Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

  Young men and boys from all over the New York City metropolitan area volunteered, so that by the end of July the ranks were filled. On Monday, August 24, the 165th Infantry was mobilized at its armory on Manhattan’s Lexington Avenue. It paraded north on Fifth Avenue, the regimental band blaring “Garry Owen,” while a cordon of police kept back crowds of cheering New Yorkers.

  Sobbing mothers, wives, and sweethearts tried to break through the police to kiss the boys a last good-bye. The regiment marched to 48th Street and then to the East River, where it boarded the 34th Street Ferry for the trip to Long Island City. There a train waited to carry the men to Mineola, Long Island. The regiment was to be trained at Camp Mills, a vast array of tents that covered the level fields adjoining the Mineola Aviation Field and that in time would house 27,000 soldiers.

  When America declared war, Bill Donovan, learning that former President Theodore Roosevelt had offered to raise four volunteer divisions to go to France, got in touch with his boyhood hero and asked to serve under his command. Roosevelt had heard of the commander of Troop I who had made his unit one of the crack cavalry outfits in America. The old Rough Rider saw that Donovan was a man after his own heart. Donovan would serve as a lieutenant colonel.

  Congress voted to authorize Roosevelt to raise his volunteers, but President Wilson refused to allow him to do so. He claimed that Roosevelt’s divisions would attract too many capable Regular Army officers and would undercut the draft, which was Wilson’s answer to America’s manpower needs. He also accused Roosevelt, who had opposed him in the 1912 election, of seeking to advance his political fortunes through a military adventure. Wilson sent Roosevelt a blunt notice that he was to halt his efforts to raise the force.

  On May 21, Roosevelt consulted with Bill Donovan and 19 other proposed leaders of the divisions by telephone and wire, and decided to give up his plan. He sent a message to each of his commanders. “I now release you and all your men,” Donovan read with anger and disappointment.

  I wish to express my deep sense of obligation to you and to all those who had volunteered under and in connection with this division.

  As you doubtless know, I am very proud of the Rough Riders, the First Volunteer Cavalry, with whom I served in the Spanish-American War. I believe it is a just and truthful statement of the facts when I say that this regiment did as well as any of the admirable regular regiments with which it served in the Santiago campaign. It was raised, armed, equipped, drilled, mounted, dismounted, kept two weeks aboard transports, and put through two victorious aggressive fights in which it lost one third of the officers and one fifth of the men; all within sixty days from the time I received my commission.

  If the President had permitted me to raise the four divisions, I am certain that they would have equaled this record, only on a hundredfold larger scale. They would have all been on the firing line before or shortly after the draft army had begun to assemble; and moreover they could have been indefinitely reinforced, so that they would have grown continually stronger and more efficient.

  I regret from the standpoint of the country that your services were not utilized. But the country has every reason to be proud of the zeal, patriotism, and businesslike efficiency with which you came forward.

  Bill Donovan was not to serve in the Great War under the command of his boyhood hero, but he intended at least to serve. He accepted an assignment as assistant chief of staff of the 27th Division, a safe berth that would insure a man of his military acumen ready advancement. He was offered the rank of colonel, and Buffalonians, meeting him on the street or at the Buffalo Club, congratulated him. One evening Donovan spoke at a war rally held in Buffalo’s Convention Hall.

  “The test of citizenship is our willingness to affix our signatures to an oath of enlistment and delivering that oath to a recruiting officer,” he stated. “Our flag has meant a country of peace and comfort and happiness, but now it stands as a symbol of service and of sacrifice.”

  Even as he was talking, Donovan was intriguing to get himself transferred from the 27th Division headquarters, where life promised to be much too quiet for a man of his temperament and ambition. He had observed the Fighting 69th on the Mexican border, and he was convinced that the regiment’s spirit was bound to carry it into the hottest of the fighting in France. The 69th was Irish, and within the now successful Buffalo lawyer still beat the heart of the 12-year-old boy who had won a medal for his declamation of a poem about leading Irish hosts into battle.

