American Expeditionary Forces

The American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) consisted

of the United States Armed Forces sent to Europe in
World War I. During the United States campaigns in
World War I the AEF fought in France alongside French
and British allied forces in the last year of the war, against
Imperial German forces. Some of the troops fought
alongside Italian forces in that same year, against AustroHungarian forces. The AEF helped the French Army
on the Western Front during the Aisne Oensive (at
Chteau-Thierry and Belleau Wood) in June 1918, and
fought its major actions in the Saint-Mihiel and MeuseArgonne Oensives in late 1918.

one million U.S. troops were stationed in France; but

only half of which made it to the front lines.[2] Since the
transport ships needed to bring American troops to Europe were scarce at the beginning, the army pressed into
service cruise ships, seized German ships, and borrowed
Allied ships to transport American soldiers from New
York, New Jersey, and Newport News, Virginia. The
mobilization eort taxed the American military to the
limit and required new organizational strategies and command structures to transport great numbers of troops and
supplies quickly and eciently. The French harbors of
Bordeaux, La Pallice, Saint Nazaire and Brest became the
entry points into the French railway system which brought
the US forces and their supplies to the front. American
engineers in France built 82 new ship berths, nearly 1,000
1 History
miles (1,600 km) of additional standard-gauge tracks and
100,000 miles (160,000 km) of telephone and telegraph
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson initially planned to give
lines.[1]
command of the AEF to General Frederick Funston, but
after Funstons sudden death, Wilson appointed Major The rst American troops, who were often called
General John J. Black Jack Pershing in May 1917; Per- "Doughboys", landed in Europe in June 1917. However
shing remained in command for the entire war. Persh- the AEF did not participate at the front until late October
ing insisted that American soldiers be well-trained before 1917, when the 1st Division, but only on a small scale.
going to Europe. As a result, few troops arrived before A formation of regular soldiers and the rst division to
1918. In addition, Pershing insisted that the American arrive in France, entered the trenches near Nancy.[1] By
force would not be used merely to ll gaps in the French the time the Americans were ready and trained to engage
and British armies, and he resisted European eorts to the enemy, the Germans had been thoroughly worn down
have U.S. troops deployed as individual replacements in by the Allied forces.
decimated Allied units. This attitude was not always well The AEF used French and British equipment. Particureceived by the Allied leaders who distrusted the potential larly appreciated were the French canon de 75 modle
of an army lacking experience in large-scale warfare.[1] In 1897, the canon de 155 C modle 1917 Schneider and the
addition the British tried to barter their spare shipping to canon de 155mm GPF. American aviation units received
make the US put its soldiers into British ranks.
the SPAD XIII and Nieuport 28 ghters and the US tank
corps used the French Renault FT light tanks. Pershing
established facilities in France to train new arrivals with
their new weapons.[3] By the end of 1917 four divisions
were deployed in a large training area near Verdun: the
1st Division, a regular army formation; the 26th Division, a National Guard formation; the 2nd Division, a
combined formation of regular troops and United States
Marines; and the 42nd Rainbow Division, a National
Guard formation consisting of units from nearly every
state in the United States. A fth division, the 41st Division, had been converted into a depot division near Tours.
At the beginning, during the Spring of 1918, the four
battle-ready U.S. divisions were deployed under French
and British command to gain combat experience by deBy June 1917, only 14,000 U.S. soldiers had arrived in fending relatively quiet sectors of their lines. After the
France and the AEF had only a minor participation at rst oensive action and American-led[4]AEF victory on
the front in late October 1917, but by May 1918 over 28 May 1918 at the Battle of Cantigny, by the 1st U.S.
With Americas rst convoy. The troop ships are the Henderson,
Antilles, Momus and Lenape.

