Col. Charles W. Raymond
Class of 1926

by his son, Robert.W.Raymond

Charles Walker Raymond II was born February 18, 1909 at Washington Barracks, District of Columbia. He was the third son of Robert Rossiter Raymond, USMA Class of 1893, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Of seven children, he was next to youngest. His eldest brother, R. R. Raymond, Jr., graduated from the Military Academy with the Class, June 1919, which actually got to France almost a year before World War One ended.

Charley Raymond was Army. He detested the term "army brat", because he always considered it as something used as an epithet by people whose characters were in anything but military order. "Why is it that you never hear them say 'showbiz brat' or 'legal profession brat'?" he would ask. His father was Army. Both of his grandfathers were, too. And they were all West Pointers and proud of the fact.

Charley's grandfathers--on his father's side, Charles Walker Raymond and on his mother's side, William Rice King--were Engineer officers who had served their country in the Civil War. The Raymond connection to Old Cambridge District is in the King family name, whose provenance hereabouts goes back to the Revolution.

Raymond had not grown up on Army posts as such. This was because his father had lived in the civilian communities where his river and harbor projects were, and near seaports where he built coastal defenses.

Charley Raymond's teenage years were in Cambridge after his father retired in 1920. The elder Raymond bought an old house from his cousin John Larmon and had it rebuilt for his large family on West Main St. While the house was being made habitable, they lived for six months over the Paro tailor shop, corner of Park and E. Main. As a youth, Raymond was fascinated by things with wheels. He had a bicycle which he nicknamed "Galloping Gertrude" and went everywhere on it.

The Cambridge Volunteer Fire Company fascinated him in particular and he grew to be one of its biggest enthusiasts. He was a member of the famous Cambridge High School football team of 1925. When he graduated in 1926 he had earned the only Classical Diploma given that year, and applied for an appointment to his family's Alma Mater, West Point.

Charley's father wasn't really "from" Cambridge, so the few Congressional appointments went to local men. A year later, after much hard work, he was able to secure a Presidential, or "at-large" appointment, and on July 1, 1927 reported for duty at the U.S. Military Academy.

The Army of the 1920s and 1930s really wasn't much different from the Army of the 1870s or 1880s. It was rather small in comparison to the armies of comparable Western democracies, and much smaller than those of the Imperial governments like Britain, France, Germany and Russia. When William McKinley brought the United States into the world as a power of global significance, it was the Navy that got the bulk of defense expenditures. The Army was seen as only being needed to defend America's land borders and to provide for seacoast defense.

When Charles Raymond graduated from West Point in 1931, it was into a fairly small, unremarkable army that he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant. His first assignment was to report to the Field Artillery School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Raymond was going to be an artilleryman.

From West Point, in the old days, the top few men in each class were assigned to the Corps of Engineers, the elite minds of the Army.

Since billets were few and careers were long and stable, the remainder of the really smart fellows went into the Artillery, because that required a working acquaintance with technical matters. Next came the Cavalry officers, whose horsemanship training was also a technical skill. And last came the Infantry officers, for throughout history the main requisite to be a good one was to have good, healthy feet.

To Charley Raymond, the artillery was a case of natural selection, because after all, he liked things with wheels. He served fourteen years with horse-drawn and truck-drawn artillery units. He was lucky to have employment in the Army during the Depression, even though national defense was affected by economics just like everything else. In artillery practice, they expended shrapnel ammo left over from the World War, which manifested itself by a rather puny puff of light gray smoke on the gunnery range. They got to shoot only one round of high explosive ammo, which kicked up a large, impressive plume of black earth. They always fired this round last, as a finale to their weekly exercise.

When Raymond had been a cadet, the President, who then was Calvin Coolidge, had once exclaimed that the Army's airplanes were very expensive and that he didn't see why they had to buy so many of them. He thought the Army should buy just one and let the pilots take turns flying it. After the left-over ammo was used up, the artillery was reduced to practicing with a miniaturized system of laying and firing guns, sort of a sand-table model in a tiny scale. At one point, then, during the Thirties, American soldiers were actually playing with toys, attempting to train for a future conflict.

