Original subtitles

He had a face made for monuments, and that's where it ended up.

And their stone and bronze were no harder than the unsmiling general they

saluted.

He moved from a frontier Indian fighter chasing down Geronimo's band to become

the builder of a United States army that would shake the earth in war.

He was America's premier soldier.

He held a higher rank than did Ulysses Grant or George Washington.

His methodology, his stance, his way of saluting, his

concepts, the way he wore his uniform were imprinted in the consciousness of

the most obscure private standing guard in some godforsaken mud-covered village

in Lorraine.

He was.

His tragedies were as vast as his victories.

He was venerated and vilified.

He was General of the Army's John J. Pershing.

John Joseph Pershing was born in Laclede, Missouri, in 1860.

Young John dreamed of becoming a lawyer.

But the financial panic of 1873 postponed his plans.

They had lost their money, and at the age of 13, John was told, no more

school, forget about law school, the University of Missouri, forget about

that. You are going to run a farm that we've held on to with your brother

helping you. And for three years, John and his brother Jim ran the farm.

Eventually, the farm was foreclosed, and John went to be a teacher.

His teaching talents went no further than giving assignments and then

terrorizing students to learn them on their own.

So when the local paper announced a competitive exam to get into West Point,

he took it, passed it, and changed careers.

John was not interested in being a soldier. He knew nothing of West Point

except that big names had gone there, Grant, Lee, Sherman.

but it was a free education.

He entered West Point in June of 1882, where he and his instructors did

not impress one another.

Even so, its traditions and its old heroes finally got to him.

At one point, he walked out of his way in order to salute General Sherman.

on another occasion he passed by and grasped the hand of grant anything

pershing lacked as a scholar at west point was more than compensated for by

his performance in all things military he was dogged on detail almost beyond

the rational his sense of command was total he was elected

class president all four years at the academy and he achieved his first

exalted position At West Point, he was first captain of the Corps of Cadets,

which had been a position held by such luminaries as Robert E. Lee, and would

in the future be held by Douglas MacArthur and William C.

Westmoreland, our commander in Vietnam.

A classmate sized up Pershing as having regular but not handsome features, a

robust, strong body, broad-shouldered, and well-developed.

He had keen, searching gray eyes.

Pershing inspired confidence, but not affection.

Some thought otherwise.

The ladies adored him, and the feeling was mutual.

And so it would be through a long, lusty bachelorhood.

In the last days of the Indian Wars, Young Second Lieutenant Pershing's first

assignment after graduation in 1886 was with the 6th Cavalry at Fort Bayard, New

Mexico Territory. In chasing renegade Apache raiders, he performed well enough

to attract the admiration of the commanding general in the Southwest,

Nelson A. Miles.

Pershing was a very typical cavalry officer.

His language was very salty.

actually rather profane. He liked to drink, liked to gamble, and he loved the

women. So as a young officer, he had a hell of a good time.

Pershing, with an eye to leaving a dead-end service, picked up a law degree

during four years of detached duty as professor of military science at the

University of Nebraska.

he was called back to the field in october eighteen ninety five this time

with the tenth cavalry a black unit immortalized as the buffalo soldiers

his unit did grueling work pursuing indians for six hundred miles after an

uprising general miles remembered his efforts by summoning him to washington

for his staff

The Pershing balloon suffered a rare puncture when he was assigned to West

Point as a tactical officer responsible for discipline.

He was rigid so far beyond the harshest traditions that the cadets rebelled.

They subjected him to a contemptuous silence when he appeared in the mess

hall.

Behind his back they called him Nigger Jack, referring to his service with

black troops.

The name, contemptuous and in the bigoted spirit of the time, stuck to

Pershing. To jump ahead, he becomes the head of the American Expeditionary Force

in 1917. You cannot in the newspapers say, nigger Jack Pershing goes to France

to lick the hun. So the newspapers made him Black Jack Pershing.

In February of 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine was anchored in Havana Harbor.

showing the American flag at a time of great tension over Spain's repressive

occupation of Cuba.

When the Maine blew up mysteriously with heavy loss of life, America flew into a

jingoistic raid.

And John Pershing was soon going into war with the Buffalo soldiers of his

favorite old regiment, the Black Tenth Cavalry.

