First to Fight, An American in the French Foreign Legion and the Lafayette Escadrille in World War I

by Steven T. Tom

Stackpole Books, 2019

Michael P. Kihntopf, Reviewer

Kiffin Rockwell, 1916

My first thoughts were: not another book about the Lafayette Escadrille? But the author, a retired Air Force veteran and engineer, supplied me with an answer on page vi of his prologue. “There were seldom more than a dozen pilots in the escadrille at any time, and throughout the course of the war only thirty-eight pilots served in the unit, but its fame was such that after the war more than five thousand impostors publicly claimed to have flown with the prestigious group.” That settled my misgivings and I dug in to find that the book contained far more than just flying. Tom has also given us an excellent picture of serving in the French Foreign Legion at the beginning of the Great War that is quite unparalleled.

This is a book about Kiffin Yates Rockwell, one of the founding members of the Escadrille. It starts with a detailed biographical sketch of Rockwell that gives the reader a clear picture of the man’s motivation. Rockwell, a third child, was born into a successful Baptist preacher’s family, but tragedy struck when his father died just one year after Kiffin’s birth at age 26. Rockwell grew up in the care of his mother who drove herself to near exhaustion providing for her three children.

The author’s depiction of Rockwell’s early life clearly shows how, when war came to Europe in August 1914, Rockwell viewed the war as a crisis in human civilization and he saw himself as bound to help by fighting in it. He and his older brother left for France within five days of the German invasion of Belgium with the intention of enlisting. Tom cleverly weaves information gleaned from Rockwell’s letters home about his life in the Foreign Legion. We are treated to a description of training methods but also a seething condemnation of officer and non-commissioned officer leadership. Rockwell manages a transfer to aviation but only after both he and his brother are severely wounded. His brother never returns to the Legion.

Tom gives a very good picture of how the Escadrille was formed despite many French politicians’ misgivings about a purely American unit and the mismanagement of resources in getting the unit into the air. The key driving force in everything was publicity. French politicians wanted United States support and they got it through constantly releasing stories about the Americans. Rockwell’s feat of bringing down the first German plane for the Escadrille made banner headlines across the world.

But this is not a book about fantastic team efforts in flying over the ravaged battlefield of Verdun. Tom shows the reader another side of the Escadrille: one of dissension between the pilots. Rockwell went to France to stop tyranny. He was quite appalled at the sensationalism that was attached to the Escadrille in the hometown newspapers. The other pilots seemed to have more of a mixed attitude toward their work. In many cases fame and fortune were their goals. And there were other stumbling blocks to camaraderie: quite a few pilots, as we know, were financially better off than others and snobbery often raised its head. Although in the air the pilots displayed a coordinated team effort, that was not the case on the ground.

Tom’s portrayal of worldwide reaction to Rockwell’s death is excellent, although the reader, after wading through the Escadrille’s pilots’ underlying thoughts, may find its depth a little suspect. Nevertheless, family and friends were most sincere.

First to Fight, is an excellent read. Rockwell’s letters are used accurately in any situation and the sources he used in gleaning background information are extensive. For special interest, Tom’s chapter-long description of aviation development between 1903 and 1916 is well worth the time in reading, as is his overview of how the Verdun battle came to be. “Not another book about the Lafayette Escadrille?” Yes! This is a work which eclipses many previous books.

Michael P. Kihntopf

Ungaretti of the Carso: A Roads Classic

Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888–1970) is considered by some to be the greatest modern Italian poet. During the war he served with the 19th Infantry Regiment on the bleak Carso Plateau on the lower end of the Isonzo River sector. The fighting in the area was some of the grimmest of the war. Ungaretti began writing poetry there during interludes. 

Later he was attached to the Italian contingent sent to the Western Front. He was a modernist and Dadaist, and after the war aligned with Mussolini's Fascists through the fall of the dictatorship. Following the Second World War, he and his reputation went through a slow "rehabilitation". However, his political history probably denied him the highest literary honors.

Mte. San Michele and the village of San Martino del Carso were on the front line and are the subjects of two of Ungaretti's most famous poems.

I AM A CREATURE

Like this stone of

San Michele

as cold

as hard

as thoroughly dried

as refractory

as deprived of spirit

Like this stone

is my weeping that can't

be seen

Living discounts death

The Battlefield Where Ungaretti Fought As It Looks Today

SAN MARTINO DEL CARSO

Of these houses

nothing

bur fragments of memory

Of all who

would talk with me not

one remains

But in my heart

no one's cross is missing

My heart is

the most tormented country

of all

Remembering a Poet Veteran: Capt. Francis Wolle, 356th Infantry, 89th Division, AEF

Great War Veteran Francis Wolle

By Paul Albright

As a university instructor in English, Lt. Francis Wolle frequently inserted poetry into his letters to his parents. Moving toward the western front in July 1918, the 29-year-old volunteer wrote: “Here in France across the ocean/Far away from home and love/We will fight with deep devotion/To the God who rules above…”

Hearing distant thunder or the rumble of artillery, he wrote to his mother: “Oh, dearest mother, good-night now/And think of me still in your dreams/For the stronger you yearn, the more sure I’ll return/When the sunlight of victory gleams.”

