vii our we are part of the state is part of a national event and I'll read this it's a proclamation from Governor Collier and it says to the people of Kansas greetings whereas a century ago 4.7 million American families sent their sons and daughters off to World War one and whereas the route the resources of our entire nation were brought to bear on the war effort and whereas one hundred and sixteen thousand five hundred and sixteen Americans gave their lives and we were only in it for a short time gave their lives in the war and more than two hundred thousand were wounded and whereas the tolling of bells is a traditional expression of honor and remembrance whereas in November 2018 the world will commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the armistice that ended the fighting in World War one at 11:00 a.m. the 11th hour the 11th day of the 11th month now therefore I Jeff Colyer governor of the state of Kansas do hereby call upon all Kansans to toe bells in remembrance of those who served in World War one at 11:00 a.m. on Sunday bell tolling is different than bell ringing ringing is ringing tolling is a bell and then waiting five seconds it's on a Sunday at 11 o'clock so I hope all the churches get the message because they ring their bells I will be out at the statue school our one-room school which is interpreted as a 1920 school so it's very appropriate I'll be out there at 11 o'clock totally an hour Bell and if you'd like to join me bring your coffee it'll be short but we're part of a national international movement effort to commemorate these brave souls who are going to learn more about tonight and their hardships and their sacrifices and if you have a bell at home just toll it 21 times count 5 seconds between each and you'll be part of this International bell tolling the National Cathedral the world war one Memorial you'll be part of this bigger effort that day Sunday the 11th is now known as Veterans Day and the museum is free that day to veterans and active military I do want to put a plug in for the world war one Memorial in Kansas City I know a lot of you have been there and I hope you've all heard about the poppies that are being projected on the memorial I think it's a once-in-a-lifetime event they will have the memorial lit from 6:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. weather permitting through Sunday Blair Tarr curator has seen it and you can go on the web and google it and see it as well but again it's a once-in-a-lifetime they also have a thousand metal poppies and they are selling those for $1000 apiece they represent every one for every thousand people killed in the war so if you buy one and wouldn't like give it to us we'll give you more cookies just saying yeah the Colonel Hughes exhibit that kind of started this whole museum after ours program about programs on World War one is actually closing December 2nd it comes down and this is the story of the colonel who was in went after Pancho via recorded World War one in photographs and was captured in World War two at Bataan we have videotape that through Google arts and culture they came out and so it will live on virtually yay we'll get that up on our website our next exhibit is a hundred and five counties a hundred and five stories and it opens March 1st I am pleased tonight to enter our speaker dr. Shawn Faulkner some of you may remember him from last January when he also spoke on soldiers in World War one giant in with feet of clay the US Army enters World War one he is with the command and General Staff College our favorite people in the world they do a lot of these programs and they only hire the best the tonight's program is the doughboys life in battle the Great War caught a generation of American soldiers at a turning point in the nation's history at the moment of the Republic's emergence as a key player on the world stage these were the first Americans to endure mass machine warfare and the first to come into close contact with foreign peoples and cultures and large numbers what was it like to be one of these foot soldiers at the dawn of the American Century we're here to find out from dr. Faulkner please join me in welcoming him good evening it must be a real slow night in Topeka now yeah this is the Centennial and it wraps up on Sunday but to put things in perspective 100 years ago today on the 9th of November 1918 soldiers from Kansas the 89th division were pressing hard upon the mers River okay and they had to make a assault crossing and assault crossings in war or bad because you've got a big river and you got our guys on the other side they're gonna shoot you full of holes and to make that crossing there's a number of men from that unit Kansans some from Topeka who actually get in the water swim across it and try to establish a bridgehead on the other side what's appropriate for tonight is the weather a hundred years ago at that crossing site which is very much like the weather tonight yeah so just sort of get that so if you really want to feel World War one on your way home there's the Kansas River now before I get sorry I always like to know my audience how many veterans do I have here okay now that we're gonna do some process of elimination how many combat veterans do I have here okay those fewer how many ground combat veterans oh good so I could be us everybody but him okay we're gonna start sort of thinking about what it was like to have been one of these soldiers a hundred years ago but I want to put things into perspective again I teach youth command and General Staff College and one of my mentors was a guy named James wool banks and Jim was a Vietnam veteran he is also one of the foremost experts on the US Army in Vietnam and the funny thing is you could always count on Jim to come into your classes when you were teaching Vietnam always to make sure you're doing it right okay and so you knew he was coming in and I could not help but busting his chops a bit okay and so the minute he would walk into the classroom I'd stop whatever I was doing it and say I got to ask the students I got to ask you one thing how many Vietnam veterans is it take to screw in a light bulb you don't know man you weren't there that's for you my brother ok yeah yeah and he would make obscene gestures there it was really bad but if you think about a historian trying to capture the reality of what soldiers experience in battle they face that same issue you don't know man you weren't there and what these guys went through is fortunately for most Americans something that is beyond most of their comprehension now there's funny things about war my favorite philosopher of war is this guy on the left with a great hairdo he's a prussian named karl Clausewitz and he says war has an objective nature always unchanging that there are things and war that a Roman Legionnaire 2,000 years would understand just as well as a kid humping through the boondocks of Afghanistan today and he said these unchanging realities any place any time come back to this the climate of war always comes down to danger exertion uncertainty and chance ok to understand the doughboys life in battle to understand any soldier in war you got to start with a couple of ugly realities first and foremost you take out all the bugles all the drums all the flags all the cool slogans the cool uniforms at the end of the day war is about two things killing and die period drop the mic okay now here's the problem once you get to the reality that war is about killing and dying you also have to come to another reality that you were asking young men and now women to do things that common sense and instinct tells them not to do to put themselves at risk of mortal injury and to kill others part of that this also means soldiering is a tough thing there's a infantryman from World War two sorta knew his way around the battlefield that said if any of you really want to sort of get the impression of what it would been like to have been a Combat Infantryman do this his name was Bill Malden he was an infantryman in the 36th division the greatest combat cartoonist in American military history says when you go home I want you to dig a hole in your backyard while it is raining sitting that hole into the water climbs up around your ankles pour cold mud down the back of your collar sit there for 48 hours and so there's no danger of you dozing off imagine that a guy is sneaking around waiting for a chance to club you on the head or set your house on fire get out of that hole fill up a suitcase full of rocks pick up pick it up grab a shotgun put it in your other hand and walk on the muddiest roads you can find fall flat on your face every few minutes as you imagine big meteors are streaking down trying to sock you he said then pick up that load walk for about 10 to 2 miles occasionally have one of your closest friends shoot off rifles in your general direction and repeat that performance every three days for several months so Clausewitz and bill Mauldin their own line these are the objective unchanging realities of war but he also said there's a subjective character of war that every war is different that the technologies and the societies and the people that you're fighting in the place that you're fighting is also going to greatly influence the type of war you get now unfortunately for the doughboys they're going to be serving in a period that witness one of the most revolutionary