by Dr. Robert Thompson Wilfrid Laurier University
Sincere thanks to Dr. Robert Thompson for allowing his work to be copied and published on this website. Dr. Thompson's work on CAC Regiments serving in the AEF is unrivaled.
Please see www.thompsonwerk.com for more information on the author and his work.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my sincerest thanks to all those who assisted me throughout this major research project. At the forefront is my advisor Dr. Roger Sarty, for without his impeccable understanding of American seacoast defenses as well as the science and history behind large caliber artillery, much of this paper would lack proper context. More importantly, Dr. Sarty’s enthusiasm, guidance and countless edits have been of immeasurable value. Providing significant background information, as well as introducing me to the invaluable Coast Artillery Corps publication, Liaison: Courier of the Big Gun Corps, is a Mr. Joe Hartwell. I am indebted to his personal connection to the topic and his substantial online collection of primary evidence and developed histories of CAC regiments. Furthermore, Joe provided me with a copy of History of Battery “D” 56th Regiment, CAC, in order to allow me to complete a more detailed wartime account of a CAC unit. An acknowledgment section would not be complete if I did not thank fiancé, family and friends for their support and constant calls asking if the paper was finished. My friends in the Tri-U MA program deserve thanks for their assistance and suggestions over these past few months.
INTRODUCTION
Before the United States entered the Great War in 1917, the units of the Coast Artillery Corps operated the armaments protecting American coastlines. Mobilization of the American Expeditionary Force for combat in France and Belgium, however, would remove many of these artillerymen from the confines of their fortifications to crew mobile heavy artillery pieces that had proved to be an indispensable component of the arsenals of all belligerents in that conflict. At the very outset of the war in August 1914, the rapidly advancing armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary aptly demonstrated that guns once deemed fit for only warships or static emplacements had an essential role in smashing the concrete and steel frontier fortresses of neighboring states. During the following months, as the fighting fronts stabilized, mobile heavy artillery proved equally essential against the field fortifications that troops on both sides at first spontaneously improvised for protection against the fearsome power of new industrial age weapons, and then systematically developed into continuous lines of entrenchments and strong points. France and Great Britain followed the lead of their enemies and began to field their own heavy artillery pieces of increasing size and in increasing numbers. Artillery came very quickly to dominate the battlefield, the organization of armies, and the rapidly expanding industrial efforts of all belligerents. American intervention in Europe immediately gave rise to the need for America to deploy her own heavy artillery arm.1
The Coast Artillery Corps was the prime candidate for such a task, particularly so because of the expansion and important technological development of the corps since the 1880s. Rather paradoxically, in view of the important offensive role the US coast artillery would play in the European theatre, the growth of this quintessentially defensive branch of the US military prior to 1917 had been the result of a re-emphasis on traditional American isolationism towards European powers in response to the growing competition among those powers in the late nineteenth century. American coastal defense artillery weapons had become heavier, more numerous and more capable since the 1880s to protect American shores against the ever more powerful, faster and longer-ranged warships in European navies produced by the arms race among the great powers. Therefore, an examination of the Coast Artillery Corps on the Western Front is more than a means of understanding the US Army’s rapid and generally successful mobilization for large-scale combat in 1917-18. The little-studied transformation of the Coast Artillery Corps also shows how a symbolic element of American isolationist military and foreign policies quickly became one of nation’s best offensive capabilities on the European continent.
