Best Posts of the Week of March 25, 2018.

So its Easter Sunday, March 31, 1918.

 

The 2018 Wyoming Election

 

 

 

Lex Anteinternet: The Kaiserschlacht Commences. Operation Michael. The First Battle of Villers-Bretonneux and the Battle of Moreuil Wood

What was that big gun?

The Easter Riots Commence in Quebec City, March 28, 1918.

The 8th Cavalry Crosses into Chihuahua. The Battle of Pilares. March 26, 1918.

The Neville Ranch Raid, March 25, 1918.

So its Easter Sunday, March 31, 1918.

 Church of the Ascension in Hudson Wyoming.  I don't live in Hudson, but this Catholic Church in the small town is just about the same size as the original St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church where I would have attended, everything else being equal, in 1918.  Because of the huge boom that occurred in my home town during World War One, that original church was taken down and the current church built during the late teens with the new church being completed in 1920.

Which, if you read this on a timely basis, means that you are reading it on Holy Saturday, 2018.

Let's look back on your Easter Sunday of that year, assuming of course that you are somebody situated like me, not assuming by extension that you are a young man in an Army camp somewhere that's being ravaged by the flu, or in France fighting against the German onslaught.

One thing you'd have to endure is the very first occurance of Daylight Savings Time, on this day in 1918.

So the US endured the ravages of false time for the first time on this day in 1918.

 

Oh, the humanity.

 

A sleepy nation "sprang forward".  And on Easter Sunday, no less.

So let's assume that you are in fact somebody like me living in the region I do.

If that were the case, you'd be living in what was still a small town, but an enormously expanding one due to a tremendous oil boom (something I've experienced at least twice, in fact, in my own life).  You  have an office job, but maybe you have an interest in cattle too, or perhaps farming, somehow, although mixing professions would have been much, much, more difficult in 1918 than in 2018, although it did actually occur.  If you had a military age son, as I do, you'd almost certainly have seen him off at the local train station, or in our case one of the two local train stations, last year.

And you'd be worried.

So how would the day go?

Well then, like now, most people would have attended a Church service on this Easter morning.  There's a really common widespread belief that religious adherence was universal in the first part of the 20th Century and has sadly declined markedly now but  that is in fact mostly a myth on both scores.  And part of that is based upon the region of the country you live in, and it was then as well.  But Easter Sunday, like Christmas, is always a big event and many people who don't attend a service otherwise, do on those days.  Others, like me, go every Sunday and of course adherent Catholics and Orthodox go every Sunday and Holy Day.

Now, one feature of the times that has changed is that by and large people tended to marry outside of their faith much less often and people's adherence to a certain faith was notably greater.  Currently, we often tend to hear of "Protestants and Catholics", but at the time not only would you have heard that, but people were much more likely to be distinctly aware of the difference between the various Protestant faiths.  And this often tended to follow a strongly economic and demographic base as well.  People of Scottish background, for example, tended to be Presbyterians.  The richest church at the time was the Episcopal Church and if people moved within Protestant denominations it tended to be in that direction.  I know to people here in town, for example, who made a move in that direction in their pre World War Two marriages, although one of those individuals, who married prior to World War One, went from the Catholic Church to the Episcopal Church, which was quite unusual.  In the other the individual went from the Presbyterian Church to the Episcopal Church, which was not unusual.  In both of the instances I'm aware of the men adopted the faiths of their brides to be in order to marry them.

People of "mixed marriages", i.e., where the couple were of different faiths, did of course exist so this can be taken much too far.  Even then it wasn't terribly uncommon for Catholics to be married to Protestants, although it was much less common than it is now, with the couple attending the Catholic Church.  Marriages involving Christians and Jews were much less common but also did occur, with at least the anecdotal evidence being that this also tended to be something in which the Jewish person married (it seems) a Catholic and they attended the Catholic Church.  I'm sure that this also occurred between Protestants and Jews but it's harder to find immediate examples.  In the area we're talking about, however, the Jewish demographic was so small that it would have been practically unnoticeable, although it was sufficiently large in Cheyenne such that a synagogue had gone in there in 1915 and it was about to be absorbed, in 1919, by a new Orthodox Jewish community.  I don't know if Jewish people even had a place that they could attend services of their own in this era, here in this town.  I doubt it. But I don't doubt that there were Jewish residents of the town by 1918.

What was hugely uncommon at the time were "mixed marriages" in terms of two different "races".  As I've noted here before, however, the concept of "race" is a purely human construct and what this means is not the same in any one era.  Because of the oil boom in Casper, Casper was starting to have a black and Hispanic community, and both of those groups have "race" status in the United States today, and then did then as well.  Mix marriages between blacks and whites, while not illegal in Wyoming as they were in some areas of the country, would have been completely socially unacceptable at that time.

Marriages between Hispanics and "whites" were certainly uncommon at that time, but that barrier was never as stout.  For one thing Hispanics were co-religious with various other groups that had "race" status earlier and that caused the boundaries to break down pretty quickly in some regions.  The Irish, Italians, Slavs and Greeks all had "race" status at the start of the 20th Century but by even World War One that had basically disappeared in the case of the Irish and it was disappearing for the other groups as well.  It had not, and still has not, for Hispanics but the "no mixed marriages" social taboo was not as strong.  It was oddly not as strong in regards to men marrying Indian women either.

All of which is only introductory to noting that on this Easter Sunday, March 31, 1918, you'd likely have gone to church with your family in the morning, assuming all of your family was in town, which if you had a young male in your household, wouldn't have been true.

Before you did that, however, you likely would have picked up a newspaper from your front step.

Now, I've been running newspapers here really regularly for a couple of years and that may have created a bit of a mis-impression.  Quite frequently, when I run newspapers, I run the Cheyenne paper or the Laramie paper.  I don't run the Casper paper nearly as often although I do occasionally.  I hardly ever run a paper like the Douglas paper, and Douglas is just fifty miles from Casper and much closer to Casper than Cheyenne.

Why do I do that?

Well, because there was a huge difference in Wyoming newspapers at the time.

Cheyenne and Laramie had excellent newspapers.  I think the Laramie Boomerang, which still exists, was a better paper then than it is now, which is not to say it's bad now.  But a feature of those papers is that they were all on the Union Pacific rail line and they were Associated Press papers.

Casper's newspapers had never been really bad, but they were much more isolated going into the early teens.  They only became contenders, sort of, in terms of quality in 1917 when the big oil boom caused buyouts in the local newspaper market and the quality really started to improve.  Immediate global news became more common in the papers.  Unfortunately, at the same time, a sort of massive economic myopic boosterism also set in and on some days, many days, there was nothing but oil news in them.

Some other local papers, like Sheridan's, were pretty good, but others were strictly local news.  So if you got the Douglas paper in Douglas, it was just all local happenings. Hardly any global news at all.

And that really matters.

There was no other source of news, other than letters, in 1918.

In the entire United States there were just a handful of commercial radio stations. In fact, those stations were;  KQW in San Jose California, WGY in Schenectady New York, KGFX in Pierre South Dakota, and KDKA in Pittsburgh, absent some university experimental stations and a couple that did Morse Code transmissions only.  Early radio, moreover, until the 1920s, was practically a hobby type of deal and a person depending upon radio, where there was radio, for the news would have been a rather optimistic person.

So, no radio, not television, no Internet.  The newspaper was it.

So if you relied upon a paper like the early ones in Douglas, you'd know that the State Fair was doing well, how local events were going, and that Miss. Barbara Jean Romperoom visited her aunt Tille for three days before returning to Chicago.

You wouldn't have been aware that the Germans were knocking on the door of Paris.

You'd be doing better if you read the Casper paper, after wading through the Oil!, Oil! Oil! hysteria, but not as well as you would have been if you were reading the Cheyenne paper.

Which maybe you were.

 No really cheerful news on the cover of this Easter addition of the Cheyenne State Leader.

Newspapers being so important at the time, traveled. Indeed they did well into the 1980s.  When I was a kid you could buy the Cheyenne Tribune Eagle, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, every day, from newsstands, in Casper.  Now you sure can't.  Indeed the Rocky Mountain News doesn't even exist, having been bought out by the less impressive Denver Post.

Now, in 1918, they couldn't have trucked the paper up from Denver and Cheyenne every day early in the morning, but they could have put them on the train and I suspect they did, at least with the Cheyenne paper. That is, I suspect that sometime that day, or the next day, a reader in Casper was able to pick up the Cheyenne papers.  I didn't know that for sure, but that was the general practice of the day.  It's no accident that the really major newspapers in Wyoming were all on the Union Pacific.  So I'd guess that perhaps the Cheyenne papers, if they didn't come overnight (and they may have) arrived late that day or the next and were available at newsstands, which did exist at the time.  Indeed, one such stand existed in the "lobby" of my office building, which had gone up in 1917, at a stand that also sold cigars. Don't they all?

  The office.  It had a newsstand and cigar shop in the small lobby originally.  Another cigar shop that sold papers for many years was just on the corner.

So my guess is that if you lived on a rail line, you were probably able to pick up the Cheyenne papers, and maybe the Denver papers, if perhaps on a day late basis.

So, let's get back to the day.

Chances are that you picked up the daily paper (there were two different ones, maybe you picked up both) from your front step about 5:00 a.m., assuming the local paper published on Sunday, which not all of them did.   You likely read it as you waited to go to Church.  If you are Catholic or Orthodox, you didn't eat anything as you couldn't break the Sunday morning fast.  Indeed, if you were Orthodox, and there were some Greek Orthodox in this region at the time, you were in an interesting situation as your faith had no church and, at that time, no pastor.  As a rule, you went to the Catholic Church instead, although perhaps a traveling Priest would come up next weekend for Orthodox Easter, which was a week behind that year.  If so, he'd use the Catholic Church for his Easter service.

Of course if you were Catholic or Orthodox, and you had a resident pastor, you could have gone the night prior to the Easter Vigil and you may have well done so. Given as that's the preference for my family, I'll assume that would have also been the case in 1918.  If that was the case, I'd be firing up the cook stove for coffee.  If you are a President, and had no pre service fast, you likely would have done that anyhow.

So, I'd fire up the cook stove and boil coffee, probably before anyone was up, put out the dog, and wait for other people to get up. I know that I'd have to wake my wife up, as she has a long standing tradition of Easter morning minor gifts that have replaced hidden eggs as the kids have grown older.  This year, that is 1918, it'd be sad and worrisome of course, as it'd be unlikely that our son would be here.

If I felt energetic, maybe I'd start breakfast.  I don't see us going out for breakfast in 1918, although that was just as much of an option in most places as it is in 2018. Frankly, I've never liked eating out after Church on Sunday mornings as I feel that it sort of occupies a lot of time involving sitting around eating a lot more then I normally would.  I'd have likely felt that way then.  My wife and my late mother, I'd note, feel very much differently so who knows.

So, at some point, I'd have read the local news.  Me being who I am, if the Cheyenne papers came in by train in the morning, at some point in the morning I'd have likely fired up the Model T, which would likely have acquired, and driven downtown to the station to buy one.

