What did they die for? The enormity of the killing made it almost a sacrilege to ask such a question, let alone attempt to answer it. More than
9.5 million soldiers died in battle—and for what? A botched treaty that set the stage for an even bloodier war twenty years later and for conflicts that still bedevil the world? No great principles, ideals, or even dreams remained intact to glorify or justify the Great War after it was over. Looking back, it’s impossible to say with confidence which side was worse. It was not the war to end all wars. It did not, as President Wilson promised, make the world safe for democracy. It ended nothing, resolved nothing, made the world safe for nothing except more war. The only great thing about the Great War was the scale.
So why did they fight?
The question was especially fraught for America’s immigrant soldiers. To fight for your own country is an inescapable part of the social contract. In exchange for the benefits of a secure civil society we offer our bodies, and if need be, our lives in time of war. But the foreign-born were asked—indeed, forced—to serve without having executed the social contract in full. In the streets of America they were aliens—but in no-man’s-land they were expected to fight as fervently as native-born Americans. And, for the most part, they did. It was that loyalty in action that changed everything. They righted the imbalance of the social contract not by protesting but, paradoxically, by submitting. Their pride in serving won them, and their families, the status they could never have gained without the war. God knows they weren’t all heroes. But the fact of their service was heroic. In a war remembered more for senseless slaughter than personal courage, the service of the foreign-born shines. Nearly a hundred years later, it’s one of the few things about the Great War that still does.
The Armistice took effect with eerie numerical alignment on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918—but the war didn’t end when the guns stopped firing. Indeed, the aftershocks of the four years of bloodshed and the treaties that formalized its termination are still rippling through central Europe and the Middle East. Less obvious are the tremors that run through families. For many immigrant families, the memories and emotions remain fresh and accessible, even though they have long since assimilated to the mainstream culture. “I can speak only for my family but service in the military transformed them into Americans with an Italian heritage,” writes Patricia A. Valente, whose Italian-born ancestors served with the U.S. Army in both world wars. “July 4th picnics may have had lasagna on the menu but they were our holidays. I attended a funeral of an older family friend who had the U.S. Army insignia in the coffin. When I asked why this was chosen, his wife replied he felt that this gave him the most pride. He too was born in Italy but he was proud to be an American.” Pride is a word that comes up again and again—even among those whose sons and fathers never came back. Not pride in the war, not even necessarily pride in the United States—but pride in their ancestor for having fought. “Service in the military transformed them into Americans”—in one way or another, many say the same. Some say it with a touch of bitterness over how much their family was asked to sacrifice; some with amazement at what an ancestor endured; some with an abiding sense of connection—a path blazed, footsteps followed ever since. In many immigrant families, the military service that began with the Great War continued into the following war, and the one after that, and the next, and the next, and continues still in the wars we are fighting today.
This is not, however, a chorus that sings in unison. There are those who look back in shame and anger at the waste of so many lives. Those who proudly remember not their ancestor’s service but his refusal to serve because of his faith, principles, or political beliefs. The price these men and their families paid for refusing is another strand in the immigrant experience of the war.
It’s astonishing, given the volume of propaganda the Wilson administration pumped out in 1917 and 1918, how quickly the nation turned its back on the war and how reluctant it has been to turn around to look again. The Great War was too painful, too irrelevant, too quickly superseded by the next and even greater war. The attempt to find meaning and make sense of the carnage proved futile—if anything, the war and its aftermath consumed and destroyed the very idea of meaning in art, in politics, in civic life and rhetoric.
For the foreign-born that retreat from meaning was especially troubling because of the hostility to all things foreign that gripped the nation in the years immediately following the war. The Wilson administration had spent the war years hammering at Huns, alien agents, disloyal hyphenates, German speakers or sympathizers, slackers of all stripes—and the public, once infected, remained feverish with hate well into the next decade. In the hysterical xenophobia of the Red Scare period, Jews, Bolsheviks, and immigrant workers were lumped together as enemies of the American way. Medals, military honors, and loyal service counted for nothing if you spoke with an accent, held a union card, dared to advocate the brotherhood of man.
The United States’ experience in the Great War is commonly derogated by the word “only”: the country was in the war for only nineteen months and really fought for only six of those; only 53,513 American soldiers died in combat (another 63,195 succumbed to disease, accidents, and privation), compared to 1.3 million Frenchmen, 900,000 Britons, 1.6 million Germans, 1.7 million Russians. For the United States, the Great War was only a small war—the other war, the forgotten war. But many have not forgotten. For immigrant soldiers, their families and descendants, the First World War marked their watershed experience as Americans. Whatever happened to those men in their months of hell redounds still, privately but nonetheless vibrantly, in the lives and experiences of those who came after.
Motorized traffic was a rare thing in the south of Italy in 1918, so rare that the arrival of a bus in the main piazza of Forenza high in the stony hills of Basilicata was something to make the townspeople stop and stare. There was more staring than usual the day a young American soldier stepped off the bus. Polished and gleaming from his jaunty brown cap down to the puttees wrapped around his calves, the youth looked like he had just come from a military parade. But what on earth was he doing in Forenza? The war was over, finita, so why were the Americans sending a soldier to their village?
