With Their Bare Hands

In April 1917, the American people were ready to fight. The Army, however, was not. The largest force it had mustered since the end of the Civil War was the Cuban expedition of 1898, which numbered 17,000 men along with six artillery batteries and one company of Gatling guns.¹* The National Defense Act of 1916 was intended ultimately to expand the Army to about 250,000 officers and men; but by the time of America’s entry into the war only about 120,000 men and 5,000 officers were in uniform, few of whom had ever seen action. The National Guard contained about another 80,000 soldiers, but was not a professional force.²

Numbers were not the only weakness. With the exception of the Civil War, the American Army had historically pursued only two purposes: to protect the coasts, especially strategic harbors, from attack and invasion; and to subdue fractious Indian tribes. Two almost unrelated armies had therefore developed. The Coastal Artillery occupied heavy fortifications equipped with the latest long-range guns and was led by engineering officers, the top graduates of West Point, who were typically promoted every two or three years. The field army spent its time as a constabulary force, spread over the landscape in detachments of one to three companies or an occasional battalion, policing the southern border and chasing, though rarely fighting, Indians. Such combat as took place was closer to guerrilla warfare than to pitched battles in the European style. Unlike the engineers, officers in the infantry, cavalry, and field artillery were promoted only every six or seven years, if that. As a result, at the end of the nineteenth century, almost the entire Army hierarchy was in the hands of Civil War veterans, including the immediate superiors of the junior officers who would be top commanders in World War I. Lieutenant Peyton March, later Wilson’s wartime Chief of Staff, found on joining the Third Artillery in 1888 that his regimental commander was a veteran of the Mexican War. Up to 1900, all regimental commanders in all three arms were Civil War veterans, and many officers of lower formations were too. In the words of historian Robert Ferrell, “The Army in April 1917 was a home for old soldiers, a quiet, sleepy place where they killed time until they began drawing their pensions.”³

Important changes had been made at the top, but they had not yet resulted in anything like a modern army. In 1903 President McKinley’s Secretary of War, Elihu Root, had streamlined management by combining authority for administration, training, and operations in a single person, the Chief of Staff, who reported to the President through the Secretary. He established the first full-time, long-range planning body, the General Staff, an innovation that the Germans had adopted in the 1860s. His reforms led to the creation, between 1901 and 1913, of the General Staff and Service colleges at Fort Leavenworth; the Army War College; and a galaxy of other specialized schools to re-educate the officer corps in modern warfare and military administration. The War College quickly became the de facto planning arm of the General Staff. But the General Staff was hobbled in its authority by the jealousy of the old bureaus that controlled procurement and administration. As a result, these reforms made the Army fit to control the island empire won in 1898 but not to take on the large, professional armies of Europe.

For decades, Congress systematically denied the Army the funds to equip itself. Every year from 1909 through 1916 the Quartermaster General asked for an allocation to build up a reserve supply of clothing; every year Congress cut his requests by two-thirds. Nor did the National Defense Act of 1916 help much. In that year General William Crozier, the Chief of Ordnance, pointed out that 18 months’ notice would be necessary to put factories on a war footing for arms production, and asked for funds to produce enough weapons in three years to equip a million-man army. In committee, Congress cut the proposed amount by 35 percent. One thing the Act did do, however, was to add positions for four major generals and 19 brigadier generals to the Army establishment. The 1916–17 promotions to brigadier general were based, as of old, on seniority rather than on fitness for command. There was, however, one exception: Joseph E. Kuhn, an engineer and the top graduate of the West Point Class of 1885. He was one of the General Staff’s experts on the German Army; in March 1917 he was appointed chief of the Army War College. We shall hear more of General Kuhn.

The war being fought in Europe was based on industrial technology and the United States was an industrial power, but one would never have guessed either fact by observing how the US Army waged war. The Army’s innocence of the effects of technology on warfare is well illustrated by its response to the machine gun. Until 1900 its experience with rapid-fire weapons was limited to the Gatling gun, hand-cranked with multiple rotating barrels, which could not be traversed horizontally and which was usually classified and used as artillery. By the start of the war, American inventors had created four highly efficient designs—the Maxim gun (for heavy use), the Browning medium machine gun, the Lewis gun (a light, company-level weapon) and the Browning Automatic Rifle (which became the famed BAR of World War II). Although the European powers had adopted the Maxim gun as early as the 1880s and the British had taken up the Lewis gun at the outbreak of the war, the American Ordnance Department tested and rejected all four weapons and thereafter virtually ignored modern automatic weaponry until 1917. As a result, when it entered the war, the Army possessed a grab-bag collection of only 1,453 automatic weapons, most of them of inefficient design.⁴*

* The American lack of respect for machine guns as defensive weapons is surprising. Pershing himself had seen them used in support of fortified positions, as an observer in the Russo-Japanese War and at Japanese Army maneuvers in 1907. From 1907 to 1914 he directed a number of training exercises that used machine guns, and he used them in the Mexican Punitive Expedition of 1916. In the latter, an American cavalry charge was turned back by a single Mexican machine gun; but Pershing only exulted that American rifles had still killed 30 Mexicans and wounded 40. Although intellectually aware of the power of the machine gun and the difficulty of attacking modern fortifications, Pershing was unable to shake off the effects of military tradition and training. (James W. Rainey, “Ambivalent Warfare: The Tactical Doctrine of the AEF in World War I,” Parameters 13, September (1983), pp. 36–37.)

Modern artillery fared little better in the hands of the prewar Army. American military doctrine was based on mobility and quick, fierce offensives aimed at shattering the enemy’s formations by a combination of maneuver and firepower. Based on experience in the Civil War and against the Indians, it relegated artillery to a strictly supporting arm. The Army Field Service Regulations said, “The artillery is the close supporting arm of the infantry and its duties are inseparably connected with those of the infantry. Its targets are those units of the enemy which ... are most dangerous to the infantry or that hinder infantry success.”⁵ Conservation of ammunition was a major principle of artillery operations.

These principles took no account of the development of artillery since the end of the previous century. Formerly, the barrel of a gun was hard-mounted on the carriage so that the entire assembly leaped backward when the gun was fired. The whole gun then had to be re-aimed before it could be fired again. The propellant was black gunpowder, which caused the gunners’ view to be blocked by a dense white cloud of smoke after the first shot and instantly revealed their position to the enemy. In 1897 the French Army adopted a 75mm gun fitted with an oil-compression-based shock absorber that contained the barrel’s recoil, left the gun carriage relatively motionless, and automatically repositioned the barrel for the next shot. It had three effects. The rate of fire, previously five rounds per minute, quadrupled, because the crew could reload and fire repeatedly without having to re-aim the gun. Fire became much more accurate, because it was now possible to correct the gun’s aim based on the fall of the previous shot. Sighting, ranging, and fuze-setting mechanisms added to accuracy; smokeless powder gave a clear view and made it harder for the enemy to locate one’s own guns and suppress them with counterbattery fire. Most important was the development of indirect fire. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 demonstrated that the old artillery doctrine, where the opposing batteries could see their targets, was obsolete. To protect their guns from counterbattery bombardment, the Japanese put them on the rearward slopes of ridges, out of the enemy’s view. Although the Russian guns were superior weapons, they could not find the Japanese batteries, while the Japanese readily destroyed the Russian pieces, which were placed in the open. The Russians eventually adopted the new methods, as did all European powers soon afterward. Relying on forward observers linked to concealed batteries by telephone or signal flags, artillery was no longer limited to firing at targets within view.

