Brest

Brest was the French port where Harry S. Truman first went ashore in April 1918, arriving with thousands of American troops. In the book’s account, the city marks a striking threshold: Truman’s first experience of France was not the battlefront but a warm welcome, comfortable quarters, and a landscape he could admire as a visitor.

Arrival at the harbor

The SS George Washington steamed into Brest’s crowded harbor on the morning of April 13. The day was warm and sunny; bands played, and crowds lined the shore, cheering and waving flags as the troops came down the gangways. About 7,000 soldiers arrived on the ship, a small share of the much larger monthly flow. American forces in France already numbered nearly one million. That April, 120,000 more troops arrived, and the monthly total would soon reach 250,000, before two million Americans were eventually in France.

A first impression of France

For Truman, then a first lieutenant, Brest offered an unexpectedly comfortable introduction to overseas life. At a hotel there, he had a room to himself, larger than any room he had known in the Gates mansion. Lace curtains, a white marble mantelpiece, a seventeenth-century Dutch clock under glass, red-plush chairs, polished floors, a crystal decanter, and a mahogany wardrobe with a full-length mirror made his accommodations feel far removed from the cramped shipboard journey.

For nearly two weeks, he did little more than enjoy himself. France more than compensated for his disappointment with New York and the Atlantic crossing: he relished the food, especially the bread, and the wine, and admired the carefully tended gardens and patchwork countryside. He praised the French people’s welcome and their roads, and was charmed by the audiences who applauded love scenes at the movies. His enthusiasm was practical as well as aesthetic: he calculated that his pay of 1,100 francs a month went far, with a fine meal costing about 10 francs. Many men in the 35th Division seemed bent on drinking France dry, though Truman judged the supply inexhaustible.

Port and battlefield in contrast

Brest’s welcome stood in sharp contrast to the war unfolding hundreds of miles away. Near the Belgian border, the German offensive at the River Lys was raging; the previous day, the British commander had urged his troops to fight on with their backs to the wall. The Battle of the Lys would last three weeks and become a critical struggle on the Western Front. Yet that distant violence was not apparent to Truman and the newly arrived soldiers. Their first days ashore showed them what the book calls a France that was not the war: Truman experienced Brest less as a battlefield gateway than as a place of hospitality, comfort, and discovery.