Posted 13 years ago
tlmbaran
(136 items)
Here is a close up shot of that Red Cross arm band with French Minister of war stamp, the uniform on a mannequin, with the better condition red cross arm band, and medical belt. The whole lot displays great!
If your are interested, I added some info on the WWI Ambulance Corps. Read below....
A remarkable number of well known authors were ambulance drivers during World War I. Among them were Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, and W. Somerset Maugham.
There were three predominant WWI volunteer ambulance groups: the American Field Service (AFS), Norton-Harjes, and the American Red Cross operation in Italy. The United States entered the war on April 6, 1917 and both AFS and Norton-Harjes were merged into the U.S. Army Ambulance Corps by August 30, 1917.
Many of the future writers left the war rather than join the army where they would have become privates. In the volunteer groups they had been considered "gentlemen drivers" and the equivalent of officers. "Richard Norton is hanging on by his eye teeth," wrote E.E. Cummings to his mother on August 2, 1917, "God help us from being taken over by the American Army!!!!!!"
The American Field Service started as the ambulance arm of the American Hospital in Paris. Its driving force was A. Piatt Andrew, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and professor of economics at Harvard University. A mid-1915 agreement resulted in the ambulances being attached to French line divisions.
The AFS got an eighteenth century mansion of five acres as headquarters and cut its ties with the American Hospital. AFS had recruited its drivers directly from colleges and universities around the United States. Individual ambulance units were made up exclusively of drivers from particular universities. Thus there were Harvard units, Yale units, etc.
The Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps was created through the merger of the Harjes Formation of the American Red Cross and the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps organized in 1914 by Richard Norton, son of Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton. Harjes was A. Herman Harjes, a French banker. Norton-Harjes reported no fatalities among its drivers