Their great task came when the guns with their equipment first landed at
St. Nazaire. Not only was it necessary to assemble the guns, but also
the locomotives and accompanying armored cars. All of this work was done
by the men of the two units as officers and petty officers. When these
guns finally got into action, they outranged every battery on any front
and, striking at the German railway lines of communication, now from
this point and then that, they threw the whole "neck of the bottle"
toward which the American forces were driving into hopeless confusion.
Of the men in these two battalions over sixty percent received
commissions, and of the others, almost all held high ratings as petty
officers with responsibilities ordinarily only assumed by commissioned
officers.

With so great a number of Michigan men with the expeditionary forces,
the University was particularly interested in their welfare while "over
there." From the first Michigan took a prominent part in the
establishment of the American University Union in Paris, of which
President Hutchins was one of the first Board of Trustees. Professor
Charles B. Vibbert, '04, of the Department of Philosophy was appointed
Director of the Michigan Bureau by President Hutchins and was made one
of the Executive Committee in Paris. Here he rendered most effective
service to the hundreds of Michigan men who used the club house, a
large hotel in the heart of Paris, as their headquarters. He was also
assigned as his special duty, the promotion of friendly relations
between the Americans and the French people of Paris, and so successful
was he in this task that he was awarded the Legion of Honor by the
French government. After the end of the demobilization period he
remained in Paris for a time as Director of a permanent Union which
succeeded the war organization. Two other representatives of the
University, Mr. Warren J. Vinton, '11, for some time Professor Vibbert's
assistant, and Assistant Professor Philip E. Bursley, '02, one of the
general secretaries, were on the Union's staff.

No review of Michigan's record in the war would be complete without a
word as to the share of the Faculty. As never before this was a war of
scientists and technically trained men. There was hardly a subject
taught in the University which did not fit in somewhere, while the work
of such departments as chemistry, physics, astronomy, mathematics, and
the various branches of engineering, to say not