I've just finished Paddy Griffith's
The Great War on the Western Front A Short History, towards the end of which he makes some interesting points about American reactions to their participation in that war. I thought it would be interesting to consider them. Some points are less than complimentary of the American military in the Great War, so I shall ask our angryteens to stop reading now, reminding them that the American army could hardly be expected to reach technical perfection in a shorter time and from a position less favourable than that of the BEF. Everyone who's likely to be less, ah, patriotic, please read on. Well, if you can stomach a few pages of text.
Chapter Nine: The American Contribution to Victory
Griffiths notes the superior health of the Americans as a positive aspect, but also criticises their inexperience, claiming that "'Don't worry, we'll do it our own way'" was a claim made during training courses with the British and French that "invariably frustrated their allies who had seen modern battle at close range."
He notes the good work performed by the Americans on the defensive at Villers-Bretoneux, Chateau Thierry and elsewhere, but remarks on deficiencies in the Americans' offensive capabilities, "At Belleau Wood, for example, the marines made very heavy weather of their assaults."
The Meuse-Argonne offensive also comes in for some stick.
"The battle of the Meuse-Argonne, which started on 26 September and lasted for all the rest of the war, would cost 1117,000 US casualties as a well as alarge number of French (which seems to be as unspecified in US sources as the French losses on the Somme are unspecified in British sources). Initially some fifteen US and twenty-seven French infantry divisions were committed, as well as four French cavalry divisions, although the size of the American divisions made them the equivalent of some thirty French divisions. The dividing line between the French and Americans was the western edge of the Argonne forest, which meant that the Americans had the unenviable task of clearing this dense and heavily defended terrain, although admittedly they had the benefit of some clearer and more open ground to the eats of the forest.
"The first day of the battle went reasonably well, but problems soon arose thereafter.In particular the American logistics collapsed, and there were fantastic traffic jams, on a scale that nobody had seen before. There were reports of officers attempting to get the traffic moving by discharging their revolvers but, unsurprisingly, this technique did not appear to work. Many symptoms were encountered of the same tactical naivety that the British had displayed on the Somme and the French in 1915. Not only were there many instances of sacrificial frontal attacks which had not been properly prepared, but reported 'gas casualties' were running at about ten times the level known on any other battlefield. This entitles us to suspect that most cases were just bad smells that were misinterpreted by inexperienced troops, rather than actual poison gas.
...
"Beyond Pershing's personal frustration that the Meuse-Argonne battle was terminated by the armistice just as the AEF was finally getting into its stride, there was another and much deeper frustration that would mark the US armed forces for much of the twentieth century. This may be simply expressed as a frustration that the Americans were never really allowed to demonstrate what they could do. They had been participating in thiswar on a large scale for just two months before it ended. They had lost 'only' about 52,000 dead and 255,896 total casualties, almost half of them in the Meuse-Argonne. This was fewer even than the Canadians' 59,000 killed in the whole war, out of 208,700 casualties, whereas the French had been fighting for four years and had lost 1,385,300 dead, and the UK had lost 702,410. Also in the Meuse-Argonne, the major American effort of the war, their troops had not obviously distinguished themselves. They had become entangled in the traffic jams, in the forest, in the wires, in the supposed 'gas clouds', and in the notoriously interlocking fields of fire of the German machine guns. All in all, it was not a glorious performance, and this would have two main consequences.
"In the first place the Meuse-Argonne experience meant that the First World War as a whole somewhat slipped out of the American military consciousness. It had been a major national effort, but it had ended as something of a damp squib. People like Pershing might have blustered that the whole German army lay at their mercy, but the ordinary American soldier saw only a futile exercise in hardship, deprivation and danger. Nor did the hardships stop when the war ended and the army was demobilized, since many of the troops found it hard to find a job in the bleak civilian landscape of the 1920s. US historians have subsequently tended to dismiss the whole sequence of mobilization, combat and demobilization as 'futile', without enquiring very much further, and have echoed the Wilsonian critique of 1914-16 that the war was never really any of America's business anyway. Perhaps it would be best to forget all about it. The US political classes made an even swifter decision in the same direction, by voting Wilson out of office in 1920, while refusing to ratify his beloved plans for the League of Nations.
"Secondly, the Meuse-Argonne battle seems to have imprinted the myth of the 'ten-foot-high German' into the American military consciousness. In Britain the experience of being shot down in thousands on 1 July 1916 seems to have created a belief that their own generals were butchers and bunglers. In the USA, by contrast, the experience of being shot down in October 1918 seems to have created a belief that the Germans facing them were remarkably fine soldiers and the epitome of all military virtues. During the remainder of the twentieth century this idea, which would be reinforced in many hard battles during the Second World War, bored its way into so much of American military literature that by the 1980s it had become axiomatic that anything the Germans ever did was fantastically wonderful, while anything done by any other nation's army was distinctly mediocre. So far did this bizarre cult go that the US Army even adopted a version of the German pot helmet for its infantry, although no one apparently stopped to ask if the Germans had actually won either of their two world wars. To the present author it seems that this whole movement can be traced back, precisely, to the Meuse-Argonne battle. Before that, apart from the influence of the German Von Steuben during the Revolutionary War, it had always been France that had fulfilled the role of 'the USA's most admired military nation'. It was certainly apparent during the Great War that the Americans' commander, if not perhaps their men, preferred to fight alongside their French rather than their British allies.
"However that may be, there was a third and arguably no less important set of lessons that the US Army took away from the Meuse-Argonne offensive. These consisted of the much more personal and specific experiences of its officers who would later rise to occupy eminent positions during the Second World War and thereafter, most notable George C Marshall, Douglas MacArthur and George Patton. ... In common with MacArthur, lieutenants Mark Clark and Omar Bradley both fought in the front line, and both were critical of the tactics being employed. Thus the lessons they took away from the Meuse-Argonne were of the 'how not to do it' kind."