General Blackjack Pershing
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*General Black Jack Pershing Muslim Terrorists
*General Blackjack Pershing Pig’s Blood
*General Black Jack Pershing Biography
*General Black Jack Pershing Vs Muslim Extremists
From the Old West to the Western Front, from a troop of Buffalo Soldiers to a million doughboys, Pershing’s globe-circling career is a virtual history of the U.S. Army.
He has all but faded from our collective memory: A terse, uncharismatic figure in a drab, old-fashioned uniform. During the war in which he commanded, he accepted no unconditional surrenders, invented no famous strategies. He never defied a president or harbored obvious presidential ambitions. And yet, no other American general ever held significant command positions in so many diverse theaters of war. No American general besides George Washington ever held such high rank. None ever commanded so many different types of troops, from one of the nation’s last all-black combat regiments to the first U.S. ground force to fight in Europe. And probably no American officer ever went on so stoically doing his duty after enduring such appalling personal tragedy.
John Joseph ’Black Jack’ Pershing (September 13, 1860 – July 15, 1948), was a general officer in the United States Army who led the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I. Pershing is the only person to be promoted in his own lifetime to the highest rank ever held in the United States Army—General of the Armies (a retroactive Congressional edict passed in 1976 promoted George. He was General of the Armies John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in World War I. Over the course of his 38-year career, he fought Apaches in New Mexico, Sioux in the Dakota Territory, the Spanish in Cuba, the Moros in Mindanao, Pancho Villa in Mexico and the Germans in France.
Department of defense pin 30150 famous generals - pershing 1963 military highlights of ’blackjack’ perishing’s carrer, from prior to turn of century through. General ’blackjack’ pershing General of the Armies of the United States John Joseph Pershing was the only soldier to be promoted in his own lifetime to the highest rank ever held in the United States Army—General of the Armies.
He was General of the Armies John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in World War I. Over the course of his 38-year career, he fought Apaches in New Mexico, Sioux in the Dakota Territory, the Spanish in Cuba, the Moros in Mindanao, Pancho Villa in Mexico and the Germans in France. Along the way, he would pick up a law degree, a teaching position at West Point, a mistress in Paris and a Pulitzer Prize for his memoirs of the Great War. He had a knack for being in the right place at momentous times—Wounded Knee, San Juan Hill, the Argonne—and for influencing important people. He would command most of the generals who would shape the American century. Among his aides, and friends, he would count both George C. Marshall and George Patton, and he would find occasion to personally dress down Douglas MacArthur—however unfairly. And in his final command, he made decisions that would have enormous ramifications for American foreign policy to this day.
Pershing was a small-town boy, born in Laclede, Mo., on September 13, 1860, to a staunchly Unionist store- keeper and his wife. His earliest memory was of a deadly raid on his hometown by Confederate bushwhackers. His father survived but was ruined by the Panic of 1873. John was left to scratch out an education as best he could, working a farm with his younger brother when he was just 13, then teaching first black and then white schoolchildren while still a teenager himself. His ambition was to become a lawyer, but when he won an academic competition for the right to apply to West Point, he grabbed at the chance and left his home state for the first time.
Pershing graduated from the Point in 1886, near the middle of his class academically, but with the highest leadership honors as captain of the Corps of Cadets. He was a natural officer, both in spirit and appearance. In every photograph, at every stage of his life, he looked like a caricature of his profession. As biographer Gene Smith put it, “As an immaculate and snappy and severe and disciplined soldier of perfect military bearing, he was unsurpassable.”
