In many ways, Maj. Charles Whittlesey was like so many of the other former civilians who made up much of the American officer corps during the First World War. The gangly, bespectacled, thirty-two-year-old New York lawyer had grown up in Wisconsin, attended Williams College, graduated from Harvard Law School in 1908, and settled into a comfortable private practice in New York City. After Congress passed the Selective Service Act on April 28, 1917, he signed up for Reserve officer training.
Now, Maj. Whittlesey was deep in the Argonne Forest commanding a battalion in the 77th Division, the “Metropolitans” made up mostly of New Yorkers. It was a division of almost ridiculous diversity: Chinese, Poles, Italians, Irish, Greeks, Russians, Germans, and Anglo-Saxons. Nearly a quarter of the division was Jewish, many of them draftees from Manhattan's Lower East Side. There were street toughs, urchins, bartenders, grocers, cops, streetcar conductors, writers, baseball players, stockbrokers, drifters, and blue bloods.
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