If the experience of the war from 1914 to 1917 taught anything, it was that artillery ruled the battlefield. But American gunnery lagged Europe’s by several decades almost until the moment of its entry into the war. American officers in the early 1900s only grudgingly acknowledged that modern artillery would dominate the infantry in modern warfare. Many still held that too much artillery was a liability because it hindered movement. Some officers came to the realization, with the Europeans, that Japanese fire superiority over the Russians in 1905 had resulted from better organization and use of their guns, rather than the quality of the weapons themselves. Senior artillerists began pressing for a new doctrine that emphasized indirect fire. This was partially achieved in the Drill Regulations of 1907, which said, “By rendering the guns inconspicuous, or entirely concealing them, their sustained service may be counted upon, while the difficulties of the enemy in locating his targets and adjusting his firing are increased.”⁶ Additionally, some artillery officers were aware of tactical developments in Europe and particularly of the dominating role of artillery. But this perception conflicted with the prevailing US doctrine, which stressed light artillery in support of mobile offensives, and such insights were limited to the few artillery officers who studied their profession. The reports of the US military observers in Europe, which could have revolutionized American gunnery, contained almost no useful information. In any event, they were sent to the War College, filed, and forgotten.⁷

American weaponry also lagged behind. At the end of the nineteenth century, the standard American field gun lacked a recoil-absorption system. The powder charge and the shell had to be loaded separately, a slow process. The propellant and the bursting charge were black powder, which proved an almost fatal failing in Cuba in 1898, where modern Spanish artillery was able several times to silence or disperse the American batteries by firing at their white smoke cloud. Attempts at modernization began soon afterward. A series of unsuccessful experimental designs eventually led to the development of the Model 1902 3-inch field gun, the first true rapid-fire artillery piece to be used by the US Army. But field trials showed that the shells of the Model 1902, whether conventional or high explosive, were ineffective against fortifications, so guns and howitzers of heavier caliber were developed. The guns fired “fixed” ammunition, but the howitzer designs still separated the powder charge from the shell.*

For these innovations to have any effect, the gunners would have to be trained in their use, and therein lay failure. The existing training establishment still clung to the old direct fire methods; it was not until 1911 that the School of Fire for Field Artillery was established at Fort Sill, Oklahoma to give both practical and theoretical instruction. Moreover, the development of an effective artillery arm was throttled by the parsimony of Congress and the War Department. Training was mostly in the classroom; budget constraints limited ammunition, which curtailed the amount of range practice. Firing in bad weather or at night was prohibited, as if gunners need not worry about such conditions. The commandant of the School of Fire protested almost as soon as he was appointed that failure to allot adequate funds for training would cause the horse and foot soldiers to pay “in blood for the mistakes made by our [artillery] arm, through the lack of [training] opportunity given to its officers. A field artillery captain who cannot direct the fire of his battery is useless ... to any army.”⁸ His words were prophetic.

The Army didn’t catch up until after its divisions had reached Europe. Colonel Conrad Lanza, a senior artillery officer in the AEF, wrote after the war that, upon arriving in France, US field artillery officers expected to find the enemy guns arrayed on opposing ridgelines as in the Civil War, and that fire would be “for effect”—that is, the gunners would be able to watch their targets explode as they were hit. Their French hosts had to point out that enemy guns were generally invisible, even from forward observation posts. ⁹

The situation was no better with regard to the weapons themselves. General Crozier had long maintained that supplying artillery for a large army would take two years. But he compounded the problem by relegating the successful Model 1902 3-incher to the training camps in favor of a new, experimental 75mm gun, the design of which had some advantages over the French model of the same caliber. This gun, the Model 1916, turned out to be inaccurate, unreliable, and difficult to manufacture. The only option in the end was to buy guns directly from the French and British once the Army arrived in France. No gun made in the States ever reached the battlefield.

The very latest development in European artillery was gas.* Several types were used, depending on whether the commander using it wanted an immediate but short-lived effect on enemy troops or persistent contamination of fortifications and gun positions. Major General William Gorgas, the US Surgeon General, sent medical officers to the British and French to observe gas warfare. They reported on the medical aspects, including diagnosis and treatment, beginning in 1916. But neither General Gorgas nor the Adjutant General, Major General Henry P. McCain, took any steps to develop protective devices. In February 1917 the Quartermaster General, Major General Henry G. Sharpe, finally took notice of reports of poison gas, and asked the Adjutant General which bureau was responsible for supplying gas masks. No one knew. As the country entered the war, the Adjutant General, the Chief of Ordnance, the Quartermaster General, and the Surgeon General were still discussing the problem.¹⁰

The Army’s late start at developing modern guns and fire doctrine, compounded by the prewar lack of funds to train gunners and manufacture weapons, meant that the rapid expansion of the Army for service in Europe was doomed to chaos, at least as far as the artillery was concerned. In 1914 the US Army had six regiments of field artillery comprising 266 officers and 4,992 enlisted men. In response to the National Defense Act of 1916, this establishment was increased to nine regiments by April 1917. With an additional 16 regiments of National Guard field artillery, the total complement was 1,130 officers and 21,874 men at various levels of training, mostly low.¹¹ On their shoulders would fall the initial burden of instructing the roughly 150 brand-new artillery regiments that would be part of the two million-man army being sent to France.

Aviation, which the Americans had invented, was in an equally parlous state. In 1908 Orville Wright crashed a plane during a demonstration flight, killing an Army Signal Corps lieutenant who was a passenger, the first air fatality ever. That event, coupled with preoccupation over Army reforms and the purchase of traditional but necessary weapons, was the likely reason Congress failed to appropriate any funds in 1909 or 1910. By late 1909 the air arm consisted of one Wright biplane and one pilot, Lieutenant Benjamin D. Foulois (who later was to command Pershing’s Air Service). His budget, obtained from the Signal Corps, was $150. Between 1908 and 1913 France and Germany each spent $22 million on military and naval aviation; Russia spent $12 million and even Belgium spent $2 million. The United States spent $430,000. An aviation section of the Signal Corps was not authorized until 1914. On declaring war, the Army had only 65 officers, of whom 26 were actual pilots, and 1,100 enlisted and civilian personnel. The Signal Corps prior to 1917 had bought only 142 aircraft.¹² Eventually, of the 6,624 combat aircraft operated by the US Air Service, the French supplied 4,879, 1,440 came from the US (all of them DH-4 bombing and observation craft based on a British design), and 291 were from the British and Italians.*¹³

Small arms was virtually the only category of weapon in which the US Army made a respectable showing in April 1917. In 1911 the .45-caliber Colt automatic pistol replaced the .38-caliber revolver, which had failed to stop charging Moro tribesmen in the Philippines; it was to remain the standard service pistol for over 80 years. The war with Spain had revealed the need for a rifle that could compete with the German-made Mauser, so in 1903 the Army introduced the modern Springfield, a bolt-action weapon (as were all service rifles of the time) that fired a five-round clip with high accuracy. On the eve of war, the Army had 890,000 of the excellent .30-06 Model 1903 in inventory.¹⁴

But a large collection of modern rifles did not make an army. An article published by a German officer in 1911 concluded that, if judged by the standards of Europe and Japan, the American Army did not exist. It was “deficient in training and in everything else that is necessary for the constitution of an armed force.” It is more than likely that this perspective encouraged the German High Command to ignore the possibility of a significant American military contribution when it considered resuming unrestricted submarine warfare in the winter of 1916–17.¹⁵ Admiral von Holtzendorff’s statement to the Kaiser on January 9, 1917 that “not one American will land on the Continent” was not vainglory; it was a sober assessment of the situation.