After leading patrols into no-man’s-land, scrambling through barbed wire barriers to escape enemy fire, and participating in the capture of several German soldiers, the young officer wrote his parents: “And while bullets whiz by or shells bark/We think of you there, where we wish that we were/And our hearts smile, tho prospects seem dark.”

Wolle (pronounced “Wally”) was promoted to captain in October 1918 and reassigned from the 356th Infantry to the intelligence (G2) unit of the 4th Army Corps. He poetically said farewell to the 356th with: “Goodbye, my friends, adieu/Good luck to every one!/I’ll always think of you/Till the last battle’s won;/And wish you happy days/When we have won the war/Back home with loved one’s praise/On our own native shore.”

One month later, the Armistice was signed and lights reappeared in the French village where Capt. Wolle was stationed: “For as I look out of the window I can see lights from the chateau windows across the way; and that means peace. Yes, light in France means peace! How significant that is!” Nine days after the Armistice, Wolle rejoiced in verse: “Hurrah! The killing’s quit!/The Allies growing stronger/Have justly seen to it!”

As his parents relocated in 1918 and 1919 from New York to Pennsylvania and then to Michigan, Wolle often reminisced about his adopted home in Boulder, Colorado. Leading a post-Armistice surveillance party into Germany via Luxembourg, Wolle wrote: “There’s a pretty little Duchy with its pretty little fields/And pretty woods and pretty little towns;/But more glorious is that land where the lofty mountains stand/Whose peaks wear the year their snow-white crowns.”

Four days after Christmas 1918, Wolle visited his former unit in the 356th Infantry, which had engaged in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. “It was like a terrible funeral service” as he learned of the death and wounding of many of his former comrades. “My Army heart is still in the three-fifty-six/With the men and the officers there./Against all adversity their brave spirit sticks/O, God, guard their welfare!”

But there were pleasant moments, too. Wolle’s surveillance squad mingled with French troops and German citizens in the Lorraine area. In one verse he described a post-war dance party that included the names of two privates in the squad (Pvt. Edwin L. Rose and Pvt. 1st Class David Herrmann): “That night while some made raids for wood/And two others found girls whom they understood/And a few played cards till the wee small hours/Three of our throng sought the dancing bowers/And who but Rose a bower should grace!/He soulfully sighs, while the whirling pace swirls round:/And the sergeant and Hermann dance/With the German girls who now waltz for France!”

Wolle was transferred to Paris to study French literature at the Sorbonne as part of the postwar AEF American University. While in Paris he received word that he had been promoted to assistant professor at the University of Colorado. 

Reverend Wolle's Ordination

He remained at the university in Boulder, Colorado, for 44 years as a professor of English and drama and track coach. In retirement, Wolle became a deacon in the Episcopal Church and in April 1973, was ordained a priest at the age of 84, reportedly the oldest man to receive ordination in the Episcopal Church. 

Francis Wolle—AEF veteran, poet, professor, and priest—died on 1 October 1979, at the age of 90. 

Sources: 

Collector’s Club Philatelist, November-December, 2018.

Francis Wolle papers and collection, 1917-1979, Special Collections and Archives, University of Colorado-Boulder.

Episode 22 of BBC's Great War Series

 

Damn Them Are They Never Coming In?

By Accident: The Anzacs Road to Gallipoli

 

Heading Ashore at Anzac

Roger Lee, Australian War Memorial

As is well known, it was the failure of naval firepower to suppress both the fixed and mobile artillery defending the Straits that forced the Allies to resort to the use of land forces. And available reserves of land forces in early 1915 were very small.

The Australians found themselves on Gallipoli almost by accident. They were in the area and available. When war was declared and the first AIF raised, the intention was it would sail to Britain, train in camps there and be sent forward to France as required. 

Perhaps fortunately for the Australians and New Zealanders, the rush of volunteers in Britain itself so overwhelmed the available facilities that the War Office diverted them to Egypt for training.

The entry of Turkey into the war and the Turkish attack on the Suez Canal in February 1915 simply confirmed the decision to leave the Anzacs in Egypt to train, as they augmented existing British troops in defence of the canal zone.

The Anzacs’ lack of training and experience was another factor. The War Office was never very keen on the Dardanelles “adventure,” so when directed to provide troops, it actively resisted sending any of its battle experienced units from the Western Front.