  Father Duffy wrote of Donovan in his journal, “Everybody knew that he could get higher rank by staying with the 27th Division, but he preferred to join our Regiment, especially now that it is to be the first in the fray, and he would rather be Major than Colonel, for in battles, as now conducted, it is Majors who command in the actual fighting.”

  John Cassidy, then a 16-year-old private, remembered the day that Major Donovan arrived to take command of the First Battalion of the 165th. Donovan walked the company streets with Capt. Tom Riley, who was six feet six inches tall. The new commanding officer was shorter than his companion, but to the watching men he appeared a good half-foot taller.

  “Tom, what the hell is this?” Donovan demanded, looking about him at the new recruits. “A regiment or a mob?”

  Donovan had brought along several dozen pairs of boxing gloves, and he soon had the men in his command squaring off in a boxing tournament. He led the soldiers on 4-mile cross-country runs, in which he invariably returned to camp fresher than any of the men, who were mostly in their teens or early 20s.

  Duffy noted that Donovan, now in his mid-30s, was “very attractive in face and manner, an athlete who always keeps himself in perfect condition. I like him for his agreeable disposition, his fine character, his alert and eager intelligence. But I certainly would not want to be in his battalion.”

  Sergeant Mike Donaldson, a redoubtable giant of a man, was acknowledged the boxing champion of the regiment. One day he asked the First Battalion’s CO to put on the gloves with him. Donovan smiled in a gentle sort of way and demurred, but when he saw that dozens of men had clustered around and were expecting him to take up the challenge, he slipped on a pair of gloves. Those angry hours of boxing his brother in the barn behind his boyhood home made him confident. As the big man flailed and slugged at him, Donovan danced lightly about, jabbing him in the face. Finally a blow struck the sergeant full on the jaw, and he sank to his knees.

  “Holy Christ,” remembered a soldier who watched the battle between the regiment’s champion and the officer. “Donovan put the gloves on with him one time. Donaldson couldn’t touch him.”

  Reveille for the 165th Infantry at Camp Mills was at 4:50 A.M., and in Donovan’s regiment there were no slugabeds. “All right, men!” he’d shout, sometimes bursting right into their tents. “Three minutes to make up your cots, and then out here on the double. Full packs today!”

  After an hour of exercises there would be a strenuous hike or run before breakfast. There were drill at formations, bayonet practice with dummies, and sitting-up exercises, the latter considered the very latest in physical conditioning. Sometimes the men played baseball or football or boxed, and when there was nothing else to do, Donovan led his battalion on another cross-country run. Evening mess was at 6:00 P.M.

  “Our gathering place was Camp Mills, Long Island,” Sgt. Dick O’Neill, later to earn the Congressional Medal of Honor, said after the war. “It was here that they started to turn us into a division. And it was here that I got to know our battalion commander, Major William Joseph Donovan. Now, let me point out that my son is named William Donovan O’Neill; that should tell you what I thought about him. He surely worked us that summer at Mills. But I ask you, was there any other way to get us ready for what was coming?”

  Donovan had rented a tiny house close by the camp, and Ruth and young David lived there. Usually he spent the night with his family. On September 17, Vincent Donovan was ordained a priest at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C
., a matter of great pride and satisfaction to his brother. When soon afterward Ruth gave birth to a girl, Bill Donovan hoped that his brother could christen her. Instead Father Duffy baptized the infant, with holy water sprinkled from an army canteen. To Father Duffy, the 69th was “Irish by adoption, Irish by conviction, Irish by association,” since only 5 percent of the men enlisted in it were not of Irish ancestry. He had dedicated the regiment to St. Patrick, and it made the men of Donovan’s command proud that their CO had chosen the name Patricia for his child, whom they adopted as a daughter of the regiment.

  Back in New York City the celebrated Irish tenor John McCormack sang a concert at the Hippodrome and the New York Giants played an exhibition game at the Polo Grounds to raise money for the Fighting 69th’s recreation fund. McCormack came to sing for the boys at the camp too, and there was scarcely a dry eye as he sang Irish song after Irish song.

