Unknown Soldiers

The American Expeditionary Forces in Memory and Remembrance

Mark A. Snell

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781612776088
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The Great War remembered

"This book is not a history of World War I, nor is it a history of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) on the Western Front. Rather, it is a collection of essays that examines how the wartime generation and those that followed have remembered or commemorated individuals, groups, and military organizations that comprised the AEF."
—from the Preface

When the United States declared war in April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson sent the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) under the command of General John Pershing to the Western Front. After the war, Pershing became the head of the American Battle Monuments Commission, the new government agency that commemorated the AEF's exploits.

The essays comprising Unknown Soldiers are divided into three sections: "Remembering the AEF, " "Soldiers and Their Units in Battle and Beyond, " and "The AEF in Popular Memory." The first section provides an overview of how Americans and the government have remembered, commemorated, and interpreted the history of the AEF, its battles, and its soldiers. The four essays in the second section shed light on how the doughboys fought, how they interacted with Allied soldiers, how the war shaped their postwar careers and memories, and how heroic feats became the stuff of myth and legend. The last section explores how the AEF has been remembered through popular literature, film, and music.

This collection draws on primary sources from previously unheard voices, including memoirs, autobiographies, official records, and oral histories, to present the coherent story of the AEF's experience and the memories they evoked. Unknown Soldiers will be a welcome addition to World War I literature and a solid addition to the fields of military history and the history of memory.

PART 1

REMEMBERING THE AEF

“The Price Was Made and the Price Was Paid”

Grandpa’s Scar and Other Memories of the AEF

Mark A. Snell

I never knew my maternal grandfather and, based on what my grandmother told me, I am not sure if I would have wanted to meet him. Grandpa abandoned my grandmother and her two-year-old daughter in 1923 for parts unknown—worse yet, he illegally remarried despite the absence of a divorce decree. Nonetheless, I still had a tad of admiration for the old fellow because of his honorable service in the First World War. When I was young, my grandma told me that her husband had been wounded and gassed in the great Argonne battle. She even described his nasty-looking scar, left by a German shell fragment. A child, I had no idea where the Argonne was or even when the battle was fought. However, I never forgot that my grandfather had spilled blood there; maybe the trauma from his battle wounds had adversely affected his mental stability, perhaps even his sense of manhood. Maybe, just maybe, grandpa left his wife and child because he was too shell-shocked to cope with his family responsibilities.

I have no personal memories of my grandfather, only what has been passed down to me. Those are ugly and ragged except for that one “honorable” moment in his life: he had served his country in the Great War, and he had paid for that service with his blood. Unfortunately, I later learned that even that moment was a fabrication. According to his Veterans Administration records, the scar grandma remembered was from a hernia operation, and his only other wartime malady was a bout of gonorrhea. Not only had he not fought in the Argonne Forest, he had never even left the country: his entire stint in the military was as a sheet-metal worker in the Army Air Service on Long Island, New York.¹

Several decades and academic degrees later, I found myself leading a tour of the Belleau Wood battlefield, near Château-Thierry, France. There, on June 6, 1918, the U.S. Marine Corps suffered what would be the bloodiest day in its history until the sacrifice at Tarawa Atoll a quarter of a century later. There were several former and retired marines in our group. Some were quite intimate with the details of the battle, while others only knew that Belleau Wood is an important part of Marine Corps heritage, as significant as Iwo Jima, Chosin Reservoir, and Khe Sahn. They gathered around the granite Marine Corps memorial for a photograph; some filled small vials with the sacred soil of the Bois de la Brigade de Marine; all drank from the “Bulldog Fountain” at an old chateau in the village of Belleau. Their collective memory, cultivated during three months of boot camp at the Parris Island or San Diego recruit depots, told them that Belleau Wood is hallowed ground, a place sanctified by the combat deaths of young marines so many years ago. Somehow, they sensed, it was their duty to remember what had happened there.

In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a place well known in American history, a small marker sits in front of a memorial tree planted fifty years after World War I by veterans who had been posted to Camp Colt, which in 1918 served as a training ground for the fledgling Tank Corps. Located on the terrain where Pickett’s Charge had occurred in 1863, the sprawling camp was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower, the recipient of a temporary promotion, was not happy to be in command of a stateside training camp while his contemporaries fought in France. His own memory of the First World War would be much different than those of three other officers of his generation—Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur, Colonel George C. Marshall, and Colonel George Patton—who distinguished themselves as part of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). The marker and the tree go unnoticed by the millions of visitors who come to Gettysburg to learn about an earlier war. If anything, the tree obstructs the visitor’s view as he or she stands on Cemetery Ridge and tries to imagine the Confederate legions charging toward the gaping muzzles of the Union cannons.

Since the premiere of the film Sergeant York in 1941, several generations of Americans have watched Gary Cooper’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Alvin York, the most famous U.S. soldier of the First World War. In some ways, Cooper has become the American icon of a long-forgotten war: begrimed, dressed in his doughboy uniform, and gobbling out turkey calls—which never happened except in the mind of the film’s director—to lure unsuspecting German soldiers from the security of their trenches. At the movie’s end, we learned how the people of Tennessee gave York and his new bride a house and bottom land in appreciation for his heroic exploits. But the real story is that York still had to pay for the land and build the house; he was responsible for the mortgage, and he almost lost his farm to bill collectors. Today, Alvin York’s home is a Tennessee State Historic Site, where visitors can buy T-shirts and coffee mugs decorated with York’s portrait or tacky plastic cheese cutters emblazoned with his signature. When I visited there several years ago, one of the park rangers at the site was York’s son, Andrew Jackson York, who also owned a used-car lot that sits adjacent to the historic site.

