Aboard the Mauritania heading for France in 1918
By Janet MacKenzie
Edited by Dick Vara
Harold MacKenzie was born at the family home on upper Center Street in 1886 and lived in Dover all his life. He attended the old North District School on Main Street and first went to work for the Dover Tree Department in 1906. Four years later he was appointed Supt. of the Moth Department.
He enlisted in the army in 1917 and was sent to France where he served in the Field Artillery. He often wrote home describing life in the army and also kept a diary. Today his writings tell us first hand what it was like ÒOver ThereÓ in World War I.
Based on MacÕs letters and diary his daughter
Janet wrote this memoir for a family gathering in 1986. She included some
historical information from "The 55th Artillery", a book by Chaplain Frederick
Morse Cutler.-DV
Aboard the Mauritania heading for France in
1918
Harold MacKenzie of Dover enlisted in the U.S. Army on Dec. 7, 1917 at Boston and was assigned as a Private in the 55th Field Artillery, Battery D at Fort Banks in Winthrop.
On March 25, 1918 he sailed from New York on the H.M.S. "Mauretania" and arrived in LeHavre, France on April 8th.
He was transferred to the 119th Field Artillery, Battery A, where he continued his military training for three months, learning to drive teams of horses that hauled artillery guns. He drove horses from the saddle and rode all kinds, saddled or bare-back and wrote home that heÕd been kicked and bitten but had become a "regular jockey".
He learned to fire a rifle and pistol and to get his gas mask on in a hurry. Word from the front was that mankind was divided into just two classes: the Quick and the Dead.
On July 3 he wrote home: "We moved up to the front. We have just settled in a new place after a long journey..on a freight train and..over the road with our horses. I am driving a lead team on a three team (sometimes a four team) caisson and we carry ammunition to our guns on the firing line every night."
July 7: "Our battery is doing some good work. Please send me a pound of Old English Curve Cut Tobacco. I can't buy tobacco over here. The government issues tobacco to us, but not the kind I like. It certainly would be pretty nice to have a smoke of real tobacco. When the young folks at home write me about all the good times they are having it makes me wish I were home, but I am not coming home until we have stopped all this big noise over here, and then you may bet, I will not be long getting there."
On July 18 Harold woke up with pains in his side and was sent by ambulance to a hospital in Romindy and then to a French hospital in Movilair. "The Doctor and Nurse maul me over twice a day.Ó They diagnosed his illness as acute Nephritis, inflamation of the kidney, and spent the next ten days at a Base Hospital in Dijon. By July 28th he had mostly recovered and returned to active duty. He made his way back through army camps at St. Aignan and Le-Cournlau and arrived at Pontoise, just north of Paris, on August 8th. A few days later he spent three hours seeing the sights in Paris.
On August 23 Harold caught up with his outfit at 7:00 pm camped near a small town at the edge of a large wooded area. They had been in Chateau Thierry and were now on a forced march to a sector north of Soissons. That night they ate and slept near the woods until 11:OO pm and were awakened to continue marching all night.
They stopped at 7:00 am the next morning ten kilometers from the front. Harold was appointed mess orderly, which meant he would be up close to the guns all the time.
For the next three days his outfit's guns pounded away day and night with little success and the Germans advanced their artillery 200 yards. On August 29th Harold's Regiment and thirty-two others sent over a heavy barrage, which in Harold's words, "made SOME noise". It put the Bosh in full retreat and allowed the Americans move their own guns forward ten kilometers.
The Germans started a counter-attack on September 1 but the Americans stopped them and advanced the guns one kilometer.
On September 5th Harold's outfit was relieved and sent to a rest camp behind the front lines for a week, but by September 17th they were back in the thick of it. After marching 15 to 20 miles a night for three nights Harold wrote: "We are on our way to the front again. I don't just know where but I think it is on the Verdun Front."
Harold was right; it was the Verdun Front. General Pershing was taking his 1st Army into what proved to be the last battle of the war and Harold's outfit was to be in the middle of what was called the ÒPershing Line". It was the beginning of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the largest battle that American units have ever fought in.
On September 26th at 2:30 am 3,928 American and French guns all fired at once, as rapidly as possible. Three hundred thirteen thousand rounds of ammunition were fired during the night and morning before the infantry advanced, the mightiest artillery barrage ever. "Der Tag" had come for the Germans. At 5:30 am, Zero Hour, the 1nfantry went Òover the top" so many field guns ceased fire, but PershingÕs heavy artillery continued the barrage until noon.
As the battle continued, German artillery responded with fusillades of their own and Harold found himself in the middle of it all. On October 3rd he wrote: ÒThe old shells have kept everyone humping for the last weeks. For several days and nights the shells and shrapnel have been falling so thick that they have kept all of us continually on the alert. More so than ever today. Since lunch I had several very close calls.Ó