Leonard C. Hammond WW I Ace
Leonard C. Hammond – WW I Hero
Missoula native Leonard Coombes Hammond joined a rare society in 1918 when he became an American air ace while flying in WW I. Pilots achieved the ace status upon the downing of 5 or more enemy aircraft and Hammond accomplished that, with six official shared victories in 1918, while flying as a machine gunner aboard a French Salmson 2A2 aircraft. This aircraft carried 2 airmen as well as 2 machine guns. Leonard served in the 91st Aero Squadron of the U. S. Army and rose to the rank of Captain during the conflict. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and the Silver Star in 1918. Leonard also drove for the Norton-Harjes ambulance corp in France for a year beginning in November of 1915. Following his year in the ambulance corp he returned to the United States and took his officer training at the Presidio in San Francisco, becoming a 1st Lieutenant in 1917.
Although an authentic war hero, Leonard’s notoriety was no doubt overshadowed by his millionaire lumber-baron father, Andrew B. Hammond. His father had become a wealthy man before leaving Missoula in 1894 to move to Oregon, and he proceeded to become even more wealthy as he invested in many businesses in Oregon and California.
Born in Missoula in 1884, Leonard was one of seven children of Andrew and Florence Hammond. The second of two sons, he would eventually succeed his father in the Hammond Lumber business as chairman of the company. He attended Harvard University for two years and apparently dropped out before graduating. By 1909 he was employed in one of his father’s businesses as a managing Secretary/Treasurer. After the war Leonard resumed his employment in his father’s businesses. Following Andrew’s death in 1934, Leonard stayed with the company and finally succeeded his father as head of Hammond Lumber in 1936. His eventual success in leading his father’s company through some hard times would seem to indicate that he was a very competent businessman.
Leonard died in San Francisco in 1945.
Little of his early life seems to be documented, but one recent author has provided some commentary about him.
In his exhaustive PhD Dissertation on A. B. Hammond, author Greg Gordon mentioned Leonard briefly, several times in connection with his father, Andrew, and his career.[1]
See quotes below:
After leaving Missoula in 1894, Hammond spent the next four years living out of hotels like the Waldorf-Astoria, shuttling back and forth between New York, Missoula, and Portland. His family remained east during the school year, the children attending The Gunnery, a private boarding school in Connecticut and spending their summers in Oregon and Montana. This was the beginning of an increasing physical separation between Hammond and his children. His sons, Richard and Leonard, preferred to spend their summers in Montana, camping and fishing. Although, he never used it himself, Hammond maintained a camp on the Blackfoot River for his sons‘ use. The girls, too, spent increasing less time with their father. Edwina, the eldest, in particular enjoyed the sunshine and social life of Los Angeles for months on end.
(p.318)
Often intimidating and demanding when it came to his own children, he could also be quite indulgent. Despite his antipathy toward higher education, Hammond sent his sons, Richard and Leonard, to Harvard and Stanford. During the summer they spent considerable time hunting and fishing in Montana and in Humboldt County. While Hammond expected his sons would soon join him in the lumber business, he also provided them with plenty of spending money and a comfortable life. Hammond‘s insistence upon hard work and pulling one‘s self up by the boot straps apparently did not apply to his own family. In insulating his children from the necessities of life, however, Hammond also isolated them from himself.
