After the American declaration of war in 1917, two million US troops were deployed to France - among them the recently drafted 79th Division. These men, raw recruits from the streets of Boston, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, were plunged into the hell of trench warfare. With just seven weeks of combat experience, they were thrown into their most important and bloody battle of the Meuse-Argonne offensive - the attack on Montfaucon, the highest and most heavily fortified part of the German line. Gene Fax's ground-breaking narrative tells the full story of these men and their commanders from the 1917 draft right through to the end of the war. Using the division as a window on the US Army as a whole, Fax reveals both its mistakes and its triumphs, and how the lessons it learned ultimately helped it to fight World War II. -- back cover.
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