HISTORY

Division, and a similar local action by the 2nd Division

at Belleau Wood beginning 6 June, both while assigned
under French Corps command, Pershing worked towards
the deployment of an independent US eld Army. The
rest followed at an accelerating pace during the spring
and summer of 1918. By June Americans were arriving
in-theatre at the rate of 10,000 a day; most of which entered training by British, Canadian and Australian battleexperienced ocers and senior non-commissioned ranks.
The training took a minimum of six weeks due to the inexperience of the servicemen.
The rst oensive action by AEF units serving under
British command was by 1,000 men (4 companies from
the 33rd Division AEF), with the Australian Imperial
Force (AIF) during the Battle of Hamel on 4 July 1918.
(Corporal Thomas A. Pope was awarded the Medal of
Honor for this battle.) This battle took place under the
overall command of Australian Corps Commander Lt.
General Sir John Monash. The Allied force in this battle combined artillery, armor, infantry, and air support
(Combined arms), which served as a blueprint for all subsequent Allied attacks using "tanks".[5]
American Army and Marine Corps troops played a key
role in helping stop the German thrust towards Paris,
during the Second Battle of the Marne in June 1918 (at
Chteau-Thierry and Belleau Wood). The rst major and
distinctly American oensive was the reduction of the
Saint Mihiel salient in September 1918. During the Battle
of Saint-Mihiel, beginning September 12, 1918, Pershing
commanded the American First Army, comprising seven
divisions and more than 500,000 men, in the largest offensive operation ever undertaken by United States armed
forces. This successful oensive was followed by the
Meuse-Argonne oensive, lasting from September 26 to
November 11, 1918, during which Pershing commanded
more than one million American and French combatants.
In these two military operations, Allied forces recovered
more than 200sqmi (488sqkm) of French territory from
the German army. By the time the Armistice had suspended all combat on November 11, 1918, the American Expeditionary Forces had evolved into a modern,
combat-tested army.[1]
Late in the war American units ultimately fought in two
other theaters at the request of European powers. Pershing sent troops of the 332nd Infantry to Italy, and President Wilson agreed to send troops, the 27th and 339th
Infantry Regiments, to Russia.[6] These latter two were
known as the American Expeditionary Force Siberia,[7]
and the American Expeditionary Force North Russia.[8]

1.1

Casualties

The AEF sustained about 320,000 casualties: 53,402

battle deaths, 63,114 non combat deaths and 204,000
wounded.[9] This high AEF casualty count was sustained
at a time when French casualties for 1918 are listed as

A United States Army eld hospital in France, 1918.

330,000, but with a much longer front line to hold.[1]

The inuenza pandemic during the fall of 1918 took the
lives of more than 25,000 men from the AEF while another 360,000 became gravely ill. Other diseases were
relatively well controlled through compulsory vaccination. Typhoid fever was also practically eliminated. Relatively few men suered actual injury from poison gas,
although much larger numbers mistakenly thought that
they had been exposed.[6]
Using questionnaires lled out by doughboys as they left
the Army, Gutirrez reports that they were not cynical
or disillusioned. They fought for honor, manhood, comrades, and adventure, but especially for duty.[10]

1.2 African Americans

African Americans were drafted on the same basis as
whites and made up 13% of the draftees. By the end of
the war, over 350,000 African-Americans had served in
AEF units on the Western Front. However, they were assigned to segregated units commanded by white ocers.
One fth of the black soldiers sent to France saw combat, compared to two-thirds of the whites. They were
3% of AEF combat forces and under 2% of battleeld
fatalities.[11] The mass of the colored drafted men cannot be used for combatant troops, said a General Sta
report in 1918, and it recommended that these colored
drafted men be organized in reserve labor battalions.
They handled unskilled labor tasks as stevedores in the
Atlantic ports and common laborers at the camps and in
the Services of the Rear in France.[12] The French, whose
front-line troops were resisting combat duties to the point
of mutiny, requested and received control of several regiments of black combat troops.[13] Kennedy reports:[14]
Units of the black 92nd Division particularly suered from poor preparation and the
breakdown in command control. As the only
black combat division, the 92nd entered the

