How America Won World War I by Alan Axelrod

Author:Alan Axelrod [Axelrod, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2018-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 25. This photograph, which may have been staged for propaganda purposes, shows American soldiers “at close grips with the Hun,” assaulting a bunker. Library of Congress

Other military figures, years after the war, dismissed Belleau Wood as something of a “prestige” objective rather than a strategic one. General Matthew Ridgway angrily opined that Belleau Wood should be added to the tragic gallery of “prize examples of men’s lives being thrown away against objectives not worth the cost.” He called it “a monument, for all time, to the inflexibility of military thinking in that period.”7

The strategic thinking in the spring and summer of 1918 was that Belleau Wood, a kind of natural fortress, was just too dangerous to leave in enemy control. Almost without doubt, the initial defense of the Belleau Wood sector saved Paris. Whether the offensive afterward launched against Belleau Wood proper was so urgently needed is doubtful. Yet the final taking of Belleau Wood was of extraordinary psychological value to the Allies. It inspired America, unleashing a torrent of enlistments—especially in the USMC. It inspirited the battered, war-weary French nation and its military at precisely the moment that such an injection of renewed hope and enthusiasm was most needed.

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