Excellent Account of U.S. & French Cooperation During World War I

Army, Sep 2003 by Stroup, Theodore G Jr

Excellent Account of U.S. & French Cooperation During World War I A Fraternity of Arms: America & France in the Great War. Robert B. Bruce. University Press of Kansas. 380 pages; photographs; maps; notes; index; $39.95.

Like a classic tumultuous marriage, America and France have had a long and entangled "love affair" when it comes to the two nations supporting each other in war in their 200 years plus as republican democracies. In both cases, one nation's armed forces have assisted in either the founding or preservation of the other's democratic society.

Robert Bruce's A fraternity of Arms is an excellently researched account of just one of those occasions-the Great War-the war to end all wars. American assistance was truly needed at the time when the consequences of decades of political intrigue, monarchic impetuousness, economic disasters and massive political change were breaking out across the old world. These changes were occurring in the giant land of Russia, the empires of the Kaiser, the Sultan and the smaller houses of Europe. International economic ambitions played a part in the tumult as well.

Barbara Tuchman aptly describes the background and beginning of World War I in The Guns of August, and Robert Bruce picks up the thread with Europe already at war since 1914. The battlefields had become a quagmire of blood, gore, mud, miles of trenches and poor generalship on both sides of no-man's-land. Each national participant was losing an entire generation. France feared not only the loss of life, but also feared another potentially disastrous accession of territory to the Germans and perhaps large scale occupation of Paris and eastern and southern France. It also faced internal economic and political dissension over the further prosecution of the war.

In the new world, America was just settling into its world role and its version of imperialism in the Caribbean, the Pacific and other small locations. Teddy Roosevelt was out, Woodrow Wilson was in-albeit with controversy-and the nation wanted to get on with the business of business behind its Atlantic and Pacific walls. But many extraneous forces-economic, political and military-were soon to change that.

Bruce recounts the inevitable march to war of this young world power with a miniscule Army, no arms industry and the aging great white fleet. Lack of preparedness and underresourcing were alive and well in American land forces of the early 19th century, both Army and Marines.

America's ace in the hole in its inevitable march to war was its ground force leadership-well-traveled, well-schooled and well-monitored. Yes, nepotism did exist, but it also produced exceptional senior leaders. Identified by political leadership for rapid upward movement were our Pershings, Marches, Conners and MacArthurs. Bruce also does an accurate job of reporting the political joustings among the Army generals for the new American Army soon to be fielded.

Both England and France knew they needed American help to stay the war, reach some sort of an armistice and to just quit fighting. The key to success was sheer American manpower, in the millions-for America had no arms industry. The tug of war for Wilson was to maintain a national role and a national identity for the Army, and to create a postwar world on Wilsonian terms. The French position clearly offered a better deal, treated American men-at-arms with more respect, and since combat was upon their democratic homeland, merited more consideration than the options extended by the British.

The hero of the hour for the victories experienced by this fraternity of arms was not a politician, not an American general, but a true national hero from recent earlier wars and this war-Marshall Foch.

Bruce's account of Foch's understanding of American soldiers and their potential on the battlefield along with his presence with President Wilson and secretary of War Newton D. Baker, contribute to a better understanding of how these two democracies went to war together again to save a democratic way of life-this time in France.

His description of the reception, training, servicing and supplying of the Americans by the French people in 1917 and 1918 again demonstrate the bond between these two republics. This Franco-American vision of what the American fighting man and his leaders would bring to battle carried the day in the national, strategic and operational discourse that Bruce shows throughout the book.

Gen. John J. Pershing clearly was a paramount leader and hardnosed visionary for American troops' employment. he allowed excellent training of the Americans by French regiments, but also instilled the vanished spirit of "change" into the tired battlefield. Bruce shows how Foch's support of Pershing in all instances was exemplary.

Foch and Pershing, in short, forged the fraternity of arms once again between the two democracies whose national understanding of one another had been worn thin by national political leaders and the media. The American hero Sgt. Alvin C. York established the American way of war on the battlefield in terms of bravery, audacity and tactical acumen. The French poilus accepted and respected that American icon.