Home : America At War : WW I :

Western Front

All Quiet On The Western Front (1930) One of the first and most powerful war films ever made, director Lewis Milestone's adaptation of the Erich Maria Remarque novel follows a group of idealistic young German soldiers in the final days of the Great War.

The conventional view of life on the Western Front in 1917-18 is that of an unending, continuous version of hell, with a permanent threat of being mashed, mangled, torn asunder and ripped apart. Yet while the conditions under which most soldiers existed for most of the time were upsetting and offensive, life-threatening events resulting from military action were comparatively unusual in the daily existence of the typical doughboy. The suffering he most commonly endured derived from more banal things, such as being perpetually at the mercy of the elements, a poor diet, the filthy grime, and the ubiquitous 'cootie' or louse. The stench of living and dead bodies, the appalling noise and excruciating boredom, added to the awful purgatory.

It was impossible to keep clean in the trenches. Dirt bred disease, and with only the most primitive drugs, many diseases which are today innocuous could be life-threatening. They also sapped the AEF's fighting power. Official figures show 71 per cent of duty-time lost in the AEF in France was through disease, against just 22 per cent from battle injuries. In 1918, influenza, pneumonia and other respiratory diseases caused 17.33 per cent of all AEF hospital admissions for disease and 82 per cent of illness-related deaths. The same year the total number of AEF soldiers admitted to hospital for disease was 2,422,362; for ordinary injuries 182,789; just 27,855 were hospitalized as a result of battle injuries.'

The average doughboy who saw any action at all - and many did not - spent around seven days under fire all told. This statistical flattening-out of their experience inevitably disguises the individual intensity of many soldiers' experience, but one thing united them all - the louse, 'cootie' or 'seam squirrel'. These parasites were not merely a nuisance. They were also the cause of many of the trench fevers that would afflict soldiers for several days, laying them low with fierce temperatures and bodily weakness.

The cootie was but one element in a generally filthy existence, a lifestyle which shocked and distressed most doughboys, who could never accustom themselves to the coarseness of the French billets - usually farmyard buildings - they were expected to occupy when in the rear areas. US armies traditionally built their own encampments but the exigencies of trench warfare made this expensively pointless and French billets were generally used. Many doughboys decided that a leading feature of the French character was a distinct lack of interest in basic hygiene.

Food - or rather the poor quality of it - was another item constantly on the mind of the doughboy, a source of jokes, grousing and ever-receding promise. For the vast majority there never seemed to be enough to eat. All too often they were dished up a variant on what they feelingly called 'slum' or 'goldfish' - respectively a basic stew of infinite variety but little appeal, and canned salmon. Another staple was 'monkey meat' (variously described as 'Argentine horse meat' or 'corned beef'). When they were permitted to light fires - a rarity in the front lines - the soldiers would invariably add whatever ingredients they could lay their hands on to the 'monkey meat' to produce 'slum'. Soon after arriving in France Private Benjamin Dexter 'Heard a ruckus; a whole contingent came along. They had a stretcher with an imitation of a monkey. They had a sign, saying, "Be it resolved. When we get home again we will petition Congress to enact laws to the effect that in future wars troops won't have to eat his ancestors."’

On the Western Front it was not even clear if simple fraternization with local women was permitted. As for the type of women who might conceivably have been deemed at the time to be of 'bad reputation' - prostitutes - the AEF tried to impose on the rank-and-file soldier impossible standards. The French embraced the inevitable and established a system of licensed brothels behind the front lines: establishments with a blue light over the front door were for officers, those with a red light were for other ranks. The typical charge was 15 francs for thirty minutes, or about $2.85 at the contemporary exchange rate. British troops were perfectly free to visit these establishments until in May 1918 the British War Office ruled them out of bounds. Even then the British authorities preferred to turn a blind eye. For the first four months after arriving in France the doughboys were not under any formal ban from visiting brothels. This changed once Pershing realized how serious a problem VD was for the British and French, who both lost millions of troops' days each year as a result of sexually communicable diseases. Doughboys were then formally banned, on pain of severe punishment, from visiting brothels.

Being barred from bordellos is one thing, abstinence is another. There is no way of quantifying how many doughboys had sexual relations with prostitutes or those who did not charge for the service, but it is evident from the archives that the typical AEF soldier had a normal inclination to indulge this need whenever possible. Failing to persuade the French to close down the licensed brothels, some AEF chaplains tried to persuade men of the dangers of VD, rather than preach the virtues of prophylaxis: 'We had [a] saying "15 minutes with Venus and 3 years with Mercury." This was prior to the invention of penicillin.’

French sexual mores were puzzling for many doughboys, who had been raised in a more conservative and prudish environment. They failed to understand that French frankness about sex was just that, an open-minded recognition that the impulse towards procreation was not possible to repress and indeed should not be stifled but recognized and accepted. Sex, and the effort to get it, was a common preoccupation of doughboys, no matter where they found themselves.

The presence on the soil of France of a large American army was, after the war ended, an uncomfortable reminder to the French that their military had not covered itself with glory; the rescued are often rather graceless to their rescuers. Even worse for the French, the peace negotiations in Versailles revealed the Americans to be utterly bereft of the sort of lust for revenge France expected from her allies. French civilians and American soldiers rapidly developed mutual contempt, and the treatment the doughboys received in Germany was in stark contrast.

