WWI and the AEF

[Pete]

In this particular message I'll admit in advance I'm at the outer limits of my ordnance knowledge, so I'll concede that I may be wrong. U.S. Army Ordnance had thown its weight behind the Benet-Mercie Machine Rifle, Caliber .30 U. S. Model of 1909 firing the .30-06 cartridge. The Lewis gun was probably a competitor to that weapon, which was why the chief of ordnance probably had an intense dislike for the inventor.

(Benet had commanded Benicia Arsenal near San Francisco, and his son Stephen Vincent Benet wrote the epic poem "John Brown's Body.")

The ordnance officer Julian Hatcher wrote in his book Hatcher's Notes how he had been sent in 1916 to the Texas border of Mexico to sort out the reliability problems with the Benet-Mercie MG. He said the issue was that the guys sent to the newly-formed MG units were the misfits, neer-do-wells and alcoholics all the other units wanted to get rid of. So what else is new? Plus ca change.

[Pete]

There is information on the Benet-Mercie Machine Rifle in this article in American Rifleman.

[Rifleman]

The 2nd Divisions actions at Belleau Wood, then a few weeks later at the village of Vaux showed how succesful a division could be when they shook of Pershings arrogance and incorporated tactics used by their allies....

I feel it's only fair to point out the 2nd Divison was a combined Army/USMC divison and was commanded by USMC MG John Lejune, who had seen a lot of small war expeditionary duty before WWI.

[carl]

Another really fascinating section is on the re-establishment of large organizations using conventional tactics when the Army was at the time a small wars endeavor scattered across the frontier. So, as Gian likes to remind us, there are problems inherent in having a force that is overwhelmingly conducting non-conventional missions, then having a big balloon go up.

The book I cited above "The AEF Way of War" argues that the AEF doctrine, championed by Pershing, was wholly inappropriate for conditions found on the western front. The doctrine was one created before our involvement in the war and said a lot about "determined infantry", "open order fighting" and musketry. That is what Pershing wanted to see.

The divisions got away from that starting with initial training by the French and British. Once they actually saw combat they did what worked on the field and ignored Army doctrine and what AEF HQ wanted.

The problem wasn't an inability to transition from irregular to conventional ops. The problem was the Army's inability to figure out what was needed before getting to the field. The units had to learn it when they got there.

[AdamG]

I know industry mobilized long before the miitary did to provide weapons to the early combatants, was this just small arms?

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 proved to be a bonanza for Bethlehem Steel. Orders for military products from Great Britain, France, and Russia soon filled the company’s coffers and the plants workforce swelled to over 35,000. Wartime profits enabled Schwab to undertake an expansion campaign, purchasing major steel plants in Steelton and Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and Sparrows Point, Maryland. By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, Bethlehem Steel had become the third largest industrial company in America.

http://www.hsp.org/default.aspx?id=945

[Seabee]

I feel it's only fair to point out the 2nd Divison was a combined Army/USMC divison and was commanded by USMC MG John Lejune, who had seen a lot of small war expeditionary duty before WWI.

Indeed, but there were two phases in the action I mention.... Pershings way... then the enlightened way...

http://www.kaiserscross.com/257543/284222.html

best
Chris

[USMC-03]

Fantastic subject gentlemen; I'm reading all posts with enthousiasm!

Seabee, please expand on your objections to the "Pershing way" and advocacy of the "enlightened way." What are the elements of each? I have read the article you linked to and would be very interested in learning more about what your outlook is and how you formed your position.

And just in the intrest of accuracy, as I recall the 2nd ID was commanded by Army MG Harbord at the time of Belleau Wood; USMC MG Lejune assumed command later when Harbord was transfered to an AEF staff billet.

[Pete]

Generally the Pershing way was a suicidal frontal assault without much artillery and the so-called enlightened way was to use terrain, fire and maneuver to pry the enemy from his positions. The celebrated marksmanship skills of Marines and Army guys at the time were probably exaggerations that gratified the gun nuts back in the States, but even if only 10 or 15 percent of riflemen put their long-range marksmanship training into practice the results would have been deadly.