Upon the declaration of war by the United States government in 1917, the armed forces of America prepared to mobilize. Prior to 1917, US Army strength was at 100,000 men, many of which were either in the Calvary or in the Coast Artillery Corps. By 1919, however, the Army reached a total strength of four million men, of which half, some two million, had already been deployed to Europe in the American Expeditionary Force (AEF). The AEF, during the short twenty-one months of US belligerency had become as strong as both the British army of 1.8-million troops and the French army of 1.7-million.2 The CAC had mobilized 147,386 men, 70,384 men for coast defense duty, and 69,890 men for the army in Europe.3
The essential story of the American army during the First World War was in many respects the rapid mobilization of such a massive field force from such a small peacetime service, and one utterly lacking experience in deploying large all-arms formations. The expansion, moreover, took place under heavy pressure of unanticipated events at the fighting fronts. Planning, both Allied and American, always looked to the mounting of a large victory offensive in 1919, the earliest it seemed that that the new American formations could be transported to Europe and readied for battle. The months immediately following the United States’ entry into the war, however, saw the a succession of disasters for the Allied cause: the utter failure of the French and British offensives of 1917, and the German victory over Russia that allowed the transfer of scores of divisions to the Western Front. As a result, American plans were disrupted by the need to rush only partly organized formations to Europe to help shore up the Allied line. American units, then divisions and corps filled gaps in French and British field armies. Only in the summer of 1918 was the AEF able to pull together some of the divisions and corps serving with Allied formations to create the US First Army, which, even so, depended upon the French Army for many of its combat elements. Heavy artillery posed particular challenges, because of the high level of training needed for personnel, and the need for large quantities of sophisticated equipment, much of it at the limits or beyond of American industrial capacity. In these circumstances, the highly trained personnel of the Coast Artillery Corps became an invaluable resource for the raising of the AEF.4
Mobilization in 1917 brought a radical change from the corps’ traditional role, the defense of America’s seacoasts from foreign attack by garrisoning well-developed permanent fortifications at mouths of the principal ports and estuaries. Instead, as one officer, Captain Gustaf H. Ericson, commented, the corps mobilized exactly like an infantry division of the expeditionary force.5 Coast Artillery units gathered at central camps, where they reorganized their basic company units into the larger formations needed for mobile field service. Tailored to provide the crews necessary for specific fortifications, the smaller units were inadequate for frontline service in France. In fact, the British and French armies needed the heavy, accurate firepower of the Coast Artillery more urgently than they needed additional infantry formations, to such a degree that the Americans had rapidly to organize special field units. Accordingly, “numerous orders and telegrams were dispatched from the Adjutant General’s office in Washington to all parts of the country, and in a very matter-of-fact tone ordered officers and organizations of the Coast Artillery relieved from the present assignment to report to the Commanding Officer, Sixth Provisional Regiment, C.A.C.”6 “Up to that time” Captain Ericson recalled, “we had never heard of the Six Regiment before. We were, therefore, a little surprised.” 7 From this moment onward, the story of the Coast Artillery would be one of transformation; instead of applying its technical mastery of long-range heavy artillery fire against hostile navies, it would target the armies in France.
Since the American Expeditionary Force of the Great War was engaged in actual combat for barely a year, the common misconception is that there is limited scope for scholarship. This is particularly striking with respect to the important role of artillery, a major subject of research concerning most of the major armies of the First World War, but the focus of very few studies of the AEF. The work that does exists deals primarily with the field artillery, the lighter guns organized at the divisional level to provide direct fire support to the infantry. This was the traditional role of artillery in field armies. Arguably, the most marked revolution in artillery during the First World War was in the large-scale deployment of heavy artillery, at the corps and army level, to provide indirect, long-range fire support against targets behind enemy lines across broad stretches of the front. The near absence of discussion of AEF heavy artillery is the more notable because it was raised by the Coast Artillery Corps, in some respects the archetypical arm of the US army from the earliest days of the republic. Perhaps because of the rather mundane nature of the coast artillery’s traditional homeland defense role, there is only a limited number of analytical works on the coast artillery. Somewhat more surprising is the near absence of literature concerning the innovation by which the coast artillery became an essential component of the AEF.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
The literature on the American military in the period from the 1880s-1919, that is from the beginning of modernization of the forces through the First World War, emphasizes policy. Works on the mobilization and operations of the American Expeditionary Force similarly treat the consequences of flawed high level military policy, such as the haphazard adjustment from the pre-war vision of fast moving offensive thrusts to the real world quagmire that was the Western Front warfare, and the high casualty rates that resulted from the failure to take fuller account of European experience in 1914-17. By contrast, coverage of the development of particular branches of the military is thin, and, in the case of the Coast Artillery Corps in the AEF, virtually nonexistent.
The Coast Artillery Corps was born out of American isolationism. Indeed, historian Emanuel R. Lewis wrote that coastal fortifications were the preeminent construction projects of the United States Army during times of peace.8 Much of America’s military history, encompassing the Revolution, War of 1812, and the Civil War, directly influenced the construction of fortifications. Historian Jamie W. Moore noted that the United States turned towards seacoast fortifications because of the turbulence emitted from the French Revolution and its impact on Europe. While the Napoleonic Wars raged in Europe, the United States faced Great Britain in the War of 1812. Moore comments that all of the measures made by the United States prior to the War of 1812 amounted to nothing for the naval might of Great Britain completely outweighed the entire American military.9 The pre-war measures failed due to the insufficient defense of American coastlines, as was aptly demonstrated by the Royal Navy’s prolonged penetration of the Chesapeake Bay during the conflict.