It couldn’t avoid the use of regulars altogether. The British regular 29th Division, offered up by Kitchener to support another politically inspired adventure into Salonika to support the Serbs, was diverted to the Mediterranean.

The bulk of the fighting force, was supplied by the British Royal Naval Division and the two Anzac divisions. Finally, even had the War Office tried to transport sufficient numbers of experienced troops from France to the Mediterranean, gathering sufficient numbers of transports to carry them would have been an almost insurmountable problem. As it was, logistics and logistics support was to be the Achilles heel of the whole venture. 

Hunkered Down

Although it is true that soldiers seem needed when diplomacy fails, using a mixed force of partially trained, inexperienced troops in a hastily planned operation designed to offset a failure of naval or gunboat diplomacy was a very risky solution.

Gallipoli was not the result of a cogent, well-developed strategy. From the appointment of the commander-in-chief down, decisions were made in haste, on the basis of poor or incomplete information and against an ill-defined objective.

The surprise is not that the operation failed but that it achieved as much as it did.

A U-boat Commander Describes an Attack

Adolf K.G.E. von Spiegel commanded a German U-boat during the First World War. He published his memoirs, U-boat 202, in 1919. Here he describes the attack on a cargo vessel in April 1916.

Capt. von Spiegel

"The steamer appeared to be close to us and looked colossal. I saw the captain walking on his bridge, a small whistle in his mouth. I saw the crew cleaning the deck forward, and I saw, with surprise and a slight shudder, long rows of wooden partitions right along all decks, from which gleamed the shining black and brown backs of horses."

'Oh heavens, horses! What a pity, those lovely beasts!'

'But it cannot be helped,' I went on thinking. 'War is war, and every horse the fewer on the Western front is a reduction of England's fighting power.' I must acknowledge, however, that the thought of what must come was a most unpleasant one, and I will describe what happened as briefly as possible."

'Stand by for firing a torpedo!' I called down to the control room.'

'FIRE!'

" A slight tremor went through the boat - the torpedo had gone."

"The death-bringing shot was a true one, and the torpedo ran towards the doomed ship at high speed. I could follow its course exactly by the light streak of bubbles which was left in its wake."

"I saw that the bubble-track of the torpedo had been discovered on the bridge of the steamer, as frightened arms pointed towards the water and the captain put his hands in front of his eyes and waited resignedly. Then a frightful explosion followed, and we were all thrown against one another by the concussion, and then, like Vulcan, huge and majestic, a column of water two hundred metres high and fifty metres broad, terrible in its beauty and power, shot up to the heavens."

'Hit abaft the second funnel,' I shouted down to the control room."

A Successful U-boat Attack

"All her decks were visible to me. From all the hatchways a storming, despairing mass of men were fighting their way on deck, grimy stokers, officers, soldiers, groom, cooks. They all rushed, ran, screamed for boats, tore and thrust one another from the ladders leading down to them, fought for the lifebelts and jostled one another on the sloping deck. All amongst them, rearing, slipping horses are wedged. The starboard boats could not be lowered on account of the list; everyone therefore ran across to the port boats, which in the hurry and panic, had been lowered with great stupidity either half full or overcrowded. The men left behind were wringing their hands in despair and running to and fro along the decks; finally they threw themselves into the water so as to swim to the boats."

"Then - a second explosion, followed by the escape of white hissing steam from all hatchways and scuttles. The white steam drove the horses mad. I saw a beautiful long-tailed dapple-grey horse take a mighty leap over the berthing rails and land into a fully laden boat. At that point I could not bear the sight any longer, and I lowered the periscope and dived deep."

Sources: Eyewitness to History

Explaining "Blighty"

Originally presented in English Words in Wartime, 6 August 2015

Blighty was, by the summer of 1915, one of the most prominent—and certainly the most evocative—of the new lexical items which had come to be associated with the war. Usefully for the Words in War-Time archive, it had, by this point, also prompted a series of articles in the daily press which explored—in considerable detail—a range of aspects of its meaning and use. Even if blighty was by no means "a pretty word," its expressiveness was undoubted, as the Daily Express proclaimed in July 1915: "In its inharmonious syllables there lies concentrated all the sentiment of 'Home, Sweet Home' and a hundred similar melodies." Blighty stands, it added, "for all that is beautiful," representing "what every mother’s son in the trenches hopes to see again."

