Florida Fallen Stories

Captain Arthur Ellis Hamm was killed in action in the Lorraine front of France, on September 14, 1918, a few weeks after his 26th birthday. His name was not included on the Memorial Scroll, but it should have been. He lived in Florida as many as five years prior to the war, and when he joined the Army during the summer of 1917, he resided in Jacksonville.

Born in Groveland, Massachusetts, on June 29, 1892, he was the middle child and younger son of Joseph Edwin Hamm (1860-1915) and Amy C. White (1866-1907). When he was three, the Hamm family moved to Minot Street in Stoneham, about nine miles north of Boston, where Joseph worked as a soap manufacturer. Arthur attended Stoneham schools, a teacher remembering him as “an unusually happy hearted, courteous and faithful little fellow.” He was a hard worker, praised in 1904 when he and his older brother, Loring White Hamm (1890-1955), were the only two paper boys to deliver during a blizzard.

After his mother’s death when he was 15, Arthur refused moving with his father and brother and sister to Reading. Instead, he remained in Stoneham, where he was involved in town life, from helping organize the annual Unitarian May festival, to acting in local shows and plays. He was the best shot in the Stoneham High School Rifle Club, medaling in numerous competitions. Refusing his foster family’s generous offer to finance college to Harvard, he joined Company H, 6th Massachusetts, in which he was at first mascot, then chief bugler, followed by acting chief musician of the entire regiment. He especially distinguished himself as an expert marksman, becoming a rifle instructor.  The Cadets rifle team won the Mass State Championship in 1910, with 18-year-old Hamm on the team. The census that year has him boarding in Stoneham with Louis Charles George Byrnes, a German-born 57-year-old tanner, and his wife Mary, in their house on Main Street, and working as a paper and twine salesman.

Two years later, Arthur had moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where he worked as assistant manager for the Seminole Club, a private social club for men located on the corner of North Hogan and Duval Streets. His older brother Loring was also in Jacksonville that year, clerking at the Postal Telegraph-Cable Company. The Hamm brothers both resided at the Young Men’s Christian Association about a mile away from the Seminole Club. Over the next five years, Arthur Hamm called the Jacksonville Y.M.C.A. “home.”

From 1913 to 1917, while Loring appears to have returned to Massachusetts, Arthur Hamm held several other jobs in Jacksonville. One of them was chief steward and purser for the Clyde Steamship Company, which offered passenger and mail service from New York to Miami. In 1914-15 he was a salesman with the Atlantic Auto Repair Company at 415 West Adams. The next year he was a salesman for the newly-opened Central Tire & Vulcanizing Company located at 16 East Forsyth.

In the fall of 1916, he applied for and was accepted as a special student at the University of Florida in Gainesville. As he explained to his fiancée, Elizabeth (Beth) Hale Creevey (1885-1958) of Brooklyn, New York, whom he had first met earlier that year: “I have always wanted to be a professional man, a [criminal] lawyer.” Attending law school would finally give him that opportunity. Having already had experience as a businessman would make him a better attorney, he reasoned. Both Beth’s father, John Kennedy Creevey (1841-1921), and brother, William Stickney Creevey (1880-1933), were attorneys.

President Albert Murphree recalled a few years later that Arthur Hamm “made many friends in the short time that he attended the University of Florida, and proved to be an untiring worker, ambitious of attaining the best that there is in the educational world.” Among his friends were Wiley Haralson Burford of Ocala, also a first-year law student. Like Burford, Hamm joined Kappa Alpha fraternity, and he was a member of the intercollegiate debating team. Dean Harry R. Trusler, head of the law school at UF, was impressed with Hamm’s abilities. He was “an eager student” with a “vital personality,” Trusler remembered, “taking color with unusual readiness from the studies he pursued, and from the environment of the University.”

In her biography about her then-late husband, published in 1919, Beth Hamm wrote that “Florida put its mark on Arthur’s speech and manner.”  The former became “a curious mingling of soft southern drawl and the Boston A,” while the latter “was typical of ‘old southern chivalry.’” And Florida’s climate meant that he had typhoid and malarial fever, occasioned by bouts of incapacitating headaches, at least once a year. But overall, she said, “the influence of Florida upon this Yankee born boy was all to his advantage. He was able to realize there a certain flowering of soul that his native State alone could not have given him.”

