Trechos de Harry S. Truman: A Life (1994), de Robert H. Ferrell.
In the last months of 1916 and early in 1917, just before the United States entered the World War and [Harry] Truman himself went to war, he engaged in one more effort to make money. Not long after returning from Commerce he became acquainted, actually through Culbertson, with an oil wildcatter, David H. Morgan, and went in with him in a venture that involved buying leases in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana.
- - -
When the United States entered the World War, the company had not yet gotten its well down far enough. The manpower shortage forced the company's officers to dispose of the leases and go out of business. Not long afterward one of the major national oil companies tapped the pool. Had Truman done it, he would have become a millionaire.
- - -
The decision to go into the army during World War I was the crucial event of Harry Truman's life, and he made that decision, let it be added, because he was a patriotic citizen of the United States, and not because of what the army might do for him. To be sure, he was no student of the great issues that divided Europe, and if he read about the carnage on the front - the killing by machine guns, artillery, and poison gas - he never mentioned it in letters to Bess. Nor did he understand the submarine issue that divided the United States and Imperial Germany. The sinking of great liners with frightful loss of life does not seem to have crossed his mind; again, he never mentioned it. Like millions of other Americans, he had felt as remote from Europe as if Jackson County were somewhere in China surrounded by the Great Wall.
- - -
The farmer near Grandview was an unlikely candidate for the draft; he would not have to go - he was thirty-three years old - but he had belonged to the Guard and thought he should volunteer.
- - -
Much more important, the army also showed him that he could be a leader of men. Never before had he undergone such an experience. The Guard was a casual organization, really just a lot of fun. But when he became commander of Battery D, he found himself with 193 men of diverse backgrounds, far different from the bank clerks and salesmen and lawyers in the Guard. He had to control them, else they would control him. His success made him understand he could do the same on a much larger scale.
And, as matters turned out, when he came back to Kansas City after the war he had a political base. [...] "My whole political career," he once said, "is based upon my war service and war associates."
- - -
He worked so hard, he said afterward, that he told his associates they should make him a sergeant. Instead, they made him a first lieutenant.
- - -
At Camp Doniphan the regiment went to school, which kept everyone occupied and helped take their minds off the living conditions. How helpful this tuition was for fighting the war in France is difficult to say. One suspects it was theoretical instruction that had kept generations of West Point cadets out of mischief.
- - -
He found an optician, a member of the Scottish Rite, who sent him to an oculist who made a thorough examination, and charged $5; Dr. Leonard in Kansas City charged ten. He returned to the oculist, who charged $17.50, less 10 percent, for two pairs of regulation aluminum frames and glasses, with an extra lens he had chipped on the edge in grinding [...].
The group then boarded the USS George Washington, a former German liner, the same ship President Wilson later took to the Paris Peace Conference.
- - -
After landing "somewhere in France," actually Brest, April 13, 10:00 A.M., after a fourteen-day passage, the lieutenant and friends spent a few days in the Hotel des Voyageurs.
- - -
Truman liked to say that infantrymen were the heroes of World War I and artillerymen had "soft jobs" ("Join the artillery and ride"). This was true for some artillery units, but Truman's battery saw more than its share of action, first in a quiet sector in the Vosges Mountains, then at St.-Mihiel, the Meuse-Argonne, and Verdun. Indeed, the action in the quiet sector produced what battery members described as the Battle of Who Run, which was no easy affair and showed coolness on the part of the battery commander. American troops were known for stirring things in quiet sectors, and Truman's regiment sent over several hundred rounds of gas.
- - -
The Meuse-Argonne was something else, a terrifically hard battle that began on September 26, lasted until the end of the war, and cost the lives of twenty-six thousand Americans, nearly the equivalent of a big World War I square division. It was the most costly battle in the nation's history. Captain Truman marched his men for twenty-two nights, and on one stretch believed he did not sleep for sixty hours. Horses died by the thousands. Men weakened with the strain - Truman's weight dropped from 175 pounds to 135. After the battle opened, the 129th got into several actions. According to Truman's chief mechanic, McKinley Wooden, "They'd fire those guns, then they'd pour a bucket of water down the muzzle and it'd come out the breech just a-steaming, you know."
