Chapter 11

America Goes to War

In This Chapter

arrow Understanding isolationism

arrow Seeing why America went to war

arrow Winning the war at home

arrow Going into battle with the doughboys

Up until the First World War, the United States had always taken a simple line on foreign policy: it stayed out of Europe’s quarrels and it expected the Europeans to stay out of America’s. Yet by the end of the war, the United States had not only come into the war and tilted the balance of power in favour of the Allies, but President Woodrow Wilson was even proposing plans to change the shape of the world.

In this chapter, I explain how a country that had for so long deliberately turned its back on foreign war, especially in Europe, came to enter into and play such an important part in the First World War.

Woodrow Wilson’s World

keypeople_fmt.eps The man who took the United States into the war was President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson had an academic background: he’d been president of Princeton University, where he lectured in modern history and politics. Wilson had a clear idea of the sort of higher-profile role he thought the United States ought to play on the world stage.

remember.eps Not long after the war broke out in Europe, Wilson envisioned a special role for the United States as a peacemaker, mediating between the warring sides. The United States had played that role in ending the war between Russia and Japan back in 1905 and Wilson thought that peacemaking could be the country’s special contribution to world affairs in the 20th century. However, although the United States stayed neutral, Wilson himself wasn’t quite so even-handed. He came from the southern United States and, like many southerners at the time, his general outlook was pro-British. He thought that the Allies were fighting to defend Christian, civilised values against German militarism and aggression. If Wilson’s attempts at mediation failed, however, and especially if it looked as if German militarism might prevail, then, he thought, America’s place was alongside the Allies. However, by no means all Americans agreed with him.

The American melting pot

In the early 20th century America was changing rapidly, probably more so than any other country on the planet. Thousands of immigrants were arriving in New York every day, completely transforming the nature of American society. By 1914 the predominant British influence was being rivalled by the new cultures of the immigrants, and the country had to get used to a whole range of new national communities, such as Italian-Americans, Hungarian-Americans, Polish-Americans, German-Americans and Jewish-Americans.

remember.eps These immigrants went to America to make a new life for themselves because their own countries offered them no future. Many went because they were poor and were likely to stay poor. Some, such as the Jews of Russia, went to escape persecution. Whatever the reason for their going to America, they had no wish to return home. America was their home now. This attitude lay at the root of what historians call American isolationism, and because these new Americans had the vote, the President had to take their views very carefully into account.

Don’t go there! America’s isolationists

Ever since the founding of the United States after the American Revolution, America had maintained a long tradition of isolationism, meaning that Americans liked to leave other countries, especially European countries, to sort out their own problems without Americans having to get involved. The United States certainly had a foreign policy but it didn’t want to get tied down in any entangling alliances that might drag it into other people’s wars.

Most American governments followed an isolationist policy, and with good reason:

  • Americans believed their country was special – richer, happier and more morally upright than other countries. Why would anyone want to spoil that situation by getting dragged into other people’s wars?
  • Americans didn’t have a very large army, so they felt tangling with the huge European armies on their home ground would be a bad idea. Americans were proud of their victories in the past over the British, but those had been fought on American soil. Travelling over to Europe to fight a war was a very different, and much riskier, proposition. It would also mean investing in a bigger navy, to protect both the troopships and American merchant ships, and that would mean yet more expense for the American taxpayer.
  • Americans came from so many different European countries that taking sides in any European war was bound to divide Americans too. German-Americans, for example, would never agree to fight alongside the British. On the other hand, Italian-Americans and all those of British descent would want to fight on the Allied side and against the Germans. The best way to avoid trouble between these different groups of Americans would be for America to stay out of any war in Europe.

After the war broke out, news of the appalling losses being suffered by all sides simply added to the list of good reasons many Americans had for thinking their country was much better off keeping out of it. Prominent people and groups began demanding that America continue to stay neutral and out of the war:

  • Henry Ford: The famous industrialist was a prominent opponent of getting involved. He thought the war was a European matter and that it would be an economic disaster for the United States to get dragged in.
  • Women’s groups: A large number of women’s groups existed in America in the 1910s, campaigning for a wide range of issues, including closing down bars and securing votes for women. Women’s groups were strongly opposed to the idea of America getting involved in a major European war – they didn’t want to send their own sons off to get killed in someone else’s war.
  • Churches: The many churches and religious groups within America called on Wilson to negotiate a peace settlement between the two sides fighting in Europe, but not to get involved in the war itself. Wilson did offer to negotiate between the two sides but they turned him down.
  • Irish-Americans: The Irish were a powerful political lobby, especially in New York. They’d never agree to fight alongside Britain, the country they blamed for dragging Ireland into poverty. They became even more hostile to Britain after the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin (Chapter 10 has the details).

