Transcript for the Piece Audio version of World War One Living History Project (with newshole)

The WWI Living History Project

A creation of Treehouse Productions

Host: Walter Cronkite (WC)
Producer: William Everett (WE)
Original Music: Chuck Wild

Voices of veterans talking and laughing

WC: Imagine, if you will, a long conference table, around which sit twelve old soldiers. They range in age from a hundred and five to a hundred and thirteen. Some of these veterans are blind; most have trouble hearing. Ninety years ago, four million Americans served their country on the homefront and on the battlefield during World War One. Of that number, these are the last surviving witnesses. I'm Walter Cronkite. Join me this hour as we honor the memories and experiences of these veterans on Doughboys: The World War One Living History Project.

WE: My name is Will Everett. The First World War was a rite of passage for the United States, marking its transition from an emerging power to a great power. For the veterans we'll meet on this program, it was a rite of passage of a more personal sort. Some of them were as young as 16 when they enlisted to serve in Europe; others were conscripted in the first federal draft. For each of them it was a defining experience. For the most part, the years 1917 and 1918 have receded from the popular consciousness. It's the era of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, an age of silent movies, tin lizzies and starched collars. For the doughboys of World War One, born in the closing years of the nineteenth century, these were their heroic years.

Roll call: Five veterans introduce themselves
COF001 BAB001 PIER001 PUS001 AND001

WE: This program is both tribute and time capsule. As the four million veterans of World War One shrink down to these final few, their stories become all the more important in understanding the birth of America's participation in international armed conflict. Terrible as it was, World War One was not "the war to end all wars" but the catalyst that would give rise to such 20th century phenomena as the Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler. History records the causes and the consequences, but the true meaning of World War One can best be found in the testimony of those who were there.

Roll call: Another five veterans introduce themselves

BRN001 GOLD001 JOHN001 BUCH001 BUCK001

Music break

WC: It had been nearly half a century since Europe had seen a major military conflict. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 still resounded in living memory. When one thought of war, the image that came to mind was a Napoleonic-style contest fought with cavalry and cannons, where the object was to capture territory and subdue an enemy opponent. With the technological advances of the twentieth century, however, a new form of warfare had emerged, swifter and bloodier than anything that had gone before. The airplane, the automobile, the submarine, and chemical weapons had forever changed the manner by which grievances would be redressed on the battlefield.

WE: General Stephen Berkheiser is executive director of the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri.

BER005 (:40)

In 1914, the effects of such a conflict could only be imagined. What had not changed were the methods of international diplomacy. Centuries-old treaties bound the European powers in a complex tangle of alliances which had been strained by regional conflicts and seething ambitions. The nations of Europe were in a race for Great Power supremacy. The old monarchies, though often related by blood, vied to become the dominant land power on the continent.

It was against the backdrop of accelerating technological and political change that on June 28th in Sarejevo a Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip assassinated Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Political assassination was not new in the Balkans, where the old principalities had been in an ongoing ethnic struggle for centuries. What was new was the complex relationships the existed among the great powers. Austria, intent on making war against Serbia, sought the support of its ally Germany, and received the unconditional support of Kaiser Willhelm the Second.

And so began a political chain reaction that swept through the capitals of Europe. When Austria sought the support of Germany, it was to protect itself from Serbia's formidable Russian ally and its mighty army. Pledged to stand behind Russia was France. And pledged to France was Great Britain. Ultimatums were exchanged, and armies were mobilized. No means of diplomacy existed to defuse the mounting tension; no mediator stepped in to avert the cataclysm ahead. Exactly one month after the archduke's assassination, the armies of Europe marched into war.

BER007 (:38)

Lady Margot Asquith, wife of Prime Minister Henry Asquith, recalls the night Great Britain entered the war.

SPE001 :44

MUSIC: FADE UP: "GOD SAVE THE QUEEN"

Many believed the conflict would be quick and decisive. Military strategists in Russia, Germany and France had been preparing for this event decades before Gavrilo Princip fired into the archduke's motorcade. France had formulated a plan which it believed would cripple German industry. Russia had a plan for how to handle a simultaneous assault from Germany and Austria-Hungary. But it was a German strategy that would determine the course and the nature of the Great War.

MUSIC: FADE UP: "DEUTSCHLAND ... UBER ALLES" Some twenty years before, Alfred von Schlieffen, the German Army Chief of Staff, had created a plan for how Germany could successfully fight a war on two fronts. The Schlieffen Plan called for a quick, sweeping attack on France through Belgium, one that would cripple the French army and allow Germany to concentrate its military might on the advancing Russian army in the east.

WE: Dr. William Adams is chairman of the history department at the University of Texas at Brownsville.

ADAMS003 (:54)

Schlieffen did not live to see the implementation of his strategy, nor to see its failure as the German army encountered the stubborn resistance of the tiny Belgian army. With the arrival of the armies of France and Great Britain, the fighting deadlocked, moving from the battlefield to the trenches. And so it would be until the end of the war. Conceived as temporary shelters, these trenches would soon stretch some 500 miles from the Swiss frontier to the North Sea.

The First World War would be characterized as a war of attrition. Gains were measured not in terms of miles but of yards. Armies gathered in opposing trenches with the single goal of wearing down the manpower and reserves of the enemy, a slow, grinding method of warfare that would result in the death of millions. The trenches remain one of the lasting images of World War One. Here the soldiers lived, ate, slept and fought in conditions that often defied the imagination.

