OneManGang
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Tennessee vs The Maxims vs Georgia State
In numerous conversations with Vol fans who came through the store this past week, one theme was dominant, “All I really want to see is improvement.”
What happened Saturday was nothing less than free-fall regression.
The Tennessee Vols lost to Georgia State 38-30 and it really wasn't that close.
In all the iterations of opening paragraphs for the 2019 season that ran through your Humble Scribe's carapace leading up to Saturday, THAT line never entered the lexicon.
As the Elder Son&Heir and I walked back in the midst of several thousand wet cats wearing Orange 151, I remarked, “I don't even know where to begin.” Within seconds, CharterVol, ensconced safely at his fortified compound on the Duck River, text-ed me that exact same sentence. Great minds, as they say …
* * * * * * * * *
Historians are an odd lot. We are trained to go behind what the rest see and try to discern What Actually Happened. Our idea of a good time is spending the day in the bowels of some archive looking at muster rolls and after-action reports. Your Humble Scribe must admit that in the third canto of Saturday's tilt with GSU as the Vols faded, he glanced longingly at the UT Library and wondered if the Special Collections room was open.
In short, we LOOK for history and rejoice when we find it. If what we find is something nobody has found before, then so much the better. Occasionally, just often enough to keep things humble, History finds you.
So it was one day while doing research for a future book on Tennesseans in the Great War focusing on the 117th Infantry Regiment of the 30th Division which was drawn largely from the Tennessee National Guard when your Diligent Student stumbled on a treasure trove online at the Fort Benning Archives. It was a collection papers written by students in the Officer Advanced School written in the late1920s and early 1930s.
One of those papers was by a Captain John W. Stanley. Cpt. Stanley had been CO of the 105th Signals Battalion and sometime Signals Officer to the 59th Brigade, both part of the 30th Division. I skimmed the paper noting that he described various efforts to keep communication lines open in at best primitive conditions, a difficult task made worse by a determined enemy throwing artillery shells around. I put it to one side thinking I could use it for background and maybe to illustrate the difficulties commanders faced getting orders where they were needed.
It was some time later when I finally got around to reading the whole thing. The latter half of the paper piqued my interest and I read it again. A quick “Google” search revealed something – I had stumbled on something nobody, as far as I could discover, had ever found. History had found me.
The Great War saw the first use of telephones in a major conflict. Nobody knew much about the newfangled contraptions on the military side despite the fact they'd been in use since the late 1800s. Virtually all of these lines were buried. It was in Russia that the Germans learned that using their own buried lines they could actually listen in on what the other guys were saying.
Being Germans and addicted to engineering, they wouldn't leave it at that. They quickly developed an advanced system and dubbed it “Moritz” which looked something like an oversize bedspring set with spikes that went into the ground and could pick up telephone signals traveling through the un-insulated wires of the day at ranges of over a mile. They then deployed them on the Western Front beginning in mid-1915. The French never embraced the telephone and so the sets weren't as effective there. The British were another matter.
The Germans soon discovered that the British officers simply LOVED talking to each other over the phone. It was so bad that shortly before disastrous attack at the Somme in 1916, which cost 58,000 British casualties on the first day ALONE, a German divisional commander boasted the the Moritz system allowed him to know the names of every British company commander in the division opposite his.
The Brits eventually figured out something was amiss and developed a thing called a “Fuller Phone” which was actually a telegraph system with encryption and threatened any officer who used a voice phone with court-martial. Then, in the summer of 1918 the Americans showed up. Not trusting the Yanks with such sensitive equipment, the British gave the Americans their left over field telephones and instructed them on how to set them up and connect them.
Cpt. Stanley picks up his story with the attack on Bellicourt (29 Sep 1918) describing all his troubles just keeping the lines connected. Shortly after that battle, the division was ordered to attack another objective. On 8 October.
Sometime on 6 or 7 October, Stanley was sitting in Divisional HQ listening to phone conversations on an extension to check sound quality. He got to overhear a discussion between a Colonel “A” at Division and Col. “B” in one of the assault regiments.
Col. A: “How are things down there?”
Col B: “Oh, fine. They're shelling us pretty heavy but it's all landing about 100 yards behind my reserve line.”
The conversation went on for a bit then …
Col B: “By Jove! They are hitting right on top of my reserves!” Then he exclaimed, “There! One landed right on my dugout! They're surely giving us hot peas now!”
I instantly had a vision of Stanley sitting there doing a face palm. Colonel B had not only told any German listening where the shells were landing, he then corrected their fire for them and told them when they were on target!
