by A. J. Baime
Seven thousand men were aboard the George Washington. “There we were watching New York’s skyline diminish,” Harry recorded, “and wondering if we’d be heroes or corpses.”
///
To a Missouri farm boy, wartime Paris was a wild scene. Bars and hotels spilled fresh-faced American soldiers into the streets. Few had ever left the county where they were born, and their pockets were full of army pay. France had an inexhaustible supply of wine and cognac, and American soldiers were “trying to drink all there is here,” Harry wrote Bess. He went to the Grand Opera, and strolled the Champs-Élysées. “The country is very pretty,” he wrote, “and I don’t blame the French for wanting to keep it.”
The first 100,000 U.S. troops under General Pershing were headed to the front lines as Harry spent his first days in France. Here he learned to fire the “French 75”—World War I’s most heralded gun. It could blast a 75-millimeter shell 4.25 miles, at a rate of fifteen rounds per minute. The gun weighed more than three thousand pounds, and rolled on pneumatic tires, so it could be towed into position by car or horse from one battlefield to the next. It required an understanding of trajectory theory as well as mechanics. Harry barely slipped through artillery school, and soon joined his unit from Missouri at Camp Coetquidan in Brittany, France.
July 10 was one of the most momentous days of his life. He was called in to see a colonel and was sure he had done something wrong. In fact, the opposite was true. His superiors saw leadership qualities in him that he did not yet know existed. When he arrived at the colonel’s office, he saluted and braced himself.
“Harry,” the colonel said, “how would you like to command a battery?”
“Well, sir,” he responded, “I hope to be able to do that someday.”
“All right, you’ll take command of D Battery in the morning.”
Truman saluted, about-faced, and marched out of the office. Outside he told a major that his tour of duty in France would be short. He had just been given command of Battery D, the most incorrigible doughboys in the service.
“I think of Battery D as the most mischievous, unpredictable, and difficult-to-handle unit in the whole AEF [American Expeditionary Forces],” recalled one member, Harry Murphy. “Most of the young fellows were athletes of some kind,” recalled Battery D soldier Floyd Ricketts. “I was a semipro ballplayer around Kansas City, and there were fighters, and football players, and basketball players.” Harry was no athlete. Battery D soldiers were predominantly Irish and German Catholics, and Harry was no Catholic, either. He had heard that four other commanders had tried to browbeat Battery D into line, and all had failed.
The next morning, at six thirty, he stepped in front of Battery D’s 194 soldiers. He had never been so nervous in his life.
“He took command of the battery on a cold, frosty morning at Camp Coetquidon [sic],” recalled Battery D’s Eddie McKim, who was about to become one of Truman’s lifelong friends. “My recollection of him was that his knees were knocking together . . . Yes, you could see that he was scared to death . . . I didn’t care much for him. I didn’t care much for the idea of going through a war with a man I considered a ‘sissy.’”
“He was kind of a rather short fellow—compact, serious face, wearing glasses,” recalled another Battery D soldier, Vere Leigh.
Harry got straight to the point: When he gave an order, he wanted it carried out. “I didn’t come over here to get along with you fellows,” he barked. “You’re going to get along with me. And if I hear there are any of you who can’t, speak up right now and I’ll bust you right back.”
“He let us know he was Boss!” McKim concluded. “There was no trouble whatever when Truman took command.”
“I am a Battery commander now,” Truman wrote Bess on July 14, 1918. “You’ve no idea the experience I’m getting . . . I have attained my one ambition, to be a Battery commander. If I can only make good at it, I can hold my head up anyway the rest of my days.”
On August 17, the 129th Field Artillery moved out to the front. Battery D soldiers boarded train cars with all their gear, 105 horses, and 6 French 75 cannons. The trip to the front would take two days, and as the train clattered along the tracks, Captain Truman was suffering the same emotions the rest of the men were. “I have my doubts about my bravery when heavy-explosive shells and gas attacks begin,” he wrote. They were headed for France’s Vosges Mountains, the only mountainous battlefield on the western front.
