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The East Coast Chapter of the Western Front Association
welcomes enthusiasts as well as amateur and professional historians
interested in the study and commemoration of the Great War, 1914-1918.
Adding a Page of Your Own
OVER HERE AND OVER THERE: AMERICA’S GREAT WAR AND AMERICA’S GREAT WARRIORS
Western Front Association-U.S. Branch Annual National Seminar
U.S. Army Heritage & Education Center
12-14 September 2008
COL Robert J. Dalessandro [AHEC Director] & Mr. Michael G. Knapp [AHEC Collection Manager]
"Forging the Force: Organizing and Preparing the AEF for Overseas Duty"
Organization and Insignia of the American Expeditionary Force, 1917-1923
Dr. Nancy Gentile Ford [Professor, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania] "Americans All! Foreign-Born Soldiers in WWI"
Americans All
Mr. Stephen L. Harris [Author/Historian] "Irish by Association, Irish by Adoption, Irish by Conviction: The Fighting 69th Changes Its Color From Green to Rainbow."
Stephen Harris Website
Dr. Marion Pinsdorff [Professor Emeritus, Fordham University] “War Morphed Hawaii’s Business: Hackfeld’s Into American Factors; Ehlers Into Liberty House”
Mr. Jay Graybeal [Army Heritage Museum Chief Curator] “’Us Sailors Never Reach France Cause!’: The U. S. Naval Reserve Flying Corps in France”
Mr. Christopher Semancik [AHEC Arms Curator] “Trenches, Tranches, Schützengraben”
Dr. Douglas V. Johnson [Professor, US Army War College] "Americans at the Battle of Soissons"
Doug Johnson Website
Soissons, 1918
Dr. Mitch Yockelson [National Archives and Records Administration] "Borrowed Soldiers: The Anglo-American Relationship in World War I”
See the Review for Mitch Yockelson's Book on Our "Great War Books and Reviews" Page
Dr. Ed Lengel [Professor, University of Virginia] "America's Experience in the Meuse-Argonne"
See the Review for Ed Lengel's book on our "Great War Books and Reviews" Page
Dr. Lengel Accepts the Tomlinson Book Prize For To Conquer Hell
Dane Coffman as General Pershing
A Ring,a Razor, and a Pipe
New WFA President, Doran Cart
National World War One Museum
Program Coordinator, Louise Arnold-Friend
US Marines in the Great War
US Marines in Belleau Wood
"Detroit's Own" Polar Bear Memorial Association
American Troops in Northern Russia, 1919
Dreadnoughts
Austro-Hungarian Dreadnoughts, 1915
First Division AEF
First Division Museum
The Sergeant Alvin C. York Project
The Sergeant York Discovery Expedition
Ask any British student about the Somme or any French or
German student about Verdun and you are likely to get a
quick response. It may be a response about an ancestor who
fought in one of the war's titanic battles or it might be a
response influenced by a work of fiction like Blackadder,
Oh! What a Lovely War, or All Quiet on the Western Front. It
might even be the now fashionable response of dismissing the
war as a fratricidal relic of Europe's "old" age of
nationalism and rivalry. These responses might well be
slightly inaccurate or even wildly so, but the war remains
enough of a part of the living memory for Europeans to
elicit certain emotional and historical triggers. This
continued sense of relevance for Europeans is, of course,
entirely natural given the great destruction the war brought
and the impact the war had on European history.
American students, by contrast, are unlikely to have such
close associations to World War I. The war for Americans was
a brief event, and a relatively small proportion of
Americans saw any sustained military action. The United
States was never attacked and there is no single moment
associated with the war in American memory as the Somme is
in British memory. The war, moreover, falls in between two
much larger and more emotive events in American history, the
Civil War and World War II. American students might thus be
forgiven for not responding to Belleau Wood or the Meuse-
Argonne in the same ways they might react to Gettysburg or
Pearl Harbor.
That contrast is the first point I always make to my
students. Whereas for the United States, World War I is a
little-known and arcane period in history, for Europeans it
is absolutely formative. For France and Great Britain
especially, World War I (known as the Great War or La Grande
Guerre for a good reason) remains the war both in the
popular imagination and among scholars. While one compares
humanitarian catastrophes at one's own peril, a few numbers
may make the case. The British Empire suffered an estimated
908,000 deaths in World War I, or more than twice the number
of World War II. Put another way, the British had more men
killed on one day of World War I (July 1, 1916, still the
bloodiest single day in the history of the British Army)
than it suffered in the first month of operations on and
subsequent to D-Day. For France, of course, the contrast is
even more stark: an estimated 1,300,000 Frenchmen died in
World War I compared to 567,000 in World War II.
