[On June
26th, 1917, the first 14,000 U.S. soldiers arrived in France to join the Allied
effort in The Great War. To commemorate that centennial, this week I’ll be
AmericanStudying the U.S. and WWI—share your thoughts and contexts in comments,
please!]
On three
interesting histories and contexts for the million
U.S. soldiers who fought for General John Joseph
“Blackjack” Pershing in the Great War.
1)
Doughboys: The slang term for U.S. soldiers
didn’t originate in World War I; it apparently dates back to the Mexican
American War, with a somewhat unclear or contested etymology (the two most
likely derivations are the resemblance
between brass uniform buttons and doughnuts; or the chalky northern Mexican dust on their uniforms
that made soldiers appear to be made of “adobe,” which was then translated as
doughboy). But it was during the Great
War that the term became ubiquitous with American soldiers, and I would
argue that the reason is a telling one: that this was the first international
war in which U.S. troops fought alongside those from many other nations, and so
such a shorthand linguistic nickname was necessary both to highlight American
participation in the conflict and to distinguish our soldiers from those other
groups (each of whom apparently had their
own parallel nicknames, including Tommies for British soldiers and poilus
for French ones).
2)
Influenza: As I wrote
in this post, the 1918-1919 influenza epidemic was deeply interconnected
with the Great War, both in its origins and how it spread around the world. And
the epidemic hit American soldiers
very hard, with more than 40,000 dying from the disease in the fall of 1918
(among the nearly 400,000 who were stricken by it, almost half of the U.S.
force). The idea that the war’s unprecedented and horrific levels of death and
destruction fundamentally
changed the world is one of the most familiar and widely shared historical
narratives; but a case could be made that it was influenza, not the war, which
most fully produced those effects, not least because returning soldiers
carried the disease with them and thus spread it to nations (such as the
U.S.) that had not seen or experienced the war’s destructions first-hand. At
the very least, it’s impossible to separate the war from the epidemic, as the
AEF’s tragic experiences reflect all too clearly.
3)
The Bonus Army: Another familiar American
historical narrative is that over the last half-century (since Vietnam, the
narrative generally goes) the nation
has stopped taking good or even adequate care of its veterans. That
narrative (which leaves aside veterans of color, on whom more tomorrow) is
largely based on World War II, when returning veterans were greatly aided by
policies like the G.I. Bill. World War I was a different story, however, as
reflected by the stories and histories of the Bonus
Army (or Bonus Expeditionary Force, as they called themselves), the group
of WWI veterans and their families who marched on Washington in the spring of
1932 to demand promised but greatly delayed compensation for their service.
Better remembering the Bonus Army would thus help us likewise better engage
with both the
longstanding issue of veteran care and the specific experiences shared by many
of the million men who made up the American Expeditionary Forces.
Next Great War
Studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other WWI stories or contexts you’d highlight?
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