Back in Petrograd he noted that the disorganization of the city was worse. Mr, Root was complaining that he couldn’t get a response from Washington to his plea for a hundred thousand dollars to set up an American propaganda agency. Scott found the members of the mission bubbling with enthusiasm for young Kerensky’s energy and magnetism. “Too radically inclined to suit me” was the general’s comment.
Petrograd was being organized but not according to the hopes of the American Mission. They learned that Lenin and Trotsky, two German agents, as they were described, were influencing the soldiers of a machinegun regiment and the workers of the Putilov plant. Already they were said to control most of the workingclass quarters of Petrograd. Senator Root’s advice to Kerensky was to arrest Lenin immediately. “Any government would have arrested, tried, imprisoned and executed him,” he complained in a letter home. General Scott agreed. Kerensky would have been very glad to arrest Comrade Lenin but he couldn’t get his hands on him.
The American Mission did not wait to see the outcome of the Brusilov offensive. They all piled back into the Czar’s special train and were trundled across Siberia to Vladivostok again. The last news they had was that Brusilov had advanced forty miles towards Lemberg and that Lenin’s attempted insurrection — the July days of the Russian revolutionary legend — had failed. By early August they were back in Washington telling President Wilson and the State Department that Kerensky was the man who would not only promote democracy in Russia, but continue to fight the Germans.
Lansing was unconvinced. “I am astounded at their optimism,” he wrote in his neatly kept diary on August 8. “When I expressed doubts as to Kerensky’s personal force and ability to carry through his plans in view of the strong opposition developing against him, they assured me everything would come out all right … and that Russia would continue the war. I presume they know more about it than I do, and yet in spite of what they say I am very skeptical about Kerensky.”
The Eastern experts on the German general staff, meanwhile, were biding their time. By the end of July Brusilov’s army was buckling under clever German counterattacks. These, combined with lack of supply from the rear, produced a sudden and complete collapse. Whole divisions turned around and started for home. The Galician front was no longer defended.
The moment had come to let von Hutier try out his experiment in front of Riga. After a three hour bombardment his army advanced in a spearhead behind a rolling barrage, crossed the Dvina River on pontoons and broke through the strong Russian positions on the eastern shore.
By September 3 the Germans had captured the city of Riga. From Riga they sent small expeditions to occupy some of the Baltic islands as a method of increasing the confusion among the Russians. They had no intention of risking large forces in an expedition into Russia proper. The aim of von Hutier’s experiment was to bring down Kerensky’s pro-Allied government. In that aim it was completely successful. Within two months the Bolsheviks had established the Soviet power.
Chapter 15
THE LINE OF COMMUNICATION
TRAINING and supply were General Pershing’s chief preoccupation during the summer and fall of 1917. “It was one thing,” he wrote in his Experiences, “to call one or two million men to the colors, and quite another thing to transform them into an organized instructed army capable of meeting and holding its own in battle against the best trained force in Europe with three years of actual war experience to its credit.”
At home General Wood had already laid down a preliminary system of training. Sixteen cantonments each to accommodate approximately fortyeight thousand men were being planned by the War Department for the instruction of the national draft army, and an equal number of camps under canvas for the reinforced National Guard.
In France, Pershing’s immediate problem was to get his 1st Division in fighting trim. Next, a system of instruction had to be set up for the reinforcements to be landed in France during the summer by the navy’s transport service, which under Admiral Gleaves had so successfully brought the first contingent across the Atlantic without loss.
Pershing started as a schoolteacher. He taught military subjects at the University of Nebraska and at West Point. He had confidence in the school method of teaching. Even before he moved his headquarters away from the beguilements of Parisian life, he set up a special section of his staff to supervise army schools. He and Harbord were impressed when they visited the British armies by their methods of instruction in trench warfare. One of the fruits of Pershing’s weekend at Blendecques was that Haig assigned to him a lieutenant general, and a group of officers for one reason or another incapacitated for frontline service, to help train his raw Yanks. Pétain did the same. In the end Pershing had to train his own teachers.
The trouble with the British and French instructors from the American general’s point of view was that their minds were bogged in trench warfare. “Therefore in large measure the fundamentals so thoroughly taught at West Point for a century were more or less neglected … It was my opinion,” he continued, “that victory could not be won by the costly process of attrition, but it must be won by driving the enemy out in the open and engaging him in a war of movement.”
Drive the squareheads out of their trenches and knock ’em off with rifles, was his plan. He wanted his men trained in marksmanship, rapid riflefire, the use of the bayonet, and oldfashioned field tactics. He claimed that handgrenades, machineguns, mortars, and trench artillery were all right for specific purposes, but he clung passionately to the dogma that the welltrained infantryman with rifle and bayonet would eventually emerge as master of the field.
Before he could train an army he had to train his staff officers. He opened a General Staff College with a three months course in the old walled town of Langres a little south of Chaumont. Separate from that, he established a network of schools for corps, divisional and regimental staffs, for unit commanders, for noncoms, for recruits and replacements, for specialists in everything from bridgebuilding to the warehousing of o.d. uniforms. Most important in the early months were the schools for training teachers to teach in all these schools.
While the troops were being trained arrangements had to be made for their supply. As soon as Pershing had dispatched his General Organization Project to Washington he set his staff to work to plan a line of communications to the American ports. Almost every day he cabled for fresh personnel. He needed railroadmen to run and recondition the worn-out railroads the French were placing at his disposal, canalboat men to operate the canals, trucking experts to handle shipment by road, carpenters, muleskinners, warehousemen, stevedores.
Most of his supply would have to come from America. Everything depended on shipping. Food and shells and powder and small arms ammunition produced in the States had to be shipped across the Atlantic. The British were proving closefisted about letting go any ships of their own. Not enough ships were being built to make up for the U-boat sinkings. In Washington a Shipping Board had been established and enormous new shipyards were in the blueprint stage. No new ships could be expected until the following year. There was a list of materials as long as your arm that Pershing needed right away.
To ease the strain on shipping he decided to set up a purchasing agency in France. To head it he picked Charles G. Dawes, a friend of many years standing whom he’d helped procure a commission in the Engineers. When as a lieutenant he taught military science at the University of Nebraska he’d known Charley Dawes as a fledgeling lawyer there. With a certain amount of envy he’d watched Dawes, who came of an Ohio family already firmly entrenched in railroad finance and banking, become wealthy and eminent in financial Chicago. Herbert Hoover tried to commandeer Dawes for his Food Administration but Dawes managed to slip through his fingers and to get himself sent overseas. He was hardly established as a major with an engineer regiment from Alabama reconstructing the docks at St. Nazaire when Pershing called him to Paris.