Chapter 1
The Great War
It was called The Great War.
It would last four agonizing and murderous years,
and change the lives of its children
- and their children’s children - forever.
The bow crashed into the trough of the giant wave with a shudder. Confined below decks, the company of soldiers suffered through the cold and damp air, fouled by the rancid smell of vomit. Private Henry W. Anderson wrote in his journal,
Jan 16, 1918 Wed
Conditions rotten beyond words.
Air damp and cold.
Feeding fishes.
The RMS Carpathia, famous for rescuing the survivors of the Titanic disaster in 1912, served as a transport between America and England, ferrying troops for the Great War raging in Europe.
The year is 1918. The first leg of the trip to Halifax was cold and rough. Despite the ship’s size, 541 feet overall and 64 feet in beam, it was tossed violently in the rough seas.
Arriving finally after three days, the great liner anchored at the head of Halifax harbor awaiting the other vessels that would form a convoy to Glasgow, Scotland. The weather cleared somewhat, and on January 19, the day after making port, the soldiers were allowed on deck.
“Nice to get a bit of fresh air, eh, Andy?”
Lee Gray was from Chicago, just eighty miles as the crow flies from Andy’s family hometown of Rockford, Illinois, and had befriended the 21 year old Henry “Andy” Anderson of Santa Cruz while struggling to keep the passage rations down in the rough seas. The two young American recruits strolled the deck together, their first time at sea.
“I cannot imagine what the trip across to England will be like after that,” Andy replied, happy to breath the clean harbor air and stretch his legs on deck. “Will you look at that!”
While the European war seemed remote, there was ample evidence of the conflict even here on the coast of Canada. A massive explosion had rocked this port in Nova Scotia just over a month before when the munitions ship Mont-Blanc filled with 3000 tons of explosives bound for the war and the Belgian relief ship Imo collided. A fire started and after the crew abandoned ship, the Mont-Blanc exploded, laying waste to two and a half square miles of the city in a mostly working-class section. Two thousand were killed, and more than six thousand wounded.
The men stared in silence at the giant debris field that once had been a part of the town.
For a young man from Rockford, this had already been the trip of a lifetime. Rockford was located northwest of Chicago, and had been populated by industrious Swedish and Irish immigrants. Among them was Lars Johan Anderson of Harnesta village, Munktorp Parish, WŠstmanland, Sweden. The son of Lars Anders made his living repairing shoes in his own repair business and running the village’s commercial scales.
Andy Anderson had left home and moved to the San Francisco Bay area in April 1917 just three days before President Wilson declared war on Imperial Germany. His parents visited him in California, and so liked the area that by July his father had sold his business and moved west to San Jose. Andy’s mother Karolina, sister Ruby, and brother Sam followed by mid-September.
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The letters were all written in Andy’s schooled style, but in French. Certain phrases that I could understand caught my eye. It would take a while to piece all this together, especially using my computer translator. My first thought - who was Antoine?
I remember my mother telling me Grandpa Andy had served in France during World War I, but no one in the family really knew what he had done or where he had been. My mother had compiled a comprehensive family history that included extensive genealogy and family scrapbooks, organized by family name on both my maternal and paternal sides. I would start there.
The histories were stored in boxes in the attic. After rummaging around in the dust I managed to pull out several boxes filled with binders, some with photos and letters and another marked “Anderson, Hewitt, Kelso, and Greene; Genealogy, History.” The Hewitt line was the least known, the genealogy records stopping with an adoption. The Greene line was the longest, stretching as I remembered multiple generations before the Revolutionary War. My father’s mother was a Greene, and Nathaniel Greene, a friend of George Washington’s and a famous general in our Revolutionary War, was a direct ancestor. The Kelso line was Irish.
On my Mother’s side I was Swedish and English, an Anderson on one side and a Bond on the other. My Grandpa Andy’s parents had immigrated to America in the Northern European migrations of the late 19th century, and had settled in the Midwest. There was nothing even remotely close to an Antoine, on either my grandfather’s or grandmother’s side. I found nothing in the genealogy or the photo and letter binders either that gave me a clue who Antoine could be.
