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YORK COUNTY AND THE WORLD WAR 1914 - 1919
YORK JUNIOR
COLLEGE
YORK PA.
ES
This book was presented by . ..
Francis Farquhar
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from Lyrasis Members and Sloan Foundation
http://www.archive.org/details/yorkcountyworldw00hill
YORK COUNTY
and the
WORLD WAR
31855
BEING A WAR HISTORY OF YORK AND YORK COUNTY
AND A RECORD OF THE SERVICES RENDERED TO THEIR COUNTRY BY THE PEOPLE OF THIS COMMUNITY
:
Compiled, Edited and Published by CLIFFORD J. HALL and JOHN P. LEHN
,
Copyright York, Pennsylvania
Ref
D 570.85 P4197 .
,
Cop. p. 2
TO THE BOYS WHO "WENT WEST"
AND TO THE LOVED ONES OF THOSE THAT MADE THE SUPREME SACRIFICE THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
CONTENTS
Foreword
CLIFFORD J. HALL
Sometime We'll Understand (Poem) .
JAMES MCGRANAHAN
The United States of America at War
CLIFFORD J. HALL
A Proclamation .
WOODROW WILSON
Why War Was Declared .
WOODROW WILSON
In Memoriam
CLIFFORD J. HALL
In Flanders Fields (Poem)
LT. COLONEL JOHN MCCREA JOHN MITCHELL
From Other Fields (Pocm)
Flanders Field NELSON HORN
York County Court House Showing Honor Roll
SHADLE AND BUSSER
York County's Honor Roll .
THE EDITORS
Pictures and Sketches of Those Who Lost Their Lives.
THE EDITORS
The Return (Poem)
URITA DANNA PLATT
Alphabetical List of Those in the Service
THE EDITORS
Letters of Interest from " Over There"
BOYS OF THE A. E. F.
Group Pictures of Boys Before Leaving for Camps
BEN SWEIGART
Gobdom (Poem)
CLIFFORD J. HALL
Satire on the Kaiser .
LOUIS SYBERKROP
Overheard on a Train from Berlin to Holland
TREAT 'EM ROUGH (Magazine)
The Kaiser's Prayer.
York County and the Early Wars of Our History
GEORGE R. PROWELL
York in the World War
WADSWORTH M. GEORGE
York: A City of Thrift
WADSWORTH M. GEORGE
Aeroplane Pictures of York . BEN SWEIGART
The Silent Hero.
CLIFFORD J. HALL
They Also Serve (Poem)
ELIZABETH N. HEPBURN
Some Prominent Men and Their Work JOHN P. LEHN
Fifth Liberty Loan Workers
GRIER HERSH
Board of Directors York County Chapter Red Cross
SHADLE AND BUSSER
The Red Cross Report, York Chapter .
REV. C. M. EHEHALT
The Red Cross Report, Hanover Chapter
Picture of Little Court House in Center Square.
War Savings Stamps During the World War
O. ROLAND READ
Report of the War Council .
JAMES RUDISILL
The Scouts of York County During the War
RAY F. ZANER
Activities of the Y. M. C. A.
H. A. BAILEY
Work of York Theater's During the World War
WADSWORTH M. GEORGE
Speaking Activities of the Four Minute Men G. HAY KAIN
General John Sedgwick Post No. 37. G. A. R. G. P. SPANGLER
United Spanish War Veterans.
CHARLES A. LUTZ
York Post No. 127, American Legion
CURTIS A. THOMAS
World War Statistics JOHN P. LEHN
World War's Notable Dates
JOHN P. LEHN
4
FOREWORD
HE war time history of our community was not made solely by the bravery, the sacrifices and the victories of its soldiers, sailors and marines. The activities of all the rest of its patriotic citizens, men, women, and children, played a vital part, whether their achievements were the result of individual effort, or of the co-ordinated work of such organizations as the American Red Cross, the War Camp Community Service, the Food Administration and others too numerous to mention, which surmounted every obstacle caused by the national emergency with a zeal and an unselfish devotion that made history for this old County of ours.
