Original subtitles

Over four long brutal years, World War I's

trench warfare on the western front browned on.

But to the east, a remarkably different war was fought.

A war of movement, of dramatic gains and losses.

A huge army is on the march, of terrain which

required everything from camels to skis.

In this war, one great empire, Austria-Hungary, was destroyed.

A second, Russia was captured by revolution.

It's royal family murdered.

The war on the eastern front would reshape the map of Europe forever.

Now it can be seen as it really happened, in colour.

In August 1914, two emperors, full of pomp and circumstance,

strutted like peacocks on the stage of Central Europe.

The first was Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, whose own grand ambitions were matched by

the ambitions of his nation's ruling classes.

The Kaiser was very, very highly strong.

He was given to hysterical outbursts about things and lived in a fantasy world,

but then, you know, frankly, the whole of

the country lived in a fantasy world in 1914.

The second emperor was Wilhelm's ally, Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary,

a deeply reactionary autocrat, presiding over

a court crumbling from intrigue and division.

These two emperors of the Central Powers were opposed on the eastern front by a

third emperor, Josef Nicholas II of Russia.

The someone was a man who was very, very conscious of his own limitations,

and his own limitations were considerable.

And he was not somebody like the Kaiser who would get hysterical at all,

who much happier living the life of some kind of country gentleman.

He certainly wasn't a warmonger at all.

The immediate spark, which had set these three empires, Germany, Austria-Hungary

and Russia, on the road to war, was the assassination of Art Duke Franz

Ferdinand Austria, by alleged Serbian nationalists.

When war broke out in August 1914, the Eastern Front campaign moved swiftly.

Austrian troops invaded Serbia.

Russia, Serbia's ally, invaded both Germany and Austria.

The Austrians quickly retreated before the Russians, losing key fortress towns.

For the ordinary Austrian soldier, it was demoralizing.

The march seemed endless, and we became too tired for anything except swearing.

Some cursed the car that produced the car that bore the

hide that formed the leather which their pecks were made.

Others swore that if they had only known what was in store for

them, wild horses would not have pulled them away from home.

While the Russian army smashed the Austrians,

it came badly unstuck against the Germans.

In late August, at the Battle of Tannenberg, 50,000 Russians were killed or wounded.

100,000 taken prisoner.

One British observer noted...

The sight of thousands of Russians driven into

two huge lakes and swamps to drown was gasketing.

And the shrieks and cries of dying men and horses will not be forgotten.

The German victory made the reputation of its two architects, Generals Paul von

Hindenburg and Erich von Ludendorff, who became idolized as the nation's saviors.

Every single day of the war, Hindenburg was having his portrait painted.

What he was was a great, avant-killer, dignified

old boy who stood for certain solid German virtues.

And he had them too.

Now Ludendorff was obviously a very good technician, but the trouble with

Ludendorff was that he got affected by megalomania.

The early battles on the Eastern Front persuaded Hindenburg

and Ludendorff that the Russian army would be easy meat.

Ludendorff began to dream of a great German empire to the East.

But British observers had noted the strength of the Russian fighting spirit.

Individually, the Russian soldier is the finest soldier in the world.

He puts up with cold and hunger and suffers hardships without a word of complaint.

But in taking on both Germany and Austria, the Tsar was asking much of his soldiers.

To fight on two major fronts was going to test the Russian army in the extreme,

not least because of the logistical problems of getting material, soldiers,

equipment, horses, food and fodder to the front.

In late September 1914, the Germans, brimming with confidence that the Russian

army would roll over, invaded Poland, which was part of Russia's empire.

It looked very tempting to attack Poland, which

after all juts out far into German territory.

And if you attack the Russians from the north and the south,

then you might catch a lot of them in the bag in the middle.

And that is the essential strategy of the Germans

in the last few weeks of 1914 in the East.

But the German army had been weakened by the demands of the Western Front,

and the Russians now hurried to reinforce the Polish capital, Warsaw.

