Caissons Go Rolling Along: A Memoir of America in Post-World War I Germany

By Johnson Hagood

An engrossing portrait of war-torn Europe written by one of South Carolina's most distinguished military officers of the last century.

Major General Johnson Hagood (1873-1948) was one of South Carolina's most distinguished army officers of the twentieth century. An artillerist and a scholar of military science, Hagood became a noted expert in logistics and served as the chief of staff of the Services of Supply in World War I Europe. Taken from Hagood's wartime journal, Caissons Go Rolling Along describes his artillery brigade's march into Germany in 1918, the wartime devastation, his impressions of the defeated enemy and occupied territories, and his tour of the recent battlefields in the company of the commanders who fought there.

Written in a conversational style, the narrative focuses principally on Hagood's time in command of the Sixty-sixth Field Artillery Brigade following the armistice. The Sixty-sixth FAB was attached to the American Third Army, which later became the American occupation force in the Rhineland. Hagood recorded his impressions of the conditions in which he found his men at the end of the war and the events of a tour of the French, British, and American battlefields. More important, he set down a record of the devastation of the French countryside, the contrasting lack of suffering he found in Germany, the character of the Germans, and some predictions for the future.

"I have left the text as it was when we held these people at the point of the bayonet," he wrote in his preface years later. "The opinions we formed at that time are important because they were the basis of our action.... The scourge of the Great War took a heavy toll... and we Americans might as well keep in mind what we were fighting for." Hagood captures defining aspects of the American character at the close of World War I. He described a boisterous, optimistic people, sure of their new place in the world. Rome provided Hagood with an analogy for the new American empire, which he took for granted in his postwar memoir.

Completed during Hagood's lifetime but unpublished until now, Caissons Go Rolling Along is an engrossing portrait of war-torn Europe, a stark reminder of grim realities of the Great War, and a richly detailed look at the daunting task of occupying and rebuilding a defeated nation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Dec 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781611172188

Book preview

Johnson Hagood

Caissons Go Rolling Along

A MEMOIR OF AMERICA IN POST–WORLD WAR I GERMANY

Maj. Gen. Johnson Hagood

Edited by

Larry A. Grant

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS

© 2010 University of South Carolina

Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2010

Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2013

www.sc.edu/uscpress

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13       10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

Hagood, Johnson, b. 1873.

    Caissons go rolling along : a memoir of America in Post–World War I Germany / Johnson Hagood; edited by Larry A. Grant.

       p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-1-57003-915-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

    1. Germany—History—Allied occupation, 1918–1930. 2. Hagood, Johnson, b. 1873—Travel—Germany. 3. Germany—Social conditions—1918–1933. 4. Military government—Germany—History—20th century. 5. Military government—United States—History—20th century. 6. Reconstruction (1914–1939)—Germany. 7. Rhineland (Germany)—History—20th century. I. Grant, Larry A. II. Title.

    D650.M5H24 2010

    940.3'73—dc22

                                                                                                                    2010005684

ISBN 978-1-61117-218-8 (ebook)

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

About Maj. Gen. Johnson Hagood

Editorial Method

Preface

Introduction

Being the Summary of a Previous Work—THE SERVICES OF SUPPLY, a Memoir of the Great War—By General Johnson Hagood—Houghton Mifflin Company, 1927

Chapter 1 Back with the Old Brigade

Armistice Day—Mailly-le-Camp—Haussimont—General Chamberlaine—Naval Guns—In Front of the Front—Prisoners of War—Étain—Metz—Marshal Pétain

Chapter 2 The Army Artillery

Visit to G.H.Q.—Luxemburg—Hotel Staar—66th F.A. Brigade—Blercourt—Getting Back to Normalcy—Brigade Mess—Robert

Chapter 3 On the Move

Out of Blercourt into Esch—Welcomed by the Luxemburgers—The Grand Duchesse—Cost of Living High—Mertert—Peasant Life in Luxemburg—First Glimpse of Germany