(p. 459)
Like most men of his background, the hardships of life conditioned Hammond to display little emotion, especially regarding personal matters, and he remarked little on Richard‘s death. Nevertheless, it affected him profoundly. Now that his offspring were adults, it seemed too late to reconcile the past, and he plunged into his work. With Richard‘s illness, Hammond had turned to his second son, Leonard, and in 1909 made him secretary and treasurer of the Eddy, Hammond Company, A. B.‘s multi-million dollar holding company. Leonard now bore the full burden of his father‘s expectations, and while he would prove competent, he also rebelled against Hammond‘s overbearing authority in his own ways.[2]
(p. 460)
Hammond had yet another reason for wanting to ensure production of aircraft quality spruce. With the outbreak of war, his only remaining son, Leonard, had quit his job in his father‘s office and joined the Harjes Ambulance Corps. In 1917 Leonard transferred to the Army Air Corps and flew numerous missions in Allied planes built of Sitka spruce. While the U.S. intended to build 28,000 airplanes, by
October 1918 the industry could only supply a scant fifth of the required lumber. Not only was the IWW impacting Hammond economically, but in his mind, they were also imperiling his son.[3]
(p. 494)
Although Leonard shared many of his father‘s ideals – hard work, thrift, and patriotism – he also embodied the new age. A desire for indulgence and leisure was replacing the fading ethic of sacrifice and restraint. As historian Lynn Dumenil puts it, the nineteenth-century emphasis on character gave way to a twentieth-century preoccupation with personality. The emergence of a consumer culture quickly eroded Victorian restraints. Two of the more apparent manifestations of this shift were the emergence of “welfare capitalism” and spectator sports. Both converged at the HLC company town of Samoa.(31)
Leonard absorbed many of the ideas of welfare capitalism, including filling workers‘ recreational needs. Under his tenure at Samoa, not only did the HLC provide housing and medical care, but the company built a large gymnasium for workers, a women‘s clubhouse, and organized a baseball team. The Humboldt County league only consisted of four teams: Eureka, Arcata, Scotia, and Samoa, but competition was fierce. Engrossed in his team, Leonard provided incentives to attract top players, including easy work schedules, higher salaries, and new housing. When A. B. showed up on one of his periodic tours, he was aghast at such frivolity. Declaring that Samoa had plenty of housing, he halted construction. After he left, however, Leonard quietly resumed the building. Leonard also made improvements to the Humboldt operations, adding new machines, new logging locomotives, and overseeing the transition from a steam powered mill to an all electric one in 1921. Having proved his worth at Samoa, Leonard moved back to San Francisco to assume the vice-presidency of the HLC.(32)
31 Dumenil. For more on consumer culture see William Leach, Land of Desire Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993) and Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption: critical essays in American history, 1880-1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1983). For welfare capitalism see: Stuart Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism: 1880-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)
32 Arcata Union, Feb. 1, 1923; Mengel, 85; Timberman, March 1920:53.
(pps 523 / 524)
. . . In March 1936, Lea resigned and Leonard replaced him and immediately began to emulate his father‘s business approach. The HLC, apparently, was not quite ready to fully embrace a CEO-style organization.
Leonard inherited a company saddled with a $4 million debt and threw himself into the challenge. As the company‘s lead salesman, he initiated an aggressive retailing effort. Not only did the HLC have marketing offices throughout the U.S., it joined with other producers in a “vigorous foreign sales campaign with agencies in thirty-two countries.”(10) At the end of his first full year as president, Leonard was able to pay out nearly half a million in dividends, maintain a cash surplus and claimed that the company was “in a better financial condition than it has been for a long time.”(11) In 1939, Leonard acquired the financially strapped Hobbs-Wall Lumber Company, the largest timber owner in neighboring Del Norte County, for a mere $150,000. By 1940 Leonard had halved the HLC‘s debt, paid off all its bills, and posted a net profit of $586,000 on sales of $1 million a month.(12)
10 Melendy, 300.
11 L. C. to McLeod, Dec. 29, 1937.
12 Mengel, 130; Melendy 113, L. C. to McLeod, Dec. 12, 1940, March 14, 1941.
(p. 554)
Leonard Hammond had more than adequately filled his father‘s shoes. When he took over the company in 1936, the HLC had missed three years of dividends and was more than $4 million in the hole. By the time he died, he had retired all the company‘s debt, paid all the missed dividends, and cushioned the HLC with a cash reserve of more than $5 million.21 Had he lived, the subsequent history of the Hammond Lumber Company would have turned out quite differently.
