AFS Intercultural Programs
AFS Intercultural Programs is an international youth exchange organization. It consists of over 50 independent, not-for-profit organizations, each with its network of volunteers, professionally staffed offices, volunteer board of directors and [|website]., 12,578 students traveled abroad on an AFS cultural exchange program, between 99 countries. The US-based partner, AFS-USA, sends more than 1,000 US students abroad and places foreign students with more than 2,000 US families each year. As of 2022, more than 500,000 people have gone abroad with AFS and over 100,000 former AFS students live in the US.
History of AFS Intercultural Programs
World War I
When war broke out in 1914, the American Colony of Paris organized an "ambulance"—the French term for a temporary military hospital—just as it had done in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 when the "American Ambulance" had been under tents set up near the Paris home of its founder, the celebrated Paris-American dentist, Thomas W. Evans. The "American Ambulance" of 1914 took over the premises of the unfinished Lycée Pasteur in the suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine—and was run by the nearby American Hospital of Paris.The volunteer drivers of 1914 found themselves behind the wheels of motorized, not horse-driven, vehicles: Model-Ts, purchased from the nearby Ford plant in Levallois-Perret.
In the fall of 1914, when the war front moved away from Paris, the American Ambulance set up an outpost in Juilly and sent out detached units of volunteer drivers to serve informally with the British and Belgian armies in the north. In early 1915, one of those drivers, A. Piatt Andrew, was appointed "Inspector of Ambulances" by Robert Bacon, head of the American Ambulance and one of Andrew's colleagues from the Taft Administration.
The newly appointed inspector toured the ambulance sections of Northern France and learned that the American volunteers were bored with so-called "jitney work," transporting wounded soldiers from railheads to hospitals far back from the front lines. French army policy prohibited foreign nationals from traveling into battle zones.
In March 1915, Andrew met with Captain Aimé Doumenc, head of the French Army Automobile Service and pleaded his case for the American volunteers. They desired above all, he said, "to pick up the wounded from the front lines..., to look danger squarely in the face; in a word, to mingle with the soldiers of France and to share their fate!" Doumenc agreed to give Andrew a trial. The success of Section Z was immediate and overwhelming, and by April 15, 1915, the French created American Ambulance Field Service operating under French Army command. Sections of about 30 drivers each were assigned to individual French Army divisions. The volunteer drivers at first joined for six months at a time; some received acting officer uniforms and ranks to work with the French officers that commanded the units.
This marked the formal beginning of American Ambulance Field Service, three units of which made their mark during battles in northern France, the Champagne, Verdun and the Vosges.
By the summer of 1916, the Field Service severed its ties with the American Ambulance and moved its operations from cramped quarters in Neuilly to Paris, onto the spacious grounds of the Delessert château at 21 rue Raynouard in the Passy area of Paris. There, it grew rapidly over the next year, continuing to provide "sanitary sections" to the French Army, while also serving as a recruitment source of combat pilots for the newly formed Escadrille Lafayette, one of whose prime movers, Edmund L. Gros, was the Field Service's in-house physician.
By 1917 the Field Service had 33 ambulance sections with about 1200 volunteers total. When the United States entered the war in April 1917, the French Army successfully appealed to the Field Service for drivers for its military transport sections. Using excess ambulance volunteers that agreed to enlist in the French Army, the service established 14 transportation combat units with 800 drivers carrying ammunition and supplies. No longer limited to medical transport, the organization renamed itself the "American Field Service", thus establishing today's well-known acronym, "AFS".
While American media described the ambulance and transport units as easy duty, many volunteered for AFS to join the fighting as fast as possible. Before the AFS was absorbed into the much larger, federalized U.S. Army Ambulance Service in autumn 1917, it had numbered more than 2500 volunteers, including some 800 drivers of French military transport trucks. It had actively recruited its drivers from the campuses of American colleges and universities, promoting morale by creating units with volunteers from the same schools. All financed their own uniforms and transportation to France where they worked under the same conditions as French ambulance drivers—with the same pay—and often found themselves serving under extremely dangerous missions on the Front. By the end of the war, some 127 men who had served with the AFS had been killed and a notable number of individuals and units had earned the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de Guerre for their heroic actions as drivers.
