Reducing The Saintmihiel Salient September 1918 Walter G Ford by Walter G. Ford 9780160944178, 0160944171 instant download after payment.

When Marines of the 5th Regiment, commanded by Colonel Charles A. Doyen, arrived in France in June 1917 as leading elements of what would become the 4th Brigade, they found the western front in somewhat of a stalemate, with the French and British faced off against the German Army in a gory line of trenches stretching from Nieuport, Belgium, in Flanders on the North Sea, all the way to the Swiss border. After two and a half years of furious back and forth between the Allies and the Germans along a 468-mile strongly fortified line, the German armies still retained the initiative and Allied morale was low.
Along this battle line, just east of Verdun, sat a longstanding German-held “hernia” on the French side that French forces had repeatedly attempted to reduce between 1914 and 1916—the Saint-Mihiel salient. Here, in September 1918, the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), led by General John J. Pershing, commander in chief, with its one Marine brigade, the 4th Brigade, would win the first large-scale American-led victory of World War I.