A Doughboy With The Fighting Sixty Ninth

Formed in 1851 by Irish immigrants, the Fighting Sixty-Ninth has served with distinction since the Civil War. This is a complete, illustrated history of the regiment’s service in the Irish Brigade and the Rainbow Division. Functioning as the 1st Regiment, Irish Brigade, 2nd Corps, Army of the Potomac throughout the Civil War, the regiment made history at Malvern Hill, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg and Appomatox. According to legend, an exasperated General Jackson cursed them as part of “that damn brigade.” Functioning as the 165th Infantry, 42nd Division (Rainbow Division) throughout World War I, the regiment helped turn back the last German offensive, counterattacked at the Ourq river, spearheaded one of Pershing’s pincers at St. Mihiel, and helped break the Hindenburg Line in the Argonne Forest. Today, the regiment is known as 1st Battalion, 69th Infantry (Mechanized), New York Army National Guard.

Ettinger's reminiscences, verified by his son's detailed research, show us Americans in France during the Great War as they have never been seen before. Here is a 17-year-old peripatetic motorcycle dispatch rider's view of New York's famous Irish-American regiment in action as part of Douglas MacArthur's equally renowned 42nd Rainbow Division. This remembrance contains true stories about MacArthur, Joyce Kilmer, William J. Wild Bill Donovan, Father Francis P. Duffy, and other famous members of this regiment, stories told here for the first time. Young Ettinger was not a model soldier. His ingenuity at going AWOL was exceeded only by his ability to survive such inconveniences as a determined enemy counterattack during the Battle of the Argonne; four intimate shell bursts; convalescence in two hospitals; strafing by a German pilot; driving into a stone wall, through a railroad crossing guard, and off a bridge on his motorcycle; and a military stockade, where he was incarcerated -- and from which he was released by personal order of General MacArthur.Ettinger's stories are earthy, and, while contributing little to military, strategy or tactics (in Pershing's A.E.F., the synonym for tactics was Attack ), having many implications for understanding morale and leadership. In sum, the Doughboy of 1917-18 is revealed in dimensions of courage, determination, and good humor that have rarely been surpassed. These stories ring true, sometimes tragic, frequently hilarious, always full of human interest.

The "stirring," definitive history of America's decisive role in winning World War I (Wall Street Journal). The American contribution to World War I is one of the great stories of the twentieth century, and yet it has all but vanished from view. Historians have dismissed the American war effort as largely economic and symbolic. But as Geoffrey Wawro shows in Sons of Freedom, the French and British were on the verge of collapse in 1918, and would have lost the war without the Doughboys. Field Marshal Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, described the Allied victory as a "miracle" -- but it was a distinctly American miracle. In Sons of Freedom, prize-winning historian Geoffrey Wawro weaves together in thrilling detail the battles, strategic deliberations, and dreadful human cost of the American war effort. A major revision of the history of World War I, Sons of Freedom resurrects the brave heroes who saved the Allies, defeated Germany, and established the United States as the greatest of the great powers.

Faith in the Fight tells a story of religion, soldiering, suffering, and death in the Great War. Recovering the thoughts and experiences of American troops, nurses, and aid workers through their letters, diaries, and memoirs, Jonathan Ebel describes how religion--primarily Christianity--encouraged these young men and women to fight and die, sustained them through war's chaos, and shaped their responses to the war's aftermath. The book reveals the surprising frequency with which Americans who fought viewed the war as a religious challenge that could lead to individual and national redemption. Believing in a "Christianity of the sword," these Americans responded to the war by reasserting their religious faith and proclaiming America God-chosen and righteous in its mission. And while the war sometimes challenged these beliefs, it did not fundamentally alter them. Revising the conventional view that the war was universally disillusioning, Faith in the Fight argues that the war in fact strengthened the religious beliefs of the Americans who fought, and that it helped spark a religiously charged revival of many prewar orthodoxies during a postwar period marked by race riots, labor wars, communist witch hunts, and gender struggles. For many Americans, Ebel argues, the postwar period was actually one of "reillusionment." Demonstrating the deep connections between Christianity and Americans' experience of the First World War, Faith in the Fight encourages us to examine the religious dimensions of America's wars, past and present, and to work toward a deeper understanding of religion and violence in American history.

