May 2012

Doughboys in France and First American Combat Deaths

I. Pershing and the First American Soldiers in France

Magazine Illustration, Americans Arrive in France [Image Courtesy of World War One Historical Association]

When the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, the U. S. Army numbered only about 125,000 men. By the time the war ended in November 1918, about four million men had served in the U. S. Army, another 800,000 in the Coast Guard, Marines, and Navy. Of the four million in the U. S. Army, half, known as the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), were deployed to France under the command of General John J. Pershing. At two million men, the American Expeditionary Force was comparable in size to the British army (1.8 million) and French army (2.2 million) fighting in France.¹

Prior to World War I the United States had never sent soldiers abroad to defend foreign soil. The vanguard of those two million men—General John Pershing and about two hundred soldiers and civilian staff members—arrived at Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, on June 13, 1917. They were the first American soldiers ever to be sent to continental Europe. A week earlier they had been the first to land in England. On June 26, 1917, about two weeks after arriving in France, Pershing greeted about 14,000 men of the First Division as they disembarked at Saint-Nazaire, France. To welcome the arrival of this first sizable group of the AEF in France, a parade took place in Paris on July 4, Pershing and a battalion of the First Division's 16th Infantry Regiment participating. On that day Pershing and his staff visited the tomb of the Marquis de Lafayette, the French aristocrat whose voluntary service in General George Washington's Continental Army heralded the Franco-American Alliance during the American War of Independence. Pershing spoke of the American mission to "battle and to vanquish for the liberty of the world."² Lt. Col. Charles Stanton, a Quartermaster officer who was fluent in French, delivered a speech implying an American obligation to repay an old debt when he proudly proclaimed, "Lafayette, nous voilà" ["Lafayette, we are here"].

II. "Teddies" become "Doughboys"

Gerneral John Pershing and Staff at Tomb of Lafayette    [Photo Courtesy of Library of Congress]

Shouts of "Vive les Teddies" welcomed the American soldiers who had come to help save France, but Pershing did not like the sobriquet, and an American correspondent's proposal that they be called "Sammies" did not gain support among American soldiers.³ Among the proposals resulting from First Division Commander Major General William Sibert's call for suggestions were "Yank," "Yankee," "Johnny Yank," and "Doughboy." The suggestion of "doughboy" took hold, a name of uncertain meaning, one theory being that the name came from one soldier who facetiously asked another if the caked white mud on his boots was the result of walking in dough.⁴

III. First American Combat and First American
                         Combat Deaths

Following four months of training on French soil, units of the First Division took up a position near Nancy, France. There on October 21, 1917, Cpl. Robert Bralet of the Sixth Artillery fired a 75mm gun at a German position. That was the first shot fired by an American in the Great War.

On the night of November 2-3, 1917, a German raid on an American trench position near Bathelémont-les-Bauzemont resulted in the deaths of three American soldiers of Company F, 16th Infantry, First Division. Pvt. Thomas Enright of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, Cpl. James Gresham of Evansville, Indiana, and Pvt. Merle Hay of Glidden, Iowa were the first Americans to die in combat in the Great War. They were buried on November 4 where they were killed, and, in their memory, the French government later erected a monument at the site. In 1921, three years after the war ended, they were disinterred and brought to the United States for burial in their hometowns. Enright was buried at St. Mary Cemetery in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Burial of First Three American Doughboys Killed in Action [Photo Courtesy of State Historical Society of Iowa]

Gresham was buried in Locust Hill Cemetery in Evansville, Indiana. Hay was buried in West Lawn Cemetery, later renamed Merle Hay Memorial Cemetery, in Glidden, Iowa.

By November 1918 when the war ended, about 116,000 Americans had given their lives. Their sacrifice and the commitment of the 4.7 million Americans who served in the Armed Forces in those years helped bring the war to an end. American participation in the war arguably doomed the Central Powers. The British military historian John Keegan proposes, "Rare are the times in a great war when the fortunes of one side or the other are transformed by the sudden accretion of a disequilibrating reinforcement. . . . President Wilson's decision to declare war on Germany and its allies had brought such an accretion to the Allied side."⁵
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      ¹Hew Strachan, The First World War (New York City: Viking, 2003), p. 310.
      ²Heywood Brown, The A. E. F. with General Pershing and the American Forces (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1919), p. 35: http://archive.org.
      ³Ibid., pp. 34 and 38-39.
      ⁴Ibid., pp. 39-40.
      ⁵John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 373.