Waiting for the Armistice

Harry S. Truman (1884–1972)
From World War I and America: Told by the Americans Who Lived It

Interesting Links

“Harry S. Truman and the Influences of His Service in World War I” (Harry S Truman National Historic Site, National Park Service)

“First Lady Biography: Bess Truman” (National First Ladies’ Library)

Previous Story of the Week Selections
• “I Am Not Dead,” Ashby Williams
• “Roll Call on the Prairies,” Willa Cather
• “The Diary of a Retreat,” H. L. Mencken

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World War I and America: Told By the Americans Who Lived It
127 selections by nearly ninety soldiers, airmen, nurses, diplomats, statesmen, political activists, journalists, and others • 987 pages

Beginning of Harry S. Truman’s letter to Bess Wallace, November 11, 1918 (the day of the Armistice ending World War I). Courtesy Harry S. Truman Library.

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Days after the soldiers commanded by Harry S. Truman in France experienced combat for the first time, Private (and soon-to-be Corporal) William O’Hare wrote to his father, “We have a captain who cannot be beaten.” For decades after World War I, virtually everyone in Battery D, 129th Field Artillery, would similarly recall their commanding officer with admiration and fondness—but it didn’t start out that way.

Truman had been promoted to captain and given command of the “Dizzy D” in July 1918. The battery was a difficult and somewhat notorious group of nearly two hundred Missouri National Guardsmen, self-described “wild kids,” many of them Irish and German Catholics who had attended Rockhurst Academy in Kansas City. They had already gone through three previous commanding officers since arriving in France. When Truman first addressed the battery, these city toughs, many former athletes, scoffed at the bespectacled 34-year-old farmer who (as one recalled) “gave the impression more of a professor than he did an artillery officer.” The rebellious soldiers concluded the assembly on Truman’s first day with a noisy “Bronx cheer,” proceeded to stage a mock stampede using the battery’s horses, and ended the evening with an alcohol-fueled brawl that sent four men to the infirmary. The next morning Truman posted a notice demoting half of the noncommissioned officers, along with a good number of the first class privates for good measure. Their mirth instantly turned to disgruntlement—but he had got their attention.

During the next month Truman earned the grudging respect of at least some of the men. And then, on the night of August 29, 1918, in the Vosges Mountains, Battery D faced its first firefight. As Private Vere Leigh told an interviewer in 1970, “We were firing away and having a hell of a good time doing it until they began to fire back.” As Truman confessed two days later in a letter to Bess Wallace, his future wife, “My greatest satisfaction is that my legs didn’t succeed in carrying me away, although they were very anxious to do it.” Not all the battery’s members resisted the temptation to flee and an unknown number of soldiers turned tail. The usually genteel Truman let loose with a blistering barrage of words “in language that they could understand” and rallied his troops forward. After the war, as battery members disputed over who fled and who stuck with their captain, the episode entered Battery D lore as the “Battle of Who Run.”

Truman continued to lead his troops in the Battle of Saint-Mihiel (September 12) and the Meuse-Argonne campaign (‎September 26–November 11). As a whole, the National Guardsmen from Missouri and Kansas that made up the 35th Division were largely unprepared for war, and the division’s organization and command occasionally bordered on chaotic. Harry wrote Bess about one incident he witnessed in late October:

One of [the German] aviators fell right behind my Battery yesterday and sprained his ankle, busted up the machine [plane], and got completely picked by the French and Americans in the neighborhood. They even tried to take their (there were two in the machine) coats. One of our officers, I am ashamed to say, took the boots off of the one with the sprained ankle and kept them. . . . If a guard had not been placed over the machine, I don't doubt that it would have been carried away bit by bit. . . . I heard a Frenchman remark that Germany was fighting for territory, England for the sea, France for patriotism, and Americans for souvenirs. Yesterday made me think he was about right.

Yet the members of Battery D soon realized that their commanding officer had their backs and that he was just as generous with commendation and reward as he was with punishment. During three months of combat, the “Dizzy D” stood out from the other five batteries in the regiment not only because of its tighter discipline and its successes in the midst of heavy fighting but also because, under Truman’s command, none of its members were killed in action and only two were wounded. The other batteries suffered a total of 16 killed and 55 wounded.

On each of the last two days of the war Harry wrote a letter to Bess, and we present both of them below. For the duration of Harry’s deployment Bess lived in her family’s home in Independence and, after their marriage the following year, Truman moved into the house, which would be his Missouri home for the rest of his life.

