HISTORY
OF THE 304th FIELD ARTILLERY
by
James M. Howard
1920
FOREWORD
In the summer and fall of the year 1917 a group of men
who had been called into the service of their country
were put together, by the hazard of military life, to
form a regiment known as the 304th Field Artillery. Two
of them were officers from the Regular Army. Not a few
had seen service on the Mexican Border with the National
Guard. A great majority were essentially civilians who
had become soldiers simply in answer to the call of duty
in a time of national need. Most of them were from New
York City. They came from every conceivable walk of life.
Some entered the service as commissioned officers, and
some as enlisted men.
During the winter and spring which followed, other men
joined the group, some from New York State and a good
many from Iowa, Minnesota and various parts of the
country.
Together they trained as soldiers, first in Camp Upton,
Long Island, and later in Camp de Souge, near Bordeaux
France. Together they served at the front, in the quiet
Lorraine sector, on the Vesle and the Aisne Rivers, and
finally in the great Argonne-Meuse offensive which ended
the war. There developed among them a spirit of
comradeship, which surpassed anything they had known
before. Whether or not they liked army life, these men
learned to love their regiment.
This book is intended simply as a record of the
experiences, which they shared during their twenty months
of service together. It does not purport to be in any way
a history of the Great War. Its purpose is to preserve in
concrete form for the men themselves and for their
friends the story of their experiences.
Parts of the narrative, especially in the first two
chapters, will doubtless "be dry reading for an
outsider. If the reader will remember that the details of
those early days are recorded for the benefit of the men
who lived through them, and will pass on to the later
chapters, he will find there the story of actual war as
it was fought by a regiment of soldiers who were second
to none in the American armies.
The author desires to express his profound admiration of
the officers and men with whom it was his privilege to
serve, and his appreciation of their fellowship, without
which the story could never have been written. In the
preparation of the book itself, the help of certain
individuals has been invaluable:
Colonel Copely Enos, who commanded the regiment from
November 20, 1918, until demobilization, not only gave
the whole project his enthusiastic support, but read the
manuscript with minute care and offered wise and
constructive criticism.
Major Lewis Sanders was from the first a resourceful
advisor in everything which had to do with the
publication of the book, and furnished considerable
information about the work of the First Battalion.
Major Alvin Devereux, of the Second Battalion,
contributed written accounts of various episodes
connected with the operations of his command from which
the author has drawn freely without always using
quotation marks or indicating the source.,
Captain Harry Kempner was an unfailing source of
information regarding the operations in which the
regiment was engaged. He also made one of the
illustrations.
Lieutenant Lawrence Thornton, of the Brigade Commander's
Staff, wrote an account of the Plattsburg Training Camp
and of the beginnings of Camp Upton without which the
first chapter could hardly have been written, and as
Brigade Historian he has offered helpful advice and
criticism.
Lieutenant Roger McE. Smith gave a great deal of time to
the work of illustrating, produced many of the best of
the drawings, and supervised the final preparation of the
cuts. His helpful labors and loyal cooperation after the
regiment was disbanded and the artists scattered, deserve
special thanks.
Sergeant William K. Vernon collected and arranged a vast
amount of information and furnished many helpful
suggestions.
Mr. Perry Newberry, the regimental Y. M. C. A. Secretary,
took entire charge of the illustrating, laid out the work
for the artists, lived and labored with them for weeks,
and himself drew some of the pictures. His wide
experience, both as an illustrator and as a writer, as
well as his sincerity and enthusiasm in the work, made
his criticisms invaluable. The whole layout of the book
is the work of Mr. Newberry. His work for the regiment in
the making of this memorial volume is surpassed only by
the resourcefulness, the genuineness, and the unfailing
good will of his life and work among the men, both at the
front and during the trying period after the fighting was
over. He was not an adjunct, but an integral part of the
regiment, respected and beloved by officers and men as a
tried and trusted friend.
