Remembering a Veteran: Pvt. John DeWitt, 168th Infantry, 42nd Rainbow Division

Pvt. John DeWitt, Rainbow Division

Background

One day in 2020 Dr. John Chase was called to Lincoln, NE,  to help sort through his  grandfather's recently discovered wartime letters. His grandfather, John Dewitt, was a World War I veteran, and John's sister Abby had discovered the 80 long-forgotten letters written from various military posts and the battlefields of France. 

Reading them, Dr. Chase came to realize he did not know much about the nature of his grandfather's service — that he had the dangerous job of battalion runner, and that he had been gassed and wounded in one of the most dramatic moments of the war in the Second Battle of the Marne. He was floored, and he resolved to learn as much as he could about John Dewitt and his comrades, what they fought for, and what they had gone through. The result of his effort had been the recent publication of the a 255-page book titled Searching for John Dewitt.  The volume combines excerpts from the letters with commentary with fresh insights and discoveries from his grandson.

 

John Dewitt, American Soldier

John Dewitt  was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on 30 August 1896,  the first of seven children. Three of his brothers would die  in childhood. His surviving three sisters, Anne, Mary Clare, and Helen, we addressed in his letters home as “the girls.” His father, also named John, worked as a brakeman on the C.G. and W. railway. When the future Doughboy was around ten years old, he moved with the family 400 miles southwest from the Minneapolis St. Paul area to Council Bluffs, Iowa. As a young boy in Council Bluffs, John Dewitt got a job at a local firehouse caring for its horses.   

When America joined the World War, he entered the service and became part of the 42nd Rainbow Division's  168th Infantry—made up mainly of Iowa National Guardsmen—and was sent to France. Since his division was one of the earliest  to arrive in France, John saw a lot of action and had a very dangerous job.  He  was a runner in the front line, tasked with carrying messages from his command post, through and over the trenches.

He would be awarded a Purple Heart for getting gassed by chemical weapons and being shot in the leg in August 1918 helping to stop the last German offensive of the war. When he returned to Iowa, he helped form an American Legion post, a group in which he remained active for the rest of his life.

Back stateside, he became a traveling salesman, with a long route through Texas and Oklahoma, but his heart was not in it. He decided to take advantage of the small funds available to  returning veterans and enrolled in Creighton University Law School in Omaha. He took the Iowa State Bar Exam and passed without needing to graduate. In 1927 he would meet, court, and marry Helen Brennan, a city  girl from Omaha. John and Helen moved to Griswold, Iowa, in 1932, where he practiced law and the couple raised their children, Maribeth and Jack. Doughboy John Dewitt died on 1 December 1975.

John Dewitt Reading a Burial Tribute to a Fellow Doughboy

A Selection from Searching for John Dewitt

May 1918 was unlike anything John Dewitt and the rest of the Iowa 168th had experienced —four turbulent weeks of continuous raids into no-man’s-land bookended by two memorable events. The month began with an unrelenting American bombardment of the German lines that started in the early morning hours of 1 May 1. It ended with an ominous and lethal phosgene gas attack on the Americans that killed or maimed scores of men.

Still, despite the clamor, things were beginning to look up. The Americans were starting to make a difference in the four-year-old war, though the advances came at a great price. Patrols left the safety of the American lines to the point where they seemed nonstop. The Americans began to feel they dominated no-man’s-land. If he did not already know  by then, weeks into his job as a battalion runner, John Ryder  Dewitt had learned that war was a serious and unforgiving enterprise.

The phosgene attack at the end of the month, besides  offering a taste of the depths to which both the Germans  and Allies had sunk, prompted my grandfather to mention  the possibility of his own demise to his mother, which of course he shrugged off. In his letter home, he only hinted at the gas attack that caused his introspection— dancing, I suppose, with the censors about how much he could reveal. The attack had left him uncharacteristically pensive, when he wrote home:

May 28, 1918

At the Front

Well Mother dear, this is about all the news here I am able to tell. I think the people of Iowa will get quite a  shock between now and when you get this letter.

Don’t ever worry about me when you hear rumors, which I suppose circulate around. Wait until you get official  notification from Washington. If I am called, you may  rest assured I am not afraid to go to the Maker and that I  am better off. There is no reason to be alarmed. I just thought this was as good a time as any to write it. 

That gas is certainly awful stuff. I fear that more than anything else.

John

May was a month of heated battles, and for battalion runners, an abundance of chances to tease fate, or as my  grandfather phrased it, opportunities to meet his Maker. The momentum for the war had turned in favor of the Americans and Allies and he was swept up in the current.

In his dedication, Dr. John Chase wrote: "I hope this book will encourage families to ask their veteran relatives about their military service and not have to learn about it by reading long-lost letters 100 years later."

Order Online HERE

Lonesome Memorials #12: The Ulverston Street Trench Memorial

This 21st-century memorial on the Somme battlefield, located just west of the village of Ovillers, is one of the more recently dedicated monuments on the Western Front.

