The Home Sector – Old Magazine Articles

‘Father Duffy Tells What Happened” (The Home Sector, 1920)

In this article, the famous chaplain of the 165th Infantry (formerly the NY Fighting 69th) Father Francis Duffy (1874 – 1932) describes how the regiment was ripped to shreds in two offensives – hinting all the while that somebody blundered:

Since 1915 no commanders in the older armies would dream of opposing too strongly wired and entrenched positions [with] the naked breast of their infantry. They take care that the wire, or part of it at least, is knocked down by artillery or laid flat by tanks before they ask unprotected riflemen to [breach the line]. When the wire is deep and still intact and strongly defended, the infantry can do little but hang their bodies upon it.

More about Father Duffy can be read here…

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When The Doughboys Returned To France (Home Sector, 1920)

Despite its almost unanimous vows testified to by countless rounded phrases in trenches and billets, a good share of the A.E.F. is returning to France. It is almost chasing its own tail in the effort to get back, for it was only a few weeks ago that newspapers everywhere said that the last of the A.E.F. was home. And before the rear guard of the A.E.F. was aboard boats headed westward, the vanguard of the returning A.E.F. was pouring back into France through every port.

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The Armistice Day Offensive (The Home Sector, 1920)

A Congressional committee of investigation has recently been treated to a scathing arraignment of the General Staff because military operations on the front of the Second Army were continued up to the hour of the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918. Members of the operations Section of the Staff, particularly the chief, Brigadier General Fox Conner, have been accused of slaughtering men on the last day of the war in order to satisfy their personal ambitions.

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American Colleges During W.W. I (Home Sector, 1919)

Here is a book review of The Colleges In The War And Afterward (1919) by Parke Rexford Kolbe:

One obtains a very clear picture of our educational institutions during the war and a definite feeling of the difficulties encountered when agencies which were quite individualistic, quite self-dependent, suddenly found themselves mere sub-departments of the War Department submitting to a command from higher authority as if they had been used to it all their lives…

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‘The Truth About Chateau-Thiery” (Home Sector, 1919)

The veterans magazine that published the attached column, THE HOME SECTOR, was edited by Harold Ross, who, just a few months earlier, had held that same post at THE STARS and STRIPES; the article was written by Alexander Woollcott – previously a journalist with that same paper. I’m sure that this was quite common in 1919, but it would seem that these two men wanted to be forthright with their readers and set straight an issue that they wrote about when they were in the employment of Uncle Sam: the Doughboys who were victorious at Chateau-Thiery and Belleau Wood did not save Paris. Just as German historians have insisted for many years, those German divisions were simply not headed for Paris.

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How the YMCA Got it Wrong (The Home Sector, 1919)

There were many benevolent organizations that volunteered to go abroad and cheer up the American military personnel serving in W.W. I Europe; groups such as the Jewish Welfare Board, the Knights of Columbus, the War Camp Community Service and the Salvation Army – to name just a few, but the Y.M.C.A. (Young Men’s Christian Association) was the only one among them that irked the Doughboys. In this 1919 exposé former STARS and STRIPES reporter Alexander Woollcott (1887 – 1943) levels numerous charges against the Y, believing that they had misrepresented their intentions when they asked the War Department to grant them passage. Woolcott maintains that their primary mission was proselytizing rather than relief work.

Click here to read another article about the YMCA.

From Amazon: My Hut: A Memoir of a YMCA Volunteer in World War One

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