Steele's Battalion: The Great War Diaries

Doughboy Machine Gunners in Training

By John D. Beatty

JDB Communications, LLC. 2025

Reviewed by David F. Beer

Although Steele's Battalion is a work of fiction—as the author points out right away—it would be easy to take it as based on the actual diaries of its main character, Edmund Archer "Ned" Steele, born in Michigan in 1896. Found, we are told, in an old steamer trunk in 1996, these documents plus some other memoirs supposedly enhanced by the research of an endowed professor of American ishtory, provide the fictional genesis for the novel.

Steele is mechanically talented, and we begin his story in January 1917, when he is in Mexico with the Machine-Gun Section of the U.S. Army’s Provisional Division. He distinguishes himself by coming up with a new kind of pedestal for the current machine gun, a gun that is still causing various problems for its users. Steele’s abilities soon find him in WWI and promoted from corporal to lieutenant, after enduring Officer’s Candidate School where they are told

…you are the most contemptible creatures on God’s Earth: third Lieutenants. For the next ninety-one days you will remain the most contemptible creatures unless you fail, are ejected or quit, at which point you will revert to whatever enlisted slime you once were where you will remain until you die or muster out (p. 29).

For almost 400 pages, we follow the life of Ned Steele as he leads his men through the last year of the war. He distinguishes himself more than once and advances from lieutenant to brigadier general (although this rank is rescinded after the war). The author spares no detail in making Steele’s war career come alive to us, whether in his relationships with women, his men and his superiors, or in his grueling experiences which never even allow him a badly needed break without a heightened reality crashing in upon him:

But rest would not come; only fitful sleep, with artillery and machine guns and explosions and rivers of blood invading his mind. The wounded he knew rose and fought again, only to be hurt again; the dead fell and died again…and again. A ghastly tableau of horrible wounds and the stench of blood, gas, guts, and smoke…(p.311).

We learn much in Steele's Battalion about the overall American experience in France during the final year of the war. We meet notable figures such as George Marshall and General Pershing, and we encounter some interesting British and American Army characters. Inevitably, since Steele always serves in machine gun units and by the end of the war is commanding a machine gun battalion, we get in-depth descriptions of the workings of these weapons and their use.  

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The horrors of war do not end for Steele with the cease-fire. For him, the flu epidemic among the soldiers is as dreadful as actual combat:

We have become an isolation camp since more than half of our men are sick. Murph says it is worse than he could have imagined in his worst nightmares. I know now what Milton meant by the inner circles of Hell…all the blood…death stalks the halls of our once-safe camp… (p. 345).

There is much to recommend this historical novel. Despite some unfortunate over-italicizing in the text, I found Steele’s odyssey from the Mexican border to the end of the Great War a captivating and informative read full of fascinating characters and insights into the workings of a wartime American army machine gun company.

David F. Beer