Lost in the Shadow of Fame

by William E. Lemanski

  “the most widespread and costly conflict man had yet known, one that eventually would put under arms sixty-five million men from thirty countries representing every continent, and one that would involve sea battles around the globe and major land campaigns not only in Europe but in parts of Africa and Asia Minor.”1

  Although the United States didn’t declare war against Germany until late in the war, many prominent Americans foresaw the need to prepare for the possibility of armed conflict. Despite President Woodrow Wilson’s stubborn policy of neutrality, Theodore Roosevelt leading other influential citizens argued strenuously in the press for military preparedness. When the United States finally entered the war, Roosevelt even offered to raise and command a division. In 1915, Major General Leonard Wood who was Roosevelt’s commanding officer during his Rough Rider days and continued as his personal friend, created a summer camp for reserve officer military training in Plattsburg, New York, for professional and business men. Many prominent athletes, businessmen and members of society attended the training and would later become junior army officers when the United States entered the war. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Archie and Quentin attended the Plattsburg training.

  Kermit, because of his established business career in South America, missed out for the most part on the Plattsburgh summer camp. In 1917, just as he was to be transferred to a newly anticipated Russian branch of the National City Bank in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), the United States declared war on Germany. True to the Roosevelt ethic of patriotism and military obligation, Kermit immediately decided to enter the war. Although the United States officially declared war on Germany in April, General Pershing did not engage troops until the spring offensive of 1918, and then they were initially intermingled with French troops.

  In July, 1917, Kermit, not waiting for U. S. forces to enter the fray, pursued a commission from the King of England. He was granted an honorary commission in the British Army2 and offered a position on the staff of General Maud operating against the Turks in Mesopotamia.

  Major Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and Second Lieutenant Archibald Roosevelt left Plattsburgh and sailed for Europe to join Pershing’s command as young Quentin began training at Long Island, for service in the newly formed air corps. As family members donned uniforms, TR approached Wilson with a plan to organize and command a volunteer fighting force as he did in Cuba two decades earlier. However, Wilson, ever the politician and angered by Roosevelt’s years of venomous public badgering of his administration for his delaying U. S. entry into the war, denied Roosevelt’s request. Roosevelt and Wilson were at odds both philosophically and politically since the 1912 election, and Wilson certainly did not want to provide Roosevelt with any added fame that could possibly impact in Roosevelt’s favor for a potential 1920 presidential election campaign.

  Notes

  1 Office of the Chief of Military History, United States Army; World War I, The First Three Years, Chapter 17

  2 From a note dated July 31, 1917 from Royal Pavilion Aldershot Camp signed by Lord Stamfordham, King George V's Private Secretary, British Military Archives

  Chapter V- Action

  in the Great War

  Once more we hear the word

  That sickened earth of old: --

  "No law except the Sword

  Unsheathed and uncontrolled."

  Once more it knits mankind,

  Once more the nations go

  To meet and break and bind

  A crazed and driven foe.

  “For All We Have And Are” Rudyard Kipling

  Mesopotamia

  Small, wispy vortices of extremely fine, powdery sand danced across the hot, sun-baked flatland gaining speed and the momentum to continually grow, enabling each to transform on the erratic wind into large wavering phantom-like funnels. At other times, a more stable and consistent wind would scoop enormous volumes of the abrasive mix into a wall of stinging particles that would enter every crack, crevice, seam and orifice of both man and machine. From mid-June to mid-September, a steady wind, the “shamal”, blowing from the north and northwest, would usher in sand storms rising to several thousand feet.

  Combining with this abrasive mix, the searing temperatures of July and August would reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit, baking the shifting desert sand similar to the burning coals of a kiln. During the wet season, torrential rains would turn the dry water-courses into a raging maelstrom, flatland and roads into a sea of glutinous mud. Adding to the misery of these extremes were the occasional swarms of desert flies.

