Reminiscences of Conrad S. Babcock: The Old U.S. Army and the New, 1898-1918

Introduction

Introduction • • My acquaintance with the memoirs of Conrad S. Babcock came slowly, curiously, and for a while without a great deal of understanding. I had come on the diary of Major General William M. Wright, the commanding general of the Eighty-ninth Division in World War I, discovered that Colonel Babcock was one of the general’s four infantry colonels, decided to edit and publish the diary, and found that Babcock had written his memoirs and they were in the Hoover Institution at Palo Alto, California, on the Stanford University campus. Not desiring to travel from my home university, Indiana, I called the archivist at the Hoover and learned that they would send a copy of the memoirs but only at a rate of 100 pages a year. The manuscript was 1,100 pages in length. I accepted that, for after doing several monographs on American participation in World War I, I had begun an account of the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne, the largest, longest, and by far the most costly (26,000 men killed, tens of thousands wounded) battle in all of American history. So each year, I ordered my annual allotment, read it, and for the most part filed the pages away. The curious part of the Babcock manuscript was that it is the onlyAmerican military manuscript at the Hoover Institution. The institution’s vast collections were on the subjects of war, revolution, and peace. The war portion was European, on former president Herbert Hoover’s theory that Europeans started wars, and that excluded American manuscripts. I guessed that Colonel Babcock’s account of his experiences from 1898 through 1918, typed by the colonel with handwritten emendations, found its way to Palo Alto because Babcock married Marion L. Eells, whose sister married the most prominent clergyman in New York City, the Reverend Henry Sloane Coffin, who could have known the founder of the Palo   Reminiscences of Conrad S. Babcock Alto library. Or, a less plausible guess, Mr. Hoover, himself a voracious reader, somehow read that mass of typescript, liked it, and put it in his library. At first, I had no sense of what had moved Babcock to draw his huge, at times photographic, picture of the change in the U.S. Army from its primitive proportions in 1898 to its European efficiencies in the final attack in the Meuse-Argonne, November 1–2, 1918 (after three failed attempts), as I was reading Babcock’s manuscript piecemeal, interrupted by the difficult book on the Meuse-Argonne. Finally, I began to see that the retired colonel , writing in 1940–1941, realized that he had witnessed the drama of the American Army reforming itself, forced into massive change, belatedly and at a heavy cost in casualties. The delinquent generals survived—only two were killed—one of them Babcock’s successor in the First Division who arranged his own demotion, claiming that as a general officer he was incompetent, the other in the Twenty-ninth Division who allowed his driver to take his limousine up a road under fire from German artillery. Not so the army’s men; one estimate by a successful front-line battalion major was that they suffered, on average, twice the necessary casualties. Babcock saw all this, had the literary ability and the patience to set it down, and somehow it passed into a library. His narrative is the only such account I know of. Babcock descended from eight generations of New Englanders, the first of them coming over in the great Puritan migration, settling in Portsmouth , Rhode Island, in 1642. The colonel duly described them in his memoirs. All of them put together, although he did not say that, did not see as many changes in American life as Babcock saw in his twenty years of American military affairs after 1898. But from them, who saw the rigors of the separation from Old England and making their ways in New England, the colonel obtained a feeling of where he stood in his own experiences . The colonel’s father, in a desire to do as much as he could as soon as possible, was a typical Babcock. In 1856, at age thirteen, he sailed out of New York on the clipper ship Young America, of which his uncle was captain and part owner. He arrived 107 days later in San Francisco just in time to observe the Vigilance Committee in charge of the city and engaged in hanging two murderers in a street in front of...