Pershing demanded this severity—a constant emphasis on proper drill, dress, demeanor, readiness, attitude—both of himself and those he commanded. It would become a hallmark of his career, carried, at two critical junctures, to extremes that threatened to alienate all those around him. During his year as a tactical officer at West Point, he handed out so many demerits that the cadets subjected him to “silencing”—falling mute whenever Pershing set foot in the academy mess hall. They also saddled him with his nickname, not the newspaper-sanitized version, but the infinitely more derisive “Nigger Jack.” He was undeterred. In World War I, commanding a force that would number more than 2 million men, most of them newly drafted, Pershing issued the impossible order that the Point’s standards would apply to everyone: “The rigid attention, the upright bearing, attention to detail, uncomplaining obedience to instruction required of the cadet will be required of every officer and soldier of our armies in France.” Even a jilted fiancée—George Patton’s sister—would describe him at this time as “a little tin god on wheels.”
And yet, Pershing was a surpassingly adaptable soldier, one who continually saw beyond the parameters of his profession. It was as if his reliance on discipline and drill were a grip he kept on his own deeply passionate and inquiring nature— one he tightened whenever he feared it might fly out of control. This served him best when he had to struggle vigorously to keep his very command—the greatest command in U.S. history to that point.
He could not have anticipated any such challenges at the outset. Lieutenant Pershing graduated into a U.S. Army that consisted of fewer than 25,000 men, most of them assigned to desolate forts throughout the rapidly vanishing Western frontier. Its officer corps, just 2,000 strong, was hopelessly stagnant. Pershing himself took 15 years just to rise to captain. He spent much of his career fruitlessly chasing various hostiles across the empty Western landscape—Chief Mangus’ Apaches through the hills and mesas of New Mexico; Chief Big Foot’s Sioux across the Dakota Territory during the Ghost Dance uprising; Pancho Villa through the dust of Chihuahua; a band of Cree attempting to return to Montana from Canada.
In between, he duly provided the other eclectic services expected of an American officer at the time, spending four years teaching and drilling cadets at the University of Nebraska. He seldom complained about any of it. Not the loneliness and isolation of the distant forts; not the daunting weather extremes or trivial nature of many of his duties. He remained, instead, doggedly self-reliant, flexible and observant—all qualities that would serve him well. He didn’t just adapt to the West; he seemed to love it, including its native peoples. The treatment of the Indians, he would write, constituted “the most cruel, unjust, blackest page of American history”—even as he pursued some of them relentlessly. Later, he would fight a remarkably successful campaign against Islamic insurgents in a complex civil war halfway around the globe. He was a romantic without illusions, always eager to study, understand and even sympathize with the dizzying array of peoples he was supposed to fight.
Everything seemed to fascinate him. In a time when an officer’s career promised neither riches nor glory, Pershing made the most of it. Sent the long way around to fight the Moros in the Philippines, he visited with Parisian art students in the Latin Quarter and perused the Louvre and Versailles, where he would one day have to battle for the independence of America’s greatest army. Returning from his post as military attaché in Tokyo, Pershing took his young family on the newly completed Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow, toured St. Petersburg, Berlin and the Waterloo battlefield, and lived for several months in Tours while trying to improve his French. A ladies’ man, he enjoyed (successively) a loving marriage and a loving, decades-long affair with a French-Romanian painter—and perhaps some briefer interludes that threatened to ruin his career and reputation.
They didn’t, in part because Pershing was also adept at making the right connections. Like Dwight Eisenhower, he was a consummately political general who advanced by not indulging in the spiteful politics of a peacetime army. It was no coincidence that he won the two biggest promotions of his career from two presidents—Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson—who could not have been more different in temperament or loathed each other more. But then Pershing was always able to make the best of a situation. Stuck in Lincoln, Neb., for four years teaching military science to farm boys, he used the opportunity to get his law degree, pass the Nebraska bar, lead his charges to a national drill championship…and make friends with a congressman named George Meiklejohn, whose ambition of becoming assistant secretary of war Pershing helped to fulfill.
