The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  He grew up to be a slight young man, five feet two or three and blond. He’d never had any trouble, he said, as a Jewish kid living in a predominantly Irish neighborhood; on the contrary, he told me, he’d actually developed a brogue. He left the public schools to go to trade school, then left trade school to go to work. He was good with numbers, tended to get jobs at manufacturers where he could use his accounting skills. He was working for the Willys-Overland automobile company in Atlanta when he joined up. “May 6, 1918,” he recalled.

  “Why did you enlist?” I asked him.

  “Because the excitement appealed to me,” he explained. “You know, I wanted to enlist in the signal corps because that was a dangerous corps. You exposed yourself by sending signals.” The recruiting sergeant, though—on orders from above, or maybe his own initiative—tried to steer new enlistees to another branch of the service. “He said, ‘Kid, join the cavalry. You know, ride a horse.’” The minimum weight for the cavalry was 116 pounds; Sam Goldberg weighed 104. The recruiter got him a waiver, and assigned him to M Troop of the 12th Cavalry, one of Arthur Guy Empey’s old outfits. He went to Fort Oglethorpe for a week—Samuel Levine was long gone by then—and then on to Leon Springs, Texas. But the 12th, unlike the 22nd, was allowed to remain a cavalry unit, and after two months of training in Texas, it moved on to New Mexico, where it was assigned to guard the border against a Mexican invasion.

  In those days, there was actually some reason to worry, if not quite fear, that Mexicans might come streaming over the border with intent to do Americans harm. On March 9, 1916, some five hundred armed Mexican revolutionaries, under orders from their leader, Pancho Villa, attacked the border town of Columbus, New Mexico, killing eighteen Americans—ten of them civilians—and burning down much of the place. Historians differ on why, exactly, Villa did this; some say he was angry at the United States for backing a rival of his, or for selling him defective bullets, or both, while others claim he needed provisions. It seems possible that all are correct, but whatever the case, Villa took the worst of it—he gravely underestimated the size of the Army garrison in Columbus, and lost eighty men there, at a time when he had only about two thousand in total. Nevertheless, his raid terrorized the United States, which sent General Pershing and his troops down to capture Villa. But they couldn’t, and Villa sent his men over the border several more times, killing a handful of American soldiers in Texas in the summer of 1916. Then came the Zimmermann Telegram incident of March 1917, when Germany was caught trying to entice Mexico into attacking the United States should America enter the war, which it did shortly thereafter. So when the Army sent Sam Goldberg and the 12th Cavalry to Hachita, New Mexico—just fifty miles or so from Columbus—he had reason to think he might actually get to see some action.

  He didn’t. By the summer of 1918, Pancho Villa was off doing other things, and no one else in Mexico seemed interested, or in any event able, to take Herr Zimmermann up on his offer. Nevertheless, his service in the cavalry did give Sam Goldberg an appreciation of horses; his own didn’t have a name—“his number was 93. But I called my horse Chickamauga,” he explained, “because he was so old, he was in the Battle of Chickamauga. He was a good horse.” More important, though, the cavalry was his admission ticket to the great diorama that was, and remains, America. It was a dying institution, but still proud, and it had an unusual ratio of old-timers to novices. His drill sergeant—“a Polack from Chicago”—was one of the former; when Sam arrived in M Troop, the sergeant, calling out the name “Goldberg” in the roll, laughed and said: “A Jew in the cavalry? That’s gone too far.” Private Goldberg didn’t take it too hard, since the same sergeant, who had served in the Pacific during the Spanish-American War, also picked on him for being so small. “In the Philippines,” he told Sam once, “they would issue a blanket with a little boy like you.”

