Book received from NetGalley.

I am really just starting to read more about World War I history and I have to admit I had never heard of this battle prior to receiving this book. The author does well at showing how things were for the first American forces to enter World War I. I thought it was a great book on a part of American history that I had not studied before.

This is a very griping book about the Meuse- Argonne campaign during the First World War. The author takes you from the beginning of the 79th and through their training and then to their arrival at the front. The author takes you through the difficulties that were experienced by this unit in losing so many men to other units and replaced by men that were not trained properly. This lack of fore thought by the higher were just one of many that would follow this unit. Another would be the artillery unit they trained with was changed to an entirely different unit once they got to the front. The author leads you through to the attack that they were to lead on a place named Montfaucon or little Gibraltar. This part of the story is sad to read because of the amount of lives that are lost, not just from this unit but by other AEF as well. You are shown the bravery by the men leaving the trenches and having to cover open ground to take the Germans who have been dunged in for four years with machines guns, and artillery. The Germans are also at an elevated position with aerial support and artillery, something the Americans did not have. This would add to the casualties for the Americans and the days it would take to capture Montfaucon. The men would do this without machine-gun fire, or artillery support, and also without food and water for days. This was the part of the story that makes me always upset when I have read WWI or any war books in how the leaders can order their men to attack and days later when they are still fighting not working on getting food and water to them. Especially when you have some generals from the civil war who always made sure they had supply lines in place. These men were running out of ammo, with no help in site yet they continued to fight. Yes by capturing this mountain would hasten the end of the war, these problems of how to attack a stronger opponent would be done differently when WWII would begin. Overall this was a very good in book in honoring the men who fought in WWI. A good book.

Reading about the First World War can be so depressing. The American Expeditionary Force went into the Meuse-Argonne battle untrained and mismanaged, which led to thousands of unnecessary deaths.
General Pershing assumed he knew better than the British or French because they’d been at it for four years while he’d been successful in the Philippines and Mexico. His insistence on open warfare (rather than trench warfare) cost American lives. Infantry alone was no match for machine guns, but the Americans had never trained with artillery or tanks, so got little help there. Add to that virtually no battlefield communications.
If the German army hadn’t been so depleted after four years of war and the flu epidemic, many more American lives would have been lost in a longer war. The chief American contribution to the Allied victory was making clear to the exhausted Germans they couldn’t hope to win a war of attrition.
Gene Fax concludes that the American legacy of World War I was the experience enabled the government and military to mobilize for WWII and fight effectively.