The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  Gee. I don’t think it’s very nice that somebody even had to write such a song. If you’re a major branch of the United States military and you have to rely upon pluggers to make sure that you’re not entirely ignored—in wartime, no less—well, something is seriously amiss. Maybe it’s just because they often seem like the World War I of armed forces—that is, overlooked and underappreciated—but I am inclined to give a little credit to the Navy.

  For one thing, they had their war stolen right out from under them. When America entered the fight in April, 1917, the conventional wisdom held that the Allies already had enough men, and that what they lacked were munitions, food, and, of course, money. The United States’ main contribution, it was thought, would be guns and ammunition, wheat and corn—and the ships to carry it all across in the face of unrestricted submarine warfare. So little thought was given in those early days to raising an army, in fact, that the nation didn’t even institute a draft until June, and only then after rigorous debate over the matter in Congress. Just as Art Fiala, looking to get into the war quickly, was directed toward the Engineers, other young men, looking for action, were encouraged to enlist in the Navy, where they would surely get in a shot or two at the hated Unterseeboot, or U-boat. This was to be a naval conflict, which explains why Laurence Moffitt’s mother was relieved when she learned that her son had joined the Army National Guard.

  It didn’t work out that way. The notion that America’s main role was to be played upon the high seas had been formed in a vacuum; when French and British representatives arrived in Washington toward the end of April, 1917, they quickly disabused the American military of it. What they really needed, it turned out, were more warm bodies in the trenches. And so, though the Navy would still be critical to the war effort, theirs would be more of a behind-the-scenes role. While the USN would offer battleships and destroyers to the British Navy to help keep the German fleet trapped in harbor, their primary role would be to shuttle men and materiel across the Atlantic. In the first three months of the war, a quarter of all American ships that headed off to Europe never returned. A quarter! With odds like those, it makes you wonder how the Navy got anyone to enlist at all.

  Fortunately, those odds got better and better as the war progressed; you might say, even, that if the Navy had to go through such growing pains, it’s best they did it at the beginning, before the boys were ready to go Over There. I say that by way of introducing perhaps the most remarkable statistic of the entire war: The Germans did not manage to sink a single American troop transport during a year and a half of war with the United States. Not a one. And America sent two million men across an ocean for the sole purpose of killing Germans.

  So yes: Let’s all try to give a little credit to the Navy. They really did take the boys across without a single loss. And it wasn’t easy.

  Among the veterans I met, seven of them had some direct connection to the Navy during the First World War.

  There was 104-year-old Russell Buchanan, whom I visited in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 13, 2004. The son of immigrants from Prince Edward Island—his father, who died of some ailment (“You never hear of it today—I suppose they changed the name of that sickness”) when Russell was three, had been a carpenter and, Russell added proudly, a Scottish piper—he had grown up in Cambridge. One day in 1916, while crossing Boston Common, he came across a Marine Corps recruiting station and tried to enlist. When they asked him his age, he made the mistake of telling them the truth: sixteen. They sent him home. He went up to Maine and worked on a farm for a while, built himself up; when America entered the war, he joined the United States Naval Reserve Force. “I was offering my service” is how he put it. They assigned him to an Eagle boat—a class of steel ship smaller than destroyers but larger, and with a longer range, than wooden submarine chasers—which patrolled the Atlantic coast from the Maritimes to the Carolinas. He was a signalman—flags, semaphores, lights. They never found any U-boats, though they did encounter some banana boats, and once got stranded at sea for a few days; eventually they were towed to Charleston, where Mr. Buchanan had his first encounter with racial segregation. “We went ashore,” he recalled, “and we had a black chef, a cook, aboard the ship, and I was ashore with him. And we were going to the town proper, and a trolley car stopped. So we entered, and we took the first seats on the trolley.” He laughed. “And the operator informed us, that he had to go back to the rear . . . So we both got off the trolley car, because we were insulted.”