In the Spanish-American War, Pershing went to Cuba as regimental quartermaster

and adjutant of the 10th Cavalry Regiment. There he saw how not to run an

expedition. Supplies were chaotic, the generals were over-aged, and essentially

out of it much of the time.

With 12 years of service behind him, and nearing 40 years of age as a lowly first

lieutenant, Pershing saw a golden chance to earn promotion in battle.

When the advance before the San Juan Heights bogged down in death and

confusion, Pershing stepped from his role as quartermaster to take charge of

the 10th Cavalry Combat Troops. He was as cool as a bowl of cracked ice, one

observer noted.

Pershing described the action before Kettle and San Juan Hill.

It was a hot fight. The converging artillery and infantry fire made life

worth nothing.

Our losses were 20% killed and wounded.

50% of officers were lost, a fearful rate.

The end of the short, hard war saw the United States take possession of the

Philippine Islands.

With them came all of Spain's troubles with insurrectionist guerrillas seeking

freedom from colonial domination.

When the tough rebels found out that they were exchanging one foreign master

for another, they rebelled again, fighting as fiercely against the

Americans as they had against the Spaniards.

Pershing, knowing that there was no advancement for peacetime officers from

behind a desk, volunteered for a field assignment in the Philippines in 1899.

He ended up on the large southern island of Mindanao, where Moros, A ferocious

Muslim warrior society from the dawn of history had bloodily repelled Spanish

attempts to subdue them over centuries.

Brutal U.S. Army methods were faring no better, but young Lieutenant Pershing

had different ideas.

He would go among them unarmed, and to go among the morals unarmed, who were

brought up from childhood to believe, the more Christians you slew, the closer

you would be to the prophet in heaven. And also it was said that nothing would

better fertilize a crop than a dead American.

The Moros didn't deal with governments. They dealt with people, and they

respected Pershing as another warrior.

He conferred with them as well as fought them.

As part of indication of their respect, one tribe named him a Datu, a chieftain.

In 1901, after 15 years as a lieutenant, Pershing was finally promoted to

captain. Word of his outstanding success in pacifying the Moros had spread to the

upper echelons of the army.

They broke precedent and juggled the chain of command to put him in charge of

all major operations in the South.

Pershing went up there and he conducted this brilliant campaign as a captain

with a sign to him.

the equivalent of a position that a general would have held.

When Pershing was assigned back to Washington in 1903, he found himself

famous in the military hierarchy for the job he had done.

Clearly, he deserved promotion, and clearly, he did not have the seniority.

But he had something better.

he had President Teddy Roosevelt on his side.

In 1903, John Pershing was back in Washington and about to

add a political victory to his military triumphs in the Philippines.

President Roosevelt said, we've got to fix things up so that by merit, by

industry,

By attention to his duty, an officer can get promoted.

So a good example of this would be Captain Pershing, who did such wonderful

work against the Moros.

Listening to this speech was the daughter of the senior senator from

Wyoming. Senator Francis Warren was the richest man in Wyoming.

In her diary, she wrote, met Mr. Pershing of presidential...

message and moral fame.

Unspoiled girl, good-looking girl, nice girl.

Everyone liked her. Good smile, good laugh.

Four days after having first met Captain Pershing, writes in her diary, he is

a wonderful dancer. I have lost my heart irretrievably.

Pershing goes and he wakes up one of his pals, who was indeed destined to be the

best man at the wedding.

And he says, I've met the girl God made for me.

He was 20 years older than she, and she was rich, and he had nothing.

He worried and worried and worried about that.

Finally, she writes him, I'm tired of this money business.

A perfectly good ring can be bought for $1, and if you don't have the dollar,

I'll lend it to you.

John Pershing and Frances Warren were married in January of 1905.

in one of the great Washington social events of the season.

2,500 people, including President Teddy Roosevelt, Supreme Court justices, and

much of Congress and the diplomatic corps, attended the wedding of a lowly

captain.

Pershing was on his way to the heights of glory and the depths of tragedy.

In 1905, Pershing was sent to Manchuria as an observer to the Russo-Japanese

War.

By 1906, he was military attaché to Japan, and his first daughter, Helen

Elizabeth, was born in Tokyo.