The American Civil War provided another catalyst for the development in coastal fortifications and armaments. Unlike the wars prior to the Civil War, argued Russell F. Weigley, the distance separating the established power and the rebel forces was much closer than in the wars and confrontations with Great Britain. The close territorial proximity allowed the Union to penetrate Southern territory more easily and for sustained periods. While the close proximity and strength of the Union navy weighed heavilyagainst the Confederacy, the Southern states possessed a land force that greatly rivaled the Union land formations.10 In a war where the strategy of the Union was to penetrate, divide, and strangle the Confederacy, the famed Anaconda Plan, the defeat of powerful southern fortifications would prove a central challenge for the Union forces. Vicksburg, the fortified Confederate stronghold along the heights of the Mississippi River, proved to be a major obstacle in the Union’s conquest of the entire river system. While the Union would eventually succeed, the victory was only accomplished by starving Vicksburg’s garrison and not simply through superior artillery fire. In other regions, Confederate fortifications along the James River protected their capital of Richmond from seaborne attack and proved to be another major hindrance to Union forces. Similarly, immensely strong Confederate artillery fortifications resisted determined union land and sea assaults at Charleston and the Cape Fear River until the very end of the war. Conversely, the Union armies drew on heavy coastal and naval artillery armament to create a mobile heavy artillery arm that laid siege to fortified Confederate cities with devastating effect.
Although the Civil War had spurred a mass expansion of the US military, it did not prompt them to place a greater emphasis on offensive power. In fact, in the years following the war, the US resumed its traditional focus on defensive posturing. Historian Walter Millis maintained that while the Civil War scarred the American public, for it was the first total war experienced by the Americans, it had a more subdued affect on US military thought.11 Similar to the pre-war years, emphasis was placed on warding off European aggressors and upholding American isolation. The fortification of American coastlines thus took on a renewed political and military importance. It is within this realm of history historians such as Millis and Russell F. Weigley have argued that after 1865 the United States fielded a lackluster army and navy, barely adequate for constabulary duties on the land and sea frontiers, but were keen on coastal defense.12 Millis notes that under the administration of President Chester A. Arthur (1881-5), the antiquated Navy and Army fortresses witnessed the slight military revival with the construction of a few
modern warships in response to the palpable inadequacy of the US forces in the face of new technology rapidly developing in Europe and being acquired even by impoverished South American states; the beginnings of a new era in American coast defense would commence with the next presidential administration.13 Millis emphasizes the modest nature of initiatives in the early 1880s, since the Arthur government made it clear that it was revamping America’s abilities of defense, with no vision of manufacturing a military of conquest.14
The brainchild of the Cleveland administration (1885-9) was the “Board on Fortifications or Other Defenses,” created in 1885 under Secretary of War William C. Endicott, and known then and since as the Endicott Board. As noted by Millis, the board focused in minute detail on new technologies and on their potential for protection of particular key vulnerable areas along the US coast, but in this intense research (the board’s main report comprised nearly 400 closely printed pages) all but ignored the realities of international relations, and the pertinent lessons of history. Britain, the only power in a position to launch a major assault on the US coastline, had ardently sought US friendship since crises in Anglo-American relations during the Civil War, and there was in the 1880s no sign of a potential break in relations between the two powers. According to Millis, the reason for the intensely theoretical nature of the Board’s report, filed in 1886, was that it believed war was “a problem in cost accounting.”15 The board’s central premise was that the worst military disaster that could befall the US was the sacking of American coastal cities, the focal points of American wealth.16 Weigley states that the board, even while ignoring the state of international relations, exaggerated the capacity of European fleets to attack American ports.17 Weigley particularly notes that the Endicott Board was unable to name a particular foe to challenge their extensive fortification proposals.18
