The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  “So you sent away for it?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said. “And I’d be going to the post office every day to find out.” He chuckled.

  “What did it look like?”

  “It’s an oak base. About, not very long, eighteen inches long. And the green coil. The tuner on top. And the key . . . and a little buzzer. So you could work that, a buzzer. And that part of it never worked. And I’m not too sure whether that one was any advantage over the one I already had.”

  “You had already made one yourself before you sent away?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, sure,” he replied. “I took a . . . a medium-sized oatmeal container, and, let’s see, varnished it over first. And then wound it with wire, copper wire. And the terminals at the beginning and the end. And then with a, a little adjustment key that you moved it back and forth on that drive. So that would—the total sound of the wires, including the lead-in, would finally bring it over to whatever was on the transmitter. And one of the transmissions that we used to get was from Arlington.”

  “Arlington, Virginia?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You used to get that out in Missouri?”

  He nodded. “We got that in Missouri.”

  That wasn’t just luck. He’d gotten some pretty extraordinary help from his father; another dividend of being an indulged youngest child. And growing up on a farm. In those days, you see, a radio set—and they were still crystal sets, no tubes yet—needed an extremely large aerial to pick up anything at all. The magazines suggested they run as high as fifty feet off the ground. “There was a problem getting sticks that were long enough,” he explained, ninety years later. “So my father arranged to get over to the river and had somebody cut two trees, fifty-five feet long, and trim them down. And we went over on a wagon, with the wagon seat in front, and then he took that and extended it—two wheels in the back and two wheels up the front, where the seat was. And that wagon was fifty feet, fifty-five feet long.” Then his father—who was already in his midfifties by then—sank the two poles five feet into the ground, spaced 225 feet apart, and then somehow ran six wires back and forth between the two poles, spaced out two feet apart, starting all the way up at the top. That’s what you had to do to make a good antenna back then.

  “Where else did you pick up from?” I asked him.

  “That was about the only one,” he said. “Nobody else was sending out.” “That” was the United States Naval Observatory, and they made exactly two transmissions every day: a time signal, one at precisely 11:00 p.m. Central Standard Time, the other at precisely 11:00 a.m. “You could set your time by it,” Frank Buckles said. A little dry by today’s standards, but terribly exciting in 1913, seven years before the first commercial radio broadcast. Especially to a twelve-year-old boy. The only damper, he told me, was that “I had no one to talk to about it.”

  A couple of years later, another person in town, a jeweler, finally got a set. Wood Buckles showed him how to use it. By then, he himself had a newer model, that kit he had sent away for; he would often listen to it well past the point where a schoolboy should have gone to sleep. “My parents were very nice about that,” he said fondly. “Let me stay up late and do that thing.” One day, a traveling photographer stopped by the farm and made a portrait of young Wood sitting at his wireless set, headphones on. He’d even donned a necktie for the occasion. Both the photo and the wireless set were on display in that sunroom the next time I visited. The latter was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.

  Like many things, the birth of radio looks nothing but romantic at this distance. To Wood Buckles, it was mysterious, exotic. People were talking about it; maybe not in his particular corner of Missouri, but out there, in the world. Someday, he believed, it would bring that world, and everything in it, to him. And someday, he believed just as fervently, he would be out there, in that very world, a part of things that people in little corners like his would hear about on the wireless.

  Soon enough.

  In 1916—“for reasons I don’t know, because parents didn’t always confide in the children, and children . . . sometimes didn’t ask too many questions”—Wood Buckles’s father, James Clark Buckles, decided to move the family to Dewey County, Oklahoma, in the western part of that state. (Mr. Buckles later told me: “I know from some of his associates that he was expecting an oil strike.”) He had already bought some land in Dewey County, and decided to send some draft horses on ahead to sell there—the price they fetched would have been much higher in western Oklahoma than in Vernon County, Missouri, where the family was then living and farming—in order to help prepare their arrival. James Buckles had planned to send a hired man to do it, for twenty dollars and round-trip fare; but his son, Wood, fifteen years old, sensed an opportunity for adventure. “So I talked to him allowing me to make the trip,” he recalled. “I made the trip alone with the horses. It took four days to get to western Oklahoma.” His parents would follow, eventually; for a while, though, he was on his own, in the small town of Oakwood.

