 When the United States declares war on 6th April 1917, the American Army is wholly unprepared. In terms of regular forces, there's roughly 133,000. That could maybe be elevated to 300,000 if you federalize the entire National Guard. On the first day of the SOME, the British suffer upwards of 50,000 casualties. That means the Army has the potential staying power of basically a week. When the United States declares war, the question arises, what does this mean? What are we calling upon the nation to do? How are we going to influence the war? The decision is made very quickly to send a small expeditionary force to France. The American War Department, under the leadership of Secretary of War Newton Baker, selects General John J. Pershing as the commander of what will become the American Expeditionary Forces. Pershing assembles a small staff in May of 1917 and they sail to Europe. Now Pershing and his staff very quickly find out that the circumstances for the Allies is much more dire than they had thought. The French had engaged in a series of offensives in the spring of 1917 that were disastrous and had resulted in a number of units within the French Army mutiny. Many of the French soldiers were arguing that they were no longer willing to attack needlessly in this war where they were just being slaughtered. They were still willing to defend France but they would not engage in these costly bloody attacks without any hope of victory. So Pershing very quickly sees that the Allies are in difficult position in 1917. He makes the determination along with his staff and in consultation with the War Department that in fact the United States is going to need an army. The Allies very quickly send military missions to the United States upon the American entry into the war and what they call for is men. They argue for the incorporation of American manpower into Allied units which is something that we call amalgamation. Now from an American perspective there are a number of reasons why amalgamation is not acceptable. First and foremost is just national pride. It is going to be very difficult to convince the American public to send their sons abroad to fight in foreign armies. The other is obviously with the French you have a language difference. The other danger is morale. How will the soldiers fight if they're not fighting for their own cause, if they're not fighting under their own flag? Wilson also rejects amalgamation because it does not fit into his objectives for the war. Wilson's goal is not to see the Allies victorious. It's more to overthrow Germany and remake the international order. To do so that means that Wilson needs a seat at the negotiation table, at the peace table and he needs a prominent position. The only way that he is going to do that is if his forces make a significant contribution to the Allied victory or to the overthrow of Germany. The way that we're going to do that is through selective service. It's argued as a way to most effectively build an army using the best assessment of American skills. They're going to provide literacy training, they're going to provide physical fitness, they're going to provide moral instruction. It's one of the reasons why the idea of wholesome activities and the eradication of an aerial disease is going to be so prevalent within the American army. This is because there's an implicit social compact between the federal government and the American public through conscription that says that if you give us your men that we will return them as improved citizens. The first expeditionary division begins arriving in France in June of 1917. By the end of 1917 the United States has roughly four divisions in France that equal to an estimated 200 to 250,000 troops. This is far lower than the Allies want, but it reflects what the United States had been really capable of in 1917. One of the challenges that the United States faces during the war is how do you train an army and how do you train one rapidly, particularly how do you train one in modern warfare when your forces are not experienced in that. One of the things we do initially is rely upon the French and the British who are both going to send hundreds and hundreds of individuals and soldiers across the ocean to help train the army. The training system that the United States develops is going to be a multi-staged effort. There are going to be several months training within the United States followed by several months training within France. What you would think of as the training within the United States is going to be basic training, marching marksmanship, close order drill, so on and so forth. The training in France is going to be more directed at trench warfare. The Americans very quickly become concerned about relying upon the French and the British to train their forces. Pershing does not think that the French and the British show the proper level of a lawn or spirit. He thinks that they rely too much on trench warfare, on static positional warfare. He wants more maneuver warfare. This is a very big debate amongst historians about whether or not he was right. By the time many American units go into combat, they're going to have insufficient training due to the truncated timetable upon which they were operating. The army had never done something like this before. The army didn't really have the experience. And clearly by 1915, the tremendous attrition brought about by trench warfare, a machine gun, no man's land, this sort of muddy, demoralizing environment where gains were measured in 500 yards, 1,000 yards, a few miles. A huge shock to the psyche, both of the military and the public. That was a challenge for the U.S. because we had no experience in that. We hadn't really had any observers in Europe, a few accounts. The British and French had sent advisors to the United States to try to help some of these camps get started. The question is, if these training camps, they're having trouble with just the bare basics of handling this massive amount of folks that have come in the military, left-faced, right-faced, how to wear a uniform. The idea that they would learn a creeping barrage, for example, that is where artillery moves forward ahead of the infantry, at a set pace, a very complex, effective but complex artillery procedure, that was really something that wasn't in the cards for training here in the States until late in the war. The idea was that when you get to France, the U.S. would be able to plug in train and sort of training camps established behind the lines, then go through a process where they would serve alongside French units, in small cases British units. They'd be able to learn sort of how it works, and then eventually be moved into a quiet sector of the front line to really stand on their own. It's sort of a crawl, walk, run process. But this was a mental challenge because American doctrine, for example, hadn't really accounted for by 1917-1980, artillery and machine guns are the king of battle. Americans, including folks like Pershing, still thought that, you know, this ethos of a rifleman. A rifleman is the man who dominates the battle. By accurate fire, by maneuver, he will be able to advance and take the fight to the enemy. If his spirit is good, if he trusts his unit, he'll be able to overcome these difficulties. That didn't prove to be the case, and there was a learning curve during 1918 as American units do take high casualties, and we do see this in reports by Germans and by Allied, that is British and French observers, that the Americans are great soldiers. They're fresh, they're vigorous, they want to fight, but they're fighting in the style of 1914. So there is a growth period there. There is a deathlet period where people have to learn through practice. They have to learn on the front lines what works and what doesn't. A little less rifle fire and bayonet, a little more lobbying hand grenades to the next trench line, a little less frontal charges, a little more sneaking around under the cover of night to ascertain machine gun positions which then can be hit by artillery, a little bit more professional style of fighting and less romantic 1914 style of fighting. By the end of 1917, Germany finds itself in a position of strategic strength. The Italians have been utterly smashed in the Battle of Caporetto. The French had been bloodied and their army had mutinied after the Nevelle offensives. The British had suffered tremendously during the Third Battle of Ypres at Passchendaele. Russia had undergone the Bolshevik Revolution and the United States, which was the one bright spot for the Allies, had only been able to land roughly 200,000 soldiers in France. So the question now is, can the Allies hold out long enough for the Americans to arrive en masse?