May 25, 1918: On the eve of the battle of Belleau Wood, four young conscripts stood huddled together on the rail platform at Parkston, South Dakota, and waited for the westbound train. Three of the men were brothers in their early twenties, Joseph, Michael, and David Hofer; the fourth was their brother-in-law Jacob Wipf. All four had received induction notices from the Hanson County draft board with orders to proceed to Camp Lewis outside Seattle to begin training. Even though they were just standing there quietly minding their own business, these four young men were getting pelted with suspicious looks and wisecracks from the other recruits waiting on the platform. Their beards and homemade clothes marked them as Hutterian Brethren—members of the Rockport Hutterite colony, one of seventeen South Dakota communal farms run by German-speaking immigrants from Russia. Hutterites, Hutterish, Hutterian Brethren—call them what you would, every red-blooded South Dakotan in 1918 knew that they were little better than Huns—in fact, they were Huns, only they wouldn’t admit it. They kept to themselves on vast tracts of choice farmland that they bought up on the cheap from the government or squeezed from poor American farmers. They were rich as Croesus when everyone else was struggling. They spoke and prayed in German, grew beards, and wore funny clothes. They were “poor citizens” who refused to buy their share of government war bonds. And, worst sin of all, they refused to fight. While other American boys were shipping out by the tens of thousands to the battlefields of France, these Huns claimed that their religion forbade them to serve in the military, even invoking the Bible to justify their cowardice. “Any other country is welcome to them,” railed one South Dakota newspaper, these “so-called men who will let others shed blood to make this a land of freedom.”
When the train pulled in, the four bearded men got on together and were placed in an empty compartment along with another young Hutterite conscript. They decided to barricade themselves in. They knew it would be a long ride and they didn’t want trouble. But trouble came knocking in the shape of a fellow recruit named William Danforth. Danforth, a thirty-year-old local lawyer from the nearby town of Alexandria, stood at the barricaded door and begged them to open up. He said he just wanted to talk to them. At first the four made no response, but as the lawyer kept knocking, they finally decided to comply. After all, he was a lawyer. No sooner had they opened the door a crack than a gang of recruits stormed in and set upon them. Taunting the Hutterites, they grabbed Jacob Wipf and Michael Hofer and cut off hunks of their hair and beards. They beat them. They dared them to speak another word of German. It was as if these four quiet bearded men were the enemy—or prisoners of war.
All four of them were married with children: Jacob Wipf, thirty, was the father of three children, ages three to seven; David Hofer had five children ranging in age from six years old to four months; his brother Joseph, twenty-four, had a young son and daughter and his wife back at the Rockport colony was pregnant; Michael’s wife had given birth to a daughter two months before his induction notice came. They were all simple, humble farmers, brought up in a strict faith that had taught them to serve God and live peaceably with all people. Their religion expressly forbade them to hold public office, to serve in the military of the country they lived in, or to wear the uniform of the state. All their lives they had lived with their own kind in a sheltered colony, working the fields, speaking German, upholding the faith and the customs that their families had brought over from Europe. When the draft notices arrived from the Hanson County board, the four had talked with their minister about what they should do. They knew that other Hutterite brethren had fled to Canada, which accorded Hutterites and members of other so-called peace churches the status of conscientious objectors—but they feared if they followed that course they might never see their wives and children again. The minister helped the Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf work out a compromise position: they would submit to the draft notice and report to Camp Lewis as ordered—but that was all. They would enter the army but not serve. It was the only way they saw to obey the law and remain true to their faith.
On the train, the four Hutterite men covered their faces and wept as the other recruits went after them with scissors and fists. As they rattled west for two endless days, they trembled to think what would happen to them when they arrived at Camp Lewis and fell into the hands of the U.S. Army.