  One day Joyce Kilmer, one of America’s best-known poets, joined Donovan’s battalion. He had two sons and two daughters, and with his gentle ways hardly seemed the sort of man who would volunteer to be among the first overseas. But he too had responded to the wave of patriotism sweeping New York City.

  Lieutenant Oliver Ames reported for duty with Donovan’s battalion in September. A member of the Harvard University Regiment, Ames had attended the 1916 Plattsburg, New York, camp for young officers, finishing his training in May. On October 6, Ames married Caroline Lee Fessenden, to whom he was to write some of the most deeply moving accounts of the events that awaited the regiment in France.

  The 165th New York was combined with the 166th Ohio to make up the 83rd Brigade, commanded by Brig. Gen. Michael J. Lenahan. After the war, General Lenahan recalled that it was “urgent to land another combat division in France as soon as possible to augment Regular Army troops. The men selected were those of the highest caliber and those nearly ready for immediate field service, the elite of the National Guard.”

  How prepared were these men? Bill Donovan was not so sure. “There was no rifle range at Camp Mills,” he said later, “and none of the men had any real training as marksmen.”

  In early September, former President Theodore Roosevelt came to Camp Mills to visit General Lenahan, an old friend. When the soldiers discovered the unmistakable bulk of one of America’s most popular figures coming out of their leader’s tent, they set up a loud cheer. Donovan found himself cheering with the rest. The men shouted for a speech, and Roosevelt silenced them with a jaunty wave of his hand. He said that he wished he could go with them. Donovan shook his hand, and Roosevelt asked that he bring his four captains in the First Battalion out to his home in Oyster Bay to dine with him. On September 8, Roosevelt wrote a letter to his son Archibald Bulloch Roosevelt, already serving in France.

  Last evening Major Donovan of the 165th (who would have been a lieutenant colonel in my division) and his four captains dined here. They hope to go abroad in two or three weeks; and then I hope they will see you. They have good fighting stuff in them. Their regiment was at Mineola where I visited it; it is built around the old 69th N.Y.N.G. as a nucleus. They are having difficulties not only with their multitude of raw recruits but with some of the elderly regular officers; for the War Department is paying an amount of attention to seniority that inevitably means much slurring of merit and promotion of demerit.

  Roosevelt could well have been writing about Donovan, who had been recommended by a board of officers to serve as a colonel of the 165th Infantry but did not receive the post because army regulations required that it be given to a Regular Army officer.

  Donovan, fresh from dining with the vigorous Roosevelt, renewed his efforts to shape his battalion into a fighting force. The autumn weeks were passing, and Donovan expected to receive his marching orders almost any day. In Europe the Allies awaited the arrival of American troops to break the stalemate.

  The men also knew that their marching orders would soon be issued, and fear and excitement spread through the camp. There were last farewells with loved ones, and then, when the orders did not come as expected, still more last farewells. Bill Donovan spent as much time as he could with Ruth and the children. He held his new baby on his knee and put his arm around his son’s slender waist as if he could never hug his children enough. Ruth watched and suppressed her tears.

  In the battalion streets between the tents, Father Duffy walked, his hands folded behind him in meditation. When his eyes met those of a worried young soldier, he gave him what Alexander Woollcott, then a correspondent for the army newspaper, Stars and Stripes, called “the heart-warming benediction of Father Duffy’s smile. I seem to remember it more often that not as a mutinous smile, the eyes dancing, the lips puckering as if his conscientious sobriety as a priest was once more engaged in its long, losing fight with his inner amusement at the world.”

  His smile was infectious, but after Father Duffy had passed by, the men felt fear return. Joyce Kilmer noted in his journal: “Twice secret orders to sail were received at Regimental Headquarters, and twice these orders were hastily countermanded. The suspense began to tell on officers and men, to tell even more, perhaps, on those to whom they had again and again to say good-bye.”