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Modern recoil mechanisms allowed gunners to shoot off round after round in rapid succession. At the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, artillery crews fired at an incredible rate of a million shells a day. The losses on each side were incredible. On July 1st the British Army saw the worst day in its history, with nineteen thousand dead in a single day. The conflict that was expected to end by Christmas had bogged down into what would be the bloodiest war yet seen in human history.

QUO010

To break the stalemate of trench warfare, the Germans introduced the first chemical weapons in modern warfare. At the Belgian town of Ypres, a strange fog crept across no-man's-land toward the French trenches. Blinded and choking, the French retreated as more than five thousand cylinders of chlorine gas were deployed, opening up a hole in the Allied defense four and a half miles long.

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Early use of gas was unreliable; the wind could carry it in any direction, killing friend and foe. But gas would later be deployed with greater accuracy by artillery shells. Soon more lethal forms of chemical weaponry such as phosgene and mustard gas would be developed by both sides.

QUO007B Another war was being fought on the homefront. Nations mobilized their entire populations for the purpose of keeping their armies and navies supplied with weapons, ammunition, clothing and food. Civilians became targets for enemy raids far behind the front lines. The Germans shelled French and Belgian cities with long-range artillery and bombarded Britain from battleships and Zeppelin airships. Britain's navy blockaded Germany, starving it of food and raw materials for its industry. Germany's solution to the blockade was unrestricted submarine warfare. It hoped to break the allied homefront before the German homefront gave way. Thousands of tons of shipping went to the bottom of the ocean. Adolf von Spiegel commanded a German U-boat during the First World War. Here he describes the attack on a cargo vessel in April 1916.

QUO008

Among the casualties was a ship on the Cunard line, the Lusitania, which was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915. Twelve hundred civilians perished, many of them women and children. Across the Atlantic, Americans were horrified. President Woodrow Wilson had maintained a policy of neutrality toward the war, but the German attacks on merchant shipping and the sinking of the Lusitania brought the war ever closer to American shores. Wilson's secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, condemned the German submarine attacks in no uncertain terms.

SPE010 :50

Germany suspended its policy of unlimited submarine warfare for a time, but by now the majority of Americans had sided with the cause of the Allied powers. It was helped in part by British and French propaganda aimed at stirring the sleeping giant into action. Rumors began circulating of Germans parading through Belgian towns with babies on the ends of bayonets. One headline of the period read: "Germans Crucify Canadian Officer." President Wilson remained firm in his policy of neutrality, citing George Washington's farewell address in which he advised against getting involved in foreign entanglements. But many Americans felt differently. Between 1914 and 1917 some 15,000 young men and women slipped across the border and joined the Canadian Army, or signed up for the French ambulance and nursing service, as did Ernest Hemingway, E.E. Cummings and Gertrude Stein. For many medical volunteers, it was a brutal awakening to the realities of modern warfare.

QUO009

On the Eastern front, the well-trained German army dealt easily with the large but ill-equipped Russian army. In 1914, Russia had the largest army in the world, with one and a half million men. But many were now fighting without arms or ammunition. At the Battle of Tannenburg, in August 1914, a force of 150,000 was shattered; only 10,000 Russian soldiers left the battlefield. With more and more civilians being conscripted into the Russian Army, harvests failed and famine spread through the land. Ironically, a monk and seer named Rasputin had warned Tsar Nicholas that if he entered the war, Russia would lose and the Romanov dynasty would come to an end. His prophecy would be borne out by the Bolshevik Revolution, a direct consequence of the blood-letting taking place along the Eastern front.

The armies of Europe remained in what looked like a permanent deadlock. The battle lines had changed scarcely at all since 1914. And still the war dragged on. Towns in France and Belgium would become synonymous with wholesale slaughter -- Pashendaele, Verdun, Ypres. At the Battle of the Somme, in 1916, the British introduced the tank, but without significantly affecting the battle's one million casualties. Morale eroded within the ranks. At Verdun, more than 40,000 French infantrymen refused to fight. Penalties for mutiny and desertion were swift and severe.

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The spirit of dissent spread across both sides of the trenches. Camaraderie began to flourish between opposing forces. Realizing the futility of the eye-for-an-eye policy of attrition, they would sometimes signal to each other before launching an assault, or simply refuse to fire. By 1917, two and a half years after an assassin's bullet lit the powderkeg that would become the first world war, there was no end in sight. The Bolshevik revolution in February had taken Russia out of the war and relaxed Germany's Eastern Front, allowing the Kaiser to send the bulk of his troops to tip the balance in the west. And yet the British naval blockade of Germany had left the country in desperate need of munitions and food. Events in Russia pointed to the possibility of revolution on the German homefront. Only one option would free up German merchant shipping and reduce the flood of American supplies pouring into Great Britain: to resume unrestricted submarine warfare. It was a policy which Germany knew would have immediate repercussions across the Atlantic.

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President Wilson had been reelected the year before on the platform "he kept us out of the war." Even in early 1917 Wilson vowed that America was "too proud to fight." But as American merchant ships were sent to the bottom of the sea, both the interests and the dignity of the United States were at stake. American public opinion had swung swiftly in favor of war. Germany's intentions were made abundantly clear when a telegram was intercepted on January 16th. In it, the German Foreign Minister Alfred Zimmermann proposed an alliance with Mexico. President Wilson was a peace-loving man, reluctant to commit American money and American lives to someone else's war. But the Great War had now become America's problem as well. And as the urgency of the situation presented itself, he realized there was but one clear alternative. On April 6th, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany.

