Alternate commanders of the AEF

What alternate choices were there to Pershing for command of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF)? Additionally, would a different AEF Commander have an effect of any kind?
 
Technically there were quite a few. Politics reduced the field considerablly. Only a few experts remember who the US general officers were circa 1917, other than Peyton Marsh. Marsh was a alternative & many at the time assumed he would cross the Atlantic to take over in 1918.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Hugh L. Scott was CSA;

What alternate choices were there to Pershing for command of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF)? Additionally, would a different AEF Commander have an effect of any kind?

Hugh L. Scott was CSA; he asked for JJP to come to Washington in March for cosultations, and with Newton Baker's blessing, let him know he'd start with a small staff (~200 officers and men) which would initially get the 1st Division (under William Sibert, initially) and then build up to a corps, army, and army group.

Scott was very capable, but both he and JF Bell (who commanded the Eastern Department and was a former CSA) were not young; Scott was born in 1853 (as was Tasker H. Bliss, who served as CSA from 1917-18 and on the Supreme War Council in 1918-19) and Bell in 1856. Pershing was born in 1860; Peyton March - who served as CSA in 1918-21, was born in 1864.

There was some lobbying for Leonard Woood, for obvious reasons, who was the same age as Pershing, but although a former regular was not a West Pointer and had a fairly irregular career path.

Pershing was the best choice.

Hunter Liggett, RL Bullard, and JT Dickman, the three army commanders, were basically the only real alternatives; Liggett (born in 1857) was older than Pershing, as was Dickman (also 1857); Bullard, born in 1861, was a year younger.

Best,
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Interesting comparison with the French and British

Interesting comparison with the French and British; Joffre was born in 1852 and Nivelle and Petain in 1856, while Foch was even older, born in 1851; French was born in 1852 and Haig was a contemporary of Pershing and Bullard, born in 1861.

Considering the record of their contemporaries in the French and British armies, Pershing et al did as well or better as commanders of national contingents at the corps/army/army group level in association with other major powers; considering how late it was before the French and British set up anything approximating a joint command for true coalition warfare (Foch's in April-May, 1918) it is hard to differentiate the American position on high command for the theater (much less the learning curve necessary in a rapidly mobilizing 4 million-strong force) as anything significantly different than those of the other western allies.

The French and British fought as national armies; to suggest the US - which did, after all, use conscription for field service in Europe, unlike many of the Allied "nations" - was somehow lacking in being unwillinging to simply provide replacement cannon fodder for the BEF and French in 917, which is the common complaint about Wilson's Administration, is ahistorical.

Best,
 
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