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Robert Frost on World War II: ‘Wisdom Is Better Than Bravery’

Robert Frost owed a lot to his closest friend, Louis Untermeyer. Untermeyer, a preeminent literary critic, had supported his work and helped make him a national poet. But when Untermeyer asked him to write propaganda for the Allies in World War II, Frost said he just couldn’t do it. He chose to teach instead.

Robert Frost

In 1943, Frost started at Dartmouth as a George Ticknor Fellow. By then he was a beloved American poet, a winner of four Pulitzer Prizes and a popular speaker on college campus.

Students and faculty flocked to his classes and seminars. They met with him during his office hours and hiked with him in the woods. He had tea at the home of a student wounded in the war, asked about his war experience and later critiqued his short stories.

Fifteen years later, speaking at Harvard, Frost explained why he taught. He was, he said, “seeking kindred spirits — to comfort them and comfort me.”

Frost on War

Though Frost’s poems were chosen for anthologies given to GIs to boost their morale, he refused to join the Office of War Information (OWI) in spite of the urgings of Untermeyer, his closest friend. Untermeyer, who was Jewish, was the OWI senior editor of publications.

It wasn’t that Frost was against the war. Robert Frost viewed war as an inevitable, if tragic, outcome of human nature. He had suggested in 1942 that his grandson Prescott attend military school in preparation for the war. When his daughter Lillian replied that Prescott hoped to join the Air Force and work on a ground crew, Frost commented sarcastically on his less-than-noble aspiration in a letter.

Not that he would avoid duty at the front. Only of course he would want to be where his abilities and training would help most. He had been out hunting and killed a grey squirrel. I shall say nothing more on the subject. Not everybody can be expected to like war.

But he hated the gung-ho gang thinking of Americans, “the gay songs and big talk about our celebrating Christmas in Berlin and next Fourth of July in Tokio or vice versa,” he wrote. He refused to accept the moral superiority of the Allies who, after all, would create holocausts in Dresden, Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Robert Frost at Dartmouth

“The best construction I can put on it is that we and the British have a property and a position the Germans would give anything to get away from us: and that we arent [sic] fools enough to let them,” he wrote in a letter to his daughter Lesley.

Frost was a teacher, not a propagandist, and he was open to the possibility that God was on both sides. He aimed to inspire nuanced moral thinking among his students. “Wisdom is better than bravery,” he said shortly after the war ended.

Dartmouth had turned into an arm of the military during the war. Many colleges trained officers for military service through their participation in the V-12 Navy College Training program or the Army Specialized Training Program. Most of Dartmouth’s students between 1943 and 1946 belonged to the V-12 program. Of those, 85 percent had recently graduated from high school. Another 10 percent were Marines, many of whom had returned from Guadalcanal.

They tricked out their dorm rooms like military barracks and called them the “ships of the Dartmouth Navy.” They woke at reveille, drilled on campus and spoke of time in military terms: “0800” for 8:00 a.m.

After they finished their military service, many of the V-12 veterans returned to school, older and wiser than when they left. The faculty thought them the best students they ever had. Some continued to wear their uniforms on campus because those were the only clothes they owned and could afford.

The captain of the football team had been badly disfigured. His plane had crashed and he was thrown clear. He went to rescue men still in the plane and it blew up in his face.

A V-12 marine named John Gustafson made an appointment with Frost one day so he could autograph a copy of his new book of poetry, Come In. Frost wrote a two-line poem above his signature.

We dance ʼround in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.

Images: Dartmouth logo By http://communications.dartmouth.edu/sites/communications.dartmouth.edu/files/dartmouth_guidelines_web_final.pdf, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14332488.

With thanks to the Rauner Library World War II Oral History Project.

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JFK One-Liners: Presidential Wit and More

President John F. Kennedy managed to seduce reporters with witty retorts to their questions during presidential news conferences. Many JFK one-liners are still remembered, such as his observation that “Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.”

His childhood friend Lem Billings remembered his sense of humor before he moved into the White House. “I’ve never known anyone in my life with such a wonderful humor — the ability to make one laugh and have a good time,” Billings once said.

Lem Billings and the future president. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Here, then, is a collection of JFK one-liners from well before and during his presidency.

Early JFK One-Liners

His mother, Rose, remembered him as a funny little boy. He once said to her, “Daddy has a sweet tooth, hasn’t he? I wonder which one it is.”

He also had a sharp tongue, which he directed at his mother. Rose didn’t show her children much warmth and took long trips away from her family. Just before she left on one journey, five-year-old Jack said, “Gee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children all alone!”

JFK in his first Communion suit. Image courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

In Sickness

Throughout his life, he suffered through a series of illnesses. At Harvard, he was rushed to the hospital with an illness the doctors misdiagnosed as leukemia. He wrote to a girlfriend.

Took a peek at my chart yesterday and could see that they were mentally measuring me for a coffin.

He also had chronic back pain and several surgeries to correct it. After one unsuccessful operation, he wrote,

In regard to the fascinating subject of my operation, I …will confine myself to saying that I think the doc should have read just one more book before picking up the saw.

World War II

Kennedy joined the Navy during World War II and commanded a PT boat in the South Pacific.

The most famous JFK one-liner during his naval career wasn’t funny.

Kennedy aboard PT-109. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

A Japanese destroyer had rammed his boat in the Solomon Islands. Kennedy swam for five hours to an island, a wounded shipmate on his back. He held on to the man by clenching his lifejacket straps in his teeth. Kennedy carved a message for help in a coconut and sent it with a native.

NATIVE KNOWS POSIT HE CAN PILOT 11 ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY

Rescued after seven days on the island, he came home a hero. As president, someone asked him how he got to be a hero.

“It was involuntary,” he said. “They sank my boat.”

Before the Japanese sank his boat, he had already grown disillusioned with the war effort. In a letter, he expressed his cynicism. “We are at a great disadvantage–the Russians could see their country invaded, the Chinese the same,” he wrote. “The British were bombed, but we are fighting on some islands belonging to the Lever Company, a British concern making soap.” And then:

I suppose if we were stockholders we would perhaps be doing much better, but to see that by dying at Munda you are helping to secure peace in our time takes a larger imagination than most possess.

After his boat sank, he had little use for the desk duty to which he was assigned.

“Once you get your feet upon the desk in the morning, the heavy work of the day is done,” he wrote to a friend.

His brother Robert joined the Naval Reserve in Boston while in his senior year of high school. Their parents had sent Jack a clipping of Robert taking the oath. He wrote to Robert, “The sight of you up there, just as a boy, was really moving, particularly as a close examination showed that you had my checked London coat on.”

Politics

After the war, Kennedy decided to run for Congress from the Massachusetts district once represented by John Quincy Adams.

