From the Halls of Bristol County to the Shores of Buzzards Bay: The Old Colony Hosts the Great War Game of August 1909
By Eric B. Schultz
“The greatest war game ever played in America will begin on the Massachusetts coast, south of Boston, at one minute past midnight next Saturday morning,” August 14, 1909, The New York Times proclaimed, “when two armies, one representing a great European power and another the United States, will begin a seven days struggle for the possession of some strategic point between Narragansett and Portland, Me.”¹
The strategic point, unknown to either side until “hostilities” commenced just after midnight, would be the capture of Boston. Neither the Red Army invaders nor the Blue Army defenders would fire a single bullet during the coming week of warfare. Nevertheless, the Times added, both sides would use powder in such great quantities that anyone living within earshot of the Massachusetts coast would be entertained for a week “with the liveliest concert heard in that vicinity.”²
The Great War Game of 1909 was a large-scale military exercise conducted by the U.S. Army. Nine thousand “foreign invaders” from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and the District of Columbia landed along the coast of Buzzards Bay, meeting resistance from 7,000 Massachusetts National Guard defenders positioned in the woodlands and bogs of Plymouth and Bristol Counties.
This little-known chapter of Old Colony history was critical for assessing and improving US defenses before WWI. With global tensions rising and fear of England’s and Germany’s massive navies, the war game was designed to test mobilization, strategy, command structures, and logistics for a feared large-scale invasion of the Eastern seaboard.
Technological breakthroughs such as the automobile and bicycle, the mining of harbors, and wartime use of the telegraph would be tested across the mock battlefields of the Old Colony.
Leadership
Major-General Tasker H. Bliss (1853–1930), an 1875 West Point graduate who later taught at the military academy, led the 9,000 invading Red Army soldiers. During the Spanish-American War (1898), he had been involved in logistics and supply planning. In 1917, Bliss was named Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, overseeing America’s initial military mobilization for World War I. His initial headquarters were established in Acushnet.
The 7,000 Massachusetts Blue Army defenders fought under Brigadier-General William A. Pew, Jr. (1858–1933). Pew had served as commander of the 8th Massachusetts Infantry during the Spanish-American War, where his regiment was recognized for its excellent discipline and the strong rapport between officers and enlisted men. His first base was established in Bridgewater.
Overseeing the exercise was Major General Leonard Wood (1860–1927), a key figure in early 20th-century military reforms. Wood began his career as a surgeon in the U.S. Army, earning the Medal of Honor in 1886 for his actions during the Apache Wars. In 1898, he helped organize the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry — better known as the “Rough Riders” — alongside Theodore Roosevelt, who assumed command from Wood. In 1899, Wood was appointed military governor of Cuba (1899–1902).
Wood maintained his headquarters at Lakeville’s King Philip Tavern on the shore of Lake Assawompsett, an establishment founded that same year to take advantage of the rising trade in automobile travel and vacations.
Drawn from regular army officers and the War College, Wood’s staff of umpires was central to this War Game. Each body of troops was accompanied by an umpire who could declare soldiers safe or “dead.” A “dead” soldier was retired for the day but resumed fighting the next day so that his battlefield education continued. A record of killed and wounded on each side was tabulated each day.
For example, in a field outside of Middleborough, the Blue Army occupied a farmhouse while a large force of Blue hid behind a stonewall. A half troop of Red cavalry charged both locations. The umpire, a lieutenant of the Eleventh Cavalry, rode with the troopers, whom he declared had been routed with severe loss. But the farmhouse, he said, had been overrun 4-to-1 by the Reds.
But the umpire also determined that the Blue defenders had not fired in the range their officers gave, leaving part of the Cavalry intact. Based on the use of revolvers by the Cavalry, however, he also determined that many of the men in the front ranks would have been shot by friendly fire from the rear.
The soldiers didn’t always agree with the umpires but recognized that most had acquired real combat experience in Cuba, the Philippines, or China.
“The next time I saw that same troop in action,” war reporter Richard Harding Davis wrote, “they had benefited by the lesson of the fight at Middleboro Green, and, having left their horses under cover, were creeping up on foot upon the enemy, and, by taking him in the flank, won a glorious victory.”³
Davis (1864–1916) was the fourth important figure on the battlefield during the Great War Game of 1909. A novelist, adventurer, and the most famous American journalist of his generation, Davis brought the importance of the War Game home to the readers of one of America’s most popular magazines, Collier’s. He had been the first American war correspondent to cover the Spanish-American War and the Second Boer War. Eventually, he reported from the battlefields of World War I.
Davis had a clean-shaven look so popular at the start of the 20th century (with the launch of Gillette’s replaceable safety razor blades in 1901) that he was thought to be the model for the “Gibson Man” — Charles Dana Gibson’s epitome of the athletic, chivalrous, confident, and well-dressed gentleman to which American men aspired in the early 20th century.