Beware U-boats!

When Germany’s Admiral von Tirpitz decided to launch unrestricted U-boat (that is, submarine) warfare in 1915 (and Chapter 8 tells you why he reached this decision) he knew perfectly well that American merchants ships would be torpedoed. Americans were naturally outraged to learn that German U-boats could stop and sink unarmed merchant ships flying the American flag in international waters. But even though American shipping losses soon began to mount, President Wilson still couldn’t bank on getting enough support at home to take America to war. Many Americans thought the U-boat sinkings merely showed what a nasty business the European war was and how wise the US was to stay out of it.

ononehand_fmt.eps Then the U-boats went too far. On 7 May 1915 a German U-boat sank the British passenger liner Lusitania, with the loss of 128 American lives (see Chapter 8). Americans were aghast and angry, and it began to look as if the sinking would bring America into the war. But the Germans had given warnings in the American press that they considered it a legitimate target and advising American passengers that they travelled at their own risk. Horrifying though the sinking was, it wasn’t enough on its own to win over those Americans who were determined to stay out of the war.

To appease American isolationists Wilson announced that the United States was too proud to fight, no matter what outrages the Germans might commit. This approach didn’t go down well in the Allied countries: some people in Britain thought that Wilson should have said the United States was too scared to fight. However, Wilson knew that the German U-boat campaign was making war much more likely, so he ordered a fleet of new battleships for the navy, though they wouldn’t be ready until 1919. The United States wasn’t in the war yet, but it was certainly getting its boots on.

He kept you out of war! The 1916 election

Nineteen sixteen was a presidential election year and Wilson was standing for a second term. With so much feeling against getting involved in the war, winning the election wouldn’t be easy if he allowed his personal sympathy for the Allies to become an election issue.

remember.eps By 1900 American politics had settled into the two-party system you see today, with Republicans and Democrats. By the time of the 1916 presidential election, these two parties had been joined by two other political groups, both of whom were putting pressure on Wilson:

  • The Preparedness Movement thought that America was far too weak compared with the Europeans. Preparedness Movement members, which included many Republicans, wanted to build up America’s position in the world and to see conscription introduced in order to get America’s armed forces up to a suitable level for a Great Power. They thought that Wilson should be doing much more to protect American shipping from German attack and that America needed something much bigger and more efficient to defend it than the existing National Guard.
  • The Progressive Party thought that America needed a big dose of social reform, in order to iron out inequalities between rich and poor and make government more efficient and answerable to people’s needs. They wanted to see women get the vote, limits imposed on alcohol consumption, working conditions in factories improve and an end to child labour. They believed that Wilson was already spending too much on new battleships and that the only people who’d benefit from them would be the rich arms manufacturers and profiteers.

By and large, President Wilson sympathised with the Preparedness Movement. He too thought America needed a larger army and a much larger navy in order to make its presence felt in the world. However, the Progressives disagreed. They thought that building up the army and navy was just an excuse for government not tackling the question of poverty among America’s immigrants and farmers. Both the Progressives and the Republicans opposed Wilson’s spending plans (the Progressives did this because they didn’t approve of spending on armaments; the Republicans did it because Wilson was a Democrat), so he couldn’t increase America’s fighting forces by quite as much as he’d hoped.

Wilson knew that many Americans feared getting dragged into the war, so he kept his campaign slogan very simple: ‘He kept you out of war!’ This slogan suggested, of course (though it didn’t actually say – Wilson was a politician, remember), that Wilson would carry on keeping America out of the war if he was re-elected.

The election result was close: Wilson got 52.2 per cent of the electoral vote, whereas his Republican rival got 47.8 per cent. However, Wilson had clearly won and he got his second term of office.

Five months later he took America into the war.

