The Last of the Doughboys
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Maps
Prologue: No Man’s Land
Wolves on the Battlefield
Over the Top
The American Sector
Cheer and Laughter and Joyous Shout
The People Behind the Battle
The Forgotten Generation
Give a Little Credit to the Navy
A Vast Enterprise in Salesmanship
Hell, We Just Got Here
We Didn’t See a Thing
Loyal, True, Straight and Square
Photos
Old Dixieland in France
L’Ossuaire
A Wicked Gun, That Machine Gun
Wasn't a Lot of Help
The Last Night of the War
The Last of the Last
We Are All Missing You Very Much
Appendix
A Note on Methods
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
Copyright © 2013 by Richard Rubin
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Rubin, Richard.
The last of the doughboys : the forgotten generation and their forgotten world war / Richard Rubin.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-547-55443-3
1. World War, 1914–1918—Veterans—United States. 2. World War, 1914–1918– Personal narratives, American. 3. Soldiers—United States—Biography. 4. Veterans—United States—Biography. 5. Centenarians—United States—Biography. I. Title.
D639.V48U67 2013
940.4'12730922–dc23 2013000614
eISBN 978-0-547-84369-8
v1.0513
Excerpts from Company K by William March (University of Alabama Press) used by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.
To them and those they represent
Maps
1. Western Front, 1914–1918 [>]
2. Seicheprey, April 20, 1918 [>]
3. The German Spring Offensive, 1918 [>]
4. Belleau Wood, June 1918 [>]
5. Saint-Mihiel, September 12–13, 1918 [>]
6. The Meuse-Argonne Offensive, September 26–November 11, 1918 [>]
7. The Second Battle of the Marne, July 15–August 6, 1918 [>]
Prologue: No Man’s Land
BEFORE THE NEW AGE and the New Frontier and the New Deal, before Roy Rogers and John Wayne and Tom Mix, before Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, before the TVA and TV and radio and the Radio Flyer, before The Grapes of Wrath and Gone with the Wind and The Jazz Singer, before the CIA and the FBI and the WPA, before airlines and airmail and air conditioning, before LBJ and JFK and FDR, before the Space Shuttle and Sputnik and the Hindenburg and the Spirit of St. Louis, before the Greed Decade and the Me Decade and the Summer of Love and the Great Depression and Prohibition, before Yuppies and Hippies and Okies and Flappers, before Saigon and Inchon and Nuremberg and Pearl Harbor and Weimar, before Ho and Mao and Chiang, before MP3s and CDs and LPs, before Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall and Jackie Robinson, before the pill and Pampers and penicillin, before GI surgery and GI Joe and the GI Bill, before AFDC and HUD and Welfare and Medicare and Social Security, before Super Glue and titanium and Lucite, before the Sears Tower and the Twin Towers and the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, before the In Crowd and the A Train and the Lost Generation, before the Blue Angels and Rhythm & Blues and Rhapsody in Blue, before Tupperware and the refrigerator and the automatic transmission and the aerosol can and the Band-Aid and nylon and the ballpoint pen and sliced bread, before the Iraq War and the Gulf War and the Cold War and the Vietnam War and the Korean War and the Second World War, there was the First World War, World War I, the Great War, the War to End All Wars.
It wasn’t the biggest Veterans Day parade in New England, or in Massachusetts, or even on Cape Cod, for that matter. In fact, it was rather modest: a handful or two of old soldiers and sailors in uniform, a half-dozen large flags, a few cars, a couple of cops on motorcycles, and a fife-and-drum corps comprising two or three dozen area schoolchildren dressed like Continental soldiers and playing Revolutionary War–era tunes. There were short speeches at the war memorial, salutes at the Civil War monument, and hot dogs at the American Legion Hall. All told, this celebration of Veterans Day, 2003—a holiday that was first established by Congress in 1926 as Armistice Day, an observance of the truce that ended World War I at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918—lasted about an hour.
But the procession, modest as it was, had something else that made it unique among Veterans Day parades throughout the United States that year: Corporal Jesse Laurence Moffitt, a bona fide World War I veteran, a man who was then 106 years, eight months, and five days old. He had joined the Connecticut National Guard in February, 1917; when America entered the war, two months later, his unit became the 102nd Infantry Regiment, which was in turn part of the 26th Division, the “Yankee Division,” so called because it was composed entirely of regiments from New England. That summer, he shipped out for France, where he would, eventually, fight in one terrible battle after another—until, on November 11, 1918, as he recalled, “all firing stopped. Complete silence—there wasn’t a sound at eleven o’clock. And we were able to go out of our dugouts and trenches without our helmets or gas masks, which was the first time we’d been able to do that since we first went to the front.”
Exactly eighty-five years later, he rode in a parade in the picturesque seaside town of Orleans, Massachusetts, to mark the anniversary of that day, just as he did every year. Afterward, I asked him why, at his age, he made a point of doing so.