German, German-speaking, German by descent or heritage, name or association—May 1918 was not a good time to be German anything in America. For going on four years now, ever since the rape of Belgium in August 1914, hostility to all things German had been mounting in the United States. But when American soldiers began dying of German bullets, shells, bayonet blades, and gas in April 1918, anti-German hostility boiled over into rage. Some of the rage took ridiculous forms. Sauerkraut was renamed liberty cabbage; local patriots mounted machine guns in front of Milwaukee’s Pabst Theatre to prevent a troupe from performing Friedrich Schiller’s play William Tell; people caught speaking German or people with German names who refused to buy liberty bonds had their houses or churches painted yellow. German books were torn from library shelves and burned; German-language classes were banned in secondary schools and universities; German and Austrian music—even Beethoven—was barred from the nation’s music halls. But sometimes the rage turned from ridiculous to violent, even deadly. A South Dakota rural mail carrier with a German name was caught by a mob of his neighbors and horsewhipped for his lack of zeal for the American war effort. On April 4, 1918, a thirty-one-year-old baker named Robert Paul Prager who had emigrated from Dresden and settled in East Saint Louis was seized by a mob, stripped of his clothing, paraded through the streets barefoot, bound with an American flag, and made to kiss an American flag. The fact that Prager had attempted to enlist in the U.S. Navy but was barred on medical grounds made no difference to the mob. Fearing for the man’s life, the police took Prager into custody and hid him in the local jail—but the mob, now five hundred strong, found him, dragged him out, and lynched him after midnight at the outskirts of town. “Pray for me, my dear parents,” Prager managed to scrawl on a piece of paper before he died. At the ensuing trial, the lawyers defending the mob ringleaders claimed it was a “patriotic murder” and the jury voted to acquit.
Almost as shocking as the lynching itself was the reaction of the federal government. U.S. attorney general Thomas W. Gregory turned the Prager murder into an argument for cracking down harder on dissidents: “Until the federal government is given the power to punish persons making disloyal utterances,” Gregory declared, “Department of Justice officials fear more lynchings.” In fact, the federal government had already given itself extraordinary powers over “persons making disloyal utterances” and would shortly give itself more. The Espionage Act, passed at the urging of President Wilson in June 1917, criminalized the spread of information intended to obstruct the American military in any way. Wilson’s goal was to outlaw protest against his war policy, but the Espionage Act proved to be a handy way of legally spying on aliens, particularly Germans, silencing political opponents, and removing from circulation publications that the government found objectionable. Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs was arrested and sentenced to a decade in jail under the Espionage Act in 1918 when the government claimed that he was trying to obstruct military recruiting. The law acquired a sharp new set of teeth in May 1918 with the passage of the Sedition Act: now it was a crime to speak out against the United States government, flag, or military with “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language.” Historian David Kennedy notes that “commentators ever since have rightly viewed [the Sedition Act] as a landmark of repression in American history.” In essence, the Espionage and Sedition Acts put a legal muzzle on freedom of speech for the duration of the war. But the pernicious effects went beyond an evisceration of the First Amendment. Under cover of these laws, Wilson’s government launched a massive surveillance and propaganda campaign directed against aliens, socialists, pacifists, labor leaders, Wobblies, really anyone perceived or accused of being less than 100 percent American. Loyalty Leagues were set up in states to enforce patriotism in the ethnic communities; citizens were actively encouraged to spy on their neighbors, root out foreign spies, turn in slackers and doubters. “Not a pin dropped in the home of anyone with a foreign name but that it rang like thunder on the inner ear of some listening sleuth,” boasted George Creel, the head of a wartime federal propaganda agency known as the Committee on Public Information. By the middle of 1918, the Department of Justice was receiving fifteen hundred letters a day related to loyalty charges. “Never in its history has this country been so thoroughly policed,” proudly insisted Attorney General Gregory.
