Category Archives: WW1

Ten million new members by Christmas

24 Monday Dec 2018

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I hope everyone’s holiday season is going well.

There was no slowing down in late 1917: that Christmas was the first after the United States officially joined in the fight. Prolific artist L.N. Britton produced this poster for the American Red Cross’s nationwide holiday membership campaign. The drive to reach 10,000,000 new members officially began on December 17th. New York City’s quota in that was set at a cool 500,000. Tammany Hall–still going strong nearly two decades into the twentieth century–boosted Red Cross membership in Manhattan by sending almost 9,000 of its own canvassing door-to-door. The initiative for new members proceeded smoothly enough, though on December 18th Red Cross officials in Washington D.C. called off the request for a Christmas Eve candle in every window; the National Board of Fire Underwriters convinced Red Cross leaders that such displays would be a safety hazard. Service flags, and in many cases electric lights, did go out on many windowsills as planned.

The Red Cross hit its 10,000,000 goal by Christmas, and with a week’s extension doubled that number by year’s end. Ironically, in some predominantly German-American regions such as Brenham, Texas it was vigilantism and threats of violence that put local quotas over the top. History is complicated.

Enjoy the day, everyone.

(image/Pennsylvania State University Libraries)

Remembering Franklin Pettit Updike

15 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by in Memory, Those we remember, WW1

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I wrote this four years ago and am re-posting it today, the 100th anniversary of the death of Private Franklin P. Updike in the Great War.IMG_1108I was in Green-Wood Cemetery on Sunday when I came across the headstone of Franklin P. Updike. These WW1 headstones are much rarer than the ubiquitous Civil War markers one sees so often in old garden cemeteries. For one thing, there were fewer American deaths in the First World War than there were during the Rebellion. what’s more, a significant portion of doughboys were interred overseas where they were killed.

Updike, I later learned, lived in Brooklyn Heights and enlisted in the Army a month after the U.S. entered the Great War.

Updike death copy

Updike is somewhat unusual in that he died during the war and was brought home. Note that the headstone was ordered in April 1942, just as the U.S. was entering the Second World War.

Updike grave marker copy

The young private was a wagoner, that is he tended horses and carts. This was a dangerous task; the enemy understood the importance of the enemy’s transport and so did everything to neutralize–kill–it. In his Memoirs George Marshall wrote of the wagoners in his division that at certain periods “the most dangerous duty probably fell to the Quartermaster Sergeants and teamsters who went forward each night.”

The people of St. Ann’s Church held a service for Updike at Thanksgiving 1918. The war had been over for two weeks by this time. This announcement and the one below are from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Updike St Ann's announcement copy

This afternoon on my lunch break I went to the Heights and took this photo of St. Ann’s as it is today.

IMG_1110

The people of Brooklyn did not forget Updike. Alas I don’t believe it still exists today but they named the local American Legion Post after him. This was in January 1924, ninety year ago this year.

Updike color presentation copy

August 8, 1918: the start of the Hundred Days Offensive

08 Wednesday Aug 2018

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Battle of Amiens: German prisoners about to carry British wounded off on stretchers. Sailly-le-Sec, 8 August 1918.

In a vey real sense the beginning of the end of the First World War began one hundred years ago today; it was on August 8, 1918 that Supreme Allied Commander Ferdinand Foch began the counteroffensive that was itself a response to Ludendorff’s own Spring Offensive. This was hardly just a French military campaign; the British, Canadians, and Australians were also integral to the fighting against the Germans. The Americans played a supporting role as well. I saw on the news today that Prince William and others were on hand to mark the occasion. The Amiens Offensive lasted one week. The Allies suffered about 60,000 casualties and the Germans about 27,000 in addition to having almost 30,000 taken prisoner.

We are getting into the stage of the Great War centennial where events are going to move extremely quickly between now and the anniversary of the Armistice. Historians eventually called the period from August 8 to November 11 the Hundred Days Offensive. It was hard, full on fighting from here to the end. The Hundred Days Offensive was an extraordinary human drama. Men on all sides would be pushed to the limit, and the ambulance drivers, nurses and doctors who tried to put them back together faced extraordinary challenges. Every day had its own individual tragedies, multiplied thousands fold.

No one knew at the time when or how it would all end, but August 8, 1918 proved a crucial turning point in the Great War.

(image by Lieutenant John Warwick Brooke; Courtesy Imperial War Museum)

More on Quentin

14 Saturday Jul 2018

Posted by in Memory, Monuments and Statuary, Quentin Roosevelt, WW1

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Quentin Roosevelt stone marker, Sagamore Hill

Quentin Roosevelt stone, Sagamore Hill

Thankfully there has been a great deal of interest in the life and times of Quentin Roosevelt this summer. Sagamore Hill for one is hosting a number of events and exhibits in this anniversary year of his death. Margaret Porter Griffin, author of The Amazing Bird Collection of Young Mr. Roosevelt, has a piece out today about the significance of Quentin. Above is the marker that Margaret mentions in her article. I took these photographs at the Theodore Roosevelt Association conference in October 2016.

