After three hours of intensive shelling of the Italian network of communications and a saturating gas attack, in a dim dawn of mist and rain which was turning to snow in the high mountains, the German spearhead broke through at the village of Caporetto, crossed the Isonzo and outflanked the Italian line.
Though other units held until forced into orderly retreat the Italian Second Army broke and ran. The panic crossing of the Tagliamento, thirty miles to the rear, became a byword for defeat. It was largely because the unexpected extent of their gains threw the German and Austrian armies off balance that the Italians, under new generalship and stiffened by British and French reinforcements, were able in the first days of November to establish a line of entrenchments along the Piave, sixtyfive miles to the south on the dank Venetian plain.
In Paris, sitting on November 3 in the quiet of the Morgan Harjes bank, Dawes, groggy from his struggle to free shipping space for essential items, described the Italian reverse as sobering. He noted that eightyfive thousand British and French troops were speeding to the Piave. He had just lunched with Pershing, whom he found both depressed and stimulated by the Italian news. Dawes’ nephew, who was a private, drove the two friends out to a secluded place where they could take a long walk on a country road together. Their conversation was solemn.
“To help the Commander in Chief, my dear friend carry this his burden, to help my country in this time of need …” wrote Dawes, “all this is my weary but happy lot. But it is not difficult to be happy when one feels the sense of progress … With the latitude John gives me I feel as if I were exercising the powers of one of the old monarchs. To negotiate singlehanded with governments comes to but few men.”
Pershing, while shaken by Caporetto, felt privately stimulated, as a professional of warfare, by the German successes at Riga and on the Isonzo. It seemed to foretell the end of trench warfare. Here was convincing proof of the correctness “of the doctrine of training for open warfare … It simply proved that nothing … had changed this age-old principle of the art of war.”
About ten days after the Austro-German advance into Italy had settled down to a war of waiting along the Piave, the correctness of Pershing’s doctrine on the art of warfare received fresh confirmation, this time from the British. On November 20 the British tanks broke through the German lines at Cambrai and led the infantry on a four mile advance with casualties light indeed for the western front.
The eager young officers of the British tank corps had been much chagrined by their failure to score any gains during the first days of the offensive at Ypres. Almost tearfully they had tried to point out, while the battle was still in the planning stage at G.H.Q., that the terrain there was impossible for tanks. They had prepared careful maps indicating the most dangerously flooded areas and had been told to forget that nonsense. Now in front of Cambrai, between Lens and St. Quentin, on hard rolling ground which had not been made impassable by constant shelling, they were given a chance to see what they could do.
The British and French had been developing armored vehicles independently. In England the idea seems to have started when the official army reporter, a Colonel Swinton who signed his reports “Eyewitness,” remembered having read a story a dozen years before in the Strand Magazine called “Land Ironclads.” Of course it was by H. G. Wells. He confabulated with some young fellows of the Royal Naval Air Service who had been impressed by the performance of the armored motor cars they improvised for use on the roads around Dunkirk during the first battle of the Marne. They got hold of an American Holt caterpillar tractor and called in the help of various engineers to see how it could be developed into a selfmoving armored gun carriage, the land ironclad of Wells’ science fiction. At that point the Sea Lords announced that the Royal Navy would have no part of a contraption that cruised on land and the program was transferred to the army.
Winston Churchill, being an imaginative fellow, was struck with the idea of landships from the first moment he heard of them. When Lloyd George became Minister of Munitions he followed up Churchill’s suggestions. In September 1916 General Haig allowed some Mark I tanks to be deployed on the Somme, to bolster morale he somewhat apologetically explained. Of fortynine primitive types on hand only thirtysix reached the scene of the engagement before breaking down.
At that time the fastest speed tanks could make was four miles an hour. Even so, a couple of the clumsy vehicles made a name for themselves. The first tank to go over the top flushed out a pocket of German resistance before a shell put it out of business. Another, followed by a company of infantry, captured a trenchful of startled Heinies. Their greatest achievement came later in the Somme campaign when a pair of tanks, although hopelessly stuck in the mud, forced the surrender of four hundred men.
At Cambrai the tank corps rejoiced in the possession of three hundred tanks of their latest improved model. The tanks were hidden from the enemy in an undamaged piece of forest. When they took off before dawn, in spite of their slow motion, the surprise was complete. Advancing in groups of twelve followed by infantry, they flattened the barbed wire entanglements and crossed the concrete trenches of the Hindenburg Line with the greatest ease. Two German divisions were routed and a hundred and twenty guns and seventyfive hundred men were captured.
The catch came when it was discovered that the only preparations made by Haig’s G.H.Q. for following up a breakthrough was the deployment of some units of Haig’s beloved cavalry. German machinegunners from their pillboxes slaughtered the horses and their riders. A few days later German counterattacks wiped out the British gains.
The success of their counterattack proved to the satisfaction of the German High Command that tanks were a failure. For the benefit of German civilians the cumbersome machines were ridiculed as unmanly devices of the degenerate English and unworthy of the brave Teutonic soldier.
Pershing was present at the headquarters of General Byng who commanded the Cambrai show during the first part of the engagement. His staff was already at work on arrangements for the furnishing of French light tanks and British heavy tanks to the American troops, but nothing that he said or wrote indicated that he felt H. G. Wells’ “land ironclads” in any way threatened the infantryman with rifle and the bayonet, whom he trusted to dominate the war of movement he looked forward to in the coming year.
Meanwhile the buildup of the A.E.F. continued with gradually increasing tempo. By the end of November something like a hundred thousand men had been landed in France. Brest became the chief disembarkation port. A little more than half the American troops crossed the Atlantic on British ships, a small percentage on French and Italian ships, and the rest on transports officered and convoyed by the U. S. Navy.
Early in the summer the destroyers had learned to refuel at sea. That meant that even the smaller types could make the full voyage to Europe with their convoys instead of having to turn back halfway.
The first few convoys reached home ports intact in spite of continual forays by U-boats off the Brittany coast and in the far Atlantic in the latitude of the Azores. On the eastbound course not a ship was lost during that year.
A day out of Brest on the return voyage in mid October the small transport Antilles was hit square in the engineroom by a torpedo. The ship sank in six and a half minutes, but due to carefully worked out abandon ship routines only sixtyseven men were lost out of two hundred and thirtyfour on board. The radio electrician stuck to his wireless room and continued sending out SOS signals until the ship sank and he drowned. The skipper who insisted on being the last man off the ship was saved by a hair.