Racine County, Wisconsin - Chapter with an unread heading (no. 33 of those read), 1920

Some Figures And Facts About Casualties

DEATH was not a usurer in collecting his toll from the ambulance loads of American wounded who i-eached hospitals in the A. E. F. Of 222,252 soldiers admitted suffering from wounds, only six percent died. The actual number of deaths was 13,866. These figures are based on reports received in Washington up to June 1, and tabulated by the Statistics Branch of the General Staff of the War Department.

The tabulated figures are illuminating testimonials to the relative deadliness of the methods used by the Germans in close-range fighting. Perhaps the outstandmg fact is the proof afforded by the figures that German gas really was a menacing casualty factor, a fact that the A. E. P., as well as the British and French furces, concealed for obvious reasons while the fighting was on.

The War Department table shows that enemy gas caused twice as many hospital casualties as any other factor, and the death rate among those gassed was fairly high. The total number of gassed American soldiers admitted to hospitals was 74, .573, and of these 1,194 died, a death rate of two percent.

Shrapnel was responsible for the next highest number of men admitted for a single cause of wounds, the total being 32,753, with 2,074 deaths, or six percent. High explosive shells caused a death rate of twelve percent, among those admitted to hospitals, 2,058 men dying out of 16,740 admitted. Of 19,.528 men wounded by rifle balls, 980 died in hospital.

The figures disprove a popular belief that bayonets cause many wounds - a belief which never was shared by Army men familiar with modern fighting. Classified as wounds from cutting or piercing instruments, bayonet wounds numbered only 181, and only ten men wounded by bayonets died in hospitals. The so-called liquid fire sent only 21 men to the hospitals, and none of these died. Twelve soldiers were wounded by clubs in the hands of Germans.

admitted to hospitals suffering from wounds of unclassified origin, as hospital surgeons in many cases were unable to determine definitely just how wounds had been received. Ten percent, of men in this classification died, a total of 7,413.

In addition to the 222,252 soldiers admitted to hospitals suffering from casualties inflicted by the enemy, there were 6,512 admitted as casualties from causes other than enemy action or disease, and of this number 4,394 died. Explosions were the greatest single factor of this class, being responsible for 813 patients, of whom 15 died. Airplane accidents sent 148 to hospital, 36 of whom died. The Army mule, assisted by the Army horse, accounted for 68 casualties, only one of which proved fatal. Extreme heat knocked out 24 men temporarily and killed one, and extreme cold disabled 60. Lightning killed one man.

Eleven men collapsed during drills and were sent to hospitals. Athletics transformed 150 players into patients, and five soldiers were admitted as injured in "fighting brawls." Illfitting shoes put 68 men in hospital. A rather ambiguous classification, "hot liquids," accounted for 43 patients, although the cognac casualties are not believed to have been included in this figure.

Soldiers who go into battle are like men who go down to the sea in ships. There are those who return and those who do not, those who live and those who die. And then there are those who dwell for years in a twilight zone of uncertainty, neither life nor death, from which no word ever comes back to the shores called home.

The newspapers of the country announced that there were no more members of the A. E. F. "missing in action." The only reason they are not missing in action is that they have been "presumed dead."

There are still between 250 and 300 members of the American front-line Army unaccounted for, who, carried on the rolls for months and months as missing in action, seem to have disappeared from the battlefield as if by the wave of a magician's hand, leaving neither the ripple of a rumor behind them, the testimony of an eye, nor a footprint in all the paths of the world.

They are the irreducible minimum of the 50,- 000 lost, strayed or stolen men that the A. E. F. carried on the morning of November 12, 1918, as missing in action. To guard against injustice to their relatives or friends, the War Department has ordered that from henceforth they be carried as "presumed dead" instead of "missing in action," in order that their War Risk insurance benefits may be paid. That in brief explains why the American Army as it stands demobilized today technically has no "missing in action."

To get the 50,000 missing from the battlefield on the morning after the armistice down to less than 300 is a very creditable consummation of an unusually complicated and tedious piece of work, while the ways and means used are well worth while recording.

While the war was on, periodic alphabetical lists of the missing in action were made by liaison maintained between the Central Records Office and the Provost Marshal General's office, and these lists distributed to every nook and corner of Europe. They went certainly to all organization commanders, to all hospitals, to all M. P. headquarters, to all hospitals and convalescent camps, to all ports, to all prisons in enemy territory, to the headquarters of all Allied Armies and to numerous other places that from time to time suggested themselves as mediums.

As fast as missing men were found - and those who handled the records know under what queer circumstances and in what almost uncanny ways some of them were found - others would take their place in this scattered as well as lost battalion. Its ranks were always well filled, and the 50,000 that were missing at the close of the war by no means represents the sum total of all the men carried as missing in action during the war. Three times that number would be a safe and conservative estimate of the number of Americans who disappeared from the friendly eyes of their comrades on A. E. F. battlefields in ways unaccounted for.

