The American Expeditionary Forces (Part I)
The American Expeditionary Forces (Part I)
Battalion: An Organizational Study of United States Infantry
The estate of the late John Sayen has graciously given the Tactical Notebook permission to serialize his study of the organizational evolution of American infantry battalions. The author’s preface and the immediately preceding section of this book may be found via the following links:
The 1917 infantry regiment was the final development of the reorganizations that began in 1898 and it remained in use until 1920 by Army units serving outside of Western Europe or Russia. However, both the War Department and the Army General Staff overwhelmingly agreed that even at maximum strength, this regiment was woefully lacking in both the size and the firepower needed on a European battlefield. The American Expeditionary Force (AEF) that was soon to be sent to France would need an entirely different organization.[1]
However, our new British and French allies did not share the War Department’s opinion. They knew that the United States had no army fit for a European War, yet they needed American help immediately. They wanted Americans to help them bolster their own depleted armies by taking over rear area support functions to free more of their own men for front line duty. Americans that did enter combat would do so as individual replacements, or as units not exceeding regimental size, which could fill out existing Anglo-French formations. Large units like divisions were not desired.
The British and French assumed rightly that the Americans possessed very few officers able to competently command large and complex formations. Much of the Americans’ combat value could be wasted through the inexperience and ineptitude of their senior leaders, should the latter receive combat commands. Even worse, a large American army might just be enough to end the war in favor of the Allies and enable the United States to dictate the peace.
However, the British and French should have realized that they were asking for the politically impossible. With no distinctly American army in France, serving under its own officers in its own sector, the position of the United States relative to Britain or France in any postwar peace negotiations would be gravely weakened. Also, the American public would never allow its sons to go overseas to fight and die under foreign officers. Finally, there was the more practical problem of actually integrating Americans into foreign organizations in the face of numerous cultural, institutional, and (in the case of the French) language barriers.[2]
Major General John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing, the designated commander of the AEF, was a strong willed, and politically astute cavalryman whose military experience, like that of most American officers, lay mostly in small scale “irregular” warfare against Filipino and Mexican insurgents. However, he needed little encouragement from the Woodrow Wilson administration to resist Anglo-French plans to graft Americans into their own forces. While allowing a few minor concessions, Pershing would ensure that most Americans who served in France did so under AEF command.[3]
However, to allay fears that a separate American army could not be ready soon enough to be of use to the Allies, it was important that some sort of combat division be assembled and sent overseas immediately. To this end, the War Department, through the General Staff, hastily drew up a provisional division and published its organization tables in July 1917. The new division would have a “square” configuration. This meant that its infantry would consist of four regiments, grouped under two brigade headquarters. This had been the standard configuration for French and German divisions in 1914. However, by 1917, most French and German divisions had converted to a “triangular” configuration based on three infantry regiments. Manpower per division had been cut to about 14,000 from a 1914 norm of 18,000.
The War Department’s decision to use the square organization was not a flat rejection of European experience. While the triangular division was recognized as easier to transport and maneuver, the square division was seen as having more staying power and being better able to break through the fortified trench lines that dominated the war in France. Also, larger divisions would mean fewer high-level commands to fill from the Army’s very short supply of experienced senior leaders. Finally, the French had told the War Department that they had switched to triangular divisions mainly to save manpower but they still preferred square divisions.
The British, by contrast, used a unique division structure based on three infantry brigades with four battalions each. This produced the configuration of a triangular division with the infantry strength of a square one. However, the War Department never gave this much more radical solution (that would also have required a dramatic regimental-level reorganization) any serious consideration. Instead, it built its 1st Expeditionary Division, soon to become the AEF 1st Division, as a French-style square division. The 16th, 18th, 26th, and 28th Infantry Regiments, all plucked at random from the Mexican border and hastily fleshed out to their new authorized strengths, would constitute the new division’s infantry.
By the time they left for France, 90% of their enlisted men were raw recruits. With artillery and other support troops the new division counted some 17,000 officers and men. All duly boarded troopships and, together with the 2,700-man Fifth Marine Regiment embarked in the escorting warships, departed for France.[4]
As it worked out the organization of the infantry regiments of this new division the General Staff had been particularly impressed by reports from France about how machineguns were dominating infantry combat. Therefore, its initial approach to structuring the AEF infantry focused on ensuring that there would be enough machineguns. It noted that French and German infantry regiments now included one machinegun company per infantry battalion. In the case of the French, this was accomplished by substituting a machinegun company for one of the four rifle companies in each infantry battalion.
