Rod Paschall

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, thousands of African-American men volunteered to fight for a country that granted them only limited civil rights. Many from New York City joined the 15th N.Y. Infantry, a National Guard regiment later designated the 369th U.S. Infantry. Led by mostly inexperienced white and black officers, these men not only received little instruction at their training camp in South Carolina but were frequent victims of racial harassment from both civilians and their white comrades. Once in France, they initially served as laborers, all while chafing to prove their worth as American soldiers.Then they got their chance. The 369th became one of the few U.S. units that American commanding general John J. Pershing agreed to let serve under French command. Donning French uniforms and taking up French rifles, the men of the 369th fought valiantly alongside French Moroccans and held one of the widest sectors on the Western Front. The entire regiment was awarded the Croix de Guerre, the French government's highest military honor. Stephen L. Harris's accounts of the valor of a number of individual soldiers make for exciting reading, especially that of Henry Johnson, who defended himself against an entire German squad with a large knife. After reading this book, you will know why the Germans feared the black men of the 369th and why the French called them "hell fighters."

January 1917. On the Western Front the armies of Imperial Germany, Great Britain, and France were locked in grim stalemate. Repeated attempts by both sides to achieve breakthrough in the face of machine-gun fire, barbed wire, long-range artillery, and poison gas had brought only enormous casualties. The Defeat of Imperial Germany focuses on the innovative plans created by generals on both sides in their struggles to dislodge the entrenched enemy and to restore maneuver and victory on the Western Front. In a series of vivid analyses of successive offensives, Paschall examines the problems of command and what happened when the massed soldiery sought to carry out their orders. These strategies and tactics developed by the military leadership in 1917-1918, though largely failing to shatter the deadlock, would prove successful when implemented twenty years later in World War II.The first volume in the Major Battles and Campaigns series published under the general editorship of John S.D. Eisenhower, The Defeat of Imperial Germany has been designed for the "armchair strategist." Dozens of photographs, many never before published, as well as clearly drawn theatre and battlefield maps help to make this book an outstanding, challenging, and original contribution to the history of the Great War.