Fairgrounds were training camp for WWI ambulance drivers

ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) - Since its debut in 1852, the Allentown Fair has been a source of spirited, end-of-summer entertainment.

Only twice in its history did the fair take a break. The first time was during the Civil War. The second happened 100 years ago this month when the federal government leased the 46-acre tract in west Allentown for $37,000 a year, turning it into Camp Crane, the only training ground for the U.S. Army Ambulance Service.

Young recruits poured in from all corners of the country, their accents and backgrounds different but their purpose the same: to volunteer for a necessary but dangerous job. On the fair’s racetrack, they practiced evacuation drills they would use on the French and Italian front lines, where their job was to evacuate wounded soldiers to field hospitals.

“A lot of people going to the fairgrounds every year never think about the military camp that was once there, let alone how important a role it played during World War I,” said Jill Youngken, chief curator of the Lehigh Valley Heritage Museum in Allentown.

“You’re thinking about eating, entertainment and having fun - not people training to help wounded soldiers overseas. And these men went to the front lines just like the regular soldiers. What they were doing was just as dangerous and not a cakewalk by far.”

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Camp Crane, the Lehigh Valley Heritage Museum is showcasing artifacts associated with the camp installation in an exhibit that will run through at least the end of the year. And when the fair opens in August, the Lehigh County Agricultural Society, which runs the fair, will display a replica 1916 Ford Model T ambulance like the ones used during World War I.

According to the Agricultural Society, Camp Crane - named in honor of Brig. Gen. Charles H. Crane, surgeon general of the Army 1882 to 1883 - had between 4,000 and 5,000 men stationed on the grounds at any given time. Trainees set up in the horse barns, pig pens and sheds, according to the Army Medical Department Office of Medical History website. Photos show lines of white tents in the grassy area where today stands the grandstand stage where artists such as Bruno Mars and Brad Paisley have performed.

“To bed at 9:30 in a horse stall - oh well, remember the Nativity,” Guy Bowerman, a trainee from Idaho wrote in his diary, The Compensations of War. He was not impressed with the mess hall, referring to his first meal as “a terrible thing consisting of liver and onions.”

Trainees, who became known as USAACs, lamented marching exercises that took them back and forth across the grounds and on hikes in Bath, Catasauqua, Emmaus, Lehighton, Tobyhanna and Guth’s Station in South Whitehall Township, where wetlands provided field training for marching through mud.

Men were arriving in such great numbers that if a battalion were not taken out on a hike, “utter chaos would have developed,” according to “The History of the United States Army Ambulance Service with the French and Italian Armies,” written in 1967 by John R. Smucker Jr.

That book notes that USAAC casualties were many, with 106 killed in action, 76 eventually dying from wounds, 242 from disease and 22 from accidents. Five ambulance crew members took their own lives and 16 died from miscellaneous causes. In addition, 228 others were wounded, five were gassed and 40 were taken prisoner.

“The ambulance man goes under fire as cheerfully as the infantrymen,” wrote Lawrence Flick Jr. in a June 1917 Philadelphia Record article republished in Lehigh County Historical Society’s “Proceedings” in 1978.

“It is highly responsible service, for he has in his charge the lives of helpless comrades. He will work long hours. Often he will go without food and sleep. He will have to make quick decisions, and take desperate chances.”

If the war’s most famous ambulance driver - author Ernest Hemingway, who volunteered for the Red Cross and was wounded in Italy - trained in Allentown, there’s no record of it. However, novelist John Dos Passos attended Camp Crane and wrote of his training there in the novel “Three Soldiers.”

Dos Passos, from Harvard, and trainee Bowerman, from Yale, were joined by other university students - including 15 All-American football players - and men from all walks of life, such as silent-film star Adolphe Menjou, Pulitizer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield and Nicola Iacocca, father of automobile executive and Allentown native Lee Iacocca, according to the Agricultural Society.

During its two-year run, Camp Crane trained more than 20,000 men, including about 2,000 officers, to be ambulance drivers, the Army Medical Department site notes.

Apparently, the grandstands were a selling point for the Army, which hailed the structure as “modern in every particular,” Jeff Klinger, who has studied Camp Crane and is involved in the project that replicated the 1916 ambulance, noted at a recent America on Wheels presentation.

