United States Expeditionary Force

The American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) were the growing American military presence in France during the First World War. By April 1918, they numbered nearly a million men; their rapid expansion gives scale to Harry S. Truman’s arrival and sets his first impressions of France against a war already raging nearby.

Rapid Expansion in France

The AEF’s growth was strikingly swift. In July of the previous year, when the first American infantry unit marched through Paris, only 14,000 American troops were in France. By April 1918, the force there had reached nearly a million. The 7,000 troops who arrived aboard the George Washington were only a fraction of that month’s 120,000 arrivals. The account anticipates a continuing influx of 250,000 men a month, eventually bringing two million American troops to France.

Truman’s Arrival with the AEF

The George Washington, a confiscated German luxury liner carrying 7,000 troops, sailed on March 29, 1918, and reached Brest on the morning of April 13. Truman, then a first lieutenant, came ashore with the arriving troops. He found the town welcoming and, in his first weeks, experienced a France that seemed more like a place to visit than a battlefield. In a letter to the Noland sisters, he compared his perspective to Mark Twain’s in Innocents Abroad, casting himself as a tourist as much as a soldier.

The Army and the War Beyond His View

The narrative places the AEF’s arrival beside the Battle of the Lys, then raging about 400 miles northeast of Brest. That brutal German offensive would be remembered as a critical struggle on the Western Front, but its significance was not apparent to Truman and the other new arrivals. Their first days ashore showed them a France apart from the war. The contrast makes the AEF’s growth both a military fact and the threshold of Truman’s own experience of service overseas.