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On Our Covers
of Battle of the United States Land Forces in the World War, Zone of the Interior: Directory of Troops. Vol. 3, Part 3. Washington, D.C.: 1988. See Hathitrust.org (accessed 27 July 2017).
Mauer, Mauer. The U.S. Air Service in World War I. Volume II. Washington, DC: GPO, 1978. See https:// media.defense.gov/mwg-internal/de5fs23hu73ds/pr ogress?id=feBtzAPuwIszADWbwuIYu2xqJyQJR0qLQvblce8JGU, (accessed 27 July 2017).
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Peter L. Belmonte is a retired U.S. Air Force officer, author, and historian. A veteran of Operation Desert Storm, he holds a master’s degree in history from California State University, Stanislaus. He has published articles, book chapters, reviews, and papers about immigration and military history. Belmonte has written four books: Italian Americans in World War II (2001); Days of Perfect Hell: The U.S. 26th Infantry Regiment in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, October-November, 1918 (2015); Calabrian-Americans in the U.S. Military During World War I (2017); and America’s Immigrant Doughboys: The Forgotten Soldiers, 1916–1918 (with Alexander F. Barnes, forthcoming).
Notes
1. To avoid excessive, repetitive footnotes, the author has included a complete list of the online sources used for the raw data for this article; please see the “SOURCES” section of the article. 2. For example, Anthony Spizzirri, who owned a tailor shop in
Chicago, enlisted in the Navy at Great Lakes Naval Training
Station, Illinois, on 25 April 1918. He is listed as being 5 feet, 4.75 inches tall and weighing 179 pounds, and his enlistment papers bear the notation: “Obesity waived for special duty as tailor.” Louis Bruno was co-owner of a tailor shop in Chicago; on 27 May 1918, Bruno enlisted in the Navy at Great Lakes. He was 5 feet 2.75 inches tall and weighed 116 pounds. His enlistment document bears the notation, “Underheight and underweight waived for special duty.” Both men were enlisted as firemen first class. See Louis Bruno and Anthony Spizzirri, U.S. Navy Service
Record, National Archives and Records Administration, St.
Louis, Missouri; copies in the author’s possession. Also see Peter
L. Belmonte, Calabrian-Americans in the U.S. Military During
World War I (CreateSpace, 2017). 3. On 9 September 1918, while on her return trip to North America, the Missanabie, a former British passenger steamer, was torpedoed and sunk off the southern coast of Ireland with a loss of forty-five lives. German U-boat UB–87 fired the fatal torpedo.
See http://uboat.net/wwi/ships_hit/4178.html, accessed 19 July 2017. 4. Immigration dates were obtained through naturalization, census, and passport records, via Ancestry.com. Dates for any one man often vary among the sources; in these cases the author has used the date given on the document closest in time to the date of immigration. It should also be noted that some Italian immigrant men of this era made more than one trip to the United States. One man who was born in Italy in 1892 was listed in the 1900 U.S.
Census for New Jersey, but no date of immigration has been found for him; he is counted in the table as “1890s.” 5. Belmonte, Calabrian-Americans in the U.S. Military, 13, 39, 140, entry for “Andrea Morelli.” 6. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Beneficiary Identification
Records Locator Subsystem (BIRLS) data for one man gives a
date of entry into active duty of 23 April 1917; given the weight of the rest of the data, the author feels the year 1917 is in error and should be 1918, and the man is counted here as having entered service in April 1918. The New York State service record abstract for another man gives a date of enlistment as 20 July 1918, but a date of assignment at Garden City as 6 July 1918; this man has been counted as having entered service on 20 June (versus July) 1918. 7. The large number of men in the detachment who were of foreign birth makes the Sailmakers Detachment grounds for fruitful study of the social history of some immigrant doughboys. Many of the men naturalized at Camp Sevier were Russian, Polish, Russian-
Polish, Turkish-Armenian, Austrian, Scottish, etc.; probably many of them were Jewish. 8. Please note some men are counted in more than one squadron, having been transferred from, for example, the 1107th Aero
Squadron to the 833d Aero Squadron. 9. The total for December 1918 includes one man for whom a date of discharge could not be determined. 10. The names appear in the table as they appear on the manifest. They are not always correct in their spelling; “Guiseppi,” for example, is properly “Giuseppe,” and Frank DeMaske appears differently in other documents. The prospective researcher should also be aware the spelling of the name on the manifest does not always agree with the spelling of the name under which the man was indexed in Ancestry.com.
On Our Covers
René Chartrand
The Front ... Assault by the 22d (French Canadian) Battalion at Neuville-Vitasse, 27 August 1918.
Painting by Lt. Alfred Bastien showing his unit going “over the top” in the area east of Arras (France). It is held to be one of the starkest artistic and most realistic depictions of trench warfare by a participant. Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, Canada. Photo and text by René Chartrand
... and the Back Regiment of United States Dragoons, standard bearer, 1846.
Watercolor by Henry Larter. Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library, Providence, Rhode Island. Photo by René Chartrand