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War or early post-war photograph of the Belleau Wood American Cemetery. The American assault by U.S Marines and Army infantry to take Belleau Wood began on June 6, 1918 against well-entrenched German defenders. The battle continued for three weeks. The Marine casualties were 113 officers and 5,598 men killed, wounded and missing; the Army 9th and 23rd Infantry lost 65 officers and 3,496 men.
1917 photograph of Austro-Hungarian soldiers posing on the ruins of a destroyed plane, likely a pusher with the engine facing the rear of the plane.
A poem beneath a United States flag calls on American boys to show the Kaiser.
Memorial statue to Prime Minister David Lloyd George in Parliament Square, London, United Kingdom. © 2013 John M. Shea
Map of Alsace and the Franco-German border from Switzerland north along the Vosges Mountains to Strasbourg. The postcard celebrates the German victory at Mulhouse on August 11, 1914, retaking the city from the French.
"The individual soldiers are very good. They are healthy, vigorous, and physically well developed men of ages ranging from 18 to 28, who at present lack only necessary training to make them redoubtable opponents. The troops are fresh and full of straightforward confidence. A remark of one of the prisoners is indicative of their spirit: 'We kill or get killed.' . . .Only a few of the troops are of pure American origin; the majority is of German, Dutch, and Italian parentage, but these semi-Americans, almost all of whom were born in America and have never been in Europe, fully feel themselves to be true-born sons of their country." ((1), more)
"In Germany and Austria the early days of July were a time of scarcity, of explosions of pacifist sentiment in the Reichstag, and of open defiance of edicts of the Imperial Government. The Brest-Litovsk peace and resulting measures taken to include the old dominions of the Czar in the Mittel-Europa trading complex only resulted in spreading the Bolshevik contagion through the kingdoms, dukedoms and city states of the central empires. The imperial confederation that Bismarck cemented was shaking apart. Even Prussia, the cornerstone was cracking.The Kaiser had assured his subjects that Ludendorff's spring offensives would bring peace with victory, but all the German workingpeople could see was an immense new butcher's bill, and hunger and stringency. It was the turn of the Germans to get tired of being killed. They were beginning to listen to Bolshevik agitators whispering that peace lay in defeat." ((2), more)
"Throughout June and into the first days of July, the Americans were part of the nail-biting waiting game—waiting for the German assault. Nightly shelling harassed the New Yorkers. Influenza struck, too, afflicting 40 percent of the men in the regiment. Nerves frayed. Sgt. Noble Sissle felt an 'air of tenseness that seemed to show that trouble brooded of a greater magnitude than we had witnessed in our section of the front.'" ((3), more)
". . . the real moment to make peace will be reached as soon as the totality of American reinforcements will have landed in Europe. The enemy will then be really anxious. You must make peace when he fears you most, and very often he fears you more before an offensive campaign than after it.Mr. Balfour found that this was a new way of envisaging the end of the war. In common with Mr. Lloyd George, he did not believe a military victory impossible on account of the weariness of Austria and Turkey . . ." ((4), more)
"This month of waiting, from June 15 to July 15, marked some of the greatest troop movements in the war. The British and French regrouped their reserves, and the American divisions were moved about in conformity as they formed part of these armies. The seasoned divisions were assembled back of the line between the two German salients, while the newly arrived divisions were rushed down to the quiet sectors in the Vosges mountains to relieve more experienced divisions for service on the Marne." ((5), more)
(1) Excerpt from an official German report on American prisoners of the Second US Infantry Division (5th, 6th, 9th, and 23rd Regiments) captured in the Bouresches sector between June 5 and 14, 1918.
The Great Events of the Great War in Seven Volumes by Charles F. Horne, Vol. VI, 1918, pp. 207–208, copyright © 1920 by The National Alumnia, publisher: The National Alumni, publication date: 1920
(2) German Commander Erich Ludendorff mounted four offensives on the Western Front between March 21 and June 14, 1918. They bent but did not break that Allies, and did not end the war with a German victory. There would be one more beginning in mid-July. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed between Russia and the Central Powers in March, 1918 following Russia's Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917.
Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos, page 347, copyright © 1962, 2013 by John Dos Passos, publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
(3) By July Germany had already mounted four offensives on the Western Front in 1918, the last ending on June 14. Through the following month The Allies expected the fifth offensive at any time. The 'New Yorkers' were Black soldiers in America's segregated army. The country's and the army's racism forbade Black and White soldiers serving together, and kept the former from combat. Our author, Stephen Harris, elsewhere writes (page 175), 'The men of the Fifteenth New York had been moved out of St. Nazaire as common laborers and into the French Fourth Army as combat infantrymen. On 12 March the regiment had been placed at the disposal of the French Sixteenth Division "for service as a combat unit." French Black and other colonial soldiers were an integral part of the French army. The influenza would return in the autumn in a more deadly form.
Hellfighters of Harlem by Stephen L. Harris, page 216, copyright © 2003 by Brassey's Inc., publisher: Brassey's Inc., publication date: 2003
(4) Excerpt from the War Diaries of Albert, King of the Belgians on his July 10, 1918 meeting with the British War Committee in London, a group that included Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour. The Committee wanted victory, expecting it in 1919. The King cannot have endeared himself to them when he declared, 'Those who refuse to show a certain good will towards avoiding a fifth year of war would bear a heavy responsibility in the annals of history. It would be criminal to attempt nothing to avoid the further bloodshed which would result.'
The War Diaries of Albert I King of the Belgians by Albert I, page 218, copyright © 1954, publisher: William Kimber
(5) By July Germany had already mounted four offensives on the Western Front in 1918, the last ending on June 14. Through the following month, the Allies expected the fifth offensive at any time. American Commander-in-Chief John J. Pershing had long resisted placing American units under foreign command, but had relented in the face of the success of Germany's offensives. The Vosges Mountains are in eastern France, in what had been a quiet sector after the Battle of the Frontiers in the beginning of the war.
The History of The A.E.F. by Shipley Thomas, pp. 102–103, copyright © 1920, by George H. Doran Company, publisher: George H. Doran Company, publication date: 1920
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