Under him in the task of illustrating worked Corporal
Michael Lemmermeyer, whose cartoons enliven the entire
book; Private Dalrymple, whose brush work has given most
of the full-page illustrations; Private Revard Graham,
who has done
the decorative chapter headings; and Privates Archie
Anderson and E. H. Reims, Jr., whose pen drawings have
helped to make the story interesting. Sergeant Stephen
Avres, as a member of the Art Department, did
considerable work on the maps.
Two members of Battery E, Corporal Edwin C. Cass and
Private George Petri, were kind enough to lend their
diaries, which not only furnished numerous quotations,
but suggested a great many things which the author has
himself written. Several others, who would prefer that
their names did not appear, have contributed bits from
diaries and letters.
To all these friends the author extends his sincere
thanks. Their cooperation has made the whole work a joy.
CHAPTER I
BEGINNINGS
For three long months before the 304th Field Artillery
existed most of those who were to be its officers had
been together. The United States had declared war on
Germany on April 6, 1917, and on May 15th those New York
men who had been accepted as candidates for commissions
in the Officers' Reserve Corps were summoned to
Plattsburg, New York, to undergo a period of intensive
training. There for three months they lived bunk to bunk
in the barracks and ate the same army food. For three
months they toiled with mind and body to master the
elements of things military. When, at the end of that
time, they left the camp as commissioned officers, they
took with them not only a somewhat confused mass of
technical knowledge but also a spirit of comradeship
which went far toward insuring the success of the
regiment in which they were to serve.
At the beginning of the course every one started as an
infantryman. With rifle, bayonet and pack be drilled and
hiked like any doughboy. After a month of this the men
who had chosen to serve in the artillery were reassembled
and assigned to provisional batteries for special
instruction, and it was with supreme satisfaction that
they laid aside their packs and congratulated themselves
on the prospect of future hikes on horseback. Let the
doughboys laboriously plod their way on foot-the
artillery would ride. Some three-inch guns had arrived in
camp, and they looked to be man's size weapons. What a
splendid showing they would make, rumbling by at a trot,
six horses to a gun!
Long-cherished visions of horseback riding quickly
vanished, however, as the artillerymen entered on their
specialized training. There were no horses in camp.
Hikes on foot were as frequent as before, only instead of
packs and rifles the men now carried instruments. Classes
were held from seven in the morning to quarter of twelve,
and in the afternoon from one-thirty to half -past four.
There was a two -hour study period every evening. The
path was not strewn with roses; leisure hours were rare.
Barracks and company streets had to be policed (i. e.,
cleaned) before class in the morning, and the strict
insistence on personal neatness made it necessary to fill
in the precious moments between four-thirty and retreat
with shaving and the polishing of personal equipment. The
life was all work, with mighty little play.
When the First Provisional Battery was assembled, Captain
Ned B. Rehkopf, a field artilleryman of the Regular Army, introduced
himself as its commanding officer and senior instructor. With his hat tilted down over his eyes he
looked slowly along the line of faces before him, said a
few words and dismissed the battery. The men's first
impression of him was one of calm, impersonal leadership,
and as the weeks', wore on the impression deepened and
left a lasting influence.
Second in command was Lieutenant Barnes, also of the
Regular Army. Like the Captain he had a faculty of
smoothing over difficult places, of which there were not
a few. Major Lewis Sanders, although on cadet status,
assisted in the instruction, and with terrible energy he
spurred his charges on through the intricacies of firing
data and reconnaissance, and led them on strenuous hikes,
which even the long marches in France never effaced from
their memory. The men lived in a state of uncertainty.
Each day brought new and difficult things to learn, as
well as fresh rumors.
The latter always had to do with the prospects of being
or not being commissioned. joy rose and fell according as
the rumors were propitious or unpropitious, and each
candidate measured his chances by the successes or
failures of each day's work. At the most unexpected
moments the instructors would call a man forth from the
obscurity and oblivion of the ranks and thrust upon him a
position of command where his short-comings were
painfully conspicuous. He might do well, or he might do
ill, From One Farmer's Roof to Another but in either case
he was apt to feel that he had lost his chance of winning
a commission.