A simple car ride along any of World War I's many
battlefields will prove the point to those less
statistically inclined. On many battlefields, such as
Verdun, Champagne, and the Somme, the war still speaks
through the massive shell holes and mine craters that
continue to scar the landscape 90 years later. An observant
tourist can also see signs reading village detruit
(destroyed village), marking a place that was quite
literally pulverized during the war and never rebuilt. The
French burial custom has been to build massive cemeteries
such as the ones at Verdun, Les Islettes, or Notre Dame de
Lorette that impress by their sheer size. Ossuaries
containing the remains of thousands of inconnus (unknown
soldiers) stand as silent witnesses to the awesome power of
modern weapons, most importantly artillery, to kill men
without leaving sufficient remains to allow for
identification or burial. The British have preferred to
build smaller, more numerous cemeteries with the unique
touch of including a personal statement from the family on
the headstones. The Germans, too, built cemeteries with
black, solemn crosses that stand in stark contrast to the
gleaming white marble to be found in the American ones.
Driving away from the battlefield, a traveler might stop at
any of a number of appealing French or Belgian towns to have
a coffee or meal and try to get the horrors of what they
have just seen out of their minds. But it will not take much
imagination to see the impacts of the war in any town near
the western front. Some, like Arras or Ypres, will have post
cards for sale showing the astonishing destruction and
devastation that left them mere piles of rubble. Others will
have place names like Place Foch or Avenue Joffre named to
honor the heroes of the war. One might even see an Avenue
Haig or a Rue Pershing thrown in. Every French town, no
matter how small or how far from the western front, will
have a statue near the town hall commemorating the young men
who died pour la patrie from 1914-1918. If one looks very
closely, one will see a tragic recurrence of family names on
such statues and, often on the back, the addition of a
smaller number of names from the war of 1939-1945, seemingly
added as an afterthought.
For Europeans, the war is the epochal event of the century.
Without it, there would have been no great depression, no
fascism, no Second World War, and no concentration camps. We
will never know, of course, what the estimated 8 million
Europeans who died in the course of the war might otherwise
have contributed to politics, to medicine, or to art. What
we do know is that Europe is still suffering from that huge
loss of its best men and is still struggling to figure out
how to even cope with their memory.
The American experience of World War I must therefore be
kept in its proper perspective. Americans who do not
understand what the war did to Europe will never really
understand the Europe that emerged. Europe's ambivalent
attitude toward the United States, its drive toward
unification, and the relatively recent coming together of
the French and German governments will all come into sharper
focus if they are set against the backdrop of the killing of
1914-1918. Americans, a European might say over coffee in
Arras, do not really understand war because it has not
touched us as it has them.
For that, of course, we can all be very grateful. Although
the war did not result in destruction for Americans on the
European scale, it nevertheless had deep and often forgotten
impacts on America. Perhaps most importantly, it led to
fundamental, long-term changes in the way America (and
Americans) relate to the outside world. It is hard to
imagine today, but when Woodrow Wilson went to Paris for the
postwar peace conference in early 1919, it marked the first
time ever that a sitting American president had visited
Europe. This was due to much more than the limits of
transportation technology. It reflected instead an American
mindset that clearly relegated European affairs to the back
burner.
Woodrow Wilson forever changed that attitude, and with it he
changed much more. Wilson committed America to international
sponsorship of an idea of foreign policy based around the
high-minded quest for democracy, capitalism, and freedom.
While not all Americans have seen the problem in the way
Wilson did and while even Wilson did not fully believe in
all of the consequences of his own idealism, his way of
viewing the world has bequeathed a legacy to every American
leader since. Echoes of his belief in the use of American
power to pave the way for ideals that would in turn secure
the freedom and peace of peoples everywhere has influenced
American foreign policy ever since. Presidents of both
parties, down to the present day, have used Wilson's ideals
and his language as the basis for their global involvement.
To many Europeans, these ideals have come, as Wilson hoped
they would, as a breath of fresh air to a continent
hopelessly mired in ancient hatreds. To others, they have
come as a lofty intrusion from a society that they see as
having more power than wisdom. Georges Clemenceau, France's
hard-bitten premier, famously dismissed Wilson's idealistic
Fourteen Points with the witty, "God Himself only gave us
ten." In some versions of the anecdote, the anti-clerical
Clemenceau followed that quip with "and we soon enough
learned to break those." His principled distaste for
Wilson's idealism notwithstanding (Clemenceau derisively
called him "the professor"), Clemenceau had a deep
admiration for America. As a young journalist, he had
covered the end of the American Civil War, spoke English
with American idioms, and had an American wife, at least
until he had her deported on trumped up charges. His
experiences with America are a symbolic microcosm of those
of his French countrymen, and, more generally, Europeans
across at least the western part of the continent.
