American Expeditionary Force (World War I)

The American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) was the American Army serving in Europe during World War I, 1917-1918.

Presidential policy

"You're not going to send American soldiers over there, are you?" asked a Senator incredulously. Washington soon realized that economic support for the Allies would not be enough to defeat Germany. An American army would have to go "Over There" and fight. President Woodrow Wilson’s military policy was poorly thought out. Of all wartime presidents, he paid by far the least attention to military affairs, either before the war or during it. Wilson avoided as much as possible reading war plans, visiting camps or talking to his generals--or even looking at war maps. Baker and Wilson picked John J. Pershing as the commander of all American forces in Europe without meeting the man. Indeed, Pershing had only one meeting with the President before the war ended. The general expected to get some policy guidance about cooperation with the Allies, but Wilson ignored the issue and left Pershing to devise his own relations with Britain and France. Wilson always followed diplomatic issues very closely, and sometimes of course military matters were involved--as with the maneuvers to threaten Mexico, the expeditionary force to Russia, and the proceedings of the advisory Supreme War Council in London. The central issue of how to fight the war against Germany he studiously ignored. When the discussions turned to soldiers, weapons, strategies, tactics and timetables, his eyes glazed over and he let the War and Navy departments make all the decisions. His secretaries of War and Navy Newton Baker and Josephus Daniels were pacifists unfamiliar with military language or concepts. They largely ignored matters of strategy and policy, and limited themselves to supplying men and munitions. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt made all the policy decisions for the Navy Department, allowing Daniels to concentrate on ceremonies, party politics and publicity.

The American tradition of civilian control of the military demands that the appropriate civilians (the president, secretary of war and Congress) actively assume their responsibilities, especially in time of war. Wilson, thoroughly steeped in government and history, of course knew this. His delegation of his duties to the generals was an astonishing act that every subsequent president avoided. The main exception was Baker's decision to send the Army to the Western Front. Army planners at first had suggested an indirect attack on the wobbly Austro-Hungarian Empire through Greece. However logistics for a large army would be hard enough stretching to France, and quite impossible to go much further. More important, the Western Front was decisive; if France fell, the war would be over regardless, and Germany had to be defeated sooner or later. Baker insisted the main US role would be an American Expeditionary Force (AEF) fighting the Germans on the Western Front. .DQ

Absent civilian leadership, military decisions were left in the hands of the AEF commander, General Pershing. As a temporary major in the 10th Cavalry in 1898 he won fame leading black troops up San Juan Hill--and gained the nickname "Black Jack." President Roosevelt jumped him from captain to brigadier general in 1906, over the heads of 862 more senior officers-- testimonial to Pershing's impressive demeanor (and his powerful father-in-law, a leading republican Senator.) He had commanded 16,000 soldiers who in 1916 undertook a much publicized but unsuccessful chase of Pancho Villa through northern Mexico. Pershing had a command presence that officers and politicians alike appreciated. Although far less experienced than any of several hundred British or French generals, he was the best available, so Wilson and Baker put their prestige solidly behind him. Baker said he would give Pershing only two orders--"one to go to France and the other to come home, but that in the meantime his authority in France would be supreme."

Pershing's main qualification was his command presence. Ramrod straight, dedicated totally to the Army Way, he looked and talked like a man in command. He was at ease in dealing with senior Allied officials, and with civilian experts. Time and again he stood up to the field marshals and prime ministers, insisting that his Americans would be an independent battle force, and would not be used as piecemeal reinforcements for Allied units. Pershing's first year was consumed in planning and logistics, especially the establishment of training camps, supply dumps, and communications systems inside France. His overarching challenge in the first half of 1918 was how to get enough shipping to send millions of men and their arms "Over There" to France. While he had scant understanding of military strategy or tactics, Pershing did show superb organizational skills, and built a brilliant staff dedicated to efficiency. Indeed, it was more impressive and effective than the General Staff back in Washington.

Senior officers like James Harbord and Peyton March (chief of artillery) were models of American efficiency, as were mid-level staff officers like colonels Fox Conner and George Marshall. By contrast with the AEF staff, the General Staff back in Washington had entered the war with fewer than 20 officers (compared to 650 officers in the German General Staff in 1914, or 232 on the British), and the Chief of Staff, Hugh Scott, and his deputy and replacement Tasker Bliss were bogged down in minutia. They did not have the President's ear and they lacked control over the key bureaus like Ordnance and the Quartermaster Corps. Divided command led to deepening administrative chaos until March was brought back from France in March, 1918, becoming Chief of Staff with a free hand over all Army activities in the States, while Pershing remained supreme in Europe.

