American History Tellers - World War I | "Heaven, Hell, or Hoboken" | 5

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

After the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, America scrambled to assemble boot camps across the country to train a fighting force to send to Europe. The training was fast, with recruits using old weapons, and sometimes even broomsticks as rifles. The new soldiers then embarked from Hoboken, New Jersey, on a trip across the Atlantic to bolster exhausted French and British forces. Today, Lindsay is joined by Christopher Capozzola, author and professor of history at MIT, to discuss what recruits went through as they prepared for war. His book is called Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen.Listen to American History Tellers on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season. Unlock exclusive early access by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial today by visiting https://wondery.com/links/american-history-tellers/ now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's October 1918 and you're a major in the U.S. Army. You and roughly 550 men under your command are trapped on the north slope of a ravine in northwest France, and the situation's bleak. The Germans have you surrounded, ammunition is running low, and for the past hour, a relentless artillery barrage has pinned your unit down. The worst thing is, it isn't the Germans

bombarding you, but your own side. Another shell slams into the ground above, causing dirt to rain down. You ignore it, stay focused on your watch, timing the gap between shells. Counting the seconds, you realize your hunch is right. The bombardment has eased. Not much, but enough to give you a chance to get word to command that it's your unit they're firing on. You race out of the bunker and to the command hole where the pigeons are. The private who tends the carrier pigeons salutes. Major, sir. At ease, private. The bombardment has eased.

We need to use this opportunity to send a pigeon to command to tell them to stop shelling our position. How many birds we got? Just two, sir. You and the private's eyes meet in the silent acknowledgement of how dire this situation is. Pigeons are the only way to communicate with headquarters. Your unit has no telephones. No courier would make it back alive, and the Germans will do all they can to shoot any pigeon your unit releases. All right, private, prepare a bird with this message.

Private grabs a slip of paper and a pencil. We are along Road Parallel 276.4. Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven's sake, stop it. The Private rolls the message up and slides it into a small message tube that clips on the bird's leg. Then he reaches into the coop and removes a pigeon. But before he can attach the tube, a shell hits, and the private loses his grip on the bird. As it flies up and away, you realize there's only one chance left. Private, concentrate. The entire unit is depending on you.

Private takes the last bird from the coop, a male pigeon named Cherami, French for dear friend. He strokes it gently and clips the message to its leg. It's ready, sir. Then send it. The private lifts Cherami towards the air and then lets go. Wings flapping, the unit's last hope takes to the air. As the Germans start firing at the bird, you say a silent prayer. Then you return to your hole and wait as shells keep raining down for the next 40 minutes until suddenly the shelling subsides and then stops altogether. It seems Cher Ami made it. Now streaming. Welcome to Buy It Now, where aspiring entrepreneurs get 90 seconds to pitch to an audience of potential customers. If the audience liked the product, it gets them in front of our panel of experts. Gwyneth Paltrow.

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I'm your host, Brandon Jinks Jenkins. Follow Criminal Attorney on the Wondery app or'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. In early October 1918, deep in the Argonne Forest in northern France, Major Charles Whittlesey led nine companies of the U.S. 77th Division into combat, part of a synchronized attack on the German line. But the Allied troops accompanying Whittlesey's battalion were stalled, leaving him and his men alone deep in German territory. These men, who would later be known as the Lost Battalion, quickly dug in, but due to an unknown error, they soon found themselves under friendly fire from their own artillery. As a last resort,

Major Whittlesey sent an urgent message by carrier pigeon, begging for the shelling to stop. This pigeon, Cher Ami, miraculously reached its destination at the same time that the U.S. command realized their mistake and called a stop to the barrage. The men of the lost battalion managed to survive several more days of German attacks, refusing to surrender. And in the end, after sustaining high casualties, Major Whittlesey and the remaining men were rescued, and Whittlesey was later awarded the Medal of Honor for his bravery. Here now with me to discuss this incident, as well as the mass mobilization of U.S. troops

and the ways in which modern America was shaped by the First World War, is Christopher Capozola, professor of history at MIT and author of Uncle Sam Wants You, World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen. Chris Capozola, welcome to American History Tellers. Thanks for having me. Now, today and for the past hundred years, the United States has been regarded as a military powerhouse. But in 1914, that wasn't the case. What was the size of the U.S. military then when the First World War broke out?