Eyes and whispers followed the American as he made his way through the narrow streets, stopped in front of the Pierro house, craned his neck to look up at the windows, and then opened the door and walked in without even knocking. Nine-year-old Nicola, one of the three Pierro boys still living at home, gaped in amazement as il soldato americano strode into the house. Even the grin on the clean-shaven unlined face failed to tip the boy off. When the first flush of shouting and crying and embracing played itself out, everyone had a good laugh. How could Nicola possibly fail to recognize his own brother Antonio on leave from the American army that had fought so valiantly, shoulder to shoulder with the Italians, to win the Great War?
Nicola never got over it. His brother Tony had left Forenza five years earlier, a teenage peasant in homespun with a pasteboard suitcase—and he came back a man, a soldier, a hero, an American. No wonder Nicola didn’t recognize him. It was nothing short of a miracle.
Tony visited with the family in Forenza for four days; then he kissed his mother good-bye, got back on the bus, went to Naples, caught a train, and returned to the All-American Division in France. The war was over, finita, but that didn’t mean they got to go home. Tony’s regiment was now stationed in Bordeaux, and all through the long dreary postwar winter the officers racked their brains trying to keep the restless, bored, demoralized veterans from going crazy. Officially, there were wholesome organized activities like theatricals, ballgames, classes (the most popular were auto repair, accounting, and bookkeeping), and the inevitable and by now utterly useless drilling. Unofficially, there was a lot of drinking and fraternizing with the French villagers. Tony had been careful to stay away from French girls while the war was going on—too many stories about disease—but that winter in Bordeaux he fell in love. Tony met Magdalena when the lieutenant he served sent him into town to find comfortable billets. By this point Tony spoke passable French, and he’d always had a way with the ladies—so he had no trouble chatting up the pretty French girl and arranging a date. Many more dates followed. The couple went to dances and spent a lot of time walking. Tony curried favor with Magdalena’s father by bringing him American cigarettes—not much of a sacrifice since Tony had never been a smoker. It seemed like a promising match—the good-looking, clean-living American soldier; the pretty French girl; the father’s blessing.
But it was not to be. Tony told Magdalena’s family that he was an American now and when his regiment sailed for America he would be sailing with them. He didn’t tell them that he had a girlfriend back in the States, Maria Pierro, a distant cousin living in Boston.
Tony’s field artillery unit left for the United States on May 9, 1919, and Tony received his honorable discharge six days later. He married Maria the following year, took a job in a shoe factory in Lynn, Massachusetts, not far from his home in Swampscott, and settled into civilian life. There had never been any question in his mind about returning to the States, rejoining his father and brothers, becoming an American citizen, getting an American job. The older he grew, the more patriotic he became.
When Tony’s mother and three younger brothers arrived in the United States in 1920, the last tie with Italy was severed. Tony never went back to Forenza. As the years passed, his memories of the war faded and blurred. In time he would even forget how to speak Italian. But he never forgot Magdalena.
Why would I want to go back to Ireland?” Peter Thompson once brusquely asked a friend. “All I ever got in Ireland was black bread and black tea.” The United States had always suited Peter better—in the army, in the mines in Butte, it didn’t matter as long as he didn’t have to go back to black tea and bread.
But he did go back to Ireland once, right after the war. The Wild West Division was still in France in March 1919 when Peter managed to get a furlough to visit his ma and siblings in Belfast. In a photograph taken during the visit, Peter and his brother Denis stand side by side in their uniforms—two victorious Irish soldiers, one in the BEF uniform the other in the AEF khaki, both of them looking pale, stunned, and serious.
Like Tony Pierro, Peter, now Sergeant Thompson, arrived back in the States in May 1919. When he strode into his aunt’s house in Butte and flashed his melting blue-eyed grin and boomed his hearty hello, the woman cried out in amazement, “Peter, you sound like an American.” To which he replied, “I am an American—I’ve my papers to prove it!” On the back of a photograph taken at a family reunion to honor his return, the aunt wrote, “Peter just returned from France, helped save democracy.”
Butte was roiled in yet another round of labor unrest, but Peter settled back to working in the mines without any trouble—or without any more trouble than usually followed him. Even more restless than most war veterans, he moved from mine to mine, working for a few months and then quitting. He drifted out to Seattle, worked there for a spell, and drifted back to Butte.
It was on his return that he learned he had won a military honor: the Republic of France had awarded him the Croix de Guerre for dragging that damned sergeant to safety in the Flanders mud in October 1918. An American recruiting officer stationed in Butte had the French medal and certificate and was eager to hand it over. But with typical cussedness, Peter refused to accept it. He insisted that he wouldn’t take the award until his comrade Winks Brown, who had participated in the rescue, had also been decorated. A tussle ensued in which the officer kept proffering and Peter kept refusing the Croix de Guerre. Finally, the officer threw up his hands, left the medal with Peter’s Uncle John, and closed the case.
