An injured World War I veteran treated by Dr. Harold Gillies, featured in his 1920 book 'Plastic Surgery of the Face.' (Credit: Public Domain)

Innovative Cosmetic Surgery Restored WWI Vets' Ravaged Faces—And Lives 

By Christopher Klein
via the History.com web site

The blue benches outside London’s Queen’s Hospital were reserved for men with shattered faces and smashed dreams. The colorful paint job warned the locals that they might want to avert their eyes, shielding them from coming face-to-face with the awful reality of the war and saving the terribly disfigured young men from another look of horror, another uncomfortable stare.

The soldiers who sat on those benches in the years during and after World War I had suffered facial wounds on the Western Front that had never been seen before in warfare. Hailstorms of bullets, exploding metal shells and shrapnel tore off the flesh and ripped off the faces of men who dared to peek out of their trenches or attempt to dodge machine gun fire.

“The sky was full of shattered iron. Usually the first thing exposed to this shattered iron were human faces. If soldiers were not killed immediately, those who survived could be horribly disfigured,” says Doran Cart, senior curator at the National World War I Museum and Memorial. “This was a graphic war. There were losses of cheekbones, causing the whole face to sink in. Jaws would be completely decimated. When you put up human flesh and bone against 8 millimeter machine guns, shell fragments and shrapnel, there was no contest.”

Improvements in anesthesia and treating infections also meant that these gruesome battlefield injuries had become survivable. However, facial wounds could be so severe that they left soldiers unable to eat, drink or even speak. As terrible as amputations were, soldiers who lost their faces also lost their identities. “It is a fairly common experience for the maladjusted person to feel like a stranger to his world,” wrote World War I surgeon Fred Houdlett Albee. “It must be unmitigated hell to feel like a stranger to yourself.”

Read more: Innovative Cosmetic Surgery Restored WWI Vets' Ravaged Faces—And Lives

Dr. Hosea J. Nichols could be in this photo of Officer Reserve Training Camp in Fort De Moines, Iowa, as he was sent to the camp in September 1917 to train with other African-American officers. | Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County

Black physician who served in WWI was mover, shaker 

By Arlis Dittmer
via the Herald-Whig (Quincy, IL) newspaper web site

Dr. Hosea J. Nichols was one of the 104 doctors of African-American descent who were physicians in World War I.

His father, William Nichols, who had been born a slave, served with the Union Army in the 59th U.S. Colored Infantry during the Civil War. Hosea was born in 1870. He and his six siblings were raised in Sardis, Miss.

Nichols attended an American Missionary Association school, organized for freed men, in Memphis, Tenn., where he trained as a teacher. He taught for two years before enrolling in medical school. He graduated from Howard University Medical College in Washington, D. C., in 1899.

After graduation, Dr. Nichols moved to Quincy and opened a practice at 234½ N. Sixth. He married Annie M. Davis, who was a trained nurse, in 1901. They lived at 819 N. Eighth, where they raised three daughters.

Although Dr. Nichols only lived in Quincy about 20 years, he was involved in many organizations and for a time, was the only African-American physician in Quincy.

Whenever a spokesman or committee was needed, Dr. Nichols' name was included. The black community objected to the proposed location of Lincoln School in 1908.

Dr. Nichols and two other gentlemen presented a petition to the school board saying, "We consider it a menace to our welfare, as a people, to have our children educated in the vicinity of Adams row, which is the dwelling place of all manner of vice and crime and which is the rock of Gibraltar to the police station."

Read more: Black physician who served in WWI was mover, shaker

100 years later: Returning to World War I's Western Front in France 

By Mary Winston Nicklin
via the STARS and STRIPES newspaper web site

A century has passed since the battles that baptized the U.S. military into the horrors of modern industrialized warfare. Nearly three years after the guns of August opened the First World War, the first doughboys in Gen. John J. Pershing's American Expeditionary Forces - young, enthusiastic and prone to breaking into song - arrived on French shores to join the weary Allied Forces.

The United States' entry into the war would turn the tide. Numbering just 200,000 - including the National Guard - at the beginning, the soldiers in the U.S. Armed Forces in France would total 1,894,000 by the time the armistice was signed. Not only did the Great War create the modern American military, but it was also a catalyst for the civil and women's rights movements, and it carved up empires on the modern world map.

The "War to End All Wars" claimed an estimated 40 million military and civilian lives - of which nearly 117,000 were American - and left behind apocalyptic devastation. "Over There" - in the parlance of the famous George M. Cohan song - France was an unimaginable hellscape: trees like charred matchsticks jutting from bombed-out craters, miles of trenches, body parts blown into trees or lost in the mud. In this ghoulish wasteland, the scale of physical and psychological suffering was unprecedented. Fifty percent of the dead have no known graves.