Thirty-five years old by the time his stint in Nebraska ended, still a bachelor, still a lieutenant nine years after leaving the Point, Pershing considered taking up the law. Instead, he accepted what a lesser man might have seen as yet another demeaning assignment, command of a troop of the 10th Cavalry—the all-black regiment cadets would later deride—at Fort Assinniboine, Mont. His troops seemed to like him, respect him, and gave him their own nickname, “Old Red,” during his two years there. When war broke out with Spain in 1898, Pershing, then stuck in a miserable tenure at West Point, begged for the chance to see action.
Assistant Secretary of War Meiklejohn found an opening in his previous posting, commanding a troop of the 10th Cavalry. The 10th was one of four African-American regiments at the time, commanded by white officers and stationed at Western outposts, as far as possible from white population centers. Getting them into position to invade Cuba was almost a war in itself: The black troops found that the cheering that greeted their troop train at every station stopped abruptly once they crossed into the South. Bivouacked outside Lakeland, Fla., they had to endure the animosity of local whites, who alternated between gawking openly at the sight of armed black men in uniform and vehemently denying them access to restaurants, bars, stores and brothels. Brawls, shootings and even a full-scale riot broke out between black regulars and white citizens and volunteers. Once deployed in Cuba, they had to endure the same poisonous rations, archaic weapons and erratic leadership as the rest of the invasion force in this most precipitous and chaotic of all the nation’s wars.
Pershing picked up a case of malaria in Cuba and was nearly killed in a stream by a Spanish artillery shell that landed close enough to leave him soaking wet. He led his men through the jungle and then in the desperate, improvised rush up San Juan Heights on the left of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.
“If it had not been for the Negro cavalry, the Rough Riders would have been exterminated,” one of Teddy’s men claimed later. “We officers of the 10th Cavalry could have taken our black heroes in our arms. They had again fought their way into our affections, as they had fought their way into the hearts of the American people,” Pershing exulted.
In this, he could not have been more wrong, but he won a Silver Star, a captaincy—at last—and a command in the ensuing savage war in the Philippines. There, Pershing fought a strikingly modern counterinsurgency campaign against the fiercely independent Islamic Moro peoples. He alternated patient negotiation with the ruthless reduction of Moro strongholds, yet openly admired the intelligence, customs and even the cuisine of those he fought.
Pershing’s work in Mindanao won him the public praise of now- President Roosevelt, the man he had followed up Kettle Hill, who was intent on instituting military promotions based on merit rather than time served. In 1906 he raised Pershing from captain to general over 862 senior officers, making him military governor of Mindanao. Soon after, a story broke in the press that Pershing had kept a querida, or “sweetheart,” while on that first posting in Mindanao, fathered two children by her and subsequently offered her hush money not to expose him. It would not be the last time accusations concerning an affair threatened Pershing’s career (the next concerned an heiress who would become Douglas MacArthur’s first wife). He never quite denied the charges, but the War Department dismissed them out of hand. True or not, they were transparently the work of officers jealous of Pershing’s promotion.
In 1905 Pershing married Helen Frances “Frankie” Warren, the daughter of a wealthy, powerful U.S. senator from Wyoming. It was another propitious connection, but also seems to have been a love match. Frankie, nearly 20 years Pershing’s junior, was devoted to him, bearing him three daughters and a son in the first seven years of their marriage, while following him around the world without complaint. Spirited, loyal and intrepid, she was living with the children in the dilapidated officers barracks of San Francisco’s Presidio on August 27, 1915, just a week from joining Pershing at his latest post, at Fort Bliss in El Paso. In the early morning hours, a fire swept through their rooms, suffocating Frankie and the couple’s three girls, ages 3 to 9. Only their son, 6-year-old Warren, survived.
It was a devastating blow, one made worse by the fact that Pershing blamed himself for the suspected cause of the fire, a dining room floor he’d recently had varnished that had caught fire when some coals fell out of a grate. This supremely self-controlled officer was reduced to screaming and weeping openly before friends and junior officers, exclaiming, “I can understand the loss of one member of the family, but not nearly all!” Those around him feared he might go mad.
