_BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL_
THE ARMY BEHIND THE ARMY
THE LAST FRONTIER
GENTLEMEN ROVERS
THE END OF THE TRAIL
FIGHTING IN FLANDERS
THE ROAD TO GLORY
VIVE LA FRANCE!
ITALY AT WAR
_CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS_
THE ARMY BEHIND THE ARMY
[Illustration: THE BURNING OF AN OBSERVATION BALLOON AT FORT SILL,
OKLAHOMA.]
THE ARMY
BEHIND THE ARMY
BY
MAJOR E. ALEXANDER POWELL
U. S. A.
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1919
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published September, 1919
[Illustration]
TO
FIVE FRIENDS OF THE A. E. F.
LIEUT.-COL. N. J. WILEY
MAJOR HUGH B. ROWLAND
MAJOR HAMILTON FISH, JR.
LIEUT. WILFORD S. CONROW
LIEUT. KINGDON GOULD
IN MEMORY OF THE DAYS WE SPENT TOGETHER
ON THE BANKS OF THE MARNE
AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT
For the interest they have shown and the assistance they have given me
in the preparation of this book, I am indebted to many persons. Each
chapter was written with the co-operation of the chief and subchiefs
of the branch of the army with which it deals, and upon its completion
it was by them carefully read and revised. The statements and figures
are as nearly accurate, therefore, as extreme care can make them. The
Honorable Newton D. Baker, Secretary of War, authorized the writing
of the book and issued orders that every facility was to be afforded
me for obtaining the necessary material, and the Honorable Benedict
Crowell, Assistant Secretary of War, who from the beginning took a
lively personal interest in the work, placed at my disposal the great
mass of material which he had collected for his Official Report. To
Major-General William S. Seibert, Director of the Chemical Warfare
Service, to Colonel William S. Walker, in command of Edgewood Arsenal,
and to Colonel Bradley Dewey, in command of the Gas Defense Division,
I am particularly indebted, as it was due to their efforts that I was
able to undertake the writing of the book. Major-General William M.
Black, Chief of Engineers, Lieutenant-Colonel Chenoweth, and Major Evarts
Tracy of the Corps of Engineers; Major-General C. T. Menoher, Director
of Military Aeronautics, Colonel S. M. Davis, Lieutenant-Colonel H.
B. Hersey, and Major H. M. Hickam of the Air Service; Colonel James
L. Walsh, to whose generosity I am indebted for much of the material
relating to Army Ordnance, Colonel E. M. Shinkle and Major A. B. Quinton,
Jr., of the Ordnance Department; Major-General George S. Squier, Chief
Signal Officer of the Army, Brigadier-General C. McK. Saltzman and
Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph O. Mauborgne of the Signal Corps; Major-General
M. W. Ireland, Surgeon-General, and Colonel M. A. De Laney of the Medical
Corps; Brigadier-General Marlborough Churchill, Director of Military
Intelligence, Captain R. G. Martin, Captain A. R. Townsend, Captain H.
M. Dargan, and Captain J. Stanley Moore, of the Military Intelligence
Division; Major-General Rogers, Quartermaster-General of the Army;
Colonel I. C. Welborn, Director of the Tank Corps; Brigadier-General
Drake, Director of the Motor Transport Corps; Captain W. K. Wheatley,
Chief of the Historical Section of the Motor Transport Corps, and
W. L. Pollard, Esq., Chief of the Historical Branch of Purchase and
Storage, all showed me exceptional courtesy and afforded me every
possible assistance. I welcome this opportunity to express to them my
appreciation. To the _Bulletin of the Spruce Production Division_,
published by the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, I am indebted for
a considerable portion of the account of spruce production in the Pacific
Northwest.
