U.S. Army Campaigns of World War I

OCCUPATION AND DEMOBILIZATION, 1918-1923

Brian F. Neumann and Shane Makowicki

U.S. Army Campaigns of World War I
CMH Pub 77-9, Paper
2019; 80 pages, illustrations, maps, further readings

GPO S/N: Pending

When the guns finally fell silent at the end of the First World War, just under 2 million American soldiers were serving on the Western Front. Over the next month, 250,000 doughboys marched into Germany as part of an Allied occupation of the Rhineland. Tens of thousands more Americans remained in France and provided crucial logistical support. The American occupation would last until 1923, when the last soldiers withdrew and the Europeans continued the difficult process of restoring the continent to stability. American political, military, and business leaders quickly turned their attention to dismantling the vast war machine built during 1917 and 1918. Returning soldiers to their civilian lives and shifting to a peacetime economy proved almost as difficult as mobilization, but without the unifying impulse the war provided. Just as the war produced unique challenges for the nation, so too did the process of demobilization. American armed forces underwent a massive reduction in force and returned to peace in a world fundamentally altered by war.

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