Welcome back. We are so glad you could join us
for today's Deep Dive. Yeah, thanks for tuning
in. I'm really excited about this one. Because
today we're exploring a truly massive transformation.
You might think of World War I just as trenches
and biplanes and that tactical stalemate on the
Western Front. Right, the mud and the barbed
wire. Exactly. But today we are looking at the
sheer math behind breaking that stalemate. We
are digging into the history of the American
Expeditionary Forces. or the AEF, which is just
a fascinating subject. It really is. The mission
today is to figure out how you physically transplant
an army across an ocean in 1917. Right. We are
talking about how the United States military
went from this tiny, vastly inexperienced force
to a massive modern combat tested army of millions
in just over a single year. It is a staggering
leap. I mean, when you look at the raw logistics
of this operation, it completely rewrites the
standard narrative. We tend to picture fully
formed armies just arriving on the battlefield,
ready to go. But the reality of building a military
machine from scratch on foreign soil is, well,
it's far more chaotic and complex. And that is
exactly what makes this so compelling. You have
to consider the scale. Like, how do you move
two million people across an ocean filled with
enemy submarines? Yeah, that alone is a nightmare.
And once they arrive, how do you keep them fed,
armed and organized? without totally collapsing
the local infrastructure. You really can't overstate
how difficult that is. OK, let's unpack this.
To grasp the magnitude of that challenge, we
really need to look at the starting line. In
June 1917, there were a grand total of 14 ,000
American soldiers in France. Wait, 14 ,000? Just
14 ,000. That is barely enough to fill a modern
sports arena. Wow. But then fast forward to May
1918, which is less than a year later, and that
number exploded to over one million American
troops stationed in France, and half of them
were deployed directly on the front lines. From
14 ,000 to over a million, that is a wild escalation
in manpower. It's unprecedented. And the whole
operation was spearheaded by Major General John
J. Pershing. Though it's interesting, President
Woodrow Wilson actually initially planned to
give the command to General Frederick Funston.
Right, but Funston passed away suddenly in February
1917. Yeah, which left the door open for Wilson
to appoint Pershing that May. And Pershing brought
a very specific, uncompromising philosophy to
this command. He absolutely insisted that American
soldiers be thoroughly trained before ever seeing
combat in Europe. He wasn't just going to throw
them into the meat grinder. Exactly. He established
large training areas near Verdun for the initial
divisions. You had the 1st Division, which was
the regular army, the 26th National Guard Division,
the 2nd Division, which was this mix of regular
troops and Marines, and the 42nd Division. The
Rainbow Division, right, because it literally
pulled soldiers from nearly every state in the
U .S. That's the one. And because of this massive
training requirement, very few American troops
actually arrived on the front lines before January
1918. But wasn't Pershing risking the entire
war by holding those troops back? I mean, over
in Europe, the Western allied leaders were desperate.
Oh, they were panicking. They had been grinding
through this brutal war for years. Their units
were severely depleted. They were facing mutinies.
The French army was practically in open revolt
in some sectors. Right. And they were actively
losing ground. They just wanted to use these
fresh American troops as individual replacements,
basically to plug the bleeding holes in the.
British and French armies. It was a massive gamble
for Pershing and he faced intense pressure, but
he flat out refused to amalgamate his troops.
He demanded that the American force would not
be used merely to fill gaps as, you know, cannon
fodder for foreign generals. Which didn't make
him very popular. Not at all. He wanted the United
States to fight as an independent field army.
The allied leaders deeply distrusted the potential
of an American army that lacked any real experience
in large scale modern warfare. They thought Pershing
was being incredibly naive. The British government
even went so far as to use their spare shipping
vessels as leverage. Yeah, this part is wild.
They basically said, hey, we will give you the
ships to transport your men. but only if you
put those American soldiers under British operational
control. Talk about high stakes negotiations.
The fate of Europe is hanging in the balance,
and they're haggling over transport ships. If
we connect this to the bigger picture. Oh, definitely.
Oh, wait, I think you usually say that. Yeah,
I'll take it. If we connect this to the bigger
picture, you can see how Pershing's stubbornness
in that specific moment really laid the groundwork
for the modern American military identity. How
so? Well, by refusing to let U .S. troops be
absorbed and commanded piecemeal, he ensured
that the United States would emerge from the
war not just as a junior partner or an allied
helper, but as a distinct unified and major global
military power. To actually become that major
power, though, they had to get all those troops
to the fight, which brings us to the supply chain.
