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| My Guidebooks |
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About the Author |
There are mountains of books which tell about America at war and the combat participation of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in World War I. This brief listing of forty books will be all you will need to read to get the "gut-feeling" of what it was like to be in and fight with the AEF of 1917-1919 in France during World War I. Most of these titles are books which were written by the Doughboys who were 'up front,' and not by the generals in corps or division headquarters.
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It has been almost ninety years since the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) fought its great battles in France during World War I.
The Great War of 1914-1918, now known as World War I, has also been a great war of words. Although the conflict has attracted more than its fair share of bores, there are nonetheless a lot of interesting reads in its massive bibliography. In the process of researching and writing my series of guidebooks to the battlegrounds of the AEF in France and Belgium, it has been my pleasure, over a period of some twenty years, to have read about well over one thousand unit histories, memoirs, fictional and nonfictional books relating to the AEF and its combat operations. My working bibliography is now 100 pages in length. One finishes his reading of this literature with his emotions and thoughts stirred by some of the better writings. In spite of the fact that World War I has been over for eighty-six years, and has been eclipsed by cataclysmic events since, the intensity of passion spread upon the pages of many of these literary efforts still has a great impact. Many of these writers felt deeply, and their intense involvement in the issues of the war was well translated in fictional form to the written page. They made the war and their positions come alive for readers of that period, and their words still have that power. It is this type of literary effort that it has been the compiler's purpose to list. These authors, even in presenting the most destructive effects of war, offered their novels as testaments of horror, and, in so doing, expressed some hope for change. We sometimes overlook the testimony of the ordinary soldier- not a scholar or an expert in the accepted sense - but he who knew certain limited things because he was there, he was personally involved, he did the fighting himself. The serious historian should always seek out such first-person accounts because they can frequently correct a record that was distorted in the first writing and was perpetuated by scholarly experts copying each other. Eyewitnesses and participants have memories of things not previously in print or commonly known. The soldiers observed people and events from a special viewpoint. They should therefore be considered prime sources for the military historian and author. Authenticity is a prerequisite of the good war literature. Of all the books, both pre-and post-Armistice, there are too few which have caught the reflection of the American doughboy so that he himself may recognize the image. Of that which Barbusse did for the French poilu in Le Feu and Ian Hay for the British Tommy in The First Hundred Thousand, our shelves show but faint traces. Who can fail to be moved even today, in a world grown callous by brutality and destructiveness, with the poignant writing of Hervey Allen about the fighting of the Pennsylvanians in Fismette, the little suburb of Fismes (by the Vesle River in France), or of John W. Thomason's account of the capture of Hill 142 on the left flank of Belleau Wood, on the morning of the day on which Belleau Wood was assaulted. Yet these books are so intensely personal and historical at the same time that each one individually still reveals new insights to an understanding of that period out of which they came and of later periods as well.  According to Richard Coombs, the late editor of Relevance, the Journal of the Great War Society, 150,000 books have been written about the Great War. Of these, a relatively small number have survived the test of almost a century and can truly be called classics, in the best sense of the word. These show the magic of the writer's penmanship holding the reader's immersed attention on the subject. An even smaller number of books fit these criterion for the AEF of 1917-1919. There are hundreds of good books on the AEF in the First World War. I have listed a few of the best here, including some old ones, because they are classics and have lasted these many years since the War faded into history. Here then, are the forty books that I would like to recommend to the readers of this article, the books that give the reader a "gut-feeling" of life and combat in the AEF. These books see the war as a microcosm of the large war. The authors "get at the real thing" (Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage) and show life in the AEF "the way it really was" ( Ernest Hemingway, author of For Whom the Bell Tolls). The infantry and artillery soldiers viewed war from a different angle than those staff officers and generals who wrote memoirs and other wartime effusions--the combat soldiers saw and felt war from the bottom of the ladder, so to speak. It was the infantry that conquered enemy ground, and the artillery paved the way for the infantry. These books, with the sole exception of Anton Myrer's Once an Eagle, were all written by men and officers of the AEF who had huddled in trench and shell-hole, and who had known Zero-Hour. There are no books here that were authored from "back yonder" by Generals, about whom it has been said they "die in bed", nor are there any accounts from the "headquarters viewpoint." There are only the narratives of AEF life and actions in which the writer had directly participated. These books present a moving, true picture of what men feel, how they act, what passes in their minds and hearts, living, fighting and dying in the trenches of the most awful war of all time. "On this war," said a great man, "men will think and write for a thousand years." They will. And the things that will concern, interest and fill the thoughts of the great bulk of humanity who do think and want to know, will be not the great battles, not the tactics and the strategy of generals and mighty armies but such human feelings and actions as fill these books. Some of these books may be easily and currently available at your local library. Often large libraries will have them in their collection. If not available, the reference department of your library can get the book for you on the National Interlibrary Loan Program; they are well worth searching out and reading. What follows is a brief list of some of the better works that should be read by nonspecialists and accidental historians. Here then, is my distillation of two decades of steady reading about the AEF in World War I.
 Allen, Hervey. TOWARD the FLAME. NY: Doran, 1926. Hervey Allen's account of his experiences as an infantry lieutenant showed that one man's battle role was so insignificant that the war aims faded into the background. Once in action, the individual's struggle to survive eliminated all other considerations. In most cases, success depended on a combination of fortunate circumstances, seldom on skill. Allen's graphic account of service in the 28th Division, Pennsylvania National Guard, AEF, and the vicious battle for Fismes and Fismette during the Aisne-Marne offensive of 1918 is very lucid. The five day fight for Fismette was said to have been the worst five days of fighting by the American Expeditionary Forces. Allen describes the Fismette massacre in horrendous detail. This book is very candid in its observations and formed a basis for some of Allen's later war stories.
