Letters from battlefields reveal soldiers’ stories of World War I

 

Letters, poems and other writings from soldiers who served, and died, in World War I provide an inside look at “The War to End All Wars.”

The War to End All Wars ended a century ago.

The brash Americans through sheer numbers and individual heroics ended the stalemate of World War I trench warfare in western Europe.

“We got there in the nick of time to stave off the attack,” said retired Col. Doug Mastriano, a retired military historian living in Fayetteville. “Even British historians will admit the war could not have been won without the Americans.”

The Russians quit the war in 1917 and freed up a million German troops to leave the Eastern Front to fight the French and British. The U.S. entered the war in April 1917.

Communities across the U.S. answered President Woodrow Wilson’s call to make the world safe for democracy. The young men fell in the Argonne Forest and at St. Mihiel and Chateau Thierry.

In little more than a year, 116,708 American military personnel died from combat, wounds or influenza. About as many died from the flu as died in combat.

Franklin County lost 91 people to the war, including six nurses. More than 160 county residents died of the Spanish flu, which the war had bred.

World War I was an introduction to modern war tactics and structure, according to Mastriano.

Machine guns lay waste to vain Napoleonic charges. Armored tanks accompanied infantry assaults. Airplanes strafed troops and observation balloons. Truck convoys moved to replace horse-drawn wagon trains. Both sides used poison gas.

The mechanized war signaled the end to chivalry, but not without a final bow.

 “The American Expeditionary Force was the most sentimental outfit that ever lived,” John T. Wintinnly wrote in the introduction of a book of Doughboy poems. “Most of it – so it seemed to anyone who served on the staff of The Stars and Stripes – wrote poetry.”

Civilians, too, were drawn into the war.

“Everyone is considered a belligerent,” Mastriano said. “Everyone pulled together in supporting the troops.”

For U.S. civilians that meant sugar rationing, gasless Sundays, fuelless Mondays, meatless Tuesdays and wheatless Wednesdays.

The war is “generally relegated to the dustbin of history,” Mastriano writes in his most recent book, Thunder in the Argonne. “Yet, this national amnesia misses the fact that World War I thrust the United States onto the world scene as a dominant economic, political and military power.”

Mastriano is hard on Wilson for failing to prepare the nation for war.

He also criticizes Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing for relying on costly frontal assaults that cost thousands of soldiers their lives in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. The operation remains the U.S. military’s largest and bloodiest fight ever. More than 1.2 million Americans fought in the battle that eventually routed the Germans.

Archie Monn of Waynesboro was one of the 122,093 U.S. casualties and was awarded a Purple Heart.

Second Lt. Philip Evans Kriechbaum of Chambersburg was among the 26,277 killed in action.

The Germans suffered more than 100,000 casualties.

The armistice was signed on Nov. 11, 1918, and a ceasefire declared at the “11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.” The conflict formally ended when Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919.

The Americans who returned to their homes in rural Pennsylvania had seen the horrors of the Great War and the sophistication of Paris. They led ordinary lives:

• Duffield Winger Varden, a 21-year-old taxi driver before the war, served two years in France. He returned to live in Mercersburg and work at Fairchild Corp., Hagerstown, Md. He died at the age of 74.
• James H. Craig I of Greencastle enlisted at the age of 24. He served a year in the Army Medical Corps and rose to the rank of sergeant. After the war in 1922, he bought the business of J. Lesher & Son and dealt in plumbing, heating, roof tinning, spouting and stoves. He retired in 1972.

Below are stories from the battlefields about other local soldiers.

Battlefield poet

The namesake of the