Once the war broke out the spring of 1917, Arthur Hamm decided to place on hold his dream of becoming a lawyer. Eager to join up, he applied for the First Officers’ Training Camp to be held at Fort McPherson, near Atlanta, Georgia, beginning May 15. As he told Beth: “I can lead men . . . better than I can follow.” In his application to the OTC, he highlighted his law student status, business management and sales experience, and Massachusetts guard and sharpshooting skills. He was accepted among the first 2,500 candidates from Georgia, Alabama, and Florida into the 3-month program of intensified military training. More than four dozen other University of Florida students likewise attended the camp.

 

 

In letters to Beth, with whom he got quickly engaged on May 1, he described his experience at the Officers’ Training Camp at Fort McPherson: “Our schedule is fairly stiff,” with “every minute of the day” filled with drills, hikes, lectures, and meetings, from reveille at 5:30 a.m. to lights out at 9:30 p.m. Daily range practices, bayonet exercises, trench digging with picks and shovels, long marches — It is a lot of “hard work” and “great strain,” he wrote. On top of that, it rained nearly every day, and Georgia clay turned-into-mud covered him from head to toe. After a couple of weeks, he confided in Beth: “Army life is distasteful to me, and I shall be glad… when we get this business over.” He explained: “It is narrow, bound with red tape, and the insincerity, assumed courtesy, and sham of the whole thing make me sick.” Yet he was willing to do his part. “I hope our work is going to make it possible to bring about a speedy peace,” he continued, “so that we can settle down to the normal—a home, a fireside, for us two children, my profession—and, Beth, listen to this now — I am going to make a great lawyer!”

After ninety days, Arthur Hamm completed his training, becoming one of only 14 candidates in his company to earn a captain’s commission, Officer Reserve Corps, on August 14, 1917. Afterwards he received a two-week leave of absence, during which time he journeyed to Westhampton Beach, Long Island to get married. He and Beth wed at her home on August 18, 1917, followed by a five-day honeymoon in the Berkshires. Less than a week later, the young couple returned to Georgia.

 

As a “90-day wonder,” as with most of the officers commissioned from the Fort McPherson

OTC that summer, the army assigned him to the 82nd (“All American”) Division, which was then forming at the newly-created National Army cantonment of Camp Gordon, some 14 miles north of downtown Atlanta. Newlywed Beth accompanied her husband, and they lived first in a boardinghouse, then in a rented home nearby. Occasionally she would visit her husband at Camp Gordon, where she taught French to officers of the 326th and a class of all-privates. He typically spent his day on post and returned home at night. He was usually off duty by noon on Saturdays and spent Sundays at home.

At Gordon, Captain Hamm was initially assigned to the 307th Ammunition Train, ordnance branch, a non-combat, presumably “safe,” role, which he, as a fighting infantryman, “severely scorned.”  “Why in the world should one take that course at McPherson for such work as that?,” he exclaimed. His request for an immediate transfer granted, he was attached to Company M, 326th Infantry Regiment on September 14. A month later, he commanded the company, after most of his men from southern states had been ordered to other camps and replaced by transfers from Camp Devens (Mass.), Camp Dix (N.J.), Camp Upton (N.Y.), Camp Lee (Va.), and Camp Meade (Md.). Of the 250 enlisted men in Company M, more than half were from New York, Massachusetts, or Pennsylvania, and roughly 25% could not read, write, or understand English. Ten of his men identified their next of kin as residing in foreign countries: Russia, Italy, Norway, and Canada.

 

 

 

 

 

Captain Hamm would spend more than eight months stationed at Camp Gordon. The 326th and the 82nd Division left for Camp Upton, New York, for mobilization and embarkation overseas during the week of April 8.  The 326th was part of the 163rd Infantry Brigade, with the 325th Infantry and the 320th Machine Gun Battalion. The 163rd Infantry Brigade, the 164th Infantry Brigade, and the 157th Field Artillery Brigade, together with divisional support troops and trains, formed the 82nd Division. Anticipating that he was about to be ordered to leave Camp Gordon, he arranged for a hotel room for Beth. The last time he saw her was in New York City the day before he shipped out.