* Much of the American-made equipment was faulty. The airframe of the DH-4 was not strong enough to survive the engine vibrations at full throttle. DH-4s had pressure-fed fuel lines but no self-sealing gas tanks, which meant that a single hit could engulf the whole plane in flames. They were nicknamed “flaming coffins.” (John H. Morrow, Jr., The Great War in the Air: Military Aviation from 1909 to 1921 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), p. 338.)

At the beginning, it was not clear that America would need much of an army at all. Many thought that aid to the Allies would be limited to loans, ships, weapons, and food. The New York Morning Telegraph said, “They don’t need more warriors, they want money and food, and munitions of war.”¹⁶ Many officers thought that the prevailing shortage of transport would prevent sending more than a token force. The British and French at first insisted they did not want an American army, they wanted only to recruit several hundred thousand Americans into their units. Congress certainly did not understand what it had gotten into when it declared war; a few days later the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee stated, “Congress will not permit American soldiers to be sent to Europe.”¹⁷ It took two months, until June 5, to authorize $3 billion to purchase the first installment of weapons for a million men; another $3.7 billion for the second million men did not pass until early October.

The decision to send a sizeable American force to France was made gradually and in spite of President Wilson’s resistance. In mid-April, British and French military missions met with Newton D. Baker, the Secretary of War, and a board consisting of Major General Hugh L. Scott, the Army Chief of Staff, Major General Tasker H. Bliss, the Assistant Chief of Staff, and General Kuhn to coordinate the American assistance. Marshal Joseph Joffre, the French former commander-in-chief, hero of the battle of the Marne and leader of the French mission, was the first to realize that the Americans would never consent to have their soldiers absorbed into French and British units. His request to the General Staff board was to send one division to France as soon as possible, to raise morale by showing the Stars and Stripes on the Continent. This should be followed quickly by technical troops, such as transportation units, for the Allies’ immediate use. He advised the Americans to create and train a large army, to be kept independent. Although the British privately insisted that they mostly needed money and ships, officially they seconded Joffre’s recommendation. On May 2 Joffre met with Wilson and urged sending a division within a month; Wilson agreed. But by May 24 or 25 Baker understood that sending a token American force to France, while other units trained for a year or more at home, would not suffice. On May 27 he wrote Wilson urging that the public would not support a drawn-out training program at home justified by only a vague plan of future combat. In addition, waiting increased the risk that France or Russia would collapse before American troops could appear in combat. Even so, the President continued to toy with other solutions. Baker tolerated Wilson’s distractions until November, when he put his foot down and insisted that the administration honor its pledge to support the British and French on the Western Front. Wilson finally acquiesced.

The Army’s chief problem, even more than the lack of munitions, was its lack of men and officers. It was clear that many new soldiers would be needed—but how many, and how would they be recruited? General Joseph E. Kuhn’s War College Division at first recommended a relatively small army of one and a half million, figuring that anything larger would impede the vital effort to send money, food, and munitions to the Allies. The Regular Army and the National Guard would stay home, so they could train the new divisions. General Pershing, as he sailed to France with his staff in early June, figured that one million men should be sent to France as soon as possible, with further numbers to be determined after his arrival.¹⁸ For 50 years the US had not mustered an army close to this size.

When it came to finding these men, two alternatives presented themselves: volunteerism and conscription. With the partial exception of the Union Army during the later years of the Civil War, all of the United States’ fighting forces had been made up of volunteers, and many assumed that the same course would prevail in this war. Prominent old-stock Americans such as Theodore Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Wilson himself perpetuated the image of war as romantic and liberating. Princeton president John Grier Hibben rhapsodized over the “chastening and purifying effect of armed conflict.” This ethos was disseminated in many popular movies and books, which portrayed war in terms of the medieval chivalry familiar to American minds from the novels of Sir Walter Scott. The pictures they painted of willing sacrifice among heroic comrades neutralized the factual accounts of slaughter at the Somme and Verdun. Within three months of the declaration of war, 301,000 men had volunteered for the Army and the National Guard and another 109,000 for the Navy.¹⁹

Not everyone welcomed the idea of a volunteer army. Regular Army officers, most of whom had led volunteers in the West, had a poor opinion of them, believing with some justification that they represented the dregs of society:

ran the old soldiers’ marching song, and their officers considered that men who would sign up to spend much of their adult lives at a succession of isolated, flyblown outposts with low pay and few prospects must be drunks, misfits, or criminals. Conscription, on the other hand, would summon the best of the nation’s manhood—the strong, healthy field hands, the skilled factory workers, the educated professionals—who were used to getting the job done.

Wilson and Baker at first were against conscription. Wilson felt that the draft was a betrayal of the American ideal of individual freedom in favor of the European ethos of compulsion. In February 1917 Wilson and Baker refused to back proposals for conscription-based Universal Military Training. But that same month, soon after the United States and Germany had broken diplomatic relations, General Scott, the Chief of Staff, insisted to Baker that the draft be implemented immediately if the US should enter the fight. “If you do not secure conscription now,” he wrote, “you will already have lost this war.”²¹ He cited the experience of the British, who waited until 1916 to institute a draft, while unrestrained volunteering drained the mines and factories of workers. Baker agreed and told Wilson. Once conscription was presented as a rational (i.e., “progressive”) way of allocating labor rather than as coercive militarism, Wilson adopted it and ordered that a law to that effect be drafted so it would be ready to present to Congress if the need should arise. In his speech to Congress on April 2 asking for a declaration of war, Wilson specified that the manpower buildup would be based on “the principle of universal liability to service.”²²

Democrats in Congress, especially from the South and West, strongly opposed Wilson’s draft law. The House Military Affairs Committee voted 13 to 8 in favor of a bill that supported expansion of the military through volunteers rather than the draft. And Wilson might have compromised with Congress but that former Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt and former Chief of Staff General Leonard Wood launched a public campaign to raise a volunteer division with Roosevelt at its head. The scheme was militarily ludicrous. TR wanted most of the officers—if possible, most of the enlisted men—to be Ivy League graduates, and wanted to give staff positions to offspring of French nobility, in memory of Lafayette. The easiest way to prevent such distractions was to discourage volunteering in general. The Selective Service Act allowed the Regular Army, Navy, and National Guard to accept volunteers, but not the National Army, which would eventually provide 77 percent of the men. Wilson signed the draft bill on May 18. As he did so, he set June 5 as registration day. In his proclamation he called selective service “a selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass.”²³