E. ALEXANDER POWELL.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE EARS OF THE ARMY 1
“ESSAYONS” 47
THE GAS-MAKERS 101
THE “Q. M. C.” 140
ORDNANCE 197
FIGHTERS OF THE SKY 259
“M. I.” 328
“TREAT ’EM ROUGH” 409
“GET THERE!” 424
MENDERS OF MEN 437
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Burning of an Observation Balloon at Fort Sill,
Oklahoma _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Laying a Field Telegraph Line 8
Signal-Corps Men Erecting a Field Telephone 8
Signal-Corps Men at Work Repairing the Tangle of Copper Wires Which
Link the Infantry in the Front-Line Trenches with the Guns 9
Communication by Use of Panels 14
A Member of the Signal Corps Sending Messages by Means of a Lamp 15
Motion-Picture Operators of the Photographic Section of the Signal
Corps Going into Action on a Tank 34
An Officer of the Signal Corps Operating a Telephone at the Front 35
New Type of Search-Light Used in the American Army 80
Camouflaging a Divisional Headquarters in the Toul Sector 81
Suits Known as Cagoules 94
The Work of the Camouflage Corps 95
Man and Horse Completely Protected Against Poisonous Gas 132
Types of Gas Masks Used by American and European Armies 133
1,500 Tons of Peach-Pits Used for the Manufacture of Charcoal for
Use in Gas Masks 134
Testing Respirators Outside the Gas Chamber 135
Testing Gas Masks Inside the Gas Chamber 135
Advancing Under Gas 138
Training for Gas Warfare 139
Cutting Their Way through Barbed-Wire Entanglements while Training
with Gas Masks 139
American Salvage Dump in France 192
A Workroom in an American Salvage Depot in France 192
An American Delousing Station 193
An American Laundry in Operation Near the Front 193
A 16-Inch Howitzer 202
A 16-Inch Howitzer on a Railway Mount 203
A Scene in an American Arsenal 214
Filling a Powder-Bag for a 16-Inch Gun 215
An American 75-mm in Action 232
The 37-mm Gun in Action 233
An American 75-mm Field Gun, Tractor Mounted 234
A 12-Inch Railway Gun in Operation 235
A 12-Inch Seacoast Mortar on a Railway Mount 236
6-Inch Seacoast Rifles Taken from Coast Fortifications and Mounted
for Field Use in France 237
John M Browning, the Inventor of the Pistol, Rifle, and Machine
Gun Which Bears His Name 242
The Browning Heavy Machine Gun 242
A Rifle Grenadier 243
Bombing Practice 288
Eggs of Death 288
Pigeons Have Been Repeatedly Used with Success from Both Airplanes
and Balloons 289
The Eye in the Sky; an Airplane Camera in Operation 289
Radio Telephone Apparatus in Operation on an Airplane 300
President Wilson Talking with an Aviator in the Clouds by Means of
the Radio Telephone 300
A Range-Finder for Ascertaining the Altitude and Speed of Airplanes 301
A Sentinel of the Skies 306
An American Observation Balloon Leaving Its “Bed” Behind the
Western Front 307
A Balloon Company Manœuvring a Caquot from Winch Position to
Its Bed 307
An American Kite Balloon About to Ascend 310
Planes in Battle Formation 311
A Basket Parachute Drop 316
Balloonist Making a Parachute Jump from an Altitude of 7,900 Feet 316
Training the Student Aviator 317
The American Whippet Tank 418
The Mark V Tank 418
A Squadron of Whippet Tanks Advancing in Battle Formation 419
A Squadron of Whippet Tanks Parked and Camouflaged to Conceal
Them from Enemy Observation 419
Mobile Machine-Shop Operating in a Village Under Shell Fire 434
Supply of Motor Tires 434
A Motor-Car Wrecked Returning from the Front Lines 435
Field-Hospital 454
An Infectious Ward 454
Clear, Filtered, Disinfected Water 455
Water Station on the Western Front 455
THE ARMY BEHIND THE ARMY
I
THE EARS OF THE ARMY
Before the war made most Americans as conversant with the functions of
the various branches of the army as they are with the duties of the
gardener and the cook, the work of the Signal Corps troops was popularly
supposed to consist, in the main, of standing in full view of the enemy
and frantically waving little red-and-white flags. Don’t you remember
those gaudily colored recruiting posters which depicted a slender youth
in khaki standing on a parapet, a signal-flag in either outstretched
hand, in superb defiance of the shells which were bursting all about
him? This popular and picturesque conception was still further fostered
at the officers’ training-camps, where the harassed candidates spent
many unhappy hours attempting to master the technic of semaphore and
wig-wag. Yet, as a matter of fact, during more than four years of war
I do not recall ever having seen a soldier of any nation attempt to
signal by means of flags, save, perhaps, in the back areas. Had such an
attempt been made under battle conditions the signaler probably would
have provided, in the words of the poet, “more work for the undertaker,
another little job for the casket-maker.”
By this I do not mean to imply that the changed conditions brought about
by the Great War made the army signaler a good life-insurance risk. Far
from it! But they did have the effect of making him a trifle less dashing
and picturesque. Instead of recklessly exposing himself on the parapet
of a trench in order to dash-dot a message which the enemy could have
read with the greatest ease, he dragged himself, foot by foot, across the
steel-swept terrain, a mud-caked and disreputable figure, on his task
of repairing the tangle of copper strands which linked the infantrymen
in the front-line trenches with the eager guns; crouching in the meagre
shelter afforded by a shell-hole, with receivers strapped to his ears, he
sent his radio messages into space; carrying on his back a wicker hamper
filled with pigeons, he went forward with the second wave of an attack;
or, by means of a military edition of the dictaphone device so familiar
to readers of detective stories, he eavesdropped on the enemy’s strictly
private conversations. Even though he had no opportunity to wave his
little flags, the Signal Corps man never lacked for action and excitement.