Behind the lines, the battery found chaos waiting. “The roads [that led to the front] were literally blocked, jammed and packed with men, caissons, limbers, trucks, field guns, heavy artillery, autos, ambulances, motorcycles, field kitchens, thousands of horses and mules and men fighting with them,” remembered Battery D soldier Verne Chaney. “Add to this two or three thousand tanks, a night dark as Hades itself, and over all a drizzling rain creating a mud hole the likes of which the world has never seen.”
Truman moved his men deep into the Vosges. On the morning of September 6, “we pulled over the crest of [a] mountain in view of the lines,” Chaney recalled. On this terrain, huge dugouts had to be shoveled to situate the French 75s on level ground. Across the valley, Truman could see smoke from enemy encampments, and as the sun began to set, he ordered his sleepless men to fire the guns at 7:45 p.m. “It was our first taste of war,” recalled Battery D’s Floyd Ricketts. From atop his horse, Truman gave the order.
“Then all hell broke loose,” according to Chaney, “not only where we were but in the woods all around us [from other American batteries].”
The gunners fired the French 75s as fast as they could, as many as forty rounds of gas shells in three minutes’ time. Between shots, soldiers dumped buckets of water down the sizzling cannon barrels to cool them. After forty-five minutes the barrage ended. A moment of silence passed, then suddenly shells and bullets came whistling through the forest—enemy fire, returning.
“My battery became panic-stricken,” Truman recorded. The men dashed for cover in trenches, some sprinting through the woods. Spooked horses darted in every direction. “The first sergeant got so scared,” recalled Battery D’s Walter Menefee, “that he ran back eight miles to the echelon and I’ve never seen him to this day.” Truman stayed on his mount, but a shell hit some fifteen feet away, tumbling him from his horse and pinning him beneath. One soldier recalled Truman fighting to get out and “gasping like a catfish out of water.”
When he was later able to collect his men and retreat, Truman found that not one Battery D soldier had been killed. Four horses perished in the shelling, and two more were wounded and had to be shot. Battery D members would name the night’s fight the Battle of Who Run, for some had fled at the first sign of enemy fire. Captain Harry Truman was not one of them.
///
For the next two months, Battery D moved from one position to the next along the western front, firing barrages at the Germans. Night marches left the horses near death from exhaustion and malnutrition, while the soldiers grew so tired, they slept as they walked, forced to eat rotten meat at times for sustenance. One soldier recalled marching all night, so weary that he hallucinated: “I would make an effort to see something ahead and all I could make out was tall office buildings and large residences. I knew then I was seeing things, optical illusions.”
The battery landed in the Argonne Forest, in mid-September. For days the American forces prepared for a push at the Germans, what would later be known as the Meuse-Argonne drive—the largest American military operation in history up to that time.
On the morning of September 26, the drive began. At 4 a.m. Truman’s battery unleashed some three thousand rounds of 75-millimeter ammunition. “The fireworks started,” recalled Battery D soldier McKinley Wooden. “It was the greatest artillery battle the world had ever seen up until that time. You never saw anything like it. I mean to tell you, for seven days after that, our guns were still warm, all the time.” At 8 a.m., four hours after the artillery barrage started, some 140,000 Ame
rican troops drove forward into a fog and light rain. Many were cut down by enemy fire. “I saw bodies without heads,” recalled one soldier, “some without arms or legs, some cut in two at the waist and parts lying several feet apart.” The drive continued, and the German lines faltered.
By this time, Truman had gained an affection for his men that he struggled to put into words, a respect particular to brothers in arms. He was “plumb crazy” about them, he said. They felt the same way about him; they would call him their captain for the rest of their lives. He had yet to lose a single soldier in his command. Curiously, his men noticed, he always seemed neat and trimmed, even after long marches. “The rest of us would look like bums with mud sticking all over us,” remembered another soldier, Harry Vaughan. “He always looked immaculate. And I was never able to understand why.”
When Truman finally found the time to write Bess, the Meuse-Argonne drive was nearly two weeks old. “The great drive has taken place,” he wrote on October 6, 1918, “and I had a part in it, a very small one but nevertheless a part. The experience has been one that I can never forget, one that I don’t want to go through again unless the Lord wills but one I’d never have missed for anything. The papers are in the street now saying that the Central Powers have asked for peace, and I was in the drive that did it!”