3
line with unique liabilities. It had been deliberately dispersed throughout several camps
during its stateside training; some of its artillery units were summoned to France before
they had completed their courses of instruction, and were never fully equipped until after
the Armistice; nearly all its senior white ocers scorned the men under their command and
repeatedly asked to be transferred; the black
enlisted men were frequently diverted from
their already attenuated training opportunities
in France in the summer of 1918 and put to
work as stevedores and common laborers.
The 369th, 370th, 371st, and 372nd Infantry Regiments served with distinction under French command
with French colonial units in front-line combat. The
French did not harbor the same levels of disdain based
on skin color and for many Americans of an AfricanAmerican descent it was a liberating and refreshing experience. These African-American soldiers wore American uniforms, some dating from the time of the Union
Army, with French helmets and were armed with French
Model 1907/15 8mm Lebel Berthier ries manufactured by Remington Arms rather than M1903 Springeld or M1917 Eneld ries issued to most American
soldiers.[15] One of the most distinguished units was the
369th Infantry Regiment, known as the Harlem Hellghters. The 369th was on the front lines for six months,
longer than any other African-American regiment in the
war. One hundred seventy-one members of the 369th
were awarded the Legion of Merit.[16] One member of
the 369th, Sgt. Henry Lincoln Johnson, was awarded the
French Croix de guerre,[17] and has been considered for
a posthumous Medal of Honor.

See also
Fort Omaha Balloon School
United States home front during World War I

Notes

[1] Coman, The War to End All Wars (1998)

[2] Pershing, My Experiences in the World War (1931)
[3] Wilson, Treat 'Em Rough: The Birth of American Armor,
19171920 (1989)
[4] Matthew Davenport, First Over There, 2015, Thomas
Dunne Books
[5] Roland Perry, Monash The Outsider Who Won a War,
2007, Random House, Sydney, pp.349352
[6] Venzon, ed. The United States in the First World War: An
Encyclopedia (1995)

[7] Robert L. Willett, Russian Sideshow, pp. 166167, 170

[8] E.M. Halliday, When Hell Froze Over (New York City,
NY, ibooks, inc., 2000), p. 44
[9] Congressional Research Service, American War and Military Operations Casualties:Lists and Statistics
[10] Edward A. :Gutirrez, Doughboys on the Great War:
How American Soldiers Viewed Their Military Experience
(2014)
[11] Jennifer D. Keene, Americans as Warriors: 'Doughboys
in Battle during the First World War, OAH Magazine of
History, Vol. 17, No. 1, World War I (Oct., 2002) , p. 17.
[12] Kennedy (1982) 162.
[13] Barbeau and Henri (1974); .
[14] Kennedy (1982) p. 199.
[15] Caneld, Bruce N. American Rieman (April 2009) p. 40
[16] http://www.explorepahistory.com/~{}expa/cms/pbfiles/
Project1/Scheme40/ExplorePAHistory-a0b1b6-a_514.
pdf
[17] 3dpublishing.com.

4 References
Ayres, Leonard P, The War with Germany: A Statistical Summary Government Printing Oce, 1919
full text online
Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri, The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World
War I (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1974),
Beaver, Daniel R. Newton D. Baker and the American War Eort, 19171919 (1966)
Chambers, John W., II. To Raise an Army: The
Draft Comes to Modern America (1987)
Coman, Edward M. The War to End All Wars:
The American Military Experience in World War I
(1998), the standard history
Cooke, James J., The Rainbow Division in the Great
War, 19171919 Praeger Publishers, (1994)
Dalessandro, Robert J. & Dalessandro, Rebecca S.,
American Lions: The 332nd Infantry Regiment in
World War I, (Atglen, Pennsylvania: Schier Publishing, 2009)
Dalessandro, Robert J., & Knapp, Michael G., Organization and Insignia of the American Expeditionary Forces, 19171923 (Atglen, Pennsylvania:
Schier Publishing, 2008) The best single volume
on AEF unit organization.

