The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  In those days, cold weather more or less killed automobile sales in Canada, so in the winter of 1921, Frank Buckles took his new suit and savings—“forty-nine dollars and a half”—and boarded a train for New York. He arrived at Grand Central Terminal, walked over to the YMCA on West Fifty-seventh Street, and took a room, a share, for five dollars a week. He found a job at an advertising agency down by Union Square, then quickly found another one in the bond soliciting department of Bankers Trust Company, on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street. “It was a prestigious bank,” he told me. “It was formed in nineteen hundred and three. And they were rather particular about their clientele. You had to have some money to belong there. And most of the bond salesmen, I even remember their names, practically all of them, right from Seward Prosser, the president of the bank, on down.” One of them, a sixtysomething senior vice president named Wyckoff, befriended the young bond salesman; Mr. Wyckoff, the scion of an old Knickerbocker family, shared tales of old New York with him. “Well, he said that when he was a boy, about ten years old, he used to play over there”—that is, across the street, where the big library, the one with the lions out front, is now—“because it was the city reservoir.” From time to time, he recalled, “we went down to the Murray Hill Hotel, which at that time was the aristocratic hotel. And we were treated nicely of course, and had one of those nice ten-course dinners.”

  Frank Buckles had always been very fortunate in his associations, but in New York they ascended to a new stratum. He was living at the Hotel Elite, on West Fifty-seventh Street across from the Y, and going to a gymnasium, where he met a couple of men who took it upon themselves to help him get integrated into the life of New York. They advised him, among other things, to join a National Guard unit, so he did: the 7th New York, an old outfit sometimes called the “Silk Stocking Regiment” because of the affluence and prominence of its members. (In 1861, it is said, they marched off to the Civil War carrying lunches from Delmonico’s, the finest restaurant in the city.) Their armory, opened in 1880 and occupying an entire city block on the Upper East Side, was constructed and furnished entirely with private funds; the members wanted the likes of Louis Comfort Tiffany and Stanford White to be able to work on the project, and a government budget just wasn’t going to cut it.

  The regiment, Frank Buckles said, was primarily a social organization in those days, with a few military trappings. “Once a week we had a meeting,” he recalled. “I was the secretary of my company.” Occasionally they would drill, though even that was a social event. “After each drill,” he said, “we’d go up to the mess room on the fourth floor and have a beer . . . even though this was Prohibition.” There was a brewery in the neighborhood owned by a colonel in the regiment, a fellow named Jacob Ruppert; “he made sure that we had plenty of beer,” Mr. Buckles explained. Colonel Ruppert also owned a professional baseball club, and was just then in the process of building it a new ballpark across the river, in the Bronx.

  Every day, walking to and from work, he would pass by an automobile dealership on Fifty-seventh Street at Eighth Avenue. “On the main floor, the big windows in there, that’s where his showroom was,” he told me in 2006, noting that the owner was always there each morning. “When I came back in the evening, very likely he’d be in there. I don’t know how he spent all of his time there, in the showroom.” The dealership belonged to the Rickenbacker Motor Company; its owner, the man standing in the showroom every morning and evening, was Eddie Rickenbacker, a former racecar driver who became America’s top air ace of the war, with twenty-six confirmed kills. “And he liked to talk to me,” Mr. Buckles explained. “I guess because I was probably the one ex-soldier . . .” His voice trailed off; I knew what he meant to say.

  In 1921, he heard about a Bible class being given at a Baptist church in Manhattan, and decided to start attending—not for religious reasons, but because the class was being taught by the future vice president’s father, John D. Rockefeller Jr. “I sat about how close we are now,” he told me, also in 2006. “There were never more than forty, if there were that many, in the class. I always sat down in the front, in the old-fashioned pews. And he would sit there with his feet on the seat, and I would be facing. That would be the first row I would be in.”

  “Did you get to know him?” I asked.

  “I sure did,” he said. “And I remember, I was clearly impressed by the frankness with which he could speak. And the ease, and such a relaxed person. He was a little bit different than the reporters tried to make him out to be. Because they made him to be a statesman, but a young man has a better way of analyzing the situation than some reporter.”