On September 8, all the years of glacial promotion were forgotten.

President Roosevelt, tired of the idea that you could not be promoted unless

somebody died in the rank above you, knowing that he, President Roosevelt,

could appoint someone to be a general officer, promoted Captain Pershing to

become a brigadier general. He jumped over hundreds of people.

Every major, lieutenant colonel, and colonel in the army was suddenly

the inferior in rank to someone who has been a career captain.

Now, this produced, as may well be imagined, no small amount of jealousy.

Now, the fact that he had just married the daughter of the Senate's Committee

on Military Affairs did not go unnoticed by many officers over whom he had made

this stupendous leap.

Brigadier General Pershing was sent back to the Philippines in 1907 as military

governor of the Moro province in his old stomping grounds at Mindanao.

He had his new family with him and was about to begin the happiest years of his

life.

In rapid order, Anne, Warren, and Mary Margaret were born to complete the

family.

From 1909 to 1913, Pershing completed a vastly successful tour as military

governor in the unruly southern Philippines.

With half a million people under his responsibility, he gained priceless

experience in military and political administration and in war.

Pershing personally led his troops in the Battle of Budbagsak, later writing,

The Moros fought like devils. Once committed to combat, they count death as

a mere incident.

Over 500 Moros and 15 Americans would die before the position fell.

For his upfront leadership in the Battle of Budbagsak, Pershing was recommended

for the Medal of Honor, which he emphatically declined, believing that

danger was a soldier's duty. But his battle experience had immense value.

At a time when generals were involved in peacetime activities, Pershing was the

one general winning battle stars.

In 1914, flush with professional success and personal happiness, Pershing and his

family returned to the United States to a command and home in the beautiful

setting of the Presidio at San Francisco.

His rest was short.

When the Mexican insurgent Pancho Villa made a threat against El Paso,

Pershing's brigade was ordered to the Mexican border at Fort Bliss, Texas.

Pershing and Villa met during negotiations and came to a guarded

mutual respect during what would be an uneasy two-year standoff.

Pershing's greatest privation was his separation from the wife and family he

adored beyond what anyone imagined.

They wrote every day, sometimes twice a day. No letter that I have seen, and I

have gone through thousands, fails to express their love.

I love you, my dearest Jack.

When can we be together again? I'm so lonely for you, your loving Frankie.

The reply would come back.

My dearest darling wife, Frankie, I think of you all the time. I go to sleep

at night thinking about you. I wake up thinking about you. Love, your darling

Jack.

Tragedy waited to strike John Pershing, a blow from which he never recovered.

In August 1915, while Pershing was in Texas,

Mrs. Pershing and the four children were living at the Presidio in San Francisco.

She had a houseguest who had two children, as I recall.

That night there was a fire, and the houseguest

and her children escaped.

And people thought... That was Mrs. Pershing and her children, so they

didn't bother to go back and try to rescue anybody.

Only Warren, the son, escaped.

Mrs. Pershing and the three daughters died.

They were all gone.

And he, this 55-year-old, is left with the 6-year-old and the memory of the 10

years of paradise with Frankie and the girls.

He appears to have dealt with the whole thing by never discussing it.

His son Warren never heard from him a single word as to what happened at the

Presidio.

Little Warren would be raised in the loving care of Pershing's sister,

Bessie. The boy would be the treasure of his father's life, the one enduring

center of affection.

In March 1916, a grieving Pershing was granted the dubious distraction of war.

Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico.

and kill several American soldiers as well as civilians.

President Wilson ordered an intervention.

Pershing was the man on the scene in Fort Bliss, so he was given command of

this punitive expedition that numbered around 10,000 people to go after Villa.

So for a period of several months, Pershing was in Mexico chasing Villa.

Now a major general in the spring of 1916, Pershing found the political

battles in Mexico even more frustrating than the sparse military battles, as he

pursued his elusive foe.

Crossing the Mexican border without permission from a fractured Mexican

government, he found himself fighting both Villas guerrillas and the

government they were trying to overthrow.

Pershing's columns of men, horses, planes, and trucks were accused by

newspapers of floundering vainly in pursuit of Pancho Villa, but his dogged

persistence in the face of miserable weather, terrain, and Mexican government

interference quietly did its assigned work.