  He loved it. “I lived at the hotel,” he told me, “worked at a bank, and went to school.”

  And after that, I imagine, it was just a matter of time. Wood Buckles wasn’t going to go back to living with his parents again, and doing farm chores; not for long, anyway. Something, sooner or later, was going to lure him away again. Something bigger.

  “It was April the sixth, 1917,” he said, setting the scene. “We declared war. And naturally, the posters appeared on the post office, and the newspapers were full of it, full of the news. So I was quite aware of it. And I had been aware of the World War since it started in August, nineteen hundred and fourteen.”

  “You had been reading the news accounts?” I asked.

  “I don’t think that was unusual then,” he said. “People around the country were quite well-informed about what’s going on in the world.” Years later he would add that he had known from its inception that the war was “an important event”: “The world was interested,” he told me. “I was interested.” He wanted to be a part of it; waited for his chance.

  “Well, the summer vacation came,” he continued. “And a rancher nearby in this place—Oakwood, Oklahoma—his son, about my age, invited me to stay with him for the Kansas State Fair, in Wichita. I went up to Wichita, and while there, went to the Marine recruiting station. The Marine sergeant was very nice to me, but he says, ‘You’re too young.’ I gave my age as eighteen. So he says, ‘You have to be twenty-one.’ Well, I went then out to Larned, Kansas.” He had an aunt and uncle living there; they owned a bank nearby. He spent some time visiting with them and his ninety-two-year-old grandmother, Harriet, who took the occasion to tell him, for the first time, about her great-grandfather, Mathias Riebsomeer, killed at Oriskany in 1777.

  A reminder like that of the potential price of military service might make some people less likely to enlist; not Wood Buckles. As soon as he was back in Wichita, Mr. Buckles told me, he returned to that recruiting station. This time, there was a different sergeant on duty. “He very graciously gave me the examination, which I passed with no question,” he recalled. “But he says, ‘You’re just not heavy enough.’ So then I tried the Navy, and the Navy gave me an excuse. Said I was, flatfooted.” In retrospect, he understood that they had known all along he was underage—if you see pictures of him from that time, there’s no mistaking it; he looked about twelve years old—and were making excuses that would either spare him some hurt feelings, or them some paperwork. Or both.

  “Well,” he continued, “what am I going to do? I’m going to get in someplace. So, I went to Oklahoma City, tried the Marine Corps, the Navy, with no success. Then—I decided, well, I’ll try the Army, then. And there the sergeants wouldn’t—they had to get permission from the captain. The captain interviewed me, and asked about a birth certificate. I explained that in Missouri, where I was born, there were no—they had no public record of births, and that it was in the family Bible.”

&
nbsp; “Is that true?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he assured me. “And I told him, ‘I’m not going to bring the family Bible down here.’” He smiled. “OK. They accepted me.” Years later, he would add: “If I hadn’t have made it in Oklahoma City, I would have gone to St. Louis.” And from there, wherever he had to.

  “After the recruiting station,” he continued, “I went with thirteen men out to Fort Logan, Colorado. Those of us who were qualified . . . they wouldn’t at that time accept married men, you had to be a certain age, and quite, quite strict about it. Well, that was the Regular Army. My serial number by the way, 15577 . . . that’s the Regular Army. An older sergeant told me that if I wanted to get to France in a hurry to go into the Ambulance Corps. Because the French are just, are asking for ambulance service. So he said to go that way.”

  “When was this?” I asked. “What month?”

  “I was sworn in on the thirteenth of August, in Fort Logan, Colorado.” The whole process—being turned away, going elsewhere, trying and trying again until he found someone who would enlist him—took nearly two months. As badly as the AEF needed men, at least some recruiters remained reluctant to sign up boys who still had baby fat on them.