Hindenburg and Ludendorf ordered their troops to race to the river Vistula,

which they needed to cross to get to the Polish capital.

The strength to which our troops were subjected during the advance was enormous.

The roads were mere mud and the weather was bad.

In spite of this, very long marches of 30 kilometers and more had to be

accomplished, if the enemy was to be caught.

The Germans crossed the Vistula on the 9th of October, and closed in on Warsaw.

A Russian nurse, Sophie Bochowski, saw the battle unfold.

For two weeks, the Germans tried to secure Warsaw, the key to Poland.

They battered us pitilessly.

Our wounded Russian soldiers came to us in their thousands to be treated.

But some had bright eyes.

They were exhilarated because we were managing to hold our own.

To German surprise, the Russians succeeded in their defense of Warsaw.

And as the German army retreated, the Russians, keeping

up this bewildering war of movement, attacked again.

In response, fresh German troops were sent

into Poland to intercept the Russian advance.

The result, in November, was the last great confrontation

on the Eastern Front in 1914, the Battle of Wuzch.

The Russians were the losers at Wuzch.

150,000 men were captured.

But the Germans also suffered, with 130,000 casualties.

German commanders now realized that their Russian counterparts had no scruples in

throwing unlimited numbers of men into battle.

But how long could it possibly last?

There was no doubt that despite their terrific losses, the Russians would soon

resume their offensive and continue it for some time.

They had plenty of men, but used them recklessly, and such

tactics promised no success, even against our thin lines.

By the end of 1914, a staggering 1.8 million Russians had been killed,

wounded, or taken prisoner.

In early 1915, with stalemate on the Western Front, the German High Command

decided to go for a quick victory in the East.

The Austrian army was to support the German offensive by

launching an attack on the Russians in the Carpathian Mountains.

It became a terrible grind for the Austrian soldiers

as they got bogged down in the cold and deep snow.

The fighting in the Carpathians, thanks to the difficulties of the ground

and the severity of the season, demanded the greatest effort and the

suffering of which our army was ever capable.

Those who have not taken part in it can have

no idea of what a human being is capable.

After two weeks, the Russians halted the Austrian attack, but despite this success,

the Russian commander in the Carpathians, General Alexei Brusilov, who would become

the key Russian general of the war, knew that the terrible

casualties of the early months were taking their toll.

The men sent to replace casualties, generally knew nothing except out to march.

Many could not even load their rifles, and as for

their shooting, the less said about it the better.

Such people could not really be considered soldiers at all.

Time after time, I asked my men in the trenches why we were at war.

The inevitable senseless answer was that a certain arch Duke and his wife had been

murdered, and that consequently the Austrians had tried to humiliate the Germans.

Why Germany should want to make war on us because of the Serbians?

No one could say.

A new breed of more questioning Russian officer began to emerge.

One of these is a guy called Demetrioskin, who describes sort of these gluttonous,

fat military officers, one I think spent most of the war sitting in a tent eating

ice cream, while the soldiers were sent out to fight.

So there's a real sort of challenge to authority.

What are we doing in this war?

Several hundred men have already passed through my platoon alone, and at least one

half of them have ended up on the fields of battle, either killed or wounded.

What will they get at the end of the war?

The desperate Russians needed help.

By now they faced yet another threat.

In October 1914, Turkey had joined the war on Germany's side.

The elderly Sultan, Enver Pasha, assumed he'd be part of a quick victory.

Enver Pasha had been in Germany.

He spoke excellent German, got on very, very well with the Germans, and he thought

in the first place these people will never lose.

If you think that the war will be over by Christmas, then you can snaffle the odd

few things in the Balkans, or perhaps against the Russians.

Enver Pasha sent his forces north to invade Russian Armenia.

In the biting winter, the Turks faced a ferocious Russian counterattack.

Of 95,000 Turkish soldiers who fought the campaign, only 18,000 survived.

Some 30,000 froze to death.

The Turks stagger back, and the angry and tired Turkish soldiers going back through

Turkish Armenia, then launch what is known as the Armenian Genocide.

