Originally Posted by
Mott the Hoople
Oh The US Army was pathetic back then. The Allies had every right to be skeptical and condescending about its capabilities. What my reading has indicated that what infuriated the Allies is that the US was more than willing to supply war materials, food, munitions and even money to help the Allies out but that's not what the Allies really needed. Both France and England had smooth running war industries supplied with raw materials and food stuffs from their Imperial Colonies. What the Allies needed desperately was manpower which the US had in abundance but was hesitant, and understandably so, to provide.
The US had no understanding of modern trench warfare tactics, no training infrastructure, no staff capabilities, few modern weapons and as an independent Army the US forces were in pathetic condition by the Spring of 1918 in spite of the US having declared war a year earlier on Germany. The US Army was indeed ineffective on its own. So that's where a compromise on amalgamation occurred. Instead of doing it at the unit level, which is what Britain and France wanted, the US thought such a piecemeal approach a bad idea and not in US National interest but they did compromise on amalgamation at the division and corp level instead. That way the US Army has a recognizable presence on the battle field, US Soldiers stayed under the command of US officers and the Allies got the American troops trained and into combat quicker, effectively and in time to repel the Spring Offensive of 1918 which, as I stated earlier, they probably would have lost without US Manpower.
By unconditional surrender I mean like how the Germans were forced to surrender without conditions after WWII. Though the terms of the Armistice were tough with loss of national territory and massive indemnities and were close to an unconditional surrender. The big mistake was that the terms of the Armistice did not force the German Government and Military to admit that they had been soundly defeated on the battle field and this eventually had catastrophic consequences.
The great lie that the NAZI's sold the German people on in their rise to power was that the German people had not been defeated on the field of battle but had been betrayed by their Generals and fifth column elements, like the Jews and Communists, etc,. To propagate the great lie they only had to point to armistice agreements in the Treaty of Versailles where the German delegates never admitted to military defeat.
We now know with 20:20 hindsight that was a catastrophic mistake and that the Allies should have required "Unconditional Surrender" from the Germans and forced them to admit military defeat, as the Germans has lost on the battlefield, and if the Allies continued fighting the Germans would have been forced to such a capitulation anyway.
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