American Ambulances Go To War

World War One was the first mechanized war and American volunteers pressed into service the automobile. The new warfare which turned verdant fields into bogs of shell-pummeled muck presented a who new problem. Traditional horse ambulances and hand litters no longer worked.
The fighting and the terrain challenged the endurance of the litter bearer and the horse. They could not keep up with the damage on the battlefield, carry the wounded from the field to dressing stations and evacuation stations to the rear.
One idea that did work was the American Field Service, created by concerned Americans living in Paris in 1915, two years before America entered the war.
Within a year, the AFS had been assigned to the French front and broken down into three corps of 20 ambulances, each staffed with nearly 400 American volunteers.
Among them, Ernest Hemingway who would write his famous "A Farewell to Arms" about his experience as a driver and his romance with Hadley Richardson, a volunteer AFS nurse and graduate of Bellevue Hospital.
The success of AFS and its drivers was due in large part to the Ford ambulance, shipped in parts from the United States at a cost of about $350 each.
They needed an ambulance that was geared low so it could maneuver in mud. The Ford ambulance was designed to carry four wounded men but it had the ability to carry seven or eight in an emergency. It was called a goat and a mechanical flea, but it serves a great purpose over the course of the war, it was used to evacuate over a half million men. There were little more than 2,100 used by the end of the war.
Our Friend France
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[@m10bob22]

My grandfather was an American ambulance driver in WW1, and in those days very few people even knew how to drive. When the war ended, his unit had to stay behind and help dig up all the trenches from that terrible war and help graves registration identify those bodies. It was a gruesome task which affected all who were involved. I the twenties, he used the skills of driving and repairing ANY type of motor vehicle to the extent that he operated his own auto junk yard/repair facility in Bloomfield Indiana. He often bragged that he used to buy Model T Fords' for "five dollars apiece all day long"....just to scrap them! In the thirties, the infamous motorized outlaw from Indiana, John Dillinger dropped by on more than one occasion for quick repairs as this was a very rural location and off the "beaten path". My grandfather was not a crook...it was the Depression and he needed the money, just like anybody else. BTW, another early American who drove an auto in WW1 became the chauffeur for General Pershing...and Pershing liked the fella so much he allowed his driver to go to flight school. That man was Eddie Rickenbacker. (Rickenbacker learned to drive and repair automobiles right before the war by walking into a local automobile/blacksmith shop...picking up a broom, and start sweeping the floor till they allowed him to stay and "learn what he could so long as he was gonna be around".