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Books on the AEF
Robert Ferrell's The Question of MacArthur's Reputation
Thomas Fleming: Review of Robert H. Ferrell's The Question of MacArthur’s Reputation
(University of Missouri Press, 2008)
Source: Special to HNN (1-9-09) (University of Missouri Press, 2008)
At the close of World War I, Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur of the 42nd “Rainbow” Division was nominated for the Congressional Medal of Honor for his leadership in the division’s Oct. 14-16, 1918 attack on the Cote de Chatillon, a fortified hill that was a crucial strong point in the Kreimhelde Stellung, the main German defense line on the Argonne battlefield. General C.A.F. Flagler, the then commander of the division, wrote in his citation: “General MacArthur put himself at the head of his men and took command in the line.” Officers in the headquarters of the 84th Brigade, which MacArthur commanded, confirmed Flagler’s account and told how MacArthur had been recently undergone spells of vomiting from gas poisoning. But he and his men drove home the climactic assault, which largely sealed the German Army’s defeat in the battle. Lieutenant Reginald Weller described MacArthur’s leadership in the following words:
“…He incurred the greatest peril and placed his life in immediate and constant danger. He made his way through a heavy interdiction fire of gas and shrapnel and despite the machine gun fire and artillery shelling of great intensity…he alone made victory possible...the courage of General MacArthur was the outstanding feature of the battle.”
Another headquarters lieutenant, Wayne Hill, certified that Weller’s report was correct in all particulars. The army corps’s ruthless commander, Major General Charles P. Summerall approved the nomination. The most hated and feared general in the AEF, Summerall had told MacArthur on the telephone that he wanted Chatillon and was ready to pay any cost. MacArthur had replied: “General, we will take the Cote de Chatillon by tomorrow afternoon by six o’clock or report a casualty list of 6,000 dead, That will include me.”
Two weeks later, MacArthur bragged to Major General Charles D. Rhodes about his performance in the assault on Chatillon. On Oct. 27, 1918, Rhodes wrote in his diary: “MacArthur says it is difficult to get soldiers to go into severe fighting without being personally led by officers, that he himself had to lead his brigade ‘through the wire in recent fighting.” The next day, Rhodes added further recollections of their conversation “The time comes in every division, said MacArthur, when brigade or division commanders must instill ‘the fighting spirit’ into their commands by personal presence and example.”
In an astonishing analysis of these three violent, chaotic October days, Robert H. Ferrell, professor of history emeritus at Indiana University, concludes that Brigadier General MacArthur’s heroism is fiction. In the savage fighting that eventually carried the Cote de Chatillon, MacArthur never left his command post, three miles behind the front lines. Two other officers, largely unrecognized to this day, achieved the victory by ignoring General MacArthur’s murderous demand for a frontal assault and finding a way to attack the hill on a relatively unfortfied flank. General MacArthur did not deserve to be nominated for anything, much less the Congressional Medal of Honor. It is probably significant that the nomination was rejected. MacArthur filed a protest, and the decoration was reduced to the Distinguished Service Cross, the next highest level of honors for bravery.
The story gets worse. Ferrell’s lowkeyed methodical narrative describes how the 42nd Division’s battle plan directed MacArthur to capture the Cote de Chatillon on Oct.14th in three hours – between 5:30 and 8:30 a.m. – a total impossibility. Instead of protesting this ridiculous order, MacArthur said nothing—and his brigade did next to nothing in the face of the massed machine guns and barbed war that confronted them on their immediate front. This failure to advance left division’s 83rd brigade, which included New York’s 165th Regiment-- the famed “Fighting 69th” -- exposed to murderous punishment when they tried to capture an adjoining hill, the Cote Dame Marie. When the colonel of the regiment halted the hopeless attack, and the general commanding the brigade agreed with him, they were called cowards and relieved of their commands by General Summerall. MacArthur, the man responsible for this failure, never said a word in their defense.
At 5 pm on Oct. 14, MacArthur, obviously embarrassed by the slow pace of his regiments, had ordered a bayonet attack after darkness fell. The officers in command in the front lines, Major John Ross of the 168th Iowa regiment and Lt. Colonel Walter Bare of the167th Alabama regiment, simply refused to obey the order. A flustered MacArthur repeated the order on Oct. 15, and again the officers refused, even more vehemently. Instead, they worked out a plan to attack Chatillon on its vulnerable northeast flank. They used a machine gun battalion to deluge the hill with bullets, driving the German gunners into their shelters. MacArthur apparently did nothing but approve this plan. Casualties were comparatively light.