Absent from the Oxford English Dictionary as it then existed in which the negatively connoted blight ("Any baleful influence of atmospheric or invisible origin, that suddenly blasts, nips, or destroys plants, affects them with disease, arrests their growth") was followed by words such as blighted, blighting, and blik), blighty’s lexicographical heritage can instead be located in Anglo-Indian and the diction of the colonial past. Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell provided, for example, an entry for the word bilayut (alternatively spelled billait) in Hobson-Jobson or, as its sub-title explained, A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms; Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. Published in 1886, this has been described by Salman Rushdie as "the legendary dictionary of British India." Bilayut, as Yule and Burnett explained, was a word which, if deriving from wilāyat ("a kingdom, a province"), had, in recent years, "come to be employed for distant Europe." It signified absence, the sense of a familiar elsewhere from which the individual is, for whatever reason, separated. The forms billait or bilatee could likewise appear, as Hobson Jobson adds, in a range of items which connoted Europe rather than India, such as belatee panee—"European soda-water—which  had become "the usual name for soda-water in Anglo-India."

In 1915, etymological awareness of facts of this kind nevertheless remained somewhat hazy. "Etymologists will tell you that it is a corruption of the Hindustani word for Great Britain—Belati from belati pani,” the 'black water' which has to be crossed before Britain is reached," as the Daily Express article had confidently explained. While word history and derivation can hence be conspicuously awry, what remains true in the contemporary accounts of blighty which appear is the sense of a profound spatial (and cultural) divide which it involves, as well as the contrastive positioning of home and "other." Both forms and the original geographical components have, of course, changed by the summer of 1915; “Blightie is Tommy’s word for home in France," as an even earlier article—from May 1915—asserts. India is eclipsed by the new historical realities of conflict overseas, while the now anglicised blighty or blightie attests to an effective  process of  assimilation into English; the initial syllable of bilatee has, by ellipsis, yielded the more familiar English consonant combination bl-. An analogical pattern of respelling—on the basis of  blight—likewise underpins other aspects of this change in form. If, as other posts on this site explore, respelling as device  can be used to enhance a sense of the alien and ‘other’ in lexical loans from German as war advances, blighty follows a very different trajectory. As a range of comments in contemporary news discourse confirms, blighty or blightie is, by this point, popularly regarded not as part of Anglo-Indian but, as the Daily Express confirms, as fluent ‘Atkinese’ for “Home’. As in the extract below:

Tommy, crouching under the parapet of his trench while “whiz-bangs,” “coal-boxes,” “Jack Johnsons,” “woolly bears,” and all the rest of the infernal brood scream and crash around, has nothing to do but think “BLIGHTY”.

Thinking blighty—and what precisely this might involve—nevertheless remains a matter of some interest. If ‘Atkinese’ for home, this is clearly an emotional as well as geographical destination, as well as one which is able to be individualised anew by each and every soldier:

“To one man it stands for a creeper-covered cottage set amid the trees. To another a means a squalid tag-end of bricks and mortar in a mean street in a great city. To the kilty it stands for the moor and the heather … The word is “Blighty”

Blighty can, by the same token, also be a wider and generic destination, one which, as in the first example above, is seen in terms of nation and homeland, of Britain set against ‘somewhere in France’  or as against the ‘foreign’ as realised in Turkey or Mesopotamia, or the other diverse locales of war.

There is only one longing in the hospitals and it is the longing for home. A man with a bullet in this chest told hopefully how a soldier in the bed next to him … “went home yesterday”. His thought was not of the bullet, but of “Blightie” (Daily Express, 29 May 1915)

Tommies with Blighty Wounds

It is the word used to cheer up the wounded man, and it then you realise the magic of it. It brings a gleam to eyes dimmed with pain, and the wound that means torture becomes a heaven-sent reprieve—for few soldiers really believe that it is probable that they will ever reach home again, and indeed, for many Blighty never “rolls on” … When Blighty lies at the end of it, the slow, laboured progress of a stretcher party becomes a triumphal procession.

Here, Blighty’s initial capital affirms its identity as a proper noun, in what is another creative renaming of place. If, as a number of writers note, it thereby operates, on one level, as a simple synonym of ‘Britain’ or ‘England’ or ‘Scotland’ (depending on the point of view assumed), it nevertheless remains, as the examples above suggest, more than just a place on a map, or the physical terrain this might occupy. As here, in being Blighty—as a place of desire and longing—it is also defined by what it is not, whether in terms  of peace and protection rather than danger, or of warmth and comfort rather than deprivation.

Further shades of meaning accrue around other uses it acquires. As in the context of injury and war-wounds illustrated above, blighty's role as recuperative destination in productive of other shifts in meaning and use. Very serious wounds sustained on the battlefield might prevent immediate repatriation. Others, in contrast, might  enable the soldier in question to return to blighty for a period of treatment and convalescence. Minor wounds, conversely, could merely put one temporarily out of action, without necessitating a return home at all. The kind of semantic short-cut by which certain wounds popularly came to be designated blighty wounds is clear; blighty in this sense can be noun or adjective (a blighty wound, a blighty, a blighty bullet i.e. a bullet which yields an injury of such a level that a return home is both feasible and advised). 