changes of military technology in human history but arguably and the fifty years between the end of the American Civil War as you see here on the left on the beginning of World War one there is more change in military technology that occurs in that rough 50 years than in the previous two thousand years of warfare you can sort of see the difference so when these soldiers are going off in 1914 and for the Americans in 1917 to 1918 the battlefield is a much more lethal place that there's a lot more stuff out there trying to snuff you out and it's getting at you at much greater ranges so there's one of these subjective characters that these soldiers going to have to deal with the other reality is the simply the fact that the Republic is woefully woefully unprepared for a major war throughout the majority of our history we saw our army as a necessary evil that standing armies are detrimental to your liberty and to your pocketbook so in the United States enters the war after the Europeans have already been fighting for nearly three years our army and National Guard is tiny just around three hundred thousand soldiers right around nine thousand officers that's again in the Regular Army and the National Guard now be Marines here good I don't have to speak slow that's good so if you were to ask Americans tell me about the Marine Corps prior to April of 1917 they'd look at you strange the Marines are 13,000 people they don't even know there is such a thing as a Marine Corps and World War one will actually put the Marine Corps finally within the American consciousness at places like Bello woods now we've got to raise this army we've got to expand it fortunately we learn from the British the British experience they're actually on their fourth army by the time the Americans come into the war and we learn from them that if you're going to raise a big army keep into the field you're gonna have to base it on conscription so we're gonna break with tradition this will be the first time in American history where we are going to raise over 75 percent of our troops through the draft and actually works relatively well now in the end we will create an officer corps of over two hundred thousand officers and an army of 4 million think about that you go from 300,000 to four million and we only carry that off because we cut a couple of corners we're sort of out of luck when it comes to officers you cannot just make officers overnight but that's exactly what we do they establish a series of three-month-long officer training camps across the United States ok now the soldiers call these guys 90-day wonders okay and it's not all these guys are wonderful it's we're wondering how the hell these guys ever got Commission's yeah they're not bad guys though these are some of the most dedicated officers the Republic ever creates but in the hurry and rush and confusion and mobilization they are simply not getting the degree or the realism of training that they need to adequately lead the soldiers now if it's bad enough for the officers it's even worse for the noncommissioned officers sergeants corporals are the backbone of any modern army sergeants and corporals are responsible for the basic discipline of the unit's keeping the soldiers in line they're also responsible for the basic training of the soldiers there are no cash Cinthia army establishes whole cloth for training of NCOs and so what often happens if you need NCOs the NC of the draft these that show up on Monday quickly become the sergeants and corporals for the draft these that show up on Wednesday now that means that these under trained officers are going to have the burden of the responsibility for training the new soldiers and when their training is sketchy and incomplete then that redoubles down for the rest of their units we even have other problems we have grave shortages of modern weapons in fact the vast majority of our machine guns and our artillery vast majority of our aircraft all of our tanks come from the British and the French this is a wooden cannon on a set of wagon wheels and since we do not have the amount of modern artillery most artilleryman and for that matter most machine gunners that we train for World War one the two great killing weapons of the war those if those are children and machine gunners do not receive the weapons are going to use in combat until after they arrive in France so again for the soldier's life you're gonna have some problems now when it comes to the actually training there's some other issues things that the army can't control the winter of 1917 1918 is one of the worst in the 20th centuries and you have deep snowfalls as far south as Atlanta Georgia Charleston South Carolina and Gainesville Florida and so for weeks and weeks at a time the soldiers training you're cut short because they simply can't go outside adding to that misery there's a host of diseases that break out the most famous courses of Spanish influenza we'll talk about that a little bit later but even basic things like mumps and measles are to create a problem you take a bunch of farm boys from around western Kansas you bring them to camp Funston Fort Riley with a bunch of city boys city boys have had all these diseases farm boys not so much and the minute that a man and a 250 man infantry company comes down with the mumps all 250 guys are sent out to a far distant corner of the post for a month of quarantine and that month of quarantine of course no training is taking place the Army is doing some dumb things of their own though our mobilization is so haphazard that they're rapidly shifting guys around from one unit to the other the 82nd division sergeant gorks division is formed in camp Gordon Georgia and a division at this time is 28,000 men nearly double the size of a modern US division and about the time that division is coming up to full strength and late September early October in 1917 the army sends down orders that takes all the enlisted men except 786 and sends them to other posts and then painfully over the next month draftees from the northeast are brought back in to bring them up to full strength and then 3,000 soldiers are taken away because they're technical specialists and then 1600 soldiers are taken away because they are enemy aliens and of course they're refilled one of these divisions the 86th division has a hundred thousand soldiers passed through its ranks in six months now if you are a sergeant or NCO or officer you're pulling your hair out because the minute you start training all of a sudden the army comes down takes off half your soldiers refill you back up with green soldiers and so your training starts back at the lowest possible level now the guy who understands this more than anything else is John J Pershing he understands that this army of his is undergoing one of its great changes prior to this for the nearly 20 years prior to this the army had spent its time chasing guerrillas in the Philippines and Bandidos down on the Mexican border army on the border who would have thought it and while we're chasing Bandidos in 1916 the Europeans are inventing modern war and now we're playing catch-up give you an idea of how deep these changes are on the left here you have what an infantry would have looked like in 1916 okay most of the soldiers the vast majority of the soldiers are riflemen carrying rifles they only have a provisional machine gun company provisional means it costs a lot of money the Army's not sure it's going to give it to you that's that same regiment in 1918 when the AEF sees combat it's doubled the size but look at all the new weapon systems that it has four of those five weapons at the bottom had not even been invented when the war broke out in 1914 it's even more chaotic when it comes to the infantry platoons and that infantry soldiers life revolves around their squad their platoon and their company so this is an infantry platoon just like the other one the vast majority of the soldiers in April 1917 when the u.s. enters the war our rifleman that's that same platoon just a little over a year later and I color-coded it because each one of these different colors is a different type of weapon or a different type of specialty with each of those weapons in each of those specialty requires leaders sergeants and officers that know how to use them Pershing understands that due to all those problems we had with mobilization no two divisions arriving in France in 1917 to 1918 have the same degree of training now he has a plan let's take the soldiers the first month we're going to take them through three months of standardized training once they arrive the first month we're going to give them all those weapons that they did not have in the United States the artillery pieces and the automatic rifles of the machine guns and we're going to train individuals up through company level how to use those weapons and low-level combat the second month of training they'll be sent to a quiet sector of the British or the French front put into the trenches where they'll learn trench warfare and also become season two or get a little bit of experience under shellfire and last but not least in the third month of training they'll be brought back put into large units in their regiments their brigades in their division where they will learn open warfare now this is a pretty good plan and he believes that given the waning strength of the French and the