With the firing of the last gun, however, and the realization that at last the list of missing in action was stationary, the men at the Central Records Office at Bourges began a determined effort to clear up the 50,000 names whose presence on that list was casting a shadow mingled of dread and hope in thousands of American homes.

The first step taken was the compilation of all of the names, together with their organizations and the date upon which each was last seen and accounted for, in book form. That little baby-blue colored book, prefaced by a statement from the Adjutant General of the A. E. F., went to all the mediums through which it had been found possible to locate missing men.

Diligent searches were of course made in hospitals. A careful check was made against the reports of the Graves Registration Service as isolated and unknown dead were found and identified. Agents were sent out to search every homegoing list. As organizations came and went through Le Mans or moved through other central points, their rosters were gone over and many of the missing found. The return of our prisoners from Germany accounted for several.

In the meantime, the personnel officers of all organizations in the A. E. F. had been summoned to Bourges to make a check in person of their rosters against the missing in action list, and the number of missing had been reduced from 50,000 to 25,905.

It is a toss-up as to which is the hardest to explain, the way the men got lost or the way they turned up. Not a few of them went to France for the express purpose of getting lost - not a few were German spies. There were others who had no special leanings toward the enemy or his lines, but, quite to the contrary, were moved by a decided disinclination to contact with him. Many who were carried as missing in action were simply AWOL, just as it was inversely found that many AWOL's were realy missing in action.

were found, however, in hospitals and organizations other than their own. More than half of the 50,000 missing at the close of the war were found in this way. Another goodly portion were discovered to have put one over on all concerned and gotten away to the States. Several cases are on record of adventurous ones who disguised themselves in various ways and betook themselves on cattle boat or freighter to some strange parts and eventually back to the U. S. A.

The final official figures on the search for the 25,905 missing in action show that 23 percent, of them were dead, 16 percent, prisoners, 25 percent, lost from their organizations and subsequently returned, and 36 percent, sick or wounded in hospitals.

In the last days of September 1919 there was more than one homegoing from those parts of France which are now beginning to classify their memories of the A. E. F. While the tail end of the A. E. F. itself was wagging on the French coast, there was under way the exodus of the last of the 49,000 German prisoners who had been held in .American camps since the armistice.

The German prisoners on September 1 numbered more than 40,000, almost 10,000 having been previously repartriated for various reasons. The total number of prisoners in the custody of the A. E. F. was 49,884, according to the latest revised figures, and this number included 737 Austrians.

The Inter-Allied Council in the middle of September notified the War Department at Washington by cable that all enemy prisoners would be released as soon as possible, and would not be held until the ratification of the Peace Treaty by all the signatories. The Council gave September 30 as the date when all the prisoners held by the Americans would be out of France.

The United States maintained its own good name throughout by its administration of its Prisoner of War camps in France. Despite the fact that 2,719 of the prisoners were suffering from wounds when taken, there were only a few hundred deaths in the camps. Clothed, housed, and fed as well as the average American units in permanent posts, the German prisoners were so well treated that they came to feel themselves a part of the A. E. F., so much so that a group of them at Brest proudly decorated themselves with service stripes six months after they had been captured. They were dressed in bright green uniforms, made over and colored from the doughboy's discards, with the familiar stenciled letters "P. W." as an additional distinction. The prison camps were the only places in the A. E. F. where goldfish was not in disfavor, although the sample menus that Uncle Sam's propaganda department distributed so liberally behind the German lines had not been specific about the kind of "fisch" that would be served to all who wanted to come over and get it.

The principal Prisoner of War enclosures were at Is-sur-Tille, in the Advance Section, and at St.-Pierre-des-Corps, on the outskirts of Tours. From these two points the prisoners were transferred to labor companies, approximately 125 in number each, scattered throughout France.

With the going of the German prisoners, the homeward movement of their keepers also began. Members of the Out-of-Luck Club - 7,488 Yanks - composed the 104 Prisoner of War Escort Companies on September 1. They started for the United States in detachments as the prisoners started for Germany.

Thirteen cents out of each dollar spent in the war for strictly army purposes was devoted to the pay of officers and enlisted men, and the total pay roll of the army for the 25 months of the war up to May 1, 1919, was $1,831,273,000, which is more than the combined salaries of all the public school teachers and principals in the United States for the five years from 1912 to 1916.

Eliminating the $10,000,000,000 which the United States has lent the Allies, subject to repayment, the cost of the war to the end of April was $21,850,000,000, according to government statisticians. This figure includes such items as the building of ships for the Emergency Fleet Corporation, the construction and operation of naval vessels, food, clothing, pay, and land and ocean transportation of the army, which cost almost as much after the Armistice as during the fighting. The sum actually expended on the army account was $14,244,061,- 000. Deducting from this sum the average peace time expenditures of the army, the statisticians estimate an army expenditure of $13,- 930,000,000 directly chargeable to the war.