  Like Russell Buchanan, David Byerly, whom I met in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, on September 11, 2004, was 104 years old, born in 1900, and had lost his father at the age of three. But unlike Mr. Buchanan, whose mother had to go to work as a judge’s housekeeper, Mr. Byerly had grown up in somewhat less straitened circumstances in the town of Butler, about twenty-five miles from Pittsburgh. “The Byerlys were very well-known in Pennsylvania,” he told me. His father, who had been in the oil business, had died, at the age of thirty, during a local epidemic of typhoid fever; “they drained the reservoir of the water,” his son explained to me, and “found half a dozen cows in there.” The family went to live with his widowed grandmother. One day in early 1916, his mother was at the bank when she ran into her local congressman, who made her a proposition: “Eunice,” he said, “you have two boys. I’ve got an appointment for the Naval Academy. Would one of your boys be interested in it?”

  “So my mother grabbed it,” David Byerly recalled nearly ninety years later. “I think money was running a little shy at that time. And my older brother was already a freshman in college. And so the idea of a free education appealed to her.” For his senior year in high school, his mother sent him to a special preparatory school in Annapolis, where he studied every past Naval Academy entrance exam since the Civil War, just to make sure he passed his. He did. Two months later, several of his friends from Butler High School enlisted in the Army. He tried to do the same, he said, but “they wouldn’t take me. On account of I had already committed to the Naval Academy.”

  Classes didn’t begin until September; he and the other five hundred members of his incoming class spent the summer drilling. At one point, he told me, “I was caught smoking and landed down on the Ship for two weeks.” “The Ship” was a prison ship.

  Once classes began, he explained, “we had a school routine. And the war didn’t really intrude on it.” In the summer of 1918, when classes were out, “they wanted us to get war experience. So they sent us out with the Atlantic Fleet . . . I served in a turret of a battleship . . . I was what was called the ‘plug man.’ In other words, I had seventeen and a half turns of this plug, to put the plug back into the breech of the gun. I did it every morning, all morning long.”

  The battleship, the USS Wisconsin, was already twenty years old; after the war it would be sold for scrap. “We were hiding up in the Chesapeake Bay,” he recalled. “Actually, the York River . . . hiding from the German submarines.” At night, he said, “I had to serve as a boat officer for a boat to patrol the net. We had a net down at the Chesapeake, and in the York River.” The net was supposed to ensnare U-boats. “So every night I would go down with this boat. And my only armament was my .45 pistol.”

  “So if you had spotted a submarine—”

  “I’d be firing bullets.” Fortunately, he never spotted one.

  And that was Midshipman Byerly’s war.

  It’s a funny thing about revolutions: Sometimes, they can begin very subtly.

  The Naval Reserve Act of 1916 started one not with a bold statement or action, but with an omission. What was omitted was any mention of the fact that you had to be a man to serve active duty in the Navy; by being omitted, it quietly ceased being a fact. So quietly, in fact, that Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels didn’t even realize it until the following year. When he did, he made a decision that shocked many: He formally granted the Navy permission to start enlisting women. (The Navy already had a small Nurse Corps, but it was staffed by civilians without
rank or benefits.) This was around the middle of March, 1917, several weeks before the United States entered the war, and three full years before American women would be granted the right to vote. By the end of April, nearly six hundred women had signed up. Their official designation was “Yeoman (F),” but most people called them Yeomanettes.

  By the end of the war there would be more than eleven thousand of them in the Navy, which is kind of surprising to me because, as far as I can tell, the Yeomanettes didn’t have it so good back then. All but five served stateside; no France for them. Almost all of them were confined to clerical work. Their uniforms were dowdy. They weren’t assigned official ranks. The money wasn’t very good. They didn’t receive any benefits. They even had to pay their own room and board. You have to wonder: Why did they bother? If they really wanted to help the war effort, there were much easier ways of doing so; Rosie the Riveter was not an invention of World War II, even if her name was. So, why the Navy?

