The Doughboys: America and the First World War [Hardcover]

Gary Mead (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 2000

The Doughboys were the more than three million men, many of them volunteers, recruited from the cities and farms of the United States, who traveled across the Atlantic to aid the Allies in the trenches and on the battlefields of World War I. Without their courage and determination, the outcome of the war would have been very different.

Drawing upon the often harrowing personal accounts of the soldiers of the AEF, The Doughboys establishes the pivotal role played by the Americans in the defeat of the Central powers in November 1918. Gary Mead brings together a rich selection of archive material in an engaging account that is part military history, part social analysis, part memoir. The Doughboys records the events of the war from the perspective of the United States, highlighting the crucial part played by the troops of the AEF and exposing the prickly, often turbulent relationship between the American and the Allied forces.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Making a strong case that America's moral and material contributions were vital to the Allied war effort, Financial Times journalist Mead also argues convincingly that the performance of the American Expeditionary ForceAcomprised of young "doughboys"Ahas been systematically underrated. Mead uses firsthand accounts to reconstruct the AEF's operational experiences, which largely reflected the problems of improvising a multimillion-man army in little over a year. He is particularly successful at portraying the frontline experience, with its mixture of trench and open warfare, presenting the doughboys as enthusiastic fighters who learned quickly when given a chanceAand who were a good deal better at war than their officers, especially the generals. The problems the AEF faced in the Meuse-Argonne, according to Mead, in good part reflected the poor planning and hasty execution occasioned by General John J. Pershing's insistence on mounting the offensive in the immediate aftermath of Saint-Mihiel. Mead's proneness to take enlisted men's grievances and complaints at face value at times gives the book a strong flavor of studies from the 1930s, but his reiterated demonstrations of the AEF's virulent antiblack racism clearly distinguishes this book from such tainted sources. Less effective is the treatment of the war's wider issues: America's participation, for instance, becomes as much the consequence of French and British wire pulling as of German behaviors that posed objective short- and long-term threats to U.S. security. Nevertheless, readers looking for an up-to-date, single-volume account of American WWI troop experience should look no further. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This is a soldier's story. In his first book, Mead, a former reporter for the Financial Times, traces the history of American military involvement in World War I primarily from the perspective of the troops directly involved in the action. Mead relies heavily on the papers at the Army's Military History Institute at Carlisle BarracksDa largely untapped trove of primary sources by the doughboys, including questionnaires of American Expeditionary Force survivors conducted as late as the 1970s and 1980s. While the focus of the book is on the troops in the trenches, Mead nicely balances this perspective with an overview of the strategic picture and ably discusses the political and social issues facing the nation as it became involved in its first major overseas intervention. The text is enhanced by 50 photos, notes, and a bibliography. Overall, this title provides a unique perspective on the troops of a nation on the cusp of becoming a world power and is filled with voices of excitement, anticipation, and fear of those who helped this transition come to pass. Highly recommended.DDaniel Liestman, Kansas State Univ. Libs., Manhattan
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 478 pages
• Publisher: Overlook Hardcover; 1St Edition edition (November 4, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585670618
• ISBN-13: 978-1585670611
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,115,641 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Detailed, delayed praise, disappointing, September 8, 2001

By 

Peter Lorenzi (Maryland, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Doughboys: America and the First World War (Hardcover)

While many Americans assume that out belated entry into World War I led to the rapid demise of the war, Mead writes that many people, including most of the American allies in the war, thought much less of the American role and efforts. As an Englishman, Mead appreciates and extols the Americans.
Death and destruction on a grand scale, with gas, tanks, machine guns, and blatantly incompetent leaders were the way of the war for three long years before the Americans arrived, however woefully unprepared they were for trench combat. Pershing thought that flexible fighting, using the almost discarded rifle (the Allies had come to prefer a sack of grenades as the weapon of choice), could overcome the stalemate of the muddy ditches. Mead shows the importance of the American combat troops and, perhaps most important, their boost to materiel and morale at a time when the Allies, especially the French, were near paralysis if not collapse. The French troops' mutiny and executions of a few of those convicted makes the point.