If the Air Service is, as it has frequently been termed, “the eyes
of the army,” then the Signal Corps constitutes the army’s entire
nerve-system. Under the conditions imposed by modern warfare, an
army without aviators would be at least partially blind, but without
signalers it would be bereft of touch, speech, and hearing. It is the
business of the Signal Corps to operate and maintain all the various
systems of message transmission—telegraphs, telephones, radios, buzzers,
Fullerphones, flags, lamps, panels, heliographs, pyrotechnics,
despatch-riders, pigeons, even dogs—which enable the Commander-in-Chief
to keep in constant communication with the various units of his army
and which permit of those units keeping in touch with each other. It
was imperative that General Pershing should be able to pick up his
telephone-receiver in his private car, sidetracked hundreds of miles
away from the battle-front, perhaps, and talk, if he so desired, with a
subaltern of infantry crouching in his dugout on the edge of No Man’s
Land. The Secretary of War, seated at his desk in Washington, must be
enabled to talk to the commander of a camp on the Rio Grande or of a
cantonment in the Far Northwest. Though every strand of wire leading to
the advanced positions was cut by the periodic shell-storms, means had to
be provided for the commanders of the troops holding those positions to
call for artillery support, for reinforcements, for ammunition, or for
food. It was essential to the proper working of the great war-machine
that the chiefs of the Services of Supply at Tours should be in constant
telegraphic and telephonic communication with the officers in charge of
the unloading of troops and supplies at Bordeaux and Marseilles, at Brest
and St. Nazaire. It was vital that the Chief of Staff should be kept
constantly informed of conditions at the various ports of embarkation.
All this was made possible by the Signal Corps. But it was also necessary
that these various conversations should be so safeguarded that there was
no possibility of them being overheard by enemy spies. And the Signal
Corps saw to that too.
When Count von Bernstorff was handed his passports in the spring of
1917, the Signal Corps consisted of barely 50 officers and about 2,500
men. When, nineteen months later, the German delegates, standing about a
table in Marshal Foch’s private car, sullenly affixed their signatures to
the Armistice, the corps had grown to nearly 2,800 officers and upward
of 53,000 men. It comprised at the close of the war seventy-one field
signal battalions, thirty-four telegraph battalions, twenty replacement
and training battalions, and fifty-two service companies, together with
several pigeon and army radio companies, a photographic section, and a
meteorological section.
Not many people are aware, I imagine, that nearly a third of the officers
and men who wore on their collars the little crossed flags of the Signal
Corps were recruited from the employees of the two great rival telephone
systems of the United States—the Bell and the Independent. The former
raised and sent to France twelve complete telegraph battalions; the
latter ten field signal battalions—to say nothing of the great number of
experts, specialists, and telephone-girls who left the employ of those
systems to embark on the Great Adventure. So you need not be surprised
if, the next time your telephone gets out of order, your trouble call
is answered by a bronzed and wiry youth who wears in the buttonhole
of his rather shabby coat the tricolored ribbon of the D. S. C.—won,
perhaps, while keeping the communications open at Château-Thierry. And
the operator who says, “Number, please,” so sweetly, may have been—who
knows?—one of those alert young women in trim blue serge who sat before
the switchboard at Great Headquarters and handled the messages of the
Commander-in-Chief himself.
For a number of years before the war it was recognized in Washington
that should the United States ever become involved in a conflict with
a first-class Power, the handful of officers and men who composed the
personnel of the Signal Corps would be utterly incapable of handling,
unaided, the enormous system of communications which is so essential
to the success of a modern army. It was perfectly evident, moreover,
that should the country suddenly find itself confronting an emergency,
there would be no time to train officers and men in the highly technical
requirements of the Signal Corps. To insure the success of the great
citizen armies which we would be compelled to raise with the utmost
speed in case of war, it was essential that there should be available
an adequate supply of men who were already thoroughly trained in
the installation and operation of the two chief forms of military
communication—telegraphs and telephones. And this trained personnel was
at hand in the employees of the great telephone and telegraph companies.
It was not, however, until June, 1916, when Congress, tardily awakening
to the imminent danger of sparks falling on our own roof from the
great conflagration in Europe, passed the National Defense Act, which
authorized, among other things, the creation of the Signal Officers’
Reserve Corps and the Signal Enlisted Reserve Corps, that the way was
opened for definite action. Shortly thereafter the Bell Telephone System
was approached by the Signal Corps with the suggestion that a number
of reserve Signal Corps units be recruited from its various subsidiary
organizations. The suggestion met with the hearty approval of the Bell
officials and the work of organization was turned over to the Bell’s
chief engineer, Mr. J. J. Carty, the foremost telephone expert in the
world. In accordance with the plans drawn up by Mr. Carty, there were
organized from the employees of the New York, New England, Pennsylvania,
Chesapeake and Potomac, Central Union, Cincinnati, Northwestern,
Southwestern, Southern, Mountain States, and Pacific telephone companies
twelve reserve telegraph battalions. I might mention, in passing, that
Mr. Carty was given a commission as major, was later promoted to colonel,
was made chief of the telegraphs and telephones of the A. E. F., and for
his invaluable work was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal.
