Pershing: general of the armies.

A MILLION BLOODY RUGS

JOHN J. PERSHING "was a remote, awesome figure--aloof, austere, forbidding . . . the incarnationon of West Point training and tradition." In 1906, while observing the Russo-Japanese War as a captain, he suddenly jumped over 862 officers and was promoted to brigadier. In 1916, the year after his wife and three daughters died in a fire, he led a punitive expedition against Pancho Villa. This volume (the second of two) opens with his appointment as commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Force and his departure for France in May 1917. He had the complete support of his superiors in Washington and (in the days of poor communication) was a virtually autonomous leader. He had no peer in the army, and the other American generals, compared to him, looked like lumpy and tired old men. After the commander, the most outstanding soldiers were Marshall, MacArthur, and Patton. The latter believed soldiering was "making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country"--not you.

Smythe's biography, though thorough and competent, seems mechanically patched together. It has a leaden style ("a knock-down, drag-out fight"), encyclopedic lists, and many flat anecdotes; it never quite comes alive. (One quarter of the book is notes, bibliography, and index). Smythe makes many banal observations: In the summer of 1939, "Pershing found the French very apprehensive about Hitler"; "like most Americans, he was shocked by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor." He lacks the narrative sweep and dramatic flair of British military historians like Correlli Barnett, John Keegan, and David Irving.

This book is less concerned with actual combat than with Pershing's vast organizational and political problems: when to commit fresh American troops to battle, whether to amalgamate them with the Allies or wait for the development of an independent army. Casualties, as expected, were significantly lower when American troops were under American command. The buildup that led to victory was relentless. Eventually, there were two million Americans in France, 31 per cent of Allied manpower, who used 45,000 tons of supplies each day.

In November 1917, when the British suffered 270,000 casualties at Ypres, the first American battalions rotated in a quiet sector of the French lines. In February 1918, ten months after the declaration of war, only one American unit helds its own front. After one year, American combat deaths were only 163. In June 1918, the South African general, Jan Smuts, furious and impatient with the commander's delays, said, "Pershing is very commonplace, without real war experience," and made the extraordinary proposal that he take over command of the American army.

Between October 1914 and the major German offensives of April 1918, the western front had not moved more than ten miles, for the avalanche of artillery that preceded an attack--1,400-pound shells could be fired 25 miles-devastated the terrain and impeded the subsequent advance. The first significant Pershing battle--Belleau Wood, June 1918--followed a French retreat and had no strategic value. But it proved that Americans were superior to German troops.

In July the Americans were still under British and French commands. But in the battle of Soissons that month the Germans, who had held the initiative since March, lost it permanently. In August, on the Somme salient, the British won the greatest victory of the war, capturing four hundred guns and 27,000 prisoners. In September the American Army came into existence and fought under its own flag at St.-Mihiel, wiping out a four-year salient in two days. Liddell-Hart said: "The extraction of the St.-Mihiel fang was one of the most perfectly complete pieces of strategic dentistry in the war." In November, in the Argonne forest of northeastern France, the Americans broke through the Hindenburg line for the first time. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of the Germans that they "walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs."

The war was eventually won, not by the introduction of any new tactic or new weapons, but simply by attrition and exhaustion--"by the fact that one side ran out of men and equipment before the other." Pershing and Foch pressed for a harsh armistice (men were killed right up to 11 A.M. on November 11). The Germans, who had terminated the war on enemy territory, claimed they were undefeated in battle.

After the war, Pershing had an uneventful life (his last thirty years are covered in fifty pages). He made a half-hearted bid for President in 1920, and the nomination went to Warren Harding. He was Chief of Staff during 1921-24, and wrote a boring book about the war. He had a secret thirty-year affair with a Rumanian-French woman, Micheline Resco, and married her as he lay dying. The American commander in the First World War, like Eisenhower in the Second, was a surprisingly ordinary man.