British Army by 1919 the American army will be the only army left in the field good plan funny thing about war whenever you make a plan like this Woody Allen once said if you want to make God laugh tell him your plans okay he did not tell the Germans because the Germans had their own plans the Germans realized that there are a bunch of Americans coming overseas and with the Russians coming out of the war thanks to the Russian Revolution Erich Ludendorff basically the commander of the German army believes he's got a small window of opportunity to crush the British in the French before the Americans can come in so beginning in March of 1918 he launches a series of offensives what that means for the Americans is they're thrown into combat long before they are ready they're thrown into the deep end of the pool and told to swim and these early battles are ugly in the late spring through the summer of 1918 over ten thousand six hundred American dead now let's talk about that cannot say it don't need to read these because that's always bad you're not supposed to read oh okay they had been practicing marching formation who's receiving far small arms bayonet training and had been taught infantry tactics as far as they had been developed by the summer of 1918 they had not studied the use of modern infantry weapons of the assault of the trench mortar or infantry cannon they had not learned the use of cover which only comes with service at the front they were totally uninformed as to the methods of the attack developed and perfected by the French by the end of 1917 babes in the woods now we'd face something like this before in our history in the last time the Americans had raised the large army of course was 1861 in 1861 again the Regular Army was tiny and all these volunteers start flocking into both the Union and the Confederate armies and the Union the commander of what would become known as the Army of the Potomac was a guy named Irvin McDowell and in the midst of this McDowell really understands how little training his new Union soldiers has and so he's very hesitant about taking to the field against the Confederates and finally Lincoln gets exasperated it is true he says you are green but they are green also you were all green alike but this is in 1861 where you were Green and they are green also when the Americans go into battle in nineteen in the summer of 1918 they're facing these guys the Germans and by the time the Americans get thrown in the Germans have become masters at defensive warfare and they're going to make these Americans pay they're going to be these tough school masters that if you're not going to learn through training we're gonna teach you through the school of hard knocks and even if the Americans had been very well trained this was going to be a problem those Ludendorff offensives knock out a lot of the German strength so we get fortunate in many ways the German army that we faced in the fall of 1918 is not the German army of 1914 it's not the German army of 1915 it's not even the German army of the spring of 1918 but they're still pretty lethal and as the infantry strength of these German units ever way the Germans make up for that by giving them more and more machine guns and I love that quote from an American soldier in the meuse-argonne he said when I jumped in there seemed like every goddamn German there who didn't have a machine gun had a cannon and they could use them quite well the nature of the World War one battlefield meant that the the dice has already stacked against the attacker that mating at modern firepower was filled entrenchments meant that this was already going to be a really tough nut to crack for experienced troops and the Americans are far from experienced and far from trained and this is one of the most poignant passages I've come across in World War one this is a soldier in the second division I'm not going to read the whole thing but I'll give you the gist of it taking out these German machine guns is tough the Germans knew how we do what we call interlocking fire so you've got a machine gun placed here on good terrain but there's also another machine gun on another Hill that's covering it so you try to take down one machine gun you're probably going to be running into the path of fire of another machine gun and that when the Westover says is you're sort of stuck no matter what you do this is going to stink and so you start off with 30 men and your platoon to take down this machine gun and you're gonna try to maneuver but every time you maneuver the Germans are going to move over in that direction so you start off with 30 and by the time you capture that machine gun seven guys are left this is not unusual officers in the 79th division report then the first week of the meuse-argonne it is taking their infantry platoons a loss of 10 to 15 men for each machine gun that they take out from the Germans now the doughboys have a special hatred for a couple of types of German soldiers they absolutely hate snipers those guys they're unfair you're going about your business and they pick you off snipers are almost never captured machine gunners generally the same thing and it's not at all unusual to go through the Doughboy accounts to find them really very blase talking about killing German prisoners okay and I'm not saying that they were bloodthirsty more or less anybody else that's just one of the ugly reality of war these machine gunners german machine gunners were told to hold their position to the last possible minute and then surrender to the american soldiers that's not right okay if you're gonna fight till the last minute don't throw up your hands and expect to accept surrender so they fear the machine guns they fear the snipers the biggest thing they fear is shell fire our Tillery fire accounts for 70% of the casualties in World War one and the soldiers hate this for a couple of reasons first of all the nature of artillery fire means it's completely random that you're sitting in a shell hole with two of your buddies a shell lands close by one of the guys is killed one of the guys is severely wounded and one goes out without a scratch there's no rhyme or reason to it but the biggest thing they hate is the fact that there is no way for an infantryman to respond to this when you're under shellfire the only thing you can do is dig a hole and make sweet sweet love to mother earth and wait for it to pass one soldier says that he would much have preferred would have preferred much more to efface an army of machine guns with nothing but his bayonetted rifle then doing to her an artillery barrage because at least then he would have at some chance and that these artillery fire that you can't do anything about tore one's nerves to pieces the other thing they hated was one of these new additions to warfare poison gas in april of 1915 the Germans have the first successful use of poison gas and the idea is if I got to get up out of my trench across no-man's land if the other guy is coughing up his lungs if he's dead or if he's running away in panic he's not shooting back at me poison gas will account for 9% of the AEF combat fatalities in the war 9% and overall will account for 31% of the AEF total casualties now majority of the gas it's used in World War one against the Americans 76% of our casualties are caused by mustard gas and you see these soldiers both on the left and the right are victims of mustard gas now mustard is what we call a blister agent so when it gets on your skin it creates a chemical burn it leads these nasty sort of pus-filled painful blisters okay if it gets in your eyes it can lead to temporary or permanent blindness that's what those guys are now it tends to affect the moist areas of the body most virulent Lee your eyes your nose your mouth your armpits gentlemen okay if you get mustard gas there you don't want to play soldier anymore now worse of course is if you breathe that mustard gas in because now those chemical burns those blisters are on your lungs destroying the lining of the lungs ultimately your body will try to wash it out fill the lungs full of fluid and you drowned this is your only protection this is a reproduction of an American gas mask now unlike modern American gas masks it's not airtight so you fitted it to your mouth to your face as best you can but to make it work to keep the poison gas out you have a nose clip to keep your nose closed so you don't breathe through here and then you have to breathe in and out through this thing like a snorkel okay anybody done snorkeling you like snorkeling oh yeah yeah you look sort of goofy if you're not right I snore clean I hate it because your jaw starts to hurt right with this gas it's persistent so you will be in this gas mask for up to three hours and if your jaw starts to hurt that's too bad because the alternative is worse the soldiers fear this because again just like artillery ferret fire there is nothing that they can do to counter it it's just something that must be endured now those are all those nasty things that will hurt and kill you but there's also some ugly things that come along with soldier that exertion that Clausewitz talks about now just to get you in mind the average heighth of an American soldier in World War one was between five nine and five ten and their average weight was a hundred and forty-one pounds these are infantry soldiers that I'm talking about so by