 A 1910 manufacture Ford Model T in Salt Lake City, Utah.  Model Ts had been out for fifteen years by this time and were becoming quite common.

And so, as a newspaper reading person, what would we have learned and have known that Easter of 1918?

Well, what we would have known is that the Allies were in serious trouble.  We'd have been constantly reading this pat week of a massive German offensive that was throwing the British, against whom it seemed primarily aimed, back.   We'd have also know that the Germans had resorted to the shocking measure of shelling Parish with some new huge long range artillery.  Every recent issue of the newspapers would have asserted that the Germans were slowing down and would soon be thrown back, but it sure hadn't happened yet.

We would have also seen it claimed (and not terribly accurately, we'll note) that the Americans were taking a role in the fighting, although we would also have seen that just a couple of days ago Pershing volunteered to deploy US troops to the fighting, which wouldn't have made a lot of sense if they were actually fighting already.

And that might have caused us a lot of concern if we had a relative in the Army, let alone if we had a son in the Army.

And if we were in that position, we might know more about the status of the Army in March 1918 than the average paper reader who was reading about our "Sammies", as the press oddly called them.

If you were in that position, your son (or other relatives) would have ended up in the Army one of three ways.  They could have been 1) drafted; or 2) joined the Army prior to the draft taking over everything; or 3) they could have been in the National Guard.

Indeed, they could have been in the National Guard even if they hadn't been until after war was declared.

That's actually an oddity that can still occur, and it was quite common in 1917.  For that matter, while a little different, quite a few men joined the National Guard in 1940 after it had been mobilized for the emergency.  There were strong incentives to do so as it allowed you to serve with people you knew, where you were from.  And in 1917, when the Guard was called back up, after having been demobilized from the Punitive Expedition's border service, the tradition that carried over from the Civil War of mustering state units was still sufficient strong that the states were raising Guard units as state units that were larger than their peacetime establishment.  Indeed, Wyoming not only called back up the infantrymen who had recently been on the Mexican border, but added new infantrymen to them, and planned on trying to raise an entire regiment of cavalry.  It didn't get that far with the cavalry, however.

Men who had been drafted after war was declared and also men who had volunteered were still in training all over the United States. But many prewar regulars and some National Guardsmen were already in France, undergoing training there.  Those infantrymen had gone to Camp Greene, North Carolina as the 3d Infantry Regiment, Wyoming National Guard.  At Camp Greene, however, they were soon converted into part of the 148th Field Artillery, as artillery, and the 116th Ammunition Train of the 41st Division.  The 41st had been established just five days before the declaration of war and it as an all National Guard division.  The 148th Field Artillery was an artillery unit made up of National Guardsmen from the Rocky Mountain region, only some of whom had been artillerymen before the war.  Conversion of the Wyoming infantrymen into artillerymen spoke highly of them, as artillery was a considerably more complicated role than infantry.  Conversion of the remainder into the 116th Ammunition Train spoke to their experience with horses and freighting, both of which were a necessary element of that role.

The 41st had already gone to France and it had been one of the five U.S. Divisions sent over by this time.  However, it met with bad luck when the SS Tuscania was sunk on February 5, as the men on it were of the 41st.  We earlier dealt with that disaster here:

SS Tuscania Sunk, February 5, 1918.

SS Tuscania

The first US troops ship to be sunk during World War One, the SS Tuscania, went down due to German torpedos launched by the UB-77.  210 lives were lost.

It was only briefly dealt with in the local papers, and no doubt not much was known at the time, but some of the passengers on the Tuscania were Wyoming Guardsmen.  I don't know if any of them went down with her.  By March 31, anyone with relatives who died when the ship sank knew it.  Wyoming Guardsmen definitely witnessed the sinking from a nearby vantage.

Gen. Pershing only had five divisions of men in France, all trained, but he needed a source of immediate replacements.  The 41st Division became that source.  Units of unique value, like artillery, were taken out of it wholesale.  The 148th was equipped there with French 155mm guns, large artillery pieces, and also equipped with French artillery tractors.  They thereby became highly mobile, highly modern, heavy field artillery and were soon to be split out of the 41st in that role, if they hadn't been already.  The 116th Ammunition Train, however, went to Tours with the rest of the 41st and waited there to be pieced out as replacements, a sad end to the division.

French 155 GPF gun. This is the same type of artillery piece used by the Wyoming National Guard during World War One. They had not yet fired their first shot in anger.  A version of this gun would serve alongside a more modern 155 all the way through 1945.

You'd be unlikely to know much about that, however, unless you had letters home that might raise the question.  And they might.  If your son or loved one was an artilleryman, you might have had a hint about the fate of the Tuscania and that the unit was training with French artillery pieces.  If your son was in the 116th Ammunition train you might have received a disappointing letter from Tours.

You'd be worried either way as the papers were full of reports about Americans going into action, which wasn't happening much yet.

Well all that would be pretty grim to think about for Easter, wouldn't have it been?

Well, sometime mid day we'd likely gather for an Easter Dinner with relatives. Chances are really good that it'd feature ham, but that ham would likely be boiled ham.

You've likely never had boiled ham.  I never have.  But I recall my father speaking about it and he wasn't a huge fan. Boiling drove off the salt that was part of the curative brine and it took quite awhile.  Of course there's be other good foods as well, including likely pie.

My guess is that there's be beer too.  Maybe wine. And perhaps some whiskey.

The day would likely wrap up about 5:00 p.m. or so, and then back home. Back home would probably entail some reading, and some worrying as well.  If you are like me, that would entail worrying about the next days work, but it surely would have entailed worrying about what was going on over in France.

Lex Anteinternet: The Kaiserschlacht Commences. Operation Michael. The First Battle of Villers-Bretonneux and the Battle of Moreuil Wood

Lex Anteinternet: The Kaiserschlacht Commences. Operation Michael

 The First Battle of Villers-Bretonneux and the Battle of Moreuil Wood

On March 30 the Germans none the less tried again, launching an assault south of the new Somme salient towards Amiens resulting in two significant battles, one of which is very well recalled today.  The Germans gained some ground but it was slight, and German troops lost discipline when they hit Allied supply depots.

The resumed German offensive opened up near the town of Le Hamel but was turned back, although the Germans took ground near the Hangard Wood.  This resulted in a five day pause in the German effort in this location until they resumed their attack towards the town of Villers-Bretonneux.  The French fell back upon the German resumed attack but British and Australian troops generally held well but were ultimately forced to retire due to a two stage retreat by the 14th (Light) Division. which ultimately fell back some 3500 yards to a new position.  Australian troops restored the line and counterattacked, pushing the Germans back out of the town.  This was followed up by flanking advances by British cavalry and Australian infantry which consolidated the line for the time being.

This phase of the German offensive also saw the remarkable Canadian cavalry charge in the Battle of Moreuil Wood in which the Canadian Cavalry Brigade conducted a mounted assault near the village of Moreuil, taking the wood against the prediction of failure of a nearby French unit, receiving assistance from the RFC in the assault.  The Germans retook the wood the following day, March 31, but the Canadians then took it back. The Germans ultimately retook the wood, showing the intense nature of the fighting, but the overall offensive was called off shortly after that.

 The charge at Moreuil Wood.

Operation Michael had gained a lot of ground, but it had ground to a halt.  By April 5 the Germans were exhausted and an effort to resume the offensive against the British failed.  Moreover, German casualties had been massive, and many of those casualties came from their very best units.

What was that big gun?

It was a railroad gun.

And a really big one at that.

Or rather, they were really big ones.  There were several.

Details on the giant long range guns are surprisingly sketchy.  They, or it, or whatever, never fell into Allied hands and the Germans took what was left of the guns, whatever that was (and it was likely most of it, or them), back into Germany as they retreated towards the end of the war.  What they couldn't take, they destroyed.

The guns were apparently 211mm guns, a little over 8in.  That would remain a large gun today, but not so large as to not be deployable then or now as field artillery. The M110 Self  Propelled Howitzer, for example, featured an 8" gun.

 

 M110 Self Propelled howitzer

The Paris guns weren't howitzers, however.  They were rifles.  Extremely large rifles with very long barrels.  And over time, likely due to barrel wear, they were bored out to 236mm, 9in.

 They were transported by rail, and indeed they featured a rail turntable as part of their emplacement.  

And they were weapons of terror.

Say what you like about the Germans prior to World War Two, but at the end of the day, the fact of the matter is that the German military seems to have been uniquely prone to acts of terrorism as early as the Franco Prussian War.  And during World War One they undertook several strategies and weapons that were frankly terroristic, of which the giant railway guns were merely one example.  Their only purpose was to silently shell Paris at extreme long range, some 75 miles, and with accuracy that was no better than to simply hit the city, which the guns did at least twenty-one times on March 21, the first day they were used.  They kept up that rate of fire for a considerable time thereafter until the end of the Kaiserschlacht in August and the ultimate reversal of German fortunes mandated their dismantling and removal.  They were never captured by the Allies.  It's telling that while the Versailles Treaty required them to be turned over to the Allies, the Germans did not do it.

250 Parisians were killed by the giant guns and another 620 were wounded.  On this day, Good Friday, 1918, a projectile from one of the giant guns went through the roof of St-Gervais-et-St-Protais Church, killing 91 and wounding 68.

The aftermath of the March 29, terror shelling.

There is no excuse for their use.  There wasn't then, and there still isn't.

Super artillery, into which these guns class these fit, went on to see some use during World War Two by the Germans again, but the advent of aircraft meant that they had become too vulnerable for much use, although they never saw all that much use to start with.  The Germans would deploy some super artillery in the East during World War Two, but the manpower required was so vast that the use of the guns has been calculated to be a net detriment to the German war effort during World War Two.  They didn't achieve much during World Ware One either, as the Parisians grew blase about the big guns which, as destructive as they were, were unlikely to actually get any one person in a city of millions.  In modern times super long range artillery has not seen use although it has been studied with at least Baathist Iraq having taken an interest in them, and having studied a gun that would have been capable of hitting Israel while being fired from Iraq.

Seems if a nation uses these its cause is dishonorable by definition.

Wyoming State Tribune, March 29, 1918. The Germans in control of the breweries?

Lots of grim war news.

And a report that the Germans were in control of the breweries to the tune of, a fellow from the Anti Saloon League claimed, 75%. That is, he said, 75% of all the stock owned in breweries was owned in Germany.

Hmmm. . . . .

And a draft evader was shot in the Seminoes after fighting to contest his arrest.  As this shows, there was opposition to the draft during the Great War and it was sometimes pretty determined, even if most people accepted it readily.

Today In Wyoming's History: Halfway House Stage Stop, Park County, Wyoming

Today In Wyoming's History: Halfway House Stage Stop, Park County, Wyoming

Today In Wyoming's History: March 29, 1973

Today In Wyoming's History: March 29: 1973  The United States completes it's withdrawal from Vietnam.

By odd coincidence, this is also the day that Lt. William Calley was sentenced in 1971 in a courts martial for his role in the My Lai Massacre, although his prison sentence ended up not being a long one.