"I have a rendezvous with death," begins the famous poem by Alan Seeger, who died at the Battle of the Somme while volunteering in the French Foreign Legion.

Entire villages were wiped off the map and never rebuilt. Names like the Somme and Verdun - site of the war's longest battle and one of the costliest battles in human history - are eternal symbols of the sacrifice. Following the war, what was called the Red Zone, a swath of 460 acres across the Western Front, was declared off-limits for habitation. The annual "iron harvest" unearths tons of shrapnel, guns and grenades. Unexploded ordnance is still a danger to farmers plowing their fields. Reminders are everywhere in France; the tiniest rural villages have monuments to the war dead.

Read more: 100 years later: Returning to World War I's Western Front in France

"The Liberation 1918-2018" project consists of a column of dozens of WWI reenactors in period vehicles, wagons, costumes, uniforms, and equipment, who are trekking across Belgium, following the route of the final counter-offensive of the war.  

Four Questions for David Moortgat

"The reaction of the audience was overwhelming."

By Chris Isleib
Director of Public Affairs, United States World War One Centennial Commission

An amazing WWI Living History event has been taking place this past week across Belgium. Called "The Liberation 1918-2018", the project consists of a column of dozens of WWI reenactors in period vehicles, wagons, costumes, uniforms, and equipment, who are trekking across Belgium, following the route of the final counter-offensive of the war. In Flanders Fields of September 1918 a massive campaign was launched by Belgian, British, Commonwealth, French and American forces against the German axis forces in a final effort to end the War of wars and liberate Belgium. To commemorate this final offensive, a historical multinational column embarked on an epic journey from Lo-Reninge to Deinze between 13 and 19 August 2018 -- stopping in several towns, at every memorial and battlefield to pay due homage to all of those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our liberty. The participants are doing this to teach modern people across their country about the important history, and the lessons, from WWI. They are also undertaking this journey as a tribute -- to honor the allied troops, including the American military members, who sacrificed so much in the name of freedom during WWI. Information on the event and the route can be found here: http://debevrijding.be/Home/home%20eng/index.html. We spoke to the leader of this unique living history event, Mr. David Moortgat, President, V.Z.W Platform for Belgian military history.

-- This is a remarkable project! Tell us all about it. Who's project is it? Who is participating in it?

I have started this project with our living history group 4 years ago. With his project there are more than 25 Belgian towns, groups and authorities involved.

It was hard work to have them all on the same line but after long meetings with the local authorities we managed to have the project rolling.

The reason that we started this project is to show the people the army and the end offensive of 1918 and to let them think about it.

Many soldiers died in those last months of the war in a part of the war that is in Belgium not really well known, most people think that the war ended in the trenches.

Read more: Four Questions for David Moortgat: Amazing Reenactor Road-Journey in Belgium

US Nay 14-inch railway gun firing at Thierville, 1918 

First US Naval Rail gun operational for final Allies counter-offensive of WWI

By Dennis Conrad, Ph.D.
Histories and Archives Division, Naval History and Heritage Command

On August 18th, 1918, the U.S. Navy's first naval railway gun, a 14-inch, 50 caliber, Mark IV Navy gun mounted on a railway carriage, became operational in St. Nazaire, France during World War I.

In November 1917, Rear Adm. Ralph Earle, the head of the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance, suggested that if the Navy mounted “several naval 14-inch guns . . . fitted with high angles of fire, and with specially formed shell, fitted with delayed action fuses,” they might be able to outrange the German Lugenboom guns, then pounding the vital port city of Dunkirk from a distance of some 24 miles. Earle added that after securing Dunkirk these guns, if mounted on railroad cars so they would be mobile and self-sustaining, could be used offensively to bombard German supply and railroad centers well beyond the front lines. Thus the Naval Railway battery was born. As an aside, note that contrary to popular belief, the Naval Railway battery was not intended to combat the German Paris-Geschütz gun that had fired on the French capital from some 75 miles away during the critical German offensive in the spring of 1918.

Getting the guns proved easy. They were taken from spares created when the Navy altered the design of its battle cruiser class. The mobility came from mounting the guns on specially-constructed railway carriages created to carry the gun and its slide and hauling them where they needed to go using special locomotives manufactured by the Baldwin Railroad Works at Eddystone, PA. Five of these trains were readied and then shipped unassembled to France where they were reassembled by their crews.

Read more: First US Naval Rail gun was operational for final Allies counter-offensive of WWI

The 'Hello Girls' were the U.S. Army female telephone operators recruited during World War I to play a vital role in manually connecting telephone calls.