“Did you check the old box on the closet shelf?” my wife asked. I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant, but on looking further I found an old wooden box with a keyed lock on the front. Inside was a lift out shelf, and a separate compartment in the lid. It contained some old buttons, an old Boy Scout badge, and other little mementoes. Nothing of relevance to my current search, but I found my attention wandering as I carefully touched these precious little objects my mother had so carefully saved.
Lifting the shelf out, I found some old books and what appeared to be journals. There were old maps of Paris and Tours, France. Beneath these, I hit pay dirt. There was an old journal stamped with the title, “A Soldier’s Diary.” It was my Grandpa Andy’s personal diary from World War I.
I carefully opened the first page, and read,
Nov 28, 1917
Quit job at Fageol Motors.
Enlisted 660 Market St.
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Young Andy had taken his first job at the American Can Company in San Francisco, but soon moved to a position at Fageol Motors, a manufacturer of farm equipment and an ill-fated luxury car that cost $12,000 in 1920 dollars.
His job there was short lived. On November 28 he quit and enlisted in the Army, just 26 days after the first American casualties of the Great War with the grand idea of adventure “over there.” Andy had attended a private vocational school as a boy where he learned drafting and the use of machining tools, so he was given a position in the Engineering corps.
As he bade goodbye to his family, his father Lars Anderson gave him a gold cross with a simple inscription, “To Henry from Father.”
“The pastor of the church blessed it before God. It will bring you luck,” he solemnly said. Andy was moved to tears - his father never wore nor approved of jewelry.
Andy made a special point of writing to family and friends often, as was the custom of the day. He also diligently recorded each day’s events in his journal.
On December 12, 1917, after a quick orientation at Ft. McDowell on Angel Island near San Francisco, Andy boarded the Pacific Limited San Francisco. After stops in Ogden, Omaha, and Chicago, he finally detrained at Fort Devens, Massachusetts where he bunked in barracks 688. After less than a month of training, he was off to New York where he boarded the RMS Carpathia for Europe.
By the following day six other transports and two escort cruisers had joined the Carpathia. The small flotilla left Halifax harbor for the open Atlantic. The rough seas continued, but in a few days they had crossed over into the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream and the cold weather began to moderate, allowing for some fresh air time on deck. Six days out of Halifax, while Andy was taking a late morning nap below decks, the monotony of the cruise was shaken.
“Andy! Get up, man!” Lee shouted to be heard above the pounding engine drone in the steerage compartment. “The cruisers have made contact!”
He burst out of the narrow bunk. The cruisers were sounding the shrill alarm of general quarters. They sped off, boilers belching heavy black smoke, to the fringe of the convoy to the south.
The British had been convoying materials and supplies across the Atlantic in the face of the German submarine threat since the outbreak of the war, some fours years before. A tactic often used by the U-boat commander was to shadow an innocent neutral vessel. When the escorts raced off to inspect, leaving the convoy vulnerable, they would sneak in for a kill. Over the years tactics had improved, and losses reduced. One of the escorts challenged the target, an unidentified steamer, while the second steamed ahead-full in a picket line around the convoy, alert to the possibility of an unseen attack.
U-boats usually attacked at night, so this was likely a false alarm. But the potential threat was taken seriously. The ship’s alarm sounded.
“All hands on deck. Life jackets required. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill.”
The two friends scrambled quickly out of steerage to the deck, life jackets in tow, clumsily pulling them on in the process.
“Submarines?” Lee sounded out loud, excited.
“I hope not,” Andy shouted back, as they hit the deck railing.
“Get to your stations!” the unit commander screamed, running down the deck. He was a nervous fellow, so the boys below decks liked to joke, and was what Andy would later write in his journal, “a bit of a spectacle, all things considered.”
The escort cruiser cut quickly in between the Carpathia and the SS Mary Catherine, closing off a wide opening at the front of the convoy, then cut back across to race down the length of the transports again. In the rough seas the spray from the bow crashing into the sea was frightening.
“Can you imagine being on that thing?” Lee gasped. “I’d be feedin’ the fish all day.”
At the end of an hour, with all the troops crowded together, the call of “All Clear” was given. The life preservers disappeared quickly, and for a while things settled down. At least until Capt. Nervous Nellie, the “bit of a spectacle” unit commander, got all fired up.
“Not good enough,” he would say, again and again. The unit repeated the “on deck” drill all afternoon. “No, not good enough. Again!,” and they would trod back below decks, only to scramble once again topsides.
