A whiff of gunpowder in the Poconos
While passing through the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania recently on an industry trip, I recalled a fierce battle fought some 110 years ago.
During the late summer of 1916, the “blue” gentlemen volunteers of the Yale Battery, after spending weeks learning their trade while school was out, drilling by day and attending military science classes until 9:30 p.m. each night, put their 3-inch guns to work, defending their ground around the Tobyhanna Artillery Range (now Army Depot) against a “red” foe.
As noted by the NYT
An invading force, which was making a drive through the Pocono Mountains to capture the military stores on the Government reservation at Tobyhanna, was scattered this morning by the artillery fire of Battery B, one of the crack batteries of Yale men who have been taught in six weeks of seventeen-hour days to handle three-inch guns, find ranges and fire accurately on targets hidden from the gunners.
First stood up in 1915 as Europe burned at war, the all-volunteer Yale Battery robbed the school’s football and baseball teams of some of its best prospects, whose free time was spent thinking about battle. Eventually, some 500 undergrads donned uniforms and studied field artillery.
Among their military science professors were U.S. Army regulars, Captains Robert Melville Danford (USMA 1904) and Sherman Miles (USMA ’05), the latter the son of Gen. Nelson A. Miles of Plains Wars fame and grandson of William Tecumseh Sherman. Importantly, Miles served from 1912 to 1914 as a military attaché in the Balkans, observing the combat there against the Ottomans; then, during the Great War served as a military observer in Russia until 1916.
By early 1916, the Yale men formed four batteries, A, B, C, and D, in the Connecticut National Guard’s 10th Field Artillery Regiment, with Danford as a NG Colonel and Miles as a NG Lt. Colonel. They had a set of M1895 Mountain guns for campus drill hall use back at New Haven and 3-inch M1902 field pieces (later donated French 75s) while away at camp.
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Yale Battery at Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania. 1917. The 10th Regiment, F.A., Connecticut, N.G., had four batteries made up of Yale men—A, B, C, and D. They were in camp from July to September 1917. 165-WW-124F-021
Yale University. Battery of American Mountain guns on the firing platform of Artillery Hall, manned by a group of Yale R.O.T.C. members. New Haven, Connecticut. 1917. 165-WW-124F-032
By late 1917, the French ambassador presented them with four actual battle-used French 75s, and the school augmented them with four fake “quaker” guns and caissons for drill purposes. By that time, the school was one of the first ROTC units in the country, with Danford in command.
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By the fall of 1917, only one Letterman remained on campus, the sporting interest almost exclusively being on the Batteries.
Approximately 9,500 to 10,000 Yale students, faculty, and alumni served in the Great War, with 227 students dying in the conflict.
NARA’s catalog includes a tremendous number of images of the Yale Battery.
Today, Yale has separate Army, Navy (Bulldog Battalion), and Air Force (Detachment 009) ROTC programs, but fewer than 100 students are enrolled across all three combined. For what it is worth, the campus only rejoined ROTC in 2012, after disbanding its units in 1972 during the protests over the Vietnam War.
As for the Battery’s instructors, after the Great War, Danford continued to serve in high-profile assignments, including Commandant of Cadets at West Point, and was Chief of Field Artillery as a major general during World War II. He passed in 1974, aged 95. Miles served in France during the Meuse–Argonne Offensive, spent much of the interwar years as an attaché and (controversially) in MID, then served in WWII as a major general over the First Service Command in Boston. He died in 1966 at age 83.
