Devil Dogs: Fighting Marines of World War I
Clark, a former Marine and a historian of the Corps, does an excellent job of showing how the identity of the U.S. Marine Corps was forged in the experiences of the American Expeditionary Force in 1917- 1918. Combining published records with private sources, Clark tells the full story of the Corps in the Great War, from the training camps to the front lines, occupation and demobilization. Clark demonstrates that the Marines were no better prepared than their Army counterparts for the trenches of France. Most enlisted men were green wartime recruits, and few officers had experience commanding formations as large as those used in the Great War. The consequences were predictable: time after time, Marine units lost contact with one another and with their supporting artillery, and colonels and majors were remote from the battles their men were fighting. Clark is a stern critic of these command failures. His judgments indeed may be excessively harsh: no WWI army solved the problems of liaison and control. But at the company and platoon levels, Clark tells of how the Marines redeemed their superiors' shortcomings, overcoming uncut wire and damaged machine guns with raw courage buttressed only toward the end of the war by tactical sophistication. The front-line Marines' lot was not unique. What was unique was the way these experiences have become central to the Corps identity. Clark's text establishes beyond question the WWI origins of the synergistic emphasis on small-unit leadership, sharp-end initiative and esprit de corps that, for good and ill, characterizes and defines the U.S. Marine Corps.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.