Doughboys – Old Magazine Articles

‘The Americans in the Argonne Won the War” (You Can’t Print That, 1929)

Here is a segment of the famous interview with General Paul von Hindenburg that was conducted just days after the close of hostilities in which the journalist George Seldes (1890 – 1995) posed the question as to which of the Allied Armies played the most decisive roll in defeating Germany; whereupon the General responded:

The American infantry in the Argonne won the war.

Read on…

Click here to read about sexually transmitted diseases among the American soldiers of the First World War…

‘The Americans in the Argonne Won the War” (You Can’t Print That, 1929)

The American infantry in the Argonne won the war.

Read on…

Click here to read about sexually transmitted diseases among the American soldiers of the First World War…

‘The Americans in the Argonne Won the War” (You Can’t Print That, 1929)

The American infantry in the Argonne won the war.

Read on…

Click here to read about sexually transmitted diseases among the American soldiers of the First World War…

‘The Americans Are Here” (Scribner’s Magazine, 1919)

Les Américains Sont Là!

Those were the words on everybody’s lips as the first big detachments of United States troops began to appear in the Paris streets… I think there is a simple politeness in these young warriors from across the sea, whether they come from some of the big cities, New York, Boston, Chicago or from some far-away states on the other side of the Rockies.

A Pat on the Back for the Doughboys (The Stars and Stripes, 1919)

The attached Stars & Stripes article briefly summarizes the American efforts from Cantigny to the Armistice and serves as one big attaboy for the whole Doughboy army. The journalist anticipates John Mosiere’s World War One history, The Myth of the Great War, which opines that it was the high morale and seemingly endless supply lines of the A.E.F. that served as one of the most decisive factors in bringing the war to a close.

Stars & Stries could not have agreed more.

Ten years later a Frenchman writing for La Revue Mondiale would say essentially the same thing, click here to read that article.

Click here to read an article about life in a W.W. I German listening post…

‘The Doughboys” (The New Red Cross Magazine, 1919)

What we enjoyed about this piece by the Muckraking Ida Tarbell (1857 – 1944) was that it was written some six months after the heavy handed George Creel had ceased influencing Yankee magazine editors into printing pro-American blather, and so we tend to feel that her praise of the American Doughboys was quite sincere – and praise she does! Up hill and down dale, the Doughboys can do no wrong in her eyes.
This essay appeared in print around the same time the French had decided that all the Doughboys were just a bunch of racist hurrah-boys and were becoming increasingly sick of them. The Yanks might have squared their debt with the Marquis de Lafayette, but the recently returned Poilus were not above taking an occasional swipe at Ida Tarbell’s Doughboys…

Click here to read some statistical data about the American Doughboys of the First World War.

Training the Doughboy (U.S. Gov. 1931)

Two remarkably brief paragraphs concerning the required military training of the average American Doughboy throughout the course of America’s blessedly short participation in the First World War:

The average American soldier who went to France received six months of training in this country before he sailed. After he landed overseas he had two months of training before entering the battle line. The part of the battle line that he entered was in a quiet sector and here he remained one month before going into an active sector and taking part in hard fighting.

Click here to read a 1918 magazine article about the Doughboy training camps.

Their Reckless Abandon (U.S. Army Study, 1919)

Here is another account from The Enemy Order of Battle report (1919) – on this page two experienced German veterans recalled their unit’s battles with the American infantry:

American soldiers took big chances and [did so] irrespective of any danger.

Intent on Battle (U.S. Army Report, 1919)

Here is a page from The Enemy Order of Battle report (1919) by the subsection of the same name that was an arm of the U.S. Army General Staff. The report tells of Baccarat, a portion of the Western Front during the later part of the war that was quiet, by mutual agreement between the French and Germans – until the U.S. Army took their place in the French position – and then all Hell broke loose.

High Praise from a German General (U.S. Army Study, 1919)

General Karl Wilhelm Georg August von Einem (1853 – 1934), commander of the German Third Army (1914 – 1919) granted a short interview to a member of the U.S. Army General Staff concerning his observations regarding the American Army.