Notes (first letter): Fred A. Boxley, was a Kansas City lawyer Truman had met in the Missouri National Guard. In the fall of 1916 Truman had become a partner in the Morgan Oil & Refining Company, a venture that failed in 1917. Old daddy Foch refers to Allied supreme commander General Ferdinand Foch, who had presented the Armistice terms to a German delegation on November 8. Lizzie was Truman’s nickname for the five-seater car he had purchased in 1914. Sausage balloons were observation balloons.

(Second letter): The great big 155 battery refers to a French howitzer, supplied to American forces, that fired shells 155mm (6.1 inches) in diameter and had a maximum range of seven miles. Bill’s letter, sent by Corporal William O’Hare to his father and then excerpted in the Kansas City Post, contains flattering comments about Truman, including the line quoted at the beginning of this introduction. Mrs. [Maud Gates] Wells was Bess’s aunt. “Stars & Stripes” was the U.S. Army newspaper published weekly in France from February 8, 1918, until June 13, 1919.

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The Lost Cause

Red Smith (1905–1982)
From Football: Great Writing about the National Sport
Also included in American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith

Previous Story of the Week selections by Red Smith
• “The Strongest Lady in the World” (1947)
• “Jim Crow’s Playmates” (1948)
• “I’m the Greatest” (1964)

Previous selections on football
• “A Whistle-Stop School with Big-Time Talent,” Jerry Izenberg
• “The Ghost of the Gridiron,” W. C. Heinz

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President Harry S. Truman and Bess Wallace Truman at the Philadelphia Municipal Stadium for the Army-Navy football game, November 27, 1948. Courtesy Harry S. Truman Presidential Library.

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When Red Smith attended the Army-Navy game in 1948, he—like most of the spectators—expected nothing more than a “pageant of youth,” complete with a cameo appearance by Harry Truman, fresh from his reelection three weeks earlier. Many Americans had not expected Truman to win his race and, similarly, most of the crowd in the stadium didn’t expect an even match-up between the two football teams, much less the “exhibition of pure, unbridled fury” that actually occurred.

“The Lost Cause,” Smith’s account of the game, was included in the Library of America anthology of great football writing and John Schulian, the book’s editor, provided the following introduction:

Elegance is a rare word in any discussion of sportswriters and yet it is the first word that comes to mind when remembering Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith. One thinks back to his self-effacing graciousness, his Brooks Brothers sport coats, and, most of all, his crystalline prose. Reading Smith was like discovering that E. B. White knew what an onsides kick is.

After apprenticing in Milwaukee, St. Louis, and a decade in Philadelphia, Smith arrived at the New York Herald Tribune in 1945 and was quickly embraced for the keen eye and gentle wit he brought to his daily column. His virtues are on full display in the piece that follows, about the Army-Navy football rivalry when America still cared about it. It’s easy to imagine the joy he must have felt when he described President Truman as a “prominent fancier of hopeless causes.”

Smith outlived the Herald and moved on to write for The New York Times, where his “Sports of the Times” columns won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 that most felt was long overdue. To those who shook his hand afterward, his response was vintage Red Smith: “Well, God bless. Don’t let anything happen to you.”

Over the course of a career lasting nearly fifty years, Smith wrote some ten thousand columns—a total of approximately eight million words. “He never wrote a book. His work appeared in 800-word increments in daily newspapers,” notes Daniel Okrent in his introduction to the LOA edition of Smith’s best columns (which also includes “The Lost Cause”). “For half a century American sports fans were granted the privilege of reading his crystalline sentences four, six, for a period seven times a week.”

Notes: The Minneapolis line refer to the odds established weekly by the Athletic Publications Inc., established in Minneapolis by Leo Hirschfield in the 1930s and highly regarded by bookmakers and gamblers for three decades. “Gallup Picks Army” is a mocking allusion to the Gallup poll that confidently predicted Thomas Dewey would win the 1948 presidential election against Harry Truman. The sign reading “Send in Alan Ladd” refers to the Hollywood star, who briefly served stateside in the Army during World War II but was discharged for recurring stomach problems and influenza. In early 1947 he was cast in the title role of the much-publicized Paramount film Whispering Smith—Ladd’s first starring role both in a Western and in color. Based on a real-life Western detective and made popular by a best-selling novel and five previous movie adaptations, the character earned his name from his subdued demeanor and lightning-fast gun draw. After many production delays, the movie was released the week after the Army-Navy game.

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce Smith’s column, in its entirety, below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.

The Lost Cause

Philadelphia, Pa., November 27, 1948

A slight, four-eyed man stood teetering on tiptoe down near the 40-yard line in Municipal Stadium, his pearl-gray hat bobbing like a floating cork as he craned and twisted and strained to see over the wall of blue Navy overcoats and white Navy caps whose owners towered in front of America’s Commander in Chief.