  “Get it?” Mr. Goldberg asked me. I didn’t. “They issue a blanket,” he elaborated. “A little boy like me would be grabbed by a lot of the Filipinos, like priests do to boys.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “I knew what he meant,” he continued. “I was quite sophisticated. And I said, ‘Well, Sergeant’—just like this, with a smile on my face—‘where I come from, a remark like that coming from you would indicate that you might possibly be a sissy.’ In those days we called a homosexual a ‘sissy.’ And the guy, I could see him flush. Big guy. And he walks toward me, and he says, ‘What did you say?’ Now, I knew he wasn’t going to punch me, that’s against the rules . . . so I said, ‘Well, Sergeant, I heard what you said and now you heard what I said. I don’t need to repeat it. So my best opinion is that you should go back and teach us to be soldiers, not to poke fun at me, because you’re going to get it back.’ And he walked back.” Apparently he’d been no less feisty at eighteen than he was at 106.

  There were, he recalled, a great many “Polacks from Chicago” in the cavalry; for some reason, he said, they had gravitated there. “Every troop had a Polish cook,” he told me. His troop’s cook, Kluzinski, was notoriously ill-tempered. Once, when Private Goldberg hit him up for a piece of pie, Kluzinski responded, “You get the hell out of here! You see this cleaver? I’ll chop your head off.” The hungry little private, though, was undeterred. “I said, ‘All right, all right, OK, Klu, put it down. It’s all right.’ And I get to the door and I said, ‘You know what Blackey Mitchell, the sergeant major, and the four other guys in headquarters call me?’ And he says, ‘What?’ ‘The little Polack.’ [In fact, what everyone really called him was Goldie.] And he says, ‘Why do they call you that?’ ‘Because Blackey Mitchell looked up my service record and it says born in Poland.’ ‘Born in Poland?’ And I says, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘Where in Poland?’ And I said, ‘Lodz’ . . . And I said, ‘See ya later, Klu.’ And he says, ‘Hey kid, get back here.’ There’s a big piece of pie . . . I walk into headquarters and they say, ‘Where did you get that pie?’ And I said, ‘Klu gave it to me.’ And he said, ‘How did you manage that?’ And I said, ‘Diplomacy.’”

  There were all kinds in the cavalry, as he would discover—Irish from New York and “hillbillies” from Tennessee, Australians and Englishmen, Okies and cowboys, gentlemen from refined families and tough city kids. At one point, he even told me, “We had a homosexual problem.” Four men, he explained, were caught fooling around under the bunk one night. “Dishonorably discharged,” he recalled. “The leader was given three years in Leavenworth Penitentiary. The other two were given two years.” The fourth, he said, got off on “a technicality. Seemed like they punched him around too much, a confession and so on.”

  Perhaps the biggest surprise, at least at first, was that “each of those troops”—that is, I Troop, K Troop, L Troop, and M Troop—“had one Jewish soldier . . . One was Harry Schneider in one troop, the other was Dan Smith, and the other was Mose Jacobson. Three of them, they all came from Louisville, Kentucky. They enlisted in 1916. They by now were career guys. Smith and the other guy, Schneider, they were tough guys. Not nasty, not at all. They were middleweight champs; they boxed all over the place . . . Jacobson was the obvious schlemiel. He couldn’t be more of a jerk. He was just, I imagine that they were all on the same street and two of them said let’s join—oh, they joined when Pancho Villa shot up Columbus. They joined, and Jacobson said, ‘Me, too.’ He was the last over the fence. They placed them each in different [troops], so when I joined, there was one Jew in each troop.” And then there was the time when he found himself being trained at the rifle range. “Now, you get a sergeant to coach you,” he recalled. “He sits and I’m sitting, aiming so on, and coaches you. And the guy coaching me was a sergeant, didn’t give me his name. Handsome sort of guy. If you had to wonder what he looked like, you’d say, well, good-looking Greek, a good-looking Polack, and so on . . . And he sat with me, a couple of hours, no recognition, no hello, no buddy-buddy, nothing.” Later, he learned the man’s name. “Sergeant Levine,” he told me. “L-E-V-I-N-E. Jewish. Handsome. He’d been there te
n years, and somebody said, a sergeant said, ‘That Levine, best cavalryman in the Army’ . . . And he coached me in rifle. Never said to me, ‘Oh, you’re a Jewish kid.’ Never identified himself. I didn’t learn his name till quite a while after.”