Today In Wyoming's History: Updates for March, 2018

Today In Wyoming's History: Updates for March, 2018: March 4:  Photograph added for the outbreak of 1918 Flu at Camp Funston, Kansas . March 7:  Newspapers added for 1918 .  Students walko...

The Easter Riots Commence in Quebec City, March 28, 1918.

Several days of rioting, which would run through April 1, commenced on this day in Quebec City in 1918.

 

An example of a Canadian recruiting poster directed at the residents of Montreal (with which my family has a connection). Such efforts were not entirely successful.  This unit sought to recruit members of the fairly large Irish Canadian community of Quebec.

The underlying cause of the riots was conscription, which was deeply unpopular in Canada in general and hugely unpopular in Quebec, which saw the war as a European affair that they had very little stake or interest in.  404,385 Canadian men became liable for military service under the Military Service Act, which became law on January 1. 385,510 sought exemption and, given the vague nature of the statute, most succeeded.

The immediate cause of the rioting was the arrest of a French Canadian man who failed to present his exemption papers.  He was released, but things soon were totally out of control.  Soldiers had to be called into the city under the War Measures Act of 1914.  The deeply unpopular act and the riots lead to the proposed Francœur Motion under which Quebec was proposed to declare that it would be happy to leave the Canadian union if the rest of the then very English country found Quebec to be "an obstacle to the union, progress and development of Canada".  The motion was not introduced in the end out of a fear of what it would lead to.

In some ways the rioting strongly recalls the reaction that the Irish had to conscription which lead to the Easter Rebellion of 1916. England itself had no tradition of conscription for land service (it did for sea service) and conscription was actually more strongly established in the United States which had required militia service by state in all states up until after the Civil War, with there being outright conscription during the Civil War.  The English accepted it however.  None of the Dominions took well to it and Ireland, part of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, was massively opposed to it.  Originally the Irish were exempted from English conscription but when that was repealed in 1916 it lead to the Easter Rebellion and ultimately to the Anglo Irish War and Irish independence.  Australia rejected attempts to impose conscription in that Dominion in a national plebiscite, while New Zealand on the other hand adopted it.  Canada too adopted it after a prior failed attempt, but as can be seen, it was not a success and it fueled early thoughts of Quebec separation.

The irony of this is that while this was occurring, Ireland, Australia and Canada all contributed large bodies of men to the war voluntarily.  So,in the end, efforts to impose conscription in those localities were at best a waste of time and effort and at worst a cause of net manpower loss.

It's worth noting that conscription remained unpopular in Australia and Canada during World War Two and while both nations imposed it, only late in the war were conscripts required to serve overseas.  In Australia's case disgruntled conscripts were a source of poor units that otherwise stand apart from the really notable fighting qualities of the Australian Army.  Canadian conscripts seem to have accepted their late war fate and generally have worked out well when they were finally required to go overseas.  Ireland was of course independent , although a dominion, by World War Two, and it refused to declare war but once again supplied a large number of troops to the British forces.  Surprisingly Australia twice imposed conscription post World War Two, once during the Korean War and again during the Vietnam War.  Canada briefly followed the British example of Cold War conscription but phased it out very quickly and has never resumed it.

Wyoming State Tribune, March 28, 1918. Muleless Days?

The big news was on the war, of course, but a frightening item about a shortage of mules appeared on the front cover as well.

At that time, that was no minor matter.  Mules and horses remained the prime movers of short hauling and agriculture in the United States in 1918.  And the US was also a major supplier of both to the Allies.

Unlike automobiles, a demand for equines couldn't simply be supplied overnight.  A natural product had to develop naturally.  By this point in 1918 horses and mules that were born in the first year of the war were just getting to the point where they were trainable.  Horses and mules of older age, and usable for anything, had been pressed into the demand long ago.

Soldier's Farewell Parade, Indianaopolis Indiana, March 18, 1918.

Bulgarian authorities block travel to Czechoslovakia. March 28, 1968.

Bulgarian authorities blocked travel to Czechoslovakia on this day due to the civil unrest that was heating up in the Prague Spring.

Martin Luther King, Jr. leads his last march. March 28, 1968

On this day in 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. lead what was to become his last march in Memphis, Tennessee.  The occasion was a sanitation workers strike.  The march unfortunately descended into a riot and the police shot sixteen year old Larry Payne.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

While King had no role in the violence and was opposed to violence of any kind, he felt deeply distressed by what had occurred and felt that he had failed in his appearance.

Yuri Gagarin's Death. March 27, 1968.

On this date in 1968, another year we're tracking, legendary Soviet Cosmonaut Yurk Gagarin, the first man to travel into space, died in when a Mig-15UTI crashed.  Flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin also died in the accident.  The aircraft entered an apparently uncontrollable spin for reasons that remain unknown.

 Gagarin in 1961.

Gagarin passed into history on April 12, 1961 with a lift off that was marked by this exchange:

Korolev: "Preliminary stage..... intermediate..... main..... lift off! We wish you a good flight. Everything is all right."

Gagarin:  "Поехали!" (Poyekhali!—Let's go!)"

At the time of his death Gagarin, whose first flight into space made him both internationally famous and a sort of Cold War figure, was 34 years old.

The 8th Cavalry Crosses into Chihuahua. The Battle of Pilares. March 26, 1918.

Troop A and Troop G of the 8th Cavalry, under the command of Captain Henry H. Anderson, following the raid on Neville's Ranch on March 25, crossed into Chihuahua Mexico in pursuit of the raiders who had committed the raid on this day in 1918.  It was a classic cavalry force, made up of cavalrymen supported logistically by mules.  The cavalry force tracked and closed with the raider over a course of seventy miles until they Mexican force doubled back towards the border and to Pilares, Chihuahua.  Then apprised to the fact that they were being pursued they staged an ambush for the cavalrymen.

It didn't work and the Mexican force soon broke, with the battle turning into an eleven mile running fight.  As it went, townspeople from Pilares joined the raiders in defending their town.  Oddly, some contemporary reports had, however, statements from a local Mexican Federal officer both claiming to have driven the Americans out of Pilares but also to have aided them against, presumably, Villistas. Given that Villa war far from beaten at the time, and Carranza's government proving to be far from stable, perhaps that also isn't too surprising.  In reality, the Mexican Federal troops arrived just as the Americans were ready to depart, and after the Mexican commander, present with 500 Mexican cavalrymen, protested their presence the Americans, the Americans did indeed depart.

The fighting in Pilares was fierce and in fact the cavalry charged the town, which is where the sole American casualty lost his life, shot out of his saddle in that event. Anderson wasn't really driven out of Pilares, but he did withdraw, but not before searching it very completely and then issuing an order to burn the town, which was done.  In the town, a large cache of German 98s were found, but again while that was deemed significant it isn't terribly surprising.   American forces also recovered materials linking the town to the Raid on Brite's Ranch and the Neville Ranch, the latter of course making perfect sense under the circumstances, including Glen Neville's chaps, which were found on the body of dead Mexican combatant.  Materials linked to the mail driver killed in the Brite's Raid, however, were also recovered and harder to explain.  Items belonging to the Mexican Federal army were recovered, but they were likely items that had been captured by Villistas in other raids.  The Mexicans sustained 33 deaths in the American counter raid, with the 8th Cavalry suffering the loss of a Pvt Carl Albert, A Troop, 8th Cavalry.  Some of the dead were identified including at least one known Villista but also several former Porvenir residents, including some who were teenagers.   One house was left standing due to the pleas of the owner, a Mexican woman with children who was desperate to keep her house intact.

As for the village of Pilares, victims of the Porvenir Massacre were buried there, so it would be logical to assume that they had some fear about Americans being in the vicinity, no matter what their allegiance may have otherwise been.  But later reports indicated that some of the Neville raiders may have been former Porvenir residents who had taken refuge there, it was not far away.  The town was close by and intimately impacted by the Porvenir Raid and therefore the Neville Raid is not illogically tied to it.

So what does this event tell us?  Well, while all the country now was focused on France, and with an Army that remained mostly in the US in training and which was now, huge, things continued to be very heated on the border.  The presence of German arms in northern Mexico could easily have lead to a furor which would have refocused attention on Carranza's Mexico in a way that would have been devastating for him, given the present size of the U.S. Army, but also for the fortunes of the Allies in the Great War.

But perhaps more than that, it focuses us on a conflict that had now evolved into a low grade guerilla war.  A man had lost his son, a group of Mexican villagers had lost their small town, a husband and his children had lost their wife and mother.  And to them, it probably all seemed far removed from whatever the greater cause was supposed to be.

Lex Anteinternet: The Kaiserschlacht Commences. Operation Michael, The Battle of Rosieres and the Battle of Arrars

Lex Anteinternet: The Kaiserschlacht Commences. Operation Michael

The Battle of Rosieres and the Battle of Arrars

On the 26th and 27th the British fought the Battle of Rosieres in which the British committed tanks. Nonetheless the Allies continued to lose ground and lost the town of Albert during the night.  Throughout the retreat phase that went  through the 27th Tommies occasionally panicked and took up defense positions at the report of German cavalry being just over the horizon.  Still, while they retreated continually they did not disintegrate and both the British and the French remained in action throughout.  On the 28th a German assault only a handful of miles, showing that the Germans were slowing.  A primary factor was that the German cavalry that was needed to exploit the breakthroughs in the Allied lines that continually occurred simply didn't exit.

There wasn't any. The Germans were now, in terms of fighting at the front, an infantry force only.  They'd lose the war as a result.  The could exploit gaps in the British lines no quicker than a man could advance, and with each days advance the German troops became more and more fatigued until, at last, they simply refused to move, even under threat of death.

Today In Wyoming's History: March 26, 1918.

And in Laramie, something indicating the direction of things to come occurred:

Today In Wyoming's History: March 26: 1918  Elmer Lovejoy of Laramie patented a powered garage door opener.  Lovejoy had previously built his own automobile.

Lovejoy would work on this for a period of years, actually, so apparently he wasn't satisfied with his first design.

Ferdinand Foch made Supreme Allied Commander

On this day in 1918 the Allies obtained a supreme military commander.

Well, sort of.

In actuality Ferdinand Foch, the French Field Marshall, was given the task of coordinating all  of the Allied activities in response to the Kaiserschlacht at the Doullens Conference.  His formal appointment of being the supreme Allied commander would come somewhat later.  Even at that, given the strong personalities involved, the role was always more of formulating policy and then seeking  the cooperation of other Allies.

In these regards, Foch's role was weaker than, but would anticipate, the role played by Dwight Eisenhower during World War Two.  In retrospect it seems amazing that this did not occur until 1918, the last year of the war, but getting to this point was not an easy one, and it came only in the face of seemingly looming military disaster. That it would go to a French commander, rather than a British one, also seems surprising in retrospect, but France had the largest army in the field, and of course most of that field was in France.

