American division for France

On 19 May 1917 American newspapers published a statement by President Woodrow Wilson, issued late the previous evening, immediately after he signed the conscription act. In it Wilson refused Theodore Roosevelt permission to raise volunteer divisions, but at the same time announced that an expeditionary force of approximately one division of regular troops under the command of Major General John Pershing would sail for France “as early as practicable”. The same day the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, announced that about 2,600 Marines would also go with the army. It was the first official announcement that the United States would fight not only with money and ships but also on land in Europe. According to the New York Times Current History review, the news caused great excitement in America and was received with immense relief in France and Britain.

Joffre’s request

It was above all Marshal Joseph Joffre who pressed for troops to be sent at once, before a great conscript army had been raised. He had arrived in America at the end of April with the French mission of the former prime minister René Viviani. At a meeting with journalists in Washington he said that it was of “the highest importance” that the American flag should be seen in France as soon as possible, because then everyone would feel that America was already there. France had just suffered the bloody failure of General Nivelle’s April offensive and needed proof that help was really coming. Joffre argued to the Americans that one division would not change the military situation, but it would raise the spirits of the soldiers and the population, and would also become the nucleus of a future independent American army, which would have to be trained in France itself.

The American General Staff was reluctant. The regular army was small, and its experienced NCOs and officers were to train hundreds of thousands of conscript recruits. Sending the best regiments overseas weakened that cadre. At the beginning of May, however, Wilson and the Secretary of War, Newton Baker, accepted Joffre’s request. The New York Brooklyn Eagle wrote that Pershing’s expedition was also an answer to the campaign of Roosevelt, who for months had been demanding that America show itself at the front immediately. Now France was getting American soldiers, but without Roosevelt.

The first division

The division was allotted four infantry regiments, the 16th, 18th, 26th and 28th, most of them recently brought back from the Mexican border, together with auxiliary units and later also artillery regiments. Their ranks were filled up with recruits, so that the companies contained many soldiers with no training at all. Formally the unit, named the 1st Expeditionary Division, was created at the end of May and organised on 8 June, under the command of General William Sibert. It later received the name 1st Infantry Division and the nickname “Big Red One”. Pershing himself sailed for Europe with his staff at the end of May to prepare for the arrival of the troops.

The first transports carrying the division and a regiment of Marines left New York and Hoboken on 14 June under the escort of warships, and on 26 June the soldiers began to come ashore at Saint-Nazaire. On 4 July, Independence Day, the 2nd Battalion of the 16th Infantry Regiment marched through Paris amid cheering crowds. At the grave of Lafayette, Colonel Charles Stanton of Pershing’s staff spoke the famous words “Lafayette, we are here”, later attributed to Pershing himself. For the following months the division trained under French supervision, and only in the autumn did it first enter a quiet sector of the front.