You Know How President Wilson Kept America Out of the War? Well, He’s Changed His Mind

In 1915, and again in 1916, Wilson sent his close friend and adviser Colonel Edward House to Europe to try to negotiate a peace settlement. House didn’t get very far, but his talks with the British did convince the Germans that, whatever Wilson might say in public, he did, in fact, support the Allies.

remember.eps The Allies had one major advantage in their dealings with the United States: the transatlantic telegraph cable, which was under British control. The British cut the German cable, so that all messages between Germany and the United States – even German ones – had to be transmitted via Britain. This gave Britain control over exactly what messages the United States did or didn’t get from Europe.

By 1917 the Germans regarded the United States as, in effect, an enemy country, so they put plans in place to attack the United States both at sea and closer to home:

  • Unrestricted U-boat warfare: In 1917, Germany announced that it was resuming unrestricted U-boat warfare after a period during which international outcry had led to its temporarily cancelling the policy. U-boats would now sink any ship, anywhere at sea, if the Germans thought doing so was necessary in order to win the war. American ships carrying food or supplies to England were regarded as entirely legitimate targets, and the Germans promptly sank three of them. (Chapter 8 tells you more about the German U-boat campaign.)

    Americans couldn’t simply accept that the Germans would sink American ships whenever they felt like it.

  • diditreallyhappen_fmt.eps German plans for Mexico: In 1917 the British intercepted a telegram from the German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, to the German Minister in Mexico City. The telegram gave instructions to the Minister to negotiate a deal with the government of Mexico whereby Mexico would invade the USA and, with German help, recover all the land it had lost over the years to the USA: Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. The British reckoned the telegram would make interesting reading in Washington, and they were right.

    This evidence of a German plot to help an invasion of the United States caused a wave of angry indignation in America. Even staunch isolationists reckoned the Germans had gone too far this time. In fact, the telegram suggested it might be more dangerous for America to stay out of the war and be invaded than it would be to join in.

The Zimmermann telegram finally won Americans over to the idea of joining the war. Wilson made a speech to Congress outlining why repeated acts of aggression by the imperial German government against American shipping and now against the territory of the United States itself (see the nearby ‘Sabotage!’ sidebar) gave them no choice: they had to declare war. He reassured them that it wasn’t going to be a war for conquest; he called it a war to safeguard democracy and to end all wars. Congress agreed, and on 6 April 1917 the United States declared war on Germany.

Even though America was now in the war, Wilson wanted to make it clear that the US wasn’t lowering itself to the level of the European powers. America had been forced into the war by German aggression. It would send troops over to France and do whatever was necessary to bring the war to an end and then it would ship its boys home again. For this reason, the United States joined the Allies but didn’t join their alliance. The United States would be an Associated Power, supporting the Allies, fighting alongside the Allies, but not one of the Allies and definitely not under the Allies. Think of it as the political equivalent of an ‘I’m with these idiots’ T-shirt.

What were the Germans thinking?

Trying to understand what the Germans thought they were doing can be difficult. They knew perfectly well that at some point unrestricted U-boat warfare would bring America into the war – that was precisely why German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg had opposed it. And anyone knows that if you start plotting to take some of a country’s own national territory, that country will defend itself. So what on earth were the Germans thinking?

With hindsight, you can see that bringing America into the war meant that Germany and its allies had no hope of winning. However, that wasn’t quite how the situation seemed to the Germans at the time. Their thinking was as follows:

  • The United States has only a small army. America had no conscription and its armed forces were very small by European standards – good for fighting against native American tribes or the Spanish in 1898, but hardly up to European standards. To put it bluntly (American readers, keep calm here!) the Germans thought the United States was so feeble that they didn’t particularly care even if America did come into the war.
  • The U-boats will sink the Americans anyway. The Germans reckoned their U-boats would be able to sink so many American troopships that America would hardly be able to get any men to the Western Front.
  • The Mexicans will make mincemeat of the Americans. The Mexico plot wasn’t as odd as it might seem. An attack on the American homeland, the Germans thought, might cause the United States to keep more troops at home rather than sending them to Europe. Mexico was a good country to approach because it was going through a period of radical revolution and civil war, and the United States had tried – not very successfully – to intervene. In 1914 the United States had occupied the port of Veracruz, and two years later Wilson sent General Pershing into Mexico with a large force of troops to seize hold of the Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa, who’d launched a brief raid into the American state of New Mexico in search of supplies for his men. The Mexicans ran rings round them. The Germans reckoned the Mexicans might very well be interested in launching their own invasion of their overbearing northern neighbour.
  • remember.eps The Russians are out of the war and nothing can stop Germany from winning. The Russian Revolution broke out in February 1917 (see Chapter 15 for more about this) and the Eastern Front virtually collapsed. The Germans reckoned they’d soon be able to transfer thousands of troops from the Eastern Front to the Western Front, break through the Allied lines, take Paris and win the war – all before the United States knew which day it was.