Germans bore the brunt of this thorough policing. German Americans were arrested and in some cases imprisoned for “crimes” like calling the war “all foolishness” or suggesting that the United States might lose. German Americans who had not yet become U.S. citizens were forced to register as enemy aliens and subjected to travel restrictions. A German pastor was imprisoned in South Dakota for urging his congregation not to buy war bonds. It was increasingly dangerous, and in some states illegal, to speak German, either over the phone or in public. The ban on preaching in German was especially hard on older congregants who had never learned English and for whom, as one put it, “German had become synonymous with religion itself.” One Montana preacher wrote to the state’s governor in his imperfect English, “I cannot believe that it is the intention of the government to leave the people in these sad times of war without any consolation from the word of God, while their sons are offering their lifes for the country.”
The lash fell especially heavily on the Hutterite colonists of the upper Midwest because they had two sins to answer for: not only were they of German origin, they were also conscientious objectors. The Hutterites of South Dakota traced their ancestry to a group of Swiss, German, and Tyrolean farmers who split off from the followers of Martin Luther at the dawn of the Protestant Reformation. They were called Anabaptists, meaning “to baptize again,” because one of their fundamental beliefs was that the rite of baptism should not be conferred automatically at birth but rather chosen by aware believers as a confession of faith. Even more insidious in the eyes of their fellow Christians was the Anabaptists’ doctrine of nonresistance: citing Matthew 5, Romans 12, and Acts 5, among other biblical texts, Anabaptists refused to bear arms, swear allegiance to the state or wear its uniforms, pay war taxes, or hold public office. For these beliefs, and particularly the doctrine of nonresistance, they had been burned at the stake, sold as galley slaves, branded, flogged, and hounded from country to country through Europe. Hutterites, who separated themselves from other Anabaptist sects (Mennonites, Amish, Swiss Brethren) in the 1520s under the leadership of Jakob Hutter, were persecuted with particular savagery because they added a third offensive tenet: the community of goods. The story goes that in 1528, the founding group of Hutterites had become so impoverished that they agreed in desperation to place their few possessions on a blanket and then divide their pooled resources among themselves. It was an early form of communism, and it was feared and hated as much during the Reformation as the godless Marxist version would be in the twentieth century. In the long years of their wanderings through central Europe, the Hutterites did enjoy periods of peace and prosperity. They lived freely in Moravia for a long stretch before being forced to relocate to Slovakia, Transylvania, and Romania. Finally, in the late eighteenth century, they found what they hoped would be a permanent haven in the Ukrainian region of the Russian Pale. Granted the right to speak German, follow their faith, and remain exempt from military service, Hutterites prospered in the southern Ukraine for three or four generations.
The Russian idyll ended abruptly in 1870 when Czar Alexander II withdrew their rights and privileges as part of a policy of Slavicizing the Germans in Russia. Under the new regime, teaching their children in German was no longer allowed and military service was henceforth required. It was the prospect of seeing their sons drafted that convinced the families of Michael, Joseph, and David Hofer and Jacob Wipf to emigrate to the United States from their villages north of the Black Sea in 1877. Three Dakota colonies were established initially—at Bon Homme, Wolf Creek, and Elm Spring near Ethan—and these prospered so well that over the next half century fourteen satellite colonies were spun off in South Dakota and two in Montana. It was never easy to make a living off the American prairie, but the Hutterites proved that it was easier to survive communally than on isolated homesteads. The strain of wheat that they brought with them from Russia—a tough hard-kerneled winter wheat variety known as turkey red—proved to be perfectly adapted for cultivation on the Midwest prairie. Centuries of persecution prepared them for the vicissitudes of a strange, unpredictable climate. The Hutterites clung to their old customs and traditions, speaking German exclusively at home and in church; making their own clothes; celebrating holidays and festivals as their ancestors had in Europe. Men grew beards after they married; families tended to be large and tight-knit. Even though by 1918 many families, including the Hofers and the Wipfs, were starting on their third generation in the United States, in a sense these people were perpetual immigrants since they had no desire to mingle or assimilate with the mainstream. Unlike the Amish, they did not eschew modern inventions—they were happy to use telephones and cars and tractors so long as they could use them in their own way and for their own ends. But they insisted on living apart—and by living apart they prospered. Life was good in South Dakota until the United States declared war on Germany and instituted the draft.