- - -
A little before sundown one day, a German plane came right over the battery's position; Truman moved the guns back a hundred yards and to the right two hundred, and not fifteen minutes later "they just shot that orchard all to hell. If he hadn't done that there might not have been a one of us left." Once the captain received the opportunity all battery commanders hope for: he happened to see an enemy battery coming into range and setting up its guns. He waited until the commander sent back the horses, and then gave his own battery the order to fire as fast as possible. The men sent up forty-nine rounds in two minutes, smothering the enemy battery.
- - -
The 35th Division was two weeks in the line at the Meuse-Argonne, and after resting went back for three more in front of Verdun, a grisly place. Every time a German shell came over, it dug up bodies left from the battle of 1916. Wooden spread his blankets in a place on Dead Man's Hill, woke up the next morning, and "I looked over on this shelf, and there was a skull there, a bullet hole right through there. Then, over here on this shelf, there was another skull, a bullet hole right through here. I looked outside and saw a blown-off man's leg sticking up out of the ground." The battery remained there until the armistice ending the war.
After such experiences the armistice was a great relief. At breakfast on November 11, Sergeant Edward Meisburger reported to Captain Truman's dugout to find the captain with a wide grin on his face, stretched out on the ground eating blueberry pie. He gave the sergeant a piece and said, between bites, handing Meisburger a sheet of paper: "Sergeant, you will take this back and read it to the members of the battery." The men thus learned the war would end at 11:00 A.M. Fifteen minutes before the end, the battery fired its last shell. The men had sent ten thousand rounds into the German lines. A battery of French 155s behind Truman's battery shot off its surplus ammunition until just before 11:00, and for the rest of the day the Frenchmen held a celebration, then caroused through the night. At one point they insisted upon saluting their next-door neighbor, the local American commander, one man at a time, which kept Truman awake as they marched past: "Vive President Wilson! Vive le capitaine d'artillerie americaine!"
- - -
For a while, before and after Christmas, officers and soldiers managed leaves, and Captain Truman obtained his share. He was in Paris in late November, where he saw Notre Dame, Napoleon's tomb, the Madeleine, and the Folies Bergères. He and fellow officers engaged a taxi and drove down the "Champ Ellesee" (he gave up on the spelling, he said), the rue Rivoli, across the Alexander III Bridge, and down the boulevard de l'Ópera and many side streets. Traveling to Marseilles, the Truman group attended a performance by the dancer Gaby [Deslys], who threw a bunch of violets, caught by the future president of the United States. In Nice they took rooms at the Hotel de la Méditerranée, "a dandy place overlooking the sea." Truman and Major Gates "bought an interest in an auto" and drove across the border into Italy at Menton, back by way of the Grande Corniche, Napoleon's road running on top of the foothills of the Alps: "It is a very crooked road and around every turn is a more beautiful view than the last one." The group visited Monte Carlo and went inside the casino, but could not gamble because they were in uniform.
But as months passed, and a lack of ships kept the AEF from returning home ("Lafayette, we are still here"), discipline began to slip.
- - -
During all this time the larger political and diplomatic scenery passed Truman by. The letters show no interest in the proceedings of the Paris Peace Conference. He wrote two or three to Bess and the Noland sisters referring facetiously to "Woodie" - President Wilson - and relating his contempt for subjects that aroused the American president: "For my part, and every A.E.F. man feels the same way, I don't give a whoop (to put it mildly) whether there's a League of Nations or whether Russia has a Red government or a Purple one, and if the President of the Czecho-Slovaks wants to pry the throne from under the King of Bohemia, let him pry but send us home." On one occasion Captain Truman saw President Wilson. He and a group of soldiers stood across the street from the Hotel Crillon while Wilson walked down the steps to a waiting automobile.
- - -
[...] landed at New York on Easter morning, April 20, 1919.