 

Re-lighting the lamps of civilization

08 Tuesday May 2018

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Adrian Graves, Sir Edward Grey’s great-great nephew, at the Sir Edward Grey and the Outbreak of the First World War conference in London, 7 November 2014

British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey famously remarked on 3 August 1914 as Europe began going to war that the lamps were going out all over Europe and that “we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” It sounds like a far-fetched thing to say, but Lord Grey was not far off. He died in September 1933, just after Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany began unraveling the tenuous peace that had existed for the previous fifteen years. I say all this because today, May 8, is the anniversary of V-E Day, the end of the Second World War in Europe.

Churchill waves to crowds in Whitehall on the day he broadcast to the nation that the war with Germany had been won, 8 May 1945

Edward Grey was just one of the many men who played a role in both wars, some of whom did and some of whom did not live to see the end of what amounted to Europe’s Second Thirty Year War. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the Wilson Administration and later the four-term president, died on 12 April 1945. Hitler, a young enlisted man in the trenches of France before taking over in the wake of the Versailles Treaty and unstable Weimar government, committed suicide on 30 April 1945 as the Soviets were tightening their grip on Berlin. Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty in the Great War until forced out for his role in the calamitous Gallipoli Campaign. He had a way of returning to the center of things and in the image above we see him on 8 May 1945, 73 years ago today, as the prime minister, seeing the lights finally come back on after so many–tens of millions–of people had died.

(images/top, Foreign and Commonwealth Office; bottom, Imperial War Museum)

A Modern Rubens by Flashlight

17 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Film, Sound, & Photography, WW1

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“A Modern Rubens by Flashilght,” The National Magazine, July 1918

I came across this image while researching something else and thought I would share. It comes from the July 1918 edition of The National Magazine. The children are refugees in a Venetian bomb shelter and their caretaker is a nun with the American Red Cross. They are looking up at an airplane during a bombardment. From the day Italy entered the war in May 1915 until the end, the Central Powers bombed Venice more than forty times. The damage to the city was as great as anything Italians would see during the Second World War, which is saying a lot. The editors described this as a “flashlight photograph,” by which they presumably meant it was taken in darkness with a flash bulb. Hence the title: “A Modern Rubens by Flashlight.” The Rubens reference may be to the Flemish master’s early seventeenth century “The Massacre of the Innocents.”

Opening Day

29 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by in Baseball, Woodrow Wilson, WW1

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Today is Opening Day of the baseball season. I think it might be an intriguing summer here in New York. The Mets and Yanks are looking pretty good. Time will tell.

John Kinley Tener, governor of Pennsylvania and president-elect of the National League, throws out the first pitch in Brooklyn, April 1914. Four years later he would discourage NL owners from starting afternoon games an hour later during the newly-inaugurated Daylight Savings Time.

Opening Day 1918 came of April 15, which was about normal for the era; in the years of the 154-game season and no divisional playoffs, baseball started much later than today. In the weeks leading up to that season’s first pitch, baseball had an interesting issue to think through: what to do about Daylight Savings Time. Congress passed and President Wilson signed the bill creating DST in mid-March 1918. Perhaps not surprisingly the innovative Germans were the first country to try Daylight Savings during the Great War, starting the practice in 1916. The Brits, French, Dutch, Italians, Scandinavians and others quickly followed suit. It was thus inevitable the Americans would institute it as well. Daylight Saving Time here in the United States began at 2:00 am Sunday March 31, 1918. It also happened to be Easter.

Baseball teams, especially in the National League, began discussing the merits of moving weekday games from 3:30 to 4:30 pm at the time of the passing of the legislation in mid-March. Executives believed that moving games back an hour would boost revenue at the turnstiles because it would be easier for people to come to the game from work. It was the extra hour of sunlight made the potential time shift possible. Remember, night games did not begin until the mid-1930s. Much of official Washington vehemently opposed the idea, noting that the Daylight Savings measure was intended not for entertainment purposes but to save resources such as gas and coal, and to boost productivity in the munitions factories.

For several weeks after the legislative passing of Daylight Saving Time, Charles Ebbets and other owners contemplated moving games back an hour to boost attendance. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle captured Ebbets’s decision a few weeks prior to Opening Day.

One man in agreement with this was National League president John Kinley Tener. The Irish-born Tener grew up in Pittsburgh and took to baseball as a young immigrant. He participated in Albert G. Spalding’s world baseball tour in the late 1880s. Tener played for Cap Anson’s Chicago Nationals (today’s Cubs) in 1888 and 1889 and then did a brief stint in the Players League in 1890. A Republican, Tener served in the U.S. Congress from 1909-11 and then became governor of Pennsylvania. It was while serving in Harrisburg that the National League owners voted him president in December 1913.  He took the job with the condition that he finish out his gubernatorial term. Tener took the National League reins in 1915.

