Floyd Gibbons - And they thought we wouldn't fight

"Kin you beat that," demanded English. "You know, if this here red-headed guy don't get promotion pretty quick, he's just simply going to quit this army and leave us flat here in France facing the Germans.

"Let me tell you about this gattling gun expert. When they landed us off of them boats down on the coast, the battalion commander turned us all loose for a swim in the bay, and this here bird almost drowned. He went down three times before we could pull him out.

"Now, if they don't make him a Brigadier General pretty quick, he's going to get sore and put in for a transfer to the Navy on the grounds of having submarine experience. But he's right in one thing – experience don't count for what it should in the army.

"Right here in our battery we got a lot of plough boys from Kansas that have been sitting on a plough and looking at a horse's back all their lives, and they got them handling the machinery on these here guns. And me, who knows everything there is to know about machinery, they won't let me even find out which end of the cannon you put the shell in and which end it comes out of. All I do all day long is to prod around a couple of fat-hipped hayburners. My God, I hate horses."

But regardless of these inconveniences those first American artillerymen in our overseas forces applied themselves strenuously to their studies. They were there primarily to learn. It became necessary for them at first to make themselves forget a lot of things that they had previously learned by artillery and adapt themselves to new methods and instruments of war.

Did you ever hear of "Swansant, Kansas"? You probably won't find it on any train schedule in the Sunflower State; in fact, it isn't a place at all. It is the name of the light field cannon that France provided our men for use against the German line.

"Swansant, Kansas" is phonetic spelling of the name as pronounced by American gunners. The French got the same effect in pronunciation by spelling the singular "soixante quinze," but a Yankee cannoneer trying to pronounce it from that orthography was forced to call it a "quince," and that was something which it distinctly was not.

One way or the other it meant the "Seventy-fives" – the "Admirable Seventy-five" – the seventy-five millimetre field pieces that stopped the Germans' Paris drive at the Marne – the same that gave Little Willie a headache at Verdun, – the inimitable, rapid firing, target hugging, hell raising, shell spitting engine of destruction whose secret of recoil remained a secret after almost twenty years and whose dependability was a French proverb.

At Valdahon where American artillery became acquainted with the Seventy-five, the khaki-clad gun crews called her "some cannon." At seven o'clock every morning, the glass windows in my room at the post would rattle with her opening barks, and from that minute on until noon the Seventy-fives, battery upon battery of them, would snap and bark away until their seemingly ceaseless fire becomes a volley of sharp cracks which sent the echoes chasing one another through the dark recesses of the forests that conceal them.

The targets, of course, were unseen. Range elevation, deflection, all came to the battery over the signal wires that connected the firing position with some observation point also unseen but located in a position commanding the terrain under fire.

A signalman sat cross-legged on the ground back of each battery. He received the firing directions from the transmitter clamped to his ears and conveyed them to the firing executive who stood beside him. They were then megaphoned to the sergeants chief of sections.

The corporal gunner, with eye on the sighting instruments at the side of each gun, "laid the piece" for range and deflection. Number one man of the crew opened the block to receive the shell, which was inserted by number two. Number three adjusted the fuse-setter, and cut the fuses. Numbers four and five screwed the fuses in the shells and kept the fuse-setter loaded.

The section chiefs, watch in hand, gave the firing command to the gun crews, and number one of each piece jerked the firing lanyard at ten second intervals or whatever interval the command might call for. The four guns would discharge their projectiles. They whined over the damp wooded ridge to distant imaginary lines of trenches, theoretical cross-roads, or designated sections where the enemy was supposed to be massing for attack. Round after round would follow, while telephoned corrections perfected the range, and burst. The course of each shell was closely observed as well as its bursting effect, but no stupendous records were kept of the individual shots. That was "peace time stuff."

These batteries and regiments were learning gunnery and no scarcity of shells was permitted to interfere with their education. One officer told me that it was his opinion that one brigade firing at this schooling post during a course of six weeks, had expended more ammunition than all of the field artillery of the United States Army has fired during the entire period since the Civil War. The Seventy-five shells cost approximately ten dollars apiece, but neither the French nor American artillery directors felt that a penny's worth was being wasted. They said cannon firing could not be learned entirely out of a book.

I had talked with a French instructor, a Yale graduate, who had been two years with the guns at the front, and I had asked him what in his opinion was the most disconcerting thing that could happen to effect the morale of new gunners under actual fire. I wanted some idea of what might be expected of American artillerymen when they made their initial appearance on the line.

We discussed the effect of counter battery fire, the effect on gun crews of asphyxiating gas, either that carried on the wind from the enemy trenches or that sent over in gas shells. We considered the demoralising influences of aerial attacks on gun positions behind the line.

"They are all bad," my informant concluded. "But they are expected. Men can stand without complaint and without qualm any danger that is directed at them by the foe they are fighting. The thing that really bothers, though, is the danger of death or injury from their own weapons or ammunition. You see, many times there is such a thing as a faulty shell, although careful inspection in the munitions plants has reduced this danger to a percentage of about one in ten thousand.

"At the beginning of the war when every little tin shop all over the world was converted into a munitions factory to supply the great need of shells, much faulty ammunition reached the front lines. Some of the shells would explode almost as soon as they left the gun. They are called shorts. The English, who had the same trouble, call them 'muzzle bursts.'

"Sometimes the shell would explode in the bore of the cannon, in which case the cannoneers were usually killed either by pieces of the shell itself or bits of the cannon. The gunners have to sit beside the cannon when it is fired, and the rest of the gun crew are all within eight feet of it. If there is an explosion in the breech of the gun, it usually wipes out most of the crew. A muzzle burst, or a breech explosion, is one of the most disconcerting things that could happen in a battery.

"The other men in the battery know of course that a faulty shell caused the explosion. They also know that they are firing ammunition from the same lot. After that, as they pull the trigger on each shot, they don't know whether the shell is going out of the gun all right or whether it is going to explode in the breech and kill all of them. That thought in a man's mind when he pulls the firing lanyard, that thought in the minds of the whole crew as they stand there waiting for the crash, is positively demoralising.

"When it happens in our French artillery the cannoneers lose confidence in their pieces. They build small individual dugouts a safe ways back from the gun and extend the lanyard a safe distance. Then, with all the gun crew under cover, they fire the piece. This naturally removes them from their regular firing positions beside the pieces, reduces the accuracy and slows up the entire action of the battery. The men's suspicions of the shells combined with the fear of death by their own weapons, which is greater than any fear of death at the hands of the enemy, all reduce the morale of the gun crews."