[Pete]

It might be unfair to Pershing to say he wanted suicidal frontal assaults; he did however want objectives to be secured and was impatient when they were not. I've read of battalions that were pinned down and had lost cohesion being told by higher headquarters to keep pounding away anyway. That's when good leaders come up with other ways to accomplish the mission, whether they are part of doctrine or not.

[Bob's World]

It might be unfair to Pershing to say he wanted suicidal frontal assaults; he did however want objectives to be secured and was impatient when they were not. I've read of battalions that were pinned down and had lost cohesion being told by higher headquarters to keep pounding away anyway. That's when good leaders come up with other ways to accomplish the mission, whether they are part of doctrine or not.

You could replace Pershing with Bradley and not be far off. We did not evolve much at the opertional level between the wars.

[Ken White]

You could replace Pershing with Bradley and not be far off. We did not evolve much at the opertional level between the wars.

Or Bradley with Westmoreland or Westmoreland with Sanchez...

[USMC-03]

Please forgive my piecemeal response, but here it is...

RJ, you might enjoy this forum. During WW I many British had the opinion that we threw away the lives of our own men needlessly--we lost about the same number of men during our six months of fighting in that war as during the entire time of our involvement in Vietnam.

One word to our British cousins who are of that opinion; July 1, 1916. They have my highest respect but have no room to criticize anyone about wasting lives in the Great War...

The US came to the war late, but I do believe we helped end it quickly. My father fought in the AEF and was wounded at Chateau Thierry.

RJ, I'd be very interested in learning more about your father; if you wouldn't mind please write about what you know of his experiences and post for the benefit of all.

The first senior British officer to visit the U.S. after we declared war, Maj. Gen. Tim Bridges, a cavalrymen who had distinguished himself in 1914 at the battle of Mons, at first proposed that Americans enlisting or being conscripted for war service should perform their service in the British Army, thereby avoiding the need for American officers. Secretary of War Newton Baker refused to go along with it, and he told Pershing he shouldn't either.

Pershing…believed that the American male was superior to his European counterpart because a sense of adventure running strong in their families genes had drawn them to the North American frontiers !

He believed that inborn marksmanship and fieldcraft combined with an American knowledge of open warfare is what would split the German front wide open.

He, and his higher command poo-pooed effiminate European things like artillery and machine guns...

It seems to me that neither General Pershing nor his allied counterparts had a high opinion of each other, at least at the infancy of the AEF. The untested Yanks, snobbish Brits and feeble French… Some of it deserved, much was not.

In 1934, the Infantry School (via one COL George C. Marshall) published what amounted to an anthology of small unit tactics from WWI - (some US, some allied, some enemy). The work was updated in 1938 by two of the editors (Harding and Lanham) who worked closely with Marshall on the first edition.

I've downloaded it and begun perusing; thanks for the link…

The 2nd Divisions actions at Belleau Wood, then a few weeks later at the village of Vaux showed how succesful a division could be when they shook of Pershings arrogance and incorporated tactics used by their allies....

http://www.kaiserscross.com/257543/284222.html

Read the article on Vaux; interesting information, thanks.

I highly recommend a CRITICAL reading of Pershing's memoirs from "The Great War".

I have a set of Pershing's memoirs and read them with a great deal of interest. And while as Old Eagle note they should be read critically, I do highly recommend them for anyone interested in the AEF.

Generally the Pershing way was a suicidal frontal assault without much artillery and the so-called enlightened way was to use terrain, fire and maneuver to pry the enemy from his positions. The celebrated marksmanship skills of Marines and Army guys at the time were probably exaggerations that gratified the gun nuts back in the States, but even if only 10 or 15 percent of riflemen put their long-range marksmanship training into practice the results would have been deadly.

It might be unfair to Pershing to say he wanted suicidal frontal assaults; he did however want objectives to be secured and was impatient when they were not. I've read of battalions that were pinned down and had lost cohesion being told by higher headquarters to keep pounding away anyway. That's when good leaders come up with other ways to accomplish the mission, whether they are part of doctrine or not.

