Richard Faulkner

I don't often give maximum ratings to specialized monographs but this is one of the best examinations of the performance of the United States Army In the Great War that I have ever read. While there are many reasons why the AEF was not all that it could have been, Faulkner closely focuses on the institutional failures to train and nurture competent small-unit leadership, thus undercutting all that Pershing tried to accomplish on the battlefield. Speaking of Pershing and the rest of the regular army officer corps, their much-vaunted professionalism comes off as a shallow veneer of terminology overlaying a narrow-minded sense of caste privilege. About the only thing that I can mark Faulkner down for is that when he deals with the issue of "malingering" during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive he doesn't deal with the analysis suggesting that the Great Influenza hit the Army sooner than usually thought.… (meer)