His father spent lavishly on his House campaign and interfered with the decision making. When one of his campaign aides objected, Kennedy said, “I know you’re right about this, but Dad’s putting up the money and we have to let him win a couple.”

Congressman John F. Kennedy

On the campaign trail, he was late to a communion breakfast in Chicopee, Mass. He urged his driver to speed up, and he did. Kennedy than turned to his seatmate, Billy Sutton, and said,

Billy, if we get into an accident, you’ll have to remain conscious to that you can give our names, but more important than that, don’t forget to tell the reporters I was in a state of grace.

Once elected, he only lasted three terms in the House, which didn’t satisfy his ambition.

“We were just worms in the House–nobody paid much attention to us nationally,” he later said.

And so in 1952 he ran for Senate against incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the incumbent. It was a classic Boston grudge match: Lodge’s grandfather had defeated Kennedy’s grandfather for the seat in 1916. “Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names,” Kennedy once said.

Though considered a long shot, Kennedy beat Lodge by about 70,000 votes, helped by his father’s cash. He spent five times more than Lodge on the campaign. Joe Kennedy had a one-liner of his own:

It takes three things to win in politics. The first is money, the second is money, and the third is money.

The Senate

Even before he ran for Senate, Jack Kennedy had his eye on the White House. He knew he needed a wife, and in 1953 he married Jacqueline Bouvier. She fascinated the public as much as he did. Once, as president, he introduced himself during a press conference in Paris.

I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.

September 1953 Hammersmith Farm, Newport, Rhode Island Wedding of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier. Photograph in the Toni Frissell Collection, Library of Congress.

In the Senate, Kennedy grew into a political star.

Tip O’Neill once wrote that until Kennedy won election to the Senate, “You just couldn’t imagine that he was really going anywhere.”

In 1960, Kennedy announced his candidacy for president of the United States. He won the Democratic Party nomination, which prompted another JFK one-liner: “Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I’m the only person standing between Richard Nixon and the White House.”

His father again spent heavily on his son’s campaign. Kennedy acknowledge as much on the campaign trail.

“I just received the following wire from my generous Daddy,” he said: “’Dear Jack, Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide’.”

When asked his favorite song, he replied, “I think ‘Hail to the Chief’ has a nice ring to it.”

President JFK One-Liners

Kennedy didn’t lose his sense of humor as president.

He defended his choice of his 35-year-old brother as attorney general. “I see nothing wrong with giving Robert some legal experience as Attorney General before he goes out to practice law,” he said.

JFK and his brother Robert. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

He said he liked the job.

I have a nice home, the office is close by, and the pay is good.

However, he faced serious challenges.

“When we (The Democrats) got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we’d been saying they were.”

He joked about his approval rating after a vacation in Florida.

“I’ve been back in touch with my constituents and seeing how they felt,” he said. “And frankly I’ve come back to Washington from Palm Beach, and I’m against my entire program.”

He had a rocky relationship with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. When asked why he didn’t fire Hoover, Kennedy said, “You can’t fire God.”

Last Words

Kennedy’s life ended on Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas.

The First Lady and President arrive in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

His last words before an assassin’s bullet struck him were mundane, but ironic.

Nellie Connally, the wife of Texas Gov. John Connally, was traveling in the open limousine with him. “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you,” she said.

“No, you certainly can’t,” he said.

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Dartmouth Starts a Campus Navy in World War II

Eighteen-year-old George Berkowitz, wearing his brand-new Marine uniform, lined up in military order with his Dartmouth College classmates and awaited his orders.

The drill instructor shouted, “Right face!” Berkowitz turned left face. The drill instructor came over to scrutinize him, read his nametag and said, “Berkowitz!”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Youʼre the dumbest sonofabitch I ever saw,” replied the drill instructor.

Aerial view of Dartmouth’s East Campus.

Berkowitz still remembered that insult years later, after he had founded the Legal Seafood restaurant chain. He believed the drill instructor for a week. “It was an indoctrination into the Marine Corps,” he said. “It’s a very fast way to gain maturity.”

Berkowitz belonged to a staggering number of young men who grew up fast in the military during World War II. In 1940, fewer than 500,000 served. The next year, nearly 2 million men put on uniform. The military gobbled up more than double that number over each of the next two years. By war’s end, the United States had 12,209,238 soldiers, sailors, marines and Coast Guardsmen, a 3,550 percent increase in six years.

Dartmouth Looks Into the Abyss

On Nov. 11, 1942, more than two years after instituting the draft, Congress lowered the draft age to 18. About 20 million young men were newly eligible, but half were rejected the first year. Some had health problems, and 20 percent who registered couldn’t read.

Edward Stettinus and Ernest Hopkins

Dartmouth President Ernest Martin Hopkins realized the lower draft age could mean bankruptcy for his college. Formerly assistant secretary of the U.S. War Department during the first world war, he knew how many young men would get drafted in the second. He also knew very few of them could enroll in college, much less earn a degree. Dartmouth faced a crippling shortage of students.

Hopkins also knew the U.S. military desperately needed college-educated commissioned officers. It needed all sorts of expertise – engineers, navigators, quartermasters, metallurgists, radiomen, aerial photographers.

The solution was obvious: bring military training to campus on a massive scale.

And so the military and academia combined college education with military service. They did it through three major programs: the Naval Indoctrination Training School, the V-12 Naval Training Program and the Army Specialized Training Program.

The Navy V-12 Program

On July 1, 1943, the first day of the summer semester, the Navy V-12 program began on 131 college campuses across the nation. It had more than 125,000 students. In New England, 11 colleges hosted the V-12 program. Brown in Rhode Island. Bates in Maine. Middlebury in Vermont. Dartmouth in New Hampshire. In Connecticut, Yale, Trinity and Wesleyan University. Holy Cross, Harvard, Williams and MIT in Massachusetts.

Bobby Kennedy (second from left) at Bates. Muskie Archives and Special Collections LIbrary.

Hopkins called on his friendship with Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox to make sure Dartmouth had a viable V-12 program. He had tremendous success. Dartmouth College hosted the largest V-12 program in the country, with 2,000 enlisted men and an officer staff. Dartmouth had 10 times as many military recruits as civilian students, who were either 4-F or pre-med. The military recruits so overwhelmed the civilians that some enlistees didn’t remember any civilians at all at Dartmouth.

Hopkins himself served in the War Department’s Office of Production and Management. It wasn’t unusual for academics to join the war effort. The presidents of Harvard and MIT, James Bryant Conan and Karl Compton joined the National Defense Research Committee. Harvard Law School Dean James Landis directed the Office of Civilian Defense.

