Sangamon County Rifle Association
Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights
Springfield, Illinois


Phil Davis




Phil Davis WWI Doughboy
History comes to Life

Phil Davis, SCRA Meeting, April 5, 2010
May 2010 GunNews





Phil Davis with the standard gear of a World
War I Doughboy, including the Model 1903
Springfield rifle.


It began in 1914 and raged for almost three years before the United States was involved.
 
George Washington in his farewell address said, "Beware of foreign entanglements."  This is something the people in Europe could have taken a big lesson from with all the alliances between nations in Europe.

The war started out as an open field fight.  The Germans pressed through Belgium into France and people thought  that it would end before Christmas.  But cold temperatures sapped the German's momentum and they started digging in.

The Germans  tried the trick tactics they had used militarily for hundreds of years.  Advance slowly in lines towards the enemy, push to close range and tackle with bayonets.  That may have been fine in the era of bows, arrows and swords. It may have even been dandy with smooth bore muskets.  But with machine guns, it was a recipe for slaughter and men died by the millions.

Both sides had  trench lines that ran from the English Channel all the way to the Border of Switzerland.  They were occupied by  millions of men on both sides - trenches that were full of rats, lice, and disease.  "Mud, blood, and crud" - the three things of World War I.

The areas between the trenches were called No Man's Land because no one lived there long.  If you moved in No Man's Land you likely drew fire from both sides. If wounded, you were left to bleed out.  Seldom did people go out to claim bodies.

Within the first two hours of one battle, Somme, 72,000 British soldiers had went over the top and roughly 6,000 of them made it back to their own trenches.  The rest of them were shredded in No Man's Land.  The Germans and the British both followed up with heavy artillery barrages to make sure no one else got across there to attack or counterattack.  Over 60,000 men missing and assumed dead, bodies never recovered, churned into the mud of France.  That was World War I

The United States stayed out of it for a while as a divided country. There were a lot of German immigrants here who didn't want us to go to war with the Kaiser. Unlike Vietnam and other wars where folks went to Canada to avoid war, in World War I they went to Canada to join and fight. 

Trench warfare
A trench attack was very simple - It's really just organized suicide on a large scale.  A large assault, or going over the top, was usually preceded with an artillery barrage. They realized after a short time  that all a large day-long barrage does is it tells everyone where the attack is going to come.

Eventually, they opted for an extremely dense fifteen minute barrage prior to the attack, beginning right in front of your trench.  The artillery crews would perform a "walking barrage" or a "rolling barrage" across No Man's Land to, in theory,  detonate any land mines and clear barb wire obstacles.  In theory, of course. You never clear all the barb wire with artillery.  Sometimes you tangle it even worse.

On your side, you hear, "fix bayonets, make ready" and one long blast on a whistle and up over the top you go.  According to the book, you're supposed to walk steadily forward but in reality you get your butt across No Man's Land as fast as you can.

 If by the time you got across there the Germans had replenished their lines or come out of their elaborate shelters (some two or three stories underground), their Maxim guns would start to talk and it wasn't little short bursts like you hear today.  These were water cooled machine guns.  The Maxim gun had two nicknames, the Grim Reaper of No Man's Land and the Devil's Paint Brush because it painted the landscape red.  It was a sustained fire and they would just swing it back and forth on its traverse at about knee cap level.  It was designed to put you down.

If you made it to the trenches, you'd jump down into the enemy's trench and deal with enemy infantrymen, man to man and hand to hand.

The U.S. enters the war. 
When WWI began, the United States was woefully unprepared with a grand total of about 23,000 troops. Those troops had their own rifles and most were national guard troops and state troops, volunteers and draftees.

New troops were recruited and all went through training camps all across the U.S.  Some trained with wooden rifles or broom sticks or Indian war surplus.  Some of them trained with Krags, and some of them trained with trap doors.  Some of the artillery crews trained on Civil War bronze 12-pounders.  In order to practice armored tactics, they had trucks with the word TANK painted on the side of them.

By the time the first divisions went over in midsummer of 1917 the United States was sending its best.  The standard weapon issued to them was the US rifle 1903, known as the Springfield.  The Springfield was actually made by Springfield by Rock Island Arsenal and by Remington.  It had a bayonet just as long as the other rifles at that time period, a 16-inch blade attached to the end.