All this shows that provoking the United States wasn’t quite as mad an idea as you might think, although it’s hard to see that deliberately getting a country the size of the United States to declare war on you is ever a sensible idea. Even so, the Germans had badly miscalculated. Each one of their assumptions proved to be wrong:

  • The American army could quickly get a lot bigger, and it did. (The Germans had made exactly the same miscalculation about the British army at the start of the war. Some people never learn.)
  • The British were developing effective weapons to destroy U-boats. The Germans wouldn’t be able to stop American troopships getting through after all.
  • Mexico very sensibly decided not to have anything to do with the German plans to invade the United States.
  • Although the Eastern Front did indeed collapse and the Germans did move their troops west, they just weren’t strong enough to win the war quickly – Chapter 16 shows why.

When we win: Wilson’s Fourteen Points

Declaring war presented the United States with a big problem: what would it want to gain if – as seemed entirely possible – it emerged on the winning side? Wilson consolidated his thoughts about this question into a set of Fourteen Points that he announced in January 1918. His points made clear what he thought had caused the war in the first place and what the Allies could do to make sure these things never caused any trouble again.

remember.eps Wilson’s Fourteen Points fitted into three main categories:

  • General points:
    • Future international agreements should be open for everyone to know about, with no more of the secret diplomacy that had caused the war.
    • Everyone should have complete freedom of the seas, with no danger of merchant ships being sunk by submarines or warships.
    • International trade should be completely free.
    • All countries should disarm.
    • The future of colonial territories should be decided impartially, taking into account the colonised people’s wishes as well as those of their rulers.
  • Points about specific countries:
    • Russia should be left to sort out its own future.
    • The Germans should get out of Belgium.
    • The Germans should get out of France and give Alsace-Lorraine back.
    • Austria-Hungary should give its Italian-speaking lands to Italy.
    • Austria-Hungary should also allow all its different peoples to set up their own states.
    • The Balkan states should be restored and their frontiers and territorial integrity guaranteed, giving Serbia access to the sea.
    • The Ottoman Empire should allow its non-Turkish peoples to set up their own states and keep the Dardanelles open for everyone to use.
    • Poland should be liberated, with internationally agreed borders.
  • A League of Nations: A special international association should be created to solve international disputes in the future.

To the Great Powers in Europe, Wilson’s Fourteen Points seemed rather ambitious and not very realistic. At home, however, they did reassure Americans that the country wasn’t going to war to get hold of anyone else’s territory, and that after the war was over the world was indeed going to be a much safer and more peaceful place.

All the Americans had to do now was win the war.

Gearing Up for Action: A Nation at War

The last time the United States had geared itself up for a major war had been when the Civil War broke out back in 1861, so by 1917 the Americans were a bit out of practice in how to set about it. They had a whole army to recruit (see Figure 15 in the insert section) and train, methods of trench warfare to learn from scratch, weapons and equipment to get hold of, and the whole question of how to transport their troops over to Europe and what they’d be doing when they got there to work out. As if that wasn’t enough, they also had to raise money, keep their factories and farms going while their young men were away and generally get the whole country involved in the war effort. Doing all this was never going to be easy, and for the first few months the United States’ war effort was pretty chaotic. No one knew exactly what they needed to do or who should be doing what.

Apart from a small U-boat raid in Massachusetts, the Germans pretty much left the Americans alone after the declaration of war. They thought the Americans were doing a splendid job of hampering their own war effort and didn’t need any German help!

There’s no place like the home front

The Europeans had needed to gear their peoples up for war right from the start (Chapter 12 has the details), and Americans also soon realised that the war would be won or lost on the home front. To fight the war a country needed money and labour, and it was up to people at home to provide both. (Food was just as vital to the war effort at home; Chapter 12 looks at how America fared here.)