“I can’t take much more of this nonsense,” a small, wiry recruit standing next to the two friends remarked, under his breath. And for some unexplained reason, by the next day Capt. Nervous Nellie was “green to the gills,” and confined to sickbay.
Andy wrote in his journal,
Jan 28 Mon
Fine day. On deck. Convoy meets us.
Changed course.
The Carpathia arrived in Glasgow on the afternoon of January 29 with no further excitement, nine days out of Halifax. The recruits boarded a train to Carlyle and reached their destination, Camp Winnall Down.
The camp was both a staging area for troops traveling to France and a rest area for the battle weary. The unit was kept sequestered from troops recovering from front line action for the next several days. Drills and orientation followed, but it was a very short time to prepare for a trip to the front. They left the camp on February 3, and boarded the steamer Mona’s Queen at Southampton, quickly leaving port bound for Le Havre.
A seaman treated the boys to the heroic story of the “Queen Number 2” as the crew called her, the second in the line of steamers of the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company line to bear the name, Mona’s Queen. The side paddle steamer had come under attack in the English Channel on February 6, 1916. In trying to run clear of an approaching torpedo, the captain ran over the top of the partially submerged U-boat, the left side paddle wheel crashing into the conning tower. In the melee that followed, the captain tried to retire his crippled ship only to watch in amazement as the U-boat disappeared. The ship’s exploits as a sub-killer were the stuff of ever increasing grandeur as the crew told and retold the ship’s exploits to the recruits heading to the front.
“I’d be a lot happier if she had a blumin’ gun on her foredeck,” Private Gray grumbled, only to be chastised by Andy Anderson for his language.
“No need for swearing,” he would constantly remind him. Although a son of a Swedish immigrant, Anderson was a staunch Baptist - not a Lutheran. He insulated himself from the rough language of many of his fellow soldiers, and was constantly reminding his friend Lee of the sin of blasphemy.
“You’re a bit of a pain, Andy,” he would come back, but the two remained close friends throughout the voyage.
They were glad to finally be on French soil, away from the threat of German U-boats or surface raiders. The unit formed on the quay at the port of Le Havre and marched to Rest Camp #2 a few kilometers outside of the city. After a short night’s rest in bivouac, they boarded another train.
“I feel like meat going to the slaughter,” Lee groused as they rattled their way through the French countryside. They had been loaded into open boxcars, unlike the passenger trains in England and America. It was cold and damp, with little chance to rest. Andy tried to get some sleep by stretching out across the wooden floor, but awoke just before midnight. In the distance he could see the lights of Paris, but the train bypassed the City of Light heading south. He tried to sleep again, but had little success.
Trains were assigned various priorities for track time, and a boxcar load of raw recruits heading for a depot detachment behind the front lines was about as low a priority as you could get. Soldiers called the boxcar a “hom forty” from the load capacity stenciled on the side - 40 men (hommes) or 8 horses (chaveaux). It moved at a maddeningly slow pace, spending long, cold hours idled on sidings, averaging about two and a half kilometers an hour between points. So by the next day they were still heading south through the countryside.
They passed groups of German prisoners on work details. Conditions in prisoner of war camps were often deplorable - muddy, wet, and miserable. Work in the country was preferable to life in the camps, and so much better than life in the trenches.
Finally, they arrived at Blois in south central France and marched six kilometers to another rest camp where, for the first time since leaving San Francisco, they had a chance to rest. For the next six days Andy was assigned light details, and tried to keep busy.
The engineering headquarters was located in Tours, a short distance away. Tours was the point of intersection of railroads coming from the ports of Brest, Bordeaux, and St. Nazaire. Tours was the headquarters for the Services of Supply (SOS). This meant it was both a busy yet generally safe place to serve out the war. Andy had been recruited as a draftsman.
Map making was critical to the war effort, and one of the duties a devout Baptist could do and not violate his vows of nonviolence. Andy had to wait for a special waiver from the War Department to avoid trench assignments, but this was waiting for him when he arrived in Tours on February 12.
Andy was barracked in an old stable along with other members of the 447th Depot Detachment Engineers, glad to be safely away from the front, and glad to be settled in place at last.
Two days later, on February 14th, he was ordered to Paris.
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