  I was fortunate to locate and visit not one but two Yeomanettes in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the first being Ruth Elfean Richardson, who was 107 years old when I met her on November 18, 2004. She was living then in a nursing home in Farnham, Virginia, just a few miles from the town of Lodge, where she’d been born. Both are on what is known as the Northern Neck, a rural peninsula that juts out into Chesapeake Bay about a hundred or so miles southeast of Washington. Her roots ran straight back in the Northern Neck; her father, George Washington Fisher, had been a farmer there. After high school, she went to work on the farm “crating tomatoes,” she said, and didn’t much care for it, so one day, after America had entered the war, she and a friend of hers named Myrtle Dawson decided to go up to Washington. “We thought that was just somewhere to go, and it would be nice, and we’d go to Washington, and, well, we thought we could have a good time, I guess,” she recalled with a chuckle. They traveled there by steamboat. “I think we stayed on the boat all night,” she told me.

  They stayed for a bit with Myrtle’s sister, “until we got a room that we wanted to be to ourselves. You know, have a good time, go to dances, and places. You know, like girls do.” Somehow, they learned that the Navy was looking for women; she seemed to think a poster might have caught her eye: “Join the Navy and see the world,” she remembered.

  “Did that appeal to you?” I asked her.

  “Yes!” she replied exuberantly.

  So she and Myrtle went and signed up. They didn’t have to drill, as she remembered it, though she also remembered “we marched up, when they had parades. We marched in the parade on Pennsylvania Avenue.” One time, “we all got together and marched up from the Capitol to the White House in the uniform.” That was for General Pershing, after the armistice.

  Mostly, though, she said, “I worked in the Navy Department. I filed . . . I sorted papers and things. The usual things, you know, in an office that people do. . . . We went to dances, and things that girls do, you know, around that time, I guess.”

  Both she and Myrtle would meet their future husbands at dances. She mentioned them a lot; the more we talked, the more it became clear to me that these dances were her favorite thing about being in Washington. And her favorite thing about being in the Navy, it seemed, was that it got her to Washington. “If they wanted us to go to town and mail a letter for them, well, I did that, and I liked that because to get away, and go to town, you know, a girl liked to get away,” she explained. “And I enjoyed that, that I was doing something, you know?” The Navy issued her two uniforms: a white one and a blue one. “I still have some of it,” she told me, smiling. “At home, in my trunk.”

  Seventeen months later, I traveled to Boonsboro, Maryland, to meet another former Yeomanette named Charlotte Winters. She was 108 years old then. Boonsboro is near the Antietam battlefield, about sixty miles northwest of Washington, where Ms. Winters had grown up, and where she enlisted in the Navy in 1917. “Why did you join?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said with a lilt in her voice. “I just loved the Navy.” Later, she elaborated just a bit: “We lived in the part of Washington where everyone was in the Navy.”

  “Did you have any friends who joined the Navy?” I asked.

  “I think so,” she answered. “All of us girls joined the Navy.”

  Now, that’s quite a statement, and to be honest, I don’t know if it’s accurate; Ms. Richardson’s memory had been frail, but Ms. Winters’s seemed faded almost to the point of irretrievability. I do know, from her obituary—she died about eleven months later—that her sister, Sophie, had also served in the Navy during the war; that, after the war, she was one of twenty women who helped found one of the first American Legion posts, in Washington, D.C.; and that she remained a member of the Legion for eighty years. From our conversation, I determined that her mother had died when she was very young, at which point her father’s sister, her aunt Lottie, had moved in to help raise her; that her father had worked for the Navy as a civilian; that she had worked as a secretary at a factory—“the Naval Gun Factory,” she said it was called—that produced artillery pieces for ships; that she met her husband there; and that she really liked her work. “I liked everything about the Navy,” she told me, and it was obvious, almost ninety years later, that she still did. Thanks to the Navy, she was no longer confined to a sidestep realm where she could only watch from behind a glass as the world played out its script; the Navy put her out in the world, made her a player on the stage. She was doing something. Maybe that’s why they all joined up, all eleven thousand of them—because Josephus Daniels had given them this fleeting chance to step out from behind that glass, and a lack of rank and benefits and room and board seemed a small price to pay for something most of them never could have imagined beforehand: a place in the wider world. Give a little credit to the Navy.

