The World War I Memoirs of Robert P. Patterson: A Captain in the Great War

Preface

Preface My scholarly interest in Robert P. Patterson dates back to the early 1970s when I first met his future biographer, Keith Eiler, in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress. I was finishing my first book about the Plattsburg military training camp movement of 1913–20, and Keith, a retired army officer and Korean War veteran, was completing his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation on Robert Patterson’s multiple contributions to victory in World War II. Because Patterson had won his commission as a “Ninety Day Wonder” at the Plattsburg Officers Training Camp in 1917, Eiler and I often talked about the values and lessons that Patterson, Henry L. Stimson, John J. McCloy, and other Plattsburg veterans of the first “Great War” brought to the second global conflict. I vividly recall one occasion when Colonel Eiler invited me to lunch at the Army-Navy Club with the cantankerous General Albert C. Wedemeyer, under whom he had served as an aide after World War II. We kept in touch over the years, sending Christmas letters and occasionally meeting at academic conferences, and when Keith’s excellent study of Patterson’s contributions to victory in World War II was finally published by Cornell University Press, I wrote a favorable blurb for the dust jacket. I recall my curiosity being aroused by Eiler’s references to an unpublished World War I memoir by Patterson that was not in the Patterson papers at the Library of Congress. In the spring of 2009, Robert Patterson’s youngest daughter, Virginia Patterson Montgomery, contacted me about another unpublished manuscript by her father that had turned up in the files of his New York City law office. Probably written in 1948, this detailed study recounted Patterson’s herculean efforts to mobilize and supply America’s armed forces in World War II, and it had gathered dust for more than sixty years. Did I think such a first-person narrative should be published? After reading it, I responded affirmatively because it offered a fresh view of those wartime struggles along the Potomac by one of the key participants. Indeed, my UConn colleague , Brian Waddell, who had recently published two books about World War II mobilization issues, would be the perfect editor. When we visited Mrs. Montgomery at her colonial-era home in Stonington, Connecticut, she also surprised us by showing a photocopy of her father’s World War I xii Preface reminiscences, written in 1933. I read several pages, especially the section on Patterson’s nearly fatal “adventure” along the Vesle River in August 1918. I was hooked. Perhaps we could find a publisher for both manuscripts. Family and friends (and biographer Eiler) had read the first memoir, and “Judge” Patterson’s contemporaries understood very well how formative his World War I experiences were for his subsequent career. These reminiscences graphically re-created the “Great War” as Patterson lived it—the battles, boredom, terror, hunger, deaths, wounds, humor, friendships, exhaustion, stupidity, exhilaration, lessons, rumors, and regrets. When I made a copy and sent it to my former mentor Robert H. Ferrell, he replied that Patterson’s memoir ranked among the best of the hundreds he had read in authoring his own several books on the First World War. In preparing Patterson’s manuscript for publication, I made a few minor changes in punctuation and grammar, added first names to individuals when I could check them against existing rosters, and clarified the spelling of a handful of French place-names. I am especially thankful to G. Kurt Piehler and Scot Danforth of the University of Tennessee Press for their early encouragement and faith in this project. Thanks too to Walt Evans and Stan Ivester for their careful editing. I also thank Virginia Montgomery, Robert P. Patterson Jr., and the rest of the Patterson family for numerous favors and reminiscences. Alex Reger performed technical magic in turning a “PDF” file into a “Word” file so that I could edit more effectively in a wordprocessing program. My friends Ted Wilson of the University of Kansas, John Chambers of Rutgers University, and Mark Stoler of the University of Vermont offered sound advice when needed. Michael Schwartz and Alejandro Corbacho graciously critiqued portions of the manuscript. I am beholden to Jennifer Keene and Edward Lengel for their incisive comments and valuable suggestions as outside readers for the University of Tennessee Press. The Patterson family ransacked their attics for vintage photos. Robert Ferrell generously made available Signal Corps photographs and maps from his own...