Pershing promoted to general

On 6 October 1917, the last day of the session, President Woodrow Wilson signed an act that gave the rank of full general for the duration of the war to two men: the Army Chief of Staff and the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in France. Both were promoted the same day: the Chief of Staff, Tasker Bliss, and John Pershing, until then a major general. The President signed their commissions two days later, and The New York Times reported on 9 October that both were now generals. Pershing skipped the rank of lieutenant general, that is, three stars. He and Bliss were the first full generals of the US Army since Philip Sheridan, who had received the army’s highest rank in 1888, shortly before his death.

The rank was not a personal title. The act tied it to two posts and only for the duration of the war emergency, and formally Bliss and Pershing became generals of the National Army, the force raised for the war alongside the Regular Army. Prestige also mattered. Pershing, chosen in May to command the troops being sent to Europe, dealt as an equal with the marshals and generals of the French and British armies, and his subordinate division commanders were also major generals. In his view the United States needed at least a million soldiers in France by the spring of 1918, and ultimately many more. So large an army had to be commanded by someone who did not yield to the Allies in rank.

For the moment there was no army. Since arriving in France in June, Pershing had been building up the rear: ports, railway lines, depots and training camps. At the beginning of September he moved his headquarters from Paris to Chaumont in the Haute-Marne. The 1st Infantry Division, whose first units had landed at Saint-Nazaire in June, had been training under French supervision since the summer in the area of Gondrecourt-le-Château. More divisions were reaching France, but none was yet ready for combat, and Pershing refused to let Americans be fed into French and British units as replacements. He wanted an independent army with its own sector of the front in Lorraine.

The first step was taken a few days after the promotion. On 8 October headquarters ordered the commander of the 1st Division, General William Sibert, to send one battalion from each infantry and artillery regiment to a quiet sector held by the French 18th Division between Nancy and Lunéville. On the night of 20–21 October four American battalions took over the trenches, and on 23 October a battery of the 6th Field Artillery fired the first American shots on the Western Front. On the night of 2–3 November the Bavarians raided a company of the 16th Infantry Regiment near Bathelémont. Corporal James Gresham and Privates Thomas Enright and Merle Hay were killed, regarded as the first soldiers of the American Expeditionary Forces to fall in combat at the front, and the Germans took eleven Americans prisoner.