Chapter 4 Marching through Germany

Crossing the Frontier—Bitburg—The Count A…von A…n and His Wife—First Impressions Favorable—On to Hillesheim—America Crosses the Rhine—The Doctor's Office

Chapter 5 Bassenheim

The Château—The Knights' Hall—Extensive Gardens—Abundant Food—Well Trained Servants—Letter to the Burgomaster—General Hines at Neuwied—Christmas Eve among the Robber Barons—Over the Rhine at Coblenz

Chapter 6 Höhr-Grenzhausen

Journey's End—Fish—Army Artillery Commander—Our Area—Command—Pottery—Billets—Brigade Commander's Quarters—Servants—Office Space—German Prisoners

Chapter 7 Gott Strafe England—und America

Introductory—First Impressions—von Steuben—Ambassador Gerard—Hate—The Lusitania—Post War Attitude—Greeted with Flags—Servility—What Are We Fighting For?

Chapter 8 Squareheads

Our Attitude towards the Germans—Atrocities—Children—Schools—No Poverty—Motor Trucks—Precedence—First Division

Chapter 9 Welfare Workers

Soldiers Want to See Some Skirts—Letter to Carter—Miss Waller and Mrs. Stevens—Y.M.C.A. Building—Shows—Y.M.C.A. Entertainers—Saving the Boxing Game—Chaplains as Managers—Selling Cigarettes—Gift Tobacco

Chapter 10 The School at Trèves

Vocational Work—Dardanelles—Working on Hunches—Augustus Treverorum—Porta Nigra—The School—Politics Back Home

Chapter 11 Belgium

Brussels—Ouf! Ils Sont Partis!—Louvain Victim of Frightfulness—Liège—Ludendorff's Own Story

Chapter 12 Over the Battle Fields

Military Barriers—France and Germany—Area of the Somme, Marne and Meuse-Argonne—Order of Battle

Chapter 13 With the British

Vimy Ridge—General Morrison—Importance—Albert—Third Battle of the Somme—46th British Division—St. Quentin Canal—Bellenglise Tunnel—General Boyd—The Australians—Thiepval Heights—High Woods

Chapter 14 Who Broke the Hindenburg Line?

The Thirtieth Division—Abbéville Agreement—Plan of Operation—How It Came Out—Citations

Chapter 15 With the Americans

Sedan—Stenay—Grand Pré—Amiens—Cantigny

Chapter 16 With the Americans (Cont'd.)

Château Thierry—General Situation—Holding the Bridge—The Second Division—Who Signed the Chit?—Big Bertha—The Third Division—What Makes ‘em Fight?

Chapter 17 With the French

Soissons—First Visit to the Front—Chemin des Dames—Soissons' Last Fight—Laon and Rheims—Verdun—The Human Soup Bowl—Guests of the French Government—The Big Battle—Au Revoir

Chapter 18 Homeward Bound

Heavy Snow—Hôtel Porta Nigra—Waffles and Syrup—Back in Beastly Germany—Chamberlaine's Story—Shake-ups in the Brigade—Big News—Trip to Italy—Demonstration against Wilson—What about George Washington?—C'est Fini

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Portrait of General Hagood

Field Artillery's Caisson Song

Map—The Services of Supply

Your Head May be Hard

Hurry up! C'est la Guerre

Various Supply Plans for A.E.F

S.O.S. Poster. Signed by Pershing

General Pershing talking to British W.A.A.C. Generals Harbord, Hagood, Kernan and McAndrew in the background

