World War I Centennial News

Pittsburgh WWI memorial vandalized on Memorial Day, police say

By Rebekah Riess and Hollie Silverman
via the cnn.com (television network) web site

Vandalized WWI Memorial Pittsburgh Pittsburgh Police are investigating after a WWI War Memorial at Doughboy Square in Lawrenceville was vandalized overnight, according to a release from the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police.Police in Pennsylvania are investigating after a World War I memorial was vandalized on Memorial Day, according to a news release from the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police.

The vandalism was discovered at 8 a.m. on Monday on the monument in Doughboy Square in the Lawrenceville neighborhood, the release said.

Red paint was splashed on the memorial and "indeterminate messages" were written in the paint, police said.

"Vandalizing a memorial on any day is wrong, but it is incomprehensible to vandalize this memorial on a day in which we honor those who served and gave their lives for the freedoms we enjoy today. Pittsburgh Police will vigorously investigate this crime," Pittsburgh Public Safety Director Wendell Hissrich said in a statement.

Investigators are reviewing video footage of the area, police said.
Residents told CNN affiliate WTAE they were disappointed that the vandalism occurred on a day meant to honor those who gave their all.

"I almost feel like crying," Navy veteran Lawrence Cmar told the affiliate. "As a veteran, this is the worst thing you could do on the worst possible day of all days."

Holly Hicks-Opperman, whose father served in World War I, said seeing that memorial targeted was upsetting.

"This has been the hallmark, the centerpiece of Lawrenceville, for every veteran who has ever fought in every war for this country for our freedom. Awful," Hicks-Opperman told WTAE.

The memorial, which turns 99 in five days according to the Lawrenceville Historical Society, was being cleaned Monday afternoon, WTAE reported.

Henry Johnson, the One-Man Army Who Fought Off Dozens of German Soldiers in May 1918 during World War I

By Mildred Europa Taylor
via the face2faceafrica.com web site

Even though minorities served in the U.S. military since the Revolutionary War, they were usually not given the needed training and support compared to their white folks.

That was William Henry Johnson’s situation from the beginning. The Albany, New York native had enlisted in the all-black 15th New York National Guard Regiment, which was renamed the 369th Infantry Regiment when it shipped out to France.

William Henry JohnsonThe unit performed menial jobs as members were poorly trained but it was later lent to the French Fourth Army, which was experiencing a shortage of men.

With the French Army, Johnson would perform an act of heroism, earning him praise from then-President Theodore Roosevelt who eventually called him one of the “five bravest Americans” to serve in World War I.

What was this brave act? Johnson fought off scores of Germans single-handedly in the Forest of Argonne in 1918 during World War I.

Having joined the French Fourth Army, Johnson and his men who became the Harlem Hellfighters, were sent to the front lines in March 1918. They learned enough French words to be able to understand commands from superiors. They were given French rifles and helmets, even though they held on to the bolo knives used by the U.S. Army.

Alongside Needham Roberts, a man from Trenton, Johnson was assigned sentry duty on the western edge of the Forest of Argonne in 1918.

Johnson and Roberts were given the late shift; they were to patrol until midnight on the evening of May 14. They weren’t on duty long when the Germans started attacking them.

It first started with strange noises late into the night. Hearing these, Johnson urged Roberts, who was then tired and resting, to get up. But Roberts ignored, thinking his fellow soldier was just nervous.

Johnson, nevertheless, began “piling up his assortment of grenades and rifle cartridges within arm’s reach. If someone was coming, he would be ready,” writes Mental Floss.

Then he began to hear rustling noises, which ultimately became German soldiers who were rushing through the darkness. Realizing they were surrounded, Johnson urged Roberts to run and get help. This was around 2.a.m.

Roberts was hit with a grenade in the process and got badly wounded to the extent that he couldn’t fight. Lying in the trench, Johnson handed him grenades, which he threw at the Germans.

But the German forces were too many, and they were advancing from every direction. Soon, Johnson ran out of grenades.

IWOTQBBVC5E2LMWA7BIH5SIYEY Red Cross workers aid the military during the 1918 flu pandemic. In the period September through November 1918, influenza and pneumonia sickened 20% to 40% of U.S. Army and Navy personnel.