Peter married in 1921, fathered a family, and divided his time between mining and gambling, with the occasional brawl thrown in. He loved his kids dearly, but he was not cut out to be a steady, reliable father. Peter moved his family often—Idaho, Oregon—in search of work, a change of scene, the hope of something better; but for some reason the lure of Butte was too powerful to resist, and they always came back to the rowdy old mining town. Peter was working at the Tramway Mine in Butte when he was crushed deep underground by a trolley tram motor. He died of his injuries at the age of forty-two on October 31, 1937, nineteen years to the day after the act of heroism that won him the Croix de Guerre that he refused to accept.
Peter Thompson was buried in Butte’s Holy Cross Cemetery with full military honors. His casket was brought to the cemetery draped in an American flag, and an honor guard fired three volleys into the air. A bugler sounded taps as Peter’s body was lowered into the ground.
Jacob Wipf and the three Hofer brothers, Joseph, Michael, and David, had been in Alcatraz for four months when the Armistice was declared. For obeying what they believed was the word of God and for clinging to the language of their people, the four young Hutterites had been subjected to treatment that can only be described as torture. Four months of isolation, nakedness, near starvation, cold, and darkness had ruined their health, but it had failed to weaken their beliefs or break their spirits. “He promised us, his children, that he will be with us till the end,” David Hofer wrote home to South Dakota. The others believed the same.
Two weeks after the Armistice went into effect, the military police transferred the four men from Alcatraz to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. They arrived in Kansas on the night of November 23, exhausted from the three-day train ride and debilitated after the months in solitary confinement. At the train station, the prisoners were chained, handed their luggage, and then, prodded by bayonets, marched to the military prison. By the time they reached the gate they were wet through with sweat—and when they stopped moving they began to shiver uncontrollably in the raw night air. The torture they had endured in San Francisco began anew. Military police ordered them to strip to their underwear and stand outside for two hours until prison uniforms were brought out to them. At one in the morning they were finally allowed to collapse in bed, but four hours later they were routed out and again made to stand outside in the cold. Joseph, age twenty-four, and Michael, twenty-five, complained to the guards of pains in their chest—probably pneumonia—and were placed in the prison hospital. Jacob Wipf and David Hofer were returned to their solitary cells. When they refused to work, Wipf and Hofer were made to stand for nine hours a day with their hands thrust through the prison bars and chained together.
Somehow Wipf learned that Joseph and Michael Hofer had fallen dangerously ill in the prison infirmary, and he telegraphed their families in South Dakota to come quickly. Joseph and Michael’s wives, both of whom were named Maria, set out for Kansas, but due to a mix-up the women ended up at Fort Riley instead of Fort Leavenworth, and a full day was lost before they reached the prison that held their husbands. The wives did succeed in seeing Joseph and Michael briefly on the night of November 28, a Thursday, but by then the men were so far gone they could barely speak.
When the women returned to the prison the following morning, Maria was told that her husband Joseph was dead. She pleaded with the guards to be allowed to see his body one last time but was rebuffed. Finally the colonel in charge relented, and Maria was ushered into the room where the open coffin stood. To her horror she saw that Joseph was laid out not in the homespun clothing that he had worn when he left home six months before, but in the khaki uniform of the U.S. Army that he had refused to touch so long as he had breath to refuse.
Michael died three days later. His father and brother David were with him when he died—and as a result, Michael Hofer was buried wearing his own clothes. “I stood there all day and cried,” David wrote afterward; “but I could not even wipe my tears away, since my hands were chained to the bars of my prison cell.”
The Hofer wives returned to the Rockport Hutterite Colony in South Dakota with the bodies. Joseph’s Maria, seven months pregnant, had two small children waiting for her at home. Michael’s Maria had an eight-month-old daughter. On December 4, the brothers were laid to rest under the Dakota prairie grass. Their small unadorned grave markers were inscribed with the years of their births and deaths and the word “martyr” after their names.
The army at last relented. The war was over and there was nothing to be gained by keeping two ailing Hutterites in prison and risking more embarrassment if they too perished. David Hofer was released from Leavenworth on January 2, 1919; Jacob Wipf’s release came on April 13. The men returned to their wives and children in South Dakota and told and retold the story of their ordeal.
On January 28, 1919, Joseph’s widow, Maria, gave birth to his child—a son she named Jacob—but the baby died six weeks later.
The Hutterites of the upper Midwest were traumatized. As a direct result of the deaths of Michael and Joseph Hofer, nearly all of the Hutterite colonies in the Dakotas sold their holdings and relocated to Canada, mostly Alberta. Better to move on, as they had done so many times in the past, than face the martyrdom of more of their young men. Many colonies, however, chose to return to the States after World War II. In that war, unlike the first, provision had been made—made clearly and with the cooperation of the so-called peace churches—for conscientious objectors. The government now offered two options to men whose faith forbade them to fight: either they could serve in the medical corps or some other noncombatant unit of the military; or they could remain in the States and perform “alternative service” through the Civilian Public Service. Those who chose the latter were interned in CPS camps for the duration of the war and put to work doing manual labor for nine hours a day, six days a week. It was grueling and deadening work, and for the privilege of performing it each man was assessed $35 a month for room and board. But it was better than what Jacob Wipf and the Hofer brothers had been forced to endure.