Blue Tabs Show Location; Village of Orvillers on Right

The King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment (from NW England) was in action in this area during the autumn-winter period of 1915. The trenches in this sector were undoubtedly given their names by soldiers who came from Lancashire and Cumbria, some hailing from Ulverston, which later became Albert's twin town in 1976. Long after the "twinning" of the two communities, the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme came along and researchers came across trench maps that clearly showed the location of Ulverston Street Trench. Once the significance of the discovery was recognized, the town of Albert erected a memorial with a plaque on the site of the trench. The plaque is inscribed in English, French, and German. The stone memorial and plaque was unveiled by the then Ulverston Town Mayor Elect, Mrs. Brenda Marr in 2006.

Men of the 2nd Berks Prior to the Somme

On the opening day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, the Ulverston Street Trench was occupied by the 2nd Royal Berkshire Regiment of the 8th Division, whose men left the trench at 7:30 a.m. to attack. No significant advance was made. The German 180th Infantry Regiment was well prepared. Ovillers proved impossible to take. By nightfall of 1 July, the 2nd Berkshires had 437 dead, wounded or missing out a total of 5,121 for the 8th Division.

Present Day View from the Trench Site Showing Enemy Dispositions (Click Multiple Times to Enlarge Fully)

Getting There

Since some of these roads are unsigned, these directions are best given with a map.

From Albert:  Drive East on the Albert-Bapaume Highway (Rt. D929) to the turn off for the La Bosselle Mine. The map begins there. (Don't turn off Rt. yet.), follow the dark blue.  An alternate route, in blue-grey,  if you are coming from Bapaume can also be seen on the Google map.

Sources: Panorama by Jolyon Fenwick for a 2016 exhibition of Zero Hour Panorama; The Rifles Berkshire and Wiltshire Museum; Ulverston Town Council

The Worst Industrial Accident of the War—The Chilwell National Shell Filling Factory Explosion

On 1 July 1918, at 7:10 p.m., a catastrophic explosion tore through the National Shell Filling Factory at Chilwell, Nottinghamshire. The blast killed 134 workers and injured 250—the biggest loss of life from a single accidental explosion during the First World War. Eight tons of TNT had detonated without warning, flattening large parts of the plant and damaging properties within a three mile area. The colossal blast was heard 30 miles away. Eyewitness, Lottie Martin, a worker at the factory, later recalled: "…Men, women and young people burnt, practically all their clothing burnt, torn and disheveled. Their faces black and charred, some bleeding with limbs torn off, eyes, and hair literally gone…" Rapid action by the Works Manager, Arthur Bristowe—who tipped burning TNT from conveyor belt trays—prevented a further 15 tons of TNT being detonated by the spreading fires. In under half an hour, the fires were under control and emergency services from across the region were arriving.

Despite the workers’ extreme shock and the terrible destruction, repairs were swiftly carried out overnight enabling some of the next morning’s day-shift to start work again. The Home Office Committee of Enquiry published its report into the explosion on 7 August 1918. The police undertook a separate investigation into suspected sabotage. Neither enquiry could conclusively identify the cause of the explosion. The vast factory, which covered 194 acres (78 hectares), and eventually had 7,500 workers, was set up by Viscount Godfrey Chetwynd at the instigation of David Lloyd George, then head of the newly formed Ministry of Munitions.

Chetwynd, who came from the automobile industry, had no prior experience of explosives production. He was a maverick and self-publicist who loathed red tape. He demanded, and got, a free hand to design and create the factory without bureaucratic interference. Chetwynd chose the site at Chilwell because it had good rail and road links, was conveniently located between the raw material producers of the north and the supply ports of the south and could draw on the under-employed workers of the local textile industries.

Against convention, he adapted existing machinery—for coal crushing, stone pulverising, sugar sifting—to prepare the ingredients for making TNT. In keeping with his individualist nature, Chetwynd literally stamped his mark on the factory with the distinctive, self-devised crossed Cs of the Chilwell crest, adding the Royal Crown to imply a royal association with the government-owned factory. Within a few months of the factory’s opening, it had filled a major proportion of the large-calibre shells used during the Battle of the Somme (1 July to 18 November 1916). On the first day alone 250,000 shells were fired by British guns. Women made up a large part of the workforce at the Chilwell factory. They were nicknamed "canaries", as handling TNT could stain skin yellow. Some even gave birth to yellow babies.

Toxic jaundice was dangerous, and 106 women died from it during the course of the war. As the potentially lethal effects of filling high-explosive shells became better understood, munitions workers were issued with overalls, masks and caps to mitigate the dangers, along with washing facilities and good food Despite the devastation of the explosion, the Chilwell factory became the most productive shell filling factory of the war. Just two months after the fatal blast, the factory filled 275,327 shells in one week,—a record number. By the end of the war it had produced more than 19 million shells—over half the total British shells fired on the Western Front—along with thousands of mines and bombs.