Yet within weeks Pershing was back on duty at Fort Bliss. He was needed there—and unbeknownst to him, he now stood on the verge of a dizzying chain of events that would shoot him to the top of his profession. His rise began with the Punitive Expedition, the campaign against the famous Mexican bandit chieftain Pancho Villa that must have seemed to Pershing yet another hopeless pursuit. For months prior, Pershing had conducted his patient brand of diplomacy to keep the revolution that had been raging in Mexico from crossing the border. He had boasted particular success cultivating Villa, who posed grinning for pictures with Pershing, and kept hands off American interests.
That changed when President Wilson, without consulting Pershing, allowed troops of a rival Mexican faction to cross American soil by rail, outflank Villa and largely annihilate his army. Vengeful and desperate, Villa responded by trying to widen the war, pulling 19 American engineers off a train in Chihuahua and murdering them by the railbed, then launching a bloody night raid against the garrison town of Columbus, N.M. Pershing was ordered to bring Villa to justice. Thus he would become the first, but far from last, American officer over the course of the century ordered to pursue a hazy objective, under an even cloudier set of restrictions. He was authorized by the deputy chief of staff to attack Mexican towns if Villa and his men were there, but he was not to use the Mexican railroads to resupply his force. His troops were to “do as soldiers in the circumstance must do,” and if Villa’s troops broke up into smaller bands, “our people must more or less scatter in order to follow him.”
Somehow, Pershing was able to “more or less” decode these equivocal directions and conduct a campaign that adroitly avoided setting off a full-scale war, but satisfied the administration’s need to save face. The Punitive Expedition punished its way 350 miles into Mexico, diligently pursuing Villa for 11 months and dodging several ambushes. Pershing’s command eventually reached a total of 11,000 men, almost a tenth of the U.S. standing army. He saw firsthand just how short even its best units were of the latest arms, vehicles, planes; how unprepared it was to fight a modern war.
This was information he would need. Within two months of Pershing’s return to El Paso in 1917, the U.S. had declared war on the Central Powers. Pershing was clearly the only senior officer young enough, fit enough and experienced enough to lead the planned AEF, and he had impressed superiors with his handling of the delicate assignment in Mexico. Yet the appointment was probably an even better choice than Wilson and Secretary of War Newton Baker realized, for it would be as much a diplomatic mission as a military one.
Pershing shipped out almost immediately, arriving in England on June 8, 1917. There and in France, he was greeted by giddy, cheering mobs and in response made all the right gestures: kissing Napoléon’s sword and laying a wreath on Lafayette’s tomb (where, as Pershing always insisted, it was his paymaster, Major Charles E. Stanton, who actually uttered the words, “Lafayette, we are here!”)
The only trouble was he had no one with him, beyond a hastily assembled staff of some 187 officers and civilians. Nor would an army materialize anytime soon. Despite all the lobbying for preparedness over the past three years by Teddy Roosevelt and others, the country had largely chosen to ignore the possibility it could be dragged into the most terrible war in human history. Months, maybe a year, would be needed before any sizable American force could be assembled, trained, equipped and shipped to Europe—and it wasn’t clear the Allies had that much time.
Even as Pershing arrived in France, the feckless Nivelle Offensive was grinding to a halt. The traumatized French army had suffered another 200,000 casualties over the course of two months, and mutinies would sweep through 54 combat divisions. Only the strictest military secrecy kept the enemy from realizing this and breaking through to Paris. That fall Russia capitulated to the Bolsheviks and then to the Germans, and the Italians collapsed at Caporetto. Some 265 German and Austrian divisions, Pershing feared, might now be massed on the Western Front for one last overwhelming offensive as soon as the weather improved.
