2015 EDITION
WHAT WAS IT REALLY LIKE TO FIGHT AS AN AMERICAN DOUGHBOY?
Lost and forgotten for over 90 years, this book is the result of one street-wise and peace-loving but fiercely patriotic American soldier who went well beyond the typical censored letters, pocket diaries , and post-war memoirs to help answer that question for future generations. Through a unique combination of skill, circumstance and strong personal motivation, Private William J. Graham (Company B, 103rd Military Police Battalion, 28th Division/First Army) delivers one of the most compelling, detailed, and true real-time eyewitness accounts of an American soldier’s W.W. 1 experience ever recorded and available in print now for the first time.
Over four thousand miles from his home, family and work as a Philadelphia mounted policeman, thirty-nine year old William J. Graham found himself fighting as a detached field M.P. in war-devastated northern France as one of over two million men and women who made up the American Expeditionary Forces in the bloody latter half of 1918. Through his keen eyes and artful powers of description, it is not difficult to imagine yourself slogging through the muddy blood-spattered fields of the Western Front as the earth trembles and German shells scream overhead…where hunger, “cooties”, and death are constant companions. Private Graham’s uncensored journal of over 650 hand-written pages was penned by him not from memory while resting comfortably by a warm fire in a stuffed chair…but incredibly in France while the events he describes actually unfolded around him under raw filthy field conditions.
This is the 2015 revision of the book originally published in 2012. This revision contains extra journal entries recently found by Graham’s grand-daughter Deborah Share of Philadelphia and over a hundred new photos from the Jarvis Collection. With America’s centennial starting in 2017, this book is a great look at America’s involvement in the Great War as seen firsthand by a Doughboy. The Journal itself was so well written by this soldier, that it practically reads like a novel. The photographs enhance the story he is telling and combined, they place the reader right there with him. This is not a history book. Rather it is a work that gives readers an authentic and powerfully moving description of the horrific sights and emotions of Americans at war with the German “Hun” in the world’s first-ever global conflict. It serves as an accurate and superbly detailed description of what many U.S. fighting men experienced “doing their bit” while struggling to survive yet another day…”Somewhere in France”!
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