David J. Bettez

David J. Bettez is an award-winning historian from Lexington, Kentucky. His first book, Kentucky Marine: Major General Logan Feland and the Making of the Modern USMC (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1914), received the Col. Joseph Alexander Award for Biography from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation in 2015. His second book, Kentucky and the Great War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016), received the Best Book Award from the Kentucky Historical Society in 2017.

The author has also written Heroic Deeds, Heroic Men: The U.S. Marine Corps and the Final Phase of the Meuse-Argonne Campaign, 1-11 November 1918, published in 2020 by the Marine Corps History Division, and has had articles published in the Marine Corps Gazette, Leatherneck, Naval History, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, and RUSI Journal.

Bettez received his B.A. in History from the University of Notre Dame and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky.

Over the years he has amassed a large collection of French Foreign Legion materials in French, English, and German.