Artillery Song—Gruber

Bucking Bronco of 146th F.A. Regiment

Map—Verdun to Coblenz, March of 66th Field Artillery Brigade

Hagood's Brigade Enroute to the Rhine

Soldier Sleeping under Gun near Verdun

Beaulieu—Our Château at Tours

My Billet at Oberehe in Germany

Pontoon Bridge at Coblenz

America Crossing the Rhine—Dec. 13th, 1918

Bassenheim—Our Château near the Rhine

My French aides in Front of my billet at Höhr-Grenzhausen

Map—Area assigned to Third Corps

German Medal to Celebrate Sinking of the Lusitania

They Greeted us with Flags—German Postcards

Our Soldiers Laughed at the Germans

Railway Artillery in Action

Soldiers Dressed as Girls at Y.M.C.A. Dances

Carpentier—French Heavyweight Champion, Staged by Y.M.C.A

Map—Our Trip through Belgium

Roadside Crusifix [sic] and Shrine destroyed by Germans

Returning French Prisoners—at Étain

German Proclamation—Posted in France

Map—Battlefields of France

Map—Somme Area

Map—British 46th Division at St. Quentin

St. Quentin Canal—Where the British Crossed

St. Quentin Canal—Where the Americans Crossed

General Boyd—British Commander 46th Division

General Passaga—French Commander at Verdun

Map—Hindenburg Line, Broken by 27th and 30th

American Divisions

Map—Meuse-Argonne

Map—March of First American Division on Sedan

Map—Marne Area

Map—7th Machine Gun Battalion at Château Thierry

German Castle on the Rhine

Vaux—French Village destroyed by Americans

Trajectory of German Long Range Gun

Map—38th American Infantry on the Marne

The Rheims Cathedral

Street Scene in Soissons

Map—Aisne Marne Offensive

Map—German Advance on Verdun

Italian Poster—Protest against Wilson on Fieume [sic] Question

ABOUT MAJ. GEN. JOHNSON HAGOOD

Lee Hagood (1846–1890), Johnson Hagood's father, was one of eleven children and a Confederate veteran of the Civil War. In 1863 Lee left school to join his older brother Capt. James R. Hagood, who was on his way to eastern Tennessee with the First South Carolina Volunteer Infantry. Failing to locate James, sixteen-year-old Lee was taken under the wing of Brig. Gen. Micah Jenkins, the brigade commander of six South Carolina regiments in Maj. Gen. John Bell Hood's division. Jenkins made Lee an orderly and let him stay with the army throughout the Tennessee campaign. Urged by older brother James to return home, Lee left in late 1863 or early 1864 for South Carolina, where he joined the corps of cadets at the Citadel in Charleston. Although James probably hoped to safeguard his younger brother by sending him away, Lee took the field again in the remaining months of the war with other Citadel cadets in actions around South Carolina. Following the surrender, Lee returned to Barnwell, where he worked on one of his father's plantations, taught school, and eventually took up the insurance business. In 1871, at the age of twenty-five, Lee married Kathleen Rosa Tobin (1851–1914), and Johnson Hagood was born June 16, 1873, near Orangeburg, South Carolina. Lee and Kathleen had three other children, James (who died as a child), Lee, and Alice Kathleen. Young Johnson was namesake of his father's oldest brother, Brig. Gen. Johnson Hagood, C.S.A. (1829–1898).

Young Johnson's father and his brigadier uncle were active in 1870s South Carolina politics as part of the Bourbon era effort to regain control of the state's government from the Reconstruction Republicans. General Hagood was a political ally of the first post-Reconstruction governor of South Carolina, Wade Hampton III, and Lee Hagood was a member of Hampton's Red Shirt Brigade, an armed group used to intimidate blacks and Republicans. When Hampton took the governorship in 1878, he appointed General Hagood as president of the Association of Graduates of the Citadel. General Hagood then led the campaign, ultimately successful in 1882, to recover the Citadel from the federal government, which had requisitioned the school for use as a garrison during Reconstruction. After two interim governors finished Hampton's term when he became U.S. senator, General Hagood won the next election for governor in 1880. Hugh S. Thompson, another of Hampton's allies, succeeded General Hagood as governor, and he appointed Lee to his gubernatorial staff with the rank of colonel. Perhaps indifferent to greater political involvement, Lee Hagood continued to work in the insurance business with several different companies until, at the age of forty-four, he died late on Christmas night 1890 of an accidental gunshot wound.

