When Uncle Sam Was Ready, Things Moved Fast

Francis Fielding Longley on top of Charlemagne’s Tower, Tours, France, 1919. Longley family photo.

My great-grandfather, Francis Fielding (Frank) Longley, was a civil engineer who specialized in water treatment systems. Clean and readily available water is one of those things that it’s easy to take for granted, and learning about his work has really opened my eyes to what it takes to provide water to those who need it. He had a long and varied career and wrote a number of interesting accounts of his experiences, but this blog post will focus on only his work with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) during World War I.

Frank was born in Chicago in 1879. His family moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1889, where his father ran the American Playing Card Company. Frank’s first job as a teenager was gilding the edges of playing cards, but his older sister Joanna, seeing his potential, insisted that he take a competitive exam for a nomination to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He did well on the exam, won the nomination, passed the West Point entrance exam after some cramming, and entered the academy as a plebe in 1898. He graduated third out of 54 cadets in the class of 1902 but, unlike most West Point graduates, did not pursue a career in the Army.

Instead, Frank went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for post-graduate studies in engineering, natural science, and public health administration. This educational background, and the contacts he made at MIT, led to 13 years as an engineering consultant overseeing the development of city water treatment plants in—among many others—Washington, DC, and Toronto, Canada.

When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, Frank was recruited to join the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In his words:

I had a telegram from the office of the Chief of Engineers in Washington asking if I wanted to be commissioned for service in France…I was tempted to reply to the wire from the Chief’s office saying, "Don’t waste government money asking foolish questions”, but instead I phoned to Hazen [the senior partner in his firm] telling him what was up and to send someone else down to take over my work, and then I got on the sleeper that night for Washington and next morning reported to the Chief's office and by 10.30 or 11.00 o’clock I had been given a cursory examination and commissioned as a Major of Engineers and told to get my affairs in order so that I could leave for France at an early date. So when Uncle Sam was ready, things moved fast.

Shortly after, in August 1917, Frank was sent to Paris, France, where he served as a senior aide to Brigadier General Harry Taylor, the Chief Engineer of the AEF. In this position, Frank’s job was to ensure a supply of water for all American troops in the field.

In the meantime, the Army Corps of Engineers was getting organized, and Frank was also promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and made second in command of the 26th Regiment of Engineers, the water supply regiment. Of course, he was already in France while his regiment was still back in the States, which meant the new position didn’t have much effect on his work. After the regiment finally arrived in France, landing one company at a time through June 1918, Frank was promoted to Colonel and given command of the regiment.

The 26th Engineers was an all-volunteer regiment of more than 1,600 soldiers, made up of skilled tradesmen, surveyors, engineers, construction workers, and truck drivers from across the United States. Its officers all came from various engineering fields. Once in France, the regiment was spread across the front, with companies attached to all three of the AEF’s field armies, and its soldiers were tasked with the challenging job of putting Frank’s water supply plans into action, often while under bombardment by opposing forces. During the war, 28 members of the regiment lost their lives to disease, accidents, and enemy shells (Lee 1919).

Officers, 26th Engineers, Bourg-sur-Gironde, France, January 1919 (Lee 1919).

Supplying water to more than a million American soldiers was no small task. Existing water sources were totally inadequate for a large military force, and the portion of the front where the AEF was located was largely unsuitable for drilling wells. As Frank explained:

We had to build pipelines, pumping stations, purification plants, reservoirs, filling stations, horse watering stations, and a lot of other incidental things, each one different from others, and it taxed the ingenuity and the courage of the water supply officers to do all this under the very difficult conditions in the field…The reservoirs or tanks built by the water supply service could not always be placed near enough to troop areas to permit troop details to reach them on foot, so a number of water tank trains were established to carry water into troop areas. The early tank trucks were improvised of wine casks or the like on whatever truck chassis were to be found.

During its service in France, the 26th Engineers constructed 36 permanent water supply systems and 14 sewage systems at hospitals and barracks behind the front lines, built 48 railway locomotive filling stations, established hundreds of temporary water points, laid more than 120,000 feet of pipe, and delivered over 500,000 gallons of water each day (Lee 1919).

Customers of a Water-Purification Truck. "Chloropump" in background. On right, a company water cart. On left, an ammunition truck converted into a water wagon by means of French wine casks (Lee 1919).

Another crucial part of the job was making sure that the water the troops drank was clean and safe. That responsibility usually fell to the Medical Corps, rather than the Engineers, and the standard practice was to purify the water with hypochlorite, like the water used in swimming pools, which made it taste terrible and led to soldiers drinking untreated, and often contaminated, water instead. Frank was determined to change that, and after some back-and-forth with the Medical Corps, managed to get his way, shifting responsibility for water treatment to the Engineers. The 26th Engineers then set out to build water purification plants wherever they were needed, even utilizing mobile water purification plants built on the back of trucks and fitted out with laboratory facilities to test for water safety.

Water-Purification Truck ("Sterilab"). Pumping and filtering equipment in rear, chlorination equipment in center, and laboratory space in forward portion of housing (Lee 1919).

Frank’s work in ensuring adequate supplies of clean water for the AEF did not go unnoticed. On May 3, 1919, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, at the time the only Army decoration for non-combat service. The citation read, “His untiring energy, unusual initiative, and good judgment have, to a marked degree, been responsible for the plentiful supply of pure drinking water to the combatant troops, thereby materially assisting in maintaining the unusually low rates in sickness among our troops” (Lee 1919). Frank was justifiably proud of the award, although he also said it should have gone to the 26th Engineers as a whole.

After the war, Frank went on to contribute to the rebuilding of water systems in Europe and then the development of water systems in much of Australia, stories that will have to wait for another post. I hope, though, that the next time you drink a glass of tap water, it will remind you of what it took to provide the soldiers of the AEF with the water they needed to defend American and its allies.

Schematic Plan of Water Supply, Advance of November 1, 1918, Argonne-Meuse Offensive (Lee 1919).

Works Cited

Lee, Charles H. 1919. “History of The Twenty-Sixth Engineers (Water Supply Regiment) in the World War, September, 1917-March, 1919.” Journal of the New England Water Works Association 33 (4): 500-761.