Foch was, at least in my view, a good choice. He had been in French military service since 1870 in one way or another, and had seen service in the Franco Prussian War.  He was irrepressible in spirit, something that had served him well not only in the Great War but before as well, as his advancement had been slower than it should have been in the pre war French Army, something that was likely the case because his brother was a Jesuit Priest and Republican France retained a Revolutionary and Napoleonic period anti clerical bias.  His appointment was not without controversy but he filled the role well and worked well with strong personalities that were technically his inferior in the Allied armies but which never saw themselves that way.

It's interesting to note that his appointment came just one day after the US had placed its troops under French command because of the crisis on the Western Front.

March 26, 1918. Bad news. Hopeful News. And, what? Me worry?

Significant positions were falling.

Romania was giving up.

The Germans were across the Somme. . .and sending reinforcements to their own advancing men.

But the Germans were slowing down, some, and new lines were reported to be forming. . . maybe.  March was telling us now to worry. . . heh, heh.

But in Casper, the economy was doing great!

I wonder what was causing that big increase in the demand for petroleum anyway?

The Neville Ranch Raid, March 25, 1918.

Today finds us, in the midst of all the news on the Kaiserschlacht, back on the border with Mexico.  The Neville Ranch Raid occurred on this fateful day of 1918.

The Neville Ranch was an isolated ranch in West Texas that was run by Edwin W. Neville.  Neville lived there with his son, Glenn, his Mexican servant, Rosa Castillo, her husband and their three children.  There were, ironically, more Mexicans living on the small isolated ranch than there were European Americans.  That hadn't always been the case. Mr.  Neville had a wife and two daughters, but after the  Christmas Raid on Brite's Ranch he moved them to Van Horn, Texas and stayed on with his son and Mexican help. After all, a ranch can't simply be abandoned but must be worked, and he likely felt that this left him with enough help to work the ranch and that his Mexican employees were likely safe.

This particular raid was not without warning.  Warning came earlier in the day to Captain Leonard Matlock, 8th Cavalry, that a Mexican (the exact nature and allegiance of the raiding force is still not known) raid on Neville's ranch was planned and he accordingly sent out a patrol. The patrol was detailed to go to the ranch and warn Neville, but he wasn't there when it arrived as he was in Van Horn, where his family otherwise lived, and buying supplies there.  He learned that something was going on and rode back to his ranch with his son, Glen, an eight hour ride by horse.  When he arrived he discussed the situation with his ranch residents in his ranch house when the raid broke out.  The party took refuge in a ditch near the house which was better protected but Glen was shot in the head and severely wounded.  Mrs. Castillo was also shot and mutilated by the raiders in sight of her children, something that seems to have been at least a feature of other similar raids in which Mexican raiders took  vengeance upon the Mexican employees of American ranchers.  The raiders then took to looting the ranch, which was also common, and Edwin, in a state of shock over his dying son and murdered female employee wondered off into the desert.

Mr. Castillo rode for assistance and found the 8th Cavalry patrol about six miles distant from the ranch.  That patrol, under a Lt. Gaines, returned to the ranch just after the raiders had departed and he sent word to his superiors of what had occurred.

As noted, the identify and even the exact purpose of the raiders remains unknown.  It is felt that they likely were Villistas, and they were well armed as they were carrying German made Mauser 98 rifles (the left some in the raid), the common military rifle used by all sides in the Mexican Revolution.  That latter fact, however, has lead some to suggest a German connection with the raid, and of course German military advisors were a feature of the Mexican Revolution.  The raid may have been in reprisal for the Porvenir Massacre as well.  Or maybe looking at an exact cause of a single raid on the border in this era is simply asking for too much.

This story didn't end with the raid itself, which is often cited as the last "serious" raid across the border in this era (it isn't).  With Neville lost and then found deranged in the desert, Glen dead, and Mrs. Costillo murdered, the raid was a human tragedy that served no purpose for the raiders.  It did, however, result in the mustering of the 8th Cavalry.  Shortly before Lt. Gaine's patrol arrived back at the ranch the raiders withdrew, loot in hand, to Chihuahua.  But that didn't see the end of things.

Neville would live into the 1950s.  But not on his ranch.  He opened a cafe in Marfa, but held a vendetta against the murderers of his son for the rest of his life.

General Pershing places the four combat ready US Divisions in France under French command.

You will constantly hear, and now without good reason, that General John Pershing was very reluctant to place US troops under European Command.  Indeed, he was reluctant to do so.

Indeed, Pershing basically disagreed with European strategy in general and wasn't at all impressed by the argument that French and British forces were trained and combat experienced.  He felt that their experience was one of failure.  He didn't agree with concepts of trench warfare.  He was a cavalryman and like the later cavalry generals of World War Two, such as Patton, an understudy of his, he totally disagreed with concepts of static warfare.

Pershing hoped to deploy large, square, American divisions backed by cavalry regiments in mobile warfare and was largely prepared to ignore Allied pleas to commit U.S. troops to European command. But he was also savvy to the battlefield situation. The U.S. had been rotating men from the four divisions then in France to the front to get them exposed to combat.  On this day he committed the four U.S. divisions to French command, in light of the massive German spring offensive.  As the offensive was primarily directed at the British at this point, the French would not immediately call upon them.

March 25, 1918. The slowing of Operation Michael and the appearance of a famous name in the papers

The papers were correct that Operation Michael was slowing down.  Estimates of losses were overestimated, however.

And a name that was to be famous, Douglas MacArthur, appeared on the front page.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. Joseph's Polish Catholic Church, Denver Colorado

Churches of the West: St. Joseph's Polish Catholic Church, Denver Colorado.

This is St. Joseph's Polish Catholic Church in North Denver.  The church is just a couple of blocks away from another Catholic Church., Holy Rosary Catholic Church, and a couple of blocks away from a Russian Orthodox Cathedral, reflecting the ethnic make up of this community at one time. Today, the neighborhood is largely Hispanic, but this church still offers Masses in Polish in addition to English.  the school next to it was flying a Polish and US flag on the day that I went by.  The church was built in 1902.

March 24, 1918. The British holding, and the Paris gun.

Poster Saturday: Subscribe to the War Loan!

A look at the other side today, an Austrian poster urging subscription to a war loan.

These farming folks look like they don't have much to donate to any war loans. The farm wife is in her bare feet, an old man is plowing.

Sometimes these posters say more than they mean to.

Best Posts of the Week of March 18, 2018

The Best Post of the Week of March 18, 2018.

Meanwhile, in the desert. . .

The March 20, 1918 News. The Germans and the Press Getting it Wrong

U.S. Troop Strength. March, 1918.

The Kaiserschlacht Commences. March 21, 1918. Operation Michael

The United States at War, 1917-1918. What was taking so long?

National Puppy Day

Apparently today is National Puppy Day.

Our new puppy.

Meanwhile, at Spartanburg, South Carolina. . .

They seemed to be taking the news of a large offensive across the Atlantic somewhat in stride, based upon the March 23 paper's cover.

Maybe that's because they weren't too surprised by it, based upon the February 2 issue's cover.

Occupation of Luneville Sector (Lorraine), Feb. 11 - March 23, 1918 -- 42nd Division, concludes

  



The U.S. 42nd Division had been in the line in the Luneville Sector, a sector that was otherwise occupied by the French Army, in order to expose it to combat. 



While things would soon be changing for U.S. troops, with some irony, their time in the French front concluded on this day in 1918.

March 23, 1918. The news of the breakthrough at St. Quentin

The news the prior day had been optimistic. The news on March 23 was decidedly not.

And, surprisingly, Casper was reported to be favoring prohibition.

Today In Wyoming's History: Updates for March, 2018

Today In Wyoming's History: Updates for March, 2018: March 4:  Photograph added for the outbreak of 1918 Flu at Camp Funston, Kansas . March 7:  Newspapers added for 1918 .  Students walko...

The United States at War, 1917-1918. What was taking so long?

On March 20, the day before the anniversary of the massive 1918 German Spring offensive, I posted this item on U.S. troop strength in March 1918.

U.S. Troop Strength. March, 1918.

While reading the newspapers would have lead you to the opposite conclusion, and therefore no matter how attuned to the news you may have been, you wouldn't have known it, on this date in 1918 there were only four American divisions in France.

The US would end up with a big Army in World War One. A really big Army.  I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. Rather, this was posted to show that, in March of 1918, it wasn't big enough to solve the problems of millions of Germans on the march on the Western front.

Fortunately, as events will show, the fact that millions were on the march, i.e.,literally, solved that problem in and of itself.  Not very many were riding, and none were riding as large independent cavalry formation.

But we turn back to the American Army.

You may be thinking, geez man, the US declared war in April 1917. What the heck was taking thing the US so freaking long to get manpower Over There?  Only 130,000 combat troops in France in March, 2018?

Well yes, but it was pretty explainable, and indeed, the building of the U.S. Army during World War One is a really remarkable story only really duplicated in our history by the building of the Union Army  and Confederate Army during the Civil War.

We're so used to large armies now, and in spite of the big post Cold War draw down, that we tend to think of the US as having a really capable large deployable Army all the time.  But we've really only had that since the post World War Two early Cold War build up of the military, which brought in a really exceptional era of our history.  At the same time, it's an often repeated story, and frankly a myth, that the United States has traditionally ignored our defense and stiffed the Army so that,. most of the time, its understrength and poorly equipped until a war comes along.  That's simply untrue.

What is true is that for most of our history, and until up until about 1948, the United States had a very small standing Army.  It was small by design.

Congress came out of the Revolution with a healthy fear of standing armies.  The British had been difficult for the United States to defeat because it had a standing army.  That didn't argue for an army, however, by any means. That same parliamentary army had been used to enforce British prerogatives in North America over the objection of locals.  The lesson was pretty clear.  Armies meant power and in that case the parliamentary army that had descended from Cromwell's New Model Army had vested authority in the House of Commons and had overthrown and executed a king.  That same army, evolved, had been used to try to keep the authority of the restored Crown in North America.  And now matter what you think of the justice of that, it was a powerful lesson.

In contrast the various colonies had always depended for local defense on militias. Armed colonist who were obligated to serve their colonies.  That was the defense model that had North American history behind it. Militias weren't dangerous to sitting governments and didn't overthrow them.  They could defend them. The lesson was so stout that it was enshrined in the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which was quite clear in what it meant even if later day politicians claim to be confused by it.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

After the Revolution Congress was so repelled by the though of s standing army that there was in fact a period of time during which the United States actually didn't have one. None.  We had a Navy, and an early Coast Guard (the Revenue Cutter Service) but no Army.  That changed due to the eruption of a Frontier Indian War that has never borne a name soon after Independence and a small, very small, United States Army was created.  It was tiny.

But it didn't need to be large either.  Our enemies were generally far away and there was going to be time to raise a larger Army in a time of crisis.  In the meantime, real defense was based on the U.S. Navy and the various state militias.

This system was far from perfect, as the War of 1812 demonstrated amply, but it did work well enough and it kept a standing Army from overthrowing the government, a real, and realistic, fear.  The Army was big enough to work for a Frontier and Port defense force, and to serve as a source of authority, education and standardization for the militias.  It was too small to be idle.  That worked, most of the time.  Indeed, some can asks if that model might, now that the Cold War is over, be one that we wish to more completely return to.

