Father Duffy's Story; A Tale Of Humor And Heroism, Of Life And Death With The Fighting Sixty-Ninth [Illustrated Edition]

Father Francis Patrick Duffy, Joyce Kilmer

• Publisher: Lucknow Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782891833
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: History

[Includes 8 photograph illustrations]
On the northern half of Times Square in the heart of New York is a square named after Father Francis Patrick Duffy, a priest whose faith in God was only matched by the attachment to his flock. He is mainly known for his legendary exploits as chaplain of the Fighting Sixty-Ninth regiment (renumbered the 165th in Federal Army List) in the First World War. The regiment, composed of mainly troops of Irish heritage, had historically been at the forefront of the Civil War fighting at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. When the regiment marched to battle in the First World War, the troops were also mainly of an Irish Catholic background, headed by Father Duffy, who was never content to see the men of his charge go off to the front alone and frequently went into the maelstrom of battle as a stretcher bearer. Duffy and his regiment fought at Lunéville enduring a gas attack, before engaging at the Battle of the Ourcq and taking part in the two major American offensives at St. Mihiel and in the Argonne.
Perhaps no finer compliment to him was paid by the regimental commander who stated that he and his actions were the key to the keeping unit's morale high. A fine memoir by a towering figure in American First World War history.
"Diary/memoir, June 1917—April 1919. Duffy was chaplain of the 165th Infantry, 42nd Division. An exciting account by the legendary chaplain, recounting his exploits in St. Mihiel, the Argonne, and else­where."- p. 120, Edward Lengel, World War I Memories, 2004, The Scarecrow Press, Lanham Maryland, Toronto, Oxford.

FATHER DUFFY’S STORY

CHAPTER I — PREPARATIONS AT HOME

RECTORY, CHURCH OF OUR SAVIOUR, BRONX

June, 1917

WAR with Germany was declared on April 6th, 1917. Immediately the National Guard Regiments, knowing that they would be the first to be called from civilian occupations, began campaigning for recruits. Ours was conducted with little noise or speech making. An Irish Regiment has its troubles in time of peace, but when the call to arms was sounding we knew that if they let us we could easily offer them an Irish Brigade for the service. We were more occupied with quality than with numbers. The one bit of publicity we indulged in was to send round our machine-gun trucks through the city streets with the placard, “Don’t join the 69th unless you want to be among the first to go to France.” That was the only kind of men we wanted—not impressionable youth who would volunteer under the stimulus of a brass band or a flood of patriotic oratory. The old-timers were told to bring in friends who had the right stuff in them. The Catholic Clergy were asked to send in good men from the Parish athletic clubs.

The response was immediate. Every night the big reception rooms were packed with men taking the physical tests. The medical staff had to be increased at once to meet the situation and officers and enlisted men were impressed into the service for taking the minor tests. These tests were rigid. Nobody was taken who fell below the standard in age, height, weight, sight or chest measurement—or who had liquor aboard or who had not a clean skin. Many of those who were turned down for underweight or imperfect feet were readily accepted in other Regiments which had more difficulty in getting men. And when we received contingents from those regiments later on I often had to listen to the humorous reproach, “Well, I got in in spite of the lot of you.”

Amongst the sturdiest and brightest of our recruits were two young men who had recently been Jesuit Novices. I amused one Jesuit friend and, I am afraid, shocked another by saying that they were exercising a traditional religious privilege of seeking a higher state of perfection by quitting the Jesuits and joining the 69th.

We came back from Texas less than a thousand strong. Of these we could count on 500 for a new war, which left us 1,500 to go to meet the number then fixed for an Infantry Regiment 2,002. We were not long in reaching that number. Lieutenant Colonel Reed telegraphed the War

Department for permission, pending the proposed increase of a Regiment to 3,600, to establish a waiting list, but the application was refused. In the latter days we were turning away 300 a week, sending them to other Regiments.

Our 2,000 men were a picked lot. They came mainly from Irish County Societies and from Catholic Athletic Clubs. A number of these latter Irish bore distinctly German, French, Italian or Polish names. They were Irish by adoption, Irish by association or Irish by conviction. The 69th never attempted to set up any religious test. It was an institution offered to the Nation by a people grateful for liberty, and it always welcomed and made part of it any American citizen who desired to serve in it. But, naturally, men of Irish birth or blood were attracted by the traditions of the 69th, and many Catholics wanted to be with a regiment where they could be sure of being able to attend to their religious duties. About 5 percent of the 2,000 were Irish neither by race nor racial creed.

