The Doughboys

    The doughboys, or the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), led by General John Joseph Pershing, was one of the first American troops to fight in WWI. The US did not intervene into WWI until it was almost over. The US joined the allies against the central powers. Pershing saw how tired the British and French troops were from fighting Germany, that he created the doughboys to help them out. Pershing wanted the doughboys to be a private troop that could be independent of their Allies, so Pershing requested only the top best men from the American training school and also set up training camps in France to train new arrivals.

    The first major success' of the doughboys was in the Battle of St. Mihiel and the Battle of Argonne. In both of these battles, the US and France were able to recover more than two hundred square miles from Germany. These attacks were the largest military operations ever undertaken by United States armed forces. By the time Germany surrendered, the AEF was known as one of the best trained and combat-tested armies in the world. Also, before the AEF had mobilized to Europe, Pershing had underestimated the size of the AEF, so the US had to come up with new strategies for transporting lots of people somewhere very fast. They successful transported thousands of people and through this, they were able to discover new ways of organizing the moving of hundreds of thousands of miles of supplies in a timely manner.