In fact, looking at it, the model was nearly universally successful for a long time, the somewhat contrary example of the War of 1812 notwithstanding.  While US ground forces generally preformed quite poorly in the War of 1812, the opposite was true in the Mexican War in which the small US military establishment took on the larger professional Mexican Army with a combined force of Regulars, volunteers and state troops.  In that war, indeed, the professional establishment of the U.S. Army proved brilliant both in strategy and in innovation, introducing flying batteries of artillery extremely effectively.

If the Mexican War proved the concept was still viable for the growing continental power in the late early half of the 19th Century, perhaps the Civil War proved that the retained fear of a large standing Army remained correct.  Again, the professional elements of the pre war Army preformed very well in the Civil War, for both the United States and the rebel Confederacy, but the fact that the Army had been small and fully deployed during the crisis that lead up to the war may have effectively kept the Army from being used against the government going into it.  That's of course highly speculative but it is notable that the Army suffered a partial dissolution of the officer corps going into the war and even some enlisted men defected early on to the Southern cause.  A larger Army which otherwise matched the prewar pattern of having a lot of Southern officers may have acted differently than one which was 100% deployed to port and frontier duty, like the U.S. Army was at the time.

It wasn't until the Spanish American War that cracks in this well established system began to show.  The war with Spain was the first war against a European power since the War of 1812 and even though it was in the United States' backyard, at first, the US had a difficult time organizing a sufficiently large and well formed Army for the war.  The Army was combined from state units and the small Regular Army as usual, but it did not go smoothly and only the fact that Spain proved to be a weak opponent kept things from going badly.  The Philippine Insurrection showed new problems as the United States deployed state troops, successfully, to the early stages of its campaigns in the Philippines which resulted in domestic discontent as troops originally raised to fight Spain became bogged down in an endless guerrilla war based on colonial aspirations.

Following the Spanish American War and on into the Philippine Insurrection Congress undertook to address the problems that had developed in part by formalizing the relationships of state militias to the Army, thereby creating the current status of the National Guard as a reserve of the Army.  This had always been the case but it became the case legally at the time, thereby making the various state militias part of the Army's official structure and, indeed, part of the Army.  That act, the Dick Act, went a long ways towards creating a more professional Army/National Guard relationship that reflected the end of the Army's role as a frontier gendarme and the beginning of the US as a global power.  Indeed, the Army soon found itself heavily deployed overseas on a constant basis, which didn't change its nature as a being a very small Army.

In 1914, when the Great War broke out, the United States Army comprised 98,000 Regular soldiers.  45,000 of those troops were stationed overseas in such locations as the Philippines, China, and other locations.  The Mexican Revolution which had broken out in 1910 was making manpower demands on the Army on the Mexican border and the Army retained a very serious port defense role which had become highly modern, in context, with advanced coastal artillery batteries being a feature of major American ports.  The demands on the Army were huge.

Indeed, staring in 1914 Theodore Roosevelt, out of power, began agitating both for American entry into World War One for a larger American military in light of the risk of war developing with Germany.  A major civilian "preparedness" movement, inspired by Republican agitation, developed which saw thousands of men, and some women, undergo military training voluntarily under the tutelage of the U.S. Army and the patronage of some elements of the National Guard and the U.S. Army.  In 1915 the risk of war greatly increased when Woodrow Wilson, greatly miscalculating the impact of his actions, allowed Carranza's troops to be transported across southern Texas to be sued against the forces of Pancho Villa, thereby taking a nearly direct role in the Mexican Revolution.  This followed the existing American intervention at Vera Cruz which had resulted in American Marines and sailors fighting Mexican troops at that city.  Wilson's actions resulted in temporary military success for Carranza and the animosity of Pancho Villa, who in turn sent his much depleted forces across the border on March 9, 1916, a year, more or less, prior to American entry into World War One and two years, more or less, before the massive German offensive of March 1918.

By raiding Columbus New Mexico Pancho Villa oddly aided the United States in regards to World War One as the resulting Punitive Expedition would require Woodrow Wilson to mobilize the National Guard.  1916 was the first time since 1898 that the United States had commenced a complete National Guard call up.  1898, of course, was just eighteen years prior, so it wasn't that many years since that had occurred, and the National Guard had served in the Philippine Insurrection early on, in the form of "state troops", so it had seen active service just seventeen or so years prior.  But it was the first time that the National Guard had been called up since the passage of the Dick Act which made it an official reserve of the U.S. Army.  Nonetheless, that call up retained features of earlier ones with states recruiting to fill National Guard units even after they'd mustered at the state level.  Recall, for example, the saga of the disappearance of Pvt. Dilley, a recently mustered National Guardsmen, prior to the Wyoming National Guard's deployment to the Mexican border.

Because of the Mexican border crisis and looming risk of involvement of war in Europe, in 1916 Congress undertook to expand the size of the standing Regular Army to an anticipated wartime strength of 286,000 men, a huge increase in context although one that did not result in the immediate increase of the Army to that size.  The Army did increase in size, however.

The National Guard was released from service as the Punitive Expedition concluded in early 1917.  Indeed, those units that were still serving on the border at that time were rather hastily mustered out in early 1917 just as it became increasingly apparent that the US was sliding into war.  In retrospect, the fact that National Guard units were mustered out seems a rather poor idea, as by that time it became increasingly obvious that the United States was going to enter the war.  That sets aside the fact that, even as the US entered the war in April 1917, it wasn't at first clear that the US would actually form a large Army and send it to Europe.  At least some, including the Secretary of the Navy, imagined the US role as being principally a naval one.  Soon, however, it became clear that the US would be sending ground troops to Europe and a lot of them at that. The National Guard was called back up and folded into the Regular Army, adding an additional 450,000 men to that establishment.  Conscription was enacted and it was anticipated that 1,000,000 men would be drafted in the first act of conscription since the Civil War, with there being two levies of conscripted men in the amount of 500,000 men each.

This meant that right from the onset the U.S. Army went from having less than 100,000 men in 1914 to having over 200,000 men when the U.S. entered the war in April 1917.  It also meant that in very short order the Regular Army, augmented by the National Guard, went up to 730,000 men in comparatively short order. And while this was occurring the Army began to take in the first levy of conscripts, to be formed into a separate Army body known as the National Army, in the initial amount of 500,000 men.

Looking at this overall, this means that the U.S. Army roughly had about 650,000 trained men, but in various states of training, when the United States entered the war.  But those men were not formed into combat formations that contemplated a war on the scale of the war in Europe.  The last time that had occurred, somewhat, had been during the Spanish American War, but even at that time it had not been necessary to form divisions on the order that World War One obviously required.  The last time that had occurred was during the Civil War, when it most definitely had, but that was well outside the experience of any serving soldier in the U.S. Army.

And hence, the U.S. was confronted with a massive organizational and training burden it had not seen since 1865.

By the time the war ended, the United States had drafted 4,000,000 men of whom 2,000,000 went overseas.  That is, quite frankly, amazing.

But there's no way that could have been achieved by March, 1918.

Something that also could not have been achieved by March 1918 was the equipping and arming of them.

It was Franklin D. Roosevelt, during World War Two who proclaimed that the US would be the "Great Arsenal of Democracy".

Which indeed, we became.

And not only did we become the Arsenal of Democracy, we have remained that since then, allowing for the fact that our being the Arsenal of Democracy then, and now, meant that we armed some pretty undemocratic nations in pursuit of our own goals.  During World War Two our production became so vast that every Allied nation came to use articles of that production to include, as is well known, even the Soviet Union which had a large manufacturing capacity itself.  The Soviet Red Army rolled along on American Studebaker 6x6 trucks, without which it would have been a foot slogging old fashioned army like the German army largely was.

Not that the Red Army was unique in this in any fashion. The United Kingdom had a much larger manufacturing capacity than its often given credit for in common recollections of the war, but it came to rely on American wheeled transport and American armor, even though it never quit producing either itself.  Perhaps, of our Allies, only Canada, which had a vast manufacturing capacity relative to the size of its population, and which became part of the American production system for all practical purposes after 1941, is a bit of an exception, but only a bit.  It produced some American weapons, such as the Sherman tank, but it also relied on American vehicles even though it also produced vehicles for the British.

All of this is well known, of course.

And indeed its so well known that there's a common perception that the same story was true of World War One.

But it isn't.  Not even close.

I had intended, some time ago, to do a series of threads on various American weapons of the Great  War based upon their date of introduction, but it became too problematic and it struck me that a single post will be better. And so we're here. But it is a story that takes place over quite a bit of time.  It's very well known to students of the American military in World War One, so I'm breaking no new ground, but it is a significant aspect of our military history, our role in the Great War, and what our role in World War Two would be. It even stretches forward in all sorts of ways to the present day.

And like many such stories as they relate to the U.S. Army, the story has taken on a heavy element of myth.  The myth here is that the U.S. has always neglected the material needs of its Army and that it only comes up to speed once a war arrives.   You can find this story repeated about nearly every American war, but it simply isn't true.

In fact, while the peacetime Army was always very small prior to 1948, it was also very well equipped.  Indeed, equipping an Army the size that the U.S. Army was, was really not terribly difficult.  This meant that the government geared equipage and arming of the Army in a very distinct and highly official fashion, and that was a fashion that emphasized production of military equipment by the government itself. The arms and equipment that the government produced was excellent as a rule, with some exceptions.  Such production was not sufficient to fully satisfy the requirements of the service, however, so the production was augmented by civilian commercial production.  In some instances, but only in some, civilian production actually took completely over certain arms production lines entirely, with handguns being the prime example of that.

Now, those who stop in here, all two or three of you, may recall that I already did a post on the technology of the U.S. Military during the Punitive Expedition and I covered U.S. Arms, somewhat, in that post.  Indeed, in a lot of ways, this post simply picks up where that one left off, but in doing that, it entails a major evolution, and indeed change in direction, in the story.  In someways, the change in direction would be a small fork in the road in some instances that would lead to one of the roads simply terminating in the 1960s, under the unfortunate Defense Department administration of Robert S. McNamara.  Nobody could have seen that coming in 1917, however, when we determined to engage in a land war in Europe for the first time in our history.

Now, in 1910s, the United States was no industrial slacker by any means.  But as noted, the military arms industry was actually concentrated within the government itself, which handled the production of most, but not all, military arms.  Civilian manufacturers did supply some arms to the Federal government and did compete for foreign sales, but American arms manufacturers depended upon the civilian market for the most part, although handguns again provided an exception to the rule as the military had gone over to civilian manufacturers when revolvers were introduced and had never resumed government production once they took over as the standard.

On the even of American involvement in the Great War, what this mean will be demonstrated below, in so far as issue arms are concerned. As we'll be repeating portions of what we earlier posted in regards to the Punitive Expedition, which remains relevant, we need to add here however the story of how World War One and the foreign market impacted that, and what it meant for the services during the war.

