Woodrow Wilson Shows His Hand: Annapolis, 5 June 1914

Where did "Making the World Safe for Democracy" come from?  As this address three years earlier to a group on new U.S. Navy ensign reveals, it was always part of Woodrow Wilson's make-up.  Note in particular his "Idea of America" is to serve humanity.

Fifty-Four Months After His Speech at Annapolis,  a Triumphant President Woodrow Wilson Disembarks from the USS George Washington 
Ready to Share His Views with Europe's Leaders

Annapolis Commencement Address
5 June 1914

Mr. Superintendent, Young Gentlemen, Ladies and Gentlemen:

During the greater part of my life I have been associated with young men, and on occasions it seems to me without number have faced bodies of youngsters going out to take part in the activities of the world, but I have a consciousness of a different significance in this occasion from that which I have felt on other similar occasions. When I have faced the graduating classes at universities I have felt that I was facing a great conjecture. They were going out into all sorts of pursuits and with every degree of preparation for the particular thing they were expecting to do; some without any preparation at all, for they did not know what they expected to do. But in facing you I am facing men who are trained for a special thing. You know what you are going to do, and you are under the eye of the whole Nation in doing it. For you, gentlemen, are to be part of the power of the Government of the United States. There is a very deep and solemn significance in that fact, and I am sure that every one of you feels it. The moral is perfectly obvious. Be ready and fit for anything that you have to do. And keep ready and fit. Do not grow slack. Do not suppose that your education is over because you have received your diplomas from the academy. Your education has just begun. Moreover, you are to have a very peculiar privilege which not many of your predecessors have had. You are yourselves going to become teachers. You are going to teach those 50,000 fellow-countrymen of yours who are the enlisted men of the Navy. You are going to make them fitter to obey your orders and to serve the country. You are going to make them fitter to see what the orders mean in their outlook upon life and upon the service; and that is a great privilege, for out of you is going the energy and intelligence which are going to quicken the whole body of the United States Navy.

I congratulate you upon that prospect, but I want to ask you not to get the professional point of view. I would ask it of you if you were lawyers; I would ask it of you if you were merchants; I would ask it of you whatever you expected to be. Do not get the professional point of view. There is nothing narrower or more unserviceable than the professional point of view, to have the attitude toward life that it centers in your profession. It does not. Your profession is only one of the many activities which are meant to keep the world straight, and to keep the energy in its blood and in its muscle. We are all of us in this world, as I understand it, to set forward the affairs of the whole world, though we play a special part in that great function. The Navy goes all over the world, and I think it is to be congratulated upon having that sort of illustration of what the world is and what it contains; and inasmuch as you are going all over the world you ought to be the better able to see the relation that your country bears to the rest of the world.

It ought to be one of your thoughts all the time that you are sample Americans—not merely sample Navy men, not merely sample soldiers, but sample Americans—and that you have the point of view of America with regard to her Navy and her Army; that she is using them as the instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression. The idea of America is to serve humanity, and every time you let the Stars and Stripes free to the wind you ought to realize that that is in itself a message that you are on an errand which other navies have sometimes tunes forgotten; not an errand of conquest, but an errand of service. I always have the same thought when I look at the flag of the United States, for I know something of the history of the struggle of mankind for liberty. When I look at that flag it seems to me as if the white stripes were strips of parchment upon which are written the rights of man, and the red stripes the streams of blood by which those rights have been made good. Then in the little blue firmament in the corner have swung out the stars of the States of the American Union. So it is, as it were, a sort of floating charter that has come down to us from Runnymede, when men said, "We will not have masters; we will be a people, and we will seek our own liberty."

You are not serving a government, gentlemen; you are serving a people. For we who for the time being constitute the Government are merely instruments for a little while in the hands of a great Nation which chooses whom it will to carry out its decrees and who invariably rejects the man who forgets the ideals which it intended him to serve. So that I hope that wherever you go you will have a generous, comprehending love of the people you come into contact with, and will come back and tell us, if you can, what service the United States can render to the remotest parts of the world; tell us where you see men suffering; tell us where you think advice will lift them up; tell us where you think that the counsel of statesmen may better the fortunes of unfortunate men; always having it in mind that you are champions of what is right and fair all 'round for the public welfare, no matter where you are, and that it is that you are ready to fight for and not merely on the drop of a hat or upon some slight punctilio, but that you are champions of your fellow-men, particularly of that great body one hundred million strong whom you represent in the United States.

What do you think is the most lasting impression that those boys down at Vera Cruz are going to leave? They have had to use some force—I pray God it may not be necessary for them to use any more—but do you think that the way they fought is going to be the most lasting impression? Have men not fought ever since the world began? Is there anything new in using force? The new things in the world are the things that are divorced from force. The things that show the moral compulsions of the human conscience, those are the things by which we have been building up civilization, not by force. And the lasting impression that those boys are going to leave is this, that they exercise self-control; that they are ready and diligent to make the place where they went fitter to live in than they found it; that they regarded other people's rights; that they did not strut and bluster, but went quietly, like self-respecting gentlemen, about their legitimate work. And the people of Vera Cruz, who feared the Americans and despised the Americans, are going to get a very different taste in their mouths about the whole thing when the boys of the Navy and the Army come away. Is that not something to be proud of, that you know how to use force like men of conscience and like gentlemen, serving your fellow-men and not trying to overcome them? Like that gallant gentleman who has so long borne the heats and perplexities and distresses of the situation in Vera Cruz—Admiral Fletcher. I mention him, because his service there has been longer and so much of the early perplexities fell upon him. I have been in almost daily communication with Admiral Fletcher, and I have tested his temper. I have tested his discretion. I know that he is a man with a touch of statesmanship about him, and he has grown bigger in my eye each day as I have read his dispatches, for he has sought always to serve the thing he was trying to do in the temper that we all recognize and love to believe is typically American.

I challenge you youngsters to go out with these conceptions, knowing that you are part of the Government and force of the United States and that men will judge us by you. I am not afraid of the verdict. I cannot look in your faces and doubt what it will be, but I want you to take these great engines of force out onto the seas like adventurers enlisted for the elevation of the spirit of the human race. For that is the only distinction that America has. Other nations have been strong, other nations have piled wealth as high as the sky, but they have come into disgrace because they used their force and their wealth for the oppression of mankind and their own aggrandizement; and America will not bring glory to herself, but disgrace, by following the beaten paths of history. We must strike out upon new paths, and we must count upon you gentlemen to be the explorers who will carry this spirit and spread this message all over the seas and in every port of the civilized world.