A "blighty” is “a wound that is bad enough to get you home," as Andrew Clark, collecting words and evidence on words in 1915, was informed in a letter from the ‘territorial chaplain’ of the London Regiment in Saffron Walden on 31 August. Here, blighty’s intial capital has disappeared, while syntax, too, confirms a shift of use from the wider sense of Blighty = home, homeland, or Britain per se. “A blighty or a "blighty wound” (in which blighty becomes adjective as well noun) requires an indefinite article; in contradistinction, as in the popular idiom ‘roll on Blighty’, no article of any kind appears. “We may yet hear the greatest of all songs rendered as “There’s no place like Blighty,”' as a later article in the archive, here from November 1916, suggests in a similar mode.

Change of this kind was accompanied by other patterns of diffusion. In 1915, blighty could, of course, be seen as ‘the soldier’s word for home’; it is a word ‘used by soldiers on foreign service’, as the later entry which appeared in 1933 in the OED Supplement  affirmed. Yet, as the Words in War-Time archive suggests,  blighty’s perceived salience was, by 1916, already seen rather differently. ‘This great struggle’, and the ways in which it has come to ‘affect so many men and women of all classes’ meant that ‘many of the words and phrases directly associated with the war and its nomenclature’ will merge ‘into our every day speech and conversation … ultimately forming part of the English language’, the Daily Mail would, for example, predict on November 1st 1916. Blighty was, it stressed, a prime example of this transition—a word which would endure beyond the immediate contexts of war, and not least in terms of its on-going diffusion from ‘soldier’s word’ into far wider patterns of use on the home front.

Twelve Days on the Somme: A Memoir of the Trenches, 1916

by Sidney Rogerson,  Introduction by Malcolm Brown

Greenhill Book, 2006

Peter L. Belmonte, Reviewer

Moving Up on the Somme

The title of this book is a succinct, apt review of its contents. The author, Sidney Rogerson, wrote this fine little memoir in 1933, and Greenhill Books has done World War I enthusiasts a great service by reprinting it. Rogerson was born in Dorset, England, in 1894. He was studying history at Cambridge when the war broke out, and he left college to be commissioned in the West Yorkshire Regiment, eventually seeing service in France.

The book includes a Foreword by Jeremy Rogerson, Sidney’s oldest child, an introduction by Malcolm Brown, and the original author’s introduction. Brown’s introduction is very helpful in putting the memoir in its original context. Brown notes that Rogerson intended for the memoir to serve as a counterpoint to the then-prevailing (and still quite prevalent) view of the war as a hopeless, senseless waste of life, overseen by incompetent generals. According to Rogerson:

The description in the following pages is entirely without propagandist urge or intention. It is a plain, unvarnished account of one short tour in the Somme trenches during the winter of 1916, written in the hope of recalling to the soldier the scenes with which he was familiar, and of presenting the younger generations with an accurate picture of life as we lived in those days. And life in the trenches was not all ghastliness. It was a compound of many things; fright and boredom, humour, comradeship, tragedy, weariness, courage, and despair [pp. xxx-xxxi].

As the title suggests, this is not an account of Rogerson’s entire World War I service; indeed, only three full days were spent in the front line. In the space of these days, Rogerson experiences the things he described in his introduction: happiness, boredom, terror, bitter cold, bone-wearing labor, and camaraderie. He begins with his battalion moving up to the front lines, a process fraught with danger, tediousness, and extreme discomfort. Once in the line, Rogerson, as company commander, had the additional duty of making sure everyone was settled and knew their orders. During the next few days, Rogerson describes the essence of life in the trenches: patrols, work in improving the trenches, rations, the hunt for souvenirs, a fruitless search for a missing officer, shell fire, a visit by the battalion and brigade commanders, misery, and death.

The author treats us to little snippets of the infantryman’s life on the Somme. His description of the demoralizing effect of German mortars is vivid, and his thoughts about being under so-called friendly fire is worth a long quotation:

It was only natural to curse the gunners, the rotten American ammunition, the worn guns, the inefficiency of the intelligence people who did not know where their own bloody infantry were, the staff, and everyone else whom we could think of for blotting out two good Yorkshire soldiers. But, living as we were in scoops and burrows which not only were not shown on any map, but which we ourselves were frantically anxious should be difficult to detect by direct observation, we were as much at the mercy of our own as of the enemy gunners. And when we had blown off our own indignation, we had to admit that the marvel was that such accidents did not happen more often [p. 86].