(p. 558)
Below is information from the publication ‘Harvard’s Military Record in the World War,’ Ed. Mead, Frederick S. (1921).
Hammond, Leonard Coombes, s ’01 – ’02. Driver, Norton Harjes Ambulance Corps, Section 5, November 1915 to November 1916, with French Army on Oise, Verdun, Aisne and Alsace fronts. Entered Officer’s Training Camp, Presidio of San Francisco, Calif., May 1917; commissioned 1st lieutenant Infantry August 15; assigned to 1st Group of Observers October 1; sailed for France December 17; attached to 52d Squadron, French Army; April 20, 1918; assigned to 91st Aero Squadron, A.E.F., June 14; transferred to 1st Army Observation Group September 1; promoted captain Air Service, Military Aeronautics October 6; returned to United States January 14, 1919; discharged February 18, 1919. Engagements cooperated in; Saint-Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives. Officially credited with the destruction of six enemy airplanes. Awarded Distinguished Service Cross:
“For extraordinary heroism in action in the region of Metz, France, September 15, 1918. While on a photographic mission Lieutenant Hammond’s formation was attacked by a superior number of enemy pursuit planes. Notwithstanding that the enemy planes succeeded in driving off the protecting planes, Lieutenant Hammond and his pilot, Lieutenant Dickma, continued on alone. Continually harassed by enemy aircraft, they completed their photographs, and on the return fought their way through an enemy patrol and destroyed one of the machines.”
“On October 31, 1918, Captain Leonard C. Hammond, A.S., U.S.A., Observer, again displayed extraordinary heroism in the vicinity of Longuyon. While on a photographic mission, he and his pilot, Captain Kingman Douglass, with one other ship, were attacked by a superior number of enemy pursuit planes. Notwithstanding the numerical superiority of the enemy and the fact that his mission had been successfully completed and he could have easily reached the lines in safety, Captain Hammond encouraged his pilot to turn and dive at them. The enemy formation was broken, and in the ensuing combat one hostile plane was destroyed.”
S. F. Society Man to Join Belgian Corps
SAN FRANCISCO. Oct 30.—Determined to seek excitement in the war zone, Leonard Coombes Hammond, prominent in local society and club circles, has decided to become a driver for the Belgian ambulance corps. Hammond will sail for Bordeaux from New York on November 14 [1915]. He is an exceptionally skillful driver and expects no difficulty in qualifying for the ambulance corps. He was divorced from his wife, formerly Miss Ruth Carroll, a year ago. He is the son of Andrew A. Hammond, millionaire lumber man of this city.
Oakland Tribune – Sunday, October 31, 1915
The son of millionaire Andrew B. Hammond of San Francisco, California, socialite Leonard Coombes Hammond attended Harvard in 1901 and 1902. From November 1915 until November 1916 he was a driver in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps on the Western Front. Upon his return to San Francisco, he entered officer’s training at the Presidio in May 1917 and was commissioned 1st Lieutenant on 15 August 1917. Hammond was assigned to the 1st Observation Group on 1 October 1917 and embarked for France on 17 December 1917. He joined the 91st Aero Squadron on 14 June 1918 and scored 6 victories flying the Salmson 2A2as an observer. Hammond returned to the United States on 14 January 1919 and was discharged from the army 18 February 1919.
The Distinguished Service Cross is presented to Leonard Coombes Hammond, First Lieutenant (Air Service), U.S. Army, for extraordinary heroism in action in the region of Metz, France, September 15, 1918. While on a photographic mission Lieutenant Hammond’s formation was attacked by a superior number of enemy pursuit planes. Notwithstanding that the enemy planes succeeded in driving off the protecting planes, Lieutenant Hammond and his pilot, Lieutenant Dickens, continued on alone. Continually harassed by enemy aircraft, they completed their photographs, and on the return fought their way through an enemy patrol and destroyed on of the machines.
General Orders No. 138, W.D., 1918