In recording this history, it has been the honest aim of the editors to produce accurate and complete records. The undertaking has been so immense, however, that it is inevitable that some mistakes and omissions have been made, due to such obstacles as the failure of the relatives of some of the boys who lost their lives to send in photographs to complete the honor roll.
In the compilation of the necessary data, the editors have received much valu- able assistance. Especially should recognition here be given to Mr. Grier Hersh for his kind help and encouragement. Further, without the splendid co-operation of the relatives of the boys who made the supreme sacrifice, the completion of this work would not have been possible.
It is earnestly hoped that there is given, in these pages, a general, correct and vivid picture of the wonderful and glorious sacrifices of the York County people. If, in addition, this history brings us to a realization of the sacrifices of our friends, especially those that gave their all. then the aim of this work may be said to have been accomplished.
CLIFFORD J. HALL.
5
SOMETIME WE'LL UNDERSTAND
N TOT now. but in the coming years, It may be in the better land, We'll read the meaning of our tears, And there, sometime, we'll understand.
We'll catch the broken thread again, And finish what we here began: Heav'n will the mysteries explain, And then, ah then, we'll understand.
We'll know why clouds instead of sun Were over many a cherished plan: Why song has ceased when scarce hegun; "T is there, sometime, we'll understand.
Why what we longed for most of all, Eludes so oft our eager hand: Why hopes are crushed and castles fall. Up there, sometime, we'll understand.
God knows the way, He holds the key, He guides us with unerring hand: Sometime with tearless eyes we'll see; Yes, there, up there, we'll understand.
-JAMES MeGRANAHAN.
6
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AT WAR.
OT for aggrandizement, acquisition of territory, covetous- ness of any kind or vainglory; but at war in the cause of humane rights-the only cause that could stir this great, powerful, peace-loving and law abiding country to the violence that war entailed.
Our part of America is the giant among the nations of the world. It is a country of more than one hundred million people, with resources valued at more than two hundred and fifty billion dollars-figures that are by far too large for most of us to realize in their full signifi- cance. This was a vast force to inject into the terrible war that was convulsing the world, but powerful as it was, it could not have been given its full impetus without united action of the whole people. We -that is to say the bulk of the people-were slow to realize that a state of war existed. But not only did we make up our minds to the fact that the country was at war, but also to the fact that it needed our help. And we realized too, that the quicker we responded to the call and the more energy we put into our efforts the more apt we were to shorten the period of strife and save suffering for friend and foe alike.
There was work for every one. Even those who did and gave but little should be cheered because of the fact that even that little counted. What each could and should have done was outlined by President Wilson in his proclamation, dated April fifteenth, Nineteen hundred seventeen. The people of York County did their share.
CLIFFORD J. HALL.
7
PROCLAMATION
My Fellow Countrymen:
HE entrance of our own beloved country into the grim and terrible war for democracy and human rights which has shaken the world creates so many problems of national life and action which call for immediate consideration and settlement that I hope you will permit me to address to you a few words of earnest counsel and appeal with regard to them.
We are rapidly putting our navy upon an effective war footing and are about to create and equip a great army, but these are the simplest parts of the great task to which we have addressed ourselves.
There is not a single selfish element, so far as I can see, in the cause we are fighting for.
We are fighting for what we believe and wish to be the rights of mankind and for the future peace of the world.
To do this great thing worthily and successfully we must devote ourselves to the service without regard to profit or material advantage and with an energy and intelligence that will rise to the level of the enterprise itself.
We must realize to the full how great the task is and how many things, how many kinds and elements of capacity and service and self-sacrifice it involves.
These, then, are the things we must do and do well. besides fighting-the things without which mere fighting would be fruitless:
We must supply abundant food, for ourselves and for our armies and our seamen not only, but also for a large part of the nations with whom we have now made common cause. in whose support and by whose sides we shall be fighting.