Pearl Harbor

Across New England’s campuses, boys had a hard time studying or making plans after graduation. They knew they might get called up. Campus newspapers reported on the war in Europe. Nazi troops occupied the Rhineland, advanced into Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland. Nations fell like dominos as the Nazis conquered Denmark, then Norway, then the Netherlands and then Belgium.

As commencement exercises took place in the spring of 1940, the Nazis invaded France. The fall of the French government was one of the most shocking defeats of the war. Soon afterward, Hitler’s advance guards swung north to the English Channel, where they threatened to trap British, French and Belgian forces along the coast. The Allies quickly organized a fleet of hundreds of boats to evacuate the troops from the beaches of Dunkirk. Over eight days, 338,226 were heroically ferried across the English Channel to Dover in everything from destroyers to small fishing boats to pleasure craft.

Tom Braden was then a 23-year-old Dartmouth senior who later became a well-known columnist. He also wrote Eight Is Enough, a book adapted into a popular television series. He was galvanized by the fall of France and the Battle of Dunkirk.

Tom Braden. He survived the war and died in 2009.

Braden and his friend Ted Ellsworth wanted to join the fight, and decided to join an army already fighting – the British Army. They were selected for the Royal Americans, an elite unit in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps comprised of a dozen American graduates of Dartmouth, Yale and Harvard.

Braden made it through the war. Ellsworth survived, though he was captured and imprisoned in Oflag 64 at Schubin, Poland. Another Dartmouth graduate, Charles Bolte, lost his leg at the hip in Egypt at the Battle of El Alamein.

Making Up for Lost Tuition

In the days before the United States entered the war, young men anxious to see action joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, the British RAF, the British Royal Navy or the American Field Service as ambulance drivers.

Colleges developed courses to train students for the still-undeclared war. Starting in September 1941, for example, Bowdoin College lent its facilities for Naval Radio School training for more than 300 recruits living on campus.

The University of Vermont, struggling financially, brought U.S. Air Force training units to campus. Special six-to-eight-week courses were offered to help make up for lost tuition revenues.

New Curriculum

Harry Hampton, Dartmouth Class of ’45, was in his dorm room studying with his roommate on Dec. 7, 1941. Suddenly they heard someone yelling in the corridors that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Everyone grabbed their radios and listened to the news from the Dartmouth Broadcasting System.

“Everybody had the feeling, well, when will I be—or had an awareness that we were all going to be ripe for pickings by one of the military services,” Hampton said.

Like most colleges, Dartmouth telescoped four years of education into two years and several months so students could graduate before they went to war. High school students like George Berkowitz were allowed to graduate early once they’d been accepted into a college. Students often graduated high school in March and started college in June.

Schools altered their curriculum. They redirected physics, math and sciences courses to the needs of men in the armed forces. Popular courses in foreign languages included Russian, Chinese and Japanese. Courses were given in air photography, camouflage and mapping – Sometimes teachers with no training taught photography, camouflage and mapping.

Samuel Florman, a V-12 from the class of 1946, remembers correcting a Dartmouth geology teacher making mistakes in his aerial photography course.

“The faculty was being asked to do all sorts of cock-eyed stuff that they werenʼt trained for,” Florman said. “You had a chemistry teacher teaching, you know, Italian or whatever and that was because of the faculty themselves had enlisted or had been called up. So that they were scrambling to cover the courses that needed to be taught.”

Dartmouth Starts a Navy

At Dartmouth, fraternities closed, Winter Carnival was cancelled, the Daily Dartmouth ceased publication and food and fuel were rationed. The college operated like a naval base during the rest of the war, run on military time, with reveille at 0600 and Taps at 2200.

The school called dormitories the “Navy Ships of Dartmouth.” Dorm rooms meant for two single beds had two sets of bunk beds. Every day the V-12 students woke at 6 a.m. to a recording of “Oh What A Beautiful Morning.” Every day they had room inspection. Then ty did calisthenics, formed in a line and marched to their meals. They were reviewed on Saturday. The commander came down and inspected them from their haircuts to their shoes.

“When you were in the Navy here, you really were in the Navy,” said Alan Epstein, a V-12 recruit from the class of 1947.

Cadets undergo water and obstacle course training at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Once they got their uniforms, students had liberty from noon Saturday until Sunday night. Few had cars. Some joined the Outing Club and went camping. Others went home, taking the train or hitchhiking – a man in uniform quickly got a ride.

Some visited girls’ colleges nearby. Dartmouth’s Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital was training nurses for the military. They wore uniforms too. Since there were so few women on campus, the nurses had a lot of choices about who to date.

Once a month they had strength testing in the gym. If they didn’t keep up, they were shipped out to boot camp. Each student had to do a certain number of sit-ups and push-ups and shimmy up a rope.

Parris Island

On the Way to Parris Island

Dartmouth had a pool with a platform 30 feet or so above the water. Trainees practiced jumping off a sinking ship from it. They learned survival swimming, how to sweep their arms along the surface of the water if it burned. They had to leap off the platform, take off their trousers and blow them up over their heads to make floating wings and float around for a half hour.

Berkowitz remembers the courses as demanding, but the students were motivated. If they didn’t pass, they were sent off to war.

At Dartmouth, Chinese professor Wing Tsit-Chan had a reputation for never flunking anyone. “Everybody was trying to get into his class,” remembered Berkowitz, who took Chinese from him for one semester. Because of that course, he ended up in China. There he repatriated Japanese military and civilians from North China and Korea — a plum duty. “The best thing that ever happened to me was taking his course in Chinese,” Berkowitz said.

Paul Glover, class of 1945, didn’t buckle down to his studies – at first.

“I cut the classes and went to the ski meets and all that. And the professor was a guy named B.H. Brown, whose son had been in my class in Hanover High School. And of course I knew the old bastard. And he called me in, he said, “Glover, if you donʼt pass this exam pretty well, youʼre on your way to Parris Island.” In those days you were out to take a train the next day, and then you were a private. You werenʼt any officer candidate. And a lot of people flunked out that way.”

Broken Promises

Though promised they could finish school if they maintained their grades, some groups of students, such as the engineers, suddenly received orders to go to basic training.

“The next thing you knew they were in the Battle of the Bulge,” said Peter Beck, a medical school student in the Army Specialized Training Program. “They took quite a lot of casualties there thinking they were going to avoid the war completely by staying in a classroom.

An American GI captures a German soldier during the Battle of the Bulge.

Decades after the war, Florman remembered the broken promises:

…representatives from the various services started showing up on campus and giving presentations. And it was like going to the movies. You went…this evening the Army is telling you how wonderful the Army is and what wonderful chances, opportunities you will have if you will only sign up with them. Theyʼll leave you in college. Then when you do go into the Army, youʼre going to be a four-star general before you know it. Then there were people…I know we didnʼt have an air force in those days. But there were special programs if you wanted to fly for the Army or if you wanted to fly for the Navy.

