With Their Bare Hands: General Pershing, the 79th Division, and the Battle for Montfaucon

With Their Bare Hands traces the fate of the US 79th Division--men drafted off the streets of Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia--from their training camp in Maryland through the final years of World War I, focusing on their most famous engagement: the attack on Montfaucon, the most heavily fortified part of the German Line, during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in 1918.

Using the 79th as a window onto the American Army as a whole, Gene Fax examines its mistakes and triumphs, the tactics o...