Pershing’s task was to advance 10 miles and link up with the French Army on his left at the town of Grandpre, at the northern tip of the Argonne. Pershing replied, “Marshal Foch, you may insist all you please, but I decline absolutely to agree to your plan.”Īs the price for Foch’s reluctant acquiescence, Pershing had to give up his old idea of pushing toward Metz instead, he shifted his forces for a grand attack in the Meuse-Argonne in conjunction with French and British forces. Finally, Pershing said, “Marshal Foch, you have no authority as Allied commander in chief to call upon me to yield up my command of the American army and have it scattered among Allied forces where it will not be an American army at all.” “I must insist,” Foch said. Foch pressed his demand to divide the American army. “The further we proceeded in the discussion,” he recalled later, “the more apparent it became to me that the result of any of these proposals would be to prevent, or at least seriously delay the formation of an American army.” The two generals argued for some time. The Allies initially demanded that the Americans simply be used as replacements for battered British and French units. This was the revival of an old scheme, advocated by the British as well as the French, in which American troops would be dispersed piecemeal among Allied forces. The day he turned over command of the sector to Pershing, Foch visited his headquarters and proposed that the attack be drastically scaled back and that American reserves be dispatched to the Aisne sector. Mihiel attack from happening in the first place. Mihiel salient was an easy target and sensing that American forces were massing in the south for some sort of offensive, General Erich Ludendorff, the German commander on the Western Front, had begun quietly withdrawing troops from the sector two days earlier.įrench Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the supreme Allied commander, had tried unsuccessfully to prevent the St. Although well planned and executed, the assault was carried out against a phantom enemy. The attackers seized more than 400 artillery pieces and 700 machine guns, along with 16,000 prisoners. Within two days, American forces had cleared the salient, establishing a line less than 10 miles from Metz, the German-held city and crucial crossroads.
German and Austrian resistance crumbled before the onslaught. Pershing led the American Expeditionary Force in Europe. Pershing, a career soldier with much combat experience in Mexico and the Philippines. The American First Army was commanded by General John J. In all, more than half a million men supported by 267 tanks and 600 aircraft were gathered for the first grand American offensive of World War I. Seven American divisions remained in reserve. On the north were an additional three divisions, one of them French. On the south side of the salient were two U.S. German units were caught hunkering down in their bunkers in preparation for an expected renewal of the artillery barrage. Their lines were lightly manned, while many of the defenses had been neglected. The Germans were stunned by the speed and ferocity of the assault. To the Germans’ surprise, the barrage ceased after only four hours, and American troops on the north and south sides of the salient emerged from their positions and started the perilous trek across no-man’s-land. In all, more than 3,000 Allied guns of all sizes and calibers bombarded the previously quiet position. Mihiel salient on the Western Front were lit up by a massive artillery barrage. At 0100 hours on September 12, 1918, German positions in the St.
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