French men - civilians and uniformed - quickly grew resentful of the doughboy after the Armistice: Troops arriving from overseas were hailed as knights-errant, come to erase from the soil of France the imprint of an iron heel. Old women mothered them; young women welcomed the opportunity to engage in sentimental exchanges with persons of their own age and opposite sex. Old men regarded them with indifference. Children adored them, for they always had a kind word and a smile - and frequently some more substantial token, for their small admirers [ ... ] Kindly feelings were general, and reciprocal, until after the Armistice.

Snobbish jingoism was also widely prevalent among the British leadership of the day, and many French senior officers and politicians expressed an insupportable arrogance towards not only the Americans but all their partners in the struggle to defeat Germany. Of course the doughboys themselves were also possessed of an arrogant swagger, a sense of coming to finish off what was clearly beyond their British and French comrades, a self-confident certainty that they would not commit the same mistakes. But they were, perhaps, entitled to a degree of self-confidence. They were on the whole fresh, strapping, well-fed and well-exercised young men, unaccustomed to taking orders from anyone, inordinately proud of being American, yet also rather in awe of everything European. Their morale usually touched the heavens, while that of their British and French comrades was often to be found cowering in a muddy trench. The doughboys' sheer enthusiasm, their relish for a fight, their earnestly expressed yet incorrigibly naive wish to hunt Germans derived from a deceptively casual readiness to fight and die - deceptive because it stemmed from a fierce sense of honour and a widespread determination not to appear cowardly. For most doughboys a coward was often synonymous with someone who ducked at the approach of a shell, which by late 1917 was an automatic and sensible response among British and French troops. The doughboys were not in the war long enough to develop the calloused cynicism of their British and French comrades.

Was the AEF responsible for bringing Germany to its knees? In purely battlefield terms its presence was necessary but not sufficient. It is in any case the wrong question. The important question, in assessing the part the United States played in the First World War, has a much broader focus: could the Allies have defeated Germany without the financial, economic, military, and psychological backing of the United States? Unquestionably not. Yet the AEF has been ignored," and overlooked, even by American historians.

Debate over the precise turning-point of the war is endless. It is futile to enter into such a debate, which can only lead to an ultimately sterile regress. But America's true value to the Allied war effort should be understood as nothing less than vital. The process of transforming America's paltry regular army into the strongest army on the European continent within twenty months was nothing less than remarkable. By dint of careful planning, sheer determination and hard work, spiced with a willing suspension of some democratic principles and a lot of aggression, this small combat force was expanded until, by 11 November 1918, there were a total of 1,961,767 US troops in France.

The war had tangible effects on American society. It shortened women's skirts, in a drive to save wool. It hastened the arrival of Prohibition, thus inadvertently incubating the careers of Al Capone and many other gangsters. The banning of alcohol was originally introduced as a wartime scheme to save allegedly scarce resources, although in reality it had been on the agenda of conservative political forces for years. The war spread jazz across America, and ultimately the world, by forcing this new form of music out from its ghetto in the red-light district of St Louis, which was closed down as part of an effort to prevent the vast influx of new army recruits from having their morals tainted and their bodies infected. It galvanized the soluble coffee industry; the presence of the AEF in France rocketed the demand for soluble coffee to thirty times more than pre-war production figures. The war did its bit to help Americans become addicted to smoking: the monthly ration shipped to France for the AEF by the end of the war was 20 million cigars and 425 million cigarettes, all available at cost to the troops - not a cent of tax or profit was added. It brought ordinary Americans into first-hand contact - and in many cases actual combat - with Russian Bolsheviks thirty years before the outbreak of the Cold War, as US soldiers fraternized, fought and froze in Siberia. Most of all, the war cost America an enormous amount of money - more than $1,000,000 an hour over the twenty-five months from April 1917 to April 1919, enough to pay the entire costs of the U S government from 1791 up to the outbreak of the First World War.

The United States certainly learned one lesson: that efforts to help Europe sort out its problems carry big risks. Not only do you get precious little thanks; you never quite manage to extricate yourself from the mess. But despite the inevitable sense of deflation after the Armistice, most doughboys felt proud of what they had achieved, or helped the British and French to achieve, even though Uncle Sam said thanks and goodbye with a measly $60 gratuity, just two months' pay.

For American soldiers and civilians it had generally been a popular war. For the vast majority of the doughboys it would prove in many respects the most important experience of their lives. Yet in the 1920s, as economic decline set in, many Americans rejected what their country did in the Great War. A feeling grew that the United States had been duped into wasting money and men on behalf of a squabbling and thankless Europe.

John Maynard Keynes said that 'without the assistance of the United States the Allies could never have won the War'. That word 'assistance' must be understood in a far broader fashion than simply that which was done on the field of battle. A more partisan view, but from one who was nevertheless a highly objective analyst of the progress of the war, comes from Major-General Hugh Drum, who went to France with Pershing's General Staff a mere major, but rose to become Pershing's chief-of-staff and a brigadier-general. Drum intended to write his own memoir of the war, but never completed it; the following was to be part of his introduction:

We have read of the strategical genius of Foch, the tactical superiority of Petain, the dogged perseverance of Haig and King Albert, and the patriotic firmness of our own Commander-in-chief. And we have been told of the elan of the French infantry, and of the tenacity of the British, and of the intrepidity of our own troops, rushing to battle in the words of a French army commander, ‘as to a fire'. But nowhere do we find proper recognition given to Voltaire's precept that God is on the side of the heaviest battalions. Let the American people consider and reflect upon the facts that follow. Let them weigh these facts against the misinformation that has shrouded the glories of our armies since 1918; and let them be eternally proud of the fact that it was the preponderance of American manpower - and nothing else, that brought Germany to her knees on November 11, 1918.

---

top of page

back a page