Doughboys on the Great War

How American Soldiers Viewed Their Military Experience

Edward A. Gutièrrez

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780700624447, 9780700619900
• eBook ISBN: 9780700620357
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

“It is impossible to reproduce the state of mind of the men who waged war in 1917 and 1918,” Edward Coffman wrote in The War to End All Wars. In Doughboys on the Great War the voices of thousands of servicemen say otherwise. The majority of soldiers from the American Expeditionary Forces returned from Europe in 1919. Where many were simply asked for basic data, veterans from four states—Utah, Minnesota, Connecticut, and Virginia—were given questionnaires soliciting additional information and “remarks.” Drawing on these questionnaires, completed while memories were still fresh, this book presents a chorus of soldiers’ voices speaking directly of the expectations, motivations, and experiences as infantrymen on the Western Front in World War I.

What was it like to kill or maim German soldiers? To see friends killed or maimed by the enemy? To return home after experiencing such violence? Again and again, soldiers wrestle with questions like these, putting into words what only they can tell. They also reflect on why they volunteered, why they fought, what their training was, and how ill-prepared they were for what they found overseas. They describe how they interacted with the civilian populations in England and France, how they saw the rewards and frustrations of occupation duty when they desperately wanted to go home, and—perhaps most significantly—what it all added up to in the end. Together their responses create a vivid and nuanced group portrait of the soldiers who fought with the American Expeditionary Forces on the battlefields of Aisne-Marne, Argonne Forest, Belleau Wood, Chateau-Thierry, the Marne, Metz, Meuse-Argonne, St. Mihiel, Sedan, and Verdun during the First World War.

The picture that emerges is often at odds with the popular notion of the disillusioned doughboy. Though hardened and harrowed by combat, the veteran heard here is for the most part proud of his service, service undertaken for duty, honor, and country. In short, a hundred years later, the doughboy once more speaks in his own true voice.

1

The Great Adventure

The war had been raging in Europe for almost three and a half years before the doughboys arrived in France—brave, eager, and naïve. Similar to most of their European brethren, American men had become intoxicated with excitement at their country’s declaration of war.¹ The horrors of Verdun and the Somme did not deter these raw young recruits from what they thought would be a great adventure—a semester abroad, for some. The heroic legacy of warfare was already present in America and fostered a sense of exhilaration; the Civil War literature of the time, the short and victorious Spanish-American War, and the propaganda machine of the British and US governments augmented the Victorian image of romantic warfare.

The Common Bond

During the years between the Civil War and the Great War, newspapers, churches, and schools emphasized nationalism and the importance of war. Americans lauded their generals and soldiers—to die in battle was glorious. The country viewed the Spanish-American War as an opportunity for patriotism and honor. Civil War veterans, especially those from the South, urged young men to demonstrate their bravery and display their heroism by joining the military. Veterans from both the North and the South told tales to the younger generation that extolled the rewards of serving one’s country. While not declaring their love of war or killing, these men were proud to be Civil War veterans. James Marten notes, “Their service defined them, made them different, provided unique rewards and self-esteem beyond anything most Gilded Age Americans could muster.”²

During the 1880s, tributes to and the memorialization of the Civil War and its veterans increased. Memorial Day events (the first was held 1 May 1865 in Charleston, South Carolina, to honor dead Union prisoners of war), gatherings of veterans, monument construction, and the publication of books and magazines all commemorated the conflict. One of the most popular Gilded Age books was Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs. Americans had purchased 300,000 sets of these books four months before the first volume’s delivery date.³ Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, periodicals and novels helped revive interest in the war. Century Magazine printed the “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” series between 1884 and 1887, which later influenced novelist Stephen Crane.

On 30 May 1888, during a Memorial Day address at Seven Pines National Cemetery in Sandston, Virginia, orator Theodore W. Bean stated, “The great fatherhood of our country . . . left a progeny North and South, whose loyalty to leaders, whose bravery in battle, whose industry and indurance, demonstrates the glory of our enheritance, and in the grand battles fought between ourselves, however unfortunate in some respects, reveals a manhood of the Republic, as now reunited, capable and willing to protect and defend the Union against the political powers of the earth.”⁴ In an 1890 address to veterans of the Army of Tennessee, General William Tecumseh Sherman compared Civil War soldiers to the knights of old: “There is nothing in life more beautiful than the soldier,” he declared, and “a knight errant with steel casque, lance in hand, has always commanded the admiration of men and women.”⁵ Two years later, at a Memorial Day ceremony in Dubuque, Iowa, a speaker noted that Civil War veterans “remind us that with all the greed there is in this world, the holy leaven of manliness, true manliness may yet be found.”⁶ The admiration for Civil War (and Spanish-American War) veterans inspired young men to serve as doughboys. The romantic vision, in the words of James McPherson, stirred “the quest for adventure, for excitement, for the glory to be won by ‘whipping’ the enemy and returning home as heroes to an adoring populace.”⁷ These ideals impelled countless young men to follow their sense of duty and serve in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and the First World War.

