Trench Knives and Mustard Gas: With the 42nd Rainbow Division in France (review)

In 2008 ninety years will have passed since the guns fell silent in France at the conclusion of the First World War. The United States sent more than two million men and about 16,000 women to serve alongside the soldiers of the Allied nations in that war to end war. Second Lieutenant Hugh S. Thompson was one of those soldiers. He was born in 1893 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, educated for two years at the Citadel in South Carolina and assigned to Company L, 168th (formerly the 3rd Iowa) Infantry Regiment, 42nd "Rainbow" Division. The 42nd was a composite division formed from troops from twenty-six states and the District of Columbia. The division headquarters was established in France on 1 November 1917. The 42nd served in every major campaign of the AEF until the Armistice on Monday, 11 November 1918. The Rainbow Division's veterans made American Secretary of War Newton D. Baker an honorary member of the division after the war. The division history bears the banner "Americans All." It was with this famous and courageous unit that Lieutenant Hugh Thompson served with distinction.

The editor is a skillful, experienced historian accustomed to working with military materials. He has allowed the voice of Lieutenant Thompson to clearly carry the story of one officer's service in the most trying days of his life in battle. However, this is not a history in the usual sense. It deals with the impressions of battle and recollections of Thompson's fellow officers and soldiers going about their duties in France, not the details of military operations. It is the war of squads and platoons, not brigades and divisions. After returning from the trenches near Badonviller in the Lorraine region in the early spring of 1918, Thompson observed: "The smell of animals, even the luscious manure piles, was welcome after the stinking trenches" (p. 64). Seriously wounded in the St. Mihiel operation, he received medical care in several base hospitals in France and then returned to the United States for a long, painful recovery. He died in Darlington, South Carolina in 1961.

Thompson relied upon a "sketchy diary," letters sent home to his family, and loaned items from friends to write his narrative, which was serialized in the Chattanooga Times in 1934. Memoirs written many years after events can be subject to clouded recollections and interventions of moral reservations. Thompson used fictitious names for some of his contemporaries "[f]or reasons of propriety." As a result, we learn of Captain Clifton, Lt. Colonel Townes and many soldiers by only their last names. The editor's end notes fill in some of the details of the organization of the Rainbow Division and the colloquialisms of the doughboys. An appendix with the division order of battle and the names of key commanders would have been helpful. A bit more detail on the maps would have allowed orientation as Thompson spun out his adventures.

A number of excellent general and popular histories have appeared recently. Perhaps the best of the personal memoirs are George C. Marshall's Memoirs of My Services in the World War 1917-1918, published in 1976, and Joseph Dorst Patch's A Soldier's War, published in 1966. Lieutenant Thompson's memoir should be included in that group of high quality first person accounts. Texas A&M Press and Robert Ferrell have made a significant contribution to the literature of World War I, one that gives us authentic details of the human dimension of modern warfare. This book is informative for the casual reader of history who is interested in World War I, but it will be most useful for specialists eager to understand how combat in the Great War affected the doughboys of Uncle Sam's expeditionary army.