Two revolutions led to Russia’s withdrawal from the war. The Allies suffered a wave of calamitous events between mid-1917 and mid-1918. When the United States entered the war in mid-1917, all the major forces of both sides were showing the material and moral strains of three years of total war. The AEF nonetheless played a critical role in the defeat of Germany. It was also characterized by battles and campaigns that showed the AEF's hurried creation, operational inexperience, and anachronistic initial combat doctrine. The American combat experience was fraught with tension, both with elements of the War Department at home and with the Allied powers in Europe. In sum, the AEF represented the first massive projection of American military power into Europe, and it dwarfed all previous military expeditions. Though the Civil War (1861-1865) lasted longer, America’s participation in the Great War led to the creation of the nation’s largest army to date (nearly 4 million men under arms) the shipping of over 2 million of them to Europe and the waging of the nation’s largest, longest, and most deadly battles. The dispatch of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) to the Western Front constituted the greatest, most intense military effort in the nation’s history to date. Simply put, the United States had never attempted anything approaching what it did in Europe between mid-1917 and late 1918. Prior to that, during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) the combined American invasion forces never exceeded 20,000. When the United States declared war against Germany in April 1917, its most recent expeditionary military efforts had involved sending 10,000 men into Mexico in 19, maintaining a combat force of approximately 25,000 men in the Philippines from 1899 to 1902, and deploying 17,000 men to fight the Spanish in Cuba in 1898.
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