Military History | Monument Américain, Tours — One of the Four Figures Is Procurement
· 1932
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Military History | Monument Américain, Tours — One of the Four Figures Is Procurement
kevin
On the shaft of a fountain at Tours, four robed stone figures stand above the water. Their plinths read ADMINISTRATION, CONSTRUCTION, PROCUREMENT and DISTRIBUTION — what the American Battle Monuments Commission called the four principal divisions of the Services of Supply.
The Services of Supply was the American Expeditionary Forces' rear organisation, and Tours was its headquarters: the ports, railways, warehouses and hospitals behind the front were run from this city. Major General James G. Harbord took command of it on 29 July 1918.
Below the upper basin, on the octagonal pedestal, are the arms of eight French cities where the supply installations stood: Tours, Brest, Saint-Nazaire, Le Mans, Is-sur-Tille, Nevers, Neufchâteau and Bordeaux. Around the kerb of the lower basin the dedication is cut twice. The English reads ERECTED BY THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION OF THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE SERVICES OF SUPPLY. The French half calls them les Services de l'Arrière. On the same rim: A.D. 1932, the commission's name, and the architect's, Arthur Loomis Harmon. The fountain was dedicated in 1937.
The commission's 1938 volume put the number commemorated at more than 640,000; its current figure is 650,000. Both counts are its own.
The crowning group, an Indian releasing an eagle, was modelled by Carl Paul Jennewein; the study for it took the Widener Memorial Gold Medal at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1932. Its bronze survived the war. The City of Tours records that the wartime mayor, Ferdinand Morin, kept it off the requisition lists by telling the prefect the monument was American property and not the city's to give, and that about seventy per cent of the department's public bronzes were melted down.
The water still runs, on the avenue that was the quai d'Orléans when the fountain was built, east of the Pont Wilson.
📸 Cover: the fountain in April 2025, photograph by Benjamin Smith, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: American Battle Monuments Commission, "American Armies and Battlefields in Europe" (1938), page 480, the plate captioned "American Memorial at Tours to the Services of Supply, A.E.F." — a United States Government publication, public domain, scanned by the Internet Archive, cropped to the plate.
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