In 1918 John J. Pershing and Peyton C. March were the American generals who gave the edge to Allied victory over Germany. Pershing was the commander who organized and led the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) of two million men in France while, during the last eight months of the war, March was in Washington, D.C., as the chief of staff who oversaw the logistics and general development of the army, and the shipment of some 1.8 million troops across the Atlantic. As Secretary of War Newton D. Baker noted shortly after the war, ‘Together they wrought…victory.

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During the war, Pershing became famous, and he is still remembered today, yet March, who was little known then, has been virtually forgotten. As cadets at West Point and as officers in the small regular army, they knew each other, and their careers briefly overlapped. Their service encompassed the transformation of the United States into a world power and the role of the army as the cutting edge of that great change.

Hard, tough men, they played prominent roles in the Philippine Insurrection (1899-1903) before they reached the culmination of their careers during World War I. Their stories reflect the differences in background, personality, and position that ultimately resulted in friction between them and affected their places in history.

Pershing’s early years were marked by the guerrilla war that lasted throughout the Civil War in Missouri and made life more uncertain. The Pershings, nevertheless, were better off than their neighbors in the small village of Laclede. At one time, John F. Pershing owned a store, a lumberyard, and two farms; however, he lost all but one farm in the Panic of 1873 and had to take a job as a traveling salesman, while young John was left to run the farm. In his teens, the young Pershing also worked on the railroad and as a janitor and teacher. An ambitious boy, he saved money to pay for a year at a state teacher’s college, but his goal was higher. He wanted to go to West Point because of the free education and the opportunities it offered.

March, who was almost five years younger, grew up on the campus of Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. His father, Francis A. March, became one of the most distinguished academics in the United States. His mother, Mildred Conway, was a direct descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Peyton majored in classics at Lafayette, earned a Phi Beta Kappa key, and played on the football and baseball teams. Only nineteen when he graduated, he went to West Point a few weeks later because he wanted to be a soldier.

Both his classmates and the supervising officers at West Point recognized Pershing as a leader. As one cadet remembered, he was a fine figure of a man. At 5 feet 9 inches tall, with compact build, he looked as if he were born to wear a uniform. Older and more experienced than his classmates, he was class president throughout his years at the academy and served as the first captain his last year. He graduated in the middle of his class in 1886. March, who was in the class of 1888, was a lieutenant his last year but graduated in the top quarter of his class. With a bearing as erect as Pershing’s, March was taller at 6 feet 2 inches, and thinner. The two served in the same company one summer, but the cadet corps, which numbered fewer than four hundred, was small enough that everyone knew everyone else. Their classes produced a large number of generals — twenty-six of the twenty-seven graduates in 1886 and twenty-three of forty-four in 1888.

Their early service in the army sent them in different directions. As a cavalry officer, Pershing went to frontier posts as the Indian wars were ending. He had one significant break for four years when he was the professor of military science at the University of Nebraska, which afforded him the opportunity to earn a law degree. He still had hopes of making a career in civilian life. In 1897 he left the frontier again to be a tactical officer at West Point. Unlike in Nebraska, where students heaped adulation on him, the cadets at the military academy thoroughly disliked Pershing for his martinet ways. Since he had served in one of the army’s four black regiments, they started calling him Nigger Jack, which in later years became Black Jack. After a difficult eleven months, he returned to the 10th Cavalry to take part in the expedition to Cuba in the Spanish-American War.

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