My Experiences in the World War
by John J. Pershing
Summary
My Experiences in the World War is John J. Pershing's own two volume account of commanding the American Expeditionary Forces in France, written by the general who insisted, against considerable pressure from French and British commanders, that American troops fight as an independent army under American command rather than being absorbed piecemeal as replacements inside allied units. Pershing was installed as AEF commander in May 1917 and promoted to full general that October, the first officer to hold that rank since Philip Sheridan, and the book gives his own version of the argument he had to win before American forces could fight the way he intended.
The memoir follows Pershing's account of building an army essentially from nothing, since the United States had no force remotely large enough for a European war when it declared one in April 1917, through the campaigns that vindicated his insistence on independent command: the relatively quick American victory at Saint Mihiel in September 1918, and the much larger, costlier Meuse Argonne offensive that followed immediately after, in which Pershing moved roughly six hundred thousand American troops into the Argonne forest and kept them fighting for forty seven days against a defense that eventually drew in dozens of German divisions. Pershing gives his own account of a campaign later historians have criticized for its costly frontal tactics, including the final day of the war, when American attacks continued right up to the armistice at eleven o'clock on November 11, 1918, producing several thousand more casualties in fighting Pershing has always defended as necessary given the uncertainty about the exact ceasefire time.
Reading the book means hearing the commander's own justification for decisions that historians still debate, written by a man Congress later promoted to General of the Armies, the highest rank the United States has ever created, in recognition of exactly the campaign this memoir describes. It suits a reader who wants the American war effort explained by the general who insisted on running it his own way, rather than by a historian assessing his choices from a distance.
Historical Context & Significance
My Experiences in the World War won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for History, recognition that arrived more than a decade after the armistice for a memoir published in 1931, well after Pershing's active command had ended. Pershing had already received the country's highest possible military honor when Congress created the rank of General of the Armies specifically for him in September 1919, making him the only American to hold that rank in his own lifetime; Congress would not confer it again until it promoted George Washington to the same rank posthumously in 1976.
After the war Pershing served as Army Chief of Staff from 1921 to 1924, where he developed the Pershing Map, a proposed national network of military and civilian highways that influenced later American road building. He spent his final years mentoring officers who would lead the next generation of American forces, including George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and George S. Patton, men whose own commands in the Second World War carried forward lessons Pershing had drawn from exactly the campaigns this memoir recounts.