And what was its general mission at the time? So the United States military is small in 1914, but it's mighty. There were maybe about 125, maybe or so, thousand troops. So it's a very small standing army. It's able to do what American national interests require. And there's also a real concern in the early 20th century about having a force that's any larger. A concern that a large standing army would be a departure from our historic tradition of the Minutemen of the Revolution who brought us our independence

from Britain, and also a worry that the centralization of military power in an armed force would threaten civil liberties or freedoms at home. It's also the case that the kind of war Americans imagined they would fight in the early 20th century was one that would happen at sea. This was an era of naval buildup, and the United States had definitely built up its navy in the early 20th century, was one that would happen at sea. This was an era of naval buildup, and the United States had definitely built up its navy in the previous 20 years, in the same way that Britain and Germany and Japan had been doing. And they anticipated that some conflict would happen at the Panama Canal, in the Pacific, or elsewhere. No one imagined a massive land war in continental Europe. And even how American soldiers imagined they would fight the next war was different from

what was waiting for them in Europe. They had had experience, whether in the western states of the United States or in the Spanish-American War, with small formation, often horse-based cavalry fighting in smaller units with a lot of movement. There certainly wasn't a significant preparation for the large-scale trench warfare that was waiting for them. You mentioned the American Minuteman tradition. Then-President Woodrow Wilson also had quite a bit of domestic policy to balance here between

hawks and doves, those who wanted to go to war and those who didn't. What was he really facing on the home front in the first few years as World War I raged in Europe? You know, remember, the war breaks out in August of 1914, and Americans are following it incredibly closely. Just because the United States doesn't declare war or enter the war doesn't mean that they're not involved or affected by it. And that affects American politics in particular. That on the one hand, there are those who think that the United States should

enter immediately, particularly to defend France and to fight alongside our primary ally, Britain. And one of the leading voices for this is Theodore Roosevelt. And remember, Theodore Roosevelt had just been president. He had been in battle. He also hated Woodrow Wilson with a passion. The two were mad rivals. And Theodore Roosevelt wanted the United States to enter the war yesterday. So Woodrow Wilson is facing that pressure on one side, and mostly from Republicans. Wilson, who's a Democrat, also faces pressure on the other side, from populists in the South and in the West who are opposed to

overseas adventures, opposed to a large military, and then another constituency, which is German Americans, a substantial proportion of them, who worried that the U.S. entering the war on the side of Britain and France would be devastating to their historic homeland. So Wilson, in a way, is a bit squeezed in the middle in terms of politics. But what was his real sympathies? Where did he fall on the spectrum as a person? You know, it's a little hard to tell. Wilson didn't write down all of his private thoughts in any consistent way.

He would sometimes tell people what they wanted to hear. So we may never know for sure. But we know that Wilson was a real admirer of the British political system, of what Britain meant in the world in 1914. And fundamentally, at heart, I think his sympathies were with Britain and France from the very beginning. But he also was a believer in peace. I think he really did genuinely believe that a negotiated settlement, some diplomatic outcome could end the war without the U.S. actually having to enter it. So I guess with this optimistic view that peace could be diplomatically achieved,

Woodrow Wilson decides to keep the United States out as long as possible. And even though it appeared the U.S. would stay out of the war for quite a while, Congress did pass and Wilson signed the National Defense Act of 1916. What did this do? I'm glad you bring this up because the National Defense Act is probably one of the most important pieces of legislation that most Americans have never heard of. And it's really an important turning point in our history. It's adopted in the summer of 1916. So the United States is not at war at this moment, but they know what the war is like.

