What were the contributions of the American expeditionary forces and general pershing?

Answer 1

The contributions of the AEF were of two types. One was psychological. The knowledge that an immense, fresh army was gathering to make its weight felt on the battlefields of the western front sustained the Allies through 1917 and on into 1918, and gave them hope to hold on and continue the struggle until the new army could arrive. It also affected German thinking, the desire to win the war before the Americans could get there being a factor in the planning of the great "friedensturm" German "Peace Offensive" of 1918.

The other contribution was practical, in direct fighting. By the end of the war there were more than one million US combat troops in France, and another million support and supply troops. Two million more were in the states getting ready to head to France. US troops were only involved on a large scale in about the last six months of the war. At the time, everyone, the French and the British included, agreed that the American contribution to victory was crucial, essential, that it would not have happened without the AEF. You'll be hard pressed to find a Britisher or Frenchman today who will admit as much.

In early June 1918 one lunge of the German Friedensturm attacks was poised to finally, at long last, capture Paris, which might have finished the French. There was literally nothing in the way of the Germans, about 35 miles from Paris, the French units having evaporated. The US 2nd and 3rd Divisions filled this breach, and saved Paris, and possibly the whole Allied effort, despite what anyone claims to the contrary today. This was at Belleau Wood and the surrounding area, and in July another lunge was halted at Chateau Thierry by US troops. In a different sector on July 15 US troops stopped the Germans nears Soissons, and the Germans never took a step forward in France after that.

US WWI divisions were huge, truly massive, around 27,000 men, almost twice as large as US WWII divisions, and more than twice as big as the divisions of any other nation in WWI. We sent more than forty of these to France. We loaned four to the British, where two of them, the 27th and 30th, the National Guard of New York and North Carolina, cracked through the Hindenburg Line at the formidable St. Quentin Canal complex, where the Germans had been entrenched, undisturbed, for three years. We loaned two more divisions to the Belgians, to flesh out the slender army of King Leopold. And still there were enough Americans to form the 1st Army by August, and a few weeks before the Armistice, the 2nd Army was activated.

The largest battle Americans have ever fought, anywhere, in any war, was the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, which began on September 26, 1918, and was still going on when the Armistice took effect. This move came about two weeks after the successful and rapid completion of the American operation to eliminate the St. Mihiel Salient, a bulge into the French lines that had been there from the start of the war, and resisted every effort to eliminate it and straighten the line. St Mihiel was an attack to the eastward, and the US Army could have kept right on going and taken Metz, but the plan was to immediately move into position to attack in the Argonne, so Metz had to be foregone. It was a formidable achievement just to move the hundreds of thousands of troops over inadequate, small dirt roads, mostly mud, with all their equipment and supplies, and reorient from attacking eastward to attacking northward into the Argonne Forest. Here too the Germans had been undisturbed for three years, as attacking there had seemed too costly an idea to the French. Their pillboxes and wire were concealed by lush undergrowth that had grown back in. The Germans were on the high ground in the forest, and the attack had to be uphill. The enemy had three complete, very elaborate trench systems, one behind the other, each named for a Wagnerian Witch - Freya, Kreimhilde, etc. It took some weeks of savage fighting but eventually US troops broke through the last of these defenses into open country beyond. Here, Pershing's insistence that his men be trained in open warfare - much disparaged by the French and British, who thought only trench skills needed to be learned - paid large dividends. At the other end of the line the BEF had also broken through, in the north. US troops were driving for Sedan, the city through which ran the single railroad available to the Germans to supply their entire force in France. Out of concern for French self-esteem the Americans were ordered not to take the city, but to wait for the French, lagging far behind on the flanks, to catch up, and let them capture the symbolically important town, the site of a stunning French defeat in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. All this came right at the end, as the Germans could see they were beaten. It might have been better to take Sedan, cut off all their supplies, and force an outright surrender, than to allow the Germans an armistice. Certainly many leaders of the AEF thought so.

Perhaps Pershing's greatest contribution was in successfully insisting on putting an American Army into the field. Almost to the end he had to fight off both the British and the French, who thought it was plainly apparent that the only thing America should do was draft all its young men and send them to France, to become replacements in British and French units, and fight under British and French officers, who had no men left to speak of, having gotten a very great many of their own killed.