Most of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) was employed in France alongside British and French units. They faced the Germans on the Western Front. The actions of the AEF decisively tipped the balance of the war, ensuring a quick end to the fighting and a defeat for the Germans.
The AEF was composed mainly of units from the U.S. Army, but also included U.S. Marine Corps units, as well as a few units from the U.S. Navy. General John Pershing was in command of the entire AEF, as historians Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski write:
Measured by their own national experience, Pershing and his staff viewed the AEF’s accomplishments with awe and pride. When the war ended, 1.3 million Americans had served at the front in twenty-nine combat divisions. These troops had provided the margin in numbers that allowed the Allies to grind the German army into surrender.
American involvement in WW1 coincided with a global pandemic. The number of soldiers who died from the virus was greater than the number who died in combat.
The bulk of the U.S. force arrived at the beginning of 1918. The entire war, from June 1914 to November 1918, lasted approximately 52 months. The AEF was greatly involved for approximately 11 months, or about 21% of the war.
In 200 days of combat, the Americans had lost 53,402 men killed in action or died of wounds. Over 200,000 more were wounded in action. Disease deaths, largely associated with the flu epidemic of 1918, claimed the lives of another 57,000 soldiers at home and abroad.
The United States Civil War had ended in 1865. For over fifty years, there had not been a major war. While WW1 involved the use of far more ammunition than the Civil War, but far fewer combat deaths.
Of the various engagements which the AEF experienced, the most significant was the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Almost all of the AEF fighting happened in France.
As amateur Civil War historians, some of Pershing’s officers could not help drawing comparisons with their Army’s heroic past. In area and type of terrain, the Meuse-Argonne operation resembled the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. There the similarities ended, as the AEF’s struggle made the Wilderness pale by comparison. The Wilderness lasted four days, the Meuse-Argonne forty-seven. The Union Army fought with 100,000 men, the AEF with 1.2 million. In the course of the campaign Pershing’s artillerymen fired a tonnage of munitions that exceeded the totals fired by the entire Union Army during the course of the Civil War. gm About half the total AEF casualties occurred in the Meuse-Argonne.
Because the total number of casualties sustained by the U.S. Army was small fraction of the deaths sustained by British, German, French, and Russian armies, and because the AEF had been engaged in combat for only a fifth of the total duration of the war, the major European nations regarded the U.S. as a minor player in the war, and therefore thought that the U.S. should have only a minor role in the writing of the peace treaties that would determine the postwar world.
The Treaty of Versailles is the most famous peace agreement, and did much to shape international relations going forward from 1919. But there were several other treaties which answered some of the questions which Versailles left open.
As Woodrow Wilson learned at Versailles, however, the Allies did not view the American achievements and sacrifices with similar reverence. In a four-and-a-half-year war that claimed the lives of 8 million soldiers, the United States fought late and at relatively small cost.
The United States had spent billions of dollars on WW1, and was left with a massive debt at the end of the war. Not only was the U.S. effort underappreciated by the European powers, but it was also not well understood by the American public at home.
Few Americans had any military experience, and none had experienced a war as massive and as technologically advanced as WW1. The public was informed mainly, almost exclusively, by newspaper accounts of the fighting in France, and could not conceptualize the difficulties entailed in this type of war, as Allen Millett and Peter Maslowski write:
Despite its profligate mobilization, the United States bore only one-fifth of the Allies’ war costs. Quickly forgetting their relief at the arrival of the AEF’s big divisions in 1918, Allied generals minimized the American contribution to the final victory. The Germans convinced themselves after the war that they had been defeated by the war-weary revolutionaries at home and the British at the front. As the AEF’s generals expected, few of their countrymen appreciated the scope and complexity of the American war effort.
Historians in later years were able to appreciate the crucial role which the U.S. played in the war.
If the AEF had a pivotal role in the war, the war also had a major role in the history of the U.S. Army. In a short period of time, the army was modernized. Prior to WW1, technologies like airplanes, machine guns, tanks, poison gas, etc., were marginally present, if at all, in the U.S. military.
Yet for all the AEF’s problems, its role in the Allied victory was crucial, and the Americans who fought in France, professionals and citizen-soldiers alike, knew they had participated in a critical turning point in their nation’s military history. They had gone to Europe, and they had fought a mass, industrialized war with allies against a modern national army noted for its expertise. “Over there,” they had seen the face of future war.
A song titled “Over There” was popular during the war, referring to the scene of the action in France. The physical distance — thousands of miles — between the homes of Americans and the battlefields of WW1 was matched by the developmental distance traversed by the army: from a nineteenth-century military centered around the horse to a twentieth-century military centered around mechanized warfare.
American soldiers returned home with both physical and psychological scars. Some additionally suffered lifelong neurological damage from poison gas attacks. The ordinary soldier may not have understood the historical development in which he’d participated, but he understood the trauma and horror of having witnessed the violent loss of life on a massive scale.