Remembering the World War I soldiers who succumbed to the 1918 flu pandemic

By The Editorial Board
the Cleveland.com and Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper (OH) web site

The 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic surged in the military training camps and foxholes of a brutal world war - the perfect incubation conditions for an influenza historians now believe got its start not in Spain, but in U.S. military camps.

The flu first traveled with U.S. soldiers to European battlefields, it is surmised, where in the crowded fighting conditions, it found even more ideal conditions to spread, mutate and become more deadly. It felled young men in their prime, the very demographic of those fighting.

Then, it returned to U.S. shores with these same troops, erroneously called the Spanish flu because of early reporting on the deaths from Spain.

So many soldiers succumbed at Ohio’s Camp Sherman outside Chillicothe that the city tried to barricade itself from infection, but then had to loosen those restrictions as the bodies piled up and makeshift morgues had to be created in the city.

A recent Ohio History Connection article by Karen Robertson details the horror:

“Camp Sherman quickly became a very dark place during the summer and fall of 1918,” Robertson writes. “About 5,686 military personnel fell ill, with 1,777” eventually dying from the flu.

Flu photo navy Interior of isolation ward, Naval hospital at Naval Training Camp Gulfport, Miss., during 1918 influenza epidemic. (U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command photo)

Navy, Marines Struggled With 1918 Influenza Pandemic

By John Grady
via the United States Naval Institute web site

As the 1918 flu pandemic raged, Navy doctors preached that the rawest recruits and most senior flag officers needed to wash their hands often and to isolate the sick from the healthy, medical historians told USNI News.

Despite its best efforts, Navy medicine had mixed success containing the epidemic, the service’s reports from the time show.

In 1918, Naval medical facilities admitted 121,225 Navy and Marine Corps patients with influenza. Of these patients, 4,158 died of the virus. Sick patients spent more than one million sick days in these facilities worldwide.

Navy medical personnel were familiar with smart practices, like decrying sailors’ “promiscuous spitting,” to keep hygiene and sanitation standards high and to reduce the risk of contagion, Andre Sobocinski, the historian manager with the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, told USNI News.

Medical personnel used circulars and medical notes on outbreaks to keep up to date with best practices. The medical providers studied influenza treatments but also the work to care for patients with pneumonia, diphtheria and meningitis.

Still, even with access to the best information available at the time, Navy medicine had to face the realities of the world around them.

“Crowding is the issue” that causes the rapid spread of infectious diseases, retired Capt. Thomas Snyder, executive director of the Society for the History of Navy Medicine, said in an interview with USNI News.

In World War I America, there were movies drawing crowds, large ballrooms for dancing and huge war bond rallies that fueled the influenza outbreak. By 1918, influenza was helped spread from place to place by the way Americans were moving about the country in much higher numbers than they had at the dawn of the 20th century. Much of this movement is attributed to the wartime movement of soldiers, sailors, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen from training bases to installations to embarkation ports along the East and Gulf coasts for France.

Clara Goldsmith grave

WWI nurse Clara Goldsmith is East Liberty, OH Hometown Hero

via the Bellefontaine Examiner (OH) newspaper web site

Local military heroes have been spotlighted during the last four years at the East Liberty Memorial Day Celebration, and among their ranks have included a Civil War captain; Gen. John J. “Black Jack” Pershing’s personal secretary during World War I; a survivor of the Bataan Death March; and a corporal who served in World War II’s Battle of the Bulge.

This year as medical personnel locally and around the world bravely work on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, a World War I U.S. Army nurse, Clara Goldsmith, has been named the 2020 East Liberty Hometown Hero for the fifth annual award.

While the East Liberty Memorial Day ceremony is among the many local observations that have been canceled this year, East Liberty resident Jeff Hall and his son, attorney Tyler Hall, have researched the late Mrs. Goldsmith, a Logan County native, to put together a video presentation honoring her work as a nurse during another difficult time in the medical field.

The video will be available at the Perry Township website, www.perrytownship.net, along with the East Liberty Church of Christ’s Facebook page. Tyler wrote a reflection about Mrs. Goldsmith, World War I nurses and the current times to be shared in the video.