69TH REGIMENT ARMORY

July 20th, 1917

Frank Ward O’Malley of the New York Sun has written up in his inimitable style a little scene from life in an Irish regiment. The newcomers are not yet accustomed to the special church regulations relieving soldiers of the obligation of Friday abstinence, the men came back from a hard morning’s drill to find on the table a generous meal of ham and cabbage. The old-timers from the Border pitched into this, to the scandal of many of the newer men who refused to eat it, thus leaving all the more for the graceless veterans. After dinner à number of them came to me to ask if it were true that it was all right. I said it was, because there was a dispensation for soldiers. “Dispensation,” said a Jewish boy, “what good is a dispensation for Fridagood me. I can’t eat ham any day of the week. Say, Father, that waiter guy, with one turn of his wrist, bust two religions.”

POLO GROUNDS

July 25th, 1917

A great day for Ireland. Everybody aboard and up the river to 152nd Street and then to the Polo Grounds. Baseball Game as benefit for the 69th, between Giants and Cincinnatis, thanks to the generosity of our good friends, Harry Hempstead, John Whalen, Herbert Vreeland, and John J. McGraw. A fine game—plenty of people, plenty of fun, and best of all, plenty of money for the exchequer, which, after an ancient venerable custom, is going to have an ecclesiastical chancellor. Mr. Daniel M. Brady, the G-o-C father of the regiment, had procured the signature President Wilson on a baseball which he auctioned off during the game. I asked him if he had arranged for a purchaser. “I have selected one,” he said. “Is he aware that he is going to buy it?” I asked. “He will be informed at the proper time,” said Mr. Brady with a smile. “How much is he going to pay for it?” “Well, I don’t consider $500.00 too much to pay for the privilege.” So after a certain number of bids, real or fictitious, the ball was knocked down at $500.00 to Mr. James Butler, who accepted the verdict smilingly and was allowed the privilege of handing the ball back to me. I am to auction it in Paris for the French Orphans’ Fund. So Mr. Brady says, though I wish I had his confidence that we shall ever get to Paris.

ARMORY

August 5th, 1917

Father John Kelly had me meet Joyce Kilmer this evening. Nothing of the long-haired variety about him—a sturdy fellow, manly, humorous, interesting. He was a little shame-faced at first, for he had told Father Kelly that he was going to join up with the 69th and he is now in the 7th. “I went to the Armory twice,” he said, “but failed to find the recruiting officer.” I told him that if we could not have him in the 69th the next best place was the 7th, but he still wants to return to his first love, so I shall be glad to arrange it. If he left the whole matter up to my decision he would stay home and look after his large family and let men with fewer responsibilities undertake this task, at least until such time as the country would have need of every man. But he is bound to do his share and do it at once, so there is no use taking off the fine edge of his enthusiasm. He is going about this thing in exactly the same spirit that led him to enter the Church. He sees what he considers a plain duty, and he is going ahead to perform it, calm and clear eyed and without the slightest regard to what the consequences may be.

I shall be glad to have him with us personally for the pleasure of his companionship, and also for the sake of the regiment to have a poet and historian who will confer upon us the gift of immortality. I compared him with the old lad that one lot of Greeks sent to another to stir them to victory by his songs; and he wagged a pair of vigorous protesting legs at me to show he was no cripple. So I tried him with a quotation from a poet that no poet could ever resist; and with some reservations about the words “Grey. Bard” I managed to drive my compliment home:

For not to have been dipt in Lethe’s lake Could make the son of Thetis not to die; But that grey bard did him immortal make With verses dipt in dews of Castaly.

ARMORY

August 18th, 1917

We are still full of excitement at our selection from among the National Guard Regiments of New York to represent our State in the selected 42nd or Rainbow Division which is to go abroad amongst the very first for active service. It is an undeniable compliment to the condition of the Regiment and we are pleased at that as well as at the prospects of carrying our battle-ringed standards to fly their colors on the fields of France. Our Regimental organization has been accepted intact—it is no composite Regiment that has been selected; it is the 69th New York.’ Our ranks however are to be swelled to the new total of 3,600 men by the transfer of enlisted men from the five other city Regiments of Infantry. We would have been glad to have done our own recruiting as we could easily have managed; but these are the orders. We shall give a royal Irish welcome to our new companions in arms. They are volunteers like ourselves and fellow townsmen, and after a little feeling out of one another’s qualities we shall be a united Regiment.