When Jacob Wipf and the Hofer brothers received their induction notices in the spring of 1918, the U.S. Army had yet to implement a clear or consistent policy toward conscientious objectors. Officially, Secretary of War Newton Baker had declared that conscientious objectors should be allowed to request noncombatant service, be permitted to live apart from combat soldiers, and be treated with “tact and consideration.” But secretly, in a confidential memo, Baker urged training camp commanders to pressure COs to serve—the types of pressure being left to the discretion of the officers in charge. In March 1918, President Wilson attempted to resolve the problem by defining “noncombatant service” as work in the medical or quartermaster corps or the corps of engineers. On paper, this sounded like a workable approach. But many COs—Hutterites among them—took the position that Wilson’s noncombatant options contributed to the war effort and were therefore a form of military service. In any case, once they got to training camps, they were at the mercy of army officers who had been given free rein by Baker. “To hell with your conscience,” one lieutenant told a Hutterite draftee who refused to work at Camp Funston in Kansas—this was typical. Verbal abuse, coercion, and beatings were common; many were tried and sentenced to lengthy prison terms; some were found guilty without a trial. The pressure to serve was relentless and cruel. One conscript who wouldn’t sign for his uniform reported being dragged to a bathhouse, stripped naked, shoved under the shower, and scoured with a broom. “Part of the time they had me on my back with face under a faucet and held my mouth open,” he said of the ordeal. “They got a little flag ordering me to kiss it and kneel down to it.” Hutterites reported being hung upside down in a tank of water until they were on the verge of drowning and being stood on their head in a shower with water running into their noses. Those who refused to obey orders were sometimes told they would be shot: they had their heads covered with sacks and were forced to listen to an officer give the command to fire, whereupon a soldier would clap two boards together.
This was the pit that the Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf fell into when they arrived at Camp Lewis on May 28, 1918. Shortly after they got off the train, they were assigned to the 29th Company, 8th Battalion, 166th Depot Brigade and ordered by the company’s second lieutenant, Robert S. Shertzer, to fall in with their squads. Shertzer and his sergeant, Reynolds B. Hilt, explained that the order to fall in had “nothing to do with fighting,” but still the Hutterites wouldn’t budge. They stood apart and conferred with each other in German, and then Jacob Wipf stepped forward as their spokesman. “We can’t do it,” he told the officers. “Our conscience won’t allow us.”
They were immediately imprisoned in the Camp Lewis guardhouse. Five days later, on June 2, the four were ushered into the camp’s muster office and ordered to fill out enlistment and assignment cards—a standard form on which all enlistees were required to state their place of birth, occupation, and marital status and then sign their names next to the words “Declaration of Soldier.” The four Hutterites refused to fill out or sign the form, and they were returned to the guardhouse. A week later, at one thirty in the afternoon of June 10, their court-martial began.
The trial was brisk and routine, though the outcome was anything but. Officers testified that the four Hutterite conscripts refused to obey orders as soon as they got off the train and repeatedly refused to sign any military papers or fall in with their squads. “Their attitude [was] ‘This is as far as we go,’ ” said one officer. “They intended not to obey anything. But they were meek about it.”
The four Hutterites were put on the stand, one after the other, and asked about their background, the history of their religion, their family situations, the nature of the Rockport Hutterite colony, why they spoke and wrote in German, whether they were in fact German partisans. The men, who spoke English haltingly and crudely, had trouble understanding some of the questions.
From the testimony of Jacob Wipf:
...
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From the testimony of David Hofer:
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From the testimony of Joseph Hofer:
The court was adjourned at 4:20 P.M. by Lieutenant Colonel Harold D. Coburn, 363rd Infantry, 91st Division.
Five days later the division’s commander, Major General H.A. Greene, reported the outcome of the trial in a memo to the judge advocate general of the army:
The findings of the court in the case of each of the accused was guilty of all specifications and charges. Each of the accused was sentenced by the court to be dishonorably discharged the service, to forfeit all pay and allowances due and to become due, and to be confined at hard labor at such place as the reviewing authority may direct for twenty (20) years.
