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On November 11, 1918, Armistice Day, the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) on the Western Front in France suffered more than thirty-five hundred casualties, although it had been known unofficially for two days that the fighting would end that day and known with absolute certainty as of 5 o'clock that morning that it would end at 11 a.m. Nearly a year afterward, on November 5, 1919, General John J. Pershing, commander of the AEF, found himself testifying on the efficiency of the war's prosecution before the House of Representatives Committee on Military Affairs.
The encounter was amicable and respectful since members were dealing with the officer who had led America to victory in the Great War. However, a Republican committee member, Alvan T. Fuller of Massachusetts, deferentially posed a provocative query: 'This question is somewhat irrelevant to the matter under discussion,' Fuller began, 'but I would like to ask General Pershing if American troops were ordered over the top on the other side on the morning of the day when under the terms of the Armistice firing was to ceaseâ?¦and that those troops who were not killed or wounded marched peacefully into Germany at 11 o'clock. Is that true?'
Pershing answered with his customary crisp confidence:
When the subject of the armistice was under discussion we did not know what the purpose of it was definitely, whether it was something proposed by the German High Command to gain time or whether they were sincere in their desire to have an armistice; and the mere discussion of an armistice would not be sufficient grounds for any judicious commander to relax his military activitiesâ?¦.No one could possibly know when the armistice was to be signed, or what hour be fixed for the cessation of hostilities so that the only thing for us to do, and which I did as commander in chief of the American forces, and which Marshal Foch did as commander in chief of the Allied armies was to continue the military activitiesâ?¦.
Just days later, however, the congressman forwarded to Pershing a letter from a constituent with a cover note saying, 'I have been deluged with questions on this subject.' The enclosed letter had been written to Fuller by George K. Livermore, former operations officer of the 167th Field Artillery Brigade of the black 92nd Division, stating that that force had been engaged since 5 a.m. on November 11 and had been ordered to launch its final charge at 10:30 a.m. Livermore lamented 'the little crosses over the graves of the colored lads who died a useless death on that November morning.' He further described the loss of U.S. Marines killed crossing the Meuse River in the final hours as 'frightful.' Congressman Fuller closed his letter to Pershing asking for 'a real frank, full answer to the question as to whether American lives were needlessly wasted.'
Fuller had Pershing's answer within the week, and it was categorical. By allowing the fighting to go forward, Pershing reiterated that he was simply following the orders of his superior, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, commander in chief of Allied forces in France, issued on November 9, to keep up the pressure against the retreating enemy until the cease-fire went into effect. Consequently, he had not ordered his army to stop fighting even after the signing of the armistice, of which, 'I had no knowledge before 6 a.m. November 11.'
The possibility of an armistice had begun the evening of November 7 when French soldiers of the 171st Régiment d'Infanterie near Haudroy were startled by an unfamiliar bugle call. Fearing they were about to be overrun, they cautiously advanced toward the increasingly loud blaring when out of the mantle of fog three automobiles emerged, their sides gilded with the imperial German eagle. The astonished Frenchmen had encountered a German armistice delegation headed by a rotund forty-three-year-old politician and peace advocate named Matthias Erzberger. The delegation was escorted to the Compigne Forest near Paris where, in a railroad dining car converted into a conference room, they were met by a small, erect figureâ??Marshal Fochâ??who fixed them with a withering gaze. Foch opened the proceeding with a question that left the Germans agape. 'Ask these Gentlemen what they want,' he said to his interpreter. When the Germans had recovered, Erzberger answered that they understood they had been sent to discuss armistice terms. Foch stunned them again: 'Tell these gentlemen that I have no proposals to make.'