Nevertheless, the Endicott Board’s propaganda about grave, even if unnamed, threats set the stage for the transformation of American fortifications from antiques to leading edge applications of new military technology. Since the American Civil War, developments in European navies had transformed warships from awkward transitional types still dependent upon wind power, and armed with guns that could shoot accurately no more than a few thousand yards, to all-steel, heavily armored, fast steamers capable of crossing oceans at speed, with guns that could bombard a shore target with massive high explosive projectiles from ranges of 10,000 yards and more. In the wake of the Endicott report, although Congress was never willing to fund fully the massive program recommended, the US Army did develop some of the finest and heaviest coast artillery guns and weapons in the world.19 Wherever possible these formidable weapons were hidden from the sea in folds in the terrain well out on headlands in advance of the harbors they were protecting, and made full use of new telephone, telegraph and optical technology for indirect fire methods. The guns crews did not need to see the target; rather observation posts on high ground, and well out on the flanks of defended areas instantly delivered all the fire control data necessary to instruments on the gun mountings that only required the crews to “follow the pointer” to bring their weapons onto target and then to correct fire. 20 Ironically, Historian Roger F. Sarty argues that the lack of consistent US development of cannon technology was actually beneficial in the end. By the 1880’s, Coast defense technology, had stabilized, and thereby allowed the United States to skip the expensive transitional weaponry.21 Technological advancement, also argues James L. Abrahamson, was also the main factor in forcing change upon American defenses. Abrahamson notes that many military officers argued that modern wars erupted with little warning and escalated rapidly, therefore equating the need for adequate peacetime preparation, adding that well prepared defenses could even deter an invasion. Later echoed by the Endicott Board, this perception of modern warfare resulted in the Boards suggestions for the upgrading of fortifications with advanced defensive works and armaments.22
Much of the material written one the CAC covers the traditional role of the Corps, with emphasis on the distinctive configuration of the branch for fortress service. Mark A. Berlow and William C. Gaines note that until 1901 the US Army’s artillery was organized into regiments that included some companies or batteries for coastal defense duty and others for field service, a throwback to the era before the Civil War when the technology of field and fortress guns had much more in common than was the case after technological change gathered speed in the 1860s. A reorganization in 1901 that abolished the regiments in favor of 126 coast artillery companies and thirty field artillery batteries did not resolve the fundamental difficulty which was the increasingly distinct function of the two types of artillery. The answer lay in the creation of two separate artillery branches in 1907, which marked the birth of the Coast Artillery Corps as a branch separate from the field arms of the service.23 Historian Larry H. Addington noted that the number of coast artillery personnel had outstripped the growth of the Field Artillery, some 13, 734 personnel in the 126 coast artillery companies as compared to only 4,800 in the thirty field batteries, implying the favoring of the CAC by the military hierarchy. The creation of the Coast Artillery Corps, Addington argued, enshrined that special influence, for the coastal gunners now had their own chief, a major-general, at the War Department, who in many respects was the co-equal of the chief of staff of the rest of the army, the sole senior representative of all the other branches of the service.24 Berlow and Gaines, however, note that personnel demands fueled by the creation of additional large fortresses, such as those that guarded new overseas possessions, principally the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone, called for the establishment of more CAC companies. Therefore, US defense policy dictated the high ratio of CAC personnel to Field Artillery personnel.
Addington’s argument that the creation of the Coast Artillery Corps owed much to the special influence of coast artillery officers and created an awkward division in the organization of the US Army’s artillery ignores the impact of the rapid advances in naval and heavy artillery technology in the late nineteenth century. These changes in fact required the coast artillery to become a much more specialized service, in many respects more closely aligned with naval than land warfare, not least because US national policy rightly or wrongly gave such a high priority to the security of the country’s sea frontiers against naval attack by European powers. Men highly trained in the operation of complex large caliber guns were needed to garrison the fortifications if the country’s huge investment in those defenses was to be effective. It is this line of reasoning one finds absent in Addington’s assessment of Army artillery organization.
