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America's Deadliest Battle: Meuse-Argonne, 1918. By Robert H. Ferrell. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. ISBN 978-0870061499-8. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xii, 195. #29.95.
America's Deadliest Battle is historian Robert H. Ferrell's most recent World War I monograph. Based on his research and analysis, the book should be titled America's Incompetent Battle. From page one Ferrell offers ample proof of how leaders from President Woodrow Wilson on down to the lowest field commanders contributed directly to the loss of 26,000 American soldiers killed and tens of thousands wounded during the course of forty-seven days on the western front between the Argonne Forest and the Meuse River. Eventually more than one million troops took part in this operation. America's Deadliest Battle is the first full-scale narrative of the Meuse-Argonne operation since 1924, if one dismisses the disappointing A Test of Battle, by Paul Braim (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), as Ferrell rightly does.
The commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), General John J. Pershing, is taken to task for conducting the unnecessary operation in the St. Mihiel salient less...