VETERANS DAY 2008: ‘Through some bad stuff’

By John D. Cantwell
For the Journal-Constitution
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
An Atlanta doctor remembers his World War I veteran father, wishes he had asked more questions and wonders how he might have fared in the same situation. Letters from the farm teenager who returned home a more serious man said, ‘at the present writing, the armistice is in effect. I bet they’re having some celebrations.’ It did not turn out to be the war to end all wars.
“All wars end up being reduced to statistics, strategies, debates about their origins and results. These debates about war are important, but not more important than the human story of those who fought in them.”
—- Martin Gilbert, “The First World War”
For me, the human story of World War I is preserved in a packet of letters my grandmother gave me before she died, letters my father wrote home from the battlefields of France.
Dad was just 18 years old, fresh off the football fields of his high school days, when he enlisted in the army. As an adult, he never talked much about his war experiences, and I was not mature enough to ask him about them in greater detail. Perhaps he would not have said much even if I had asked, as men of that era tended to put memories of war experiences in the recesses of their minds.
In re-reading his letters, I see a deep feeling of patriotism, a certain bravado that young people are blessed with, a sense of fatalism and a longing for things and people near and dear to him. He expressed concern for his horse, cat and chickens, and hoped that they were being cared for well.
Yet service to his country also changed some of his priorities. Once crazy about baseball and big league ball players, he wrote that he no longer gave a “whoop for the game and the players either.”
“It makes me sore to hear of their playing the World Series when they ought to be over here fighting,” he wrote. Babe Ruth was pitching for the Boston Red Sox against the Chicago Cubs that year of 1918.
Dad faced death even before he set foot on European soil. The Tuscania, his troop ship, was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat on Feb. 5, 1918, en route to the front. Over 200 soldiers drowned. Fortunately, my father survived by leaping onto a destroyer that had pulled up alongside the sinking vessel.
The Tuscania was the only American troop ship torpedoed and sunk en route to battle, out of all the ships that transported some two million soldiers to France.
Once there, he faced tough battles at Chateau-Thierry, where the Germans’ thrust toward Paris was halted, and finally the Meuse-Argonne offensive, which helped end the fighting when the Germans were subdued.
One of his close friends, Eli Elefson, was killed by machine gun fire near Soissons. They played football together in high school.
Sometimes, I wonder what lessons we learned from World War I. It certainly showed us how costly wars are, and how poorly thought out our alliances can be. I agree with Adam Gopnik, who wrote in The New Yorker that “the blind mechanism of arms and alliances trumped common sense.”
The assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian-Hapsburg Empire, led one country after another into a war that eventually cost nine million lives. Forty-eight thousand American soldiers were killed; 25 lived in the vicinity of Shawano, Wis., the small town northwest of Green Bay where Dad and my family were from.
World War I was to have been “the war to end all wars.” Yet less than 25 years after it ended, many of the same countries were in combat again in World War II, with the loss of nearly 300,000 additional American lives.
If the lesson from World War I was for countries to not rush into a fight, the lesson of World War II was “never to back down from a bully … [that] selling out small nations only encourages the tyrant,” to quote Gopnik again.
On Nov. 11, 1918, Dad jotted this note to his brother Roger:
“Well, old Boy, the war is over and the Hun are beaten. I figured they would give in and at the present writing the armistice is in effect … I’ll bet the States are putting on some celebrations and I sure would like to be there. But with good luck, we will figure in on a few good times of our own. … I am okay, and have gone through some bad stuff.”
I keep Dad’s helmet in my office. Occasionally I will put it on and try to imagine all the experiences he had, in his late teens, and wonder how I might have held up under similar circumstances.
Mostly, I remember a loving father, a hard-working and dedicated physician and a boy who came of age in battle.
For the rest of his life, he was content to enjoy the pleasures of his family and friends, his farm and horses and the other joys that a small Wisconsin town provided.
> Dr. John D. Cantwell, a physician, lives in Atlanta