Four years after the end of World War I, President Warren G. Harding orders U.S. occupation troops stationed in Germany to return home.
In 1917, after several years of bloody stalemate along the western front, the entrance of America’s well-supplied forces into World War I was a major turning point in the conflict. When the war ended in November 1918, more than two million American soldiers had served on the battlefields of Western Europe, and more than 50,000 of them had lost their lives.
As part of the Treaty of Versailles, signed the next year, U.S. troops, along with other Allied forces, were to occupy the defeated Central Powers nations to enforce the terms of the peace agreement. In Germany, Allied occupation and stiff war reparations levied against the country were regarded with increasing bitterness, and in 1923, after four years of contending with a resentful German populace, the American troops were ordered home.