Allen's story covers only a few weeks in the summer of 1918, during which American troops attacked German positions in Fismette and were virtually annihilated. It wasn't a crucial action-the Germans gained nothing by their momentary victory-and it shed no particular glory on the Americans who fought in it. But it is a convincing picture of the American war-the new, untried troops moving anxiously through country they don't know, uncertain of where the enemy is, where their supporting troops are, or even what they are expected to do. Troops move, bivouac, move again, attack and are attacked, without ever knowing quite what is happening. What they do know is the immediate physical scene in which they live and fight and die; the village, its river and bridge, a stone wall, a hill. Allen's narrative has the virtue that all good battle memoirs have: it makes real the part of a war that one man, fighting, sees. Allen's book is listed here mainly for the sense of its ending. In the last episode, Allen and his men are sheltering from the German shells and gas in a dugout in the village of Fismette. The shelling stops, and Allen realizes that an enemy attack is about to begin, and tries to marshal his men to cover the hilltop over which the Germans come. Not surprisingly, few accounts exist of what it was like to be on the receiving end of a flamethrower attack. Can there be a narrative more memorable than the concluding paragraph of Hervey Allen's appropriately titled Toward the Flame, one of the notable memoirs of the Great War? Allen, better remembered (though mostly forgotten today) as an historical novelist, was a first lieutenant in the American 28th Division, a National Guard unit from Pennsylvania. At Fismette on the Vesle River in August 1918, storm troops swept over Allen and his company: "Suddenly along the top of the hill there was a puff, a rolling cloud of smoke, and then a great burst of dirty, yellow flame….It was the Flammenwerfer, the flame throwers; the men along the crest curled up like leaves to save themselves as the flame and smoke rolled clear over them. There was another flash between the houses. One of the men stood up, turning around outlined against the flame-"Oh! My God!" he cried. "Oh! God!" Hervey Allen's Toward the Flame, a war-novel of exceptional interest, should be considered a classic of war, but it is not.
_________________. IT WAS LIKE THIS: TWO STORIES of the GREAT WAR. NY: Farrar & Rinehart, 1940. "Report to Major Roberts" tells of a young Yank lieutenant who comes to enjoy killing and whose only hold on reality during combat is his title, "Blood Lust" sees the transformation of a simple youth into a professional soldier via a heavy-handed introduction to the horrors of combat. This book contains a shocking scene or two of Americans enjoying the killing of Germans and a somewhat heavy-handed initiation of an American innocent named William Henry Virgin.
Baker, Chester E. DOUGHBOY's DIARY. Burd Street Press, 1998. Corporal Chester E. Baker joined the U. S. 28th Division of Pennsylvania National Guard along with friends and relatives from Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania. Suddenly these young men found themselves in Texas chasing Pancho Villa. Baker, unofficial mother hen to Company F, 2nd Battalion, 112th Regiment of Infantry tells a fascinating, sometimes hilarious, sometimes tender, and often heartrending tale of the year the men of Company F spent in France, before and after the Armistice. Together, they fought lice and dysentery, mutilation and death, shell shock and homesickness. In one short year they were changed from quixotic boys dreaming of glory to battle-hardened veterans, willing to lay down their lives to save a friend's. Baker and the others who survived the war, which they thought would end war forever, returned from France members of a brotherhood as sacred as Arthur's Knights of the Roundtable. Baker's memoir was written when he was eighty-seven years of age and something of his advanced age is reflected in the writing thereof. Some of the passion and impact of 1918 is missing. Baker admits to having lost his original notes and to using the notes of others in writing this memoir. Nonetheless, Baker's account of the fighting in Fismes and Fismette (at the Vesle River) is, at times, colorful. He seems to simply skip over the ten days of vicious fighting by the U. S. 28th Division for the heavily fortified ridge of the Argonne Forest plateau called La Chene Tondu. All-in-all Baker's memoir of fighting with the "Bloody Bucket" (as the Germans called the Red Keystone insignia) 28th Division is a solid one, although at times rather pedestrian in nature.
Barber, Thomas H. ALONG the ROAD. NY: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1924. Thomas Barber, formerly a captain in the Pioneer Infantry, writes graphically about twelve ordinary days of combat experience by his engineer company in the Meuse-Argonne Campaign. Barber has presented a small cross section of that war with which the majority of the AEF were familiar. Reading Barber's book is akin to the feeling one has when striking gold on a worked-out claim. A tale told with simple vigor that, to those who knew the Argonne front, will make the shadows of October 1918 leap out from the past into sharp reality. Such boldness and homely honesty of line could only have been drawn by one endowed with rare powers of observation and human sympathy.
Through the lines of a soldier's diary emerges the soldier himself. That strange mixture of discontent and cheerfulness, stubbornness under discipline and tractability under leadership, sentimentalism and repression, garrulous incoherence. Barber has captured the spirit of the "middle army" which sweated unsung through seas of mud, heaving, cursing, straining to get supplies up to the front lines.
Barkley, John Lewis. NO HARD FEELINGS. NY: Cosmopolitan, 1930. John L. Barkley's narrative takes the reader from Château-Thierry to the Argonne, where he was a winner of the Medal of Honor. Enough said!