“We are generous and compassionate by nature in this country, and we see that generosity and compassion time and again,” he wrote.

“Sometimes we realize it during the times of national or local emergencies as communities band together to support each other. Other times we will simply notice how our neighbor comes to plow out our driveway after a few inches of snow.

“At its base, we all have, and we give to those who have not. We do not need to be commanded to do so by some higher authority; we want to help.

“The pinnacle of that selflessness manifests itself in segments of our populace that we all know: medical first responders, law enforcement, and military service members. These are individuals whose assistance goes well beyond the norm. In many cases, they hold our own lives in their hands as they treat us, protect us, and defend us.

“Clara Goldsmith, this year’s Hometown Hero, was such a person.”

French soldiers arrayed in gargoyle guise. French soldiers wearing anti-poison gas mask and respirators while expecting an attack under cover of gas cloud. (Photo by: SeM/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

How Fast The World Ends

By Rod Dreher
via The American Conservative web site

New unemployment numbers are out today. After reading them, I told my wife, “If a soothsayer had shown up on New Year’s Eve and said that by summer, 40 million people would be unemployed in this country, we would have thought he was crazy.”

A global economic crash like 2008, sure, that we could understand — but even then, the job losses weren’t this bad, and they happened over 18 months. This thing, though? Forty million made jobless in 10 weeks? Seriously, if someone had told you that this was going to happen, and you believed them, what kind of plausible scenario would you have come up with to explain this catastrophe? I don’t know if most of us could have done it.

And yet, here we are.

An aside: it’s a tale that has been told many times: how World War I destroyed European civilization, and ushered in modernity in full force. I don’t know when I last read it told with such insight than by the historian Modris Eksteins in his acclaimed 1986 book The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, which is available on Kindle for just over seven bucks. I downloaded it the other day after reader Rob G. recommended it. It’s very hard to put down. Eksteins begins with the 1913 Paris premiere of the Nijinsky ballet of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a scandalous event at the time. To have been present in the hall that night, he says, was to witness the violent birth of modern art. This essay tells you what happened, and why it happened. Excerpt:

What is certain is that the audience was shocked – and with good reason. Stravinsky’s score for The Rite of Spring contradicted every rule about what music should be. The sounds are often deliberately harsh, right from opening Lithuanian folk melody, which is played by the bassoon in its highest, most uncomfortable range. The music was cacophonously loud, assaulting the ears with thunderous percussion and shrieking brass. Rhythmically it was complex in a completely unprecedented way. In the ‘Ritual of the Rival Tribes’ the music unfolds in two speeds at once, in a ratio of 3:2. And it makes lavish use of dissonance, i.e. combinations of notes which don’t make normal harmonic sense. ‘The music always goes to the note next to the one you expect,’ wrote one exasperated critic.

National WWI Museum and Memorial Sets Reopen Date

By Mike Vietti
Director of Marketing, Communications and Guest Services, National World War I Museum and Memorial

KANSAS CITY, MO. – The National WWI Museum and Memorial will reopen to its members on Monday, June 1 and to the general public on Tuesday, June 2.

“We have monitored the COVID-19 situation closely during the past few months and, in accordance with guidance from public health officials at the local, state and federal levels, we are ready to reopen America’s official WWI Museum and Memorial,” said Dr. Matthew Naylor, National WWI Museum and Memorial President and CEO. “We’ve spent considerable time developing a comprehensive reopening plan that allows for people to visit one of the world’s great museums and memorials in a safe and welcoming environment.”

Upon reopening, several elements of the Museum and Memorial will be adjusted to account for guidelines established by public health officials. Among those items:

Guests may visit the Museum during one of two timed sessions each day (10 a.m. - 1 p.m. & 2-5 p.m.) to maintain limited occupancy levels and provide for additional cleaning between sessions.
Guests are strongly encouraged to buy tickets online in advance to guarantee entrance due to limited occupancy levels.
The organization has increased the frequency of cleaning using CDC-rated disposable products, installed hand sanitizing stations throughout the complex and adopted “no-touch” measures such as hands-free door openers and touch-free waste containers. Staff and volunteers will wear face masks at all times in public spaces. In conjunction with city regulations, guests are encouraged, but not required to wear face masks.
While the Main Gallery, Exhibit Hall, Memory Hall and Wylie Gallery are available, some areas will be unavailable such as the Liberty Memorial Tower and the Edward Jones Research Center.
Some amenities such as checking of coats/backpacks and complimentary use of wheelchairs/scooters will be unavailable.