Today large Hutterite colonies flourish once again on the prairie of the Dakotas and eastern Montana. Their members still speak and worship in German. They still refuse to wear the uniform of the armed forces or fight in the nation’s wars. They still remember the ordeal of Joseph, Michael, and David Hofer and Jacob Wipf. When Hutterites travel to San Francisco nowadays, it is for one purpose only: to pay their respects at the dungeon at Alcatraz where four of their brethren were imprisoned and tortured in 1918. Someday Hutterites hope to see a plaque placed at Alcatraz commemorating what their ancestors suffered while the nation was fighting to make the world safe for democracy.
Epifanio Affatato arrived back in New York on March 6, 1919, on board the world’s largest ship, the Leviathan (known as the Vaterland until the U.S. Navy seized it from Germany when the country went to war). While the immense three-funnel steamer was anchored offshore waiting to disembark thousands of eager veterans of the 27th Division, the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII and then, following his abdication, the Duke of Windsor) came on board to bestow British medals. Epifanio was awarded the British Military Medal for his heroic acts of September 29—an honor he would cherish all his life.
The division’s welcome-home parade took place on New York’s Fifth Avenue on March 25, and it was an epic event even by New York standards. Crowds estimated at 3 to 5 million people turned out to watch the soldiers parade up Fifth Avenue from Washington Square Park. Two airplanes kicked off the gala by buzzing low through the canyon of skyscrapers, and nine black horses, one of which was riderless with stirrups reversed, moved out in solemn procession escorting a caisson decked with memorial wreaths. Then in a mighty surge came the soldiers of the 27th Division, marching up the avenue company by company. The men of the 107th Infantry had painted their battle helmets a darker shade, so Epifanio and his fellow survivors of the Hindenburg Line stood out like a dark current in the river of bobbing helmets.
Epifanio wasn’t quite done with the army. After the parade he had to go out to Camp Upton on Long Island to await his discharge, which came through on April 2. An honorable discharge, of course. At Camp Upton, he also took care of one other piece of official business: he became a citizen of the United States of America. No proof of residency or declaration of intention was needed—you fought for Uncle Sam, you were a citizen, bang, just like that. Hundreds of thousands of other guys did the same as Epifanio. In total, over 280,000 immigrant soldiers became citizens by virtue of their service in the war.
For Epifanio the high point of the postwar euphoria came on April 14, twelve days after his discharge, when he learned that he had been awarded the military’s second highest award, the Distinguished Service Cross, for his heroic actions at the Hindenburg Line.
So now he was a war hero, a citizen, a buddy, a veteran—in a word, an American. All he needed was a job. Family memory is a little vague about what Epifanio did in the years immediately following the war—trade school, night classes to perfect his English, and whatever jobs he could pick up. He had a case made to store and display his war medals—the British Military Medal, the French Croix de Guerre, and the DSC. When the Great Depression hit and jobs were hard to come by, Epifanio took the case with him from one potential employer to the next. The bosses looked at the medals and shook their heads. Nobody was hiring.
Finally, in 1935 Epifanio landed a good steady job as a machinist with the New York City Department of Sanitation. That same year he bought a house and married Filomena Mancuso, a young Calabrian immigrant from a coastal village only a few miles away from Scala Coeli where Epifanio had grown up. The difference in age—he was forty, she was twenty-six—didn’t matter to them in the slightest. They made a fine couple. They had three children, all boys—Domenick in 1936, Edward in 1939, Charles in 1941. Inevitably, as the boys grew up, they asked their dad about the war and the medals he had won—but invariably, Epifanio refused to talk about it. Occasionally, he had nightmares about the fighting, even years later, but he never told the boys what the nightmares were about. He had a small scar on his face where the shell fragment had hit, and he kept the bit of exploded steel that the doctors extracted as a souvenir. The other souvenir he showed the boys was the German officer’s belt inscribed with gott mit uns that he had traded his warm hat for. But Epifanio kept the reality of the war to himself.
Despite his reticence, Epifanio was a proud and active veteran. For a while he served as president of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter, and he remained buddies with a couple of guys from the regiment. Every year, he put on his medals and marched in the big Memorial Day parade on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. “My father was a shy, conservative man—not a flag waver,” recalled Ed, the middle son; “but he was always very proud of his service and of his country.” His country, meaning America. As for Italy, he had put the land of his birth behind him. Epifanio and his wife spoke Calabrese dialect around the house, and when the boys got to high school he taught them to speak proper Italian. But he never had the slightest desire to return to Italy.
Today, the two surviving Affatato brothers speak of their father with devotion and reverence that go beyond filial piety. “Everyone loved him,” said Ed (who died of leukemia in 2009). “They thought he was like a saint—he would settle family problems, he took care of his parents and in-laws, he gave money to the poor, he was very patient and kind as a father. A kind, gentle, and loving man.” A family story has come down that says a lot about Epifanio’s fundamental humanity. The details differ a bit with the teller, but the gist of it is this: At the Department of Sanitation, Epifanio befriended a German who had emigrated to the United States after the war. The German fellow was missing one eye, and in time he let it be known that he had lost the eye while fighting in the German army—in fact, he had lost the eye in the battle of the Hindenburg Line in which Epifanio won his DSC. The German took to ribbing Epifanio, saying, “Maybe you’re the one who shot my eye out.” To which Epifanio responded, “Yeah, maybe you’re the one who threw that grenade.” The men became buddies and Epifanio introduced the German guy to his brothers and sons. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, being enemies in the war sealed their friendship in civilian life.