Florman called it “a salesmanship evening.”

…And a lot of my classmates—and I guess maybe even those in the class ahead—would sign up. And maybe one semester, two semesters later, as the war required, all the promises were forgotten, and suddenly dozens of classmates were swept off to boot camp and were in the middle of battle before anybody really knew what had happened.

From Dartmouth to Boot Camp to the Grave

Florman remembered a boy sent to boot camp because he had a soft voice.

They marched on the Green. And this is how you march. This is how you turn. As a matter of fact, this brings to mind: You were expected to take turns and after a while shout out the orders and lead the group and show leadership qualities. And if you didnʼt—and there was one; I donʼt know if he was our classmate, but he was down at Thayer School, Joe Vitalini, a wonderful fellow with a quiet voice. And he didnʼt satisfy the drillmaster. And next thing we knew, he was on his way to boot camp.

The drillmaster so frightened Florman he pulled his braces off his teeth during a drill, That earned the respect of his drillmaster and saved his naval career. The drillmaster selected another boy, Gene Cafiero, to lead his unit in close order drill. He later served as president of Chrysler Corp.

Many were not so lucky.

Memorials at Dartmouth College

Over 300 of the 11,091 Dartmouth men who served in World War II died. The Class of 1942 alone lost 34 members. Twenty-three young Dartmouth men died in 1943, then another 23 in 1944, and still another 24 in 1945.

George Berkowitz survived the war and died in February 2022 at the age of 97.

End Notes

With thanks to the Rauner Library Oral History project, World War Two at Dartmouth.

Images: Ernest Hopkins United States Office For Emergency Management, Lee, R., photographer. (1941) Edward R Stettinius, Jr., former director, Priorities Division, Office of Production Management OPM, and currently September 2,lend-lease Administrator. Dr. Ernest M. Hopkins, Minerals and Metals Executive of the Priorities Division. President of Dartmouth College. United States, 1941. Sept. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017689452/. Bobby Kennedy at Bates By Unknown, Courtesy of the Bates College Historic Photographs Collection – The Edmund Muskie Archives and Special Collection, Lewiston, Maine, Bates College, 1940s, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45202568. Tom Braden By http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKbraden.htm, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48798732. East campus By Kane5187 – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2949909.

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The Vanceboro Bridge Bombing: Germany’s Secret War on America

On a wretchedly cold Maine night in 1915, a lightly dressed German army lieutenant walked from his hotel and placed 60 pounds of dynamite on the Vanceboro Bridge. The bridge spanned the St. Croix River, which separates Maine from Canada. With frostbitten hands, the German lit a cigar and touched it to the fuse. Then he ran back to his hotel, desperate to get warm.

Werner Horn, undated

The attack on the Vanceboro Bridge was a comedy of errors involving a hapless spy, a German diplomat, a sleepy deputy sheriff and a small Maine town where little went unnoticed. But it turned into an international incident when four governments, three of them at war, argued over what to do with Lt. Werner Horn.

The attack on the Vanceboro Bridge belonged to a larger German campaign of sabotage against the United States. Before the U.S. entered World War I, it supplied the allied powers with munitions, foodstuffs and military supplies. Despite official neutrality, the United States allowed Canadian Pacific trains to carry Canadian soldiers across its soil.

So Germany tried to interrupt the supply of munitions to Allies with a spy network inside the United States. Over a year after Werner Horn attacked the Vanceboro Bridge, German spies blew up 2 million pounds of arms and ammunition on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor. The explosion killed four and injured more than 100.

A shattered pier on Black Tom Island

Werner Horn didn’t hurt anyone.

German Sabotage

Horn served in the German army for 10 years until inactivated. He then went to Guatemala to manage a Guatemalan coffee plantation. There he learned Spanish and English.

Werner Horn around 1910

In August 1914, shortly after World War I broke out, Horn received a telegram saying he’d been reactivated. It also said he had to return to Germany.

Horn could travel freely to New York, as the United States hadn’t entered the war. There he found himself stranded, unable to book passage home. So he went to the German consulate for help.

Franz von Papen

Capt. Franz von Papen, then a German diplomat, had also received a telegram. It read:

The General Staff is anxious that vigorous measures should be taken to destroy the Canadian Pacific in several places for the purpose of causing a lengthy disruption of traffic.

The Vanceboro Bridge

With the arrival of Werner Horn, von Papen had a willing operative. He also had a target: the Vanceboro Bridge.

The Canadian Pacific moved troops and materiel through Maine and across the Vanceboro Bridge to the Port of St. John, a major shipping entrepot for Allied men and materiel during World War I.

Port of St. John around 1898

The Germans complained, correctly, that by doing so the U.S. violated international neutrality law.

But neither the U.S. nor Canada seemed to understand that the iron railway trestle in remote Washington County was a key link in the wartime supply chain. They had left it unguarded since October.

Von Papen persuaded Werner Horn to blow it up. But he did it on one condition: No one would be hurt.

Maine Bound

Von Papen sent Horn to the tiny Maine town of Vanceboro with a train schedule, a .38 revolver, money, small German flags and a suitcase full of explosives. When Horn arrived at Grand Central station on March 31, he bought a first-class train ticket on the New York-New Haven.

For his mission the Germans dressed him in workingman’s clothes: torn pants, work boots, a brown overcoat and a woolen cap. That didn’t make him inconspicuous. He was tall, at six feet two inches, with short blond hair, a military bearing and a heavy German accent.

When he boarded the 1 am train to Boston, passengers took note of his shabby clothes, out of place in a first-class car.

In Boston, he switched to a train bound for Bangor and, ultimately, Vanceboro.

Nosy Neighbors

At 6:40 pm he arrived in Vanceboro. Perhaps not realizing how little goes unnoticed in such a small place, he hid his suitcase in a woodpile. Jean and Charles Hunter saw him do it. They then watched him traipse over to the bridge. The Hunters also noticed he wasn’t dressed warmly enough for the subfreezing temperatures. Charles went to see the local immigration officer, Inspector Carr Horn.

The Vanceboro Bridge before Werner Horn got to it.

Inspector Horn and Charles Hunter then returned to the bridge, where they saw Werner Horn walking back and forth, inspecting it. They confronted him, and Horn explained he was a Dutch farmer looking to buy land. The inspector suggested he check into the local hotel, the Exchange. Then several townspeople watched him retrieve his heavy suitcase from the woodpile.

Horn checked in to a first-floor room at the hotel. He spent the next day in his room, studying the railroad timetable. Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t very reliable.

