Tag Archives: First World War

A Hundred Aprils Ago, We Entered World War I

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The Great War had been raging for almost three years by the time the U.S. declared war on Germany in April, 1917, and it was already affecting our country deeply.

*When Jack Vilas came to Hammondsport to buy an airplane in 1913, he later stated, it was clear that cash was short in the Curtiss operation.  Two years later Glenn Curtiss sold controlling interest in his company for seven million dollars in cash and stock.  The war made him a fortune, and the old Hammondsport plant — by then the smallest in Curtiss’s empire — was soon employing more people than lived in the village, straining Hammondsport and Bath beyond the limit.

*But if the war was lining local pockets by making the Curtiss company boom, it had the opposite effect on the Thomas Brothers Aeroplane Company.  As orders piled up the Thomases abandoned Bath for Ithaca, where they could find more labor, not to mention added capital needed to expand.

*Corning Glass Works was already benefiting from the war.  German lab-ware had long been considered the best on the market.  But with imports closed off, first by blockade and then by the state of war, Corning rushed into the market vacuum.  The same pattern would follow, after the war, with Christmas ornaments — buying German was no longer popular.

*In fact, nothing German was popular.  Germania Winery in Hammondsport changed its name (temporarily) to Jermania.  The fact that many vinters (Frey and Freidell in Hammondsport, Widmer and Reisinger in Naples) and brewers (Schwarzenbach in Hornell) had German names fueled demands for Prohibition, on the theory that debilitating America through alcohol was a German plot.

*The buildup to the declaration of war took weeks, giving German nationals a chance to flee the country, often for neutral Mexico (Canada being already at war).  Citizens of other Central Powers may have done the same, though we didn’t go to war with Austria-Hungary until December, and never declared war on Bulgaria or the Ottoman Empire.

*With much of the French and Belgian agricultural heartland in enemy hands, and with Britain requiring massive food imports even in the best of times, agricultural prices boomed.  Since it was clear that large numbers of young farmhands would soon be going into uniform, and also clear that the money was flowing well, many farmers turned to mechanization.  The Extension Service sponsored tractor workshops in Hornell, and many farmers invested.  This modernization marked a turning point in local agriculture, but when the war ended abruptly and unexpectedly in 1918, many farmers found themselves with low farm prices and high monthly payments.  The first component of the Great Depression was in place, more than a decade before the stock market crash.

*Crashing demand for grapes and wine also hurt locally, and so did the closure of the Curtiss plant with the end of the war.

*The lads in their hundreds came in for the war. Some experienced it as an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. For others, it was the end of their lives… we’ll see more about that in another column. Women too now wore America’s uniform, for the first time in America’s history. Members of the Army Nurse Corps were not contractors, or civilian employees. They were military personnel. In 1909 the army asked Jane Delano of Montour Falls to take command. She blended the Corps with the Red Cross Nursing Service and with the American Nurses Association… both of which she also headed. She was frantically preparing for on oncoming gigantic war which she, almost alone, had seen on the horizon.

*Besides advancing into the army, women also won the vote in New York, thanks to a statewide referendum in November, 1917. All-male voters had turned it down two years earlier… men in Steuben, Chemung, Schuyler, and Yates STILL voted no… but New York women had full voting rights as of 1918, two years ahead of national women’s suffrage.

*Corning and Painted Post between them fielded three Home Defense Unit companies, complete with uniforms and rifles. Given that we already had an army, navy, reserves, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and National Guard… and the fact that no attack on Corning seemed imminent… these units were pretty much superfluous and soon quit drilling, becoming largely ceremonial.

*Rationing, spy scares, and Liberty Bonds still lay ahead. Stay tuned!

World War I in the Air

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Glenn Curtiss had war on his mind practically from the first time he took his seat in an airplane. He practiced dropping mock bombs onto a mock battleship on Keuka Lake. He flew an army officer who sat on the wing and fired his Springfield rifle at a ground target, despite fears that the recoil might throw the airplane out of control. As cadets cheered when he flew over West Point in 1910, he was brooding on how easy it would be to bomb the place.

*There had been crude uses of airplanes in battle before the Great War. At least three American pilots, flying airplanes from three manufacturers, had contracts to fly and drop bombs for various factions in Mexico. On one of our many invasions of Mexico, a Curtiss seaplane took minor damage from ground fire near Vera Cruz, for the first combat flight in U.S. history.

*Our Curtiss Jennys searched for Pancho Villa in Mexico. They never found him, and they all broke down. Their open cockpits flooded in thunderstorms, and they told horror stories about carving new propellers with a jackknife. (Just tall tales… you can’t do that.)

*Still, for most militaries, the only real use they could think of was scouting. In maneuvers off Cuba, Curtiss seaplanes spotted an approaching enemy fleet, giving their own fleet enough warning to meet the mock attack. Future admiral John Towers in an airplane spotted a submerged submarine commanded by future admiral Chester Nimitz, kicking off decades of very cranky relations between the two.

*In 1903, Wright brothers made first airplane flight. In 1906, Santos-Dumont made the first flight in Europe. In 1908, Curtiss and his associates made their first flights.

*But by 1909, when Curtiss flew spectacularly in the Grande Semaine d’Aviation in Reims, he was the only American pilot, and he had the only American-built airplane. How and why had the Europeans advanced so rapidly in just three years?

*Although some would argue otherwise, and although their effect may be overstated, I think that the Wright patent suits had some chilling effect on American research and development. But more important than what we DIDN’T do is what the Europeans DID do, and what circumstances drove them.

*Simply put, military aviation posed no threat to America. Neither Mexico nor Canada was likely to send swarms of warplanes across the border, and if they had they’d only have been threatening El Paso or Bar Harbor.

*All the strong European nations, on the other hand, had OTHER strong European nations right on their borders. They had to know what the guy on the other side of the hill was doing, and preferably they had to stay one jump ahead of him.

*This urgency only deepened, of course, once war actually got under way. So Europeans had an incentive, even a desperation, to innovate in their military aviation, where America did not. Even once Europe was at war, we still took a lackadaisical approach, with the result that with one exception, no American-designed airplanes were used in World War I combat, because none of them were equal to World War I combat. Our pilots flew British and French designs, such as SPADs.

*Besides airplanes, Europeans, especially Germans, were also ahead in airSHIPS… lighter-than-air craft, most famously the Zeppelins.
But what the powers were still lacking was a doctrine for the use of aircraft – a set of ideas as to how they were best employed. When doctrine was developed, it often embodied wooly thinking about this perplexing new invention. (Remember that almost all the top political and military leadership were born BEFORE the Civil War.)

*Even so, the First WORLD War was the first AIR war. And that’s the topic of the free presentation I’ll be giving for the next Steuben County Historical Society Winter Lecture, 4 PM Friday March 4 at Bath Fire Hall. Hope you’ll join us!