General of the Armies John Joseph "Black Jack" Pershing (September 13, 1860 — July 15, 1948) was a senior United States Army officer best known for commanding the American Expeditionary Force on the Western Front in World War I from 1917 to 1918. He rejected British and French demands to integrate American forces into their armies and insisted that the AEF operate as a single unit under his command, though some American divisions fought under British command and all-black units were integrated with the French army. American forces first saw serious battle at Cantigny, Chateau-Thierry, Belleau Wood, and Soissons, and to speed the arrival of the doughboys in France they left heavy equipment behind and used British and French tanks, artillery, airplanes, and other munitions. In September 1918 at St. Mihiel, the First Army under Pershing's direct command overwhelmed a salient the German Army had held for three years. For the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, he shifted roughly 600,000 American soldiers to the heavily defended Argonne forests, where his divisions fought alongside the French for 47 days as part of the Allied Hundred Days Offensive that contributed to Germany's call for an armistice. Pershing believed the war should continue until all of Germany was occupied to permanently destroy German militarism. He was the only American promoted in his own lifetime to General of the Armies, the highest possible rank in the United States Army; in 1976 George Washington was retroactively promoted to the same rank with higher seniority. Allowed to choose his own insignia, Pershing used four gold stars to distinguish himself from officers holding the rank of General, and after the creation of the five-star General of the Army rank during World War II, his rank could unofficially be considered equal to that of a six-star general, though he died before Congress acted on proposed insignia. Some of his tactics were criticized at the time and by modern historians, especially his reliance on costly frontal assaults that have been blamed for unnecessarily high American casualties. In addition to leading the AEF to victory in World War I, he mentored many of the generals who later led the United States Army during World War II, including George Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, Lesley J. McNair, George S. Patton, and Douglas MacArthur.