Davis knew that Generals Wood, Bliss, and Pew’s activities in the Old Colony were serious, even if no soldier died. Writing for Collier’s magazine, he described the exercises as “the most important war game ever attempted in America,” an activity that expanded the largest ground area in the U.S. ever covered by maneuvers from twenty square miles to two thousand.⁴
Davis was annoyed that the average American, who considered baseball’s Spring Training essential and watched his favorite football player block dummies in practice, thought the War Game to be ridiculous because a bridge could be destroyed by pasting a label to it, or “an umpire should declare a troop of cavalry shot to pieces when no bullets had touched it.” He told his reader, “To disembark nine thousand troops and march them through an unknown country and bring them into and out of action and to feed them is no mean problem” in itself.⁵
Taunton got its first glimpse of the Game on August 12 when the United States regulars, the 10th Cavalry, trooped through the city headed for Freetown. These 400 so-called “colored soldiers” (in an Army that was to remain segregated until 1948) were fresh from serving in the Philippines. They had camped in Mansfield, marched into the city with post riders, a wagon train, and a field ambulance, passing through Oakland, around the Taunton Green, and then heading for New Bedford. Hundreds of Taunton residents lined up to see these troops, an impressive show of military force that hadn’t been witnessed in the city since a battery of artillery from Newport made an overland hike twenty years before.⁶
The Game Takes Shape
By Saturday morning, the Blue defenders had deployed throughout Bristol and Plymouth counties. They knew the Red Army was marching north but were unsure of their location or goal.
By the next day, Taunton was threatened by the Red Army advance. “Early Sunday morning,” the Taunton Daily Gazette reported, “the city was a scene of military activity. Mounted pickets were passing through the streets, automobile and motorcycle dispatch bearers and scouts were bustling to and fro, carrying orders from the commander to his outposts, and later on, now and then, a squadron of cavalry or a detachment of infantry passed through to occupy strategic points.”⁷
For a time, it appeared that the central bodies of both armies might collide in Taunton.
On Monday morning, commuters in the city found placards indicating that the Weir, Neck O’ Land, and the Williams and Mill River bridges were “destroyed.” Whole companies of Blue Army soldiers were guarding some. Meanwhile, light field artillery and cavalry had been called into service to guard the city’s main entrances.
By Tuesday, August 17, the Blue Army had formed a long, thin defense from Plymouth to Freetown, across the outskirts of Middleborough and Wareham to Taunton and beyond. Observation balloons flew overhead, seeking the location of the Red Army. Residents who spoke with the Blue defenders found many were already exhausted. “It’s a hard job for chaps who are working indoors 51 weeks in the year to get to the grind of a campaign of this kind,” one soldier said.⁸
Restaurants in the city did a booming business serving observers and occasional AWOL soldiers looking to supplement their rations. Camp activities at Assawompsett and Long Pond threatened Taunton’s water supply, which was forced to rely entirely on Elders Pond.
The Pivotal Battle
With bridges across the Taunton River “blown up,” the Red Army was cut off from advancing on Boston from the direction of Fall River. This forced General Bliss to choose a route along the coast. The “triangle of country between Taunton, the Taunton River, and the coast” was full of Red scouts and lookouts. A few days into the exercise, observing the movements of the Red Army, it was apparent to the Blue defenders that Boston was the prize.
Camped overnight at Eddyville on the Atwood farm in Middleborough, the Reds broke camp at 5 a.m. on Monday, August 16, and marched directly toward Plympton, where they encountered the Eighth Massachusetts Infantry. The entire First Brigade of the Red Army, consisting of five field artillery batteries, routed the Blue Army’s Eighth Massachusetts Infantry.
“Driving the panic-stricken Blues before them,” the Taunton Daily Gazette reported, “the Reds pushed on toward Boston, taking the road leading toward Plympton and Halifax.”⁹
However, the Red Army soldiers soon shifted their line of march to the coast, where a fleet of “battleships” that had been patrolling around Marblehead, Beverly, and Salem came to their support. The Blues were faced with defending the coast from landing parties or opposing the main force on land. The Reds also threatened a full-scale attack of the Blues at East Bridgewater. The Blues fell back just south of Brockton as the skies opened, soaking both armies.
The pivotal battle came on August 19 on the South Hanson Road at Hanover Four Corners. Skirmishing from Middleborough along School Street in Pembroke to Mayflower Grove and on to Hanover Four Corners, the Red Army turned the flanks of the Blue, opening up the road to Boston. The expenditure of powder was so great that it looked as if the woods surrounding Four Corners had been set on fire. Seeing the outcome of Hanover Four Corners, General Wood closed the campaign.¹⁰
None of the drenched soldiers were sorry to have the Game stopped. An hour later, both sides were fraternizing over the same campfires.
It was “the colored cavalry, the larger part of whom were with the Red Army, that performed a large share of the work for General Bliss” and received the highest praise in this final battle, especially in their ability to dash around the battlefield and keep Bliss appraised of conditions. The benefit of their battle experience in the Philippines was clear to Bliss, Wood, and his umpires.¹¹
These were the same segregated troops that the residents of Taunton had admired on August 12 as they marched through the city.
