James Harbord

When the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Harbord was attending the United States Army War College.[12] He was selected by Pershing, now a major general appointed to command the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), to be his chief of staff.[13] Harbord graduated in early May,[14] and on 28 May set sail for England with Pershing and his headquarters staff.[15][16][17] Over the next few months Harbord worked closely with Pershing to organize the AEF's buildup on France's Western Front, including the shipping schedules of American forces being sent to Europe, and he was promoted to temporary brigadier general in August 1917.[14][18]

Following a great German offensive against the Western Front on March 21, 1918, the British and French armies were in retreat, and the need for American troops was urgent. Previously agreed to arrangements to provide 120,000 servicemen a month for three months was cast aside when Pershing was informed by the British that by using confiscated Dutch shipping, over 300,000 American soldiers could be sent a month.[19][20][21][22][23] However, due to manpower attrition within the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), its combat divisions were reduced in strength by 25%, and with the breakthrough on the front, the British were asking that only infantry and machine gun battalions be sent over, and all other units be held back, as the overwhelming need at that time was for infantrymen. The American policy on this matter was quite different: Pershing was sent to France to organize American armies under American leadership; the idea that its combat units would be used solely as replacement units, or as reinforcements, for foreign countries was unthinkable. President Woodrow Wilson would not agree to this. He thought the idea would not go over well with the American public, and it risked preventing an American army from ever being formed. In secret conversations, General Pershing even said he was willing to risk the fall of France, because the United States would still carry on the war against the Kaiser; if his forces were stripped away from him and the allies lost, then Germany would win complete victory. For his part, Prime Minister Clemenceau thought this plan appealed to the romantic side of America's intervention.[24]

Brigadier General Harbord and members of his 4th Marine Brigade staff, May 1918.

During a Supreme War Council meeting in Versailles on March 28, President Wilson shifted his position on American ground forces by allowing the temporary duty of AEF combat units in the British and French ranks (Joint Note #18). This was confirmed in, "The London Agreement" of April 27.[25][26][27] However, at the next Supreme War Council meeting in Abbeville, held a month later, other troops were allowed, and Pershing held that the latest agreement was in force.[28] This brought rebuke and a letter from Prime Minister Clemenceau to President Wilson.[29] In a follow-up conversation between Lord Reading, the British ambassador to the United States, and Harbord, the ambassador said the British would be willing to supply the transportation of 120,000 American infantry and machine gun unit personnel to France, if the United States could supply the men.[30] Harbord says the statement was like, "the sun breaking through the clouds" because, "If Great Britain can give us the ships to carry infantry alone, she could not refuse to carry troops from any other arm of the service. Accordingly, I said to him, 'Give me the ships, and I will furnish 120,000 men a month.'" When the ships arrived, the ship captains were instructed to accept only infantry and machine gun units. When Lord Reading found out that complete divisions were assembling, he was furious. When he was told that he must have misunderstood his conversation with Harbord, it looked like a conspiracy was in the works by the American generals. As a result of this, in May 1918, General Pershing transferred out much of his staff who he said, 'were too complacent about themselves, and how things are run around here'. The first to go was Harbord, who was sent forward to the trenches to command troops in battle.[31] However, due to Harbord's decision, the American position prevailed,[32][33][34][35] and full American divisions kept coming, so much so that by the time of the Armistice, the AEF. was two million men strong, two full American armies were formed, and a third was ready and deployed to the Rhineland in January 1919. In all, 40 complete divisions had arrived, 30 were fielded, and 10 were under temporary British control.[36] A complete list of A.E.F. divisions can be found here.

From left to right: Major General Francis J. Kernan, Major General James W. McAndrew, General John J. Pershing, Major General James Harbord and Brigadier General Johnson Hagood in Tours, France, July 1918.

