Pershing's Crusaders: The American Soldier in World War I (Modern War Studies)

The Great War caught a generation of American soldiers at a turning point in the nation’s history. At the moment of the Republic’s emergence as a key player on the world stage, these were the first Americans to endure mass machine warfare, and the first to come into close contact with foreign peoples and cultures in large numbers. What was it like, Richard S. Faulkner asks, to be one of these foot soldiers at the dawn of the American century? How did the doughboy experience the rigors of training and military life, interact with different cultures, and endure the shock and chaos of combat? The answer can be found in Pershing’s Crusaders, the most comprehensive, and intimate, account ever given of the day-to-day lives and attitudes of the nearly 4.2 million American soldiers mobilized for service in World War I.

Pershing’s Crusaders offers a clear, close-up picture of the doughboys in all of their vibrant diversity, shared purpose, and unmistakably American character. It encompasses an array of subjects from the food they ate, the clothes they wore, their view of the Allied and German soldiers and civilians they encountered, their sexual and spiritual lives, their reasons for serving, and how they lived and fought, to what they thought about their service along every step of the way. Faulkner’s vast yet finely detailed portrait draws upon a wealth of sources—thousands of soldiers’ letters and diaries, surveys and memoirs, and a host of period documents and reports generated by various staff agencies of the American Expeditionary Forces. Animated by the voices of soldiers and civilians in the midst of unprecedented events, these primary sources afford an immediacy rarely found in historical records. Pershing’s Crusaders is, finally, a work that uniquely and vividly captures the reality of the American soldier in WWI for all time.

• My Fellow Soldiers: General John Pershing and the Americans Who Helped Win the Great War
• Back Over There: One American Time-Traveler, 100 Years Since the Great War, 500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many Trenches, Shells, Legends and Ghosts to Count
• Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing's Warriors Came of Age to Defeat the German Army in World War I
• The World Remade: America in World War I
• With Their Bare Hands: General Pershing, the 79th Division, and the battle for Montfaucon
• The School of Hard Knocks: Combat Leadership in the American Expeditionary Forces (C. A. Brannen Series)
• First Over There: The Attack on Cantigny, America's First Battle of World War I
• Thunder in the Argonne: A New History of America's Greatest Battle (Battles and Campaigns Series)
• Never in Finer Company: The Men of the Great War's Lost Battalion
• Preparing for War: The Emergence of the Modern U.S. Army, 1815–1917