A good history book is one that combines the factual with the excitement of fiction: Meirion and Susie Harries’ 1997 history
of the United States and its role in the first world war is a prime example of a written history that both educates and entertains.
Bookended by chapters on the United States just prior to and directly after the war are chapters on Germany and France in the period 1916 to 1917, on France’s desperate slide into starvation and disease and the ensuing urgency for U.S. military support, and on Germany’s decline as well and their simultaneous need to uphold within their society support for continued aggression. A large amount of the book is devoted to describing the battles that comprised the war: the strategy, the logistical mishaps, the soldiers, both deserters and heroes, the commanders – Germany’s Erich Ludendorff, the French commander General Ferdinand Foch, and the West Point graduate John Joseph Pershing, Commanding Officer of the
American Expeditionary Force in France. Pershing was to prove instrumental in both the Allied victory and also in demanding such a punitive surrender for Germany that the world would suffer its repercussions in years to come.
Americans in the second decade of the 20th century were, much like they are today, progressive in the cities and more traditional in the rural areas; by 1920, 50% of Americans lived off of farms in towns or cities. The Harries’ bring to life an America of huge proportions, supplying large amounts of meat, grain, steel, and other necessities of war to the fighting Allies, but stopping short of sending soldiers. Then Germany sank one too many American ships (the Germans had “allowed” the U.S. to sail one ship per week across the Atlantic). The Allies, due to the new pacifist Bolshevik rule of Russia and its abandonment of aggression with Germany and Germany’s subsequent amassment of all troops on the Western Front in France, desperately pressured the U.S. to supply manpower and America finally joined up, to make the world, in President Wilson’s words, “safe for democracy.” Women opposed the war as a threat to domestic stability; Socialists ranted that it was a Capitalist ploy to make money. The Harries’ describe an America quite opposed to the draft, although as in all wars, many chose to serve. The Selective Service Act of 1917 gradually gave way to a draft. Wartime sentiment in the U.S. was an odd conglomerate of xenophobia and the increasing belief in the need to Americanize immigrants. George Creel’s Committee for Public Information controlled all information on the army including soldiers’ letters home and could ban the mailing of offensive reading material, while programs proliferated that taught immigrants to read and speak English, with lessons often in patriotic speak. Going to the movies was the most common American pastime during the war years; actors like Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks inserted scenes into their movies of good Americans having meatless and wheatless days so as to supply more food to the troops.
The horrors of fighting are detailed by the Harries’, drawing on first-hand accounts of battles including those of Belleau Woods, Chateau-Thierry, and Meuse-Argonne and the challenges of terrain, ammunition levels, hunger, disease, and leadership. The Harries’ describe the continual battle of wills among the different leaders of the British, French, and American troops and their often grudging cooperation. The French countryside, with its dense forests, foggy fields, villages, and strategic hillsides come to life here. Finally, the overwhelming push of the U.S. Marine Corps through German-held territory helped the Allies see the light of victory at the end of the tunnel and a whole new battle of personalities ensued as the different Allied countries vied for control of the peace process. Great Britain, and particularly France, who had seen its countryside ravaged, felt no terms of German surrender could be harsh enough, while Wilson had promised the Germans -- and was determined to deliver – his 14-point solution: the offer of a fair and respectable cease fire that would allow for an end to aggression, punitive enough to satisfy the Allies, yet dignified enough for the Germans to re-build their nation and their self-respect. Sadly, Wilson, who was already at odds with his supreme commander, Pershing, who also believed the Germans had asked for and deserved severity, was weakened by the very fight to secure such a peace agreement, suffered a massive stroke before the Senate vote on the treaty with Germany, and failed to win approval. The United States had lost over 75,000 of it’s young men to the war to end them all, was saddled with thousands of maimed and mentally-ill veterans, was exhausted by the privations of the war years, and wanted Germany to suffer the consequences of its actions.
The Last Days of
Innocence takes the reader from a portrait of America, innocent in the days prior to the war, through a richly detailed account of World War I, back over the Atlantic to an America emerging from war more xenophobic, more advanced in technology, aviation, and engineering, a country of more cars, more rights for women, fewer for African-Americans, less genteel, more Anti-Semitic, stepping into the Roaring Twenties. The Harries’ history of this American era is greatly informed, richly detailed, and highly readable.