History does not spring from dust, nor is it static. Families, institutions, and nations rely on mechanisms of culture and oral tradition to forge and to preserve an identity born from the past. It is difficult, however, to pinpoint how that identity is determined and by whom. My academic background has given me a much different perspective on the First World War than I had possessed when my only knowledge of the conflict was what I had learned from my grandmother and Gary Cooper. The young marines making pilgrimages to Belleau Wood in most cases know little about the war, but they do understand that the battle fought there has become known as one of the Marine Corps’ greatest moments of valor. Likewise, the thirty-fourth president of the United States certainly had a much different perspective on World War I than did Douglas MacArthur. While MacArthur was commanding an infantry brigade in the 42nd Division and earning a brigadier general’s star, Eisenhower was relegated to a battlefield of the past, on another continent.

Unlike Eisenhower and my grandfather, York, Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, and the marines who fought at Belleau Wood were members of the AEF, the largest army the United States had yet raised. It would experience active, sustained combat for only five and a half months, yet it would suffer extremely high casualties. The AEF helped turn the tide of the war in favor of the Allies—some even say it was the deciding factor.² In the United States’ year and a half engagement in the conflict, more than 116,000 of its soldiers, sailors, and marines died in combat or from disease or accidents. Those who survived came home to a country that offered them all of its blessings of prosperity and opportunity—but only if they were white. The World War, indeed, was a most terrible conflagration, so terrible that it was considered the war to end all wars, yet Woodrow Wilson and the U.S. Senate failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles or allow the United States to join the League of Nations. Even U.S. membership in that largely ineffectual organization, however, would not have guaranteed a check to German and Japanese aggression.

In the years after their return home, the veterans witnessed one of their unknown comrades buried in a place of honor in Arlington National Cemetery, and citizens across the country debated the best ways to commemorate those men (and the few women) who had made the ultimate sacrifice. The society that the doughboys left in 1917 and 1918 changed quickly after the war ended. The consumption and sale of alcoholic beverages was prohibited beginning in 1919, women had been given the right to vote in 1920, and an era of prosperity seemingly loomed ahead. At the same time, it remained an age of racism, ethnic discrimination, corporate scandal, organized crime, and economic instability. Shortly after his return, one veteran wrote, “I know how we all cried to get back to the States. But now that we are here, I must admit for myself at least that I am lost and somehow strangely lonesome. These our own United States are truly artificial and bare. There is no color here, nothing to suffer for or laugh at.”³

In the hard years after the 1929 stock market crash, the AEF veterans again faced hardships, serious economic and social problems. When thousands of these veterans marched on Washington in 1932 to demand early payments of their government bonuses, Douglas MacArthur, one of the generals who had led them in combat, now used Regular Army troops to push them out of the nation’s capital.

Mothers and wives of fallen soldiers made pilgrimages abroad to their loved ones’ graves during the 1930s as the American Battle Monuments Commission—of which Dwight Eisenhower was an officer—was putting the finishing touches on memorials to honor the battles of the AEF. Yet the same U.S. government that footed the bill for these overseas trips, as well as the elaborate memorials, also forced African American mothers and wives to make their journeys in segregation.

By the autumn of 1934, more than 100,000 U.S. disabled WWI veterans had died, while nearly 40,000 were still hospitalized and more than 9,300 were patients in veterans’ homes and hospitals.⁴ Surviving veterans would suffer through the Great Depression only to send off their own sons and daughters to fight in a much bloodier conflict, a war that was in many ways an extension of the one they themselves had fought two and a half decades earlier. Indeed, literature and films of the 1920s and 1930s for the most part portrayed the Great War as a folly—until, on the eve of U.S. entry into the Second World War, Sergeant York became a national blockbuster.

Today we see few reminders of the AEF. Doughboy statues still decorate town squares, but few passersby stop to look, and fewer still even know that the bronze soldiers pay tribute to the Americans who fought in World War I. Americans who visit overseas battlefields and cemeteries are more interested in Omaha Beach and the Battle of the Bulge than Belleau Wood and the Argonne Forest. The seventy-fifth anniversary of the United States’ entry into World War I came and went without much notice, primarily because the fiftieth anniversary of World War II overshadowed it.

It is doubtful that the throngs of people who attended the dedication of the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., in 2004 even noticed that only a few blocks away stands the much more modest AEF Memorial (which is really a memorial more to John J. Pershing than the men who served under his command). On the reverse side of the memorial’s east wall Pershing’s tribute to the AEF is inscribed: “In their devotion, their valor, and in the loyal fulfillment of their obligations, the officers and men of the American Expeditionary Forces have left a heritage of whom those who follow may ever be proud.” For the most part, however, that heritage has been forgotten.

The history of the AEF actually predates the First World War. From March 1916, through February 1917, John J. Pershing commanded an expeditionary force of some 14,000 regulars in Mexico in pursuit of the bandit Pancho Villa, while another force of 140,000 regulars and mobilized national guardsmen patrolled the U.S.-Mexican border. Although Villa never was captured, this mission, called the Punitive Expedition, provided the American soldiers with a wealth of field experience, and it gave Pershing the visibility that would propel him to command the AEF once the United States entered the World War.⁵ On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. In less than two months, Pershin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• PART 1: REMEMBERING THE AEF
• PART 2: SOLDIERS AND THEIR UNITS IN BATTLE AND BEYOND
• PART 3: THE AEF IN POPULAR MEMORY
• Contributors
• Index