While the Bell System was devoting its efforts to the raising of the
telegraph battalions, the Chief Signal Officer of the Army asked the
co-operation of the Bell’s great rival, the United States Independent
Telephone Association, in the organization of a number of field signal
battalions for front-line work. Mr. F. B. McKinnon, vice-president
of the association, assumed charge of the work and enthusiastically
threw himself and all the agencies at his disposal into the business
of recruiting, ten field battalions eventually being raised by the
Independent System.
But the demand for trained personnel from the telegraph and telephone
companies did not end with the formation of the units I have just
mentioned. With the declaration of war and the despatch to France of the
first American contingents, it was realized that their work had only
begun. Though the telegraph and field battalions contained many experts
on telegraphy and telephony, they were formed primarily as constructive
and operative units for comparatively short lines. But the lines in the
A. E. F. did not remain short, and as they grew in length and in number,
new equipment and different types of technicians had to be employed. In
August, 1917, there came from France the first call for specialists,
to include telephone-repeater experts, printer-telegraph mechanicians,
printing-telegraph traffic supervisors, and similar highly trained men.
Almost at the same time there was received a cablegram from General
Pershing requesting the immediate organization in Paris of a Research and
Inspection Department, in order that the best, latest, and most reliable
signal equipment might be assured for the American troops. To Colonel
Carty was assigned the task of selecting the twelve scientists to be the
officers of the new division and the fifty enlisted assistants who were
necessary to commence the work. He found them in the remarkable Research
Department of the Western Electric Company, which is closely allied
with the Bell System, Mr. Herbert Shreeve of the Western Electric being
given a commission as lieutenant-colonel and placed in charge of the
work. The improvements made and the devices introduced by this division
made the signal system of the A. E. F. one of the marvels of the war.
So wide-spread and reliable were the American communications, and so
efficient the American operators, that on more than one occasion Marshal
Foch, during his tours of inspection along the battle-front, went many
miles out of his way in order to use the American wires for important
conversations. But so rapid was the growth of the telegraph and telephone
lines in France that hardly had one requisition for additional personnel
been filled before another was received. Yet always the great systems of
the United States answered the call, and this despite their crying need
for such personnel at home, where war conditions had enormously increased
their business, and the difficulty which they were experiencing in
making replacements in their own forces. In fact, of the 2,800 officers
commissioned in the Signal Corps during the war, fully 30 per cent had
been trained with the telegraph and telephone systems, and the percentage
of enlisted men was equally high. The response made by these great
corporations to the nation’s call constitutes, indeed, one of the most
gratifying incidents of the war.
When the history of the great conflict comes to be written, the story
of the achievements of the telegraph and field battalions of the Signal
Corps will form one of its most fascinating chapters. Working under the
most trying conditions, in a land with whose customs they were unfamiliar
and whose language they did not understand, with equipment and material
frequently improvised from whatever was at hand, they covered France
from the seaboard to the Rhine with the network of their wires; they made
it as easy for Great Headquarters to communicate with a remote outpost in
Alsace or the Argonne as it is for a brokerage house in Wall Street to
communicate with the manager of its Chicago branch, and it established a
standard of speed and efficiency which will make the French dissatisfied
with their own services for years to come. Their work was, in the words
of General Pershing, “a striking example of the wisdom of placing highly
skilled technical men in the places where their experience and skill will
count the most.”
[Illustration: LAYING A FIELD TELEGRAPH LINE.
They established a standard of speed and efficiency.
_Photograph by Signal Corps, U. S. A._]
[Illustration: SIGNAL CORPS MEN ERECTING A FIELD TELEPHONE.
Working under the most trying conditions, these men covered France with
the network of wires.]
[Illustration: SIGNAL CORPS MEN AT WORK REPAIRING THE TANGLE OF COPPER
WIRES WHICH LINK THE INFANTRY IN THE FRONT-LINE TRENCHES WITH THE GUNS.]
Despite the unending stream of men which constantly flowed Europeward
for work on the “A. E. F. Tel. & Tel. Co.,” as our military telegraphs
and telephones were familiarly known, more were ever needed, and it
was finally decided, though, I believe, with considerable reluctance
on the part of certain old-fashioned officers in the War Department,
to replace the men operators, wherever possible, with girls. Again the
American systems were called upon, this time to furnish young women who
possessed the necessary technical experience, and to give them a working
knowledge of French. Imagine the furor of excitement that swept through
every telephone-exchange in the country when it was learned that girls
were wanted for service in the A. E. F.! Where was the red-blooded,
adventure-loving American girl who could resist such a call? Soon the
company officials as well as the Signal Corps itself were almost swamped
by the flood of applications that poured in. Then the Signal Corps found
itself confronted by the necessity of educating the applicants; to do
this it had to operate a whole system of boarding-schools for girls.