The “reviewing authority” directed that the three Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf be confined in the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Alcatraz, California.
The government, in a stroke of public relations genius, dedicated the Fourth of July that year to immigrants. Pageants and parades in native costume, long windy speeches and newspaper articles, banners unfurled on Main Streets across the country, public vows of unswerving loyalty—from sea to shining sea, the nation mounted a daylong celebration of the wartime contribution of Americans of foreign birth or descent. This brilliant bit of political theater had been brought to America by the Committee on Public Information—“the world’s greatest adventure in advertising,” as the committee’s head George Creel called it. For over a year now, Creel and his public relations army had been “engineering consent” among the immigrant communities with patriotic stories planted in the foreign-language press, prowar pamphlets (often horrendously translated) in all the major immigrant languages, short flag-waving speeches delivered at public gatherings nationwide by a cadre of “four-minute men.” Yiddish-speaking orators were dispatched to the Lower East Side, Poles to Buffalo and Chicago, Spanish speakers to the Texas-Mexican border towns. Simultaneously, the CPI mounted a campaign against all things German—broadsides depicting Germans as bloodthirsty monsters and baby killers; CPI-sponsored hate films like The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin, with footage of the rape of Belgium and the sinking of the Lusitania; a whisper war of paranoia and suspicion and neighborly spying. But for one day, July 4, 1918, all were welcome in the CPI’s great patriotic tent—even Germans—so long as they supported America’s push to win the Great War. “Turning over” the day to immigrants was, boasted Creel, “one of the great ideas of the war.” In fact, the July Fourth “festival of loyalty of the foreign-born” was a war rally disguised as a celebration of diversity.
The day’s showcase event was a “pilgrimage” from Washington, D.C., to George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation, and Creel and his team choreographed it for maximum PR punch. President and Mrs. Wilson agreed to host a pageant with representatives of thirty-three nationalities—Albanians, Armenians, Assyrians, Belgians, Bulgarians, Chinese, Czechoslovaks, Costa Ricans, Danes, Dutch, Ecuadorians, Filipinos, Finns, French, French Canadians, Germans, Greeks, Hungarians, Italians, Japanese, Lithuanians, Mexicans, Norwegians, Poles, Rumanians, Russians, Spaniards, Swedes, Swiss, Syrians, Ukrainians, Venezuelans, and Yugoslavs. On the morning of the Fourth, the president, his wife, and their daughter Margaret boarded the riverboat Mayflower in Washington and received the crowd of stocky, serious foreigners with long names and florid signatures, many of them dressed for the occasion in silk hats and frock coats. As the boat made its stately way down the Potomac, President Wilson “moved from group to group,” in Creel’s reporting, “laughingly suggesting that they put their high silk hats to one side ... and giving every man and woman the feeling of being a sovereign citizen in a free country.”
The floating Babel docked at Mount Vernon and the passengers disembarked. “The scene,” wrote Creel, “was one that etched itself in memory. The shining stretches of river, the walk up the winding path through the summer woods, the hillsides packed with people, the beat of their hands like the soft roar of a forest wind, the simple brick tomb of the Father of Our Country overhung with wisteria in all the glory of its purple bloom.” Irish tenor John McCormack, once he caught his breath, crooned “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” “while each of the thirty-three immigrant representatives walked into the tomb, one by one, laid a wreath upon the grave, and offered a prayer to the ‘august shade of the departed.’ ” Then Belgian-born Felix J. Stryckmans, chairman of the Committee of the Foreign Born, stepped forward to address the assembled: “In my own city [Chicago], 800,000 foreign-born men and women are at this moment lifting their hands and renewing their vows of loyalty. ... When, to-morrow, the casualty list brings heaviness to some homes and a firm sense of resolution to all, we shall read upon the roll of honor Slavic names, Teutonic names, Latin names, Oriental names, to show that we have sealed our faith with the blood of our best youth.” Finally, Wilson made a speech insisting on the “destruction of every arbitrary power” that threatens “the peace of the world” and lauding the right of every people to freely settle questions of “territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangements, or of political relationships” in the manner they chose. “John McCormack then sang ‘The Star-spangled Banner’ as it was never sung before,” according to Creel. The New York Times reported on the front page that as McCormack “held the last ringing note” of the phrase “for conquer we must,” “the President extended his hand. A thousand soldiers of the nations allied against Germany who were in the crowd stood rigidly at attention.” Creel declared that “From that day, a new unity was manifest in the United States.”
