My grandfather was a son of privilege. He grew up, the third of six children (all four boys graduated from Ivy League colleges, both girls from Vassar) in a big house on a large lot that ran from a wide New York suburban boulevard all the way down to the Hudson River. The views from the third floor were breathtaking. Summers were spent in another big house, this one on the ocean.
On April 17, 1917, six days after his 21st birthday, my grandfather left Columbia University to enlist in the United States Navy. In 1918, he became one of the first aviators in the United States Marine Corps. His wings — which he would pin on my father’s naval uniform in Pensacola, Florida, in 1952 — were number 12. In April 1918, he deployed to France on the USS DeKalb.
He was stationed in Oye, France, on the Western Front.
These are some of the photos he took and some of the words he wrote while he was there.
The letters we have — and there are dozens of them, because he was, throughout his life, an inveterate correspondent — are all on stationery he bought in France in support of the war hospital in Belgium. Each has a blockprint or photo of a scene from the war at the top, many of them appropriately horrifying.
It rained much of the time he was there.
The planes he flew were rudimentary. He flew them without radar or a parachute.
The pilots sailed to England to retrieve new planes, then flew them back, across the Channel.
On November 10, 1918, he wrote another letter home:
Today has been the first day since I came back from England that we have had good weather — only rain and fog day in an day out . . . .
But today was fine — nice warm weather and bright sunshine — only a little fog hanging over the boggy places but not enough to bother. We got orders for a raid — proceed up to an advance base . . . . Take on bombs and then go over. We got everything all fixed up — our fur-lined teddy bear flying suits pulled on — maps in their place — guns tested out and all the hundred and one little things that go to make up a raid. Just as everybody had climbed in and started to warm up their motors — an order was passed for a washout.
Everybody expects the war to end any minute.
That night, in the journal he kept, he wrote:
More drizzle — Everyone expects PEACE any minute. [The German] envoys have till tomorrow — 11 a.m. — to sign the Allies Armistice (which will practically be unconditional surrender like Austria signed) — or it will be a war to the finish.
The Kaiser abdicated — now Peace is assured.
His November 11, 1918 journal entry begins:
No further news about the Armistice but hostilities were officially called off after 11 a.m. today. We all went to celebrate tonight — the town was a madhouse. Flags of the allies were everywhere. Impromptu parades with the box bands were marching through the streets.
The lighthouse at Calais shown forth for the first time.
Even after the Armistice was declared, though, the carnage of this senseless war continued:
Since the armies tabulated their casualty statistics by the day and not by the hour, we know only the total toll for November 11th: twenty-seven hundred and thirty-eight men from both sides were killed, and eighty-two hundred and six were left wounded or missing. But since it was still dark at 5 a.m., and attacks almost always took place in daylight, the vast majority of these casualties clearly happened after the Armistice had been signed, when commanders knew that the firing was to stop for good at 11 a.m. The day’s toll was greater than both sides would suffer in Normandy on D-Day in 1944. And it was incurred to gain ground that Allied generals knew the Germans would be vacating days, or even hours, later.
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And so thousands of men were killed or maimed during the last six hours of the war for no political or military reason whatsoever. Among the many victims were troops of the American 92nd Division, part of Bullard’s Second Army. The U.S. military was rigidly segregated, and the men of the 92nd were black. (snip) After already enduring discrimination and fear at home — sixty black Americans were lynched in 1918 alone — and being treated as second-class citizens in the Army, these troops found themselves, after the Armistice had been signed, advancing into German machine-gun fire and mustard gas. They were ordered [by the white officers in charge] to make their last attack at 10:30 a.m. The 92nd Division officially recorded seventeen deaths and three hundred and two wounded or missing on November 11th; one general declared that the real toll was even higher. The war ended as senselessly as it had begun.
~ Adam Hochschild, The Eleventh Hour (The New Yorker, Nov. 5, 2018)
In the days after the Armistice, my grandfather returned to places he had observed from the air.
He documented what he found:
And all that was left of Ypres.
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My grandfather returned home in December 1918.
He lived for another 60 years, until six days after the 60th anniversary of the Armistice. We were very close. He never talked about the war.