Horn knew he’d have to walk a fine line. If he got caught blowing up the Vanceboro Bridge on the American side, he’d face criminal charges. If he got caught blowing it up on the Canadian side while disguised as a Dutch farmer, he could be hanged for espionage. So as darkness fell, he pinned his German flags to each arm of his overcoat and headed toward the Canadian side of the bridge. Von Papen had told him the flag would prove he wasn’t a spy.

But first he checked out of the hotel, telling the proprietor, Aubrey Tague, he planned to take the 8 pm train to Boston. He then walked to the train station in the snow, underdressed for the gusty wind and subfreezing temperatures. When the Boston train left the station he hid in the woods, planning to wait until the 11:30 from Montreal to St. John passed.

Blowing up the Vanceboro Bridge

Having studied the timetable, Horn expected he’d have an hour until the next train came through. He’d use a 50-minute fuse, which would give him enough time to blow up the bridge without hurting anyone. That would also allow him to make his escape. He planned to walk to the next town, 30 miles through the Maine woods, and get on a morning train.

Horn probably would have frozen to death walking 30 miles through the Maine woods

As he cased the bridge, two railyard workers spotted him and asked what he was doing there. He replied he was “an officer.” They believed him, figuring he was guarding the bridge, and left him alone.

When the Montreal-St. John passed he stepped onto the bridge with his suitcase, but he hadn’t gotten far when he heard another train whistle. He rushed off the bridge and waited for it to pass. Unnerved by the railyard workers and suffering from the cold, he now had no idea when the next train would come rumbling over the Vanceboro Bridge.

Horn picked his way across the bridge and heard another train coming. He flattened himself on Canadian ground, and he decided he had to act quickly.

He placed his explosive next to an iron post and, with his frostbitten hands, cut the 50-minute fuse down to three minutes. Then he lit the fuse and rushed back to the American side.

The Vanceboro Bridge Explosion

The explosion woke the residents of Vanceboro and St. Croix and broke windows on both sides of the river.

The blast woke Aubrey Tague, who then heard water running from a bathroom. He opened the door and found Horn shivering over a sink, running hot water over his frozen hands. Tague told him to put snow on them, opened the bathroom window and handed him a handful. Then he told him he could sleep in an attic room.

The sound of the bomb also woke Deputy Sheriff George Ross, who thought a boiler had exploded or a train had crashed, neither of which concerned him. He went back to sleep.

The explosion did little damage and delayed trains only slightly. Trains could still make it over the bridge.

X marks the spot where Horn placed his bomb. Canada decided to guard the bridge after the attempt.

Caught

At 5:30 the next morning, three railroad police knocked on Deputy Sheriff Ross’s door. Tague had spoken to railyard workers the night before about the stranger. The four police went over to the hotel and found Tague. “German, upstairs,” Tague said to them.

They found Horn in his room and took him into custody. He answered their questions honestly. Horn later explained to a U.S. intelligence agent,

I really did it for my country. I did not want to kill anyone. We wanted only to stop traffic of British supplies over that bridge. I would have done a better job but for the cold. I froze my fingers and my face and ears and I thought I would freeze to death before I made all my arrangements.

He pointed out he had planted the dynamite in enemy territory, since Canada was at war with Germany. That meant he’d committed an act of war. And the U.S. couldn’t have him extradited to Canada or Britain because it had declared neutrality.

10 Years

Ross was at a loss. Feelings ran high against Horn on both sides of the river, and he feared a mob might gather and lynch the German. But he didn’t know what to do. The crime had happened in Canada, where he had no jurisdiction.

Nor had state or federal or authorities contacted him, just railroad police.

Finally, federal authorities got in touch with the Washington County sheriff, Ross’s boss. They told him to take Horn into custody for safekeeping in Machias. The sheriff said he didn’t have any grounds for arresting him. The feds told him to charge him with malicious destruction – those windows broken in Vanceboro.

A county court sentenced him to 30 days in jail. But Horn had also transported explosives by rail, which made him vulnerable to federal charges.

Dorchester Penitentiary

On March 2, 1915, he was charged with three counts of “the conveyance of explosives on passenger trains.” He was sentenced to 18 months in prison and sent to the U.S. Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta.

von Papen later admitted it hadn’t been his shining hour. “Not a particularly intelligent piece of work on my part,” he wrote.

Horn expected to go home after his release from prison. Instead, he was extradited to Canada, where he spent 10 years in Dorchester prison. Upon his final release, doctors certified him as insane.

Vanceboro Bridge

The Vanceboro Bridge has since been replaced.

Images Vanceboro Bridge today: By THE CENTER FOR LAND USE INTERPRETATION – http://www.clui.org/section/united-divide-a-linear-portrait-usacanada-border, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47474541. Washington County Jail By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28029643. Dorchester Penitentiary By Verne Equinox at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4230825. Werner Horn 1910 Bain News Service, P. (ca. 1910) Werner Horn. , ca. 1910. [Between and Ca. 1915] [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2014697286/. Horn and Ross By McAdam Senior Citizens Historical and Recreational Club (1979). The History of McAdam 1871-1977, p 180., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20059952.

With thanks to German Sabotage at Vanceboro 1915 by the St. Croix Historical Society and Burn, Bomb, Destroy: The German Sabotage Campaign in North America, 1914–1917 by Michael Digby. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Portuguese Farmers Who Made Falmouth Strawberries Famous

In 1892, Manuel Viera Martins retired from whaling and bought a cottage in the Waquoit section of Falmouth, Mass. He and his 11-year-old son cleared the scrub oak and pitch pine off the land with axes. Then they planted strawberries. The next spring they picked their first crop. Over the next four decades, hundreds of farmers from the Portuguese islands would grow millions of Falmouth strawberries. They made the Cape Cod town the largest producer of the tasty fruit in Massachusetts—and, for a time, the United States.

Portuguese farmers in Falmouth

Today, Tony Andrews’ pick-your-own strawberry farm remains one of the last vestiges of the Falmouth strawberry juggernaut that peaked around World War II. But the Portuguese islands still have a presence in Falmouth. Kale soup is on restaurant menus, linguica and choriza on sale in the local grocery stores. St. Anthony’s Church celebrates a Day of Portuguese Mass.

And on Pentecost Sunday, the Holy Ghost Society honors its patron saint with a festa, serving free sopas to anyone who comes.

Falmouth Strawberries

Manuel Viera Martins, nicknamed Tio Calhau, may not have been the first Portuguese islander to plant strawberries in Falmouth. Local lore bestows that honor on John Emerald. While working at a gardening job, the story goes, Emerald saw some strawberry runners sprouting from a trash heap. He then took them home and planted them in the sandy soil of East Falmouth.