The fighting on the 16th was prolonged and confused. The Germans launched two savage counterattacks before abandoning the hill. In all the accounts of the struggle, there is not a word from any participant that they were inspired by MacArthur’s example. It is devastatingly clear that he was not the man who “alone made victory possible.” Nor was his courage the “outstanding feature of the battle.” A sergeant named Atkinson received the DSC for his acts of heroism in the attack and a private named Niebaur won the congressional medal of honor.
We are only five years away from the 100th anniversary of World War I. Robert Ferrell has led the way to fresh scholarship on this neglected war with a series of tough minded books, which make it clear that the American Army had to learn painful lessons about how to fight on the western front. In 2004, he wrote “Collapse at the Meuse-Argonne: The Failure of the Missouri-Kansas Division.” He followed this with a searing portrait of the Lost Battalion, “Five Days in October,” in 2005, and “Argonne Days” in 2007. Ferrell is also noted for his expertise on Harry S. Truman. He edited his private papers in “Off the Record” and in “Dear Bess” he rescued from the archives dozens of neglected letters to Mrs. Truman. In the midst of his World War I books, Ferrell has found time to write “Harry Truman and the Cold War Revisionists” (2006) which defends the President against the numerous critics he has acquired in recent decades. In this latest book, Ferrell has written an indictment of Douglas MacArthur which his defenders will have to answer if the general is to retain his status as an icon of America’s military history.
William Lagner's GAS and FLAME in World War I
"GAS and FLAME in World War I", Lagner, William L. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1965, 121 Pages, 4 Maps
I was browsing the WW-1 section of my local public library when I came across a reprint of "Gas and Flame" This is a small unit history of Company E, 1st Gas Regiment, AEF. The author served in the unit from its inception until its demobilization. The work is interesting in that it was written for the men of the company while they were waiting demobilization. Its original intent was to provide the men with something they could remember their experiences by. The reprint also contains a forward by the author describing his own role in the unit and how the work came about. What I found most interesting about this work is its similarity to Civil War memoirs, especially Elijah Hunt Rhodes' "All for the Union". Like is so common in Civil War works this book focuses on the small day to day life experiences of the men. It does not concentrate on its discussions of World War 1 combat, nor does it go into great detail on the intricacies of Gas Warfare. What it does do is discuss where the men went, how they got there, how much sleep they were managing to get, how wet they were, etc. The unit started out at Ft. Meyer VA., arrived in France at Brest. Received training in Chaumont, then participated in the St. Mihiel and Argonne offensives. In some respects the book is as much a travelogue as it is a unit history.
Another thing I find so interesting about the book is its tone. The author conveys the impression that these men were in some ways on a great adventure to serve their country and to make the world safe from German aggression. There is no implication that it was all a waste that cost the lives of so many good men. I don't know if this is because it was a work intended for the authors comrades and superiors, whether it was because the author thought that was what was expected, or whether it is because it reflects the attitude of so many men who served in the war - immediately upon its conclusion.
Jeff Beigie
Robert Ferrell's America's Deadliest Battle
America’s Deadliest Battle: Meuse-Argonne, 1918, Robert H. Ferrell, Kansas, 2007, 195 + xii pages, photos, maps, index, bibliography, ISBN 978 070061 499 8, $29.95 cloth.
The Author, a distinguished Professor emeritus of History at the University of Indiana has produced many books on American history including Woodrow Wilson and World War I, Five Days in October: The Lost Battalion of World War I, and Peace in Their Time: the Origins of the Kellogg-Briand Pact.
This is the best recent study of the AEF’s controversial Meuse-Argonne offensive, America’s largest effort of World War One. Actually more of a campaign than a single battle, this action extended over 47 days from September 26, 1918 until the end of the war including a two-week lull for reorganization and command reshuffle. It involved some 1.2 million troops with 26 thousand of them killed and 95 thousand wounded.
