These handicaps made the successes which were to follow all the more remarkable. The increasing forces must all have their daily rations, and in the pressure of battle the artillery must not lack ammunition, and there must be at all times sufficient transport, whether railroad, motor, or horse, in order that the supplies should be delivered at the front. Therefore the development of the Service of Supply as a part of the whole project must keep pace in capacity and efficiency with the demands of the fighting forces.
Our army's activities were divided into three zones: the base, the intermediate, and advance, with that of the base and the intermediate in charge of the commanding general of the Service of Supply at Tours. Every harbor of western France not occupied by the British was teeming with American effort, while Marseilles, in the Mediterranean, was caring for our increasing business which the Atlantic ports could not accommodate. The recruits for the army of the Service of Supply must keep pace with those for the army at the front. Battalions of negroes had been brought from the Southern States to act as laborers and stevedores. We were using German prisoners for labor as fast as they were captured.
At Bordeaux and Saint Nazaire, particularly, among the ports, we had built long expanses of wharves and the spur tracks which connected them with systems of warehouses. The plan had been always to have reserve supplies for forty-five days at the base ports; with thirty days' at the great intermediate depot of Gièvres, where another vast system of spur tracks and warehouses had been built in open fields, and fifteen days' supplies at the regulating stations with their systems of spur tracks and warehouses where the trains were made up to meet the immediate requisitions from the front. Without any prevision as to when the war would end, with nothing certain except that we must go on preparing as if it were to last for years in order the sooner to force the end, new construction, while requirements of the present were met, must keep pace with growth. We had car and locomotive assembling shops; motor repair shops; salvage depots, remount depots, and immense areas of hospitals, with as many as eighteen thousand beds in a single area, which had been building in grim expectation of the flow of wounded from the front when we began operations on a large scale. Nurses and doctors must be in sufficient numbers for the emergency.
Never had America had such a test of its organizing capacity as in its formation of the Service of Supply. Its problems, both in number and complexity as well as in the size of the task, the amount of material and personnel required, were far greater than those of the Panama Canal. The leisure which any undertaking permits in carrying out plans and the dependence which may be placed upon the receipt of tools and material in time of peace were both wanting under the pressure of war. Personnel for this enterprise was summoned from our engineers, our business men and experts, and from the ranks of skilled labor in every civil branch who were for the first time brought together in a national organization in foreign surroundings where they faced many difficulties with which they were unfamiliar, under the direction of the regular army, which had to reconcile all policies with the requirements of the front line, and which had to expand its imagination and its powers of organization from a quartermaster's business of a little regular army to the mastery of unparalleled forces in the direction of reserve officers who had been used to handling great business enterprises.
Next to the position of General Pershing that of the commanding general of the Service of Supply was the most important in France. It was proposed at one time from Washington that he should have authority coordinate with General Pershing's direct from Washington; but this was strongly opposed on the ground that the commander in chief of the fighting army must be supreme over every branch if he were to be responsible for the success of a campaign. Major General James G. Harbord, who had been the first chief of staff of the American Expeditionary Force and later commanded the marine brigade of the 2d Division and afterward the division itself in the Château-Thierry operations, was summoned from the front late in July, 1918, at a time when the rapid arrival of troops from America and the prospects of the terrific demands of the campaigns which would ensue made it vital that there should be administrative reform in the Service of Supply by some man not only of high organizing ability but with the personal quality that inspires coordination among his adjutants, if the Service of Supply were to be equal to the enormous demands which would be placed upon it in the next few months.
Whether it was the officers drawn from civil life without military training, or the laborers or the privates, every man in the Service of Supply wished that he were at the front. Hundreds of officers with combat training and thousands of soldiers who had been in the training camps found themselves, because of their particular efficiency in business organization, immured in some particular Service of Supply branch, doing long hours of prosaic work in the different camps and shops of the base ports and central France without hope, so far as they could see, of ever hearing a shot fired. It seemed to them frequently that the staff organization of the Service of Supply lacked the characteristics of energetic direction and team play with which they had been familiar in civil life. They had everything to make them discouraged. General Harbord, with the reputation he had won as a fighter, his magnetism, his understanding of human nature and his capability of promptly grasping the essentials of any problem, soon showed that he had the talent for transforming the spirit of the personnel by applying the indefatigable industry and the patriotic spirit of this vast force in a homogeneous corps, without which the victory of the American forces in France would not have been possible.
While General Harbord was reorganizing the Service of Supply, General Pershing was preparing in haste and under great handicaps for the direction of hundreds of thousands of men in battle. The division was the fighting unit of our army. It went into the trenches and into battle as a division; was transferred from one part of the line to the other as a unit which was complete in all its branches, with a personnel of twenty-seven thousand men, or about double the size of a British or French division. The command of many divisions in battle brought us to the question of higher tactics. We had to train officers for this high responsibility as well as for leading the battalions in the front line.
According to the original plan we were to have six divisions to a corps. Major General Hunter Liggett, as soon as we had four divisions in training, had been set the task of organizing our first corps. He had a high reputation in the regular army as a student and tactician, and he was a man of great poise and a most thorough student. The withdrawal of our divisions from our Lorraine sector, in order to assist in the defense of Paris and later in the counteroffensive of July, had allowed General Liggett little practical experience. With the rapid arrival of our troops other corps staffs were rapidly formed. Major General Robert L. Bullard, who had commanded the 1st Division in the Toul sector and in the attack on Cantigny, was given the command of the 3d Corps. For a brief period both General Liggett and General Bullard and their staff had some experience acting as corps commanders in the Château-Thierry operations. Not until the Saint Mihiel operations, however, had we ever had more than two divisions operating together under American command. Meanwhile we had organized our First Army, which was under the personal command of General Pershing.
With our new corps and army organization, we were now to undertake an attack against the fortifications of one of the most formidable positions on the western front with a shorter period of preparation than had been generally accepted as necessary by the veteran French and British armies whose staffs had had four years' training under actual battle conditions. The experts, whether in the gaining of intelligence, in the handling of traffic, or in the highly complex technique of the arrangements for the liaison of artillery and infantry and aviation and all the other branches of uniformity of operations between the divisions, were to apply in practice what they had learned in theory and by observation of the Allied armies. Their theory had been learned at the staff school of Langres, solving problems of combat organization and listening to lectures by staff officers of other armies; but theory is not practice.
Since 1915 there had been no important action from Verdun to the Swiss border. The wedge of the Saint Mihiel salient, which the Germans had won in 1914 with its commanding hills and ridges, had remained an eyesore on the map of the western front. Aside from its strong natural positions it was defended by the most elaborate of modern fortifications. By the criterion of precedents of previous offensives against front-line positions we should succeed in our undertaking only at an immense cost of life, should the Germans decide to make a determined defense. Until a few days before the attack we had every expectation that they would. The original plan was that we should go through to Mars-la-Tour and Etain until we were before the great German fortress of Metz. Marshal Foch changed this plan, as we shall see.