Whatever the case, the two men’s lives followed the trajectory of most of the Portuguese islanders who settled in East Falmouth. They came from the Azores, where poverty and oppression made for harsh living conditions. Later they came from Cape Verde.

St. Michael’s, one of the Azorean islands From which Falmouth strawberry farmers came. They also came from Pico and Faial

Most settled first in the cities of Southeastern New England – New Bedford, Fall River, Taunton and Providence. To this day the region has the densest concentration of people with Portuguese ancestry in the United States.

After settling in the cities the Portuguese islanders came to Falmouth, returning to their farming roots. They found work on cranberry bogs, farms and as day laborers. Then they bought land. Falmouth had plenty, and it was cheap – a dollar or two an acre. Cape Codders viewed it as worthless, but the Azoreans saw something else.

Immigration

Tio Calhau, born on Pico in the Azores in 1855, shipped out on a New Bedford whaler, the Kathleen, as a young man. He landed in New Bedford after four years at sea and collected his 1/140^th share of the voyage’s profit. Then he signed up for another voyage on the Kathleen in 1875, and when it anchored in the Azores he jumped ship and went home.

Tio Calhau then married Maria Josefa Rodrigues, and in 1883 they immigrated to New Bedford. Tio Calhau took another whaling voyage, but when he came home Maria put his foot down: No more whaling.

In 1914, immigrants from Brava, Cape Verde, looking ashore from the Savoia as the await the disembarkation process to be finished. Photo courtesy New Bedford Standard-Times.

Whaling had brought many Portuguese immigrants to the United States. When whaling died out, the textile mills that replaced it drew more. Many took the packet service between New Bedford and the Azores, eventually a nine-day steamship ride.

By 1900, 142 people of Portuguese descent lived in Falmouth, then a town of 3,000. Of the 55 who had immigrated, 54 came from the Azores; the rest were born in the United States.

That was when the strawberry farms began to take off. By 1922, Falmouth had 300 acres of strawberry fields, many along the Davisville road. Most farmers had only 10 or 20 acres, but a few had 60 or 70. Altogether they extended over six to seven square miles. “One million quarts of them left her fields the past season!” gushed Cape Cod Magazine that year. And new land was being cleared every year.

Strawberries

Frank A. Waugh came to Cape Cod in 1920 to write about the Falmouth strawberries for The Country Gentleman. The Portuguese farmers had identified an agricultural opportunity overlooked by many, he wrote.

“Up until quite recent times agriculture had been considered a negligible institution on Cape Cod,” wrote Waugh. “Some persons, not excluding the natives, have indeed considered it a joke.”

Alice Valerio in 1930

(Waugh did note one exception: the cranberry.)

“These Portuguese farmers are honest, thrifty, hard workers and remarkably intelligent in their management of this somewhat complicated industry,” wrote Waugh.

He asked Manuel Garden, one of the leading Portuguese strawberry growers, how he cleared his strawberry land. “With my own hands and an axe,” Garden said.

The Emeralds

John Emerald (Americanized from Amaral) had two brothers, Frank and Manuel, who arrived from the Azores in 1898 and 1900, respectively. They married, had families, and grew strawberries, along with turnips, corn, potatoes, carrots and raspberries.

Early in the morning, Manuel would work on his farm on the Davisville Road, then bike to Penzance Point in Woods Hole to work as a landscaper on one of the estates. Then he rode home and worked his strawberry field until it got dark. Bit by bit he acquired more land. At first he’d buy an acre or two for $1 “and other considerations.” Eventually he could afford an acre of cleared land for $100.

Emily Emerald and her father Manuel

Manuel married Estrella Farias in 1903, and they had eight children. The Emerald clan reigned over Falmouth strawberries. Manuel’s brother John started shipping his strawberries in refrigerated railroad cars to Boston. When others followed, a local side hustle grew into a regional industry. Boston buyers knew the Falmouth strawberries as fern berries because the pickers packed them in layers of ferns.

The growers formed two cooperatives to market the berries, which sold in New York, Maine, New Hampshire, Montreal and Quebec. At peak season, the railroad ran a special Berry Train.

Eventually, trucks replaced trains. They left after sundown to make the then-seven-hour round trip to Boston. At the industry’s height in 1947, Falmouth sent 32 trucks to market each night, carrying a total of 13 million quarts of strawberries. That amounted to half the commonwealth’s strawberry crop.

Child’s Work

Children worked in the strawberry fields along with their parents. They fed and watered livestock, chopped kindling and filled the woodbox. As an adult, Joe Medeiros recalled school children walking the family cow to a pasture across the road from the school. “Come three o’clock, when they let us out of school, I’d call my cow,” he said. “The other guy would get his cow and we would walk home down Davisville Road.”

Because strawberries ripened over just a few weeks, children were allowed to leave school to pick them. Whole families picked strawberries. Bea Emerald, Manuel’s daughter, remembered picking 275 boxes of strawberries in one day when she was seven years old.

The Falmouth strawberry farms kept expanding, and they ran out of pickers. Most farmers hired about 10 pickers; the Emeralds had 25.

Bea Emerald would take the train to the Portuguese neighborhoods in Wareham, to knock on doors looking for pickers. If she didn’t find enough there, she’d go to New Bedford and Providence.

Strawberry pickers

By the Great Depression, when so many looked for work, 3,000 strawberry pickers came to Falmouth during the harvest when the town’s population was only 5,000.

Farmers built sheds on the property to house them. Picker sheds on the Davisville Road survived well past the zenith of the Falmouth strawberry industry.

Many pickers were Cape Verdeans, who had emigrated because of a severe drought in 1904. They earned two cents a quart.

The Church Built by Falmouth Strawberries

Devout Roman Catholics, the Portuguese farmers got permission from the diocese in 1911 to build their own church. They would call it St. Anthony’s, after the patron saint of the Azores. Farmers gave all the money from the berries picked on the peak Sunday of the harvest to the church. St. Anthony’s became “the church that strawberries built.” All the labor for the church was donated, and St. Anthony’s celebrated its first Mass — in Portuguese — in January 1924.

St. Anthony’s merged with St. Joseph Guardian of the Holy Family Parish in 2021.

Walking to church

Falmouth’s Portuguese communities also formed fraternal societies, such as The Fresh Pond Holy Ghost Society and the East Falmouth Holy Ghost Association. The Fresh Pond Society still puts on a festa in June. The celebration starts with a procession that takes a crown and a scepter to an altar, music, an auction and lots of Portuguese food — sopas, jag, cacoila and bacalhau, along with hot dogs and chips.