  “He was quite a philanthropist.”

  “That is what he talked about.” His father, John D. Rockefeller Sr.—still alive then, at eighty-two—had made the money, his son liked to say; and now, he said, it was his time, to “utilize that money in the right way, to help people out.” He told Frank Buckles, “‘I have an entire staff whose job it is [to read through the many letters he received], and we look seriously at every one.’ Then he described some of them—[for instance,] a woman who needed money so her son could go to college. Naturally, and some of them were more private nature, but still, [he said,] we never bypassed any of them.”

  In 1923, Frank Buckles, now twenty-two years old, decided he was ready for another change, so he got a job with the Munson Steamship Line, as a purser. “Now, as the purser on a ship,” he explained, “you’re dealing with all of the crew, right from the captain to the lowest boy. You’re dealing with all the passengers. In the ports, you’re dealing with all of the officials. It’s the job where you know everybody. So that was the place where you learned.”

  And he learned well. In his spare time he studied Spanish, as he’d become fascinated with the idea of seeing South America. In 1924 he moved over to the W. R. Grace Line, which made him purser on the SS George Washington, a luxury liner that had been seized by the government after April 6, 1917; it had been launched in 1908 by the North German Lloyd Company, which had christened it . . . George Washington. Really. “I probably did twenty or thirty ports in South America,” he told me. “I was in Brazil, and Uruguay, and Argentina . . . then I went to the west coast of South America.” Through the Panama Canal, too. After that, he decided he wanted to see the Orient, and traveled from port to port, China and Japan, for a while. One day, onboard, he was approached by a very distinguished-looking Japanese gentleman who engaged him in conversation. As a young man, this gentleman had left Japan to live and study in Portland, Oregon, returning to Japan in 1902, at the age of twenty-two, having earned a law degree. He was drawn to the young American. “And he asked questions. Where I was going? What I was going to do on the boat? . . . Are you going to Japan? And I said . . . I probably will. And I said, of course, if I go there, I’ll go to Tokyo. And he said, ‘When you come to Tokyo . . . come to my office and I will take you around Tokyo and show you the sights. Now, if I’m not there’—and he wrote on the back of it—‘you just present this card, and you’ll get a chauffeur, and an interpreter, and taken around sightseeing.’ He signed it—and I have it somewhere if I could find it—Yosuke Matsuoka.” He added: “Look him up.”

  I did. Matsuoka was a successful businessman turned diplomat; in 1933, some years after his encounter with Frank Buckles, he stood before the League of Nations in Geneva and, disgusted by international condemnation of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, delivered a scathing address condemning that body, then led his country’s delegation out, never to return. He then went into politics, and was eventually named Japan’s foreign minister; he conceived and vigorously campaigned for a tripartite alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, which was realized and became known as the Axis. He tried to get Japan to invade Siberia (because that had gone so well the last time), but was unsuccessful; after the war, he was arrested and charged with war crimes, but died in prison before he could be tried.

  October, 1929, found Frank Buckles back in New York, living
at 111 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village, walking distance from the West Side piers and across the street from poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom he often ran into at a certain restaurant. His job protected him, personally, from the economic chaos that was descending upon the country, but there was no mistaking that a depression was under-way; “nobody had any money to spend, that’s one thing,” he said. Perhaps because of that, he started thinking about Europe again. He had been to England with the Munson Line, but a 1928 trip to Bremerhaven revived fond memories of Germany, and he sought a position that would take him there. He found one, and traveled back and forth between New York and Hamburg many times over the course of seven years, from 1931 to 1938, on the SS City of Norfolk, which had a mail contract.