Already we have received the contingent from our old friends in the 7th—handed over to us with a large gesture of comradeship which that old Regiment knows so well how to make. The departing body of 320 men were escorted by the remaining officers and men, and passed through their guard of honor to our Armory floor. Our 2,000 lined the walls and many perched themselves on the iron beams overhead. They cheered and cheered and cheered till the blare of the bands was unheard in the joyous din—till hearts beat so full and fast that they seemed too big for the ribs that confined them, till tears of emotion came, and something mystical was born in every breast—the soul of a Regiment. Heaven be good to the enemy when these cheering lads go forward together into battle.

CAMP MILLS

September 1st, 1917

We are tenting tonight on the Hempstead Plains, where Colonel Duffy and the Old 69th encamped in 1898, when getting ready for service in the Spanish War. It is a huge regiment now—bigger, I think, than the whole Irish Brigade ever was in the Civil War.

We have received our new men transferred from the 12th, 14th, 23rd and 71st N. G. N. Y. Our band played them into Camp with the Regimental Air of “Garry Owen” mingled with the good-fellow strains of “Hail! Hail! the Gang’s All Here.”

All in all, the newcomers are a fine lot. A couple of our sister organizations have flipped the cards from the bottom of the pack in some instances and worked off on us some of their least desirables. On the other hand, all the Regiments have made up for that by allowing men anxious to come to us to change places with those who prefer to stick where they are. This gives us a large number of the men we want—those that feel their feet on their native heath in the 69th, and those that like its recruiting slogan, “If you don’t want to be amongst the first to go to France, don’t join the 69th.” For the rest, the Company Commanders and Surgeons know “Thirty-five distinct damnation,” or almost that many, by which an undesirable can be returned to civilian life to take his chances in the draft. Our recruiting office has been re-established at the Armory. We can get all the good men we want.

As he had put the matter in my hands Kilmer did not come over with the men from the 7th, but I had the matter of his transfer arranged after a short delay.

CAMP MILLS

September 26th, 1917

I do not know whether to take it as a mark of general interest in the Old Regiment or as the result of the spontaneous big-heartedness of a kindly and enthusiastic Irish artist—but John McCormack sang for us tonight. Sang in the open air with no stinting of voice or program. Our lads could have listened to him till morning; I never saw such an eager mob. They kept calling for their favorite McCormack songs and he, like the fine big Bouchal that he is, laughed at their sallies and gave them their hearts’ desire, until I dosed the unique performance by reminding them (and him) that we had a financial interest in his voice because he was to sing for the benefit of our Trustees Fund at no distant date. While I write, the camp is buzzing around me with talk of the great tenor. A voice from the darkness sums it up. “I always knew he was a great singer. We got a lot of his records at home. But the records never learned me that he’s such a hell of a fine fellow.”

CAMP MILLS

Sunday

I mess with the Headquarters Company, and James Collintine, who has the job of looking after us, always welcomes Sunday morning because it gives a chance for a friendly chat between the two of us. James had been a deep-water sailor for a good many years since he first left his

October 15th, 1917

We will soon be off to the war and I have been looking over the Regiment, studying its possibilities.

About the enlisted men I have not a single doubt. If this collection of hand-picked volunteers cannot give a good account of themselves in battle, America should keep out of war. The men will fight no matter who leads them. But fighting and winning are not always the same thing, and the winning depends much on the officers—their military knowledge, ability as instructors and powers of leadership. The Non-corns are a fine lot. The First Sergeants as I run over the list are a remarkable body of good old-time soldiers. Starting with Company A, we have John O’Leary, John O’Neill, William Hatton, Tom Sullivan, William Bailey, Joseph Blake, John Burke, Jerome O’Neill, Patrick McMeniman, Tim Sullivan, Eugene Gannon, John Kenny; with Denis O’Shea, A. McBride, J. Comiskey, and W. W. Lokker, for H. Q. M. G. Supply and Medical. All of these men have been tried out in the eight months of Border service and we are sure of them. Under Colonel Haskell the hard driven Company Commanders had to break their Sergeants in, or break them—life was too strenuous for favoritism. In fact, except for recruits, it is surprisingly Haskell’s regiment that is going to the front; Haskell’s, that is, with the reservation that his work was done on the basis of Colonel Conley’s selection and promotion in the more difficult period of peace service. When we were selected for immediate over-seas service the authorities were free to make what changes they would, and they left the regiment intact except for the transfer of one Major and one Captain. The M. G. Company was vacant by resignation. All other officers remained at their posts, though we have been assigned a large number of newly created Lieutenants to correspond with the new tables of organization for a regiment of three thousand six hundred.