definition World War one infantry soldiers are going everywhere on their feet a grateful Republic will put you on a train and move you to the front and then if you're lucky they'll put you on a truck that will then move you from the railhead to the battle area but they're gonna dump you out long before they're in artillery range and from then on you're gonna be marching and soldiers talk about marching for two or three days usually overnight so without any sleep before they get to the battle itself a soldier has to carry everything that they need to live and fight in battle on their backs this is the American pack the marching pack comes in at sixty-five to seventy-five pounds now one of the soldiers Charles mender of the 77th division says you know if a New York City teamster would have burdened down one of his horses with as much weight as the American soldiers were carrying the Society for the rich and of cruelty the animal would have had them locked up now the American soldier does have some advantages in theory this pack can be broken up that you can actually separate that half of the pack and leave it behind yeah when you go into battle but then as soon as you do that the Army's going to give you more stuff hey here's some extra bandoliers of ammunition here's some hand grenades here's your gas masks here are wire cutters so even when they are going with a reduced pack they're still carrying about forty-five to fifty five pounds of gear and a bottle now this is an old habit for American soldiers we get lazy I don't want to carry all that stuff and so you can actually trace the path of the American army going into battle by the number of things that they throw away one of the first things to go is they're big heavy want your overcoat because it's big and heavy and when it's nice and warm in early September it'll always be that way then you throw away your raincoat then you start throwing away other stuff one of the Marines even my r1 macton who was in a veteran of the Battle of belleau woods he says just before his unit went into Bella woods they were issued with the new army and trenching tool a little shovel and that's relatively heavy and when the Marines got it's like what do we need this for we're not digging in we're attacking so all the way along their path to Bella woods you could trace his unit by the number of these little shovels that they discarded by the side of the road he said within one day of being in Bella woods if someone would have come up to him with a million dollars in one hand and one of those little shovels and the other he would have taken the shovel without batting an eye because they needed that to survive same thing is going to happen to these soldiers when the weather turns nasty in October of 1918 and they're going to wish that they had those overcoats now an army of course also travels on its stomach this is the official end regulation field ration that every soldier is supposed to receive every day that they're in battle okay now it's a little short of fresh vegetables but if you look at it it's not a bad meal relatively balanced good caloric content now the army also whenever possible wanted to make sure that the soldiers had fresh hot food and it made some changes just before World War one the army had established a cook and Baker school right down the road at Fort Riley to provide every company with some cooks they'd also fielded this thing here a field kitchen a rolling kitchen every infantry company every artillery battery had one of these things and it's actually a big breakthrough that you have the company cooks these will be able to accompany you on the March you can there would fire so you fill up you build the fire underneath it you put in the fresh beef and the fresh vegetables into the stew pot and it's actually cooking along with coffee and even bread because it has a little little bakery in it so by the time the soldiers reach their destination they've got a hot meal now of course the cooks are a little lazy you got to make a lot of them when the war breaks out so their favorite dish is something called slum which is nothing but taking all the meat in all the vegetables and throwing it together and making a nasty stew and it's stew for breakfast stew for lunch and stew for dinner so I might bit monotonous but this doesn't look too bad but then then there's reality you quickly figure out that there's a problem with these mobile kitchens they are burning wood that creates a lot of smoke as you see here World War one again as an artillery war if the enemy see smoke the enemy drops artillery all over it so increasingly you're going to have to move your field kitchens further and further away from the front which means that now you've got to carry all that stuff up every day to the soldiers and the way you do that is with big pots like this very heavy and oh by the way if this party comes under shellfire or they're bringing it forward what they're concerned about is not dying not about dropping your food all over the side of the road now in theory you also can get fresh bread and there are big bakeries behind the line but it runs into the same problem that you have the army bakeries behind the line making fresh bread but then they get shoveled into railroad cars and if there were horses in the railroad cars before the bread goes in yeah and then it's a the railroad station they will then take that and throw it in the back of horse wagons or trucks which will then move them forward to the rations dump this is actually a bread dump for the 26th division at the end of the bottle of meuse-argonne in theory these guys are supposed to lay out nice clean tarps throw off the bread and then cover them up I don't see any tarps there so they're just taking the bread there get out if it's rainy and nasty like it's been for the last couple of days or freezing the soldiers aren't gonna like what they get so with these fresh rations sort of going by the wayside what the soldiers are generally eating in battle are can rations so you get a canned meat ration it tends to be corned beef or salmon you get a vegetable ration it tends to be Tomatoes cold stewed tomatoes now I don't know about you I hate stewed tomatoes so I have something in common with most Oh boys maybe some green beans and for the bread they get hard bread it's a flour salt and water cracker baked at low temperature for a long time it leeches out all the moisture so it will last forever there's probably still tons of this and in France okay and the Civil War they called it hard tack okay and they call it hard tack because if you wanted to get out of the draft you knocked out all your teeth so you could eat the crackers right now that's not a very well balanced mill and one of the other problems of course is just bringing up water water is heavy water is bulky these Canton rations are exceptionally salty the soldiers only carrying a single quart campaign but if you look at the meuse-argonne the Army's gonna have some issues lack of training and and logistics for a lot of officers the fact that the roads are not well developed there are monumental traffic jams behind the Allied lines and when these monumental jacket jams happen nothing is coming forward okay no food no ammunition it's even gonna be worse for the wounded the 79th division reports in the first couple of days the battle moose are going it is taking 15 hours for their ambulances to go five miles no golden hour like we expect today for our soldiers and when this starts to break down you've got some issues soldiers constantly report being short of food one soldier and the 82nd division says he went for three days straight with only one can of corned beef 1 can of salmon and a can of hardtack for three days nah did some back of the envelope math that is the equivalent of roughly 1600 calories over those three days a McDonald's Big Mac meal not a supersize a Big Mac meal with a medium coke and fries is 1,100 calories an MRE that the army eats today is 1250 calories okay so this guy is subsisting for three days on roughly one MRE oh when he's getting his water from a stream and a shell hole that he knows dang well has poison gas in it but he says I got nothing else I there's there's nothing else I can do here so this is going to start to have an effect on the soldiers now and the meuse-argonne forty seven days of fighting I added it up for forty six percent of those days the soldiers are being rained on or being snowed on once you get rained on the snowed on you're not going to get warm the first thing that happens when you stop you take that little shovel and you dig a shell hole to protect you against the artillery and just like bill Mauldin said those shell holes are quickly gonna fill up with rain you've thrown away your shelter half you've thrown away your overcoat so it's gonna be really hard for you to stay warm because of all of this exposure and bad food lack of food bad water it's going to have a really horrible effect on the overall health of the American soldiers the division soldier for the 91st division reports that none of the men on 19 October quote none of the men were fit for duty owing to dysentery fatigue and stubble stomach trouble caused mostly by drinking bad water the the division surgeon for the 82nd division reported that throughout the month of October on average 700 soldiers from his division were going to the hospitals