The Writings of the War

My Fellow Soldiers: General John Pershing and the Americans Who Helped Win the Great WarBy Andrew CarrollPenguin Press, 2017 Author Andrew Carroll is the founder and creator of the Legacy Project, a wonderful and worthwhile effort to document, collect, and preserve wartime letters (and email) of US servicemen and women. Carroll’s new book, My Fellow Soldiers: General John Pershing and the Americans Who Helped Win the Great War, is, according to publicity materials, “a marvelously vivid and moving account of the American experience in World War I, centered on an intimate portrait of General Pershing [General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) during World War I].” Furthermore, the book is based “on an astonishing collection of letters and diaries harvested by Andrew Carroll and the Center for American War Letters …” The “astonishing collection of letters and diaries” turn out to be, mostly, already-published sources. This, however, is not necessarily a drawback since the ocean of published material about World War I is vast and deep indeed. While some of these sources are obscure and difficult to find, others are very well known and readily available. With this corpus to choose from, limiting oneself to the number necessary to make a readable book that contributes to World War I historiography would be a challenge.In his Foreword, Carroll outlines his approach. This book

tells the story of the American experience in World War I, with General Pershing as the unquestionable central protagonist. It does so primarily through the letters, journals, and other personal writings that Pershing and his countryman wrote throughout the conflict.... [T]he aim in this book is to portray an overall sense of what these men and women, especially those who volunteered, lived through and felt and expressed during the war and, if they survived, and the years and decades that followed.

Carroll’s subjects were anything but ordinary. This is helpful for the novice student of the war; the witnesses Carroll chooses were articulate and often in a position that allowed them to comment on important or interesting events. The selection of diaries and letters are skewed toward well-known participants such as future distinguished generals Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, and George Marshall. Future president Harry Truman is featured, as is former president Theodore Roosevelt. The selections from Pershing’s letters tend to reflect Carroll’s goal of an “intimate portrait” of the general, but equally important are the excerpts from other participants.Carroll sets the stage by outlining the familiar rush of military and diplomatic misunderstandings and chicanery that plunged Europe into war in the summer of 1914. Distracted by a military intervention across the Mexican border, and eager to maintain independence from European affairs, President Woodrow Wilson at first tried to follow a policy of neutrality. But individual Americans became involved in the war almost from the beginning. Carroll uses excerpts from the letters of men such as aviator Kiffin Rockwell and American poet Alan Seeger, both of whom journeyed to France to enlist in the Foreign Legion. These men were the first Americans to experience the horrors of trench warfare—lice, rats, filth, flooding, incessant bombardment, trench raids, and poison gas. A letter from Seeger to his father illustrates the dangers:

I was shot a few days ago coming in from sentinel duty. I exposed myself for about two seconds at a point where the communication ditch is not deep enough. One of the snipers who kept cracking away with their Mausers at anyone who shows his head came within an ace of getting me. The ball just grazed my arm, tore the sleeve of my capote and raised a lump on the biceps which is still sore, but the skin was not broken and the wound was not serious enough to make me leave the ranks.

Both Rockwell and Seeger were killed in action.Other Americans went to France to become volunteer ambulance drivers. Carroll supplies quotes from letters and newspaper articles to cover such men as former assistant secretary of the US Treasury Abram Piatt Andrew, who founded the American Field Service in France in 1915, and professional actor Leslie Buswell. Their letters depict the agony and carnage of industrialized warfare and the courage and fortitude of the men who were wounded. Buswell describes watching French troops pass his position on their way to the front:

I could not tell them that they were going to a place where between their trench and the German trench were hundreds of mangled forms, once their fellow citizens, arms, legs, heads, scattered disjointedly everywhere; and where all night and all day every fiendish implement of murder falls by the hundred into their trenches or onto those ghastly forms, some rotted, some newly dead, some still warm, some semi-alive, stranded between foe and friend, and hurls them yards into the air to fall again with a splash of dust, as a rock falls into a lake.

Many American women became involved in this important life saving work, and Carroll features the letters of several of them. Amy Owen Bradley drove wounded men between hospitals in Paris and delivered comfort bags to patients. These bags were packed by American volunteers and contained small gifts that would please wounded men; items such as chewing gum and finger puzzles were among the little treasures contained in the bags; in that connection, Bradley tells us how something simple can cause confusion:

Many of the French soldiers had never seen or heard of Wrigley gum, a popular item, and they ate it like candy, swallowing it, which caused rampant indigestion throughout the hospital wards. Efforts to educate them on chewing the gum and then spitting it out were not entirely successful, so Bradley and other volunteers picked through the bags and removed all the gum.