You see, therefore, why I said that when I faced you I felt there was a special significance. I am not present on an occasion when you are about to scatter on various errands. You are all going on the same errand, and I like to feel bound with you in one common organization for the glory of America. And her glory goes deeper than all the tinsel, goes deeper than the sound of guns and the clash of sabers; it goes down to the very foundations of those things that have made the spirit of men free and happy and content.

100 Years Ago: Fourth Ludendorff Offensive,Operation GNEISENAU, Fails

Operation GNEISENAU, 9–13 June 1918

German Casualties Being Evacuated

Operation GNEISENAU followed on 9 June 1918, five days after Operation BLÜCHER in the Marne sector ended in an attempt to force the Allies to commit troops south and fill the gap between the two enormous salients created by BLÜCHER and in March by MICHAEL. However,  the French were better prepared and the offensive ended after just three days of bloody fighting and a further 30,000 German casualties. But like Operation GEORGETTE following Operation MICHAEL, GNEISENAU had been cobbled together too fast and was too light in combat power. 

The Germans terminated the attack after only six days, after once more failing to achieve any operationally significant results or to cause the French to withdraw their reinforcements from behind the British. But there was also an ominous difference between Operation GNEISENAU and its three predecessors. For the first time in the Ludendorff Offensives the Germans had failed to make any notable tactical gains. The Allies were beginning to understand the new German attack tactics and develop more effective methods of defense.

Source: Zabecki,  The German 1918 Offensives

To the Last Man: Spring 1918 Reviewed by Bryan Alexander

To the Last Man: Spring 1918

by Lyn Macdonald

Carroll and Graf, 1998

German Assault Troops Assembling in St. Quentin

One hundred years ago the German Army launched its spring offensive on the Western Front. The Kaiserschlacht nearly broke the Allied armies but ultimately failed, ending German hopes for victory against France and leading to the Second Reich's collapse later that year. In To the Last Man Lyn MacDonald chronicles the British experience of surviving the onslaught, following events chronologically. After a good introductory chapter surveying the state of forces on either side of No Man's Land, the rest of the book tracks events day by day, from 21 March through 5 April.

A great deal of the book consists of participants' voices. Interviews, letters, diary accounts, and other primary sources appear extensively, giving readers eyewitness accounts of events in great detail. This documentary approach gives To the Last Man a deep sense of humanity, while grounding larger questions of strategy. It also allows a wide range of experiences, including the full range of military ranks and some variety within the British empire (for example, a story about a Scots unit growing to like South African troops, 121–2).

One private reports in all candor:
That was the first moment that I was frightened, really frightened, because the orders came along, 'This position must be held at all costs until the last man.' Well, you've got to be in that situation to understand what it means. I was only nineteen, I'd only been a France a little over a month, and I thought I was going to be killed. I had a sinking feeling in my tummy. Everybody was thinking, 'How on earth can we hold this position? It's impossible!' That was on the night of the 22nd (197).

Amidst the horrors there are many cheerful passages, however, like the story of a retreating British officer who pauses to set a gramophone to play a patriotic, German-mocking song (141), or this interesting bit of medical practice: "The next thing I hear is a lot of shells falling in the sunken road, and before very long I heard Major Adam saying 'Gas! Gas! Pass the whisky.' This was his antidote to gas" (133; emphasis in original).

MacDonald's style is powerful and accessible, with some fine phrases—"The German infantry advanced like a tidal bore on the heels of the devastating bombardment, and the posts disappeared beneath the onslaught like castles on a sandy beach." (89) Her overall tone is interesting, in that while she portrays serious defeats and epic horrors, the text is generally very positive. The subject is a British victory, of course, but the author also takes care to represent British optimism and energy. This is unusual in my reading of WWI literature.

The book is well equipped with maps, some of which are very clear, and which helps the reader navigate some of the complex geographical details. There are also black-and-white photographs of some quoted participants and battlefields.

The focus of the book is largely on the British experience, especially the hard fighting of the Fifth Army. A key theme is understanding and ultimately approving of general Gough's decisions on the ground. On the positive side, this allows us to immerse ourselves in that population and its responses to events. However, we see much less of the French, beyond some brief notes about their strategic reaction to the German attacks.

British Troops Form a Temporary Defensive Line, March 1918

Inter-Allied national discussions do appear, but with a strong bias toward London rather than Paris. We do read some German accounts, which nicely illuminate that side's experience, from initial success to too much pillaging, but I would have preferred more, in order to balance the British. The Portuguese units, who bore the brunt of one major attack and whose collapse led to a major crisis, barely appear at all. (159) Ultimately this is a book best understood as being about the British experience of the Ludendorff Offensive. I think To the Last Man is the first Lyn Macdonald book I've read. It won't be the last.

Bryan Alexander

The Role of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission

Lone Pine Cemetery, Gallipoli

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission was established by Royal Charter of 21 May 1917, the provisions of which were amended and extended by a Supplemental Charter of 8 June 1964. Its duties are to mark and maintain the graves of the members of the forces of the Commonwealth who died in the two world wars, to build and maintain memorials to the dead whose graves are unknown, and to keep records and registers. The cost is shared by the partner governments—those of Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom—in proportions based on the numbers of their graves. The commission acts for its member governments in all matters concerning their war graves of the two World Wars.

Rouge Cabaret Cemetery, Artois, France

The commission's work is guided by fundamental principles which were established in 1920:

• that each of the dead should be commemorated individually by name either on a headstone over the grave or by an inscription on a memorial if the grave was unidentified;

• that the headstones and memorials should be permanent;

• that the headstones should be uniform; and 

• that there should be no distinction made on account of military or civil rank, race, or creed.

Aveluy Wood Cemetery, Somme Battlefield

The theme of common sacrifice and equal honour in death was reflected in the policy of non-repatriation of remains and contributed to the non-sectarian design of the headstones used throughout the world. Non-repatriation was strictly applied during both world wars for members of the Commonwealth's forces and resulted in the location of the memorials and cemeteries truly reflecting the scope of both conflicts. Indeed, the commission's mandate encompasses 1.7 million war dead commemorated in 150 countries in over 23,000 burial grounds.

To be considered war dead, a member of the forces must have died in service or as a result of service within the two war periods designated by the participating governments, i.e. 4 August 1914–31 August 1921 or 3 September 1939–31 December 1947.

Source:  CWGC Website

Where Were the British Tanks During the 100 Days Offensive?

While failing to achieve critical mass at any particular point on the battlefield, the Tank Corps soldiers and their tanks represented themselves well throughout 1918. They trained hard and fought harder for the eventual victory. One continuing Achilles' heel remained the lack of reserves at any echelon to help press the fight. In fact, with the crush of the Michael Offensive appropriating many soldiers into infantry units originally allocated to expand the Tank Corps, the corps was reduced from six brigades to five for the remainder of 1918. Help was all but nonexistent as the Tank Corps only received two fresh battalions between August and November 1918. All other tank battalions were in a continuous though piecemeal fighting essentially through war’s end.