Now, this was not just a spontaneous reaction to being beaten by the Russians.

It was clearly premeditated.

But that killed half a million Armenians.

The initial Turkish invasion had prompted Russia to appeal to her allies,

Britain and France, to do something to remove the threat from Turkey.

At the same time, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the

Admiralty, was planning an allied expedition to the Dardanels.

His great dream was that the war could be won by

attacking Germany and its allies at their weakest point.

On the 25th of April 1915, after a hazardous naval operation, British,

French, Australian and New Zealand soldiers landed on the beaches of Gallipoli.

The campaign on land degenerated into a bloody stalemate.

The people said, oh, if only we got another brigade, we could get forward,

and only we could get another division, but every time

another brigade or division was sent, they were stopped.

Because the Turks just brought up another division,

another division, another division, another division.

The trenches are totally different to what I expected.

It is sure death to put your head up, to look around.

Even the periscope mirrors, measuring three inches square at the most,

picked off one after the other.

When the Turks charge, they usually cry, alla, alla.

And our boys reply, come on your bastards, we'll give you alla.

And from the frequent use of this word, poor old

Turk wants to know if bastard was one of our gods.

Between the trenches are any amount of dead, and decomposing

bodies of our own men and Turks, lying on the heather.

The smell is awful.

A great brass sun beats relentlessly down from a clear

sky, and we soon learn what the term thirst really means.

Let's crack and heads go dizzy in the stifling heat.

Infantry men come begging for water, but our bottles are empty.

All night long, wounded men came struggling back,

all with tales of our men still lying out there.

The whole attack was a ghastly failure, they generally are now.

It was a super romantic campaign, you know, the views, you know,

but it masked awful suffering for the Allied soldiers and the Turkish soldiers.

The dysentery was rife, there were more casualties from dysentery than anything else.

People died in the latrines, it was awful.

And it achieved nothing.

The whole campaign was just a total failure, absolute failure.

Finally, in January 1916, the Allies withdrew.

They had suffered over a quarter of a million casualties.

The Turks had won a famous victory, but their triumphant

Gallipoli would soon be overshadowed by defeating the North.

In early 1916, Russian troops headed through the

Caucasus Mountains to attack Turkish Armenia.

They captured vital Turkish fortresses, and Turkey would never threaten Russia again.

And there'd been a further favourable development

for the Russians and their British and French allies.

In May 1915, Italy joined the war on the Allied side.

Tempted by the chance of winning territory from

Austria-Hungary, particularly the mountainous Tyrol region.

Italian soldiers headed north.

Austria diverted troops from the Russian front to reinforce the Tyrol.

The first war on skis unfolded.

The fighting on the Italian front was particularly harsh, because everywhere the

Austrians had their positions in the mountains.

And so we had the worst of the warfare on the Western Front in terms of heavy

artillery and machine guns with the added problem of fighting in mountain terrain.

Fighting on the Italian front was some of the hardest of the entire First World War.

A young British officer Hugh Dalton fought with the Italian army.

Trenches are cut in the solid ice, where more

Italians are killed by avalanches than by Austrians.

Where guns have to be dragged up precipices and

perched on ledges fit only for an eagle's nest.

Where sentries have to be changed every ten minutes, owing to intense cold.

Where battalions of alpini charge down snow

slopes on skis at the rate of 30 miles an hour.

We crept along the sides of the docks by a very narrow path.

The peak above us filled sky.

Below us the spacious, smooth and almost vertical

meadows seemed waiting for someone to roll down.

Everything froze hard during the night.

One's boots, the ink and one's fountain pen.

And the lava froze on one's face before one had time to shave.

For the next two and a half years, there was stalemate in the mountains.

In the summer of 1915, Germany and Austria once again set their sights on Warsaw,

capital of Russian-controlled Poland.

14 divisions amounting to 250,000 men headed east.

The May 1915 Austrian offensive in the Carpathians

had cost the Russians a hundred thousand casualties.

