Attached is a list of the twelve inconveniences that W.W. I American soldiers hated the most about their lives over there (well over 50% of them had to do with certain elements of their uniforms). This article appeared some seven months after the war, and it presents an interesting account of the first American tank units that ever existed.
The preferred tank of the American Army of World War I was a light tank made by the French called a Renault. It had a crew of two, measured 13 feet (4 meters) in length and weighed 6.5 tons. The tank's 35 hp. engine moved it along at a top speed of 6 miles per hour. This article outlines where the American tanks fought, which units they supported and who commanded them; some readers may be interested to know that reference is made to the First American Tank Brigade and the officer in charge: Lieutenant Colonel George S. Patton (1885 – 1945). "During the course of the Meuse-Argonne battles, the tank units of the 1st Brigade had lost 3 officers and 16 enlisted men killed, and 21 officers and 131 enlisted men were wounded. These losses were suffered in 18 separate engagements..."
Read about General Patton, Click here
Read other articles from 1919.
Appearing in The Stars and Stripes in mid-February of 1918 was this column about one of the newest disciplines to be introduced to the photographic section of the U.S. Army Signal Corps: the motion picture branch.
"There is one movie-officer at present assigned to every division in the A.E.F.; one might call him the camera battery, if one wanted to get really military about it. Under him is a squad of expert photographers, some movie men, some 'still' snappers.
"From the time when the sun finally decides that he might as well hobble up in the sky and do part of a day's work, which isn't often in this region, until the time that the aged, decrepit old solar luminary decides again, about the middle of the afternoon, that he's done all he's going to do while the calender is fixed the way it is, the camera battery is up and around taking pot-shots at everything in sight... They may be 'covering' a review, a series of field maneuvers 'up front' or merely Blank Company's wash day at the village fountain. But always when the sun is shining, they are at it."
Click here to read a YANK MAGAZINE article about the Signal Corps films in the Second World War
"On the afternoon of December 8, 1918, the troops of the Third American Army entered Koblenz. This was the goal of the occupation. The Yankees had reached the Rhine." "Probably never in all its stressful history did enemy troops enter it so in quite the matter-of-fact manner which marked the American entry last Sunday. There was no band. There were no colors. 'We're just going in sort of casual like,' one of our generals had said the day before, and he was right." 1919 marked the third anniversary of the Battle of Verdun and the grounds were still littered with the dead, surrounded by a tons of equipment, lying in open fields pock-marked by thousands of high explosive shells:
"Spring will come to France next month, but Spring will not come to the field of Verdun. Already the grass is green on the broad stretches of Champagne; in the Vosges the snow patches linger only in the stubborn shelter of rocks that bar the sun,; but there is no portent of resurrection in all the stretch of churned up gravel marking the line of forts that protect the citadel of the Meuse from the Northeast...the shell holes are filled with clear water, and between them course new born brooks, sublimating in crystal pools from which no man would dare drink." A few historians tend to believe that the sobriquet Doughboy had it's origins in the 1846 - 48 war with Mexico (a perversion of the Spanish word 'adobe'), but the attached article makes a different reference, dating the term to the American army's period in the Philippines. An effort was also made to explain the term Buck Private.
Click here if you would like to read an article about the Doughboy training camps.
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