Our Greatest Battle (The Meuse-Argonne)Palmer, Frederick
History
Our Greatest Battle (The Meuse-Argonne)
Palmer, Frederick
Argonne, Battle of the, France, 1918; World War, 1914-1918 -- Campaigns -- Western Front
He found the S. O. S. working in a series of compartments rather
than departments. Though each was most conscientiously striving for
coördination, different chiefs were in a mood that meant friction.
Projects whose immediate completion was vital were not as far along as
those whose completion could wait. Many were being constructed on too
elaborate and lavish a scale by chiefs who had won a disproportionate
amount of authority to carry out their ideas. They were enjoying the
building of a plant that would last for twenty years, when the war
might be won in another six months. Harbord did what Pershing would
have done if the C.-in-C. had come to Tours; he was Pershing's man, as
he had said. He grasped his problem, made his plan, and then set his
adjutants to driving.
"The first time I went in to see Harbord," said one of them, "I knew
that he knew his own mind, and that he was going to tell me what to do;
and that I was going out to do it with the confidence that he would
back me up. His 'no' to my suggestions was as convincing as his 'yes'
that we were to have team-play--and that he was master."
His faculty of drawing men together was put in full play in some of
the obvious methods of leadership which had been somewhat neglected
in the S. O. S., where there had evidently been a policy that if you
honestly follow the regulations all will come out well in the end.
All the chiefs gathered at his house once a week for luncheon, where
they found one another to be human. Instead of remaining at Tours,
he left routine to his Chief of Staff, and spent three nights out of
four on his railroad car in going and coming, with his office on board
always in touch with Tours, while his inspections kept him informed of
progress and aroused the enthusiasm of subordinates. The feeling passed
that you were derelict if fate sent you to work in the S. O. S. The S.
O. S. began to have the fighting spirit of corps of the front--that
of an ambitious business concern. Harbord had not been a week in
command before the S. O. S. was feeling a new force emanating from
headquarters. They were calling to the fighters: "We're with you. Take
more prisoners, so that we can set them to work. It means more supplies
for you." That new commander who now had under him more than four
hundred thousand men, and activities exceeding those of the largest
of our trusts, would make every worker feel that he was contributing
his part, not for his wage envelope, but for winning the war which had
brought him to France.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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