Clemenceau and Wilson did agree on their shared dislike of
communism. Although it is now hardly more than a footnote,
even in American histories of the war, the United States
sent an expedition to northern Russia from 1918 to 1920 to
assist the noncommunist Whites in the Russian Civil War.
Although ultimately unsuccessful in stopping the spread of
Bolshevism, the incident showed Wilson's faith in the
ability of even small numbers of American soldiers to
influence world events. It can also be seen as the first
real American shot in the Cold War, and one that Josef
Stalin never fully forgave or forgot.
Historians short on space and teachers short on time like to
contrast the interventionist Wilson to the supposedly
isolationist years that followed. But the contrast is not
entirely accurate. The United States rejected the Treaty of
Versailles and refused to join the League of Nations, but
those events are only part of the story. The United States
did participate in a number of international conferences and
programs designed to reduce world tensions; in many cases
the United States provided the key leadership. These
conferences included the Washington Conferences on Naval
Disarmament, the Kellogg-Briand Pact that aimed to eliminate
war as an act of statecraft, the Dawes and Young Plans to
refinance German war debt, and the promotion of
international trade in the hopes that nations that trade
together would not go to war against one another. American
isolationism, to the extent that it even existed, is
therefore best seen as a desire not to go to war; it was not
a desire to bury the nation's collective heads in the sand.
The distinction is critical. A rough analogy might be found
today in the environmental movement, where the United States
is a recognized player and sometime leader, but only on
American terms, as the continued American refusal to sign
the Kyoto Accords demonstrates.
The war had equally dramatic impacts on the American home
front. The idea of intervening in a bloody and inconclusive
European war for unclear gains generated tremendous
controversy. Conservatives and many east coast elites
supported American entry into the war in large part because
they believed that the nation's honor had been impinged by
repeated German insults such as submarine warfare and the
notorious Zimmerman telegram promising Mexico parts of
American territory in exchange for military intervention.
Even before America entered the war, hundreds of young men
from "good families" and Ivy League universities had
volunteered their services for the French cause in the
French Foreign Legion and an all-American fighter squadron
called the Lafayette Escadrille. Among the Escadrille's most
vocal supporters was the former president and Wilson nemesis
Theodore Roosevelt, who praised the courage of young
Americans willing to risk their lives and their American
citizenship to fight for a cause that they believed to be
just.
But not all Americans responded as Roosevelt did. In the
Midwest and South there was widespread suspicion of entering
the war and lukewarm feelings about America's potential
British and French allies. Although few Americans supported
the Central Powers after the callous German sinking of the
Lusitania in May 1915, there was a deep chasm between anti-
German sentiment and a desire to send American troops "Over
There". The problems of Europe were a long way from the
minds of most Americans and, censorship notwithstanding,
Americans could read the newspapers and understand how
murderous the battlefields of the western front were.
Moreover, Americans were making money from their definition
of neutrality, which permitted trade with both sides. Why
put American safety and security at risk? Why kill the goose
that laid the golden eggs?
Germany's decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare
in April 1917 may have convinced Wilson and his advisers of
the need for war, but millions of Americans remained
unconvinced. The administration was worried about active
opposition to the war from radical labor groups like the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), anti-British Irish-
Americans, and ethnic Germans living in the Midwest and in
most major cities. Aware of the need to build consensus and
ensure support for the war, the government engaged in a
massive public relations and propaganda campaign, the like
of which the country had never seen. Newspapers and books
combined with new media like movies to saturate the American
people with images and ideas to promote the war. As with all
propaganda, it is hard to know exactly how average Americans
responded to these images. But Americans did rally around
the flag and even opponents of the war generally gave the
government its support once the country was officially at
war.
The American experience of war may have been brief, but its
impacts on the home front were dramatic. Among the groups
most deeply affected were African-Americans, thousands of
whom moved north to take jobs in the now booming northern
factories. This "great migration" was a transformative event
in African-American history as individuals and entire
families left the sharecropping south and came north. While
the jobs paid well and offered an escape from the Jim Crow
racism of the south, problems and violence emerged when
white workers came back and demanded their jobs. Many also
demanded that African-Americans return to the South as well.
Nineteen-nineteen was a year of terrible racial violence
characterized by widespread lynching. African-American
deaths due to racial violence in the turbulent period 1917-
1923 appear to have at least equaled, and may have exceeded,
the number of African-American battle deaths. This figure is
a function both of the general exclusion of African-
Americans from the battlefield and the intensity of racial
tension in the immediate postwar years.