In an effort to compensate for the resulting 25% reduction in rifle strength, the French bolstered the firepower of their remaining rifle companies with Chauchat M1915 automatic rifles. Unlike machineguns, the lighter Chauchats did not require a solid mount such as a tripod but could be supported by a soldier’s own heft.
The British, by contrast, allowed only four machinegun companies for an entire division. However, these machinegun companies belonged to a corps of specialists similar to what John Henry Parker, by now a lieutenant colonel, had advocated for the American Army. Each was about one third larger than a German or French machinegun company and was supplemented by large numbers of Lewis machineguns organic to the infantry battalions. Lewis guns, while considered to be automatic rifles like the Chauchats, were heavier, more reliable, and offered better firepower than the French weapons. However, they were still inferior in effective range, accuracy, and sustained rate of fire to full sized machineguns.
Based on this information, the War Department in July decreed that three of the four companies in each of an AEF infantry regiment’s three battalions would be rifle companies of four officers and 200 men each. The fourth company would be a machinegun company with four officers and 148 men. This would give the regiment an adequate number of automatic weapons and, even after the regimental supply company (four officers and 110 men) and headquarters and headquarters company (286 officers and men) were added, it would not exceed the 15-company limit that Congress had mandated for an infantry regiment.[5]
Further change would await the results of a fact-finding board made up of representatives from the cavalry, infantry, field artillery, quartermaster corps, and general staff and chaired, oddly enough, by its senior quartermaster representative, a Colonel Chauncey Baker. The Baker Board sailed for Europe in late May of 1917 and spent six weeks touring France and England to collect as much information as possible on the optimal combat organization for the AEF. The Baker Board’s findings received close scrutiny from AEF commander Pershing, who now had broad authority from the War Department to organize the AEF as he saw fit and to determine its doctrine.
With regard to the infantry, the Baker Board’s recommendations remained inconclusive as to the organization of divisions and larger units because British and French opinion was divided on the issue. The Board recommended that the square division structure of July 1917 be retained but with its size increased to 25,500. It would have 12 infantry battalions based on a rifle company of six officers and 250 men. This rifle company would be larger than either a British rifle company of six officers and 221 men or a French company of four officers and 194 men, although all three were based on a similar structure of four rifle platoons.[6]
The AEF company’s extra manpower would better enable it to absorb heavy casualties and then rebuild itself afterwards. The Board recommended replacing each battalion’s machinegun company with a fourth rifle company. Four companies would enable a battalion to put two companies on line and still have two more in reserve with which to relieve them. A machinegun company would still be necessary but the Board believed that such a unit could be habitually attached to the battalion from another organization. The regiment itself would get its old machinegun company back and this could support one battalion.
Other machinegun companies could come from a separate three-company machinegun battalion assigned to each infantry brigade but this would still leave one infantry battalion per brigade without machineguns. A five-company division level machinegun battalion would have to contribute additional companies to make good this deficiency. One company in the division-level battalion would employ armored cars or motorized machineguns and act as a mobile firepower reserve. The undue complexity of this three-tiered system promised unpleasant consequences in combat. Nevertheless, in August 1917, the War Department adopted a 27,000-man division that incorporated these Baker Board recommendations.[7]
General Pershing soon aired his own views about how AEF divisions should be structured. He believed that the situation on the Western Front could only be resolved by a large and well trained force of riflemen that could drive the Germans from their entrenchments and then defeat them in open combat. He believed that the British and French were war weary and weakened by casualties and, though conditioned to the tactics of trench warfare, had lost the aggressive spirit, which he had determined that the American Army must have. Nevertheless, Pershing rejected the greater mobility and flexibility of the triangular division and opted for a version of the Baker Board’s square division (with a further boost in manpower) even though it was designed for precisely the battle of attrition, which Pershing in his own writings deplored. Pershing reasoned that the organizational redundancy of a square division, which could bring two regiments into action and still have two more in reserve, best suited it for battering its way through the German defenses, which were invariably fortified in great depth.[8]
Pershing retained the 250-man rifle companies recommended by the Baker Board although he cut the size of their headquarters in order to put more men in the rifle platoons. The French rifle company of September 1916, which the Baker Board had endorsed, became the model for the AEF company. The French company had a headquarters platoon with the captain and 25 men and four rifle platoons with a platoon leader and 42 men in each. Lieutenants led the first three rifle platoons but the fourth was always reserved for the company’s most senior sergeant.