Pershing arrived in France unfamiliar with large-scale warfare as it had rapidly evolved on the Western Front. The War Department had, incredibly, made no studies of the Great War, of the new tactics and technologies, or of appropriate American responses. When Pershing went to look for secret reports, he discovered "the pigeonhole was empty." What information he did obtain came from helpful British officers, who hoped the Americans would serve as replacements inside experienced British divisions. Pershing did not ignore the advice, but he distrusted British motives and preferred to rely most heavily on American organizational skills, as developed in industry and at the fledgling War College. Knowledge of the new battlefield tactics was irrelevant, because he strongly opposed war of attrition and trench warfare generally. Pershing's solution to the Western Front was his doctrine of "Open Warfare." Savoring the flavor of the Indian Wars of 30 years earlier, it combined the firepower of the highly accurate Springfield rifle with the maneuverability of the infantryman; bayonets were much talked about. Europeans thought it resembled the mass attacks that had been mowed down so many times, but Pershing retorted that his riflemen were not going to be automatons but would use their own on-the-spot judgment, and would be trained to shoot down machine gunners. He demanded that training camps emphasize rifle marksmanship.

The folk hero of the war would be Alvin York, the backwoods Tennessee pacifist-turned-warrior, the sharpshooter who single handedly destroyed a German company. The superb 1940 movie "Sergeant York" remains the best American film about the war, as Gary Cooper in the title role brilliantly captured the Pershing doctrine of open warfare fought by individualistic Yanks with a rifle.

Raising a Vast Fighting Force

The population of the U.S. exceeded that of Britain and France combined, and by 1917 it had far more available healthy young men than all the powers combined. Wilson (who remembered the invaders who had burned and ravaged his beloved South in 1864-65) distrusted the regular Army, as did most Democrats. Few southerners, Democrats or ethnics were field officers (majors to colonels); very few were flag officers (generals and admirals). (The low-prestige enlisted ranks did include many ethnics and few Blacks and white southerners.) Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in 1913 had humiliated career soldiers by telling them they ought instead to be in respectable civilian occupations.

The Democrats who controlled the government placed their hopes on the American volunteer tradition, expecting that millions of patriots would spring to arms in the emergency. They ignored General Staff warnings (in 1916) that the volunteer system was "undemocratic, unreliable, inefficient and Extravagant." (In the Progressive Era, "inefficiency" and "waste" were always considered evil.)<ref. By contrast In World War II, the Navy, Marines and Air Force relied largely on volunteers, while the Army depended chiefly on draftees.</ref>

In 1916 Congress had expanded the Army to 175,000 men--about what Greece had. A fighting Army had to be 25 times larger: by war's end, 4.3 million soldiers were in uniform, plus a half-million in the Navy and Marines. Reliance on volunteers would indeed have been inefficient because it would have drawn essential managers, talented engineers and skilled machinists away from critical jobs--a formula for shutting down industrial production just when it was most urgently needed. Wilson finally reversed positions in March 1917 when ex-President Roosevelt (his great political enemy) publicly demanded to raise two elite divisions and lead them into battle, much like the Rough Riders regiment of 1898. Wilson vetoed Roosevelt's proposal and accepted the General Staff plan for conscription, with the option of volunteering left open. The first national draft was begun, shaped by Washington but administered by 119,000 local officials in 4,600 draft boards. It was the model of Progressive expertise. "The business now in hand is undramatic, practical, and of scientific definiteness and precision," said Wilson. Some 2.8 million doughboys were drafted, 400,000 entered as National Guardsmen, and 1.6 million (including nearly all sailors and Marines) were direct volunteers. The draft was compulsory in a sense, but it was so well organized that the vast majority voluntarily stepped forward. Apart from the far left, there was little overt resistance.

Doughboys

The "Doughboys" (as they called themselves) joined for patriotism and excitement. Some were aroused by the atrocity stories, others fought for democracy. Only a few clearly understood their motivations, like Lieutenant Philip Shoemaker, who fought "for freedom and justice to all":

"If I am fortunate enough to come home alive after the war, I will be able to handle any kind of job, a better man than any one that has not been in the war. If I don't come back, I will of first had a chance to see the country, have a good time and be an AMERICAN soldier in the World War."

"Don't worry about me," Elizabeth Lewis Knight assured her mother, "for this is an experience of a lifetime. There are many nurses [who] would give anything if they could be here."