Memorial at the Site of the Detonation

Of the 134 dead, 25 were women. Only 32 of the fatalities could be positively identified. The victims were buried in a series of mass graves at the parish church, a short distance from the factory complex.

Source: Historic England, June 2018; British War Works Tokens

February 1918 News: Harry Lauder Visits the Front and His Son's Grave

Harry Lauder and His Son, John

Harry Chats Up the High Command

Final Resting Place of John Lauder

Sources: I patched this together from multiple online sources, but I could not find the name of the original correspondent. MH

Poilu Léopold Jules Maréchal's Book of Hours of the Great War, Part I: The Manuscript

Le Journal des Tranchées 

Images in This Series Can Be Enlarged
by Clicking on Them

By John Anzalone

In 2010, I acquired at the Hôtel Drouot auction house in Paris a unique relic of the Great War.  Shown above, Le Journal des Tranchées recounts the war memoirs of a soldier who served on the Oise and the Somme fronts for 18 months (1914–1916). Subsequently, he was transferred to a cartography unit behind the lines, where he served until he was demobilized in early 1919.

In every particular, the journal is a deliberate pastiche of a medieval book of hours. Bound in illustrated, incised calf, the book consists of 46 pages of text in calligraphy, with rubricated letters, 38 facing page 5” x 7” watercolors, and as many cartouche drawings in grey wash. The color plates are bordered in gold leaf; all pages are framed in an elaborate barbed wire border.

Title Page

The manuscript gives little personal information about its author, identified only as L. Maréchal. The colophon, however, informs us that its design, calligraphy, layout and binding were completed on 31 December 1926. The painted title page portrays a ghostly figure emerging from thick black smoke as a banner studded with the names of epic battles of the war unfurls. Rising upward, it remains partly attached to the barbed wire that it has ripped loose from its moorings. 

The image can be read as the memorial acknowledgement of the many sacrifices each named battle represents. But it can also be read as a ghastly parody of victory when we notice the cannons hidden within the shroud and the field of crosses on the devastated, blackened battlefield over which that deathly wraith hovers. A similar ambiguity reappears in both the text and the illustrations, emphasizing that this is a less a work of celebration than of commemoration and somber reflection. The colophon on the final page reveals that the book was completed on 31 December 1926 and is wholly the work of a single individual who identifies himself only as “L. Maréchal, artisan.” It is accompanied by a medallion self-portrait. 

Maréchal's Self-Portrait

A Poilu Emerges from Anonymity

The book provides little personal information about the man, but notably, the colophon indicates that more than ten years elapsed between the end of Maréchal’s duty on the front and his completion of this unusual record of it. Exactly who was Maréchal? When and why did he decide to collect in book form the writings and drawings he had made in the trenches? What prompted him to imitate the format and allure of an illuminated book of hours for a war journal? And what were the more salient aspects of his war experiences? 

Despite his authorial identification and the self-portrait, an enigmatic anonymity attaches to Maréchal. Except for his signature and the self-defining reference to him as an “artisan,” the manuscript gives almost no personal information about the man: no mention of any family; no references to his life before the war’s outbreak, and only occasional, brief anecdotes about the comrades in arms he made during their shared hard times. For anyone having a passing familiarity with autobiographical writing of Great War combatants, this near total absence of personal information comes as a surprise.

 What specifics he does provide can be quickly summarized: Maréchal was mobilized on 13 August, 1914 at Sens. With the Battle of the Marne under way, he was sent north with the 168th regiment. It was then divided into smaller units and he was reassigned to the 86th Infantry which was immediately sent due north of Compiègne to the Oise sector, which the Journal describes as “relatively quiet.” Maréchal was to spend the near entirety of his 18 months of combat service there, billeted in the abandoned stone quarries in Montigny/Machemont. These limestone quarries had supplied stone for Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris in the 1860s and were now empty of usable stone. They were vast enough to sleep hundreds of soldiers and were at a very short distance from the frontline trenches. The manuscript provided precious details of what the quarries looked like as the French army invested them once the war went into the trenches. The watercolor below, dated October 15 (1914), shows Maréchal’s unit arriving at the quarries after a long uphill slog. 

Arrival

Illustrated World War One journals are not so rare as one might imagine. Others have come to light, such as Gaston Lavy’s Ma Grande Guerre, published in facsimile by Flammarion in 2004, but Maréchal’s is a unique example employing the form of an illuminated book of hours. Significantly, such depictions of individual war experiences by otherwise anonymous poilus link the pictorial war memoir to the long, distinguished history of the illustrated book in France that had thrived in the nineteenth century and received a new impetus with the coming of the war. Thanks to new artistic tendencies, innovative printing technologies and the advance of aviation reconnaissance, the Great War stimulated a notable expansion of visual representation. In the quest to represent unprecedented aspects of industrialized warfare, image makers tapped into cubism, war camouflage, and sequential narratives influenced by the nascent cinema. They also injected new vitality into older, traditional forms like the single sheet broadside known as imagerie d’épinal.

