American academic and Dial editor Robert Morss Lovett compared and contrasted two very different First World War memoirs in this review from 1919:America in France, by Frederick Palmer (1873 – 1958) and Floyd Gibbons’ (1887 – 1939) And They Thought We Wouldn’t Fight.:
“The titles of these books correctly prophesy their contents, style, and general approach. Mr. Palmer writes as a historian -a plain unvarnished tale. From his position on General Pershing’s staff as censor we may assume that his book is the result of the fullest information…Mr. Palmer does not disguise the fact that the machine did not work perfectly…Mr Floyd Gibbons, of the Chicago Tribune, writes like a newspaper man…Mr Gibbons made it his business to know the American soldier, not as an unidentifiable factor in the grim unity of his formations with the same humorous stoicism with which he accepts war.”
1929 was the year many of the finest W.W. I books were published…
