by Neil Hanson
British and French officers also continued training the American soldiers on every other aspect of the war they would soon be fighting, from trench routine and trench raids to the dangers of booby traps and German subterfuges on the battlefield. British instructors also taught the men grenade-throwing; like almost all their weaponry and equipment, the grenades used were British. The steel, egg-shaped casing of the “Mills bomb” was scored with vertical and horizontal lines, like the lines of latitude and longitude on a globe, and when the grenade exploded, it fragmented along those lines, hurling lethal shrapnel in all directions. The thrower often pulled the steel firing pin with his teeth, and the grenade detonated about seven seconds later—in theory, enough time to throw it, but not long enough for the target to retrieve it and throw it back. The straight-armed throwing action taught by British instructors was more like bowling in English cricket than a baseball throw, and Americans often struggled to adapt to it.33 While tests showed that it was better than the baseball catcher’s snap throw, the baseball outfielder’s throw gave the greatest range and accuracy and was the one used by American troops. Monk had a natural aptitude for it and repeatedly proved himself to be among the most powerful, fearless, and accurate of grenade throwers.
Despite the best efforts of the instructors, training was often hampered by a lack of rifles, ammunition, and almost every other kind of weapon and military equipment. Even in February 1918, more than four months after they arrived at Spartanburg, the men were still being forced to use wooden guns and pipes as pretend rifles, trench mortars, and field guns.34 Live firing exercises with real rifles, trench mortars, and artillery required the construction of firing ranges at a site in wild country at Dark Corner, thirty-one miles northeast of Camp Wadsworth. The ranges spread across the lowlands at the foot of Glassy Rock, and the rock face, rising sheer for a thousand feet, was the backdrop to the targets.
While on the ranges, the recruits practiced loading with a clip of ammunition; sight-setting; and firing while standing, kneeling, sitting, and prone, and using a parapet, wall top, or the vertical edge of a wall, door, or tree.35 They were also given a “flinch test” in which the man being tested did not know whether his rifle was loaded until he pulled the trigger. Those who flinched at the discharge of the rifle could expect further hours on the ranges to stiffen their sinews. Monk, the veteran of more armed combat than even the most experienced member of the regiment, did not flinch or turn a hair, whether firing or under fire himself. He adapted so well to military life that he was soon promoted to private first class.36
Monk and his comrades also practiced following a creeping barrage, forming a line one hundred yards behind the predicted point of shell bursts and then waiting as “shells whistled twenty feet over our heads and burst not a hundred yards in front of us.37 We were told to duck our heads. We did.” The barrage sent rocks, earth, and trees skyward, and as it lifted and began to creep forward, the infantry advanced behind it, maintaining the hundred-yard gap between themselves and the curtain of exploding shells. This exposure to the kind of concentrated shell fire these raw soldiers would encounter on the Western Front made a profound impression upon them.
As fall turned to winter, the conditions at Camp Wadsworth became similar to those they could expect in the trenches on the Western Front: muddy and waterlogged. Monk and his comrades were even made to practice moving through the trenches with water up to their waists. Hot water was a luxury that few enjoyed, and cold-water shaving ensured that “no man was unshaved for Saturday inspection, but an awful lot of blood was spilled without bringing peace any nearer.”38
There were worse hardships to be endured during South Carolina’s wettest, coldest, and snowiest winter in eighty years. Beginning on December 8, there was a ten-day cold snap, with thick snow and temperatures falling to sixteen degrees on the first night and getting progressively colder as the frost bit deeper.39 One company sergeant complained that there were now only two kinds of water: frozen and dirty. The conditions provoked a rising chorus of complaints about lack of blankets, hot food, hot baths, and wood for the stoves in each squad tent. Hard-bitten soldiers already serving on the Western Front would have had scathing comments to make about men complaining about such minor issues, but for the recruits of the 27th Division, shivering in their tents, still wearing their light khaki uniforms and with thin and often threadbare blankets, the cold was a terrible ordeal.
Snow filled the practice trenches; sentry duty and patrols continued for a while, as they would have to in Flanders and France, but were soon suspended. By then the camp rumor mill was already claiming that headquarters was covering up the news that as many as eleven soldiers had frozen to death.40 The rumors were so widespread that the 27th Division was forced to issue a statement that the percentage of deaths at Camp Wadsworth had been no higher than in any population of thirty thousand people and that no one had frozen to death.
The conditions only increased the men’s desire to be done with training and off to France, and rumors circulated almost daily about the date of their departure. As each date passed without any sign that they were to leave, frustration increased. The gloom deepened when Major General O’Ryan told a Senate committee that it would be another two months before his troops could be sent abroad, and even then they would need to undergo more intensive training before they were ready to face the enemy. “Officers and men should not be impatient to get abroad,” he said.41 “There is enough war there for everybody.”
Winter at last gave way to spring and, as the weeks drifted by, The New York Times was moved to wonder when the thirty-one thousand men of the New York Division would be going overseas.
