altogether unexpected. For several weeks the American naval authorities had been searching for U-boats in home waters in consequence of a dispatch from the British Admiralty stating that two German submarines of the latest type, with a cruising capacity of 10,000 miles, had left the North Sea and were observed proceeding westward, probably in an attempt to cross the Atlantic.
The first information that German U-boats were conducting a transatlantic campaign was brought to New York City on June 4 by Captain Humphrey G. Newcombe and the ten members of the crew of the American four-masted schooner Edward H. Cole, which was sunk with bombs on the afternoon of June 2, fifty miles southeast of Barnegat, N. J. All were agreed that the U-boat was about 200 feet long, of more than 20 feet beam, and with 5 feet freeboard, that it carried a three-inch gun fore and aft, and a one-pounder quick-firer amidships, and that it had a speed of 17 knots. The mate of the Edward H. Cole told how he had noticed a submarine moving around the vessel at a high speed and believed that it was an American craft with Naval Reserve cadets on board, who were trying to have some fun with the sailors of the merchant ship.
"I thought," the mate continued, "that it would be a good idea to have a little fun with our skipper, who had turned in for a nap in his cabin, and I yelled down the skylight, 'Tumble up on deck lively, Cap! There's a big German submarine close astern, getting ready to attack us.' Then I took the marine glasses and looked through them at the stern of the U-boat, where her ensign was flapping limply against the short flagstaff. For a moment or two I could not make out her nationality, and then a gust of wind came and blew the ensign straight so that I could see that it was the German flag, and then I shouted in earnest to Captain Newcombe, 'It's no joke this time. By gosh, she is a German submarine!'"
The schooners Hattie Dunn and Edna were the first vessels sunk—on May 25. Their crews, as well as that of the schooner Hauppauge, which was sunk three days later, numbering twenty-three men, were taken on board the submarine and kept prisoner there for eight days. When the tank steamer Isabel Wiley was sunk, on June 2, the twenty-three prisoners were placed, with the crew of the Isabel Wiley, in the tanker's four boats and left to find their way to the shore. They were picked up by a coastwise steamer and brought safely back to land.
Captain Charles E. Holbrook of the Hattie Dunn, the first skipper to encounter the U-boat, thus described his experience:
We left New York for Charleston in ballast on May 23, and when, two days later, we were about fifteen miles south of Winter Quarter Lightship bowling along under an eight-knot breeze, I heard a shell pass near the vessel. Then another shell, which fell perhaps a quarter of a mile away. I was not taking much notice, because I believed the vessel which I saw about two miles away was an American submarine at target practice.
A third shell exploded close by us on the weather quarter, and I knew that, whoever it was, wanted us to stop. I brought the vessel up into the wind. The submarine, with her superstructure and conning tower showing plainly above the water, came within two hundred yards, and I saw that she was flying the two code letters "A B," meaning "stop immediately."
From a small staff at the rear end of the superstructure fluttered a small flag of the Imperial German Navy. An officer and three men came over in a small boat, not over twelve feet long. In perfect English the officer told us to get into our boats and that we had but ten minutes allotted to us to get clear of our vessel. They placed bombs along the sides of our vessel and blew her up immediately, in the meantime putting an armed German sailor on board the small boat in which were seven men and myself. This did not give me time to rescue my personal effects and nautical instruments. My men only saved what they stood in.
Perhaps I would have been given more time if the commander of the submarine had not seen the Hauppauge under full sail about four or five miles away. Like us the Hauppauge was light, and, I understand, was bound from Portland to Newport News. He destroyed Captain Sweeney's fine new schooner after ordering him and his crew to take to their boats, and within a half hour both crews were on board the submarine and both the small boats had been placed on the submarine's deck and lashed down.
ON BOARD THE U-BOAT
Captain C. M. Gilmore of the Edna said that when he was stopped by the U-boat an officer came aboard and told him he had ten minutes to abandon ship. During the week he was on board the submarine, Captain Gilmore said the Americans were treated with such extreme courtesy by the Germans that it was evident that the whole matter was being done under orders with the hope of having an effect on American public opinion. Captain Gilmore added:
The officers of the submarine included a spare Captain who was apparently on hand to take charge of any prize that might be worth while turning into a raider, the commander of the U-boat itself, and two others. These gave up their berths to me and the master of the Hattie Dunn, and the Germans of the crew gave up their bunks to the sailors and slept in hammocks themselves. The officers gave us wines, cordials, and fine cigars, and in general treated us with such marked hospitality that it seemed apparent that they were carrying out a course that had been laid upon them. The commander said that he had fuel and supplies for a month in American waters and intended to stay here for that time before going back.