Now, through June and July, Russian losses in the face

of the German and Austrian advance would rise and rise.

In May, the Russians lost another 400,000 killed wounded and prisoners.

And by June 1915, their war losses as a whole up to that time are a staggering 3.

8 million.

Fortress towns that had been fought over again and again lay in ruins.

The people of Warsaw awaited their fate.

Warsaw is doomed, but always there seemed a little hope.

Short of a miracle, there's no hope now, however.

The Germans will clatter through the streets with all the pride of victory.

There's no hope now, however.

The Germans will clatter through the streets with all the pride of victory.

The only question is, how long before they come?

Not days, hours, I think.

The next day, August the 5th, 1915, the German army strutted through Warsaw.

It was exactly one year into the war, and German

commanders could begin to believe they had won.

The Russians really would roll over.

They were wrong.

There were two years of better fighting ahead on the Eastern Front.

But for the moment the German soldier could relax, he was confident and victorious.

His Russian opponents seemed defeated and demoralized.

British observers felt it was a decisive moment for the Russian army.

One of the three more weeks we continued to retreat.

Each day was a light, tired men shuffling east.

Hungry, homeless peasants praying for food.

Wounded men in their thousands.

We were all utterly exhausted.

We were weary for a rest.

We wondered when the great trek east would stop.

In response to the defeat, Tsar Nicholas II declared

himself supreme commander of Russia's armed forces.

Tsar would soon appoint General Brusilov to be

commander of his armies on the Eastern Front.

But Brusilov's private verdict on Tsar was scathing.

Tsar's lack of knowledge and ability, his weakness of character and his

vacillating, making totally unfit to command.

The men were saying with perfect truth, we are being sacrificed for nothing,

for we cannot hope to beat them.

A complete moral collapse is obviously not far away.

Yet Russian soldiers proved to be extraordinarily resilient.

In early 1916, the British and French planned their combined

offensive for the coming summer on the Western Front.

The Russians were to play a vital part in the plan by attacking

Germany and Austria in the east to weaken their reserves.

General Brusilov would lead the summer offensive.

But Brusilov was becoming caught in a conflict of loyalty.

He wrote, as early as 1914, that he was fighting not for the Tsar, but for Russia.

And it was as if he sensed that at some moment

he might have to choose between the two.

Brusilov carefully prepared to attack the Germans and Austrians across a 200-mile

front, taking them by surprise, with short, sharp, accurate artillery barrages.

His first target was the weaker Austrians.

On June the 4th, 1916, Brusilov's armies launched their attack.

Within days, he was jubilant.

I will simply say that by mid-day on the 6th of June, we had captured 900 officers,

more than 40,000 men, and taken 77 guns, 134 machine guns, and 49 trench mortars.

By June the 9th, we had captured 1,240 officers, over 71,000 men, 94 guns,

167 machine guns, and a vast quantity of miscellaneous military booty.

In the face of the Russian onslaught, Austrian soldiers began to lose their nerve.

I did my best to rally the company, but it was hopeless.

The men began to run, held his shelter over the fields.

The Russian artillery soon discovered us, and did its best to see us home.

Along the drenched roads and fields came numberless batches of blue Austrian

uniformed prisoners, usually escorted by only one brown Russian.

Miserable was their word for their condition before their capture.

All were sick of the war.

Brusilov very nearly finished off the central powers.

He looked as if the Austrian Empire was collapsing under those hammer blows.

It proved very much touch and gold when all the central powers didn't collapse at

the same time they got the battle of the Somme in the West.

And the Italians were attacking in the south,

and they survived really only by a whisker.

Ludendorff called Brusilov's offensive the crisis in the East.

It meant that yet again the Germans would have to

scramble reinforcements in the wake of Austrian defeat.

And though the Russians had won a great victory, it had cost them dear.

Our hospital was congested with wounded, as were all the other hospitals in the town.

We were told that the casualties had been calculated at 200,000.