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WE: You're listening to The World War One Living History Project.

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WE: Coming up, an unprepared America enters the war, losing its innocence, but gaining a world-class army. The story of World War One as remembered by its last eyewitnesses:
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CROSSFADE: ?OVER THERE 1? :10

CLIP MONTAGE:

BAB013: "I heard a lot of stories about France"
JOHN003: "The war was on .... Germany was knocking the heck out of everything.?
BRN003: "Almost all the young people were doing it at that time."
GOLD003: "I said, what the hell, look at all these guys ... I'm going to join the army."

MUSIC: FADE UP :05

WE: In 1917 the United States committed itself to the Allied cause in Europe. It was a decision reached at first reluctantly, and then with outrage when Germany threatened both the country?s maritime commerce and the security of its border with Mexico. The future Republican president Warren G. Harding was no great fan of the Wilson Administration, but for a moment party lines had disappeared as America rolled out its first military operation ?over there.?

SPE004 :42

No military had ever set out on such a high-minded course with such limited resources. At the time, the U.S. Army numbered only 108,000, ranking seventeenth in the world, [del: just behind Portugal]. The Marine Corps numbered only 15,000 and these were already deployed in other parts of the world. President Wilson had hoped that the American commitment would be one of supplies and materiel, but from the Allies came the cry: we need men. Limited conscription had taken place during the Civil War, but for the first time, in May 1917, Wilson signed a law requiring men aged 21 to 29 to register for the draft; the age would later be extended to ages 18 to 35. Many would never receive the call. But when it came, usually in the form of a telegram, it often gave only a few days' notice. George Johnson, at 112 years old, is the oldest man in California. He was living in Philadelphia in 1917 when his number came up.

JOHN003 (1:24)

Between 1917 and 1918, some 24 million men would fill out the lengthy application form required at the time. This form, which went into great detail about the applicant's family background, health and economic status, would provide future historians with a valuable demographic profile of the wartime generation. General Stephen Berkheiser:

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As in future wars, draftees had no say in where they would be sent. Because of this, many chose to enlist, including 109-year-old Ernest J. Pusey.

PUS002 (:14)

Lloyd Brown, a 105 year old veteran living outside Bethesda, Maryland, also chose to enlist in the Navy, though for different reasons.

BRN003 (:30) But not all enlistees were sent overseas. With the Zimmermann telegram and the possibility of a war with Germany along America?s southern border, cavalry were needed along the border from Texas to the Pacific coast. Like many recruits, Samuel Goldberg was looking for adventure. At 106, Rhode Island?s oldest veteran recalls how his choice ultimately went with the cavalry.

GOLD003 (1:16)

One year before America's entry into global war, the first foreign attack had taken place on U.S. soil. After a failed bid for the Mexican presidency, a bandit and revolutionary named Pancho Villa, hoping to provoke the U.S. into a war with Mexico, raided the small border town of Columbus, New Mexico, killing 11 and leaving the town in ruins. In response, President Wilson deployed 15,000 cavalry troops to the border and sent a punitive expedition into Mexico. The expedition was led by Brigadier General John J. Pershing

KNOPP001 (1:34) SHORTEN THIS!

Whether the Mexican government ever seriously considered Germany's offer is still a subject of debate.

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Samuel Goldberg was posted to the border fort at Hatchita, New Mexico.

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Pershing's mission never encountered Pancho Villa. But Villa had achieved his goal of arousing the U.S. military into action, which would provide a training ground for the larger events which were to unfold. Along the way, a general of no particular prestige had become a public figure, a symbol of the American fighting spirit. The following year, General Pershing would command the American Expeditionary Force in Europe.

MUSIC BUTTON :15

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SPE002 (:31)

So spoke U.S. Secretary of War Newton Baker in 1917. But the U.S. army was anything but prepared. In numbers it ranked 17th in the world, just behind Portugal. An aggressive enlistment campaign and a federal draft would soon increase its number of active-duty soldiers to more than four and a half million. Those who couldn't serve in the military were encouraged to support the war effort through massive fundraising drives. Oil tycoon and philanthropist, John D. Rockefeller:

SPE003 (:20)

General Pershing sent his own rallying cry from the battlefields of France in this rare wax recording. SPE006 (:27)

Support for those "high ideals" ran strong and the recruitment rolls soon swelled. Those who were not yet old enough to enlist found creative ways of beating the system. Among the World War One veterans living today are a number of these underage soldiers, like Jack Babcock, an American citizen who joined the Canadian army early in the war when he was only 15 and a half.

BAB003 (~1:00)

The popular music of the time acted as a rallying cry, encouraging young men to do their part for Uncle Sam and the war effort, as in this song by the Peerless Quartet, "For your country and my country."

MUSIC: "For your country and my country." Up for :12

At the start of the war, only men over 21 years of age were drafted. But enlistments in the Army were accepted as young as 18, the route chosen by 107 year old Homer Anderson.

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At 108, Howard Ramsey of Portland, Oregon is one of only three living U.S. veterans to see action in the trenches in France. Like many aspiring soldiers, he joined up with a friend.