  It soon became apparent that something was up. Much of the crew of the George Washington had been German, friendly fellows who taught him the language. During one visit to Germany, he told me, he’d met a German gentleman and his father-in-law, who had been, respectively, a captain and a major in the last war; they invited him to visit them down at the family estate—he was moving in lofty circles again; or, more accurately, had never stopped doing so—where, in the course of entertaining him, they took him into their confidence. “And they said, ‘We are going to tell you something that will surprise you—that we are preparing for another war.’ He says, ‘It’s not the wish of the officers who have been through the war, but still . . . we are going to get into another one.’” On another occasion, he said, he was visiting a baron’s estate in Hungary and enjoying lunch on the lawn, “and there was a plane flying over. And he says, ‘We never know, when a plane is flying over, when we might get a’—I forget how he expressed it, but—‘get a visit from Germany.’” But few people did much more about it than just nod knowingly, and shrug: What can you do? Even the newspapers, he said, didn’t report such things. Many people felt guilty about the harsh terms of the peace treaty, and few could bring themselves to contemplate the prospect of another war so soon after the last one.

  The iconic image of post–World War I Germany is people pushing wheelbarrows full of money to the bakery just to buy a loaf of bread; but by the time Frank Buckles first saw Hamburg, “in 1931, they had, they did an excellent job of recovery,” he told me. “And Germany was doing quite well.” Two years later, though, Adolf Hitler was made chancellor, and things started to change. He first took notice at an antiques shop in Hamburg that he had started frequenting on his first visit; it was owned by a Jewish lady. “She would invite me to have tea,” he said. “So I would go up in the center dais and have tea. And this time I came, and she saw me, and came right over to the door and said, ‘I’m sorry, my situation has changed. I won’t be able to talk to you. I can’t invite you in to have tea.’” She was, she said, being watched.

  “Then I went into one of the very fine big stores,” he continued. “And they had put up signs in front of it.” Signs: Don’t Buy from Jews, or some equivalent sentiment; “signs against the Jews, against the Jewish people,” is how he put it. (One of his earliest memories, he once told me, was of a Jewish peddler coming by his family’s farm in Missouri; “Every place they went, they were received . . . they always sold something . . . [and] they never went hungry.”) One time, he said, he was at a party, enjoying the company of a young Jewish woman—“the life of the party, always cheerful,” he recalled—until “she went to the telephone to call her family, who I think were in Hanover . . . and, my gosh, when she came back, she was just broken up. She said nobody could believe what they . . . what was happening there, what was happening to some of her family.” He added: “And there were Americans going over to Europe, making a trip around, telling [people back home] what a wonderful time they were having in Germany.” And not just older folks, who perhaps didn’t know better; “I had students during that period,” he said, “who had traveled around in Germany and stayed at youth hostels, and came back and said it was wonderful.”

  For years after that first visit, I had a terrible time trying to reconcile the things Frank Buckles had seen in Nazi Germany—and, looking at the entire picture, I know he’d seen almost nothing of it, but not quite nothing—with those stories he’d told about his encounters with the German prisoners, with those tired, underfed men who had fashioned musical instruments out of scrap and gave concerts behind barbed wire, with those big, older fellows who had pinned his arms behind his back and whispered for him to calm down until he did, when just as easily they could have strangled him and buried his body out in the woods. In 2006, three years after our first conversation, I asked him: “The Germans that you knew right after World War I seemed like very decent people; was it hard for you to imagine them then following Hitler?”

  “No,” he said. “I knew how it was done. Hitler wrote in his book Mein Kampf, which is, if you read that, you can see what, that he had to have somebody [for a scapegoat], and the way he got control of the people—Germany wasn’t all . . . it wasn’t Germany speaking in their attitude toward the Jews; it was a certain group, and they got you either for them or against them.” It was, he said, very effective; as he told me during another visit, “When they get control—boy. And I’ll tell you something: You have difficulty keeping your hand in your pocket when they said ‘Heil Hitler.’” Most historians, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists would probably agree with that; but that doesn’t make it any more satisfying an explanation. One thing is certain, though: Without the previous war—and the peace treaty that officially ended it—none of it would have happened.