But whether they were looking back on the traditions of their craft or forward to newer trends, illustrators were also participating in the historicizing of the war, relating the narratives of 1914–18 to earlier wars and to the history of war imagery itself. Attempts to connect the history of the Great War in real time to the history of French warfare and of France itself abound in WW I illustration. They participate in the rhetoric of propaganda, of course, but they once again represent an attempt to make sense of a present many found incomprehensible by reaching back to a seemingly more coherent past. It is this tradition Maréchal has tapped into. His is among the numerous works that allude in both form and substance to the chivalry and panache of the medieval and renaissance periods, and earlier victorious combats in order to assert a noble genealogy for the poilu. The great Books of Hours of the middle ages served Maréchal well, allowing his memorial to echo the solemn, even exalted history of France at its foundation. The choice of this format for his memoir hints as well at his unusual level of education and his cultural fluency, something that could only be confirmed once we had a better sense of his biography.

It took two years of archival digging for that more detailed picture of Maréchal’s life to emerge—and here I wish to acknowledge the collaboration of Bernard Lambot, a former police detective,  and the late Lucette Lambot, a professional archivist, whose dogged pursuit of this elusive man in recruiting station archives across the Ile de France is responsible for all that we are ever likely to know about him. 

On Observation Duty

Léopold Jules Maréchal was born on 21 November 1882, an only child, who lost his father at the age of 14. In 1902 he had his first, brief experience of military service in the 37th, then the 104th infantry regiments before being declared exempt from military service as the only child of a widowed mother. In 1909 he married a teacher named Eugénie Zeckel. His mother died in July of 1914 scant weeks before he was mobilized at the age of 32. A few months later, on 12 December, his wife succumbed to septicemia soon after giving birth to a daughter named Suzanne. This occurred while Maréchal is at the front at Machemont, yet he makes no mention of the loss of his wife or the birth of his child in the manuscript. A few years after the end of the Great War, he remarried.  

He exercised the profession of illustrator/engraver throughout his professional life. The quality of his French and the sophistication of several other paintings that have turned up suggest that in some respects he must have received a classical education. Around 1950, the Maréchals retired and moved from Paris to Jouques in the Bouches du Rhône near Marseille. A few now quite elderly inhabitants there still remember the profile of a slightly built gentleman whom people called “le Parisien,” a self-effacing, discrete, even aloof man who spent his time drawing, painting, and walking in the countryside. 

Léopold Maréchal died on Christmas Day 1964, his wife ten years later on 11 December1974. Upon inheriting her parents’ estate Suzanne Maréchal, who was then living in Africa, entrusted the sale of its contents to a local brocanteur or secondhand dealer. As far as we have been able to determine, Le Journal des tranchées disappeared from view with the dispersion of Maréchal’s estate in 1975. We lose track of it there and have no idea of its whereabouts before it came up for auction on Tuesday 10 March 2010. 

Next:  In Part II of this series, to be presented on 28 March 2025, Maréchal's war service with be examined.

About Our Contributor

John Anzalone is Professor of French and Media/Film Studies, Emeritus at the Department of World Languages and Literatures, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs NY

Contact John at: janzalon@skidmore.edu

The Unsinkable Molly Brown Goes to War

Margaret "Molly" Tobin Brown

Margaret Tobin  was born to Irish immigrants John and Johanna Tobin in 1867 in Hannibal, Missouri. (Margaret did not become commonly known as "Molly" until after her 1933 death).  The Tobins were part of a wave of immigration following the first period of industrialization in America. Margaret—with  her brother Daniel—followed the family's and the nation's "head west" impulse and moved to Leadville, Colorado, in 1885.

There she met  and married miner J. J. Brown, who struck gold. J. J. and Margaret became millionaires. They moved to Denver in 1894, where Margaret—a born reformer—became involved in politics, philanthropy,  and the progressive movement. The couple became world travelers but drew apart. In 1909, after 23 years of marriage, the Browns quietly signed a separation agreement that left her financially independent.

On a 1912 trip, Margret received  news of her ill grandson that hastened Margaret’s return, and she booked passage on the first available ship, the Titanic. Her stellar efforts to encourage her fellow survivors and raise funds for the less fortunate passengers has become part of American folklore. Titanic survivor Margaret Tobin Brown has been known since as "The Unsinkable Molly Brown."

Margaret Presenting an Award of Appreciation to the Captain
 of RMS Carpathia for Rescuing the Titanic Survivors

What is forgotten (for the most part) is Margaret's dedicated work in the Great War.  Arriving back in Colorado as a nationally recognized figure, she worked hard to relieve the suffering of striking Colorado miners and for womens' suffrage, and even made an unsuccessful run at a seat in the U.S. Senate.