  In 1914, within the hostile and ancient cradle of civilization of Mesopotamia, the British Army deployed. The Middle-East regions of Arabia and Mesopotamia*[10] were strategically critical to both the British and French even before the outbreak of World War I. This was primarily for the same reason the United States and the West have a major interest in Iraq and the surrounding Arab countries today: oil.*[11] However, at the beginning of the 20th century, this land was under the control of the Ottoman Empire dating back to 1534 when Mesopotamia was taken from Persia. As the war progressed, British military forces were beginning campaigns throughout the Middle-east while simultaneously scheming in Cairo and Whitehall against the French for post-war domination of this entire region. Colonel T.E. Lawrence was organizing the Arab Revolt as General Allenby planned the Palestine Campaign while further north in Turkey, thousands of allies were dying on the beaches at Gallipoli.

  The Standard Oil Company of America already had a foothold in Persia to the north. Anglo-Indian Army Forces landed in Mesopotamia in November 1914, capturing the southern port city of Basra with the goal of thwarting the Ottoman Turk allies of Germany. The plan was to open access to the oil fields and pipeline near Basra which would provide a much needed commodity to the Imperial British Navy as the fleets of the world’s major powers had recently converted from coal to oil.

  The capturing of the seaport of Basra and securing the oil-rich region for large scale troop disembarkation was only the first step in a three-year struggle in the drive north to Baghdad and domination of Mesopotamia. Numerous skirmishes and major battles ensued during the next two years, testing both the British forces on the ground and the politicians in London.

  In 1915, the British failure at the Battle of Ctesiphon and the retreat along with the subsequent siege and surrender at Kut-al-Amara*[12], coupled with the losses at Gallipoli*[13] simply added to the dire military position of the Empire. However, this situation soon changed in early 1917 with the addition of troop reinforcements and a command change to General F S Maude. This began a major troop incursion north.

  Captain Kermit Roosevelt, volunteer with the British Expeditionary Forces, arrived in Basra in 1917, beginning his Middle-East odyssey from England by train through France and then to the Italian seaport of Taranto. Following his training in the Reserve Officer Training Camp in Plattsburg, New York, during the early summer of 1917, Kermit was offered a commission and service on General Maude’s staff in Mesopotamia. At Taranto, he boarded a troop transport and began a long and tedious sea voyage through the Suez Canal, south down the Red Sea, through the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf.

  There was no overnight flight for a VIP Roosevelt aboard a plane or first-class accommodations aboard a steam ship as a former President‘s son. Despite the discomfort of travel as an ordinary junior grade British officer, Kermit was conditioned to both rugged travel and the anticipation and even welcome expectation of danger. The combined qualities of duty and patriotism expressed through military combat service had been a family tradition since Kermit‘s maternal uncles, James and Irvine Bulloch, served in the Civil War on the Confederate side: James served as a confederate agent and Irvine on the CSS Alabama which sank in the Atlantic off the coast of France following a naval battle.

  Kermit’s grandfather, Theodore Senior, avoided military service in that conflict which may have been the underlying basis for Rough Rider and San Juan Hill hero, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, to obsess over the Cuban revolution
in 1898. He ultimately was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his conduct in the resulting Spanish-American War.

  Kermit’s brothers also distinguished themselves under arms. Youngest of the clan, twenty-one year old Quentin would be killed in action as an aviator over France on July 14, 1918. Brother Archie, serving with the 26th US Infantry, was severely wounded in March 1918 and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Ted Jr. was gassed at Cantigny and, like his father, was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously for his service as a WWII general.

  As a member of this vocally patriotic family with a legacy of hyper-martial tendencies, Kermit’s natural impulse was to enlist in the center of the storm. Great Britain’s military force was his choice as his own country was hurriedly mobilizing after equivocating and marking time in a neutral posture for the previous three years.

  The searing Middle-East August heat burned the decks of the twin-stack Union Castle troopship Saxon and shimmered like a mirage as she cut through the swell of the Red Sea. Below decks, the un-ventilated vessel was a veritable oven.

