The American Military Experience in World War I
University Press of Kentucky, 1998, 412 pages, index, photos, maps, ISBN 0 88310 955 8, $25.00 paperback
First published by Oxford University Press in 1968 and still in print, this is considered the best single account of American involvement in the Great War by one of America’s premier military historians. Starting with a sketch of the US Army in 1917, Coffman analyses the growth of that force from a frontier constabulary of barely 125 thousand men backed by a National Guard of some 200 thousand largely untrained militia to a force numbering some four million men (two million of them deployed in France and Flanders) barely 18 months later. He traces how the army resolved issues of training, recruitment, weapons production and procurement, movement overseas and logistics. Coffman examines the major American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) campaigns including St. Mihael, and the Meuse Argonne as well as the Battles of Belleau Wood, Soissons, the Aisne-Marne, and at the St. Quentin tunnel on the Somme. He also traces issues of command and control, the American contribution at sea and in the air. And, he examines topics often glossed over in other histories such as the operation of the draft (conscription), officer selection and training, the performance of Black troops, treatment of conscientious objectors, troop morale and disease.
About the only thing missing from Coffman’s treatment is detail on America’s major industrial, agricultural and financial contributions to victory. These are covered in British historian Gary Mead’s Doughboys: America and the First World War (Overlook, 2000).
Reviewer: Len Shurtleff