Let's start, however, with the situation in 1916, which was, and we should keep this in mind, a situation that applied to a very small Army and the National Guard.

Weapons

Something that's truly remarkable about the Punitive Expedition, but rarely completely appreciated, is that it is one of the very few instances, and indeed perhaps the only instance, when the Army deployed with all new weaponry.  Everything was new at the time and much of what was used in the Punitive Expedition was used in field for the very first time.  This is all the more remarkable when it is considered that the Army had introduced a new series of weapons in the late 19th Century, which it then went on to replace in the early 20th Century.

Rifles were then, as now, the basic individual weapon for most soldiers.  In the Punitive Expedition, the Army was using one that was new to the Army, the M1903.

 U.S. troops armed with M1903 Springfield rifles on Mexican border.

The M1903 was adopted in that year, 1903, and replaced a rifle and a carbine that had only been adopted nine years prior, the Krag–Jørgensen series of rifles and carbines.  For the U.S. Army to abandon a rifle system after using it so briefly is fairly extraordinary, although its not wholly without other examples of the same.  More remarkable, however, is that the Krag rifles and carbines were introduced in order to bring new high velocity smokeless cartridges into use, which was done with the accompanying adoption of the .30-40 cartridge. When the Army (and Marines) adopted the M1903, they were abandoning existing smokeless cartridges as well, which had only just been adopted themselves.

This all came about due to the Spanish American War.

The Army had appreciated the new smokeless cartridges soon after their adoption and set about to find a repeating smokeless cartridge rifle for Army use accordingly, which was to replace the rifles and carbines of the Allen pattern that had first come into use late in the Civil War.  The problem the Army faced, however, is that with the introduction of the new, smaller caliber, high velocity, smokeless cartridges a debate in how these rifles were to be used developed in advanced armies.  One theory, a conservative one, held that the military rifle would continue to be used basically as the early large caliber, black powder, single shot military rifles had been. I.e., they'd be used as single shot rifles, with the magazine containing additional cartridges reserved for assaults.  The more radical theory, advanced by German Peter Paul Mauser, held that this was unrealistic and that any solder would empty his magazine in combat invariably, rather than singly load, and so it placed a premium on the ability to rapidly reload.  Various nations went with one theory or another, with the United States, like the United Kingdom, taking the conservative approach.  Hence the adoption of the Krag which held four rounds, loaded through a permanently affixed box system, in reserve. These rounds could be cycled through the rifle very rapidly, but they could not be rapidly reloaded as they could not be loaded in a block with a clip, in constant to the Mauser series of rifles which could be.

 Black soldier carrying a Krag rifle.  This 1898 photograph was taken in Tampa, Florida, and therefore probably was of a soldier waiting to go to Cuba.  The soldier's blue uniform was obsolete at the time this photograph was taken, but many soldiers early in the war were equipped with the old blue uniform.

The deficiency of the theory was proven in two wars of the late 19th Century, the Spanish American War and the Boer War.  Both wars would pit armies equipped with Mauser M1893 rifles against armies equipped with rifles based on the opposing theory, the Krag in the case of the US and the Lee in the case of the UK.  Mausers, equipping the loosing forces, nonetheless held the day and very quickly the US and the UK reacted.  In the case of the United Kingdom, their existing Lee rifles and carbines could be retrofitted to take a clip, like the Mauser, partially curing the defect in their design. The Krag, however, could not be redesigned. The Army, therefore, set about designing a replacement.  And that's how it was done, the Army itself designed the rifle.

And not just a rifle, but a new cartridge as well.  Logically figuring that it it was to go with a new rifle, which would essentially be a Mauser rifle, it would also go with a "rimless" Mauser type cartridge and abandon the rimmed .30-40.

The result was the M1903 rifle firing the .30-03 cartridge.  The new rifle, as noted, as a Mauser type rifle and only a rifle, not a rifle and a carbine, was adopted. The rifle was a "short" rifle, taking advantage of the new high velocity cartridges that rendered a longer infantry rifle unnecessary. By going with a short rifle, the Army could replace the rifle and carbine with one arm.  The Army started the manufacture of the new rifle immediately in 1903.

However, early in the production of the rifle it came under criticism from President Theodore Roosevelt, who did not like the retention of the M1898 Krag's rod bayonet, which he regarded as a bit of a joke. The rifle was accordingly redesigned to take a conventional sword bayonet.  At the same time perceived deficiencies with the cartridge were addressed and, in 1906, the redesigned rifle and the the redesigned .30-06 cartridge were introduced.

Perhaps because Theodore Roosevelt, who was friendly to the military was President, or perhaps because the Army was producing the rifle itself (although it had with the Krag as well), or just perhaps because it appreciated the need, the Army set about immediately to replace the Krag.  That is fairly amazing if the history of the Krag is considered, as while it was adopted in 1892 insufficient stocks of them existed at the time of the 1898 Spanish American War such that much of the Army fought in the first stage of that war with .45-70 "trapdoor" Springfield's, a clearly obsolete rifle by that time.  The history of the M1903 Springfield would be much different.

 Volunteers from Kentucky in the Spanish American War.  They are equipped with obsolete .45-70 trapdoor Springfield rifles.

By 1916, just a decade after the redesigned rifle had first been finished, the entire Army, Marine Corps and National Guard would be equipped with M1903s.  Again, this is in stark contrast to the Krag, which did not fully equip the Army at the onset of the Spanish American War and which only probably came to do that at some point during the Philippine Insurrection.

 Wyoming National Guardsmen, July 1916, equipped with M1903 Springfield rifles.

The Punitive Expedition would not be the first time that the M1903 would be fielded in action.  I frankly don't know when that was, but my suspicion is that it was likely in one of the various small actions in the Philippines that trailed on well after the technical end of the Philippine Insurrection. According to one source the first use of the rifle in combat was against the Moros at Bud Bagsak in June, 1913.  The rifle was definitely used in action by 1914, however, as the Marine Corps and the Navy used it in the action at Vera Cruz, Mexico.  That is interesting in and of itself as the Department of the Navy had followed the Army's lead with the M1903, adopting it immediately to replace the M1895 Navy Lee, a rifle that it had adopted three years after the Army had adopted the M1892 Krag, and in a different cartridge, that being 6mm Navy Lee.

 Sailors at Vera Cruz. The sailor on the left is equipped with a M1903 rifle.  The one in the middle, probably a Petty Officer, is equipped with the then new M1911 pistol.  The one on the right is carrying what is probably a Model 97 Winchester shotgun.  What is remarkable about this photograph is that it shows how the U.S. Navy, which often was equipped with somewhat older small arms than the Army, was here equipped with all new small arms in 1914.

The Army had fought a few minor skirmishes with Villistas prior to the Columbus Raid (I'll be going back and adding those on the centennials of their occurrences, so the Columbus Raid and the following expedition were not even the first time that the Army had fought Mexican forces of some kind armed with the rifle. But, in any event, the rifle proved to be just about ideal for the conditions it was used in and it went on to a long and successful service life.  Following the Punitive Expedition the rifle was manufactured in large numbers as the Army equipped itself for World War One, although the government arsenals proved to be incapable of supplying adequate numbers of them for the hugely enlarged Army. As a result, commercial contracts were given out for the a rifle based on the British designed Pattern 14 rifle, which itself was in the design stages when the war broke out and was intended to be a British high velocity Mauser based rifle. The American variant in .30-06, the M1917, was a good rifle in its own right and following the war some consideration was given to standardizing it as a replacement for the M1903.  This was not done, however, and the M1903 kept on as the Army's standard rifle, with the M1917 relegated to reserve stocks and certain specific uses.

I should note here that I failed to note in my original text that the Pattern 14 rifle was under production by Remington and Winchester, commercial firms, for the British Army.  When the U.S. entered the war it operated to disrupt these contracts and cause the commercial production to be diverted, after the rifle was redesigned, for the United States Army. The M1917 was not U.S. Arsenal produced, like the M1903 was.

Both rifles would go on to see service in World War Two even though the Army adopted a replacement for the M1903 in 1936. The replacement, the M1 Garand, was adopted not because the M1903 had proved deficient but rather because the Army had appreciated that the advancement of self loading rifles mean that a semi automatic rifle could be introduced for military service.  Nonetheless few M1s were bought prior to 1940 and for the first years of World War Two the M1903 remained the principal longarm in US service.  Even more M1903s were built during World War Two, this time commercially by Remington and Smith Corona, and the rifle soldiered on in some uses until 1945.  After that a sniper variant carried on until the Vietnam War.

Marine in training, May 1942, armed with M1903 rifle.

Completing this story, which we did not have to do in regards to our story that stopped in February 1917, even with non stop production of M1903 rifles and commercial production of M1917 rifles, the needs were so large that the US also took into use Mosin Nagant rifles made for Imperial Russia, but bizarrely rejected by Russian inspectors. These were issued to American troops that deployed to Russia during World War One. This wasn't a large number of rifles, but the curiosity of it being done tells us something about how pressing the needs were.

So does the fact that Krags came back into service as a training rifle and some even went to Europe early on, although they were never used in combat.  Likewise, some British SMLE's were used by at least the 82nd Division, and likely others, as elements of that unit rotated through British lines in order to be exposed to combat. 

Let's look at the handgun situation.

If the rifle that equipped the American soldier in Mexico in 1916 and 1917 was new, the pistols were even newer.  The Army had adopted two new pistols in less than a decade preceding the Punitive Expedition, one as a stopgap measure, and the second as a new long term sidearm. That arm would go on to the the longest serving small arm in American military history.  The sidearms were the M1909 revolver and the M1911 pistol.

 M1911 pistol.  This photograph was taken during World War Two, but the pistol had changed very little since 1916.  Indeed, it's still in use today.

Before going on it should be noted that sidearms, while frequently called minor weapons by military commentators, were not at this time, and really they aren't today.  The U.S. Army is currently in the process of trying to find a replacement for the Beretta M9 pistol and just as the adoption of the M9 took a long time to come about, and was accompanied by a lot of controversy, finding a replacement for it today is not without its problems.*  In some ways this is because the M1911 remains such a successful sidearm everything tends to be judged against it in some vague ways, even if not intentionally.

In 1916 the sidearm was issued to every cavalryman in the Army and to a lot of other servicemen as well.  Almost every officer in the Army was required to carry a sidearm and many NCOs were issued sidearms.  The Army used a lot of revolvers and pistols, and it had for a very long time.  This made the U.S. Army somewhat unique.  Most armies issued relatively few sidearms, although there are exceptions.  The U.S. Army issued a lot of them.

The introduction of smokeless powder, which not only eliminated the tell tale smoke, but which proved to allow for higher velocity cartridges, came at the same time that the reliability of double action revolvers had become well established.  The Army had adopted a single action revolver as long ago as the Mexican War when it adopted the massive Walker Colt. That large single action .44 revolver yielded to a series of Dragoon revolvers that lasted through the Civil War and indeed a bit after it.  Cartridges for revolvers began to come in late in the  Civil War and the Army converted a number of single action revolvers to fire .44 cartridges (an original example of which, surprisingly, can be seen in the film Major Dundee).  When the Army went to a designed cartridge revolver after the Civil War it adopted a tried and true single action which, quixotically, was adopted in .45 rather than .44.

