AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENTS ON THE WESTERN FRONT
By FREDERICK PALMER
(LATE LT. COLONEL U.S.R.)

The glory of our accomplishment in France lies in the titanic energy and natural resourcefulness of our people which were applied with a unity of purpose which surprised even ourselves. It is possible for us to exaggerate our part in assisting the Allies to final victory, and it is also possible for us to underestimate our part.

If England had not entered the war in 1914, and if Italy and Rumania had not entered later, and if Canada and Australia and the British dominions had not put forth all their strength, and if the United States had not sent an army to France, the Germans would have won. The balance of victory and failure at times hung by a thread. While Americans must always realize that comparatively we suffered slightly beside Britain and France and Italy, and that the Canadians were the veterans of cruel and wicked fighting in holding the western front against the enemy in the height of his confidence, numbers, and efficiency, no one will gainsay that at the end of the conflict we were giving our lives as freely as our neighbors and Allies.

Any consideration of our accomplishment must include the fact that we were as unprepared in April, 1917, for any immense military effort as we had been in August, 1914. While the world witnessed the British making citizen armies out of raw material by slow and costly processes, our governmental policy, to the regret of many of our people, had not been to profit by the application of their experience in view of the emergency which seemed inevitable to many observers, but, as neutrals, to keep ourselves free from any imputation of militaristic aims.

Once we were in the war, the policy of our Government was to put all our preparations in the hands of the regular army and to assist the Allies in every way that was in our power. Our people had learned from observation of the European war that modern warfare required expert direction, and with a unanimity that was startling in a democracy which had always resisted any efforts to form a large army in our country we welcomed the national draft and a centralization of authority in the hands of the President and army chiefs which was out of keeping with all our precedents.

Our training camps were to repeat under the draft the slow and wearisome business of training not only men but officers to command them at the same time that we were building new factories and plants to supply the army with ordnance and with ships to transport men and material to France. As the Allies had waited on England to become prepared, they must now wait on the United States; and in the crisis of their fortunes, when the Germans had had repeated successes, they faced the question of whether or not the resources of the United States in men and material could be transformed into a force that could be exerted by sea against the submarine or on the western front in time to prevent a German victory.

The sending of Major General John J. Pershing to France with a pioneer staff in May, 1917, had for its military purpose the huge and time-consuming task of preparing the way for the troops that were to arrive as soon as we had them trained, and the immediate object of assuring the people of the Allies that we meant to make active warfare on the western front. Although we had relieved the financial stress of the Allies by our loans, and with the removal of our interference with the British blockade we had strengthened the wall around Germany, we were incapable for the first eight months of striking any blow of account against the enemy except through the flotilla of destroyers which we had sent to cooperate with the British navy in combating the submarine. Considering that the French and British had over three million troops on the western front, the total of our regular army of one hundred thousand men, if all had been immediately dispatched to France, would hardly have been an important military factor. In a war where such enormous numbers were engaged, though we might have ten million able-bodied men in the United States, they were of no combat service against the enemy until they were in France, armed and trained.

The French offensive, in the early spring of 1917, had failed with the result that France was depressed and that all observers agreed that it was not in the power of the exhausted French army to undertake another offensive. The Germans, after their retreat across the old Somme battle fields, had stood firm on the Hindenburg line. Despite their losses they had sufficient force on the western front to assure, unless there was some unexpected break in their morale, their retention of their positions in face of the determined attacks of the British in their summer offensives, culminating in the bloody ridge of Passchendaele, which were made not in the expectation of any decision, but to hold German divisions off from the Italian front, from an effort to crush Rumania, an effort against Saloniki and from exploitation of their successes in Russia.

With Russia out of the war, Rumania crippled, the Servian army reduced to a small body of veterans and the Italian offensive making no decisive progress, it was evident that unless Germany could be starved into submission by the blockade, which seemed out of the question from the information in possession of Allied councils, we must have a fighting force in France which should be as strong as either that of the British or the French while its transport across the Atlantic through the submarine zone was by no means assured. Trusting to no adventitious event to make so large an army unnecessary, General Pershing and his staff, after they had studied the situation and conferred with the Allied command, decided that their duty as pioneers was to prepare for the operations in France of an army of at least one million men with the communications and plant for their support capable of expansion for the care of two million men.

As the Allies throughout the war had depended very largely for war material upon America and overseas countries, it was essential that we should be capable of largely providing for our army from the resources of our own country. With the French railway system strained to capacity, and France suffering from a shortage of labor behind the lines, owing to all her able-bodied males being in active service, we must furnish transportation as well as labor from home. Despite the strong influences brought to bear to have our soldiers introduced by regiments and battalions into the French and British armies, it was our duty, not only to our national spirit but to our conception of our duty to the Allies, to form an integral American army which should fight as a unit in the same manner that the British and French armies were fighting.