'Hello Girls' film on whirlwind schedule of Film Festivals, screenings 

By Chris Isleib
Director of Public Affairs, United States World War One Centennial Commission

Our friends who produced the Hello Girls documentary film are enjoying great success, both in their film's audience/critical reception, and in their efforts to get these special women honored by Congress with the Congressional Gold Medal.

New Congressional sponsors have joined on from the U.S. Senate, and the project is gaining in visibility nationwide. A recent article about the Congressional Gold Medal effort can be found here.

The 'Hello Girls' were the U.S. Army female telephone operators recruited during World War I to play a vital role in manually connecting telephone calls. Their story is amazing. General Pershing personally issued a recruitment for skilled women, and over 7,000 volunteered. Two hundred and thirty were accepted, and were put to use across the battle areas of France. They patched through over 24 million telephone calls, and due to their vital skills, they stayed deployed long after the war was over, to help with communications for the Versailles Peace Treaty.

However, when they returned home to the U.S., these heroic women were denied basic veteran status by the Army -- which started a 60-year fight for them to gain recognition from the U.S. government for their service.

Read more: 'Hello Girls' documentary on whirlwind schedule of Film Festivals, special screenings

America’s First Female Soldiers Getting Deserved Recognition

By Julie Zeilinger
via the Task & Purpose web site

When Grace Banker graduated from Barnard College in 1915, women did not yet have the right vote. But lacking this basic right didn’t stop Banker from serving her country — and breaking barriers in the process.

U.S. Army Signal Corps telephone operators at switchboard. Left to right: Rose Langelier; Melanie Van Gastel; Louisette Gavid; Marie Lemaire; Eglantine Moussu. Toul, Meurthe et Moselle, France.Just two years later, Banker volunteered for and was chosen to head a team of women assigned to fulfill a crucial communications role alongside American. service members deployed to France as part of World War I.

These women joined 190 others recruited to serve in the U.S. Army Signal Corps by connecting American and French forces via newly-available phone lines after military officials discovered that male infantrymen were struggling to connect these calls quickly enough.

The bilingual team of women served on the front lines of battle, connecting 26 million calls for the American Expeditionary Forces in France. They served at military headquarters and outposts in the field alongside the American Expeditionary Forces in France, connecting the front lines with supply depots and military commands. They became known as the ‘Hello Girls”

Yet despite this service — and despite taking a military oath —the Hello Girls were denied veteran status and benefits when they returned home.

After petitioning Congress more than 50 times for recognition, lawmakers in 1977 finally relented and passed legislation to retroactively acknowledge the military service of the women of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. And on July 3 of this year, Sens. Jon Tester, Democrat from Montana, and Dean Heller, Republican from Nevada, introduced the Hello Girls Congressional Gold Medal Act, which will award the Hello Girls with the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors. On Tuesday, Sen. Tammy Baldwin co-sponsored the legislation as well.

“The Hello Girls stepped up to the plate and got the job done, and they played an important role in our nation’s history,” Heller said at the time. “They pioneered the way for female veterans, and like all of our nation’s service members – they should be recognized for their bravery and contributions,”

Read more: They Were America’s First Female Soldiers. Now They’re Getting The Recognition They Deserve

American Occupation forces entering Germany in 1918. A quarter-million U.S. troops held some 2,500 square miles of Rhineland for four years after the November 1918 armistice that ended the fighting.

Cousins Reunited: How America's Century-Old Occupation of Germany Still Reverberates 

By Viola Gienger
via the ozy.com web site

The clues were in a faded, tattered black-and-white photograph that Johannes Heibel’s father carried with him everywhere. Nearly 100 years after it was taken in a German village, the photo shed light on a family secret that connected Heibel to a cousin he had never known in faraway Tennessee.

In this centennial year marking the end of World War I, the discovery illuminates a postwar occupation of Germany that most Americans have never heard of: A quarter-million U.S. troops, including the men in the photo carried by Heibel’s father, held some 2,500 square miles of Rhineland for four years after the November 1918 armistice that ended the fighting. The American troops were deployed, along with French, Belgian and British troops in other military zones, to ensure Germany didn’t resume attacks to the west if negotiations failed to reach a final peace agreement at Versailles.

The photo shows seven American doughboys, with one kneeling in front of the others. They were part of the Cooks and Mechanics section of Company F, 2nd Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment, 1st Division of the U.S. Army. The photo was taken in 1919 in the village of Bannberscheid, about 47 miles southeast of Bonn. Heibel still lives nearby.

During the occupation, U.S. Army soldiers were billeted in private homes. The military struggled, mostly unsuccessfully, to prevent “fraternization” between soldiers and local women. Among the more famous offspring of the era is the provocative late writer Charles Bukowski, born not far from Bannberscheid, in Andernach, on Aug. 16, 1920.