Tactically, a rifle platoon broke down into two half platoons led by sergeants. The first half platoon had one squad of eight grenadiers and another with a leader (all squad leaders were corporals) and two three-man automatic rifle teams. The second half platoon had two squads of 12 and 13 voltigeurs (riflemen), each, respectively. Two men per squad had grenade launchers on their rifles while another man carried extra grenades. The first half platoon provided a base of fire while the second maneuvered. Unfortunately, this platoon organization proved to be awkward and inflexible and in September 1917 the French discarded it in favor of two identical half platoons, each with two squads of seven (minimum) or nine (maximum) men each.[9] One squad had grenadiers-voltigeurs armed with rifles and hand grenades. The other had half its men serving an automatic rifle while the rest used rifle grenade launchers. Each half platoon could now fire and maneuver within itself and the overall organization became much simpler and more adaptable.[10]
Unfortunately, the AEF rifle companies incorporated few of the benefits of the French 1917 reorganization and perpetuated many of the mistakes of 1916. Each company would consist (see Appendix 2.2) of a headquarters and four platoons. As in the French Army, a company headquarters would have forward and rear echelons. The former was known as the “captain’s group” and included, besides the captain himself and the first sergeant, the messengers, signalers, and buglers (who served as messengers in combat) needed to control the company tactically.
The rear echelon, or “service group” had the cooks, mechanics, supply sergeant, and clerk who took care of the company’s administration and logistics. Men detached from the rifle platoons to act as a cadre for rebuilding the company in the event of heavy casualties might also be attached to the service group. In an AEF company the company executive officer commanded the service group whereas, in the French army, the group would be under the company’s second most senior sergeant (after the fourth rifle platoon leader). Neither the French nor German armies used executive officers at company, battalion, or even regimental level. They believed that a first sergeant or senior platoon leader could easily carry out executive officer functions as additional duties.
Even in the United States Army prior to 1917, executive officers had only been used in the case of regiments and that was more the result of tradition than practical necessity. Nevertheless, the Baker Board, based on British advice, had recommended an executive officer for each rifle and machinegun company. Majors (or senior captains) commanded British rifle companies. Junior captains served as executive officers and lieutenants commanded platoons. This was a product of the reorganization of the eight-company pre-war British battalion into the four-company wartime organization. The four senior pre-war company commanders became majors and took over the new double-sized wartime companies. The junior pre-war company commanders became their executive officers. They took care of administrative and logistical matters and took charge of their companies during the many occasions on which the actual company commander was absent. Like his American counterpart, the British company executive officer also commanded the cadre from which his company might be rebuilt, should it suffer heavy losses in combat.[11]
In an AEF company, each rifle platoon would have a headquarters and four sections. The sections were numbered 1 through 16 throughout the company just as the old rifle squads had been. The sections were of four different types, each rifle platoon getting one of each. The hand bomber section was supposed to be composed of three four-man teams specially trained in throwing hand grenades. Its men were to be equivalent to the French grenadiers. It was called a bomber section because the British and American armies were using the term “bomb” to refer to hand grenades while the term “grenade” applied only to rifle-launched grenades. The rifle grenadier section was supposed to form three three-man teams. The rifle and automatic rifle sections each had two squads. The standard automatic rifle was the French Chauchat though after September 1918 a few lucky units received Browning Automatic Rifles (BAR). The AEF regiments that operated with the British received Lewis guns in lieu of Chauchats.
The AEF rifle platoon’s internal organization was better suited for facilitating training than for tactical use. For battle, a lieutenant was expected to task organize his platoon into as many as seven squads of six-to-eight men each and then to group these squads into two half platoons. This was but a variation on the Uptonian system used to organize pre-war and non-AEF (May 1917) rifle companies for combat. Though the exact composition and distribution of the squads in an AEF platoon was left up to the platoon leader, it was normal to base the two half-platoons on the rifle and automatic rifle sections. Their sergeant section leaders would become the half-platoon leaders and they would cross-attach squads between themselves so that each would have one rifle squad and one automatic rifle squad.
A full-strength rifle platoon could build three additional squads by combining each of the three four-man teams in the hand bomber section with a three-man team from the rifle grenadier section. For its eighth man, each of these squads could use one of the messengers from platoon headquarters. Though eight men was still the standard squad size, the two automatic rifle squads would only get their original seven. Instructions included in the organization tables specified that only one team per automatic rifle squad would carry its automatic rifle except in broken terrain where the half-platoon might separate into two or more parts. The other team would have rifles only. However, combat experience soon taught most regiments to dispense with any such voluntary firepower reductions and to always employ every serviceable automatic rifle they possessed.
