East of the Argonne Forest is the little river Aire, its valley forming a trough between the hills, and between that and the Meuse for a distance of about ten miles the German line, which had been placed in the retreat from the Marne, had at its rear a whaleback of rising heights which reached their summit in the neighborhood of Buzancy. From this summit it was downhill all the way to the Meuse River. It was this summit which the American army must gain in advancing over ground in which nature seemed to have had in mind the possibilities of modern warfare in defense. The heights would give observation for the enemy guns which were hidden on the reverse slopes. Numerous patches of woods and tricky ravines made ideal positions for machine-gun nests. One position gained, the victor still looked ahead to higher ground. The enemy could always bring his reserves up under cover while those of the attacking force would be in full view.
The soldiers of our new army had shown that they had the spirit of attack. Marshal Foch was to give them the opportunity to display it to the utmost, and in the conference which he and General Pershing held before the battle of Saint Mihiel one of the great decisions of the war was made. We were to send partly trained divisions into a conflict in winter rains and under incalculable hardships in the faith that our courage, exerted to its utmost in the fall of 1918, might break the weakening German army before it could recover its spirit, while the losses which this effort entailed would save us from far greater losses in the spring and the prolongation of the war. Though we should never reach the summit of those heights, the threat which we should make against the German line of communications must withdraw more and more German troops from other parts of the line, and keep on increasing the confusion of Ludendorff's dispositions.
The only American comparison for the Meuse-Argonne Battle was the Appomattox campaign which lasted much longer and consisted of a series of separate actions with nothing like the concentration and continuous fighting which the Americans of another generation were to endure. Grant had no lack of supplies, he had more guns than he could use and was fighting on his own soil with ample resources in reserve within easy reach. Pershing's army was not relatively as ready for the task that it was to undertake as McClellan had been for his Peninsula campaign.
From the time of the attack of Saint Mihiel on September 12, 1918, until September 25, 1918, we had thirteen days to prepare for an offensive which, as it was made by a new army, could be likened to the great Somme offensive of the British in 1916. Then the British had taken five months in which to build roads, dig assembly trenches, prepare ammunition dumps, and bring up necessary engineering material. But it must be borne in mind that at this time the enemy was in the prime of his numbers and confidence. Moreover, such elaborate arrangements were then considered necessary in order to take powerfully intrenched lines. They had the fault of warning the enemy in ample time of any concentration which enabled him to mass men and material for defense. Later, the French had developed a system of limited objectives of brief artillery preparations, followed by the rolling barrage which preceded the advance of the infantry, while the enemy's strong points and gun positions were smothered with shells. The Germans, however, in their great offensive against the British in March, 1918, had taken ample time for preparation while they made the innovation of driving through for sufficiently great depth to become masters of all the trench defenses and of the opposing artillery.
In the counteroffensive toward Soissons on July 18, 1918, and again in the Anglo-French-Canadian offensive of August 8, 1918, and the succeeding offensives, the Allies had depended on either a very brief artillery preparation or upon not opening fire until the moment of the infantry's advance while they followed through in the German fashion. In our Meuse-Argonne offensive, we had all these precedents and the experience of the officers in directing them for our guidance. But very veteran and skilled armies had carried out the later style of offensive, and they had the advantage which comes from long experience that the units, used to keeping their uniformity in battle action, did not become dispersed after they had made a certain advance as was supposed to be the case in any extensive offensive where new divisions were engaged.
The most disastrous example in throwing an untrained division into a violent attack was that of the British 21st Division in the fall of 1915 at Loos, which in trying to apply its drill-ground training under fire, became disorganized and failed to take its objectives. Later, after it had had more experience, this same division, though no more courageous than in its first battle, proved itself masterful in the complicated technique of modern attack which it had learned in diligent application in smaller actions after Loos, and by applying the lessons learned at Loos by thorough drilling.
Practically all our pioneer divisions which had had long experience in France were either engaged at Saint Mihiel or else they were occupied elsewhere. For the new offensive we must therefore depend upon new divisions which had been a shorter time in France than the 1st or 2d or 26th or 42d Divisions.
Following the attack by the American army on the Meuse-Argonne line and the 4th French Army on its left with their threat toward the lines of communications, the British and French were to strike the Hindenburg line in the St. Quentin-Cambrai region on September 29, 1918, and on October 2, 1918, the French were to attack to the east of Rheims. Thus a succession of offensives were to broaden the whole front of operations in an effort to break through the old trench line, all the way from the Meuse to the North Sea, and bring the Allied armies into the open where they would be forever free of trench shackles. This was a most audacious enterprise which was warranted by the information which the Allies had of the state of the German army. The Bulgarian army was beginning to disintegrate and the Italians had turned the Austrian offensive on the Piave into a disaster from which the Austro-Hungarian armies could not recover. Throughout the months of August and September, 1918, the Germans had been yielding large numbers of prisoners and an immense quantity of material, while the Allied losses had been comparatively light.
The German cards were now on the table; the number of German divisions in reserve were known; and in the arrival of American divisions the Allies had a vast store of man power. We had become the dependable quantity of a mighty growing reserve force.
Marshal Foch chose to put us in the very hinge of the whole movement and he set for our objective in a swift series of advances nothing less than the heights of Buzancy—the heights of the whaleback itself. Had we gained that within three or four days, we would have threatened the retreat of the whole German army, indeed, the capture of a hundred thousand or more Germans would have been fairly certain. No one considered such a success except in the category of a military miracle until German reserves were more depleted than they were at the end of September.