They have had six months and more of training, much of it intensive.42 They have marched and counter-marched many hundreds of miles; they have dug trenches enough for a city’s foundations; they have shot away cartridges and shells by the thousand; they have punctured dummies to rags with their bayonets; they have fought the enemy across No Man’s Land and repulsed him with heavy losses; they have listened in trenches all night long for the raiders; they have gassed and been gassed; and how tired they are of waiting to go ‘over there’… The Empire Division is needed in France, sorely needed, and the call should be sounded soon.
At the start of May 1918, the rumors of the division’s departure for France at last hardened into solid fact: they would be leaving within the week. Private Edward Eastman and his buddies in the 106th Infantry put their affairs in order, including filling out the forms that detailed the next of kin to be contacted in the event of their death and to whom any unpaid wages and personal effects would be delivered. Unlike during his time in Sing Sing, when Monk had named his sister Lizzie as his next of kin, this time he listed his wife, Mrs. Worthy Eastman, but the only address he gave was “Persido” (Presidio), in the Big Bend area of Texas.
For the ex-prostitute wife of an ex-gangster who must still have been holding at least some of the proceeds from his past criminality, Presidio and Big Bend would have been a good bolt-hole. The border dividing the sun-baked dirt streets of Presidio from its Mexican neighbor, Ojinaga, was a porous one, little scrutinized by the authorities, and Presidio was “a gun on both hips kind of town … a place to go if you didn’t want to be found.”43 The population was largely transient, and few questions were asked of those who passed through or stayed to live there.
Although Worthy had family in Texas, they were in Galveston, seven hundred miles away, and if she was basing herself in Presidio, it was most probably because of its reputation as a no-questions-asked safe haven for those in trouble with the law. However, the clean air and bone-dry climate of the desert and mountain ranges north of Presidio, around the Big Bend town of Alpine, also drew a large number of sufferers from consumption and other chest complaints. The beneficial effects of the climate were regularly advertised in the New York newspapers, and it is also possible that Worthy was a consumptive seeking a healthier place to live than the damp, cold Lower East Side.
The remaining men, including Monk, made their final preparations for war. Senior officers of the division remained concerned about their men’s level of training, discipline, and war-readiness, but events had now overtaken them. A last-ditch German offensive on the Western Front, launched on March 21, threatened to overwhelm the depleted British and French forces. On April 11, the British commander Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig issued a last, desperate rallying call, as his troops stared defeat in the face: “With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end.45 The safety of our homes and the Freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.” American troops were needed urgently in France to shore up the creaking Allied defenses and take the battle to the Germans; the 27th Division would now be thrown into the fight.
12
WE ONLY SEE OLD MEN AND BOYS
On May 6, 1918, the 106th Infantry left Camp Wadsworth for the last time and marched to Fairforest, about six miles west of Spartanburg, where they boarded a train to Jersey City. A quarter of a million men a month were now shipping out to Europe—the peak was reached in August 1918 when three hundred thousand embarked, the majority leaving from Newport News, Virginia, or Hoboken, New Jersey.1 Almost all men embarking for overseas from Hoboken were processed through Camp Merritt in New Jersey or Camps Mills and Upton on Long Island, where the camp personnel would receive, house, feed, inspect, and equip them. When the 106th Infantry boarded a ferry on the morning of May 8, many of the longer-serving men thought they were returning to the regiment’s former base—Camp Mills at Mineola, Long Island. One of them shouted “Mineola!” and the response was “both instantaneous and electrifying; in one voice, raised to high heaven, the whole regiment shouted the magic word ‘MINEOLA! MINEOLA!’ ”2 From that moment it became the battle cry of the 106th Infantry.
However, the ferry was not bound for Long Island. It steamed slowly along the Jersey shore, past the North German Lloyd and Hamburg-American piers, as the men crowding the rails cast wistful glances across the Hudson toward the New York skyline. Only the most naïve of those soldiers would have been expecting a home leave at this stage, on the eve of their departure for France and war, when the chances of a spate of desertions were much too high, but any lingering hopes they might have harbored were erased as the ferry docked at a row of Hoboken piers, alongside great troopships covered in camouflage paint.
Monk and his fellows boarded U.S. Navy Transport No.3 36—the USS President Lincoln—an eighteen-thousand-ton German passenger liner that had been impounded and converted and was making its first run as a troopship. In the opposite berth, the mammoth USS George Washington, painted with “dazzle” camouflage to break up the ship’s outline and already laden with men, was about to sail for France. In the early evening the great ship slid out of her berth and disappeared into the dusk.
The President Lincoln remained at the pier for two more days while other troops from the 42nd Engineers and 129th Infantry embarked. Even at this late stage, after an examination by the attending surgeon, a number of 106th infantrymen were found unfit for overseas service and were disembarked at 8:00 a.m.4 on Thursday, May 9. The following day, Friday, May 10, 1918, the ship was readied for departure. Card schools, circled by spectators, were already running in various parts of the ship. Other groups of men were pacing the decks, but most were “lounging along the rail with faces toward New York; no doubt we are all thinking the same thoughts. It grows hot and sultry; the afternoon drags.”