And they have seen two years of war in Europe. So they understand the ways that large armies make a difference and that tanks, airplanes, et cetera, are already having an impact on the outcome of the war, right? They know that this is a new and different conflict. So what the National Defense Act aims to do is to basically give the United States the power to fight war at a global scale. So one thing it does, for example, is simply increase the size of the standing military. It also gives the federal government a great deal of power to mobilize

the economy in the case of a national emergency, right? There's a lot of expenditure for technology, airplanes, tanks, shipping, etc. And maybe the most important part is that it enables the president to call the National Guard into federal service. And this transforms the National Guard from a series of 48 state militias into a national force that's fundamentally aligned with the federal forces and gives us the National Guard that we have today. So this was signed in anticipation of what looked increasingly like the inevitable entrance of the U.S. into the war, which happened in April of 1917. I guess the increased size of the standing army that the National Defense Act provided for was not enough. And so in May of 1917, the federal government passed the Selective Service Act to build up U.S. armed forces even further. But there hadn't been a draft

since the Civil War. What did this draft of 1917 look like? So the adoption of selective service in 1917 is another transformational moment in modern American military history. The United States had had a draft before, both in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War. But those drafts were highly controversial. And in fact, they generated only a small fraction of the soldiers who entered the Civil War conflict. So it had been done before, but it wasn't really part of the American tradition. It was a real departure to say that every man in the United States between the ages first of 21 to 30, eventually every man between the ages of 18 and 45, had to register for selective service. The European powers that had been

fighting had already been doing this. And so the United States is modeling the draft law after Europe's, Britain in particular. And what this does is it creates a registry of people who may potentially serve in the US.S. Armed Forces. It doesn't mean that they're immediately going in, but having that registry then enables the Army to call up soldiers over time as it needs them. And as it does this, it's making decisions. And that's why it's called selective service, right? That the government is doing the selecting based on how old you are, based on how healthy you are, and also based on what job you are doing, right? That the government is doing the selecting based on how old you are, based on how healthy you are, and also based on what job you are doing, right? So in Britain, at the very first days of

the war, all of the most skilled factory workers, you know, rushed to the front lines, and many of them are killed. And suddenly, Britain has an industrial manpower crisis in 1914. The United States doesn't want to repeat that mistake. And so selective service is always designed at least as much to keep people out of the army as to get them in. Another big difference is that selective service was designed to put a human face on a big expansion of government power, right? So the selective service is administered locally. You register at maybe the county or community level, and you tended to register in very community-based places, maybe the post office or town hall, sometimes even a church basement.

They deliberately avoided police stations or army bases as registration points. They wanted to make it feel like this was the community responding to the crisis rather than the state imposing militarization on American society. And with these changes, how did the public react to the draft? This was a hard sell. Even the legislation that passed the Selective Service Act had substantial opposition, particularly from populist voters, mostly in the Democratic Party, but also Republicans.

There was a concern that this was a real departure from American political and military traditions. On the other hand, there was a great deal of support for the war. And the draft seemed like the fairest way to ensure that the right people would get into service. You know, there was resistance, there was evasion, but overall, most people supported the draft and also wanted the draft to work as a system so that it would be fair. You mentioned resistance and evasion of those groups for different reasons, right? So conscientious objectors were recognized in law for the first time in the Selective Service Act of 1917. Tens of thousands of people filed conscientious objector claims. Very few of those claims were in fact actually supported. You had to prove that you were a pacifist. You had to prove that you had been a

pacifist long before the war started. Sifting that out became one of the jobs of the U.S. military. And in fact, they interview every single one of them and test their knowledge of the Bible and so forth. So by the time it's done, only a few thousand conscientious objector claims were validated by the U.S. military. On the other hand, the easiest way to avoid the army in 1917 is simply not to register for the draft, right? So think about it, this is a more than 100 years ago, right? There are no birth certificates, there are almost no passports, there are, you know, no driver's licenses, there's no social security card. So it's very hard for the government to know who you are. So if you simply don't register or skip town or move around, you might