Young Johnson Hagood attended schools in Orangeburg, Allendale, and Columbia while growing up, and at fifteen, in 1888, he entered the University of South Carolina. A few years later, as he wrote in The Services of Supply, I decided to try for West Point. Actually Hagood applied for appointments to both the U.S. Naval Academy, in a letter dated March 17, 1891, and to the U.S. Military Academy, in a letter dated March 20, 1891. His decision was almost certainly influenced by the loss of his father. An appointment to either academy would have eased the family's financial burden by providing him with an education and a living while he got it. Congressman George Washington Shell of Laurens, South Carolina, the new representative of the Fourth District, nominated him to West Point on June 20, 1891.¹

On June 15, 1892, he entered West Point, where he soon received the first title of distinction…in the military service, to wit, Water Corporal.² Hagood graduated twenty-third in his class in 1896 and was appointed to the artillery as an additional second lieutenant, joining Battery G of the Second Artillery at Fort Adams on Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. He spent the next five years at various artillery posts in Connecticut, Florida, and South Carolina. Just after being posted to Fort Fremont, located on Port Royal Sound a few miles south of Beaufort, South Carolina, he married Jean Gordon Small on December 14, 1899. The newlyweds remained in South Carolina until his promotion in August 1901 to captain, artillery corps. Soon afterward they traveled to West Point, where Hagood taught as an instructor in the Department of Philosophy, a position he held until June 1904.

Hagood returned to troop command at Fort Monroe, Virginia, for a year following his departure from the military academy, and in July 1905 he began the longest period at a single location, Washington, D.C., in his army career. As Hagood says of this time, I was seven years in the War Department. During this time I came in close contact with all the men who played a prominent part in contemporaneous Army affairs and also those who were subsequently to play a big part in the Great War.³ First assigned as an assistant to the chief of coast artillery at the War Department, Hagood served on committees that were developing seacoast fortifications plans.

The first two years he spent in Washington established Hagood's reputation well enough that he was detailed in July 1907 to duty connected to all Army legislation.⁴ Legislative staff duty varies according to the desires of the army chief of staff but would have included acting as a liaison to the various official bodies with interests in army affairs. Performing well in such a sensitive and visible position requires that a junior officer possess sophistication, energy, and good judgment. Much of the time, a legislative staff officer may do little more than research topics and provide answers to requests for information, but he may, if judged able, be called upon to draft legislation and take a personal hand in shepherding it through the process of turning it into law. In all cases he is expected to be an able, if informal, army lobbyist and the professional face of the army any time he is working on Capitol Hill.

Hagood's efficiency reports testify to his success in this arena. In 1907, soon after his arrival, the chief of artillery, Gen. Arthur Murray, wrote in his first report on Hagood that he was a most excellent officer, especially well qualified for work in connection with artillery fire control.⁵ In the next report, Murray had discovered Hagood's broader talents: "a brilliant officer, especially good for work with Congressional Committies [sic].⁶ When Hagood was moved from the office of the artillery chief to the General Staff Corps in November 1908, this appreciation was echoed by others, including the army chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, who wrote in 1911, Major Hagood has rendered most efficient and valuable service in this office during the past year in connection with legislative matters…. He is an officer of marked ability, great application, excellent judgment and high character.⁷ Maj. Gen. J. Franklin Bell, the previous army chief of staff, had called him one of the best officers I know in the army."⁸

The outstanding artifact from this period showing Hagood's skill is the Circular Relative to Pay of Officers and Enlisted Men of the Army. The Circular is a wonderful snapshot of army pay conditions and of the effect those conditions had on the army's recruiting, retention, and every other aspect of maintaining a capable force. A single graphic captures the gist of the story: it shows the forty-five-year change in wages in the manufacturing industries in comparison to army pay. Starting at parity in 1860, by 1905 civilian wages had nearly doubled, while an army private's pay was unchanged. Hagood's compelling presentation helped sell the army pay bill of May 11, 1908, which increased pay across the board.

