First American troops in France

On 26 June 1917, in the port of Saint-Nazaire at the mouth of the Loire, the first soldiers of the United States Army who were to fight in France came ashore. They were men of the 16th and 28th Infantry Regiments of the division that Wilson had announced in May, called the First Expeditionary Division and later the 1st Infantry Division. According to the division’s history, the first to set foot on French soil was K Company of the 28th Regiment. Chronologies often give 25 June. On that day the first group of ships reached the French coast, but at the entrance to the port it had to wait for pilots to take it through the minefields. According to the US Navy, it arrived off Saint-Nazaire at about midnight, and the soldiers began going ashore the next day.

Crossing the Atlantic

The soldiers, many of them freshly brought back from the Mexican border and filled out with recruits, were taken to Hoboken and New York on 8 and 9 June. They marched to the piers at night, through side streets, so that no one would notice them. They had boarded the ships by 10 June, but sailed only at dawn on 14 June, in thick fog. The convoy was commanded by Rear-Admiral Albert Gleaves in the armoured cruiser Seattle. The ships sailed in four groups, from the fastest to the slowest, so that the gaps between them would widen on the way and the small port of Saint-Nazaire could receive them in turn. The first three groups carried about 14,000 soldiers and Marines, the fourth mainly supplies. They were escorted by cruisers, destroyers and armed yachts, and in the waters where submarines hunted they were taken over by the American destroyers from Queenstown. Near the coast French warships joined them.

The voyage was full of nerves. On the night of 22 June lookouts in the first group saw wakes in the phosphorescent water which they took for torpedoes. The auxiliary cruiser De Kalb opened fire, and the ships scattered according to their instructions. After the war Gleaves described this as a repulsed attack by German submarines, but the US Navy later established from German sources that there had been no submarine in the vicinity. Alarms in the other groups ended the same way. The last ships reached Saint-Nazaire on 2 July. Gleaves boasted that not a single man had been lost, and one officer joked that only one horse had died, and that was a mule. In fact, on the destroyer Preston, when a boat was being lowered to rescue a sailor washed overboard, the sea carried off two of its crew.

To mislead German agents, the American naval attaché in Paris ostentatiously prepared to receive the troops at Brest. Saint-Nazaire was a small and little-known port, with a shallow channel and strong currents.

At Saint-Nazaire

The port was not ready to receive so many ships at once. The 26th Infantry Regiment came ashore only on 27 June, and the 18th Regiment on 30 June, after twenty days aboard ship. Working side by side at the unloading were French dockers, black labourers brought over from America, German prisoners of war and also Marines, who unloaded their own transports themselves. The local people received the first units in silence, which surprised the Americans. According to Gleaves, women, children, old men and war invalids stood silently on the quays. Soon shyness gave way to enthusiasm, the mayor issued a proclamation thanking America, and French bands played in turn with American ones. The soldiers marched to a camp a few kilometres outside the town, where German prisoners had barely finished putting up the huts. The division was commanded by Major-General William Sibert, an engineer who had made his name building the Panama Canal. At the end of June the port and camp were visited by General John Pershing, who had arrived in France earlier.

The soldiers, many of whom had not even completed basic training, were not yet ready to fight. On 4 July a battalion of the 16th Regiment marched through Paris, and the rest of the division soon left for training in the area of Gondrecourt-le-Château in Lorraine. Above all, however, the arrival of the Americans mattered for morale. In launching unrestricted submarine warfare, the Germans had counted on the Entente collapsing before the American army could reach Europe. Now its first units were in France, and hundreds of thousands more were to follow them.