While experienced officers might have been able to handle these rather complex “build it yourself” platoons, they must have been utterly bewildering to the barely trained temporary second lieutenants that commanded most of them. Dealing with “shrinkage” created by casualties must have been especially vexing since the “textbook” methods of organizing a platoon which the lieutenants had learned in training could seldom be applied in combat. It was not enough to simply memorize task organization. One had to actually understand it. Failures of the replacement system (to be discussed below) caused rifle companies to typically be manned (exclusive of officers) at about 200 men each (or about 45 per rifle platoon) in mid-1918.
By late October, this average had fallen to 178 (or about 40 per platoon). With experience a number of basic principles to guide officers in how to organize their units in the face of manpower shortages, evolved. First, the automatic rifle squads, being the heart of the platoon’s firepower, were always maintained at full strength, if at all possible. Second, since the “hand bombers” seldom achieved any special expertise with the hand grenade, they could serve as extra riflemen to fill gaps in other sections. Third, the rifle grenadier section could reorganize as two teams of three grenadiers and one carrier each. Adding four riflemen to each team would produce two squads. Any remaining riflemen could then form additional squads. Each half platoon could then have an automatic rifle squad, a rifle and rifle grenadier squad, and (hopefully) a rifle squad.[12]
Editor’s Note: The format of the many appendices to this work fit poorly with Substack. For that reason, I have placed them on a PDF file that can be found at Military Learning Library, a website that I maintain.
[1] Ibid pp. 74-75
[2] Leonard L. Lerwill et al, The Personnel Replacement System in the United States Army (Washington DC, USA Center for Military History 1988, first published 1954) pp. 169-171.
[3] The one major exception was the integration of four regiments of the all-Black 93rd AEF Division into three French infantry divisions.
[4] Weigley pp. 355-356; Armstrong p 189; Buckner pp. 16-17; Allen R. Millett, The General, Robert L. Bullard and Officership in the United States Army 1881-1925 (Westport Connecticut, The Greenwood Press 1975) pp. 304-312; See also David F. Trask, The AEF and Coalition Warmaking, 1917-1918 (1993 Lawrence Kansas, the University Press of Kansas) p 19. For some additional reasons why the War Department preferred to take its advice from the French, see the beginning of the next chapter.
[5] US War Department, The United States Army in the World War Vol 1, Organization, pp. 117-118; Virgil Ney, Evolution of the US Army Division 1939-1968 (Fort Belvoir Virginia, US Army Combat Development Command 1969) pp. 18-24.
[6] Subtracting the men normally absent from a British company left only about five officers and 160-180 men. See M. A. Ramsey, Command and Cohesion, The Citizen Soldier and Minor Tactics in the British Army, 1870-1918 (Westport CT, Praeger 2002) pp. 184-187.
[7] US War Department, The United States Army in the World War Vol 1, Organization, pp. 55, 74, 75, 95, & 121-123; For British companies see US National Archives Record Group 165 Box 638 Ellsdran File 2017-153 for description of British Infantry Division in 1918. See also John A. English, A Perspective on Infantry (New York, Praeger 1981) pp. 8-9 and M. A. Ramsay, Command and Cohesion, The Citizen Soldier and Minor Tactics in the British Army 1870-1918 (Westport CT, Praeger Publishing 2002) pp. 77, 97 & 184-87. For the French organization see Pierre Guinard et al, Inventaire Sommaire des Archives de la Guerre, Série N 1872-1919 Introduction: Organisation de L’Armee Francaise (Troyes, État-Major de L’Armee de Terre Service Historique 1975) pp. 123-131.
[8] James W. Rainey, “Ambivalent Warfare The Tactical Doctrine of World War I” Parameters September 1983
[9] A few months later the British also reorganized their rifle platoons to discard their specialized rifle, hand bomber, rifle grenade, and machinegun squads (called sections) in favor of three uniformly organized rifle squads (sections) of an NCO and six to nine men each and a Lewis machinegun section of an NCO and two five-man gun teams. See M. A. Ramsey, Command and Cohesion, Ibid.
[10] See Guinard op cit; and Manual of the Chief of Platoon of Infantry (Translation from the French edition of January 1917, HQ AEF August 1917) pp. 27-38.
[11] Ibid; and see F. I. Maxse “Battalion Organization” Journal of the Royal United Service Institute Volume, January 1912
[12] US War Department, The United States Army in the World War Vol 1, Organization, p 347; Manual of the Chief of Platoon of Infantry, pp. 27-38; and Henry H. Burdick “Development of the Half-Platoon as an Elementary Unit” Infantry Journal, April 1919.