We had seen her felt and known broken men.

By the winter of 1916, the Germans had gathered the reserves to fight back and

regain much of the territory captured in Brusilov's summer offensive.

It was a devastating disappointment for ordinary Russian soldiers who fought so hard.

But British observers continued to be amazed by their endurance.

The physique of the men generally was magnificent.

They could march and fight too, and Russian so scanty and coarse,

that I doubt any other European soldiers would tolerate.

While there were medals for the summer's victors, by the end of 1916, hundreds of

thousands of Russian soldiers were decaying

in German and Austrian prisoner of war camps.

For those who remained at the front, it was no longer a story of victory,

but of retreat.

Brusilov himself began to feel deep of disillusion, not with his men,

but with the powers above.

I would merely say that my armies, which in 1916, had accomplished miracles

of bravery and whole-hearted devotion to Russia and to their duty.

So all their feet of arms brought to nothing, by what they considered a lack of

intelligence and decision on the part of the supreme command.

Some politicians began to share Brusilov's views.

The High Command disregarded losses in men, and

it does not take enough care of the soldiers.

The army no longer believes in its leaders.

The desperation of the soldiers was spilling over to the civilian population.

From all sides came the complaint of a people weirried by the war.

Disillusioned, lost in what seemed an endless circle of mistakes.

Food was growing ever more scarce.

The queues outside the bread shops stretched right down the length of the street.

It was said in all directions that the merchants and shopkeepers

were building up huge profits at the expense of the people.

It was whispered that the Empress trafficked with Germans.

Even the Emperor was no longer held in the same war and reverence.

Russia, this great Russia that could feed the world, was short of food.

And very short of other commodities too.

It was a scarcity of everything in Russia.

Food and clothes and boots and petrol and paraffin.

We will soon have a famine.

I advise you to buy 10 pounds of bread and hide it.

In the suburbs of Petrograd, you can see well dressed women big in the streets.

It is very cold.

People have nothing to burn in their stoves.

But to hell with it all, how hard has it become to live?

This content was brewing all over Russia.

Strikes became commonplace.

People from all sections of society questioned the need for war.

By autumn 1916, the bored and restless sailors of the Russian

Navy had mutinied twice in the Baltic and Black Sea fleets.

Lazar and his family were isolated.

In every rank of society, it was freely said that the nation and the army were

sold by the empress' minions, and that she aimed at obtaining a regency to replace an

emperor whose weaknesses, garlessness and drunkenness had become a byword.

Gossip was rife.

It was rumored that the empress was meddling in affairs of state.

Under the spell of her secret lover, the sinister guru, Rasputin.

Everywhere the slander spread and ripened.

There was nothing bad or vile enough that was not insinuated.

The dark powers behind the throne.

German influence at court.

The suspicion of a separate treacherous peace.

The power of Rasputin.

Infamous stories about the empress.

In late 1916, they tried to project a positive image of the empress by showing

her working as a nurse in the Winter Palace.

But what they didn't realise is that the image of the nurse had changed.

And because a whole supply of nurses' uniforms had fallen into the hands of

Petrograd's prostitutes, they didn't realise that the pictures they were

putting out of the empress dressed up as a nurse would have

precisely the opposite effect of the one they intended.

So here she was dressed as a nurse only reinforcing

all those rumours about her sexual games with Rasputin.

Lazar responded to the revolutionary threat with more repression.

Some of his advisers even began secret negotiations with Germany to end the war,

hoping this would preserve Lazar's position with his people.

In February 1917, Lazar's troops were ordered to shoot at demonstrators in Petrograd.

Some, like Fido Alind, refused.

The Cossacks were fighting on defenceless and unarmed crowds.

The Cossacks were fighting on defenceless and unarmed crowds, striking people with

their whips, crushing the fallen with their horses.

I jumped to the table and cried out wildly.

Friends long lived the revolution.

As the tensions grew, senior military commanders appealed to Lazar to step down.

Your Imperial Majesty, I am well aware of your profound love for our country.