  At last, on the night of October 25, 1917, Major Donovan led the First Battalion through the dark camp and down the silent lanes to the long train that was to take them to Montreal. “And now there were no crowds, there was no music,” wrote Kilmer. “It was a journey more momentous, greater in historical importance, than its flower and flag decked setting forth for Camp Mills. But it was not like those memorable events, a time for music and pomp. The feeling of the officers and men was one of stern delight, of that strange religious exaltation with which men of Celtic race and faith go into battle.”

  Donovan at last was leading his fellow Irish-Americans in war. As the troop train rumbled through the night on its way to the Canadian border, Father Duffy passed from car to car, hearing confessions and giving absolution. He blessed rosaries and crucifixes presented to the young soldiers by their mothers. Donovan’s battalion was the first unit of the 165th to leave for France. The rest of the regiment remained at Camp Mills, preparing to sail on November 11.

  When the train reached Montreal, it proceeded to the waterfront over tracks usually reserved for freight shipments. Tight security was observed as the men went aboard the rust-streaked SS Tunisian. German submarines operating in the North Atlantic must not learn that a troopship was about to sail from Montreal for England. At eight o’clock on the morning of October 27, the Tunisian dropped down the St. Lawrence River with the men hiding below decks so that German spies could not see them. Once the ship was out on the wide Gulf of St. Lawrence, far below Quebec City, the men crowded up on deck to get their last look at North America. Few of them had ever been on the ocean, and their first sight of its rolling vastness filled them with dismay that at least lessened their preoccupation with the German army or even the U-boats that might be lurking ahead.

  One day before the Tunisian docked in Liverpool, England, Oliver Ames wrote to his parents in Boston: “If you ever want to appreciate your family and friends, just try a 3,000-mile trip across the ocean in a rotten little tub, a huge life preserver with you every minute, and a feeling every minute that you may have to swim for it, and the water looking oh, so cold, to say nothing of the glorious future of participating in an Allied drive in the spring which may bring you glory and martyrdom; I wonder how I’ll like to be a martyr; my chief occupation on the trip has been one long attempt to persuade myself I’ll like it.”

  On November 10, with a year and a day of war still to go, the Tunisian docked at Liverpool. The men, toting their packs, went ashore and boarded a waiting train that rolled across the rain-soaked English countryside to Southampton. When the battalion reached Southampton, it was quartered in a bleak rest camp. In his war diary, Donovan noted that at Southampton there was a “three mile march through a dark, dirty seaport town to a rest camp—rest would be too complimentary—wooden floors, t
ents, no fires, a very poor night.” The men shivered through the following day until it was dark enough on the night of November 11 to go aboard the boat for the Channel crossing to Le Havre.

  “That boat ride was not soon to be forgotten,” wrote Donovan. “Neither moon nor stars. Boat so crowded that it was like walking on a floor of faces to get through the ship. Then the landing. Marching through a strange city with queer names in an unknown tongue on all the shop windows. And our men truly overwhelmed. They seemed stunned with the new tongue and quite at a loss.”

  The men hiked 5 miles to another rest camp, this one, in Donovan’s words, “well kept, clean with bathing facilities. A good place for officers’ mess, but very tiresome sleeping on the hard tent floors.”

  The battalion spent an anxious day awaiting the arrival of one company that had been forced to take a later Channel boat. That night the men marched, according to Donovan, “through a heavy fog along dark, unlighted, narrow, muddy streets to our station. Loading the men, thirty-five or forty in horse cars, officers in third class carriages, which were much like the slabs in a morgue and quite as cold. The entire battalion in one train.”

  This was the battalion’s first encounter with what the men called “side-door Pullmans,” the French freight cars designed to hold either 40 men or eight horses. “The main objection to the 40-and-8s,” said one soldier, “being that the horses had been sleeping in them the night before and somebody had forgotten to get them ready for the troops, who were bundled into them in a pitch-black night.”