Another family story speaks to the depth of Epifanio’s love of his adopted country. He was forty-six years old in 1941 when the United States entered World War II. Nonetheless, when he heard the news on the radio about the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war on Japan, he told his family he was going to reenlist. “What, are you crazy? You have three children,” everyone said. “They’ll never let you in the army again.” Crazy or not, Epifanio believed it was the right thing to do. But the army turned him down.
Epifanio died in 1959 at the age of sixty-four, just shy of his twenty-fifth anniversary with the Sanitation Department. He had been hospitalized for a hernia operation and his sons believe he died of the pneumonia he contracted after the operation. Epifanio Affatato was buried at Long Island National Cemetery, a military cemetery in Farmingdale, Long Island, about thirty miles west of Camp Upton. His gravestone is inscribed with his name, his military unit, and the initials of his two American military honors—PH (Purple Heart) and DSC (Distinguished Service Cross).
A couple of weeks before the grand 27th Division parade in New York City, the Ogdensburg News ran a short article about local “celebrated hero of the great war” Mike Valente. Mike, the article stated, was “the type of youth that every person is glad to shake hands with not because he is about to receive distinguished laurels when the 27th Division parades in New York city but because he is very human and sincere.” In one way or another, everybody who knew Mike said the same thing. Mike Valente was a great guy and the role of war hero fit him like a glove.
Though Mike never again did anything as spectacular as his rampage at the Hindenburg Line on September 29, 1918, his day of heroism was enough to keep him in the public eye, in a modest way, for the rest of his life. When things settled down after the postwar festivities, Mike moved down to Newark, New Jersey, to study electrical engineering at the Newark Technical School. He married a Sicilian woman named Margarita he had met in Newark, and the couple settled in Long Beach on the south shore of Long Island. Mike ran a building and electrical contracting business, and he sold real estate during the boom years of the 1920s, when property prices kept shooting skyward.
On September 27, 1929, eleven years after his actions at the Hindenburg Line, Mike was given the nation’s highest military award, the Congressional Medal of Honor. Whether the long delay was due to a bureaucratic foul-up or whether it was because he was Italian never became clear. “It’s the proudest moment of my life,” Mike told President Hoover when he accepted the medal at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. One hundred and twenty-four men received Medals of Honor for valor in the Great War, but Mike Valente was the only man of Italian descent among them. The Italian American press went crazy with pride. One dazzled reporter, begging Mike for a message to convey to the Italian American community, got this response: “Tell them this in my name: I’m happy that the duty I carried out in the war gained such high recognition in Washington yesterday. Say that I did not forget, while the president of the republic was conferring the Congressional Medal, that he had decorated an American of Italian origin. Proud of these origins, happy that through him honor can come to the entire mass of Italians who emigrated here, of which I am a humble part.”
The stock market crash a month later hit Mike and his family hard. His real estate business failed and the contracting work dried up, but Mike managed to hold onto the Long Beach house—and the house remains in the Valente family to this day. In the 1930s and ’40s, he became involved in local politics, serving as a Long Beach city marshal and a committeeman for the Democratic Party. He was active in the American Legion and VFW—but he always maintained that his favorite veterans group was the Jewish War Veterans. Even though he wasn’t Jewish, he felt at home with these guys.
Like Epifanio Affatato, Mike had pretty much put Italy out of his mind. But history has a way of reminding people of their origins. In the next war, the United States fought a prolonged and costly battle to wrest Italy from the Germans, and at a critical juncture in this battle American planes bombed and destroyed the ancient monastery of Monte Cassino on February 15, 1944. Sant’Apollinare, the satellite village of the great Benedictine monastery where Mike was born and raised, was bombed in the attack and some of his relatives and family friends were killed.
When Dwight David Eisenhower was inaugurated president on January 20, 1953, Mike was invited to Washington to attend the ceremony with a squad of World War I MOH winners. Five years later, on Memorial Day 1958, he attended the internment of the Unknown Members of the Armed Forces of World War II and Korea at Arlington National Cemetery. By nature affable and mild-mannered, Mike made it a point of pride never to use the medal to advance himself or gain special privileges. As he got older, he spoke with a touch of wonder, even incredulity, of the twenty-three-year-old soldier who had blasted through the German trenches all those years ago in Picardy. It was hard for his grandkids to picture the raging, adrenaline-pumped war hero in the kindly, courtly gent who rode his bike along the Long Beach oceanfront and grew tomatoes in his backyard. But the soldier’s steel never went to flab. “He was like a bull,” recalled grandson Ralph Madalena. “He kept himself in fantastic shape all his life.”
Had his country called on him to serve again, Mike Valente would have answered the call proudly and unhesitatingly. He died at the age of eighty on January 10, 1976, and was buried at the Long Island National Cemetery, a few paces from the grave of his exact contemporary Epifanio Affatato, fellow Italian American, fellow veteran of the 107th Regiment, fellow hero of the breaking of the Hindenburg Line.