  Clearly, it filled Private Goldberg with pride to hear a fellow Jew referred to as the “best cavalryman in the Army.” And I’m sure it made him prouder still to hear, that fall, of the exploits of another Polish Jew, Abraham Krotoshinsky, in France. Krotoshinsky had immigrated to New York in 1912 because, he said later, he did not wish to be drafted into the army of the anti-Semitic czar, whom he despised. Five years later, while working as a barber, he was drafted into Company K of the 307th Infantry Regiment of the 77th Division of the Army of the United States of America, in which he was glad to serve. The 77th was a storied division; composed entirely of draftees, most of them from the city of New York, it was the first division of American draftees sent Over There, and was seen as a model for those that followed. Because it came from New York, and because so many of the men in its ranks were immigrants, it was nicknamed the “Statue of Liberty Division,” although the press sometimes referred to it as the “Melting Pot Division” or the “Metropolitan Division,” and devoted a great deal of space to how well the Irish and Jews and Italians and Poles and Greeks and Ukrainians and Magyars were getting along under the banner of Uncle Sam. The 77th went into action at Château-Thierry in July, 1918, and later played a critical role at the Meuse-Argonne. It was there, on October 2, that 554 men from the 77th found themselves cut off from the rest of the AEF, trapped in a forest ravine and surrounded by Germans. Newspapers, learning of their plight, dubbed them the “Lost Battalion”; they were picked off by both German snipers and poorly aimed American artillery, and had no way of communicating with headquarters except by carrier pigeon, as the Germans killed every runner they tried to send through the lines. Desperately short of food, water, and medical supplies—they took bandages off the dead to use on the wounded but still breathing—their position looked hopeless, not least to the Germans, who couldn’t believe the Americans wouldn’t just surrender. On October 7, they sent back a captured American, blindfolded and bearing a note that read, in part:

  It would be quite useless to resist any more, in view of the present conditions. The suffering of your wounded men can be heard over here in the German lines, and we are appealing to your humane sentiments to stop. A white flag shown by one of your men will tell us that you agree with these conditions.

  It was signed: THE GERMAN COMMANDING OFFICER.

  The American commanding officer, Major Charles Whittlesey, ignored the plea. Instead, he called once again for a volunteer to try to make it through the German lines and bring back reinforcements. Given what had happened to the previous runners, he must have wondered what kind of man might volunteer for such a mission. Private Abraham Krotoshinsky did.

  Krotoshinsky managed to evade German fire, though it wasn’t easy; at one point, sensing he was surrounded, he lay down on the ground, pretending to be dead. A German patrol came upon him. The American certainly looked dead. A soldier stepped on his hand anyway, just to make sure. Nothing. They moved on. Krotoshinsky waited a while, then hopped up, shook out his hand (or so I imagine), and was able, somehow, to find a hole in the German lines; he made his way through to headquarters, and led a rescue mission the next day. The Lost Battalion was saved. Nearly 200 of them had been killed; another 150 or so had been taken prisoner or gone missing. Only 194 of the original 554 were able to walk out of that ravine.

  There’s a lot more to the story, of course, but many of the newspapers focused on Krotoshinsky—the private, the barber, the immigrant, the hero. He was exalted as a symbol of the New American, the man who came here by choice and made good, who proved his American-ness with blood, or at least tremendous courage and resourcefulness and a crushed hand. In New York, before the war, he may have been a greenhorn, a Polack, a Yid; in the Army, he was a Yank. And if he took any abuse in the ranks on account of his origins, it was nothing compared to what immigrants were still dealing with back home.

  And that, strange as it seems, made them—all of them—feel better.