After the tank’s highly successful use in the battles of Hamel and Amiens in the summer of 1918, few figured dramatically in the final weeks before the Armistice. Some historians, such as John Terraine, hold that the tank force had culminated by the end of September 1918. A noted exception is historian Tim Travers, whose calculations on mission-capable tanks available to General Haig from August through November 1918 revealed around 300 ready at any particular time of choosing. Travers cites lack of trained crews, lack of reserves, and lack of spares (complete tanks) as the prime suspects in keeping tanks out of the majority of fighting during late 1918. Though compelling, Travers fails to account for crew or unit cohesion, or logistical support. Further, with the Allied breakthrough in October 1918, tanks likely lost significance with many leaders who envisioned the tank’s role as primarily to execute the breakthrough, not win the war of maneuver...

German Infantry Versus a British Tank

J.F.C. Fuller himself in his 1920 history of tanks in the Great War described the Tank Corps as a shattered force by November 1918, and his accounting of tanks showed out of 1,993 tanks and other armored vehicles engaged in battle during the last 100 days of the war, 887 were turned over to salvage. Only 204 had been repaired and reissued by the end of the war, 15 were declared un-salvageable, and the rest were still in some sort of maintenance limbo.

Source:  "What Kept the Tank from Being the Decisive Weapon of World War I," Thesis, Major Brian A. Pedersen, U.S.Army, 2007

Prisoners of War in Russia

Austrian Prisoners at a Camp in Northern Russia

by Yucel Yanikdag

The prisoners who survived the grueling conditions of the assembly camps  and transport ended up in one of the prison camps that dotted the Russian  empire. There were not enough of these camps and those that existed did not  have enough beds, which were not really beds but only wooden racks. They  also lacked latrine facilities. Accordingly, various kinds of buildings were converted into prison camps—former army camps, exhibition halls, prisons,  stables, circus buildings, distilleries, abandoned factories, and schools.

Usually the prison camps were located outside a town. Krasnoyarsk, for  example, was 40 minutes walking distance from the town. Holding as  many as 35,000 prisoners, the Siberian camps were larger than their European  counterparts. Most camps were surrounded by wooden or wire fences that stood between 12 and 15 feet high with sentry towers at intervals. The  prisoners were usually kept at large camps, but it was not unusual for officers  to end up in large houses commandeered by the Russian government. Most of  the largest camps were former garrisons that had housed a much smaller number of Russian soldiers. In such places, the lucky ones were housed in brick or  log barracks. The unlucky ones ended up in animal stables and artillery  storage buildings. Depending on the crowding, which was almost always a  problem, each man had a personal space of between 20 and 28 inches. It  was very common for men to be in physical contact with each other as theyslept.

Housing conditions for the officers were better. In former army garrisons, officers were usually quartered in the Russian officers' barracks. Typically, the  officers were not as crowded as the enlisted men. In the earlier years of the  war, enlisted men were assigned to serve as orderlies for officers in the prison  camps.  Prisoners were always infested with lice, largely because of the lack of extra underwear. Whenever the prisoners did receive extra underwear—a rare  event especially for the Ottomans—they sold it to the peasants to  purchase tobacco. Others, who were missing socks, used the underwear as foot  rags. It seems that this practice was especially common among Ottomans, Hungarians, and Czechs. Every day the prisoners removed their clothing to kill  the lice, but their efforts were in vain as the boards and mattresses on which  they slept were also infested. Lice made the prisoners' lives miserable as they  could not rid themselves of these creatures. However, they found various ways  to deal with them; some burned them, others pricked them with needles.

According to a German prisoner, the Ottoman prisoners usually drowned the  lice, as they were convinced that drowning assured the slowest death. Presumably, the creative ways of killing lice was the only way of releasing their  stored-up hatred and frustration, for they felt helpless in defending themselves  even against these little creatures.

Overcrowding and insanitary conditions in the camps resulted in diseases  that took a heavy toll on the prisoners. Typhus, typhoid fever, and cholera were  the major killers, but other epidemics also developed. At one time or another  every camp had a typhus epidemic. In some cases, the Ottomans brought the  disease with them from the Caucasus Front.

Following their capture, the officers, usually starting at the assembly  camps, were separated from the enlisted men. Differences in treatment set the  imprisoned officers apart from their men. The Russian government paid  captured junior officers 50 rubles, staff officers 75 rubles, and generals 100  rubles a month; corresponding salaries were paid by [other countries] to its  Russian prisoners. The officers, however, had to purchase their food from the  Russians, whereas the men received theirs free.

The prisoners usually kept to their own nationality. In other words,  Ottomans lived with Ottomans, Germans with Germans, but there were cases  of mixed nationalities.   Enlisted  men did not speak the languages of other prisoners, and, unlike the officers,  they were expected to work. The work alone probably left little time to do  much else. The men's jobs could be inside the camp, like building and repairing barracks and other facilities, or outside it. In order to make up for the labor shortage created by mobilization, Russian officials used the prisoners in  various areas to help minimize the shortage. In general, those who  worked outside the camps became factory workers or farm hands.

Source: "Ottoman Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914-22,"  Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Jan., 1999).

Prayer of a Soldier in France

PRAYER OF A SOLDIER IN FRANCE

by  Joyce Kilmer (1886–1918)

Sgt. Joyce Kilmer

My shoulders ache beneath my pack
(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back).

I march with feet that burn and smart
(Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart).

Men shout at me who may not speak
(They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek).

I may not lift a hand to clear
My eyes of salty drops that sear.

(Then shall my fickle soul forget
Thy agony of Bloody Sweat?)

My rifle hand is stiff and numb
(From Thy pierced palm red rivers come).

Lord, Thou didst suffer more for me
Than all the hosts of land and sea.

So let me render back again
This millionth of Thy gift. Amen.

"Prayer of a Soldier in France" was originally published in Joyce Kilmer. Ed. Robert Cortes Holliday. New York: Kennikat Press, 1918.

Source: Poetry-Archive.com

Recommended: The Great War and Rudyard Kipling

By Hugh Brogan
Presented by the Kipling Society

Hugh Brogan, Professor of History at the University of Essex, is a long-standing member of the Kipling Society and an authority on Kipling's life and works. This article was first delivered as an address to the Society on 11 February 1998 and reprinted in the Kipling Journal in June 1998. A revised version is to be found in In Time's Eye, essays on Rudyard Kipling edited by Jan Montefiore (Manchester University Press 2014). The collection also includes an article by Harry Ricketts on "Kipling Among the War Poets."

Hope lies to mortals
And most believe her,
But man's deceiver
Was never mine.