I believe General Pershing was short sighted with an emphasis on the infantry charge during the attack (it worked at San Juan Heights didn't it?), but I'm not going to be overcritical. Pershing also championed maneuver warfare instead of attrition in the trenches and maintaining the AEF as an army separate from either the French or British; both correct in my view. It also seems that the actual ability of artillery to keep up with the infantry and provide effective support, once the stalemate in the trenches had been broken, was something of an unknown, especially when viewed through the prism of trench warfare and considering communications of the day.

When the 2nd ID, commanded at the time by Army Major General Harbord, was ordered up to the line by the French corps commander in June of 1918 it was little more than the little boy plugging a hole in the dyke. The German offensive had smashed the French lines and the only cohesive units of any size between them and Paris were the largely untested American 3rd and 4th Brigades. They had poorly coordinated artillery support and little to no time for detailed planning; by default they were forced into an infantry centered attack with inferior tactics and formations taught by the French. Casualties were certainly high but the last German offensive of the war was stopped cold and the allies got the respite they sorely needed and were able to take up their own.

It is very true that the role played by the 3rd Brigade (made up of troops from the pre-war regular army organized into the 9th and 23rd Infantry Regiments and 5th Machinegun Battalion) in halting the Germans has been largely overshadowed by the combat encountered in Belleau Wood 4th Brigade (make up of troops from the pre-war regular Marine Corps and organized into the 5th and 6th Marine Regiments and 6th Machinegun Battalion). The role of the 3rd Engineers in direct support of the marines in Belleau Wood is nearly ignored. A large part of this disparity goes back to the army news censors at the time; while specific unit designations were expressly forbidden to be reported, by no less than General Pershing himself, the used of the word "marine" was allowed to slip and so many correspondents, hungry for details to report, made extensive use, sometimes incorrectly, of the label when sending dispatches to their papers back home.

[Pete]

Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914-1918
by Bruce I. Gudmundsson

People reading the current thread on infantry squad tactics might consider reading this book by one of Small Wars Council's own members, Bruce Gudmundsson. It also gives the lie to the idea that tactical thinking was morimund between the years of 1914 to 1939.

[carl]

One word to our British cousins who are of that opinion; July 1, 1916. They have my highest respect but have no room to criticize anyone about wasting lives in the Great War...

This is rather unfair to the British. The British Army of 1918 was not the British Army of 1916. They learned.

The British and the French both advised that the AEF do what they did, lots and lots of artillery and machine gun support, very detailed planning and limited objectives. The AEF eventually ended up fighting about like the British and French did because that is what worked.

I know I am a broken record but please refer to "The AEF Way of War." It covers exactly what this thread is about in detail.

[Pete]

I've noticed some similarites between the procedures used by the British army for its conduct of trench raids during 1916-18 and current U.S. Army guidance for patrolling, especially as it is taught by Rangers. The areas where the procedures overlap concern the things leaders are supposed to do in the preparation phase before the operation -- junior officers and NCOs checking the amount of ammunition carried by soldiers, insuring that things like wire cutters, extra MG ammo, and so forth are being carried by designated personnel, and making sure things that could identify the raiding unit -- ID cards, documents, insignia, etc. -- are left behind for the operation. This is one of those little intuitions I occasionally have when reading military history that I have not followed up on with research that might prove that it's true. However, I suspect that parts of our patrolling doctrine came from things the British taught us in 1917-18.

[Firn]

I've noticed some similarites between the procedures used by the British army for its conduct of trench raids during 1916-18 and current U.S. Army guidance for patrolling, especially as it is taught by Rangers. The areas where the procedures overlap concern the things leaders are supposed to do in the preparation phase before the operation -- junior officers and NCOs checking the amount of ammunition carried by soldiers, insuring that things like wire cutters, extra MG ammo, and so forth are being carried by designated personnel, and making sure things that could identify the raiding unit -- ID cards, documents, insignia, etc. -- are left behind for the operation. This is one of those little intuitions I occasionally have when reading military history that I have not followed up on with research that might prove that it's true. However, I suspect that parts of our patrolling doctrine came from things the British taught us in 1917-18.

At least the Americans distributed British manuals on sniping, scouting and patrolling in that 1917-1918 timeframe. I have one somewhere. A lot of "SF" stuff goes back to WWI, both from the allied and central power side.

