Gene Fax

Over the years, I've read about 300-plus books relating to the Great War, and this is one of the better studies that I've encountered. Fax's goal is to take one typical division of the American Expeditionary Force, and see what its collective experience tells us about American military performance during the war. What might be unique about the 79th is that there has been some modern second-guessing about its performance during the opening days of the Meuse-Argonne offensive, with one William Walker, in "Betrayal at Little Gibraltar," claiming that professional jealousy led to a great opportunity being thrown away.

Before one gets to that point, Fax takes the reader from the start, as he makes no assumptions that his readership is particularly conversant with World War I and the United States. This means he leads the general reader through the political circumstances that finally forced Wilson to enter the war in 1917, after great exertions to avoid that decision, and inter-allied arguments over just what the American contribution was to be, and the conflicts over the creation of a great American field army. On the whole, the British and French leadership would have preferred to just have American manpower to reinforce their own units; which would have never flown with the American body politic.

It's at this point that the 79th enters the actual narrative, as Fax takes you from its creation as an organized entity, its deployment to France, and the thousand screaming agonies it took to get this half-baked formation onto the point of departure by September 26, 1918. A great question is why one of the rawest units in the American army was given a part in the hardest task of the day, the taking of the hill at Montfaucon, and there are no great answers; the extant documentation doesn't allow for that. What is known is that after four days of hell, the 79th took that position basically "with their bare hands," a commentary on the lack of artillery support they received in the effort, and did about as well as any participating division in the assault, before logistical collapse brought the whole operation to a standstill. The 79th's commander, Joseph E. Kuhn, expected to be sacked for non-performance; that he was not suggests that he was regarded as something of a miracle worker for what he did accomplish.

From there, Fax is mostly traces the accelerated evolution of the AEF, and how in two months it went from a half-baked organization to a fighting force with a respectable degree of efficiency; though every man who served in 1918 who went on to serve during the Second World War were determined to make at least new mistakes.

As for the argument that cooperation by the 4th Division on the 79th's flank on the first day of the operation could have led to a great breakthrough, but was foiled by professional jealousy displayed by Robert Bullard (commander of US III Corps), Fax finds little to justify William Walker's argument. Fax concludes that a poorly written operational plan, which did allow for cross-corps cooperation, was short circuited by the chief of staff of US III Corps, one Alfred Bjornstad, a man possessed of an authoritarian temperament who liked his battlefields tidy, and a man who was quietly sacked for being an embarrassment; the AEF liked to bury their mistakes rather than air out their dirty laundry. Again, there was never a great breakthrough victory to be had; all Great War offensives tended to collapse of their own weight due to logistical weaknesses.

In the end, I think this is a great book, but perhaps a little bit more than the general reader really wants to know.… (més)