The Marne 15 July 6 August 1918

A century ago, the great powers of Europe became engulfed in what was then called the Great War. It signaled a new age in armed conflict in which mass armies supported by industrial mass production brought an unprecedented level of killing power to the battlefield. By the time the United States entered the war in 1917, the combatants were waging war on a scale never before seen in history. The experience defined a generation and cast a long shadow across the twentieth century. In addition to a tremendous loss of life, the war shattered Europe, bringing revolution, the collapse of long-standing empires, and economic turmoil, as well as the birth of new nation-states and the rise of totalitarian movements.The modern U.S. Army, capable of conducting industrialized warfare on a global scale, can trace its roots to the World War. Although the war's outbreak in August 1914 shocked most Americans, they preferred to keep the conflict at arm's length. The United States declared its neutrality and invested in coastal defenses and the Navy to guard its shores. The U.S. Army, meanwhile, remained small, with a regiment as its largest standing formation. Primarily a constabulary force, it focused on policing America's new territorial possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific as it continued to adapt to Secretary of War Elihu Root's reforms in the years following the War with Spain. It was not until June 1916 that Congress authorized an expansion of the Army, dual state-federal status for the National Guard, and the creation of a reserve officer training corps.In early 1917, relations between the United States and Germany rapidly deteriorated. The kaiser's policy of unrestricted submarine warfare threatened American lives and commerce, and German meddling in Mexican affairs convinced most Americans that Berlin posed a danger to the nation. In April 1917, the president, out of diplomatic options, asked Congress to declare war on Germany. But the U.S. Army, numbering only 133,000 men, was far from ready. The president ordered nearly 400,000 National Guardsmen into federal service, and more than twenty-four million men eventually registered for the Selective Service, America's first conscription since the Civil War. By the end of 1918, the Army had grown to four million men and had trained 200,000 new officers to lead them. As it expanded to address wartime needs, the Army developed a new combined-arms formation-the square division. Divisions fell under corps, and corps made up field armies. The Army also created supporting elements such as the Air Service, the Tank Corps, and the Chemical Warfare Service. The war signaled the potential of the United States as not only a global economic power, but also a military one.The United States will never forget the American soldiers who fought and died in the World War. America's first unknown soldier was laid to rest on 11 November 1921 in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery, where soldiers still stand guard. The United States created permanent American military cemeteries in France, Belgium, and Britain to bury the fallen. To this day, memorials to their sacrifice can be found across America, and the date of the armistice has become a national holiday honoring all those who serve in defense of the nation. The last surviving U.S. Army veteran of the war died in 2011. It is to all the doughboys, those who returned and those who did not, that the U.S. Army Center of Military History dedicates these commemorative pamphlets.

A seventeen-volume compilation of selected AEF records gathered by Army historians during the interwar years. This collection in no way represents an exhaustive record of the Army's months in France, but it is certainly worthy of serious consideration and thoughtful review by students of military history and strategegy and will serve as a useful jumping off point for any earnest scholarship on the war. --from Foreword by William A Stofft.

An analysis of the memorialisation of Australia's role in the Somme and the Anzac mythology that contributes to Australia's identity.

The St. Mihiel salient, created during the initial German invasion in 1914, had withstood multiple French efforts to regain the territory. Yet even though the Germans had established strong defensive positions around St. Mihiel and its neighboring villages and towns, the salient was highly vulnerable to attack and was an optimal target for a potential American operation. Until this point in the war, members of the American Expeditionary Forces had not fought in a formation larger than a corps, and then only under French or British leadership. Now, as part of the American First Army under General John J. Pershing, they prepared to launch an offensive that would demonstrate to the Allies and the Germans alike that the Americans were capable of operating as an independent command. The AEF's successful efforts in the St. Mihiel Offensive, and the hard-won operational and tactical lessons that it learned during the battle, helped set the stage for the grand Allied offensive that would seize the initiative on the Western Front and blaze a path toward ultimate victory in the war.

Nick Lloyd's Hundred Days: The End of the Great War explores the brutal, heroic and extraordinary final days of the First World War. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day in November 1918, the guns of the Western Front fell silent. The Armistice, which brought the Great War to an end, marked a seminal moment in modern European and World history. Yet the story of how the war ended remains little-known. In this compelling and ground-breaking new study, Nick Lloyd examines the last days of the war and asks the question: how did it end? Beginning at the heralded turning-point on the Marne in July 1918, Hundred Days traces the epic story of the next four months, which included some of the bloodiest battles of the war. Using unpublished archive material from five countries, this new account reveals how the Allies - British, French, American and Commonwealth - managed to beat the German Army, by now crippled by indiscipline and ravaged by influenza, and force her leaders to seek peace. 'This is a powerful and moving book by a rising military historian. Lloyd's depiction of the great battles of July-November provides compelling evidence of the scale of the Allies' victories and the bitter reality of German defeat' Gary Sheffield (Professor of War Studies) 'Lloyd enters the upper tier of Great War historians with this admirable account of the war's final campaign' Publishers Weekly Nick Lloyd is Senior Lecturer in Defence Studies at King's College London, based at the Joint Services Command & Staff College in Shrivenham, Oxfordshire. He specialises in British military and imperial history in the era of the Great War and is the author of two books, Loos 1915 (2006), and The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day (2011).