 

 

On April 28, the 326th Infantry, made up of 107 officers and 3,709 men, sailed on the H.M.S. Mauretania for England.  Disembarking at Liverpool on May 6, they immediately passed through Southampton by train before crossing the Channel to Le Havre. The troops were held at Le Havre only long enough to exchange U.S. 1917 rifles for British rifles and receive helmets and gas masks. From Le Havre the officers went to the British training area at St. Valéry-sur-Somme. Captain Hamm rejoined M company at Ault on the Norman coast, before marching to the front lines north of Toul. The Lee-Enfield rifles which they had trained with were turned back to the British, and the U.S. 1917 rifles were reissued. By June 29—his birthday—Arthur Hamm was with his men in the trenches, occupying that part of the Woëvre front known as the Lagny Sector.

 

 

During the time in the Lagny Sector, Hamm and his men accustomed themselves to the details of trench warfare. Not only were they charged with holding the lines, but from the outset they engaged in occasional night patrolling, penetrating deeply into the enemy’s positions numerous times.

At three in the morning, on August 4, 1918, Hamm’s Company M, and Company K of the same regiment, conducted a trench raid with artillery assistance against a section of the German position north of Flirey, immediately in front. In less than an hour, Hamm and his men performed the raid “in commendable fashion,” going some 600 yards behind enemy lines, killing a platoon of Germans and taking three machine guns, numerous rifles, pistols, and other equipment. “I took one machine gun myself,” Arthur wrote Beth the following day, “cutting it loose with the bowie knife that you gave me, and which I keep in the top of my boot.” M Company did not lose a man, though four men were wounded, including Hamm, whose hand while holding a flashlight was hit by shrapnel. “Probably the coolest man in the raiding party was Captain Hamm,” remarked another officer. “In an old raincoat which had been torn to pieces by German barbed wire, with a walking stick in one hand, and a lighted cigar in the other, Captain Hamm that morning was the picture of utter content. To look at him you would never know that there was a war going on.”

A division order on August 8, 1918, cited M Company for its gallantry, and its captain was posthumously awarded the second highest U.S. military honor—the Distinguished Service Cross—for valor.

 

 

 

Afterwards Hamm was sent to Corps Headquarters on staff duty for a rest, but was recalled in a very short time and again put in command of his company. He wrote Beth: “I am to return to – day to my company. The Colonel [John Campbell McArthur (1869-1928), an 1894 West Point graduate from Minnesota] is very anxious to have me back.” In another letter he again confided in Beth: “Who fears to die? Is there any man worth living that is afraid to die? Life is very sweet to me, and I do not want to die, but I don’t know what it is to be afraid.”

Three days after returning to his command, during the 82nd Division’s advance in the St. Mihiel drive, Arthur Hamm died after his outpost position near the town of Lesménils on the old “Hindenburg Line” was bombed by a German airplane on September 14, 1918. The hands of his watch had stopped at the precise moment a piece of shrapnel pierced the dial, 11:25 a.m. Mortally wounded at the base of his neck, he was carried by ambulance some 18 kilometers southward behind the lines, near Milléry, on the banks of the Moselle River, where he was buried two days later. Disinterred on June 9, 1919, he was reburied in Grave 32, Section 11, Plot 1, St. Mihiel American Cemetery. Three years later, on July 19, 1922, he was disinterred and reburied a final time in the same cemetery.

 

Although his name was not written on the Memorial Scroll, Captain Hamm was included on the Duval County Honor Roll, as published in the Jacksonville Metropolis of April 28, 1921.

 

 

As a student at the University of Florida, he was remembered in the 1919 edition of the Seminole yearbook. To date, his military insurance has funded the Captain Arthur Ellis Hamm Memorial Scholarship established by his wife in 1918, at the University of Florida and Smith College in Massachusetts, Beth’s alma mater (1905). And his name was also inscribed on the bronze tablet of UF alumni who died in the Great War that was dedicated on October 13, 1934, at Florida Field stadium.