After the War, American intelligence officers combed through interrogation records and intercepted letters to compile a report about what Germans thought of their former enemies.
The document, titled “Candid Comment on The American Soldier of 1917-1918 and Kindred Topics by The Germans,” included comments from soldiers, priests, women, village notables, politicians and statesmen. Here are some highlights from the report:
For much of the last ten years, military historian Edward G. Lengel has researched the First World War. Now an independent historian, he wrote a cover article for the Summer 2010 issue of American Heritage on the Meuse-Argonne offensive, “America’s Bloodiest Battle.” Last month, Da Capo Press published his masterful account of the battle and the Lost Battalion’s heroic stand, Never in Finer Company. Mr. Lengel adapted portions of that book for this essay.
--The Editors
We choose the cover image of this issue to honor the personal sacrifice of Americans who died on the fields, and in the skies, of Europe 100 years ago, as well as the losses suffered by their families.
In the poignant image, a German soldier hammers on the cross that marks the temporary grave of Lieutenant Quentin Roosevelt, the youngest son of Theodore Roosevelt.
Encouraged by his father and siblings, Quentin signed up for the Army Air Service and became a pursuit pilot during World War I. He was popular with fellow pilots and known for his daring.
At the start of the Second Battle of the Marne, Quentin was shot down behind German lines on Bastille Day, July 14, 1918.
The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers, by Elizabeth Cobbs (Harvard University Press)
The United States was tragically unprepared for World War I. Woodrow Wilson's slogan for re-election in 1916 had been “He kept us out of war,” which most Americans endorsed at the time. But, when war was finally declared war on April 2, 1917, the isolationist attitude would mean that American armed forces were undermanned and ill-equipped. The European powers, on the other hand, had developed advanced weaponry — artillery, tanks, machine guns, and airplanes. It would take the Americans time to catch up.
One hundred years ago, the bloody fighting finally stopped in the forests of eastern France. We commemorate that event with this special issue of American Heritage.
For many years, it was called simply the Great War. Only later, after a larger, even more horrific, more global fight, did it take on the Roman numeral I, to distinguish it from what had come next. World War I created the modern era, the world in which we live, as historian John Lukacs so eloquently explains in his essay in this issue, “The Meaning of 1918.”
It did so by sorting out the winners and the losers and fostering conditions that sparked upheaval in Europe and elsewhere. But it also banished the past. Old technologies, accepted practices and mores, the way things were: All were reconsidered and found lacking after the bombs stopped falling in the forests of eastern France in the fall of 1918.
In many ways, 1918 is closer to us than we are inclined to think.
In the afterglow of the armistice in 1918 that ended World War I, Europe, and particularly the city of Paris, exhibited a wild exuberance. In mid-January 1919, American Expeditionary Forces officer and future civil rights pioneer Charles Hamilton Houston encapsulated the mood and sounds of European joy: “Paris is taken away with jazz and our style of dancing,” he wrote in his diary. “The girls come after the boys in taxis and beg them to go to the dance. Colored boys are all the go.”