be invisible to the draft board. And there were many such people, perhaps as many as 300,000 over the course of the war evaded the draft. In the slang term of the period, these were called slackers. And these were really some of the most unpopular, most carefully targeted individuals over the course of the war. From small towns to big cities all across the country, in 1918, you would encounter what were called slacker raids, where individual organizations would mobilize to track down draft dodgers, finding them on the streets, in baseball stadiums, on streetcars, in movie theaters. People would be interrogated and asked to show their draft cards. And if they didn't have them, they were presumed to be draft evaders or slackers, often taken to a local armory or jail until they could sort out their status and register

if they hadn't done so. So you're painting a picture of complex emotions and thoughts about the war leading up to America's involvement. And of course, you know, even in designing the Selective Service, the government is aware of the importance of manipulating the image. And part of getting anyone enthusiastic about signing up for military obviously included propaganda. One of your books called Uncle Sam Wants You has that iconic image on its cover. Did the recruiting effort have its desired effect? Did we get large numbers of men to enlist or were we forced to rely on the draft? You know, this is an image that needs no introduction of Uncle Sam pointing out at the

viewer with his finger saying, you know, I want you. And so then the Army's recruiting soldiers hand over fist as soon as the enabling legislation is passed in May of 1917. And by the fall of 1918, when the armistice comes, about four million men have been registered, have been drafted, or volunteered and brought into service. In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her. And she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is The Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses, and specific instructions

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Buy it now. Stream free on Freeview and Prime Video. Let's talk a little bit about the man who was tasked to lead the American Expeditionary Forces, General John Pershing. Tell us a little bit about him. Who was he and what was he like? So John Pershing was the very image of a soldier. Tall, neatly cropped hair, mustache, loved to wear a uniform, insisted that it be perfect, you know, every time he put it on. He was incredibly strict, demanding, a stickler for the rules and the traditions of the army.

That meant polishing your shoes and shining the buttons on your uniform and keeping all the uniforms sewed appropriately, even at the front lines. He made his way to West Point, built his career largely through wars in the American West and the Philippines. And by the time he's put in charge of the American Expeditionary Forces, he has decades of military experience under his belt. He also knew how to work a room. Pershing was a political general. He knew how to navigate Capitol Hill. His first wife was the daughter of the chair of the Senate's Military Affairs Committee. So, you know, Pershing was, in that sense, very much a modern American general. Well, he may be the father of modern American generals. He certainly mentored many people who went on to be famous generals themselves in World War II. generation of younger soldiers, early career officers who make their mark in the First World War. And we know them primarily through their contributions to the Second World War. People like George Marshall, Omar Bradley, Douglas MacArthur, and even people who began as military

officers, but then finished their careers in politics like Dwight Eisenhower. And many of them pass through the American Expeditionary Forces. And as they do so, Pershing is identifying them, recruiting them, supporting them, and promoting them to lead an army that's growing every day. So America was facing some novelty in its approach to the war. It built up an army very quickly. It needed to modernize its technology very quickly. So it probably needed to adapt its strategies very quickly. It needed to modernize its technology very quickly. So it probably needed to adapt its strategies very quickly. We know in the military today, war games and scenarios,

all sorts of things. But did America, as it declared war on Germany, have any plans for the war in Europe? It did. It did. So the United States had a series of plans for all kinds of war scenarios. There was even one for the possibility of an invasion by Canada that we were prepared for in case that ever happened, which hasn't yet. But by the time the US enters the war in April 1917, any of those war plans were completely out of date. Many of them were sort of tossed out and new plans were developed. On the one hand, what's happening on the ground is very clear, even by the end of 1914. And it's certainly just as clear in the spring of 1917 when the US gets involved, which is that there are two giant forces that have dug in

hundreds of miles of trenches facing each other against barbed wire, snipers, landmines, artillery, right? And so there's no easy solution here. No clear way to go around this, and there's no easy way to go through it. For about three years, the British and the French had been trying the latter. They'd been trying to go through it by just throwing, you know, 18-year-old boys at this wall and hope that they could break through. And although initially the Americans think that they're going to do something different,

that they'll be smaller, they'll be more nimble, eventually they start adopting the same approach, which is just to bring enormous numbers of troops and increasing amounts of firepower against the Germans and hope that eventually they'll have better luck. So this must all be terrifying for the newly drafted soldier, American soldier about to be shipped over to Europe. Once you're drafted, you still have to be trained. Why don't you walk through the experience of a new draftee?