“The experience of walking through the Museum, seeing the exhibitions and spending time looking though the materials and information we offer will remind visitors about the passion, strength and resilience humankind is capable of,” Naylor said. “The world was devastated by the Great War, compounded by the pandemic of 1918, yet re-emerged. We can look to the past to gain an understanding that we have the capacity to get through this and quite possibly emerge stronger than before.”

WUSA 9

Eisenhower Memorial awaits dedication, World War I Memorial construction continues

By John Henry
via the WUSA9 television station (DC) web site

WASHINGTON — The Dwight Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C. is basically completed. Now, it's just waiting for a formal dedication.

United States Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) has spearheaded the project to create a memorial honoring his fellow Kansan, President Dwight Eisenhower, for years.

Construction crews broke ground on the Independence Avenue project, across the street from the National Air and Space Museum, in 2017. Roberts said the project was to be formally dedicated on May 8, the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day.

"But the virus and social distancing stopped that," Roberts said.

The memorial is essentially finished, according to Roberts. He said there are only a few minor tasks that need to be completed to wrap up the $150 million project.

The block-long memorial boasts green space, tapestry, and statues of Eisenhower in both his roles of President and general.

"He dreamed big and then look what happened," Roberts said. "He became one of the most famous generals of all time and then President the United States. So, if you're from a small town, you can do it too."

USS Nevasa composite 1925 The USS Nevada (BB-36), shortly after her launch in 1914 (left) and as she appeared in 1925. Nevada was a leap forward in dreadnought technology; four of her new features would be included on almost every subsequent US battleship. Commissioned in March 1916, Nevada served in World War I, escorting convoys en route to the British Isles. After the war, Nevada escorted the ocean liner George Washington while it delivered President Woodrow Wilson to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.

Underwater Drones Discover Battleship That Survived Both World Wars and Atomic Blasts

By George Dvorsky
via the gizmodo.com web site

The wreck of the USS Nevada has been located 75 miles off the coast of Hawaii at a depth of nearly three miles. It’s a significant discovery, as the battleship represents one of the most storied vessels in U.S. history, having survived Pearl Harbor, a kamikaze suicide attack, and atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll.

The submerged and deteriorating 27,500-ton battleship was discovered by Ocean Infinity and SEARCH Inc., using a fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles, according to a press release issued Monday. The two private U.S. firms joined forces for the expedition aboard the multi-purpose vessel Pacific Constructor.

Search crews had a rough idea of where the USS Nevada was located, as it was deliberately sunk by the U.S. Navy in 1948, but the vessel’s precise resting place was unknown, according to USNI News. The wreck was found 120 kilometers (75 miles) southwest of Pearl Harbor at a depth of 4,690 meters (15,400 feet).

Photographs of the wrecked USS Nevada show one of its 32 dual mount anti-aircraft guns, a toppled foremast, the stern hull still displaying its number, and an old tank, among other features.

The USS Nevada is among the U.S. Navy’s most storied battleships, having survived both world wars and blasts from atomic bombs.

Falls Township, PA World War I Statue To Be Restored

By Tom Sofield
via the levittownnow.com (Levittown, PA) web site

A statue of a World War I infantryman in Falls Township’s Fallsington section will be restored.

The limestone Doughboy statue that sits atop a small memorial at the intersection of Yardley Avenue, New Falls Road, Main Street, and West Tyburn Road has become weathered and damaged over the years.

Fallingston doughboy The Doughboy statue in Falls Township’s Fallsington section will be restored.The Doughboy name comes from a popular nickname for American troopers who fought on the battlefields.

