By the time we had finished the Saint Mihiel operations the chilling fall rains would have begun in earnest. These would not only expose the men, but would impede transport. We should use the winter months for applying the lessons learned in our first offensive in the forming of our organization for the greater offensive which was to begin in the spring of 1919 and continue until we had won a decision. For in 1919 it was the American army with its inexhaustible reserves and the vigor of its youth which was due to do the leading and to endure accordingly heavy losses. The artillery, the machine guns, the tanks, and all the other material which we had been manufacturing at home as it arrived through the winter of 1918 we should incorporate into our organization.

Marshal Foch, who desired the complete success of the Saint Mihiel offensive as a part of his plan, had assigned to the American army, under General Pershing's command, ample forces in addition to our own artillery and aviation. While French divisions were to mark time at the apex of the salient before following up our attack, the American divisions from right to left, the 90th, 5th, 2d, 89th, 42d, and 1st were to swing in on the eastern side of the salient, with the 82d as a pivot and the 26th Division, cooperating with French troops, was to swing in on the western side. For the first time our army corps and divisional artillery were to cooperate in a preliminary bombardment in cutting the barbed wire, encountering the enemy's artillery fire, and to prepare the way for the charge of a long line of American infantry in the first attack of an American army as an army on the continent of Europe. For the first time the responsibility for command all the way from the front line through all the headquarters up to that other commander in chief was ours. The French staff officers were at hand with their advice and information, but ours was the decision and the battle was ours.

By the morning of September 12, 1918, the Germans, in view of the strength of our forces and of the pressure on other parts of their line, had decided not to make strong resistance in the Saint Mihiel salient. Indeed, they contemplated a rear-guard action in withdrawal, but not expecting that we would attack on the 12th, owing to rainy weather, we practically caught them before their withdrawal had begun, with the result that the impetuosity of the attack of our men, who forced their way through stretches of barbed wire which the artillery fire had not cut, cleared both the first and second lines of defense on schedule time and gathered in prisoners and guns out of all keeping to their losses. On the morning of the 13th, troops of the 26th Division and the 1st Division, swinging in from the east and west, had come together and the Saint Mihiel salient was no more. Our success had been complete and inexpensive. It thrilled the Allied armies with fresh confidence in our arms when they saw that the angle on the old line of the map had been straightened and the German people, to whom the Saint Mihiel salient had become equally a symbol, were accordingly depressed.

Already, instead of looking forward to months of preparation for the next offensive, our army had begun preparations for another offensive which was to begin only thirteen days after that of Saint Mihiel. Marshal Foch had decided before the Saint Mihiel attack to change his plan, and instead of going through to Mars-la-Tour and Etain, only to cut the salient, withdrawing surplus troops for action elsewhere. In conjunction with the Fourth French Army, which was to attack from the left, we were to attack from the Argonne Forest to the Meuse River in the greatest battle in which Americans had ever been engaged. Following the success of the Château-Thierry offensive in which our troops had played a part, the British Canadians and the French had had continuing success in their offensives beginning on August 8, 1918. Our 32d Division had increased the reputation which it had won in the fighting on the Ourcq by assisting the French in breaking the old front-line positions northeast of Soissons.

The Allies had now regained practically all the ground that the Germans had won in their spring and summer offensives. In places they had penetrated the Hindenburg line. The Belgian as well as the British and French armies were about to take the offensive. The German losses in prisoners and material in the last month indicated a decline in German morale. Information confirmed the idea that Hindenburg, with his rapidly weakening reserves, was contemplating a withdrawal to the line of the Meuse. Every consideration called upon the Allied armies to stretch their resources in men and material to the utmost in order to take advantage of the situation. For the first time since the war had begun on the western front they completely had the initiative.

The next step was to broaden the front of the Allied attacks, further confusing Ludendorff in his dispositions, and breaking through the Hindenburg line and all the old front-line positions which the Germans had held for four years, to force the offensive in the open, where rapid maneuvers could harass the effort of the Germans in withdrawing their forces and the material which they had accumulated through four years, and by repeated blows continue to weaken their morale until a positive decision was won.

If Ludendorff were given leisure for a deliberate retreat to a shorter line which he could fortify during the winter while his army recovered its spirit, this shorter line would give him all the advantage which serves the defense in deeper concentrations of troops to the mile with less room for the offensive to maneuver for surprises.

All the Allied offensives—Champagne, Loos, the Somme, Arras, and Passchendaele—had been made to the west of the Argonne Forest, because of the advantage of ground. To the east, facing the Rhine, the Germans had their great fortress of Metz, and the positions in Lorraine and the Vosges Mountains and the wedge of Saint Mihiel, which had seemed unconquerable. The Meuse River winds past Saint Mihiel through the town of Verdun, then northward where it turns westward toward Sedan. All the way from Saint Mihiel, including the hills of the forts of Verdun, which look out on the plain of the Woevre with the fortress of Metz in the distance, runs a rampart of heights clear to the great bastion of the Forest of Argonne, where the country becomes more rolling, and therefore better ground for military operations.

The line of our second offensive was to be from the Meuse River just west of Verdun to the western edge of the Argonne Forest. Anyone who looks at the map of the old line of the western front and of the enemy's railroad communications would say at once that this was the obvious line for an offensive. The Metz-Lille railway line, two-track all the way, and in places four-track, runs through Sedan and Mézières, following the Meuse Valley where it turns westward. This was the most important southern transversal line that the Germans had for supplying their armies in eastern France and connecting them with the coal fields of northern France. Northeast of the Meuse-Argonne positions were the famous Briey iron fields on which the Germans were dependent for their supplies of ore for the Krupp works. A blow toward Mézières and toward Briey was a blow at the heart of German military power.

The Germans fully realized the danger in this direction and knew, as our generals knew, how thoroughly it was protected. They had all the advantage of rail connections in hastening their reserves to this point if the Allies had made an advance in this direction. In 1916 or 1917 the Germans would have welcomed the Meuse-Argonne offensive, in the confidence that the Allied attacks would have suffered as bloody repulses as the Germans suffered at Verdun against the same kind of positions. The front German line was in the southern part of the Forest of Argonne with its ravines and hills covered with dense undergrowth. And back of this was still another great forest, that of Bourgogne. Offensives against even small patches of woods had proved the hopelessness of any frontal attack against forests.