The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting
Of lovers' meeting
Or luck or fame.
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady,
So I was ready
When trouble came.

[A.E. Houseman]

Many, many years ago, when I was a young academic at Cambridge, I found myself sitting on a sofa having tea with E.M. Forster. It was the season between Bonfire Night and Christmas. He said that, according to his bedmaker, old people hated Remembrance Sunday—it brought back too many painful memories.

I myself hated Remembrance Sunday 1997. During the last Parliament I couldn't help noticing (like everyone else, I watch the television news) that every year in the week or so before 11 November, Tory M.P.s sprouted plastic poppies in their lapels (by the way, why are modern Poppy Day poppies so cheap and ugly?) as if they had contracted a rash. In 1997 they put the things on a full fortnight beforehand and so did members of the Government. There was no sign of the pacifist White Poppy movement, which made itself conspicuous a few years before; but Peter Tatchell led a homosexual group to place artificial pink poppies (arranged in a triangular wreath) on the Cenotaph a week before the official ceremonies. The British Legion repeated its plea that two minutes silence should be observed by everyone on 11 November as well as on Remembrance Sunday; and commerce (my building society) and the prime minister hastened to endorse it.

Since only one war ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month—not World War II, the Korean War, the Falklands affair, or the Gulf War—this seemed to me to be an objectionable idea, suggesting that only the First World War mattered, or that it mattered uniquely. In a way that is quite true, but I do not think it is a point that should be made at the time when all our battle dead are being commemorated.

The whole shabby farce culminated on Remembrance Sunday itself, when a dirty, tattered Union Jack was flown over Whitehall upside down. The Ministry of Defence gallantly blamed the Crown Property Services Agency.

Surely this concatenation of self-serving humbug, enacted at the expense of what used to be the most sacred ceremony of the British year, is proof that those old painful memories are losing their hold on the nation. We would not insist so vulgarly that we remember if we were not actually forgetting, or putting the sagas aside. This forgetting is, I think, a development both inevitable and healthy. But we will do ourselves no service, and the dead no honour, if, as a people, we continue to pretend that the poppies mean as much to us as ever. Did those sons and daughters die so that we could play the sanctimonious hypocrite in their name?

Of course not. Yet I can see few signs that the popular imagination is ready to consider and discuss the wars of the 20th century—the two World Wars particularly—dispassionately, honestly and knowledgeably. In the course of preparing this paper I went to hear a lecture by Professor Brian Bond on the First World War  in which he told how, recently, he had heard a young woman remark during a television discussion that it was thanks to the public schools that Britain lost that war. Professor Bond wrote in to say that according to his information Britain had won. The BBC wrote back to say politely that he was entitled to his view.

Another anecdote: not long ago I had occasion to read a graduate thesis on women writers and the Great War. I was startled to find that the author, writing nearly 80 years after the Armistice, took it for granted that the absolute pacifists of 1914–18 were right. The war should never have been fought, and any writers, even women writers, who thought otherwise—who let their attitudes be tainted by patriotism or any other belligerent propensity—were simply written off as "militarists." It had not crossed the writer's mind that you could hate the war and the processes of waging war and yet believe that it must be fought and won. As Wagner once said of Mendelssohn, I seemed to see an abyss of superficiality opening before me.

Nor could I dismiss this piece of work as a mere token of one student's personal eccentricity. On the contrary, the writer was the typical victim of two generations of misrepresentation. It is hardly surprising that an age which finds in Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem" (which ought to be called "An Anti-War Requiem") its most representative piece of public music, should be unaware that it is possible, in all seriousness and decency, to take more than one view of the Great War. Nor is it surprising that the British generally, so far as I can judge, now hold two logically incompatible beliefs; first, that all war is pointless and avoidable, that all admirals, generals, and air marshals are vicious incompetents, that all servicemen are passive victims, rather like sacrificial sheep; second, that the sheep were heroes who saved their country. And attempts are now being made to launch a third fallacy, or should I say to resurrect one. On 11 November 1997 the BBC saw fit to run a TV news item on German atrocities in Belgium in 1914. The wheel has indeed come full circle.

As a professional historian I passionately repudiate all this inconsistent and irresponsible myth-mongering. Neither the pacifist nor the nationalist view of the World Wars—of World War I in particular—is an adequate interpretation; nor is a hellish blend of the two; and there are some things that are too precious to be relinquished to the self-serving posturing of demagogues, whether of the Left or the Right. Furthermore, a nation which wallows in sentimental falsification of its past is likely to misjudge and mishandle its present, with Heaven knows what evil results. The time has come to cry halt, as I am glad to report that a good many of my professional colleagues are doing;  and we, as members of the Kipling Society, have a particular obligation to raise our voices, for among the many burnt offerings currently being set before the God of Slovenly Falsehoods is the reputation of Rudyard Kipling. It grieves me to say that to judge from the latest issue of the Kipling Journal we are failing somewhat in our duty.

The journal in question (December 1997) contained eight pages of comment on the recent (October 1997) play, "My Boy Jack", by David Haig. The comment was intelligent, good-humoured, and well-informed, as was to be expected, and the Holts, in particular, had some important reservations, but except for one paragraph by the editor (who had not seen the play), all the contributors fell into the same trap which, in my opinion, had swallowed up the dramatist. They all accept that the war was pointless, and that the dead died uselessly. The play amounted to an almost total falsification of the beliefs, views, and principles of the Kipling family where the Great War was concerned, and simultaneously displayed a shocking ignorance, indeed I must say prejudice, about the war itself.

John Kipling, Irish Guards

The tragedy we were shown was not the tragedy which actually befell the Kipling family; the interpretation of the war that was laid before us was one which no one at the time would have endorsed, except possibly Bertrand Russell and a handful of pacifists (16,500 conscientious objectors, as against 4.9 million who enlisted). To a historian, the piece was a travesty of the past, and a confirmation, if one was needed, that myth has displaced truth, and that too many of the British have lost touch with their actual past. Ours is a generation which has succumbed to sentimentality and to what, in my profession, is sometimes called "presentism": the inability to understand that the past is different and that what seems obvious to us, or to some of us, would have seemed contemptible, even incomprehensible, to our recent ancestors. So my business tonight must be to remind you all of certain facts about the Great War and to clarify Kipling's response to it.

