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The Doughboys
Gary Mead

The Doughboys

Drawing from the often harrowing personal accounts of the soldiers of the American Expeditionary Force, The Doughboys establishes the pivotal role played by the Americans in the defeat of the Central powers in November 1918. Gary Mead brings together an extraordinarily rich selection of archive material in an engaging account that is part military history, part social analysis and memoir. The Doughboys records the events of the war exclusively from the perspective of the United States, highlighting the pivotal role played by the troops of the AEF and exposing the prickly, often turbulent relationship between the American and the Allied forces.

Book Details:

  • Author: Gary Mead
  • On Submission
  • Rights Sold
    • UK: Penguin
    • US: Overlook
Gary Mead

Gary Mead

A graduate of the University of Newcastle on Tyne, Gary Mead started his journalistic career by reporting on the rise of Solidarity and the imposition of martial law in Poland for New Statesman, The Observer and various other publications. He then joined the BBC World Service as a writer on East Europe. Subsequently he moved to Granada TV and spent a year in South Africa making a documentary history of apartheid. He then joined the Financial Times, initially as the paper’s correspondent in Argentina. He was head of research for the World Gold Council and spent time in Washington D.C.&...
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Book Reviews

  • "A fine account of the Great War."
    Kirkus
  • "Readers looking for an up-to-date, single-volume account of American WWI troop experience should look no further."
    Publishers Weekly
  • "Excellent anecdotal material from the letters and papers of senior and junior A.E.F. officers and enlisted men."
    The Journal of Military History
  • "Mead has soaked himself in their diaries, letters and memoirs, and has woven a tapestry which conveys the filth, fear, boredom, hunger and sleeplessness of their experiences."
    Times Literary Supplement
  • "Gary Mead argues that Europeans, especially the British and French, have allowed a fog of ignorance and forgetfulness to obscure the decisive role of America's doughboys...Their story is well worth telling."
    Literary Review