Ferrell begins the story with a review of American preparations for war. He finds these deficient largely because of the lack of aggressive political leadership from Wilson and his Secretary of War, Newton Baker to mobilize American business and industry.
What Ferrell does not take into account is the fact that, by 1917, American industry was operating at well over 90% of capacity to fill Entente orders and that the traditional source of excess labor for American industrial expansion – European immigration – had dried up as a result of the war. Unlike in 1940 and 1941, America What ever the causes, the result was devastating in terms of shipping available to transport hundreds of thousand of ill-trained Doughboys to Europe along with the motor vehicles, mules and horses needed for their transport to and supply at the front. American industry also fumbled technically and failed to produce the artillery and aircraft need to fight a modern war. And, army trainers – steeped in the lore of past conflicts -- failed to impart the infantry and artillery skills necessary for survival on the Western Front. Indeed, far too many soldiers arrived in the trenches uninstructed even in the loading and firing their rifles. Though Pershing instituted impressive local training programs in France, these came too late to meet the emergency created by the dangerous German offensives of spring 1918.
Moving on to the Meuse-Argonne itself, Ferrell describes and analyses the improvisation and confusion of the opening days typified by heavy casualties, faulty use of artillery, poor infantry tactics and clogged supply lines. Senior leadership in the AEF was uneven. Pershing, frustrated and embarrassed by lack of progress fired many divisional commanders. These commanders, in turn, relieved brigade, regimental and battalion commanders deemed less than aggressive in pushing their troops forward in costly frontal assaults. Ferrell uses a full chapter in recapping his 2004 book on the failure of the 35th Missouri-Kansas National Guard Division before moving on to more successful efforts to end the artillery enfilade and the occupation of the Kriemhilde Stellung in mid-October. Though he recognizes that Foch had assigned the green AEF perhaps the toughest sectors of the German line (they had been entrenched in the broken, hilly Argonne Forest virtually undisturbed for four years), Ferrell sensibly places most of the blame for American failure on faulty tactics and poor leadership.
The author then goes on to analyze the reorganization of the AEF into two separate armies as Pershing mandated during the last two weeks of October 1918. This allowed time to rest and reinforce units skeletonized by the earlier fighting, to reorganize artillery deployment and tactics, and order the general use of mustard and phosgene gas. Junior officers were also busy retraining their men to use infiltration and other innovative tactics against German machine gun nests. The troops that fought the breakthrough phase of the battle from November first were far better prepared, led and supported than their September 1918 comrades.
In all this is an excellent survey of the Meuse-Argonne campaign for the general reader. It lacks the tactical detail of Paul Braim’s 1987 work, but is stronger and better organized in its analysis. Ferrell provides excellent maps (often lacking in works of this kind) drawn largely from the official U. S. Army history American Armies and Battlefields in Europe (GPO, 1938). Some may consider him overly harsh in his judgments of American leadership shortcomings. Many historians -- while recognizing the AEF’s shortcomings -- hew to the view that it was just short of miraculous that America was able to send two million men to Europe in less than 18 months. That being said, the only weakness is the author’s hasty attempt at a survey analysis of the postwar world following what he views as the hollow victory of 1918.
Len Shurtleff
Mark Grotelueschen's Doctrine Under Trial
Doctrine Under Trial: American Artillery Employment in World War I, Mark E. Grotelueschen, Greenwood, 2001, 174 + xxiii pages, index, maps, photos, appendices, bibliography, ISBN 0 313 31171 4, $115 cloth.
Written by a professor of history at the US Air Force Academy and author of The AEF Way of WarCambridge, 2007), this book undertakes to examine the evolution of the use of artillery firepower by the American Expeditionary Forces in World War One. It covers much of the same ground as The AEF Way of War, but concentrates on artillery and the experience of the Second Division as illustrative of the AEF as a whole.
Chapter 1 examines pre-war US Army theories and doctrines and compares these with the conflicting doctrines of the French and the British developed over three years of fighting. Chapters 2 and 3 analyze the combat experiences of the Second Division at Chateau Thierry and Soissons in June and July 1918. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 follow the division through a period of rest, refitting and training into the final its final three major battles St. Mihiel, Blank Mont and the final days of the Meuse-Argonne offensive in November 1918.
