Christmas was no holiday for soldiers during conf lict
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. » More than 400,000 New Yorkers served in the Army and Navy during World War I, more soldiers and sailors than any other state in the country.
In December 1917, National Guard Soldiers of the 42nd Division were in France, awaiting training in trench warfare.
It was nicknamed the “Rainbow” division because it was comprised of National Guard units from 26 states, which stretched across the country “like a rainbow,” in the words of division chief of staff, Col. Douglas MacArthur.
The division’s 27,000 troops started moving from Camp Albert Mills on Long Island to France in October. The last elements, the 168th Infantry Regiment from Iowa, got to France in late November.
By Christmas 1917, the division’s elements were located in a number of villages northeast of the city of Chaumont, about 190 miles east of Paris. The men had hiked there from Vaucouleurs, which they had reached by train.
New York’s 165th Infantry celebrated Christmas 1917 in the village of Grand. Father Francis Duffy, the regiment’s famous chaplain, celebrated a joint American-French mass on Christmas Eve.
According to Sgt. Joyce Kilmer, a poet, and editor, “A choir of French women sang hymns in their own language, the American Soldiers sang a few in English, and French and Americans joined in the universal Latin of “Venite, Adoremus Dominum.”
On Christmas Day the men ate turkey, chicken, carrots, cranberries, mashed potatoes, bread pudding, nuts, figs and coffee. The Army, wrote Corporal Martin Hogan “was a first rate caterer.”
The 168th Infantry, from the Iowa National Guard, hosted 400 French children at a Christmas celebration in the village of Rimaucourt. Two American Soldiers dressed like Santa Claus gave presents to the French children and a French band played the Star Spangled Banner. The kids received dolls, horns and balloons, recalled Lt. Hugh S. Thompson in his book “Trench Knives and Mustard Gas.”
While Christmas 1917 was a good one for most soldiers of the Rainbow Division, the next week went down in the division’s memory as “The Valley Forge Hike.”
It was 30 to 40 miles from where the division’s troops had celebrated Christmas to the town of Rolampont, where the U.S. Army’s Seventh Training Area, had been established.
Today this route can be driven in an hour. In 1917, it took soldiers four days to get there.
The march was miserable, according to the 1919 book, “The Story of the Rainbow Division.”
Soldiers had “scarcely any shoes except what they had on their feet, there was no surplus supply to speak of. Some of the men had no overcoats.”
Soldiers walked into a mountain snowstorm. In some places the snow was three to four feet deep. Soldier’s shoes wore out. Some marched almost barefoot and there were bloody trails in the snow.
Lt. Thompson recalled that the men in his unit were issued hobnailed boot — the soles were held by heavy nails. The problem, he said, was that the nails got cold and the men’s feet froze, too.
“Bleak expanses of icy geography appeared and vanished in monotonous fields between villages,” he recalled. “Legs ached, pack straps cut into shoulders, unmercifully men fell out, exhausted.”
At night the men huddled in the barns and haylofts of the French villages to keep warm.
The mule- and horsedrawn supply wagons got stuck on the icy roads and men had to move their best animals from wagon to wagon to get them unstuck, Father Duffy recalled.
For three days the men in the 165th Infantry Regiment’s Third battalion had no food, according to Kilmer, and when rations caught up to the men they got coffee and a bacon sandwich, or a raw potatoes and bread.
“The hike made Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow look like a Fifth Avenue Parade,” one New York officer remembered later.
“The men plowed over the hills and through the snow, enduring hardships which are not pleasant to remember,” wrote Reppy Alison, the author of a book about the 1st Battalion 166th Infantry.
Medics reported cases of mumps and pneumonia as the temperatures dropped below zero. Hundreds of men fell out, but most made it to Rolampont.
As the 165th Infantry arrived, the regimental band struck up the tune: “In the Good old Summer Time”.
By New Year’s Day the division’s elements had arrived in Rolampont, and along with a new year they got a new commander.
Major General William Mann, the former head of the Militia Bureau, the equivalent of today’s chief of the National Guard Bureau, had taken command of the division at Camp Mills.
But Mann, who was 63 in 1917, couldn’t meet the physical standards for officer laid down by General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force.
He was replaced by 55year old Brig. Gen. Charles T. Menoher.
As 1918 began, Menoher and the Soldiers of the Rainbow division began gearing up to go to go into the trenches.
Today the 42nd Infantry Division is part of the New York National Guard and has a training relationship with National Guard elements in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. The 69th Infantry, which fought during World War I as the 165th Infantry Regiment, is still part of the New York National Guard today and went on to fight in World War II, and Iraq.