But the draft as an institution was still unpopular in the country and in Congress, largely because of the bad experience in the Civil War. To overcome this antipathy, Baker instructed the head of the Selective Service System, General Enoch Crowder, to administer the draft through local civilian boards appointed by the state governors. This avoided the need to post conscription officers in communities or to turn government facilities such as post offices into draft centers. It worked; on June 5 over nine and a half million men between the ages of 21 and 30 signed up for the draft lottery. Eventually, roughly 24 million men registered at 4,648 local draft boards, which provided 2,758,542 men to the armed forces, almost all of whom went to the Army.²⁴ Crowder wrote after the war, “Conscription in America was not ... drafting of the unwilling. The citizens themselves had willingly come forward and pledged their service.”²⁵*

“Willingly” was a term open to interpretation. In Baltimore, soon to be the home city of the 313th Infantry Regiment, the Sun kept up a fusillade of headlines such as:

Blacks, said the Sun, were under particular suspicion of being draft dodgers. They were often rounded up on the street and ordered to present their baptismal certificates to the US Marshal in order to establish their ages and identities.²⁸ No doubt such propaganda, coupled with more coercive measures such as slacker raids and the vigilant surveillance of “patriotic” neighbors, turned many civilians into “willing” conscripts. In the end, about 337,000 men subject to the draft, or about 12 percent, avoided conscription. As David M. Kennedy has written, “Thus rudely was the fiction abandoned that the government merely selected from a people who had ‘volunteered in mass.’”²⁹

Another stereotype shattered by the draft was the image of the American soldier as the classic White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. The vast immigration of the previous 30 years dictated that many recruits would have been born in foreign lands, mostly in southern and eastern Europe. In the event, over half a million conscripts were immigrants, making up 18 percent of the Army’s manpower, and children of immigrants added many thousands more.³⁰ The Army was faced with two tasks regarding the huge influx of foreign-born soldiers, many of them European Jews and Catholics. Delighted to have access to this huge pool of manpower, the leadership knew it faced two problems before they could be turned into effective fighters. First, the Army had to build up the immigrants’ morale as soldiers. Second, it had to impart values of loyalty, patriotism, and hard work. It took pains to maintain their morale, partly by accommodating their cultural and religious needs and partly by recruiting Progressive reformers, leaders in the ethnic communities, and social workers used to dealing with immigrants to acculturate the newcomers to American and Army life.

This effort was manifested at the top by the Foreign-Speaking Soldier Subsection (FSS) of Military Intelligence, created in January 1918 by the Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker. The FSS visited Army training camps and reported on the cultural, linguistic, and religious problems the immigrants faced. As a result of these investigations, it instituted “development battalions organized by native language and led by officers who were native speakers. The effect was dramatic; before the arrival of the FSS, virtually all of the foreign-language speakers refused to go overseas. Afterward, 85 percent (later, 92 percent) were eager to go to France.*³¹ Over time the immigrants became accepted, if not as equals, then as legitimate soldiers. A private at Camp Oglethorpe, Georgia, wrote in his diary for March 28, 1918: “This is Jewish Passover, and to celebrate we are eating roast pork and matzoth bread. Today, sausage; and tomorrow being Good Friday, we shall probably have hot cross buns, matzoth, roast beef, and ham.”*³²

* Training immigrants could have its lighter moments, at least as seen from a later time. At Camp Upton on Long Island, three Morris Cohens served in the same company. In another example, a drill sergeant, frustrated by foreign names he couldn’t pronounce, finally blurted out, “Well, who in hell ever this is, answer here!” A captain in the 306th Infantry took over a company and put it through its drill. It did fine until he rearranged the men by height to achieve a more military appearance. At his first order, “Right by squads,” some men obeyed but most went off in the wrong direction or milled about aimlessly. The officer inquired of the NCOs as to what was going on and discovered that the men had previously organized themselves into squads by language; when an order was given in English, the corporal in charge of the squad translated it into the appropriate tongue. (Christopher M. Sterba, “The Melting Pot Goes to War: Italian and Jewish Immigrants in America’s Great Crusade, 1917–1919” (Ph.D. thesis, Brandeis University, 1999), pp. 230–31.)

* This discussion may give the impression that the Regular Army was amenable to minorities and immigrants. It was not; anti-Semitism, racism, and xenophobia prevailed. The racial theories of eugenicist Charles Davenport, later adopted by the Nazis, were taught at the Army War College. Many officers, some of whom became major personalities of World War II such as George Patton, George van Horn Moseley, Sherman Miles, and Albert C. Wedemeyer, believed that white, Christian America was under attack from the greedy and devious Jews, the brutish and sex-crazed blacks, and the indolent, socialistic swarms of southern and eastern Europe. Many of those who did not hold such views, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, tended to tolerate them in others. See Joseph W. Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri, The Unknown Soldiers: African-American Troops in World War I (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974); and Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York: Random House, 2012), pp. 95–96.

Parallel to the search for men was the search for officers to lead them. In April 1917 the Regular Army and National Guard between them had only 18,000 officers; over 200,000 would be required. As part of the prewar Preparedness movement, General Leonard Wood had organized a camp at Plattsburg in upstate New York at which Regulars had given some elementary officer training to about 16,000 civilians. Another 16,000 could be obtained by promoting qualified enlisted men, and specialized services, such as the Medical Department, granted commissions to 70,000 civilians; the rest had to be trained from scratch, and quickly.

On May 15, 16 officer training camps based on the Plattsburg model went into service at 13 Army posts, with 30,000 candidates enrolled, most of them from the educated upper middle class—Ivy Leaguers, businessmen, and professionals. The course lasted three months and concentrated on basic soldiering skills. But the training hardly went beyond that of enlisted men, and suffered the same shortages of qualified trainers, equipment, and facilities. Leadership and tactics were given little attention; such tactics as were taught were based on the Army’s recent experience fighting Indians and guerrillas. Eventually, almost half of the officers who served in the AEF were trained in this way. The rest came from officers’ training programs in the divisional camps, which later gave way to eight consolidated officers’ training schools. Despite their training’s shortcomings, in the judgment of military historian Maurice Matloff, “these officers provided the Army with a leadership far surpassing that of the average new officer in any previous war.”³³

As it turned out, the weakness in the officer corps of the AEF lay not in its junior officers, but in the higher commands and their staffs. The vast majority of the senior officers of 1917 had been trained at the US Military Academy at West Point. The Academy at the end of the nineteenth century was an intellectual backwater, caught in its memories of the Civil War and in reverence for its heroes. Traditions—including the traditional curriculum—“were as carefully preserved as the captured cannon on Trophy Point.”³⁴ All ideas for curricular reform were rejected by the Academic Board, whose members were themselves Academy products. The Corps of Cadets looked down on any of its members who showed any military ambition. In fact, the institution was primarily an engineering school, and status accrued to those who did well in mathematics and the sciences and who stood high in their class. The only military skills the graduating cadets had besides riding and fencing were small-unit infantry and cavalry tactics, how to work guns large and small, and the technical details of equipment and weapons. The Board of Visitors of the House of Representatives was moved to ask, in its 1884 report, how the Academy could fulfill its purpose of turning out military leaders if it paid scant attention to matters such as leadership, supply, sanitation, and training of troops.³⁵