The total cost of the war, $21,850,000,000, represented an average of $1,000,000 an hour for the whole twenty-five months. The total is twenty times the pre-war debt of the United States. It is nearly enough to have paid the

Top Row - John C. Powers. F. C. Bronenkart. H. D. Oneson. G. W. Stettler, Fred I. Hansen, J. A. Huck. O. Goldbeck. Second - W. W. Feiker. Lawrence A. Nelson, N. I. Peil, Roit. A. Jacobsen, N. M. C. Due, G. O. Downing, Frank Lipp. Third - R. S. Kinreed, J. A. Mutchic, R. Koblisek, L. A. Bu terfield, F N. Seibold, F. S. Baedon, L. M. Pfeiter. Fourth - Christ Sondergaard, H. Roeschcn, W. F. Gersonde, A. M. Hardie, A. W. Gerber, P. Matvenik, Alfred Markusson. Fifth - Sigwart Simonson, P. S. Peterson, A. F. Barltel, J. G. Tessner, F. C. Benecik, Edw. Kruppstadt, Chas. P. Beyer. Bottom - E. A. Chmel. Erick Hack. B. A. McGregor. E. A. Brook. Mike Bilen. Christ Poulson. Lewis H. Lasch.

entire costs of the United States Government from 1791 up to the outbreak of the European war. It was suflficient to have carried on the Revolutionary War for a thousand years at the rate of money-spending that war involved.

In addition to the thirteen cents for pay, for each dollar directly expended for army purposes, the following- distribution was figured: Quartermaster, 44 cents; Ordnance, 29 cents; Air Service, 6 cents; Engineers, 4 cents; Medical, 2 cents; Signal Corps and miscellaneous, 2 cents.

The General who feared men would get undisciplined if they were not drilling twelve hours every day, including Sunday, when they were presumed to be in a "rest area."

"Medical officers and nurses were discovered at not a few of the camps deliberately injecting the virus of influenza into the veins of soldiers who presented themselves at infirmaries and hospitals for treatment. Camp Upton and

"Of course the fiends were members of the German intelligence section masquerading as American officers. They were treated none too gently, ."^n immediate court-martial. Sentence of death. A firing squad the next morning.

"At least six nurses had already been executed. There was no telling how many such spies, male and female, were circulating freely through the camps. It was appalling. What was to be done ? Could the Medical Department as a whole be trusted since it was so contaminated ? And if the Medical Department was a festering sore of kultur, how could victory be won?"

The one comforting feature of this second barrage of hectic imaginings was that it was so preposterous that many of those who saw beneath the surface were not caught in it. But there are always the gullible and the excessively gullible.

Here is how the story originated. The facts were dug up by members of our Military Intelligence Department. It must be set down first that no American medical officer and no member of the Army Nurse Corps ever was suspected, or tried for such despicable treason. At two or three camps visiting parents and soldiers were near the infirmaries when the anti-pneumonia vaccine was being administered to groups of men. They were lined up by units, their arms bared, to facilitate and speed the work. With thousands of men to be so treated no time could be lost. Each injection took but an instant, and the lines were constantly moving.

Someone messed up these terms in his head. Then, establishing his own premises, he put two and two together. Officers were shooting men with flu germs. The tale, once started, gathered material and momentum with the speed and force of a mountain slide. Nurses were brought in to garnish it. It would never have done to neglect the romantic feminine appeal.

The final passing of the flu epidemic garnered in this crop of distortions - but not before the rumor had found its way into print under the label of fact and been strenuously denied in official announcements.

"Over at Camp Grant they are just dying by the hundreds. Three of our undertakers and one from Beloit worked with all the Rockford undertakers all one night last week getting bodies ready to be sent awajf." Mr. Wilbeek said the bodies were piled sixteen deep waiting to be cared for. They found one old villain guilty over there this week - a doctor. Every soldier in his camp died. They became suspicious of him, examined his medicine and found poison in it, so they took him out, made him dig his own grave, and shot him right down. Even that was too good, though."

"There have been no more insidiously false reports come to my attention than those, recently widely spread, to the effect that nurses and medical officers have been executed at the 'stage hour' of sunrise for spreading influenza or pneumonia germs among soldiers.

"The reports are ridiculous and without the slightest foundation of fact. They have taken many forms, but through them all has run such a significant likeness of texture that it is not unlikely that the German propagandist is taking advantage of and spreading them. Unfortunately, as is so frequently the case, those behind the baseless reports have been and are being aided in the nefarious dissemination of them by many thoughtless persons who have not taken the time to investigate before passing the reports on."