5
Dalessandro, Robert J. & Gerald Torrence, Willing Patriots: Men of Color in the First World War
(Atglen, Pennsylvania: Schier Publishing, 2009)

EXTERNAL LINKS

Wilson Dale E. Treat 'Em Rough: The Birth of

American Armor, 19171920 Presidio Press, 1989.

Davenport, Matthew J. First Over There: The Attack on Cantigny Americas First Battle of World
War I (New York, Thomas Dunne: 2015)

Yockelson, Mitchell A. (2008-05-30). Borrowed

Soldiers: Americans under British Command, 1918.
Foreword by John S. D. Eisenhower. University of
Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0-8061-3919-7.

Ferrell; Robert H. Collapse at Meuse-Argonne: The

Failure of the Missouri-Kansas Division University
of Missouri Press, (2004)

Zeiger; Susan. In Uncle Sams Service: Women

Workers with the American Expeditionary Force,
19171919 (1999)

Freidel, Frank. Over There (1964), well illustrated

Grotelueschen; Mark E. Doctrine under Trial:
American Artillery Employment in World War I
(2001) ISBN 0-313-31171-4 (full text version at
Google Books)
Hallas, James H. Doughboy War: The American Expeditionary Force in World War I (2000)
Heller Charles E. Chemical Warfare in World War I.
The American Experience, 19171918. Fort Leavenworth, Kan.: Combat Studies Institute, 1984.
Holley, I. B. Ideas and Weapons: Exploitation of the
Aerial Weapon by the United States During World
War I(1983)
Howarth, Stephen. To Shining Sea: A History of the
United States Navy, 17751991 (1991)
Hurley, Alfred F. Billy Mitchell, Crusader for Air
Power (1975)
James, D. Clayton. The Years of MacArthur, I,
18801941. (1970)
Johnson; Herbert A. Wingless Eagle: U.S. Army Aviation through World War I University of North Carolina Press, (2001)
Kennedy, David M. Over Here: The First World War
and American Society (1982)
Koistinen, Paul. Mobilizing for Modern War: The
Political Economy of American Warfare, 1865
1919 (2004)
Pershing, John J. Pershing, My Experiences in the
World War (1931)
Smythe, Donald. Pershing: General of the Armies
(1986)

5 External links
United States Army Center of Military History
Army Historical Series: American Military
History
Chapter 17: World War I: The First
Three Years
Chapter 18: World War I: The U.S.
Army Overseas
CMH Subject Publications
CMH Pub 24-1: Learning Lessons in the
American Expeditionary Forces
U.S. Army Chemical Corps Historical Studies
Gas Warfare in World War I: Study
Number 9:
The 1st Division at
Ansauville"; January April 1918
American Battle Monuments Commission
Publications
82d Division: Summary of Operations
in the World War
92d Division: Summary of Operations
in the World War
93d Division: Summary of Operations
in the World War
Archival material
Awards and Decorations: World War I
Statistics
Campaigns of the United States Army
AEF General Headquarters Papers
American Expeditionary Force website recaps war
in 10 pages
WWI Service Questionnaires at Gettysburg College

Van Ells, Mark D. America and World War I: A

Travelers Guide. (Interlink, 2014)

World War I : Soldiers Remembered, Washington

State Library and Washington State Archives

Trask, David F. The United States in the Supreme

War Council: American War Aims and Inter-Allied
Strategy, 19171918 (1961)

The American Expeditionary Force in World War I

Venzon, Anne ed. The United States in the First

World War: An Encyclopedia (1995)

Hoover Institution Archives: Collection Name:

Faulstich, Edith M. died 1972, collector

Edith M. Faulstich A.E.F Collections & Writings

5
Edith M. Faulstich collection, 1918
1975: A.E.F. Letters, Diaries, Photos
Letters to the A.E.F in Siberia
A Find! Mail To the American Expeditionay Forces"