That month, Jacob Wipf and David, Michael, and Joseph Hofer, with hands and feet shackled, were sent under guard from Camp Lewis to San Francisco to begin serving their twenty-year terms at Alcatraz. David Hofer later gave an account of what happened to them to a man named J. Georg Ewert, and Ewert wrote this narrative of the ordeal:
When they arrived at Alcatraz, their own clothes were forcefully removed and they were told to put on military uniforms. They refused just as before. After that they were brought into the dungeon, into dark, dirty, stinking cells for solitary confinement. The uniforms were thrown beside them with the warning, “If you do not conform you will stay here until you die, just as the other four we dragged out of here yesterday.” So they were locked in there in their light underwear.
The first four and a half days they did not get anything to eat, only half a glass of water every twenty-four hours. During the night they had to sleep on the wet and cold cement floor without blankets. ... The last one and a half days they had to stand with their hands over their heads crosswise chained so high to the iron bars that they could barely touch the floor with their feet. ... They could not talk to each other during this time since they were separated from each other. Just once he [David] heard Jakob Wipf cry out, “Oh, Almighty God!”
After five days the four men were brought out of the lower part of the prison into the prison yard where more prisoners were standing. Some of those were overcome with compassion when they saw the Hutterians. One commented with tears in his eyes, “Is it not a shame to treat human beings in such a way.” The men were covered with boils, bitten by insects and their arms were swollen so badly that they were unable to slip the sleeves of their jackets over them. They had been beaten with sticks. Michael Hofer was beaten so badly that he, on one occasion, became unconscious, and fell over.
The “dungeon” referred to here is a group of cells on the lower level of Alcatraz known as “the citadel”—off-limits in today’s tours of the prison. Originally, these cells were open niches in the prison wall probably used for storage: at some point bars were added to convert them into cramped, damp, suffocating cells. Since the citadel lacks a natural source of light, when the electricity is switched off the darkness is complete.
Wipf and the Hofer brothers had in fact gotten off with a comparatively light sentence. Of the approximately 500 conscientious objectors who were court-martialed during the war, 7 were sentenced to death (though none was actually executed) and 142 to life in prison.
Peter Thompson spent the night of July Fourth marching with a full pack through dense humid woods. He and the other men of his company had been rousted out at 11:00 P.M. with shouts of “Everyone out,” given coffee and sandwiches, and then ordered to get moving. “The packs became unbearable,” wrote a sergeant marching with the unit, “the feet hurt miserably—sweat ran off the face in streams—the rifles were heavy and cumbersome—the overcoats and slickers slung on the arm were constantly slipping from the almost nerveless arms—it became unbearable.” All this terrible misery and pain and Peter and his comrades in the 362nd Infantry, 91st “Wild West” Division were still in New Jersey. The men were humping their “unbearable” packs not to the front lines in France but to Alpine Landing on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, where riverboats were waiting to take them to a troop transport docked in New York Harbor.
Peter had spent the previous eight months training with the Wild West Division at Camp Lewis, and his last days in boot camp had overlapped with the imprisonment and trial of the Hutterites. In fact, Captain Joseph W. Sutphen, an officer with the 362nd Infantry (though not Peter’s battalion commander), sat on the court-martial that convicted Wipf and the Hofer brothers of willful disobedience. Had the Hutterite men chosen to obey orders instead of their consciences, they would have been marching alongside Peter that July Fourth night through the steamy Jersey woods. Peter had no strong feelings about the war one way or the other. He had enlisted not out of any burning desire to slit the kaiser’s throat but as a fast track to U.S. citizenship. And lucky for him, that track proved even faster than he had anticipated thanks to the recent amendment to the naturalization act. On June 1, 1918, Private First Class Peter Thompson, all five feet, three inches and 115 pounds of him, raised his right arm and swore allegiance to the United States of America. Irish no more.