I also suspect that the US army WWII squad was heavily influenced by the British, as well as by the French. For example two soldier per squad should be trained according to the British manual as scouts and used in the roles of sniper, scout and observer. Close cooperation between a sniper/observer and a scouting team was also trained, and the manual showed at least one example of the close cooperation between the three or four scout pairs of the platoon.

The French were the first to use automatic rifles and grenade rifles on a large scale, using them in a interesting manner.

BTW there is a WWII German wartime training movie which is rather interesting, and certainly contains a lot of similarities with WWI actions.

[Pete]

The other day an unusual thread on the Great War Forum inspired me to be in a satirical mood, so I post my essay here so my wit won't entirely go to waste. Someone asked what would happen were a Gurkha battalion to occupy a trench on the Western Front during the First World War. His point was that the average Gurkha was only about 65 inches tall, 5 ft 5 in, whereas the standard trench was 82 inches deep, so how could the little guys see over the parapet? It led to a thread of around 40 messages, with many gravely earnest people posting wartime anecdotes about the proper design of trenches and diagrams on trench dimensions from Engineer publications during the war. (It could be that I need a new way of spending my time.)

Would the Great War have been won sooner if all the short guys, medium ones and tall guys been put in different battalions? If that had been done the Pioneers could have saved themselves a lot of extra work from having to dig deep trenches. Instead, had they known in advance that little short guys would be occupying the trenches they might have saved themselves a lot of unneccesary work by having to dig deeper. Conversely, trenches that were dug too deep for little guys required additional exertions to build up steps so the short ones could see over the parapet. When you visualize the scope of this situation across the BEF's entire front it adds up to an enormous amount of work that might have been saved.

Well, I was thinking, had that happened, with all of that saved effort for the Pioneers, Engineers, and Labor Corps, it might have let them work on other projects that might well have brought the Germans to their knees much much earlier than as it turned out. In fact, this issue of the depth of trenches might go down in history as one of the great might-have-beens of the Great War. I never would have thought of this if it weren't for GWF.

[Pete]

My grandfather's unit, the 17th London, was part of the 47th "London" Division. In 1917-18 it was given the task of acclimating recently-arrived U.S. battalions to forward areas before the units were committed to major combat operations.

The first Doughboys my grandad saw in the war were ones who came forward to his trench wanting to know where they could take a bath. Grandpa told them it wasn't a good thing to do in a forward area, but they persisted, so grandpa told them where a creek was. He also told them to be under cover at a certain time that afternoon, when the punctual Germans habitually shelled the area.

They didn't listen and were out in the open when the Germans shelled. Grandpa said they all were killed. He was blunt and matter-of-fact about guys getting killed, it was something that had happened and that was all there was to it.

When the Armistice in November 1918 was declared he was one of the six original members of his battalion left over from 1915. Grandma showed me his wallet from the war, filled with the calling cards of a dozen of or so his buddies -- on the back of them he had written in pencil "killed" with the date when their deaths had happened.

[Granite_State]

Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914-1918
by Bruce I. Gudmundsson

People reading the current thread on infantry squad tactics might consider reading this book by one of Small Wars Council's own members, Bruce Gudmundsson. It also gives the lie to the idea that tactical thinking was morimund between the years of 1914 to 1939.

Has anyone seriously (or anyone serious) argued that? Gudmundsson's book is good. It's been a while since I read it, but I believe it was based heavily on this U.S. Army monograph, which also covered how the Germans changed their defensive doctrine from 1916-1918:

http://books.google.com/books?id=8jI...page&q&f=false

On the British side, the best look at the interwar mechanized experiments is this, pick it up if you're interested in the subject and can find a cheap used copy:

http://books.google.com/books?id=00m...page&q&f=false

[Pete]

One of the relatively unremarked upon major impacts of the Great War is that most American men from rural areas didn't realize there was such a thing as oral sex until the Doughboys went to France in 1917-'18. Once they came home a veritable upheaval in intimate behavior in America took place. Word of the practice even reached remote and insular places like Louisville, Kentucky.

The popular American song from 1919 says it all, "How Ya Gonna Keep Them Down on the Farm"?