“People like to see a World War I exhibit,” he replied. “I would assume that it means something to people to see a World War I veteran, because there’s not many of us around, as you know. Just to be able to say that you have seen a 106-year-old is satisfying to some people. After all, it’s not an everyday event for most people.”
I couldn’t argue with that; if anything, it was a serious understatement. It had taken me several months of intensive searching to find just such a man, and several more before I found myself here, witnessing this historic occasion. And yet, as remarkable as all this was to me, I would not grasp the occasion’s true significance for some time to come. None of us who lined the road that morning could have known that what we were actually witnessing there in Orleans was the last small-town Veterans Day parade anywhere to feature a living American veteran of World War I.
I write these words on the island of Manhattan, the center of a city older than Boston and Philadelphia, a city that is richer in history than perhaps any other in America. That this is so often comes as a surprise to people, because New York is and always has been about what is new, not what is old; about what will be rather than what was. But just a few blocks from where I sit, mounted on the front of a small, vest-pocket Presbyterian church, there is a very large plaque listing the names of 136 members of that congregation who went off to fight in the First World War, including five who never returned. Three blocks away, inside a large Catholic church, another plaque lists the names of thirty-eight men from the parish who were killed in the same war. Across the park, almost to the East River, is York Avenue; most New Yorkers assume it is named, as is their city, for th
e Duke of York, but it is actually an homage to Sergeant Alvin C. York, a pacifist from the mountains of eastern Tennessee who was drafted and sent off to France, where, on the night of October 8, 1918, he single-handedly killed seventeen German soldiers and captured 132 more, a feat for which he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the French Légion d’Honneur, and several other high honors. Farther uptown, at the spot where Broadway and St. Nicholas Avenue converge, you will find a large bronze statue of doughboys struggling on a battlefield, mounted atop a granite monument to neighborhood boys who did the same. And up at the tip of the island, in the neighborhood known as Inwood, there are streets named for local sons who never returned from the trenches. Their last names, and the war they served in, are all that is remembered of them today.
And that’s just what I can think of off the top of my head, for the top half of the island. There are statues, monuments, and plaques commemorating World War I all over this city that often doesn’t seem to care about history—in parks and squares and libraries, in the South Bronx and Times Square and the Lord & Taylor department store on Fifth Avenue. I’m not sure I could direct you to three World War II monuments within the five boroughs, and believe me, I pay attention to these sorts of things. But World War I is everywhere.
And not just in New York. In Memphis, where I lived in the early 1990s, the city’s most revered old park is dominated by a massive green statue of a doughboy charging up a hill, lips pursed in a grim scowl, bayonet thrust out to skewer the Hun. I can think of only two Civil War monuments in the entire city, which was occupied by the Yankees for three years before Appomattox.
Most of these statues, monuments, plaques, and memorials were commissioned, produced, and dedicated within about a decade of November 11, 1918. For ten years or so—maybe a bit longer in some cities or regions, a bit less in others—it seemed terribly important, at least to a certain type of person, that America remember that war and the people who fought it. Those who weren’t a certain type of person had already set out to forget the war years earlier, in some cases even before the troops had all returned home. They were traumatized or embittered veterans; or men and women who had lost a boy Over There, or were caring for one who was now an invalid; or those whose businesses or marriages hadn’t survived the experience; or just people, most of them good at heart, who’d had enough and didn’t want to hear or think about it anymore. And then the Great Depression came along, and then World War II, and between those two events, even a certain type of person had other, more pressing things to think about. And by the by, America just forgot about World War I—did it so thoroughly, in fact, that after a while it became difficult to conceive that it had ever remembered it in the first place, that there had once been a time when that war hadn’t seemed like very distant history.
Those statues and monuments and plaques and memorials commissioned back in the 1920s, though—they were big and elaborate, well made and well placed. They are still there, still everywhere, still striking and arresting and as legible as the day they were cast or chiseled. They still proclaim their stories as clearly as ever. And it’s not just them: There are murals in old buildings, markers in front of old trees, ships and highways and public spaces named for World War I generals or battles or heroes or casualties; they talk a bit more softly, perhaps, but if you’re attuned to them they can tell you a great deal. Go to any flea market in the continental United States and you will find reams of old World War I sheet music, and stacks of old World War I 78s, both selling for pocket change. They are as common as they are cheap. And of course, they speak, too.
And surprising as all of that may seem, you may be more surprised yet to learn that, well into the first decade of the twenty-first century, you could, if you were really determined, still track down a remnant of World War I capable of speaking to you more effectively and compellingly than all of the aforementioned put together: an actual veteran.
One day in the mid-1970s, when I was perhaps seven or eight years old, I was riding into the city with my mother when she pointed out the Bronx VA hospital, up on a hill, and told me that there were still in residence there veterans of World War I, including some who had never recovered from being gassed at the front.