Boyd, Thomas Alexander. THROUGH THE WHEAT. NY: Scribner's, 1923. Reprinted 1978 by Southern University Press, Carbondale, ILL. Boyd's book stands at the top of the list. War's utter waste and futility permeate Boyd's novel. During the Château-Thierry and Soissons battles, Boyd revealed in each member of a marine platoon his motives for fighting, his fears, and his ambitions. He knew the men who fought and he has crystallized their actions, both physical and mental, with an unerring pen in this novel concerning marines in France during World War I and their adjustment to the daily tasks of surviving under frontline conditions and the constant advance into almost certain death.
William Hicks enlists in the U. S. Marine Corps hoping to see some action. Before going into battle, he had a great urge to fight. During the fighting some men were brave, some cowardly, but without maudlin extremes. Through the bloody action, the personnel changed radically. One who remained was Private William Hicks. Hicks' education, however, is more complete, with greater realistic detail: he is caught sleeping on guard duty; feels numbing fear in combat; sees unarmed men shot down in cold blood; is gassed; and finally goes insane during a heavy bombardment that kills his best friend before his eyes. Boyd shows a brief glimpse of an ambitious general who, devoutly seeking his third star, exhorts his troops to battle by promising them "Hell, Heaven, or Hoboken by Christmas. Battle horrors dissipated his enthusiasm for everything except getting away. It was not that Hicks was afraid of dying, but that he was weary of the seeming futility of it all. This is the story of how young Private Hicks adjusted to the daily encounter with death on the front line. The novel concludes with a scene that suggests the final moments of The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane: "An ochre cannon-ball lay suspended in the soft blue sky. Efflorescent clouds, like fresh chrysanthemums were piled on top one another…." The enemy approaches from an adjacent ridge-line as Hicks walks over ground strewn with bodies to get his rifle. The Germans draw "ever…nearer," bur "no longer did anything matter, neither the bayonets, the bullets, the barbed wire, the dead, nor the living. The soul of Hicks was numb." The scenes of death and putrefaction are continuous, adding steadily to the final impact of Through the Wheat. Boyd, however wrote of that comparatively small body of men, the Marines, who participated in desperate fighting of July and August 1918. Considered by many to be not only the best combatant story of the World War I but the best American war book since "The Red Badge of Courage." The characters are all familiar, but the action, thrilling, horrifying, vivid, is, fortunately, unfamiliar to a great majority of the American army. A true literary military classic. Boyd served with the 4th Marine Brigade, 2nd Division, AEF, and when he wrote about the Battle of Soissons, he knew that many of the men of his Marine Brigade would judge his record.
March, William. [Pseud. Campbell, William E. M.]. COMPANY "K", by William March, psued. NY: Smith, Haas, 1933. Also Hill & Wang, 1957, and University of Alabama Press, 1995. Arguably the best work of American Great War fiction is William March's 1933 classic Company K. March, the pen name for William Edward Campbell, served with the 5th Marines in France and was awarded the Croix de Guerre, the Distinguished Service Cross and the Navy Cross for his heroism under fire. The book contains 113 short chapters, or sketches, spoken by various men of Company K, tiny lightning-sharp vignettes of combat experiences in France that together print an emotional and unforgettable group portrait that works its way through the entire personnel roster of the fictitious company. March manages to completely capture every aspect about the war in the highly personal insights of the men of Company K.
William March, author of Company K, presents a true picture of what the war meant to the "provincial" young American. March, who was wounded and gassed in 1918 has each soldier in his company of one hundred and forty-seven men tell their story in their own words. Each is given a chance to express his feelings concerning war through some small action of incident which impacts strongly upon the mind of each soldier. Company K supplies an adequate array of points of view and capturing in vivid detail an entire unit's disenchantment with the war and its country's involvement in it. Contained in it is criticism of Christianity more profound than that found in many other war novels. At one point a captain orders his men to slaughter German prisoners, and, shortly thereafter, orders them to attend church services. In a comic aside, his YMCA representatives supply women-impersonators rather than have American boys mix with French women. Campbell's men are at the mercy of experimenting doctor. Campbell presents military justice as cruel and expedient, and he seems to conclude that all soldiers are prisoners, controlled by inhuman laws and absurd traditions. The more educated members of the company see war as "brutal and degrading" and common soldiers as "pawns shoved about to serve the interests of others." Campbell's Unknown Soldier is unknown because, lying on barbed wire with his entrails dripping out, he destroys his dog-tags, letters, and everything else that might identify him in order that his body would not be returned to the United States and be fawned over by hypocrites. Those members of Company K who return home meet defeat in one form or another, and Campbell make it clear that the war experience is ultimately responsible. Private Yancey, in Company K, conjectures that "If the common soldiers of each army could get together by a river bank and talk things over calmly, no war could possibly last as long as a week." Company K is an unusual novel, much acclaimed in its day. The author (whose real name was Campbell) was a highly decorated (Croix de Guerre, Distinguished Service Cross, Navy Cross) sergeant of Marines who served in the 4th Brigade of Marines (Co F, 2nd Battalion., 5th Marines), U. S. 2nd Division, AEF, in WWI. Sgt Campbell served in all major engagements of the Brigade, including Belleau Wood and Blanc Mont. Company K, arranged after the manner of the Spoon River Anthology, presents brief consecutive soliloquies by over one hundred members of a Marine Corps rifle company in WWI, most of them characterized by a morbid wit and a tone of bleak resignation.