It had taken Peter’s regiment five days to move itself from Camp Lewis to the embarkation center at Camp Merritt in Bergen County, New Jersey. Trains packed with soldiers rattled east through Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota, then southeast through Wisconsin until they reached Chicago, and finally made a straight shot to the coast. “Guards were stationed at each end of every coach to prevent the men from leaving the train,” wrote Zenas A. Olson, a sergeant with the division’s 361st Infantry. “The opportunity of seeing the American girls along the route was one that could not be missed and the side of the train that faced the station at each stop was crowded and heads filled the window. Handshaking was one of the big orders of the day.” Another recruit described the train trip as “one mad panorama of noise and excitement.” The madness reached a fever pitch at Camp Merritt—Olson described it as a “nightmare”—as officers worked frantically to get the men equipped, inspected, showered, and issued new boots and clothing prior to departure.
That miserable Fourth of July night march down the Palisades with full packs ended at Alpine Landing on the Hudson, where the men boarded boats bound for New York harbor. The last glimpse of America was stirring—the wall of the Palisades rising to the west, the glittering pinnacles and canyons of Manhattan to the east, the river echoing with the shouts and songs of excited men. When the men caught sight of the Statue of Liberty, they let rip with a chorus of “Over There”—“And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there!”—the immigrants among them no doubt remembering how they had gazed in silence at the “goddess” the last time they had sailed these waters. Peter and the men of the 362nd Infantry were herded onto a liner called the Empress of Russia.
In the peak immigration years before the war, arriving ships had to wait for hours or even days to unload their human cargo on Ellis Island. Now, in the frenzy to get American soldiers overseas, the same thing was happening in reverse, often with the same ships. More than 1.6 million American soldiers shipped out between April and October, 1918; in July, when the mass military exodus reached its crescendo, some 306,350 soldiers crossed to Europe. July 5, 1918, the day Peter Thompson’s infantry battalion boarded the Empress of Russia, was also the day Meyer Epstein shipped out with the 76th Depot Division.
July 5, wrote Olson, was a full-blast New York summer day: “below deck was stifling, above it was crowded beyond comfort.” The Empress of Russia sat motionless in its berth through interminable sweltering hours. The steerage quarters began to reek as they filled with sweating men and their equipment—or rather to reek worse. Weak electric bulbs barely penetrated the brown air. The percussion of army boots on the decks and packs hitting the bunks echoed through the chamber. Late in the afternoon, as the gangplanks were finally raised, a current of excitement surged through the ship. “The boat drifted slowly out and away, swung into the current and dropped down the river to anchor in the lower harbor,” wrote Olson. “We had made the start; we had broken the last ties that bound us to the old life; we had shoved off for France. The light of the early morning of July 6th, revealed through the fog a flotilla of ships, resting at anchor, all camouflaged in weird colors and designs, all in readiness for the start.”
One of the twenty-one ships in that weird flotilla was the British troop transport Belgic carrying the 6th Division’s machine-gun battalions, Joe Chmielewski among them. The anonymous officer who wrote the history of the 16th Machine Gun Battalion ( Joe’s unit) described the explosion of joy that morning from men who couldn’t wait to go to war: “At 9:05 [ A.M.], a mighty whistle blew two long blasts, and like a snail we began to move out into the Hudson. Who will be the first to forget the joyous yell that went up! All New York city must have heard it! Soon we were in mid-stream, the faithful tugs released their grip, and the mighty ship steamed ahead under its own power. It was a good time to sing ‘Goodby Broadway, Hello France.’ The Band played it and a few more than five thousand on board sang it. Soon we passed ‘The Lady’ and joined in the convoy of 21 other ships loaded with ‘Kahki.’ [sic] Out, out, out, we went, till America was lost to view.”