The Carolina, a 5,000-ton passenger steamship belonging to the New York and Porto Rico Steamship Line, which was sunk at 6 P. M. on June 2, had on board the largest number of persons of any of the ships destroyed. Passengers and crew numbered 331. All escaped except seven out of the twenty-six who were put on board on a motor launch. The launch encountered a heavy storm and overturned. Christian Nelson, Chief Engineer of the Carolina, who was in charge of the launch, after a great effort managed to right it, but in the meanwhile seven persons had disappeared in the sea. With the aid principally of a young Porto Rican girl, who did not understand English, but who behaved very intelligently and bravely, Nelson kept the launch afloat, although it was waterlogged and the engine would not work. The launch was finally picked up by a British freighter, which took the survivors into Lewes, Del. The rest of the passengers and crew of the Carolina were picked up by other vessels and safely landed. Some of the survivors were more than twenty hours at sea in open boats.
LIST OF VESSELS SUNK
The complete list of ships attacked up to June 20 is as follows: The complete list of ships attacked up to June 20 is as follows:
| H. Haskell, schooner, 1,362 tons. |
| Isabel B. Wiley, schooner, 611 tons. |
| Hattie Dunn, schooner, 365 tons. |
| Edward H. Cole, schooner, 1,791 tons, subsequently raised and saved. |
| Herbert L. Pratt, tank steamer, 7,200 tons. |
| Carolina, passenger steamer, 5,093 tons. |
| Winneconne, freighter, 1,869 tons. |
| Hauppauge, auxiliary schooner, 1,500 tons. |
| Edna, schooner, 325 tons, subsequently towed in. |
| Texel, steamship, 3,210 tons. |
| Samuel M. Hathaway, schooner, 1,038 tons. |
| Samuel C. Mengel, schooner, 700 tons, unconfirmed. |
| Edward Baird, schooner, 279 tons. |
| Eidsvold, Norwegian steamship, 1,570 tons. |
| Harpathean, British steamship, 4,588 tons. |
| Vinland, Norwegian steamship, 1,143 tons. |
| Desauss, schooner, 500 tons. |
| Pinar del Rio, steamship, 2,504 tons. |
| Vindeggen, Norwegian steamship, 2,632 tons. |
| Henrik Lund, Norwegian steamship, 4,322 tons. |
| One seagoing and two coal barges, which struck mines. |
All the ships mentioned were sunk except the Herbert L. Pratt and the Edna. Most of them were destroyed by bombs placed alongside after the crews had left. In some cases gunfire was used. The submarine also laid mines, which caused some damage. The commander of the submarine was reported as saying that he was saving his torpedoes for bigger ships. With the exception of the British and Norwegian vessels all were American. The raid extended along the coast from within a couple of hundred miles of New York southward as far as the entrance to Chesapeake Bay.
HUNTING THE RAIDER
As soon as the first news was received that a submarine campaign was being conducted off the American coast, prompt action was taken by the Navy Department. Destroyers, submarine chasers, and airplanes were sent out in large numbers to patrol the coast and search the neighboring waters, but the U-boat eluded detection. New York Harbor was temporarily closed, and, though there was no indication of the presence of hostile airplanes, the lighting of the city was for several nights diminished by darkening the main thoroughfares. There were rumors that the submarine either had a "mother ship" or was using a base on the Mexican coast. Marine insurance rates were not raised, but the officers of vessels in the coastwise trade were granted a bonus by the Shipping Board.
Other Submarine Activities of the Month
The British Admiralty's official statement of all losses of shipping during the month of April, 1918, shows that 220,709 tons of British and 84,393 tons of allied and neutral vessels, a total of 305,102 tons, were destroyed by submarines and lost by accident. The total for the preceding month was 381,631 tons. In April, 1917, the total losses amounted to 893,877. April, 1918, showed the lowest figures for any month since the beginning of 1917. Another satisfactory feature of the situation was that 40,000 tons more shipping was built by Great Britain and the United States than was lost during the month.