The doughboys were a cross section of the entire population of young men; they served an average of 12 months. Half went to Europe, staying an average of 5.5 months. Only 34% of the enlisted men were assigned to combat specialties. This was the first industrial war, and the Army's "tail" was twice as long as its "teeth." One third of the men were assigned as laborers or service workers (including 80% of the blacks); 22% were mechanics and craftsmen; 12% held clerical or technical jobs. Col. George Patton observed, "It is remarkable how much easier these [drafted] men are to teach than the old soldiers we used to have. They had no brains at all. These men have plenty." Women enthusiastically volunteered for the Army and Navy Nurse Corps, and thousands served in hospitals in France (none of which were near the combat zone, though a few were raided by plane or hit by artillery.) The Navy and the Marines enlisted 11,000 women as clerks (coded "Yeoman-Female," they were nicknamed "yeomanettes"); they handled much of the paperwork and telephone traffic in France. Thousands of civilians (especially college youth) served overseas as volunteer ambulance drivers and Red Cross social workers.

Creating 200,000 Officers

America needed 200,000 officers to command its Army; it started with only 6,000 Regulars and 3,000 National Guardsmen. The generals who fought the war were nearly all West Pointers; most had also attended the staff college at Fort Leavenworth. Pershing insisted that youth and physical vigor made for the best leadership; he wanted his brigadier generals to be younger than 45 and in perfect shape. The major generals could be as old as 50 if they were in superb condition. Regular army officers were promoted rapidly; cadets who graduated from West Point in 1915 or 1916 routinely became temporary majors or lieutenant colonels by age 25. (They reverted to captain after the war, and if like Dwight Eisenhower they did not resign, they might take another 20 years to become a lieutenant colonel again.) Pershing and the regulars deeply distrusted the National Guard officers. No matter how talented they were, they rarely were promoted or allowed to command regulars.

Officers high and low attended special schools hurriedly set up in the states and in France, and modeled roughly after the Command and Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth. Commissions directly from civilian life went to 42,000 physicians, 2,000 chaplains and 26,000 other specialists. 25,000 commissions went to enlisted men. Finally, 96,000 men (mostly college educated) who passed rigid mental and physical tests were whisked through a 90-day training program that stressed offensive tactics. Lessons from the Western Front did not reach the camps quickly; Dwight D. Eisenhower recalled that he and other instructors relied on newspapers to learn about new tactics. These "Ninety-Day Wonders" then pinned on a lieutenant's bar and rushed off to command new draftees.

The most glamorous roles were the fliers, young officers in perfect physical condition who had survived intensive training programs. In every nation they were celebrated as knights of the modern age who single handedly did battle with the enemy. The "Ace" accolade given the pilots who shot down five enemy planes further built up their celebrity status. (A mere 4% of the pilots accounted for half the victories.) Down on the ground, train, train, train was the watchword. Most doughboys received seven months' training in the states, plus two months in France, before entering the front lines. Eight hundred French and British instructors helped a great deal--especially regarding gas and artillery. Pershing thought the French were defeatist and he replaced them with Yanks. He felt the British were right to stress bayonets and hand-to-hand fighting, but was alarmed at their neglect of marksmanship. The Europeans were too cautious, too defensive. To win the war the Americans would have to be much more aggressive.

Over There: The AEF in France, 1917-1918

Pershing decided that a hurried use of his army piecemeal would be less effective than a massive presence; furthermore the training could not be shortened, and a complex supply and logistics system had to be built. The French were impatient: "We expected to see two million cowboys throw themselves upon the Boches and we see only a few thousand workers building warehouses." Pershing's refusal to amalgamate his troops with British or French divisions meant the Yanks had to have their own sector.

The AEF sector was Lorraine, the southern part of the Western Front, because its supply line would not have to go through the clogged Paris region. Pershing's headquarters worked furiously day and night on logistics and on his plan for a great attack in spring 1919. Getting troops over was problem number one. By the summer of 1918 the doughboys poured into Europe at an incredible rate: a million and a half men arrived between April and October. The passenger ships they used were much faster than U-Boats, and none were sunk. Given the shortage of generals and trained staff officers, the divisions had to be twice the size of British or German divisions. Each contained about 1,000 officers and 27,000 men; another 12,000 doughboys and nurses served the division in support roles. Each division set up a training camp in France and drilled some more. After two months it went to a quiet sector of the front lines. After another month it was declared ready for battle. The training stressed the doctrine of open warfare, and familiarized the troops with their weapons. The bolt-action Springfield rifle that Pershing placed so much faith in was perhaps the best rifle of the war--fast, trouble-free, and highly accurate. American had helped invent the machine gun, but by 1917 lagged far behind the Europeans. Inventors in the States managed to leapfrog the state of the art, producing the highly effective Browning water-cooled heavy machine gun. It proved to be too good a weapon--Pershing refused to use it until late 1918, because he feared the Germans would capture one and copy it. Pershing did not want his riflemen to hide behind tanks, but he did allow experimental use of some lightly armored 7-ton French Renaults; they broke down repeatedly.