That revolver, the Colt Single Action Army, M1873, went on to enduring fame although its best remembered for being the most popular civilian sidearm of the Frontier period, where it acquired the commercial name The Peacemaker.

Double action revolvers existed even in the cap and ball era, although they were clearly not regarded as sufficiently reliable for general military use.  The difference between the two action types is that the trigger on a double operates to cock the pistol and rotate the cylinder.  On a single action, however, the hammer must be cocked manually, the operation of which rotates the cylinder.  Single actions are, by their very nature, slower to operate as the operator must manually cock the revolver for every shot.  With a double action a user may simply keep pulling the trigger until the cylinders are empty.

During the Frontier Era self equipping with sidearms, and even long arms, wasn't uncommon for officers and even enlisted men, so the double action began to come in to unofficial Army use irrespective of the strong love of the M1873.  The Army itself experimented with some double actions during this period, although it never adopted one to replace the M1873.  When smokeless powder came in, however, it did.  That pistol was the M1892.

 Sailors drilling with M1892 .38 revolvers.  Unlike with the Navy M1895 rifle, the Navy adopted the same sidearm as the Army with Colt's M1892.  In fact, the M1892 revolver carried by Theodore Roosevelt up Kettle Hill in the Spanish American War was a Navy M1892 recovered from the USS Maine.

The M1892 reflected the same sort of thinking, in a general way, that the Navy's M1895 Lee rifle did.  That is, nobody was really sure how small cartridges could now be, and the Army guessed too small.  In adopting the M1892, it also adopted the .38 "Long Colt" cartridge. The cartridge itself was not a bad design, but it was quite light in comparison to the black powder .45 Long Colt used by the M1873.  Ironically, perhaps, the .45 LC would survive into the smokeless era.

The M1892 was first used in a significant way in the Spanish American War where it gave a good account of itself. Things changed, however, when the Army found itself fighting in the Philippines, as the .38 proved to be simply inadequate for combat.  The Army rapidly reissued stocks of the obsolete M1873, cutting the 7.5 in barrels of the cavalry model down to the 5" of the artillery model.  Having accepted the superiority of the double action, however, the Army also rapidly looked for a new revolver.  Colt came to the rescue with an existing design, the Colt New Service, which as adopted as the Model 1909 in a smokeless variant of the .45 LC.

Even at that time, however, the M1909 was regarded as a temporary measure.  By the late 19th Century semi automatic pistols were coming into use and proving themselves.  Mauser had again pioneered the field with its ungainly but functional M96 automatic pistol, familiar to modern movie goers due to its use in the film Star Wars as a laser pistol.  The M96 sold world wide and was adopted privately by quite a few mounted officers of various armies, including British cavalryman Winston Churchill.

Hard upon the heels of the M96, and indeed even contemporary with it, various other manufactures started designing semi automatic pistols.  Georg Luger came out with a famous one by the first decade of the 20th Century that would bear his name.  Significantly for the United States, phenomenal American firearms designer John Browning turned his attention to it as well.  The Army began testing a Browning design, manufactured by Colt, and a Luger design, in the first decade of the century.

The Browning design was definitely the better of the two, and with modifications it was adopted in 1911.  The M1911 went on to be the longest serving American arm of all time, and it is widely regarded as a contender for the best military sidearm ever made.  Adopted in a new cartridge, .45 Automatic Colt Pistol, it went into immediate production for both the military and the civilian market.

Unlike the M1903 rifle, the Army did not acquire sufficient stocks of M1911s with which to equip the entire Regular Army and the National Guard prior to the expedition into Mexico.  It did start issuing them immediately, but Colt did have a hard time keeping up with the demand, in part because the private purchase demands from Army and Navy officers was so high that it interfered with the military production.  The outbreak of World War One in Europe further increased demand as British officers sought to  buy the pistol in .45 ACP and the British government contracted for some in .455 Webley, which amazingly actually worked in the pistol if designed for it.  Still, the were many of them in service by the time the Navy and Marines went into action at Vera Cruz in 1914.

Surprisingly, a lot of senior Army officers did not really trust the M1911, which sets it apart from the M1903.  Almost nobody distrusted the M1903, and indeed when it was slated for replacement in 1936 many older soldiers opposed the change.  The story was different with the M1911, however.  Cavalrymen in particular were highly acclimated to revolvers and many simply didn't trust an automatic pistol.

The M1911 gave an excellent account of itself during the Punitive Expedition, but nonetheless at least one officer, the legendary Frank Tompkins, urged the Army to retain the M1909 for cavalry use, arguing that the M1911 was so easy to discharge that green solders sometimes would accidentally shoot their horses in the head in a mounted charge.  That recommendation was ignored but the huge demand for sidearms during World War One meant that the M1909 went back into production, as the M1917, along with a Smith & Wesson design by the same name.  Those revolvers were designed to take a clip so that they could take the .45 ACP cartridge in keeping with the Army's real desire to replace all revolvers with the M1911.  By the wars end, however, so many revolvers had been made that they were kept around and they were still in use by some old cavalryman when World War Two broke out.  They were more often carried, however, by servicemen who were unlikely to need to use them, although they soldiered on through the war.

 M1917 revolvers being used during World War Two.  Note the off side holsters, which were retained for the revolvers in the old cavalry style until the very end.

The M1911, however, came out of the First World War with glowing reviews.  A slightly different model of the pistol, the M1911A1 was adopted after the war, and it would remain the Army's standard pistol up until Congress force the adoption of a new pistol, the 9mm M9, in 1985.  The M1911 never really went fully away however as it was simply too good of a combat pistol.  The US entry into Afghanistan in 2001 saw the M1911 creep back into use until that could no longer be ignored and both the Army and the Marine Corps began to acquire new stocks of them for the first time since 1945, with the Marine Corp even adopting a new variant of the old M1911.

Our earlier history on the handguns of the Army of the period was so complete that we have nothing to add to it other than that both Colt and Smith & Wesson were already producing the revolver variants noted in .455 for the British, so adapting them to .45 ACP was a very easy thing for them to do. 

Lets look at automatic weapons.

If the story of the Army's rifle and sidearm are glowing success stories, the story of the Army's first real machine guns is much more mixed.

 Model 1904 Maxim .30-06 machine guns in use by U.S. cavalrymen.  Note that these cavalrymen also carry M1911 pistols.  The cavalryman pointing is wearing a holster for the M1911 that was unique to cavalry, as it swiveled.  The machine gun crewmen are wearing the general issue M1911 holster.

The Army began to experiment with high repeating weapons as early as the closing days of the Civil War, but those designs did not get as far as popular tales would have it. The first such weapon to be adopted was the Gatling Gun, which in US service actually saw next to no service at all.  The first real application of the Gatling Gun came during the Spanish American War, by which time real machine guns were already coming into use, and indeed in use against U.S. troops.  The best and most effective use of the Gatling came in British hands in the Boer War, although they were already experimenting with true machine guns themselves.  The British liberated the Gatling from its wagon wheel trails, which was foresighted, but by that time the Gatling was already a bit of an obsolescent freak.

 

Machine gun troop in Mexico.

The introduction of modern cartridges made true fully automatic weapons possible and designers were well aware of that. A variety if early attempts at automatic weapons of various types were made, including by such famous designers as John Browning, who later would perfect a couple of American automatic weapons that went into extremely long use, including one, the Browning M2HB, which was adopted in the 1920s and remains in use today.  The early field of automatic weapons, whoever, was pretty confused.

The first true machine gun used by the U.S. Army was in fact the John Browning design, which bore the official name of M1895.  Manufactured in a variety of calibers and sold world wide, in U.S. use it started off in .30-40 and in 6mm Navy Lee.  In spite of the fact that the Army never officially adopted them, they showed up in use more often than a person might suppose as National Guard units often simply bought them, in a variety of calibers, and during the Spanish American War two were given as gifts to the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry by family members of the unit, although oddly those were in 7x57, the cartridge used by Spain.  The unofficial nature of this use in Army hands (Navy and Marine Corps use was official) meant that the gun was still in use in various units as late as 1917 when the United States entered World War one.

 

Schematic of the Colt-Browning, "Potato Digger"

The M1895 was not a bad gun, but it was a very early gun, and it was clearly a pioneering, and therefore not fully satisfactory, weapon.   It was delicate and prone to stoppages.  The experience of the Spanish Civil War showed that another weapon would have to be found as its operational rate fared poorly in comparison with the obsolete Gatlings.

Fortunately there was a ready alternative to the M1895 available, that being the Maxim gun.
 

M1904 Maxim in use in Texas in 1911.

The Maxim gun was a heavy machine gun designed by American born Hiram Maxim.  A visionary weapon, Maxim first introduced the gun in 1886, shortly after he had relocated tot he United Kingdom.  The heavy recoil operated gun would set the standard for heavy machine guns, a position which to some degree it still occupied.  Maxim's gun came right at the end of the black powder era and because of the nature of its design it was suitable for any of the then existing cartridges as well as the smokeless cartridges that were just being invented.  Indeed, the gun was so adaptable that some of the larger variants of it were really automatic cannons due to the virtue of their size.

 Giant Maxim Gun in the small cannon class in use by the U.S. Navy circa 1901.

The Army started testing the Maxim relatively early on, but it was slow to adopt it, perhaps in part as the Army had a hard time figuring out exactly how to deploy machine guns at first.  Indeed, nearly every Army had difficulty in this department.  In 1904, however, the Army adopted the Maxim as the Army's first machine gun.  Production, however, was slow, with initial production taking place in the UK for weapons chambered in.30-03 and remaining production undertaken by Colt.  Only 287 of the guns were made, but as the picture above shows, they were deployed along the border and they were very good guns.  They were also extremely heavy, both because of the heavy weight of the action and because the gun was water cooled. For an introductory weapon, it was excellent, but as we'll see below, the Army was seeking to replace it and in fact had already adopted a replacement by the time of the Punitive Expedition.

Perhaps because production of the M1904 was limited, the Punitive Expedition is much more associated with the M1909 Benét–Mercié, and not happily so.

 U.S. Troops firing the M1909 Benét–Mercié machine gun, a variant of the Hotchkiss light machine gun.  The Benet Mercie has a fairly poor reputation but it was widely used under other names by other armies that liked it.

The entire story of the M1909 is an odd one, as the gun itself is a legendary weapon, one of the Hotchkiss machine guns. The Hotchkiss machine guns saw service around the globe and were generally well liked by most armies. The U.S. Army, after the Punitive Expedition, and indeed at least partially because of it, ended up not liking the gun.  All in all, the M1909 acquired a bad reputation in the U.S. Army during the Punitive Expedition even though reports of its use really don't support that feeling and it was a better gun than the one that would go on to be used in the same role during World War One.