The AEF high command remained skeptical about British and French tactics which they saw as exceeding cautious and timid. These tactics involved set piece “bite and hold” attacks featuring pinpoint artillery counter battery fire combined with barrages creeping ahead of and protecting advancing infantry. The AEF and its commander General Pershing favored reliance on rifleman; massed infantry attacks aimed at breakthrough. These resulted in excessive casualties at Belleau Wood. It was the British and French method of attack which was successfully employed by the Second Division (and many other AEF divisions, as well) in its final battles. This book is the story of how that doctrine evolved despite the lack of general agreement among AEF commanders during and even after the conflict.
Len Shurtleff
Marc Wortman's The Millionaires Unit
The Millionaires Unit: The Aristocratic Flyboys Who Fought the Great War and Invented American Air Power, Marc Wortman, Perseus, 2006, photos, index, ISBN 1 58648 238 5, $26 cloth. Also available in paperback (ISBN 1 58648 444 3) and on CD.
Like his subjects, the author is a Yale graduate. Drawing on original papers and correspondence, he describes the creation of the Yale Aero Club and the lives of its privileged members who expressed their noblesse oblige by volunteering to fly for the US Navy in 1917, but by no means single handedly invented air power. Wortman concentrates on six of the Yalies who set out to fly Navy seaplanes as he weaves the story of the famous First Yale Unit and its founder F. Trubee Davison, son of a J. P. Morgan partner. Davison went on to become active in Republican politics in New York, Assistant Secretary of War for Air in the Coolidge and Hoover administrations and director of personnel in the early years of the CIA.
Among Davison’s flying Yale and Skull and Bones compatriots were Kenny MacLeish, brother of the poet Archibald MacLeish, David Ingalls, the US Navy’s only WWI air ace and a future Secretary of the Navy for Air, and Robert A. Lovett, ranking defense official during and after WWI, and mastermind of the Berlin Airlift in 1949. Davison himself was badly injured in training and never flew in combat. He nonetheless retained his naval commission and remained central to the Unit. Two of the remaining five aviators whose service is highlighted by Wortman were killed in action, two won the Navy Cross, and one became a POW.
In all this is a fine rendition, well research with cracking good descriptions of flying the primitive aircraft of The Great War era. It is also a reminder of a long-vanished breed of elite East Coast male adventurers who were willing, even eager to risk their lives in military service.
Len Shurtleff
Richard Slotkin's Lost Battalions
Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality, Richard Slotkin,
Henry Hold, 2005, 659 + xii pages, index, illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, ISBN
0 8050 4124 9, $35 cloth; ISBN 0 80508138 0, $17 paperback (2006). The author is professor of history at Wesleyan University.
A well crafted tale of two infantry units, the 369th Harlem Hell Fighters and the 308th Infantry. Both of these units were formed mainly from citizens of New York. The men of the 369th were black Africa-American volunteers (some recent immigrants from the southern states) of the 15th Regiment of the New York National Guard largely officered by white patricians. The men of the 308th Infantry of the 77th Division were conscripts, “draftees,” from among the newly arrived immigrants from Ireland, Italy and Slavs from southern and central Europe, and including many Jews. These very different units fought virtually side-by-side in the AEF’s Meuse-Argonne offensive, America’s single most bloody battle.
The author uses the familiar story of these two famous regiments to illuminate race and immigration issues in early 20th century America. One in eight Americans in 1917 were either foreign-born or black. African-American leaders of the time urged their men to volunteer and thus claim the full rights of citizenship. Recent immigrants volunteered out of the same hope and conviction. What resulted -- post-war anti-immigrant and anti-Black backlash -- disappointed both groups and left America still riven by ethnic and racial divisions that only changes in government policy and social mores arising in part by a great economic depression and another global conflict began to heal.
Len Shurtleff
Simmons and Alexander's Through the Wheat
The long awaited Through the Wheat: The U. S. Marines in World War I has finally been published by the US Naval Institute Press at $34.95 (cloth)The book has excellent maps and many illustrations.It is authored by the late Brigadier General Edwin H. Simmons (USMC, ret.) and Colonel Joseph H.Alexander (USMC, ret.). Simmons, a veteran of WWII and Korea, and the author of many books and articles,was for years the Marine Corps Historian. He was to have spoken at the WFA Quantico Seminar in the fall of 2004,but was overtaken by ill health and died soon after.