Europeans were incredulous at how fast an American division could use up supplies--600 tons a day. Lumber, horses, fodder and food were purchased locally. The Corps of Engineers built an entire railroad network and a road system to connect the French ports, the training camps, and the American sector of the front. One vast warehouse complex included 4.5 million square feet of covered storage and 225 miles of railroad track. The Medical Corps opened hospitals with 280,000 beds attended by 16,000 physicians, 8.500 Army nurses and tens of thousands of enlisted corpsmen. They had less work than everyone feared-- there were only 3,000 amputation cases, for example. To prevent the beds from filling up with venereal disease cases, Secretary Baker had his War Department launch strenuous--and successful-- efforts to eliminate prostitution around American camps both in the states and in France. Late in the war, the hospitals filled up with influenza cases, a part of the epidemic that killed millions of people across the globe. In all, 63,000 doughboys died from disease or accidents, a far lower rate per thousand than in previous wars.

The Navy War: Convoys Overcome the U-Boat Blockade

Preparedness efforts in 1916 resulted in an Army that was too small, and, paradoxically, a Navy that was too large. Caught up with the Mahanian doctrine of the decisive surface battle, the Navy sought and was given the budgeting for a "fleet second to none"--that is, a fleet larger than Britain's. The goal was to defend against the far-fetched notion of a simultaneous war against Britain and Japan. That was a "worst case" scenario that overlooked the real "worst case" of control of the Atlantic by German submarines. From 1916 to 1918, manpower expanded by a factor of 9, and Navy yards began building big ships. Even after 1917 the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral William Benson, seemed more troubled by the hypothetical long-term threat posed by Britain and Japan rather than the submarines that were torpedoing Allied ships.,ref> By contrast in World War II, Roosevelt, working closely with Churchill again, was committed to building up the British forces, to the point of transferring old destroyers and new airplanes to them, much to the dismay of US military leaders.</ref> He decided to keep most of his big ships out of European waters--and most of the Navy never saw action during the war. Benson's doctrine was faulty, but Admiral William Sims, US naval commander in London, correctly grasped the situation. In cooperation with Franklin Roosevelt, and with strong support from the British, including Munitions Minister Winston Churchill, Sims refocused naval strategy on the U-boat threat.

In strategic terms, the purpose of merchant shipping was to deliver so many tons of cargo per month. Convoys cut the flow of cargo in several ways. The ports could load only so many ships a day; loaded ships had to wait for the last ship to be loaded before sailing. The convoy moved at the speed of the slowest ship, and some ships lacked the navigational skills to stay in formation. The need to synchronize movement well in advance precluded merchants ships from adjusting quickly to particularized opportunities to move cargo from here to there.

The only advantage to convoys was that they got through. A single convoy of 30 ships was almost as hard for a U-boat to locate than a single ship. Therefore a convoy system meant there were far fewer targets that got spotted, and then they had armed escorts that could fight back. The Royal Navy, however, wanted to hoard its destroyers to protect its precious battleships. It made a strong argument using a paper-stone-scissors analogy. Submarines could sneak up on a big battleship and sink it with a torpedo, but the torpedo would probably miss a small destroyer. They could circle and sink subs with a new defensive weapon, the depth charges (drums of TNT set off by water pressure at a certain depth.) Finally the battleships with their heavy guns could sink destroyers from far away, but were too clumsy to circle and sink subs. A complete battle fleet therefore had to have a mix of all three ships, and to detach destroyers for convoy duty would gravely weaken the fleet. The admirals who wanted to hoard their destroyers for the battle fleet were wrong, and were overruled in 1917. Single merchant ships could not survive a year. The life expectancy of a cargo ship traveling alone on the north Atlantic run, including time in port, was nine months. In 1917, 1,300 British ships were lost to subs, and another 840 were attacked and escaped. By contrast the convoy losses were strikingly small: of 16,600 ships convoyed in 1917- 18, only 102 were torpedoed.. The supplies they brought into Britain and France were desperately needed by the armies at the front, and by the civilians at home. It was therefore necessary to assign destroyers to escort convoys. While this involved vast amounts of busywork that distracted the fighting sailors who wanted to blast away at German battleships or aggressively hunt down U-boats, it was the proper way to win a war.

