Morals and the AEF Officer Corps

By Richard S. Faulkner

Excerpted from "'Gone Blooey'—Pershing's  System for Addressing Officer Incompetence and Inefficiency"

Historian Richard Faulkner has written extensively about the American Expeditionary Force sent to Europe in the First World War. [See our review of his award-winning School of Hard Knocks HERE.]   In an article he contributed to Army History in 2015,  he has much interesting to say about how the army dealt with those of the 82,000 officers under Pershing's command who did not cut the mustard and were reassigned, disciplined, or discharged. "To address the worst of these problems, Pershing established standing reclassification and efficiency boards as part of the Casual Officers’ Depot at Blois, France, in March 1918. The stigma of Blois was hard to shake. In fact, the reputation of Blois grew so fearsome that the terms 'blooeyed' or 'gone blooey' entered the American lexicon as slang for a failure or a colossal malfunction."

The number of officers of all ranks and sources of commission "boarded" to Blois and later sites totaled roughly 1,870 including a dozen generals. Of course, there are countless ways an officer can foul up, but I thought the most interesting category of complaint against the men Faulkner describers was for “personal moral failings,” when their commanders found their behavior at odds with the army’s expectations of gentility, morality, temperance, or standards of behavior.

The Blois case files also disclose much about the AEF and the times in which it served. For example, the officers ordered to Blois for their personal moral failings illustrate the code of conduct that the AEF expected of its officers and the taboos or morays that it was unwilling to have transgressed. 

In some cases, the officer’s transgressions attacked the social contract between the leaders and the led as well as the barrier between officers and their men. Capt. Augustine P. DeZavala was sacked for lending money to his soldiers while charging “usurious” interests rates. The board viewed 2d Lt. Ewart G. Abner as unfit for holding a commission for having bought 32 pounds of chewing tobacco from the Quartermaster Sales Commissary with the intent of reselling the item to his soldiers for profit. The senior officers involved in these cases rightly saw the actions of these officers as detrimental to the discipline and morale of the units.

Other moral failings dealt more with the temptations of sex and demon rum. Despite the moral standards of Progressive Era America, the army was not quite as puritanical in its outlook as the larger society. Drinking was fine, as long as it was not allowed to influence a soldier’s performance or harm the image of the army or its officer corps. The officers who could not live within these limits quickly made themselves unwelcome in their units. Second Lt. Thomas Hazzard was sent to Blois after twice exhibiting conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. He was involved in a drunken brawl with another officer after he “goosed” the lady the other man was escorting.

The AEF’s view of cases involving sexual misconduct generally reflected similar attitudes as alcohol. The U.S. Army in the Great War instituted the first widespread efforts to provide sex education in the nation’s history. While the Army encouraged the Young Men’s Christian Association representatives to pass out booklets pushing sexual abstinence, it also established a large system of prophylaxis stations across France. However, if a soldier still contracted a venereal disease (VD), the AEF’s judicial and reclassification systems showed him little compassion. As 2d Lt. Earnest W. Chase found out, this was doubly true for officers. By contracting VD, Chase had basically “damaged government property” by rendering himself unable to carry out his duties. Upon ordering him to Blois, his commander moralistically announced that he hoped that Chase’s replacement would be “an officer whose mind is on his work and whose determination is to render adequate service to his country without selfish concern for himself.” 

When it came to an officer needing to satisfy his sexual desires, the Army tended to turn a blind eye unless the man’s conduct interfered with his duty or brought the service’s image and standing, or that of its officer corps, into question. The case of 2d Lt. Arthur Fortinberry provides an illustration. Just before leaving the United States, Fortinberry met and married a woman whom he had known only a short time. Shortly afterward, some of the soldiers in his unit informed him that his new wife had been working as a prostitute when he met her. An investigation by Fortinberry’s commander verified the suspicions about the officer’s wife and that the young officer had become an object of ridicule within the unit. The board concluded that due to this fact, Fortinberry’s “influence and usefulness as an officer is at an end.”

The one sexual matter that the AEF had absolutely no tolerance for was instances of homosexuality. The Blois files contain at least two cases where officers were accused of homosexual conduct. Second Lt. John W. Royer of the 29th Division’s 111th Machine Gun Battalion was sent before a general court-martial in August 1918 for violations of the 96th Article of War. Royer was accused of making “advances and invitations of an unnatural and immoral nature” to three of his soldiers while on board the ship to France and of committing sodomy on one of his privates on numerous occasions in June and July. Although the court-martial found him not guilty of the charges, his commander had no further use of his services and hurriedly sent him to Blois.The other case involved Maj. L. H. English, a doctor assigned to the 60th Coast Artillery. After his “inappropriate” actions, the board gave English the option of resigning for the “good of the service” or face court-martial.

The board’s treatment of officers sent for reclassification due to physical and mental breakdown, including those suffering from shell shock or combat fatigue, was much more sympathetic and enlightened. Second Lt. Morris Oppenheim was a case in point. Oppenheim enlisted in the Pennsylvania National Guard in 1916 and had served on the Mexican border. His sterling record as an enlisted man, solid performance in combat during the Second Battle of the Marne in July 1918, and demonstrated skill with machine guns had led his previous commander to send him to the AEF’s officer candidate school. Upon his commissioning in September, the Army assigned him as a machine gun platoon leader in the 30th Division. He seemed to have all of the best characteristics the Army sought in its junior leaders. In fact, during his hearing one of his squad leaders noted that “in the advance he had acted so bravely that I thought, well we have a Liut. [sic] that will stick to us no matter what happened.” But despite this courage, he broke under the strain of shell fire during his unit’s attack in the Argonne on 17 October 1918, straggled from the lines, and was apprehended by military police in Paris seven days later. Although Oppenheim could easily have been charged with desertion or even misconduct in the face of the enemy, his commander and the board members appreciated the strain that combat had put on him and agreed that both he and the Army would be best served by finding him a suitable noncombat billet. 

Source: "'Gone Blooey'—Pershing's  System for Addressing Officer Incompetence and Inefficiency," Army History, Spring 2015