I had a wonderful, innocent childhood growing up in America’s
Heartland next door to my grandparents.
Those were carefree and innocent years.
That is, they were for a young child born as the second world war was
raging not long after “the war to end all wars” had been fought by young men
like my grandmother’s brother Walt. Of
course, I was oblivious to all of this and thankfully my parents shielded me
from knowing that many of our family members were directly involved in both
wars.
Those early childhood memories are beginning to become a
very faint part of my life at this stage.
But as I finished reading about my great uncle’s time spent in Europe
during WWI that my nephew Mike had assembled, I did have one primary memory
that surfaced. My grandparents had the
traditional detached garage with access to a dirt alley behind their home. And just about every Saturday morning, it was
always a treat to greet Walt and his wife Edna when they would drive into town
and deliver live baking chickens and eggs to my grandmother. I remember Walt was always smiling and happy
to see all the family and he must have been the world’s expert on raising
chickens on the farm. In fact, that’s
about all I can remember him talking about in an uncharacteristically, melodic
fast pace. He was the only person that I
knew that talked that way and when I questioned my mother, she told me that he was
in the war. So, that sufficed at my
young age and I only pondered this again today, many years later.
I learned that Walt was a member of General “Black Jack” Pershing’s American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), 353rd Regiment, 89th Division, Company F. He entered service at Fort Riley, Kansas on April 27,1918, just one month after the first report of the Spanish influenza was detected there on March 8. The WWI museum in Kansas City, Missouri reports that the Spanish flu spread overseas to the Western front and 20 million people worldwide would perish in the next year. Walt escaped that pandemic of 1918, but not the “hell on earth” in the trenches of WWI which contained cold rain, mud, lice, rats, maggots, hunger and fear. And the enemy by that time was also using vaporous mustard gas to seep into the trenches. Gas masks were standard issue and the cry of “GAS” instilled traumatic, psychological fear in the trenches. Exposure to chemical weapons resulted in a higher prevalence of depression and anxiety disorders for the survivors compared to war related violence alone.
Walt also wrote home about the prevalent machine gun nests and sniper fire that were a constant threat. The story might have been humorous if it wasn’t so dead serious. “I must tell you about picking plums. I was in a tree and Bert Coffey was on the ground. The first thing I knew someone was shooting at me and I dropped quickly to the ground. We lay flat on the ground for a while but the sniper must have thought he got me. My helmet was up in the tree full of plums. We poked it down with a stick and gathered up the plums from the ground, but no more tree for me.”
Company F was involved in two major operations in France against the Germans—St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne. A record of the division includes over 1,000 killed and 6,000 wounded and gassed. They captured over 5,000 prisoners. In one of his last letters home from the war, Walt wrote “We sure had some march all over Germany and carried heavy packs all the time. It was about 195 miles so you see it was not any easy task. I was all in when night came.” His company was present in Stenay, France for the armistice signing on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 (Hence, Veterans Day).
Walt spent eight months in a Tennessee VA hospital when he
returned to America and then finally made his way back to a Kansas farm where
the odyssey began.
P.S.
The irony has not been lost on me as I realized that my American
grandmother Ida Ulm-Davis, who has a German ancestry, had a brother in a world
war with Germany and sons in the next world war with Germany.
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