In eleven engagements, Pershing's men killed 273 of Villa's 485 Columbus

raiders and captured 19.

Survivors were pushed into the hands of the Mexican government.

Villa and 108 of his men were wounded.

In June Pershing got the order to pull out of Mexico and made a difficult and

bloody withdrawal, hounded by Mexican troops.

Deeply bitter about the political handling of the campaign, Pershing led

his men home.

His greatest victory, it would turn out, was in his ability to hold his tongue.

On April 6, 1917, barely two months after General John Pershing had returned

from his Mexican campaign,

the United States joined a war of unimaginable size and fury at a critical

juncture.

Since 1914, the greatest nations of Europe had flung huge armies against one

another in a stalemated bloodbath along trench lines that ran 600 miles from the

North Sea to Switzerland.

The Allies that the United States joined against Germany had been bled white.

They looked to an American expeditionary force for salvation.

Again, fate stepped in for Pershing.

General Frederick Funston, highly regarded and senior to Pershing, died

suddenly, and his position as commander of the southern department went to

Pershing, giving him immediate stature for higher command.

Newton Baker, the Secretary of War, was a Pershing fan.

He had seen him operate pretty deftly in the field in Mexico and then in

Washington in 1917.

Baker, who read a lot of Civil War history, believed that Pershing had the

personality and the force to be a good field commander. There wasn't much doubt

about his loyalty to civilian control.

Hardly two weeks after his appointment to lead the AEF, Pershing arrived on the

continent. to a tumultuous welcome in England and France.

They expected masses and legions of great six-foot-tall boys from Minnesota

and Montana and great southerners, the heir to Robert E. Lee. And what did they

get?

They got John J. Percy and 200 people and the promise that someday a lot of

people will come.

The Allies came from a tradition of monster continental armies where

everybody had served their time and then were in the reserves.

They were accustomed to thinking in terms of a thousand troop trains putting

a million men into the field.

They somehow had in their mind that a continental power like the United States

must have vast numbers of soldiers.

They were not aware that we had a little constabulary.

that had been chasing Indians.

It only gradually became apparent that Pershing would have to build an elephant

out of a mouse.

But they had chosen the right man for the job.

Through the long months after America's entry into the war, America's allies

became increasingly irritated at the agonizingly slow buildup of Pershing's

army. After a while, the United States scraped together one division.

That was all they had.

They didn't have any artillery.

The whole United States had enough ammunition, it was estimated, to fight

one day under Western Front conditions, and then there'd be no more ammunition.

They had no logistics.

They had no officers who had commanded anything hardly.

more than a battalion.

They had no staff.

They had no machine guns.

They had no anything.

The idea of the Allies was we French and we British have experienced company

-grade officers. We got field-grade officers. We got high field marshals.

We've been at this for two and a half years. The thing to do is for them to

serve under us.

They don't need any staff officers. We'll take care of that.

They don't have to have any subtleties or anything of nature beyond machine

gunners and infantry privates.

This was not General Pershing's idea.

Pershing said the United States Army will fight under its own officers and

without the contribution of the French and British.

The French and British are on their last legs.

Field Marshal Foch, the Generalissimo, asked Pershing, if he intends to hold

his army forever until the French and British are licked, and then, as Foch

put it, march over our dead bodies to finally fight the Germans.

Only somebody with Pershing's strength of character could resist all the free

advice, all the pressure that he received, both from Americans and from

foreign officers.

The Allied governments consistently tried to go over Pershing's head. They

wanted to deal with people their equal.

President Wilson and Secretary of War Baker, gave him almost sovereign powers.

He was in charge of the American war effort in Europe, period.

The Europeans had to negotiate with Pershing almost as if he constituted a

sovereign nation.

But he knew talent when a young captain named George Marshall flared up and

grabbed the arm of the fearsome Pershing for unfairly berating an officer.

All expected Marshall's career had ended.

Instead, Pershing brought him onto his staff.

Marshall would perform brilliantly for the U.S. in three wars.

He represented a degree of selfless professionalism that was really unknown

in the Army before his time, putting the interests of the Army first and that of

families and careers and personal likes and dislikes, certainly secondarily.

