Product Description
Includes two Rifle Half Platoons each containing one Browning Pistol team, five Springfield rifle teams, two VB rifle Grenade teams, two Chauchat MG teams. one Flamethrower team, one 37mm mle 1916 team, four Hotchkiss HMG teams, two 76mm Stokes mortar teams, one 75mm mle 1897 guns, one Char Saint Chamond tank, two Renault FT-17 tanks and one Sniper team. When the United States finally went to war in April of 1917 its Army was not prepared to meet the challenges that awaited it on the battlefields of Europe. What America did have, which the rest of their allies lacked, was a source of manpower that seemed inexhaustible. Under the command of General John ‘Black Jack’ Pershing, the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) raised an army of over 4 million men and was able to get half of that number sent to France by the time the war ended. The lack of suitable material was solved by borrowing heavy weapons and artillery from the French and British, who also trained their new allies in the ways of modern trench warfare. The Americans finally got into the fight in October of 1917 seeing action all over the Western Front, and notably helped stop the final German offensive from reaching Paris in the battles of Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood in the summer of 1918. After the success of the Americans in these battles, Pershing lobbied hard for the AEF to be an independent American command in the field as opposed to being broken up and given piecemeal to the French and British armies as manpower to bolster worn out units already in the front line.