Other volunteer ambulance corps served the French Army as "foreign sanitary sections" during World War I. The first was Henry Harjes’’ "Formation" units under the American Red Cross, followed by Richard Norton's American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps, organized in London under the St. John's Ambulance. Later, both would merge —under the American Red Cross—as the "Norton-Harjes". In the summer and fall of 1917, when all the volunteer ambulance services were invited to join the new U.S. Army Ambulance Service, Norton's units simply disbanded, while Harjes’, under the American Red Cross, moved into Italy where they would subsequently serve under the USAAS.
Once the Americans entered the war, many drivers joined combat units, both French and American, serving as officers in a variety of assignments, notably in air force and artillery units. At the same time, a large percentage of volunteers signed up for the military, thenceforth members of USAAS units, but remaining identified with their AFS past—a past kept alive through the work of HQ, still at 21 rue Raynouard, where a Bulletin was published and where visiting ambulance drivers could find temporary lodgings and meals.
World War I publications
The young AFS drivers came from "prominent families in the States," and had attended, or were still attending, one of almost a hundred prominent colleges or universities around the country. Also represented were a smaller group from America's professional class: doctors, lawyers, architects, painters, brokers, businessmen, poets and writers. This literate group produced many letters, diaries, journals, and even poetry. The AFS collected many of these writings into Friends of France, published in 1916. The Service used this volume to recruit more volunteers to the "gloriously exciting and grandly humanitarian" work of an ambulancier on the Western Front.Also published in 1916, Ambulance Number 10, by Leslie Buswell, was composed of the author's letters back to the States. Buswell went on to assist Henry Sleeper in the AFS's recruiting and fundraising offices in Boston.
Other literary "ambulanciers" brought their letters and journals and memoirs to American publishers in the coming years. William Yorke Stevenson produced To The Front in a Flivver in 1917, stayed on in France after militarization, and composed From "Poilu" to "Yank" in 1918. Robert Imbrie published Behind the Wheel of a War Ambulance in 1918, as did Julien Bryan with Ambulance 464: Encore des Blesses.
The AFS recruits who joined the Service in late spring 1917, after Congress's declaration of war, were greeted by Piatt Andrew with a request: Would they forego ambulance driving for trucking supplies to the front? Eight hundred AFS recruits joined the camion service, including John Kautz, who published Trucking to the Trenches in 1918.
After the war the Field Service produced three hefty volumes of writings from numerous AFS alumni, including excerpts from the previously published books above.
Between the wars
Following the Great War, the AFS became sponsors for the French Fellowships—graduate student scholarships for study in France and in the US—which were ultimately administered by the Institute of International Education and were precedents for the Fulbright Foundation exchanges. AFS also created an association for its veterans, publishing a bulletin, organizing reunions and contributing a wing to house its memorabilia at the Museum of Franco-American Cooperation in Blérancourt, France.World War II
When World War II broke out, AFS reorganized its ambulance service, sending units first to France and then to the British Armies in North Africa, Italy, India-Burma and with the Free French for the final drive from southern France to Germany.2,196 men served in the AFS during World War II. Twenty-five were sons of World War I AFS drivers. While US Army officers were paid $75 to $105 monthly, AFS drivers as unpaid volunteers paid at least $390 each year to serve; basic equipment cost $150, and at least $20 each month for other expenses. Families deposited money at AFS headquarters, and volunteers withdrew funds from AFS cashers in the field. AFS encouraged sponsorship of drivers, and in August 1943 began providing a $20 monthly living allowance. AFS favored the Dodge WC54 4x4 ambulance; each cost $2000, usually paid by donation.
Seventy AFS Ambulance Drivers assisted the efforts to liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April and May 1945.