  The story goes that, when he gave that captain in Oklahoma City his full name—Wood Buckles—the captain informed him no one could enlist who didn’t have a middle name. Perhaps this was one last gambit to turn him away—I personally know of several men who entered the Army in 1917 without a middle name—but whether or not the captain was doing a bit of fudging himself, Wood went ahead and changed his name right there and then to Frank Woodruff Buckles. It wasn’t too radical an amendment; he’d been named for his uncle, Frank Woodruff, anyway.

  “How did your parents feel about you going off to join the Army?” I asked him.

  “Well,” he replied, “the first they knew about it, I was on the way to Bordeaux. I sent a postcard, that I was in the Army, on the way to Bordeaux.”

  “Did your grandmother know, when you were staying with her in Kansas?”

  “She knew. She told me that she approved of it.”

  I asked again about his parents: “When they got that postcard, and they found out you had already enlisted . . . did you hear back from them?”

  “No,” he said.

  “They were upset.”

  “I don’t know.” Years later, he told me that his father would have known there’d be no point in trying to talk his son out of enlisting, or anything else. “We weren’t that kind of people,” he explained. “We made a decision and that was it.”

  “Why were you in such a hurry to enlist and see action?” I asked.

  “Well, why not?” he said, and smiled. “I knew all about the war, had for several years.”

  “Why did you think America was getting into the war?”

  “Well, I don’t know. It might have been influenced by the year previous, when General Pershing was down in Mexico chasing Pancho Villa. I knew all about that. I knew the position of our Army—very small. And of course, now, you’re thinking about patriotism, well . . . I didn’t know anybody whose . . . family hadn’t lived in this country for maybe a century or two. So, we just—we didn’t talk about those things.”

  “But I mean,” I said, “did you join up because you wanted adventure, or did you believe strongly in the cause? Or both?”

  “Oh, well,” he said, and shook his head, silently, for a moment. “I wanted action, of course.”

  For a while, it certainly seemed like Frank Buckles had chosen wisely in following that older sergeant’s advice about joining the Ambulance Corps. He was sent to Fort Riley, Kansas, and placed in the First Fort Riley Casual Detachment. In army parlance, a casual detachment was a discrete group of men, separated from a larger unit, that could be sent out on its own, or even attached to another unit, for specific duties or assignments. In the case of the First Fort Riley Casual Detachment, there were 102 men in all. Mr. Buckles had a group picture of them, one of those old, oblong photographs you associate with that war, framed and hanging in his sitting room.

  The training was exciting from the start; “at Fort Riley,” he told me, “there were officers there from France and from Britain, who had you build trenches, similar to the trenches in Europe.” Once that was done, they got into more serious matters. “The training that we had there was ‘trench retrieval,’ they called it,” he explained. “A man was lying here, and they’d teach you how to go crawl up to him, take off your belt—you’d want to use [that], you didn’t have anything else—put it over his arm, and turn a certain way, and you could put him right on your back, he’d come up.” He mimicked some of the actions as he described them. “It was a very tricky thing, I knew. But I could do it. And I probably weighed 125 pounds.” He added: “But men weren’t so big then, too . . . Well, we were soon well-trained, and they made up the unit; the top-ranking officer in that group was going to go overseas with me, with the sergeant.”

  They rode the train from Fort Riley to Hoboken, and sailed from there. “On the Carpathia,” he specified. “His Majesty’s Ship the Carpathia, which rescued the Titanic, the survivors of the Titanic, on the fifteenth of April, 1912. And which I knew all about from reading the newspapers and listening to the stories.” It was winter; he remembered that specifically, he told me, because from Hoboken they’d sailed up to Halifax, Nova Scotia, arriving just a few weeks after that city experienced a terrible disaster: In the busy port, the French freighter Mont-Blanc, loaded with munitions, collided with another ship, caught fire, and exploded. “Exploded” doesn’t really do it justice, though; it was the biggest manmade blast in history to that point, destroying every structure in a vast area and causing a tsunami that did even more damage. Some two thousand people were killed, with many times that number injured; more Nova Scotians died that morning in Halifax than on the battlefield during the entire war. Bodies kept turning up for years afterward. Even though he wasn’t there at the time, Frank Buckles never forgot the date. “December the sixth, 1917,” he recalled. The devastation was still fresh when he came through, weeks later. “There were great woods in there, cedar trees, and all you would see is the stumps,” he said.