Elihu Root had introduced an element of professionalism, but no more than an element, into the Regular Army officer corps. Between 1900 and 1902, he and his advisers instituted sweeping reforms in the education of officers. At the base of their system were schools at each major army post that taught junior lieutenants a standardized curriculum of tactical and administrative duties. Those who excelled went on to schools for the technical branches (signals, artillery, engineers) or to the School of the Line and the Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. At the top of the pile was the Army War College, which was to teach strategy, mobilization, training, and logistics. (Over time, the curricula of the War College and the Staff School converged until they were indistinguishable.) General Tasker H. Bliss, the first War College president, stated its educational policy: Officers must “learn things by doing things.” These things included analyzing map problems involving large bodies of troops, augmented by tactical rides over the actual terrain. But the emphasis was on battles of maneuver such as Chancellorsville, Antietam, the Peninsula, and Gettysburg. The siege of Petersburg, closer to the future experience in France, was given little attention. Also, the emphasis on the Civil War, combined with the method of re-enacting the roles of commanders and staffs, paid little attention to the implications of vastly greater firepower for the modern battlefield. They would have done better to have studied the Russo-Japanese War.

As the Army itself was very small, no practical experience commanding large units could be had. The closest many graduates of the service schools came was the joint Army–National Guard exercises held intermittently in the decade before the war, some of which included as many as 125,000 troops. These were expensive and unrealistic from a tactical point of view, but they gave the regular officers assigned as instructors, observers, umpires, or assistant directors the opportunity to manage and observe large bodies of troops in the field. The men had to be fed, equipped, transported, and maneuvered on a scale not normally seen by junior (or even senior) officers. The maneuvers also supplied the human factor—fatigue, discomfort, miscommunication, frustration—that was missing in classroom exercises.

Many of the officers who would lead the divisions of the AEF had combat experience, only some of which would prove beneficial on the Western Front. All of the division commanders who got to France and about half of their chiefs of staff served during the Spanish-American War or the Philippine Insurrection, and a few fought in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900–01. Combat consisted of small-unit actions typified by marches through hostile country; short, sharp attacks against enemy strong points; and, in the Philippines and China, guerrilla warfare. More usefully, they learned to operate in hostile territory, control their fear, and make independent decisions; and they experienced the reality of war rather than the scholarly, literary, or official views of it. While their experience and training did not relate to the conditions of the Western Front of 1917, in the words of Edward Coffman:

One could argue that graduates of Leavenworth and the War College and those who had seen combat in the Spanish War and the Philippine Insurrection were as professionally prepared, if not more so, than their French and British counterparts had been, on the basis of their schooling and colonial war experience, in 1914.³⁶

So through improvisation, trial, and much error, the Army began to gird itself with materiel, men, and the officers to command both. But it still had to learn how to fight.

The 79th Division, authorized by the Selective Service Act of 1917, came into existence on August 25 of that year. Like almost all of the new American divisions, it comprised two infantry brigades (the 157th and 158th), an artillery brigade (the 154th), and a machine gun battalion (the 310th). Also assigned to the division were an engineer regiment (the 304th), a field signal battalion, a sanitary (i.e., medical and ambulance) train, and trains for ammunition, supplies, and military police. Each infantry brigade contained two infantry regiments (the 313th and 314th in the 157th Brigade, the 315th and 316th in the 158th Brigade). Additionally, each brigade had its own machine gun battalion. The artillery brigade contained three regiments of field artillery—two light (75mm guns) and one heavy (155mm guns) plus a battery of trench mortars. This organization would hold more or less throughout the war, except for a swap of artillery brigades upon reaching France and, later, a reshuffling of infantry brigade assignments under rather dramatic circumstances that we shall encounter. At first, of course, these units existed on paper only. They contained essentially nothing; officers, men, and materiel would have to be found, assigned, transported, housed, and organized.

On August 26, the 79th received its commander, newly promoted Major General Joseph E. Kuhn, and his staff, led by Lieutenant Colonel Tenney Ross. By some measures, they were the ideal pair to command a division. Kuhn, short and trim of build, meticulous of dress and bearing and sporting a silver brush mustache and a penetrating gaze, had accumulated in his 32 years of service a list of credentials that made him almost unique among American general officers. As a result of his experience, or perhaps because of his innate character, he radiated a confidence that inspired his men but often irritated his colleagues. First in his West Point Class of 1885—one year ahead of Pershing—he entered the Corps of Engineers and served with distinction in a number of posts around the country, eventually returning to the Military Academy to serve as head of the Department of Practical Military Engineering. When the Moros in the Philippines revolted, he commanded a battalion of engineers in the force sent to suppress them. During the Russo-Japanese War he was a military observer attached to the Japanese Army, where he witnessed the first employment of modern artillery, machine guns, fortifications, and assault tactics. In 1906 he was a US observer at the German Army’s annual maneuvers, where he met with the Kaiser and discussed strategy and tactics. Among his assignments upon returning to the United States was a term as Director of Instruction at the US Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.

Kuhn’s most important postings, from the point of view of an incipient division commander, were his appointments in December 1914 as leader of the US military mission to Germany and in March 1915 as military attaché to the American Embassy in Berlin. His arrival coincided with the end of the mobile phase of the war and the beginning of what Kuhn called “the siege of the middle powers”—trench warfare.³⁷ Soon after his appointment, news arrived in Berlin of the large loan from New York bankers to the French and British and of the placing of large Allied orders for munitions with American manufacturers. This was the first intimation to the Germans that America would be neutral only in the most formal sense. Thus began the Germans’ public and private hostility to America that would plague Kuhn’s mission during its lifetime.

At first the American mission under Kuhn was allowed extensive access to the German commanders and front-line positions. Kuhn inspected the German lines in the Vosges (where he came under French artillery fire), the Meuse, the Russian front in Poland, and even Louvain, the medieval city the Germans had destroyed in their August 1914 advance to the Marne. But mounting German hostility, including the refusal of some German officers to accommodate or even meet with the American mission, soon made clear to Kuhn and the rest that their effectiveness was almost at an end. James W. Gerard, the American ambassador, agreed, and arranged for their departure. But the War Department ordered Kuhn, much to his chagrin, to stay on to replace the departing US military attaché. As the attaché of a neutral country, Germany had to treat him with the courtesy due to all other neutral diplomats.

Kuhn’s first field excursion as military attaché was to the Flanders front. Although the Germans had recently launched a successful gas attack to take the British and French positions opposing them, Kuhn’s German guides did not mention the use of gas and he did not find out about it for another two months, and then from the foreign press. On the way to Ypres, he heard (from a German officer) the news of the sinking of the Lusitania, which led him to expect a quick break in diplomatic relations; the break did not come for two more years. While in the Ypres sector Kuhn visited the front-line position at St Julian Farm; he was to visit the farm again in January 1918 when it was back in British hands and America was in the war. When Warsaw fell in August 1916, Kuhn was in the headquarters of General Max von Gallwitz, whom he would face two years later in Lorraine. On subsequent trips to the Western Front he observed from up close the German “Big Berthas” using balloon-directed fire at British positions. In Poland he watched German engineers throw a bridge across the Vistula and three divisions cross it in rapid order.