Casey, Robert J. THE CANNONEERS HAVE HAIRY EARS: A DIARY of the FRONT LINES.
Captain Robert J. Casey, a battery commander in the 58th Field Artillery Brigade kept a wartime diary, later published anonymously as The Cannoneers Have Hairy Ears.
This work is the unedited journal of a combat unit of the United States Field Artillery-the story of one battery of seventy-fives from the date on which it was hurriedly called out of the training sector at Valdahon, until that November morning on which the last shot of the Great War was fired, and, as such, may properly be accepted as the story of most combat units. Necessarily without form, or definite continuity, it is, none the less, a remarkable literary performance, composed, though it was, to an accompaniment of shellfire. From the book the reader will miss, perhaps, certain linguistic spices and savors that have given a pungency to other war records, yet the men of the author's battery did speak the language of the A.E.F. with fluency, including references, on occasions, to definite canine ancestry as well as numerous colorful Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. The author's avoidance of these sprightly terms was due in no degree whatever to any personal squeamishness, but because the journal was kept for the eyes of a lady-a lady into whose hands it might possibly fall only after the author himself had been transferred to somewhere in the far silence and thus rendered unable, in person, to explain his yearnings for realism. Furthermore, the language of this battery, the author surmises, was probably as chaste as that of the average group of college students, and it improved steadily as the repetition of certain open-air expletives ceased to soothe. Moreover, as the author makes beautifully clear, the average American soldier was not the introspective Russian novelist that certain war fiction would have us believe. He appears herein, not to have been concerned at all about the status of his soul, nor the many and muddled causes that had dragged him out of an Alabama back-lot to make the world safe for anything in particular. Certainly his primary, and frequently his only, questions with regard to the murderous trade to which he found himself apprenticed were: Of the conditions under which the journal was kept and of its author, the reader may be interested in knowing that before the "outfit" left Valdahon, the author bought a fountain-pen, a packet of ink tablets, four notebooks, and a ream of coordinate paper. The paper and two of the notebooks he carried in his saddlebags; the rest of his literary equipment was stowed away in the pockets of his blouse. The journal was pen-kept, so to speak, until the battery arrived at Romagne, where its author discovered an ancient typewriter in a compartment of a reel-fourgon. The variety of style in the work may be thus, in some degree, accounted for. Obviously, the author declares, an artilleryman would have a far better opportunity to keep a detailed journal than an infantryman, for, even though the battery were seldom more than one thousand yards behind the front lines, an efficient battery functioned like a machine, and the executive officer found plenty of time on his hands. As a matter of fact, the author's battery spent the last days of the war ahead of the infantry, yet was composed, in greater part, of high-school boys from Springfield, Illinois. The outfit was detached from the 33rd Division and sent into the line as "circus" artillery, which means that it was not hauled out when new divisions came up. For accuracy, efficiency, and conduct under fire it was cited several times, twice by Major General Summerall. The battery's "boss," and author of this book, was awarded a Captaincy in October, 1918, but in the meantime had received three citations, one of them signed by General Pershing himself. This journal is an exceptionally good read about the fighting done by one battery of French .75's from the start of the St. Mihiel Campaign on into the Meuse-Argonne and to the end of the war. Inasmuch as the journal was written while in combat, the writing is fresh, at-the-time, and original. This is not a book written many years after-the-fact and with a retrospective pen. The author pulls no punches in describing the horrors of frontline combat for both the infantry and the artillery. 
Dos Passos, John R. THREE SOLDIERS. Doran, 1921. Reprinted 1964. Three Soldiers was the first important American novel, and one of the first in any language to treat the War in the tone of realism and disillusion. The book made a deep impression, and may be counted the beginning of strictly contemporary fiction in the United States. Three Soldiers is an American war classic that traces the experiences of three doughboys through World War I, showing how all are broken by the pressures of conflict and the "system"; a bitter attack on what the author conceived as the misery, tyranny, and degradation found in Pershing's American Expeditionary Forces. This was one of the first books published which de-glorifies the American Army and which presented the War in unheroic colors. Dos Passos accurately depicts the uneasy relationships between the officers and men of an egalitarian society's army. The book of hard-boiled realism is the odyssey of three buck privates-Fuselli from the West, Christfield from the South, John Andrews the musician from New York-multiple protagonists, the theme of America as a melting pot, was an attempt to tell in miniature the national story of the AEF. The book takes Andrews, a dilettante musician through his war experiences and with him the two average Americans who share his discontent. One of them begins by being ambitious for promotion, but rises no higher than an army kitchen. Another, a mild farm boy, murders and officer who has bullied him. Fuselli is an urban non-entity but Andrews, an alienated, passive artist, and Chrisfield, a pathological man-of-action, a man who hates all forms of authority. There are three protagonists in the book, but only one hero, John Andrews; and it is his humiliation and agony in war that finally dominate the book. The book follows the central figures from background phases in the United States to their final fates in war. Andrews, the musician, permitted after the Armistice to study in Paris, is so resentful because his final discharge is slow in coming that he deserts and at the end faces a long term in prison. John Andrews, the musician and chief figure in Three Soldiers, has come from Harvard to the war expecting that he will find peace for his troubled mind in a large, generous cause. Instead, he finds slavery and