His book recounts the experiences of the Fourth Marine Brigade at Belleau Wood, Soissons, Blanc Mont, St.Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne where they fought as part of the Army's 2nd Division, commanded late in the war by Marine Major General John A.Lejeune.
Len Shurtleff
Mark Grotelueschen's The AEF Way of War
Mark Ethan Grotelueschen. The AEF Way of War: The American Army and Combat in World War I. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2007. x + 387 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN
9780521864343.
Reviewed by Stephen A. Bourque, Department of Military History, United States Army Command and General Staff
College.
Published on H-War (March, 2008)
Unlike other conflicts in American history, the operational
and tactical combat of American forces in World
War I has received little in-depth analysis. Library shelves
groan under the weight of books about the Army of
the Potomac, the Army of Northern Virginia, Sherman’s
March to the Sea, and individual campaigns such as Gettysburg
and Antietam. A few stacks down we find the
World War II section with an array of books about almost
every aspect of American combat and many studies about
Normandy, the Bulge, and the units that fought these campaigns.
Somewhere between these huge collections is the
smaller section on the United States Army in World War
I. As the conflict’s centennial approaches, more and more
scholars are reevaluating the popular image of the American
Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in combat. Recent studies,
most notably Robert H. Ferrell’s Collapse at Meuse-
Argonne (2004), Robert B. Bruce’s A Fraternity of Arms
(2003), and an article by Timothy Nenninger have chipped
away at the popular illusion of an army of Sergeant Yorks,
led by General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, repaying
the Marquise de Lafayette by saving the French from the
hated Hun.[1] What is emerging is a more complete account
of an enthusiastic force of poorly equipped, poorly
trained, and poorly led draftees fighting a tired, but experienced,
German force in the last days of the war. The result
was an inordinately high, and probably unnecessary, rate
of casualties among the American forces.
Mark Grotelueschen’s The AEF Way of War is part
of this increasingly impressive array of scholarship on
the Great War of 1914-1918. His purpose is to examine
how the AEF fought by investigating the details of doctrine,
methods, and changes during the conduct of operations.
In order to understand his topic, he poses a number
of questions concerning the relationship between prewar
Army doctrine, AEF operational doctrine, and the troops
in contact. He argues that American military leaders,
specifically General Pershing, “resisted making the intellectual
adjustments necessary to effect the kind of fundamental
doctrinal changes demanded,” and when they did
modify official doctrine, they did it “belatedly, slowly, and
incompletely” (p. 10). He concludes, among other things,
that the changes that did take place (and there were many),
resulted from subordinate leaders making these adjustments
in spite of the guidance of both official doctrine
and senior leadership.
Grotelueschen has scoured a broad array of archives
and libraries to support his critical analysis of AEF performance.
Certainly any student interested in American
combat performance during this conflict would find this
book’s bibliography an excellent place to start. Working
under historian Brian Linn’s guidance while preparing
his dissertation, the foundation for this book, the author
visited most of the archives relevant to America’s participation
in the Great War and consulted with most experts
on the topic. Throughout the manuscript his evidence is
solid, and he sets a standard by the extraordinary use of
primary sources at all levels of command.
In seeking to describe and evaluate the AEF’s formal
and informal training doctrine, the author has set
an ambitious goal, one that he only partially fulfills.
Grotelueschen supports his conclusions by evaluating four
divisions (1st, 2nd, 26th, and 77th) that saw action in the
war. Two of these, the 1st and 2nd Infantry Divisions, represent
the best that the United States Army sent into the
war. Throughout the conflict they received the best training
and equipment, the most replacements, and the pick of
the best officers. Their importance as the chosen American
units is confirmed by the author devoting 45 percent
of the book to just these two divisions (versus 28 percent
to the other two). This disparity is partially accounted for
by the limited combat seen by the 26th, a National Guard
Division, and the 77th, a unit full of draftees. These two
divisions received limited support and reinforcements and
few experienced officers. It is obvious that the 1st and
2nd Divisions did much better than the 26th and 77th in
battle. Both, ultimately, learned to ignore the “open order”
tactics required by General Pershing and his staff and
emphasized artillery fire to destroy enemy strong points.
