Book Review: First Over There

First Over There:The Attack on Cantigny,America's First Battle of World War Iby Matthew J. DavenportThomas Dunne Books, 2015The roster of World War One centennial milestones is growing longer with every passing month since 2014 marked the anniversary of the beginning of the war, and there's a strong argument to be made that the most significant of all these milestones is still a few years off: 2018, the 100-year anniversary of the entry of United States troops into a European conflict that neither affected not threatened the United States at all. That the United States should send troops – eventually in eyebrow-raising numbers – to the battlefields of France, and that those troops should then quickly tip the balance of the war in favor of the Allies and rapidly bring the fighting to a halt, marked a watershed moment in geopolitical affairs – the moment, to paraphrase Gandalf about the Ents, that America woke up and realized it was strong.The moment itself – the first time US troops of the 1^st Division went “over the top” and into combat at Cantigny on May 28^th, 1918 – is the subject of Matthew Davenport's smart and rollingly theatrical debut First Over There, in which he delves into contemporary diaries and autobiographies to create theatrically compelling portraits of dozens of participants on that day, from the lieutenants and captains seeing their first combat to the man in charge, General “Black Jack” Pershing, who spoke more prophetically than he knew when he assured his new command that “Centuries of military and civil history are now looking toward this first contingent of the American Army as it enters this great battle.”Balancing this gallery of personalities, each illuminated with a perfectly-chosen quote or detail, Davenport gives readers the bigger picture, reminding them not only of the terrors these men faced that day:

The doughboys who fought to capture Cantigny were met with a violence never before experienced by uniformed fighters of the United States. In the two-and-a-half day fight, men were shredded by machine-gun fire, blown to unrecognizable bits by mortar blasts, and knocked into instant death by the concussive detonations of high-explosive shells. Over one-fourth were wounded and nearly one-tenth killed in action, marking a higher casualty rate than that suffered by the Continentals at Saratoga, either side at Antietam, or even the Allies on D-Day.

But also reminding them of the significance of it all:

Tactically, the operation previewed modern military methods, marking the first time American soldiers fought with the intricate support of artillery, machine guns, flamethrowers, grenades, gas, tanks, and airplanes, signifying the establishment of combined arms and the birth of our modern Army. Thus, May 28, 1918 was the US military's coming-of-age – the day it crossed a historical no-man's-land that separated contemporary fighting methods from the muskets and cannon of the nineteenth century.

On the other side of that no-man's-land was a nation made suddenly aware of the fact that it could field thousands of men a month and tens of thousands of pieces of military equipment, that it could harness its manufacturing and food-producing capacities to extents other nations could only dream of, and as Davenport points out, those months blooded a whole corps of officers who would ruminate on their experiences and put to use the lessons they learned when they returned to Europe twenty years later to fight an even larger war. Thinking about that larger war really brings home one of the points of Davenport's superb book, which is just how much was born at Cantigny that day in May.