Perhaps the best known of all American five-star generals, Douglas MacArthur established his military reputation at the hill of Châtillon during the great battle of the Meuse-Argonne in World War I. The thirty-eight-year-old brigadier general in command of the Eighty-fourth Infantry Brigade boasted to a fellow general that he had inspired his troops by example, taking the hill and breaking the main German line in northern France. Ever since, historical accounts and biographies have celebrated his leadership and bravery. That MacArthur's forces prevailed is beyond question, as military historians have shown. Yet in all the annals of the Great War there is no detailed description of what happened at Châtillon, nor of what MacArthur had to do with it. Robert Ferrell examines those events and comes to a startling conclusion--one that will revise how we view this archetypal American hero. After sifting through the inexact accounts of the battle found in regimental and divisional histories--and through the many biographies of MacArthur that assert his leadership at Châtillon but do not describe it--Ferrell has gone into Army records to determine if what MacArthur claimed was true. In a moment-by-moment account of the battle, he reconstructs the movements of troops and the decisions of officers to show in detail how MacArthur's subordinates were the true heroes. Ferrell describes how the taking of Côte de Châtillon could have been a disaster had the Eighty-fourth Brigade followed MacArthur's original plan, a bayonet charge at night. Wiser heads prevailed, and the attack of the Iowa and Alabama regiments was a great success. Ferrell has completed a chapter in the history of World War I that has stood unfinished for years, showing in masterly fashion how MacArthur exaggerated his reputation at Châtillon. The Question of MacArthur's Reputation will reward historians seeking to fill gaps in the record, engage readers who enjoy descriptions of battle, and startle all who take their heroes for granted.

A lively, street-level history of turn-of-the-century urban life explores the Americanizing influence of the Irish on successive waves of migrants to the American city. In the newest volume in the award-winning Penguin History of American Life series, James R. Barrett chronicles how a new urban American identity was forged in the streets, saloons, churches, and workplaces of the American city. This process of “Americanization from the bottom up” was deeply shaped by the Irish. From Lower Manhattan to the South Side of Chicago to Boston’s North End, newer waves of immigrants and African Americans found it nearly impossible to avoid the Irish. While historians have emphasized the role of settlement houses and other mainstream institutions in Americanizing immigrants, Barrett makes the original case that the culture absorbed by newcomers upon reaching American shores had a distinctly Hibernian cast. By 1900, there were more people of Irish descent in New York City than in Dublin; more in the United States than in all of Ireland. But in the late nineteenth century, the sources of immigration began to shift, to southern and eastern Europe and beyond. Whether these newcomers wanted to save their souls, get a drink, find a job, or just take a stroll in the neighborhood, they had to deal with entrenched Irish Americans. Barrett reveals how the Irish vacillated between a progressive and idealistic impulse toward their fellow immigrants and a parochial defensiveness stemming from the hostility earlier generations had faced upon their own arrival in America. They imparted racist attitudes toward African Americans; they established ethnic “deadlines” across city neighborhoods; they drove other immigrants from docks, factories, and labor unions. Yet the social teachings of the Catholic Church, a sense of solidarity with the oppressed, and dark memories of poverty and violence in both Ireland and America ushered in a wave of progressive political activism that eventually embraced other immigrants. Drawing on contemporary sociological studies and diaries, newspaper accounts, and Irish American literature, The Irish Way illustrates how the interactions between the Irish and later immigrants on the streets, on the vaudeville stage, in Catholic churches, and in workplaces helped forge a multiethnic American identity that has a profound legacy in our cities today.

American fighting men had never seen the likes of it before. The great battle of the Meuse-Argonne was the costliest conflict in American history, with 26,000 men killed and tens of thousands wounded. Involving 1.2 million American troops over 47 days, it ended on November 11-what we now know as Armistice Day-and brought an end to World War I, but at a great price. Distinguished historian Robert Ferrell now looks back at this monumental struggle to create the definitive study of the battle-and to determine just what made it so deadly. Ferrell reexamines factors in the war that many historians have chosen to disregard. He points first to the failure of the Wilson administration to mobilize the country for war. American industry had not been prepared to produce the weaponry or transport ships needed by our military, and the War Department-with outmoded concepts of battle shaped by the Spanish-American War-shared equal blame in failing to train American soldiers for a radically new type of warfare. Once in France, undertrained American doughboys were forced to learn how to conduct mobile warfare through bloody experience. Ferrell assesses the soldiers' lack of skill in the use of artillery, the absence of tactics for taking on enemy machine gun nests, and the reluctance of American officers to use poison gas-even though by 1918 it had become a staple of warfare. In all of these areas, the German army held the upper hand. Ferrell relates how, during the last days of the Meuse-Argonne, the American divisions had finally learned up-to-date tactics, and their final attack on November 1 is now seen as a triumph of military art. Yet even as the armistice was being negotiated, some American officers-many of whom had never before commanded men in battle-continued to spur their troops on, wasting more lives in an attempt to take new ground mere hours before the settlement. Besides the U.S. shortcomings in mobilization and tactics, Ferrell points to the greatest failure of all: the failure to learn from the experience, as after the armistice the U.S. Army retreated to its prewar mindset. Enhanced by more than four dozen maps and photographs, America's Deadliest Battle is a riveting revisit to the forests of France that reminds us of the costs of World War I-and of the shadow that it cast on the twentieth century.