Child refugees from Russia. On the American Red Cross relief ship bringing Russian refugees from the port of Odessa in the Black Sea hundreds of children had the first wholesome food that they had ever tasted. Some of them had never tasted salt before, that being one of the most difficult things to obtain in Russia at the present time. When they arrived in Constantinople, where they were deloused and given medical attention before being sent to the concentration camp arranged for them on the island of Proti, far out in the sea of Marmora, they were met by Junior Red Cross of America directors who had large supplies of clean clothing, shoes and underwear awaiting them. To these miserable, unoffending waifs, who have known little but suffering and terror in their short lives this was almost the first sign that human kindness was to be found in the world. Their changed spirits spoke worlds of gratitude for American children whose slender savings brought them so much comfort and happiness

American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) encountered a multitude of orphaned children when they joined the war in 1917. Grassroots orphans’ relief efforts sprang up in France as early as 1914. A 1916 advertisement in The New York Times stated that in August of 1914, a group of drafted factory workers demanded that an organization should be formed to care for their potentially parent-less children. This first charity was founded by M. Vilta, the head of the Paris Université Populaire. It was known as the Association Les Orphelins de la Guerre, War Orphans’ Association. In 1915, the CNSA (National Relief and Food Committee) created the Oeuvre nationale des orphelins de guerre (National war orphans charity) in order to help children who had lost their parents due to the war. This section was created with the support of the very active Commission For Relief in Belgium (CRB). Across the Atlantic ocean, they were supported by a broad network of charitable donors and private citizens including philanthropist William D. Guthrie, Catholic Archbishop John Cardinal Farley, US Supreme Court Chief Justice Howard Douglass White, and French ambassador William H. Sharp, the American Society for the Relief of French War Orphans, which solicited funds from Yale University. In August of 1914, a group of New York-based philanthropists, and several former French residents including August F. Jaccacci, Mrs. Cooper Hewitt and Frederick René Coudert Jr. began the most wide-reaching orphans’ relief organizations, the Franco-American Committee for the Protection of Children of the Frontier. The Committee was assisted by the Service de Transport France-Amerique, a shipping service for transferring goods across the ocean to help the French. The Committee spread and advertisements printed in publications like the Chicago Tribune. Funds collected from the solicitation on the orphans’ behalf by the American public through the advertisements paid for ophan’s care and education that reportedly cost “16 cents a day.” In addition to relief agencies’ fundraising campaigns, the US Red Cross hosted several large-scale Child Welfare Expositions in Saint Etienne, Lyons, and Marseilles in 1917. By December 1, 1917, the Franco-American Committee for the Protection of Children of the Frontier recorded that they had aided 1,365 children. Despite the war environment, most of the children in American Red Cross photographs appear to be calm and well-fed despite their uprooting and the horrors that they may have witnessed. On April 12, 1918 Stars and Stripes newspaper reported that 38 children were adopted by Infantry companies. The Great War resulted in six million orphans across Europe.