The Falls Township Board of Supervisors, who met virtually Monday evening, approved spending $10,700 to clean the statue and pedestal, perform a process to strengthen the stone while maintaining permeability, repair a crack and recreate a missing barrel on the rifle stock, and steam the brick walkway and low wall to clean it and reduce biological growth.

Kreilick Conservation is the firm performing the work. The company has worked on preserving the iconic Rocky statue in Philadelphia, historical monuments in Gettysburg, some in Washington D.C., and hundreds in total, township officials said.

The restoration and repair work will take place following the American Institute for Conservation’s Code of Ethics and Guidelines for Practice and in accordance with the U.S. Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Restoration.

“It’s in bad shape,” Supervisor John Palmer said. “They are a complete historical reconstruction statue outfit. I’m glad we’re getting this thing moving ahead.”

Palmer noted acid rain and pollution have taken their toll on the statue erected to recognize the veterans and casualties of World War I.

America's deadliest month? Not April, but a deadly combination of war and pandemic

By J. Mark Powell
via the Washington Examiner newspaper (DC) web site

This is a time for taking stock amid the COVID-19 outbreak. President Trump and his top advisers, public health experts, governors, business leaders, and everyday people are all asking the same questions: Is the outbreak finally starting to wane? If it is, will there be a second wave? And if that happens, could it be worse than the first round?

Times may change, but history is once again repeating itself. Just over 100 years ago, folks were asking similar questions as they endured a different, but savage, illness. It helped make October 1918 the deadliest month in our history.

More U.S. citizens died then than ever passed away during any 30-day stretch before or since. Blame it on the one-two punch of a hideous pandemic and an equally horrific world war.

Flu patients Base Hospital Number 29 First Lieutenant W.F. Faris (kneeling, left) and Captain R.N. Brookmeyer (kneeling, right) diagnose newly arrived flu patients at Base Hospital Number 29, 5th Division, in Hollerich, Luxembourg, 7 December 1918. (National Archives)While World War I had officially begun in summer 1914, the United States didn’t enter the conflict until April 1917. The nation wasn’t prepared for combat, and it took a long time to equip and train it and transport it across the Atlantic. But by summer 1918, the doughboys (as American soldiers were nicknamed) were finally in the thick of the action.

That September, the Allied Forces (the British, French, and Americans) launched a major counter-offensive against the Germans. A host of new names such as the Meuse River, Argonne Forest, and the Hindenburg Line joined the roster of earlier bloody battles such as Belleau Wood and Chateau Thierry. People in the U.S. pored over maps of Europe, locating these unfamiliar places as the casualty counts poured in. By month’s end, General John “Black Jack” Pershing reported a total of 19,552 U.S. servicemen killed in action and dead from illness and injuries. (That figure would jump to 38,819 the next month.)

At the same time, the Spanish Flu pandemic was raging unchecked back home.

It had popped up mysteriously on an army training base in Kansas that winter. One soldier woke up feeling ill. By lunchtime, 106 others were sick. The ailment was so intense and spread so fast, doctors had never seen anything like it. Strangest of all, unlike typical infections that target the very young and the very old, this one brought down healthy people from late teens to the early 40s. With the nation mobilizing for war, the flu went with the troops, then spread through civilian ranks from city to city and bringing death and incredible suffering along with it.

Things seemed to turn a corner as spring gave way to summer and the weather grew warmer. That, many people thought, was that.

Except it wasn’t. The Spanish Flu returned with a vengeance that fall, stronger and more deadly than before. By October, it was again silently rampaging across the U.S. Major cities went into quarantine. People wore gauze face masks. Schools were dismissed, mail service stopped, churches and theaters were closed.

Ask Geoffrey: How Did Chicago Deal With 1918 Spanish Flu?

By Erica Gunderson
via the WTTW television station (Chicago, IL) web site

The so-called Spanish flu infected one-third of the population of the entire world, some 500 million people. It is generally said to have killed between 20 million and 50 million people, although some estimates are as high as 100 million. In the U.S., about 675,000 died from what we now know was an H1N1 avian virus.

Unlike COVID-19, which is mostly lethal in older people, mortality in the 1918 pandemic was high among children under age 5, and adults from 20 to 40 years old.