[...] The rest was anticlimax. In New York the mayor's welcome boat came out and the band played "Home, Sweet Home," and almost everyone wept - even the most hardened member of the battery sniffed, Truman said. Welfare organizations overwhelmed the men with gifts. "The Jews gave us handkerchiefs, the Y.M.C.A. chocolate, the Knights of Columbus, cigarettes; the Red Cross, real homemade cake; and the Salvation Army, God bless 'em, sent telegrams free and gave us Easter eggs made of chocolate." The unit crossed from Hoboken to Camp Mills on Long Island, and there everyone ate mountains of ice cream. Captain Truman went into the city and visited the house of the sister of his battery barber, Frank Spina, where he ate spaghetti and "nearly foundered." Thereafter came the train ride out to Camp Funston, Kansas, with a stop for the parade in Kansas City, and mustering out on May 6.
The experience was unforgettable, its importance for the future national and international leader crucial.
- - -
The memories of the battery never dimmed, neither those of the commander nor those of his men. In Truman's twenty-one-line article in Who's Who, he devoted five lines to military service in World War I, including the Guard and Reserves, and only two to the presidency. The files of the Truman Library contain hundreds of letters to the president of the United States from former members of the battery, and every time a letter arrived for "Captain Harry" it received a personally dictated answer, usually with a handwritten postscript. Each year the division held a reunion; at one of them, in Kansas City in the late 1940s, the battery assembled in a large room, and President Truman brought in General Eisenhower, then army chief of staff, and Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, the president's personal chief of staff. He went around and introduced each member of the battery: "By God," Wooden remembered, "he called pretty near all of us by our first names." At the inaugural in 1949, the president invited the battery to Washington. That morning everyone had breakfast together. Someone called him "Mr. President," and he put up his hand. "We'll have none of that here," he said. "I'm Captain Harry." Battery D marched in the inaugural parade in single file on each side of the president's automobile, each man carrying a cane and wearing a red armband with a gold-colored D.
- - -
When Truman died in 1972, one of his members of Battery D, Abe Gladstone, said: "Captain Harry had a few favorites but I wasn't one of them. But he was my favorite and always will be." When Bess passed on, ten years later, five veterans of the battery attended her funeral, four of them in wheelchairs.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnINnEydVlaUjBPNXM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMu6qzeX7KA
- - -
When the United States entered the World War, the company had not yet gotten its well down far enough. The manpower shortage forced the company's officers to dispose of the leases and go out of business. Not long afterward one of the major national oil companies tapped the pool. Had Truman done it, he would have become a millionaire.
- - -
The decision to go into the army during World War I was the crucial event of Harry Truman's life, and he made that decision, let it be added, because he was a patriotic citizen of the United States, and not because of what the army might do for him. To be sure, he was no student of the great issues that divided Europe, and if he read about the carnage on the front - the killing by machine guns, artillery, and poison gas - he never mentioned it in letters to Bess. Nor did he understand the submarine issue that divided the United States and Imperial Germany. The sinking of great liners with frightful loss of life does not seem to have crossed his mind; again, he never mentioned it. Like millions of other Americans, he had felt as remote from Europe as if Jackson County were somewhere in China surrounded by the Great Wall.
- - -
The farmer near Grandview was an unlikely candidate for the draft; he would not have to go - he was thirty-three years old - but he had belonged to the Guard and thought he should volunteer.
- - -
Much more important, the army also showed him that he could be a leader of men. Never before had he undergone such an experience. The Guard was a casual organization, really just a lot of fun. But when he became commander of Battery D, he found himself with 193 men of diverse backgrounds, far different from the bank clerks and salesmen and lawyers in the Guard. He had to control them, else they would control him. His success made him understand he could do the same on a much larger scale.
And, as matters turned out, when he came back to Kansas City after the war he had a political base. [...] "My whole political career," he once said, "is based upon my war service and war associates."
- - -
He worked so hard, he said afterward, that he told his associates they should make him a sergeant. Instead, they made him a first lieutenant.
- - -
At Camp Doniphan the regiment went to school, which kept everyone occupied and helped take their minds off the living conditions. How helpful this tuition was for fighting the war in France is difficult to say. One suspects it was theoretical instruction that had kept generations of West Point cadets out of mischief.