Although Pershing didn't have enough soldiers or equipment in the autumn of

1917, he did have enough stars to stand up to his rank-heavy Allied

counterparts. He became a four-star general.

Now, his allies muttered, if only he had a fighting army.

As the year 1917 closed, The Communists, who had seized control of Russia, moved

to take the great Eastern power and its huge armies out of the war.

There began a shift of German troop power to the Western front that tilted

the balance against the Allies.

The next 200 days would test Pershing and all of Western civilization as

torrents of high explosive hell descended on a battlefield of millions.

Confused and faltering tide of shipping began to win the struggle to transport

and build a brawny American expeditionary force in Europe.

The cries for American troops in massive numbers under European command grew to a

crescendo. But there was only limited assignment of such forces.

Pershing understood Wilson's political motives and took advantage of them.

Wilson had entered the war reluctantly.

but his reluctance had been overcome by his belief that he was the right man to

dominate the peace conference to make a better world.

And if there didn't exist an independent American army at the end of the war,

Wilson's influence over the peace process would have evaporated so that

Wilson's ultimately standing by Pershing probably rested on that principle.

Late March saw the start of the first of five crushingly powerful German

offensives, some of them penetrating Allied lines deeply.

The British lost 164,000 men in the first battle alone.

French Marshal Ferdinand Foch was made Generalissimo of the Allied armies.

But the European allies' hopes of jurisdiction over Pershing's Americans

were dashed when Foch was given only strategic, not tactical authority.

Pershing would still have his way.

Pershing's Americans finally got into offensive action with the 1st Division

at Cantigny on May 28.

The battle wasn't huge or significant, and it was loaded with bloody

operational mistakes.

but its symbolism was outsized.

Cantini was the first demonstration of what the promise of the American Army

was going to be.

It was not an easy victory by any stretch of the imagination.

After the Germans lost Cantini, they quickly came in with very heavy, well

-orchestrated counterattacks, four of them. They wanted to humiliate the

Americans, and they failed to do it. The 1st Division held on to Cantini.

In late May of 1918, Pershing's forces had a high-profile victory at Chateau

Thierry and Belleau Wood.

A German exploratory probe at a bridge across the Marne was seen as a major

threat to Paris, unleashing a horde of refugees and retreating French soldiers.

When elements of the U.S. 2nd Division, including the Marine Brigade, moved up

through the retiring French to counter the move, Their hard-fought success in

blowing the bridge and holding the Germans was seen as the salvation of

Paris.

By September, with the last of the great German offensives running down, Pershing

had 20 divisions in place.

He now created the American First Army and planned the first American-led

attack to eliminate the German-held wedge into the Allied lines at Sammiel.

His army was beginning to hit its massive stride.

Pershing's first big offensive went well, partially because the Germans were

caught in the act of withdrawing from the salient, and partly because the

freshness and belligerence of Pershing's forces made up for their still pitifully

wasteful tactics.

Americans were attacking almost shoulder to shoulder in waves. They were being

mowed down by German machine guns.

It was as if nothing had happened between 1915 and 1917.

Pershing was no Napoleon.

The brilliant maneuvering of armies was not part of him, even if the Western

Front had permitted it. But he brought enormous force to the building of an

army from nothing.

to where it was a huge, unfinished hammer of enormous power.

After Samiel, Pershing had to make a difficult shift of his army north to

join the French in a far bigger battle.

It would be there, in the bloodbath of the Meuse-Argonne, that the United

States Army would come of age.

Marshal, Pershing's protege, pulled a logistics miracle.

moving the U.S. forces out of Samael and into the huge offensive that would

decide the war.

In the Meuse-Argonne offensive that began on October 4th, 1918, Pershing

found himself in the greatest battle that the Americans had ever fought.

In the number of U.S. troops involved and casualties suffered, It was bigger

than any American battle before or since.

Things began well with the fall of the important town of Montaussan.

Pershing kept pushing.

He was ruthless.

He gave one order, shoot stragglers.

The first week of November was the one where they really made a breakthrough in

the Muzaka.

By the 1st of November, the AEF was a veteran army.

They knew the ropes of combat, and the last week showed that in the

breakthrough.