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The youngest U.S. World War One veteran, Frank Buckles, is 105. After lying about his age to get into the Marines and then the Army, he finally settled on the ambulance corps.

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He was stationed at Winchester, England, which for the ambitious 16-year-old ambulance driver was not enough. France, of course, was where the action was.

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And yet with carnage reaching sometimes unimaginable dimensions along the Western Front, the U.S. media was often hesitant to portray the true nature of the sufffering. Soldiers training for combat often had little idea of what lay ahead. George Johnson:

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John Babcock recalls an aspect of the new warfare that had become a common part of every soldier's training: chemical warfare.

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Howard Ramsey:

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. Russell Coffey, who turned 108 in September 2006, was another enlistee eager to see action in France.

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American infantrymen had been fondly called "Doughboys" since the time of the Civil War, though the origins of the term are shrouded. Some say the term refers to the dough-like adobe buildings that often housed army soldiers at remote outposts in the 19th century -- others that it refers to the dough-like globular buttons on early uniforms. Whatever the origins, by the 4th of July, 1917, General Pershing was marching his first unit of AEF doughboys down the Champs-Elysees in Paris. By the years' end, 10,000 robust American servicemen were arriving in Europe each day. Frank Buckles:

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Dr. William Adams

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General Pershing would not let his men be drawn into allied skirmishes. Resisting the call by France and Great Britain to join the allies, he made it clear that American soldiers would not simply fill gaps left in the allied lines. The American Expeditionary Force would be an independent fighting force, operating on its own terms and with its own tactics. His maverick attitude caused the allied commanders to bristle at what they perceived as American arrogance. And yet his approach would set a pattern for America's involvement in another European war two and a half decades later. Frank Buckles is the last World War I veteran to have had a personal encounter with John "Blackjack" Pershing. The young ambulance driver's unusually "dapper" uniform immediately caught the general's attention.

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Stationed near Bordeaux, Buckles was well away from the fighting on the Western Front. But he remembers the mix of patriotism and dread in the French soldiers on their way to join the fighting.

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American optimism and elation were soon tempered by the reality of the Western Front. Three and a half years of trench fighting had reduced much of Belgium and France into a stew of mud and barbed wire and human carnage. One hundred and ten year old Tony Pierro was an Italian immigrant who saw enlistment as a chance for quick American citizenship. He saw action in the Battle of St. Michiel and the Meuse-Argonne offensive, two battles in which U.S. participation proved decisive in pushing back the German line, and rebuilding morale among the Allied troops. The fighting in the Argonne forest was particularly brutal, with American mortality during the three weeks of fighting running an average of a thousand lives a day. Ninety years later, Pierro's eyes still mist over when he recalls those days.

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ne of Howard Ramsey's fondest memories of France was waiting outside his military vhicle to drive an officer somewhere, when a little French girl came by and sat in his car and asked him for a souvenir. He said he didn't have anything, but looked around and gave her an American penny and she gave him a little gift wrapped in tissue. As she left, he looked in the tissue and found a lock of her curly hair. he still has that lock of hair. But he also carries with him memories of the trenches, and the relentless shelling that characterized the latter part of the war.

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Ramsey was one of the few men who could drive, an unusual skill in 1917.

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But the lot of most American doughboys in Europe was to serve in the trenches, where the stakes grew higher, and the fighting became more and more desperate.

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The 3-week Meuse-Argonne offensive was a key battle for the United States and the allies, coming at a time when the German resistance was breaking. The balance was already tipping in the favor of the allies due to the fresh, energetic U.S. troops. But the Germans weren't yet willing to capitulate, responding with deadly shelling. The U.S. lost an average of a thousand lives a day in the offensive.

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The oldest living World War One veteran to have seen combat experience is also the oldest man living in the continental United States. Moses Hardy is 113 years old. As an African-American he served in a segregated unit, the 805th Pioneer Infantry. Unable to speak during his interview for this program, his son Haywood Hardy related a family legend handed down by his father about Army food on the combat lines.

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Moses Hardy entered the war in May 1918. After the Armistice, the colored soldiers were among those who were kept behind to identify the dead and clean up the battlefields. Then as now, returning veterans often had trouble shaking off their combat experience, and the memories.

HAR006 (:42)

WC: You're listening to the World War One Living History Project.

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WC: Coming up in the second hour:

Music: "K-k-k-k-Katy" Clip: VETERAN MEDLEY

WE: The Armistice, the Treaty of Versailles and four and a half million soldiers are matriculated into civilian life. We'll take an in-depth look at the lives of the war's last surviving veterans, Americans whose lives span three centuries, when the World War One Living History Project continues. For photos and video clips, visit wwi living history dot org. I'm Will Everett.

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The World War One Living History Project
HOUR TWO

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MUSIC: Last Post / LHP Theme

Clip: VETERAN MEDLEY

WC: Coming up, an intimate look at the lives of America?s oldest veterans. Born at the close of the nineteenth century, their lives span one of the most dramatic and tumultuous centuries in human history. They watched America come of age, and we?ll take a closer look at their lives, their experiences and their memories as the World War One Living History Project continues.