  Discomfort and danger lurked for Kermit and his British colleagues on this voyage even before hearing the first enemy fire on land. To secure the ship from predatory German submarines that were prowling the Adriatic and Mediterranean, taking a toll on allied shipping, two Japanese destroyers were assigned to convoy the vessel. The combination of evasive zig-zag nighttime cruising in blackout darkness added to the difficulty of coordinating multiple vessels in two languages within that difficult pattern and ended in a collision. Fortunately, the breach in the Saxon’s hull was above the waterline and after a two-day repair, continued on its way to Basra.

  It was within the searing heat of the ship’s engine room when Kermit decided to exercise his dormant muscles and shovel coal with his new friend, the British aristocrat Denys Finch Hatton. Finch Hatton had been serving as a lieutenant after initially fighting the war against the German Schutztruppe*[14] as a bush scout in his chosen home of Africa. While exercising his bush craft skills and keen intellect, he quickly gained notice of the British commanders and was assigned as aide-de-camp to the former Inspector General to the Kings African Rifles, Lieutenant General Reginald Hoskins. He later was a prominent character in British East Africa (now Kenya) during the Happy Valley days of the 1920s and was the lifelong love of writer Karen Blixen, author of the bestselling autobiography, and later motion picture, Out of Africa. Finch Hatton also became a world famous big-game hunter and, due to the kinship of similar personality traits, became a life-long intimate and friend of Kermit’s*[15]. Finch Hatton was also a loner and dreamy intellectual who valued a solitary, adventurous lifestyle. For the remainder of his life, he and Kermit would share frequent correspondence and Kermit would visit with him when in England. He was not the only prominent Brit that Kermit would befriend in the Middle-East.

  As the British began to aggressively build railways, roads and communication lines, attempting to travel north from Basra during war became exceedingly difficult for the traveler, and typical for any large military movement, a major project. Hence, moving upcountry to Baghdad and the northern action required Kermit to rely on a hodge-podge of paddleboats, rail and flat cars for his transportation ultimately arriving in Samarra, approximately one-hundred miles north of Baghdad.

  In Samarra, he was assigned to the Royal Engineers where he engaged in motorized reconnaissance work. In true Desert Fox fashion, he skirmished with Turkish forces in the region between Samarra and Daur in a four-ton Armored Rolls Royce car. However, despite being in His Majesty’s Army and assigned to a motor unit in a war zone, in typical Victorian fashion he found the time and wherewithal to privately secure two horses and retain both a Dervish syce (horse handler) and a Kurdish servant boy.

  While moving through Daur and advancing on Tekrit, Kermit’s unit engaged the enemy and in one day suffered casualties of about two thousand. Besides attack by ground troops, artillery and assault by Turkish aircraft, the Anglo-Indian army fell victim to heat stroke and sand fly fever. Even the British Commander, General Maude, was not immune to the dangers of this desert campaign and succumbed to cholera and died in November 1917.

  Following these engagements, Kermit was transferred to the Motor Machine-Gun Corps, Fourteenth Battery1 of light-armored motorcars (LAMB) and was employed in raiding Turkish forces, quelling Arab uprisings and operating with mounted cavalry during attacks. The Rolls Royce armored car2 provided mobility with a marginal degree of protection behind light armored bodywork while carrying a single turret for a Vickers machine gun, but the vehicles were stiflingly hot death boxes. Kermit’s war chariot, the armored motorcar was similar to the airplane as a new innovation in military technology. The motorcar was constructed on a standard RR Silver Ghost chassis with a steel superstructure and revolving turret. The four-ton vehicles had twin rear wheels compensating for the additional weight and provided a high degree of mobility for both reconnaissance and skirmishing; the disadvantages being mechanical repairs, fuel supply requirements, traction on mud and the hot, sandy desert environment. When under fire, Kermit said:

  “the crew would pull the steel doors shut. The slits through which the driver and the man next to him looked (through) could be made still smaller when the firing was heavy, and the peep-holes at either side and in the rear had slides which could be closed. The largest aperture was that around the tube of the gun.”3

  He said “splinters of lead came in continuously, and sometimes chance directed a bullet to an opening. One of our drivers was shot straight through the head near Ramadie.” He complained of temperatures within the steel coffins, “During the great heat of the summer the inside of the turret was a veritable fiery furnace, with the pedals so hot that they scorched the feet.” Through the rainy season of 1917 his unit fought their way northwest battling Turks, raging rivers and muddy bogs all the way to the Kurdish hills in the northeast.