per day due to exhaustion diarrhea and increasingly influenza now living out in the open has its own pleasures these guys are reading reading their certs which means are looking for lights and the soldiers complained that even if they've been through these lousing and washing within a few days of being back in the field their heavy wool uniforms are quickly crawling with lice now not only is that very uncomfortable but it also spreads disease now there's no way to get dry there's no way to wash when you're at the front and so increasingly you're getting stuff like this that's one of the signature maladies of the war the 1st Army's Inspector General is going behind the lines and up to the front as close as he can throughout October and starting to ask soldiers question and he discovers that most of the soldiers he encounters are dirty and grubby and quote some of the men had not had a change of socks during a tour of 18 days at the front and many had not removed their shoes or rubbed their feet more frequently than once and 3 to 5 days if you don't change your socks if you don't change your boots you get trench foot trench foot happens when your foot can never get dry it gets wet over time the skin starts to slough off in really bad cases when the skin starts to slip stuff off it creates cracks in the skin where bacteria gets in and ultimately leads to what you have here which is gangrene hope you guys didn't eat before you came your Gretton that cookie now right but of course this is also bringing now the troops again war is about killing and war is about dying and this army this green army going up against very rich well-trained soldiers are paying the price for the nation's lack of preparedness these three numbers here that's the first three weeks of the Battle of meuse-argonne which is still the bloodiest battle in American history that sadly too many Americans don't know anything about compare that to our total dead from 17 years of fighting in Iraq Afghanistan and Syria so they almost lost as many men in the first week of the meuse-argonne as we've lost in the last 17 years now by the time the war is over we'll suffer fill over a little under fifty three thousand combat dead and another two hundred and twenty-five thousand will be wounded in action now when you take that to a human term just to sort of give you some of the ideas of what this meant for the soldiers on the single day the 8th of October 1918 the 36th division 71st Brigade lost 33 percent of their officers and 24% of their enlisted men one day Fred takes an infantry soldier in the 82nd division his company goes into that battle with 250 soldiers and after nine days a continuous fighting that unit have been reduced to three five-man squads but the worst is yet to come because the biggest killer of the American soldier in World War one is influenza that one in four American soldiers comes down with it over eighty eighty eight hundred thousand soldiers and of that about forty seven thousand six hundred ultimately died due to influenza now you got to put an asterisk behind that because the army didn't even start counting dead due to influenza until the fall of 1918 because influent is generally not what's killing the guys it's usually the secondary pneumonia that comes along with it and this is shocking the army surgeons because unlike what they'd seen before with influenza that took off the very young yeah you guys and they're very old me okay it's taking off the young and the healthy because it's so virulent it's actually causing the young immune systems to go into overdrive as they try to flush this thing out in the midst of all of this misery the losses the privation the bad food the sickness by the middle of October 1918 the AE EF is on the brink of collapse and there's a couple of indicators of this during the course of the war over 27,000 27,000 657 American soldiers will be diagnosed with psychiatric illness another one of the maladies of the war shell-shocked neuro psych and psychiatric injuries what we'd call today PTSD now to the credit of the US Army they're actually relatively progressive in their approach to dealing with men undergoing shell shock they have moved so far forward and this is really only a few years after Sigmund Freud has come out with his you know ideas about psychology they actually are supposed to have a psychologist a psychiatrist excuse me on the staff of every division field hospital for filled hospitals per division and what they're doing with these guys what we will do both in world war ii vietnam and even some of more recent conflicts when the soldiers come in the first thing you do is you wash them you give them clean uniforms you give them a hot meal and you put them to bed and the surgeons report that some of these men went into a profound sleep that lasted 36 to 48 hours but here's the issue military medicine is to do the right thing to take care of the wounded but it's also to quickly get the soldiers back into the battle the vision hospitals can only hold guys for a short amount of time and so if you're good enough after that sleep the next thing they do is slap you back into the line and if they can't treat you there they'll move you back to specialty hospitals but they find that over the course of the war the court according the army record 60 to 70 percent of the soldiers that they treat for psychiatric injuries are returned to battle within twelve to fourteen days so they're looking to deal with the short-term problems but not really the long-term psychosis now some other bad indicators and the month of july 1918 the seven the the the great first Infantry Division four beautiful Fort Riley has seventy seven cases of self-inflicted wounds but there's more by the second week of the bottle of meuse-argonne Hunter Liggett one of the great generals of the war reports that there are a hundred thousand American soldiers straggling from the lines a hundred thousand soldiers who are AWOL now there's a couple of reasons for this one is if I haven't been fed for three days sooner or later I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna go to the rear I'm gonna find something to eat and the best soldiers then commute back into the battle other soldiers are simply lost two hundred and fifty man infantry companies under soldier sergeants and officers who really aren't well trained quickly get lost in the tangle that's the meuse-argonne but there are significant numbers of these soldiers who are deliberately avoiding combat in fact 1mb patrol founds finds 90 American soldiers in one large old German dugout behind the line and if they're there you know miles behind the line it's not because they're hungry it's not because they're lost they're trying to avoid combat a lot of these stragglers are replacements again we get thrown in the deep end of the pool in the summer of 1918 the Army is not expecting this level of casualties and so our whole replacement system breaks down so beginning in the late summer and early fall what's often happening is men are being conscripted they're arriving in camp and they're being slapped on ship to go overseas without an iota of training the 77th division reports that of the 800 replacements that they receive after coming out of a brief lull in meuse-argonne 80 to 90 percent of them had never fired their rifle never thrown a grenade and sergeants and officers report repeatedly having to teach soldiers how to load their rifle just before they went over the top going into battle you can't blame the soldiers for perhaps absently themselves when they're faced with this ugly reality so in the face of all this I want to end on this the question is why did they do it then what kept them going and I think there's a few things here that we should keep in mind one is this generation believes in the cause and you see it in their letters and you see it in their Diaries you see it in the stuff that they're writing back home they absolutely do believe that they are making the world safe for democracy as Charles Clement here and I'll come back to Clement here in a minute the Allies must win every true American is glad for the opportunity to pay whatever price may be extracted that Prussian ISM those evil Germans may be annihilated from ever and that democracy may live you see it in the posters you gotta love this poster one of those famous from the war James Montgomery flag okay this is Uncle Sam this is not hey I'm happy Uncle Sam today let me give you a handout this is your old man Uncle Sam right every teenage sons pissed-off father okay I want you to mow the lawn or in this case I want you to join the army this little cartoon here is pinned by a guy who is too young to serve in combat but manages to wheedle his way under age to serve as an ambulance driver it shows an American soldier kicking the Kaiser and the butt off a cliff that cartoonist is uh Walt Disney okay let me tell you how dedicated these guys are on the far left is George McMurtry now he will be part of the Lost battalion and will won a medal of honor for holding out with his soldiers in the Lost battalion from the 2nd to the 7th of October 1918 George McMurtry is 41 years old as a captain okay he's also a millionaire Wall Street broker and yet this millionaire Wall Street broker believes in the cause so much that he's in that nasty Park pocket in the Argonne forest Teddy Roosevelt loved him I hate him I