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Transcript

Intro

Hi, I’m the History Guy. I have a degree in history and I love history, and if you love history too, this is the channel for you.

History

Between the first and third of July 1863, more than 23,000 soldiers of the Union Army would be killed in the Battle of Gettysburg. It was the deadliest battle for the American Army during the U.S. Civil War and yet not the deadliest battle in the history of the American Army. Between December 16, 1944, and January 25th, 1945, more than 600 thousand U.S. troops would be engaged in the Battle of the Bulge. That made it the largest battle for the American Army in the Second World War, and yet it was not the largest battle in the history of the United States Army. No, the largest and deadliest battle in the history of the United States Army occurred between September 26th and November 11th, 1918, in the Battle of the Meuse Argonne. As the world commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Great War, I find that many Americans don’t know much about the war or the American contribution to the war. And that is too bad because the largest and deadliest battle in the history of the United States Army deserves to be remembered.

When the U.S. declared war in April of 1917, our allies were already on the brink. A credit crisis that year demonstrated that France and Britain were reaching the end of their ability to continue to borrow money to support the war, and so when we joined the war effort, we knew that we had to fairly quickly be able to provide enough troops to break the stalemate and end the war quickly or there would be no allies to support. But the problem is we had done nothing to prepare for war and we were not in a good position to do that. The entirety of our ground forces, including our Army National Guard and Marines, accounted for just around 250 thousand troops, or enough for about nine divisions. And to put that into perspective, the Germans were fielding 136 divisions just on the Western Front, and after the Bolshevik rebellion in Russia ended the war in the east, they were able to up that to 185 divisions. And not only that, but the army that we did have was simply not a modern army; we hadn’t invested in things like tanks and aircraft and heavy artillery, and our training and tactics did not incorporate the important lessons that our allies had learned fighting on the Western Front.

One of the reasons that Germany thought they could get away with things like sinking the Lusitania is that they figured even if America came into the war, that we were so woefully unprepared that it would take us years to mobilize, and they thought by then they could have defeated Britain and France. And yet in 1918, just one year after declaring war, we had more than a million troops in France; it was an amazing mobilization. But the dirty little secret that that hid was that the way that we had done that was by so abbreviating the process that the army that we sent to France was simply not prepared for the war that they were being asked to fight.

The Allied High Command decided that in the fall of 1918, they were going to launch a grand offensive that was going to take all of the Allied armies and attack the entire length of the Western Front with the goal of driving Germany out of the war by the end of the year. But it was such a broad offensive that they had to include the million men of the American Expeditionary Force even though most of them had never seen combat before, and many had not even completed their training. And to make matters worse, the A.E.F. was assigned some of the very worst ground of the offensive, the area called the Meuse Argonne. The Meuse Argonne was an area of steep hills and ravines, nearly impassable terrain that had ample cover for things like snipers and machine gun nests and pillboxes. And it was all spied by a fortified height that allowed the Germans to accurately drop artillery on anyone who would attack the fortifications. The Germans had taken the ground in 1914, and despite all their best efforts, the French had never been able to take it back because it was described as “Perfect Defensive Ground,” which means the worst place to try to launch an attack. And yet if we could break through those defensive works, we could take the railway junctions that the Germans needed to supply their army in France.

The American losses were obscene, made worse by the fact that so many of them were avoidable. They simply had antiquated training; their tactics were more applicable to the Civil War than the First World War. They attacked machine guns head-on. Many of the untested commanders proved to be completely unfit for command, and the higher command was simply not prepared for the logistical challenges of an offensive this size. We didn’t have adequate medical support; we weren’t able to move supplies forward to even feed the troops, and we couldn’t get the artillery moving forward fast enough to be able to support continuing the attack.

You have to understand the sheer size of this attack. In the first three-hour bombardment to start the assault, the Allies fired more ordinance than had been fired in the entirety of the United States Civil War, by both sides! In the end, America involved 1.2 million troops, by far the largest operation in the history of the United States Army. And the 26,000 dead made it the deadliest battle in the history of the American Army.

There’s a big debate on how much credit America can take for ending the war, and it’s a fair debate; our allies have a fair complaint there. We didn’t enter the war until 1917, and we couldn’t appreciate the sacrifice of armies that had been fighting there since 1914. And yet in the Meuse Argonne offensive, American troops took positions that the allies had not been able to take in four years of trying. And the American position in the Grand Offensive that ended the war was irreplaceable; our allies did not have the troops to do what they were doing in the offensive, and to replace what was done by the million men of the American Expeditionary Force. And so in the end, we did what we came to do; we shifted the balance, we broke the stalemate that allowed us to win the war. And because of that, despite the fact that our casualties were only two percent of the entire conflict, the largest battle and deadliest battle in the history of the American Army deserves to be remembered, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Outro

I’m the History Guy. I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series, five minutes of history, short snippets of forgotten history five to ten minutes long. If you did enjoy it, then please go ahead and click that thumbs up button that’s there on your left. If you have any questions or comments, then feel free to write them in the comments section and I will be happy to respond. And if you’d like five minutes more forgotten history, all you need to do is click the subscribe button that’s there on your right.