By the winter of 1918, a quarter-million doughboys had arrived in France, but for the most part they lacked artillery, planes and transport. They were, in short, not an army. The British and French argued that they didn’t need to be. The Americans could be fed into the Allied armies as they arrived by the battalion, platoon or company, some 50 to 150 men at a
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*General Black Jack Pershing Muslim Terrorists
*General Blackjack Pershing Pig’s Blood
*General Black Jack Pershing Biography
*General Black Jack Pershing Vs Muslim Extremists
From the Old West to the Western Front, from a troop of Buffalo Soldiers to a million doughboys, Pershing’s globe-circling career is a virtual history of the U.S. Army.
He has all but faded from our collective memory: A terse, uncharismatic figure in a drab, old-fashioned uniform. During the war in which he commanded, he accepted no unconditional surrenders, invented no famous strategies. He never defied a president or harbored obvious presidential ambitions. And yet, no other American general ever held significant command positions in so many diverse theaters of war. No American general besides George Washington ever held such high rank. None ever commanded so many different types of troops, from one of the nation’s last all-black combat regiments to the first U.S. ground force to fight in Europe. And probably no American officer ever went on so stoically doing his duty after enduring such appalling personal tragedy.
John Joseph ’Black Jack’ Pershing (September 13, 1860 – July 15, 1948), was a general officer in the United States Army who led the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I. Pershing is the only person to be promoted in his own lifetime to the highest rank ever held in the United States Army—General of the Armies (a retroactive Congressional edict passed in 1976 promoted George. He was General of the Armies John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in World War I. Over the course of his 38-year career, he fought Apaches in New Mexico, Sioux in the Dakota Territory, the Spanish in Cuba, the Moros in Mindanao, Pancho Villa in Mexico and the Germans in France.
Department of defense pin 30150 famous generals - pershing 1963 military highlights of ’blackjack’ perishing’s carrer, from prior to turn of century through. General ’blackjack’ pershing General of the Armies of the United States John Joseph Pershing was the only soldier to be promoted in his own lifetime to the highest rank ever held in the United States Army—General of the Armies.
He was General of the Armies John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in World War I. Over the course of his 38-year career, he fought Apaches in New Mexico, Sioux in the Dakota Territory, the Spanish in Cuba, the Moros in Mindanao, Pancho Villa in Mexico and the Germans in France. Along the way, he would pick up a law degree, a teaching position at West Point, a mistress in Paris and a Pulitzer Prize for his memoirs of the Great War. He had a knack for being in the right place at momentous times—Wounded Knee, San Juan Hill, the Argonne—and for influencing important people. He would command most of the generals who would shape the American century. Among his aides, and friends, he would count both George C. Marshall and George Patton, and he would find occasion to personally dress down Douglas MacArthur—however unfairly. And in his final command, he made decisions that would have enormous ramifications for American foreign policy to this day.
Pershing was a small-town boy, born in Laclede, Mo., on September 13, 1860, to a staunchly Unionist store- keeper and his wife. His earliest memory was of a deadly raid on his hometown by Confederate bushwhackers. His father survived but was ruined by the Panic of 1873. John was left to scratch out an education as best he could, working a farm with his younger brother when he was just 13, then teaching first black and then white schoolchildren while still a teenager himself. His ambition was to become a lawyer, but when he won an academic competition for the right to apply to West Point, he grabbed at the chance and left his home state for the first time.
Pershing graduated from the Point in 1886, near the middle of his class academically, but with the highest leadership honors as captain of the Corps of Cadets. He was a natural officer, both in spirit and appearance. In every photograph, at every stage of his life, he looked like a caricature of his profession. As biographer Gene Smith put it, “As an immaculate and snappy and severe and disciplined soldier of perfect military bearing, he was unsurpassable.”