In the 1930s, Charles performed battery and battalion staff duties in regiments at Fort Lewis, Washington; Fort Sill, Oklahoma; Madison Barracks, New York and Schofield Barracks, Hawaii.

In 1936, Charles met Anita Cervi of Centralia, Ill., who was a 2nd Lt. in the Army Nurse Corps. She resigned her commission and they were married. Over 25 years of marriage they raised four boys, all of whom served their country in uniform.

Just prior to World War Two, Charley served with the 50th Field Artillery Battalion at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Then the Nips hit, and the United States was forced into the big war it had kept making believe that it wasn't going to have to get involved in. His outfit deployed to Iceland early in 1942, relieving the British Army who had grabbed the place earlier to keep it from falling into Kraut hands. He recalled that the British weren't a particularly tidy lot. They never swept up the canteen, and when the Yanks got there, the place was a foot deep in candy wrappers.

Charley Raymond joined up with the 34th (Red Bull) Infantry Division in Northern Ireland, taking command of the 185th Field Artillery Battalion. They went into Algiers, North Africa late in 1942. His battalion of 105mm howitzers helped drive the remnants of the Afrika Korps off Africa and into Italy. He was laid up for a short time with a bout of yellow jaundice, then got assigned to the 34th Division Artillery staff in the Italian Campaign. They went in at Anzio and got stalled in the Rapido Valley until we could nail the Jerries who were using the Monte Casino Abbey as an observation post. Charley found out afterwards that his nephew John Burlingame was in the third wave of B-25 bombers that plastered the mountain vantage point. He completed his combat service as the executive officer of the 423rd Field Artillery Group, earning the Bronze Star Medal.

In the 16 years following the War, Charles Raymond served in various command and staff positions. He was Executive Officer of Troops, 1802nd Special Regiment at the U.S. Military Academy. He was on the staff of G3 Section (Operations), Army Field Forces, Fort Monroe, Virginia. While there, he received a patent for the Artillery Testudo, a device for the protection of towed-howitzer gun crews.

In the 1950s, he served in politico-military and reserve affairs positions. He was Army Attaché in Korea at the time of the Armistice; Senior Army Advisor for Reserves, Connecticut Military District, and from 1958-1960 he was chief of the military mission to Nicaragua. He completed military service as the Commander, Western Sector, XXth Army Corps, Fort Hayes, Ohio, earning a Certificate of Achievement.

During his Army career, Raymond was a student at the Field Artillery School, the Army Command and General Staff College, the Army Language School (for Korean), the Strategic Intelligence School, and the Navy Language School (for Spanish).

Charles Raymond retired from the Army in January of 1961 returning to Cambridge. His first wife, Anita, died in September of that year and was buried at West Point. He married Marcia Clark of White Creek the following year.

His long and full retirement included earning a Masters of Science at SUNY Albany and teaching in local school districts. He was active in the Cambridge Volunteer Fire Department as a fireman, Publicity Officer, and Fire Police Captain. He was a member of the Washington County Fire Police Association, and a member of Captain Maxson Post 634, American Legion.

Just as Charles Raymond witnessed the transition from horse-drawn to motorized artillery, he also saw the evolution of rural firefighting equipment from primitive hand-worked apparatus to mechanized region-wide mutual aid systems. For a quarter century he kept a meticulously detailed account of the activities of the local fire company.

His lifelong hobby was making fire engine models out of common, found objects of every description. He not only built the models, he used them in visualizing and simulating complex firefighting situations in much the same way that war-game enthusiasts recreate historic battles.

He also loved to sing. He lent his resonant baritone to church choir, choral group or amateur vaudeville troupe whenever his talent was required. Charles Walker Raymond II died March 18, 1989, after a short illness. His body lies in the West Point Cemetery along with his forebears.

 

 

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