The extent to which the war made the United States a
"nation" remains a point of considerable debate among
scholars. Some argue that the mass movement of people across
the nation, the shared military service of Americans (in
segregated units) raised across the nation, and increased
government standardization of the economy all point to the
emergence of a national mindset. World War I was the first
large-scale crisis that required a shared response from
Northerners and Southerners, Easterners and Westerners, city
dwellers and farmers, men and women. The country had
national heroes like John Pershing (born in Missouri), Alvin
York (born in Tennessee), and Eddie Rickenbacker (born in
Ohio). Having worked together to meet a common challenge,
America, these scholars argue, was ready to face the 1920s
era of mass media as people who identified themselves as
Americans first and foremost.
This narrative is compelling, but it is not the full story.
America remained deeply divided along numerous fault lines,
especially that of race; the United States Army raised two
African-American divisions for military service, but it
treated one so brutally that it performed badly in combat
and it gladly dispatched the other to the French Army, under
whose guidance it won numerous citations. Most of the
divisions in the United States Army, moreover, were National
Guard units connected to a state. Many of the largest and
most important monuments to the Americans on the Western
Front are dedicated not to the United States Army, but to
state units like the 28th Division from Pennsylvania,
memorialized at Varennes in one of France's largest World
War I monuments.
Perhaps what makes this complex war ultimately so difficult
to teach is the absence of an easy and straightforward
narrative. Although we recognize the limits of grand
narrative, there is a simplicity in teaching the Civil War
as the end of slavery and World War II as the destruction of
Nazism and Japanese totalitarianism. World War I's narrative
is much more complex and ultimately less satisfying to most
students. Nevertheless, it is a critical part of American
history and deserves a greater place in the curriculum than
the parenthesis to which it all too often gets relegated.
Click "Add page"a New Page" in the left column to start your page. Click "Easy Edit" to begin working on your page. You can type text and paste information right in your page. The interface works like a word processing program with the abilities to add images, video, and links to other websites. Choose fonts, colors, and check your spelling just as you would with a word processing program. The are icons to click that allow you to add "Photos""Photo" and "Links"."Link". The "Widget""Video" icon enables you to add video from the internet. Click "Save" when you are done working. You can return and update your page anytime.
Fort Mifflin
Christopher George talks about his grandfather's service as A British 'Grunt' in the Great War: The Service of
Private George T. Matchett
Our Tour Guide
History of World War One Course
Those in the Philadelphia area may be interested in taking a course on the History of World War I (listed in the course catalog as HIS 224-01) at Delaware County Community College in Media, PA this fall
History of World War I
Fall 2009
CRN #: 2763
COURSE: HIS 224.01
TIME: 12:10 p.m. – 1:35 p.m.
DAYS: Tuesday & Thursday
Details about registering for the course can be found HERE
WFA 2008 National Seminar WFA East Coast Chapter Spring Seminar
At
Fort Mifflin, Philadelphia, PA
9 May 2009
At
Fort Mifflin, Philadelphia, PA
9 May 2009
Fort Mifflin
Private George T. Matchett
Tim Mulligan speaks on World War I German Naval Records at the National
Archives: Access and Research Possibilities
Archives: Access and Research Possibilities
Our Tour Guide
Weapons Demonstration
History of World War One Course
Those in the Philadelphia area may be interested in taking a course on the History of World War I (listed in the course catalog as HIS 224-01) at Delaware County Community College in Media, PA this fall
History of World War I
Fall 2009
CRN #: 2763
COURSE: HIS 224.01
TIME: 12:10 p.m. – 1:35 p.m.
DAYS: Tuesday & Thursday
Details about registering for the course can be found HERE
The James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, PA
presents
presents
From Swords to Plowshares: Metal Trench Art from WWI and WWII.
The show features more than 300 pieces of unique, handmade trench art from the United States, England, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, and Hungary.The exhibition runs from March 14 through May 31, 2009. www.MichenerArtMuseum.org
The League of WWI Aviation Historians will be holding its biennial seminar
in San Antonio, Texas, Friday and Saturday, October 16 & 17, 2009. San
Antonio, home to Kelly and Brooks Fields, as well as Ft. Sam Houston, where some of
the first U. S. military flights took place, is rightly known as the Cradle
of Military Aviation; hence our seminar's theme, Back to the Cradle.
We'll begin the evening of Thursday, October 15 with an informal
get-together where you can renew old acquaintances and make new ones. Friday will be
devoted to presentations on many aspects of the air war by well-known
historians and authors. That evening, we'll have our traditional banquet with an
after-dinner speaker.
Saturday will be divided between additional presentations and a field trip.
We're still finalizing arrangements, but we believe you'll be delighted with
what you see.
For everyone's convenience, we'll be staying at a hotel with free shuttle
service to the nearby San Antonio Airport, and we've arranged for a block of
rooms at a special rate. If you want to take in downtown San Antonio, with its
famous Riverwalk and the Alamo, you'll be only a few minutes' drive away.