On November 11, Truman was awoken by a field telephone ringing in his tent at 5 a.m. Cease-fire orders had come in, for 11 a.m. He gathered his men and set them to work, firing 164 more rounds that morning, stopping at 10:45, when Battery D fired its last shot at a village northeast of Verdun. On this day—in Independence, Missouri, as in cities and towns around the United States—sound is what most people would remember: the booming clang of church bells, the pouring of frenzied citizens into the streets. For Truman it was silence that symbolized American victory. “The silence that followed almost made one’s head ache,” he recalled. That night he was desperate for sleep, but a unit of French soldiers—many of them drunk—insisted on filing by and saluting him one at a time. They slurred: “Vive President Wilson! Vive le capitaine d’artillerie Americaine!”
For weeks Truman was stuck in Europe, awaiting his ticket home. He was bursting with anticipation. Bess wrote him, “You may invite the entire 35th Division to your wedding if you want to. I guess it’s going to be yours as well as mine.”
///
“You’ve just never seen such a radiant, happy look on a man’s face,” Truman’s cousin Ethel Noland recalled. Truman was standing at the altar at Trinity Episcopal Church in Independence, watching his bride walk down the aisle toward him. Since Bess’s father was dead, her brother Frank held her arm as she walked. Even on Truman’s wedding day, destiny was at work. On this same day—June 28, 1919—President Wilson signed the Treaty of Versailles in France, a treaty that was meant to bring on lasting peace but was in fact ill constructed and destined to fail.
For her wedding day Bess wore a gown of ivory chiffon, a white faille hat, and pointed white leather shoes with Louis XV heels. The groom wore a single-breasted cream and black houndstooth suit freshly stitched by his best man, Ted Marks, a fellow captain in the 129th Field Artillery, who had just opened a tailor shop in Kansas City. The suit cost Harry $65, and his best man let him have it on credit, since Truman had spent quite a bit on a wedding ring, purchased in New York on his way home from Europe. The reception was at Bess’s home, and if there was one awkward element, it was the mothers. Bess’s mother, Mrs. Wallace, had never been fond of the “farm boy” from Grandview. As for Mamma Truman, she was escorted from the affair at the end by best man Ted Marks. “Well, now, Mrs. Truman,” Marks said, “you’ve lost Harry.” She looked at him with fierce blue eyes (“I can see her face to this day,” Marks remarked decades later). “Indeed I haven’t,” Mamma Truman said.
Harry and Bess departed for Chicago, where their honeymoon began. When they returned, Truman moved into the Wallace home at 219 North Delaware. It was not a comfortable fit. Bess’s grandmother Mrs. Gates slept in a room on the first floor, while Bess’s mother occupied the master bedroom on the second floor, a few feet from where Harry and Bess began their marriage, in separate beds in their own small room. Harry brought his belongings—nothing but a stack of books, some clothes, and some souvenirs from the army. Bess’s mother endured Harry’s presence. “The Wallaces . . . rather ignored Mr. Truman,” a friend and future secretary of Harry’s later said. “Not blatantly, rudely. But it was there.”
Truman set out to make some money. “I finally decided to sell all my farm equipment, hogs, horses, cows, harnesses and whatnot,” he wrote in a diary, “and go into business with my Jewish friend, my canteen Sergeant, Edward Jacobson.”
Thus began the next of Harry Truman’s business debacles.
8
ON NOVEMBER 28, 1919, Truman & Jacobson held its grand opening. It was a haberdashery on Twelfth Street and Baltimore, in the heart of downtown Kansas City. Upon entering the store, customers saw a menagerie of luxury products, from neckties to silk underwear. They also found thirty-five-year-old Harry Truman behind the counter. Truman & Jacobson had twenty feet of storefront, with broad windows and a sign advertising SHIRTS, COLLARS, HOSIERY, GLOVES, BELTS, HATS.