Harry Truman, of Independence, Missouri, a former haberdasher and prominent fancier of hopeless causes, was struggling to focus his lenses on the hopeless Navy football team, a team that had lost thirteen successive games and now, with fifty-eight seconds of its season remaining, stood tied with undefeated Army, champion of the East, third-ranking power of the nation, and twenty-one-point favorite in the trustworthy Minneapolis line.

Fifty Secret Service men fidgeted, watching protocol go down the drain. For safety’s sake, it has been their custom to get the President clear of the crowd two minutes before an Army-Navy game ends. Hot or cold, out he goes with two minutes to play.

But Harry Truman wouldn’t budge. Like the 102,580 others present at the forty-ninth meeting of service academies, he simply had to see Navy fire the last shot in its locker.

Pete Williams took a pitch-out and lost three yards. Bill Hawkins went twisting and wrestling through the line, gaining five. The clock showed thirty-three seconds left. Slats Baysinger, the quarterback, tried to sneak around end. He lost six. Navy huddled once more, rushed up to the line for one more play, but the referee stepped in, waving his arms.

The red hand of the clock stood at zero, and the best, most exhilarating and least plausible Army-Navy game in at least twenty years was over. The score, 21 to 21, was the same as that of 1926, the year historians always mention first when they try to name the finest of all Army-Navy games.

And even if you’d seen it, it was fearfully hard to believe. While the referee tossed a coin to decide on permanent possession of the ball, Baysinger walked around the periphery of huddled players, shook hands with Army’s Tom Bullock and then with Arnold Galiffa. Army’s guys walked off hurriedly, but Navy’s froze to attention while the midshipmen’s band played “Navy Blue and Gold.”

Then all the players save two departed, as civilians and non-combatant midshipmen and cadets swarmed over the field. Dave Bannerman, Navy’s substitute fullback, and Ted Carson, left end, just stayed there where the deed had been done. When small boys came asking for autographs, they signed abstractedly and kept rubbering around through the crowd. Maybe they were looking for a couple of peach cakes to share an evening’s liberty. But it seemed more likely they were waiting in the hope that someone would give them one more crack at Army.

The great, sunswept crowd that paid six dollars a head hadn’t expected anything like this. The customers had come for the show, the spectacle, the pageant of youth that always is about as thrilling as anything in American sports. They had thought to get their money’s worth out of just being there; out of seeing the magnificent parade these kids always bring off superbly before the game; out of the shiver that scampers along the spine when the colors are brought to midfield and the band plays the national anthem and the packed stands are a frozen block of color, with the bright blue-gray of the Army on one side and the shimmering white of Navy caps on the other.

They figured to get a chuckle out of the kids’ musty nonsense. And of course they did. There was a Navy dreadnought that rolled around the cinder track and shot off cannon and went down in flames. There was a huge papier mâché goat and a huge papier mâché mule. There were signs in the Navy stands: “Gallup Picks Army” (to which the Army stands replied with a cheer: “Gallup, Gallup, Gallup!”) and a sly reference to the difference between Army and Navy schedules: “When do you play Vassar?” (“Vassar, Vassar, Vassar!”) and then after the Navy scored first: “Send in Alan Ladd”; (no response to this).

But nobody expected a ball game, except the few people who bore in mind an old, old truth which the game restated dramatically. That is, that there never can be between undergraduate football teams of the same league a gap in ability too great to be bridged by spirit alone. Navy proved that beyond remotest doubt, and the guy who did most to prove it was a fellow playing on spirit and very little else. Bill Hawkins, ill a long while this season with a blood disorder that doctors call acute infectious mononucleosis, was entirely out of action for three weeks in midseason. Without preparation, he came back to play against Michigan on November 6. Then he played three minutes against Columbia and was hurt November 13. Since then he hadn’t a minute of physical contact until today.

But today he was a bull, and a mad bull into the bargain. He ran the ball fourteen times and made fifty important yards. He scored two touchdowns. He backed up the line, his blocking was like a crime of passion, and he played almost all afternoon.

It wasn’t exactly a football game, it was an exhibition of pure, unbridled fury on both sides for both sides persistently moved the ball against incredibly savage resistance. It was, altogether, as good a thing as could possibly happen to football.

Thirty-two Navy players got into the game, which means—if there is such a thing as justice—that the Navy added thirty-two full admirals today. For the guys down there on the field today were officer material, as ever was. It goes without saying that there are more than thirty-two full admirals in Philadelphia tonight.

Originally appeared in the New York Herald Tribune (November 27, 1948) and reprinted in Out of the Red (1950). Copyright © 1950. Reprinted by permission of Terence Smith and Catherine O’Meara.

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