First Over There

On October 21, 1917, the first Americans to see action on the front lines of WWI entered the front lines at Sommervillier under French command. From the article:

"On the foggy morning of June 14, 1917, 12 steel-gray transports filled with four regiments of American soldiers weighed anchor at their berth in Hoboken, N.J., and sailed for France. It had been 69 days since the United States entered the world war, answering President Woodrow Wilson’s call to make the world “safe for democracy.” In the weeks since the April 6 war declaration, British and French delegations had come to personally ask Wilson for an immediate U.S. presence on the front, and these dozen transports carried Wilson’s direct answer: America’s first combat troops to voyage “over there.”

The transports were escorted by destroyers for a two-week voyage across the U-boat patrolled Atlantic. They carried the U.S. First Expeditionary Division, composed of four infantry regiments hand-picked by the newly promoted commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, Gen. John Pershing. While a national draft was still being debated by lawmakers, the ranks of this first contingent were Regular Army – veterans of the recent “punitive expedition” for Pancho Villa in Mexico, a few who had fought in the Philippines against the Moro rebels, and a handful who had seen combat in the Spanish-American War. Augmented by a few thousand young men who had flooded enlistment offices in the previous two months, the division infantry numbered more than 12,000 soldiers – “doughboys,” as they were affectionately called – and represented each of the 48 states.

The transports berthed at Saint-Nazaire, France, and the troops disembarked. Pershing, who with his staff had arrived two weeks before, was present to greet them. The second soldier down the gangplanks, following the division commander, was the newly appointed division operations officer, 36-year-old Capt. George C. Marshall. The man who would one day lead the U.S. Army through a second world war saluted and shook hands with the man who was about to lead the AEF through the first. And as the troops formed up on the waterfront, the First Expeditionary Division – soon to earn the title the “Fighting First” and destined to be called the “Big Red One” – stood as one for the first time. Of the more than 2 million men the United States would send to Europe before the war’s end, these were the first, and their division became the first face of American military might on the global stage.



BY MID-JULY, as a blindfolded War Secretary Newton Baker pulled the first registration number from a jar in Washington, D.C., to begin the national draft, across the Atlantic the soldiers of the 1st Division began their training on the northern French plains. In dummy trenches and mock-up enemy lines on drill grounds near Gondrecourt, the green American infantry trained under their veteran French counterparts. In addition to sharpening their marksmanship with their own Springfield rifles and Colt .45s, doughboys learned how to operate and employ the Hotchkiss machine gun for suppressive and destructive fire, and how to use the Chauchat automatic rifle to provide covering fire. They learned the noise and light discipline required to hold front-line trenches and go on night patrol through no man’s land, how to effectively use grenades and how to launch raids on enemy trenches.

In late October, the division moved up into front-line trenches near Sommerviller under French command. Three field artillery regiments, which had arrived in August and trained under French gunners on 75 mm and 155 mm guns, joined the four infantry regiments to work for the first time as a combined-arms division. And even though 1st Division soldiers were restricted entirely to defensive action, under orders to not go beyond their own barbed wire, the sector immersed them in the realities of trench life, the frustrating helplessness of riding out occasional artillery bombardments and the ever-present danger of enemy snipers.

With lines unmoved since being originally clawed out in the fighting of late fall 1914, Sommerviller was a relatively quiet sector. But for the German units holding the lines across no man’s land, the propaganda value of inflicting casualties on – or better yet, capturing – American troops proved too great, and in the early morning hours of Nov. 3, 1917, more than 300 German soldiers crossed no man’s land behind the cover of an artillery barrage. The attackers swarmed a short stretch of trench held by a single platoon of the 16th Infantry Regiment, capturing 11 and killing three – the first Americans killed in front-line combat in a world war.

Eleven more were killed and three dozen wounded by the time the 1st Division left the sector in late November. And while the doughboys of three newly arrived American divisions began their own training, the troops of the 1st – now veterans of the front lines – moved to the rear for more training as their ranks swelled with fresh recruits and draftees."