Stanley now had a dilemma. Battalion commanders cannot simply tell “bird” colonels to SHUT THE HELL UP! So, he went to his boss, the Divisional Signals officer, to see if he could intervene. The DSO told him he'd been trying to do that for weeks but they simply would not listen. He then told Stanley to come up with a solution by 8AM the next day.
Stanley worried this problem for the rest of the night and then had an inspiration, he recalled that when he had trained with the division back in the States, the North Carolina regiments had contained a number of Cherokee. He was willing to bet that no German knew Cherokee and that by placing a Cherokee at each telephone and getting the Division commander to issue an order that ALL messages were to be transmitted by them, the problem would go away. He presented his idea to the DSO and then ran with him to Gen. Lewis's office where the appropriate orders were signed and within 24 hours there was a Cherokee beside every phone in the division.
The proof came a few days later when the advancing Doughboys overran a German intelligence unit and the Colonel commanding it was brought to Division HQ for interrogation. As the session was winding up the Colonel, who spoke perfect English asked if he could ask a question. Assured he could he blurted, “I have men in my command who can speak virtually every known language. Please, tell me, what language are you speaking?” The laughter from the assembled Americans echoing in his ears, the Colonel went off to captivity.
Stanley was reassigned to a Stateside training command and the War ended three weeks later. The Cherokee Code Talkers went back to their parent units and eventually back home to Western North Carolina where they faded from memory and into the mists of history.
Other American divisions used different tribes, most notably the 36th Division with the Choctaw. The Choctaw have done an excellent job of identifying and honoring their Code Talkers. The Cherokee are supposedly compiling a list of all their Great War soldiers but nothing has been published yet.
One thing all the Code Talkers shared was a quiet outrage that while they were being commended for using their native tongues, their children were being punished in schools for using them there.
*********
So, How Did the Team do Compared to the Maxims?
1. The team that makes the fewest mistakes will win.
When your opening drive ends in a pass interception that sets GSU up in scoring position and then your defense is so disorganized it can't stop them, you have violated this Maxim in its essence.
2. Play for and make the breaks. When one comes your way … SCORE!
This Maxim speaks directly to EFFORT. Hit them harder. Make them drop the ball. Intercept their passes. Confuse and baffle their defense. Make your opponent respond to what you are doing not the other way around. I saw absolutely none of the above on Saturday.
3. If at first the game – or the breaks – go against you, don’t let up … PUT ON MORE STEAM!
MORE steam? Hell's bells! We Vol fans would have been happy to have seen ANY steam. Beyond that, I really don't know what to say.
4. Protect our kickers, our quarterback, our lead and our ballgame.
Second to last Vol drive, fourth quarter. Fail.
5. Ball! Oskie! Cover, block, cut and slice, pursue and gang tackle … THIS IS THE WINNING EDGE.
Again this speaks to effort. Fly to the Ball! I am remembering GSU's drive in the 4th after UT clawed its way back into the lead. Tennessee had them stopped, 2nd and 10 on the UT 30 when someone noticed the Vols had only ten on the field. A lineman was sent in. So far, so good. Said lineman not only took his time getting to the rest of the team he stood there perpendicular to the line of scrimmage and looking for guidance as the ball was snapped. The GSU running back actually hit him on the left shoulder and blew by him on the way to a 15 yard gain which was followed by a scoring jaunt on the very next play. Game. Set. Match.
6. Press the kicking game. Here is where the breaks are made.
Okay, so the kickers were a rare bright spot. Huzzah.
7. Carry the fight to Georgia State and keep it there for sixty minutes.
Tennessee couldn't even do it for THREE minutes.
Methinks the old GA Tech v Cumberland score from the 1920s may be at risk when the Vols arrive at the Swamp or at Bryant-Denny if things don't change a great deal in the next 3-4 days.
Your Humble Scribe has been sitting on a 4500-word, obscenity-laced rant since Saturday and no matter how soul satisfying that would be, I am limited by an 11000 character ceiling for posts. Dammit.
MAXOMG
© 2019 Keeping Your Stories Alive
Suggested Reading:
(British) Intelligence Museum.org "The Birth of Signals Intelligence"
Capt, John W. Stanley, “Personal Experiences of a Battalion Commander and Brigade Signal Officer, 105th Field Signal Battalion, In the Somme Offensive, September 29 – October 12, 1918”
History strikes again! While downloading some photos from the Tennessee State Library's excellent collection, I stumbled on this. The photo shows a captured German bunker being used as a command post. Based on the coloration and facial features of the man on the right with the rifle beside him, I think we may, just may, have us a Code Talker. (TSLA)
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