No proposals, perhaps, but he did have demands. Foch's interpreter read aloud the Allied conditions, which struck the Germans like hammer blows: All occupied lands in Belgium, Luxembourg, and Franceâ??plus Alsace-Lorraine, held since 1870 by Germanyâ??were to be evacuated within fourteen days; the Allies were to occupy Germany west of the Rhine and bridgeheads on the river's east bank thirty kilometers deep; German forces had to be withdrawn from Austria-Hungary, Romania, and Turkey; Germany was to surrender to neutral or Allied ports 10 battleships, 6 battle cruisers, 8 cruisers, and 160 submarines. Germany was also to be stripped of heavy armaments, including 5,000 artillery pieces, 25,000 machine guns, and 2,000 airplanes. The next demand threw the German delegates into despair. Though the German people already faced starvation, the Allies intended to paralyze the enemy's transportation by continuing its naval blockade and confiscating 5,000 locomotives, 150,000 railway cars, and 5,000 trucks. The translator droned on through thirty-four conditions, the last of which blamed Germany for the war and demanded it pay reparations for all damage caused. Foch informed Erzberger that he had seventy-two hours to obtain the consent of his government to the Allies' terms, or the war would go on.
On average, 2,250 troops on all sides were dying on the Western Front every day. 'For God's sake, Monsieur le Marechal,' Erzberger pleaded, 'do not wait for those seventy-two hours. Stop the hostilities this very day.' The appeal fell on deaf ears. Before the meeting, Foch had described to his staff his intention 'to pursue the Feldgrauen [field grays, or German soldiers] with a sword at their backs' to the last minute until an armistice went into effect.
General John J. Pershing (National Archives)
To Pershing the very idea of an armistice was repugnant. 'Their request is an acknowledgment of weakness and clearly means that the Allies are winning the war,' he maintained. 'Germany's desire is only to regain time to restore order among her forces, but she must be given no opportunity to recuperate and we must strike harder than ever.' As for terms, Pershing had one response: 'There can be no conclusion to this war until Germany is brought to her knees.' The French and British Allies might be exhausted and long for peace, but Pershing saw his army akin to a fighter ready to deliver the knockout punch who is told to quit with his opponent reeling but still standing. Conciliation now, he claimed, would lead only to future war. He wanted Germany's unconditional surrender.
The Germans finally yielded and signed the armistice at 5:10 on the morning of the eleventh, backed up officially to 5 a.m. and to take effect within Foch's deadline: the eleventh month, eleventh day, eleventh hour of 1918. Pershing's postwar claim that he had had no official knowledge of the impending armistice before being informed by Foch's headquarters at 6 a.m. was disingenuous. The moment when the fighting would cease had been clear from the time Foch handed Erzberger the deadline, information to which Pershing was privy. On the evening of November 10 and through that night, news of the impending end was repeatedly affirmed from radio transmissions received at Pershing's AEF headquarters in Chaumont.
After the general was apprised that the signing had taken place, the order going out from him merely informed subordinate commanders of that fact. It said nothing about what they should do until 11 o'clock, when the cease-fire would go into effect. His order left his commanders in a decisional no man's land as to whether to keep fighting or spare their men in the intervening hours. The generals left in that limbo fell roughly into two categories: ambitious careerists who saw a fast-fading opportunity for glory, victories, even promotions; and those who believed it mad to send men to their deaths to take ground that they could safely walk into within days.
Congressman Fuller's mention of the loss of marines that final day referred to an action ordered by Maj. Gen. Charles P. Summerall, Pershing's commander of the V Corps. No doubt had clouded Summerall's mind as to how all this talk of an armistice on the eleventh should be treated. The day before he had gathered his senior officers and told them, 'Rumors of enemy capitulation come from our successes.' Consequently, this was no time to relax but rather to tighten the screws.
Major General Charles P. Summerall had ordered the 5th to force a crossing of the Meuse River that morning. (National Archives)
Summerall, a fifty-one-year-old Floridian, had spent three years teaching school before entering West Point. By the time he arrived on the Western Front he wore ribbons from the Spanish-American War, the Philippine Insurrection, and the Boxer Rebellion. He was a severe, unsmiling, some said brutal man who liked to turn out in prewar dress uniform with copious medals, gilded sashes, and fringed epaulettesâ??suggesting a viceroy of India rather than a plain American officer. Because he had taught English, Summerall prided himself that he possessed a literary turn of phrase. 'We are swinging the door by its hinges. It has got to move,' he told his subordinates as he ordered them to cross the Meuse River on the war's last day. 'Only by increasing the pressure can we bring about [the enemy's] defeatâ?¦.Get into action and get across.' His parting shot was: 'I don't expect to see any of you again, but that doesn't matter. You have the honor of a definitive successâ??give yourself to that.' Was he referring to ending his present command over them, or foretelling their fate? In either case, Summerall was spurring them on to defeat an already defeated enemy, whatever the cost.
