Attending school during a war with Germany—a war that threatened to overrun Georges’s home city—must have been terrifying to say the least. To help him relax, Georges got his driver’s license about a week after he turned fifteen, the youngest age one could receive a license at the time. The license, which was referred to as a “patrol,” permitted Georges to drive a car of up to 220 horsepower, a privilege that Georges enjoyed on a regular basis.
While Georges drove around the city, he encountered many unusual sights. In the first weeks of September in 1914, Paris was hunkered down for battle. Thousands of French and Moroccan troops, called the “Armies of Paris,” entered the city and were placed under command of the military governor of Paris, Joseph Gallieni. Bridges were mined, the Eiffel Tower was prepared for demolition, and reconnaissance patrols scoured the city.
As the war dragged on for six more years, the French Army suffered profoundly. In the Battle of Verdun in 1916, the French military alone suffered 351,000 losses. If one of Georges’s cousins saw action in Verdun, they entered a netherworld resembling Dante’s inferno, a hell on earth consisting of almost continuous and thunderous noise, of chemical warfare and flamethrowers choking and burning men and horses, of the appalling stench of rotting flesh.
Beginning in early 1917 and continuing sporadically through 1918, France’s civilian population was convulsed by massive strikes and raging bouts of inflation. By the time July came around, a “veritable prices explosion” took hold as prices for a group of basic food products more than doubled since the beginning of the year. Like an army of termites, inflation ate away at the savings of Auguste Doriot and every other French family.
Then came the strikes. In January 1917, strikes broke out in several munitions factories, including Panhard-Levassor. In total, one hundred thousand workers from seventy-one industries in the Paris region took to the streets, but minimum wage scales and cost-of-living allowances ended the stoppages. Then, in May 1918, a major wave of strikes slammed the Paris region. Although it is not known if D.F.P. was hit by a strike, “most factories in Courbevoie, Suresnes, Puteaux and Levallois were working with 30% to 60% of their full complement.”
By 1917, it was also time for Georges Doriot to play his part in the Great War. Georges enlisted in the French Army, signing up for the three-year service requirement. A photograph taken that year shows Georges outfitted in his new military uniform. Instead of the laughable blue and red uniforms that offered no camouflage protection, Georges wore the new beige ensemble, similar to the uniforms worn by the better-equipped German soldiers. Rifle slung over his shoulder, black leather boots laced up to his knees, hands stuffed in his pockets, and pants hitched up high over his thin waist, Georges stands in front of a barracks, a young untested soldier, prideful but looking a bit unnerved, fear peaking through the slits in his eyes. Lord knows, he had ample reason to be terrified. The war exacted a horrible toll on his family. All of Georges’s first cousins on both sides of his family who had entered the war had been killed.
But Georges was lucky once again. Now that he was old enough to serve, the war was finally winding down. Georges joined the R.A.L.T., a motorized heavy artillery regiment. His regiment maintained 145 millimeter longrange guns, one of the most powerful guns in the French Army. Instead of horses, the regiment towed its guns with tractors. Soon after joining the 81st R.A.L.T., Georges was asked to replace the engineering officer in charge of artillery. His superiors believed that his experience in the motor vehicle industry made him a logical candidate for the job.
It was the first major test of the young man’s leadership ability and Georges, still a teenager, was intimidated. Most of the soldiers who worked under him were experienced repairmen from the top companies in Paris. They resented the young man’s promotion and tested him by asking for detailed repair orders. By conceding to their superiority, however, Georges won over the men and ended up forming a good relationship with them. “We understood and respected each other, and I can say that it was a useful time, and, in many ways, a happy time,” recalled Georges. “I made some friends there that I kept in contact with for many years.”
On November 9, 1918, as it became clear that Germany could not withstand the Allied counteroffensive, the Germans entered into armistice negotiations in a railroad carriage at Compiègne in France. The conflict persisted for another seven months, until it was finally declared over on June 28, 1919 with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.
By the time the war ended in November 1918, Europe’s liberal civilization was destroyed. But among the Allied Powers, it was France that suffered more than any other nation. The heaviest battles of World War I were fought on French soil, and the French deployed the greatest number of Allied troops and suffered the heaviest casualties. More than 1.3 million French soldiers were killed in the war, or two out of every nine men who marched away, while more than 3.2 million were wounded.
Although none of the great French offensives allowed France to wrest control of Germany, French soldiers prevented German victory on the most important land front of the war, the Western Front. The courageous performance of the French Army during World War I led Winston Churchill to famously refer to them as “that sorely tried, glorious Army upon whose sacrifices the liberties of Europe had through three fearful campaigns mainly depended.”
After the war ended, Georges returned to the lycée. One of Auguste’s friends had suggested that since Georges was interested in machinery and production, he should give serious thought to sending his son to America. France was no place for a bright young man, agreed Auguste. The country had lost millions of its best men. Its gross domestic product had shrunk by nearly 40 percent, and by January 1919, the national debt exploded more than five-fold. France, to put it mildly, was devastated by the war.
Auguste’s pessimism was grounded in personal experience. The war was a major setback for his company. Reconverting the D.F.P. factory back to making cars would have been hard enough. But that year Auguste suffered another blow: he learned that his most important partner, the Bentley brothers, decided to end their deal with D.F.P. so they could create their own car company.
Auguste knew what he had to do: he had to send Georges to the United States. In 1920, after receiving his baccalaureate science degree from the Paris lycée, Georges prepared to come to America. Father and son agreed upon a plan: Georges would study machines and manufacturing in America, and then, after a short while, would return to France to get a job. Now, it was Georges’s turn to take a big risk.
THREE
COMING TO AMERICA
(1921–1925)
ON JANUARY 4, 1921, when Georges Frederic Doriot stepped aboard the S.S. Touraine of the French Line, one of the grand old European steamships, he left France with two important items. In one pocket, he kept a letter of introduction to a gentleman named A. Lawrence Lowell, which had been given to him by a friend of his father who was an expert in technical education in France. In his other pocket, Georges carried a small French coin, a symbol of his father’s fortune, which had been destroyed by the war. The letter, which would radically change the course of Georges’s life, represented the bright light of the future; the coin embodied