And They Thought We Wouldn't Fight

Floyd Phillips Gibbons was aboard the RMS Laconia when a German U-boat torpedoed it in the Atlantic. He survived nineteen hours in a lifeboat before rescue. This is not the kind of correspondent who watched from a safe distance. Gibbons embedded with the American Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front, reporting as shells fell and doughboys went over the top. His account captures the war as the men who fought it experienced it: not as strategy or politics, but as fear, exhaustion, and the particular courage of ordinary Americans asked to do extraordinary things. From the chaos of that Atlantic crossing to the grim reality of the trenches, Gibbons renders the Great War with the urgency of someone who could die with the next dispatch. Marshal Foch, commanding eleven million bayonets, declared no man more qualified to tell this story. General Pershing said Gibbons gave America a picture of her soldiers in France as no one else could. Read this to understand what it meant to be there.