Tag Archives: Great War

“Merchants of Death”?

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World War I begins what I call “the Hell Years” (copyright!) – the Great War, the Spanish influenza, the postwar recession, Prohibition, the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, the Great Depression, and World War II.

Here at home, many Americans did very well on the Great War – so much so that some postwar analysts traced our declaration of war to the “Merchants of Death” who made fortunes making, selling, and financing military supplies.

That vastly oversimplified things, but many ordinary people legitimately made good money for a short time, right here in the Finger Lakes, in new industries that blossomed with the war, and would largely shrivel after it.

The most obvious example was GLENN CURTISS. He had just started producing a decent training plane, the Curtiss Jenny, and the British quickly ordered 250, then ran the numbers up into thousands. They also wanted seaplanes, and although the Curtiss shop in Hammondsport was quickly running 24-6, it was noplace near enough. He built, bought, or leased huge new factories in Buffalo, as the Hammondsport plant switched over to all engine production, especially the 90-hp OX-5, to get the Allies into the air.

Glenn employed almost 3000 people just in Hammondsport, but even with his Buffalo plants it still wasn’t enough. The Willys-Morrow factory in Elmira made Curtiss engines and Liberty engines under license, employing women and old men to help make up the numbers. We hear a lot about Rosie the Riveter in World War II, but we should also remember Wanda the Welder (copyright!) from World War I. Women had been working in American factories ever since the factories were created. Now more than ever, with millions of young men in uniform, they were needed. Neta Snook, who later taught Amelia Earhart to fly, worked in Elmira as an expediter for the British government.

As for the old folks, there was no social safety net in those days. You worked until you couldn’t and then you probably died pretty quickly, because you couldn’t pay for food, clothing, housing, or medical care. If you couldn’t work you also had no economic value, so the economy got no benefit from you continuing to hang around.

Up in Geneva, boatmaker Fay & Bowen built hulls for Curtiss seaplanes.

Several fellows who had cut their teeth at Curtiss had opened the Thomas Brothers Aeroplane Company in Bath, but they, like Glenn, had to expand when the war broke out in 1914. Six months later they had shifted to the larger town of Ithaca and forged a merger with Morse Chain Company. Thomas-Morse manufactured airplanes, especially the Thomas-Morse “Scout,” in respectable numbers.

Taylor Instruments in Rochester had been in business for over half a century before the first airplane flew. But by 1914 they were already supplying Curtiss, Thomas, and others with altimeters and other instruments (often under the Tycos brand) needed for flight. Sometimes the instrument face bore the name of the buyer, such as Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company.

By 1916 Ingersoll-Rand in Painted Post employed over 800 men and “several score” of women, and the shops were “running night and day, on war materials for the British and allied governments.” The Rand manufactured ammunition, or more precisely it made shells, with the powder and projectiles installed elsewhere. On a smaller scale Corning Glass Works supplied optical glass for the same governments. They bought Steuben Glass at this time, since the main company was unaccustomed to precision work.

Both the Rand and the Glass Works were patrolled by armed guards, with admission by pass. The Curtiss plant had a scare when a couple of former employees were arrested for espionage, but while details on output might have interested the Central Powers, by that stage Curtiss didn’t have any secrets worth pirating. Some employees were also charged with sabotage, for passing through unacceptable materials in order to make quotas.

No one was expecting war in early June of 1914, but it exploded two months later. By October the New York Times reported that the Curtiss plant was running ’round the clock, six days a week. By year’s end Ingersoll-Rand was filling two boxcars with shells every day. By January Thomas was relocated in Ithaca. By spring Curtiss broke ground for huge new factories in Buffalo. It was good money while it lasted, but tens of thousands would be unemployed without warning, when the Armistice was signed in 1918.

11-11-11

Back in 2008, I was at Dick Kurzenberger’s 90th birthday party in the National Soaring Museum. “Dick,” I asked, “were you actually born ON Armistice Day?”

With his usual big smile, he assured me that he was, and I had visions of Dick being born as bells rang and flags waved and everybody burst out singing. But his obituary a few years later told me that Dick had been born November 11, 1918 IN GERMANY. Now my vision was completely different – a baby boy coming into a world of fear, despair, and defeat.

World War I ended at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The effect had been spoiled a bit by the “false armistice” a few days earlier, when a newspaper reporter’s draft article was mistakenly sent out to the world. But it was for real this time. Businesses closed. Bath, Penn Yan, and Hammondsport had impromptu parades and motorcades. Steuben County’s monthly draft contingent was held at Addison, then told to change trains and go back home. People lined up to pay a quarter (benefit of Red Cross) and ring the Bath fire bell. “Mark this date down in your calendar,” the Hammondsport Herald wrote while monarchies crashed, “as the last day of the Middle Ages.”

