122nd Field Artillery Training at Camp Logan

122nd Field Artillery soldiers standing outside the Mattes Club at Camp Logan.
©DN-0069642, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum.

The following excerpt is courtesy of the States Publications Society, Illinois in the World War. All the photos (except for above) are from Carl O. Ericke's WWI scrapbook.

On August 16 Battery A, under command of Captain Joseph W. Mattes, entrained for Houston to prepare a section of Camp Logan, where the regiment was to receive its training as part of the Thirty-third Division, under command of Major General George Bell, Jr. Only seven days later Captain Mattes was shot and killed in an effort to disarm negro soldier rioters in the city of Houston, where he had been sent to quell the disturbance. On September 21 the regiment was officially designated the 122nd Field Artillery and assigned to the Fifty-eight Field Artillery Brigade. 

The eagerly awaited order for overseas service came in May, 1918. The regiment then had attained a high degree of efficiency. Many of the vacancies in the ranks of the offices, created when selections were made from the regiment to complete other organizations, were filled by promotion from the ranks. When the regiment entrained for the seaboard the latter part of May, the commissioned personnel was made up entirely of men who had held commissions in the unit in its national guard days or who had risen from the rank.

Next stop, Europe!