General Grant’s Anaconda

For most of the early 20th century, European military experts and historians viewed the U.S. military unsophisticated and amateurish. During WWI, in fact, this sentiment even reached the point that the French and British soldiers sent to the United States to instruct the American soldiers in modern warfare tended to aggravate some of the Army officers they had come to help! General Pershing often felt it necessary to send messages back to the training camps to stop focusing so much on British and French-style “trench warfare” and focus instead on aggressive offensive “open warfare” tactics. Even Major General Joseph Dickman, 3rd