Many details are being finalized, so we'll update you in future e-mails.
Until then, mark your calendar -- October 16 and 17.
For announcements and information pertaining to the national branch of the WFA click the link below.
Over the Front's Back to the Cradle Seminar
The League of WWI Aviation Historians will be holding its biennial seminar
in San Antonio, Texas, Friday and Saturday, October 16 & 17, 2009. San
Antonio, home to Kelly and Brooks Fields, as well as Ft. Sam Houston, where some of
the first U. S. military flights took place, is rightly known as the Cradle
of Military Aviation; hence our seminar's theme, Back to the Cradle.
We'll begin the evening of Thursday, October 15 with an informal
get-together where you can renew old acquaintances and make new ones. Friday will be
devoted to presentations on many aspects of the air war by well-known
historians and authors. That evening, we'll have our traditional banquet with an
after-dinner speaker.
Saturday will be divided between additional presentations and a field trip.
We're still finalizing arrangements, but we believe you'll be delighted with
what you see.
For everyone's convenience, we'll be staying at a hotel with free shuttle
service to the nearby San Antonio Airport, and we've arranged for a block of
rooms at a special rate. If you want to take in downtown San Antonio, with its
famous Riverwalk and the Alamo, you'll be only a few minutes' drive away.
Many details are being finalized, so we'll update you in future e-mails.
Until then, mark your calendar -- October 16 and 17.
For announcements and information pertaining to the national branch of the WFA click the link below.
Visit the WFA East Coast Chapter's website at the link below.
Links to World War One Battlefield Tours
Spring 2009 Battlefield Tour
Valor Tours
Bartlett's Battlefield Journeys
Spring 2009 Battlefield Tour
Valor Tours
Bartlett's Battlefield Journeys
OVER HERE AND OVER THERE: AMERICA’S GREAT WAR AND AMERICA’S GREAT WARRIORS
Western Front Association-U.S. Branch Annual National Seminar
U.S. Army Heritage & Education Center
12-14 September 2008
COL Robert J. Dalessandro [AHEC Director] & Mr. Michael G. Knapp [AHEC Collection Manager]
"Forging the Force: Organizing and Preparing the AEF for Overseas Duty"
Organization and Insignia of the American Expeditionary Force, 1917-1923
Dr. Nancy Gentile Ford [Professor, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania] "Americans All! Foreign-Born Soldiers in WWI"
Americans All
Mr. Stephen L. Harris [Author/Historian] "Irish by Association, Irish by Adoption, Irish by Conviction: The Fighting 69th Changes Its Color From Green to Rainbow."
Stephen Harris Website
Dr. Marion Pinsdorff [Professor Emeritus, Fordham University] “War Morphed Hawaii’s Business: Hackfeld’s Into American Factors; Ehlers Into Liberty House”
Mr. Jay Graybeal [Army Heritage Museum Chief Curator] “’Us Sailors Never Reach France Cause!’: The U. S. Naval Reserve Flying Corps in France”
Mr. Christopher Semancik [AHEC Arms Curator] “Trenches, Tranches, Schützengraben”
Dr. Douglas V. Johnson [Professor, US Army War College] "Americans at the Battle of Soissons"
Doug Johnson Website
Soissons, 1918
Dr. Mitch Yockelson [National Archives and Records Administration] "Borrowed Soldiers: The Anglo-American Relationship in World War I”
See the Review for Mitch Yockelson's Book on Our "Great War Books and Reviews" Page
Dr. Ed Lengel [Professor, University of Virginia] "America's Experience in the Meuse-Argonne"
See the Review for Ed Lengel's book on our "Great War Books and Reviews" Page
Dr. Lengel Accepts the Tomlinson Book Prize For To Conquer Hell
Dane Coffman as General Pershing
A Ring,a Razor, and a Pipe
New WFA President, Doran Cart
National World War One Museum
Program Coordinator, Louise Arnold-Friend
US Marines in the Great War
US Marines in Belleau Wood
"Detroit's Own" Polar Bear Memorial Association
American Troops in Northern Russia, 1919
Dreadnoughts
Austro-Hungarian Dreadnoughts, 1915
First Division AEF
First Division Museum
Scholars and historians are in debate over the location of Alvin C. York's Great War heroics. The Sergeant Alvin C. York Project and The Sergeant York Discovery Expedition represent some points of view. Visit their sites for details about their theses.
The Sergeant Alvin C. York Project
The Sergeant York Discovery Expedition
Interested in Trench Art?
Visit these sites.
Trench Art Collector
Trench Art Website
Trench Art Article
Visit these sites.
