Articles from The American Legion Weekly
An interesting profile of General Pershing by the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Marquis James (1891 – 1955):
• Ever hear about the time the C-in-C saluted a French cow?
• Did you know he had the right to put ‘Attorney at Law’ after his name?
• That he was given eight hours extra guard duty for a breach of discipline at West Point?
• Do you know why he was chosen to command the A.E.F.?
Much has been written on the unique relationship that has existed between African-Americans and the city of Paris
A 1923 article about the earliest days of Mussolini and the Italian Black Shirts; their discomfort with neighboring Yugoslavia, their love of the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863 – 1938) and their post-war struggle against the Italian Communists:
When the Communists virtually ruled over Italy in 1920 and 1921, they set up a detestable tyranny. Railways could not carry troops. Officers were forbidden wear sidearms, and men with war medals were spat on and beaten.
Mussolini changed all that.
You can read about his violent death here…
An article written for an American veterans organization one year after the war, the attached piece tells the story of the five American naval batteries that were mounted on specially made rail cars and deployed along the Western Front. The article is two pages long and is filled with interesting facts as to the whereabouts of their assorted deployments and what was expected of the naval crews who worked them.
A former American prisoner of war recalled the American flag that he and his fellow prisoners had fashioned from Bull Durham and Lucky Strike bags the day they heard that the Germans had quit.
At the time this profile first appeared in 1919, P.G Wodehouse (1904 – 1975) had recently resigned his post as the drama critic for Vanity Fair in order to realize his ambitions as a novelist and playwright. This article revealed to all Wodehouse’s keen interest in American slang and American comic strips.
A two page history of the 32nd Division and their struggle to eradicate the bulge in the Marne battle line that resulted in the liberation of Fismette and Fismes.
A genuinely funny reminiscence written by an anonymous Doughboy recalling his days as an M.P. in war-torn France during the First World War:
Now that it is all over I wonder what did I gain from my experiences as an M.P. in the great Army of Newton Baker’s Best?…Watching the dawn coming rosily up over snow-clad barracks roofs and rows of tents; informing careless privates, sergeants, lieutenants and even majors to ‘button that there button’; listening to the dull bang-slamming of artillery barrages on crossroads; jotting down the names of high-spirited young men found in cafés at the wrong hours -such things aren’t of much lasting value.
Click here to read an article about the sexually-transmitted diseases among the American Army of W.W. I – and the M.P.s in particular…
A veteran of the U.S. First Division, Sixteenth Infantry, tells the chilling story of that rainy night in November, 1917, when the first German raid upon the American trenches took place:
It was on that night that Company F took over its first front line position, received its baptism of fire, bore the brunt of the first German raid and lost the first American troops killed and captured in the World War.
…two hundred and forty Bavarians, the widely advertised cut-throats of the German Army, hopped down on us. The first raid on American troops was in full swing. They had crawled up to our wire under cover of their artillery barrage and the moment it lifted were right on top of us.
The U.S. Army would not launch their own trench raid for another four months.
This piece reminds me of what my son’s history teacher so wisely passed on to them one day in sixth grade: History can be found anywhere. How right she was, and in this case, a seldom remembered but perhaps widely practiced method of escorting German prisoners to the rear was rendered by a cartoonist in a 1921 magazine advertisement for a firm that manufactured men’s accessories [underwear]:
Remember that big attack? You couldn’t spare a whole squad to escort your prisoners back to the cages; you needed every man in front. You got around the difficulty by cutting off the Boches’ trousers. That made them helpless. They couldn’t run and they couldn’t fight. You parked the skipper’s dog robber on their flank with a warped rifle and ran’em back.
Click here to read an article about the American POW experience during the Korean War.
At the time this magazine profile first appeared in 1919, P.G. Wodehouse
Click here to read magazine articles about D.W. Griffith.
With the close of the war came the release of millions of combat veterans onto the streets of the world. Some of these veterans adjusted nicely to the post-war world – but many had a difficult time. Their maladjustment was called Shell Shock and it could manifest itself in any number of ways; in the attached article, written less than a year after the war, one anonymous American veteran explained his own personal encounter with the illness.
Click here to read a post-W.W. I poem about combat-related stress…
Here are a few lines from The American Legion Weekly that reported to their disappointed veteran readership that the foreign-born men residing legally in the United States who were previously accused of shirking the 1917 draft were, in fact, absolved from service and thus free to swear the oath of citizenship, after having been slandered as draft dodgers and alien-slackers until the finer points of the selective service law was clarified.
This is a fiery editorial from a U.S. veteran’s magazine covering American law enforcement’s search for the 487,003 young men who resisted the draft of 1917-1918.
The War Department will take care of the actual deserters, the men who went into camp and then deserted. Such men are liable to prosecution at any time in their lives. The Department of Justice will get after the draft dodgers, who never answered the summons…
Only eight men are serving sentences as draft deserters in Federal penitentiaries, Mr. Taylor declares. ‘Yet, the number of men defying our country in its hour of need, was many times the number who deserted the Army after the Armistice.’ Thirty-nine men, he states, are still serving time for desertion from the Army, and the draft deserters are serving shorter average sentences than are the soldiers who took unauthorized leave of the service after the Armistice.
Few topics were as irksome to the editors of THE AMERICAN LEGION WEEKLY than that of the draft dodger. This article appeared one year after the close of the war and presents all the facts about the deferment process and how many native-born American men had shirked their responsibility to kin and country.
Forward passing dominated eastern and western intercollegiate football to a degree unprecedented in the history of the game…
The Doughboys of the the U.S. Twenty-Seventh Infantry remember the bad old days in Vladivostok guarding the trans-Siberian railway line:
The Czar’s old government used to send its enemies to Siberia, to exile; Uncle Sam’s government sent its own men there to guard a railroad. Whose railroad it was and what it was there for and why Americans should be taken away from a perfectly good war in France and stationed up there to take care of it — surely you can answer all these questions. If you can’t, don’t go to any of the veterans of the Siberian Expeditionary Force, because they won’t give you very coherent answers. They think the whole trip was a post-season special, staged especially for their benefit.