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Ambi: Liberty Memorial construction

WE: Summer, 2006, Kansas City, Missouri. From what looks like a dark, underground grotto, history is being re-created. Opened in 1926, the Liberty Memorial was the first large-scale monument devoted to the American veterans of World War One. It's also the only federally designated museum dedicated to the memory of the first world war. At night the 217-foot tall tower releases its ghostly red flame above the Kansas City skyline, a memorial to the fallen and the unforgotten. Beneath the tower, in the newly remodeled exhibit hall, visitors can look inside a full-scale version of an actual trench, examine the machinery of war and share in a multi-media experience that attempts to make sense of what for most scholars has been dubbed a senseless event in world history.

Ambi up for :05 -- crossfade into music: ________________________

This is Will Everett. In the first hour we examined the causes and consequences of the first world war. Triggered by an assassin's bullet, it was the result of a complex tangle of alliances and treaty obligations that pitted the nations of Europe into two hostile camps. With virtually no attempt at reaching a diplomatic solution, armies were mobilized, marching orders were issued and a war began that would have a transforming effect on European history, on the 20th century and on a generation of young soldiers. If pride leads before a fall, World War One might be seen as the product of 19th century hubris, the end result of the gilded age and decades of plenty. Dr. William Adams is chairman of the history department of the University of Texas, Brownsville -- Texas Southmost College.

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It was a preventable war that no one chose to prevent, a war of catastrophic proportions that no one in the summer of 1914 could really grasp. Technology had given the world machine guns, chemical weapons, submarines and aviation, none of which had yet found expression on the battlefield. Nor had another wartime factor been considered in a global conflict: the U.S. military. World War One is the story of how the Western world became enmeshed in the bloodiest and most destructive military deadlock that had yet been seen in human history. It's also the story of how a relatively young country, a mere 141 years old, experienced its own rite of passage on the world stage, helped break the deadlock in Europe and found itself a key player in international relations. The U.S. approached the war with reluctance, until its own interests were at stake. As seen earlier, two events were critical in moving U.S. policy away from isolationism to active military participation: Germany's unlimited submarine warfare, which threatened to cripple American merchant shipping, and the discovery of a plot that would pave the way for a possible German invasion through Mexico. On April 6th, 1917, the U.S. declared war on Germany. U.S. Treasury Secretary William McAdoo summed up the reasons for American intervention in this fundraising address:

CLIP: SPE007 (:52)

A draft was instituted and the U.S. military was ramped up from a force of around 120,000 to one of more than four and a half million. Armaments soon poured from American factories. Training camps were created or expanded to take in the huge influx of new recruits. The American public voiced its unquestioned support of the Wilson administration's war aims, though few knew just what the aim of the war really was. A song of the time expressed an existential answer: we're here because we're here.

MUSIC: "We're here because we're here." (up for :10)

Brigadier General Stephen Berkheiser is Executive Director of the Liberty Memorial.

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And so the United States settled into the realities of a world war, one far away from American shores but connected suddenly to its emerging sense of self. Led by General John Pershing, the American Expeditionary Force embodied the American spirit of independence. While working side by side with the Allied armies of France and Great Britain, Pershing's army was an independent fighting force with its own commander, its own war aims and its own military muscle. At the battle of Belleau Wood, when urged by a French commander to retreat, Capt. Lloyd Williams summed up the AEF's fighting spirit with his famous reply: "Retreat? Hell, we just got here."

MUSIC: "The Yanks are coming." (up for :15)

The arrival of the American doughboys brought renewed optimism to the allied soldiers. They brought their naive American confidence, their good humor and above all their determination to (quote) "kill the Boche." But the doughboys who envisioned a hero's war were soon in for the truth of trench fighting. Dr. Anthony Knopp:

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The American soldiers also brought their differing attitudes toward race relations. African American soldiers were segregated or placed in non-combat roles. Many of the black U.S. combat units were handed over to the French for use in the trenches, which for most African-American soldiers would be the only time they would fight side by side with white troops. For the black soldiers of World War One, Europe may not have been a society of complete equality, but it was certainly one of acceptance. One song of the time went: how are you gonna keep him on the farm when he's seen Paree. For those black soldiers coming from the segregated south, the war meant stepping across the color line, however briefly.

MUSIC: "How you gonna ... Paree" (up for :10)

Back home, the roving eye of racial injustice had moved from African-Americans to German-speaking immigrants. The late 19th and early 20th century had seen the largest influx of European immigration in American history. Many unassimilated German speakers lived in German districts, read German-language newspapers and shopped at German markets. In 1917, James W. Gerard, former U.S. ambassador to Germany, gave a speech to the Ladies Aid Society in which he suggested that action should be taken against any Germans who questioned America's commitment to beating Germany.

CLIP: SPE005 (1:15)

For the veterans of the first world war who were too young to fight, like 106-year-old veteran John Babcock who spent the war in England as a 16 year old in the Young Soldiers Battalion, the horror was often experienced second-hand.

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But training camp was a wartime society of its own, and brought its own contact with death. Babcock remembers two fellow soldiers for whom the pressure of war was too much.

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Soldiers defending America's southern border were not immune to the stresses of war, as Samuel Goldberg remembers.