The real war winner. Exactly. Imagine you are
in charge of logistics. You have a million men
arriving in France. And you realize you don't
even have the ships to get them there, let alone
the docks to unload them once they arrive. The
logistics operations were placed under the direction
of Charles G. Dawes. He was a Chicago banker
who transitioned into a logistician. A banker?
Yeah. He served first as a colonel and then as
a brigadier general reporting directly to Pershing.
Dawes was essentially trying to create a coherent
support structure with almost zero institutional
knowledge to draw from. And he had to be incredibly
creative just to get the men across the Atlantic
because the U .S. Army didn't have enough transport
ships. They pressed civilian passenger liners
into service, whatever floated. Basically, they
seized German ships that had been interned in
U .S. ports and they borrowed allied ships just
to transport the soldiers, the doughboys from
ports in Hoboken, New Jersey and Newport News,
Virginia. And simply crossing the ocean was only
step one. Once they arrived at French harbors
like Bordeaux or Brest, the true engineering
nightmare began. Because the ports were full.
Exactly. French ports were already operating
at absolute maximum capacity, just trying to
keep their own war effort alive. They couldn't
handle a million extra Americans showing up with
all their gear. So the Americans just had to
build the infrastructure themselves. They did.
This stat from the source blows my mind. American
engineers in France constructed 82 entirely new
ship berths. 82. Think about the engineering
hurdles there. Navigating the tides, working
in war torn areas with a massive lack. of local
labor and having to import the steel and heavy
cranes just to build the docks that would eventually
unload their own supplies. And it didn't stop
at the docks. They also laid nearly one thousand
miles of additional standard gauge railroad tracks.
A thousand miles. And the gauge is critical here
because it had to perfectly match the French
railway system. If the tracks were even a fraction
of an inch off, American supply trains couldn't
seamlessly connect with the existing French rail
network to move troops to the front. And beyond
the physical transport, they strung over 100
,000 miles of telephone and telegraph lines across
France. That is a lot of wire. It sounds like
a random statistic, but the insight there is
huge. World War One was the first major conflict
where the sheer scale of the battlefield entirely
outpaced. human messengers, or guys on horseback.
You couldn't just run a note to the next trench.
Right. Instant communication wasn't just a convenience.
It was the absolute backbone of the war effort.
You couldn't coordinate a million men without
that wire. Dawes recognized that this couldn't
just be an American effort either. He recommended
setting up a Joint Logistics Planning Board,
which the Allies approved. It became the Military
Board of Allied Supply coordinating logistics
on both the Western and Italian fronts. But while
the Americans were busy building all this infrastructure,
they were surprisingly lacking in actual combat
equipment. That is something that really flips
the script for me. You usually picture the American
military showing up with all their own heavy
gear, ready to roll. Yeah, but American factories
simply couldn't retool fast enough for this kind
of war. So they had to rely heavily on European
weapons. Yeah. They use French 75 millimeter
cannons. They drove French Renault FT light tanks,
which are iconic, by the way. Oh, totally. Even
their aviation units flew CESPE 13 and Newport
28 fighter planes. These were incredibly fast,
highly maneuverable French biplanes, basically
because the U .S. didn't have a combat ready
fighter plane of its own yet. It is a stark reality
check about what it actually takes to win a modern
war. We always focus on the front lines, the
weapons, and the romanticized charges over the
top. Movie stuff. Right. But an army runs entirely
on its rear area network, what they call the
services of supply. Tell me about that. We are
talking about massive depots, vehicle maintenance
facilities, industrial bakeries, clothing repair
shops, replacement depots. You don't think about
clothing repair in a war. But you need it. and
ice plants to keep food from rotting, and grimly
graves registration to handle the casualties.
This immense logistical enterprise is what actually
enabled the success of the AEF. So we have this
massive logistical machine moving millions of
men. But who exactly were these men? The demographics
are fascinating. African Americans were drafted
on the exact same basis as white citizens, making
up 13 % of the draftees. That's a significant
portion. By the end of the war, Over 350 ,000
African Americans had served in AEF units on
the Western Front. Here's where it gets really
interesting. To understand the reality for African
American troops, we really have to look at the
systemic discrimination they faced. The source
details how they were assigned to strictly segregated
units, commanded almost exclusively by white
officers. And the historical record highlights
how racial hostility in the United States boiled
over tragically in 1917. specifically with the
Houston riot. It's a deeply sobering event. The
history details that this incident occurred within
a climate of overt racist hostility from members
of the all -white Houston Police Department against
the local black community and the black soldiers
of the 24th Infantry Regiment, who were stationed
at Camp Logan. Following instances where police
officers arrested and physically assaulted black
soldiers, a mutiny erupted involving 156 soldiers.