Yet, the learning pace for all divisions was glacial, and
there was no organized structure for exchanging lessons
learned among the divisions. To use only these four units
as a sampling of the adaptation style of the twenty-nine
divisions that saw combat is a bit of a stretch.
On the other hand, Grotlueschen does an excellent job
of describing the problems that soldiers in this conflict had
to face. There is no doubt that the American soldier fought
with incredible bravery. However, this book adds to the
evidence that these soldiers went to war with archaic doctrine
that only evolved slowly over the conflict. Few had
any substantial training, and often the training was confusing
and not related to the war they would fight. These
soldiers were poorly led and poorly equipped. Their commanders
and staffs had little understanding of how to fight
this kind of war. Add a touch of arrogance and illusions of
fighting “open warfare” and the consequences were devastating.
In only 200 days, the one million American soldiers
engaged (there were two million American soldiers
in France at the end of the war) suffered an astounding 26
percent casualty rate (53,400 killed, 204,000 wounded)
against a German army that was only a shadow of the
force that marched to the Marne in 1914. The lessons in
this book are many, and historians of the period and every
serving military officer should read it.
Stephen A. Bourque “Review of Mark Ethan Grotelueschen, The AEF Way of War: The American Army
and Combat in World War I,” H-War, H-Net Reviews, March, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=324671207675530.
The AEF Way of War: The American Army and Combat in World War I, Mark Ethan Grotelueschen, Cambridge, 2007, 387 + x pages, maps, index, maps, photos, bibliography, ISBN 0 521 86434 8, $75 cloth. The author is an assistant professor of history at the U. S. Air Force Academy.
There remains a dearth of critical analysis on the operational performance of the American Expeditionary forces in World War I. This book and another recently authored by Robert Ferrell (America’s Deadliest Battle: Meuse-Argonne, 1918, Kansas 2007) help fill this gap.
Though America’s belligerency was brief, barely 19 months, it was arguably decisive in particularly in terms of industrial power and finance. Contemporary Entente political and military and military leaders (Clemenceau and Haig among them) were, nonetheless, disparaging, even contemptuous of the AEF’s effectiveness as a fighting force and the skill of its officers. Beginning in the 1960s, American historians began seriously to question the view, asserted effectively by General Pershing among others, that the AEF was a powerful, efficient combat force. Little work, however, has appeared contrasting American pre-war doctrine to the refinement and evolution of AEF battle tactics during the summer and fall of 1918. And, little detailed operational analysis has been published on the AEF’s major battles: Aisne-Marne, St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne. In making his examination, the author concentrates on the operational experiences of three divisions heavily involved in combat: The 26th New England National Guard, the Second “Regular Army” and the 77th National Army draftee division.
Though the publisher does not assert it, this work comprises a ground-breaking fresh and detailed look at the operational record of a force that came to number two million men overseas with two million more in training in America before the war was over in November 1918..
Len Shurtleff
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Latest page update: made by JeffreyLaMonica
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| Started By | Thread Subject | Replies | Last Post | ||
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| NeilBurns | 26th & 77th Underperformed? | 5 | Aug 29 2009, 4:23 PM EDT by soldiersmail | ||
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Thread started: May 24 2008, 8:05 PM EDT
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Strange choices for comparison the 26th:
saw 193 days in the line (148 Quiet/45 active 2nd Overall in the AEF) advanced 34 kilometers (8th overall in the AEF) Suffered 13,460 men killed and wounded (6th overall) Captured 3,148 Germans (6th overall) 77th: saw 113 days of combat (47 Quiet/66 active 5th Overall) Advanced 71.5 Kilometers (1st Overall in the AEF) Suffered 10,497 killed and wounded (9th overall) Captured 750 Germans (22nd overall) I'm not trying to take away from the 1st or 2nd, nor am I trying to question the author's conclusions, but there were certainly other National Guard and National Army units who performed much worse than the 26th or 77th. Just for the record, I have no relatives who served with either the 26th or 77th! Best regards, Neil
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| perlman | 369th "Harlem Hellfighters" | 2 | Feb 1 2009, 4:47 PM EST by perlman | ||
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Thread started: Jan 4 2009, 8:33 PM EST
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Does anyone know if there is a history of the French 4th Army under which the 369th was attached ?
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