Georges Leygues, the French Minister of Marine, informed the Army and Navy War Committees of the Senate on May 25 that the means employed to rid the seas of submarines had become increasingly effective since January and had given decisive results. Tremendous strides had recently been made by the Allies in repairing ships damaged by torpedoes or mines. The Minister added that co-ordination between the allied nations had become so smooth during the past four months that the tonnage restored to the sea exceeded 500,000 weekly. Great Britain had repaired 598,000 tons in one week recently, while France had effected repairs upon 260,000 tons in one month. The increased building and more efficient and speedier repair work were constantly bringing better results in the transport of troops and supplies.
Twelve German submarines were sunk or captured in British waters by the American and British destroyers during the month of April, which was a record. This means that twelve U-boats were officially reported and recognized as sunk and that evidence, either a ca pbearing the name of the submarine, a portion of the craft, or a live or dead German, was produced when each case was recorded.
A YEAR'S DECLINE IN SHIPPING LOSSES
In addition to this number, at least two other U-boats were destroyed during that period. One was sunk on April 8 in the North Sea while making an attack on a convoy to Holland. Another U-boat, making the total fourteen, was sunk on Friday, April 26, during the forenoon while attempting to attack a convoy of transports filled with American troops on the way to France. In the case of these two U-boats no débris or other direct evidence was recovered, and the British Admiralty accordingly withheld official recognition.
Senator Swanson of Virginia, a member of the Senate Naval Committee, made the statement on June 7 that the allied and American naval forces had destroyed 60 per cent. of all German submarines constructed. Senator Lodge of Massachusetts on June 15 said that since Jan. 1, 1918, the United States Navy had sunk twenty-eight German submarines.
The American troop transport President Lincoln, 18,168 gross tons, was sunk by a German submarine on May 31 while returning under convoy from Europe. The ship was struck simultaneously by three torpedoes and sank in eighteen minutes. Three other vessels were in company with her at the same time. The crew and passengers abandoned the ship in excellent order. All passengers, including the sick, were saved. One of the American destroyers which went to the rescue saved 500 persons, and another destroyer the remainder of the survivors. The number missing was twenty-seven, comprising four officers and twenty-three enlisted men. One of the officers was taken prisoner by the submarine.
The British armed mercantile troop-ship Moldavia, with American troops on board, was torpedoed and sunk on May 23. Of the American soldiers fifty-six were reported by the British Admiralty as "unaccounted for." The British transport Ausonia was torpedoed and sunk on May 26. Forty of the officers and crew were reported missing. The British transport Leasowe Castle was torpedoed and sunk by an enemy submarine May 26 in the Mediterranean. Thirteen military officers and seventy-nine of other ranks, and of the ship's company the Captain, two wireless operators, and six of other ratings were drowned.
Out of the Sleep of Death
Rescue of a Submarine Crew Imprisoned Fathoms Deep for Three Days
By an act which must stand among the most heroic in the records of the war, Commander Francis H. H. Goodhart sacrificed his life to save the crew of a British submarine, fast in the mud in thirty-eight feet of water. It was in the first week of May, 1918, that the commander's vessel found itself in this perilous plight. When the air supply of the imprisoned men was about exhausted, Goodhart entered the conning tower, giving instructions that he was to be blown upward in the hope of reaching the surface and bringing aid to the imperiled crew. As he entered the tower with the senior officer a small tin cylinder containing instructions for rescuers was fastened to his belt, and the commander's last words were: "If I don't get up, the cylinder will."
Air at high pressure had been forced into the conning tower, and the lid was opened. Taking a deep breath, Commander Goodhart was shot upward, but he struck a portion of the superstructure and was killed.
The senior officer, who had intended to remain in the submarine, was forced from the tower by the air pressure and reached the surface safely. The remainder of the crew was rescued soon afterward. A posthumous reward of the Albert Medal for gallantry in saving life at sea was conferred on Commander Goodhart.
