ABSTRACT
The American military, and notably the US Army, was afforded a brutal introduction to the realities of modern industrial warfare while the administration of President Woodrow Wilson assumed a leading role in the attempt to forge a postwar settlement, although the opportunity was unfortunately squandered. American involvement in the war, while belated, brought the United States firmly into the affairs of Europe—a process. Women served the American armed forces in unprecedented numbers, mostly as nurses. The war at sea tends not to receive the attention often lavished on the Western Front, but the control of sea lines of communications and the neutralizing of the German fleet by the Royal Navy were critical to the Allies’ capacity to fight and win the war. The Great War experience of the Army and the Navy would have implications for the peacetime development of American arms in the war’s aftermath and through the long, and sometimes bitter, years of peace.
