Harold Johnston's war

     Dad joined the Kansas National Guard shortly after the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917.  The picture of him on this blog was taken about that time.  In August, the Kansas and Missouri National Guards were called into active service and merged into the 35th U.S. Infantry Division. They trained at Camp Doniphan in Fort Sill, Oklahoma.  They left there in early April 1918, sailing first to Liverpool before arriving in Le Harve, France a month later.  Once there, the soldiers were stripped of diaries, such as the one Dad had been keeping, and given combat equipment and moved to a relatively quiet sector in the Vosges Mountains in eastern France to get some experience before being thrown into full-scale combat.
      That combat came on the morning of September 26, 1918 just south of a little village called Vauquois.  The Germans had fortified a hill south of the village.  Butte Vauquois is still there and the entrenchments. have been preserved.
Vauquois map
      Dad was in a machine gun company.  The battle order for that morning, which I obtained from the National Archives, assigned Dad's company to what was called Buzemont hill to the south of Butte Vauquois with instructions to direct fire at the Butte.  Dad's diary, which he retrieved after the war, recalls the machine guns began firing at 5:30 a.m. and continued for twenty-eight minutes.  Then their comrades in the trenches "went over the top" in Dad's words, and the machine guns fired over their heads for another nineteen minutes.
       So this is where I plan to start my day on September 26, 2018 although maybe not at 5:30 a.m.  You can get future postings automactically by submitting your email address in the space to the right.