Let me begin by saying a word about young John Kipling. It need not be long, since George Webb (editor of the Kipling Journal from 1980 to 1998) has already said all that is needful. John in life was not the sympathetic but probably neurotic weakling that David Haig makes him. He was an entirely typical specimen of the young men who rushed to arms in 1914 at their country's call. Over a million of them had volunteered by Christmas. I would like to stress how extraordinary this was: every other belligerent in 1914 relied on conscription; only Britain disdained it. It is inconceivable that John would have held back, and we know that he did not. He was not quite seventeen when the war began, and his bad eyesight might have kept him out of uniform, but he would not allow it to do so. Rejected on his first application for a commission, he said he would volunteer to serve as a private. But his father applied to Lord Roberts, who got John a commission in his own regiment, the Irish Guards.

To continue reading the article go to:

http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_greatwar1.htm

100 Years Ago: U.S. Assault on Belleau Wood Opens

Belleau Wood Today

The Battle

The Battle of Belleau Wood began on 6 June 1918 and would prove to be one of the most ferocious battles fought by American troops during the war. The 5th and 6th Marine Regiments, under the command of the U.S. Army's 2nd Division, were tasked with capturing Belleau Wood and clearing it of German soldiers. It was a battle that catapulted the Marine Corps to worldwide prominence and signaled to the world that the United States had come to Europe intending to make a serious contribution on the battlefield. 

To launch their assault on the forest, the Marines first had to cross a wheat field into oncoming German machine gun fire. Trying to cross the field proved to be an incredibly dangerous undertaking and over 1,000 Marines died on the first day of battle, more than the Corps had lost in its entire 143-year history up to that point. 

After three weeks of brutal tree-to-tree fighting, including multiple charges on German machine gun nests with fixed bayonets and hand-to-hand combat, and after trading possession of the forest with the Germans six times, the Marines cleared Belleau Wood of the German Army entirely on 26 June, at the cost of about 5,200 U.S, killed, wounded, or missing. 

Aisne-Marne Cemetery, Belleau Wood Above the Memorial Tower

The Legacy

The Battle of Belleau Wood was a landmark event in Marine Corps history. Prior to the battle, the United States Marine Corps was a little known, unproven commodity. After three weeks of displaying the courage, determination, and win-at-all-costs attitude that has become synonymous with the Marine Corps in the years since, that all changed. . . After the battle, the French Army renamed Belleau Wood in honor of the Marines, changing the name to "Bois de la Brigade de Marine" – "The Wood of the Marine Brigade." Furthermore, the 5th and 6th Marine Regiments received the Croix de Guerre, an award for distinction and heroism in combat with the enemy, three times during the First World War--the only regiments in the American Expeditionary Force to do so. As a result, the 5th and 6th Marine Regiments are authorized to wear the French fourragère, a military award that distinguishes military units as a whole and that is shaped like a braided cord, on their dress uniforms. 

Belleau Wood was also the setting for two of the most famous quotes in Marine Corps history. On 2 June 1918, as the Marines were arriving at Belleau Wood to support the French Army, they found the French retreating. A French officer ordered the Marines to do the same. Captain Lloyd Williams, of the 5th Marine Regiment, refused to do so, replying, "Retreat, Hell! We just got here." Four days later, on 6 June, Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly is said to have rallied his men by yelling, "Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever!" as they charged into battle. 

Source: By Collin Hoeferlin, from MarineParents.com, Inc.

With Snow on Their Boots Reviewed by Michael P. Kihntopf

With Snow on Their Boots: The Tragic Odyssey of the Russian Expeditionary Force in France During World War I

by Jamie H. Cockfield, PhD

St. Martin's Griffin edition, 1999

Russian Forces Arrive at Marseilles 

Dr. Cockfield is currently Professor of Russian History at Mercer University in Georgia. Previous works include articles on late Tsarist Russia and White Crow, the Life and Times of the Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov 1859–1919.

I have seen very little about the Russian Expeditionary Force (REF) over the years, believing that the force was very small and contributed little toward the war effort on the Western Front. The paragraphs that I read from various sources did little more than say the soldiers arrived, were immediately swept up in revolutionary ideals, were isolated from other Allied armies, and then disappeared overnight. Dr. Cockfield's work has substantially expanded my brief knowledge and provided a much deeper picture of the importance of the REF. The first chapters go far in explaining how the REF, consisting of three brigades, came about and where they came from.

Russian Troops in the Trenches, Western Front

I can well imagine the rancor felt by the soldiers when they found out they were going to France and northern Greece to fight the Germans and Bulgarians—not for the valor of Russia, but in exchange for French artillery shells and various other armaments that Russian depots had run out of due to the first battles of the war. The First Brigade's origin was in Moscow among politically savvy workers who had a history of labor unrest, while the Third Brigade (the Second Brigade was shipped to Salonika and doesn't enter into this picture) came from the more conservative rural settings across Russia. I could see a conflict within the ranks in the future. Both brigades' soldiers had a distinction that was uncommon in the Tsar's Army: they were recruited with one question, "Can you read?" This capability had severe consequences in France.

The REF's arrival in France was greeted enthusiastically. The French people met them at the ports and followed them through France to their training camps with undying verve. This adoration had a twofold result. First, rumors began circulating that the Russians were immediately, after landing, launched into the Verdun battle in which they singlehandedly saved the French from defeat. Second, the Central Powers believed that the arrival of the Russians meant that the French Army was on the verge of collapse. Few tried to squelch either rumor, which led to growing resentment between the French and Russians. The REF's baptism under fire came in one of the worst disasters of French generalship, the Neville Offensive. Noted for horrendous casualties among French units because Neville tried to re-introduce the tactics of 1914, the Russians did exceptionally well attaining their objectives while the French did not.

But as a result, they endured many casualties. Their bravery and tenacity were noted by the French, but when they returned to their camps news came of the Revolution and the infamous Order No. 1 attempting to level the field regarding Army authority. The result was disastrous and led to the soldiers refusing orders. Herein lies the theme for subsequent chapters of the book: controlling an army that refused to obey orders, which expelled their officers, and which became a nuisance to the French countryside. Eventually order was restored but the REF disintegrated in an effort to weed out agitators. Almost the entire First Brigade wound up in prison or in North Africa serving as augmentation to French units keeping the peace there. The Third Brigade dissolved into farm labor across France with a few thousand donning the name of the Russian Legion and fighting as a French unit until the end of the war.

Cockfield's With Snow on Their Boots is an excellent read and very adequately shows a microcosm of the developing Russian Civil War. Perhaps its strongest point is in showing how ineffective and incompetent Russian officers were in dealing with revolutionary concepts. Find a place on your shelf for this book amid other works about the Russians and World War One.

Michael P. Kihntopf

Remembering a Veteran: John Philip Sousa, Band Leader, Composer

Sousa During the War in Naval Uniform

John Philip Sousa (1852–1934) was born in Washington, DC, on 6 November 1854. His father was born in Spain of Portuguese parents and his mother was Bavarian. Sousa, known as the "March King," ranks among the most famous American composers and conductors.