Such schools were established in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, San
Francisco, Jersey City, Atlantic City, and Lancaster, Pa., the candidates
for overseas duty being given intensive courses in military telephony,
French, and European geography, together with lectures on French manners
and customs, and, I might add (this in a whisper), on their own behavior,
particular emphasis being laid on the evils of flirting, impertinence,
and gum-chewing. Upward of 200 girls were finally selected, provided with
uniforms and overseas caps of navy serge—which looked as though they
might have been designed by the technical experts of the Signal Corps—and
sent to France as full-fledged members of the A. E. F. No pupils at a
fashionable girls’ boarding-school were ever more strictly chaperoned. At
Tours quarters were built for them on an island in the Loire, which was
connected with the mainland by a narrow foot-bridge, the military police
on duty at the end of the bridge only permitting the girls to “go ashore”
when they were accompanied by a matron or were in pairs. Notwithstanding
the strictness of the regulations under which they lived and worked, it
was a girl’s own fault if she came home unengaged. Though it goes without
saying that the military authorities took every precaution against
exposing the girls to danger, those who were on duty in towns near the
front, such as Toul, on numerous occasions tasted the excitement of
German air-raids, one of them being cited in army orders for remaining
at her post and coolly continuing to operate her switchboard “whence all
but she had fled.”
I always liked the true story of the telephone-girl who, upon her arrival
at an American port of debarkation, informed the landing officer that she
was a second lieutenant.
“But why do you call yourself a second lieutenant?” he inquired. “No
commissions have been given to telephone-girls.”
“I don’t see what that’s got to do with it,” she retorted, tossing her
head. “I get more pay than a second lieutenant, and I’ve been of more use
to the army than any second lieutenant that I know.”
In order to assess at their true worth the achievements of the Signal
Corps during the war, it is essential to realize the amazing number,
variety, and magnitude of the tasks the corps was called upon to perform.
The Signal Corps is a staff department charged with providing means of
communication for the army, both at home and overseas. According to the
present tables of organization, one field signal battalion is usually
attached to each division, the telegraph battalions being used as corps
or army troops. Generally speaking, the telegraph battalion maintains
communications in the rear; the field battalion usually operates with
the combat troops at the front. In addition to these troops, there are
numerous special units, such as pigeon companies, radio companies,
photographic and meteorological sections, which are attached to corps,
armies, or to General Headquarters. In France where hundreds of miles
separated our base ports from our troops on the firing-line, there
devolved upon the Signal Corps an enormous amount of work in the area
known as the Services of Supply. The magnitude of the telegraph and
telephone systems in the S. O. S. is illustrated by the fact that when
the Armistice was signed, the Signal Corps in France was operating 96,000
miles of circuits known as “long lines,” with 282 telephone-exchanges,
and a total of nearly 9,000 stations. The requirements for wire in the
field were even greater. When our operations were at their height in the
summer of 1918, it was estimated that the Signal Corps would require
68,000 miles of “outpost wire” a month for use at the front in connecting
telegraph and telephone systems. Outpost wire is, I ought to explain, a
development of the war. It is composed of seven fine wires, four of them
bronze and three of them of hard carbon steel, stranded together and
coated first with rubber, then with cotton yarn, and finally paraffined.
This wire is produced in six colors—red, yellow, green, brown, black, and
gray—in order that it may readily be identified in the field, the red
wire running, for example, to the artillery, the yellow to regimental
headquarters, green to brigade headquarters, and so on. The enormous
amount of this wire required is explained by the fact that very little
of it was saved, it being out of the question to pick it up during the
hurry and excitement of an advance, while hundreds of miles of it were
destroyed during the heavy bombardments which usually preceded an attack.
Within the memory of many of us the size of combat armies was largely
determined by the efficiency and scope of their signal systems, it being
essential that the forces in the field should be kept within a size which
permitted of communication being maintained between all units by means of
runners, riders, or visual signals. Those were the days when messengers,
often chosen by lot, crawled through the enemy’s lines at night in order
to bring reinforcements to beleaguered garrisons; when stories of ambush
and massacre or urgent appeals for ammunition and food were brought to
headquarters by weary riders clinging to the manes of reeking ponies;
or when, in the Indian country, cavalry columns communicated with each
other by means of heliograph messages flashed from mountain-top to
mountain-top, or signal-fires curling slowly skyward.
But all this changed with the introduction of the telegraph and the
telephone, the communications of an army thereafter being limited only
by the amount of its wire. A far greater change came, however, with
the introduction of the radio or wireless, whose area of operations is
limited only by the power of the sending apparatus. Now it should be kept
in mind that each of the systems of military signalling which I have
already enumerated—telegraphs, telephones, radios, panels, lamps, flags,
pigeons, runners, dogs, and the rest—is an adjunct to the others—when
one fails, another is employed to get the message through. If the wires
of the field telegraph and telephone are cut by a barrage, the radio is
employed; if a shell knocks out the radio set, the message is intrusted
to a pigeon; should the pigeon fail, a runner attempts to take it
through; and if the runner is killed, the message can be communicated,
either by means of rockets or by cloth panels spread upon the ground, to
the aviators circling overhead.
