Coffman - The war to end all wars: the American military experience in World War I

THE WAR TO END ALL WARS

The American Military Experience
in World War I

Edward M. Coffman

Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright 1968, 1986 by Edward M. Coffman

Preface to the 1998 Edition Copyright 1998 by Edward M. Coffman

Published by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Coffman, Edward M.

The war to end all wars : the American military experience in World War I / Edward M. Coffman.

p. cm.

Originally published: New York : Oxford University Press, 1968.

With new pref. by author.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN-10: 0-8131-2096-9 (alk. paper).ISBN-10: 0-8131-0955-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. World War, 19141918United States. I. Title.

D570.C6 1998

ISBN-13: 978-0-8131-0955-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

To Anne

The war meant the World War when I was growing up in the 1930s. My father and most of the other middle-aged men in my hometown were veterans, and I was fascinated by their war stories. Parades and ceremonies on Armistice Day also helped keep the memory of that war alive. In the 1940s, World War II eclipsed what then became known as World War I in the nations consciousness. Over the next four decades, the Cold War preoccupied Americans, with the experiences of the Korean War and the Vietnam War further dimming memories of 1917 and 1918.

This book originally appeared in 1968, and that golden anniversary of World War I came at a time when the Vietnam War was reaching its nadir. Approximately a third of those who served in World War I (almost 1.9 million) were still living then, but a people sickened by a war they watched on television paid little attention to them. They had become, as my father in his last years said, the forgotten men. Twenty-five years later on Armistice Day, now called Veterans Day, only one American family attended the memorial service at Romagne, the largest American military cemetery in Europe, where the dead from the Meuse-Argonne campaign are buried. During this eightieth anniversary of the war, only some four thousand veterans survive. What they and their comrades did so long ago certainly deserves to be remembered.

Although many American historians were enthusiastic about the war during 1917-1918 and a few later wrote about it, virtually none showed any interest by the 1950s when I began my graduate studies. Nor did I, initially, as the Civil War then captivated me. After considering at length a Civil War topic for a dissertation, however, I came across an obituary in the morning newspaper which changed my mind. The death of Peyton C. March, who as Chief of Staff was the top-ranking American soldier in the last months of World War I, evoked a desire to learn more about Marchs accomplishments during the war. Preliminary research turned up relevant personal papers of March and other key figures at the Library of Congress and his office files at the National Archives. I also corresponded with or interviewed quite a few people who had been closely associated with him. During my research I had a virtually clean slate as there were hardly any other scholars in the entire field of the American participation in World War I.

Before I completed The Hilt of the Sword: The Career of Peyton C. March, former Wisconsin governor Philip F. LaFollette, a friend and World War I veteran, suggested that I write a history of the war. He also put me in touch with Sheldon Meyer of Oxford University Press, who was then planning a series on American wars. As it happened, the series did not materialize as only The War to End All Wars and Charles B. MacDonalds The Mighty Endeavor: American Armed Forces in the European Theater in World War II were published.

I conceived of this book as a comprehensive history of the American military experience in World War I. I wanted to deal with the administrative and logistical aspects of the War Department and the strategic and diplomatic matters at the high command level, but I also wished to describe how the draft worked, what the training camps were like, and how the generals plans affected the men in the trenches. I planned to devote separate chapters to the sea and air wars. As it happened, they were among the earliest I wrote. Originally, I thought I would do more with the two expeditions to Russia but time and space limited that coverage.

I used some of my previous research on General March, and the experience gained from those months in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress and the Modern Military Branch of the National Archives facilitated my efforts to locate other relevant material for areas not covered in the earlier book. My discovery of the Hugh A. Drum Papers in an attic in his grandsons home was a particular boon to my understanding of the high level staff work in the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). Again I talked with people who were there. Listening to Douglas Campbell describe dogfights as planes swooped within fifty feet of each other or Lieutenant General Charles D. Herron explain how he as a division chief of staff worked with his commander, as well as many others accounts, certainly taught me a great deal about the war.

When I wrote about the battles, I leaned heavily on the superb maps and terrain descriptions in the American Battle Monuments Commissions American Armies and Battlefields in Europe. At the time, I had never seen the Western Front. In the late spring of 1990, I finally got to France, where Paul Jacobsmeyer, an excellent, well-informed guide and congenial companion, took me over the American battlefields. As we retraced the operations of the AEF, we depended on those Battle Monuments maps. They are invaluable to anyone who studies the operations of the AEF or visits those battlefields; hence I was pleased when the Armys Center of Military History recently reprinted this long out-of-print book and its maps.

Near Belleau Wood, Paul and I stood where the Marines had begun their attack and saw the poppies swaying amidst the waist-high wheat in the fields that those Marines crossed exactly seventy-two years before. There was wheat also on the fields near Soissons where the First and Second Divisions fought. Appropriately, it was a gloomy day in the Argonne Forest when we found the vestiges of foxholes on the steep slope of the ravine where the Lost Battalion was besieged. Much of the front is now farmland, but there are wooded areas cordoned off as unsafe because of unexploded shells and one can occasionally see traces of trenches. On top of Blanc Mont, I even slipped and fell into one. We also visited the American cemeteries at Bony, Belleau Wood, Fere En Tardenois, St. Mihiel, and Romagne. Among the more than 14,000 white crosses at Romagne, I located the grave of Frederick Trevenen Edwards, the only soldier whose death I describe in this book, and was moved to find a small bouquet at the base of his cross.