Army - Kicking Tires On Jltv

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terrain for effective fields of fire. Understanding
this, the reader should regard
the 3rd Division’s stand on the Marne
River on July 15, 1918, differently, at
least in terms of the criticisms leveled at
French units on the division’s flanks.
Lengel ably shows how U.S. commanders
exaggerated the importance of almost
every battle, claiming their units
fought at the point of main enemy effort,
against overwhelming odds and elite
German units, and without the considerable
support of their Allies, among other
factors. Again, the Champagne-Marne
defensive serves as a great example.
For 100 years, the 3rd Marne Division
proudly claimed to have saved Paris. It
didn’t. Lengel clearly documents that the
German attack on the Marne was a supporting
effort in a secondary area with no
intention of reaching Paris. This does not
denigrate the valor and sacrifice of the
brave men positioned along the Marne in
the middle of July, but it does place the
battle’s importance in proper perspective.
Lengel lays the responsibility for thousands
of needless deaths at the feet of inexperienced
and incompetent commanders
at all levels who failed to prevent
junior leaders and soldiers from using
outdated and fatal linear tactics in the
face of machine guns and massed artillery.
He discusses the age-old problem of
where on the battlefield commanders
should be to decisively affect the fight—
he takes the chain of command of the
2nd Division to task for this failure in
the battle for Belleau Wood, where commanders
made the wrong decision with
incomplete information while far removed
from the fight.
He also excoriates the 2nd Brigade,
1st Division’s commander, Brig. Gen.
Beaumont Buck, for “whizzing about the
battlefields, with no obvious purpose
other than to see what a real war looked
like” while his brigade was being decimated
in the attack south of Soissons,
July 18–22, 1918.
Lengel takes commanders at all levels
to task for not passing on their units’
lessons learned from early combat actions,
with new units repeating the mistakes
made by the “experienced” divisions
because they did not know better.
Brig. Gen. James Harbord, commanding
the 4th Brigade, 2nd Division, appears
to be criminally negligent in his failure to
pass on lessons learned by the Marines in
Belleau Wood to the 7th Infantry Regiment
that replaced them, condemning
that unit to failure and resulting in hundreds
of needless deaths.
This book contains many more critical
observations and new interpretations
that will challenge readers’ understanding
of the American Expeditionary
Forces’ performance in World War I.
Each point is well-argued and well-supported.
Commanders and units are exposed
to criticism, with some looking
better and some looking worse once seen
through Lengel’s lens.
Despite the many critical assessments
made in this book, the American soldiers
and Marines who fought in difficult conditions
under often-incompetent commanders
and with terrible logistic support
are judged to be brave men who
performed their duty as best they knew
how, and with an aggressive spirit and
abiding faith in the superiority of the
American way.
The French poilu and French colonial
troops are given the due they have
been denied by American historians for
nearly a century. The German landser is
shown to be no Superman, but is still
depicted as a brave and determined foe
who continued to fight with discipline
and cunning even as the cause appeared
to be lost.
I heartily recommend Lengel’s excellent
book to anyone interested in the
American Expeditionary Forces in World
War I, and the development of the U.S.
Army into a professional fighting force.
Lt. Col. Timothy R. Stoy, USA Ret., is the
historian for the 15th Infantry Regiment
Association and the Society of the 3rd Infantry
Division.
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70 ARMY ■ February 2016