Despite the new methods of transmitting messages produced by the war,
the telephone remains the backbone of the military signal system. Though
the portable telephone instrument used by all front-line troops was
manufactured in the United States for commercial purposes prior to the
war, the switchboard in most general use by mobile troops was originally
developed by the French, being the only telephone equipment used by the
American forces which was not of American design. This switchboard,
which was built in units so that it could be expanded from four to
twelve lines, was the “Central” of the front-line dugout, being so
compact that it could be carried as part of the equipment of a soldier
and quickly put into operation. For the use of the larger field units
there was designed a camp switchboard, with provision for forty wires,
which when in transit resembled a commercial traveller’s sample-trunk.
A third type of switchboard, for use at headquarters in the zone of
combat, but where extreme portability was not essential, was designed
in units, like a certain popular style of sectional bookcase, and could
readily be increased to any size required. An important auxiliary to the
field-telephone lines was the buzzerphone, an American device for use
where extraordinary secrecy was imperative, it being impossible for the
German Listening-in Service to eavesdrop on messages sent by this method.
[Illustration: COMMUNICATION BY USE OF PANELS.
When other means of communication is found impracticable, the infantry
can communicate with aviators by means of panels of cloth cut in various
shapes spread upon the ground.
_Photograph by Signal Corps, U. S. A._]
[Illustration: A MEMBER OF THE SIGNAL CORPS SENDING MESSAGES BY MEANS OF
A LAMP.]
Prior to the war the “lance-pole” was used exclusively by American troops
in the field, as it permitted of rapid line construction and served its
purpose admirably in open warfare. The conditions prevailing in Europe
made the use of this pole impracticable, however, and where poles were
used at all they consisted of very short stakes with special cross-arms,
miniature copies, in fact, of the commercial equipment commonly used in
the United States. The enormous mileage of the trench-lines called for
vast quantities of insulators, cross-arms, and other special fittings, in
all of which there was great wastage, for though the instruments used on
the military lines usually had a certain degree of protection, the lines
themselves were constantly exposed to artillery and airplane bombardment.
A factor which greatly complicated the supply of the front-line forces
with wire was the necessity for maintaining two-way or twisted-pair lines
in order to avoid giving information to the enemy, for the detectors used
in the German listening-posts were so highly developed that a telegraph
or telephone message sent over a “grounded” or single-conductor line was
to all intents and purposes sent direct to Berlin. This necessity for a
double-conductor line relegated the old field-wire of open warfare to
the scrap-heap, a long series of experiments being required to produce a
twisted-pair wire which was light enough to permit of easy portability
and rapid laying, strong enough to stand the strain of heavy traffic and
shell-shock, and withal so well insulated that “leaks” to the ground
might not reveal to the enemy listeners-in facts intended to be strictly
confidential. The enormous demands for all types of wire and cables which
came both from the A. E. F. and from our allies necessitated the United
States being combed for every foot of available material and the speeding
up of production until every wire-mill in America was working twenty-four
hours a day. Yet, in spite of labor troubles, housing problems, and the
difficulties of obtaining material and transportation, the wire-makers at
home filled every requirement of the soldiers overseas.
