Customer Reviews

America's Deadliest Battle: Meuse-Argonne, 1918 (Modern War Studies)

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As Ferrell says in his introduction, most Americans today don't know much about our country's involvement in the First World War, despite its influence on the following century and the world we live in today. This volume gives a wonderfully succinct overview of America's entry into the war in 1917, including justified criticism of President Wilson and Sec. of War Baker's inability to put the nation quickly on a total war footing... faults that were, as the author points out, primary in the Meuse-Argonne being the deadliest battle in US history.

Ferrell moves the history along quickly, giving brief overviews of the AEF's smaller battles throughout the spring and summer of 1918 (Cantigny, Belleau Wood, etc) and the reduction of the St. Mihiel Salient in September of that year. He paints a vivid portrait of the failings of US logistics and planning and is equally critical of many divisional and brigade commanders, although he finds little fault with Pershing.

This is essentially an operational level history, but Ferrell does an excellent job of introducing quotes and anecdotes from individual soldiers and officers. These bring the narrative to life at just the right times, and help Ferrell avoid the 'official history' tone of so many less talented military historians.

Like his previous book about the 35th Division "Collapse in the Meuse-Argonne", this is a realtively short volume (195 pp include voluminous end notes) and one wishes for more detail and length. Nevertheless, "America's Deadliest Battle" is an excellent history of America in the Great War - events that are so little written about today. So Ferrell in his brevity, simply leaves the reader wanting more. Hopefully he is hard at work on another book about this important and interesting time.

The author does an excellent job in detailing the specific
causes of the enormous loss of life in this campaign. He does not hesitate to point out how the previous attitudes toward isolationism, controversy over a regular army as compared to a militia, the probems with the logistics of developing military strength quickly and the failure of corporations to deliver on contracts all combined to create a situation with inadequately trained soldiers who had little equipment
being sent into battle with the foregone conclusion of a tremendous loss of life. Mr. Ferrell is an accomplished writer who understands and describes the personalities of the commanders whose actions determined the outcome of the campaigns. This book goes beyond a simple reiteration of which troops fought in which battles in which areas and describes
the people whose decisions, often based on personal interests and attitudes affected this deadly war. It is a fascinating story.

The author presents the full picture of the greatest battle the US troops fought in World War I and with the help of some very good b&w maps analyses the succesive offensive operations that Pershing undertook. I found extremely interesting the references to the US war preparations, the weak points of the US tactical and operational doctrine and the descriptions of the various characters of American commanders. The battle itself is amply analysed, with a whole chpater devoted to the miserable performance of the 35th Division. The only drawback in this book is that there are very very few descriptions of the German side and there is not even a list of the German formations engaged in the Argonne-Meuse battle. The b&w photos are also of very poor quality.

Robert Ferrell's writing in "America's Deadliest Battle: Meuse-Argonne, 1918" is quite succinct and to the point. He succeeds in reconstructing the single costliest battle in United States history in an engaging and relatively short work. I found Ferrell's book to be a perfect length at 150 dense pages. Even though many general overviews of military history are encyclopedic, I do not often find these voluminous books to be interesting reading unless you are studying at West Point. Ferrell has struck the perfect balance with this book; he covers all the bare necessities of the enormous battle without lapsing into a boring rundown of statistics and facts. He is able to profile some of the more notable leaders as well as interject personal narratives from some classic American memoirs of the 6 week campaign which hastened the end of WWI.

I was slightly surprised by the fact that the Meuse Argonne produced the highest casualty rate of a single battle in US Army history. Although the numbers of Americans killed in the Second World War was far greater, the offensives tended to spread across a wider front and generally are not referred to as a single battle as is the Meuse Argonne. One of the great strengths in Ferrell's book was the assorted collection of maps that are interspersed throughout the text. They give the reader an excellent geographical understanding of WWI combat and how the units were arrayed in the attack. Most of the maps include the whole front from the Argonne Woods in the west to the Meuse River in the east, including the sectors occupied by each division along the line. I found these to be especially helpful in conveying the enormity of the battle and the huge number of divisions that were committed.

Ferrell's use of statistics in support of these maps gives the reader an understanding of just how costly the fighting could be as a division might be on the line for a week before being replaced due to 50 percent casualties or more in some units. The excessive number of deaths also creates one of Ferrell's major assertions in the book which describes the poor preparation in both training and armament that plagued many divisions in the 1st Army. Some of these problems were unique to the Americans because a strong belief in isolationism had existed before the war, leaving the country ill-prepared to train and equip a massive field army in modern combat. Though the US Army did have some unique problems, no army in WWI was really able to minimize casualties while taking substantial enemy held areas. This is a point that concludes Ferrell's book as he cites WWI as being a enormous and costly learning experience for the US Army.

One of the other aspects of Ferrell's book that I enjoyed was his particular focus on divisions. He breaks up the book into chapters which go into depth concerning the attacks of a particular division. I was especially interested in his focus on the 79th, which attacked Montfaucon on the opening day of the offensive, September 26. I learned that my grandfather's uncle, Edward Lucian Killion was fatally wounded during those first deadly days as a Captain in M company, 313th infantry regiment. I was slightly disappointed at his appraisal of the division which he considered a failure because they couldn't take the town until the 27th. Other authors have acknowledged the importance of Montfaucon to the Germans, who considered its defence of the utmost importance in that sector. Although the 79th held up the advance for a day, the fact that troops who had been on the line for less than a month took the town 24 hours later is still quite a feat. Although I did not like Ferrell's appraisal of the 79th (perhaps through a bit of bias), I still liked his breakdown of each assault based on divisions.

I found the criticism of the 79th Division to be especially indicative of the attitudes of commanding generals in WWI,on whose testimony Ferrell based his criticism. There was very little compassion for the slaughter forced upon attacking units as commanders had no choice but to take objectives "at any cost" with tragically absurd casualties. As Winston Churchill said "We are taking on machine gun nests with the chests of brave men." Though there was little choice as to how the advance would progress, it still remains tragic that units were sacrificed piecemeal just to take a mile or two, with little understanding from the commanders concerning the plight of their men.