In the morning tactical walks under Major Sanders became
the usual thing. The camp edged the shore of Lake
Champlain, and back from it the roads led into the sandy,
pine-tree country, and the region of the Chateaugay
branch railroad and the Salmon River.. Commanding this
country from the north was a hill on which stood the
Hotel Champlain and its water tower. Hither the men hiked
along the Peru Road and fought strateoric battles with
imaginary guns against an imaginary enemy, and always the
water tower figured as an important element. Observers
were shot from it daily. There was not a copse or knoll
for miles around but sheltered artillery, friendly or
otherwise.
After a time some horses arrived, and three batteries
alternated in their use. Just enough days elapsed between
equitation lessons to heal the soreness of the previous
riding, but at least there was some satisfaction in an
occasional drill with horses and guns.
Actual firing was not possible, but every one hoped that
a big maneuver might be held in which batteries would be
taken into position. The maneuver never took place, but
instead of it the instructors arranged a big problem in
communication, in which all the different means of
signaling were to be brought into play.
When the day arrived, the legions started forth at dawn
equipped with blinker lights, signal flags, field
telephones, rockets, and horses for messengers. Observers
were stationed in the tower to flash the progress of
events, while groups of runners relayed messages. From
one farmer's roof to another instructions were
wig-wagged, and rockets and bombs Went up all along the
line. At the close of the day it was decided that if
communication had won the fight the enemy had certainly
been surrounded and taken.
The Plattsburg course ended with a grand review of all
the troops in camp. One battery of artillery, patched
together for the occasion, passed proudly in review with
guidons flying and guns and caissons bowling along behind
the horses,-a stirring spectacle for the men who had
toiled through the terrible heat of the summer to become
artillery officers.
On August 15th the commissions were announced. Captain
Rehkopf assembled the successful candidates and made a
characteristically short speech.
"Gentlemen," he said, "you enter the
service to become representatives of the American Army.
It has been very difficult to choose among you. I trust I
may be able later to say that I have chosen wisely."
Where all had been comrades of equal standing, each
successful candidate was now to take on rank commensurate
with his age and, it was to be hoped, with his ability;
but a fellowship had grown up in those three months which
rank could not efface. It was a group of friends who
separated on August 15th for a brief vacation, with
orders to report at the end of the month at Camp Upton,
Long Island, there to take up their duties as officers of
the 304th Field Artillery.
Camp Upton, on September 1st, was a howling wilderness of
stumps, lumber piles, civilian workmen, ditches and half
finished buildings. The stumps were all that was left of
a forest of scrub oak and pine which had been cleared
away to provide an area f or the camp. The lumber was
strewn in wild confusion all over the place. The civilian
workmen swarmed like so many ants, and often with as
little apparent aim. The ditches marked the first stage
of what was to be an elaborate system of water supply and
drainage, while from day to day newly completed buildings
showed the progress of the great wooden city, which was
to house forty thousand men.
In this wilderness our newly commissioned officers found
themselves when, after alighting from the train, they
walked the long dusty road to camp and sought out the
headquarters of the Commanding General. There the
Adjutant assigned them to their regiment, and told them
to report to the headquarters of the 304th Field
Artillery. The vague address given was "J-1,"
and it was difficult at first to determine Just which
part of the camp the constructing engineers had labeled
"J"; but as soon as the section was located the
building was not hard to find, for it was one of the few
finished barracks in the area, situated between what
afterward became 2nd and 3rd Avenues above 11th Street.
Here, amid a confusion of desks and papers pertaining to
other regiments, Captain Leonard Sullivan, the regimental
Adjutant, was already busy with that bane of all army
officers, paper work."
There was not much about the camp at that time to suggest
military life. Steam stump pullers were tearing roots out
of the ground to make way for new buildings. Great noisy
machines were plowing up new ditches and adding to the
pitfalls which made walking dangerous after dark.
Carpenters were hammering, and plumbers were littering
the floors with pipe, bolts, solder and tin. The only
warlike touch was a battalion of the 15th New York
Infantry (colored), who were acting as guards until the
camp should toast a military police force of its own.
These happy-go-lucky blacks furnished as much amusement
as protection. They presented arms with superb dignity
whenever an officer passed by, and when off duty they
laughed and chased each other about among., their tents,
or beat out marvelous ragtime on the piano in the Y. 'M.
