Editor's Introduction: Thanks to our contributor this month, historian Jeffrey LaMonica, we will see that Pershing's forces were needed on the battlefield earlier than anticipated and had no choice but to learn as they were fighting. This process involved making many mistakes, digesting them, and developing new doctrines and tactics on the fly. In this issue, our contributor analyzes the learning curve of the AEF, using a case-study approach with the 5th Division of the First Army, a formation that did not arrive in France until May 1918, had absolutely minimal formal training, and yet on 11 November 1918 found itself in the most advanced position of all the U.S. forces. MH
By Jeffrey LaMonica
Introduction
Most historical treatments of the AEF published before the 1980s do not acknowledge its tactical development. They provide sweeping assessments of American battlefield performance and draw broad conclusions concerning the U.S. Army's general contribution to the defeat of Imperial Germany. More recent scholarship, however, provides a deeper understanding of the United States' impact on the Great War by evaluating all facets of the AEF. The majority of these works dismiss the AEF as tactically stagnant and inept. A few scholars delve deeper into the evidence to reveal and more fairly assess AEF tactical growth, such as Mark E. Grotelueschen's The AEF Way of War: The American Army and Combat in the First World War. This article strives to fit in with this trend by exploring the AEF's aptitude in two specific tactical areas, open warfare—the use of fire and maneuver, championed by General Pershing from the birth of the AEF—and combined-arms warfare—the coordinated use of infantry and its weapons, artillery, vehicles, aircraft, communications, and logistics—by demonstrating how they were learned and applied by the 5th Division, one of America's most active divisions of the Great War.
The AEF came to appreciate these techniques by late 1918 but was not able to execute them with greater success. Ultimately, its formal training failed to prepare the AEF for modern industrialized warfare. Survival instinct and combat experience, however, fostered enough tactical learning to enable American divisions to keep gaining ground until the Armistice. The U.S. Army would revisit and build upon the AEF's experimentation with combined arms and open warfare during the interwar period and the Second World War. Furthermore, the AEF's brand of learning by fighting continued to be the Army's method for tactical growth from 1941 to 1945 and still persists in the 21st century.
Pershing's initial open-warfare vision stemmed from his determination to restore mobility to the Western Front and his confidence in the skill and fighting spirit of American officers and enlisted men. He believed open warfare relied on expert marksmen to provide effective suppressing fire and individual bravery to flank the enemy and close with the bayonet. The commander-in-chief's brand of open warfare represented a combination of traditional tactical principles, such as offensive spirit and hand-to-hand combat, and new trends in battlefield survival, such as infiltration and flanking maneuvers. Pershing's tactical ideas, however, contained flaws. Other belligerents learned earlier in the war that élan and the bayonet counted for little on the modern industrialized battlefield. Although the Japanese launched successful bayonet charges as recently as the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the volume of machine guns and artillery on the Western Front in 1914 made it virtually impossible to get close enough to engage the enemy with cold steel. Furthermore, the most effective open-warfare tactics relied on support from advanced weapons, motor vehicles, and aircraft.
The AEF also proved slow to mix open-warfare infantry tactics with advanced weapons and other arms. The fact that a clear definition of Pershing's open-warfare concept was not published until the fall of 1918 was highly problematic. Despite issuing 54,968 copies of Pershing's Combat Instructions to the AEF before the end of the war, there were not enough weeks left before the Armistice to afford time to learn and implement these new tactics. The fact that Pershing's open-warfare concept remained nebulous until September 1918 had the hidden benefit of allowing AEF divisions several months of combat to improvise, experiment, and engage in the experiential learning typical of the U.S. Army's history. AEF officers and enlisted men devised their own tactical innovations to survive on the Western Front. The resulting incarnations of open warfare and combined arms often proved more effective than those published by the commander-in-chief and the U.S. War Department.
The strategic planning and combat decisions of AEF commanders during the last phase of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive indicated that combined arms and open warfare had permeated the AEF's collective mindset primarily through battlefield experience, not published doctrine or training.
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| Divisional Observation Post in the Vosges Sector |
The 5th Division's Experience
Although the 5th Division spent the prescribed six months in a stateside training facility, its piecemeal assembly at Fort Logan and fragmented shipment to Europe led to discrepancies in the amount and type of instruction received across the division. Major General John E. McMahon took command of the division in January 1918.
After arriving in France, the division's infantry brigade began Pershing's three-month training regimen in April 1918 at AEF Training Area Thirteen near Bar-sur-Aube, France. Officers of the advance training detachment rejoined their units as instructors at this time. For approximately one month, the men learned basic trench warfare tactics, such as defensive chemical warfare techniques and trench raiding. The 5th Field Artillery Brigade remained at Le Valdahon for its instruction. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth machine-gun battalions trained around Bar-sur-Aube but did so separately from the infantry. Training divisional elements separately from one another was typical of all U.S. Army divisions during the Great War and greatly detracted from their ability to conduct cohesive combined-arms tactics in combat. For example, American machine-gun crews never provided fire support for live infantrymen during their training exercises.
The first phase of the 5th Division's training in France ended on 31 May, when General Pershing ordered the division to a “quiet” zone on the Western Front near the town of Epinal in the Toul Sector. The Vosges Mountains stretched across much of this area and inhibited large-scale military activity. This sector of the front saw only occasional patrols, raids, and minor exchanges of artillery fire.