As a captain in the 12th Connecticut Volunteers during the Civil War, John William De Forest participated in the capture of New Orleans, the Port Hudson campaign, and the Battle of Cedar Creek in Virginia. When asked whether he “liked the business” of war, De Forest stated, “I did not like it, except in some expansive moments when this or that stirring success filled me with excitement.” Fighting, he continued, “is just tolerable; you can put up with it; but you can’t honestly praise it . . . it is much like being in a rich cholera district in the height of the season.” De Forest called on his own experience as a veteran to answer the question: why do men fight in war? He declared, “‘Self-preservation is the first law of nature.’ The man who does not dread to die or to be mutilated is a lunatic. The man who, dreading these things, still faces them for the sake of duty and honor is a hero.”⁸ Men who fought in the Great War were inspired by the courage of their Civil War ancestors. But under the stress of modern warfare, the doughboys’ courage was tested. They discovered that courage meant overcoming fear and completing the task of a soldier.

On 4 July 1913 President Woodrow Wilson spoke at an event in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, commemorating the semicentennial anniversary of the Civil War. In his oration, Wilson memorialized “the splendid valour, the manly devotion of the men” who had fought on the fields of Gettysburg and praised “the high recklessness of exalted devotion which does not count the cost . . . the blood and sacrifice of multitudes of unknown men lifted to a great stature in the view of all generations by knowing no limit to their manly willingness to serve.”⁹

How many future doughboys heard or read Wilson’s words and took them to heart when, a year later, the war in Europe began? The “splendid valour” and “manly willingness to serve” of the Civil War soldiers inspired thousands of young men to prove their own heroism on the battlefields of France. These words could pertain to the doughboys of 1917 as well as to their Civil War counterparts. Bell Irvin Wiley observes, “Yanks and Rebs were far more alike than not. For the common soldiers of both sides the qualities that stand out were: pride in themselves and their families; a strong sense of duty; courage; a capacity for suffering; a will and strength to endure; and, for most, a devotion to country and cause which exceeded that of the folk at home.”¹⁰

The correspondence of Civil War soldiers from both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line attests to the characteristics Wiley defined. In August 1861 seventeen-year-old Day Elmore enlisted in the 36th Illinois Infantry. In spite of being wounded and taken prisoner, he reenlisted. In a letter to his father, Elmore explained his motivation: “I can not Express my self so I will only say that my whole soul is wrapt up in this our countrys caus I ought to be at school but I feel that I am only doeing my Duty to my self and you, Pa.” Elmore died from wounds he received at Franklin, Tennessee, in 1864, three months before his twenty-first birthday.¹¹ When J. T. Terrell’s mother suggested he acquire a substitute to replace him in the Confederate army, the soldier from Aberdeen, Mississippi, declared, “I can say I do not want any as I think it is the duty of every man to bear an equal part in this struggle.” After serving for three years and spending time in a Union prison camp, Terrell reenlisted in 1864. He was killed by a sharpshooter while on watch outside Atlanta on 22 August 1864.¹² The deaths of Elmore, Terrell, and 752,000 other Civil War soldiers left an immeasurable imprint on Victorian America. As a result, the doughboy had a strong connection with Billy Yank and Johnny Reb. The American soldiers of 1861–1865 and 1917–1918 fought for the same reasons—above all, duty.