One thing that should have been noted here is that production of the M1909 was in very small numbers with only a few hundred being made, that being all the service really required.  Both the Federal arsenals and commercial production supplied those numbers.

We carried on.

Indeed, the entire story of American light machine guns in this era is odd.  There were a variety of light guns available when the Hotchkiss was adopted and there were options. What was lacking was knowledge on how the guns would be used and what the best feature for such a gun would be.  Looking back in hindsight, a gun like the early Madsen probably would have been better but that wasn't obvious at the time.  The real defect of the gun was that it took a very long clip, rather than a magazine, to feed it, which was awkward in combat and left the rounds exposed.  Guns like the Madsen did not do that.

Neither did the Lewis Gun, which was an American design and which would play a small role in the story of the Punitive Expedition, albeit very small.  The Lewis Gun was a new gun at the time, having just been invented around 1911, but it was already receiving some use early on.  Unfortunately for the Army, it seems that a dislike on the part of the chief of the Army of the inventor kept it from being adopted by the U.S. Army for a light machine gun, a decision that would have consequences during World War One.  Given the nature of the times, however, the gun was picked up privately by at least one small National Guard unit that was funded heavily by a member, in an era when that sort of thing was still not uncommon.  But Guard units did not cross the border, they only guarded it, during the Punitive Expedition.  The gun wold see heavy use by the British during World War One and on into World War Two, and by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, but not by the Army.  Even at that, the Army took Lewis Guns away from Marine Corp units assigned to the AEF in Europe during the Great War and issued to them the Chauchat, a French automatic rifle that the Army adopted for the Great War that was and is universally regarded as a disaster.  Late in World War One the Army would field the Browning Automatic Rifle which, interestingly enough, first saw use by cavalrymen in the 2nd Cavalry Regiment in September 1918.

 

Marine training with Lewis Gun

 

The American solder on the left is equipped with the terrible Chauchat Mle 1918.  The Cahuchat has a reputation of being one of the worst weapons every fielded by American soldiers, but it was available in large numbers.

So, as opposed to the story of rifles and pistols, the story of automatic weapons in U.S. service in 1916 is really mixed.  All the weapons were relatively new, but none of the automatic weapons then in use would go on to long use in the Army in spite of all of them being fairly contemporary weapons.  The M1904 Maxim was a really good heavy machine gun, but it was truly heavy.  By 1909 the Army was working on replacing it with the British Vickers, itself a Maxim variant.  During World War One none of the M1904s would go overseas and the Army would equip itself with British and French heavy machine guns.  Likewise, the M1909 light machine gun would not see service with the US, which oddly equipped itself with a bad French weapon.  By the end of the war native designs had been adopted by the US in the form of the M1917 heavy machine gun, a Browning design, and the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle.

  M1917 machine gun, in this case being operated by Val Browning, the son of John Browning, the designer.

That covered the weapons that were used by the U.S. in this time frame. But we really didn't cover, and didn't need to cover, is that the numbers on hand in 1916 were quite limited.  Production, moreover, was in the hands of Federal arsenals in part. It proved to be impossible for the arsenals to manufacture significant numbers of weapons for the war and this was evident very early in 1917.  That in and of itself was a limiting factor to the growth of the American Army during the war.  Substitutes had to be rapidly developed is some areas and in other it simply proved to be easier to take into service weapons that were being made in Europe.  Up until very late in the war the US entirely depended upon foreign production for automatic weapons, which was also a limiting factor in the growth of the US Army during the war.  Very late in the war new US designs came into use.  There was really nothing else in this area that could have been done as a military that required less than 700,000 rifles went to one that required more than 4,000,000. 

So with that, we now turn to artillery.

The U.S. Army has traditionally had very good artillery.  And yet in France during World War One it used principally French artillery.  How did that occur. Well, again we turn to the situation prior to our entry into the war. And in doing so we must first note that American artillery was all arsenal made.

Artillery?  Yes.

We don't tend to think much about artillery in the Punitive Expedition, but it as there.  Indeed, contrary to what a person might suppose, not only did the U.S. Army field artillery during the Punitive Expedition, but the contesting sides in the Mexican Revolution did as well.

The 4th and 6th Artillery went into Mexico in 1916 and other Army artillery units were stationed on the border.  The 4th Artillery took pack howitzers.

Pack howitzers are a class of gun that had a long and interesting history.  They're gone now, but pack artillery lasted well into the rocket age, finally disappearing, in the true mule packed manner, only in the 1950s, when the last U.S. Army pack artillery unit, an Army Reserve unit, finally lost theirs. Even at that, airborne artillery, in some ways, is the immediate heir of pack artillery.

 

Pack howitzers go way back in U.S. Army usage, but the piece used during the Punitive Expedition, which is nicely discussed on a thread of the Society of the Military Horse's website, was the 2.95" Vicker's Mountain Gun of 1900. As discussed on that site in that thread:

This is the 2.95” Vickers-Maxim Mountain Gun, Model of 1900. Look through the Runyon photos from the National Archives for the various shots of it being packed and fired. It was a major improvement over the 1.65" Hotchkiss Mountain Gun, Model of 1875, in that it was capable of being fired at higher angles.

It was a good little gun and very well suited for an Army on the move. Quite a few Runyon Photographs of the Punitive Expedition on line at the University of Texas show it in use.  It was a British designed gun that replaced a French designed gun and would go on to give service until replaced by the M1 Pack Howitzer that would be the Army's last pack howitzer and first airborne howitzer.   The Model of 1900 was a 75mmm gun, so in relative terms it was a relatively large gun.

The US also took the M1902 3" field gun into Mexico. 

M1902 Field Piece at Ft. Mead, South Dakota

The M1902 field piece was a 3" (76.2 mm) gun that entered US service in 1902 and served throughout World War One, making it a rare example of a US gun that served during the Great War in Europe.  A good gun, they went into Mexico and back out, but reportedly never engaged the Villistas at any point during the campaign.  Basically a gun equivalent to the French 75 (Model 1897), it was phased out quickly after the Great War, during which the Army had used more 1897s than M1902s.

The US also sent the 6th Artillery into Mexico. The 6th was equipped with the 4.7" field gun Model of 1906.  As also noted on the Society of the Military Horse webiste:

4.7-inch Field Gun, Model of 1906.  Served from 1906 through WWII.  It served in combat in WWI, the only American Field Artillery weapon to do so.  They were used as training weapons in WWII.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4.7_inch_Gun_M1906

http://runyon.lib.utexas.edu/r/RUN00000 ... N00530.JPG http://runyon.lib.utexas.edu/r/RUN00000 ... N00479.JPG

This was a big gun, shooting 120mm shells.  I haven't seen any indication that they were taken into Mexico, and if the M1902s were never fired during the expedition, the M1906s were almost surely not.  Nonetheless, they were part of the story as they were stationed along the border, providing the Army with a very substantial field piece, if needed.

One thing to keep in mind about artillery of this period is that all of this came before the big revolution in artillery spotting that  defined artillery missions during World War Two and ever since.  The Second World War, which isn't all that much later than the period we're discussing in real terms, came during the era of indirect fire.  The Punitive Expedition, and even to an extent World War One, did not.  The guns we're looking at above are all basically direct fire weapons.  They could indirect fire, but they were really designed for direct fire.  And they all came before radios had incorporated themselves into the scene on a field basis, and while field phones existed, this meant that you really didn't have Forward Observers up at the front calling in their missions.  No, the Army at this time used the Battery Commander System.

An excellent description of that is provided on the Society of the Military Horse website, so I won't try to repeat it here, but will rather simply refer to it.  The system was much different from that which would prevail just a few years later, and the description provided on that thread is excellent.

M1908 6" howitzer.  A really big gun, these pieces were not taken into Mexico, but as can be seen from the caption, they were available along the border, no doubt more in anticipation of a full scale war with Mexico.

This is far from a complete list of US artillery at the time.  Rather, it's only a list of those guns that I know, and perhaps inaccurately, to have been associated with the Punitive Expedition, all of which were field pieces.  The Army had a range of additionally artillery, such as the M1908 howitzer. The point would be, rather, that the Army went into Mexico with two fairly modern artillery pieces, one of which at least never saw action in the expedition, but which did go in. The artillery in the US inventory was fully modern for the time, rivaling anything used in Europe or, in some cases, being identical to the guns then in use in Europe. The two guns that were used were highly mobile pieces, and their failure to see much action reflected the conditions of the expedition more than anything else.

Okay, if that's what we had, why did we fight the war with French guns.

Simply enough, this is what we had, but we didn't have that much of it.

The pre war Army hadn't required much artillery as it was a small army. The Army being sent to France was gigantic. Shipping the volume of artillery required, let along manufacturing it, was simply impossible.  All American artillery pieces were very close in form to European ones, and the French artillery we primarily adopted was excellent.  In 1916 we didn't have the volume of artillery pieces and there was no earthly way that production of the complicated weapons was going to be satisfactory for an army of the size the war required.  Relying on European guns was required by that factor alone, and that was before the topic of shipping guns from the United States to Europe can even be addressed.  Here too, therefore, artillery, a major player in the war, operated slow the growth of the American Army.  It had to be acquired.

And artillerymen had to be trained.  Among all of the combat arms, the basic weapon of the artilleryman is the most complicated to use and the most dangerous if misused.  At the time, artillery was mostly horse drawn as well, which had training concerns all of its own.  In order to address this many existing units, both Regular Army and National Guard, were converted into artillery including some cavalry units that had horse experience.  Some infantry units, such as the Wyoming National Guard, were likewise converted as their soldiers were experienced (sometime having horse experience) and trainable in the complicated tasks that artillery demanded. Be that as it may, however, training the number of artillerymen required was an enormous undertaking that required the use of trained artillerymen itself.

Indeed, this was a feature of training the Army in general.  One of the largest tasks the Army performed during the Great War was training a huge number of untrained men.  It's not surprising that some of the trainers, such as Dwight Eisenhower, would go on to be major World War Two figures in spite of having never served in combat and having never left the United States during World War One.  Training in some ways was more important that combat leadership at a certain level.

Amongst the the thousand upon thousands of training subjects were thousands of horses and mules, something that the United States had been supplying to European armies in large numbers already.  American entry into the war meant that the United States took over this natural market, but even at that the US, in spite of already being a supplier to the European armies, had to rely on French horses for the 2nd Cavalry.**  Therefore, even here American resources proved to be limited. 

With all of this in mind, the amazing thing wasn't that only 130,000 U.S. combat troops were in France in March, 1918, but that about 2,000,000 would be overseas by the end of the war.

*Since this was written the Army and Marine Corps have adopted the Sig P320 as the M17 pistol and will be replacing their Beretta M9s and various other handguns with it. 

**Among the limitations that the US experienced during the war the inability to supply Pershing with independent cavalry regiments, as he had desired to have.  Only one such regiment fully deployed to France during the war, although the French divisional square division organization did include organic cavalry at the troop level for each division.  Be that as it may, a substantial need for cavalry continued to exist due to the need to patrol the boarder with Mexico, which remained tense, during the war.