In early May 1918, Harbord, anxious to command men in battle, was succeeded as the AEF's chief of staff by Brigadier General James W. McAndrew.[37] This was due to his new assignment, to command of the 4th Marine Brigade after its former commander, Brigadier General Charles A. Doyen, failed to pass a medical examination.[37] The brigade, whose adjutant was Holland Smith, later famous during World War II, was serving as one of two infantry brigades which formed part of the 2nd Division, then commanded by Major General Omar Bundy.[37] It was not long before Harbord was to see action with his brigade, commanding the marines at the famous battles of Château-Thierry and, in particular, at Belleau Wood where, on June 6, they suffered almost 1,100 casualties on just that day alone. [38]

On July 15 Harbord was promoted to the temporary rank of major general and succeeded Bundy in command of the 2nd Division.[13] That day also saw the Germans launch a new and, as it turned out, their last offensive of the war, Operation MARNESCHUTZ-REIMS, more commonly known as the Second Battle of the Marne. The attack immediately ran into difficulties and soon stalled.[39] On July 18, three days after the opening of the offensive, the Germans were counterattacked by a well coordinated French assault, crashing into the German's right flank. Harbord's 2nd Division, by now serving in XX Corps of Charles Mangin's French 10th Army, launched an assault in the direction of Soissons, one of the enemy's key communications centers.[40] Harbord and his divisional staff had had less than a day to prepare the attack plan for the division. In the midst of a thunderstorm, the infantry elements of the division marched all through the night to reach their lines of departure on time. The division launched three separate attacks over the next 24 hours although none of these received enough artillery support.[39] Despite this, the 2nd Division still managed to reach its initial objective, the Soissons-Château-Thierry Highway, and had driven ahead nearly 7 miles, more than any other Allied units and formations involved. The cost was very high, however, as the division had sustained over 4,200 casualties.[39]

Harbord (fourth from the right) and staff during a visit of Secretary of War Newton D. Baker (center) at Harbord's SOS headquarters in Tours, France, October 1918.

Confirmation of US Army Troop Shipments to France

After Major General Richard M. Blatchford, commanding the AEF's Services of Supply (SOS), and his replacement, Major General Francis J. Kernan, had failed to organize an adequate delivery of supplies to the American forces in France, Pershing asked Harbord in late July 1918 to take the job. Although disappointed, having only just assumed command of the 2nd Division, he nevertheless complied with Pershing's wishes.[41] Marine Brigadier General John A. Lejeune took over from Harbord as the 2nd Division's new commander.[39]

After moving the SOS headquarters to Tours, Harbord began introducing several reforms to the SOS and achieved almost instant improvements.[42] The task of anticipating the arrival of divisions in France, and their type, and having in place the correct amount of supplies for them at the rear, toward the front, and at the front, was all worked out.[43][44] It was at Harbord's insistence that the SOS became fully integrated among the American, British, and French armies.[45] Pershing's trust in Harbord went so far that Jim Lacey wrote in his Pershing biography "if a problem were outside Harbord's ability to solve, it was not solvable by mortal man".[46]

Despite this, things were not going well for the SOS. Although numbering 602,910 enlisted men, 30,593 officers and 5,586 nurses–almost a third of the entire strength of the AEF–under its control by November 1918, "the SOS system always operated under great strain and required constant tight control. After the war Harbord admitted that if the Armistice had not come when it did on 11 November 1918, the AEF would have had to stop fighting because its logistics system would have totally collapsed".[47]

In August 1919 President Wilson sent a fact-finding mission to the Middle East, headed by Harbord, to report on Turkish–Armenian relations in the wake of the Armenian genocide. As chairman of the Harbord Commission, upon returning to the United States, Harbord wrote Conditions in the Near East: Report of the American Military Mission to Armenia, which was a summary of the expedition that provided various details of the mission. The report includes maps, statistics, and a historical analyses of the country and its population. In addition to such details, Harbord collected evidence and information regarding the massacres of Armenians. Harbord's report stated that "the temptation to reprisals for past wrongs" would make it extremely difficult to maintain peace in the region.[55][56] The final conclusion of the report was the inclusion of Armenia in the possible American mandate for Asia Minor and Rumelia since a mandate for Armenia alone was not deemed feasible under these conditions.[57] Harbord was also sent to investigate the feasibility of the Balfour Declaration, which supported the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, taken from the Ottoman Empire during the war.

After returning home to the United States Harbord took command of the 2nd Division, the same formation he had commanded in France in 1918. His stay was short-lived, as it had been back then, as in 1921, when Pershing succeeded General Peyton C. March as Chief of Staff of the United States Army, he requested Harbord to join him in Washington, D.C. to serve as his Assistant Chief of Staff. At the time it was only a major general's appointment, equivalent to the modern day position of Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Army. While he was serving in this position Harbord "was instrumental in making the AEF's wartime G-staff system the standard model throughout the Army. That finally broke the bureaucratic power-lock of the old bureau chief system".[47]