While many couples married, other American soldiers either didn’t know their liaisons had produced children before they were shipped back to the U.S. or didn’t own up to it, says Alexander Barnes, command historian for the Virginia National Guard and author of the illustrated book In a Strange Land: The American Occupation of Germany 1918–1923.

Heibel had learned his family secret — that his paternal grandfather was an American soldier — but nothing more. Two years before his father, Erwin Heibel, died in 2003, Heibel asked him about his life.

Read more: Cousins Reunited: How America's Century-Old Occupation of Germany Still Reverberates

 Soldiers of the 77th Division's Company G, 2nd Battalion, 308th Infantry Regiment watch Britsh Army Sgt. Stevens show them the proper way to attack an enemy with their bayonet during training on May 8, 1918, in this still from the video "Training with the British Army in Picardy, May 1918" found on the National Archives website. The Soldiers of the 77th Division, who were mostly draftees from New York City, were one of five American divisions to be trained by the British Army in World War I. ( Photo by U.S. Army Signal Corps via National Archives)

 Why World War I matters

By Maj. Frank Huffman
U.S. Army Reserve Command, via the U.S. Army Reserve web site

FORT BRAGG, N.C. — There are 13,484 reasons World War I matters to today’s Army Reserve Soldier.

That is the number of Americans killed in action “Over There,” along with another 52,721 who were wounded in the fight. And these numbers reflect only those Soldiers serving in National Army divisions, the forerunner of today’s Army Reserve, not the regular Army or the National Guard. National Army units suffered 26 percent of all American casualties during the war.

Not interested? Then think what Europe was like before the war. A continent covered in empire, with the German Empire, the Russian Empire and the Austo-Hungarian Empire dominating the European landscape. The re-shaping of Europe’s internal boundaries following the Treaty of Versailles, including the creation of several new countries (or the return of historically old ones), caused a human migration that stretched across the Atlantic Ocean to the shores of America.

Still not impressed?

No less a man than former Army Chief of Staff General Matthew Ridgway, widely recognized as one of the finest Soldiers this nation has ever produced, said it was the duty of every American Soldier to know, respect, and live up to the history of the Soldiers who came before him. Ridgway believed the spirit of the Minutemen of the Revolutionary War was in every American Soldier. He believed the veterans of Gettysburg, the Doughboys of World War I, his own generation’s glorious history in World War II, should be remembered – and their examples of courage and leadership should be followed and burned into the psyche of every Soldier in uniform.

Of course, times were different then. Actual history, good and bad, was taught in the schools and universities, unlike today’s politically-correct versions of what history should have been, rather than what it was.  Then again, it’s not surprising that Americans do not know, or appreciate, the military history of the United States as less than one-half of one-percent of the population wears a uniform. Today’s service members are part of an elite corps. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2016, only seven percent of the U.S. population were veterans, compared to 18 percent in 1980. The Pew Research Center reports that, today, 61 percent of Americans have an immediate family member who was/is in the military – but only one-third of them are below age 30.

So what does this have to do with World War I, and why does it matter? 

Read more: Why World War I matters

At the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial, graves of American soldiers who died while fighting in the Fère-en-Tardenois vicinity during World War I. Photo by Megan Devlin.

From the Battlefields of World War I: Lessons on Franco-American Relations and the Centuries-Old Military Alliance 

via the Meridian International Center web site

Earlier this year, just ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump welcoming French President Emmanuel Macron to Washington for the first State Dinner of his Administration, rhetoric seemed promising for a renewal of the U.S.-French Alliance. A few months later at the Group of Seven summit, President Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau encouraged global leaders to pressure President Trump to reverse his trade threats aimed at numerous U.S. allies. In recent weeks, the French and U.S. leaders have discussed NATO spending and U.S.-European Union trade and possible negotiations following the imposition of American tariffs on steel and aluminum.

With bilateral tensions running high from an economic perspective, what lessons can be gleaned from the Franco-American relationship that stems back over 250 years?

Meridian explored this question during a summer delegation to France that brought U.S. National Guard officials and American diplomats together with French military and political leaders in commemoration of the Second Battle of the Marne, the last major German offensive on the Western Front during the First World War.

To kick off the delegation, Meridian partnered with the U.S. World War I Centennial Commission to host a salon dinner on Mobilizing the Citizen for National Security: Lessons from the Great War and the Centuries-Old French-American Military Alliance. The dinner, which took place on July 27, 2018, at the historic Château de Courcelles, gathered 40 leaders including high-ranking U.S. National Guard and French generals, World War I military historians, French senators and mayors, and WWI Centennial Commissioners.

Read more: From the Battlefields of World War I: Lessons on Franco-American Relations and the Centuries-Old...