We must supply ships by the hundreds out of our shipyards to carry to the other side of the sea, submarines or no submarines, what will every day be needed there and abundant materials out of our fields and our mines and our factories with which not only to elothe and equip our own forees on land and sea but also to elothe and support our people for whom the gallant fellows under arms can no longer work, to help clothe and equip the armies with which we are co-operating in Europe, and to keep the looms and manufactories there in raw material; coal to keep the fires going in ships at sea and in the furnaces of hundreds of factories across the sea; steel out of which to make arms and am- munition both here and there; rails for wornout railways baek of the fighting fronts; locomotives and rolling stock to take the place of those every day going to pieces; mules, horses, cattle for labor and for military service; everything with which the people of England and France and Italy and Russia have usually supplied themselves but cannot now alford the men, the material or the machinery to make.
It is evident to every thinking man that our industry and on the farms, in the shipyards, in the mines, in the factories. must be made more prolific and more efficient than ever and that they must be more economically managed and better adapted to the particular requirements of our task than they have been; and what I want to say is that the men and the women who devote their thought and their energy to these things will be serving the country and conducting the fight for peace and freedom just as truly and just as affectively as the men on the battlefield or in the trenches.
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The industrial forces of the country, men and women alike, will be a great national, a great inter- national Service Army-a notable and honored host engaged in the services of the Nation and the world, the efficient friends and saviors of free men everywhere.
Thousands, nay hundreds of thousands of men otherwise liable to military service will of right and of necessity be excused from that service and assigned to the fundamental, sustaining work of the fields and factories and mines, and they will be as much part of the great patriotic forces of the Nation as the men under fire.
I take the liberty, therefore, of addressing this word to the farmers of the country and to all who work on the farms:
The supreme need of our own Nation and of the nations with which we are co-operating is an abund- ance of supplies, and especially of foodstuffs. The importance of an adequate food supply, especially for the present year, is superlative.
Without abundant food, alike for the armies and the people now at war, the whole great enterprise upon which we have embarked will break down and fail.
The world's food reserves are low. Not only during the present emergency, but for some time after peace shall have come, both our own people and a large proportion of the people of Europe must rely upon the harvests in America.
Upon the farmers of this country, therefore. in large measure, rests the fate of the war and the fate of the nations. May the nation not count upon them to omit no step that will increase the produc- tion of their land or that will bring about the most effectual co-operation in the sale and distribution of their products?
The time is short. It is of the greatest imperative importance that everything possible be done to make sure of large harvests.
I call upon young men and old alike and upon the able-bodied hoys of the land to accept and act upon this duty-to turn in hosts to the farms and make certain that no pains and no labor is lacking in this great matter.
I particularly appeal to the farmers of the South to plant abundant food-stuff's as well as cotton. They can show their patriotism in no better or more convincing way than by resisting the great temp- tation of the present price of cotton and helping. helping upon a great scale to feed the Nation and the people everywhere who are fighting for their liberties and for our own. The variety of their crops will be the visible measure of their comprehension of their national duty.
The Government of the United States and the governments of the several States stand ready to co-operate. They will do everything possible to assist farmers in securing an adequate supply of seed, an adequate force of laborers when they are most needed. at harvest time. and the means of expediting shipments of fertilizers and farm machinery, as well as of the crops themselves when harvested.
The course of trade shall be as unhampered as it is possible to make it and there shall be no un- warranted manipulation of the Nation's food supply by those who handle it on its way to the consumer. This is our opportunity to demonstrate the efficiency of a great democracy and we shall not fall short of it!
This let me say to the middlemen of every sort, whether they are handling our foodstuffs or our raw materials of manufacture or the products of our mills and factories:
The eyes of the country will be especially upon you. This is your opportunity for signal service, efficient and disinterested.
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The country expects you, as it expects all others, to forego unusual profits, to organize and expedite shipments of supplies of every kind, but especially of food, with an eye to the service you are rendering; and in the spirit of those who enlist in the ranks, for their people, not for themselves, I shall confidently expect you to deserve and win the confidence of people of every sort and station.