Among replacements rushed to the Meuse was Private Elton Mackin, 5th Marine Regiment. Soon after America entered the war, Mackin had read an article in the Saturday Evening Post about the Marine Corps that lured the baby-faced nineteen-year-old to enlist. He had thus far survived 156 days at the front, beginning with his regiment's bloody baptism in the battle for Belleau Wood. Whether he would survive the last day depended on General Summerall's decision, and the human price it would exact.
In the gray hours before dawn on November 11, Mackin's regiment stumbled out of the Bois de Hospice, a wood on the west bank of the Meuse. The night was frigid, shrouded in fog and drizzle as the marines tried to find their way to the river in the gloom. Army engineers had gone before them, throwing flimsy bridges across the water by lashing pontoons together, then running planks over the top. The first signs that the marines were headed in the right direction were the bodies they stumbled upon, engineers killed attempting to construct the crossings.
Summerall crosses the Meuse on one of the rickety bridges used by the marines. (National Archives)
At about 4 a.m., the marines reached the first pontoon bridge, a rickety affair thirty inches wide with a guide rope strung along posts at knee height. They could see only halfway across before the bridge disappeared into the mist. Beyond, nothing was visible but the flash of enemy guns. The marines began piling up at the bridgehead, awaiting orders. A major blew a whistle and stepped onto the bridge. As the men crowded behind him, the pontoons began to sink below the water sloshing about the men's ankles. The engineers shouted to them to space themselves before the span collapsed.
Enemy shells began spewing up geysers, soaking the attackers with icy water. German Maxim machine guns opened fire, the rounds striking the wood sounding like a drumroll, those hitting flesh making a'sock, sock, sock' sound. The span swung wildly in the strong current. Mackin saw the man ahead of him stumble between two pontoon sections and vanish into the black water. The German guns' bullets continued knocking men off the pontoons, like ducks in a shooting gallery. Still, the Americans kept coming. By 4:30 a.m. the marines and infantrymen of the 89th Division had taken Pouilly on the river's east bank. In the remaining 6 1/2 hours they were to storm the heights above the town and clean out the machine gun nests. As day broke, Mackin watched a runner come sprinting across the bridge. The message from General Summerall's headquarters read only, 'Armistice signed and takes effect at 11:00 o'clock this morning.' Again, nothing was said about halting the fighting in the meantime. Mackin survived to write of his experience. But the Meuse River crossings had cost more than eleven hundred casualties in the hours just before the war's end.
Numerous members of Congress, including Fuller, had received appeals from families wanting to know why such pointless expenditure of life had been allowed to happen. Congress had already created a Select Committee on Expenditures in the War Department to investigate procurement practices, the sufficiency and quality of weaponry, and waste and graft in supplying the AEF. To this body, the House decided to add a 'Subcommittee 3' to investigate the Armistice Day losses. Royal Johnson, Republican from South Dakota, was appointed chairman to serve with another majority member, Republican Oscar Bland from Indiana, and a minority member, Daniel Flood, a Virginia Democrat. Johnson's interest in the task assigned him was intensely personal. He was barely out of uniform himself. At age thirty-six, Johnson had taken leave from the House of Representatives and enlisted as a private in the 313th Regiment, 'Baltimore's Own,' rising through the ranks to first lieutenant and earning the Distinguished Service Cross and Croix de Guerre.
Doughboys of the 28th Infantry Regiment crowd a trench in France during World War I. (National Archives)
Among the ranks of the 313th engaged on armistice morning was Henry N. Gunther, a fine-looking soldier in his mid-twenties, erect, with a clear-eyed gaze and a guardsman's mustache that suggested a British subaltern rather than an American private. Gunther, however, had had difficulty with army life. He came from a heavily German neighborhood in east Baltimore where the culture of his forebears remained strong. When the United States went to war, Gunther and his neighbors began to experience anti-German prejudice. In this poisonous atmosphere, Gunther felt no impulse to enlist. He was doing nicely at the National Bank of Baltimore and had a girlfriend, Olga Gruebl, who he intended to marry.
