I hope you all like this rather obscure piece of rather obscure history. Ramon Guthrie was born in New York City on January 1, 1896; the son of Harry and Ella May Hollister Guthrie. Sometime in 1898-1899 the marriage of his parents failed and he along with his mother and baby sister Eleanor moved to Hartford, Connecticut. He attended public school in Hartford and by the time he was nineteen he was working at the Winchester Arms factory in New Haven. In 1916 he enlisted in the Connecticut National Guard, serving with the 10th Connecticut Field Artillery Regiment. That same year his mother committed suicide. Soon after Ramon resigned from the National Guard and enlisted in the French Army as a volunteer ambulance driver with the American Field Service. (The American Field Service was an off-shoot of volunteer ambulance drivers that served at the American Hospital in Paris. After convincing the French military authorities to allow these young American volunteers to serve at the front, this service became known as the field service of the American Ambulance. The French loved the determination and zeal of the American volunteers as well as their American Model T Fords which could handle the mountainous terrain more easily than the heavy French Fiat ambulances.) Arriving in France in mid-1916, Guthrie was at first assigned to Section 9 which was then serving with the French armies fighting in the Vosges Mountain region of Alsace-Lorraine. In 1917 he volunteered to join Section 3 which had been attached to the French Army of the Orient then engaged in fighting in the Balkans. Section 3 had proven its worth in the mountains of Alsace and it was logical that they would be just as successful in the Balkans. Section 3 sailed for Salonica in October and by November Guthrie found himself dodging shells while driving over the wild and rugged roads in the mountains of Albania and northern Greece.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 17:49:08 +0000
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