As early as March 19, 1918, when Daylight Savings Time became law, some baseball executives began advocating for the 4:30 start. Officially the National League Office had no position and left the matter up to individual clubs. The New York Giants wanted to move to 4:30 to better accommodate subway commuters. Charlie Ebbets, owner of the Brooklyn Robins (later the Dodgers), too was keen on the shift. Ban Johnson, president of the American League, split the difference and advocated for a 4:00 start time for his clubs. Johnson’s National League counterpart, Tener, made clear his preference that teams stay with the 3:30 start time. Ebbets eventually bowed to the pressure and kept his team’s schedule as it was in past seasons.

Enjoy the season, everyone.

(top image/Library of Congress)

Sunday morning coffee

04 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by in Theodore (Ted) Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace (NPS), WW1

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Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, East 20th Street

I spent the day yesterday pounding out a small project that will hopefully see the light of day sometime this month. I don’t want to say too much about it right now, but I will say here that it is about the Roosevelt Birthplace on East 20th Street. It came out to about 900 words. Again, it is a low stakes projects. Little things like this though can be a lot of fun. There are so many good stories to tell. I will keep everyone up to date.

Once I finish the book manuscript, I intend to do something about the development of Roosevelt House as a cultural institution. The story is a more interesting one than people realize. Roosevelt died in January 1919 when the troops were coming home from Europe. The world was seemingly at peace but actually in turmoil. Much of the world was gathering in Paris for the peace negotiations. That summer was the Red Scare and the race riots here in America, and chaos and starvation abroad. The Russian Revolution was going on, and soon that country would be in civil war. Theodore Roosevelt was gone by the time all this happened, but that was the milieu in which the Roosevelt Memorial and Woman’s Roosevelt Memorial Associations went about the work of rebuilding the house in the early 1920s. The founders of the site saw it as a center for promoting patriotism and for fending off the world’s ills in what was an uncertain time. It is very much an untold story and I think there is a lot to go on here.

 

Great War inflation

31 Wednesday Jan 2018

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Food prices jump from $.90 to $1.29, Brooklyn Daily Eagle: January 31, 1918

This striking headline appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle one hundred years ago today. A jump from $.90 to $1.29 represents a 30% increase in the price of groceries. The way I have always understood it American food producers had done well the first three of the war, selling food stuffs to European governments to feed their hungry armies out in the field. This demand in turn set off inflation here in the United States, not to staggering proportions but at least enough for American consumers to feel the pinch. Rationing and price controls too contributed to inflation at the dinner table.

As of late January 1918 the United States still had few troops stationed overseas, though the number of men in uniform and in training stateside was growing exponentially. This was putting additional strain on both the food supply and the transportation systems that brought goods from here to there within the United States. One can only imagine what Americans were thinking when they saw headlines like this in the winter of 1918.

Vonnegut in winter

21 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by in Kurt Vonnegut, Rod Serling, WW1, WW2

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February 2010 image of the slaughterhouse where, sixty-five Februaries previously, Kurt Vonnegut survived the Dresden firebombing

One of my undertakings for this winter is to re-read the Kurt Vonnegut catalog. Like many, I read Vonnegut extensively in high school and college but got away from him over the years, though I did return to Slaughterhouse Five from time to time. Vonnegut is one of those writers one can return to at different points in one’s life, reading him with fresh eyes from the changing perspectives of one’s age. I intend to read both the fiction and non-fiction. I will have to do a literature review before diving in fully, but I am considering some type of project in which I analyze the World Wars on Vonnegut’s family. I know that a fair amount has been done on Vonnegut but I think there are some threads left to untangle. If this happens, it will not be until summer or fall.

Vonnegut in uniform during the Second World War, circa 1943-45

Again it has been a while since I have read him, but I recall him discussing the effect that the anti-German hysteria had on his family in Indiana during the First World War. Vonnegut, born in 1922, was a young enlisted man during the Second World War and famously survived the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden Germany as a prisoner of war. That experience in turn was the basis of Slaughterhouse Five, usually considered his most important work. He often downplayed the role that his Second World War experiences played on his personal life, claiming that people often go through cataclysmic events with little to no impact on their own psyches. That may or may not be true. It is without question true that the Second World War played a huge role in his writings. His mother’s 1944 suicide was also a factor in his worldview.

Right now I am focusing on the early novels. I finished God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater on Friday and started Mother Night yesterday. I am struck by how little science fiction there is in these considering that he is usually put in the Sci Fi/Fantasy genre. Some of those devices, time travel, etc., would come in later works but I would hesitate to put him in that category. A second thing that strikes me on reading these novels today is that, when Vonnegut was writing them, the Second World War was more current events than history. I never saw it that way when I was reading them in the 1970s & 80s because to my perspective the Second World War was already part of Ancient History. My sense and perspective on time has changed entirely now that I am in full blown middle age. So it goes.

If I indeed pursue some type of project on Vonnegut, perhaps a series of articles here on the Strawfoot, I may try to tie it in with Rod Serling. Perhaps it might be a compare and contrast of the two men and how they were influenced by their experiences in the Second World War. In some ways these are still current events: it is striking to see how the problems created by the events of the twentieth century are touching the world we live in today.

(images/top, Keith Gard; bottom United States Army)