After leaving Washington, Hagood returned to the life of frequent transfers between posts. With one exception, from June 1912 to July 1917, Hagood never stayed even as long as one year at any post. The exception, his most significant tour of duty during this period, was from May 1913 to September 1915, in the Philippine Islands, where, as a member of Gen. J. Franklin Bell's staff, he was placed in charge of the Corregidor project, a defensive fortification program based on the premise that the keystone in the defense of the Philippine archipelago was the fortification and defense of Manila Bay. To that end, islands in Manila Bay were to be converted into fortified points with nearly two thousand officers and soldiers manning them. In case of war the forts would be held by the army garrison until a naval force dispatched from the United States relieved them.⁹ Hagood later said that his Corregidor responsibilities really laid the basis of the S.O.S. job, because the A.E.F. was Corregidor magnified a hundred thousand times.¹⁰

At the end of this period, Hagood was ordered back to duty in the United States. In September and October 1916, following one assignment in San Diego, California, and on his way to another in South Carolina, he commanded a Business Man's Training Camp in Salt Lake City, Utah, as part of a national military preparedness movement. After the outbreak of fighting in Europe in August 1914 and following a number of serious provocations by the warring powers, many Americans had called for increased military preparedness. As envisioned by proponents, this meant a larger army and navy underpinned by universal service. In advance of an official government response, preparedness advocates established a number of voluntary military training camps across the nation, and army officers attended the camps to provide basic military instruction. The movement became known as the Plattsburg movement, after the encampment held at Plattsburg, New York, in 1915. Theodore Roosevelt and Hagood's old boss at the War Department, Gen. Leonard Wood, were two of the most recognizable national leaders in the movement. President Woodrow Wilson opposed much of the movement's agenda, but for political reasons during the 1916 election campaign he eventually came to support a program of military reform that became the National Defense Act of 1916.

The National Defense Act of 1916, which became law in June 1916, included a comprehensive overhaul of many aspects of the American military. The act authorized a peacetime army of about 11,500 officers and 175,000 combat soldiers—this goal to be reached in annual increases over five years—and a wartime army of about 298,000, a number to be achieved by enlisting volunteers. With additional federal funding and stricter federal guidelines, the act increased the National Guard to more than 400,000 soldiers and made the state formations subject to mandatory call-up by the president and to service wherever he directed. The act also created reserve corps of officers and enlisted men and Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs at colleges and universities. Beyond increases in manpower, the act authorized the president to order industry to provide the materials needed for the national defense and directed the secretary of war to conduct an inventory of all arms and munitions industries. Other congressional initiatives followed, including formation of the Council of National Defense and the U.S. Shipping Board.¹¹

As significant as these changes were, the National Defense Act contained a serious misunderstanding of the organization and management required by modern armed forces. It limited the number of officers who could serve on the existing General Staff Corps and directed that no more than half could be posted to Washington, D.C., at one time. Without an effective General Staff and a strong chief of staff, the army on the eve of war suffered from a divided and internally competitive command system. The various bureau chiefs (ordnance, engineers, quartermaster, etc.) remained in effective control of their respective divisions. By the time of America's entry in the war, so many different centers of power existed in the army bureaucracy that unified action was more the exception than the rule. Hagood wrote that the fourteen years, 1903 to 1917, during which the General Staff had been in existence had not been spent in making plans for war, the purpose for which it was created, but in squabbling over the control of the routine peace-time administration and supply of the Regular Army and in attempts to place the blame for unpreparedness upon Congress.¹² The truth in Hagood's assessment can be seen in Secretary of War Newton D. Baker's extended search, after appointing Gen. John J. Pershing to command the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), for someone to bring order to the chaos that existed in the War Department.