The sufferings of the crew were thus described by one of the rescued sailors in a letter to The London Telegraph:
When the first night of imprisonment passed, and it appeared from our watches—we had artificial light enough to see the time—that the dawn of a new day had come with no sign of release, some of the company threatened to chuck hope. But others of us put as bright a face on a black outlook as we could, and gave them such cheer as a waterless and breadless situation would allow. Of course, too, we had to remember that our air supply was running out.
Speak of dropping sovereigns down a well! Every tick of my watch I knew was as a lost sovereign, so far as air was concerned. But those of us who were blessed with big batteries of optimism did our best to distribute the current, and so the time dragged on. Then a great thing happened. Two heroes came forward and offered to risk all in an attempt to win to the surface. All honor to them! How they did it and at what a cost may be told later on, but the thing was done, and the outer world was thus made aware of our terrible plight. That much we realized when we knew of the presence of divers about our craft. What a relief! We had been located, practical measures were being taken for our salvage, and that splendid prospect made us take in a draught of new life. Artificial light was fast failing, but hope was burning brightly, so what did it matter?
Our ordeal, as it turned out, was but a young thing as yet, however. We had still a long way to go. The day dragged through, and when we entered on the silence and uncertainty of the night we were a forlorn enough lot, I can assure you. The nerve of the toughest of us was wearing thin. My fear that it might snap suddenly all round was not realized, however, for we were given further indications, which our practical ears were not slow to catch, that the great work of rescue was well in hand. The constant tapping of the divers outside was a cheering sound, and brought hope to those of us who, in the steadily increasing stifle of the atmosphere, were now breathing hard to live.
But rescue was long delayed, and in the early hours of the following day most of us wrote our last farewell to our loved ones—short, tender messages scrawled in pencil—and some of us made our wills. Then, as if by a miracle, three strong strands in the ladder of escape came to us from above. Exactly in what manner this was made possible I cannot tell you. We got air, water, and food, in only the smallest quantities, but just enough to stir us into new life. That was a godsend as welcome as it was unexpected. And we had not to wait long for the opening of our prison door. When the details of that liberation are given it will cause surprise and congratulation everywhere. It verges on the miraculous. When we scrambled into freedom we were a dazed and shaken lot of men, but I warrant you our hearts were full of gratitude to God for saving mercies.
It was left to others to give fuller details of the impression caused by the unexpected arrival of the three "strands" in the life ladder. The first was air—life-giving air—which was forced into the stifling compartment from above. The boon came just in time; the prisoners had had about fifty hours of captivity, their last light was burning dimly, and the atmosphere of their prison house was vile. More than one of the company had lost consciousness, but the effect of the tiny air current was instantaneous. The senseless men stirred as if in troubled sleep, and opened their eyes, breathing hard, while those of the company who had stood up to the ordeal with all their senses about them felt instantly the glorious effect of the air draught.
The second strand was water—fresh, cold water—also forced down by the splendid salvage party. The quantity was very small—only a sip to each—but, oh! the refreshment of it! "We were parched in lip and mouth and throat," said one of the prisoners, "and never was a drop of water more welcome." The third strand was food, pellets of compressed food. The salvage party had accomplished almost the impossible. And this was not their greatest achievement. It was the forcing of a way of escape for the entombed men that was the marvel. Ingenuity backed up by tireless tenacity, resourcefulness that absolutely refused to own either defeat or despair, triumphed over difficulties that seemed insuperable.
What a picture for brush or pen is offered in the scene of rescue in the dead of night, when these dazed prisoners won once again their liberty. They came forth in single file from the prison house. Near the head of the procession was a bronzed sailor, one whose coolness in the dragging hours of extremity had done much to maintain the flickering life of his comrades. He thrust out at arm's length his oilskin, and followed with a wonderfully nimble step, thus providing the only touch of lightness in the grim tragedy.
Shelter was awaiting them, and from there they dispatched hurried messages to loved ones at home, to relieve hearts nearly broken by suspense. And a while later a grateful little company heard read to them by one of the survivors the metrical version of the 124th Psalm. They needed no preacher to interpret to them its beauty and its significance—for they had been there, and they knew:
And as fierce floods
Before them all things drown,
So had they brought
Our soul to death quite down.