love him okay love him or hate him he's talked all about putting the Americans into the war but when the war breaks out he puts his money where his mouth is and all of his sons serve during the war all of them are wounded in action one of them his youngest Quentin is a pilot and is shot down by a German ace breaks the old man's heart and these guys aren't at all unusual nor the soldiers that follow him and I loved that report from a French officer French liaison officer this is a secret report that the Americans never see and the French want the Americans to do well but they're also going to be honest with how the Americans do and they say time and time again these guys are really green and have no clue about what they're doing when it comes to war but look at them morale is very high and everyone in his spirits presses a will to win almost everything seems to be carried by a certain mystical faith in victory they are convinced that they are fighting for the freedom of the whole world and that they must punish the boss for their crimes nobody's going to see this except two other French officers so they're fighting for this and fighting for the belief in American exceptionalism but they're also fighting for some of the things that American soldiers that soldiers throughout history have fought for they're fighting for this idea of manhood okay and you see it in this picture here right the United States Army builds men then Theodore Roosevelt is all about this that war is the greatest test for all young men the Marines play this up quite well this is their first poster first to fight and at the beginning they only take volunteers so what they're telling you is you really want to be out there you really want to be on the front end you want to prove your manhood join us and they pay off for it because they in the early days of the war get some of the most ardent recruits to serve now we've got Owens there let me tell you about Charles Clement Charles Clement is a Georgia from my own home state he's a graduate of Mercer University class of 1912 and he's one of these ardent young men who wants to serve and Clement manages to come out of the officer training camp with the rank of captain which means he's not doing too bad he is the son of a Baptist minister and when they get to the front line and serve in the trenches behind the Allied lines he requests repeatedly to his commander to let him lead a trench raid against the German lines no trench raids are pretty sketchy endeavors you go out by yourself with a handful of guys into the German trenches grab prisoners and come back dangerous and the commander finally lets him do it and the patrol is out for less than 10 minutes when his sergeant comes great getting him back physically into the trench because Clement is drunk as a monkey okay now this baptist son is drunk and when he is court-martialed five days later he doesn't him ha he doesn't tap-dance he doesn't try to make any excuses he says when we were training with the British the British officer gave me some brandy I'd never drank it before I was a little nervous going over the top so I decided to get some what they call Dutch courage before I attacked and he doesn't ask for any clemency in fact the court-martial sentences him to four years hard labor at Fort Leavenworth but he says okay I will accept this punishment but please please please I have been untrue to my nation I have been untrue to my family I have been untrue to my soldiers and I've been untrue to my god the only thing I request of you has returned me back to my unit as an enlisted man I dishonored myself a no man's land and no man's land let me regain my honor they let him do it he's in the same regiment as sergeant York the great Medal of Honor winner and the same day that sergeant York is winning his Medal of Honor he's leading a patrol and a no-man's land forward of his regiments attack and in the midst of that he shot through the head by a sniper and dies on the spot in his mind though he had no other way of redeeming his honor but to make that loss now some of the soldiers are fighting for other things a spree Decor this is the first time that we're gonna actually give patches to soldiers and the 81st division a South Carolina and North Carolina the Wildcat will be the first guys to do it and so the soldiers are always going to put their pride there every guy believes that his platoon his company his batai and his regiment his division are better than anybody else's and if you want to talk smack about your division somebody else once talked smack about your division it's bound to get you in a fight the 42nd division says you know devil dogs what the Marines say the Germans call he said come on we're the men of the rainbow devil dogs is a term the Marines gave themselves the Marines retorted that since it's the rainbow what's the biggest color in the rainbow yellow it speaks for itself now some guys are fighting for other things there are Mexican American soldiers there are Native American soldiers and there are African American soldiers who see their military service as a way of showing white society that they've earned a spot at the table by the reason of this war this race this is William Bratton who's a African American officer and a 370th infantry of which we are proud members we will occupy a larger and still larger place in the Sun soldiers also do this you may serve for high-minded ideas you may want to prove your manhood but when you're actually thrown into battle you're reliant upon the guys to your left and to your right and they're gonna stick out if the if your buddy stick with you stick to the battle you're gonna stick to the bottle of course the downside is if they run you're probably going to run to this tends to reinforce battlefield morale and one of the soldiers actually said you know when I'm with my buddies I'm sort of stuck because it takes more courage to say no than it does to say yes salute the flag and attack so we've covered a number of things I will say this we sort of get this bad idea about war constantly but it's good to know that not every war day in a war stinks some day it's warm some days this the the sky is blue and some days you deal on the enemy a lot more than your get dealt on yourself it's sort of interesting when I see the doughboys that are all sort of happy they're always after they capture German dugouts with lots of beer I don't know our this guy down here there's an old saying the British soldier fights for king and country the French soldier fights for leg why and the American soldier fights for souvenirs so I will leave on this because it is interesting when you ask yourself given all these problems that the Americans have what do they accomplish what do they contribute to the war effort and that's sort of a sort of a hard thing if you read a lot of the Brits it's like ah we won the war to hell with the Americans hey where the Americans replied that AEF actually stood for after England failed but I love this picture because it sort of encapsulates the American War experience this is a photograph of the first American prisoners captured by the Germans first large number okay and this is how your propaganda message sometimes shoots you in the foot the Germans will take pictures of these Americans and they will mass-produce these pictures to send all throughout Germany now this is some class there's some audience participation what message does the German High Command think they're sending with this picture we're winning okay we were worried about all these million Americans look at um we captured them pretty easily don't worry about these guys notice anything in this picture or anything jump out at you okay there's one those guys all have those big long thick luxurious wool overcoats and by this time the Germans that's the little German guy this is a stormtrooper that's their Elite Force you know most of their greatcoats have been cut to about their knees to save wool so they are well-equipped okay what else do you notice about these guys okay there's a couple of things here again here the Americans they're the Germans they are a head taller than the Germans okay are they beaten they don't look like they've been whupped okay they are fit they're in relatively good condition and most importantly somebody said it they're young so when the Germans back home start looking in these pictures the first question they ask is where are our guys that look like this they look defiant where are guys that look young and healthy and defiant they're dead and there's millions more of these guys coming okay thank you very much [Applause] what are your questions okay first question where did Doughboy come from yeah now you gotta give me a dollar so they get a dollar every time somebody asked me that that's good we not we're not really sure but there's two distinct possibilities one goes back to a pastry that was popular in New England called a dough boy and it was basically a gingerbread man that had a big round though buttons so it looked like the the buttons on the soldiers coat I don't think I buy that I think the real best description comes from the mexican-american war that we know that this term is first used at least then we can track it back and it comes from a term that the cavalry men are giving the infantry soldiers okay cause the cavalry men are owned horses and so as they're watching they're