Sousa was the leader of the U.S. Marine Band from 1880 until 1892. After leaving the Marine Band, he formed his own band, which toured Europe several times and was the first American band to make a tour around the world. On 25 December 1896, he debuted "The Stars and Stripes Forever"—his most loved piece. He was, therefore, already world famous when the Great War broke out.

During the First World War, Sousa was asked to train young musicians from the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. Sousa prepared hundreds and formed bands for different Navy ships, eventually receiving the rank of lieutenant commander. He also found time to provide accompaniment for Liberty Loan rallies and Red Cross fundraising drives. He composed some two dozen pieces related to the war, the most recognizable being the "Field Artillery March." He also created a moving accompaniment to John McCrae's immortal poem "In Flanders Fields."

John Philip Sousa died on 6 March 1932 in Reading, PA, and is buried in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, DC. In 1987 a law was passed by Congress, and signed by President Reagan, designating "Stars and Stripes Forever" the official march of the United States of America.

Grave Marker, Congressional Cemetery (Steve Miller Photograph)

How Did Bulgaria and Turkey End Up on the Same Side in WWI?

Turkish and Bulgarian Border Guards

The greatest moment in Bulgarian history came when Bulgaria proclaimed its independence from the Ottoman Empire on 22 September 1908. Its earliest strategic objective was to complete unification with Bulgarian peoples still under Ottoman rule. Hence, their subsequent joining the Balkan League to take on the Ottoman Empire in the First Balkan War. Results of this first war were positive for Bulgaria, but the treaty which followed resulted in a quarrel over the spoils of war. Bulgaria, dissatisfied with its share of the conquests of the First Balkan War, attacked its former allies, Serbia and Greece, in June 1913. It lost this time. The outcome of this  Second Balkan War negated almost all of the territorial gains that Bulgaria secured during the First Balkan War.  

At the end of  September 1913, Bulgaria—big loser of the Second Balkan War—decided to negotiate with the Turks—big loser of the First Balkan War—directly. The terms of the Treaty of Constantinople they negotiated provided that defeated Bulgaria would agree to Turkey's repossession of Adrianople (Edirne), plus territory up to the Maritsa River. In addition, the two countries agreed to resume diplomatic relations, exchange prisoners, and establish a general amnesty. The former adversaries—both embittered by their experience in the small wars of the 1910s—would find themselves allied with the Central Powers in the Great War, hoping to reverse their declining fortunes.

Germany, a Naval Power?

German Sailors and Officers on Station in the Orient, 1912

When writing his memoirs after the military and political collapse of the German Empire in November 1918, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who can rightly be called the builder of the Imperial German Navy, still remembered an encounter with an unknown English woman in Gibraltar some fifty years earlier. Boarding one of the very few German warships, which lay in the harbor of this outpost of the British Empire, and seeing a number of ratings, this woman exclaimed in astonishment, "Don't they look just like sailors?" When Tirpitz, a young sub-lieutenant then, asked her what else they should look like, she replied bluntly, "But you are not a seagoing nation."

Battlecruiser SMS Hindenburg Surrendering with High Seas Fleet, 21 November 1918

Tirpitz, a representative of the most powerful nation on the continent, obviously regarded this answer as a humiliation, for his memoirs somehow still reflect his embitterment about this event. However, there can be no doubt that this woman, though perhaps in a slightly arrogant manner, had only stated a simple fact—while the German army was the strongest in Europe, marching from one victory to another, the navy had contributed nothing to the wars of unification, and unlike the army, it was a negligible quantity internationally.2 It is the aim of this paper to analyze the reasons for this insignificant role of the navy in mid-nineteenth century Germany, to describe the course of naval history in the years between the unification in 1870–71 and the final defeat of the Empire in 1918, as well as the changing importance of sea power for government policy, for naval strategy, and for the public, and, finally, to discuss the contribution of the attempt to become a sea power both to German greatness and fall. 

Michael Epkenhans,  "Imperial Germany and the Importance of Sea Power,"
Naval Power in the Twentieth Century, 1996

Prewar Apocalyptic Art

Just as poets throughout Europe perceived the oncoming catastrophe and tried to capture it in their

writings, visual artists did so as well. This was especially true just before the outbreak of war in the

community of German Expressionists, who were busy exploring new ways to express their inner visions  by distorting and dramatizing reality. Four prewar examples are shown. Max Oppenheimer's "Bleeding Man" (1911) suggests a bloody sacrifice to come for young males. Franz Marc, who would die at Verdun in 1916, was inspired by the Balkan Wars to paint the ominous "Wolves" (1913). Ludwig Meidner was driven by his premonitions to spend 1913 cranking out a series of apocalyptic landscapes, one of which is shown below, and a detail from another is shown on our cover. Otto Dix—of the artists shown here—is probably most associated with the war for his later grotesque depictions of battle and its casualties. The detail below showing the early-morning flight of sinister-looking crows over an intensely lit field is from his "Sunrise" (1913).

After the war Meidner tried to explain what was happening at this time:

I unloaded my obsessions onto canvas night and day — Judgment Days, world's ends, and gibbets of

skulls, for in those days the great universal storm was already baring its teeth and casting its glaring

yellow shadow across my whimpering brush hand. "Mein Leben" 1919

Oklahoma and the First World War

World War I troop train leaving Hugo, OK, for Camp Travis, TX, March 1918 
(21531, Oklahoma Historical Society Photograph Collection, OHS)

By Jim Bissett
Oklahoma Historical Society

When World War I broke out in Europe in August 1914, most Americans responded in a deeply ambivalent way. Their initial response was that the United States must, at all costs, remain uninvolved in the conflict. As the presidential election of 1916 attests (when "he kept us out of war" became the centerpiece of Pres. Woodrow Wilson's successful reelection bid), most national leaders responded to this prevailing sentiment. Once the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, however, public opinion on the conflict underwent a complete reversal, and Americans embraced the war effort with a ferocity that bordered on hysteria. Oklahomans' responses to the war between 1914 and 1918 were certainly consistent with this pattern. Indeed, it can be argued that the transformation from neutrality to "100 percent Americanism" was even more precipitous in the Sooner State than in the rest of the nation.

Oklahomans initially expressed a deep aversion to the war, an opinion compounded by the conflict's negative economic effect on the state. Germany's blockade of Allied ports effectively closed off valuable western European markets to American agricultural products, leading to a steep decline in crop prices. In Oklahoma, where agriculture was king, the results were disastrous. The month after the war began, the prices that Oklahoma's cotton farmers received for that commodity dropped more than 20 percent, from ten cents to eight cents per pound. Prices remained below the ten-cent mark for a full year, falling to six cents per pound in November 1914. Although the effect was not as direct for Oklahoma wheat farmers, prices for that crop remained below one dollar per bushel during 1914.