Perhaps the most well known Americans to fight for France were the young, mostly wealthy, and highly educated men who, with help from influential backers, formed the famed Lafayette Escadrille, an elite flying unit made up of American volunteers and expatriates. Carroll covers the careers of such aviators as Kiffin Rockwell (mentioned earlier), Edwin Parsons, and Victor Chapman, the first American pilot to die in the war. In a 1916 letter to his brother Paul, Rockwell describes the exhilaration and danger of aerial combat as he pursed a German aircraft:

Then, just as I was afraid of running into him, I fired four or five shots, then swerved my machine to the right to keep from running into him. As I did that, I saw the mitrailleur [machine gunner] fall back dead on the pilot, the mitrailleuse fall from its position and point straight up in the air, the pilot fall to one side of the machine as if he was done for also. The machine itself fell to one side, then dived vertically towards the ground with a lot of smoke coming out of the rear...

Meanwhile, German U-Boat attacks, culminating with the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare and the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, and Berlin’s clumsy attempts at sabotage and diplomatic interference, all served to push the US closer to war with Germany. German atrocities in Belgium also served to turn public opinion in the US more resolutely against the Germans. Perhaps the last straw was a telegram sent by German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmerman to the German ambassador to Mexico. The telegram, intercepted by the British and eventually shared with US officials, was an inept attempt by Berlin to entice Mexico into a war with the US, with the promise of regained territory in Texas and the American Southwest. This was the proximate impetus for a US declaration of war, sought from Congress by President Wilson and granted by them on April 6, 1917.As some men joined the military and others registered for the draft, patriotic fervor on the home front also flourished. According to Carroll, some of this bordered on the ridiculous:

Libraries banned and burned German books. Schools stopped teaching the German language. Words that even hinted of anything Germanic were renamed. Sauerkraut and hamburgers became “liberty cabbage” and “liberty sandwiches.” Dachshunds were referred to as “liberty dogs.” Even German measles were preposterously renamed “liberty measles.” ... And countless men and women with German last names altered them to look and sound more American.

Of course, more than name-changes were necessary to fight a war in Europe. Consequently, the US Army grew through conscription and enlistment, and training began in the late summer of 1917. Carroll accurately describes the challenges faced by the American army before one could even contemplate sending it to Europe:

An army of at least two million troops would have to be mobilized and brought across three thousand miles of oceans teaming with German submarines, along with millions of tons of material. Ports and warehouses had to be constructed and hundreds of miles of train tracks laid to bring an estimated forty-five thousand tons of supplies – primarily food, water, and fuel – to soldiers and Marines on the front lines each day. Factories were needed to manufacture tanks, warplanes, trucks, rifles, machine guns, and millions of shells, mines, grenades, and bullets. ... Hospitals had to be built and thousands of nurses and doctors trained. A mail delivery system also had to be set up, as Pershing knew letters between loved ones were essential to keeping spirits high. And because there were so many first-generation immigrants being drafted into the AEF, sensors would have to read correspondences written in fifty different languages.

When Americans did arrive on the Western Front, their first encounters could be jarring. In one of his few uses of previously unpublished sources in this book, Carroll treats us to some of the letters and diary entries of Alta May Andrews, a Red Cross and, later, Army nurse. Her description of working with soldiers with grievous facial wounds is heartbreaking and illuminating. Referring to the “Jaw Ward,” Andrews states:

It is there that the true conception of the horrors of so-called “civilized warfare” are painfully evident. There, are congregated seventy of the most pathetic victims of the war. Strong virile young man permanently disfigured. Deadly shrapnel has done its dastardly work in most of the “cases,” while in others, bullets have exploded in their mouths. Some entire lower jaws are missing. Others have gaping ragged holes in their cheeks. Nearly all of them have lost their teeth and some have even sacrificed parts of their tongues and noses. Because of the intricate network of facial nerves in the head, these unfortunate lads are called upon to bear more than their share of suffering. It’s all so horrible and cruel...

The man responsible for commanding this force (and the nominal center of Carroll’s book) was General John Pershing, whose letters and diary entries appear throughout the book. Pershing was a strict disciplinarian: Carroll relates an incident in October 1917 when Pershing witnessed a tactical demonstration given by the 1st Division. Afterwards:

Pershing asked Sibert [Major General William Sibert, the division commander] what he thought of the exercise, and Sibert gave a vague, fumbling reply. Pershing exploded. He tore into Sibert for his uninspiring leadership and blamed him for the division’s overall lack of preparation and professionalism. Deeply humiliated in front of his troops, Sibert was shocked into silence.