kicking up all the dust that is covering the infantryman and dust and Spanish is Adobe so it's Adobe boy dust boys and it's only World War one that they go from applying that for an infantryman to all American soldiers good question yes sir we're high-tech we have a new speaker system we have a screen over there we listened we're doing better here how many approximately died from the Spanish flu according to the Army's own records it's a little over 44,000 but again that does not count those that got flu but then died from pneumonia so when you lump together the flu and pneumonia it's definitely more than the combat losses of 53,000 dead okay and far and above the Spanish influenza worldwide kills more people than the war itself the war of course helps to spread it because people are you know the food is down the health care is down the conditions are down and so it spreads it best indication are that the the first way that they identified flew first case is right down the road at Camp Funston it was a like most of these things an animal to human transference yeah so it's a it's the big killer yes sir way in the back you mentioned Native Americans and we know in World War two we have the Navajo code talkers were there Native American code talkers in World War one yes thank you Choctaw I'm among others and it's interesting that unlike African Americans the Army does not separate in fact Native Americans and Mexican Americans and Chinese Americans and everybody else are integrated within white units and the Native American services is pretty interesting they actually serve at a greater rate percentage-wise in their population because of the way the treaties are organized you cannot draft Native Americans that are living on reservations separate nations and yet a lot of these guys join up part of that is the warrior cultures that are already part of sort of Native American tribes so this is a chance for them to get as much glory as their daddies and granddaddies dead and they tend to go for some of the most dangerous service - I have another question sure I don't know whether this is appropriate or not but has US soldiers ever invaded Russian soil come on you know the answer to that twice oh maybe somebody else does the under the under a lot of pressure from the British in the French we will send a regiment plus to North Russia to Murmansk and the argument behind it is we have to keep although allied war materials have been sent to Imperial Russia from falling into the hands the German army is it advanced we also don't like the Bolsheviks so we have no problem with trying to strangle that ugly little revolutionary baby in the crib we will also send another regiment of soldiers from the 39th regiment to land in Vladivostok and we basically do that because we're afraid of what the Japanese are going to do in Siberia so we we send contingents both to the eastern side of Russia and the western side of Russia and a lot of Americans don't realize that every Russian schoolchildren can tell you hey you know how many times we've invaded the United States you've invaded us twice in fact when Khrushchev comes to New York to speak at the UN he points that out hey you know you remember that you invaded us first so good question yes sir can you talk about a little bit about Harry Truman in the war I think he was an artillery but yes what can you give us an interesting about Truman he was in the 35th division which was consisted of National Guardsmen from mostly from Missouri and Kansas he had been in the National Guard prior to the war and so when the war breaks out his unit is converted into artillery they trained down in Camp doniphon I believe in Missouri and then serves with the division and the 35th doesn't necessarily clever itself with glory it's thrown into the first day of the battle of meuse-argonne on the 26th of September and is doing a pretty tough nut to crack on the German lines the commander is a guy named Peter Traub who is something of a jerk he's a regular army guy who really doesn't like National Guardsmen and four days prior to the battle he relieves every brigade and infantry regimental commander in the division so he's already creating some problems in there and so the division starts to crack pretty quick in combat at one point of the battle truman says that he has to take his pistol and basically push the guys back into battle but from all indication it's he does quite well and his soldiers think very highly of them if you get down to the Truman Museum they have a really nice display right now on Truman service in the war and of course he will parlay that into a political career thereafter one of the guys in his regiment is named Pendergrast who is the hmm who is the brother of and so they make those connections pretty quick yes sir oh yeah they're still there's still a number of them if you really want to see that Yoder's we're done go to the psalm the canadians have a couple of reserve places one at vimy ridge from a battle in 1917 and one on the psalm at Beaumont Hamel where the first Newfoundland Regiment was almost killed to a man on the first day of the Battle of the Somme okay and and if you go to the American battle fields at meuse-argonne I was just there with the army in September it hasn't changed well the last fun thing that happened there was well us and so the people loved us and they did an outpouring of support for the Americans when we came through so if you go to the meuse-argonne we go to bellow woods you can get the same war yes sir then I'll come back over here yes was what you was Alvin New York in he was in the 328 infantry of the 82nd division and York of course is a fascinating character he is drafted in November of 1917 and he's a conscientious objector on the draft form it says you know do you have any any claim objection he said yes don't want to fight he was in a pious small pious based Protestant Church who was against killing it was a literal interpretation and the Bible said thou shalt not kill so he said I should not kill under the Selective Service Act though it only identified 13 religious organizations sex that was exempt for military service and they had to have long-standing pacifist creats and since his church was only established since 1906 the army said you don't qualify he had an officer that that basically was very sympathetic sat down and talked to him man old man he was also familiar with the Bible and basically convinced him you know render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and that it says thou shalt not murder not thou shalt not kill and on the 8th of October 1918 he kills about it two dozen Germans and captures 132 more yes sir well hang on it depends on the type of artillery you get the light guns the 75 guns that that Harry Truman have have an effective range of about six to eight miles the 155 so you can take those out to about 12 to 16 miles during the meuse-argonne they actually have 14-inch railway guns the Navy takes their battleship guns put some on railroad carriages and those things can reach easily 30 miles behind the line so it depends on the type of gun you got yes sir what do you think is the main reason why the war came to a close attrition attrition attrition this this was always going to be a nutritional war once they go into the trench warfare and that happens by really November of 1914 they try everything they can and they invent modern war so you invent tanks in the war you ain't been gassed warfare you basically are creating aerial warfare out of whole cloth in fact the majority of the missions that the US Air Force still does today had been pioneered by the end of World War one but no matter what they tried it's still the ugly reality that even if you break to break through the things that you had to do to make that breakthrough the amount of artillery you had to use so tore up the ground that it was nearly impossible for you to exploit it so ultimately to put it very bluntly the war ended when you had killed so many more so many Germans that they couldn't keep putting guys in the ranks question right here regarding where why what what would the summary of lessons learned by the US Army from World War one a number of them again we are what we were embarrassed by the fact that we're the largest industrial power in the world and yet we have to rely on everybody else for our weapons so shortly after the war the army establishes the army industrial College and one of its first students is a guy named Dwight David Eisenhower and the purpose of the army industrial college is to take army officers and educate them on how industry works and then bring in members of corporations and all so by the time you get to World War two we will actually be the arsenal of democracy we will make strides in officer training the reserve officer training course is established by the National Defense Act of 1916 but the war comes too soon after that Court to actually get off the ground so in the interwar period ROTC will actually start to provide good systemic training of officer candidates now when the war when it looks like we're going to enter World War two in 1940 so before Pearl Harbor we actually installed the world's for our own first peacetime draft they get us ready for what we start to see is the looming crisis ahead so we get a little bit more jump than the generation of 1718 did but the chief of staff of the Army