Captured  German Trench on the Somme

When his battalion was relieved, Rogerson was the last man to leave the front lines. While the men went one way, Rogerson chose another route, alone, to pass the word to battalion headquarters that the relief was complete. While moving in the dark, the inevitable happened, and Rogerson became lost in the featureless muddy landscape.

Throughout the war this was my worst nightmare—to be alone, and lost and in danger. Worse than all the anticipation of battle, all the fear of mine, raid, or capture, was this dread of being struck down somewhere where there was no one to find me, and where I should lie till I rotted back slowly into the mud. I had seen those to whom it had happened [p. 92].

We can sense Rogerson’s frustration when, after arriving safely in a rear-area “camp” after their relief, the battalion is tapped to send two working parties out to help construct a narrow gauge rail line toward the front. Thus men who just made the hazardous trip from the front to the rear area, still cold and muddy, were required to return to the dangerous area behind the lines in order to act as “navvies” for the Royal Engineers. This type of activity, common to all the armies, caused the infantrymen to be certain that the “staff” had no idea of what conditions were at the front.

The narrative ends as Rogerson and his battalion finally reach a proper rest area. As Rogerson writes, “the war years will stand out in the memories of vast numbers of those who fought as the happiest period of their lives. And the clue to this perhaps astonishing fact is that though the war may have let loose the worst it also brought out the finest qualities in men” [p. 60].

There are three pencil illustrations, two of which are humorously and nicely done by Rogerson, to enhance the text. Maps, usually so essential to military history books, are neither needed nor included. This book is a good, quick read and highly recommended for anyone who wants to learn about what it was like to be a company commander in a British infantry battalion, even if for just a few days near the end of one of the bloodiest campaigns of the Great War.

Peter L. Belmonte

The Yankee Division at War: A Photo Essay

One of the most active divisions of the AEF was the 26th "Yankee" Division made up of National Guard units of the New England States. It had been activated for the Mexican Border Crisis and was conveniently located on the east coast so it was available for early deployment to Europe. It fought in the three biggest battles of the AEF, the Second Battle of the Marne, the St. Mihiel Offensive, and the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, as well  spending time deployed along the Chemin des Dames, and the Woevre Plain where it experienced the largest trench raid mounted against American forces at the of village Seicheprey. The Yankee Division paid a heavy price for their services in the Great War, almost 1,800 killed and 12,000 wounded. Here's their story in photos. They are displayed at 580 pixels in width, but if you wish to download them, click on the photo you see and download the original 1000 pixel wide version.

Meal Time at Camp Yale for the 102nd Infantry

In France, Off to the Front

The First Winter in France Was a Tough One

Division Soldiers Meet the Salvation Army

Communion Service in a Cave at the Chemin des Dames

The Division's 103rd Field Artillery

Aftermath of the Seicheprey Raid on the Division

French Children Watching the Division Arrive

A Rare Photo of the Division Attacking at the Opening
of the Allies 18 July 2018 Counteroffensive

The Division's Most Notable Success Was Crushing
the West Flank of the St. Mihiel Salient

The Division Honored for Its Service at St. Mihiel

Moving on to the Final Battle in the Meuse-Argonne

Supply Dump North of Verdun for the Division's Last Battle

By the Final Battle the Division Was Nearly Exhausted

Presidential Review, Christmas Day 1918

USAT Mt. Vernon Arriving in Boston Harbor with Division Troops, 4 April 1919

Ironically, Today, the Most Remembered WWI Veteran of the Division Is Sgt. Stubby (Who Was a Brave Little Dog)

Recommended: General Pershing's Arrival in New York, New York: 19 September 1919

 

General Pershing Greeted at Central Park

Presented at American Past, 9 November 2015

By Jenny Tompson

[This has a terrific amount of little-seen photos and illustrations and a lot of interesting detail.  Here's a bit to get you started. MH]

"The Heart of New York goes out to you," wrote mayor John F. Hylan in an "air letter" to General John J. Pershing (1860–1948) on 7 September 1919. The letter was dispatched from Manhattan by hydroplane and dropped aboard the SS Leviathan during its final days at sea. The ship was bringing the general home.

General Pershing had commanded the American Expeditionary Forces in France during World War I. He left the United States in June 1917, just months after the U.S. declared war against Germany on 6 April 1917. He would not return for more than two years.

Just months after the signing of the treaties that officially ended the war in June 1919—and after the numerous celebrations honoring Pershing that were held in France and England—Pershing sailed from Europe on the Leviathan, (a German ship seized by the U.S. in 1917). The troop ship had crossed the Atlantic many times during the war, transporting a large share of the more than two million American soldiers who would eventually serve in France. The ship's last voyage was the one that brought Pershing home, arriving in New York harbor in the early morning of 9 September 1919.