Money

Wars are phenomenally expensive and governments always have trouble paying for them. They usually borrow heavily and raise people’s taxes, but the American government also sold Liberty Bonds, which were a form of government borrowing in order to pay for war materials, but borrowing from ordinary people instead of from international finance. People would buy bonds from the government and the government would pay them back interest at a fixed percentage each year until the end of the war – when, in theory, they’d get the original price back. The more bonds you bought, the more interest you’d get and the more money you’d make from supporting the war. (The government made even more money from bonds by charging tax on people’s income from the interest – in effect making them pay for having loaned their own money in the first place. Clever, eh?)

The first sale of Liberty Bonds wasn’t a great success, so the government upped the rate of interest and began promoting them more vigorously. A special Committee on Public Information put out propaganda posters urging people to do their bit for the war by buying Liberty Bonds, especially if they weren’t able to do much in any other way. Film stars led Liberty Bond drives in front of crowds and cameras to proclaim that it was every citizen’s patriotic duty to buy as many bonds as he could. Even boy and girl scouts sold Liberty Bonds: the government reckoned no one could walk by these earnest young people and refuse to buy from them, and by and large it was right.

Liberty Bonds had one problem that the government didn’t advertise: the government wasn’t only using the bonds to pay for the American war, but also to finance American loans to the Allies. After the war, the Europeans weren’t able to repay their debts and so many Liberty Bond holders never got their money back.

Labour

Like the food supply, control of the workforce was essential to winning the war. That meant the government would have to deal with the two main labour unions:

  • American Federation of Labour (AFL): The moderate AFL was led by the veteran unionist Sam Gompers. Gompers assured the government that the AFL supported the war and would support the government in whatever measures it needed to take in order to win it, especially letting women take over the jobs the men had left behind them. This was just what the government wanted to hear, and Sam Gompers was taken onto the Council of National Defense that was overseeing the war effort at home.
  • The International Workers of the World (IWW): Very different to the moderate AFL, the IWW (nicknamed ‘the Wobblies’) was a radical socialist organisation committed to world revolution. Like other socialist movements around the world, the IWW denounced the war as a quarrel among international capitalists that would only benefit the rich, and it said working people should have nothing to do with it.

    Many Americans thought the IWW’s opposition to the war was profoundly unpatriotic, especially after the Russian Revolution broke out in February 1917. Various groups, including many employers and even a branch of the Ku Klux Klan, arranged violent attacks on IWW meetings and some IWW members were killed. In 1917 the US Department of Justice organised a series of raids on IWW meetings by federal agents and many members were arrested and given long prison sentences.

The great majority of America’s working people supported the war. However some, including American socialists and communists, remained strongly opposed to it. At the end of the war, many of these radical opponents of the war were arrested in a big swoop operation organised by the Attorney General, Mitchell Palmer.

With so many men going off to fight, America’s women had to come forward to fill the gaps in the factories and in the fields. The war provided a huge opportunity for women in the United States and the other countries to explore types of work they’d never have got a chance to try in peacetime. (You can look at how the war affected the lives of women in Chapter 13.)

Why we fight

The American government reckoned that, given how strong isolationist feeling had been before the war (see the earlier section ‘Don’t go there! America’s isolationists’), Americans needed to have a good idea of why they were in the war and what they were fighting against. After all, the problems of Belgium or Bosnia-Herzegovina seemed a very long way from Wisconsin or Kansas.

To this end, the government put out posters showing the Germans and their allies as vicious, inhuman brutes who would dominate the world unless they were stopped. The government also deliberately suggested that German militarism might even endanger the United States itself. It organised big public meetings with flags and military bands to explain why the United States had gone to war and what ordinary Americans could do to help.

Of course, the most important thing men could do was join the army.

The Yanks Are Coming!

The famous American marching song ‘Over There!’ sums up the American approach to the First World War: ‘The Yanks are coming,’ it proclaims, ‘And we won’t come back till it’s over Over There!’ In other words, Americans were going to war to sort out the mess the Europeans had got themselves into, they’d stay till the job was done and then they’d come home.

You’re in the army now

From the moment that the United States entered the war, it was clear that the government would have to introduce conscription, known as the Draft, to bring the army up to fighting strength.

Rich or poor, you’re in!

Years before, during the Civil War, those who had enough money had been able to buy their way out of the army by paying for a substitute to take their place. This time the Draft was to be run on more democratic lines and it wouldn’t be possible for young men from well-to-do families to dodge it.