But as the probability of America joining the Allies increased and anti-American feeling grew, Kuhn was progressively excluded from the groups of attachés sent to visit the front. Although this was against protocol, Kuhn registered no complaint until confronted with the situation by the Chief of Intelligence of the German General Staff. “For once I lost my temper,” he wrote after the war, “and I fear that my conversation transgressed the usual bounds of diplomatic usage.”³⁸ His usefulness at an end, the War Department ordered Kuhn home. He left on December 5, 1916. Months after his departure Gerard praised Kuhn as “perhaps our greatest American expert in modern war,” and said that, as president of the Army War College (Kuhn’s next posting), “his teachings will prove of the greatest value to the armies of the United States.”³⁹

Something of a hero within the Army for having effectively been expelled from Germany, Kuhn continued to enjoy a flourishing career upon his return. When the National Defense Act of 1916 created four new positions for major generals and 19 for brigadier generals, all of the appointments were based on seniority rather than merit except for Kuhn’s; it was clear he was being groomed for greater things. (At one point, rumors circulated that he was to be made Army Chief of Staff. Kuhn wrote to his wife, “I don’t believe it and I hope not.”⁴⁰) The Presidency of the Army War College was indeed Kuhn’s next post, where, as an ex-officio member of the General Staff, he was at the center of American war planning. One of his early tasks was to participate in an informal committee of four generals, including Major General Tasker Bliss, Assistant Chief of Staff, to appoint new generals. Meeting over three nights, the group made their selections from a list of colonels; their recommendations were approved by Secretary of War Baker and passed by Congress with no changes. One hundred and twenty freshly minted generals now owed their appointments, in part, to Joseph Kuhn.⁴¹

As war approached, the Army Chief of Staff, General Scott, had Kuhn write a detailed “Plan for a National Army” based on the idea of universal military training (see Chapter 2). It called for a five-year buildup culminating in a regular army of 310,000 supported by two and a half million trained citizen-reservists. But despite the approach of war, the administration in January 1917 would consider neither universal military training nor a draft, so the plan went nowhere. Once war was declared, Kuhn participated in the decision to create divisions that were double the size of the Allies’, and conferred with French Field Marshal Joffre on whether and what kind of force to send to France. Along with Generals Bliss and Scott and General Enoch Crowder, the Provost Marshal, Kuhn prepared—at Secretary of War Baker’s request—“a draft of legislation to provide an army of one million men to meet possible contingencies.”⁴² This became the Selective Service Act of 1917. In short, the commander of the 79th Division had more exposure to the planning and practice of modern warfare than possibly any officer in the United States Army.

But Kuhn had significant weaknesses. For a start, being first in one’s class at West Point was not the accomplishment in 1885 that it would later become. Ignoring military theory, leadership, strategy, and tactics (except for those of small units), the Academy taught engineering and its military applications, primarily weapons and fortifications. Kuhn inherited this mentality of single-minded attention to technical detail. His reports from Manchuria, although comprehensive and thorough, were pedantic and unimaginative. He noted the devastating effect of high explosive shells, the destruction wrought by machine guns, the importance of fixed fortifications, and the dominance of position warfare over mobile tactics; but he failed to draw any lessons that might have informed American doctrine as the country entered the era of modern war. He wrote:

If there is one fact more than any other which has impressed itself on my mind it is that in its general features at least, the war was conducted by both sides along strictly orthodox lines. The formation of infantry for the attack, the massing of guns, and the concentration of their fire, the value and employment of field fortifications, the siege of permanently fortified localities and many other features, all savor strongly of the textbook. So far as I am able to judge, the recognized rules and principles for conducting warfare underwent no serious modification in their application.⁴³

After all, despite their massive losses, the Japanese frontal attacks succeeded. So among the “rules and principles” that Kuhn, along with most western observers, derived from the experience was the continued dominance of the bayonet, even over fire superiority, as the essential element of tactics.

Kuhn’s most critical deficiency was that he had never commanded a combat unit, not so much as a platoon. He therefore had no experience in either the tactical or the administrative aspects of field command. This might have been overcome in part by education (after all, few commanders of American combat units had seen action in their careers), but his formal training was not up to the standards of many American generals, even of the time. He attended neither the Leavenworth Schools nor the Army War College, although he taught at the former and was president of the latter. Thus he did not benefit from their curricula, which taught staff work, order writing, combined-arms operations, logistics, mobilization, and training of troops. Of equal importance, the schools taught a common way of approaching problems that led to a “harmonious style of thinking ... among their graduates.”⁴⁴ Kuhn, the engineer, would not be a part of this fraternity.

Why was Kuhn picked for a field command at all? Apparently, no record of the selection process survives. Most likely the War Department, strapped for senior officers, saw him as available and fit to organize the division’s training. No doubt Kuhn’s earlier prestigious assignments made him appear a safe choice. But Pershing had his own criteria for division commanders, and as head of the AEF did not feel bound by the decisions of the War Department. Just because an officer was fit to organize and train a division in the United States did not mean Pershing wanted him to command it in the field. He insisted on young, vigorous subordinates who were loyal to him. A somewhat cryptic note in Pershing’s files in the National Archives may shed some light. Headed “Confidential Memorandum for the Commander-in-Chief” and dated February 22, 1918, it was issued by the office of the AEF Chief of Staff but is not signed. Nevertheless, it almost certainly reflects the personal opinions if not the literal words of General James G. Harbord, Pershing’s Chief of Staff and close personal confidant. It records the author’s impressions of about a dozen major generals and their fitness for divisional command. With respect to General Kuhn it reads:

One of the star men of the Engineers. 53 years of age, probably in the prime of his mental vigor. He is slight, not encumbered by superfluous flesh and should be physically active. I never knew him until last year at the War College. Great things were expected from him there but he was a disappointment ... General Kuhn has had perhaps better opportunity for observing war than any other officer of the army: in Manchuria and Germany. He impresses me as being an extremely conceited man. He should be given an opportunity to command a division.⁴⁵

So Pershing allowed Kuhn to continue to lead the 79th in France because he was young and vigorous enough and had seen modern warfare, but in spite of his less-than-stellar performance at the War College, his irritating demeanor, and his lack of command experience. (The “star men of the Engineers” remark is almost certainly a slighting reference; field officers considered the engineers a separate species. Kuhn was the only one of 41 divisional commanders who came from the Corps of Engineers.)

