With Their Bare Hands: General Pershing, the 79th Division, and the battle for Montfaucon: Gene Fax: Osprey Publishing

With Their Bare Hands

General Pershing, the 79th Division, and the battle for Montfaucon

With Their Bare Hands

General Pershing, the 79th Division, and the battle for Montfaucon

Description

A ground-breaking narrative history, which examines the never-before-told story of one of the most devastating battles of American involvement in World War I – the battle of Montfaucon.

With Their Bare Hands traces the fate of the US 79th Division – men drafted off the streets of Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia – from boot camp in Maryland through the final years of World War I, focusing on their most famous engagement: the attack on Montfaucon, the most heavily fortified part of the German Line, during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in 1918.

Using the 79th as a window into the American Army as a whole, Gene Fax examines its mistakes and triumphs, the tactics of its commander General John J. Pershing, and how the lessons it learned during the Great War helped it to fight World War II. Fax makes some startling judgments, on the role of future Army Chief-of-Staff, Colonel George C. Marshall; whether the Montfaucon battle – had it followed the plan – could have shortened the war; and if Pershing was justified in ordering his troops to attack right up to the moment of the Armistice.

Drawing upon original documents, including orders, field messages, and the letters and memoirs of the soldiers themselves, Fax tells the engrossing story of the 79th Division's bloody involvement in the final months of World War I.

Prologue
Introduction

Chapter 1 Setting the Stage
Chapter 2 War Comes to Baltimore
Chapter 3 Creating an Army
Chapter 4 What Pershing Should Have Known
Chapter 5 Training – The Army at War with Itself
Chapter 6 Americans Reach the Battlefield
Chapter 7 First Army Takes the Field
Chapter 8 Concentration
Chapter 9 The Germans
Chapter 10 Over the Top and Up the Hill, September 26
Chapter 11 Left, Right, and Straight Ahead, September 26
Chapter 12 "Montfaucon Taken", September 27
Chapter 13 Bois de Beuge and Nantillois, September 28
Chapter 14 Bois 250 and Madeleine Farm, September 29–30
Chapter 15 Interlude – Troyon Sector, October 1–28
Chapter 16 Borne de Cornouiller and the Heights of the Meuse, October 29–November 10
Chapter 17 Armistice to Home, November 11, 1918–June 4, 1919

Epilogue
Appendices
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Product details

Published	Feb 23 2017
Format	Ebook (PDF)
Edition	1st
Extent	400
ISBN	9781472819246
Imprint	Osprey Publishing
Illustrations	Section of black-and-white images.
Series	General Military
Short code	GNM
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Author

Gene Fax

During his 45 years in the policy research industr…

Based on meticulous research Gene Fax's fascinating account of the poorly trained 79th Division in the Meuse-Argonne offensive tells us much about how inexperience, poor communications and inadequate support compelled that division's courageous soldiers to fight “with their bare hands.” Fax tells the amazing story of how the American Expeditionary Force and the 79th Division overcame many errors and false ideas and paid a high price learning how to fight effectively.

Brigadier General (ret.) Robert A. Doughty
The men of the AEF's 79th Division were warriors for the working day: civilians in uniform. Their training was minimal, their cohesion limited, their tactics defying four years of Western Front experience. Yet the 79th's first assignment was to take one of the best-defended position in the Argonne Forest. It became a compound disaster. But the division's subsequent recovery is a case study in American soldiers' often-demonstrated high learning curve and the AEF's contribution to victory in 1918. Gene Fax's new history of the 79th Division is a masterful study of the long and difficult road to victory.

Professor Dennis Showalter
Ordered to capture the heavily fortified high-ground of Montfaucon on the first day of Meuse-Argonne, the doughboys of 79th Division-fresh from Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia-proved themselves as brave and tenacious soldiers. With Their Bare Hands is a fine testament to their courage under fire and a compelling work of history by Gene Fax

Mitchell Yockelson, author of Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing's Warrior's Came of Age to Defeat the German Army in World War I
In “With Their Bare Hands: General Pershing, the 79th Division, and the Battle for Montfaucon” Gene Fax masterfully recounts, studies and dissects [the 79th Division's] nightmarish struggle.
...
Mr. Fax has plumbed a variety of source materials-original memoranda, reports by both sides, daily journals and correspondence-to transport the reader along with the soldiers of the 79th through the crucible of an almost impossible mission.
...
“With Their Bare Hands” is an unvarnished examination of all corners of the battlefield, filled with failures and setbacks, courage and fear, noble sacrifice and, in many places, unnecessary casualties. Mr. Fax considers the battle on its own terms and in its own time, allowing the reader an unfiltered view of combat and confusion and command decisions-both wise and unwise.

Matthew Davenport, author of “First Over There: The Attack on Cantigny, America's First Battle of World War I,” a finalist for the 2015 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History., Wall Street Journal