  In March, Kermit participated in a major attack on the Euphrates front.4 While pushing on through the towns of Khan Baghdadi, Haditha and Ana, the British forces captured three-thousand Turkish prisoners along with German officers, liberated captured British officers and even mounted an expedition to capture a gold convoy. Describing the operation, a New York Times article of the period reported “In addition 10 guns, 2,000 rifles, many machine guns, 600 animals, and a quantity of other booty have been taken.”

  Shortly after his return to Baghdad and following his adventures on the Euphrates front, Kermit volunteered to participate in the attack on the Persian front at Kifri, in what is now Iraqi Kurdistan. Throughout the campaign he traversed many miles of barren desert where he engaged in numerous skirmishes, witnessed a sword-wielding Indian cavalry charge that rendered six-hundred Turkish prisoners and he even personally liberated a Turkish General’s “field harem.”

  Besides conducting military operations against the enemy, Kermit spent much time and energy maintaining the finicky machinery of the primitive armored vehicles, searching for petrol dumps to fuel their endless appetite and fording or bridging swollen rivers and creeks. Aside from the enemy and the practical problems of day to day mechanized desert movement, Kermit and his comrades had to contend with some of the world’s most severe and extreme weather conditions. On one occasion he noted:

  “The wind blew so hard that I thought the car would be toppled over. What made us more gloomy than anything else was the thought of all the dry river courses that would be roaring floods by morning, and probably hold up the ration supply indefinitely.”5

  On another occasion he recorded:

  “…the river had risen so rapidly that many of the tents and a few ambulances were washed away. By morning it had settled down into a steady, businesslike downpour.6 We found that we were inextricably caught in among some low hills. There was not the slightest chance of moving the fighting cars; they were bogged down to the axle. There was no alternative other than to wait until the rain stopped and the mud dried. Fortunately our emergency
rations were still untouched.”

  Supply lines were always an intermittent, unreliable affair forcing the troops to sometimes forage for food, sometimes barter or buy from any local villages as they passed through.

  In the spring of 1918 Kermit finally received his desired transfer from the British to the American Army in France. After reaching Kirkuk with his armored car detachment, he decided to return to Baghdad and prepare for the long journey to Europe and a new conflict, thus ending his Mid-East adventure.

  During his months in the Middle East besides befriending and living with the common British Tommy, he had the opportunity to meet and associate with many notable British officers. In Egypt, he met the famous Colonel T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). He described Lawrence as:

  “Scarcely more than thirty years of age, with a clean-shaven, boyish face, short and slender in build, if one met him casually among a lot of other officers it would not have been easy to single him out as the great power among Arabs that he on every occasion proved himself to be.”7

  Kermit spent his first night in Baghdad in General Maude’s house. During his return from Mesopotamia while waiting to sail from Egypt, he stayed at the residence of Sir Reginald Wingate. Kermit’s friendly, easygoing personality (similar to his father’s and perhaps developed from years of associating with people ranging from indigenous natives in Africa, Indians in South America to heads of state at the White House) enabled him to naturally be at ease in all circles. He was equally at ease sleeping in the desert sand with the common soldier or dining with Arab potentates. His ability to gain fluency in languages enabled him to quickly learn Arabic and integrate into the culture of common Arab merchants or high-ranking officials and desert sheiks. His communication skills as an interpreter were used by the British command on a number of occasions.