Of all the varied activities of the Signal Corps, none was more
fascinating or mysterious in its operation than the work of the Radio
Intelligence Sections, particularly the so-called listening-stations,
which, by means of supersensitive receiving and amplifying instruments
electrically connected with ground-plates placed as close as possible
to the enemy positions, were enabled to overhear the ground-telegraph
operations of the Germans and the conversation leaking from defective
or non-metallic telephone and telegraph circuits. This remarkable
service, some of whose achievements would seem to the layman to verge
on the miraculous, combined the discoveries of Ohm, Volta, and Galvani
with the methods of LeCoq and Sherlock Holmes. These stations could, of
course, operate successfully only under favorable conditions, the chief
requisites being that the enemy’s trenches should not be too far away
and that the intervening terrain should be free of creeks, gullies, or
other features which might sidetrack the currents which it was desired
to intercept. The listening-stations were usually situated in the
second line of trenches, the ground-plates being placed about 300 yards
apart. In order to obtain satisfactory results it was necessary that
the ground-plates should be placed as close to the enemy as possible,
the work of installing them, almost under the noses of the Huns, being
one of the most hazardous duties which the signal troops were called
upon to perform. The men operating the listening-stations had to remain
on duty for a week at a time—a considerably longer tour of duty than
was required, under ordinary conditions, of the infantrymen. They were
expected to possess a fluent knowledge of German and to be able to
both speak and understand it as well as they did English, though this
requirement was not always fulfilled toward the end. They were thoroughly
coached, moreover, in German military phrases and colloquialisms and had
to be proficient in recording ground-telegraphy code, which, though slow,
is extremely difficult to master. It will be seen, therefore, that the
Listening-In Service demanded of its operators continuous interest and
constant vigilance, together with a sufficiently active imagination to
enable them to piece together the broken or garbled fragments of messages
which their instruments might pick up, and to deduce from these messages
what the enemy was doing or what he intended to do. Listening-in was
very far from being a one-sided game, however, for the Germans, who were
thoroughly conversant with its possibilities and limitations, maintained
a service which was nearly, if not fully, equal to our own. The real
superiority of our service lay, not in its equipment, but in the boyish
enthusiasm of its personnel, many of whom were university undergraduates
when the war began. With them the work never assumed the aspect of a
daily task which had to be performed whether they liked it or not: they
regarded it rather as a game, interesting, fascinating, exciting. The
quickness with which they grasped the technicalities of the service was
amazing. I knew of one case where a soldier of a Listening-In Section,
wholly without previous experience in the work, overhearing a telephone
conversation in the enemy’s lines which indicated that the watches in
that sector were being synchronized, deduced that a raid on the American
trenches was being planned. He promptly acquainted the divisional
intelligence officer with his conclusions, and when the Germans launched
their attack, expecting to take the _verdamte_ Yankees completely by
surprise, they were greeted by a burst of rifle and machine-gun fire
which almost annihilated them. After the moving warfare began it was, of
course, extremely difficult to maintain these listening-stations, but
when the advance halted, even for a night, listening-stations were always
established if conditions permitted.
A far-fetched but, as it proved, entirely correct deduction was made
by the operator of a listening-post whose curiosity was aroused by the
sudden change in the nature of the conversation taking place over the
enemy’s lines, familiarity interspersed with profanity abruptly giving
way to studied politeness. From this he reasoned that a new division had
moved in during the night. Prisoners captured the next day verified his
deduction. Just before the St. Mihiel offensive one of our operators
noted that the telephone conversations between the enemy units opposite
his station had almost ceased, presumably because a troop movement was in
progress which they did not dare to discuss for fear of being overheard,
the truth being that the Germans were quietly withdrawing. Though he had
practically no conversation to guide him, this by no means discouraged
the American listener, who, by comparing the intensity of the T. P.
S. (_telegraphie par sol_) signals he overheard, deduced with amazing
accuracy the movements of the retiring troops. In comparison with such
feats of deduction, Sherlock Holmes’s ability to deduce a stranger’s
occupation from the condition of his finger-nails or the soles of his
boots seems absurdly commonplace, doesn’t it?
A youth in search of excitement beyond that usually provided by battle
could always find it by joining the Listening-In Service. In March,
1918, the American troops holding a certain sector were suddenly ordered
to retire to a second line of resistance, but through an oversight the
orders for withdrawal were not passed on to the Signal Corps men who were
operating the listening-stations out in front. Serenely unconscious,
therefore, of the fact that their comrades had fallen back and that
German raiding-parties were prowling all about them in the darkness,
they remained at their post throughout the night. It was not until the
American infantry reoccupied their original position in the morning that
the men in the listening-station learned that for eight hours they had
been the only occupants of the sector.
While crawling over No Man’s Land to repair a break in a line connecting
his station with a ground-plate, a Signal Corps man discovered a wire
leading straight toward the enemy’s position. Being of an inquiring
turn of mind, he followed it up on hands and knees until he actually
penetrated the German trenches, where he made the interesting discovery
that the enemy’s listening-station had tapped the same ground which
we were using. Needless to say, he lost no time in crawling back and
changing his ground-plates. This feat was paralleled by a soldier who
followed an American raid into the German trenches, and, unobserved
during the excitement, succeeded in attaching a wire to one of their
ground-plates which was well within their lines, and, therefore,
presumably in no danger of being tampered with. By this means he
listened-in on the enemy’s conversations for several days before his wire
was discovered and cut.
Though the work of the Radio-Intercept and Goniometric Direction-Finding
stations lacked in some measure the danger connected with that of the
ground listening-posts, it nevertheless provided many interesting
incidents in the life of the Signal Corps man. The function of
radio-intercept stations is, as their name implies, the interception of
enemy radio messages. Goniometric stations are used, on the other hand,
for locating enemy radio-stations, the work being carried on on much the
same principles as flash-ranging, which I have described at some length
in another chapter. By placing a goniometer—an instrument for measuring
angles—at each end of a base line of known length, it is a comparatively
simple matter to ascertain the angle of direction of an enemy
radio-station, and, by prolonging the lines of these angles until they
intersect, the location of the station can be approximately determined.