I am sure that to save it as well as the dynasty, you

will consent to this sacrifice the war demands from you.

Lazar tried to return from the front by train to Petrograd.

He was diverted by revolutionaries.

He knew the time had come.

The abdication of Lazar took place on the 15th of March.

We changed from soldiers of Lazar to soldiers of the Republic quite automatically.

No one said a dissenting word.

And the soldiers, they accepted the change, just as

they would have obeyed an order to stand to attention.

A provisional government took over.

Soldiers and civilians celebrated.

There sounded a short booming peel of the Cathedral Bell, then another, and a third.

The peeling grew faster and soon the bells of all the outlying churches began to ring.

The streets filled with people.

The doors of many houses stood open, strangers weeping, openly embraced each other.

Alexander Kerensky, who would later and briefly become Prime Minister,

was appointed Minister of War.

He made General Brusilov, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army.

Together, they hoped to restore national confidence with a new

military offensive against their weaker enemy, the Austrians.

The attack was launched on the 1st of July, 1917, but

it was soon clear that troops no longer wanted to fight.

After just a week, the generals realized that mutiny was in the offing.

When I asked them what they wanted now, they said they did not want to fight

anymore, and pleaded to be allowed to go home.

In order to share out the land their fellow villages

had taken from the land owners and live in freedom.

And when I asked them what will happen to Mother Russia, they replied it was not

their job to think about what would become of a state.

After three years of fighting and suffering, the Russian soldier finally had enough.

It was a war where the advantage had constantly shifted, but in the end it was

political, not military collapse, which was deciding it.

In September 1917, in what would be their final attack, the Germans captured Rika.

Russia's second largest Baltic port.

They could now afford to sit back and wait, while Russia tore itself apart.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, was waiting for his moment to pounce.

One wrong move on our part could wreck everything.

Events should not be anticipated.

Time is on our side.

Lenin's aim was Bolshevik Revolution.

But it was his slogan of peace at any price, which began to swing support his way.

By late 1917, a second provisional government was trying to bring order to Russia.

But as Lenin incited his revolution, onlookers

could see the country was hurtling into chaos.

This is no longer a capital.

It is a cesspit.

No one works.

The streets are filthy.

There are piles of stinking rubbish in the court yards.

It hurts me to say how bad things have become.

There is a growing idleness and cowardice in the people, all those base criminal

instincts, which I have fought all my life,

and which it seems are now destroying Russia.

The socialists have sown the wind.

Russia is reaping the well wound.

The economic situation in Russia is such that the

words on the brink of ruin have become commonplace.

Foreign revolutionaries like the American John Reed could see the day coming.

On the one side, there was the monarchist press, inciting to bloody repression.

On the other, Lenin's great voice, worrying, insurrection.

We cannot wait any longer.

Daily, the government seemed to become more helpless.

Armed workers patrolled the streets at night, doing battle with marauders and

requisitioning arms wherever they found them.

By November 1917, the revolution, later glorified in Russian films, was imminent.

The provisional government ordered the battleship Aurora to leave Petrograd Harbor.

It feared revolutionary sailors would turn the ship's guns on the seat of government.

An armored automobile went slowly up and down, sirens screaming.

On every corner and every open space, thick groups were clustered.

The tides of people flowed endlessly.

On the 7th of November, prompted by the Aurora's

guns, the revolutionaries stormed the Winter Palace.

Day broke on a city in the wildest excitement and confusion, the whole nation

heating up in the long-hissing swells of storm.

Within days, the revolution spread to Moscow.

Committees of Russian soldiers began to make peace over to us to Germany.

In December 1917, an armistice came into force on the Eastern Front.

In over three brutal years, two million, three hundred thousand Russians had died.

A further five million injured.

For all its failings and for all its problems, the Imperial Russian army had,

to the end, held down 160 German and Austrian divisions.

These were now free to be released, and the effect of

this on the Allied war effort was absolutely devastating.

