America's Deadliest Battle: Meuse-Argonne, 1918 (Modern War Studies) Review

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America's Deadliest Battle: Meuse-Argonne, 1918 (Modern War Studies) ReviewAs Ferrell says in his introduction, most Americans today don't know much about our country's involvement in the First World War, despite its influence on the following century and the world we live in today. This volume gives a wonderfully succinct overview of America's entry into the war in 1917, including justified criticism of President Wilson and Sec. of War Baker's inability to put the nation quickly on a total war footing... faults that were, as the author points out, primary in the Meuse-Argonne being the deadliest battle in US history.
Ferrell moves the history along quickly, giving brief overviews of the AEF's smaller battles throughout the spring and summer of 1918 (Cantigny, Belleau Wood, etc) and the reduction of the St. Mihiel Salient in September of that year. He paints a vivid portrait of the failings of US logistics and planning and is equally critical of many divisional and brigade commanders, although he finds little fault with Pershing.
This is essentially an operational level history, but Ferrell does an excellent job of introducing quotes and anecdotes from individual soldiers and officers. These bring the narrative to life at just the right times, and help Ferrell avoid the 'official history' tone of so many less talented military historians.
Like his previous book about the 35th Division "Collapse in the Meuse-Argonne", this is a realtively short volume (195 pp include voluminous end notes) and one wishes for more detail and length. Nevertheless, "America's Deadliest Battle" is an excellent history of America in the Great War - events that are so little written about today. So Ferrell in his brevity, simply leaves the reader wanting more. Hopefully he is hard at work on another book about this important and interesting time.America's Deadliest Battle: Meuse-Argonne, 1918 (Modern War Studies) OverviewAmerican fighting men had never seen the likes of it before.The great battle of the Meuse-Argonne was the costliest conflict in American history, with 26,000 men killed and tens of thousands wounded. Involving 1.2 million American troops over 47 days, it ended on November 11-what we now know as Armistice Day-and brought an end to World War I, but at a great price. Distinguished historian Robert Ferrell now looks back at this monumental struggle to create the definitive study of the battle-and to determine just what made it so deadly.Ferrell reexamines factors in the war that many historians have chosen to disregard. He points first to the failure of the Wilson administration to mobilize the country for war. American industry had not been prepared to produce the weaponry or transport ships needed by our military, and the War Department-with outmoded concepts of battle shaped by the Spanish-American War-shared equal blame in failing to train American soldiers for a radically new type of warfare.Once in France, undertrained American doughboys were forced to learn how to conduct mobile warfare through bloody experience. Ferrell assesses the soldiers' lack of skill in the use of artillery, the absence of tactics for taking on enemy machine gun nests, and the reluctance of American officers to use poison gas-even though by 1918 it had become a staple of warfare. In all of these areas, the German army held the upper hand.Ferrell relates how, during the last days of the Meuse-Argonne, the American divisions had finally learned up-to-date tactics, and their final attack on November 1 is now seen as a triumph of military art. Yet even as the armistice was being negotiated, some American officers-many of whom had never before commanded men in battle-continued to spur their troops on, wasting more lives in an attempt to take new ground mere hours before the settlement.Besides the U.S. shortcomings in mobilization and tactics, Ferrell points to the greatest failure of all: the failure to learn from the experience, as after the armistice the U.S. Army retreated to its prewar mindset. Enhanced by more than four dozen maps and photographs, America's Deadliest Battle is a riveting revisit to the forests of France that reminds us of the costs of World War I-and of the shadow that it cast on the twentieth century.This book is part of the Modern War Studies series.

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