The AEF: Innocents Abroad

...The next day an American resident of the French capital visited the American Field Service unit at the Chemin des Dames, of which I happened to be a member, and told us how the Yanks looked marching along the Rue de Rivoli...

...When an Allied officer advised retreat, an American Marine officer bellowed: "Retreat, hell...

...Russia had dropped out, permitting the Germans and Austro-Hungarians to shift their best troops from the Eastern to the Western and Italian fronts...

...the French had been bled of a half million men in the 10 months' nightmare of Verdun...

...There was, for instance, Major General Hanson E. Ely, alumnus of the Philippines, "tougher than an alligator steak, as hard-boiled as a picnic egg...

...Stallings puts it this way: "The Americans did not win a War that day but they saved one...

...Many, unable to meet the challenge, were unceremoniously sacked by Pershing...

...Most of their officers were amateurs...

...The Americans arrived in France at a time highly critical for the Allies...

...They had been rushed off to France without training or equipment...

...After the Marne engagement, when General Bullard greeted his old regiment, the 26th Infantry, he recognized only one of its leaders, "a sombrefaced boy leading a company...

...The 16th had only a sprinkling of Regulars...

...The numerically superior German armies were striking along the road to Paris...

...The 26th Infantry was now led by a captain with less than two years' service...

...In The Doughboys, Laurence Staliings, the journalist and playwright who lost a leg as a Marine officer at Belleau Wood, graphically tells the often dramatic, sometimes grimly humorous and always absorbing story of the American Expeditionary Force in France...

...All the field officers had been lost —"colonel, lieutenant colonel, majors, staff captains, once sergeants in the regiment, and most of the old sergeants scornful of commissions...

...The previous year (1916), the British had wasted their volunteer "new armies" in futile offensives on the Somme...

...Less than five per cent of the AEF officers were Regulars...

...From the beginning, accordingly, the British and French had tried to persuade Pershing to feed his arriving troops into their divisions...

...Cantigny, Chateau Thierry, Belleau Wood—these crucial tests soon dispelled the myth that the Yank was a first-class fighting man on the sea but only a mediocre one on land...

...German intelligence officers were puzzled by the phenomenon of the "half-Americans," as they called the men of the 1st...

...We just got here...

...Stallings' real hero is the infantryman up front taking everything the Boche could throw at him, surviving somehow, then counter-attacking...

...Lieutenant General Robert L. Bullard, later Commander of the American Second Army, wrote that "had not the 2nd Division Regulars blocked access to the Paris road the night of May 31, the War would have been over...

...Pershing and his high command were Regulars, and some professionals were scattered through the divisions...

...But at what a price...

...His account follows the metamorphosis of raw recruits drilling with broomsticks into the seasoned, victorious Army which smashed the Saint Mihiel salient and slugged through the Meuse-Argonne campaign...

...World War I, as Stallings chronicles it, was "the Doughboys' War...

...The two great combat divisions [1st and 2nd] had each now, with Cantigny, Belleau Wood, Vaux and Soissons, lost around 15,000 men, and their war was only starting...

...Reviewed by HENRY C. WOLFE Author, "The German Octopus," "The Imperial Soviets" On July 4, 1917, the 16th U.S...

...Infantry paraded in Paris...

...It was the fourth year of the War...

...It was the American 2nd Division, with its two infantry regiments and Marine brigade, which drew the vital Belleau Wood sector...

...The AEF was a grueling school for officers...

...If Ely asked his mess attendant for a cup of coffee, the request had the tone of a battalion fire chief ordering a hoseman back into a burning building...

...Our visitor, as it turned out, spoke all too truthfully...

...They had, he said, put on a poor show, a line of stragglers who could not carry their rifles properly or even keep in step...

...The author pays tribute to the determination of General John J. Pershing and some of his chief officers, but his account is largely a salute to the Doughboys and the junior officers who led them...

...most of the men were green volunteers who had been in service only a few weeks...

...The 16th Infantry, which had paraded so ineptly in Paris only 11 months before, was now part of the 1st Division, the outfit which Black Jack reputedly called "the best damn division in any army...

...Regardless of whether a reader has personal memories of World War I, or has simply heard and read about it, he will better understand the valorous wisecracking, unpredictable Doughboy after having finished Stallings' unforgettable story...

...Black Jack, however, held out for an American army that would fight as a unit...

...Most of the others were National Guard, 90-day wonders, and men up from the ranks...

...The 1st (Big Red One), which had taken Cantigny, the 3rd Regulars, the 26th (New England), and the 42nd (Rainbow) were now committed to the job of stopping the triumphant German drives...

...In the spring of 1918, though, the situation was so desperate that Pershing had to send in his new divisions, most of them at the front for the first time, to plug the holes Ludendorff was punching in the Allied line...

...An amazed German General Staff officer reported: "Only a few of the men are genuine Americans by ancestry, but these half-Americans, who with few exceptions were born in America, and who never before had been in Europe, consider themselves unhesitatingly as genuine sons of America.' By the end of May, thanks to their juggernaut offensives against the British and French armies, the Germans were supremely confident of a breakthrough that would deliver the coup de grace to the Allied cause...

...The French alone, it should be remembered, had suffered 400,000 casualties in little more than two months...

...Nobody ever had to guess what was in his mind...