Under the Selective Service Act, young men of military age were registered with local registration boards, who then started selecting at random from among the young, unmarried men on their lists. The very first name was drawn by a blindfolded secretary of war. The first draft brought in 2.8 million men; later drafts brought in married men. With the existing army, Marines and National Guard, by the end of 1918 the United States was looking at a total fighting force of something like 4 million men: that was more than enough to strengthen the exhausted British and French.

Fight for liberty and equality! Sorry – whites only

diditreallyhappen_fmt.eps Even though black soldiers had fought very well back in the Civil War, most American generals didn’t want them fighting alongside white soldiers in the First World War. They could only serve in support roles.

The movement calling for civil rights for black Americans was getting going around the time of the First World War, and its leader, WEB Du Bois, called on President Wilson to let black Americans fight for their country. However, too many American generals thought black people were simply unable to fight as well as white people.

Two divisions of black soldiers were put together, though only one – the 92nd – fought together as a division: the other, the 93rd, was split up into different units. The French, who thought highly of black troops (they had their very good Senegalese troops fighting with them) specifically asked for the 92nd to fight alongside them. Unfortunately, it didn’t do very well in battle. The reason was a wonderfully circular argument: American generals had no confidence in black soldiers, so they didn’t bother training them properly, so they did badly in battle, so American generals had no confidence in them.

The American army was still segregated along racial lines in the Second World War. It wasn’t really until the Vietnam War that white Americans finally got rid of the idea that people’s ethnic identity determined whether or not they could fight.

Lafayette – we are here!

The American entry into the war was almost the only good news the Allies had in 1917 (find out why in Chapter 15), so it was important to make the most of it. Maximum publicity and razzmatazz was generated by the news, so as to cheer up people in the Allied countries and dismay people in Germany and its allies. American ‘doughboys’ (the origins of the term are unknown) in their distinctive ‘Canadian Mountie’ hats staged spectacular parades through Paris, fast marching (which showed they were fresh and strong) or cleverly making out patterns of the Statue of Liberty or the Stars and Stripes.

It was particularly important that American troops were landing in France because a young French nobleman, the Marquis de Lafayette, had crossed the Atlantic with a band of volunteers and had fought alongside George Washington during the War of Independence. Now it was time for the United States to return the favour. ‘Lafayette,’ as one banner the American troops carried proclaimed, ‘we are here!’

Learning the hard way

By 1918 American troops were arriving in France at the rate of 10,000 a day. The Allied leaders were thinking of sending American units in wherever the British or French were under-strength, but the American commander, General Pershing, was determined to keep the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) together as a single unit under his command.

diditreallyhappen_fmt.eps Pershing couldn’t ignore his allies, though. Despite their numbers, the Americans were still much less experienced than their British and French allies, had almost no military equipment and depended on supplies from Britain and France for their tanks, machine guns, artillery and so on. For example, American troops went into action wearing distinctive British ‘soup plate’ helmets and American pilots had to learn to fly French planes. Moreover, Pershing insisted on sending his men into battle in huge frontal assaults on the enemy lines. The British and French had long stopped launching those, because of the heavy casualties. The Americans soon found the same thing happened when they attacked.

remember.eps In the spring of 1918 the Germans launched their big offensive in the west and broke through the Allied line (Chapter 16 has all the details). In the emergency and Allied counter-attack that followed, Pershing realised he’d have to allow American troops to be sent into action where they were needed, even if doing so meant breaking up the AEF and even though it often meant American troops were serving under non-American command. The Americans were very quickly learning the harsh realities of the First World War.

Into battle

The Americans’ first real taste of fighting on the Western Front came in the German spring offensive in 1918, when in June they fought with the French in a major counter-offensive at Chateau Thierry in the Second Battle of the Marne (see Chapter 16 for more on what was happening in 1918) and when, in July, four units of the AEF fought alongside the Australians under Sir John Monash.

The first battle in which the Americans went into action in their own right, rather than supporting one of the other armies, came at St-Mihiel, which was part of an Allied offensive on the rivers Meuse and Argonne. The attack was a success (see Figure 11-1), though many of the Germans managed to fall back safely. However, the Americans found the follow-up attack two weeks later much harder than they’d expected. (Chapter 16 looks at what else was happening in 1918, after the Americans joined the war.)

The Americans had arrived, but the war was very far from over.

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© Imperial War Museums (HU 56409)

Figure 11-1: Americans in St-Mihiel change ‘Hinden-burgstrasse’ to ‘Wilson USA’ to celebrate their success against the Germans.