is a guy named George Marshall one of the greatest soldiers in American history and the the Secretary of the of war is a guy named Henry Stimson both are veterans of World War 1 World War one and they face the same problem he still despite ROTC you got to make a lot more officers and Stimpson sort of said to to marshal you know George we did those 90-day wonder officer training camps in World War one why don't we just go back to doing that and Stimpson leaders claimed that for the one and only time in their professional relationship Marshall said if you bring back the OTCs I will submit my reservation of resignation today so we do learn painfully but we do learn good question good question any more questions yes sir we'll never know right that's it historians have a hard enough time okay it's had we stayed neutral would it have changed the course of the war okay here's the dilemma of historians right if Eleanor Roosevelt would have had wings would she have been a b-17 we don't know but but and historians should be very careful about playing those games but here's what we know 1917 is absolutely the low point of the Allied war effort okay Russia goes into revolution in March Alcazar and then the Bolsheviks launch their own revolution in October of 1917 and we'll quickly then take Russia out of the war so Germany is now low longer facing a two-front war that's bad 1917 militarily for the Western Allies is also a disaster in April of 1917 Robert Nivelle the commander of the French army says I've got a war winning plan and for a war weary French government and nation and military coming off the nasty bloodletting if we're done this sounds good the war winning plan doesn't work and after weeks of futile bashing against the German lines half of the French divisions go into what they call collective and discipline what we'd call mutiny the British will follow up with their own advance that summer at EEP in a place called Passchendaele and about the time they start their bombardment the rains begin and soldiers are literally drowning in the mud when they get wounded so after going and losing hundreds of thousands of guys they gained a couple of miles of mud in November of 1917 the Germans and Austrians launched a massive counter-attack against the Italians at a place called Caporetto and basically push the Italian army back to the place that they had started the war in 1915 so the only bright spot for the Allied war effort are these untrained Americans okay hungry Patton who takes over the French army after the mutinies tells his soldiers trust me we're not going to launch those major attacks we will wait for the Americans and the tanks so militarily how much we accomplish is debatable but what it does to the Germans it forces the Germans to do stupid stuff the the Ludendorff offensives which that bleed out the last of their power and it also props up Allied morale at the low point of their war up so good question sort of a roundabout way to get where you're going yes sir we we all know the officers from World War one who became famous in World War two in I mentioned George Marshall in your previous remarks who were the officers that appeared to have great promise in World War one that did not succeed something happened didn't show up basically for World War two famously there's a few of them Frieden Dahl who will be a part of the disaster at castle rank Pass will be involved somewhat in World War two a world war one but for the most part this small Regular Army is pretty insular and so there's always this there's a legend that goes around that George Marshall kept a little black book not don't be dirty not like that he kept a little black book of every officer that he encountered and and supposedly if the guy was good you know you got a star and if you were a you got a frowny face right and so the reputations of these guys got around quite a bit and some of them you know Eisenhower of course Patton funny thing about Eisenhower and Bradley both sit out the war I sit out the war back here in fact Eisenhower both Eisenhower and Bradley believed that their careers are over Eisenhower gets lucky he's recognized he's a bright guy I mean the reason that he sits out the war and can't colt outside of Gettysburg Pennsylvania is to create out a whole cloth this tank corps thing this new idea but he's despondent but one of his mentor's is a guy named Fox Connor who quickly who's one of the shining lights of the army and also rise to be the chief of the staff chief of staff he will take Eisenhower under his wing he will mentor him towards the army industrial College and he will also assign him to the American battle monuments Commission and the American battle monuments Commission is responsible for the cemeteries but also the systematic study of the battle so even though Eisenhower wasn't there as a soldier he is sent back under the purview of John Pershing to do a detailed study of the war in so many ways he actually gets to look at the bigger picture where some of the junior officers like like not necessarily junior but guys like Patton only see a very narrow segment up so good question thank you that guy falls in trouble as usual okay okay we're gonna wrap it up soon up tonight my question was where was MacArthur job MacArthur was showboating as MacArthur is known to do he is a he is ultimately will be a brigade commander in the 42nd division in the rainbow division and he will have his moment of near greatness as the 42nd tries to break through the German lines on the 14th of October and he will later write that the corps commander comes down and says MacArthur I want this position taken or I want a hundred thousand thousand casualties a list of ten thousand casualties and according to MacArthur because he's the only one that recorded this he said you know general I will give you that piece of terrain or or I'll give you the casualty list and my name will be at the top of it so he actually does pretty good he he is leading from the front he doesn't take that piece of terrain though and while they're heavy cash leads his name's not at the top of the list either so but but he does make a name for himself that helps to propel him poor person or portion Utley in the battles of the First World War the different countries that were primarily involved how did the ratio of casualty to population vary who suffered the biggest losses the proportionately the country who suffers the the biggest casualties of the war is Serbia Serbia they managed to beat back the Austrians in 1914 but the Austrians and the Germans come back in a vengeance in 1915 and do almost what looks like a modern blitz they come rolling through and the Austrians will do stuff that will look eerily similar to what the Nazis do in places like Russia hanging people the the the Serbians are starving what's left of the Serbian army goes off to the island of Corfu and it's is tried to brought back up the strength but percentage-wise they lose more people than anybody else when you look at the other ones of course Russia loses both in World War one and the Revolution or roughly 20 million people France will lose 1.3 million dead and so and we ought to keep that in mind when you talk about the French bang you know surrender monkeys they suffer mightily on a single day the 22nd of August 1914 they lose 27,000 dead so in one one day they lose half of the total American combat casualties of the war so that that sticks with Germans lose a lot to the British lose just under a million so we get off relatively scot-free but you got to keep in mind that the majority of our casualties occur in the last six weeks of the war so we suffer a lot I think I'll answer the questions sort of offline I think she's giving me the hook to leave well it's just you are sitting obviously he's a wonderful presenter I think we need to give him another round of applause and the check is just a collection yeah plug your book you love his talk he wrote a book or a book yeah / Zeke's Crusaders which is basically the American soldiers in World War one published by University of Kansas Press it takes its both chronological and [Music] topical so it takes the soldier physically from his induction all the way through their training through their sailing for France to combat and then back but it also has topics so we'll talk about food clothing shelter weapons their relationship with the French and British and German civilians and soldiers that they encounter will talk about the doughboys religion and just to make things interesting we'll also talk about the double a sex lives okay so if you get that there better not be any dog-eared pages I'm saying probably something for everybody there if you're interested and parents can take and rip those pages out so well and our next program is December 14th so god buy the book and we'll have a test to see how well um this is somebody you won't come back what this has been fantastic and your colleague dr. Hopp Sadr a hospital hospital will be speaking about mr. Pope's war which is the Mexican War of 1848 a war that doubled the size of our country and is is not well known just like a lot of people don't know about World War one it's been a pleasure having you here tonight please stay and visit but I do want to go out to dinner sometime with my husband after this you know like by 9 o'clock I'm gonna be thank you all for Q thank you for coming out [Applause]
