army soldiers for whom this was a profession. in the first world war of dough buoys came from all parts of the united states, because to the first world war is the first time that we conscript a mass army from the very beginning of a conflict. so we'd also had drafts before in the past but they had come in the middle of a conflict, and the civil war when voluntary lenment dropped off. the first world war, we enact the draft right from the very beginning, a short window of opportunity to volunteer, and the army, and that closes off, and so what that means is 72% of the armis going to be conscripted and they have to spread the period out equally throughout the united states. every state has a quota, and the idea this really is a men's army that represents the american population. so there were a few reasons america decided to race the army different any in the first world war. the first reason is they

expected there to be large casualties. america enters the war in 1917, so the war has been going on for two and a half years, so they understand and in fact they're going to need millions of men, and they're worried that after the first flush of enthusiasm, there would be a dropoff and wouldn't be able to sort of build the kind of mass army they needed. and the second thing that america was worried about was raising its army efficiently because they also knew in 1917 that this was going to be a total war. what that meant was that you had to raise an army but you had to mobilize your question -- economy as well and they were concerned that too mean people would volunteer and that would drain manpower from industry, and you might have men in the army but no guns or tanks or anything for them to fight with. so, it was way to ensure a kind of efficient, steady growth of a

mass military capable of fighting on they were from and also going to be armed and fed and essential things to make shoe you can find with. the demographic of the men being chosen represented the way that the selective service regulations were enacted. the first set of regulations, only men between the ages of 21 and 30 registered, and anyone 1918 they expand that out to 18, to 45. so, a really most men that fight are really in that sort of sweet spot of 21 to 30 years old. and then, of course, we have a diverse population, and so african-americans are in fact overrepresented in terms of their proportional the population in the drafted ranks, as are ethnic soldiers, foreign, speak soldiers. technically you weren't supposed to be drafted unless you had

declared your intent to become an american citizen, but a lot of people didn't understand that regulation? so we end up with one out of five soldiers in the army actually being an immigrant. so, the training for american soldiers in the first world war was fairly rudimentary, and in a sense, how well trained you were sort of depend on when you entered the military. so there were stateside training but again we were not prepared. even though we declared this war, we didn't have -- our training camps had to be built. you lad to get these guys housed, had to have them clothed, a lot of guys are training with sticks because they don't have rifles, and maybe they're on the rifle range and learning marksmanship but not learning the sort of highly technical aspects of fighting in trench warfare. and so the unit that do the best are the ones that organize early, they do their rudimentary training in the united states, they go to france, they get some

training in the trenches, but then they also get some training in terms of combined arms because in trench warfare it's not enough by 1918 just to have guys running into the machine guns. you have to coordinate between your infantry, your artillery, aerial support, and that's very technical. communications guys know what they're doing, signal guys, and so all of that takes time to organize. and so the units that form early in 1917 have time to kind of go through that so that by the time america actually enters on to the battlefield in 1918, they're beginning to learn how to fight this war, but you have a lot of guys that are drafted in 1918, get basic training and slipped to france, and it's a critical moment in fighting and they're thrown in. so one of the criticisms of the experience of the united states

in the first world wars how many poorly trained member get thrown into battle, and it shouldn't be a surprise that a lot of those guys end up as casualties because they basically don't know what they're doing. this was interesting because of the delays of the united states in terms of getting into the war and everybody sort of recognition it is going to take a full year for the united states to raise and train this army to the point it could actually make a difference in the battlefield. this led to a big disagreement between france and the united states because france said, we have the expertise, we have the officers, we know what we're doing so just give us these guys we just need men. so just give them to us, we'll amalgamate them into our armies and then this will just be the way that america contributes. you could imagine that this is just never something the united states is going to agree to. right? they're not going to say, sure, just take 10,000 guys and put them in french uniforms, under french command, and send them into battle.