Millions of "loyal citizens of the great metropolis of the world," Hylan wrote to the general, "eagerly and impatiently await the opportunity to give their plaudits to the man through whose instrumentality the magnificent achievements of our armies were made possible."

The city was beside itself with excitement to welcome the valorous general back on American soil.

Continue to the full article by clicking HERE

Episode 21 of BBC's Great War Series

 

It Was Like the End of the World

One of the War's Big Losers: Bulgaria

Entering the War

Slavic, Orthodox Bulgaria played a role in World War I completely out of proportion to its size. Overlooking their historic hatred of the Turk and past allegiance to Slavic Russia, they entered the Great War in 1915 on the side of the Central Powers with the single objective of reversing the territorial settlements of the 1912–13 Balkan Wars. A nation of less than five million, Bulgaria mobilized an army of 1.2 million soldiers. These troops helped force the Serbian Army to abandon their own country, drove the French and British expeditionary forces back to the Salonika perimeter, participated in the defeat of Rumania, and, for the last year of the war, were the principal sentinels at the Balkan "back door" into central Europe. But playing a major role in a world war proved exhausting for the small country. By the spring of 1918, food shortages become severe at home and Bulgarian troops had to subsist on a barley bread with straw filler. On 29 September 1918, after their forces collapsed under pressure on the Salonika Front, Bulgaria became the first Central Power to sign an armistice. In three years of war the Bulgarian forces lost a quarter of a million men killed, wounded, or captured.

Specially Trained Bulgaria Assault Troops

Forgotten Front 

The Salonika, or Macedonian, Front is mostly neglected today, except by specialists. But consider: almost all the war's combatants sent forces to the theater; three-quarters of a million men were deployed along its 170-mile front; even down to the 21st century it remains the greatest focal point of debate between the war's "Easterners" and "Westerners," and, undeniably, it was the front where the final collapse of the Central Powers began.

Anglo-French forces began landing at the Greek port of Salonika on 5 October 1915. The troops were sent to provide military assistance to the Serbs, who were threatened by combined German, Austro-Hungarian, and Bulgarian armies. The intervention came too late to save Serbia, and after a brief winter campaign in severe weather conditions on the Serbian frontier, the Anglo-French forces found themselves driven back to a small perimeter around Salonika. At this point, the British advised that the troops be withdrawn. However, the French, with Russian, Italian, and Serbian backing, still believed something of strategic importance could be gained in the Balkans.

After preparing the port of Salonika for defense, the troops moved up country. During 1916, further Allied contingents of Serbian, Italian, and Russian troops arrived, and offensive operations began. These culminated in the fall of Monastir to Franco-Serbian forces during November. A second offensive during the spring of 1917 made little impression on the Bulgarian defenses.

British Troops Reinforced the Front

Bulgaria Surrenders

After Georges Clemenceau became premier, theater commander Maurice Sarrail was sacked in December 1917 and replaced first by Marie Louis Guillaumat and in the spring of 1918 by Franchet d'Espèrey, who had been advocating an offensive in the region since 1914. He proved himself the right man for the job by launching a series of decisive attacks that resulted in the surrender of Bulgaria on 30 September 1918.

Despite the precipitous Bulgarian collapse and the abdication of King Ferdinand, Franchet d'Espèrey continued to advance in accord with the plan he drew up in 1914. Allied forces were to drive toward the Danube and Budapest. These dispositions did not coincide with either French or British policy and were bitterly opposed by the Italians, who had territorial claims. The French public wanted immediate peace, not a continuation of war in the Balkans. Lloyd George pressed to have the British contingent hived off for a drive on Constantinople under the command of General Allenby. In the end, Franchet d'Espèrey was ordered to liberate Serbia while the British army with French and Italian elements under Lt. General George Milne advanced on Constantinople. The Ottoman Turks, however, capitulated before the British reached their frontiers.

Sources: The Salonika Campaign Society; OVER THE TOP, August 2008

The English Authors' Letter

One of the most interesting documents brought forth about the war was issued on 17 September in London. It was signed by 53 of the leading British writers. Herewith are presented the text of their defense of England and their autograph signatures in facsimile. Some of the best -known authors who signed included James Barrie, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle,  John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, G.M. Trevelyan, and H.G. Wells. The Irish poet William Butler Yeats declined to sign.

Four of the Signatories of the Letter

The undersigned writers, comprising among them men of the most divergent political and social views, some of them having been for years ardent champions of good-will toward Germany, and many of them extreme advocates of peace, are nevertheless agreed that Great Britain could not without dishonor have refused to take part in the present war. No one can read the full diplomatic correspondence published in the "White Paper" without seeing that the British representatives were throughout laboring whole-heartedly to preserve the peace of Europe, and that their conciliatory efforts were cordially received by both France and Russia.

