Pershing in France

On the morning of 13 June 1917 a ship from Folkestone entered the port of Boulogne-sur-Mer, having carried Major-General John Pershing and his staff across the Channel under destroyer escort. The commander of the American Expeditionary Forces came straight from London, where for several days he had been received by the King and British ministers. According to various accounts the staff numbered from well over a hundred to nearly two hundred people: officers, NCOs, clerks and interpreters. There were no troops behind him yet. The first division did not sail from New York until the following day.

Boulogne and Paris

On the quay waited French officers, representatives of the British, for whom Boulogne was the main supply port, and dozens of journalists. An infantry regiment’s band played the American anthem and the Marseillaise in turn, so many times that, according to Lieutenant-Colonel James Harbord, Pershing’s chief of staff, the general, standing stiffly at attention, eventually began to grumble under his breath. Then one dignitary after another welcomed the guest with short speeches. The last to report was General Pelletier, who had lost his right arm to a grenade in Champagne in 1915 and was now to be liaison officer with the Americans. Also attached to the staff was Lieutenant-Colonel de Chambrun, a descendant of the Marquis de La Fayette, hero of the American War of Independence.

The special train reached the Gare du Nord at about half past six in the evening, as crowds of Parisians were returning from work. On the platform waited Marshal Joseph Joffre, the minister of war Paul Painlevé, the former prime minister René Viviani and the United States ambassador William Sharp. The column of cars squeezed with difficulty through the streets to the Hôtel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde. People cheered, wept and showered the Americans with flowers, and from windows and rooftops came shouts of “Long live America”. Harbord, riding in one of the cars further back, was alarmed to find that the crowd took him for Pershing himself. The correspondent Floyd Gibbons described how the general stepped out onto the hotel balcony, took a corner of the French flag and kissed it, which the crowd greeted with an ovation. The mood in Paris was all the more fervent because France was going through the hardest weeks of the war. After the failure of the spring offensive mutinies were going on in the army, and American help had been talked about for two months, although nobody had yet seen it. That same day, before noon, a few hours after Pershing left England, German aeroplanes bombed London.

The first days

The following days were filled with visits. On 14 June Pershing paid homage at the tomb of Napoleon in Les Invalides, lunched with President Raymond Poincaré at the Élysée Palace, and in the Chamber of Deputies the members gave him an ovation lasting a dozen or so minutes. The next day the Senate received him in similar fashion, and in the afternoon he laid flowers on La Fayette’s grave in the Picpus Cemetery. Joffre, who after returning from his mission to America was to “co-operate” with the Americans, was at every reception, but he no longer had any real power. More important for Pershing was the visit on 16 June to Compiègne, to the headquarters of General Philippe Pétain, for a month commander-in-chief of the French army. Pershing did not bring good news: the United States could field a significant force in France in the spring of 1918 at the earliest. At lunch Pétain was silent for a long time, and then said only that he was glad America had entered the war and hoped “it is not too late”. Harbord noted that these words made a greater impression on both of them than all the speeches.

For the time being Pershing set up his headquarters in Paris and began looking for ports, railway lines and training grounds for an army that had yet to be created. At the beginning of September he moved his general headquarters to Chaumont in the Haute-Marne department, away from Paris politics and closer to Lorraine, where the Americans were to take over their sector of the front. The famous phrase “Lafayette, we are here” was not spoken in June, and it was not Pershing who said it. It was spoken on 4 July at the Picpus Cemetery by Colonel Charles Stanton of his staff.