A new way to fight uboats was by airplanes. The Navy began an aviation program, sending rickety biplanes out on over 20,000 anti-submarine missions. They sank no subs but did begin a tradition that would come to dominate the Navy.. Sims did get the American destroyers, which were used to escort US troop ships. British destroyers protected the merchant convoys and aggressively sought out U-boats. Berlin's response to the Allied measures was simply to build more U-boats. They would have been a much greater threat if they had used "wolf- pack" tactics (sending groups of uboats against the convoys) or had threatened the escorts with their powerful surface fleet. As it happened, Germany's U-boats were neutralized and its battle fleet stayed in harbor. The troopships did get through; accidents and torpedo attacks killed only 1300 sailors and 700 troops.

The Air Services

In April 1917 the Aviation Section of the Army Signal Corps comprised 65 very junior officers and 1,120 enlisted men. with 200 obsolete airplanes at two airfields. The Navy had 39 pilots and 54 planes--and no aircraft carriers. The impetus for expansion came from the French, who proposed an American air arm of 4,500 aircraft for the 1918 campaign, with 2,000 replacements a month. With a tangible goal in hand that was well-suited to the American taste for technology and adventure, the Congress appropriated the vast sum of $640 million.

The French had wanted American bombers, but neglected to make that point clear. Washington, still groping in the dark for an air doctrine, adopted the Signal Corps emphasis on information gathering by setting the ratio of three reconnaissance planes to every five fighters and one bomber. (The fighters were to protect the unarmed reconnaissance planes from German fighters.) Having observed the French closely, Major William "Billy" Mitchell recommended a separate force of bombers and escorts to hit "strategic" targets far behind the tactical lines, rather like a cavalry raid. Mitchell further stressed what became the cardinal doctrine of air power: "A decision in the air must be sought and obtained before a decision on the ground can be reached." By October, 1917, Washington had adopted Mitchell's proposals: strategic bombing had become part of America's war- fighting doctrine. The British were moving even faster in the same direction, as they set up an independent Air Ministry. It began building four-engine Handley- Page "superbombers" capable of flying at 14,000 feet (at 97 miles per hour) carrying 7,500 pounds of high explosives to Berlin. Aircraft production in the States fell far behind schedule. The Liberty engine, a powerful 12 cylinder, liquid-cooled, 400 horsepower, 860 pound motor was designed in only six days in May 1917, but it took Detroit over a year to figure out how to build it assembly-line style like the Model T. (It cost $7,000; the Model T was $400.)

A typical two-seater bi-plane, with wood-and- fabric wings, contained 50,000 precision parts, and required 4,000 worker-hours. Thousands of planes would have been ready for Pershing's 1919 offensive. By November 1918, Army aviation had 150,000 men and 15,000 planes, while the Navy had 24,000 men and 2,100 planes. (In each service, about half the strength had moved to Europe, and half was in training at home.) Pershing's pilots flew 4,800 excellent French SPADs, 260 British planes, and 1,200 American built versions of the mediocre British DH-4. The AEF Air Service comprised 20 pursuit (fighter) squadrons and 24 observation squadrons, which did a good job supporting infantry and artillery attacks. With only one squadron of strategic bombers, Billy Mitchell never had a chance to test his theories, but was sure "that if the war lasted, air power would decide it" and vowed to show the world his doctrine of strategic bombing was the only way to win a future war without the fantastic casualties of trench warfare.

Bibliography

• Bassett, John Spencer. Our War with Germany: A History (1919) online edition
• Beaver, Daniel R. Newton D. Baker and the American War Effort, 1917-1919 (1966)
• Chambers, John W., II. To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (1987)
• Coffman, Edward M. The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I (1998) excerpt and text search
• Cooke, James J.. The U.S. Air Service In the Great War: 1917-1919 (1996). 272 pgs.
• Frandsen, Bert. Hat in the Ring: The Birth of American Air Power in the Great War (2003). Smithsonian Books. 320 pgs.
• Gawne, Jonathan. Over There!: The American Soldier in World War I (1999)- 83 pages, heavily illustrated
• Hallas, James H. Doughboy War: The American Expeditionary Force in World War I (2000) online edition
• Holley, I. B. Ideas and Weapons: Exploitation of the Aerial Weapon by the United States During World War I(1983)
• Hurley, Alfred F. Billy Mitchell, Crusader for Air Power (1975)
• Johnson, Herbert A. Wingless Eagle: U.S. Army Aviation Through World War I (2001). 298 pgs.
• Kennett, Lee. First Air War, 1914-1918 (1999). 288 pp.
• Venzon, Anne ed. The United States in the First World War: An Encyclopedia (1995)

Primary sources

• Pershing, John J. My Experiences in the World War (2 vol 1931)

See also

• John J. Pershing
• World War I