To the men who run the railways of the country, whether they be managers or operative employes, let me say that the railways are the arteries of the Nation's life and that upon them rests the immense responsibility of seeing to it that those arteries suffer no obstruction of any kind, no inefficiency or slackened power.
To the merchant let me suggest the motto: "Small profits and quick service;" and to the ship- builder the thought that the life of the war depends upon him. The food and the war supplies must be carried across the seas no matter how many ships are sent to the bottom. The places of those that go down must be supplied and supplied at once. To the miner let me say that he stands where the farmer does: The work of the world waits on him. If he slackens or fails, armies and statesmen are helpless. He also is enlisted in the great Service Army. The manufacturer does not need to be told, I hope. that the Nation looks to him to speed and perfect every process; and I want only to remind his employes that their service is absolutely indispensable and is counted on by every man who loves the country and its liberties.
Let me suggest also that every one who creates or cultivates a garden helps and helps greatly to solve the problem of the feeding of the nations; and that every housewife who practices strict economy puts herself in the ranks of those who serve the Nation.
This is the time for America to correct her unpardonable fault of wastefulness and extravagance. Let every man and every woman assume the duty of careful, provident use and expenditure as a public duty, as a dictate of patriotism which no one can now expect ever to be excused or forgiven for ignoring.
In the hope that this statement of the needs of the Nation and of the world in this hour of supreme crisis may stimulate those to whom it comes and remind all who need reminding of the solemn duties of a time such as the world has never seen before, I beg that all editors and publishers everywhere will give as prominent publication and as wide circulation as possible to this appeal. I venture to suggest also to advertising agencies that they would perhaps render a very substantial and timely service to the country if they would give it widespread repetition. And I hope that clergymen will not think the theme of it an unworthy or inappropriate subject of comment and homily from their pulpits.
The supreme test of the Nation has come. We must all speak, act and serve together.
-WOODROW WILSON
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WHY WAR WAS DECLARED.
At a joint meeting of the two houses of Congress assembled in extraordinary session, April 2, 1917, President Wilson delivered the following address which was the basis of the subsequent action of Congress in its declaration that a state of war existed with Germany.
Gentlemen of the Congress:
HAVE called the Congress into extraordinary session because there are serious, very serious, choices of policy to be made, and made immediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally permissible that I should assume the responsibility of making.
On the third of February last I officially laid before you the extraordinary announcement of the Imperial German Government that on and after the first day of February it was its purpose to put aside all restraints of law or of humanity and use its submarines to sink every vessel that sought to approach either the ports of Great Britain and Ireland or the western coasts of Europe or any of the ports controlled by the enemies of Germany within the Mediterranean.
That had seemed to be the object of the German submarine warfare earlier in the war, but since April of last year the Imperial Government had somewhat restrained the commanders of its undersea craft in conformity with its promise then given to us that passenger boats should not be sunk and that due warning would be given to all other vessels which its submarines might seek to destroy when no resistance was offered or escape attempted, and care taken that their crews were given at least a fair chance to save their lives in their open boats.
The precautions taken were meager and haphazard enough, as was proved in distressing instance after instance in the progress of the cruel and unmanly business; but a certain degree of restraint was observed.
The new policy has swept every restriction aside. Vessels of every kind, whatever their flag, their character, their cargo, their destination, their errand, have been ruthlessly sent to the bottom without warning and without thought of help or mercy for those on board, the vessels of friendly neutrals along with those of belligerents.
Even hospital ships and ships carrying relief to the sorely bereaved and stricken people of Belgium, though the latter were provided with safe conduct through the proscribed areas by the German Govern- ment itself and were distinguished by unmistakable marks of idenity, have been sunk with the same reckless lack of compassion or of principle.
I was for a little while unable to believe that such things would in fact be done by any Government that had hitherto subscribed to the humane practices of civilized nations. International law had its origin in the attempt to set up some law which would be respected and observed upon the seas, where no nation had right of domination and where lay the free highways of the world.
By painful stage after stage has that law been built up, with meager enough results, indeed, after all was accomplished that could be accomplished, but always with a clear view. at least, of what the heart and conscience of mankind demanded.