The detailed exceprts from diaries and reports from those at the front, including those who did not survive the war, make this a great tale to tell. General Pershing's had to fight the Allies to achieve and maintain American independence in the face of Allied presumption that he would simply surrender his troops and command to the British, French, or Italians (e.g., "If you could just send us 1,000,000 troops, we'll equip them and let them fight with my men.") The British were worse; they assumed that since their ships transported American troops, that the Americans ought to fight under British command.

The diappointment is in the book's organization and, painfully, the maps. There is a needless side trip to the Siberian "front". Mead jumps around time and places. The maps appear at apparently random places in the book, with later battle maps preceding earlier ones, and the lines of advance and the cities and places where troops fought were exasperatingly difficult to match up. The "Lost Battalion" received little attention and the maps left me lost trying to find them.

Thanks for salvaging the American contribution. But give me good maps!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An Introduction to the US ground-role in the Great War, December 13, 2001

By 

Donal A. O'Neill - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Doughboys: America and the First World War (Hardcover)

This is a readable account of the involvement of the United States' ground forces in the Great War, the emphasis being on the Western Front, complemented by a short and generally unsatisfactory account of their intervention in Russia in the Civil War period. It is necessarily somewhat superficial as a result of the vast canvas covered but it does provide a good introduction to anybody who intends to follow-up with more detailed reading on specific topics. The writer moves at breakneck speed from Wilson's volte-face on involvement in the conflict, through the declaration of war, through mobilisation, training and deployment overseas of vast numbers of troops, and on to their commitment in battle. Pershing's conflicts with his British and French counterparts as regards how the initially small but ever-growing influx of inexperienced American troops should be employed are outlined and the arguments of both sides are generally presented with fairness and colourful vignettes are provided of the secondary as well as the main players. One of the major ironies of the story is that though the US was already by 1917 the second most powerful Naval power (and, even more ironically, this proved almost irrelevant to the overall outcome) it was also, despite three years of world conflict, a practically demilitarised nation in land-force terms. For this lack of preparedness the sanctimonious Wilson must carry a heavy responsibility. This applied as much in matters of military doctrine as of equipment - Pershing and many of his officers are shown here to have had little understanding initially of the realities of trench warfare - though they, and their troops, learned quickly, albeit at high cost in casualties.

Descriptions of combat and battles is possibly the weakest part of the book, probably since the actions involved deserve considerably longer treatment to put them into the overall context of operations on the Western Front. Actions such as Belleau Wood and the St.Mihiel offensive were, in absolute terms, large-scale actions, but seen in the context of the overall Western Front their relative importance decreases significantly. The greatest contribution of the American forces was, in the end, a moral one, representing massive potential for deployment in 1919 and playing a powerful role in convincing the German High Command that resistance beyond late 1918 was futile even if a tactical withdrawal to the homeland were to be achievable. By this stage however the German forces had been soundly and comprehensively thrashed in the field, with the contribution of British, despite massive earlier losses, the decisive factor.

This book is at its best when it draws on an extensive archive of first-hand reminiscences from servicemen: quite surprisingly, these have apparently not been used to any significant extent by previous writers. These accounts lend significant immediacy and colour to the narrative. In general however the extracts are too short - often little more than quotes - and one would like to see a larger selection in the future in one or more dedicated volumes, ideally arranged on a thematic basis.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Timelines, November 3, 2005

By 

Grant Fritchey (MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Doughboys: America and the First World War (Hardcover)

The author sets out his purpose, to set the record straight on Americans involvement in the Great War, right at the start of the book. The way he put the story together, with jumps in time & space, at first, it seemed like he was telling another story entirely since America had such a hard time right at the start of the war. Finally Mr. Mead, and America, gets his feet under him and the story takes off as success follows success. I especially enjoyed the emphasis on how abhorant the behavior of the British and the French were. While ultimately, they did try to teach us some useful information, their general treatment and demeanor, which caused Pershing to fight them nearly as often as the Germans, probably extended the war by a couple of months.
His chapters on the wars conclusions and aftermath were quite good as well.
While almost diametrically opposed in its treatment of the American military, this book is a good companion to Thomas Fleming's Illusion of Victory.