Existing comment:
A No Man's Land on the Western Front:
-- "Those who weren't scared, weren't there." -- Private Clayton Slack, AEF, Medal of Honor recipient, Heywood, WI, 1964 interview
While battles erupted in numerous areas during World War I, it was on the Western Front in France and Belgium that the struggle took on its most titanic and tragic cost. The Western Front stretched 470 miles from Switzerland to the English Channel. There, trench warfare locked belligerents in a costly stalemate. Massive artillery barrages preceded infantry attacks designed to achieve and breakthrough, and churned the ground into a "No Man's Land" of moon-like barrenness. Soldiers charged by the tens of thousands against well-positioned machine guns ringed by barbed wire entanglements, sometimes in the face of poison gas. The futility of this kind of warfare was grimly predictable.
America tipped the scales in favor of England and France. By the fall of 1918, the AEF had become large enough to take the lead in major efforts to break the German line in France. The Meuse-Argonne campaign... was the culmination of the American war effort. it continued through forty days of bloody, hammering attacks and ended with a spectacular breakthrough. American inexperience and a skillful German defense contributed to the high losses of the AEF, where some 26,277 Americans were killed and 95,786 were wounded. The Meuse-Argonne remains the largest battle in American history, involving more than 1,200,000 citizen-soldiers. |