It was the coming-of-age
war for the United States, and for the men who served in combat overseas,
it provided a sobering lesson in the realities of twentieth-century
warfare. Barrages of immense artillery shells snuffed out lives by the
thousands, trenches filled with water and rats and worse were home for
months on end to weary soldiers, and geographical orientation was often
impossible. Though Americans had a sense that the tide had turned with
their arrival, the sense of certain victory remained a rumor until the
very end.
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