One Hundred Years On

One hundred years ago today the United States joined the Great War changing a world that was already in the midst of change.

I don't have much new to say about the centennial. Here's part of the intro from Pershing in Command:

It is not true to say that America has forgotten the Great War. The war exerts a light but persistent pull on American memory. Countless Americans have photos in the attic of grandpa or great-grandpa in stiff-necked, uncomfortable Doughboy uniforms.[1] Hundreds if not thousands of towns have statues of Doughboys outfitted in trench-coat, British style helmet and carrying a bayonet tipped Springfield Model 1903 Rifle. The Great War shows up in American pop culture. In the movie Forest Gump, the audience sees a macabre montage of Lt. Dan’s forbearers dying in every major American war, a tri-corner hat wearing continental, a gray-capped Confederate soldier, and a trench-coat clad Doughboy. Bart Simpson once did yard work for a little old lady whose brother was blown to bits in the trenches. Snoopy engages the Red Baron in a perpetual aerial duel. The army named the M-26 Tank after Pershing while a square next to Grand Central Station in Manhattan honors the general.
            Still, as Europe commemorates the Great War’s centennial it is obvious that the conflict does not have a strong hold on America’s memory. For the European the Great War broke the 99 years ‘long peace’ that saw no continent wide conflict and brought about the fall of kings and empires. In America the Great War falls between the nation’s two existential conflicts, the Civil War on one end and the Second World War on the other. The Civil War still occupies a central place in American popular memory, more so in the south, but among the northern states as well.  In postwar America, World War Two was part of the texture of everyday life. Everybody’s father or grandfathers served.[2] Every weekend in the 1970s and 80’s, one could turn on the TV and see a movie about ‘the war’.  There are only a few World War One movies. We can see a wholesome Gary Cooper in Sgt. York, or James Cagney in The Fighting 69^th and What Price Glory.  In the new century, Rick Schroeder reprised the war of Captain Charles Whittlesby in The Lost Battalion. Where the army of the Second World War rode into battle on Lee, Grant, Stuart and Sherman tanks, the Cold War military table of organization and equipment was peppered with vehicles named for the war’s generals and admirals; the Patton Tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the mighty Nimitz Class aircraft carrier. Tom Brokaw wrote a paean to the men and women of that era in The Greatest Generation. That generation, and America at large, knew what it was fighting for and fighting against in the Second World War.
            Conversely, the reasons for the Great War are a bit obscure for an American. Most wonder why the assassination of some duke in a strange sounding city was worth a continent-wide war that killed millions; and was the Kaiser really that bad anyway? Here once again America’s other great wars overwhelm the memory of the Great War, for however bad the Kaiser may have been, nothing he did can compare to the pure evil of Adolph Hitler. The reasons for America’s entry into the war are just as vague. When asked why The United States went to war, most Americans would answer ‘the Lusitania’ if they would answer at all. Few know about Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare, and fewer still about Germany’s ridiculous offer of military and diplomatic help to Mexico if she attacked the United States.[3]            In 1917 the America was a vastly different place than it is today.  When an American referred to ‘the war’ he meant the Civil War; hundreds of thousands of Union and Confederate veterans participated in yearly parades and bored their grandkids with the same old stories of the March through Georgia or the Seven Days. Those veterans were ghosts of an army long past. As will be discussed below, in 1917 America had no army to speak of, merely a constabulary scattered throughout the west with outposts in Hawaii and the Philippines and a few other places. America’s army was smaller than Portugal’s, and the German general staff, which studied everything including the American Civil War, gave the U.S. Army no thought at all. The navy had some punch and global reach but did not master the seas the way the USN has since 1945.            The consumer culture was still in its infancy and few had disposal income to spend on luxury goods. People dressed much more formally, and informal attire had nothing in common with modern ‘leisure wear’. In 1917 much like today, America was in the midst of a great immigrant wave; unlike today, those immigrants were overwhelmingly European. In 1917 German was as ubiquitous as Spanish in 2017. Americans were discovering an exotic food called ‘tomato pie’.  Baseball was already the national past time, while football reigned supreme at the college level. Women could not vote and blacks were segregated. The growing temperance movement was on the verge of success. Cinema was a new technology that most had yet to experience. To demonstrate how much the nation has changed in the last century, the most important film of the time was Birth of the Nation, a racial passion play that helped revive the Klan and was screened in the White House by President Woodrow Wilson.            Wilson was a product of his time. Born in the south, he eventually became a professor at Princeton and governor of New Jersey. His election to the presidency was an historical accident brought about by the fracture of the Republican Party into two camps, one for the sitting President William Howard Taft, the other for the upstart and former president Theodore Roosevelt. If the GOP had a united ticket, it would have defeated Wilson by more than a million votes in 1912. Wilson was very much a turn of the century Democrat. A progressive who wanted to improve the lot of the common man via the power of the Federal Government, but also a staunch Segregationist who introduced the practice to the Federal work force. Wilson may have been an idealist, but he understood that from 1914-16 America was not ready for, and did not want to enter the Great War. That said, he disliked Germany in general, thought the Germans the aggressor in the war and personally supported the Allies. While Wilson was troubled by Germany’s actions, much of his time was occupied by events in Mexico, where a civil war was spilling over the Rio Grande into the United States. Most of the Regular Army and National Guard was deployed along the border and in Vera Cruz, an almost forgotten event dimly remembered by Americans through movies like Sam Pekinpaugh’s The Wild Bunch.