CLIP: GOLD010 (:54)

The war which many in the summer of 1914 thought would be over by Christmas had dragged on for three deadly years by the time the main force of U.S. troops arrived in the winter of 1917 and 1918. Pershing hoped for an American rather than an Allied victory, and his tactics centered on pushing back the German line and moving the war to German soil. American army and marine forces proved instrumental in breaking the German lines, but soon even the indomitable Pershing was caught in the quagmire of the Western Front. Belleau Wood, the Argonne Forest, the Meuse and St. Mihiel were soon familiar place names to Americans back home. 110 year old Tony Pierro is the last American veteran who saw action at the Argonne and Meuse offensives. CLIP: PIER009 (:25)
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As is often the case in war, taking prisoners often posed logistical problems. The trench fighting and the constant threat of attack made it impossible to construct detention camps. On the other hand, prisoners couldn't simply be released. John Babcock:

CLIP: BAB011 (:36)
The newly arrived Americans were perhaps less hardened than the war-weary allies. Tony Pierro:

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The Germans responded to the arrival of the U.S. with an all-out offensive aimed at cutting through to the channel ports and re-establishing their maritime supply lines. Despite the departure of the Russians and the end of fighting on Germany's eastern border, the Germans were no match for the remounting strength of the allies, nor could the German population keep up with the need for new bodies and provisions. In an act of desperation that would be repeated in the next world war, Germany sent its children and middle-aged men to don guns and fill the gaps. But soon the allied steamroller left the Germans with one alternative. With the threat of revolution in Germany, and pressure from the United States, Kaiser Vilhelm the Second abdicated and on November 9, 1918, Germany was declared a republic. Two days later, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year, the guns were stilled, and all was quiet on the western front.

CLIP: PIER014 (:37)

George Johnson:

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Lloyd Brown:

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Frank Buckles:

CLIP: BUCK011 (:10)

MUSIC: "Last Post" (Ypres recording)

These are the notes of the Last Post, a trumpet call which is performed each night at the Menin Gate outside Ypres in Western Belgium, scene of some of the worst of the fighting in the war. With so many monuments, so many cemeteries, the first world war has never been far from the Western European consciousness. Drive through any Belgian, French or German town, large or small, and the first thing you'll come to is an obelisk inscribed with the names of the town's World War I losses. Similar monuments adorn the town plazas and courthouse squares of many American cities, though America's memory of World War I has been overshadowed by the Second World War. Frank Buckles: CLIP: BUCK020

General Stephen Berkheiser.

CLIP: BER004 (:19)

CLIP: BUCK013 (:31)

World War I had few clearly defined heroes or villains. It was a war fought not in response to the sweeping maniacal ambitions of a Hitler, but in response to treaty violations and national pride. America entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, as Wilson put it, though with clearly defined national interests at heart. Dr. Anthony Knopp:

CLIP: KNOPP008 (:37)

The United States lost some 57,000 men in the roughly 18 months that U.S. troops were committed in Europe. U.S. involvement was critical in breaking the long deadlock along the western front and bringing a speedy end to a war which might have raged on in the old European fashion for another decade or more. Dr. William Adams:

CLIP: ADAMS002 (:27)
CLIP: KNOPP007 (:30)
CLIP: ADAMS006 (:50)

The war officially ended in June 1919, seven months after the armistice, with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Here a defeated Germany was forced to accept full responsibility for the war, to restore territories taken half a century earlier, to decommission its military and pay reparations that would prove devastating to the already crushed German economy.

CLIP: ADAMS001 (2:05)

Nine years after the controversial treaty was signed, Frank Buckles was traveling by ship to Germany when he met two well-connected Germans who took him in their confidence.

CLIP: BUCK016 (1:00)

World War II might be seen as the continuation of World War One. The old monarchies and rivalries may have been a thing of the past, but national pride ran just as strong in the late 1930s as when a Serbian nationalist fired into the Austrian archduke's motorcade. The Versailles Peace Treaty brought closure to the first world war, but the peace was only temporary. (beat) In a moment, a final tribute to America's oldest veterans as the World War One Living History Project continues.

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MUSIC BREAK :30

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PART TWO

WE: A dozen years ago, while living in France, I paid my first visit to the trenches. I had heard that after the Armistice, with 500 miles of trenches to deal with, some had been left intact for posterity, exactly as they were when the soldiers all trudged off for home. One such sector was at Ypres, a medeival flemish town of fairytale splendor that had been leveled to the ground in World War One. Farmers in the area still plow up old gunstocks, bullets and bones in these flat, placid fields. One misty morning I met a World War One veteran, a man in his mid-90s being led by the arm by his elderly son. They might have been just out for a cold-weather stroll, except that the old man seemed to be looking for something. They were walking along an observation platform, looking down into the trench, which was so much deeper than it looks in pictures. Every few yards the 90-something-year-old man would peer into the trench, then up at the nearby ridge, as if trying to get his bearings. There were no trees or buildings, just the faint rise of ground to go by. Later while the father was walking alone I spoke to the son. I asked him if his father was a veteran, and he said that he was. I asked what they were looking for. He said: "After it rains, things come up from the mud. Things that have been buried for 75 years suddenly come to the surface, and with the next rain they sink back again forever. You can see the strangest things. The trench is like a living thing."

Belgium's World War One veterans are all gone now; the last one died in 2004. Scotland lost its last veteran a year ago. The last Austrian and Hungarian veterans both died in March, an odd coincidence, considering that the two countries were once part of the same empire. As of October 2006, France and Germany each had 8 veterans, Britain had 5, Canada had 3. At the start of the year, the United States had 24 surviving World War One veterans. Now there are only 14.

