France

France was central to two different phases of Harry S. Truman’s public life: the country he crossed an ocean to defend during the First World War, and a threatened, struggling part of Europe whose postwar recovery became a major concern of his presidency. In the first role, France was an immediate place of military arrival and service; in the second, it stood within a larger political and economic crisis that Truman believed the United States could not safely ignore.

The destination of wartime idealism

Truman’s decision to go to war was shaped by duty, self-testing, and an idealized sense of the cause. He disliked guns and had never fought or risked his life, but believed the work had to be done and did not want to be regarded as a shirker. France gave that obligation a personal and historical focus: he felt that Americans owed the country something because of Lafayette, and he was stirred by Woodrow Wilson’s wartime messages. The prospect of joining a noble crusade across the ocean helped turn a decision about military service into a commitment to a cause abroad.

That idealism coexisted with uncertainty about what service might cost. When Bess Wallace proposed that they marry before he left, Truman refused, telling her she should not bind herself to someone who might return crippled or not return at all. They would wait until he came home whole. His reasons for going included confidence that the war would soon end once Americans entered it, but the farewell itself acknowledged the possibility of death or lasting injury. France was therefore not only an imagined destination of liberation; it was also the place toward which he was willing to go without knowing whether he would come back.

Crossing the Atlantic and arriving at Brest

Truman sailed aboard the SS George Washington on the night of March 29, 1918, with roughly seven thousand troops. The ship, a confiscated German luxury liner, crossed in a convoy and zigzagged through the submarine zone. The passengers practiced lifeboat drills and wore life preservers; at night the ship was dark, smoking on deck was forbidden, and officers slept six to a cabin. Truman had never seen an ocean, did not know how to swim, and ached for home. His attention to the water’s changing color and to sunsets that seemed inferior to those at home brings the vast crossing down to the scale of an individual soldier’s discomfort and homesickness.

The ship entered Brest’s crowded harbor on the morning of April 13. Truman found the town impressive on a warm, sunny day; bands played, crowds lined the shore, and people cheered and waved flags as the troops came ashore. The welcome took place amid a rapid expansion of American forces in France. The American Expeditionary Forces numbered nearly a million men by then, compared with only fourteen thousand in France the previous July. In April, 120,000 more arrived, and the monthly flow would eventually reach 250,000, contributing to a force of two million American troops in the country. Brest was thus both a particular point of arrival and one gateway into a military presence growing at extraordinary speed.

Training, landscape, and artillery combat

At the end of April, Truman was assigned to an elite artillery school near Chaumont, where John J. Pershing had his headquarters. He traveled east in a first-class coach he likened in comfort to a Pierce Arrow limousine. His quarters at Montigny-sur-Aube were a seventeenth-century stone chateau in a walled park: a garden, moat, thick stone walls, tiled floors, marble stairs, and carved woodwork made the setting feel far removed from active war. Truman remarked on the contrast between the village’s peace and beauty and the fighting elsewhere in the same country. Even the quiet had its irritations: several clocks struck the hour at different times through the night, keeping him awake.

That contrast did not mean the war was distant from his service. On September 26, 1918, the artillery bombardment began at 4:20 in the morning. Twenty-seven hundred guns opened fire along the front; in three hours, they expended more ammunition than had been used in the entire American Civil War. Truman’s unit took part in the rolling barrage, which began at 5:30 as scheduled. The guns became so hot that wet sacks placed over them to cool them would boil. France in these episodes was at once a landscape of hospitable towns and a battlefield transformed by industrial-scale artillery, with Truman’s training and command work placing him directly inside that transformation.

The fighting was part of the Battle of the Lys, where an assault launched by Erich Ludendorff against Allied lines near the Belgian border had begun while Truman was arriving at Brest. The battle lasted three weeks before the German offensive was stopped. The distance between the harbor welcome and the fierce fighting inland underscores the scale of France as a wartime setting: a country where troop arrivals, training, and the front existed at once, though not in the same place or at the same intensity.

France in the postwar recovery crisis

Decades later, France entered Truman’s thinking through a different kind of emergency. The Kennan Report argued that American assistance should restore the economic health of European society, rather than simply react to Communist pressure. After an inspection tour, Will Clayton reported that the situation was worse than expected and that millions of people were slowly starving. Truman saw the possible collapse of European economies as both a humanitarian disaster and a danger to the United States: in his view, a European depression could pull the American economy down with it.

The scale and political difficulty of aid became concrete in Truman’s discussions with congressional leaders. He told Sam Rayburn that hundreds of thousands of people might starve if relief failed, while also warning that another depression could follow a European collapse. In a later account of the crisis, he described a winter food bill of $580 million for France and Italy alongside a Marshall Plan projected at $16.5 billion over four years. He contrasted that peacetime expenditure with the much greater cost, in money and lives, of a possible war. France was not an abstract item in those calculations: it was among the countries whose people required immediate food assistance and whose recovery formed part of the wider European effort.

Truman also described how fragile he believed the strategic situation to be. He imagined that if Italy collapsed and Tito advanced into the Po Valley, France’s Mediterranean coast might become exposed to Russian occupation, with the Iron Curtain reaching cities including Bordeaux. This was a feared scenario, not an account of an occupation that had occurred. It shows how France’s geography connected the relief debate to the security argument: in Truman’s reasoning, rebuilding European society could help prevent both mass hunger and a political collapse with consequences for the United States. The country that had once been the object of his youthful wartime idealism remained, in a changed historical setting, part of the case for American engagement abroad.