That experience from, you know, draftee to soldier was rapid, a little bit chaotic, and probably pretty terrifying for the young men who were involved. So if you had registered for the draft, that didn't mean you were necessarily going to go. What came later was a call-up where you would be told that you would have to enter the forces. And literally, the next phase of it is something called entrainment, where you literally get on a train and go to a military camp. And so one of my favorite stories from my research came from a little town in Connecticut, where the local newspaper would print the names of the people who were required to appear on any given day for entrainment, right? So it'd say, you know, tomorrow person A, B, and C need to show up at the train station at 6 a.m.

But then the newspaper would also publish the following, and they'd say, if A, B, and C don't show up tomorrow, local residents D, E, and F will be required to go in their place. And when I read that in the archives, it shocked me. I realized like, oh, this is how they're filling the army, right? Because suddenly D, E, and F and their entire family, their friends, their bosses have a real vested interest in making sure that A, B, and C don't oversleep. And then right after entrainment is training camps. Exactly, right? So, you know, the question then is like, where does the train bring you? Sometimes it brings you to an existing military facility. Sometimes it would bring you to an empty field in the middle of New Jersey or the middle of Kansas or the middle of California.

And your first job as a soldier literally would be to build the barracks that you are going to sleep in. The United States built 32 of them in a hurry, 16 in the north and 16 in the south. And this is a deliberate attempt 50 or 60 years after the Civil War to kind of create some unity between the North and the South. And it's also one of the key ways in which the U.S. military in the 20th century expands its footprint into nearly every county and state and community in the country. So in these training camps in the United States, many are training with wooden rifles, with broomsticks, at best with outdated rifles left over from the Spanish-American War.

And for many of them, they don't actually fire a new rifle until they actually get to France. Speaking of France, there were also training camps in Europe. How did they differ from ones on U.S. soil? So the training camps in the United States are much bigger from ones on U.S. soil? So the training camps in the United States are much bigger. You know, these are like small cities that include hospitals and schools and theaters, and they are fundamentally factories for making soldiers. And they are using the methods of the assembly line. You know, someone fits you for a uniform, someone trains you with a weapon, you know, and you're sort of like churned through this machine in a pretty rapid amount of time, usually about two to three months, sometimes as little as six weeks before you're then taken from these camps, put on another train and sent to Europe. So getting hundreds of thousands of American soldiers from North America to Europe

is a massive enterprise. And there are not that many ships that can be spared for this work. The United States ends up commandeering both American cruise ships and also German passenger vessels that it had taken into its custody at the beginning of the war and refit them as troop ships. And these troop ships go back and forth across the Atlantic over the course of the First World War. And almost all of them leave from Hoboken, New Jersey, just across from New York City. And so this leads to the line, heaven, hell, or Hoboken by Christmas. And the training camps in Europe are much more of a kind of staging ground in

anticipation of the battles that are coming. So the mood and the feel in those camps would have been very different, right? Much more real than the kind of factory experience that people would have had in the United States. Now, among the many thousands of Americans who went through this process, 400,000 of those were African Americans who served in the armed forces. In our series, we talked about a famous unit, the Harlem Hellfighters. What was the general experience, though, for black troops in a predominantly white army? So African American soldiers knew that there was a lot riding on becoming soldiers, right? On showing Americans what they could do and how they could contribute

to the war effort. At the same time, there are plenty of white American elites, whether in the military or outside, who are hesitant about arming and training African Americans, who would rather assign African American soldiers to labor battalions, to service positions. Now, when people arrive in Europe, they're very often unloading in the far western part of Brittany, in or near the city of Brest. And much of the work of unloading,

whether of individuals or of material, is being done by African-American soldiers who are in these labor battalions. And so African-Americans in many ways had to fight for the right to fight as the very first part of what it meant to be a soldier. But of course, they are also facing a segregated army and a president who is committed to maintaining the color line and in fact, imposing it in