boredom. Andrews rebels against dullness and pettiness, aimlessness and cruelty. His own impulses are vague: he desires a perfect freedom in which he can compose a symphony on the Queen of Sheba. Andrews survives the war only to die-at least symbolically, at the hands of the military police-in the peace. Once the war is over and he is free to work in Paris, there is every reason why he should put up a little longer with the minor annoyances of being still technically a soldier. But he has reached his limit of irritation and thinks he can endure no more. His desertion seems a heedless folly. He rebels with a desperate gesture. It was a gesture with which Dos Passos and his generation could sympathize. They resented officers and officials, routine and red tape. Three Soldiers is a bureaucratic horror in which Andrews deserts the army in order to write a great orchestral poem, is captured after all; and when the police take him away, the sheets of music flutter slowly into the breeze. Dos Passos' fated soldier, John Andrews, observes that "civilization is nothing but a vast edifice of sham, and war, instead of its crumbling, its fullest and most ultimate expression." These three soldiers were not typical of the army at large, many shocked readers insisted. Dos Passos insisted that his story was as true as the romantic versions of the war, with their happy warriors all bravely aware that they were fighting to save democracy. If such instances as he had chosen to present were special, such moods were not. Soldiers were not all heroes, and those who set out to be had a very good chance of being disillusioned. The sympathy in Three Soldiers lies with the common men, whether they are heroic or not, who do the plain work of the war. This was a book published with great trepidation by George H. Doran in 1921. It is mild as milk compared with the books of today, but this book may be remembered as having been the first American war novel published in which, for the first time, the name of the Christ was used as an expletive. Some readers feel that the book draws a picture in which American doughboys were self-pitying neurasthenics and all French women were easily immoral.
Elliot, Paul B. ON the FIELD of HONOR: A COLLECTION of WAR LETTERS and REMINISCENCES of THREE HARVARD GRADUATES WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES in the GREAT CAUSE. Boston: D. B. Updike, 1920. The Merrymount Press. A collection of wartime letters written by three young lieutenants in the AEF, all three of whom were killed in action. Don't let the title of this book fool you! In reading these letters, the reader cannot help but become emotionally involved with the feelings of these men.
Fredenburgh, Theodore. SOLDIERS MARCH. NY.: Harcourt, 1930. Examines 18 months in the life of an American non-com with the Field Artillery, AEF, in France in 1917-1918.
Hallas, James H. DOUGHBOY WAR: THE AMERICAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCE IN WORLD WAR I. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2000. Hip, Hip, Hooray! At long last, a big book entirely composed of the writings of American soldiers during World War I. This is not another one of those tedious, academic historian--'in my highly-educated opinion' books-this is the real thing, and entirely written in the words of our inimitable Doughboy of World War I. This multilayered history of World War I's doughboys recapitulates the enthusiasm of scores of soldiers as they trained for war, voyaged to France, and, finally, faced the harsh reality of combat on the Western Front. Drawing on journals, diaries, personal narratives, and unit histories, Hallas related the story of men in combat-the men behind the rifles. He has crafted a vivid pastiche that portrays the realities of all the major campaigns, from the first experiences in the muddy trenches of the training sectors to the bloody battle for Belleau Wood, from the violent clash on the Marne to the seemingly endless morass of the Argonne. His moving account reveals what the doughboys saw, what they did, how they felt, and the impact the Great War had on them.
Hemingway, Ernest. IN OUR TIME: STORIES BY ERNEST HEMINGWAY. NY: Scribner's-Macmillan, 1988. Prolific author Ernest Hemingway, primarily a writer of and about subjects other than the American soldier of World War I, has a poignant and rather sad little short story in this book entitled, "Soldier's Return." The story concerns itself with a Marine Corps combat veteran named Krebs. Krebs has been through all of the World War I campaigns of the Corps: Belleau Wood, Soissons, Champagne, St. Mihiel and the Argonne and finds his adjustment to civilian life to be painful and difficult. This short story perhaps shows a thread of commonality regarding the problems facing veterans in adjusting to civilian life after the war. This story, dealing with the problems of the returned veteran's difficulty in readjusting to a value system that now seems out of step with his experience. Hemingway's protagonist, Krebs, who "went to war from a Methodist college in Kansas," simply cannot readjust to the simple Christianity of the provincial midwest. In the war and the European experience he has discovered that he needs nothing that his former environment has to offer him: not marriage with one of the nice girls nor his father's bribe of the family car nor his mother's sentimental love nor traditional Christian values. It is clear that he regards the beliefs of the culture as sham.
Hemrick, Levi E. ONCE A MARINE. NY: Carlton Press, 1968. Although written some forty years after the war, Mr. Hemrick presents a thought provoking memoir of his service in the Marine Corps during World War I.
Hoffman, Robert C. I REMEMBER the LAST WAR. York, PA.: Strength & Health Publishing Co., 1940. Infantry officer's service with the 111th Infantry Regiment, U.S. 28th Division, AEF.
Jacks, Leo Vincent. SERVICE RECORD; BY an ARTILLERYMAN. NY: Scribners, 1928. Artillery service in the AEF- 119th Field Artillery Regiment, 32nd Division.
Jackson, Warren R. HIS TIME in HELL: A TEXAS MARINE in FRANCE. The World War I Memoir of Warren R. Jackson. Presidio Press, 2001. Although my initial impression of this memoir is that it is a bit on the pedestrian side, and of 'the unit marched to point Y, then marched to point X, etc., genre, the memoir squeaked by and made it into this listing. To quote from the jacket blurbs: "The casualties suffered by the 6th Marine Regiment during World War I were staggering. Remarkably, Warren R. Jackson may have been the only Marine in his company to remain unscathed as they fought their way from Verdun through the end of the war.