They marched into Houston and according to the
source material, the resulting violence led to
the deaths of 11 civilians and five policemen.
soldiers also died in the chaos. Under the military
laws of the time, 118 soldiers were court -martialed.
Ultimately, 110 were convicted, 63 were sentenced
to life imprisonment, and 19 were executed. It
is a heavy piece of history, and those soldiers
carried that reality with them into the theater
of war, and that discrimination fundamentally
dictated how they were deployed overseas. There
is a stark contrast in the numbers. Only one
-fifth of the black soldiers sent to France actually
saw combat, compared to two -thirds of the white
soldiers. Black soldiers made up just three percent
of the AEF combat forces. That disparity was
a deliberate policy choice, wasn't it? It was.
A 1918 general staff report explicitly stated
that the mass of colored, drafted men could not
be used for combatant troops. The military brass
recommended they be organized into reserve labor
battalions instead. Consequently, the vast majority
were assigned to unskilled labor tasks. Many
worked as stevedores at the Atlantic ports. Doing
the absolutely backbreaking labor of manually
unloading supply ships. Or working as common
laborers building those camps in France. Even
the 92nd Division, which was the only black combat
division, suffered from poor preparation, deliberate
dispersal during stateside training, and senior
white officers who repeatedly requested to be
transferred out. But then you have this... Incredible
anomaly, the 93rd Division, which included the
369th Infantry Regiment. The legendary Harlem
Hellfighters. Exactly. The French Army was facing
devastating mutinies from their own frontline
troops who were refusing to go on suicidal offensives.
The French were absolutely desperate for manpower,
so they requested and received control of several
regiments of Black American combat troops. Because
the French military did not harbor the same institutionalized
racial disdain. Right. These regiments were integrated
into the French command structure and served
with immense distinction. And the logistical
weirdness of their situation creates this wild
visual. I mean, I'm geeking out over this image
because they were under French command. These
African -American soldiers wore American uniforms.
But wait, some of those uniforms actually dated
all the way back to the Union Army from the Civil
War. Yes, but they wore French helmets. And instead
of carrying the standard issue American Springfield
bolt action rifles, they were armed with French
Berthier rifles. It is such a powerful image
of coalition warfare in practice, and their combat
record is astonishing. The 369th spent six months
on the front lines. Six months. That was longer
than any other African -American regiment in
the entire war. 171 members were awarded the
French Legion of Merit. Sergeant Henry Johnson
is a major standout here. He was awarded the
French Croix de Guerre for fighting off a German
raiding party and was later posthumously awarded
the Medal of Honor. Unbelievable bravery. So
Navigating from the heavy realities of their
deployment and the sheer scale of the logistics,
we have to look at what happened when this massive
machine finally hit the trenches. The sharp end
of the spear. The timeline of American combat
actions kicked off on October 23, 1917, when
the First Division fired the very first American
shell of the war toward German lines. Initially,
Pershing deployed his four battle -ready divisions
under French and British command in relatively
quiet sectors. This was strictly to gain combat
experience without risking a total collapse of
his forces. But he was always maneuvering toward
his ultimate goal of deploying an independent
U .S. field army. Always. By June 1918, the logistical
pipeline was fully open. Americans were arriving
at a staggering rate of 10 ,000 a day. Ten thousand
a day. that is a small city arriving every morning.
And they were undergoing a minimum of six weeks
of intense training led by battle -experienced
British, Canadian, and Australian officers. And
speaking of the Australians, there's this highly
memorable moment where American troops essentially
snuck into a major offensive. This is one of
my favorite anecdotes. On July 4, 1918, at the
Battle of Hamel, 1 ,000 American troops from
the 33rd Division fought alongside the Australian
Corps. The detail that really stands out is that
their involvement was voluntary and it directly
violated orders. They just wanted to fight. They
fought despite last -minute directives from AEF
headquarters expressly forbidding them from taking
part in offensive operations led by non -U .S.
generals. They went into battle under the command
of Australian Lieutenant General Sir John Monash.