* * * * * * *
Even as a bird
Out of the fowler's snare
Escapes away,
So is our soul set free.
Broke are their nets,
And thus escaped we.
New Records in Shipbuilding
Forty-four Ships in One Month
New records in the production of ships by the United States and the United Kingdom were established during the month of May, 1918. American shipyards completed and delivered to the Shipping Board forty-three steel ships and one wooden ship, representing, in the aggregate, 263,571 deadweight tons. These figures do not refer to launchings, but to ships fully equipped and ready for service. The month's work in the United States in comparison with previous months is shown in the following table of tonnage produced:
| 1918. | Tons. |
| January | 88,507 |
| February | 123,625 |
| March | 172,611 |
| April | 160,286 |
| May | 263,571 |
The May deliveries comprised thirty-nine requisitioned steel vessels, four contract steel and one contract wooden ship. In the last six days of the month there were delivered one wooden and fourteen steel ships, totaling 82,760 tons. The best previous week was that ended May 4, when the deliveries totaled 80,180 tons.
Launchings kept pace with the number of ships completed. Among the vessels launched in May was the Agawam, the first "fabricated" ship in the world, "fabricated" being the technical term applied to ships built from numbered pieces made from patterns. Approximately 27 steel mills, 56 fabricating plants, and 200 foundries, machine, pipe, and equipment shops were engaged in the production of the parts.
On June 1 it was unofficially stated that there were in operation by the United States Government 2,200,000 deadweight tons of shipping engaged in the transportation of troops and supplies and in kindred work for the army. Reviewing the shipping situation as a whole, Edward N. Hurley, Chairman of the Shipping Board, in an address on June 10, said:
On June 1 we had increased the American-built tonnage to over 3,500,000 deadweight tons of shipping. This gives us a total of more than 1,400 ships, with an approximate total deadweight tonnage of 7,000,000 now under the control of the United States Shipping Board.
In round numbers, and from all sources, we have added to the American flag since our war against Germany began nearly 4,500,000 tons of shipping.
Our program calls for the building of 1,856 passenger, cargo, and refrigerator ships and tankers, ranging from 5,000 to 12,000 tons each, with an aggregate deadweight of 13,000,000. Exclusive of these, we have 245 commandeered vessels, taken over from foreign and domestic owners, which are being completed by the Emergency Fleet Corporation. These will aggregate a total deadweight tonnage of 1,715,000.
This makes a total of 2,101 vessels, exclusive of tugs and barges, which are being built and will be put on the seas by the Emergency Fleet Corporation in the course of carrying out the present program, with an aggregate deadweight tonnage of 14,715,000.
Five billion dollars will be required to finish our program for 1918, 1919, and 1920, but the expenditure of this enormous sum will give to the American people the greatest merchant fleet ever assembled in the history of the world, aggregating 25,000,000 tons.
American workmen have made the expansion of recent months possible, and they will make possible the successful conclusion of the whole program. From all present expectations it is likely that by 1920 we shall have close to 1,000,000 men working on American merchant ships and their equipment.
We have a total of 819 shipways in the United States. Of these, a total of 751, all of which except ninety are completed, are being utilized by the Emergency Fleet Corporation for the building of American merchant ships.
In 1919 the average tonnage of steel, wood, and concrete ships continuously building on each way should be about 6,000. If we are using 751 ways on cargo ships and can average three ships a year per way, we should turn out in one year 13,518,000 tons.
The total gross revenue of our fleet is very impressive. From the ships under the control of the Shipping Board a total gross revenue is derived of about $360,000,000.
An appropriation of $1,761,701,000 for the American merchant marine was provided in the Sundry Civil bill reported to the House on June 10 by the Appropriations Committee. The amount recommended for ships and shipping was $1,282,694,000 less than the Shipping Board requested, but Chairman Sherley explained that receipts from the operation of ships could be devoted to building charges, and that no curtailment of the building program was contemplated. Of the Shipping Board total $1,438,451,000 was for construction in this country, $55,000,000 for building American ships abroad, $87,000,000 for establishing shipyards, $60,000,000 for operating ships heretofore acquired, and $6,250,000 for recruiting and instructing ships' officers.
