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There is even less written about the division’s operations in Belgium at the battle

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of Ypres-Lys under command of the French General Degoutte. To cover these gaps, unit

histories of regiments and companies within the 91st provided insight on the performance

of the unit throughout its existence. Many of these histories have the potential for bias

since they were written by committees who served in the units during the war, but they

still provide insight into how the unit executed its mission. This paper also uses several

monographs that were completed for requirements at the Infantry school at Fort Benning,

or CGSC at Fort Leavenworth. Several officers, using personal experience, wrote of their

unit’s challenges and actions in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. These monographs

generally gave a more critical analysis. However, the authors that wrote about V Corps

operations (the corps HQ for the 91st during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive) only briefly

mentioned the 91st while concentrating most of their research on problems in the other

divisions within the Corps. Captain Harrison, one author of a monograph on V Corps

summarizes his description of the men of the 91st Division as having a “never say die

spirit,” and continues to say that “too much cannot be said in praise of the 91st Div for its

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splendid achievements during the four days of fighting.” This shows the general

consensus among researchers that the 91st division seemed to advance well when

compared to the divisions on its flanks, but there is little analysis to discover why this

was the case.

4 Byron Farwell, Over There, The United States in the Great War, 1917-1918
(New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000), 250.

5 Captain Harrison, “The Operations of the Fifth U.S. Corps in the First Phase of
the Meuse-Argonne Offensive” (Student Paper, CGSC, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 1931), 9.

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