Elected officials in Oklahoma experienced firsthand their constituents' negative feelings about the war. U.S. Rep. William H. Murray, whose record as a political leader predated statehood, discovered in 1916 that his open support for war preparedness cost him his Fourth District congressional seat. Additional evidence of Oklahomans' lack of enthusiasm for the war came in 1917 when the U.S. Congress passed the Selective Service Act, which called for all men of draft age to formally register for conscription on a single day in June of that year. In June 1917 Oklahoma officials estimated the number of draft-age males in the state to be 215,000. Of that number, only 111,986 young men actually registered, and more than 80,000 of these claimed to be exempt from the draft. Thus, only 15 percent of the state's draft-age men indicated their willingness to fight in the European war. By war's end 59,247 white men and 19,999 African Americans had been inducted. Approximately 5,000 American Indians either enlisted or were inducted.

However, the economic crisis caused by the European war lessened Oklahomans' initial aversion to the conflict. As the United States moved closer to entering the war in late 1916 and early 1917, British and French markets were reopened, and American farmers became important suppliers to the Allies. The resulting increase in demand meant that for Oklahoma farmers the hard times of 1914 and 1915 were replaced by extraordinary prosperity. By December 1916 cotton farmers in the Sooner State were getting eighteen cents per pound for their crop (compared to just over six cents two years earlier), and prices would break the thirty-cent mark before the armistice in November 1918. The trend was identical for wheat farmers, who saw prices double between 1914 and 1918. When the United States formally declared war on Germany in April 1917, most Oklahomans were much more inclined to react favorably.

Sam Anderson, a Creek soldier, in France wearing
a German helmet (22646-4, Oklahoma Historical
Society Photograph Collection, OHS).

Some, however, still opposed American involvement. The most dramatic manifestation of antiwar sentiment came in Seminole and surrounding counties in August 1917 when rumblings of discontent with the war led to an uprising known as the Green Corn Rebellion. After seizing control of local institutions, the organizers of the uprising planned to travel to Washington, DC, hoping to attract enough supporters on the journey to force the federal government to change its war policy. These plans never materialized, however, and the Green Corn Rebellion was easily put down by local authorities before the rebels left the state.

.

The Green Corn Rebellion and its aftermath helped spark a backlash against opponents of the war in Oklahoma. During 1917 and 1918 those who disagreed with American war policy were perceived as "radical" and "un-American," and the period was marked by unprecedented hysteria and the suppression of dissent. In this sense, developments in Oklahoma mirrored those in other states where federal officials used the recently enacted Espionage and Sedition Acts to prosecute approximately eighteen hundred antiwar dissenters. In addition, the federal government created a network of semiofficial watchdog organizations called the Councils of Defense to ensure the support of the citizenry for the war. In Oklahoma the council was directed by James Monroe Aydelotte of Oklahoma City, who presided over a network of county and local organizations dedicated to promoting loyalty and support for the war effort. Among other things, the Councils of Defense promoted the sale of war bonds, distributed loyalty pledge cards, and even reported to authorities the names of citizens who were less-than-enthusiastic in their support for the war. Given the kind of super-patriotism engendered by the Councils of Defense, especially the tendency to equate dissent with disloyalty, it is hardly surprising that at times the actions taken by these "patriots" took a decidedly extralegal form. Those identified as disloyal were often subjected to rituals of public humiliation (as the man in Comanche County, who was forced to publicly explain his refusal to sign a loyalty card and then to kiss the American flag) or violent intimidation (as happened to Robert Carlton Scott, Carl Albert's grandfather, who was given two hundred lashes by a mob for his refusal to sign a loyalty card).

In the end, the effect of World War I on Oklahoma was mixed at best. The increase in crop prices proved short lived. Soon after the war ended, Oklahoma farmers began suffering the effects of an agricultural depression. It would last for more than a decade, a crisis that was tied to the conflict's imperfect peace. Even more significantly, the use of intimidation to artificially limit the scope of political discourse proved to be one of the more enduring legacies of American involvement in the European war. Under such conditions the political dialogue shrank considerably as those holding positions considered to be outside of the mainstream were prevented from articulating them.

Hobart's Armistice Day parade, 11 November 1919 (20869,
Oklahoma Historical Society Photograph Collection, OHS).

The results of the super-patriotism of 1917 and 1918 and the hysteria it engendered can be seen most clearly in the elections of 1918 and 1920. Faced with such a stringent narrowing of the public discourse, many Oklahomans simply retreated from the democratic process. Voter turnout in 1918 shrank by more than 97,000, almost a third over 1916, and despite the fact that at least 100,000 voting-age males had come to Oklahoma since statehood, fewer males voted in 1920 than in 1907. In this sense, the events of 1917–19, known as the "First Red Scare," foreshadowed trends more commonly associated with the Cold War a generation later.

Cadillac Goes to War

1918 CADILLAC TYPE 57 - U.S. 1257X

Before the Jeep became the standardized and ubiquitous military vehicle, the United States military tried a little of everything. WWI saw an interesting mishmash of cars on the battlefield, but it was the Cadillac Type 57 that was predominantly favored by officers. This example, carrying the military designation U.S. 1257X, is the only known survivor and remains in remarkable un-restored condition. It was brought to France and placed in the service of the American Expeditionary Forces by a YMCA volunteer Rev. Dr. J. H. Denison and driven throughout France to set up leave areas. One of its many passengers was Eleanor Butler Alexander-Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter-in-law, who was charged with leading women serving the war effort with the YMCA.  The Cadillac U.S. 1257 is listed on the National Historic Vehicle Register.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Photo Credit and Tip of the Hat to Dave Gaddis
Source: National Historic Vehicle Register Website

Remembering World War I in America Reviewed by David F. Beer

Remembering World War I in America

by Kimberly J. Lamay Licursi

University of Nebraska Press, 2018

It's no secret to most of us that memory of the Great War is kept far more alive and vibrant in Britain than it is in the United States. Now, of course, with the excellent work of the Centennial Commission, the construction of the WWI Memorial in Washington, DC, and the numerous articles and books appearing on the war, one might hope that public awareness of the conflict will increase. But will Americans become more mindful of the war and its consequences? And if not, why?

These questions are what this highly researched book sets out to answer. As the author states in her Introduction,

America truly came of age during and after World War I, yet many Americans think of it as merely the numerical precursor to World War II. Their only consciousness of the earlier global conflict is a hazy vision of parades, Doughboys, and trenches…But Americans' common perceptions of the war end there…battles and a general understanding of why war was waged come fairly easily to mind for World War II and the Civil War, but not so for World War I (xiv).