In some ways, it was the memory of an old man staring down into that tomb-like trench that sent me at the beginning of the year to document the experiences of America's surviving World War One veterans. I encountered a lot of people along the way who would say, Oh my dad or my grandpa was in the war, until they realized that I was talking about the other war. Invariably, they'd do a double take. Wasn't that around 1915? Then they'd do the math.

It was a very long time ago, and I realized as I began traveling across the country to interview these centenarians that this country would soon be coming up on the end of a historically important era, an end that not too many people seemed to know was even approaching. They weren't members of the "Greatest Generation." Newsreel photography was scarcely out of its infancy when they were slogging it out in the trenches of Belgium and France. Sound movies hadn't yet been invented. Without much to remember them by, history seemed all too willing to simply let them go, these veterans and their distant, hard-to-reach time in history.

Historians mark the end of any major era with the passing of its last veteran. The last Revolutionary War veteran died in 1869, 86 years after the war. The last Civil War veteran most likely died in 1953, 87 years after the war. It's been 88 years since the Armistice. The veterans remaining represent only three one-thousands of one percent of the original four and a half million doughboys. Given that one of the veterans, Emiliano Mercado del Toro of Puerto Rico, is 115 years old, perhaps it's conceivable that one of the youngsters of the bunch, the 105 year olds who snuck in as boys of 16, will be around for the centennial of World War One six years from now. Frank Buckles, for one, says he plans to live to be a hundred and twenty-five, and I believe he just might do it.

The veterans interviewed for this program are not the only U.S. World War One veterans out there. There were surprisingly few veterans who couldn't be interviewed, but there were some for whom time had simply taken too great a toll but who should be remembered. Like Charlotte Winters, a Navy veteran and the oldest female veteran in the United States. Or Emiliano Mercado del Toro in Puerto Rico and Albert Wagner in Kansas. And then there are the veterans who signed on too late to be considered World War One veterans, like Robley Rex, Stillman Munger and Maurice Starkey. And we cannot leave out a curiosity like Harold Gardner, who got on the train to go to boot camp on November 11th, 1918 and was told to get off the train a few hours later when the Armistice was signed, and received a paycheck of one dollar for his one day in the U.S. Army.

The surviving U.S. veterans of World War One aren't a brotherhood of heroes. You realize right away that the story isn't about heroics on the battlefield. The war touched all of them, but not in the way you come to expect when you approach veterans to hear their stories. Their contributions were simple, sometimes unpleasant, usually dull. But most of these old soldiers had a few things in common.

For one thing, they were quite young. They were all between 16 and 21, and anxious to see some action. About which the curious interviewer can hardly help wanting to know more. We tend to think of veterans as tin soldiers who live on as symbols of this war or that. Part of my search for the last World War One veterans was a search for common ground, a connection to the past that would help me to understand such a remote point in time. When it came to talking about their personal lives, I found that not much had changed. As John Babcock was patient to remind me, they were healthy young men who did what healthy young men are prone to do.

BAB013 (:40)
BAB016 (:08)

Tony Pierro

PIER002 (:32)

Ernest Pusey

PUS004 (:49)

Howard Ramsey

RAM002 (:33)

Homer Anderson

AND003 (:30)

John Babcock

BAB017 (1:10) Most of the time these were chaste encounters that didn't go very far. But not always. Samuel Goldberg.

GOLD009 (:56)

But 112 year old George Johnson was too busy having adventures. The story of his early life is an adventure classic. He told me that before I could understand his military experience, I had to know something of how he first came to learn that the world was at war. When George was about 16 he and a friend were canoeing on the Delaware River near Philadelphia when they came upon an Argentinian battleship. Naturally they wanted to climb aboard and look it over, and while Johnson was down below the ship pushed away from the pier and he was carried off as an accidental stowaway. By the time he had the nerve to come above-deck, the ship was in open water. He spent two years trying to get home. It was while traveling to England on a merchant ship that he first learned of the German submarines that were prowling the Atlantic. He arrived back home just in time to be drafted.

JOHN007 (1:30)

Understanding the world of 1917 and 1918 meant understanding how these men filled their incidental hours, what they did for fun. As it turned out, life was pretty mundane for the average soldier or sailor in world war one, but they found ways of livening things up. John Babcock.

BAB005 (:31)

Samuel Goldberg

GOLD007 (1:36)

Ernest Pusey.

PUS003 (:10)

BAB023 (:21)

Military service taught the veterans lessons, some of which they learned the hard way.

PUS005 (:34)

BAB009 (1:00)

The first world war was also a cultural phenomenon, a time preserved in song. When I visited John Babcock in Washington State, I was curious about the music of the time. I wondered if he remembered the old songs. And would he share them with me?

BAB019 (:32)

Music: "Pack up your troubles"

BAB021 (:13)
Music: "How you gonna keep him .."

BAB020 (:05)

Music: "K-k-k-k-Katy"

BABO22 (:17)

When I approached the Office of Veteran's Affairs for a list of World War One veterans, I suspected there might be others. 80% of the VA's World War One records went up in flames when the records center in St. Louis burned down in the 1970s. The only veterans known to the VA were those who received medical checks. Then, during the production of this program, the VA got a call from a man in Rhode Island checking to see if any of his old cavalry buddies were still around. As it turned out, not only were Samuel Goldberg's buddies gone, he was the last cavalry soldier left. "Goldie," as he sometimes calls himself, was a rarity, the last witness to a little-known corner of World War One history with contemporary significance. He was posted on the U.S./Mexico border following the Pancho Villa raids as part of an effort to thwart a possible German invasion through Mexico.