As the result of an agreement between the United States and Japanese Governments, twenty-three Japanese ships, aggregating 151,166 tons deadweight, have been chartered to the United States for the allied transport services. On June 4 it was announced that twelve Japanese ships, obtained either by purchase or charter, had arrived in Pacific ports and were being transferred to the Atlantic Coast.
More than 400,000 tons of ships were released to the United States and the Allies by Sweden under the terms of the commercial agreement signed at Stockholm by representatives of the two Governments. Under a modus vivendi, in effect for some months, the War Trade Board had permitted exports to Sweden in sufficient quantities to meet immediate and urgent needs.
The shipbuilding situation in the United Kingdom has shown considerable improvement, as seen in the following table of merchant vessels, in gross tons, completed in British yards and entered for service:
| BRITISH SHIPBUILDING | |
|---|---|
| April, 1917 | 69,711 |
| May | 69,773 |
| June | 109,847 |
| July | 83,073 |
| August | 102,060 |
| September | 63,150 |
| October | 148,309 |
| November | 158,826 |
| December | 112,486 |
| January, 1918 | 58,568 |
| February | 100,038 |
| March | 161,674 |
| April | 111,533 |
| May | 197,274 |
It should be noted that the British practice is to express merchant shipbuilding statistics in "gross tons," whereas in the United States and some other countries the figures are recorded in "deadweight" tons, which is a much higher figure.
The total ships completed in the shipyards of the United Kingdom during the twelve months ended May 31, 1918, were 1,406,838 gross tons. The corresponding figures for the year ended April 30, 1917, were 1,270,337.
Raising torpedoed ships has become a considerable source of increased tonnage for the Allies. According to a report of the British Admiralty Salvage Department, made public June 17, no less than 407 ships sunk by Germans in British waters were salvaged in the years between January, 1915, and May, 1918. Up to December, 1917, 260 ships were recovered. In the first five months of 1918 the number salvaged was 147, the increased rate being due to improved methods.
Among the difficulties encountered was the danger of poisonous gases from the rotting cargoes of sunken ships, which sometimes caused the loss of lives. One salvage ship was torpedoed while working on a wreck, and sometimes the work of weeks is destroyed by one rough sea. Feats performed by the Salvage Department include the raising of a large collier sunk in twelve fathoms of water and involving a dead lift of 3,500 tons. Another vessel was raised fifteen fathoms by the use of compressed air.
American Exports Versus the U-Boats
By CHARLES FREDERICK CARTER
Notwithstanding a net loss of the world's shipping, due to the usual perils of the sea as well as to enemy mines and submarines, of 2,632,279 tons from the beginning of the war to April 1, 1918, the vital trade route across the Atlantic has shown a steady increase in efficiency. Even more gratifying is the fact that in recent weeks the gain in efficiency has been accelerated.
All the essential requirements of our allies as well as of our own expeditionary forces abroad appear to be met, according to these official statistics from the Department of Commerce. For instance, exports of nitric, picric, sulphuric, and other acids, so essential in the manufacture of munitions, are going to Europe in a steadily increasing volume. Exportsof acids increased from a total value of $10,003,647 in the calendar year 1915 to $52,695,640 in 1917. Exports of copper, no less necessary for cartridges and other uses, to France, Italy, and Great Britain increased from 229,129,587 pounds in 1915 to 890,819,053 pounds in 1917.
The same three allies, which needed only 499,719 tons of steel billets, blooms, and ingots in the calendar year 1915, took 1,395,019 tons in 1916 and 1,847,201 tons in 1917. Exports of steel plates to the same three allies for ships, tanks, and other military uses increased similarly from 63,584,467 pounds in 1915 to 72,242,656 pounds in 1916 and 165,630,514 pounds in 1917. All Europe took but a negligible tonnage of steel rails in 1913, the last full year before the war. France alone took 5,362 tons in 1915 and 122,858 tons in 1917. Exports of locomotives to France kept pace with the rails, increasing from 38 in 1915 to 570 in 1917, and 129 in the month of January, 1918. Exports of metal-working machinery to these three allies increased from a total value of $29,229,683 in 1915 to $47,666,606 in 1916 and $54,906,405 in 1917.