This minimum of right the German Government has swept aside under the plea of retaliation and necessity and because it had no weapons which it could use at sea except those which it is impossible
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to employ as it is employing them without throwing to the winds all scruples of humanity or of respect for the understandings that were supposed to underlie the intercourse of the world.
I am not now thinking of the loss of property involved, immense and serious as that is, but only of the wanton and wholesale destruction of the lives of noncombatants, men, women and children, engaged in pursuits which have always, even in the darkest periods of modern history, been deemed innocent and legitimate. Property can be paid for; the lives of peaceful and innocent people cannot be.
The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind. It is a war against all nations. American ships have been sunk, American lives taken, in ways which it has stirred us very deeply to learn of, but the ships and people of other neutral and friendly nations have heen sunk and overwhelmed in the waters in the same way. There has been no discrimination. The challenge is to all mankind. Each nation must decide for itself how it will meet it.
The choice we make for ourselves must be made with a moderation of counsel and a teniperateness of judgment befitting our character and our motives as a nation. We must put excited feeling away. Our motive will not be revenge or the victorious assertion of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right, of human right, of which we are a single champion.
When I addressed the Congress on the twenty-sixth of February last I thought it would suffice to assert our neutral rights with arms, our right to use the seas against unlawful interference, our right to keep our people safe against unlawful violence. But armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable.
Because submarines are in effect outlaws when used as the German submarines have been used against merchant shipping, it is impossible to defend ships against their attacks, as the law of nations has assumed that merchantmen would defend themselves against privateers or cruisers, visible craft giving chase upon the open sea. It is common prudence in such circumstances, grim necessity. indeed, to endeavor to destroy them before they have shown their own intention. They must be dealt with upon sight, if dealt with at all.
The German Government denies the right of neutrals to use arms at all within the areas of the sea which it has prescribed, even in the defense of rights which no modern publicist has ever questioned their right to defend. The intimation is conveyed that the arined guards which we have placed on our merchant ships will be treated as beyond the pale of law and subject to be dealt with as pirates would be.
Armed neutrality is ineffectual enough at best; in such circumstances and in the face of such pre- tensions it is worse than ineffectual; it is likely only to produce what it was meant to prevent; it is virtually certain to draw us into the war without either the rights or the effectiveness of belligerents.
There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making: we will not choose the path of submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our nation and our people to be ignored or violated. The wrongs against which we now array ourselves are not common wrongs; they cut to the very roots of human life.
With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves. but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my con- stitutional duty. I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Gove. n- ment to be in fact nothing less than war against the Government and people of the United States; that it formally accept the status of belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it, and that it take immediately steps not only to put the country in a more thorough state of defense, but also to exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the Government of the German Empire to terms and end the war.
What this will involve is clear. It will involve the utmost practicable co-operation in counsel and
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action with the Governments now at war with Germany, and, as incident to that, the extension to those Governments of the most liberal financial credits, in order that our resources may, so far as possible, be added to theirs. It will involve the organization and mobilization of all the material resources of tlie country to supply the material of war and serve the incidental needs of the nation in the most abundant and yet the most economical and efficient way possible.
It will involve the immediate full equipment of the navy in all respects, but particularly in supply- ing it with the best means of dealing with the enemy's submarines. It will involve the immediate addition to the armed forces of the United States already provided for by law in case of war, at least 500,000 men, who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the principle of universal liability to service, and also the authorization of subsequent additional increments of equal force so soon as they may be needed and can be handled in training.
It will involve also, of course, the granting of adequate credits to the Government, sustained, I hope, so far as they can equitably be sustained by the present generation, by well-conceived taxation. I say sustained so far as may he equitably by taxation because it seems to me that it would be most unwise to base the credits which will now be necessary entirely on money borrowed. It is our duty, 1 most respectfully urge, to protect our people so far as we may against the very serious hardships and evils which would be likely to arise out of the inflation which would be produced by vast loans.
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