The attached
Stars & Stripes article briefly summarizes the American efforts from Cantigny to the Armistice and serves as one big
"attaboy" for the whole Doughboy army. The journalist anticipates John Mosiere's World War One history,
The Myth of the Great War
, which opines that it was the high morale and seemingly endless supply lines of the A.E.F. that served as one of the most decisive factors in bringing the war to a close.
Stars & Stries could not have agreed more.
Ten years later a Frenchman writing for La Revue Mondiale would say essentially the same thing, click here to read that article.
Click here to read an article about life in a W.W. I German listening post...
What we enjoyed about this piece by the Muckraking Ida Tarbell (1857 - 1944) was that it was written some six months after the heavy handed George Creel had ceased influencing Yankee magazine editors into printing pro-American blather, and so we tend to feel that her praise of the American Doughboys was quite sincere - and praise she does! Up hill and down dale, the Doughboys can do no wrong in her eyes.
This essay appeared in print around the same time the French had decided that all the Doughboys were just a bunch of racist hurrah-boys and were becoming increasingly sick of them. The Yanks might have squared their debt with the Marquis de Lafayette, but the recently returned Poilus were not above taking an occasional swipe at Ida Tarbell's Doughboys...
Click here to read some statistical data about the American Doughboys of the First World War.
A diagram pulled from a 1931 U.S. Government study indicating the number of soldiers in the American Army each month from 1917 through 1919, and the number of Doughboys who were deployed in Europe.
Click here to read an interview with the World War I American fighter pilot Eddy Rickenbacker.
Attached is a pie chart illustrating the expansion of the U.S. Army beginning in April of 1917 through 1918, when it reached the zenith of its might. The chart also indicates the shrinkage in National Guard units within the same time frame.
Read about the W.W. I growth of the U.S. Marine Corps...
Click here to read what the young women of France thought about the Doughboys.
The attached file is composed of two informative paragraphs and a table listing the 42 American Army divisions, the states from which they were pooled and the locations of their respective training camps:
The Doughboys were "trained in the division, which was our typical combat unit. In the American Army it was composed of about 1,000 officers and 27,000 men. Training and sorting organizations of about 10,000 men, known as depot brigades, were also utilized, but as far as possible, the new recruits were put almost immediately into the divisions which were the organizations in which they would go into action."
Click here to read about the efforts that were made to get free cigarettes to the Doughboys...
Two remarkably brief paragraphs concerning the required military training of the average American Doughboy throughout the course of America's blessedly short participation in the First World War:
"The average American soldier who went to France received six months of training in this country before he sailed. After he landed overseas he had two months of training before entering the battle line. The part of the battle line that he entered was in a quiet sector and here he remained one month before going into an active sector and taking part in hard fighting."
Click here to read a 1918 magazine article about the Doughboy training camps.
Attached is a graph comparing the amount of time it took for both the British Army and the American Army to have 2,000,000 soldiers on the Western Front during World War One:
"The British sent to France many more men in their first year in the war than we did in our first year. On the other hand, it took England three years to reach a strength of 2,000,000 men in France and the United States accomplished it in one half the time."
Attached is a small piece that explains how the draft of 1917 was conducted. Illustrated with three charts, this article provides the number of males in the U.S. at that time (54,000,000), how many had registered under the Selective Service Act (26,000,000), the percentage of the whole number who had never registered and how the onslaught of the influenza epidemic had affected the W.W. I draft.
"In the fall of 1917 the first half million came rapidly. During the winter the accessions were relatively few, and those that did come in were largely used as replacements and for special services."
Attached is a map of the 48 states that will show you which regions of the country produced the greatest number of healthy men who passed their Selective Service physical examinations. You will also learn which parts of the nation provided men who could not pass this examination.
The attached pie chart will give you an understanding as to the history of the U.S. Army officer corps that served throughout the First World War. Drawn in 1931 and based upon the data collected by the Department of War, this study outlines the history of Army leadership between April of 1917 through November of 1918.
Click here to read a 1917 article about the U.S. Army officer training camp at Plattsburg, New York.
