From Cowboy to Doughboy: North Texas in WWI: Mobilization for “The Great War”

World War I battlefield photo

World War I wasn’t, as prolific writer H.G. Wells labeled it, the “war that will end war,” but it was a war that profoundly changed the world, the United States, Texas and Fort Worth.

The war marked the beginning of the American Century, started the nation on the path to superpower status and set the stage for the next century of war and warfare. Almost 1 million Texans registered for the draft, 198,000 served and 5,171 Texans died in service. That number could potentially be almost twice as high; a third of the casualties occurred in the United States, many of them from the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918.

Officially, World War I began on July 28, 1914, and ended Nov. 11, 1918. The United States entered it April 6, 1917.

But I am convinced that the United States, although officially neutral at the time, entered the war in 1914, possibly earlier, because the German government was attempting to destabilize the United States by encouraging Mexico and Japan to side with Germany in future conflicts.

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In 1914, the United States declared an embargo on arms shipments to Mexico and ultimately seized the Mexican port of Vera Cruz after learning that a German steamer, the SS Ypiranga, was about to deliver weapons and munitions to the Mexican government.

In 1917, German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann sent a telegram to the Mexican government suggesting that Germany would continue training officers for the Mexican army and supplying arms as well as munitions if Mexico would attack the United States from the south should the United States declare war with Germany. In return, Germany supposedly promised that Mexico would get back the territory lost in the Mexican-American War – Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

I’m not convinced yet that the Zimmerman telegram actually put the United States into the war, but right after that Congress declared war. The Zimmerman telegram was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back.

LOCAL EFFORTS

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At that time, Ben E. Keith, founder of the food supply company that is still in business and still bears his name, was president of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, which was started in 1913 by Fort Worth Star-Telegram founding publisher Amon G. Carter.

Keith was in San Antonio on business when he learned that Congress had declared war on Germany. He rushed back to Fort Worth because he knew the city would be an ideal place to build a base and it might also be a good place to build airfields.

Keith set up a community group and headed for Washington in April or May 1917 to lobby for bases in Fort Worth, and he invited a military inspection team to visit. Fort Worth leaders had decided to offer the military the Arlington Heights area, a failed subdivision dating to the 1880s. Sewers and other infrastructure were already in place.

The military inspection team arrived by rail in the middle of a drenching rain that was causing flooding in Fort Worth, including Arlington Heights. Fort Worth leaders were distraught, but the generals were delighted because the area was draining so well.

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The first military airplanes had come to Fort Worth in 1915. Gen. Benjamin Foulois, who was in charge of the first airplane owned and used by the U.S. Army, was stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio in 1910. His U.S. Air Force biography says that he was “the only pilot, navigator, instructor, observer and commander in the heavier-than-air division of the U.S. Army from November 1909 to April 1911.”

Foulois had visited Fort Worth as a guest of Carter – also an early proponent of aviation – and Keith had met the general then. Keith headed back to Washington for dinner with Foulois, who had been talking to Canadian officers about establishing a flying field in Texas, where the weather was more conducive to year-round training. Foulois had to leave the dinner early, but he took out a cigarette paper and, according to local historian J’Nell L. Pate, wrote a note on it to Brig. Gen. Cuthbert G. “Frog” Hoare, commander of the Canadian Royal Flying Corps. It said, “Do what you can for this Texan.”

Waco wanted an airfield, as did Dallas and Mineral Wells. But the Canadians decided to build them all in Fort Worth, which is how the city got three Royal Flying Corps airfields as well as Camp Bowie. Construction started in the early summer of 1917 and troops began showing up in August. By the time the airfields were finished in the fall, Fort Worth had grown from about 70,000 residents to almost 130,000.

The economy of Texas had changed little since the Civil War, but the biggest change was the growth of railroads, which were vital to the movement of people and materiel, and by 1911 Texas had the most railroad mileage in the United States. It still does.

ECONOMIC IMPACT

And this is where the true economic impact of the First World War was first evident. Texas started the war with six army camps and no airfields. By the end of the war, Texas had 24 camps and 15 airfields, almost half of all the military operations in the United States.

At the start of the war, there were between 20 and 50 airplanes in the entire country – the numbers vary. There were only 750 airplanes in the world at the beginning of the war in 1914. By the end of the war, there were more than 250,000 airplanes.

But the military buildup was only part of what was happening in Fort Worth. The city was also moving livestock across the world. In 1903, more than 732,000 animals passed through the Stockyards in Fort Worth. By 1909, that number was just over 2 million.

Fort Worth started supplying livestock to Europe in 1914, mostly horses and mules, which were heavily used for transportation in World War I. By 1917, the Stockyards saw the largest exchange of livestock in the world.

Day laborers were getting $2.50 a day. That’s about $47 a day right now. Carpenters were getting $8 a day. That’s $150 a day now. Skilled labor was in short supply. Construction of Camp Bowie cost $3 million in 1917, the equivalent to $65 million today.

The total investment in the camps and airfields was $11 million, about $206 million it today’s dollars, just for the military infrastructure. That doesn’t include what it cost to feed the horses and the people and take care of 40,000 troops that were here. The military had not yet become mechanized with internal combustion engine vehicles and was using mostly horses.

Fort Worth had three of the six Texas airfields: Taliaferro One, which we know as Hicks; Barron Field or Taliaferro Two, off Everman Parkway; and Taliaferro Three, which was in Carruthers just north of Benbrook.

Barron Field was kind of a basic training field and was used for learning how to fly formation. Taliaferro Three was primarily for photo reconnaissance and reconnaissance training. Taliaferro One taught bombing and air-to-air gunnery.

In 2012, Florence Green, a member of Britain’s Royal Air Force who was afraid of flying, died in England two weeks shy of her 111th birthday. The New York Times reported that she was believed to have been the last living veteran of the tens of millions who served in the war. She joined the R.A.F. as a teenager shortly before war’s end and worked in an officer’s mess on the home front.

Most of the structures and other parts of Camp Bowie and the Canadian airfields are gone now. But the most somber reminder of World War I in Fort Worth is in a Greenwood Cemetery plot where 11 members of the Royal Flying Corps who died in training here and the daughter of an enlisted man are buried in what is British soil in recognition of their service to the United Kingdom.

It is a restful place to contemplate the tumult of a war that changed the world. Texas had been introduced to the world, and the world had been introduced to Texas and neither has been the same since.

Jim Hodgson is executive director of the Fort Worth Aviation Museum

jhodgson@ftwaviation.com

fortworthaviationmuseum.com

“COWBOY TO DOUGHBOY”

NORTH TEXAS IN WWI EXHIBIT

Fort Worth Central Library

Opening Reception: July 9, 3 to 5 p.m.

Exhibit dates: July 9 through Oct. 19

500 W. Third St.

(817) 392-7323

Admission: free

For hours see:

fortworthtexas.gov/library/branches/central

General exhibit information:

northtexasworldwar1centennial.org

Lectures and movies scheduled:

northtexasworldwar1centennial.org/events