It was jokingly said that in WWI the Germans went to war with a sporting rifle, the Americans went to war with a target rifle and the British went to war with a battle rifle.  The Springfield was a very accurate rifle with precision sights that weren't so hot for the mud of the trenches.   The action would gum up occasionally as well.  The British had the Number 1 Mark 3 Enfield.  Ten shots, rapid fire, light compared to the US 1903 and accurate.  The more you threw it in the mud the better it liked it.  It was kind of like the AK-47 of WWI.  The British could fire so fast the Germans thought they were facing machine guns.

When it came to sidearms, unlike the Europeans who issued their officers anemic handguns in .30, .32 or occasionally 9mm caliber (and the Brits with their respectable .455 Webley), Americans arrived with Colt 1911s in .45 ACT, still a state of the art combat pistol today.  American NCOs and even privates would carry them if they could find them.

They could not produce enough of these so they went to Smith & Wesson and had them make large frame revolvers using half-moon clips of .45 ACP.

Part of the soldier's soldier's gear on his backpack

Part of the soldier's gear on his backpack.

Davis with World War I-era "Trench knife" used fo social purposes in hand-to-hand combat.




When you ran out of those then you had to rely on the 1918 US trench knife.  It will hurt you every which way.  It has brass knuckles and a nice 7" dagger bladed point and a skull crusher on the bottom.   An original one of these goes for between six and nine hundred dollars.








Davis with the Model 1897 trench shot gun

The other thing that did not endear us to the Germans was the trench broom, the model 1897 trench shot gun.  The Germans disliked these so much it was a death sentence to be caught carrying one or ammunition for it.  It was very effective in a trench.  Six rounds up the tube and one in the chamber and you could fire bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, that fast.  You could hold the trigger down and just keep hammering with buckshot.  Talk about a way to clear about a 50-foot section of trench.

And, just in case you ran out of ammunition, this is one reason why Davis carries the 1917 Enfield rifle, the bayonet from the 1917 Enfield rifle fits the shotgun.  This shotgun is what Davis keeps next to his bed at night.
 



When the Americans initially got there the Brits, to simplify supply, gave them only Enfield rifles. They gave them Hotchkiss and Vickers machine guns and they supplemented their web gear with British web gear.  The same thing happened with the troops who went over to the French side.  They got French Berthier machine guns and the most loved [sarcasm], Chauchat machine guns.  The Chauchat was an engineering abortion.  It was heavy, notoriously unreliable and featured a genius-inspired magazine open on both sides to attract mud and crap from the trenches. 

The Americans were never so happy as when General Black Jack Pershing finally got all the battalions back together and finally got all the American supply chains straightened out.  The Americans got to give back their beloved Chauchats.  They got their BARs and their 1917s and they were happy people to have their own stuff again.

The specter of WWI was  the only major war where chemical weapons were used on a wholesale scale. The first gases that were used were irritants.  Some of them are still around today.  One agent used was called "puke" gas.  Even if you hadn't had anything to eat in several days it would give you the dry heaves for half an hour.  The reason they used irritants was not to kill the enemy but to keep their heads down.  The next level they used was a lot more deadly.  Its a suffocating agent, chlorine gas, the first one they used, wicked stuff.  Then they developed phosgene gas.  Then came mustard gas.  Mustard gas will leave blisters and if you were close enough to a shell burst and the actual liquid splashed on you, it would disfigure you by burning through your muscles and you would be scarred for life.  The number one areas for mustard gas casualties were eyes, nose, mouth, arm pits and groin.  It causes huge weaping blisters in the skin that will not heal by themselves.

WWI was supposed to be the war that ended all wars.  It was a war of firsts, the first use of airplanes in combat, the first widespread use of submarines, the first use of flame throwers, the first widespread productive use of rocket launchers, the first widespread use of the machine gun, the first tanks, and zeppelins, and lots of other firsts.  It was not the last of anything except that it was the last war where we saw widespread use of gas.

World War I was carnage incarnate.  We take a look at Afghanistan and we take a look at Iraq and every casualty that we had was somebody's son or somebody's father and we morn those people.  We might lose five or six thousand in an entire war today.  During the Meuse-Argonne Sector, eight to fifteen thousand died in just one section of the battlefield.

WWI was the death of a generation.


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