As a precaution against sabotage or last-minute desertions, all the portholes were closed and the decks cleared an hour before the ship’s departure time, leaving the men to wonder why they could not wave a last farewell to those watching from the pier and the ferry passengers. On the dot of five, without noise or fanfare, the great ship, dwarfing the tugs hauling it clear of the piers, slid away through the murky waters of the Hudson and disappeared almost at once into the mist hanging over the river. The laughter of the afternoon gave way to absolute silence. Those on board knew that many of them would never see New York again.
As the Manhattan skyline disappeared from sight, Monk must have felt as if the door had closed forever on his criminal past. He had turned his back on his old ways, trained hard, and learned military discipline. “Certain qualities which had been misdirected came under proper direction and when the 27th sailed for France, Private Eastman was as good a soldier as there was in the company.”5 However, it is difficult to imagine that he did not take an active part in—and might well have taken control of—the incessant gambling aboard the ship. “There were continuously running crap games, Red Dog, poker and others I had never heard of. Some of those fellows never saw daylight during the whole trip.”
After dark that evening, the last contact with home was lost as the pilot who had steered them downstream from the docks left the ship. Already the President Lincoln was rolling in the swell and the first men were succumbing to seasickness. The ship was tracking northeast, to rendezvous with the rest of its convoy for the perilous journey eastward through U-boat-infested waters. Lookouts were posted in the crow’s nest and at intervals along the decks, alert for any sign of a periscope among the gray Atlantic rollers, a vigil that would be maintained until they made port.
At nine that night all lights except those in interior compartments were extinguished. Barely visible by day against the sullen gray Atlantic swell, the ship was a ghost by night, dark as the sky, every visible light extinguished. Seven troopships, with their dazzle camouflage “in most fantastic designs and colors,” and escorted by a cruiser, USS Huntington, had formed the initial convoy, but during the night of May 11, another seven ships joined them, the largest troop convoy at that time: fourteen troopships in three line-astern columns of five, four, and five ships, carrying fifty thousand men between them.6 No gleam of light showed on any ship; even smoking on deck was forbidden, and nothing was to be thrown overboard, for a marauding U-boat could have used a telltale trail of debris to track them. Steaming without lights entailed the chance of an accidental collision with one of the other ships in the convoy, but it was a lesser risk than offering a well-lit target to prowling U-boats.
Conditions for the enlisted men were atrocious. They were packed in the holds in hammocks or long aisles of bunks, with wood frames and chicken wire supporting the straw-filled mattresses. These bunks were three or four tiers high, so that “the bottom man was almost on the floor while the top man was practically against the ceiling.”7 The chicken wire also stretched, and the men on the bottom tiers were lying on the steel deck after a few days. In their dank, stinking quarters belowdecks, without even room to sit upright, the men of the 106th Infantry endured a miserable crossing. At night all portholes were closed as a precaution against detection from submarines, and the ventilation was so poor that the smell from the holds was overpowering. When rough seas struck them, the sour stench of vomit was added to that of foul air and stale sweat, but they were at least fortunate that the influenza pandemic had not yet struck; later transports returned home with the bodies of many of
the troops they had carried to France still aboard.
Just before dawn on the frigid, fog-bound morning of May 13, Monk was awakened by the moaning of the siren and the clanging of alarm bells.8 Like his fellows, he scrambled from his bunk and fought his way up the crowded companionways from the holds, but it proved to be nothing more than the first call to quarters for a practice drill in abandoning ship. It took only six minutes to clear the belowdecks areas of men, who then stood shivering on the deck until broad daylight, encased in bulky life belts. They were left to wonder “what chance the black gang [the coal stokers working in the bowels of the ship] will have in the event of disaster?”
The next morning the fog lifted and the troopships took turns at target practice. The President Lincoln’s four six-inch guns were fired at a huge cask, simulating a submarine’s conning tower, towed on a cable behind another troopship. Soldiers packed the rails to watch, betting on the results of each shot.
As a commandeered former German liner and one of the largest troop carriers in the U.S. fleet, the President Lincoln was a doubly prominent target for German U-boats. The news that the kaiser had put a price on their heads had already spread through the ship, and though the convoy’s escort was further strengthened by destroyers on May 15, that only signaled that the convoy was about to begin the most dangerous phase of the voyage.9 From then on, the captain took his meals and snatched what sleep he could without ever leaving the bridge, and every man aboard was ordered to wear or carry his life preserver at all times.
On May 21, 1918, the fleet entered the “Danger Zone”: the U-boat–infested eastern Atlantic approaches to the Channel and the French ports. The cruiser USS Huntington left the convoy soon afterward, leaving the job of safeguarding the troopships to the faster and nimbler destroyers. Almost at once one of the troopships fell astern, signaling for assistance. A frisson of fear ran through everyone watching, but the ship’s trouble was mechanical and, after swift repairs, she picked up speed again and rejoined the others.