A third wave of immigration has contributed to the vibrancy of Portuguese culture in southeastern New England. It began in 1957, when a year of volcanic eruption devastated the Azorean island of Faial. Sen. John F. Kennedy then sponsored the Azorean Refugee Acts, which led to 100,000 Azorean refugees coming to the United States over 10 years. Today more Azoreans live in the United States than in the Azores.

Demise of Falmouth Strawberries

World War II brought the beginning of the end to the Falmouth strawberry boom. The war itself created a labor shortage, as people could get jobs with defense manufacturers or on the military installations on Cape Cod.

Soldiers from Camp Edwards would march up the Davisville Road to train for amphibious landings. The children who lived on the Davisville farms stood on the roadside and poured fresh strawberries into their helmets.

Strawberry growers tried to adapt to the wartime conditions. They held a picking competition between the sailors at Woods Hole and the soldiers at Camp Edwards. In 1944, German POWs at Camp Edwards went to work picking strawberries.

Tony Andrews

Antonio de Andrade, born in 1905 on Cape Verde, arrived in Providence as a 21-year-old sailor. He changed his name to Tony Andrews, and with his uncle bought 17 acres of land in East Falmouth in 1927. They cleared it and farmed it and expanded it to 50 acres. Nearly half had strawberries growing on them.

Tony Andrews bragged he could plant 5,000 strawberry plants in one day without machinery. But as pickers got hard to find, Andrews turned his farm into a successful pick your own operation during the mid 1950s.

Postwar development gobbled up the Falmouth strawberry farms, which dwindled to 150 acres in 1955, then to 12 in 1984. Of those, eight belonged to Tony Andrews. He died in 2006, and his seven children put the farm on the market. In 2018, the Town of Falmouth bought the farm for $2 million. People can still pick strawberries on it in June.

With thanks to Sopas, by Lewis A. White, Strawberry Farming by Jennifer Stone Gaines and The Emerald Family of East Falmouth by Richard Kendall.

Images: Strawberries By Marcus Vegas from Tallinn, Estonia – Delicacies, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4208712 St. Michael’s By Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92988433. Vintage images of Falmouth via youtube, St. Anthony’s, Falmouth, MA, Living History.

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Camp Edwards, Cape Cod’s World War II City

One year before Pearl Harbor, many Americans thought the United States would never enter World War II. They might have thought otherwise had they visited Camp Edwards, where workers toiled at a blistering pace to build a city for 36,000 soldiers.

The Army brass, like many others, had been slow to realize war was coming. Or that it would have to shelter and train millions of new soldiers. Only when Hitler’s armies marched into Paris in June of 1940 did the Army put its building program into full gear. It succeeded, in part, because of one man, Brig. Gen. Charles Hartman, and one army camp – Camp Edwards, at the western end of Cape Cod.

Soldiers training at Camp Edwards om 1942.

It had taken three centuries for the Cape to develop into 15 towns with 37,295 people in them. The Army would nearly double its population in 125 days. Contractors would build 1,406 structures, including barracks, mess halls and officers quarters – along with 13 chapels and 217 recreation buildings. Workers at their busiest put up 30 buildings a day.

As one of the first of 159 military installations built for World War II, Camp Edwards was the proving ground for the construction of nearly every other army camp. New construction techniques were developed amid the scrub pine and sand. At Camp Edwards, contractors started using standardized plans, prefabricated units and assembly line construction.

After the war, large developers used the methods adopted at Camp Edwards to build new suburbs. Many G.I.s returning from war would buy a home in a new suburban development built in much the same way their old barracks had been built.

Charles Hartman

In 1941, Sen. Harry Truman led a committee investigating the military’s hasty build-up for the war. He singled out Brig. Gen. Charles Hartman, who had headed the Construction Division of the Quartermaster Corps in the crucial months before the United States entered World War II.

“You seem to have been the only man in the War Department dealing with construction matters that at least contemplated a plan for the future,” Truman said.

Brig. Gen. Charles Hartman

Hartman, a West Point graduate and Harvard MBA, was a colonel in the Quartermaster Corps when he began working on modern designs for military installations. The Army at the time had plans from World War I called the Series 600 cantonment. They included drawings for crude barracks heated with stoves, outbuildings and administrative quarters.

Hartman saw problems. Standard barracks, for example, were designed for 250 men. In a fire, many of them wouldn’t get out. The plans also depended on lengths of lumber no longer available.

Series 700 Cantonment

So he began updating the drawings, called Series 700, in 1934. He had to do it on the side with just a few men.

“But we had no money, and whatever money and men we could devote to the job had to come out of anything we could get — a sideline rather than a fixed job,” he later told Truman’s committee.

In 1938,as Hitler rose to power, money finally became available. So Hartman found a warehouse and filled it with 80 architects and draftsmen. They designed everything an army camp would need, from barracks to bakeries.

Basketball courts at Camp Edwards

They didn’t know why they were doing it. After the senseless carnage of World War I, most Americans wanted to stay out of European wars. Hartman’s boss, Gen. Owen Seaman, wouldn’t approve the plans.

“I don’t think myself or anybody else ever contemplated we would have the army that we have now … Or that we would have a war,” Seaman said in 1941.

The drawings for the 700 series cantonments remained in draft form, unapproved, unused. Hartman then left for California on another assignment.

Hitler

On Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. President Roosevelt issued an order adding 27,000 men to the army and 100,000 to the National Guard. The War Department didn’t really come up with a plan to put them anywhere, other than in tents on old fairgrounds. Then , the brass figured, they could train in Europe. They didn’t reckon with Hitler.

In April 1940 German troops occupied Denmark and Norway.

In June, France fell. England prepared for an invasion. And America finally began planning for war.

German soldiers march along the Champs Elysees, June 14, 1940

On June 26, 1940, four days after France surrendered, Congress expanded the army again to 375,000 men. In August, it federalized the National Guard. Then in September it created the first peacetime draft by passing the Selective Service Act.

Housing Shortage

Hitler’s occupation of Europe caught the Army flat-footed. Within U.S. borders, the Army only had space for 300,000. Within nine months it would need to shelter and train more than a million soldiers. That number quickly increased – to 2 million — and then, by 1942, 8 million.

Draftees would start showing up in two months, but plans to put them in tents did not fly. The American people had made it clear that their boys needed to be treated well if they were going off to fight a war. Congress had bowed to that public pressure. The Selective Service Act ordered that no soldier could be drafted until the government had provided “such shelter, sanitary facilities, water supplies, heating and lighting arrangements … as may be determined … to be essential to public and personal health.”

A Series 700 barracks at Camp Edwards. 100,000 others were built.