However, when World War I broke out, Margaret shifted her focus to relief efforts, eventually traveling to France where she worked with the American Committee for Devastated France to help rebuild ravaged areas behind the front line and with the Red Cross to aid wounded French and American soldiers. (The Chateau of Blerancourt, a French-American museum north of Paris, has a commemorative plaque that bears her name.) Her son, Lawrence, served in the U.S. Army during the war and was gassed in the assault on the Hindenburg Line by the U.S. 30th Division on 29 September 1918.

Margaret's Doughboy Son, Larry Brown

For her work during the war and her overall good citizenship, including her efforts with the Titanic survivors and the Juvenile Court of Denver, Margaret Brown was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 1932. Something of a mythic figure (always as Molly Brown), she's had a Disney riverboat, a Gemini spacecraft, and a museum named after her, portrayed frequently in TV and film accounts of the Titanic disaster, and even had her own Broadway musical, The Unsinkable Molly Brown.

Sources:  Over the Top, April 2012; Molly Brown House Museum; Visit Denver Blog; Retrospect Journal

Six Notable Prisoners of War

 

President of France, Charles de Gaulle

Once recovered from two wounds suffered in the early fighting, de Gaulle rejoined his regiment first as company commander, then as aide to the colonel. He was wounded a third time during the battle of Verdun, at Douaumont, in 1916. Left for dead, he was given a "posthumous" mention in army dispatches. He was, in fact, captured and received hospital treatment in Mainz before being imprisoned in various locations, including the fortress of Ingolstadt in Bavaria. After five failed escape bids, he was moved frequently and not freed until the Armistice. 

Soviet Marshal, Mikhail Tukhachevsky

During the first half-year of the war Tukhachevsky was rewarded with six decorations for personal courage. In February 1915 he was captured by German troops and tried to escape four times. While being imprisoned in the Bavarian fortress of Ingolstadt, where the most obstinate and dangerous captives were kept, Tukhachevsky met the then captain Charles de Gaulle, future Resistance hero and French president. His fifth attempt to escape was a success and he managed to return to Russia in October 1917 when the Bolshevik revolt was in full swing.

Air Innovator Roland Garros

When the war erupted, Garros, already famous, joined the French air service and was posted to a squadron near Nancy. There he took on the task of devising a method of shooting down the enemy. On 18 April 1915, the fuel line of his Morane Saulnier Type G became clogged, causing engine trouble. He came down in German-controlled territory where he was grabbed by alert German Infantrymen. Garros spent three years as a prisoner of war before escaping in early 1918. He insisted on returning to combat, but after three years he was not the same man—he was weaker, older, and needed glasses. Moreover, aircraft had improved dramatically in speed and capability. Nonetheless, Garros insisted. Now flying a Spad XIII, he shot down another German and was then shot down himself on 5 October 1918. This time he did not survive the crash.

Revolutionary and America's Favorite Communist,

 Josip Broz (Tito)

Josip Broz was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1913, completed non-commissioned officer training, and was sent as a sergeant in the war against Serbia in 1914. Transferred to the Russian front in early 1915, he was seriously wounded and captured by the Russians in April 1915. After a long hospitalization he was sent to prisoner-of-war camps, where he became acquainted with Bolshevik propaganda. He managed to escape his last camp and make his way to Petrograd (St. Petersburg). In 1917 he participated in the July Days demonstrations and, after the October Revolution, joined a Red Guard unit in Omsk, Siberia.  In the photo above, the former prisoner of war is shown on a 1971 visit to the White House with President Richard Nixon.

Musical Showman, Maurice Chevalier

In the first weeks of combat a shrapnel shell exploded in Chevalier’s trench, hitting his chest, and entering his lung. “Then it was, as the English Tommies used to say, that I got my packet.” He recalls the pain, blood oozing from his mouth, and soldiers carrying him to a village behind the lines. The next day the Germans took the village: those too badly injured to move, including Chevalier, were captured. Chevalier was in hospital at Magdeburg before being moved to Altengrabow prison camp. “That was a bitter experience for discipline was strict,” he later said. He feared the injury had ruined his singing voice, but he was relieved to find he could still entertain his fellow prisoners. Through a complex deception involving his Folies Bergère girlfriend, Mistinguett, the neutral King of Spain, and his own forgery skills, Chevalier was reclassified as an ambulance worker eligible for a prisoner exchange program. After two years and four months as a prisoner of war, Chevalier was free. He returned to Paris and was declared unfit to carry out further war service. He was discharged and awarded the Croix de Guerre.