Over in England the bells rang and townsfolk shouted in celebration as Wilfred Owen’s parents were handed a telegram. Their son had been killed in action, exactly seven days before. “What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?,” he had written a year earlier. “What candles may be held to speed them all?”

There were downsides to the peace. Within a few weeks the Curtiss Hammondsport plant closed for good, throwing 600 people or so out of work. As agricultural prices collapsed, many farmers staggered under time payments for equipment they had bought while the hands were off in uniform. On top of that, the Spanish influenza was still killing millions.

Over in Germany the fleet had mutinied, the Kaiser fled the country, Communist uprisings seized many local governments. Even before truce negotiations, millions of soldiers had already dropped their guns and started walking home. Corporal Adolf Hitler went hysterically blind.

Pat Buchanan insists that the Allies double-crossed Germany – that Germany only wanted a temporary cease-fire for peace talks, and the Allies forced a surrender. But an “armistice” was only face-saving. The top generals had ordered the Kaiser to quit, and the government to surrender. They had lost, and they knew it, and a quick surrender was the only way to stop complete chaos.

Soldiers soon “forgot” that they had deserted in millions, and the generals proclaimed that THEY hadn’t lost the war, no sir… they’d still have pulled it out, but they were stabbed in the back by civilians – especially socialists, diplomats, and Jews.

Germans were appalled and enraged by how HARSH the peace terms were, though actually they were based on the terms that Germany forced onto France in 1871. Loss of territory. Occupation of territory. Expensive reparations. Plus they lost their emperor, and had to substitute a struggling republican government. All of which seemed utterly unreasonable when applied TO Germany, rather than BY Germany.

Reparations for France and Belgium seem more reasonable when we remember that Germany laid plans long before the war to rule any conquered ground with mass murder, and that’s exactly what they did. In addition to that they stole much of the occupied territories’ industry and took it back to Germany, and as they retreated they destroyed what was left.

German voters rejected Hitler, of course – repeatedly – and he was shoehorned into power by a backroom deal. At the heart of the deal was the filthy truth that President von Hindenburg had decided to destroy democracy… in collaboration with the generals, the industrialists, the financiers, the Catholics, the monarchists, the Nazis, the other right-wing groups, and most of the Protestants.

France, of course, in similar straits following 1870, had pulled itself together, paid its reparations AHEAD of time, and built an honest-to-goodness democracy. The 1918 Armistice ended the Great War, but it didn’t deliver the new world that most people dreamed of. But the problem wasn’t with the peace, or even with the Treaty of Versailles. Germany, Russia, Italy, and Japan were not doomed by destiny. They had plenty of choices on how to use the peace. The choices they made were bad, and they dragged the rest of the world down with them.

Life as a World War I Doughboy

America has always lived a lot of its life by wishful thinking. When we got into World War I, in 1917, the war had already been going on for almost three years. And we weren’t the slightest bit ready.

*Out navy was in adequate shape, thanks in part to Franklin D. Roosevelt, our energetic young assistant secretary of that department. But our army was small and ill-equipped, and horribly unprepared. General Pershing was the only officer who had commanded anything larger than a regiment in the field.

*We beat the recruiting drum to expand our army rapidly, and we started a draft. But even once we got men into the boot camps and induction centers, we often couldn’t give them weapons, or even uniforms. Once our men got to France, many of them would be using British or French rifles, helmets, and artillery.

*American women were in uniform for the first time, mostly as nurses, and in that area we WERE fairly well prepared. Jane Delano of Watkins Glen headed up Red Cross nursing AND army nursing. She had foreseen a large war on the horizon, and worked to prepare both programs.

*The government commissioned Red Cross and similar agencies to provide care and support for the troops overseas. To finance this, those agencies were given the exclusive right to sell cigarettes to the soldiers, and even men in hospital deathbeds went without smokes unless they ponied up the price of a pack.

*By the way, prewar Americans considered cigarettes an affectation of gigolos and lounge lizards. REAL men smoked cigars or pipes. The war changed all that.

*Likewise men in the prewar carried pocket watches; wrist watches were for women. But in the midst of combat the pocket watch was clearly impractical, and wrist watches became standard wear.

*Assuming he got American equipment, the infantry soldier was probably using a 1903 Springfield rifle, bolt-action and clip-fed, with a five-round magazine. Khaki and olive drab had been adopted in ’03, so at least our men were wearing reasonable colors for modern combat. They got the “Smoky Bear” hat in 1911, but in action mostly wore the British soupbowl “tin hat” or the more substantial French helmet. They also wore puttees, a “mummy wrap” around the lower leg, theoretically serving to keep mud off the uniform.

*Thousands of local fellows served in the war, and scores died. At 4 PM on Friday, April 5, Dave Clark will attend a Steuben County Historical Society presentation in uniform as his great-uncle, PFC Steven Smith, giving us a “first-hand” account of life in the trenches. The free event is at Centenary Methodist Church in Bath. We hope you’ll join us.

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!