Washington and elsewhere. So this was a unique opportunity for these African American troops. They are going abroad, probably for the first time in their lives, maybe even outside of their local areas for the first time in their lives, and witnessing a whole other way of how the world works. World War I came right at the end of Reconstruction and the establishment of Jim Crow oppression in the U.S. So once they were over in Europe, what was the African-American experience as they served? Going to Europe was a transformative experience. Now, things in Europe weren't perfect either. They faced racism in France in many ways, just as they had in the United States, but

not in the same way and not with the explicit structures of segregation that were so fundamentally part of early 20th century American life. This didn't give African-American soldiers new ideas, right? They already knew that Jim Crow was a form of oppression and discrimination. What it did was it gave them new alternatives, new vocabularies that they could use, both in remaking their military service at the time and in remaking black politics after the war. So for those African American soldiers who are serving in combat, many of them are doing so not under the command of American officers, but French officers. to getting access to weapons, to combat opportunities, to the awards and honors that some of them earned on the battlefield that they might have faced in the American army.

Many of these combat units faced sustained combat for months and months at a time. They saw some of the worst features of the war for some of the longest periods of the war. For many, of course, they hoped that this would transform Americans, white Americans' understanding of their place in society, their rights, their opportunities. But the story of the immediate post-war period is really one of disappointment. Their services were not honored. Many of them found themselves excluded from victory parades. And over the summer

of 1919, in a series of instances of racial violence, some of the worst in American history, a series of race riots in cities and towns across the country, both North and South, targeted African-American communities and even led to killings of African-American soldiers in their uniforms. Are you in trouble with the law? Need a lawyer who will fight like hell to keep you out of jail? We defend and we fight just like you'd want your own children defended. Whether you're facing a drug charge, caught up on a murder rap, accused of committing war crimes, look no

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and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+, and the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. U.S. forces began fighting on the front in Europe in the fall of 1917. How were these forces used at first? And when did they ramp up to major engagements on the battlefield? The first contribution that American soldiers make is actually in the summer of 1917, simply by showing up. The U.S. government was insistent that we had to get some number of

soldiers there in time for July 14th, for Bastille Day, the French national holiday, as a kind of morale boost for the French people. And we did do that, but it's not really until about a year later that the United States has enough soldiers on the ground to be making a huge impact on the war's outcome. Speaking of huge impact, I guess we can fast forward to the Meuse-Argonne offensive in September and October of 1918. What was this initiative, and what was the part U.S. troops played in it? Yeah, so the Meuse-Argonne is a region mostly in northern France.

It is the heart of where the war had been fought. Before 1914, this was remarkable agricultural land. By the time the Americans arrive, it looks like the surface of the moon. It is devastated. It is the war zone at heart. And it's also a very crucial place where the Allied forces are encountering the German fortifications. And the Germans are very carefully guarding both the Meuse River and the Argonne Forest, geographies that are to their advantage. And the Germans know that if they lose those, they will be kind of on their back feet. So there are a substantial number of fortifications there, and the Americans know that it's going to take a lot to get through it.

So by this time, it's September or October of 1918, the United States has about one million soldiers. And this is the largest offensive of the war to date, and one of the first that really breaks through the German fortifications and turns the tide of the war. The fighting during this period was brutal and intense. There is a story I'd love you to tell, if you can, one of the lost battalion. Who were they and what did they do? So in the middle of this massive campaign against the German forces, there are a series of smaller battles to push forward to gain one more foot of territory. And one group of soldiers, about 500 soldiers who are with the 77th Division of the U.S.

Army, are pushing forward and they're having great success. And the men to the right of them are not. And the men to the left of them are not. And the men to the left of them are not. And you can kind of guess what happens next. The Americans have gotten too far forward. They are now completely surrounded by the Germans. They've made their way up a hill. And they soon come to realize they're trapped.