This page contains a chart clearly stating the number of men who served in the U.S. Army during World War One, the number of men provided by each state and what percentage of the entire army originated from these states.
*Doughboys from New York numbered 367,864 and made up 9.7% of the U.S. Army.
*Doughboys from Pennsylvania numbered 297,891 and made up 7.93% percent.
*While the men of California made up 2.98% of the army, clocking in at 112,514.
etc...etc...etc...
Click here to read about the shipments of chewing gum that were sent to the American Army of W.W. I.
A black and white map indicating the Atlantic ports up and down North America where the A.E.F. boarded troop ships, their trans-Atlantic routes and their French and British points of arrival. The map is also accompanied by a few facts concerning this remarkable trip across U-boat infested waters.
Click here to read an article about the sexually-transmitted diseases among the American Army of W.W. I...
When the Doughboys complained, they complained heavily about their uniforms; read about it here.
Additional data regarding the 1917 Draft and how the first one million inductees measured-up physically:
"The first adequate physical survey in half a century was made possible when the Selective Service system brought before medical examiners some ten million men. Of the 2,510,000 men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one 730,000 (29 percent) were rejected on physical grounds."
We found it interesting to learn two facts from this article; the first being that the highest number of acceptable draftees were from the countryside and the second involved the malady of flat feet -which effected one out of every five American men at that time.
Here is a segment of the famous interview with General Paul von Hindenburg that was conducted just days after the close of hostilities in which the journalist George Seldes (1890 – 1995) posed the question as to which of the Allied Armies played the most decisive roll in defeating Germany; whereupon the General responded:
"The American infantry in the Argonne won the war".
Read on...
Click here to read about sexually transmitted diseases among the American soldiers of the First World War...
So numerous were the khaki-clad immigrants who filled the ranks of the U.S. Army during the First World War that our British allies would often refer to the A.E.F. as the "American Foreign Legion"; yet as grateful as the services were to have so many additional strong backs to deploy during a time of national emergency, it was not without a cost.
The attached article was all about how the army addressed this issue regarding the high number of illiterate immigrants who filled their divisions spanning the years 1917 through 1920.
For further reading about the American immigrants who fought in the U.S. Military during the First World War, we recommend:
Americans All!: Foreign-Born Soldiers in World War I
.
General Karl Wilhelm Georg August von Einem (1853 – 1934), commander of the German Third Army (1914 - 1919) granted a short interview to a member of the U.S. Army General Staff concerning his observations regarding the American Army.
Here is another account from
The Enemy Order of Battle report (1919) - on this page two experienced German veterans recalled their unit's battles with the American infantry:
"American soldiers took big chances and [did so] irrespective of any danger."
An assortment of opinions gleaned from various interviews with German soldiers who all made remarks about the naked aggressiveness shared by the A.E.F.:
"The French would not advance unless sure of gaining their objectives while the American infantry would dash in regardless of all obstacles and that while they gained their objectives they would often do so with heavy loss of life."
Here is a page from The Enemy Order of Battle report (1919) by the subsection of the same name that was an arm of the U.S. Army General Staff. The report tells of Baccarat, a portion of the Western Front during the later part of the war that was quiet, by mutual agreement between the French and Germans - until the U.S. Army took their place in the French position - and then all Hell broke loose.
"Les Américains Sont Là!"
"Those were the words on everybody's lips as the first big detachments of United States troops began to appear on the Paris streets... I think there is a simple politeness in these young warriors from across the sea, whether they come from some of the big cities, New York, Boston, Chicago or from some far-away states on the other side of the Rockies."
Click here to read an article that compares the two world wars.
On the second anniversary of the Armistice, an American veteran of the war looked back on his days in military training. In this article, he walked the grounds of his old cantonment wistfully recalling how each plot of ground was put to use:
"...the K.P.'s peeling potatoes at the doors of the mess hall, the prisoners digging ditches or working on the coal pile, the guards walking their posts, the officers with their ladies under the trees... Here, under these trees, were the tents of the medical staff... There were the horse-stalls... That thrill, that enthusiasm, that lofty notion that the country was greater than the man..."