Statistics on the exports of barbed wire epitomize the history of defensive works by our allies. Italy, for example, took only 2,000 pounds of that commodity in 1915. Next year her requirements jumped to 58,367,004 pounds, while last year the necessity of constructing an entirely new system of defenses in haste called for 204,972,438 pounds of American barbed wire. On the other hand, France, which needed 264,310,493 pounds of barbed wire in 1916, called for only 29,952,532 pounds in 1917.
EXPORTS OF LEAD
France, Italy, and England laid in a stock of lead from which to make bullets in 1915, the former country taking 21,234,108 pounds, Italy 5,176,794 pounds, and Great Britain 81,483,866 pounds. Next year total shipments to all three countries fell off to 23,015,071 pounds, but rose again to 59,470,181 pounds in 1917, "unrestricted" U-boat warfare to the contrary notwithstanding.
Not all exports of lead went to our allies. Although at peace, Denmark, Holland, and Sweden, each and severally, bought more American lead in 1916 than Italy needed in any one of three years of desperate fighting, total exports to these three neutrals in that year aggregating 18,113,859 pounds. Even last year, after the United States had declared war against Germany, 3,470,415 pounds of lead went to these three neutrals, all of which just happen to drive a thriving trade with Germany. The patriots who supplied this brisk neutral demand for material from which bullets are made probably would not care to trace the shipments to their ultimate effect in swelling American casualty list.
Exports of explosives, including shells and projectiles, increased from a total value of $188,969,893 in 1915 to $715,575,306 in 1916. In 1917, after England and France had attained such marvelous efficiency in the production of these essentials of war, exports declined, but still reached the enormous total of $633,734,405. Just to show that we are keeping our stride in supplying explosives to the firing line the fact may be mentioned that in spite of delays due to a lack of bunker coal in the unprecedentedly severe month of January, 1918, we shipped 2,606,297 pounds of dynamite during the month, as compared with 1,787,600 pounds in January, 1917, and 37,587,662 pounds of powder, against 36,767,984 pounds in the corresponding month of 1917.
Gasoline, the foundation on which present allied supremacy in the air is based, and which also plays so great a part in land transportation, is going to Great Britain, France, and Italy in swiftly increasing volume. Shipments to these three countries in 1915 totaled 36,936,303 gallons; in 1916, 98,178,139 gallons; in 1917, 141,327,159 gallons. As a basis of comparison it may be said that America's total exports of gasoline to all the world in 1913 amounted to only 117,728,286 gallons.
Gasoline engines are going abroad at a similar rate of increase, 50,317 being shipped in the seven months ended Jan. 31, 1918, as compared with 36,209 in the corresponding period of 1916-17.
So much has been said about submarine losses that the average man may be pardoned for accepting the German figures, which have been exaggerated from 46 to 113 per cent., and the German delusion that England is about to be "brought to her knees" by the modern form of piracy. To whatever extent this impression of Prussian frightfulness has been disseminated the submarine campaign has been a success; but right there success ends. In spite of the utmost the U-boats could do, munitions have flowed in steadily increasing volume from America to Europe, while the destructiveness of the undersea boats has as steadily declined. Furthermore, the fact must not be forgotten that not all ships sunk by submarines have been eastbound with cargoes of munitions for the Allies. Some have been lost on the westward voyage; others have been laden with grain for the starving Belgians, or for neutrals which have developed such an astonishing appetite for lard, lead, and other things of which Germany stands in need; still others have been hospital ships.
VISCOUNT HALDANE
British War Secretary from December, 1905, to June, 1912, when he became Lord High Chancellor
(Photo Underwood & Underwood.)
GERMAN COMMANDERS ON WEST FRONT
General von Hutier
General Sixt von Arnim
General von Boehn
General von der Marwitz
If any further evidence of America's great part in the war, irrespective of participation by American troops in the fighting, is needed it can be found in statistics of exports of foodstuffs to the Allies, who have been obliged to depend more and more upon this country for the necessaries of life.
Exports of wheat flour to France in the calendar year 1915 were 2,392,952 barrels; in 1916, 2,263,990 barrels; in 1917, 2,659,328 barrels. Italy called for 148,999 barrels of American wheat flour in 1915 and 1,494,816 barrels in 1917, while Great Britain's requirements were 3,269,262 barrels in the former year and 4,808,141 barrels in the latter.