Pershing demanded this severity—a constant emphasis on proper drill, dress, demeanor, readiness, attitude—both of himself and those he commanded. It would become a hallmark of his career, carried, at two critical junctures, to extremes that threatened to alienate all those around him. During his year as a tactical officer at West Point, he handed out so many demerits that the cadets subjected him to “silencing”—falling mute whenever Pershing set foot in the academy mess hall. They also saddled him with his nickname, not the newspaper-sanitized version, but the infinitely more derisive “Nigger Jack.” He was undeterred. In World War I, commanding a force that would number more than 2 million men, most of them newly drafted, Pershing issued the impossible order that the Point’s standards would apply to everyone: “The rigid attention, the upright bearing, attention to detail, uncomplaining obedience to instruction required of the cadet will be required of every officer and soldier of our armies in France.” Even a jilted fiancée—George Patton’s sister—would describe him at this time as “a little tin god on wheels.”
And yet, Pershing was a surpassingly adaptable soldier, one who continually saw beyond the parameters of his profession. It was as if his reliance on discipline and drill were a grip he kept on his own deeply passionate and inquiring nature— one he tightened whenever he feared it might fly out of control. This served him best when he had to struggle vigorously to keep his very command—the greatest command in U.S. history to that point.
He could not have anticipated any such challenges at the outset. Lieutenant Pershing graduated into a U.S. Army that consisted of fewer than 25,000 men, most of them assigned to desolate forts throughout the rapidly vanishing Western frontier. Its officer corps, just 2,000 strong, was hopelessly stagnant. Pershing himself took 15 years just to rise to captain. He spent much of his career fruitlessly chasing various hostiles across the empty Western landscape—Chief Mangus’ Apaches through the hills and mesas of New Mexico; Chief Big Foot’s Sioux across the Dakota Territory during the Ghost Dance uprising; Pancho Villa through the dust of Chihuahua; a band of Cree attempting to return to Montana from Canada.
In between, he duly provided the other eclectic services expected of an American officer at the time, spending four years teaching and drilling cadets at the University of Nebraska. He seldom complained about any of it. Not the loneliness and isolation of the distant forts; not the daunting weather extremes or trivial nature of many of his duties. He remained, instead, doggedly self-reliant, flexible and observant—all qualities that would serve him well. He didn’t just adapt to the West; he seemed to love it, including its native peoples. The treatment of the Indians, he would write, constituted “the most cruel, unjust, blackest page of American history”—even as he pursued some of them relentlessly. Later, he would fight a remarkably successful campaign against Islamic insurgents in a complex civil war halfway around the globe. He was a romantic without illusions, always eager to study, understand and even sympathize with the dizzying array of peoples he was supposed to fight.
Everything seemed to fascinate him. In a time when an officer’s career promised neither riches nor glory, Pershing made the most of it. Sent the long way around to fight the Moros in the Philippines, he visited with Parisian art students in the Latin Quarter and perused the Louvre and Versailles, where he would one day have to battle for the independence of America’s greatest army. Returning from his post as military attaché in Tokyo, Pershing took his young family on the newly completed Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow, toured St. Petersburg, Berlin and the Waterloo battlefield, and lived for several months in Tours while trying to improve his French. A ladies’ man, he enjoyed (successively) a loving marriage and a loving, decades-long affair with a French-Romanian painter—and perhaps some briefer interludes that threatened to ruin his career and reputation.
They didn’t, in part because Pershing was also adept at making the right connections. Like Dwight Eisenhower, he was a consummately political general who advanced by not indulging in the spiteful politics of a peacetime army. It was no coincidence that he won the two biggest promotions of his career from two presidents—Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson—who could not have been more different in temperament or loathed each other more. But then Pershing was always able to make the best of a situation. Stuck in Lincoln, Neb., for four years teaching military science to farm boys, he used the opportunity to get his law degree, pass the Nebraska bar, lead his charges to a national drill championship…and make friends with a congressman named George Meiklejohn, whose ambition of becoming assistant secretary of war Pershing helped to fulfill.