  From there, the Carpathia, which was also carrying a unit of Marines, sailed off to Europe—though not to Bordeaux. “Our unit was stopped in Winchester, England,” he explained. “And the Marines went on to France. And as a unit I don’t know what happened to them.”

  At first, England was exciting to Frank Buckles; it was certainly a long way from Missouri and Oklahoma. “The first day that I had a case to go down to Winchester,” he told me, “I saw the statue of King Alfred the Great. It says: ‘Died in Nine Hundred and One.’ I said, ‘My gosh, that’s a thousand years before I was born!’ And I saw men on the streets with long robes and a hat, almost like a bishop’s hat . . . they were soldiers of the Crimea. The Crimea was 1853. That impressed me. And then, of course, the history of the place—the museum, and the cathedral. And you go in the cathedral, and there’s a [seat] next to Jane Austen.” Or her body, anyway. It’s buried under the aisle.

  Even more than the history of the place—how ancient it all was, compared to America—he was struck by how grave everybody seemed in England. “All the men,” he recalled, “well, not all the men, but all the officers, all the officers in uniform would have the black band. It meant that a member of the family [had been killed in the war]. And women—all in somber black. Some of them even looked dead, with veils, black veils.”

  Somber as England was at times, young Private Buckles seems to have had a fine time there. “First I drove a motorcycle,” he recalled. “As the dispatch—you know, they didn’t use the telephones then, just sent a boy on a motorcycle or a bicycle. Then I drove a car. And mostly, in that car, I was driving distinguished people around . . . And then, some of the time [I drove] an ambulance.” Years later, he clarified: “I didn’t care for the darn thing; but I enjoyed the motorcycle and sidecar.”

  As h
e had been back in Missouri, Frank Buckles was somewhat indulged in England, perhaps because of his youth. He managed to get away with a degree of cheekiness (if not quite insubordination) toward British officers, and even got chummy with a certain aristocratic one-armed lieutenant general who terrified most of the other soldiers. He might well have been happy to spend the entire war in England, but for one thing: The war wasn’t in England. It was in France. And he had signed up to be in the war, not simply nearer to it.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t appear as if the First Fort Riley Casual Detachment was going to get to leave Winchester anytime soon, so Private Buckles decided he was going to have to detach himself from the detachment. “I let any person who had any influence at all know that I wanted to go on to France,” he told me. “I contacted one of the field clerks and told him that I wanted to see the colonel.” Colonel Jones, the top-ranking American officer in the area, was particularly indulgent of him—privately, he found the young private’s antics entertaining, especially when they flummoxed the British—but this wish he could not grant. “Colonel Jones said he’d like to go to France, too,” Mr. Buckles recalled, eighty-five years later. “But he said, ‘When the Army tells me I’ve got to do something, I’ve got to do it.’”

  Perhaps that should have put the matter to rest, but it didn’t. Private Buckles kept scheming; at one point, seeing lots of other doughboys stop at Winchester briefly en route to France, he developed a plan and pitched it to three would-be collaborators. “When there were a sufficient number to fill up a craft for transportation across to France, they would march down to the railway station, always at night,” he explained. “And I’d watch them. So . . . I explained to these folks what happened, when they come to a certain place, and nothing in between, when they are marching along there, what we’ll do is just merge right into them. Go on the train, and these lads are just not sharp enough to check everybody. We’ll be on the boat, and we’ll be over in France.”