When these efforts failed Great Britain had still no direct quarrel with any power. She was eventually compelled to take up arms because, together with France, Germany, and Austria, she had solemnly pledged herself to maintain the neutrality of Belgium. As soon as danger to that neutrality arose she questioned both France and Germany as to their intentions. France immediately renewed her pledge not to violate Belgian neutrality; Germany refused to answer, and soon made all answer needless by her actions. Without even the pretense of a grievance against Belgium she made war on the weak and unoffending country she had undertaken to protect, and has since carried out her invasion with a calculated and ingenious ferocity which has raised questions other and no less grave than that of the willful disregard of treaties.

When Belgium in her dire need appealed to Great Britain to carry out her pledge, that country's course was clear. She had either to break faith, letting the {83}sanctity of treaties and the rights of small nations count for nothing before the threat of naked force, or she had to fight. She did not hesitate, and we trust she will not lay down arms till Belgium's integrity is restored and her wrongs redressed.

The treaty with Belgium made our duty clear, but many of us feel that, even if Belgium had not been involved, it would have been impossible for Great Britain to stand aside while France was dragged into war and destroyed. To permit the ruin of France would be a crime against liberty and civilization. Even those of us who question the wisdom of a policy of Continental ententes or alliances refuse to see France struck down by a foul blow dealt in violation of a treaty.

We observe that various German apologists, official and semi-official, admit that their country had been false to its pledged word, and dwell almost with pride on the "frightfulness" of the examples by which it has sought to spread terror in Belgium, but they excuse all these proceedings by a strange and novel plea. German culture and civilization are so superior to those of other nations that all steps taken to assert them are more than justified, and the destiny of Germany to be the dominating force in Europe and the world is so manifest that ordinary rules of morality do not hold in her case, but actions are good or bad simply as they help or hinder the accomplishment of that destiny.

These views, inculcated upon the present generation of Germans by many celebrated historians and teachers, seem to us both dangerous and insane. Many of us have dear friends in Germany, many of us regard German culture with the highest respect and gratitude; but we cannot admit that any nation has the right by brute force to impose its culture upon other nations, nor that the iron military bureaucracy of Prussia represents a higher form of human society than the free Constitutions of Western Europe.

Whatever the world destiny of Germany may be, we in Great Britain are ourselves conscious of a destiny and a duty. That destiny and duty, alike for us and for all the English-speaking race, call upon us to uphold the rule of common justice between civilized peoples, to defend the rights of small nations, and to maintain the free and law-abiding ideals of Western Europe against the rule of "Blood and Iron" and the domination of the whole Continent by a military caste.

For these reasons and others the undersigned feel bound to support the cause of the Allies with all their strength, with a full conviction of its righteousness, and with a deep sense of its vital import to the future of the world.

Source:  New York Times, Current History of the War, Vol 1, Issue 1

Eat Potatoes and “Spud” the Kaiser

By Paul Albright

As the U.S. shifted to a wartime footing in 1917, the federal government developed a vigorous program to shift the nation’s eating habits away from wheat, which was being shipped to Europe to feed Allied troops. The U.S. Food Administration, which was being led by future president Herbert Hoover, made a patriotic appeal to “Save a Loaf a Week—Help Win the War.”

A variety of initiatives were launched to encourage citizens to cut back on the use of wheat, sugar, meat, and some other commodities to compensate for the millions of tons of wheat being shipped to Europe. One of those replacements was the potato. 

Across the country, the population confronted posters, newspaper advertisements, an assortment of “victory cookbooks,” hundreds of recipes, and patriotic appeals to eat more potatoes and to cut back on bread and other wheat foodstuffs. 

“Let Potatoes Fight,” declared one advertisement. “They save wheat when you eat potatoes.”

Another Food Administration advertisement promoted potatoes as inexpensive, plentiful, nourishing, easily prepared for meals, and—most important—reducing the demand for wheat flour. 

One wartime cooking book published some doggerel to promote an increased consumption of potatoes: 

“Eat potatoes with their starch,

Help the fighters on their march.

Each potato that you eat,

Will help to fill the ships with wheat.

Eat potatoes, save the wheat,

Drive the Kaiser to defeat.”

One of the more creative patriotic appeals to consume potatoes emerged in Maquoketa, Iowa, where the Staack & Luckiesh pharmacy fashioned a window display that called on “Potatriots” to “Join the Ranks and Spud the Kaiser.” A squad of decorated potatoes was arrayed across the display and backed by a sign advising the viewer that “The Potato Is a Good Soldier: Eat It, Uniform and All.”

Sources: 

Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato, by Rebecca Earle, Cambridge University Press, June 2020.

“How Potatoes Conquered the World,” by Rebecca Earle, BBC History, September 2020.