Not all the foreign-born soldiers ended up as rooted and happy as Mike Valente and Epifanio Affatato. Some drifted. Some lived on the margins. Some never recovered from war wounds, whether physical or psychic.
Alexander Raskin, a smart, good-looking Jewish immigrant fighting with the 78th Division—the one who wrote in horror to his girlfriend about recruits rioting on the train in New Jersey—was never the same after being gassed in the Argonne. He returned home, married his sweetheart, got his law degree, had children—but he never fully regained his health or vitality. For the rest of his life, Alexander suffered from lung disease. He never really felt whole after the war, and despite his law practice, he never made enough money to support his family the way he wanted to. It was a fate that many other victims of gas attacks shared. In fact, medical studies have established that the long-term effects of poison gas are both physical and psychological: men exposed to gas were susceptible for the rest of their lives to chronic ailments ranging from bronchitis, emphysema, laryngitis, and cancer; adverse psychological effects included mood and anxiety disorders, sexual dysfunction, and post-traumatic stress syndrome. The excruciating external blisters raised by mustard gas eventually healed, but the damage to the respiratory system and the mind of the victim was permanent.
The expatriate artists and writers in Paris were not the only lost generation.
Polish Americans had a double stake in the war once the Wilson administration committed itself to the cause of Polish independence. Whether they had fought in the semi-autonomous Polish army in France or with the AEF, America’s Poles fervently believed that the Great War was their war. Yet when it ended and an independent Polish Republic was wrested from Russia, Prussia, and Austria, Polish Americans were faced with a dilemma: return to the homeland they had been dreaming of for so long, or remain in their adopted country? Most chose to stay, realizing as never before how thoroughly, ardently American they had become. They might fly the Polish flag side by side with the American flag on Memorial Day; they might teach their children to speak Polish and worship at the Polish church—but after the war most Polish Americans acknowledged that their future was in America and only in America.
Joseph Chmielewski was one of the drifters, one of the Polish vets who came home not to hang flags on his porch or pay tribute to the dead, but to struggle and search and finally sink beneath the surface of American life until he disappeared without a trace.
Though he had been among the first to enlist when the nation went to war, Joe never saw any action with the 16th Machine Gun Battalion; still, he ended up staying in the army for a full two years, from June 17, 1917, until his honorable discharge at Camp Dix in New Jersey on June 26, 1919. At a loss for where to go or what to do next, Joe returned to Fifficktown, Pennsylvania, and moved in with his brother Frank and his sister-in-law Mary and their growing family. Inevitably, he went back to work in the coal mine. “The war was the best thing that ever happened to him,” one of Frank and Mary’s sons later said about his uncle Joe. “He learned a lot about America by being a soldier, learned to speak English, connected more closely with this country.” But somehow the connection was never strong enough to make Joe really take hold. He had never liked being a coal miner, and since that’s the only work there was in South Fork, he left a few years after the war—the family thinks it might have been 1925—and tried his luck in Michigan. According to the census, in 1930 Joe was lodging in Detroit with a Macedonian immigrant chef and his German American bookkeeper wife and working in an auto factory.
Joe apparently returned to Fifficktown in 1932; he lived for a year or so with Frank and his family and went back to work in the mine. According to one of Frank’s grandsons, Joe’s return had something to do with the higher wages won for coal miners by John L. Lewis, the heroic leader of the United Mine Workers of America. In any case, by 1934 he was back in Detroit. That year he claimed $200 in veteran’s compensation under the terms of a bill enacted on January 5, 1934; when his application was approved the following year, he was living at 303 Highland Avenue in Saginaw, Michigan. After that, the traces grow fainter. One of Joe’s nephews thinks he moved to Duluth, Minnesota, and went to work as a deckhand for the Grantland Steamship Company. At some point he served with or was employed by the U.S. Coast Guard. One day in the 1940s a package turned up at the South Fork post office addressed to Joseph Chmielewski—and it was delivered to Frank’s son who was named for his uncle. The package contained some of Uncle Joe’s clothing and an uncashed check made out to Joseph Chmieliewski dated July 4, 1945, and drawn on the Continental Illinois National Bank. Frank’s family assumed Joe had died—but they never learned any details.
Compared to his younger brother, Frank Chmielewski led a happy, robust life, but it wasn’t a long one. Frank fathered seven children—four sons and three daughters—and he could barely contain his pride when three of his boys went to fight for their country in World War II. But Frank was never the same after one of them died in a training operation while still in the States: it was the third son, Joseph, named for the uncle who had fought in the Great War. Frank died in 1949, at the age of sixty-five, of silicosis—the lung disease that shortened the lives of so many miners.
A month after the Armistice, the Ivy Division was ordered to march into Germany as part of the Army of Occupation, and Meyer Epstein and his comrades in the 58th Infantry took up residence in the city of Koblenz, southeast of Bonn at the confluence of the Moselle and the Rhine rivers. “The area now occupied by the Regiment was a very pleasant one,” according to the regiment’s historian. “The German people were kind, courteous, and very amendable to the restrictions placed upon them by the military authorities.” But some of the shine wore off as the months dragged on with no prospect of returning home. Training and drilling, which seemed so pointless now that the war was over, continued with maddening monotony. In their free time, the guys played basketball, watched movies, and took boat trips on the Rhine. Baseball teams were organized with the first hint of spring weather. The regiment ran mandatory classes for men who were unable to speak or read English—but by this point Meyer’s English was quite proficient, so he was probably excused.
