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. |