Italy was the first of the Allies to feel the effect of Russia's collapse.

In late October, the Austrian and German armies

struck in the mountains of northeast Italy.

Rumors and denials of rumours came in from the north.

On the 27th, the rumours became hard.

The German advance to the north was sent to be considerable and rapid.

The Italian attempt to capture Austrian territory had turned sour.

Two hundred and seventy-five thousand Italian soldiers

had been captured by the Germans and Austrians.

Many who remained to fight couldn't see the point.

Our men marched doggedly on.

Some beaten and puzzled.

Others tired but cheerful.

Others with expressionless, uncomprehending faces.

But in the faces of a few I read a consciousness of

the tremendous tragedy of which we formed a tiny part.

The Italians finally stopped the German advance 15 miles short of Venice.

British and French troops had to be sent in to support.

By the end of 1917, the outlook for the Allies was bleak everywhere.

The German commander, General Ludendorff, was

by contrast more confident than ever before.

Owing to the breakdown of Russia, the military situation was more favourable

to us at New Year 1918 than one could ever have expected.

Numerically, we had never been so strong in comparison with our enemies.

There seemed just one hope for the Allies.

America.

On April the 6th, 1917, the United States President,

Woodrow Wilson, had declared war on Germany.

The British welcomed their new allies as saviors.

It has always been my dream that the two English-speaking

nations should someday be united in a great cause.

And today, my dream is realised.

The Anglo-Saxon race must save civilisation.

In the summer of 1917, the first American troops arrived in Europe.

They looked larger than ordinary men.

Their tall, straight figures were in vivid contrast to the undersized army's apparent

recruits to which one had become accustomed.

They seemed, as it were, Tommy's in heaven.

Had yet another regiment been conjured out about depleted dominions, I wondered?

Then I heard an excited exclamation.

Look, look, here are the Americans.

American soldiers were first known as dobois.

Later we became known as dog faces.

Where we got the doboi name from was always a mystery to us.

Dog things was more patently understood.

It was said we were so called, because we wore dog tags, slept in pup

tents, growled at everything we had, and tried to seduce every female that we saw.

For many of these first Americans, the early

training on the Western Front was a culture shock.

One listed his pet hates.

Our officers had the list because they never do us any good.

They're cranky, arrogant, and unreasonable.

The weather ranks second.

The mules come third.

Our leaky clothes come fourth.

Our feet are wet all the time.

The lice come fifth.

The canned potato meat hash comes sixth.

Home sickness comes seventh.

Most of us have never been away from home before, and we're

so hungry for a little womanly affection that it's awful.

The Germans come last, because if it wasn't for them, then we could go home.

The commander-in-chief of the American Expeditionary Force, General John J.

Pershing, now had to harden these rule recruits for battle.

The World War involved a handling of masses.

It was one thing to call one or two million men to the colors, and quite

another thing to transform them into an organized, instructed army capable of

meeting and holding its own in the battle against the best

train force in Europe with over three years of actual war.

The war experienced to its credit.

When the Americans began fighting, they were very

reminiscent of the British in 1916 on the Somme.

They were enthusiastic, they had high morale, but they had a lot to learn.

And they did, to be absolutely fair, learn

very quickly in some very, very bloody battles.

The Americans saw their first battle action in June, 1917.

I remember the early morning light revealing to me the first American dead.

The last I was now indifferent to the sight

of our own dead, but those somehow moved me.

They looked so new and smart with their long leggings.

They symbolized also the hope on which the Allies were relying on for the future.

Germany's commanders also realized that in the

long term, the Americans could make the difference.

The tremendous superabundance of pent up, untrapped nervous energy which the

American troops brought into the fray, more than balanced

the weakness of their allies who were utterly exhausted.

With the Americans looming into view, Ludendorff began

to think Germany must gamble to finish the war quickly.

While he made plans for a decisive victory in 1918, most on the Allied side believed

that the war on the Western Front would grind on for years to come.

Few could have anticipated how quickly everything would change.