Meyer and his comrades finally sailed back to the United States on board the Mount Vernon on July 24, 1919, arriving in New York Harbor at midnight of July 31. Six days later, Meyer received his honorable discharge and went back to the Lower East Side—and back to work.
Meyer was lucky in the years that followed. Though he lived through tumultuous times in an uproarious city, he managed to lead a steady, rewarding, honorable life. He never lacked for what he valued most—love, respect, faith, and hard work. In 1922, he married a fellow Jewish immigrant from the Pale named Ida Rubinstein—a vivacious twenty-two-year-old woman who had been working in a garment factory since the age of twelve and who could recite long passages of Wordsworth and Kipling from memory—and the couple moved to Brooklyn and started a family. Their first son, Julius—named for Meyer’s deceased father Yehuda—was born in 1923, and two more sons followed—Harold in 1925 and Leonard in 1931. In 1926, Meyer received his license as a master plumber, and in time he also became a licensed steamfitter and oil burner mechanic and installer. For the next forty years, he worked steadily and with scrupulous honesty and reliability to support his family. Every Saturday he went to pray at the Glory of Israel Synagogue in the East New York section of Brooklyn, and for a time he served as the synagogue’s vice president.
But it was his year of service with the Ivy Division that remained Meyer’s proudest moment outside of his family. “To him, November 11 was like Yom Kippur—always a very important day,” said his youngest son, Len. Many other Jewish war veterans felt the same. American Jews were quick to point out that not only had they served their country loyally, they had also served in sizable numbers. Though only 3.27 percent of the U.S. population in 1917, Jews made up 5.73 percent of the army; 72 percent of Jews in uniform served in combat units, compared with 60 percent of all military personnel. Two thousand American Jews were killed in action, and total Jewish American casualties topped ten thousand. “When the time came to serve their country under arms,” General Pershing wrote in gratitude, “no class of people served with more patriotism or with higher motives than the young Jews who volunteered or were drafted and went overseas with our other young Americans to fight the enemy.”
Meyer kept his AEF uniform, gas mask, and steel helmet all his life and proudly displayed his victory medal and service ribbon with four Bronze Stars, one star for each of the battles he had fought in France. He told his sons stories of mustard gas, trench foot, living in mud and water, and eating stale bread. He was an active member of the VFW and the Jewish War Veterans.
Meyer wept the day his oldest son, Julius, was drafted in 1942—not because he opposed the nation’s entry into World War II, nor because he wanted his boy to sit it out, but because he knew what war was and what his son would have to face. Julius fought in an antiaircraft unit in the Coast Artillery and saw action in New Guinea and the Philippines. Harold, the second son, enlisted in the navy and served from 1943 to 1946 as a radio operator on a destroyer escort. Len was too young for World War II, but he was drafted during the Korean War and served from 1953 to 1955.
To his dying day, Meyer Epstein remained fiercely proud of his military service. Len recalls visiting his father in the hospital in the last week of his life as he struggled with colon cancer. “My father felt that the hospital staff was not attentive enough (and they weren’t!),” says Len today. “As we approached his room, we heard him complain indignantly, ‘Is this how you treat a war veteran?’ ”
Meyer passed away on July 23, 1976. “When my parents died,” wrote Len, “several strangers came up to us at the funerals and told us of how they brought bags of groceries to them each week, without which they would have starved. My parents could not pass a beggar without opening their purse. They also gave substantially to religious institutions.”
The tradition of tzedakah that had saved him from homelessness in the Pale of Settlement and his military service in the Great War remain Meyer’s chief legacy to his family.
Meyer Epstein was still in Germany with the Army of Occupation on May 21, 1919, when an estimated half a million people took to the streets of New York City to protest the pogroms that were sweeping through Poland, Galicia, and Rumania. Ten thousand Jewish American war veterans, most of them from the 77th “Melting Pot” Division, led what became known as the Mourners’ Parade—and in fact, it was the presence of veterans that kept the huge demonstration orderly. A second protest rally, dubbed a Day of Sorrow, was organized in the city on November 24 to protest the mass killings of Jews in the Ukraine. Meyer by now was back in the States, and he may well have been among the estimated twenty-five thousand Jewish war veterans who marched that day from the Lower East Side to Carnegie Hall.
