Brice, you are brilliant, or singularly well informed and well read or
all of the above.

Your message is absolutely correct.

Let me add some more information.  I will quote from the book by John
Mosier entitled "The Myth of the Great War."  "How the Germans won the
battles and how the Americans saved the Allies."  ISBN: 0060196769

The first 300 pages details how the war started, how the Germans invaded
Belgium France and other places, how they won all the battles and most
of the skirmishes, how France was lying to itself about the conduct of
the war, etc.  At this point, The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was
decimated and almost totally destroyed by its inept leadership.  By
mid-1917, the Allies were at the end of their rope and Germany was
preparing for the final offensive that would win them the war.  Up until
that time, America had been furnishing huge amounts of cash, industrial
products and explosives to the Allies.  The United States was a
cobelligerent long before it declared war.

From the book, starting on page 303.

"But enough has been said to establish that the Germans were quite aware
of the American tilt toward the Allies.  From their point of view, the
issue was not if America would join with Great Britain, but when this
would happen, and what effect it would have on the war."

"Some Germans professed to sneer at the idea of an American Army having
any impact on the field of battle.  After all, in 1917, the entire army
hardly came to 150,000 men, less even than Belgium's.  But to a
generation of young German officers who had grown up reading tales of
the Wild West, and who had studied the Civil War (which German staff
officers all had done,) the idea of having to fight a country where the
average farmhouse probably had as many guns as the average German
infantry platoon was far from reassuring"

"The crux of the matter, quite simply, was this.  Could America get an
army into the field before the Germans could win the war in the West
outright?  It had taken Great Britain, which in its own estimation had
the most professional army in the world in 1914, nearly two years before
it was able to deploy a force big enough to mount a sustained offensive
effort.  British officers, who by their own reckoning were second to
none in the raising of large armies from scratch, estimated it took
fifteen months to form an infantry division and get it ready for the
battlefield.  Given what the results to date had been of the British
effort, the German General Staff reasonably assumed that an American
army wouldn't be able to take to the field until August 1918 at the
earliest, and that probably there wouldn't be an American offensive
until the following year."

"So while Petain patiently rebuilt the demoralized French armies and
Haig and Robertson completed their destruction of the BEF, Germany and
the United States embarked on what could only be described as a great
race to determine the war's outcome.  If, as Petain and the civilians of
the Painleve government believed, it was necessary to wait for American
troops to arrive in France and win the war, the obvious question was how
long would it take for the United States to create a great army and get
it into action.  In April 1917, the Germans thus had a window of
opportunity to win outright.  But it was a window of indeterminate
length, and clearly, much depended on how efficiently and rapidly the
Americans proceeded."


John J. Pershing was given the task to create and command the AEF.  He
arrived in France in June 1917.

Fast forward a bit.  Page 312.

"By contrast, Pershing wanted entire divisions which would train
together and then go into action as a separate force under American
command.  By January 1918, the Allies were extremely annoyed.  The AEF
had a quarter of a million soldiers in France, and the only ones in line
were still basically in training.  Pershing kept claiming the Americans
would only go into action as an army.  The British and the French both
knew what this meant: an intact army of two million men - or even a
million and a half- would constitute a decisive force on the
battlefield.  If the AEF went into action on its own, the Americans
would claim they had won the war.  So the Allies, and particularly the
British wanted control of the troops."

"This was hardly a concession to Pershing's vanity.  One key reason why
the BEF had been so ineffective in 1915 and 1916 was that its leaders,
in their eagerness to get into the fighting and make a difference, had
basically wiped out the original cadre in the first four months of the
war."

Fast forward...

"During 1917, Haig and Robertson had operated as though the BEF could
win the war on its own, with or without the French and certainly without
the Americans. The French Army is a broken reed, Haig smugly informed
Pershing during their first meeting.  But after the slaughter of
Passchendaele, Petain might well have retorted that it was the BEF that
was the broken reed.  As we have seen, from September 1917 on, the Lloyd
George administration in London was beginning to have serious doubts as
to the outcome of the war.  What after April 1917 had looked like a race
between the Germans and the Americans as to who would be ready first had
now become a more ominous race:  would Haig and Robertson destroy the
BEF before the AEF was ready to fight?"

Fast forward...
"And once the great German offensive of March 1918 started, the Allies,
who had become totally hysterical, resorted to a "Pershing's
stubbornness will lose the war" mode.  Only the prompt infusion of large
numbers of American soldiers into the Allied armies could save the day.
It is interesting to speculate how long America would have remained in
the war had this scheme been put into effect, particularly given the
British casualty rate."

"Neither of the Anglo-French claims had much merit.  As we shall see,
once the fighting started in 1918, it was immediately clear that, Petain
and a few commanders excepted, the fabled Allied superiority in
leadership and organization was entirely mythical."

The Germans launched the first of their last offensives on 21 March,
1918, within 10 days, the BEF lost 165,000 men, the Germans had advanced
25 kilometers and had cut the front in two.  Panic gripped the Allies
and the British were getting ready to pull out entirely.

On 9 April, the Germans started another attack and took a piece of
Flanders.  The BEF was totally exposed and in immediate danger of being
totally eradicated.

"... The problem for the Allies was simply this: not only had the
Germans suffered far fewer losses but their army was now larger than it
had been when the offensive started, with a ration strength of just over
four million me.  When coupled with the massive casualties sustained
during Third Ypres, the BEF was virtually finished as an offensive
force."


By the beginning of summer 1918, the BEF was finished, the French army
was in a panic and preparations were being made to evacuate Paris.  All
seemed lost.

Then the Americans attacked at Bellau Wood, probably one of the
bloodiest battles ever for the US Army and the Marines who had a brigade
at Bellau Wood.  The tide of the war turned and the Germans started
retreating.  By October 1918, the Germans, still on foreign soil decided
to sue for peace directly to Woodrow Wilson, bypassing the British and
French governments.  Wilson accepted the opening because he wanted peace
as fast as possible.  The French and British government did not want
peace at that time because the German army had not been defeated.
However they were in no position to go it alone, without the Americans,
so they had no choice but accept the armistice.

Germany, after winning all the battles, had lost the war, because of the
Americans.  Germany surrendered without being invaded.



Denys

-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
Behalf Of Brice Yokem
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 1:08 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [HP3000-L] OT: Veterans' Day 2003

"Germany had lost a war to America, but was not occupied by American
troops after WW1."

You must have some strange History lesson from where you are in the
world.
Britain, France, Russia and Australia to name a few fought valiantly to
win
the first world war.  I believe America was involved at some point in
the
end, but to claim they won it, is offensive and inaccurate.  Try
examining
the words "World War".

--------------------

More obsfucation Mr Barker.  The USA did not win WWI ALONE, and Denys
did not say that.  There was a reason the USA was involved 'at the end',
the USA's involvement was the REASON the war ended soon after.  Both
sides
had pounded each other to bits and were exhausted.  The addition of the
USA's fresh strength and the morale boost it gave the Allied Powers, was
all that was needed to defeat Germany.

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