The division's Ninth and Tenth infantry brigades joined
with two divisions of the XXXIII Corps of the French
Seventh Army for this phase of instruction. French
officers taught American enlisted men trench
construction, defense against poison gas, patrolling,
and raiding. These raiding exercises represented the
division's first opportunity to handle live grenades. In
keeping with General Pershing's emphasis on marksmanship, the 5th Division's brigade commanders
insisted that the French training officers include target
practice in their trench warfare regimen. The Official
History of the 5th Division USA recounted, “The
Americans still clung to the idea that the rifle was the
main dependence in warfare, and pushed training with
that arm to the utmost.”
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| 5th Division 155mm Howitzer |
The third and final stage of the 5th Division's training barely resembled the month of open-warfare instruction General Pershing intended. Instead, the division occupied its own position on the Western Front in the Saint Die Sector near Lorraine on 19 July. Its first independent action took place at 4:00 a.m. on 17 August near Frapelle. After a ten-minute preliminary bombardment, the Third Battalion of the Sixth Regiment from Brigadier General Walter H. Gordon's Tenth Infantry Brigade successfully advanced into the Fave River Valley and captured the town of Frapelle.
Surprisingly, this short operation included some successful combined arms. The infantry moved forward behind an effective creeping barrage provided by batteries from Brigadier General Clement A. Flagler's 5th Field Artillery Brigade. A major in the Sixth Infantry Regiment by this time, described the infantry assault as “strongly supported by artillery, mortars, machine guns and American aviation.” The demands of the modern industrialized battlefield, survival instinct, and experiential learning were already forcing the 5th Division to employ advanced tactics beyond the scope of their formal training. This month spent in the Saint Die Sector cost the 5th Division about 600 casualties.
With its formal training completed, the 5th Division participated in the Saint Mihiel Offensive on 12 September. It was here where the division began tactical learning through combat experience and battlefield survival. General McMahon had several combined-arms components at his disposal during the offensive, including 63 tanks, the Twelfth Aero Squadron, the Second Balloon Company, and several units from the First Gas Regiment. After a four-hour preliminary bombardment, the Sixth and Eleventh infantry regiments of the Tenth Brigade attacked at 5:00 a.m. under a creeping barrage. First Sergeant Clyde Heldreth of D Company of the Sixtieth Infantry Regiment noted the effectiveness of this creeping barrage: “At 5:00 o'clock came the command `over the top.' The artillery bombardment then changed to a rolling barrage. Our artillery shelling had accomplished the desired results and the enemy was in full retreat.” This marked the style of operations that the 5th Division would implement, with continuing success in the final and largest offensive of the war for the AEF, the Meuse-Argonne.
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The 5th Division Marker at Remoiville on the Meuse Heights
Marks the Farthest Advance of the AEF |
Summing Up:
Consistent with the majority of AEF divisions, formal training did little to prepare the soldiers of the 5th Division to conduct combined arms and open warfare in combat. All phases of the “Red Diamond” Division's instruction were rushed, and there were few weapons available for training purposes. Furthermore, the division's various combat arms trained in different locations around France. Based upon the 5th Division's performance during the final phase of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, it was six months of combat experience and survival on the Western Front that allowed it, and the rest of First Army, to conduct combined arms and open warfare to the point of achieving a successful breakthrough of the German Kriemhilde Line. Deficiencies in the areas of supply, logistics, and communications prevented the AEF from exploiting this breach to the point of annihilating the Imperial German Army. These underdeveloped support systems forced First Army and its 5th Division to pause and refit before crossing into Germany. This respite might have allowed the Imperial German Army to establish a strong line of defense along the Rhine River and drag the conflict into 1919.
According to Colonel Lanza, First Army's Chief of Artillery Operations: “The Armistice put an end to what would have been a long wait, possibly extending through the winter into the following spring. In other words, the Allies managed to give the enemy the final blow just before it would have been necessary to stop the offensive to reorganize and reequip.
After the Armistice, the U.S. Army continued to develop the tactical lessons learned by the American Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front. Combined arms and General Pershing's open-warfare concept were persistent themes in army doctrine through the 1920s. Supporting the infantry with close artillery and machine gun fire were standard practice. The Army continued working to define and expand combined arms roles for tanks and aircraft. American military thinkers carried on the conversation over trench warfare versus open-warfare tactics.
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| 5th Division Crossing the Meuse River, 5 November 1918 |
By the 1930s, however, diplomatic isolationism and the budgetary limitations of the Great Depression interrupted the Army's tactical growth. Under these restraints, U.S. Army weapons and equipment became antiquated and costly large-scale training maneuvers were nonexistent. The lack of funding for either improved weapons or training gradually led to a state of under-preparedness in everything but thought. Combat experience was, once again, the Army's primary method of learning to survive and succeed in battle during the Second World War. The U.S. Army of 1941 was not unlike the AEF in 1917 in this regard. Its greatest advantage resided in the leadership of veteran commanders, who had fought in the earlier war, and possessed the wisdom of the Great War's tactical learning curve.
This article is excerpted from American Tactical Advancement in World War I: The New Lessons of Combined Arms and Open Warfare by Jeffrey LaMonica.
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