And it wasn't just a rebellion, it was a historically
significant battle. It served as a highly successful
blueprint for combined arms attacks, perfectly
synchronizing artillery, armor, infantry, and
air support. From there, the American involvement
just exploded in scale. U .S. troops played a
critical role in stopping the German thrust toward
Paris during the Second Battle of the Marne in
June 1918, fighting brutally at Chateau Thierry
and below Wood. Then came the first major distinctly
American offensive. the Battle of Samuel in September
1918. Pershing finally had his independent command
leading the U .S. First Army, which was composed
of over 500 ,000 men. And they followed that
success immediately with the Musar -Ghan Offensive,
which is a battle we really have to pause and
fully consider. It's massive. It lasted from
late September all the way to the armistice on
November 11th. This was not a quick skirmish.
This was the largest and deadliest battle in
United States military history. Pershing was
commanding more than one million American and
French combatants. Just picture the logistical
nightmare of the Meuse -Argonne. You are moving
a million men into position entirely at night
over muddy, destroyed roads, all while trying
to quietly rotate out the exhausted French troops
they were replacing. Without tipping off the
Germans. Right. And then they had to push through
the Argonne forest, which was rugged, densely
wooded terrain heavily fortified by the Germans
with interlocking machine gun nests and concrete
bunkers. The coordination required to supply
a million men engaged in relentless, forward
-moving combat through a fortified forest is
almost incomprehensible. But between Samuel and
the Meuse -Argonne, Allied forces recovered more
than 200 square miles of French territory. It
essentially broke the back of the German army.
But the cost of breaking that stalemate was immense.
The AEF sustained about 320 ,000 total casualties.
It's a devastating number. That includes 53 ,402
battle deaths, 63 ,114 non -combat deaths, and
over 204 ,000 wounded. What's fascinating here
is when you break down those non -combat deaths,
you realize that an invisible enemy was actually
deadlier than the artillery shells. You're talking
about the flu. The 1918 influenza pandemic. The
Spanish flu swept through the tightly packed
troops. The close quarters of the transport ships
in the muddy trenches were the perfect breeding
ground. Nowhere to isolate. Exactly. The flu
took the lives of more than 25 ,000 men in the
AEF and caused another 360 ,000 to become gravely
ill. It completely and severely strained the
medical infrastructure they had just built. It's
hard to fathom everything we've just covered.
In just over a single year, the American Expeditionary
Forces went from an inexperienced, highly debated
group of 14 ,000 recent arrivals to a massive,
million -strong combat -tested modern army that
fundamentally altered the course of global history.
They really did. They recovered heavily defended
territory. They faced down a global pandemic
and they established a logistical network that
spanned the globe. So what does this all mean?
For you listening, the story of the AEF is essentially
the ultimate blueprint for the 20th century.
It is a master class in modern logistics, how
to build infrastructure from scratch, manage
transatlantic supply chains and sustain millions
of people under the most extreme conditions imaginable.
Yeah. It's also an early, complicated case study
in coalition warfare, navigating the massive
egos and desperate needs of allied nations. And
importantly, it's a reflection of America confronting
its own deep societal contradictions on a global
stage, asking men to fight and die for a country
that structurally discriminated against them
at home. It really was a defining era that set
the stage for everything that followed in the
modern military. It was. And this raises an important
question, or rather leaves us with one incredibly
unique detail to ponder. Lay it on me. Think
about the immediate aftermath. After the armistice
in November 1918, you have millions of troops
waiting to be demobilized. By July 1919, over
three million members of the military had been
discharged, but hundreds of thousands were still
stuck in France waiting for transport ships.
Because they couldn't all sail back at once.
Right. And the AEF didn't just have them sit
around in muddy camps. They literally established
a university for them. Wait, a full university?
Just for the troops waiting to go home? Yes,
the American Expeditionary Forces University
at Bone. It wasn't just a few makeshift tents,
either. It had a full faculty, including an instructor
who was a botanist. A botanist. A dedicated librarian,
and it even established its very own chapter
of the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society.
That is amazing. Imagine the logistical and cultural
flex required to suddenly build a fully functioning
university in a foreign country, strictly for
an army that is just waiting to catch a ship
home. Think about what that tells you about the
American mindset and their obsession with organization
and progress at the dawn of the 20th century.
Picture yourself surviving the news are gone
offensive. and a few months later you are studying
botany in a French town waiting for your boat.
It's incredible. That is wild. Thank you so much
for joining us on this deep dive. We hope this
exploration into the logistics, the struggles,
and the triumphs of the American Expeditionary
Forces has given you a new perspective on a massive
piece of history. Keep learning, keep questioning
the world around you, and we will catch you next
time.