Donald M. Bishop ‘67
Alum Contributor
The armistice ending the war took effect at the eleventh hour, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. That day did not, however, end the service of Trinity alumni.
The armistice required the immediate release of prisoners of war. At some camps in Germany, the guards simply opened the gates to let the prisoners walk to France. Walter Stanley Schutz ’94 and another YMCA colleague gathered medical supplies and food to meet hungry, exhausted and injured American POWs crossing into France from Baden. In the months that followed, he worked in Poland.
Clifford Ernest Hodder ’20 had moved from the 101st Machine Gun Battalion to I Corps’ Special Troops, and he had been rapidly promoted. In the months before and after the armistice, he was First Sergeant of the Kitchen Car Service—providing hundreds of meals on long hospital trains carrying wounded soldiers to hospitals or ports of embarkation.
There were two million doughboys in France. All wanted to go home, but limited transatlantic shipping meant that they had to wait. Some did not reach the U.S. until the summer of 1919; they waited in camps and groused about the “training” demanded by headquarters, wary that “idle hands are the devil’s playground.” They visited “Gay Paree.” The Red Cross, YMCA and other service organizations continued their recreation huts and hosting visits by entertainers. Unit teams vied in sports while rumors of departure abounded. A few soldiers studied at universities in France and England. Most were marking time and some became unruly, but there was still work to do.
A month after the Armistice, Brigadier General James Brailsford Erwin ’75 left his 12th Infantry Brigade to take command of the 92nd “Buffalo” Division of African American soldiers. He commanded the Division until it was demobilized at Camp Meade, Maryland, in February of 1919.
A journalist and publishing executive after he graduated from Trinity, John Jay Whitehead ’14 enlisted in the Army as a private in February of 1918 and was commissioned that September. After the armistice, he was attached to the American Commission to Negotiate Peace as a diplomatic courier and then to the American Legation in Brussels. He was discharged in August of 1919.
The Occupation of Germany
General Pershing immediately organized a force to occupy a portion of Germany’s Rhineland. In early 1919, the new Third Army’s strength was 240,000 soldiers and Marines.
Archibald Morrison Langford ’97 had been captain of Trinity’s football team. Twenty years later he joined the Army for the war. His unit, the 1st Regiment of Pioneer Infantry, trained as infantry and combat engineers and had also repaired and built roads and bridges in three campaigns. Captain Langford marched with the regiment as it crossed the Rhine on a pontoon bridge into Coblenz, Germany, one of three Allied bridgeheads.
Second Lieutenant Woolsey McAlpine Pollock ’19 had served in combat with the 101st Machine Gun Battalion, received a commission and fought with the 355th Infantry Regiment in the 89th Division at St. Mihiel and the Argonne. He spent the first part of 1919 in the occupation of Saarburg, Germany. The regiment’s mission was to patrol a 10-kilometer-wide neutral zone between the occupied areas and unoccupied Germany.
Second Lieutenant Felix Emil Baridon ’14, another veteran of the 101st Machine Gun Battalion who was later commissioned, was with 3rd Division troops in Koblenz. With the 4th Division near Bad Bertrich was Captain John B. Barnwell ’17. First Lieutenant Earl Blanchard Ramsdell ’11 was with the 7th Division, and on the 32nd Division staff was Major Michael Augustine Connor ’09. Trinity’s Marines—including Corporal William Lawrence Peck ’17—were headquartered in Niederbieber; they were in the forward outpost line of the occupation.
Corporal Thomas Gilbert Brown ’13 served in the 51st Pioneer Infantry Regiment in France and the occupation of Cochem, Germany. There, he wrote the poem “To Trinity’s Dead in the Great War.” Among its lines were:
Ye were men of Trinity.
We knew you when ye first beheld
The crimsoned shores of wounded France
With eyes that over-reached the hills,
Some flash of war’s grim face to catch
As blew on wings of circumstances;
Some foretaste of that venture great
From obdurate destiny to snatch.
Before leaving Europe, Brown studied at the University of Paris. After the war he taught at Dartmouth and worked on the editorial staff of the New York Herald Tribune.
Edmund Crawford Thomas ’03 was ordained after studying at Berkeley Divinity School, serving as rector at St. James Church in Hartford from 1912 to 1946. During the war, he was Chaplain of the 58th Pioneer Infantry Regiment, organized from elements of the Connecticut National Guard. While the regiment remained in the U.S. during the war, Thomas served in France and in the occupation of Germany. An Army study reported that “approximately 25 percent of the men enrolled under the Selective Service System during World War I were illiterate.” In the Rhineland, chaplains were also tasked to establish schools to teach the nearly 10,000 illiterate soldiers in the ranks of the U.S. Third Army to read—a highly successful initiative.
Postwar Tumult
The end to both the fighting on the Western Front and the occupation of Germany were orderly. but the end of four empires—German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian—left vacuums. The Versailles peace conference did not ensure a tidy resolution of all the aspirations and claims. New ideals, from national self-determination to Bolshevism, rushed into the lands that had been part of the empires. The U.S. was uninvolved, but there were allied occupations in Albania, Romania and Thessaly. There were regional wars in Eastern Europe.
During the war, McWalter Bernard E. Sutton ’99 was an Army doctor serving on the troopship SS Kroonland during crossings of the Atlantic. In 1919, he accompanied a mission by American Red Cross volunteers to rescue hundreds of orphaned and abandoned children left stranded due to the Russian Civil War.
The civil war between the Reds and Whites in Russia reached as far as Vladivostok on the Pacific, and a small number of American troops were there from 1918 to 1920. While the US Navy was focused on fighting U-boats and carrying American divisions to Europe, Navy Ensign Lowell T. Lyon ’16 sailed on the USS Saturn, based out of Mare Island, California, routinely carrying supplies to Alaska. In January of 1919, the ship delivered supplies for a new Naval Radio Station in Vladivostok.
Lieutenant Colonel Charles Thomas Smart ’00 spent most of the war with the 15th Infantry Regiment in Tianjin, China. But as the troops of the Czech Legion fled the Bolsheviks, they fought their way across Asiatic Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Thomas was sent to Vladivostok to help arrange the Czechs’ onward passage to France.
After the war, Herman Thomas Morgan ’08 joined the American Relief Administration in the Balkans. The ARA, led by Herbert Hoover, provided food aid to desperate populations in the wake of the war. He was twice decorated by the Romanian government.
After the war in France ended, Poland’s Blue Army—with Lieutenant Jan Henry Rucinski ’17 in an artillery unit (see part 8 of this series)—deployed to Poland to defend the new nation’s independence against a Bolshevik invasion, and it fought Ukrainian troops hoping to seize some of the territory of the Polish republic. Alas, the Blue Army was not free of Polish antisemitism. More research would be necessary to know whether Rucinski’s unit was tarnished by anti-Jewish atrocities. Interestingly, he married Edith Mary Callow of Toronto, the English secretary of Helena Paderewska, wife of the celebrated musician who became Prime Minister of Poland in 1919.
Most of the Trinity alumni serving in or with the American Expeditionary Forces in France and Italy went back home as soon as possible. In Hartford and other cities, they were cheered at victory parades. A few returned to the College to complete their degrees, but most began or resumed their careers.
A few, however, had a chance to see how the war reordered Europe. We can count the Treaty of Versailles, the occupation of Germany, battles in Eastern Europe, the armed ideologies and relief to hungry populations among the aftermaths of the war. Or we can see the same events as early chapters in the coming of the Second World War. Either way, Trinity alumni were there.
This article is the 14th part of an ongoing series, with new installments releasing on Sundays. For part 13, click here. Part 15 will be released Feb. 16, 2025.
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