Trench Art Collector
Trench Art Website
Trench Art Article
WHAT STUDENTS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WORLD WAR I
by Michael Neiberg
Ask any British student about the Somme or any French or
German student about Verdun and you are likely to get a
quick response. It may be a response about an ancestor who
fought in one of the war's titanic battles or it might be a
response influenced by a work of fiction like Blackadder,
Oh! What a Lovely War, or All Quiet on the Western Front. It
might even be the now fashionable response of dismissing the
war as a fratricidal relic of Europe's "old" age of
nationalism and rivalry. These responses might well be
slightly inaccurate or even wildly so, but the war remains
enough of a part of the living memory for Europeans to
elicit certain emotional and historical triggers. This
continued sense of relevance for Europeans is, of course,
entirely natural given the great destruction the war brought
and the impact the war had on European history.
American students, by contrast, are unlikely to have such
close associations to World War I. The war for Americans was
a brief event, and a relatively small proportion of
Americans saw any sustained military action. The United
States was never attacked and there is no single moment
associated with the war in American memory as the Somme is
in British memory. The war, moreover, falls in between two
much larger and more emotive events in American history, the
Civil War and World War II. American students might thus be
forgiven for not responding to Belleau Wood or the Meuse-
Argonne in the same ways they might react to Gettysburg or
Pearl Harbor.
That contrast is the first point I always make to my
students. Whereas for the United States, World War I is a
little-known and arcane period in history, for Europeans it
is absolutely formative. For France and Great Britain
especially, World War I (known as the Great War or La Grande
Guerre for a good reason) remains the war both in the
popular imagination and among scholars. While one compares
humanitarian catastrophes at one's own peril, a few numbers
may make the case. The British Empire suffered an estimated
908,000 deaths in World War I, or more than twice the number
of World War II. Put another way, the British had more men
killed on one day of World War I (July 1, 1916, still the
bloodiest single day in the history of the British Army)
than it suffered in the first month of operations on and
subsequent to D-Day. For France, of course, the contrast is
even more stark: an estimated 1,300,000 Frenchmen died in
World War I compared to 567,000 in World War II.
A simple car ride along any of World War I's many
battlefields will prove the point to those less
statistically inclined. On many battlefields, such as
Verdun, Champagne, and the Somme, the war still speaks
through the massive shell holes and mine craters that
continue to scar the landscape 90 years later. An observant
tourist can also see signs reading village detruit
(destroyed village), marking a place that was quite
literally pulverized during the war and never rebuilt. The
French burial custom has been to build massive cemeteries
such as the ones at Verdun, Les Islettes, or Notre Dame de
Lorette that impress by their sheer size. Ossuaries
containing the remains of thousands of inconnus (unknown
soldiers) stand as silent witnesses to the awesome power of
modern weapons, most importantly artillery, to kill men
without leaving sufficient remains to allow for
identification or burial. The British have preferred to
build smaller, more numerous cemeteries with the unique
touch of including a personal statement from the family on
the headstones. The Germans, too, built cemeteries with
black, solemn crosses that stand in stark contrast to the
gleaming white marble to be found in the American ones.
Driving away from the battlefield, a traveler might stop at
any of a number of appealing French or Belgian towns to have
a coffee or meal and try to get the horrors of what they
have just seen out of their minds. But it will not take much
imagination to see the impacts of the war in any town near
the western front. Some, like Arras or Ypres, will have post
cards for sale showing the astonishing destruction and
devastation that left them mere piles of rubble. Others will
have place names like Place Foch or Avenue Joffre named to
honor the heroes of the war. One might even see an Avenue
Haig or a Rue Pershing thrown in. Every French town, no
matter how small or how far from the western front, will
have a statue near the town hall commemorating the young men
who died pour la patrie from 1914-1918. If one looks very
closely, one will see a tragic recurrence of family names on
such statues and, often on the back, the addition of a
smaller number of names from the war of 1939-1945, seemingly
added as an afterthought.
For Europeans, the war is the epochal event of the century.
Without it, there would have been no great depression, no
fascism, no Second World War, and no concentration camps. We
will never know, of course, what the estimated 8 million
Europeans who died in the course of the war might otherwise
have contributed to politics, to medicine, or to art. What
we do know is that Europe is still suffering from that huge
loss of its best men and is still struggling to figure out
how to even cope with their memory.
The American experience of World War I must therefore be
kept in its proper perspective. Americans who do not
understand what the war did to Europe will never really
understand the Europe that emerged. Europe's ambivalent
attitude toward the United States, its drive toward
unification, and the relatively recent coming together of
the French and German governments will all come into sharper
focus if they are set against the backdrop of the killing of
1914-1918. Americans, a European might say over coffee in
Arras, do not really understand war because it has not
touched us as it has them.