“He Was a Man”

The literary works of Stephen Crane, Oliver Optic (pseudonym of William Taylor Adams), and others made a deep impression of the warrior ethos on the future doughboys. Alice Fahs concludes that the books left “an underlying consensus that the war had been—and should remain in memory—a white, masculinist experience in American life.”¹³ Crane’s Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage sparked young men’s quest for combat the moment it first appeared in a serialized version in newspapers in 1894; it was published as a book a year later. The novel chronicles the war experiences of young soldier Henry Fleming and his path to manhood. Crane places readers in the midst of violence—connecting manhood and war. When Fleming engages in a skirmish with Confederate troops and fights with a fierceness he did not realize he possessed, his lieutenant, who “seemed drunk with fighting,” called out to him, “‘By heavens, if I had ten thousand wild cats like you I could tear th’ stomach outa this war in less’n a week.’” Fleming’s fellow soldiers “now looked upon him as a war devil.”¹⁴ War transforms Fleming, as described at the novel’s conclusion: “He felt a quiet manhood, non-assertive but of sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no more quail before his guides wherever they should point. He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.”¹⁵

Some critics argue that The Red Badge of Courage is an antiwar novel, a story saturated with irony and full of deception. This ironic interpretation became stylish in the 1960s and continues today.¹⁶ To these critics, Henry Fleming is no more than a deluded, misguided young man lost in his own fantasies, simply a pawn in a symbolic battle.¹⁷ As Michael C. C. Adams suggests, “The fact is that The Red Badge is about how boys achieve manhood by facing violence.”¹⁸

Henry Fleming is a boy who, like Crane himself, dreamed of war. Crane grew up in the post–Civil War era; he met many veterans and listened to their stories, absorbing the details they imparted. As a young man, he read a series on the Civil War published by Century Magazine between 1884 and 1887, but he found that the articles lacked color and human feelings. He complained to his friend, Corwin Linson, “I wonder that some of these fellows don’t tell how they felt in those scraps! They spout eternally of what they did but they are emotionless as rocks!”¹⁹ His childhood dreams, his fascination with history, and the Century Magazine articles sparked Crane’s interest in writing his own Civil War story, in which he chooses a specific field of combat and describes the scenes with stark realism. When D. Appleton & Company published The Red Badge of Courage in its complete form, it was well received. In a letter to John N. Hilliard in January 1896, Crane wrote about his “meager success” as an author and noted, “My chiefest desire was to write plainly and unmistakably, so that all men (and some women) might read and understand. That to my mind is good writing.”²⁰ In another letter to Hilliard the following year, Crane expressed his pleasure at the positive reviews his novel had received in England (where he lived at the time): “The big reviews here praise it for just what I intended it to be, a psychological portrayal of fear. . . . I have never been in a battle, but I believe that I got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field, or else fighting is a hereditary instinct, and I wrote intuitively; for the Cranes were a family of fighters in the old days, and in the Revolution every member did his duty.”²¹

Although Crane never experienced combat, he did pursue adventure, serving as a war correspondent during the Greco-Turkish War in 1897 and the Spanish-American War in 1898. At Velestino, where the Turks assaulted the Greeks, fellow war correspondent John Bass asked, “Crane, what impresses you most in this affair?” The author answered, “Between the two great armies battling against each other the interesting thing is the mental attitude of the men.”²² In Cuba, while covering the Spanish-American War, Crane witnessed Colonel Theodore Roosevelt’s victory at Kettle Hill and saw the Rough Riders, the Regulars, and the 1st and 10th Cavalries push the Spanish from San Juan Hill. As a group of journalists watched the action unfold, someone yelled, “By God, there go our boys up the hill!” Crane wrote of the scene, “There is many a good American who would give an arm to get the thrill of patriotic insanity that coursed through us when we heard that yell.”²³

In The Red Badge of Courage, as well as his other war stories, Crane explores the “mental attitude” of his characters. In Crane’s short story “The Veteran,” published in 1896, an older, gray Henry Fleming enters a burning barn numerous times to rescue the trapped horses and cows. In contrast, the other men, fumbling with water buckets, are as terror-stricken as the animals. Crane describes one such man: “The Swede had been running to and fro babbling,” carrying an empty pail. Fleming saves the Swede by dragging him out of the barn. When the Swede remembers that two young colts are still trapped inside, Fleming braves the inferno and rushes back in to rescue the “poor little things.” The roof collapses on Fleming, killing him, and as the smoke and flames rise to the sky, Crane concludes, “Perhaps t...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “Sherman Was Right”
• 1 The Great Adventure
• 2 “Gimme da Gun”
• 3 Wooden Weapons
• 4 Across the Pond
• 5 The Supreme Test
• 6 “Would Not Take Anything for It”
• Conclusion: “If It Has to Come I Am Here”
• Appendix A. Unpacking the Source
• Appendix B. Biographies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Gallery
• Back Cover