Over There

Our last-minute intervention in this European war would save the Allies in their hour of need and change forever the way Americans saw their country and the world. When the United States finally declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, the British and French armies were at a point of total exhaustion; within two weeks the French troops had mutinied, leaving the Western Front practically undefended. In the same month, Lenin arrived in Moscow on the heels of the Russian Revolution and vowed to make peace with Germany. In the course of a few months the American army would grow from 200,000 ill-equipped and untrained men to over one million, but it was longer still before the French and British commanders took General Pershing and his recruits seriously. Byron Farwell's informed and colorful narrative covers all phases of the American effort, from the home front, where the war introduced rapid technical and social changes that were difficult to absorb, to the desperate encounters in the front lines of Belleau Wood and the St. Mihiel salient, where American troops proved their valor and altered the course of the war. The author, whose previous books include Stonewall Jackson and Queen Victoria's Little Wars, paints a vivid and memorable picture of the intense national experience whereby America came of age in the twentieth century.