  Frank Buckles made his last trip to Germany in August, 1938. “Our company could see what was happening,” he said, “and we diverted all our ships.” The signs—literally—were everywhere, now, even at the elegant hotels at which he stayed. That spring, Germany had annexed Austria, in what is now known as the Anschluss. Austria capitulated without a fight; indeed, many Austrians were thrilled with the development. In September, in an act that has become synonymous with the word “appeasement,” Western Europe sold out Czechoslovakia to the Nazis, allowing them to seize the Czech territory known as the Sudetenland without uttering a syllable of protest. In November, the Nazis unleashed a night of terror—Irving Berlin might have recognized it as a pogrom, but for its massive scale—upon the Jews of Germany and Austria, during which nearly a hundred Jews were killed, tens of thousands more were arrested and sent to concentration camps, more than a thousand synagogues were burned to the ground, and many thousands of Jewish-owned shops and businesses were destroyed. It has since come to be known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, an unmistakable harbinger of what was to come.

  After Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, dragged Europe back into another war, Frank Buckles knew he wasn’t going to be sailing there anytime soon. Nevertheless, he didn’t have any trouble finding work. Actually, “I had two jobs offered to me,” he told me. “One of them was to go to Buenos Aires with the Captain of the Port, and the other one was to go to Manila. But the one in South America was with the McCormick Line, and wouldn’t give me any advantage coming back to the United States. If I went out to the Orient, I could use that advantage in San Francisco,” where the other company, the American President Line, was based. “So I took that,” he said. His job, he explained, would be “to expedite the movement of cargos in the port of Manila.” He arrived there in January of 1941, he told me, and “expected to be out in a year.”

  And here Frank Buckles chose unwisely.

  In 1931, Japan had invaded the northern Chinese region known as Manchuria, an act for which Japan was strongly criticized around the world. (This criticism, you will recall, led Frank Buckles’s former Tokyo tour guide to lead his country’s delegation out of the League of Nations, never to return.) The Japanese didn’t leave Manchuria, though; instead, they fortified their position there and then started pushing farther and farther into China, until the situation developed into an all-out war in 1937. The world took this turn of events
rather badly, particularly the United States, which had significant interests in China, not to mention a residual wariness of Japan from their dealings in Siberia a couple of decades earlier. The farther Japan pushed on, the more the United States restricted sales of critical supplies to it, including machinery, oil, and gasoline. (As a small island nation, Japan was quite dependent on the United States and other nations to provide it with such necessities.) The more the United States withheld supplies, though, the more the Japanese felt the need to push on into China and other territories (like French Indochina) in search of new sources. In July, 1941, six months after Frank Buckles arrived in Manila—capital of the Philippines, then an American commonwealth—the United States cut off all oil sales to Japan. At that point, people on both sides of the Pacific who understood these things figured that it was just a matter of time before something bad happened.

  December 7, 1941, was a Sunday. Across the International Date Line, it was already Monday, December 8; and so, while you might think that people in the British Crown colony of Hong Kong, or the Dutch East Indies, or Thailand, or British Malaya, or the Philippines—all of which, history records, were invaded by Japan on December 8, 1941—had at least a day’s notice of what was coming, they didn’t, really.

  Being the kind of person he was, Frank Buckles had, after his arrival in Manila, made the acquaintance of the commander of the US Army Forces in the Far East, headquartered there: Major General Douglas MacArthur, former commander of the Rainbow Division, commandant of West Point, Army chief of staff, and conqueror of the Bonus Expeditionary Force. “I met him on occasions when they would have meetings at the Manila Hotel,” Mr. Buckles recalled. When Japan invaded, he said, he tried to enlist, but was turned away, an act that, depending upon how you look at it, either saved his life or very nearly took it. I’m not sure even he, more than six decades later, knew for sure which it was. “I was trapped,” he said, “because MacArthur’s headquarters said that I was more valuable to them staying where I was than being in the Army. I could see that, because we were congregating the people in the Philippines.” “The people” he was referring to were citizens of countries then at war with the Axis—Britons, French, Dutch, and Americans, among others—who had fled there from other Pacific points under attack. “We were telling them that was the safest place in the Orient.” He added: “We knew damn well better than that.”