But even as he began to see that the war would be won, he began to see a terrible

danger that the peace that followed would be quickly lost.

As the German army began to collapse and talks of armistice filled the air,

Pershing was adamant and ultimately dead right in wanting to fight on to

unconditional surrender.

He thought that unless the German army was very obviously beaten and driven

back deep into Germany, the whole performance would have to be repeated in

another quarter century.

He was so right about what the future held.

Wilson overrode his views, and Pershing just barely managed to remain quiet as

the armistice was signed and World War I ended.

Pershing was cheered throughout Europe, looked to the return of his armies, and

headed home.

He was at sea when he...

Word came that he was now general of the armies of the United States, entitled to

wear six stars above anyone before or since.

No United States general ever returned to his country a greater hero than John

J. Pershing.

Whatever the limits of his military genius, he had built a tiny 128,000-man

regular army into a four-million-man juggernaut that for all its crudeness

had learned fast and supplied the difference in the Allied victory.

Pershing had led his country to centre stage for good.

With Pershing about to reclaim a life of his own, it became apparent that a

previous romantic attachment to one Neta Patton the sister of his army colleague

George S. Patton, had slid away during the war.

What had dashed Nita's hopes was a pert young French illustrator named Micheline

Rescoe.

Pershing had met her early in his stay in France and had quickly begun an

affectionate liaison that would last a lifetime.

Like many a great general before and after, Pershing was bitten by the

presidential bug.

But his ineptitude as a communicator and his reputation for stiffness quickly

doomed his hopes for a 1920 nomination.

His service as Chief of Staff from 1920 to 1924 was not rewarding.

Although he established first-rate professional schools for the Army, his

sensible suggestions to end America's chronic unpreparedness would come to

nothing.

Noteworthy was his making certain that no future field commander would enjoy

the power that he had enjoyed in France.

He worked on memorials to the American expeditionary forces in France.

He had his social life.

He worked on his unpublished personal book.

He grew older.

He gave speeches to the American Legion, and the boys found him far more

approachable.

He would stay close to his son Warren, watching him grow into a fine man with

his mother's easy charm.

A regular part of Pershing's routine was six months in Europe each year, in which

he would attend commemorative ceremonies, see wartime colleagues, and

mostly come back into touch with Micheline Rescoe.

She also visited him in New York.

As the war in Europe was taking shape in 1939, Pershing dreaded America's

involvement in a war he had warned about 22 years earlier.

It is the hope of all peoples that another world conflict may be averted.

This nation, as one of the great powers, can do no less

in the fulfillment of its manifest duty to humanity than to make the most

earnest... and devoted effort for the preservation of world peace.

When America entered the war in 1941, he offered his services to President

Roosevelt.

But age finally had its inevitable way.

He began to grow infirm and forgetful and moved into Walter Reed Hospital in

Washington.

As a new world war began for America, the great men who had patterned

themselves after him came to visit.

Right before shipping out, Patton called upon Pershing, who by then was a very

old man, and Georgie, as he was called in the old army, got

down on his knees in front of the old general and took the old general's hand

and kissed it, got up, saluted.

And Pershing saluted, Patton wrote in his diary, as if 25 years had fallen

away and he was still the old commander, the iron commander, the impeccable

officer.

In a secret ceremony in 1946, he performed his last official act.

He married his longtime friend and love, Micheline Rescoe.

General of the Army's John Joseph Pershing died on July 15, 1948, at

the age of 88.

Thirty years after his days of glory ended at the close of World War I, fully

50% of the population in the District of Columbia attended his funeral.

He was put to rest in Arlington.

requesting only the simple stone given an enlisted man.

Barely twenty years later, the general of the armies would share his

sequestered spot on a knoll with another tragic marker belonging to the lowliest

of officer ranks.

It belonged to Second Lieutenant Richard Pershing, his grandson, killed in

Vietnam.

he went to the sound of the guns for his country throughout his life he fought

through indian wars colonial wars and guerrilla wars and finally to a war

that shook a continent and made america an international power he was not a

beloved figure or an elegant strategist but to every crisis he brought his

trademark coolness iron will and utter integrity

With those rugged tools, John J. Pershing became for a crucial time a

symbol not only of American victory, but of America itself.