The outbreak of war threw the General Staff's flaws into the open: it was too small, had too few trained officers, and lacked strong central leadership. The staff could scarcely perform its limited war-planning role, let alone act as an effective wartime command and coordinating agency. The staff bureaus had quickly fallen into pushing shortsighted agendas that led them to compete against one another for scarce resources. Secretary Baker sought to impose order from above, and after an eleven-month search he brought in Maj. Gen. Peyton C. March to become chief of staff in March 1918. March was confirmed in that position in May and soon brought to the job the strength of character and discipline required to build a military organization with the necessary efficiency to complete its assigned task. In achieving this goal, March made enemies. His response was that one is proud to be hated, if it is a consequence of doing one's work well.¹³ Hagood called him keen, cold-blooded, and quick on the trigger. He turned the War Department upside down and organized it on a working basis.¹⁴

The same disorganization that prevailed in the General Staff Corps before Major General March's arrival had carried over to European operations, and the army was forced to create entirely new command and control and logistics systems while under pressure from the Allies to commence combat operations. Soon after his arrival in France, Hagood was directed by AEF headquarters to leave his artillery regiment to help lead the reorganization effort. Good administrators and experienced staff officers were as scarce a commodity in France as in Washington, and Col. James A. Logan, Jr., who knew of Hagood's administrative, staff, and troop experiences and of his organizational work on the Corregidor project, recommended him to General Pershing as an officer with the right mix of skills to tackle the problem of supplying American forces in France. When informed of his selection to command the advance section, line of communications, by his brigade commander, Hagood says he asked him what that was. The answer he got was characteristic of the state of the army at the time: He said he did not know. He soon discovered the short answer to his question in an army text that described the function of the L.O.C. as relieving the combatant field forces from every consideration except that of defeating the enemy.¹⁵ Judging by this description alone, Hagood was faced with an extraordinary task. The reality was much worse.

After a month in his new position, Hagood wrote a letter to Pershing's chief of staff, Gen. James G. Harbord. In a paragraph labeled Our own incompetence, he pointed out the danger to the American war effort from the sheer incompetence of its line of communications, beginning in the U.S. and ending at the French front. Not only had the line of communications failed the United States, it was creating problems for the French, for it has so clogged the French railway yards, storehouses and quays in this section as to cause an official complaint to be made to the Commander-in-Chief.¹⁶ Having identified a problem, Hagood was, as in any good military organization, told to solve it. He was directed to convene a conference to bring some order to the situation. Hagood and representatives from the AEF headquarters, the Quartermaster Corps, the Transportation Department, and others produced General Order Number 73, signed by Pershing on December 12, 1917. GO 73 contained the first complete statement of organization, function, authority, and responsibility for an American logistics organization in France. Hagood called it a big improvement but incomplete in that it still suffered from organizational overlaps that complicated carrying out its duties as efficiently as was needed.

In February 1918 Hagood received another call from AEF headquarters. This time he was told he would be the senior member of a board that would consider changes in the present organization of the Headquarters A.E.F.¹⁷ The report of this board ultimately resulted in the creation of the Services of Supply, and soon Hagood was detailed to serve in that organization as chief of staff, a position he held for the remainder of the war. His experiences in that position are covered in detail in The Services of Supply and are summarized in the opening chapter of Caissons.

Historians are fortunate that individuals in important positions are sometimes able to keep a record of their day-to-day experiences. Hagood was in such a position, and he resolved early to keep a journal during the war that ultimately covered the entire period of his involvement, from July 14, 1917 to May 22, 1919. This turned out to be particularly useful when he was asked in December 1919 by the adjutant general of the army, Guy V. Henry, to provide a report, in a form of his own choosing, of his experiences during the war. Hagood responded by writing The Services of Supply: A Memoir of the Great War, which drew on the entries from his journal from its beginning through the armistice. This work is one of the few detailed studies of U.S. Army logistics of the First World War.