Constructed of brick over heavy steel frame and offering seating for 10,000, the building featured “spacious offices, an express office, telegraph office and a small jail,” as well as lavatories with more than “100 flush closets.” An on-site steam plant heated the camp’s buildings, which had running water and electricity.

Under the grandstand, “restaurant facilities” offered seating for more than 2,500 people and large kitchens resembling those found in prestigious hotels, said Klinger, citing Army Medical Department literature.

Near the main gate, under a grove of trees, a medical tent was set up “where they shot us full of vaccines and viruses,” wrote the Rev. William E. Brooks in an account published in the Smucker book.

Rising at 5:30 a.m., the trainees spent the next 11 hours exercising, studying, drilling, learning first aid and how to repair the ambulances, Flick wrote in The Philadelphia Record. They also learned how to drive, a skill new to many since the automobile was still in its infancy and relatively few people owned one.

In their down time, the men played baseball and football, watched movies on a screen set up in front of the grandstand and attended concerts by the camp band, including one featuring guest conductor John Philip Sousa, the Army Medical Department site notes. In honor of the ambulance corps, Sousa wrote “The USAAC March” in 1919.

With music came dances that the community organized, along with dinners and other entertainment meant to keep up the men’s morale. Estelle Reninger of Allentown, noted the dances in her 1918 diary. She also wrote about making surgical bandages for the Red Cross and attending patriotic gatherings.

“Went out to see bayonett drill, very interesting, then walked past Major Rausch’s quarters and to the Ammunition Train - as usual had a reception on Henry Leh’s porch - saw General Biery, Colonels Trexler and Young again just before they left for home,” read her April 3, 1918, entry.

The community so supported the camp that children started a penny donation, raising enough money to buy the camp’s commandant, Col. Elbert E. Persons, a watch, according to the USAAC 50th reunion program. With assistance from Gen. Harry Trexler, they presented the watch on Aug. 29, 1917, which was Romper Day, with a promise that they would include the colonel and his men in their daily prayers.

The first contingent from Camp Crane arrived in France on Aug. 21, 1917, the Army Medical Department site notes. The camp would send drivers to the front lines until the war ended in November 1918. The Army dismantled the camp and turned it back to the Agricultural Society on April 10, 1919.

The story of those men is captured in the Heritage Museum’s display, which includes photos and accounts of other World War I servicemen such as Allentown’s Franklin Koehler, who saw action in the Meuse Argonne Offensive; and W. Robert Carl, who transported supplies to the front line under the cover of darkness.

Other highlights of the exhibit include battalion photos, patriotic folk art, wartime sheet music, a shaving kit, Army-issued hats and boots, a brass knuckle trench knife and the story of Bethlehem Steel’s substantial contribution to the war effort.

The exhibit highlights an era when the nation was focused on one thing - a war to end all wars.

“Nowadays, we get a million things bombarding us at the same time. But, in 1917, you’re listening to President Wilson articulate why we need to go to war and that’s all you heard,” Youngken said.

There was a sense, she said, that if we didn’t go to war, the world as people knew it would change dramatically. That’s why men volunteered to be ambulance drivers and soldiers, she said. That’s why they made tremendous sacrifices.

___

TIMELINE

.On May 24, 1917, the Lehigh County Agricultural Society signs a $37,000 annual lease with the federal government, establishing a World War I training camp for the U.S. Army Ambulance Service at the Allentown fairgrounds.

.More than 20,000 men - 2,085 officers and 18,255 enlisted men - are trained to be ambulance drivers at Camp Crane.

.Among the trainees are novelist John Dos Passos, silent-film actor Adolphe Menjou, Pulitizer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield and Nicola Iacocca, father of automobile executive Lee Iacocca.

.The grandstand, hailed as “modern in every particular,” features spacious offices, lavatories with more than 100 “flush closets” and a dining room with seating for over 2,500 people.

.On April 10, 1919, the fairgrounds are turned back over to the agricultural society.

Sources: Lehigh County Agricultural Society, U.S. Army Medical Department Office of Medical History and “The History of the United States Army Ambulance Service with the French and Italian Armies”

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/2qs8x0U

___

Information from: The Morning Call, https://www.mcall.com