We like our new Colonel, though he was a total stranger to us before the day he came to command us. He is a West Pointer, and went into railroading after some years in the army as a Lieutenant; but he has loyally reverted to the army whenever there was a real call to arms. In 1898 if I had achieved my desire to go out as Chaplain of the 1st D. C. I would have had him as one of my Majors. He came into this conflict as organizer and commander of trains, a work for which his experience fitted him. He is a man of middle height with a strong body and an attractive face, healthily ruddy, strongly featured, with a halo of thick grey hair above. He is a man of ideas, of ideas formed by contact with life and business. He is a tireless worker, and demands the same unflinching service from every man under him. He has confidence in his men, especially the tried soldiers, and he has a strong liking for the Regiment and its traditions. The Regiment will do good work under the leadership of Colonel Charles Hine.

Lieutenant Colonel Reed I like better and better every day I am with him. I did not take to him at first and I think he was largely to blame. He kept himself too much aloof. The fault, however, was partly ours. He came to us at a time when we felt suspicious that it was the intention to destroy our character as an Irish organization, and we owed too much to the men who had created the Regiment and made its reputation with their blood to submit tamely to such a scheme as that. Colonel Reed was not used to being where he was not wanted, and his attitude was the result of this decent feeling. When the task of forming a war-strength regiment fell to him he took hold and worked with single-minded vigor, and he then found that everybody was anxious to work with him loyally. He discovered, what I could have told him, that one thing the Sixty-ninth admires is a good soldier. And Reed is a good soldier, keen, active, and aggressive. He learned at once to love the regiment and is as enthusiastic as myself in his regard for it. We spend a great deal of our free time together, for we have much in common.

The senior Major, Timothy J. Moynahan, is the ideal of the Irish soldier, as he comes down to us in history and in fiction. He inherits from Patrick Sarsfield’s cavaliers, from the regiments of Dillon and Burke at Fontenoy, from the Connaught Rangers at Fuentes d’Onoro. A soldier born —trim, erect, handsome, active in his movements, commanding and crisp in his orders. And a soldier bred—he lives for the military game, devotes his life to his work as military instructor in colleges, and to the old 69th. He’ is ready with a toast or a speech or a neatly phrased compliment, and equally ready to take up the gage of battle, if anyone should throw it down. A vivid interesting character in our drab modern life. He has one fault—a flaring Irish temper when military discipline is violated or high ideals belittled. A fault, yes, but I feel there will be tense moments of life for anybody with Tim Moynahan when the time comes for a death grapple with the Germans. Phil Sheridan would have delighted in him.

Major Stacom is my parishioner and I am his recruit. He acquired his interest in soldiering as a boy at St. Francis Xavier College under the stalwart old soldier, afterwards the hero of Santiago—Captain Drum. He came to the Regiment as a boy out of college, an enlisted man, and the Irish lads, after guying the handsome youngster in his college clot...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• PREFACE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• CHAPTER I - PREPARATIONS AT HOME
• CHAPTER II - IN TRAINING ABROAD - BREST
• CHAPTER III - THE LUNÉVILLE SECTOR
• CHAPTER IV - THE BACCARAT SECTOR
• CHAPTER V - THE CHAMPAGNE DEFENSIVE
• CHAPTER VI - THE BATTLE OF THE OURCQ
• CHAPTER VII - AFTER THE BATTLE
• CHAPTER VIII - THE ST. MIHIEL OFFENSIVE
• CHAPTER IX - THE ARGONNE OFFENSIVE
• CHAPTER X - WITH THE ARMY OF OCCUPATION
• HISTORICAL APPENDIX BY JOYCE KILMER
• APPENDIX
• OFFICERS WHO SERVED IN THE 165TH INFANTRY
• ROSTER OF SERGEANTS
• IRISH NAMES
• BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE 165TH INFANTRY
• WOMEN’S AUXILIARY TO 165TH INFANTRY U. S. A. Inc.