Thirty-five years old by the time his stint in Nebraska ended, still a bachelor, still a lieutenant nine years after leaving the Point, Pershing considered taking up the law. Instead, he accepted what a lesser man might have seen as yet another demeaning assignment, command of a troop of the 10th Cavalry—the all-black regiment cadets would later deride—at Fort Assinniboine, Mont. His troops seemed to like him, respect him, and gave him their own nickname, “Old Red,” during his two years there. When war broke out with Spain in 1898, Pershing, then stuck in a miserable tenure at West Point, begged for the chance to see action.
Assistant Secretary of War Meiklejohn found an opening in his previous posting, commanding a troop of the 10th Cavalry. The 10th was one of four African-American regiments at the time, commanded by white officers and stationed at Western outposts, as far as possible from white population centers. Getting them into position to invade Cuba was almost a war in itself: The black troops found that the cheering that greeted their troop train at every station stopped abruptly once they crossed into the South. Bivouacked outside Lakeland, Fla., they had to endure the animosity of local whites, who alternated between gawking openly at the sight of armed black men in uniform and vehemently denying them access to restaurants, bars, stores and brothels. Brawls, shootings and even a full-scale riot broke out between black regulars and white citizens and volunteers. Once deployed in Cuba, they had to endure the same poisonous rations, archaic weapons and erratic leadership as the rest of the invasion force in this most precipitous and chaotic of all the nation’s wars.
Pershing picked up a case of malaria in Cuba and was nearly killed in a stream by a Spanish artillery shell that landed close enough to leave him soaking wet. He led his men through the jungle and then in the desperate, improvised rush up San Juan Heights on the left of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.
“If it had not been for the Negro cavalry, the Rough Riders would have been exterminated,” one of Teddy’s men claimed later. “We officers of the 10th Cavalry could have taken our black heroes in our arms. They had again fought their way into our affections, as they had fought their way into the hearts of the American people,” Pershing exulted.
In this, he could not have been more wrong, but he won a Silver Star, a captaincy—at last—and a command in the ensuing savage war in the Philippines. There, Pershing fought a strikingly modern counterinsurgency campaign against the fiercely independent Islamic Moro peoples. He alternated patient negotiation with the ruthless reduction of Moro strongholds, yet openly admired the intelligence, customs and even the cuisine of those he fought.
Pershing’s work in Mindanao won him the public praise of now- President Roosevelt, the man he had followed up Kettle Hill, who was intent on instituting military promotions based on merit rather than time served. In 1906 he raised Pershing from captain to general over 862 senior officers, making him military governor of Mindanao. Soon after, a story broke in the press that Pershing had kept a querida, or “sweetheart,” while on that first posting in Mindanao, fathered two children by her and subsequently offered her hush money not to expose him. It would not be the last time accusations concerning an affair threatened Pershing’s career (the next concerned an heiress who would become Douglas MacArthur’s first wife). He never quite denied the charges, but the War Department dismissed them out of hand. True or not, they were transparently the work of officers jealous of Pershing’s promotion.
In 1905 Pershing married Helen Frances “Frankie” Warren, the daughter of a wealthy, powerful U.S. senator from Wyoming. It was another propitious connection, but also seems to have been a love match. Frankie, nearly 20 years Pershing’s junior, was devoted to him, bearing him three daughters and a son in the first seven years of their marriage, while following him around the world without complaint. Spirited, loyal and intrepid, she was living with the children in the dilapidated officers barracks of San Francisco’s Presidio on August 27, 1915, just a week from joining Pershing at his latest post, at Fort Bliss in El Paso. In the early morning hours, a fire swept through their rooms, suffocating Frankie and the couple’s three girls, ages 3 to 9. Only their son, 6-year-old Warren, survived.
It was a devastating blow, one made worse by the fact that Pershing blamed himself for the suspected cause of the fire, a dining room floor he’d recently had varnished that had caught fire when some coals fell out of a grate. This supremely self-controlled officer was reduced to screaming and weeping openly before friends and junior officers, exclaiming, “I can understand the loss of one member of the family, but not nearly all!” Those around him feared he might go mad.