C. A tent.
Major Sanders was at first in charge of the 304th. On
paper one Colonel Westervelt was in command, but he was
in France at the time and the regiment never saw him. The
real commanding officer, Lieutenant- Colonel John R.
Kelly, had not yet reported, so it was Major Sanders who
marshaled the officers and gave them their instructions.
No soldiers would be on hand for some days, and the
officers must practice on each other. Each battery
commander took his lieutenants out and every officer had
his turn at giving commands to the others. The Major took
them all on a personally conducted tour of the camp and
pointed out where in the great U-shaped city the various
parts of the division would eventually be. As the
officers stumbled along over the stumps and leaped the
ditches they wondered where, in all this animated desert,
there would be any room to drill.
In a few days Colonel Kelly arrived to take command. As a
captain of infantry in the Regular Army he had been an
instructor in the civilian training camps at Plattsburg
in 1916, and bad earned a good name as a leader of tact
and force. This reputation did not belie him, for in a
very short time the officers of the 304th had learned to
rely on his judgment and had been won to a strong
personal attachment to their commanding officer. The only
other regular army officer in the regiment was Major
Leonard C. Sparks, who arrived about the same time. He
was a field artilleryman and an exceptionally capable
one, as well as a man of rare personal charm.
Presently there arrived a group of non-commissioned
officers who had been sent from the Regular Army to help
in getting the new National Army into shape. Some of
these men were fine soldiers of the stamp of Sergeants
Cronin and French, who were made first sergeants of B and
D Batteries respectively and served in that capacity
until the regiment was disbanded. Others of them,
however, came with an utterly wrong notion of the
National Army and had an idea they could do about what
they liked with the reserve officers. They were mistaken.
A strenuous sifting process was instituted which soon got
rid of the undesirables. Those that remained were worth
keeping, and they served right through with faithfulness
and often with distinction.
Meantime, on September 10th, arrived the great day to
which thousands of people had been looking forward, some
with eagerness and some with dread, the calling out of
the first draft. Even since they had registered on June
5th and had been declared physically fit for military
service, these men had been watching for the day when
there should come a pink card through the mail telling
them to report for duty. Now the day had come. Great
masses of friends and well-wishers turned out to see them
off, and the first installment of the new National Army
from New York City boarded the Long Island train for Camp
Upton.
As the first trainload pulled out of the station men hung
from the car windows and crowded the platforms, shouting
and singing and hailing every one in uniform who came
near. Officers had boarded the train some distance from
the camp, so that the leaders appointed by the local
draft boards had been relieved from their none too easy
job of trying in some measure to control the enthusiastic
or defiant curiosity of the
recruits.
The occupants of the cars needed no command from the
officers in charge to swarm out, pushing and yelling, and
fall into something, which vaguely resembled a line.
There was no lack of comments and suggestions from the
ranks as the officers struggled to straighten out the
formation so that they could tell who was present and who
was missing. Finally the roll call was finished and at
the command "Right face-forward march!" the men
picked up their grips and bundles and started to march
with ragged and uneven strides toward camp.
These first recruits had been largely picked by the local
boards as being likely men to form the nucleus of the
regiments and perhaps to become non-commissioned
officers, and in most cases the selection had been fairly
good. Nevertheless it is doubtful whether there had ever
been a stranger assemblage for the making of an army.
They came from every nook and corner of Greater New York
and from every stratum of society and every walk of life.
Fifth Avenue and the lower Fast Side, men who had lived
on inherited incomes and men who toiled as day laborers,
university graduates and illiterates, those whose
ancestors had fought under Washington and those whose
parents were still living in Italy and Russia walked side
by side in a column of twos through the dust and
confusion of the camp.
At last the strange procession halted before a new
barrack which had been prepared for their reception. In
groups of eight they were told off and summoned inside,
where each man was led up stairs and assigned to a bunk.
