The AEF and Coalition Warmaking: 1917-1918.

Neilson, Keith

Over the last fifteen years, the history of the First World War has been thoroughly rewritten. On the Allied side, the work of such people as Tim Travers, George Cassar, Richard Holmes, Kathleen Burk, Keith Grieves, David Woodward and, pre-eminently, David French have enriched and deepened our understanding of the subject, particularly on the British side. Until recently, the study of the American military participation in the war largely stood outside this revisionism, and remained dominated by the explanatory framework put forward by the self-congratulatory memoirs of the commander of the American Expeditionary Force (A.E.F.), General John J. Pershing. In Pershing's view, one shared by such historians as Edward M. Coffman and Pershing's biographer, Frank Vandiver, the A.E.F. won the war, and the United States emerged from the war as the dominant power on the Allied side.

David Trask, well-known for two previous studies of the American experience in the First World War, destroys such pretensions. In a book that is all the more devastating for its understated tone, Trask makes clear just how limited was the American contribution to victory. His means of doing so is deceptively simple. Trask concentrates on what he terms grand tactics,, that is, what did the A.E.F. do in the field and how effective was it in the performance of its tasks. Grand strategy and tactics are discussed only to the extent that they are necessary to provide the context for Trask's discussion. Such a limited perspective brings many advantages, for Trask is able to focus in detail on his chosen subject and thus to obtain a clarity that would be obscured in a more general view. Equally, this suits matches his task to his primary source of documents, the seventeen-volume United States Army in the World War 1917-1919 published in 1948.

The first chapter of The AEF and Coalition Warmaking discusses the fatal flaw that was to limit the value of the A.E.F. to the Entente. President Wilson, in a desire to shape the peace to his own ends, and Pershing, in a desire to keep the A.E.F. firmly in his own hands, were adamant that the American forces should remain independent. Thus, American troops could not be used in the most effective fashion, that is, as reinforcements for the British and French armies. This, along with a parallel decision to deploy the A.E.F. on the right of the French army, determined the future of the A.E.F.

The bulk of Trask's book deals with the 1918 campaign. During the two great German offensives, the fact that A.E.F. had neither the independent supplies nor the training it required to be an effective force was underlined. At Cantigny, where the AEF saw its first action in late May, the Americans suffered disproportionate casualties to the results achieved, which in any case were small. What the ferocity of German offensives did was to force both Pershing and Wilson to allow American troops to be pressed into service piecemeal in Allied formations, where superior training, leadership and coordination between arms - in short, the hard-won lessons of four years of fighting - allowed American troops to perform more credibly than they had as an independent force.

However, the emergency of 1918 did not permanently alter Pershing's convictions, and during the "100 days" from the end of July onwards, when the Entente pushed back the Germans, Pershing insisted on creating his independent force, the First Army. Its achievements. were not impressive. Attacking with a manpower advantage that ranged from 6:1 to as much as 9:1 the First Army struggled to beat demoralized German troops on an insignificant front. Trask mentions, does not belabour the point that during the same time period, the British Expeditionary Force inflicted massive defeats on first@ line German troops despite enjoying only rough numerical parity with them. Trask's conclusion, that the real utility of the A.E.F. was to provide sufficient reserves of untrained manpower so that veteran British and French troops could be used to defeat the Germans, surely is both apt and fair, however much this goes against the grain of received American wisdom.

Trask's book needs to be considered in relation to David R. Woodward's, Trial by Friendship: Anglo-American Relations 1917-1918 (Lexington, 1993). Woodward's book is the more wider-ranging, and is based on a greater amount of primary research@ however, Trask's monograph is more tightly focused and its conclusions about the fighting capabilities of the A.E.F. and Pershing's competence more pointed. Together, they bring the study of American effort in the First World War closer in line with the sophisticated recent accounts of the British war effort.