Our total exports of fresh beef to all the world in 1913 were only 6,580,123 pounds. In 1915 we sent Great Britain, France, and Italy 256,198,283 pounds. In 1916 exports to these three countries fell off to 160,879,642 pounds, but rose again to 172,940,833 pounds, in spite of von Tirpitz's unrestricted destructiveness.
In 1913 France took only 716,266 pounds of American bacon; but in 1915 the demand jumped to 52,044,475 pounds, increasing still further to 60,606,802 pounds in 1916 and to 73,195,974 pounds in 1917. Great Britain, which got along with 145,269,456 pounds of American bacon in 1913, needed 284,783,009 pounds in 1916 and 341,674,452 pounds in 1917. In the same period exports of hams and shoulders to France increased more than twelvefold and to Great Britain more than a third.
Exports of lard to France, Italy, and Great Britain increased from a total of 200,490,003 pounds in 1913 to 210,139,760 pounds in 1915 and 224,683,383 pounds in 1916. In 1917 exports to these three countries fell to 189,024,889 pounds. It is an interesting coincidence that Holland, whose appetite for American lard was fully satiated by 38,313,677 pounds in 1913, and which was able to skimp along with a trifle more than 20,000,000 pounds a year during the first two years of the world war, required 64,888,545 pounds in 1917, when Germany's need for fats grew desperate.
Exports of sugar have gone forward to the Allies on the same vast scale. In 1913 our entire export trade absorbed only 14,995,232 pounds of sugar. In 1915 we sent to Great Britain, France, and Italy alone 860,456,311 pounds; in 1916, 1,126,022,067 pounds; in 1917, 519,881,377 pounds. No wonder the sugar bowl disappeared from the American restaurant table last Fall and still remains in strict seclusion!
SOLDIERS AND CHEWING GUM
Not only have we been rendering the Allies a useful service by supplying so important a portion of their necessary food and munitions of war, but we have been for some months forwarding troops to the battleline. No figures are given out regarding movements of troops, but there is a significant bit of evidence in the monthly summaries of foreign commerce which proves that the number of American fighters abroad must be very large. As the Government has published this evidence, there can be no harm in referring to it here.
Gum is not chewed by Europeans, but seems to be regarded as a necessary of life in the United States, if the wagging jaws to be seen in street cars and other public places are any indication. Well, according to Government figures, no chewing gum whatever was exported in 1915; but in the calendar year 1917 the value of chewing gum exported was $1,403,888! The figures given, being at wholesale prices, represent upward of 176,000,000 cuds! Even on the most liberal allowance; so vast a quantity would supply a great many fighting men.
Viewed from another standpoint, these chewing-gum statistics are even more encouraging. If the shortage of cargo space to allied ports were as desperate as Germany's press agents would have us believe, it does not seem reasonable to suppose that any part of it would be frittered away on chewing gum in such formidable quantities. This conviction is strengthened by the discovery that exports of candy have increased one-third in the three calendar years of war, to a total of $2,108,081 in 1917.
Most gratifying of all is the fact that despite the utmost endeavors of the submarines, and notwithstanding upward of 3,000 strikes in American shipyards last year, the capacity and efficiency of transatlantic shipping increases from day to day not only positively but also negatively by the withdrawal of the heavy tonnage formerly serving enemy countries through contiguous neutral nations.
True, exports fell off somewhat for the eight months ended Feb. 28, 1918; but Europe received 63 per cent. of the total. Now when Europe is spoken of it means substantially England, France, and Italy. Russia obtained very little in those eight months, and Germany's neutral neighbors still less. The shrinkage in the volume of supplies to our fighting partners was not so much on account of anything the submarines could do as because of the temporary breakdown of our own system due to extraordinarily severe weather and to other causes.
Now the weather handicap has been lifted, our industrial machine has been geared up and more ships have been placed where they could render the most effective service. While in February, 1918, we could send our allies only 750,000 tons of food, which was 50,000 tons less than their minimum requirements, in the next month this was increased to 1,100,000 tons.