When America entered the Great War in April 1917, it had a small constabulary Army with no experience in industrial age warfare. It was spread from the east coast across the nation and the Pacific to the Philippines. Nineteen months later the United States had a 2 million man force concentrated in France. Flanders and Italy. Towards the war's end the American Expeditionary Force or AEF, as it came to be known, was occupying more of the Western Front than Britain and all her Commonwealth Nations combined, lending combat divisions to all the allies and leading offensive operations against the best defended sector still occupied by the Germans. The AEF could claim when the Armistice came to have never failed on the defensive to turn back the enemy nor failed on the attack to achieve its aims.