Aerial Explorer, Gunther Plüschow

After an epic escape from the siege of the German colony at Tsing Tao, naval aviator Plüschow subsequently became the only German to escape from a British Prisoner of War camp in either World War. His capture in Gibraltar in 1915 terminated his epic Nanking-Shanghai-Nagasaki-Honolulu-San Francisco self-extraction from the Asian theater.  After his Gibraltar capture, he again demonstrated his remarkable escape skills. After promptly departing his Leicestershire prisoner of war camp, Plüschow made his way to London, where he worked and spent time visiting the British Museum, eventually slipping aboard a ship bound for the Netherlands, from where he snuck back into Germany to resume his duties with the German Navy.

Remembering a Veteran: Listen to an Interview with the Cowboy Ace, Capt. Fred Libby, RFC, US Air Service

Fred Libby—Cowboy and Aviator

Frederick Libby was born in the early 1890s in Sterling, Colorado. He worked as an itinerant cowboy during his youth and joined the Canadian Army shortly after the outbreak of World War I. Deployed to France in 1915, Libby initially served with a motor transport unit, then volunteered for the Royal Flying Corps. He served as an observer with No. 23 Squadron and No. 11 Squadron, then as a pilot with No. 43 Squadron and No. 25 Squadron. Scoring 10 confirmed aerial victories as an observer-machine gunner on a Royal Aircraft Factory F.E.2b (Farman Experimental) during his RFC career, he became the first American fighter ace. Libby transferred to the United States Army Air Service in 1917 and was medically discharged soon after for spondylitis. As a civilian, he went on to embark on a number of business ventures, including founding the Eastern Oil Company and Western Air Express. Libby passed away in 1970. 

How an F.E.2b Observer Dealt with a Rear Attack

This March 1962 interview was part of an oral history series conducted by the American Fighter Aces Association at the Museum of Flight in Washington State. It covers his first days of air combat in the Great War over the Somme battlefield.  The interviewer was Commander Eugene A. Valencia, Jr., USN, an ace himself in World War II. To access the recording (and transcript) of the interview click HERE.

Thanks to our Assistant Editor Kimball Worcester for discovering this interview.

Britain and Italy in the Era of the Great War: Defending and Forging Empires

 

British Tommies on the Italian Front with an
Italian Soldier and Civilian Volunteers

Tomlinson Prize, 2021

By  Stefano Marcuzzi

Cambridge University Press, 2022

This is an important reassessment of British and Italian grand strategies during the First World War. Stefano Marcuzzi sheds new light on a hitherto overlooked but central aspect of Britain and Italy's war experiences: the uneasy and only partial overlap between Britain's strategy for imperial defence and Italy's ambition for imperial expansion. 

Taking Anglo-Italian bilateral relations as a special lens through which to understand the workings of the Entente in World War I, he reveals how the ups-and-downs of that relationship influenced and shaped Allied grand strategy. 

Marcuzzi considers three main issues—war aims, war strategy and peace-making—and examines how, under the pressure of divergent interests and wartime events, the Anglo-Italian traditional friendship" turned increasingly into competition by the end of the war, casting a shadow on Anglo-Italian relations both at the Peace Conference and in the interwar period.

From: U.S. Dept of Commerce Library

Click HERE to Order

There is in Anglophone discourse and in particular in Anglo-American historiography, a long tradition of belittling and running down post-Risorgimento Italy's quest for Great Power status. From Lord Salisbury's ‘sturdy beggars’ to Richard Bosworth's telling description "the least of the great powers," post-1861 Italy has been seen, as in the words of Prince Bismarck, suffering from ‘a big appetite but bad teeth’. In his book, Britain and Italy in the era of the Great War: defending and forging empires, Stefano Marcuzzi seeks to challenge this narrative for the period between Italy's involvement in the Great War to the Treaty of Versailles. Marcuzzi aims to show that during this era "Britain was Italy's main partner within the Entente and that Rome sought to make London the guarantor of the promises upon which Italy joined the Allies" (p. 2).

According to Marcuzzi, Italian governing elites, especially the Italian prime minister at the time, Antonio Salandra, and his foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino, "assumed that Britain and Italy enjoyed special geopolitical, economic, cultural and historical ties" (p. 2). In his subsequent narrative, Marcuzzi uses a detailed analysis of primary sources on Anglo-Italian diplomatic interaction in the period to argue that "the geopolitical goals of Britain and Italy, which seemed compatible and even mutually supportive, grew irreconcilable by the end of the war."

From: International Affairs, Volume 97, Issue 4

The McMahon Letter of 24 October 1915

 

Sir Henry McMahon (1862–1949), British High Commissioner in Cairo, negotiated in 1915–16 with Husain Ibn Ali, the Sherif of Mecca. The British government promised to support his bid for the restoration of the Caliphate (and leadership in the Arab world).

The Hussein-McMahon correspondence was later contradicted by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret agreement between Britain and France that divided the Middle East after the war, and the Balfour Declaration, which supported the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This became a point of contention, with Arabs arguing that the British had betrayed their promises, lasting up to today. Below is the key letter in the correspondence. In 1916, T.E. Lawrence was posted to Hejaz, in modern Saudi Arabia, to work with the Hashemite forces. For most of his service time in the desert he believed he was working in accordance with the policies implied in McMahon's letter.