  I visited with Sam Goldberg for more than four hours that day in 2006, and he told me quite a few stories. I’ve shared some of them here. The one that has stuck with me the most, though, was this one:

  One day, I’m alone on the parade ground, there wasn’t much of anything around. There was one soldier, Sergeant Moellering, you might say the handsomest soldier in the US Army. He had unusual white, silver-blond hair, white-like, if you’ve seen that color. Light complexion, blue eyes, about five-eleven tall. Ten years in the service. He was twenty-eight years old. M troop, my troop, hundred-yard dash he could outrun everybody. He used to be a bugler in Washington, and once in a while taps would blow and you’d hear this bugle almost sing, somebody would say Moldie was up . . . He was a soldier’s soldier. Middleweight boxer, but a gentle sort of a guy. He’s standing about that distance away from me, we two were alone, and he says to me, “Hey, Avrumchik.” Avrumchik is, “Avrum” is Abraham and “chik” means, like, “Jimmy” [i.e., a diminutive]. And I walked over and said, “Hey, Sergeant.” Sergeants don’t talk that way to recruits. And I said, “How come?” He said, “Well, I’m from St. Louis and that’s a German city. We lived next door to a Jewish family.” And he says, “I can speak Jewish.” And he did. And we started, we became friends. It was the most peculiar friendship. It just didn’t happen, normally. Here’s a ten-year soldier and he’s the best buddy with a guy who’s in a little less than a year. It just didn’t make sense. And I remember how proud I was when somebody said in my presence, “Whenever you see Moldie, you see Goldie.” We were buddies . . . we became absolutely like he was my big brother.

  It was bad to be German in the United States of America in 1918, worse by far than to have been British in 1776, or a Southerner (or Yankee) in 1863, or Spanish in 1898. Never mind that Germans had lived in America in large numbers since colonial times. Never mind that in 1918 more Americans could trace their ancestry to Germany than to any other country. (This is still the case today, actually.) America was at war with Germany, and all things discernibly German—no matter how faint or tenuous the connection—were suspect. In a move that foreshadowed 2003’s “Freedom Fries” craze, sauerkraut producers even renamed their product “Liberty Cabbage.” Fortunately, that trend didn’t survive the war.

  And I don’t think many sauerkraut magnates were hurt too badly, at least not compared to ordinary Americans of German extraction. It’s safe to say that a disproportionately large number of those targeted by the American Protective League and its fellow vigilante organizations—probably quite disproportionate—bore suspiciously Teutonic surnames. They didn’t have to say, do, or even think anything suspicious; often it was enough merely to have that blood in you somewhere. German American professors and teachers were pulled from the classroom, or even fired; symphonies let German American musicians, and even conductors, go. They also stopped playing music by German composers. (Mostly Wagner, from what I’ve read, so that actually may have worked out well.) Libraries pulled German books off their shelves. The American Red Cross refused to hire anyone with a German surname, even as a volunteer; it was rumored that German American saboteurs were putting ground glass into bandages. I suppose it never occurred to anyone at that organization that a really good German American saboteur might adopt, say, a Scottish nom de guerre.

  The entire state of California banned the teaching of German in its public schools, decreeing it “a language that disseminates the ideals of autocracy, brutality, and hatred.” (Maybe it’s all those guttural consonants?) Nebraska, not satisfied to leave it at that, made it illegal to teach any language other than English. Iowa banned foreign languages—not just the teaching of, but the speaking of—in schools and other public places. In Minnesota, a minister was dragged outside and tarred and feathered after being overheard praying in German wi
th a dying woman. And in southern Illinois, across the river from St. Louis, a German immigrant named Robert Prager—who had tried to enlist in the US Navy but was turned away because he had only one eye—was lynched by an anti-German mob of about two hundred shortly after midnight on April 5, 1918. Prager, a former baker and miner, was described by many who knew him as ornery, which was not, at the time, a hanging offense in Illinois. Being German, though, apparently was. Before they strung him up, the mob allowed him to write a brief note to his parents back in Germany, and then say a prayer. How nice; perhaps that’s why the dozen men who were later tried for the lynching were summarily acquitted. “The lesson of [Prager’s] death has had a wholesome effect on the Germanists of Collinsville and the rest of the nation,” wrote a local newspaper publisher after the trial.

  Good Americans never had to lynch another German after that. Instead, untold thousands of German Americans, many of whom just couldn’t get work or even credit to buy bread, anglicized their names—names that had, in some cases, remained unchanged in America for two or even three hundred years.