His Time in Hell is an extremely valuable memoir of the World War I Marine. In addition to providing a wealth of detail about enlisted service of that period, the reader will find that Jackson's normal human strengths and weaknesses shine through on every page. He saw his share of combat,, though he wasn't always in the forefront of battle. He writes his account in self deprecating, non-heroic tone. "Several times when it was still dark a storm of machine-gun bullets rained over our heads….My unselfish instincts prompting me, I used dispatch to get someone else between me and thebullets. While there were quite a bunch of us huddled there, my attempt was in vain, for others were trying to perform the same feat." Jackson must have done something right, however: he was promoted to corporal and awarded two Silver Stars and the Croix de Guerre. Based on his promotions and the fact he was often chosen for roles that required intelligence and fortitude, Jackson was indeed a good Marine. An unlettered man, Jackson's reminiscences bring to life a point in time now past. Life at the front, when viewed through modern eyes, was terribly primitive. "Mud, mud, mud! Everything, everywhere was covered with mud. There was mud on our hands, mud on our helmets, mud on our faces, mud on our uniforms, and shoes. It was impossible to get away from or forget that abiding, clinging, sticky mud." Through the words of a man who lived it, the reader experiences the discomfort, hunger, and danger in the maelstrom of mortal combat. "The crack of our rifles, the hollow rattle of the enemy bullets striking the leaves…the dreadful crash of exploding shells-this din kept my ears ringing.' Starting in the trenches of Verdun and proceeding to Belleau Wood, Soissons, St. Mihiel, Blanc Mont, St. Étienne, and the Meuse: it would take much hard fighting to reach Armistice Day. With its unvarnished prose and perceptive eye for detail, His Time in Hell is a remarkable testament to the valor, bravery, and sheer perseverance of Jackson and his fellow Marines in the face of danger and hardship." Another review states: "The staggeringly high casualties suffered by the 6th Marine Regiment during World War I mean that Warren R. Jackson was almost certainly the only member of his company to survive from Belleau Wood to the end of the war. With that in mind, it is the manifestly human approach of this book that creates such a vivid impression of life in the trenches-this is not a diatribe against inept allied leadership or against the institution of war itself, it is the honest reflection of a soldier. His Time in Hell is an extremely valuable memoir of a World War I marine. It provides a wealth of information about enlisted life at the time, and is told in a self-deprecating tone that might lull the reader into thinking that perhaps the author was not much of a marine; however, the fact that he was regularly promoted, awarded two Silver Stars and the Croix de Guerre and that he was regularly chosen for operations that required intelligence and bravery should be enough to show that he had not only these qualities, but also a measure of humility, a trait not often ascribed to men of his profession."
Mackin, Elton E. SUDDENLY WE DIDN'T WANT to DIE: MEMOIRS of a WORLD WAR I MARINE. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1993. Introduction and annotation by George B. Clark. Forward by LtGen Victor H. Krulak, USMC. A haunting portrayal of war. Private Mackin participated in every campaign in which the Marine Brigade saw action-from Belleau Wood to the crossing of the Meuse on the eve of the Armistice. A runner with the 1st Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, U. S. 2nd Division, he miraculously escaped serious physical injury, but as this evocative memoir shows, his psyche did not. In the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front, Mackin offers a soldier's eye view of not just the horrors of battle, but also the subtle little everyday experiences that make the life of the combat soldier both tolerable and soul-shattering.
McCollum, Lee. OUR SONS at WAR. Chicago: Bucklee Publishing Co., 1940. A heartfelt story of an American infantryman from the beginning of the Meuse-Argonne Campaign in September, 1918 to the Armistice. Mr. McCollum, writing from his own experiences, attempts to tell his son and the sons of others who are about to go to war, what it was like on the Western Front in 1918. Through the medium of his own experiences as a soldier in the AEF, McCollum admirably succeeds in conveying to the reader the experience of battle.
Myrer, Anton. ONCE AN EAGLE. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968. Once an Eagle was not written by an AEF combat veteran and it is not a World War I novel, per se, but Myrer's descriptions of First World War combat in the Argonne Forest and the experience of the men in the AEF have seldom been equaled. Myrer's protagonist, Sam Damon, is the quintessential American figure. Growing up in a small farming community in Nebraska, playing baseball and working a night job while doing homework to help support his family, he aspires to great things. Thwarted in his dream to attend West Point, he enlists in the Army and ends up in France in the First World War, where he is earns the Medal of Honor and a battlefield commission. Damon stays in the post-war army, serving in a series of isolated posts and thankless assignments, yet gaining invaluable experience and insight from tours in China and the Philippines, all the while perfecting his craft and learning the meaning of duty and leadership from examples both good and bad. Despite his refusal to "play politics" to further his career, he is promoted to brigadier general as the nation enters the Second World War. He serves again with honor and distinction in the Pacific campaigns. It is a career pattern shared with the likes of men such as Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, George Patton, Joseph Stillwell, and many others, men who would, like Damon in the novel, be shaped by their shared experiences in the Great War, then go on to serve the nation in the Second World War and beyond. Once an Eagle is one of those books that stays with you. Myrer knows something of the 'shock and crash' of battle--he was a combat marine during World War II and was badly wounded on Guam.