I just stared at her. How could such a thing possibly be true? World War I! It felt so distant, relegated to an era of black-and-white and silence. Back then our allies were a King, a Crown Prince, and a Czar, our enemies a Kaiser, an Emperor, and a Sultan. How, I wondered, could warriors from such a remote past still be among us? It seemed unthinkable.
It seemed unthinkable because the Great War had already attained mythic status. It was an epic conflict, of course, by far the largest—in scope, casualties, and almost any other measure you can think of—the world had ever seen. The slaughter was terrific: In just one of the war’s hundreds of battles—the Somme—more than a million men were lost, among them some 14,000 British soldiers who fell in the first ten minutes of battle. And yet, so often the images of that war that come to mind are curiously romantic: dashing aviators in leather jackets and long white scarves, genially sharing a bottle of cognac with a recently downed enemy pilot; colorfully clad regiments majestically marching off to battle, singing songs written specially for the occasion; soldiers crouching in trenches, writing poetry (and really good poetry, at that) while ducking enemy fire; troops kicking out soccer balls as they went “over the top” to the sound of bagpipes. Countless men were killed by artillery fired from miles away, after fighting, hand to hand and month after month, over the same few yards of rotten ground. Armies still observed age-old codes of chivalrous conduct toward the enemy, yet also unleashed upon them awful new weapons, chemical and biological agents so horrible that after the war they were banned forever.
Such paradoxes could exist because the Great War occurred at, and in many ways created, a great crossroads in the history of man. It changed the Western world—and much of the rest of the world, too—more than any other war had, or has. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, which had dominated large chunks of Europe and Asia for centuries, ceased to exist. Russia lost the monarchy that had ruled it for nearly a thousand years. Germany lost its ruler and plunged into an era of unprecedented political chaos culminating in the horror of the Third Reich. Much of France was destroyed. England lost an entire generation of young men. The United States—which sat out the first two and a half years of the war—lost more than one hundred thousand men; and though, in the process of fighting the war, it rose to the top tier of powerful nations for the very first time, it was so traumatized by the experience that it withdrew into a reactionary, isolationist cocoon, deporting hundreds and closing the door to several generations of immigrants. On the field of American memory, World War I occupies the slim No Man’s Land between the archaic and the modern.
Other conflicts, though, hold much more prominent positions on that battleground. In the spring of 2003, I heard someone on the radio declare, in a tone of great urgency, that as many as a thousand World War II veterans were dying every day, and that we must harvest their stories now, while we still can; and, having always been a sucker for things—and people, and places, and facts, and stretches of history—overlooked and underappreciated, it occurred to me that no one was even bothering to seek out surviving veterans of World War I, since almost everyone assumed that anyone who fought in that earlier conflict was long dead. I did the math in my head, figuring that a man who was 21 at the war’s end would now be 106 years old. People did occasionally live to be that old, I knew, and even a bit older. I had no idea how I might find such a person; but I was able to find a webpage for the Department of Veterans Affairs featuring an actuarial table, compiled a couple of years earlier, which projected that there were still nearly fifteen hundred veterans of the First World War living in America. I set out to find some.
The VA, the source of that promising statistic, seemed a logical place to start looking; but no one there—at least, no one I spoke to that spring—seemed to hav
e any idea at all who any of these fifteen hundred people were, much less where they might be. And try as I might, I couldn’t get any of them to look into the matter, either. Eventually, perhaps spurred on by a few months’ worth of my phone and email inquiries, they did do one thing: they revised their original projection down from fifteen hundred to “fewer than two hundred.”
I didn’t have any more luck with organizations like the Veterans of Foreign Wars or the American Legion, neither of which, I was told, kept centralized records; “Let us know if you find any!” was, typically, the last thing the people I spoke to at local chapters said by way of goodbye. VA hospitals, state veterans’ agencies, regional veterans’ homes, assisted-living facilities, nursing homes: No one had seen a World War I veteran in years, maybe decades. I started to wonder if that actuarial table might be the only place they still existed.
And then, hope—and help—came from an unexpected source.
In 1998, French president Jacques Chirac had announced that his country would grant its highest military award, the Légion d’Honneur, to any living American veteran who had served on French soil during World War I. There were a few other requirements—the most notable one being the lack of a criminal record—but overall the program was designed to make sure that as many American veterans as possible actually receive the award, and as quickly as possible: Another stipulation held that it could not be awarded posthumously.
The French government went to remarkable lengths to track down potential awardees, and always made a point, once it did so and had processed the necessary paperwork, of having some official representative of that government present the award—a handsome little medal, coupled with a large and ornate certificate—in a formal ceremony, whether before an auditorium full of spectators or a few family members crowded around a hospital bed. (On a few occasions, President Chirac presented the award personally.) As a result, the government of France typically knew much more about America’s surviving doughboys than Americans did.