  They were all released from active duty after the war ended, whether they wanted to be or not; perhaps, in the light of day after the fighting had stopped, the Navy reconsidered what was then a bold experiment. But the Yeomanettes did not just go back home and never mention their service again. Instead, they lobbied to upgrade their discharges from general to honorable—and won. They formed American Legion posts, sometimes with men, sometimes without. Many of them never stopped working at their jobs; they merely went home one day as Yeomanettes and returned the next as civilians.

  I don’t know if the notion of the Yeomanette piqued the popular imagination during World War I; I’ve never come across a song written about them, or even any mention of them in a newspaper from that time. It seems possible that the vast majority of Americans didn’t even know they existed. But the military knew. And though the Yeomanettes were all discharged in 1919, and the Army and Navy returned to being single-sex institutions for more than twenty years, when World War II swept into America, they did not hesitate to welcome women into their ranks. In 1942, the Navy established Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, or WAVES; within a year it put some twenty-seven thousand women in uniform. The following year, the Army established the Women’s Army Corps, and enlisted, by war’s end, one hundred thousand WACs. And if their uniforms were spiffier, their nickname lacked the elegance of the one accorded to that earlier generation of servicewomen, the ones who’d blazed the trail.

  Aside from the U-boats and a couple of battles, it wasn’t much of a naval war. The first of those battles, near the Falkland Islands in 1914, was a sound defeat for the Germans, who lost an entire squadron, as well as the revered Vice Admiral Maximilian Graf von Spee. The second, fought two years later in the North Sea off the coast of Jutland, Denmark, was a draw; the Germans, tired of having their fleet bottled up in port, took it out to sea, confronted the British, and sank some ships, but not enough. The British could have pursued the retreating Germans and possibly destroyed their fleet once and for all, but they didn’t. Both sides quickly returned to the status quo: the British ruling the open waters, blockading Germany; the Germans fighting back underwater.

&n
bsp; Not the kind of naval war that might attract young American men seeking a lot of action, perhaps, but twenty-year-old William F. Cotton, of Corley, Arkansas—far away from any large body of water—chose to enlist in the Navy, nevertheless. “I was just looking for—for a life,” he explained. “Kids today, I don’t know what they look for.”

  He actually offered several different explanations. “I joined the Navy because we had a war comin’ on,” he told me at one point; then, a few minutes later, he said, “I joined the Navy, I guess, because I thought I was going to be drafted. So rather than do that, I had a choice . . . and the Navy, of course you had to go away to go to the Navy.” Later still, he said: “I didn’t particularly like the idea of the Army. But the Navy was kind of a lure.”

  They sent him to Boston—“coldest place in the United States,” he called it—where they put him to work baking bread in a galley; back in Arkansas, he’d worked in a bakery on weekends. After the war, he and his brother, Herbert, moved to Alexandria, Louisiana (where he was still living when I visited him, on September 19, 2004), and bought a bakery. Eventually they owned several throughout the state.

  From Boston he sailed off to Cork, Ireland, where he joined the crew of the USS Oklahoma, a battleship that escorted troop transports as they crossed the Atlantic for France. The Oklahoma was a new ship, one of only a few in the entire fleet to use oil instead of coal. On December 7, 1941, it was moored in Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor. It took five torpedo hits and was strafed until it capsized; 429 of its crew were lost.

  “I was what they call a ‘chief commissary,’” William Cotton recalled. That meant that when the Oklahoma docked in Brest, France, he had to go ashore and buy all the food for its crew—sixteen hundred men. And he didn’t speak any French. It may not have been the adventure he’d thought he was signing up for back in Arkansas, but it was hard work; he particularly remembered buying yeast and flour, and strawberries from a large Frenchwoman, who impressed him. “She was the boss of a working crew,” he remembered.