            From 1914 to 1917 the ongoing struggle in Europe was a controversial topic in America, editorialized in the pages of American newspapers, debated on college campuses, and argued about over family dinners. America’s sympathies generally but not universally lay with the Allies. After all, millions of German Americans had family fighting for the Kaiser. Millions of Irish-Americans deeply resented the British, who in 1916 crushed the Irish Easter Rebellion. Wilson may have supported he Allies, but without a cause bellis, there was nothing he could do to persuade America to go to war. The Germans provided him with one.
            1916 ended in bloody stalemate in Europe, with the Allies stuck on the Somme, and the German offensive having failed at Verdun. The German General Staff felt 1917 was the year to force a decision, this time via a U-Boat offensive meant to starve Britain. Once more, Germany would practice unrestricted submarine warfare, sinking any ship that entered the warzone. The Germans understood that this tactic would most likely bring America into the war.  In anticipation of American entry, the foreign minister, Arthur Zimmerman instructed the German embassy in Mexico City to offer an alliance with Mexico including military aid and diplomatic support for the Mexican annexation of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Only the Germans could have proposed something so ludicrous and written it down. Said message from Berlin to Mexico City was intercepted by British Intelligence who later published the telegram in the London Times. The nation demanded action against the German affront.
            What follows is the story of the American effort against Germany. Pershing in Command relates the character and makeup of the United States Army on the eve of the war and the subsequent scramble to prepare it for the trenches of France. In 1917 John J. Pershing was the obvious choice to command the AEF in France. He was vastly experienced and had just led the ill-fated Poncho Villa expedition in Mexico, and had the necessary political connections; his father-in-law was a U.S. Senator. Imposing, formal and stiff, Pershing was a Midwesterner and fits the modern notion of a no-nonsense American sent to give strait talk to a gaggle of effete Europeans. He was also an advocate for an independent American army and fought tenaciously for one. Over the course of the war Pershing made many enemies in the Allied high command.            The American Expeditionary Force was unlike any army the country ever fielded. True, America had raised an army to fight Spain and later to win the Philippine Insurrection, but these were not national efforts involving a levy en-mass. During the Great War, nearly three million men enlisted or were drafted. Afterward, the war veterans of the AEF formed a powerful community reminiscent of the Civil War’s Grand Army of the Republic and the 21^st Century’s Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. Most divisions formed alumni committees and in turn published histories of their exploits. These vary in historical quality, ranging from the useless jingoism of the 28^th Division’s history, to the extremely useful history of the 89^th Division including maps, orders and after action reports. The 42^nd Division commissioned an 850+ page tome filled with battle histories and personal recollections. The original is handsomely bound with the 42^nd’s rainbow insignia emblazoned on the spine and front cover and decorated by one-inch square reliefs off each subordinate unit. The 32^nd Division issued a 300-page coffee table book complete with a clear history, rosters, medal winners and a ‘roll of honor’. The interior back cover is marked ‘Memoranda’, a place to gather autographs at the annual alumni conventions. Perhaps most impressive of all the post war ‘official histories’ is American Armies and Battlefields in Europe.  This book was commissioned by the American Battle Monuments Commission, chaired by John J. Pershing. The guide is an impressive 550 pages, hard bound and printed on heavy paper. It contains descriptions of all AEF actions, dozens of maps, including several large fold-outs, and dozens of pictures and terrain sketches to assist the tourist in orienting himself on the battlefield. It is at once a tour book of the battlefields and voluminous narrative and visual history.[4] In 1938 American Armies and Battlefields in Europe could be purchased from the Government Printing office for $2.75. The book is not a bad way to learn about the AEF in the Great War.[5]

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[1] The author has such a photograph of his great-grandfather, though he wears the uniform of the Luftwaffe.

[2] The author had one grandfather in France and another slated to go ashore with the first wave in the invasion of Japan. An uncle served in Merrell’s Maruaders.

[3] The author’s freshman college student’s usually laugh at the idea.

[4] The author owns an original copy in immaculate condition and suspects he is the first person to ever crack the binding. The book’s turned down corners suggests it sat in a box, its smell suggests in someone’s basement, for decade upon decade.

[5] The author will refer to these tomes as ‘official histories’ throughout the work.