Overview
Along with the other divisions of the AEF, the 79th’s training was well-intentioned but misguided. The 79th would get some basic instruction with rifles, hand grenades, machine guns, gas and artillery (the division only had 4 outdated guns for the entire artillery brigade to train with)[1], but much of their training would focus on the doctrine that General Pershing, commander of the AEF, had developed for the army, which he dubbed “open warfare”.[2]
Pershing's Open Warfare
Open warfare was Pershing’s solution to the stalemate of the Western Front, except it lacked insight from much of the knowledge and experience that the European powers had gained over the course of the war, and was fairly ambiguous and poorly defined. Despite Pershing himself (like Kuhn) having witnessed the Japanese infantry get chewed apart by machine guns during the Russo-Japanese War, Japan’s eventual success led him to believe that the infantryman still maintained supremacy on the battlefield. Thus, his doctrine was focused around maneuverable infantry formations that emphasized individual initiative and fire superiority via rifle marksmanship, rather than the strict coordination with and heavy use of artillery, tanks, and other supporting arms.*
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General Pershing (Courtesy of Wikipedia)
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Pershing personally detested trench warfare, believing that it robbed the individual soldier of initiative and aggressiveness (ironically he was right, but not in the way he thought). With open warfare, Pershing hoped to turn the war back into one of rapid maneuver using the aggressiveness, initiative and the firepower of the infantry: a strategy of annihilation in an attrition-based conflict.[3] His view was supported by various US Army manuals, including the 1911 Infantry Drill regulations which stated that “Machine guns must be considered as weapons of emergency,” rather than the highly effective and versatile killing machines they were.[4]
Training Maneuvers (Courtesy of Gene Fax)
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Despite artillery causing around 60% of all casualties during the war, the entire combat role of artillery took up only the first sentence of American artillery regulations.[5] Unsurprisingly, tanks and aircraft were ignored as well, as the US didn’t have any tanks of its own and barely any aircraft, despite having pioneered flight technology 15 years earlier. The disastrous consequences of these deficiencies would be an almost total lack of communication between the infantry and its supporting arms, which led to many unnecessary American casualties.
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Contradictory Training
There was a major problem in Pershing's thought process: to allow the AEF to use his ambiguous open warfare doctrine, returning the war to its original state of annihilation and maneuver, the stalemate of the trenches first had to be broken. As a result, the men of the AEF ended up receiving a mix of partial training on both trench and open warfare tactics rather than full training on one or the other (if one could call the small amount of time the AEF's divisions were given "full"). Not only were the men partially trained in two separate doctrines, but many of the core principles of the two contradicted each other, with Pershing's open warfare focusing on maneuver and firepower of the infantry and trench warfare focusing on well-timed artillery coordination and relatively linear assault plans.[6]
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Officer Cadets Practicing with Bayonets at Plattsburg Training Camps (Courtesy of S.B. Butler's AEF Scrapbook)
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This mess of contradictory doctrine meant that the flurry of manuals that the army produced during its build-up proved extremely difficult for officers to understand and apply to training. Commenting on the manuals, Colonel CR Howland of the 343rd Infantry Regiment stated that "The effect on the mind... was more or less confusing, with the result that at the present time the infantryman does not exactly know what regulations in respect of drill are in force over him."[7]
Inexperienced Commanders
The combined arms coordination issue was made worse by the lack of experience American senior officers had with maneuvering division- and corps-sized formations. Overall, there were very few exercises conducted on this scale, and in the case of the 79th there were none. When the division arrived at its training site in France on July 30th, 1918 they found there simply wasn’t enough room for such exercises. The officers did a number of division-scale map drills, but these didn’t involve the enlisted men.[8] Pershing attempted to alleviate the inexperience of his commanders by establishing numerous schools, including 13 at the Army level and numerous others at both the corps and divisional levels, but this had the effect of drawing officers out of their units, often at highly inopportune times. In the case of the 79th, on the eve of the beginning of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive many of its officers were sent off to these various schools which provided them with training of limited value in exchange for damaging the 79th's unit cohesion.[9]
Reassignments
The rate at which the US Army was expanding also created a high demand for trained soldiers who were able to educate new recruits. Because of this the 79th was gutted of its most well-trained personnel, meaning that when it was finally shipped to France, more than half of the 985 officers and 24,713 enlisted men had joined the division that same month. Many of the men that were reassigned, such as 2nd Lieutenant Albert H. Allison, never even made it to France and found themselves serving at various training camps across the U.S.[10]
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African American Recruits Training at Camp Meade (Courtesy of Gene Fax)
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In total, the 79th had around 95,000 men cycle through its ranks while at Camp Meade.[11] This same training issue also meant that the division’s original artillery brigade, the 154th, was sent elsewhere and would never serve alongside the 79th throughout the course of the war; not only was the 79th unskilled in coordinating effectively with artillery, but it was also forced to work with units it was completely unfamiliar with when it eventually saw action.[12]