These are some of the most amazing soldiers of the First World War. Most of them are from urban areas. Many of them recent immigrants to the United States. They've been in battle before, many of them are from urban areas, many of them recent immigrants to the United States. They've been in battle before, many of them, but they've gotten themselves into a real difficult situation. So there they are on the top of this hill. They're running out of food, they're running out of water, they're running out of ammunition, and they have very limited ability to communicate with the officers back behind the lines. In fact, the only way that they have to do that is through the technology of a carrier pigeon that will fly messages over the front

lines. The Germans are attacking them from every single direction. And then they realize that they are under attack, not by the Germans, but by their own fellow American soldiers. An artillery barrage is hitting them on the hill where they are camped out. Their commanding officer, Major Charles Whittlesey, decides to send their last carrier pigeon named Cher Ami with a message begging the Americans to stop the artillery barrage. He scrawls out a note that says, we are along the road, and he gives the location. Artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven's sake, stop it. Cher Ami makes it back behind the lines, is also under fire, and Cher Ami delivers the message to the officers behind the lines.

So then finally, after about five days on this hill, the Americans break through. In that space of those five days, about 100 of the soldiers were killed, another 200 were wounded, but the fact that any of them survived at all, and that none of them were willing to surrender to the Germans, is a really remarkable story of fortitude and resilience. And that was in September, October of 1918. And of course, a few months later comes the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the armistice and an end to fighting. How did troops on the battlefield in Europe wind down? How did troop deployment stop back home?

So one of my favorite stories about the war is something called the false armistice. Most Americans know that this war is going to end. And on November 9th, 1918, rumors start to spread that the war is over. And so both at the front lines and in the home front in the United States, people pour into the streets, they're celebrating, and people have to come out and sort of tell them, no, you know, the war's not over. Go back to work. Go back to the front lines. It's going to end on the 11th at 11 a.m. And so two days later, the war does come to a firm conclusion at 11 a.m.

But even that whole morning, there is conflict at the battlefield. There are people who die on the last day of the conflict on November 11th, 1918. And troops whose entrainment date was November 11th, 1918, were nonetheless required to get on board the train that morning. And then at 11 a.m., the trains literally stopped and turned around and brought them back to their hometowns and dropped them off and let them go. So in this remarkable moment in which everything suddenly stands still, what did the U.S. military look like at the end of the war? It had been transformed. Yeah, the American military had been transformed in the space of really only about a year and a half into an enormous standing army with military bases all across the United States, with the engines for producing tens of thousands of ships and airplanes.

And so this is the structure of the modern American military that persists for the rest of the 20th century. It doesn't stay that big in the 1920s. The United States scales back the size of the military and its budget and so forth. But the general structure and the format of it remains. And that sense that America should have the power to fight a war anywhere in the world never goes away again.

In the wake of this conflict, many, many, many are left behind. And you've been to cemeteries in France that still have graves of American soldiers who died in World War I. What is it a visit to one of these cemeteries like? They are remarkable places, most of them maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission, which was established by Congress to preserve the memory of American soldiers and also to maintain the spaces where they are buried. They're beautiful sort of fields of white crosses, occasionally a Star of

David, that reflect the soldiers of that time 100 years ago. On the one hand, they are incredibly depressing, right, to be surrounded by all this sacrifice. On the other hand, incredibly inspirational places to imagine what it meant for Americans to make these sacrifices to defend our allies, Britain and France, and to stop German aggression in Europe. Well, Christopher Capozzola, thank you so much for joining me today on American History Tellers. Thanks for having me. That was my conversation with historian Christopher Capozzola. His book, Uncle Sam Wants You, World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen, is available now from Oxford University Press. From Wondery, this is our fifth and final episode of World War I from American History Tellers.

In our next season, founded in the 1850s, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency became America's foremost private crime fighters, foiling assassination plots, catching train robbers, and spying for the Union in the Civil War. But later, the agency's aggressive tactics on behalf of wealthy tycoons and industrialists threatened their reputation, leaving many Americans wondering whose side the Pinkertons are really on.

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managing producer, Ryan Lohr. Senior Producer Andy Herman. Executive Producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman and Marshall Louis for Wondery. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reached the age of 10 that would still have heard it.

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