so, john pershing, says, no, we're going to form an independent american army. but again, as i said, this means a lot of time, not just in training your combat soldiers but in training -- in organizing your logistics so you can actually supply these guys, and as they begin to move forward you can make sure that they've got what they need to keep an advance going. so, for france it's interesting because of course their status of one of the first american troops recovery gut then there's a lot of criticism about the tway that america is fighting this wave it's organizing, its insistence on forming an independent army. however -- this is where we have i think a pretty particularly important distinction between america and france in the first world war -- a lot of american soldiers trained temporarily with the french, but there are

four regiments given to french for the entire course of the war and they are malaga mated into french divisions and they fight seepingally well and one of the units this the harlem hellfighters, wound most famous regiments of the entire war. they're highly decorated and served with distinction, and this is in stark contrast to what happens to other african-american combatant units in the american army, where they are poorly trained, the minute they have any difficulty at all they're pulled out of the line. people are just looking for an excuse to get rid of black officers, and so out of that experience for african-american comes a very clear contrast between france and the united states. france is willing to give them a chance, train them well, and show what they can do, let them show the french what they can do. america, exactly the opposite.

and so when i say there's no amalgamation, that's the one exception to that rule and that becomes a very powerful example for post war civil rights movements. america has a huge effect in terms of what happens on the battlefield, even though -- the debate isn't, does america matter in terms of the final victory. i think when you think about just the training issues the american army has, the question we should ask is, was -- how high was the cost for americans to have that effect? and what is always interesting about world war i you have the deadliest battle in american history, a 47-day battle at the end of the war. america is victorious but that's america's deadliest battle. nobody knows that. about that is doubly interesting is that very few people raise the we i would it was so deadly after the war.

in the french case, the british case, you have the generals criticized for the high death tolls they allowed under their watch. pershing kind of walked away unscathed. nobody comes and says you did the wrong thing in terms of sacrificing these lives. did these men really have to die? the question is not that -- excuse me -- the issue is not the lack of preparation, and americans didn't make a difference. it's just in the difference they made the cost was probably really high to them on an individual level. america fought actively in the first world war for six months and there were 52,000 american deaths in those six months. so, a lot of people for the amount of time we're really on the battlefield. but the 52,000 compared to the hundreds of thousands of french and german and british that had died still seemed very small. so, americans -- seem that crazy

compared to other nations. when american soldiers come home, they're absolutely expected to go back to their old lives and pretty much walk away and say, thanks for the memories. there's almost no preparation made for their return home. again, america had not been prepared for fighting the war, didn't expect it to end in 1918. they knew there war we casualties but had not constructed a hospital system to care for the men so when the war ended unexpectedly soon, how did he mobilize these men and how to return them home in a way that was going to help them re-adjust, either emotionally or medically or vocationally. the government was just completely unprepared for that. so there's a few kind of half-hearted efforted but the whole thing falls apart, and the reason that this is important is it leads to several political

movements by veterans to sort of address this lack of appropriate planning for their homecoming, and the first sort of moment of veteran activism that we see comes in the early 1920s when veterans begin agitating for something called adjusted compensation. what they argue is that they get dumped back in the american economy, there's immediately post war recession, they can't get jobs, and the government should have seen this coming, and what they point -- the veterans point is to the fact that civilians who stayed home got paid record wages, and soldiers who served in the army only got paid a dollar a day. they wanted adjusted compensation. they want their army pay to be retroactively adjusted. so they win this argument in 1924 and are given something called an adjusted compensation certificate, or a bonus, but they don't get the cash. they gate bond.

for a lot of guys, if you serve in the military the whole war, you get a bond that was going to mature in 20 years, to $1,200. a lot of money. a lot of money to somebody in 1944. in 1924 they take the bond, and accept the compromise. second big moment of political activism, early 1930s, in the midst of the great depression, you're a veteran, down on your luck, you have this government i iou in your drawer and you don't want to wait for 1944. you're like issue want my money now now. so this leaded to the bonus march in hwang and 40,000 veterans coming into d.c., demanding immediate payment of their bonus certificate. long story short they've don't get it in 1932, get violently evicted and do finally get it in 1936. where this really leads us to and where that's really matters

is in the midst of world war ii. in world war ii, the world war i veterans say you can't do this a second time. when our son comes home from fighting in world war ii, another mass conscripted army, you need to do a better job bringing them a back happen than you do for us, so we say learn from the lessons of our experience, and the lessons they want the government to learn basically are the g.i. bill of rights. the g.i. bill of rights, which is what world war ii veterans get when they come home, is a piece of legislation that is written and lobbied for and basically pushed by world war i veterans, and so in that sense, the failed homecoming for the first world war makes a difference in american society because it leads to the adoption of the g.i. bill of rights. the government, after world war ii is really worried that if we had a bonus march of four million veterans, coming out of a population of four million veterans, what's going to happen when we