Epilogue
The soldiers involved in the Great War Game of 1909 found the invasion to be serious business. Hungry, tired, and soaked to the skin for two days, 16,000 men marched around Massachusetts for a week, following orders and behaving themselves. Total damage to private property was less than $1,000.¹² Davis calculated that the Great War Game cost less than $100,000, but the lessons learned were far more significant. The Red Army won, but every participant became a better soldier, citizen, and asset to the country.¹³
Wood and his staff saw weaknesses in the Blue Army’s defensive strategies, highlighting the need for improved coordination and battlefield communication. They also found that the National Guard was not well-trained or equipped to respond quickly to a major invasion. One key takeaway was the difficulty defending against a well-planned amphibious landing, leading to later military readiness reforms.
While General Pew and his Blue forces lost the decisive battle at Hanover Four Corners, General Wood was complimentary. “Much credit is due him. His forces made some splendid marches . . . His column arrived at Hanover only four minutes behind General Bliss.” Wood concluded that the war game of 1909 “got the old officers of the war college up on their toes with enthusiasm.” One observer noted, “Nothing in real battle was any more warlike.”¹⁴
The troops from Connecticut suffered severely, the New York Times later reported, “exhausted to the point of prostration by their experience before Boston. Nearly all have taken to their beds and still required many days to recover from the heavy colds, the blistered feet, and the muscle bruises.”¹⁵
“The real lesson derived from the Massachusetts war games is that the physical standard of the national guard must be kept practically as high as that of the army itself.”¹⁶ The guardsmen, The New York Sun opined, “received their seasoning in counting rooms and dry goods stores and went to the field almost with pens behind their ears . . . The majority of the men are not ready at a moment’s notice to undergo a severe test of their leg muscles and lung capacity, as is required of them when the commander of the Red Army attempts to double up the right wing of the Blue.”¹⁷
Despite these hardships, Davis viewed the exercises as a win for the Army. Pew’s forces learned more in one week than they “had guessed in a lifetime,” he wrote. At the same time, the 9,000 invaders from New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia under Major-General Bliss were taught “the inestimable value of a map, of scouting and reconnaissance, and how it is possible for men to live on the country through which they are fighting their way.”
“The maneuvers held the other week in Massachusetts,” Davis told his readers, “were the most successful that has ever been pulled off in this country.”¹⁸
Postscript
Students of military history will recognize the innocence of Richard Davis’s summary. The lessons of the War Game of August 1909 in Old Colony had little relevance to the Guns of August 1914 in Europe and the brutality of World War I. General Wood and his umpires had structured a game based on their experiences in the Spanish-American War, when Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, on foot and armed only with revolvers, stormed San Juan Hill and overwhelmed an entrenched Spanish position.
The lessons of the Great War Game of 1909 relied on 19th-century tactics and weapons, like slow-firing bolt-action rifles and artillery limited in range and firepower. Cavalry still played an essential role, advancing under fire in frontal assaults and winning quick, decisive victories like the battle at Hanover Four Corners.
By the time Americans entered World War I in the summer of 1917, industrial warfare had generated millions of casualties. Machine guns had ended the days of frontal assaults. Tanks created a new kind of cavalry. Precise, lethal, heavy artillery was the primary cause of battlefield death. Planes engaged in dog fights and bombing. Soldiers were pinned for months in trenches, facing constant bombardment, hobbled by trench foot and hunger, fearful of poison gas, and returning home suffering from shell shock (PTSD).
In retrospect, the war game that upended life in the Old Colony for a week in August 1909 was a vestige, a form of warfare that soldiers would never see again.
Notes
¹ “Biggest War Game Ever Played Here,” New York Times, August 11, 1909, 2.
²“Ibid.
³Richard Harding Davis, “The Capture of Boston,” Collier’s, Vol. XLIII №24, September 4, 1909, 11.
⁴Ibid, 10.
⁵Ibid.
⁶“Colored Regulars Made A Find Appearance Passing Through the City,” Taunton Daily Gazette, August 12, 1909, 1.
⁷“Taunton Gets a Taste of the Mimic War — Bridges are Blown up on Sunday — Cannon Mounted in Streets,” Taunton Daily Gazette, Monday Evening, August 16, 1909, 1.
⁸“Mimic War,” 1.
⁹“Blue Forces Routed in Pitched Battle By Invading Reds,” Taunton Daily Gazette, August 18, 1909, 1.
¹⁰See Roger Antilla’s Mayflower Grove: 1901–1945, Valerie Kroon, “Recalling Bryantville,” Wicked Local, Web March 16, 2025, Recalling Bryantville. Also, “Gen Bliss’ Red Army Officially Declared the Victors,” Taunton Daily Gazette, August 19, 1909, 1.
¹¹“Soldiers Glad War Game Ends,” Taunton Daily Gazette, August 20, 1909, 1.
¹²Davis, 10.
¹³Ibid.
¹⁴“Maneuvers Big Success,” The Patterson Morning Call, August 21, 1909, 9.
¹⁵“Boston Captured: War Game Closed,” New York Times, August 20, 1909, 3.
¹⁶“Maneuvers Essential,” Our Southern Home, Livingston, Alabama, November 3, 1909, 6.
¹⁷The War Games to Go On,” The Sun, New York, October 19, 1909, 6
¹⁸Davis, 10.