- - -
He found an optician, a member of the Scottish Rite, who sent him to an oculist who made a thorough examination, and charged $5; Dr. Leonard in Kansas City charged ten. He returned to the oculist, who charged $17.50, less 10 percent, for two pairs of regulation aluminum frames and glasses, with an extra lens he had chipped on the edge in grinding [...].
The group then boarded the USS George Washington, a former German liner, the same ship President Wilson later took to the Paris Peace Conference.
- - -
After landing "somewhere in France," actually Brest, April 13, 10:00 A.M., after a fourteen-day passage, the lieutenant and friends spent a few days in the Hotel des Voyageurs.
- - -
Truman liked to say that infantrymen were the heroes of World War I and artillerymen had "soft jobs" ("Join the artillery and ride"). This was true for some artillery units, but Truman's battery saw more than its share of action, first in a quiet sector in the Vosges Mountains, then at St.-Mihiel, the Meuse-Argonne, and Verdun. Indeed, the action in the quiet sector produced what battery members described as the Battle of Who Run, which was no easy affair and showed coolness on the part of the battery commander. American troops were known for stirring things in quiet sectors, and Truman's regiment sent over several hundred rounds of gas.
- - -
The Meuse-Argonne was something else, a terrifically hard battle that began on September 26, lasted until the end of the war, and cost the lives of twenty-six thousand Americans, nearly the equivalent of a big World War I square division. It was the most costly battle in the nation's history. Captain Truman marched his men for twenty-two nights, and on one stretch believed he did not sleep for sixty hours. Horses died by the thousands. Men weakened with the strain - Truman's weight dropped from 175 pounds to 135. After the battle opened, the 129th got into several actions. According to Truman's chief mechanic, McKinley Wooden, "They'd fire those guns, then they'd pour a bucket of water down the muzzle and it'd come out the breech just a-steaming, you know."
- - -
A little before sundown one day, a German plane came right over the battery's position; Truman moved the guns back a hundred yards and to the right two hundred, and not fifteen minutes later "they just shot that orchard all to hell. If he hadn't done that there might not have been a one of us left." Once the captain received the opportunity all battery commanders hope for: he happened to see an enemy battery coming into range and setting up its guns. He waited until the commander sent back the horses, and then gave his own battery the order to fire as fast as possible. The men sent up forty-nine rounds in two minutes, smothering the enemy battery.
- - -
The 35th Division was two weeks in the line at the Meuse-Argonne, and after resting went back for three more in front of Verdun, a grisly place. Every time a German shell came over, it dug up bodies left from the battle of 1916. Wooden spread his blankets in a place on Dead Man's Hill, woke up the next morning, and "I looked over on this shelf, and there was a skull there, a bullet hole right through there. Then, over here on this shelf, there was another skull, a bullet hole right through here. I looked outside and saw a blown-off man's leg sticking up out of the ground." The battery remained there until the armistice ending the war.
After such experiences the armistice was a great relief. At breakfast on November 11, Sergeant Edward Meisburger reported to Captain Truman's dugout to find the captain with a wide grin on his face, stretched out on the ground eating blueberry pie. He gave the sergeant a piece and said, between bites, handing Meisburger a sheet of paper: "Sergeant, you will take this back and read it to the members of the battery." The men thus learned the war would end at 11:00 A.M. Fifteen minutes before the end, the battery fired its last shell. The men had sent ten thousand rounds into the German lines. A battery of French 155s behind Truman's battery shot off its surplus ammunition until just before 11:00, and for the rest of the day the Frenchmen held a celebration, then caroused through the night. At one point they insisted upon saluting their next-door neighbor, the local American commander, one man at a time, which kept Truman awake as they marched past: "Vive President Wilson! Vive le capitaine d'artillerie americaine!"