Morgan, Daniel. WHEN the WORLD WENT MAD. Christopher Publishing House, 1931. Pike, 1993. Memoirs of a marine sergeant in the 77th Co., 6th Machine Gun Battalion, U.S. 2nd Division, who went through all five of the USMC campaigns in World War I. Sgt. Morgan does a good bit of editorializing, and is very acrimonious, but his book contains many gems of eloquence.
 Nason, Leonard H. CHEVRONS. NY: Doran, 1926. A superior portrayal of combat in the infantry and artillery of the AEF.
_________________. THREE LIGHTS from a MATCH. NY: Doran, 1927. Another superior book of three short stories dealing with life and action in the AEF. Leonard Nason is one of the best and most prolific writers of AEF fiction.
_________________. SERGEANT EADIE. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1928. The sequel novel to Chevrons by the same author.
_________________. THE TOP KICK. NY: Grossett & Dunlap, 1928. A very good trilogy of combat and life in the AEF. The first of the three short stories is entitled "A Sergeant of Cavalry," and, although not mentioning its locale by name, is obviously a story of the fighting along the Vesle River in France during July and August, 1918.
_________________. THE MAN in the WHITE SLICKER. Garden City, NY: Grossett & Dunlap, 1929. Also Doubleday, Doran, 1929. Considered a minor classic in war fiction. The story of a small group of American soldiers and their battles with the Germans and each other._________________.
A CORPORAL ONCE. Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Doran., 1930. Good general account of a soldier's life in the AEF from the Mexican border to France.
O'Brien, Howard Vincent. WINE, WOMEN and WAR: A DIARY of DISILLUSIONMENT. NY: J. H. Sears, Inc., 1926. It is rarely the editor's fortune to discover a book deserving not only of re-publication, but of the widest reading, whose author, in its composition, had neither end in view, yet such happens to be the case with this originally anonymous work. The author, an AEF officer, had been trained as an artillery officer and was later attached to "Intelligence" and worked behind the front lines. His wartime journal was kept in a series of small black books in a half shorthand of his own devisement, but quite readily translatable. Here is one of the most remarkable books that the Great War has produced, a vivid, living thing; done without attempt at drama or at form by an honest man who possessed, perhaps unconsciously, an extraordinary literary facility. Very few books like it have been produced in any country since the conflict, though why this is true is difficult to understand. Written with perfect candor for the eyes of its author only, the necessity for the author's original anonymity will be apparent to every reader. Authentic from the first word to the last, it is precisely what it appears to be-the undramatized record of the actions and reactions, recorded almost at the moment of their execution and perception, of one young American, who, given an undramatic part to play in one of the greatest dramas the world has ever witnessed, played it through to the final curtain. And, while playing it through, he recorded some of the most perceptive observations ever written about the Allied armies, France and its people and of the Germans. Here are some reviews of this book:
Scanlon, William T. GOD HAVE MERCY ON US: A STORY of 1918. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1929. Sergeant Scanlon was with the 97th Company, 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Brigade, U.S. 2nd Division and wrote this first person fictional memoir of Marines in action from Belleau Wood through the Champagne, Soissons, the Meuse-Argonne and ending with the Armistice.
Schak, Al. SOUL WOUNDS. Missoulian Publishing Co., Missoula, MT: 1934. Al Schak has written an intense and sometimes brutal story of an American infantryman in the 16th Infantry Regiment, U. S. 1st Division. The 16th Infantry saw some of the most brutal fighting of the war, and this book tells what it was like for the front-line infantryman. Although fictional, Schak must have experienced what he writes about.
Sharra, Jeff. TO THE LAST MAN. NY: Ballentine Books/Random House, 2004. Jeff Sharra is a comparative newcomer to the business of writing about World War I. Although primarily known as an author of fictional works dealing with the earlier American wars, and in particular with the American Civil War, Sharra recently brought out a masterpiece of fictional writing about World War I. To the Last Man, deals primarily with the aerial warfare of the First World War, from the American Lafayette Escadrille to Richthofen's "Flying Circus." Jeff Sharra's insight to the probable thinking of the aerial aces: Lufberry, Rickenbacker, Richthofen, etc., is nothing less than startling. I usually do not recommend books which relate to aerial combat during World War I, but in this case I must necessarily make a strong exception.
What gives this book strong appeal to those persons who wish to read about the AEF in combat, is the lengthy section devoted to the exploits in battle of one young Marine named Matthew Temple. Temple, a member of the 4th Marine Brigade, U. S. 2nd Division, was one of few Marines to survive the fighting from Belleau Wood and on through to the Armistice. Jeff Sharra relates the story of Matt Temple in such a manner that, as one reads, one is actually 'there' in 1918.
Stallings, Laurence. PLUMES. NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1924. Stallings, who lost a leg while a marine lieutenant in Belleau Wood, acquired the disillusion that pervades his novel Plumes and the play What Price Glory? Stallings is thus well qualified to write of the treatment accorded our wounded men in post-war days. Stallings reiterated war's destruction of individual rights in his novel, Plumes. Richard Plume, descendant of many civilian-soldiers, went to war against his wishes and returned from France with a shattered leg. Plume comes to hate war. A moving novel dealing with an infantry officer's combat experiences and the sordid treatment accorded him as a severely wounded and crippled veteran in the postwar years. Later, at a rally when the crowd sang "America," he mused: "War was wrong. Fighting was stupid...never was a battle worth while." He fought futilely to expose war's shams. Patriotic slogans, the return to "normalcy," and the resistance of those who thought his behavior "un-American," convinced him there was no use struggling to avoid another war. This is a soul-wrenching story of what war has done to a human body and of AEF amputees in post-war Washington, D.C.