Hagood intended to follow this first volume with a second, also based on his wartime journal. Evidence suggests that he began work on it soon after publication of The Services of Supply, certainly completing the text before 1940 and perhaps, as suggested by the date on his preface, as early as 1931. This second text, which he titled Caissons Go Rolling Along: A Memoir of America in Germany, covers Hagood's remaining days in Europe, from the armistice until his arrival in New York on May 22, 1919. The Allied occupation of the German Rhineland was the key event of this period, and Hagood reports the part he played. In itself his official role in the occupation was unremarkable because the total time of his involvement was quite short and even then he was often away from his command on other duties. Hagood's account is significant because of the picture he paints of the attitudes and conditions that existed in Germany and those he found in other places where he traveled. Caissons also establishes a clear baseline against which to measure the shift in American attitudes toward the Allies, especially the French, over the next few years.

The occupation of the Rhineland by the Allies was contentious from the start. France insisted on the occupation as a guarantee of German good behavior, with the unstated, but understood, desire that the region be separated from Germany and either joined to France or established as a neutral buffer state. The United States and Britain had little sympathy for that program and initially resisted the effort to impose any occupation at all. In the end both nations went along with their French ally, but without enthusiasm. As Hagood makes clear, he was in full sympathy with French intentions to impose a harsh peace, and from his perspective the Germans deserved any punishment they suffered, a view probably shared by most American servicemen who marched into Germany from the devastated front lines in France. However, the attitudes of those who remained long in Germany soon shifted, especially those of the senior leadership of the American occupation forces, who had to deal with French pressures, but also those of the rank and file, who changed their view of Germans once they were required to live among them, a point upon which Hagood touches. At the end of the American involvement, this shift had gone so far that even the German government saw the Americans as sympathetic to their circumstances. They pressed their point, hoping to keep in place in the Rhineland a counterforce to the French, by sending requests to the government in Washington to maintain the American presence on the Rhine.

The last entry in Caissons marks Hagood's return to the United States in May 1919 to a reemerging peacetime army at Camp Eustis, Virginia. At the end of June 1920, when many officers holding temporary wartime commissions reverted to their regular ranks, Hagood was promoted to the permanent rank of brigadier general after four short days at his regular army rank of colonel. During the next decade and a half, he returned to the regular round of assignments, moving from one army post to another. He commanded the Fourth Coast Artillery District, Atlanta, Georgia; Camp Stotsenburg in the Philippines; and the Second Coast Artillery District, Fort Totten, New York, through August 1925. Promoted then to major general, Hagood took command of Fourth Corps in Atlanta. Another assignment to the Philippines followed from 1927 to 1929, when he commanded the Philippine Division and Fort McKinley, near Manila. Returning from the Philippines, Hagood assumed corps and army commands.

In 1936, while in command of the Eighth Corps area, headquartered at San Antonio, Texas, Hagood was asked to testify before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Government Spending. The subcommittee was collecting information for the new budget, and as part of a fact-finding expedition, members of the subcommittee had visited Hagood's headquarters in San Antonio to discuss army housing programs in his area. Afterward, in December 1935, Rep. Thomas L. Blanton requested that Hagood come before the subcommittee in Washington to testify. The congressmen wanted candid answers, so they assured Hagood that his remarks would be in confidence. As ever when remarks are made in a political setting, even in confidence, the word soon got out. Before sitting down with the subcommittee, Hagood exchanged notes and met with Gen. Malin Craig, the army chief of staff, and with others in the War Department to inform them of his testimony. He did not, he said, inform them of my exact language. That is, I told them that I was going to try to get good money for permanent construction in place of the easy money which was being wasted by the WPA [Works Progress Administration].¹⁸ General Hagood then appeared before the subcommittee and gave his testimony in a closed-door session and believed that was the end of the matter. Six weeks later Hagood learned that the hearing minutes were to be made public, and he attempted to have his remarks suppressed, unsuccessfully. Time magazine reported some of his remarks, and they exhibit the sense of frustration a good troop commander must feel at being unable to take proper care of his soldiers for want of sufficient resources.

I want to say to you gentlemen that, since I came home from the World War, I have seen families of soldiers