- - -
For a while, before and after Christmas, officers and soldiers managed leaves, and Captain Truman obtained his share. He was in Paris in late November, where he saw Notre Dame, Napoleon's tomb, the Madeleine, and the Folies Bergères. He and fellow officers engaged a taxi and drove down the "Champ Ellesee" (he gave up on the spelling, he said), the rue Rivoli, across the Alexander III Bridge, and down the boulevard de l'Ópera and many side streets. Traveling to Marseilles, the Truman group attended a performance by the dancer Gaby [Deslys], who threw a bunch of violets, caught by the future president of the United States. In Nice they took rooms at the Hotel de la Méditerranée, "a dandy place overlooking the sea." Truman and Major Gates "bought an interest in an auto" and drove across the border into Italy at Menton, back by way of the Grande Corniche, Napoleon's road running on top of the foothills of the Alps: "It is a very crooked road and around every turn is a more beautiful view than the last one." The group visited Monte Carlo and went inside the casino, but could not gamble because they were in uniform.
But as months passed, and a lack of ships kept the AEF from returning home ("Lafayette, we are still here"), discipline began to slip.
- - -
During all this time the larger political and diplomatic scenery passed Truman by. The letters show no interest in the proceedings of the Paris Peace Conference. He wrote two or three to Bess and the Noland sisters referring facetiously to "Woodie" - President Wilson - and relating his contempt for subjects that aroused the American president: "For my part, and every A.E.F. man feels the same way, I don't give a whoop (to put it mildly) whether there's a League of Nations or whether Russia has a Red government or a Purple one, and if the President of the Czecho-Slovaks wants to pry the throne from under the King of Bohemia, let him pry but send us home." On one occasion Captain Truman saw President Wilson. He and a group of soldiers stood across the street from the Hotel Crillon while Wilson walked down the steps to a waiting automobile.
- - -
[...] landed at New York on Easter morning, April 20, 1919.
[...] The rest was anticlimax. In New York the mayor's welcome boat came out and the band played "Home, Sweet Home," and almost everyone wept - even the most hardened member of the battery sniffed, Truman said. Welfare organizations overwhelmed the men with gifts. "The Jews gave us handkerchiefs, the Y.M.C.A. chocolate, the Knights of Columbus, cigarettes; the Red Cross, real homemade cake; and the Salvation Army, God bless 'em, sent telegrams free and gave us Easter eggs made of chocolate." The unit crossed from Hoboken to Camp Mills on Long Island, and there everyone ate mountains of ice cream. Captain Truman went into the city and visited the house of the sister of his battery barber, Frank Spina, where he ate spaghetti and "nearly foundered." Thereafter came the train ride out to Camp Funston, Kansas, with a stop for the parade in Kansas City, and mustering out on May 6.
The experience was unforgettable, its importance for the future national and international leader crucial.
- - -
The memories of the battery never dimmed, neither those of the commander nor those of his men. In Truman's twenty-one-line article in Who's Who, he devoted five lines to military service in World War I, including the Guard and Reserves, and only two to the presidency. The files of the Truman Library contain hundreds of letters to the president of the United States from former members of the battery, and every time a letter arrived for "Captain Harry" it received a personally dictated answer, usually with a handwritten postscript. Each year the division held a reunion; at one of them, in Kansas City in the late 1940s, the battery assembled in a large room, and President Truman brought in General Eisenhower, then army chief of staff, and Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, the president's personal chief of staff. He went around and introduced each member of the battery: "By God," Wooden remembered, "he called pretty near all of us by our first names." At the inaugural in 1949, the president invited the battery to Washington. That morning everyone had breakfast together. Someone called him "Mr. President," and he put up his hand. "We'll have none of that here," he said. "I'm Captain Harry." Battery D marched in the inaugural parade in single file on each side of the president's automobile, each man carrying a cane and wearing a red armband with a gold-colored D.
- - -
When Truman died in 1972, one of his members of Battery D, Abe Gladstone, said: "Captain Harry had a few favorites but I wasn't one of them. But he was my favorite and always will be." When Bess passed on, ten years later, five veterans of the battery attended her funeral, four of them in wheelchairs.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnINnEydVlaUjBPNXM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMu6qzeX7KA
