Doughboy was a popular nickname for the American infantryman during World War I . Though the origins of the term are not certain, the nickname was still in use as of the early 1940s. Examples include the 1942 song "Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland", recorded by Dennis Day , Kenny Baker , and Kay Kyser , among others, the 1942 musical film Johnny Doughboy , and the character "Johnny Doughboy" in Military Comics . It was gradually replaced during World War II by " G.I. "
4-578: Doughboy is a former nickname for an American infantryman, especially one from World War I. Dough boy , Doughboy , Doughboys , etc. may also refer to: Doughboy 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",
8-576: The doughboys were very young, often teenaged boys. The average age of a doughboy in World War I was less than 25 years old. Fifty-seven percent of the doughboys were under the age of 25. Seventeen-year-old boys also enlisted to fight in World War I. A popular mass-produced sculpture of the 1920s called the Spirit of the American Doughboy shows a U.S. soldier in World War I uniform. In September of 2024,
12-640: The precursor of the modern doughnut . Independently, in the United States, 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: One explanation offered for
16-405: 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, although this explanation ignores the usage of the term in the earlier war. One jocular explanation for the term's origin was that, in World War I, the doughboys were "kneaded" in 1914 but did not rise until 1917. In World War I
#55944