Articles from The American Legion Weekly
At the time this magazine profile first appeared in 1919, P.G. Wodehouse
Click here to read magazine articles about D.W. Griffith.
An Interview With P.G. Wodehouse (The American Legion Weekly, 1919) Read More »
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…
The Shell-Shocked Millions (American Legion Weekly, 1919) Read More »
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.
Resident Aliens: Not Eligible for the 1917 Draft (American Legion Weekly, 1923) Read More »
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…
In Search of the W.W. I Draft Dodgers (American Legion Weekly, 1920) Read More »
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.
Draft-Dodgers and Deserters in Federal Prison (American Legion Weekly, 1923) Read More »
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.
‘Americans in Name Only” (American Legion Weekly, 1919) Read More »
Forward passing dominated eastern and western intercollegiate football to a degree unprecedented in the history of the game…
The Forward Pass Goes Mainstream (American Legion Weekly, 1919) Read More »
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.
American Soldiers Remember Siberia (American Legion Weekly, 1919) Read More »
The 36th Division has a little corner by itself in the general field covered by the A.E.F. It was not brought into either of the American major operation or into any American sector. Off by itself, under French command, it came into line in Champagne… Theses troops came bang into the middle of the hardest fighting, without any quiet sector preliminaries, and without a relatively easy initiation like St. Mihiel.
The 36th Division (The American Legion Weekly, 1922) Read More »
This is the story of the First Gas Regiment. It was organized at American University (Washington, D.C.) in August of 1917 and arrived in France in time to disperse noxious gas all over the Germans as they launched their March offensive in 1918:
Company B of the First Battalion was the outfit that participated in the first show. The attack was launched on a two-mile front extending from Lens to Hill 70 near Loos, and held by the Canadians… It was a tough job. The nature of the work was graphically described by a Yankee buck, who said in a moment of disgust: ‘This is a job for grave diggers, hod carriers and piano movers, instead of chemists, pipe fitters and mechanics.
Gassing The Germans (American Legion Weekly, 1922) Read More »