6 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

6.1

Text

American Expeditionary Forces Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American%20Expeditionary%20Forces?oldid=638218874 Contributors: Gsl, Hephaestos, Infrogmation, GABaker, Llywrch, Jrcrin001, CORNELIUSSEON, Docu, Freechild, Jake Nelson, Dimadick,
AlexPlank, SoLando, DocWatson42, Oberiko, Everyking, Grant65, Bobblewik, Wmahan, Comatose51, PDH, Marine 69-71, Klemen Kocjancic, N328KF, Rich Farmbrough, Vsmith, Kross, Pants7, Zsero, Killing Vector, Woohookitty, Tabletop, Emes, Edison, Jweiss11, Carl
Logan, Vary, MZMcBride, ApolloBoy, Jaraalbe, Brandmeister (old), Osioni, Jamesino, GLaDOS, Wbfergus, Rsrikanth05, Wimt, Hawkeye7, Rjensen, Capt Jim, Ray Chason,
robot, SmackBot, Roger Davies, DMorpheus, Brossow, Hmains, Carl.bunderson, Durova,
ViolinGirl, Hibernian, Sadads, Chainclaw, Kscheer, Colonies Chris, Scott3, Labattblueboy, TGC55, John, Nobunaga24, -js-, Buckboard,
Jrt989, Tonster, Agent 86, Kevin W., NEMT, Civil Engineer III, Mbshaver, Srajan01, BetacommandBot, JamesAM, Thijs!bot, John254,
Kylebrennan1, Arch dude, Ecphora, Beaumont, Velocicaptor, Sm8900, R'n'B, Rrostrom, VAcharon, Reedy Bot, NewEnglandYankee, Xyl
54, Andy Marchbanks, Hugo999, Malik Shabazz, DSRH, HJ32, Philip Trueman, Paulturtle, TXiKiBoT, Tavix, Hqb, Meowr, DidacticRogue, Olly150, Broadbot, Mkpumphrey, Tttom, Hoosierhistorian, Logan, NarayanGa, WereSpielChequers, Lucasbfrbot, Lachrie, Hxhbot, Kumioko (renamed), Copland64, ClueBot, Silverblaster, CasualObserver'48, Mild Bill Hiccup, Alicemsher58, Rockfang, Marcric,
CAVincent, Muro Bot, Thewellman, Cmacauley, EpicDream86, DumZiBoT, XLinkBot, Little Mountain 5, Noctibus, Addbot, Some jerk
on the Internet, Laurinavicius, CanadianLinuxUser, Groundsquirrel13, Reedmalloy, CarsracBot, Lightbot, Luckas-bot, Yobot, Ptbotgourou,
MOhistory, SwisterTwister, AnomieBOT, Xqbot, Mr. Military, Anotherclown, Doulos Christos, Erik9, Rootandbranch, FrescoBot, Cyklopas, Pioneer13, Seibun, Cannolis, Diwas, Sciacchitano, Lotje, AEF1918, Az81964444, RjwilmsiBot, Palmeira, John of Reading, Oyoyoy, Italia2006, Illegitimate Barrister, Mjbmrbot, ClueBot NG, Hengistmate, Atlbravesfan32121, Helpful Pixie Bot, BG19bot, Stax6969,
Atlas-maker, Lieutcoluseng and Anonymous: 126

6.2

Images

File:America{}s_First_Convoy_1917.png Source:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dc/America%27s_First_Convoy_
1917.png License: PD-US Contributors:
The Corsair in the War Zone by Ralph Delahaye Paine, Hugh Miin Company, Riverside Press Cambridge, page 38 (facing plate)
Original artist:
unknown
File:American_Expeditionary_Force_Baker_Mission.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/40/American_
Expeditionary_Force_Baker_Mission.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: Transferred from en.wikipedia; transfer was stated to be
made by User:Rockfang. Original artist: Original uploader was NASA at en.wikipedia
File:Field_hospital_WWI.jpg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9d/Field_hospital_WWI.jpg License: PD-US Contributors: ? Original artist: Library of Congress
File:Folder_Hexagonal_Icon.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/Folder_Hexagonal_Icon.svg License: Cc-bysa-3.0 Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
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Original artist: ?
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6.3

Content license

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