Duffy's War: Fr. Francis Duffy, Wild Bill Donovan, and the Irish Fighting 69th in World War I (review)

No American state militia or National Guard unit is so well known, or has had such a role in the national consciousness, as the old 69th New York Regiment. No doubt, the 1940 movie starring James Cagney and Pat O'Brien about the regiment's service in World War I, or the membership of the poet Joyce Kilmer, and the fact that it served as the home of the 1913 Armoury Show, partially explain its prominence. However, the reason the movie was made in the first place was the fame and stature achieved by the regiment and by its chaplain, Father Francis Patrick Duffy, and its leading officer, Colonel William J. Donovan. Part of its distinctiveness was also the long history of the regiment, and part was its Irishness. During the Civil War the 69th, including Thomas Francis Meagher, served gallantly in the famous Irish Brigade, distinguishing itself at Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. Indeed, the regiment earned its nickname, the "Fighting Sixty-ninth," from the Confederate commander, Robert E. Lee. So there is something special about the 69th.

Father Duffy and William Donovan were instrumental in sustaining the Irish aura of the regiment in World War I. Stephen L. Harris, a military historian, begins with a powerful description of the funeral of Father Duffy at St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1932. Although ostensibly a simple parish priest, Father Duffy became a national figure through his heroic actions as chaplain to the regiment during the war; the priest himself acknowledged, "The war was the making of me." It certainly brought into public awareness his qualities as a pastor and shepherd of his flock, and that flock—the regiment—was completely devoted to him. But Duffy was also an intellectual, a reformer, a soldier, and something of a politician. The regiment went through eight colonels between 1917 and 1919; it was Father Duffy and the middle-rank officers who worked the regiment into an effective fighting unit, maintained its morale, and looked after its dead and wounded. Father Duffy was the sort of chaplain who could hold his own with generals over dinner and also give comfort to his men on the front line under fire. His men—Catholics, Protestants, and Jews—loved him for it and never forgot him. St. Patrick's was packed for his funeral, and 25,000 people filled Fifth Avenue outside.

The 69th became the 165th United States Infantry Regiment when it was placed in the newly formed 42nd Division—the so-called "Rainbow Division," made up of National Guard regiments from across the country. The division was sent to France in late 1917, and went into the line during the winter, first in the Champagne region, then in major battles at the Ourcq River, at St. Mihiel, and finally in the last days of the war, on the Romagne Heights in the Meuse-Argonne campaign. The regiment again distinguished itself, suffering 3,501 casualties—about as many as made up the unit in 1917—and losing 844, the highest proportion of any of the units in the division. Harris, working from a wealth of army records and private manuscripts, pieces together the operations of the three battalions. He traces the struggles to achieve their objectives and the costs involved in exact detail. Harris never loses track of the strategic problems of command, nor does he lose touch with the struggle in the trenches. And he does not forget the Irish connections of many of the members.

Harris ends with the newly promoted Colonel Donovan taking command of the 69th in March of 1919, the culmination of the efforts of Father Duffy and the choice of the regiment. Donovan—a football hero at Columbia and a successful lawyer—had served in the National Guard on the Mexican border in 1916 and came to the 69th the following...