Doughboy was an informal term for a member of the United States Army or
Marine Corps, especially used to refer to members of the American
Expeditionary Forces in World War I, but initially used in the
Mexican–American War of 1846–1848. A popular mass-produced sculpture of
the 1920s designed by E. M. Viquesney – the Spirit of the American
Doughboy – shows a U.S. soldier in World War I uniform. The American
usage was adopted in the UK by c.1917.
The term was still in use as of the early 1940s – for instance in the
1942 song "Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland," recorded by Dennis
Day, Kenny Baker and Kay Kyser, among others; as well as the 1942
musical film Johnny Doughboy and as a character "Johnny Doughboy" in
Military Comics[2]. It was gradually replaced during World War II by
"G.I.
The origins of the term are unclear. The word was in wide circulation a
century earlier in both Britain and America, albeit with different
meanings. Horatio Nelson's sailors and the Duke of Wellington's soldiers
in Spain, for instance, were both familiar with fried flour dumplings
called "doughboys",[3] the precursor of the modern doughnut.
Independently, in the former colonies, the term had come to be applied
to bakers' young apprentices, i.e., "dough-boys". In Moby-Dick (1851),
Herman Melville nicknamed the timorous cabin steward "Doughboy.
Doughboy as applied to the infantry of the U.S. Army first appears in
accounts of the Mexican–American War of 1846–1848, without any precedent
that can be documented. A number of theories have been put forward to
explain this usage:
Cavalrymen used the term to deride foot soldiers, because the brass
buttons on their uniforms looked like the flour dumplings or dough cakes
called "doughboys",[3][8] or because of the flour or pipe clay which the
soldiers used to polish their white belts. Observers noticed U.S.
infantry forces were constantly covered with chalky dust from marching
through the dry terrain of northern Mexico, giving the men the
appearance of unbaked dough or the mud bricks of the area known as
adobe, with "adobe" transformed into "doughboy". The soldiers' method of
cooking field rations of the 1840s and 1850s into doughy flour-and-rice
concoctions baked in the ashes of a camp fire. This does not explain why
only infantrymen received the appellation.
One explanation offered for the usage of the term in World War I is that
female Salvation Army volunteers went to France to cook millions of
doughnuts and bring them to the troops on the front line,[10] although
this explanation ignores the usage of the term in the earlier war. One
joke explanation for the term's origin was that, in World War I, the
doughboys were "kneaded" in 1914 but did not rise until 1917. |