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
There was already an end to the confusion of the early days when the
parts of a piece of machinery arrived on different ships. Tables of
priority for each month were sent ahead to Washington, which might
well think that the A. E. F. considered that the War Department had
the magical power of pulling anything that it required out of a hat.
Instead of sending his requisitions for material through Chaumont,
Harbord now sent them direct to the War Department; he was the great
administrative agent for the chief of G-4 at Chaumont, who coördinated
combat and supply, holding the balance between the demands of the front
and the wherewithal to meet them. There was increasing coördination at
home, too, under the indomitable authority of General March.
The wedges which our divisions were driving down the walls of the Aire
and the Meuse rivers and against the Kriemhilde Stellung were only a
part of the giant wedge of the supply system, with its bases as broad
as the United States, which narrowed to the breadth of the Atlantic
Coast of France from Brest to Bordeaux. Most of our troops arrived at
Brest, where the harbor was deep enough for the draught of the mighty
German liners which had been transformed into transports. Navy blue
and army khaki swarmed on the docks where our sea and land forces met.
Our destroyers sped out of the harbor to disappear on the horizon, and
reappear as the protective scurrying guards of the transports which
they brought safe into port before they slipped out to sea again, to
see more freighters safe through the submarine zone under their agile
husbanding.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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