[To: Husain Ibn Ali, the Sherif of Mecca]

October 24, 1915.

I have received your letter of the 29th Shawal, 1333, with much pleasure and your expression of friendliness and sincerity have given me the greatest satisfaction.

I regret that you should have received from my last letter the impression that I regarded the question of limits and boundaries with coldness and hesitation; such was not the case, but it appeared to me that the time had come when that question could be discussed in a conclusive manner.

I have realised, however, from your last letter that you regard this question as one of vital and urgent importance. I have, therefore, lost no time in informing the Government of Great Britain of the contents of your letter, and it is with great pleasure following statement, which I am confident you will receive with satisfaction. 

The two districts of Mersina and Alexandretta and portions of Syria lying to the-west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama.and Aleppo cannot be said to be purely Arab, and should be excluded from the limits demanded.

With the above modification, and without prejudice to our existing treaties with Arab chiefs, we accept those limits.

As for those regions lying within those frontiers wherein Great Britain is free to act without detriment to the interest of her ally, France, I am empowered in the name of the Government of Great Britain to give the following assurances and make the following reply to your letter:-

(1) Subject to the above modifications, Great Britain is prepared to recognise and support the independence of the Arabs in all the regions within the limits demanded by the Sherif of Mecca.

(2) Great Britain will guarantee the Holy Places against all external aggression and will recognise their inviolability.

(3) When the situation admits, Great Britain will give to the Arabs her advice and will assist them to establish what may appear to be the most suitable forms of government those various territories.

(4) On the other hand, it is understood that the Arabs have decided to seek the advice and guidance of Great Britain only, and that such European advisers and officials as may be required for the formation of a sound form of administration will be British.

(5) With regard to the vilayets of Bagdad and Basra, the Arabs will recognise that the established position and interests of Great Britain necessitate special administrative arrangements in order to secure these territories from foreign aggression to I am convinced that this declaration will assure you beyond all possible doubt of the sympathy of Great Britain towards the aspirations of her friends the Arabs and will result in a firm and lasting alliance, the immediate results of which will be the exp I have confined myself in this letter to the more vital and important questions, and if there are any other matters dealt with in your letters which I have omitted to mention, we may discuss them at some convenient date in the future.

It was with very great relief and satisfaction that I heard of the safe arrival of the Holy Carpet and the accompanying offerings which, thanks to the clearness of your directions and the excellence of your arrangements, were landed without trouble or mis I am sending this letter by the hand of your trusted and excellent messenger, Sheikh Mohammed ibn Arif ibn Uraifan, and he will inform you of the various matters of interest, but of less vital importance, which I have not mentioned in this letter.

(Compliments).

(Signed): A. HENRY MCMAHON.

See our earlier article on the Arab Revolt HERE.

Source:  The Husain-McMahon Letters (excerpt), The McMahon Letter, From The Israel-Arab Reader, (3rd Ed.) edited, Walter Laqueur, Bantam Books, 1976.

Rogers’ Rangers in the Great War

Badge of the 20th Battalion, CEF

James Patton

Rogers' Rangers were raised in 1755 in the Province of New Hampshire by the then self-styled  Major Robert Rogers (1731–1795) to serve with the British during the Seven Years War (aka French and Indian War). Rogers was inspired by the reputation and the unconventional tactics of the Indian fighter Benjamin Church (1639-1718). His command was to be rapidly deployable light infantry, tasked mainly with reconnaissance, ambushes and  hit-and-run raids. In 1759 he codified their tactics as his 28 Rules of Ranging. His Rangers grew to over a dozen companies, totaling over 1,200 men at the peak, who were the best scouts the British had in the upper Hudson country. No longer needed after the French surrender in 1760, they were discharged, however Maj. Rogers remained in service until 1765. 

During the American Revolution, Rogers re-constituted his outfit as a Loyalist unit, calling it the Queen’s  Rangers (“Queens”), which operated from 1775 to 1783. The unit received the honorary appellation ” 1st Americans” from the king in 1779. Following the end of the war,  a group commanded by Lieut. Col. John Simcoe (1752–1806), set up their base in Upper Canada (today’s Ontario) and were known first as Simcoe’s Rangers, then the York Militia and later the York Rangers (“Yorks”), with active service in 1793–1802, 1812–15,1837–38, then finally 1866 to date. 

A group of the Queen’s not under Simcoe remained in British service in New Brunswick  until disbanded in 1793. After WWI,  a new militia regiment was created from the 35th CEF which was named the West Toronto Regiment in 1921. After amalgamation with the 2nd Battalion of the Yorks in 1925, this unit was allowed to revive the name of the Queen’s. Subsequently, in 1927 this unit was also allowed to reclaim the appellation “1st Americans.” Finally, in 1936, this new Queen’s Rangers (1st Americans) were amalgamated with the Yorks to form today’s unit, the Queens York Rangers (1st American Regiment) (“QYR”). 