Nevertheless, Gunther was drafted five months after America entered the war. His closest pal, Ernest Powell, became platoon sergeant in Company A, while Gunther was appointed supply sergeant. 'Supply sergeants were traditionally unpopular,' Powell recalled. 'Army clothing in the war, as they said at the time, came in two sizesâ??too large and too small.' Supply sergeants took the brunt of the soldiers' gripes, and Gunther began keeping to himself, his enthusiasm for army life well controlled.
After arriving in France in July 1918, he wrote a friend back home to stay clear of the war since conditions were miserable. An army censor passed the letter along to Gunther's commanding officer, who broke the sergeant to private. Gunther then found himself serving under Ernie Powell, once his coequal, a chafing humiliation. Thereafter, Powell observed Gunther becoming increasingly brooding and withdrawn.
By Armistice Day, the 313th had been engaged in nearly two months of uninterrupted combat. At 9:30 that morning, the regiment jumped off, bayonets fixed, rifles at port, heads bent, slogging through a marshland in an impenetrable fog toward their objective, a speck on the map called Ville-Devant-Chaumont. Its advance was to be covered by the 311th Machine Gun Battalion. But in the fog, the gunners had no idea where to direct their fire, and Company A thus moved along in an eerie silence. Suddenly, German artillery opened up, and men began to fall.
At sixteen minutes before 11, a runner caught up with the 313th's parent 157th Brigade to report that the armistice had been signed. Again, the message made no mention of what to do in the interim. Brigadier General William Nicholson, commanding the brigade, made his decision: 'There will be absolutely no let-up until 11:00 a.m.' More runners were dispatched to spread the word to the farthest advanced regiments, including Gunther's. The 313th now gathered below a ridge called the Côte Romagne. Two German machine gun squads manning a roadblock watched, disbelieving, as shapes began emerging from the fog. Gunther and Sergeant Powell dropped to the ground as bullets sang above their heads. The Germans then ceased firing, assuming that the Americans would have the good sense to stop with the end so near. Suddenly, Powell saw Gunther rise and begin loping toward the machine guns. He shouted for Gunther to stop. The machine gunners waved him back, but Gunther kept advancing. The enemy reluctantly fired a five-round burst. Gunther was struck in the left temple and died instantly. The time was 10:59 a.m. General Pershing's order of the day would later record Henry Gunther as the last American killed in the war.
To question officers as to why men like Gunther had been exposed to death at literally the eleventh hour, the Republicans on Subcommittee 3 hired as counsel a recently retired army lawyer, Samuel T. Ansell. A forty-five-year-old West Pointer, Ansell had served as acting judge advocate general during the war and left the army specifically to take the congressional job for the then-substantial salary of twenty thousand dollars per year. His first move was to have all senior American commanders who had led troops on the Western Front answer these questions: 'What time on the morning of November 11, 1918, were you notified of the signing of the armistice? What orders were you and your command under with respect to operations against the enemy immediately before and up to the moment of such notification and after notification and up to 11 o'clock? After receipt of such notification did your command or any part of it continue to fight? If so, why and with what casualties? Did your command or any part of it continue the fight after 11 o'clock? If so, why and with what casualties?'Ansell proved a fire-breathing pros-ecutor, ill concealing his premise that lives had indeed been thrown away on the war's last day. Among the first witnesses he called was Pershing's chief of operations, Brig. Gen. Fox Conner. Proud, ruggedly handsome, and a wily witness, Conner admitted that, pursuant to Foch's order to keep the pressure on, one American army, the 2nd under Lt. Gen. Robert Lee Bullard, had actually moved an assault originally planned for November 11 up to November 10 'to counteract the idea among the troops that the Armistice had already been signed' and 'to influence the German delegates to sign.'
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