Charles Hartman returned to head the Construction Division in March of 1940 as Seaman’s replacement. He discovered some of the Series 700 plans had been modified and some destroyed. There were no layouts for the hundreds of camps that would soon be built. So he quickly assembled a group of draftsmen to redraw plans for over 300 kinds of buildings.

Meanwhile, he anxiously waited for Congress to appropriate the funds to start building. That didn’t happen until September of 1940.

Alma Mater

In the middle of the war, an Australian newspaper described the “graduates” of Camp Edwards.

“Ack-Ack crews on Guadalcanal, “seahorses” of the Army’s Engineer Amphibian Command in North Africa, submarine-hunting pilots over the North Atlantic and even cooks in Port Ethan Allen, Vt., call Camp Edwards, New England’s largest military establishment, their ‘alma mater’,” the story read.

But in the fall of 1940, Camp Edwards was little more than a rustic National Guard facility called the Massachusetts Military Reservation. It had been chosen because it was flat, well-drained, cheap, near transportation and a population center, and it had a good water supply.

During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration had built 63 buildings and two 500-foot grass runways, called Otis Field.

But as Camp Edwards it would need 1,406 structures, including 438 barracks, 184 mess halls, 54 officer quarters, 28 storage buildings and 82 hospital units. They would accommodate 1,674 officers and 30,159 enlisted men, including a medical battalion and a signal battalion.

One feature of Camp Edwards and all the army camps would persist after the war: segregation. The Army built separate accommodations for two quartermaster truck companies of “colored” troops at Camp Edwards.

Building Camp Edwards

On Sept. 12, 1940, three days after federal money became available, construction began. The site hadn’t even been laid out yet, and no one had ever actually used Hartman’s Series 700 designs.

The Army hired the Charles Main architect-engineering firm of Boston and Walsh Construction of New York. Eighty-one field architects worked frantically – laying out corners and staking out footings — to keep one step ahead of the builders.

Series 700 buildings

Another 300 architect-engineers adapted 600 drawings to the site, making as few revisions as possible and then handing them over to Walsh. Then Walsh’s draughtsmen added specifications for things like footings, framing, heating and electrical. Those documents were checked and then sent to Main’s drafting department, which came up with blueprints the construction foremen could use.

The blueprints worked so well that 50 copies were made and sent to the other Army camps under construction.

Concrete Poured

Walsh began pouring concrete on Sept. 18, 1940, six days after signing the contract.

A rail spur was built from Falmouth to bring a staggering amount of building materials: 63 million board feet of lumber, 5 million square feet of fiber board and 26,000 kegs of nails.

The Army’s low wages didn’t attract enough skilled carpenters. By Sept. 28, Walsh had hired 930 carpenters – but needed as many as another 1,500. So the contractor divided up the construction crews into two primary groups. One worked on substructure and one worked on superstructure. Walsh divided those groups into 30 subgroups, each headed by a superintendent. Those subgroups were further divided into 15-man work crews, each with its own motor pool and timekeeper. Every crew did one thing – pouring foundations or framing the deck or framing the walls and so forth. Prefabricated doors and windows arrived by train.

Peacetime Army

On Nov. 15, 1940, a wire service reported more than 12,000 workers were putting Camp Edwards in shape for the new peacetime army. Thousands more would join. To manage that enormous workforce required another innovation: a central office handled payroll. Armored cars drove to the construction sites to distribute paychecks. At peak construction, armored cars delivered 18,593 paychecks.

Nearly a year before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the 68th Coastal Artillery arrived at Camp Edwards. Then on Dec. 19, 1940, the first batch of draftees arrived. In January came the Yankee Division of the Massachusetts National Guard.

Construction continued after the soldiers came. Contractors poured concrete for the runway in 1942 and built facilities for the Army Air Corps.

Amphibious Training

Camp Edwards added an Amphibian Training Center after the military drew up plans to invade North Africa in December 1942. Army contractors then built satellite camps for training amphibious assault units along the Cape’s beaches. In the summer of 1942, soldiers practiced invading Wellfleet, Cotuit, Osterville, Martha’s Vineyard and Washburn Island in Falmouth. They also tested the first seasickness pill.

American troops launching an amphibious assault on North Africa.

With the invasion of Africa came German and Italian prisoners. To house them, the Army built a camp for 2,000 POWs at the southern end of the runway. Soon members of Rommel’s Afrika Korps went to work harvesting cranberries, building Sandwich Road in Bourne and cleaning up trees blown down by the hurricane of 1944.

There was still more building to be done. The Army built a convalescent hospital at Camp Edwards for wounded soldiers. Some 2,500 nurses who had joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps trained there.

To train soldiers for urban combat during the invasion of Europe, the Army built a mock German village within Camp Edwards. Called Deutschedorf, three main streets were lined with Gestapo headquarters, a beer garden, a restaurant, houses and shops. Most had only three sides, with details like flowerboxes and birdhouses to add authenticity.

And still there was more. Camp Edwards built a processing center for soldiers that had gone AWOL. Then it built a processing center for soldiers returning from war. By 1944, Camp Edwards had capacity for 1,945 officers and 34,108 enlisted personnel.

Influence of Camp Edwards

In the late 1980s, the Department of Defense and the National Park Service undertook a history of the U.S. Army’s mobilization effort during World War II.

In a case study of Camp Edwards, author Keith Landreth called it one of the most well-organized and resourceful programs of the mobilization effort.

“Innovative techniques … were all developed at Camp Edwards and all served to enhance and facilitate efficiency and speed in construction,” he wrote.

Authors of the overall study concluded that the Army’s camp structures represented a building technology that would soon sweep the country.

Aerial view of Levittown, Pa., in 1959.

“In the push for speed in the mobilization construction a variety of construction techniques were developed that would soon have mass application,” they wrote.

“From a moribund depression-era construction industry rose a national effort that not only met the demands of the war, but changed forever many design and construction practices and techniques,” the authors wrote. “The effect of the mobilization program can still be seen across American, particularly in the construction of residential developments.”

Aftermath

Camp Edwards was designed to be temporary, and much of it is gone now. The Army deactivated it after World War II. It got busy again when the Korean War broke out.

Collapsed buildings at Camp Edwards

The Air Force then took it over and it evolved into Otis Air Force Base. Closed, then reopened, it is now Joint Base Cape Cod. These days it provides training for the Massachusetts Army and Air National Guard and facilities for the U.S. Coast Guard.

Charles Hartman was hospitalized in December 1940 and soon retired from the Army. He died on Feb. 14, 1962. He belongs to the Quartermaster Hall of Fame.

Images: German troops marching in Paris By Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1994-036-09A / CC-BY-SA, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5483600. Photos of Camp Edwards courtesy Library of Congress. This story updated in 2022.

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