For that, of course, we can all be very grateful. Although
the war did not result in destruction for Americans on the
European scale, it nevertheless had deep and often forgotten
impacts on America. Perhaps most importantly, it led to
fundamental, long-term changes in the way America (and
Americans) relate to the outside world. It is hard to
imagine today, but when Woodrow Wilson went to Paris for the
postwar peace conference in early 1919, it marked the first
time ever that a sitting American president had visited
Europe. This was due to much more than the limits of
transportation technology. It reflected instead an American
mindset that clearly relegated European affairs to the back
burner.
Woodrow Wilson forever changed that attitude, and with it he
changed much more. Wilson committed America to international
sponsorship of an idea of foreign policy based around the
high-minded quest for democracy, capitalism, and freedom.
While not all Americans have seen the problem in the way
Wilson did and while even Wilson did not fully believe in
all of the consequences of his own idealism, his way of
viewing the world has bequeathed a legacy to every American
leader since. Echoes of his belief in the use of American
power to pave the way for ideals that would in turn secure
the freedom and peace of peoples everywhere has influenced
American foreign policy ever since. Presidents of both
parties, down to the present day, have used Wilson's ideals
and his language as the basis for their global involvement.
To many Europeans, these ideals have come, as Wilson hoped
they would, as a breath of fresh air to a continent
hopelessly mired in ancient hatreds. To others, they have
come as a lofty intrusion from a society that they see as
having more power than wisdom. Georges Clemenceau, France's
hard-bitten premier, famously dismissed Wilson's idealistic
Fourteen Points with the witty, "God Himself only gave us
ten." In some versions of the anecdote, the anti-clerical
Clemenceau followed that quip with "and we soon enough
learned to break those." His principled distaste for
Wilson's idealism notwithstanding (Clemenceau derisively
called him "the professor"), Clemenceau had a deep
admiration for America. As a young journalist, he had
covered the end of the American Civil War, spoke English
with American idioms, and had an American wife, at least
until he had her deported on trumped up charges. His
experiences with America are a symbolic microcosm of those
of his French countrymen, and, more generally, Europeans
across at least the western part of the continent.
Clemenceau and Wilson did agree on their shared dislike of
communism. Although it is now hardly more than a footnote,
even in American histories of the war, the United States
sent an expedition to northern Russia from 1918 to 1920 to
assist the noncommunist Whites in the Russian Civil War.
Although ultimately unsuccessful in stopping the spread of
Bolshevism, the incident showed Wilson's faith in the
ability of even small numbers of American soldiers to
influence world events. It can also be seen as the first
real American shot in the Cold War, and one that Josef
Stalin never fully forgave or forgot.
Historians short on space and teachers short on time like to
contrast the interventionist Wilson to the supposedly
isolationist years that followed. But the contrast is not
entirely accurate. The United States rejected the Treaty of
Versailles and refused to join the League of Nations, but
those events are only part of the story. The United States
did participate in a number of international conferences and
programs designed to reduce world tensions; in many cases
the United States provided the key leadership. These
conferences included the Washington Conferences on Naval
Disarmament, the Kellogg-Briand Pact that aimed to eliminate
war as an act of statecraft, the Dawes and Young Plans to
refinance German war debt, and the promotion of
international trade in the hopes that nations that trade
together would not go to war against one another. American
isolationism, to the extent that it even existed, is
therefore best seen as a desire not to go to war; it was not
a desire to bury the nation's collective heads in the sand.
The distinction is critical. A rough analogy might be found
today in the environmental movement, where the United States
is a recognized player and sometime leader, but only on
American terms, as the continued American refusal to sign
the Kyoto Accords demonstrates.
The war had equally dramatic impacts on the American home
front. The idea of intervening in a bloody and inconclusive
European war for unclear gains generated tremendous
controversy. Conservatives and many east coast elites
supported American entry into the war in large part because
they believed that the nation's honor had been impinged by
repeated German insults such as submarine warfare and the
notorious Zimmerman telegram promising Mexico parts of
American territory in exchange for military intervention.
Even before America entered the war, hundreds of young men
from "good families" and Ivy League universities had
volunteered their services for the French cause in the
French Foreign Legion and an all-American fighter squadron
called the Lafayette Escadrille. Among the Escadrille's most
vocal supporters was the former president and Wilson nemesis
Theodore Roosevelt, who praised the courage of young
Americans willing to risk their lives and their American
citizenship to fight for a cause that they believed to be
just.
But not all Americans responded as Roosevelt did. In the
Midwest and South there was widespread suspicion of entering
the war and lukewarm feelings about America's potential
British and French allies. Although few Americans supported
the Central Powers after the callous German sinking of the
Lusitania in May 1915, there was a deep chasm between anti-
German sentiment and a desire to send American troops "Over
There". The problems of Europe were a long way from the
minds of most Americans and, censorship notwithstanding,
Americans could read the newspapers and understand how
murderous the battlefields of the western front were.
