page_title: A. Piatt Andrew
section_title: Founder of American Field Service
hierarchical_section_title: A. Piatt Andrew / Founder of American Field Service
caption_attribution_description: English: Bain News Service/LOC ggbain.23095. Grenville Keogh, Mrs. W.K. Vanderbilt, Anne Morgan, Piatt Andrew, 1916 (Grenville Keogh was an ambulance driver for the American Ambulance Field Service)
context_page_description: Abram Piatt Andrew Jr. was an economist, an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, the founder and director of the American Ambulance Field Service during World War I, and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts.
context_section_description: Despite American neutrality, Andrew went to France when war broke out in the summer of 1914.  He wrote to his parents about his compulsion to respond to "the possibility of having even an infinitesimal part in one of the greatest events in all history--...and above all the chance of doing the little all that one can for France." 
  Andrew drove an ambulance in the Dunkirk sector for a few weeks, but his supervisor at the American Military Hospital recognized his exceptional energy and organizing ability.  Robert Bacon created a new position for him to fill: Inspector General of the American Ambulance Field Service.  In his official capacity, Andrew toured the ambulance sections of Northern France and learned that the American volunteers were bored with so called "jitney work," transporting wounded soldiers from railheads to hospitals, far back from the front lines.  French army policy prohibited foreign nationals from traveling into battle zones.
  In March 1915, Andrew met with Captain Aime Doumenc, head of the French Army Automobile Service and pleaded his case for the American volunteers.  They desired above all, he said,  "To pick up the wounded from the front lines…, to look danger squarely in the face; in a word, to mingle with the soldiers of France and to share their fate!"   Doumenc agreed to a trial.  The success of Andrew's Section Z was immediate and overwhelming.  By April 15, 1915, the French created American Ambulance Field Service operating under French Army command.
  Andrew headed the organization, soon shortened to American Field Service, throughout the war, though his role changed significantly when its ambulance sections were taken over by the United States Army in late summer 1917.  Andrew established a domestic organization based in Boston to recruit young American drivers and to raise funds from wealthy donors.  The stateside office was headed by Henry Davis Sleeper and assisted by Henry Hays Hammond and former ambulance driver, Leslie Buswell.  The French office was located at number 21 rue Raynouard, Paris.
  At the time of militarization, the American Field Service had formed thirty-four ambulance sections manned by 1,200 American volunteers.  (A total of 2,100 volunteers had volunteered over the course of two years.)  In addition the AFS had created fourteen camion sections with 800 additional American volunteers trucking supplies and soldiers up the Voie Sacree from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun and other routes to the Front.
  The AFS motto was "Tous et tout pour France," everyone and everything for France.  At an AFS reunion a few years after the war, Andrew said, "The opportunity of living in France, as we Americans lived during the first years of the war...meant glimpses of human nature shorn of self, exalted by love of country, singing and jesting in the midst of hardships, smiling at pain, unmindful even of death."
caption: Bain News Service/LOC ggbain.23095. Grenville Keogh, Anne Harriman Vanderbilt, Anne Morgan, Piatt Andrew, 1916 (Grenville Keogh was an ambulance driver for the American Ambulance Field Service)
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