Excerpts of other letters reveal a tender side to the prickly general. Beginning during the war and continuing for the rest of his life, Pershing carried on a love affair with Micheline Resco, a young portrait painter whom he met in Paris and whom Pershing would marry after World War II. In September 1917 Pershing wrote to Resco:

Truly, today I am very very sad when I think that I cannot see you for many days. In fact it makes me feel ill. You are my dearest, isn’t it so? And your courage and devotion to high ideas makes me feel only the deepest respect for you.... I love you very much.Your friend, J.

One of his letters to his young son Warren is equally tender:

I have a very good horse, a bay. He has a splendid trot, a nice canter, and gallops well when you want him to. The only thing that was lacking this morning in making my ride a complete joy was that you were not here to go with me. I often wish you were with me when I see beautiful things as I travel about the country. I would also like to have you with me always under all circumstances. I especially miss you at night. ...With much love, Papa

But despite the book’s title, Carroll’s most interesting chapters are concerned with the war’s less celebrated participants. For example, he devotes a chapter to the racial situation in the US and to African-American contributions on the battlefield, focusing on the 369th Infantry Regiment, famously known as Harlem’s Hellfighters. Jim Europe, “one of the most brilliant jazz and ragtime composers in the United States,” enlisted in the 369th as a machine gunner, with the idea also to lead the regiment’s band. He wasn’t shy about achieving his goal:

When Europe told Noble Sissle, the lead baritone in the Cleft Club [a Harlem concert hall Europe started in 1910], what he had done, Sissle was thunderstruck. “Gracious, Jim, what's the idea? What time have you to devote to anybody's army?” Sissle was already feeling overwhelmed with work, and to lose Europe would only burden him with more obligations.Europe told Sissle not to worry. He had volunteered his name, too.“Oh no, you don't get me in anybody's army!” Sissle exclaimed, infuriated by Europe’s presumptuousness.

Sissle got over his anger, and both he and Europe made the 369th’s band one of the best in the AEF.Once in combat, the 369th acquitted itself with honor. Major Arthur Little, a battalion commander in the regiment, describes the aftermath of an action involving Privates Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts, both of whom were later decorated for heroism:

As the Germans [were retreating], Johnson pelted them with grenades. We found evidence that at least one man had been terribly torn by the iron of these explosions. At the narrowest point in the [barbed wire] opening, where they could do no better than go in a single file, we found a terrible mass of flesh and blood, and the cloth of a coat, and the pulped material of a first aide packet—blown open. Upon the ground, in this opening, was the shell hole blown by the grenade. The hole was the size and shape of a five gallon punch bowl; and it was almost filled with thick, sticky blood.

Of course the war wasn’t all blood and battles. There were instances of humor, too. An illustration of the democratic spirit of the “typical” American doughboy is given by an event recorded by Pershing when he was hosting France’s president, Raymond Poincaré. According to Carroll, while strolling through a village, Pershing and Poincaré came upon two American soldiers:

“When I told them who the visitors were,” Pershing recalled, “they seemed to regard my remarks as an introduction.” Instead of giving the French president and his wife a quick, differential nod or salute and then walking away, the two Americans marched right up to the Poincarés, gave them each a hearty handshake, and then tagged along as they continued with the tour. Pershing was more amused then embarrassed by the soldiers’ behavior...

In the end, the book succeeds in giving us an intimate, if limited, portrait of John Pershing. But the letters, diaries, memoirs, and accounts of everyday men and women make it a fine introduction for those who are just starting to read about US involvement in the war.During the war American servicemen and women wrote and received millions of letters and kept countless diaries in one form or another. Many of these have been published. Others, residing in public institutions or private hands, have been mined for information. Many, no doubt, are resting in boxes in dusty attics or damp basements. Quite possibly the vast majority of these letters have simply been thrown away at some point during the last one hundred years. It is hoped that during the centenary more of these letters will surface, and that Carroll will undertake to write a book featuring them. He would surely do them justice.____Major Peter L. Belmonte, USAF (Ret.) is a military history book reviewer and the author of Italian Americans in World War II (2001), Days of Perfect Hell: The US 26th Infantry Regiment in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, October-November 1918 (2015), and Calabrian-Americans in the US Military During World War I (2017).