Eddie Jacobson had been Truman’s partner running the canteen at Camp Doniphan and had served in Battery D. Legend has it that the pair concocted their haberdashery while playing poker and fighting seasickness aboard the ship home from Europe. Harry put all his money in from sales of his share of the family farm, plus thousands more in borrowed funds. The partners paid for the store’s build-out, and the lease called for $350 a month for five years, according to lawsuit papers later filed. The location offered a steady stream of foot traffic. “Twelfth Street was in its heyday then,” Jacobson recalled. “It was the fastest place in America. Gambling houses right around the corner from the store. Four hotels and a lot of night clubs, all full of a sporting crowd.”
In January 1920 (the same month that Prohibition went into effect), a sharp decline in the economy jolted the business. For the next eighteen months a recession lingered, and by the spring of 1922 the store was shuttered. Jacobson had to declare legal bankruptcy, but Truman avoided that route. Still, their lease ran for many more months, and bank loans were unpayable. Of all Harry’s financial setbacks, this one hurt the most. “I am still paying on those debts,” he wrote in his diary twelve years later.
Nightly suppers at home with Bess and her mother grew all the more strained. Harry was broke. One day, just before the haberdashery closed for good, he was inside his store pacing the floor tiles he had spent so much money on. He would remember feeling exceptionally blue, when an old pal burst through the shop’s door—Mike Pendergast, one of Jackson County’s more influential political figures. Harry had served in the army with Mike’s son Jim, and Mike had taken a liking to the haberdasher.
“How’d you like to be county judge?” Mike Pendergast asked.
Harry must have laughed the notion off at first. “I don’t know,” he said.
“If you would like,” Pendergast said, “you can have it.”
In Jackson County, judges were not arbiters of jurisprudence but rather county commissioners. They ran things, and every two years they came up for reelection. Not until after the haberdashery was closed for good did Harry start to take Mike Pendergast’s idea seriously. His wife thought it a terrible idea, and his friends found it odd, as if fetched out of thin air. Truman was known to be an avid reader of political history, but he had never seriously entertained the idea of actually becoming a politician. “Funny thing,” Eddie Jacobson remembered about his months at Truman & Jacobson. “Harry never talked much about politics.”
In the spring of 1922 a small notice appeared in the local Independence Examiner, announcing the candidacy of Harry S. Truman for eastern county judge. Truman made his first attempt at a political speech at an American Legion post meeting in Lee’s Summit, a farming town directly south of Independence. He rallied the Battery D
boys, and Bess sat near the front row, joining some 360 locals, many of whom had come for the free cigars. “I never will forget the first speech he made,” recalled war buddy Edgar Hinde. “Boy, it was about the poorest effort of a speech I ever heard in my life. I suffered for him.” “He kind of stammered and hummed around,” said another Independence local, Henry Chiles. “But he got through it.”
Jackson County judges controlled the salaries of about seven hundred municipal employees. Traditionally, a portion of the county income ended up in the judges’ pockets, through illegal kickbacks. Road, oil, and cement contractors got jobs oftentimes not by promising the best work or the cheapest price but by promising to slide money back to the judges under the table. It was an easy scam. As one powerful Jackson County newspaper editor put it around this time: “The purse strings of the county are therefore the prize.”
The county employed three elected judges: a western judge, who handled Kansas City; an eastern judge, who handled the rural communities east of the city; and a presiding judge, the county’s chief executive. Harry was running for eastern judge. In May 1922 he drove his Dodge all over the county, knocking on doors. His platform had two major selling points: (1) Honesty. Truman promised not to filch county purses, as was custom in the past. His family had lived in this rural community for years, and people knew the Trumans to be trustworthy and true to their word; and (2) Roads. Henry Ford’s Model Ts had swarmed the county, and Truman believed that a new arterial system of paved roads would usher Jackson County into the future.
He had no qualifications outside of his army and some National Guard service. He did, however, have the backing of Mike Pendergast, who had first approached him about the eastern judgeship. Mike’s brother, “Boss” Tom Pendergast, ran Kansas City’s Democratic political machine from his office above his saloon at 1908 Main Street, while Mike ran the machine in Jackson County’s rural areas. Tom Pendergast in particular had emerged as one of the most powerful figures in the state, and he defined machine politics in the simplest terms.