That done, the information was sent to the artillery, which proceeded
to sweep the vicinity in which the radio-station was known to be with
a hurricane of shell. So highly was this system of radio detection
developed that, after the salient at St. Mihiel had been cleared of
Germans, every radio-station which our Goniometric Service had located
previous to the attack was verified, the greatest error in location
being approximately 500 yards. In many cases some of the German wireless
equipment was still in the dugouts, and much interesting printed matter
was picked up. This was the first corroboration of the effectiveness of
our Radio Intelligence work.
Just as the naturalists can reconstruct from a few bones a prehistoric
monster which they have never seen, so the goniometric experts are able
to gain an amazingly accurate idea of the organization of an army by
locating its radio-stations, for the lines of radio communication which
spread fan-wise from army headquarters form a sort of skeleton, as it
were, of the army’s organization, the location of the various stations
and their distance from headquarters indicating quite accurately the
position of the corps, divisions, brigades, regiments, and battalions.
This fact was, of course, as well known to the Germans as to ourselves,
and consequently extraordinary precautions were taken to prevent the
stations from being located. Such a system of communications is known
in military parlance as a “net,” that serving an army being called an
“army net” and that of a corps a “corps net.” Just before the American
offensive was launched at St. Mihiel a false corps net was set up
considerably to the east of the point selected for the attack, this net
being operated in as close imitation as possible of the real thing.
Thousands of faked messages were sent in code, precisely as though
the movements of an army corps depended upon them, and, to add to the
verisimilitude of the proceeding, they were strongly seasoned with the
profane and violent English with which American radio operators are
accustomed to interlard their conversations. The German goniometric
operators promptly located this network of radio-stations, and as the
messages which were being transmitted appeared to be perfectly genuine,
they naturally concluded that they had discovered the unsuspected
presence of an American army corps, whereupon the German High Command
took steps to move its reserves to the area which apparently was
threatened. There is no means of knowing how effective this ingenious
stratagem really proved, but the best answer would seem to be the
surprisingly slight resistance which we encountered at St. Mihiel.
The operation of the mobile radio-stations which accompanied the
smaller infantry units was always a most hazardous and trying business,
requiring not only courage but a very high degree of resourcefulness
and self-possession. In one case that I know of a Signal Corps unit
received orders to have a trench radio-station installed at a certain
exposed point by a certain time. They followed their instructions to the
letter, but when their instruments were set up and they were ready for
business, they discovered, to their extreme annoyance, that the infantry
which was scheduled to occupy the position had failed to materialize and
that they and their radio set were well in advance of our lines. From
their position in a shell-hole they called up the regimental commander,
reported that they were located according to instructions, and inquired
what they were expected to do. Whereupon the infantry lost no time in
moving up and occupying the position which, as the signalers mockingly
asserted, they had been holding for them.
The exigencies of the Great War wrought many strange and startling
transformations. Scientists who had devoted their entire lives to
discovering methods for prolonging life turned their genius to finding
new and effective ways of taking it; the tractor of the Western
wheat-fields became the tank of the battle-fields in Flanders; the
machinery and chemicals used for the manufacture of dyestuffs were
converted to the manufacture of poisonous gases—and the dove became the
army carrier-pigeon, bearing, instead of the olive-branch of peace,
messages of battle. Though I find that many Americans seem to be under
the impression that pigeons were unreliable and comparatively little
used, they were, as a matter of fact, the most trustworthy of all the
systems of message transmission employed by the fighting armies. When
everything else failed, when the wires of the field telegraph and
telephone had been destroyed by the German shell-storms, when the radio
installations had been demolished, when the runners had been killed and
the aviators driven back by the air-barrages, it was the pigeons which
took the messages through. The official accounts of their exploits read
like the wildest fiction. Over 500 birds were used by our troops in the
St. Mihiel offensive alone. Through the messages brought by pigeons,
American Headquarters learned of the whereabout of Major Whittlesey and
his “Lost Battalion.” How trustworthy were these winged messengers is
proved by the carefully kept records of the Allied Armies, which show
that of the thousands of messages intrusted to pigeons during the four
years of the war, _96 per cent were delivered_.
The use of pigeons as messengers is as old as recorded history, the
Chinese, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all having used birds for this
purpose. Word of the victory at Waterloo was brought to England by
pigeons, and pigeons carried from New York to Washington the news that
Napoleon had signed the treaty which added Louisiana to the Union. Among
the oldest and most successful pigeon-trainers are the Belgians, many of
the best flying strains used by the French, British, and American armies
having been developed from Belgian stock. When the Hunnish hordes swept
across Belgium, one of their first measures was to confiscate or kill
all pigeons. For a Belgian to have in his possession a carrier-pigeon
was for him to risk a court martial and death before a firing-party.
Many of the pigeons taken from the Belgians were sent back to Germany
for breeding purposes, producing birds which served against their
former masters, but when the Americans established their watch on the
Rhine, they ordered the immediate release of all pigeons in the area of
occupation, thus giving thousands of feathered exiles a chance to fly
back to their old homes in Flanders.