On every cot lay a mess kit, two or three blankets and a
bed sack, which, when filled with straw, would serve as a
mattress. Odors of a steaming hot lunch were coming up
from the kitchen, and by the time the last man had been
given his bunk, mess was ready and every one fell to with
a will. The first army chow these rookies got was are
alone. Chefs from New York hotels had been employed to
prepare the meals until cooks could be selected and
trained from among the soldiers, and although the service
might have been more dainty the food was good and there
was plenty of it.
After mess began the weary process of being mustered into
the army. The men were lined up alphabetically, and as
each one's name was called he entered the mess hall and
took his place at table opposite him sat an officer with
a pile of large cards on which were innumerable questions
to be answered by the recruit: name, age, place of birth,
nationality of parents, previous occupation, salary,
schooling, previous military experience, and all
information which might be of assistance in determining a
man's fitness for the different branches of the service,
and later, for the various special duties Connected with
army life. All this had to be extracted by questions and
entered on the qualification cards and finally signed by
the candidate and by the officer.
As the men completed this inquisition they were marshaled
outside and marched to the building where the medical
examiners held forth. Here through the various
departments the recruits were shoved like meat through a
sausage mill, and some who were palpably unfit were
eliminated and given a slip entitling them to a discharge
from present military service. The rest were bustled
along to the unfeeling doctors who administered the
prophylactic needle.
The needle deserves special mention, for it loomed large
in the imagination of the rookie. To the first lot sent
it came as a surprise before the man knew what was
happening the needle had been thrust into his arm and the
damage was done.
But those who came later were greeted all the way from
the station with jeering cries of "Wait till you get
the needle!" "You want to look out f or that
needle-three men died from it yesterday!" For weeks
afterward any reference to inoculations in songs or skits
at the battery entertainments was sure to bring a laugh.
After the physical examination there was another line-up
and the men were marched off to the mustering office.
Here more questions were asked and answered, and finally
each man signed his name to a document, which made him at
last a soldier in the United States Army.
The next formality, and one which must be completed at
all costs before bed time, was a bath. Into cold showers
the men were hustled f or a good clean-up. Any man who
emerged from the bathhouse with a dry head, indicating
that his ablutions had not been thorough, was compelled
to go back again and make a good job of it.
Bed felt good that night to a tired lot of men. There was
some noise and hilarity in the barracks, but after a
while the place quieted down, and in the dark strangeness
of the dormitory each man was left to his own turbulent
thoughts.
During the next few days new increments of recruits kept
arriving, and presently they were assigned to the various
regiments. About a hundred came in the first lot to the
304th and were put -in charge of Captain Ewell and the
officers of A Battery. Nominally they were assigned to
the different organizations in the regiment, but while
their officers were busy equipping them and
-straightening out their records, for the sake of
convenience the men were all kept together in a single
barrack down in the P section until enough were assigned
to make it worth while to move them and separate them
according to batteries.
Meanwhile our regimental headquarters had shifted from
J-1and was now located in J-45 on 3rd Avenue. There, in a
large room on the ground floor, a space was fenced off
for the office of the Commanding Officer, the Adjutant
and their clerks. In another corner the Surgeon,
Lieutenant (afterwards Major) Horton, had his infirmary,
and those men who had physical ailments filed in at sick
call in the morning and crowded the room. Diagonally
opposite were the offices of the Headquarters and Supply
Companies and the desk of the regimental Exchange
Officer. Over by a window was stored a pile of brooms,
picks and shovels-the only weapons as yet available-and
hard by the infirmary was the post office where huge
piles of wrongly addressed mail were fast accumulating.
In the center of the room, in the midst of all the hubbub
and confusion, the Headquarters Company tailor maintained
a pressing establishment.
UP stairs lived the enlisted men of the Headquarters and
Supply Companies, while in the building on either side
the orderly rooms and sleeping quarters of the six
batteries were established. The 305th and 306th
regiments, as well as some hundreds of civilian workmen,
were all about us and in our midst. For several weeks we
stumbled over each other in our attempts to keep out of
the ditches and holes, and made ineffectual efforts to
create an atmosphere of order and efficiency in our
section of the camp, while the infantry, over in the
older P-section, with finished buildings and level
ground, began to get their drill fields in order.