August 2, 2017
This is “Our Past Is Present” from the Geary County Historical Society.
Many of us
have experienced the direction to “hurry up” and then we find ourselves having
to wait – for some reason, perhaps unknown to us. Well, today’s story is about what might be
considered a common “hurry up and wait” theme in August of 1920.
A selected
detachment of 500 regular soldiers from Camp Funston left for Denver on two
special trains in August of 1920. They
had been ordered to duty in connection with the rioting related to the
streetcar strike there.
When the
orders reached Camp Funston the previous evening, many of the officers and men
of the detachment were at their homes and they were recalled at once to the
camp. It took only a short time to get the unit together, assemble the
equipment and get ready to entrain.
The men were
said to be a special detachment that was formed to handle similar emergencies
as the one in Denver. They were equipped
with sawed-off shotguns and cartridges loaded with buckshot, Whippet tanks,
hand grenades and “one-pounders” that shot shrapnel.
Although the
men and equipment were quickly assembled, their departure was delayed until the
necessary rolling stock was available and they were finally underway with the
first train that left in the early morning of August 7, 1920.
Hurry up and
wait. Still a common theme in the
military.
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