Yet within weeks Pershing was back on duty at Fort Bliss. He was needed there—and unbeknownst to him, he now stood on the verge of a dizzying chain of events that would shoot him to the top of his profession. His rise began with the Punitive Expedition, the campaign against the famous Mexican bandit chieftain Pancho Villa that must have seemed to Pershing yet another hopeless pursuit. For months prior, Pershing had conducted his patient brand of diplomacy to keep the revolution that had been raging in Mexico from crossing the border. He had boasted particular success cultivating Villa, who posed grinning for pictures with Pershing, and kept hands off American interests.
That changed when President Wilson, without consulting Pershing, allowed troops of a rival Mexican faction to cross American soil by rail, outflank Villa and largely annihilate his army. Vengeful and desperate, Villa responded by trying to widen the war, pulling 19 American engineers off a train in Chihuahua and murdering them by the railbed, then launching a bloody night raid against the garrison town of Columbus, N.M. Pershing was ordered to bring Villa to justice. Thus he would become the first, but far from last, American officer over the course of the century ordered to pursue a hazy objective, under an even cloudier set of restrictions. He was authorized by the deputy chief of staff to attack Mexican towns if Villa and his men were there, but he was not to use the Mexican railroads to resupply his force. His troops were to “do as soldiers in the circumstance must do,” and if Villa’s troops broke up into smaller bands, “our people must more or less scatter in order to follow him.”
Somehow, Pershing was able to “more or less” decode these equivocal directions and conduct a campaign that adroitly avoided setting off a full-scale war, but satisfied the administration’s need to save face. The Punitive Expedition punished its way 350 miles into Mexico, diligently pursuing Villa for 11 months and dodging several ambushes. Pershing’s command eventually reached a total of 11,000 men, almost a tenth of the U.S. standing army. He saw firsthand just how short even its best units were of the latest arms, vehicles, planes; how unprepared it was to fight a modern war.
This was information he would need. Within two months of Pershing’s return to El Paso in 1917, the U.S. had declared war on the Central Powers. Pershing was clearly the only senior officer young enough, fit enough and experienced enough to lead the planned AEF, and he had impressed superiors with his handling of the delicate assignment in Mexico. Yet the appointment was probably an even better choice than Wilson and Secretary of War Newton Baker realized, for it would be as much a diplomatic mission as a military one.
Pershing shipped out almost immediately, arriving in England on June 8, 1917. There and in France, he was greeted by giddy, cheering mobs and in response made all the right gestures: kissing Napoléon’s sword and laying a wreath on Lafayette’s tomb (where, as Pershing always insisted, it was his paymaster, Major Charles E. Stanton, who actually uttered the words, “Lafayette, we are here!”)
The only trouble was he had no one with him, beyond a hastily assembled staff of some 187 officers and civilians. Nor would an army materialize anytime soon. Despite all the lobbying for preparedness over the past three years by Teddy Roosevelt and others, the country had largely chosen to ignore the possibility it could be dragged into the most terrible war in human history. Months, maybe a year, would be needed before any sizable American force could be assembled, trained, equipped and shipped to Europe—and it wasn’t clear the Allies had that much time.
Even as Pershing arrived in France, the feckless Nivelle Offensive was grinding to a halt. The traumatized French army had suffered another 200,000 casualties over the course of two months, and mutinies would sweep through 54 combat divisions. Only the strictest military secrecy kept the enemy from realizing this and breaking through to Paris. That fall Russia capitulated to the Bolsheviks and then to the Germans, and the Italians collapsed at Caporetto. Some 265 German and Austrian divisions, Pershing feared, might now be massed on the Western Front for one last overwhelming offensive as soon as the weather improved.
By the winter of 1918, a quarter-million doughboys had arrived in France, but for the most part they lacked artillery, planes and transport. They were, in short, not an army. The British and French argued that they didn’t need to be. The Americans could be fed into the Allied armies as they arrived by the battalion, platoon or company, some 50 to 150 men at a
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