After the War, American intelligence officers combed through interrogation records and intercepted letters to compiled 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 Lt. Quentin Roosevelt, youngest son of former President Theodore Roosevelt.
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.