The rest of this volume is a detailed analysis of why this is so. Why didn't America continue to commemorate the war by great national and local acts of remembrance? Why were there no national keepers of memory? The simple answer seems to be that the post-WWI generation, including those who had been to war, simply wanted to forget. Many weren't at all sure it had been worth it. Statement like this, however, need to be supported by solid evidence. Remembering World War I in America supplies this with an insightful introduction and conclusion which bookend four lengthy chapters on "State War Histories," "War Memoirs," "War Fiction," and "War Films."

Illinois Was One of Only Seven
States to Complete Official Histories After the War

You may not completely agree with the author's arguments, or if you do, you might find them a bit depressing. However, you'll have to agree that she has done her homework. Chapter I: State War Histories (subtitled "An Atom of Interest in an Ocean of Apathy") shows that although there was initially tremendous effort at the state level to create war histories, most such histories never materialized. Only seven states finally managed to publish one. For would-be publishers, gathering material was stymied by "indifference of men" and "indifference to the history of the war" (p. 3). Questionnaires were often not returned by men who had served, although one county partly solved this problem by having police deliver and collect the forms.

"War Memoirs" (Chapter 2) fared somewhat better, as many soldiers wrote their own personal narratives. (We have published more than one on this blog.) The author includes in this category published accounts such as Mildred Aldrich's Hilltop on the Marne, Alan Empey's Over the Top, John Thomason's Fix Bayonets! and General Pershing's My Experience in the World War, plus several titles now largely forgotten. Although Hervey Allen's Toward the Flame gained more popularity than most, these and many other titles "were and are still relatively obscure in the larger literary canon" (p. 89). As with other genres she covers, the author convincingly cites publication numbers, sales figures, and library holdings to support her argument.

One of the most popular writers in the 1920s and later was Zane Grey. Sinclair Lewis was also well known for his exposures of small-town America. However, Chapter 3 of this book, dealing with "War Stories," claims that

Readers showed interest in tales about the war, but they preferred stories that used war as a backdrop for passion, heroic exploits, and journeys of redemption. Reading a soldier's memoir might have seemed like a civic duty but reading war fiction was immersing oneself in a martial adventure (pp. 93–94).

Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Willa Cather's One of Ours became two of the bestselling books dealing with the war. There were many others, including Dos Passos's Three Soldiers, but most are long forgotten. Interestingly, pulp fiction proved much more attractive to the public. Magazines such as War Stories, Battle Stories, War Aces, and even Love and War Stories, plus many more (some surviving for only a few issues) were among at least 48 titles that were either solely or partially dedicated to war stories in the 1920s (p. 136). Yet, despite their numbers and popularity, the war pulps were ephemeral. They did little to establish long-term memory or commemorative remembrance of the war.

The Stars of The Big Parade
Highest Grossing Silent Film of All Time

In the book's final chapter, "War Films," the author points out that movie viewers were far more numerous than readers. "The market for Willa Cather's books was numbered in the thousands, but the market for popular war movies like The Big Parade was in the millions." (p. 147) In the 1920s the movie theater was by far the most popular entertainment venue, with millions of Americans attending weekly. Thus, the war movie had the best potential for forming a lasting collective memory of the war. Why this didn't happen was that the public was more interested in "Shootin' and Kissin'" films (p.147) than in war films, although The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Big Parade, and What Price Glory? did at the time prove popular.

This is a fascinating book packed with facts, statistics, dates, titles, lists, and a full bibliography and index. It's hard to find fault with Lamay Licursi's arguments, given the evidence she presents. Her book has helped me understand the difference between America and Britain regarding how "alive" the Great War is in each nation. If you are interested in this subject, I heartily recommend Remembering World War I in America.

David F. Beer

100 Years Ago: U.S. 1st Division Attacks Cantigny

This is the anniversary of America's first offensive operation of the First World War.  It involved the recapture of a tiny village in the western Somme sector named Cantigny. In April 2000, historian, novelist and a friend of ours, Thomas Fleming wrote this appreciation of the battle for American Heritage magazine.

Doughboys of the 1st Division at Cantigny with a French Schneider Tank

In May 1918 the 1st Division was rushed north of Paris to help the French and British contain the two great German offensives of that deadly spring. As these German drives ran out of steam, the Americans demanded a chance to demonstrate what they could do on the offensive. Finally they got a one-regiment show, aimed at capturing the ruined village of Cantigny, which sat on top of a ridge opposite the 1st Division’s lines. As the attack approached, McCormick came down with the Spanish flu and had to be half carried to a meeting with General Pershing, where the field-grade officers were exhorted to prove the prowess of the AEF—or else. McCormick reeled back to his dugout and commanded his batteries from a field telephone beside his cot.

The French gave the Americans 12 heavy Schneider tanks, a flame-throwing unit, and no fewer than 37 batteries of additional artillery. Unintentionally, the Germans were also cooperating. They were planning another offensive, this time against the French on the Chemin des Dames, some 40 miles south of Cantigny. They needed their crack 30th Division for this drive and withdrew it from the Cantigny lines, replacing it with the 82d Reserve Division, which was full of overage veterans, teenage recruits, and assorted other flotsam, including railway guards.

Aerial Photo of the Cantigny Battlefield

On 27 May the storm troopers struck on the Chemin des Dames with annihilating force. The French 6th army evaporated. The French artillerymen preparing to bombard Cantigny said they would stay for a day. Then they were heading south to try to stop the Germans before they reached the Champs-Élysées. The Americans decided to attack anyway.

At dawn on 28 May 1918, a torrent of steel came down on the somnolent companies of the 82nd Reserve Division. After an hour of fearful punishment, the Doughboys of the 28th Infantry Regiment went over the top and captured 255 men. American casualties were fewer than 100.

The next morning the French, eager for a gleam of success, trumpeted this tiny American victory in their newspapers, and the headlines echoed around the world. That same day, the French artillery and tanks departed, leaving the Americans dangerously under-gunned and without air support.

Now it was German artillery that came cascading down, and the Yanks were dug into open slopes. By the time the 28th was relieved, on 31 May, it had lost 45 officers and 1,022 enlisted men. The German 82nd had taken a worse beating, though, with 1,408 casualties on the very first day.

French Flamethrower Team with Doughboys in Cantigny's Ruins

For Pershing and his staff, the little clash had vast significance. “I am...going to jump down the throat of the next person who asks, 'Will the Americans really fight?’” Pershing said. Cantigny had not only banished the amalgamation hoodoo but also proved to McCormick and his fellow Americans that they could stand up to Europe’s veterans. No matter that the veterans were third-rate soldiers; that is history’s judgment. Cantigny’s importance to the Doughboys was a matter of memory, an equally important realm for those who seek to understand history.