The AEF Way of War: The American Army and Combat in World War I, Mark Ethan Grotelueschen, Cambridge, 2007, 387 + x pages, maps, index, maps, photos, bibliography, ISBN 0 521 86434 8, $75 cloth. The author is an assistant professor of history at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

There remains a dearth of critical analysis on the operational performance of the American Expeditionary forces in World War I. This book and another recently authored by Robert Ferrell (See below) help fill this gap.

Though America's belligerency was brief, barely ninrteen months, it was arguably decisive in particularly in terms of industrial power and finance. Contemporary Entente political and military and military leaders (Clemenceau and Haig among them) were, nonetheless, disparaging, even contemptuous of the AEF's effectiveness as a fighting force and the skill of its officers. Beginning in the 1960s, American historians began seriously to question the view, asserted effectively by General Pershing among others, that the AEF was a powerful, efficient combat force. Little work, however, has appeared contrasting American prewar doctrine to the refinement and evolution of AEF battle tactics during the summer and fall of 1918. And little detailed operational analysis has been published on the AEF's major battles: Aisne-Marne, St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne. In making his examination, the author concentrates on the operational experiences of three divisions heavily involved in combat: the 26th New England National Guard, the 2nd Regular Army and the 77th National Army (draftee) Division.

Though the publisher does not assert it, this work constitutes a ground-breaking fresh and detailed look at the operational record of a force that came to number two million men overseas with two million more in training in America before the war was over in November 1918.

America's Deadliest Battle: Meuse-Argonne, 1918, Robert H. Ferrell, Kansas, 2007, 195 + xii pages, photos, maps, index, bibliography, ISBN 978 070061 499 8, $29.95 cloth.

The author, a distinguished professor emeritus of history at the University of Indiana, has produced many books on American history, including Woodrow Wilson and World War I, Five Days in October: The Lost Battalion of World War I, and Peace in Their Time: the Origins of the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

This is the best recent study of the AEF's controversial Meuse-Argonne offensive, American largest effort of World War One. Actually more of a campaign than a single battle, this action extended over forty-seven days from September 26, 1918 until the end of the war, including a two-week lull for reorganization and command reshuffle. It involved some 1.2 million troops with 26,000 of them killed and 95 thousand wounded.

Ferrell begins the story with a review of American preparations for war. He finds these deficient largely because of the lack of aggressive political leadership from Wilson and his Secretary of War, Newton Baker to mobilize American business and industry. What Ferrell does not take into account is the fact that by 1917, American industry was operating at well over ninety of capacity to fill Entente orders and that the traditional source of excess labor for American industrial expansion - European immigration - had dried up as a result of the war. Unlike in 1940 and 1941, America did not have the excess industrial capacity and labor necessary for a rapid and massive economic expansion. Whatever the causes, the result was devastating in terms of shipping available to transport hundreds of thousands of ill-trained Doughboys to Europe along with the motor vehicles, mules and horses needed for their transport to and supply at the front. American industry also fumbled technically and failed to produce the artillery and aircraft need to fight a modern war, and army trainers---steeped in the lore of past conflicts---failed to impart the infantry and artillery skills necessary for survival on the Western Front. Indeed, far too many soldiers arrived in the trenches uninstructed even in the loading and firing of their rifles. Though Pershing instituted impressive local training programs in France, these came too late to meet the emergency created by the dangerous German offensives in the spring of 1918.

Moving on to the Meuse-Argonne itself, Ferrell describes and analyzes the improvisation and confusion of the opening days typified by heavy casualties, faulty use of artillery, poor infantry tactics and clogged supply lines. Senior leadership in the AEF was uneven. Pershing, frustrated and embarrassed by lack of progress, fired many divisional commanders. These commanders, in turn, relieved brigade, regimental and battalion commanders deemed less than aggressive in pushing their troops forward in costly frontal assaults. Ferrell uses a full chapter in recapping his 2004 book on the failure of the 35th Missouri-Kansas National Guard Division before moving on to more successful efforts to end the artillery enfilade and the occupation of the Kriemhilde Stellung in mid-October. Though he recognizes that Foch assigned the green AEF perhaps the toughest sectors of the German line (they were entrenched in the broken, hilly Argonne Forest virtually undisturbed for four years), Ferrell sensibly places most of the blame for these failures on faulty tactics and poor leadership.

The author then goes on to analyze the reorganization of the AEF into two separate armies, as Pershing mandated, in mid-October 1918. This allowed time to rest and reinforce units skeletonized by the earlier fighting, to reorganize artillery deployment and tactics, and to order the general use of mustard and phosgene gas. Junior officers were also busy retraining their men to use infiltration and other innovative tactics against German machine gun nests. The troops that fought the breakthrough phase of the battle from November first were far better prepared, led and supported than their September 1918 comrades.

In all this is an excellent survey of the Meuse-Argonne campaign for the general reader. It lacks the tactical detail of Paul Braim's 1987 work but is stronger and better organized in its analysis. Ferrell provides excellent maps (often lacking in works of this kind) drawn largely from the official U. S. Army history, American Armies and Battlefields in Europe (GPO, 1938). Some may consider him overly harsh in his judgments of American leadership shortcomings. Many historians -- while recognizing the AEF's shortcomings -- hew to the view that it was just short of miraculous that America was able to send two million men to Europe in fewer than eighteen months. That being said, the only weakness is the author's hasty attempt at a survey analysis of the postwar world following what he views as the hollow victory of 1918.