Thus the strongest claim to the heritage of Rogers’ Rangers belongs to this Toronto-based regiment, which has a direct line from Rogers’ second creation. Not currently serving as rangers, their current role is Light Armored Vehicle reconnaissance. 

The Great War Comes

By 1915 it had become apparent that the Western Front wasn’t going to be a ranger kind of war—it was going to be a Napoleonic cataclysm of big units engaging in big battles. The legacy of Rogers’ Rangers would extend into the Great War, but not as rangers. 

The Canadian Militia was limited to home service, so just as for the Boer War, an overseas service force was created.  This Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) had to be made up of standard British 960-man battalions and the Militia "regiments" were unsuitable building blocks because they varied widely in size and training. So their members were urged to enlist individually into new CEF battalions. Conveniently, this way all would serve under the same terms and conditions. Over the years men from the Yorks joined the 20th, 35th, 127th, and 220th  CEF battalions.

The 20th  (Central Ontario) Battalion CEF was authorized on 7 November 1914, mostly with men from the Yorks. They went overseas on 15 May 1915 and on to France on 15 September 1915. They fought in France and Flanders as a part of the 4th Canadian Infantry Brigade, 2nd Canadian Division. Until he was wounded in late 1917, the commander of the 20th was Lieut. Col. C.H. "Herman" Rogers OBE (1876–1946), a regular cavalryman who came over from the 3rd Prince of Wales Canadian Dragoons (he brought his horse with him), and he was a direct descendant of Maj. Robert Rogers. 

Lt. Col. Rogers

The 20th's battle honors include the Battle of the Somme (1916), Vimy  Ridge, Passchendaele (1917),  Hill 70, Amiens, the Scarpe, Canal du Nord, Canal de l'Escaut and the Pursuit to Mons (1918). Two of its members, Lieut. Wallace Lloyd Algie and Sgt. Frederick Hobson, were posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross (VC).

Four thousand three hundred ten officers and men served in the 20th—843 (19.6%) were killed in action or died of wounds, 1,855 (43%) were wounded, and 91 died due to disease or accidents. Only 22 were ever taken prisoner—nine of them from a stretcher party that got lost at Passchendaele—and there was only one deserter. All of these battle honors and the heritage of the 20th  CEF, including the VCs, are now attributed to the QYR.

As was the practice in the CEF, the 35th and the 220th supplied replacements, while the 127th became a railway unit. 

Officers of the 20th Battalion

The Descendants of Rogers' Ranger

Who else claims descent from Rogers’ Rangers? How about American rangers? In the 19th century there were U.S. units that operated sort of  like rangers, especially including two that were CSA, but all were short-lived. Today’s U.S. Army’s  Rangers, including the 75th Infantry and Ft. Benning’s Ranger School come to mind, but their history begins with Darby’s Rangers in 1942, who trained as British Commandos, not rangers. Instead their claim is based on being the repository for the ranger legacy in American service  (actually Rogers’ Rangers were in British service). Claiming that they are the true successors to the 1755–61 Rangers (not the Loyalist ones), they have embraced both the ranger ethos and a modern set of the Ranger Rules, outlined in U.S. Army publication TC 3-21.76 26 April 2017. 

Another American claim arises from an ad hoc local militia unit raised by Maj. Rogers to fight in Pontiac’s War (1763–65), which, although also in British Service, is regarded as the progenitor of the Michigan National Guard.  

What made a soldier a Ranger? The full text of Rogers’ 28 Rules can found HERE.

Perhaps thanks to Rogers, the term "Ranger" has long sported a certain cachet. Over the years, in British or Canadian service, it has been used by several other units that were not descended from Rogers’ Rangers and didn’t use ranger tactics. Right now there are the following:

The Rangers, a British regiment created in 2021. They aren’t rangers; their mission is to advise and train foreign partners in unconventional warfare, akin to the the U.S. Army’s Special Forces (“Green Berets”).

Historic Battle Flag of the Queen's York Rangers

The Rocky Mountain Rangers (RMR), formed in 1908 in British Columbia. Light infantry today rather than rangers, its members served in WWI with the 172nd (Rocky Mountain Rangers) Batttalion CEF. Before the 172nd CEF was broken up in 1917, they had received a set of colors from Princess Patricia of Connaught.  Due to the participation of its soldiers in the battles of Arras 1917 and 1918, Hill 70, Ypres 1917, Amiens, the Hindenburg Line, and Valenciennes, the RMR displays those honors today. 

The Canadian Rangers are a para-military unit formed in 1942. Made up of local residents  who can be called  upon to perform security, surveillance and search/rescue duties in the Far North, they carry bolt action rifles—until 2018 the venerable .303 Lee-Enfield No. 4.