From the station in Paris to the luxury Hôtel Crillion at Place de la Concorde, thronged the war-weary Parisians and screamed, so John Persing thought almost hysterically "Vive l'Amerique", until they had no voice left. Again and again he had to walk out onto the balcony, and there saw one of his officers at last what no one has seen: Black Jack pulled his lips into a small tight smile. 

But when he steps in from the balcony, he looked at the interior of Hôtel Crillon and said:
- Don´t it beat hell.
For it belonged to a man from the Midwest, the State of Missouri, to profess homeland through a popular way of speaking, without caring about syntax.

He was unhappy in Paris and longed all the time from there. Every detail of the French military administration, he got confronted with - whether it involved the unloading of ammunition or organisatioen by a staff - terrified him and strengthened him in his commitment to that American soldiers did not get put into the French divisions but would always fight as units. He was not so stupid that he did not understand that his early arrival, before troop contingents, earned the French management's determination to liven up the war-weary French, and as long as he had no army, no one would attach themselves much by what he said or demanded.

Pershing remained in command for the entire war. He insisted that American soldiers be well-trained before going to Europe. As a result, few troops arrived before 1918. In addition, Pershing insisted that the American force would not be used merely to fill gaps in the French and British armies, and he resisted European efforts to have U.S troops deployed as individual replacements in decimated Allied units. This attitude was not always well received by the Allied leaders who distrusted the potential of an army lacking experience in large-scale warfare. In addition the British tried to barter their spare shipping to make the US put its soldiers into British ranks.

By June 1917, 14,000 U.S soldiers had already arrived in France, and by May 1918 over one million U.S troops were stationed in France, half of them being on the front lines. Since the transport ships needed to bring American troops to Europe were scarce at the beginning, the army pressed into service cruise ships, seized German ships, and borrowed Allied ships to transport American soldiers from New York, New Jersey, and Newport News, Virginia. The mobilization effort taxed the American military to the limit and required new organizational strategies and command structures to transport great numbers of troops and supplies quickly and efficiently. The French harbors became the entry points into the French railway system which brought the US forces and their supplies to the front. American engineers in France built 82 new ship berths, nearly 1,000 miles (1,600 km) of additional standard-gauge tracks and 100,000 miles (160,000 km) of telephone and telegraph lines.