The first thing to know about the Spanish flu is that it wasn’t Spanish

Spain’s media was first to report it widely because the news wasn’t blacked out there as it was in other countries during WWI. This gave the rest of the world the false impression that it started in Spain. The first recorded outbreak actually happened in the U.S., at a military base in Kansas in March 1918. The actual origin of the virus has never been conclusively determined, but theories on its birthplace range from New York to France to China.

This first wave of influenza wasn’t widely noticed as American soldiers mobilized in large numbers for WWI. This first outbreak didn’t spread very widely and it didn’t get much notice in America because focus at the time was on the country’s entry into World War I.

As troops traveled back and forth to Europe, a second, more virulent wave broke out in the fall of 1918. This was the one that caused the most deaths. Just as that was subsiding, the war ended on Nov. 11, 1918. Parades and parties celebrating the armistice caused a third outbreak that lasted through the spring of 1919.

In Chicago, the first outbreak didn’t have much more of an effect than the regular flu, but the second Spanish flu outbreak arrived with a vengeance starting on Sept. 8, 1918, when a few sailors at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station north of the city fell ill. Within two months, the virus had killed 8,500 people in the Chicago area.

Looking back at ‘displays of humanity’ in Hudson, OH

By Christopher Bach, President / Hudson Heritage Association
via the Hudson, OH thesuburbanite.com web site

In the face of this unprecedented worldwide coronavirus pandemic, I am reminded of two periods in history when the Hudson community united and overcame similar challenges.

Hudson in World War I

Just over 100 years ago, on the morning of November 11, 1918, as Hudson was receiving news of the end of World War I with the signing of the Armistice, the world was fighting another global crisis: the influenza pandemic or “Spanish flu.” And while the Hudson community would come together to celebrate the end of the war with a great gathering on the Village Green and a parade up Oviatt Street that ended with a ceremony at Western Reserve Academy’s Chapel, the influenza epidemic had dramatically altered life in Hudson and across the country.

EP 305109996 David Hudson Lee (1893-1919), Hudson WWI veteran, and the only Hudson casualty of WWI.It is estimated that 50 million people worldwide, about 3% of the world population, died as this disease spread with ruthless efficiency. About 45,000 American soldiers were killed by the influenza virus and not by a mortal enemy in combat (53,402). In the United States alone, over a quarter of the population would become infected and about 675,000 would die because of the disease.

The Akron Beacon Journal would report 3,114 deaths in Ohio alone during the months of October, November, and December 1918. The influenza epidemic sweeping across America was described as “the deadliest scourge that ever had invaded the United States.”

The flu was rapidly spreading through the Hudson community with public events postponed or canceled and schools closing and reopening on a weekly basis for months, to control the spread of the flu. On Oct. 10, 1918, a month before the signing of the Armistice, one of Hudson’s physicians, Dr. J. Edgar Allport, delivered a speech at Western Reserve Academy for students and faculty, called “The Flu, and How to Avoid It.”

Accounts in the local newspaper reported that Dr. Allport made house visits to as many as 40 people a day who had the flu.

Hudson physician and WWI veteran Dr. George A. Miller (1875-1935), a graduate of WRA (1897), was among thousands of doctors and nurses who were the first ones to be sent home from Europe after the signing of the Armistice, to help their communities battle the influenza epidemic.

Martha C. Clark (1879-1946), a Hudson schoolteacher, was the only Hudson woman to serve in the Great War, and at the age of 38, joined the Red Cross as a nurse. Clark was sent to Camp Upton in Yaphank, N.Y., on eastern Long Island, where she cared for New York State soldiers who were stricken with influenza. She also served overseas for about six months as a Red Cross nurse.

David Hudson Lee (1893-1919), a fifth-generation descendant of Hudson founder David Hudson, was one of 81 WWI veterans from Hudson. He contracted influenza in the winter of 1918 while serving with the American Expeditionary Force. While he survived the virus, it left him weakened and susceptible to other illnesses. On June 6, 1919, at the age of 26, Lee passed away in Koblenz, Germany, from lobar pneumonia, the only casualty from Hudson in the First World War.