Historian Kenneth Hamburger pays closer attention to the technological challenges the coast artillerymen faced in their traditional role, but in so doing provides insights useful in understanding the importance of the CAC to the AEF. Hamburger underscores that the CAC was the undisputed leader in the US in the employment of heavy artillery. Years prior to the American entry into the War, notes Hamburger, the Coast Artillery experimented with large mobile guns, including railway-mounted artillery. Furthermore, the CAC dominated all employment of very heavy artillery, twelve inches caliber and more. The coast artillery’s close involvement in the development and operation of modern heavy artillery at all stages from its first introduction into US service in the 1880s thereby placed the Corps in the position of being America’s siege weaponry experts, which was an essential tool in the quagmire that consumed the Western Front.25
In order to understand the limited scholarly interest in the role of the Coast Artillery on the Western Front, one needs to understand that scholars in fact have not probed into the history of any branch of the AEF. Historian Mark E. Grotelueschen maintains that because revisionist historians have tended to overstate the negative aspects of the AEF, there has been little interest in investigating the contributions of particular formations and units.26 Too many historians, according to Grotelueschen, “have been long on conclusions and short on the kind of detailed operational analysis that would move the debate away from the simple good-bad dichotomy that has come to dominate it.”27 In both his major works, Grotelueschen focuses on the AEF’s Field Artillery, endeavoring to restore balance by highlighting achievements as well as shortcomings. While Grotelueschen makes meager references to the Coast Artillery Corps, his analysis of the field artillery, closely associated as it was with the heavy artillery on the Western Front, is suggestive.28
Historian Gary Mead argues that one of the main reasons for lack of interest in the AEF is that that the soldiers themselves wished to forget about their involvement.29 Historian John S. D. Eisenhower notes the, brevity and unexciting nature of the experience of most American soldiers.30 The AEF was only at war for a little over a year and a major portion of the force had non-combat related duties.31 Mead goes further noting that the American troops, leadership and public often regretted military participation due to the treatment the US and its armed services received from the British and French. The unfortunate result was that very few soldiers wrote memoirs, or published their first-hand accounts of AEF battles. Mead adds that many AEF veterans never returned to France to visit the graves of their fallen comrades, very much unlike their Second World War counterparts.32 Today, most people remember the contributions of the British and French armies to the crushing of the German armies in the summer, fall of 1918, and tend to overlook the crucial part of the AEF.33 One of the few important exceptions to the failure of the veterans themselves to record their experiences was historian Lawrence Stallings, who in 1963 finally wrote an account of the AEF, but he did not in part because of the fact that so little else had been produced, notably including any sort of an official history beyond the barebones collections of documents published by the War Department in the 1930s and 1940s.34 Edward M. Coffman in 1968 published the first comprehensive history of the American experience in the First World War, a work of great influence in the field, and he is noted by Nenninger and David F. Trask as one of the most important scholars of the AEF. 35 Coffman attributes the lack of interest in the AEF to the overwhelming influence of the United States’ much larger participation in the Second World War. 36 Coffman acknowledges that most AEF literature has been written since he first published his own work, but notes that much of the new scholarship has been based upon the biographies of General John J. Pershing and General Robert L. Bullard.37 A fact that helps to explain the long-standing focus of analysis at the top levels of AEF leadership, and in particular Pershing’s flawed faith in the offensive power of infantry.38 There have been attempts to probe more deeply into the battle history of the AEF, but these have been few in number.39
Because of the undeveloped nature of the secondary literature, the present project relied on primary sources. Although the War Department never carried through with the original intention of producing an official history of the army’s effort in the First World War, in the 1930s-40s the department published a dozen volumes of documents and basic compilations of data, such as orders of battle. Of great consequence to this study were the Order of Battle volumes one and three.40 One mark of the growing professionalism of the coast artillery was the good quality of articles produced by its officers in the Journal of the United States Artillery, which in 1919 was succeeded by the Coast Artillery Journal, and these were a key source on Coast Artillery doctrine and evaluations of Central Power heavy artillery advancements. At the National Archives Records Administration (NARA), College Park, Maryland, Record Group 120 contains the correspondence of the AEF, and the files relating to the First Army were particularly useful for information on the coast artillery; when First Army became operational in the summer of 1918 many of the Coast Artillery Corps units that had gone overseas and were scattered among various corps, were grouped together under this formation. The files in Record Group 120 deal with a wide range of issues such as supply, organization, and studies of combat.41 Contrary to the arguments of some historians that AEF veterans wished only to forget their service, members of the CAC units established their own newsletter Liaison: the Courier of The Big Gun Corps in which they published unit histories and personal memoirs, and this was an important source for the present study. Admittedly, Liaison was in existence only from 1919 to 1920, which might indicate that the interest level quickly shrank in the years immediately following the Armistice. The publication, however, went out of existence after a few years in print. The basis for terminating Liaison was the disappearance of its publication subsidy from the government.
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