FROM
UPTON TO THE MEUSE WITH THE 307th INFANTRY
by,
W. KERR RAINSFORD
1920
INTRODUCTION
Histories are too often builded upon the fallible memory
of man, wherein the records of events are liable to be
tinted with that exuberance which so often surrounds the
fisherman's catch. In order that the splendid service
which was rendered by the 307th Infantry, 77th Division
of the National Army, in the great World War, might be
perpetuated while the events were still fresh in memory,
while official documents and pictures were available, and
reconnaissance of battlefields could be made, this work
was started in January, 1919, when the regiment was still
in France and before the work could be influenced by that
too easy divergence from facts which the narrator so soon
weaves into his story in absolute credence.
After very careful consideration of the necessary
qualities and personality for a historian whose work
could be accepted without question, I selected Capt. W.
K. Rainsford, then commanding Company L, 307th Infantry,
for the task. All official documents in the 307th
Infantry and the 77th Division were made available to him
and leave was granted him for a reconnaissance of the
terrain over which the regiment had fought.
Captain Rainsford was graduated from Harvard in 1904 and
from the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris, in 1911. During
1915-16 he served with the American Ambulance section
attached to the French Army, and in this capacity
participated with the French during the big German attack
on Verdun in June, 1916. He attended the first Plattsburg
Officers' Training Camp in 1917 and was commissioned a
captain of infantry therefrom. In September, 1917, he was
assigned to the 77th Division and placed in command of
Company M, 307th Infantry. As commander of this company
he went to France with his regiment and after training
with the British Army took part in the defense of the
Baccarat sector and the Oise-Aisne offensive, until
wounded in front of Chateau Diable in August, 1918.
Returning from hospital in September be was placed in
command of Company L, 307th Infantry, and was for the
second time severely wounded in October, while leading
his company in the first attempt to reach Major Charles
W. Whittlesey's command, composed of parts of the 308th
and 307th Infantry, which had been cut off and surrounded
by the Germans in the Argonne Forest. In December Captain
Rainsford was again returned from hospital to duty with
his regiment.
This work is therefore commended to its readers as an
official product from the pen, not of an onlooker but of
a participant who endured every privation and hardship
with the regiment; one who had watched the Great War from
its beginning with the eye of a professional soldier, and
who had served therein with the greatest valor and
self-sacrifice from 1915 until the end.
Little can I express the great admiration, respect and
affection I feel for every man of this splendid regiment,
which I never commanded in battle but watched in every
action, first while Chief of Staff of the 77th Division
of the National Army to which it belonged, and then as
commander of its companion regiment in the 154th Infantry
Brigade, the 308th Infantry, during the last month of
intense fighting in the Argonne.
The entire Division was drawn from what the military
critics of the time assumed was the poorest fighting
material in the United States, that greatest of all
melting pots of humanity-New York City. Men unused to the
sturdy activity of outdoor life; men who had had little
chance for that physical development which enables them
to endure great privation, fatigue and suffering; men who
had no knowledge of woodcraft and the use of firearms,
and in consequence were lacking in the principles of
self-preservation and the confidence which comes from
such knowledge. Yet these men, inducted into the service
when their nation was in peril, after a brief period of
training were thrown against the most perfectly trained
and disciplined army the world has ever known. They
fought their way to victory and never once gave ground to
the enemy. Always enduring with perfect cheerfulness and
courage every hardship and privation, responding at all
times to their leaders, they accepted with equal tenacity
of purpose and disregard of self the necessity for a
frontal attack on the enemy's machine-gun nests or long
sleepless nights and days, drenched to the skin and
foodless, shivering with the cold, with no protection
from the elements or the enemy's terrible weapons of
destruction. A complaint was never heard, failure to obey
was a thing unknown. Men who bad lived in the glare of
electric lights and had never known darkness fought their
way night and day through fifteen miles of the most
impenetrable mass of dense forest and underbrush, wire
entanglements and trenches, that mind can conceive, in
the Foret d'Argonne.
No division suffered greater hardships, had greater
losses during the time it was in line, nor was better
disciplined and trained than this cosmopolitan division
of New York City-the 77th, New York's Own.
If our nation is properly to protect its great wealth and
future trade development, and more than all its homes and
the lives of its people, no more forceful argument for
the universal training of our young men can be presented
than the history of this regiment and division. A brief
period of intensive training made splendid officers from
raw material, and nine months of similar training in
service developed the army which whipped the Hun.
But let us not drift into the fallacy that there will
always be buffer states between us and the enemy to
protect us while this training is in progress. The deeds
of this regiment exemplify what our splendid manhood can
and will do for their country; what splendid patriotism
comes from the crucible of American citizenship. Let us
profit by past experience and in times of peace prepare
for any eventuality, not by attempting to create a huge
and expensive regular establishment but by training our
young men in the use of arms, with that healthful,
vigorous training which makes better men of them morally
and physically, so that we will at all times be ready to
safeguard our country against the encroachments and
avarice of an enemy. When arbitration fails and we must
throw down the gauntlet for the preservation of right,
let us not send them forth incompletely trained and
equipped, thus inviting an unnecessary waste of life,
through a misconceived economy or that more charitable
though equally fallacious belief of the pacifist, that
wars are of the past. Preparedness is war's antitoxin.
Had we been prepared in 1914 the Lusitania would never
have been sunk.
J. R. R. HANNAY,
colonel U. S. Army
(Formerly COMMANDING 307th Infantry)