Any gaps in Kuhn’s background were more than filled by his chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Tenney Ross, a veteran of the frontier army. Tall and round-faced, with a wide mouth and wide-set eyes, Ross was an imposing figure. As a youth he had been appointed to West Point by President Grover Cleveland, but he acceded to his father’s wishes by attending Georgetown Law College and going to work in a bank. When the Spanish-American War broke out, Ross took quick advantage of the government’s call for volunteers and joined the 3rd Infantry Regiment in Cuba. When the regiment went back to its base at Fort Snelling, Minnesota he went with them as a Regular Army officer. Soon afterward, a group of Chippewa Indians on the Leech Lake, Minnesota, reservation, angered by the local Indian Agency’s policy of seemingly arbitrary arrests and by exploitation at the hands of lumber companies, engaged with local law-enforcement officers in a scuffle that got out of hand. A group of soldiers commanded by Major Melville Wilkinson and Lieutenant Ross was sent to Leech Lake to help the civil authorities. Shooting broke out; Major Wilkinson was killed and Ross took over. By the next day the Chippewa—none of whom had been killed—had dispersed, but seven soldiers were dead. At first it was reported that Ross was the officer who had been killed; it took some time for his anguished family to learn that he had emerged unscathed, although the crown of his hat was graced by a neat bullet hole. For this action he was awarded a Silver Star for gallantry. This was the last engagement fought between Native Americans and the United States Army.⁴⁶

Subsequently, Ross attended the Staff College and the Infantry–Cavalry School at Leavenworth, where he graduated with distinction. As a recent service school graduate he almost certainly would have attended one of the joint Army-National Guard maneuvers held in 1904 (with 25,000 guardsmen and 10,000 regulars), 1906 (when seven were held), or 1908 (with eight held during the year). From a tactical point of view they were useless; but as the only peacetime occasions when large numbers of troops marched, ate, and bivouacked as a body, they would have been invaluable training for a divisional chief of staff headed to France.

After seeing action in the Philippines against the Moros in 1906 Ross returned to Washington where, among other things, he served on the General Staff for two years until the declaration of war. Now a lieutenant colonel in the National Army, he was assigned to the 79th Division as General Kuhn’s chief of staff. To his job he brought a background of leadership and combat experience, augmented by formal training in military operations and staff work, all attributes that Kuhn himself lacked.

Ross was liked by the other officers of the division, but as an Old Army type he expected them to show a military punctilio rarely found among the civilians they recently had been. One officer of the 315th Regiment wrote of an episode early in the division’s training:

About this time the Division Commander believed the officers should be jacked up, so Colonel Ross, his Chief of Staff, was given the job and he did it in a tough way. The method was to tell regimental officers how rotten they were, that they didn’t even look like officers, and more to the same effect. To correct this, his program was to take us to a more or less secluded field and put us through close order drill, all serving in the ranks. This may or may not have helped us, but it made Ross feel a lot better.⁴⁷

The first job Kuhn and Ross faced was to get the 79th Division settled in its new training ground. This was to be Camp Meade, set among the rolling hills of Ann Arundel County, Maryland, about midway between Washington and Baltimore and about a 45-minute ride from either city on the interurban railroad. Named after the Union general who repulsed Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, the camp occupied 4,000 acres and was planned with a capacity of 40,000 men. Construction began on July 2, 1917. Kuhn got his first view of the camp a week before he was due to take command, and it was disheartening. The site was one of the last the Army acquired. Only one-third of the work had been completed, barely a week and a half before the recruits were scheduled to start arriving. Water supply, sanitary system, and roads were nonexistent. Although materials and men littered the landscape, all was in chaos. An officer in the 315th Infantry Regiment described the scene:

At this time, great gangs of darkies were clearing sites and blasting stumps, hiding under any small brush nearby until after the explosion, frightened ashen-grey one moment and singing heart-high the next. Trucks from Truck Company 328, which had only recently arrived from Texas, roared up and down the sandy roads, carrying piles of lumber and pipes, as well as cots and blankets for the first few barracks that were up. On many occasions, these trucks sank hub-deep in the soft Maryland sand, and it was no uncommon sight to see a mixed crowd of soldiers and laborers digging one of the mired trucks out of its over-soft resting place. Day and night the pile-drivers were at work and were followed in turn by gangs of carpenters, erecting the framework of barracks, laying floors and putting on roofs, so that the Camp seemed to spring up from a waste almost by magic.⁴⁸

On September 1, Camp Meade was still woefully unprepared to receive the coming deluge of 40,000 trainees. Living quarters and lavatories were less than half completed; the water distribution system lacked pumps and storage tanks and the piping was unfinished, although most of the material was on site; and less than half of the electrical equipment had been installed.

As a result of these and other deficiencies the arrival date of the first draftees at Camp Meade—alone among the Army’s 32 training camps—was pushed back two weeks to September 19 with the proviso that 15,000 men be accepted on that date. Still, the facilities were not completely in order, and Kuhn’s anxiety did not let up. He wrote to his wife, “Have just finished, 10:30 P.M., a session with my people and have wired Washington not to send any more men on Oct. 3 as state of supplies too precarious. It will make some consternation but I know I am right. I will not have my men uncomfortable or suffering for the sake of calling them in a few weeks earlier.”⁴⁹ Fortunately, good weather and improvisation of water supplies and other necessaries made life bearable until the construction could be completed.

When finally finished on November 30, Camp Meade was the second-largest city in Maryland. It comprised 120 barracks and other wooden buildings, grouped in an inverted “U” around a parade ground. A railroad line passed along the southern edge; along it ran a mile of warehouses. Fifty miles of water pipe supplied three million gallons of water a day; 52 miles of sewer pipe carried away the waste.⁵⁰

The first cadre arrived on August 25, the same day as Kuhn and Ross. It consisted of Regular Army officers who would command the division and its brigades and regiments; 600 enlisted men from the Regular Army who would be the first non-commissioned officers; and 1,100 graduates of the Officers’ Training Camp at Fort Niagara, New York. Their quality was highly uneven. Of the Regulars, only a few knew how to organize and train a body of recruits. The graduates of Fort Niagara Training Camp fell into two groups, one with experience as enlisted men, NCOs, or officers in the National Guard and one with no experience beyond the three months of training they had just completed. Still, they adapted quickly. Several of the captains had been promoted from sergeant in the Regulars. Besides being expert in Army ways, they were colorful characters. One of them, a “tough old bird,” was fond of saying, “In the army it’s what you get away wid, not what you do.” Despite his gruffness, the men respected him for having “a big heart, a great fund of common sense, and an unlimited supply of army knowledge ... He could command the loyalty of men as could few others in the division.”⁵¹ The others learned fast. On one occasion the colonel of the 315th turned to a company commander and asked:

“Captain Patterson, how many pairs of serviceable shoes have you in your Company?” This was a tough one, but he never batted an eye, and with no hesitation replied; “One hundred ninety-seven, Sir!” Even the Colonel smiled at that one, but he went on to the others and everyone had an exact figure to report. After Officers’ Call they all hurried off to their Company clerks to check up, and needless to say no one was even close.⁵²

The division’s NCOs were drawn from men of the Regular Army, but they had seen only brief service, as the more experienced ones had been assigned to the new Regular Army divisions. Furthermore, the training cadres sent to train the National Army were often the way for the Regular Army divisions to get rid of their dead wood; they were of little help.