The battalion historian claimed that that afternoon a detail from Company A, Joe’s company, was assigned to man the ship’s 6-inch guns, though surely he was mistaken, because American machine gunners would never have been enlisted to operate British artillery. Still, given the constant threat of attack from German submarines even this close to home, ships’ guns had to be at the ready.
Leonardo Costantino, an affable Italian immigrant transplanted to San Diego, kept a journal of his experiences with the Wild West Division’s 364th Infantry—just a couple of lines every few days describing what he did, what he saw, how he felt. In his entry about shipping out, Leonardo complained of the lousy conditions on board the troop transport: “This Vessel here is very large but soldiers do not like the way they run it. Both eats and sleep were very unsanitary. The officers and nurses had staterooms and had a real time on the way. Many Boys got sea sick but I was feeling good all the way.” Leonardo, who had emigrated at the age of sixteen from the southern Italian town of Canetto near Bari, did not mention how the “eats and sleep” on the troopship compared with what he’d gotten in 1909 on board the immigrant ship Re d’Italia. The lower decks of the Empress of Russia on which Peter Thompson shipped out reeked of hard-boiled eggs. But the stench didn’t stop him and his buddies from playing hands of panguingue (punished for betting, since gambling was against army rules, they had to resort to placing bets on the number of kittens a pregnant stowaway cat would bear). The nights were long and dull and devoid of even the comforts of smoking and cards. “As soon as darkness comes every light goes out,” one Doughboy wrote. “Not even a match may be scratched. The transports then resemble great black lizards, prehistoric monsters, crawling over a grey desert.”
Leonardo and Peter wrote nothing in their letters or journal about being afraid or lonely or proud or bitter about being shipped back to Europe to fight. If Joe Chmielewski wrote letters back to Fifficktown, his family has lost them. But in his novel Three Soldiers, John Dos Passos, who served in the war with the French ambulance corps and then as a soldier in the American army, captured something of the snappish anxiety that permeated the “dark pit” of steerage quarters on these departing troopships:
Fuselli [an Italian American from San Francisco] sat on his bunk looking at the terrifying confusion all about, feeling bewildered and humiliated. For how many days would they be in the dark pit? ...
“An’ if we’re torpedoed a fat chance we’ll have down here,” he said aloud.
“They got sentries posted to keep us from goin’ up on deck,” said someone.
“God damn them. They treat you like you was a steer being taken over for meat.”
“Well, you’re not a damn sight more. Meat for the guns.”
A little man lying in one of the upper bunks had spoken suddenly, contracting his sallow face into a curious spasm, as if the words had burst from him in spite of an effort to keep them in.
Everybody looked at him angrily.
“That goddam kike Eisenstein,” muttered someone.
“Say, tie that bull outside,” shouted Bill Grey good-naturedly.
“Fools,” muttered Eisenstein, turning over and burying his face in his hands.
Later in the novel, the guys speculate about whether the “goddam kike” Eisenstein is in fact a spy:
“He’s foreign born, ain’t he? Born in Poland or some goddam place.”
“He always did talk queer.”
“I always thought,” said Fuselli, “he’d get into trouble talking the way he did.”
“How’d he talk?” asked Daniels.
“Oh, he said that war was wrong and all that goddamned pro-German stuff.”
“D’ye know what they did out at the front?” asked Daniels. “In the second division they made two fellers dig their own graves and then shot ’em for sayin’ the war was wrong.”
“Hell, they did?”
“You’re goddam right, they did. I tell you, fellers, it don’t do to monkey with the buzz-saw in this army.”
Such were the rumors circulating belowdecks as the troopships zigzagged across the Atlantic in patterns intended to elude German submarines. It took the Belgic and the Empress of Russia eleven days to cross the ocean to Liverpool harbor. There was no cheering from either ship when the first green smudge of the English coast came into view.