Plumes, an excellent minor novel of social protest, also deals with the returned veteran but in a more traditional manner. Richard Plume, wounded seven times, returns to his family filled with antagonism for the stupidity of war. His first words to his wife are, " 'God forgive me for my folly,' " and he attacks even those he loves when they romanticize war. His problems are at least partially economic, returning home to outrageous rents, high prices, corrupt politics, and to a religion that ignores social justice. In short, he returns to a corrupt society enjoying a prosperity based on the war itself, a depiction of the American economic system common today among those concerned with the power of the Pentagon. Plumes is an unpretentious novel that expresses, in terms of a troubled and despairing returned American veteran, an indictment of war and of American society.
Stallings, Laurence. THE DOUGHBOYS: THE STORY of the A.E.F., 1917-1918. NY.: Harper & Row, 1963. Another very good read about the general history of the AEF. This book contains the reflections of one man (like William Manchester's World War II memoir Goodbye Darkness) and its value is in setting the "tone of the times," not for its rendering of facts. History it is not, a good read it is.
Stevens, James. MATTOCK. NY: Knopf, 1927. The experiences of one Kansas doughboy from training camp through the battles in France and back to America.
Suskind, Richard. DO YOU WANT TO LIVE FOREVER? NY: Paperback edition only, Bantam, 1964. A very good read about the marines at Belleau Wood. Be forewarned, however, that the book does not represent accurate history.
Thomason, John W., Jr. FIX BAYONETS! NY: Blue Ribbon Books, 1926. Five short stories built around the actions of the 49th Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment at Belleau Wood, Soissons, and Blanc Mont. A superlative story of combat in the 4th Marine Brigade of the 2nd Division, AEF. Thomason's descriptions of combat on Hill 142 are without peer, however, they are not an accurate chronicle of events and should not be read as such. Lieutenant Thomason did not join the marines on Hill 142 until several days after June 6th, the day of the fight. Most of what he relates is from his brother marines and probably from stories he heard around campfires.
They are extraordinarily vivid, these sketches. The finished drawings have a solid, substantial quality; and angles are used with eerie and stunning effect.
Thompson, Hugh S. TRENCH KNIVES and MUSTARD GAS: WITH THE 42nd RAINBOW DIVISION in FRANCE. Texas A&M University Press, Robert H. Ferrell, editor, 2004. Hugh S. Thompson's intensely personal and moving memoir of combat with the U.S. 42nd Rainbow Division of the National Guard was originally published in the Chattanooga Times in 1934. The editor of the Times described it as "a gripping story of the World War, written with personal directness and realistic touch approached by no other war writer." This reader must agree with that appraisal. Trench Knives and Mustard Gas is hauntingly eloquent, and its scenes stay in the reader's mind. They seem to have been drawn yesterday. Much of the text's effectiveness lies in the change of Thompson's outlook as he moves through the account of his experience. Thompson's memoir demonstrates his keen eye for detail and his penchant for philosophy. Thompson combines the fast-paced prose of the Jazz Age and the passionate observations of an intellectual. Thompson takes the reader on an intense journey with the 168th Regiment, through the villages, towns, battlefields, and hospitals of 1918 France. He points out the sights along the way and has a knack for compressing a complex reflection on life into a single sentence. Lt. Thompson's account of his being gassed with phosgene, of suffering under the intense pre-attack bombardment by German artillery in the Champagne, and of being twice-hospitalized are so realistically told that this reader felt that he was right there with the author. Severely wounded in his arm and back, Thompson reassesses his situation after visiting comrades who lost arms or legs. "I went back to my tent, " he recalls, "almost ashamed of my own lucky wounds." Homesick for America during his first months overseas, Thompson discovers that his platoon has become his second family. He becomes accustomed to the war's distortion of time and values. Friendships form and disappear in the hour it takes someone to die. Thompson never regained his health. He spent the remainder of his life with a painful limp, and he suffered frequent abscesses and difficulty in breathing as a result of the gas attack that he miraculously survived. He was awarded the Silver Star, French Legion of Merit, and the Purple Heart with three Oak Leaf Clusters.
Westover, Wendell. SUICIDE BATTALIONS. NY: Putnam's, 1929. Machine-gun officer's service with the 4th Machine Gun Battalion, 2nd Division, AEF.
Wharton, James B. SQUAD. NY: Coward-McCann, 1928. Very good account of life in the AEF and of infantry combat. The war chronicle of eight men, the smallest of military units - a squad, and their feelings. The critics said of this book, "What 'All Quiet on the Western Front' does for the common soldiers of the German Army, this book does for the doughboys of the AEF."
Wood, Lambert. HIS JOB: LETTERS WRITTEN by a 22 YEAR OLD LIEUTENANT in the WORLD WAR to HIS PARENTS and OTHERS. Portland, OR: Metropolitan Press, 1932. These letters written home by a young AEF combat officer perhaps express the feelings of the average American soldier better than most writings. After reading these letters you will hopefully know what the war was about as far as the American soldier was concerned. The soldier writer of the beautiful letters was killed at Soissons.
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