The first conscripts, who arrived on September 19, were mainly from the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Later they were joined by draftees from New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and West Virginia. From these meager beginnings the division would grow in 11 months to its ultimate strength of 27,000 men.* One observer described the new recruits as they arrived at camp:

Nervous groups of company officers were at the detraining point an hour before train time, and when it arrived there poured out as motley a collection of individuals in appearance as ever gathered together, with clothes and bags of every description, some in shirt sleeves, some with coats, some with hats and some without, some carrying suitcases or paper parcels, some with nothing but the clothes on their backs.⁵³

* The authorized strength of the American division was 28,000 men, twice as large as those of the British, French, or Germans. The large division caused many problems. Training camps had to be expanded. The burden on commanders and their staffs was greatly increased. Mobility was impaired. Coordination of transport and supply with the smaller British and French divisions was made more difficult. And no US officer, including Pershing, had ever commanded a normal-sized division, let alone one of double strength. Although the number of men was twice that of the Allied divisions, the artillery allotment was the same, so that on a per-man basis the US division was in fact weaker. (Donald Smythe, Pershing: General of the Armies (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986), pp. 36–38.) In the end, the large size of the American divisions actually reduced their staying power. This was because not enough troops were assigned to support services such as supply, burial, and casualty evacuation. The infantry themselves, already strained under combat, had to do these things for themselves. Even units that were not in combat were always exhausted. (Timothy K. Nenninger, “American Military Effectiveness in the First World War,” in Military Effectiveness, Vol. 1: The First World War, ed. Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray, Series on Defense and Foreign Policy (Boston, London, Sydney, Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1988), p. 151.)

As soon as they arrived, recruits were issued uniforms, shoes, and hats of random sizes. This did not help their appearance, and allowed the top sergeants to take immediate advantage of their odd demeanor to chew them out for being unmilitary.

The thousands of men who poured daily into Camp Meade beginning on September 19 had to be organized into brigades, regiments, battalions, and companies. In addition, they had to be categorized according to their trades or technical abilities, if any—cooks, drivers, horse handlers, mechanics, and hundreds of other job descriptions. No procedures existed; the officers did it all by improvisation. In Kuhn’s recollection, among the thousands of draftees were individuals with all of the necessary trades and professions; they were quickly identified and organized according to their specialty.⁵⁴ More likely, the experience of William L. Hanson, a physician in the 304th Sanitary Train, was typical:

Nearly all the enlisted men in my ambulance company were from Detroit, where they had worked for the automobile companies. They were excellent auto and truck mechanics. So where were they assigned? To the mule-drawn vehicles, of course. Men who had never seen an internal combustion engine were assigned to the motorized ambulances.⁵⁵

What struck the officers and NCOs most forcibly about their new charges was their diversity. Sergeant Edward Davies of the 315th got his first look at the men he would be training when he met them at the railroad station in Philadelphia on the way to Camp Meade:

What a motley looking crew they are, Italians, Jews, Poles and what not. Of the 22 of them one other boy and myself are the only English speaking Americans in the bunch. Before we reached Baltimore M.D. our gang was pretty much under the weather, most of them had plenty of liquor with them, and they used it freely. A fight started just before we reached Baltimore but the MPs who boarded the train there put an end to it before any damage was done.⁵⁶

A survey of the 310th Field Artillery Regiment showed how various the troops were. Represented were 15 nationalities—American, Russian, Italian, Polish, Austrian, Jewish, Swiss, English, Lithuanian, Greek, Bohemian, French, Irish, Rumanian, “and even German”; and four religions—Roman Catholic, Protestant, Greek Catholic, and Jewish. Of the roughly 1,500 enlisted men in the regiment, only 50 had ever attended college and 114 had no education at all.⁵⁷ The Baltimore press loved to play up the division’s polyglot composition. Reporting on the arrival of recruits from Baltimore city and some of the Maryland counties, the Sun observed “good humor and cheerfulness” with much whistling and singing. Some of the Baltimoreans were downright boisterous: The first group to detrain was from the Eighth Ward, many of them “Bohemians” (Czechs) who had practiced marching and physical skills in their gymnastics clubs. They were followed by the Irish Fusiliers from the Tenth Ward who marched to their anthem, “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” On they came, the Baltimoreans by ward and the others by county. As fast as they got onto the platform they were formed into groups of 500 to 600 men by their newly trained officers and marched off to barracks. The Sun reported that the camp contained English, Germans, French, Italians, Poles, Dutch, Bohemians, Irish, Swedes, Scots, Spanish, Mexicans, an East Indian, a Japanese, and a “Chinaman.”⁵⁸ This was a new phenomenon in an American army. Minorities had served before—Germans and Swedes in the Revolution; Germans, blacks, and Irish in the Civil War—but not so many, not mixed up within units, and not all at the same time. The last word on the recruits’ ethnic variety will be left to Lieutenant J.W. Kress of the Machine Gun Company of the 314th Regiment:

Looking at the numerous Italians, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, Serbs, Slavs, Roumanians, and even Austrians and Germans in this vast Army, one at first wondered where the real American was keeping himself. Slowly the realization came that this conglomeration of nationalities was the real body of American people—they were the real Americans.⁵⁹

One minority, however, was not counted among the “real Americans”: the blacks. The War Department, desperate for manpower, decided early to draft African-Americans into the ranks. Southern Congressmen, driven as much by fear as by prejudice, bitterly opposed the War Department’s intentions. Said Representative Richard S. Whaley of South Carolina:

We of the South cannot stand for inclusion of Negroes in the universal service plan ... [It] would accomplish the very thing which the South has always fought against, the placing of arms in the hands of a large number of Negroes and the training of them to work together in organized units.⁶⁰

To mitigate the possibility of racial violence and generally to maintain discipline, Secretary of War Baker adopted three policies. First, blacks would be organized and trained in their own separate divisions. (Thus, ironically, segregation was adopted in part to protect black soldiers; the whites couldn’t abuse the blacks if they couldn’t see them.) Second, the ratio of whites to blacks in any one training camp would be no less than two to one. This had the unintended adverse effect of ensuring that Southern blacks would be exported for training to Northern states, because to keep them at home would necessarily create dominant black populations in the Southern camps. Finally, the bulk of black soldiers would be assigned to labor battalions rather than be trained for service in the field. Secretary Baker promised the radical civil rights campaigner W.E.B. DuBois that more than one-third of blacks would become combat soldiers; in the event it was 20 percent.⁶¹

In October 1917, 5,000 “colored” draftees, comprising the 368th Colored Infantry Regiment, were assigned to Camp Meade. After the war, blacks remembered Camp Meade as a place where they were treated relatively well, especially as it was a “Southern” camp. In particular, they had more opportunity for drill and rifle practice than elsewhere. At other camps they were routinely degraded and abused; it was common practice, for example, to hire black recruits out to local contractors as laborers, with the white officers keeping the money. While this and other discriminatory practices were recorded at Camp Meade, they were apparently nowhere near as prevalent as at many other facilities.⁶² Nonetheless, life could be grim for the black recruits, whose burden of discrimination fell on top of the soldier’s normal loneliness.

To the men of the 79th, however, segregation made the black recruits virtually invisible. The division had now arrived at its training grounds. A question now became urgent: What would they be trained to do?