Moreover, Americans were making money from their definition
of neutrality, which permitted trade with both sides. Why
put American safety and security at risk? Why kill the goose
that laid the golden eggs?
Germany's decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare
in April 1917 may have convinced Wilson and his advisers of
the need for war, but millions of Americans remained
unconvinced. The administration was worried about active
opposition to the war from radical labor groups like the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), anti-British Irish-
Americans, and ethnic Germans living in the Midwest and in
most major cities. Aware of the need to build consensus and
ensure support for the war, the government engaged in a
massive public relations and propaganda campaign, the like
of which the country had never seen. Newspapers and books
combined with new media like movies to saturate the American
people with images and ideas to promote the war. As with all
propaganda, it is hard to know exactly how average Americans
responded to these images. But Americans did rally around
the flag and even opponents of the war generally gave the
government its support once the country was officially at
war.
The American experience of war may have been brief, but its
impacts on the home front were dramatic. Among the groups
most deeply affected were African-Americans, thousands of
whom moved north to take jobs in the now booming northern
factories. This "great migration" was a transformative event
in African-American history as individuals and entire
families left the sharecropping south and came north. While
the jobs paid well and offered an escape from the Jim Crow
racism of the south, problems and violence emerged when
white workers came back and demanded their jobs. Many also
demanded that African-Americans return to the South as well.
Nineteen-nineteen was a year of terrible racial violence
characterized by widespread lynching. African-American
deaths due to racial violence in the turbulent period 1917-
1923 appear to have at least equaled, and may have exceeded,
the number of African-American battle deaths. This figure is
a function both of the general exclusion of African-
Americans from the battlefield and the intensity of racial
tension in the immediate postwar years.
The extent to which the war made the United States a
"nation" remains a point of considerable debate among
scholars. Some argue that the mass movement of people across
the nation, the shared military service of Americans (in
segregated units) raised across the nation, and increased
government standardization of the economy all point to the
emergence of a national mindset. World War I was the first
large-scale crisis that required a shared response from
Northerners and Southerners, Easterners and Westerners, city
dwellers and farmers, men and women. The country had
national heroes like John Pershing (born in Missouri), Alvin
York (born in Tennessee), and Eddie Rickenbacker (born in
Ohio). Having worked together to meet a common challenge,
America, these scholars argue, was ready to face the 1920s
era of mass media as people who identified themselves as
Americans first and foremost.
This narrative is compelling, but it is not the full story.
America remained deeply divided along numerous fault lines,
especially that of race; the United States Army raised two
African-American divisions for military service, but it
treated one so brutally that it performed badly in combat
and it gladly dispatched the other to the French Army, under
whose guidance it won numerous citations. Most of the
divisions in the United States Army, moreover, were National
Guard units connected to a state. Many of the largest and
most important monuments to the Americans on the Western
Front are dedicated not to the United States Army, but to
state units like the 28th Division from Pennsylvania,
memorialized at Varennes in one of France's largest World
War I monuments.
Perhaps what makes this complex war ultimately so difficult
to teach is the absence of an easy and straightforward
narrative. Although we recognize the limits of grand
narrative, there is a simplicity in teaching the Civil War
as the end of slavery and World War II as the destruction of
Nazism and Japanese totalitarianism. World War I's narrative
is much more complex and ultimately less satisfying to most
students. Nevertheless, it is a critical part of American
history and deserves a greater place in the curriculum than
the parenthesis to which it all too often gets relegated.
Links to Other Great War Websites
National World War One Museum
League of World War I Aviation Historians
Over There
US Army Heritage and Education Center
World War I Document Archive
The Long, Long Trail
BBC World War I
World War I TeacherNet
American Battle Monuments Commission
The Great War Society
Trenches on the Web
WWI Color Photos
AEF Blog
The Aerodrome
FirstWorldWar.com
The New York Military Affairs Symposium
MilitaryGenealogy.com
The Great War Forum
WWI: Experiences of an English Soldier
America's World War One Monuments
Great War Association
Letters Home
National World War One Museum
League of World War I Aviation Historians
Over There
US Army Heritage and Education Center
World War I Document Archive
The Long, Long Trail
BBC World War I
World War I TeacherNet
American Battle Monuments Commission
The Great War Society
Trenches on the Web
WWI Color Photos
AEF Blog
The Aerodrome
FirstWorldWar.com
The New York Military Affairs Symposium
MilitaryGenealogy.com
The Great War Forum
WWI: Experiences of an English Soldier
America's World War One Monuments
Great War Association
Letters Home