GOLD008 (:49)

His travels along the U.S./Mexico border also brought him in contact with Ft. Brown in Brownsville, just up the road from our studios, which today is home to the University of Texas Brownsville -- Texas Southmost College.

GOLD011 (:49)

When you reach the one-hundred mark, as a senior citizen you suddenly take on an elevated status. The World War One veterans I met for this program all had their own attitudes about longevity. People say: I'll bet they all drank and smoked right up till they were a hundred. Actually, many did smoke in their early lives, and many still drank in moderation, but for the most part the veterans I met had been living in moderation for some time, watching what they ate and what they drank. I asked them to share their secrets, how one can reach the age of a hundred and five, a hundred and ten, a hundred and twelve, and be as robust as these guys seemed to be. Frank Buckles:

BUCK017 (:09)
BUCK018B (:38)

Tony Pierro

PIER013 (:26)

Ernest Pusey

PUS006 (:07)

Russell Buchanan

BUCK004 (:27) George Johnson

JOHN008 (:44)

I came to think of the World War One veterans as Generation One, born in the 19th century, the first eyewitnesses of the 20th, holding on into the 21st. They remember the world before the airplane, before the Soviet Union, before radio, a quieter time. And these are quiet men. They're curious about the contemporary world, but many or perhaps most of them have become scholars of their long-ago time, the time most have forgotten. They care about how people remember the first world war. They want to be remembered. Frank Buckles.

BUCK016 (:31)

John Babcock

BAB025 (:26) DELETE EARLIER APPEARANCE

Lloyd Brown

BRN010 (:16)

The starting point of knowledge is the story. Begin with a story and you can travel through time. The veterans of World War One had taken me in a time machine with their stories, and they were expert navigators. But they were very old men, and the ultimate story was still left to be told, and they wouldn't be around to tell it. I wanted to know their feelings about what happens next, when you cross to the other side. The results were mixed. Samuel Goldberg.

GOLD012 (1:09)
BAB0026 (:20)
BUCK018 (:22)
JOHN009 (:20)

The latter was George Johnson, 112 years old when I interviewed him in May. He lived alone in the house that he and his late wife had built in the California Bay area in 1930. He was blind but in great health -- a loud-talking soothsayer with a sharp wit and great stories. George introduced me to another reality of this search for World War One veterans, one that I hadn't thought much about ... until George died two months later. He was the oldest man in California, and I suppose I should have seen it coming. I had gathered these men around me like dolls, and suddenly one was missing. And then a month later, 109 year old Homer Anderson passed away. He had trained for the balloon corps in World War One, an aborted effort by the army to send men over the enemy lines in helium balloons, which the army quashed when it was determined that the balloonists presented too tempting a target for the enemy.

AND004 (:23)

As an interview subject he was what I'd come to think of as a drifter -- nailing a question solidly but then drifting to other topics, other wars, places where I had trouble following. He once surprised me by calling out to his late wife, gone more than 20 years. Perhaps she was already beckoning him from the other side. A month later he was gone.

When you meet a veteran of World War One you're in their life for a couple of hours, as long as it takes, but they stick with you for weeks and months as you hear their words over and over. Their way of speaking, their values, their sense of life, it all starts to work its way in. You don't want them to go, but you know they will. .... And then, one day, the circle is completed, the era is over, and the veterans of World War One will join the ranks of those who gave their service in other wars, in other times. For every army raised by an Alexander or Nero or Napoleon or Pershing or Patton, there must be the last man standing, the last eyewitness, the last link. And then that era is relinquished to history.

But this is a tribute to the living. While one eyewitness is alive, World War One is living history. World War One is truly the forgotten war. Its causes are vague, its goals unclear, its heroes largely forgotten. I approached the subject of World War One with the memory of a Belgian veteran peering into a trench one rainy day a dozen years ago, looking for whatever would turn up in the mud. Time will move beyond World War One, as it will move beyond World War II, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. Time moved beyond that 90-something veteran I met in Belgium, but the legacies of his war are with us today. World War One was the beginning of the new world order. The United States, which lost comparatively few lives in the war, gained the most in terms of international stature. American values were shaped by the events of 1917 and 1918. From a policy of isolationism, the U.S. became a key player on the international stage. World War One gave us the Treaty l of Versailles, and with it the economic strangulation of Germany that gave rise to Adolf Hitler. World War One gave Russia the impetus to raise a 12-million-man army, and with the famine and hardship that followed, brought the 300-year-old House of Romanov to an end, giving rise to the Soviet Union. It killed the European monarchies and gave birth to parliamentary rule across the continent. A full understanding of the 20th century begins with a study of the first world war. The bungling course set by a handful of diplomats, politicians and generals in 1914 is the course we sail by today. Those men are gone, but another handful remain as witnesses to a fading time, an obsolete idealism and a universal love of liberty. It is to the American veterans of World War One that this program is dedicated. My name is Will Everett.

FADE MUSIC

CLOSING CREDITS

"This has been a creation of Treehouse Productions."

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