These postwar attacks on Jews in eastern Europe—attacks which the struggling new governments of Poland and Ukraine refused to stop or cynically condoned—presaged an era of murderous anti-Semitism. The infection of hatred spread through eastern and western Europe, ultimately becoming most virulent in Germany, but no Western nation was immune, certainly not the United States. Anti-Semitism was high on the agenda of the Ku Klux Klan, the post–Civil War white-supremacist brotherhood that came roaring back to life in the 1920s. Jews, blacks, Bolsheviks, Catholics, and foreigners—all became public targets during the Red Scare period. Congress, responding to the ugly national mood, voted overwhelmingly to bar the door to “undesirable” immigrants. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the even more stringent Immigration Act of 1924 imposed tight quotas based on national origin. The 1924 law restricted new immigration to 2 percent of the population of a given nationality resident in the United States in 1890 (with the total yearly number of immigrants limited to 164,667 individuals) and banned Asian immigration altogether. The effect of these new laws was to award the relatively small number of slots to “Nordic” immigrants (since the nation’s population in 1890, even with the mass migration from eastern and southern Europe, had been predominantly British and German), and to keep out the “inferior strains.” Immigration from Italy plunged from about 200,000 in 1900 to about 4,000 in 1924—and the figures for Poland, Russia, and the regions that had been part of the Pale were similar. Never mind that aliens had “done their bit” in France. In the Red Scare, everything alien was suspect.
It was in this poisonous atmosphere that Sam Dreben, the Fighting Jew, returned home to El Paso, Texas. Dreben had had a glorious war—the capstone to his glorious military career. He was awarded the DSC for bravery at Blanc Mont, and after the Armistice, General Pershing made Dreben his personal guest at the American headquarters in Paris. Pershing, whose acquaintance with Dreben dated back to the Punitive Expedition in Mexico in 1916, went on record stating that the Fighting Jew was “the finest soldier and one of the bravest men I ever knew.” Dreben even got to fulfill a lifelong dream one night in a Paris restaurant when he encountered Nikolai Nikolaevich, the exiled Russian grand duke who had been commander in chief of the Russian army during the war, and socked him in the nose in revenge for generations of pogroms.
When the 141st Infantry pulled into El Paso in April 1919, Dreben and his buddy, Captain (now Major) Burges, were welcomed home as war heroes with the usual rounds of parades, toasts, and flowery editorials. But for Dreben the postwar euphoria quickly turned sour. His young wife had never forgiven him for failing to come home after the death of their infant daughter, and there were rumors that she had consoled herself with other men. Two months after the hero’s welcome, Dreben filed for divorce.
The Fighting Jew picked up the pieces of his life, swallowed his pride, got a job selling insurance, and became active in the American Legion, the veterans organization founded by returning soldiers in 1919. This became the site of Dreben’s last great battle. When Dreben learned that the KKK was trying to win control of the El Paso post of the American Legion with its own slate of candidates, he took to the field again—not with weapons but with words. He proposed a resolution barring Klansmen from holding office in the El Paso post. In a rousing speech defending himself, and by extension all immigrant soldiers, from the calumny of the Klan, Dreben declared: “I am a loyal member of the Legion and a loyal American citizen. These men [indicating the Klansmen], oath-bound to secrecy, hide behind their masks and say that because I am a foreign-born Jew I am not good enough to be an American. Every time America has called for volunteers, I have put on the uniform. They did not ask me at the recruiting office if I was a Jew, and they did not ask me on the battlefield what my race or religion was. The soldiers didn’t wear masks in France, other than gas masks, and they don’t need them now.”
In the heated debate that followed, the chairman ruled that Dreben was out of order; but Dreben pressed for a vote and his resolution carried unanimously. “It was the first major defeat for the Klan in El Paso,” wrote Dreben’s biographer.
On the third anniversary of the Armistice, General Pershing invited Dreben to Washington, D.C., to be part of the honor guard at the burial of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. Among the other war heroes chosen by Pershing to accompany the casket of the Unknown from the Capitol Rotunda to Arlington were Sergeant Alvin York of the All-American Division and Major Charles Whittlesey, commander of the Lost Battalion.
A crowd of a hundred thousand lined the five-mile route of the procession. At the stroke of noon, the artillery barrage that had been booming all morning held fire as the nation observed two minutes of the Great Silence in honor of the fallen. But even on this reverent occasion there were mutterings of disillusionment and disgust. John Dos Passos ended his brilliant novel 1919, the second volume of the U.S.A. Trilogy, with a scathing reverie on the interment of the Unknown. Dos Passos did a kind of mordant jazz riff on how the “body of an American” had been chosen from the rows of reeking coffins stacked in the “tarpaper morgue at Chalons-sur-Marne”
Only one can go. How did they pick John Doe?
Make sure he aint a dinge, boys,
make sure he aint a guinea or a kike,
how can you tell a guy’s a hundred percent when all you’ve got’s a gunnysack full of bones, bronze buttons stamped with the screaming eagle and a pair of roll puttees?
Dreben would have been horrified.
In 1923, the Fighting Jew married a young widow from Dallas and moved to California. He died two years later at the age of forty-seven as the result of a bizarre medical error. Ailing and drinking heavily, Dreben was being treated by a Los Angeles doctor; in the course of one of his treatments, a nurse accidentally gave him a syringe filled with a toxic substance. The New York Times reported on March 18, 1925, that “the internationally famous soldier of fortune and hero of the World War” died of “accidental poisoning.” “He fought on scores of battlefields,” stated the Times in its obituary, “sometimes as an American soldier, sometimes as a freelance. He won every possible medal for bravery in the World War.”
Glowing tributes appeared in the two El Paso newspapers. “Here’s to Sam Dreben,” toasted the El Paso Herald, “Jewish immigrant, of old world peasant stock, a fine upstanding American who loved the United States with a passionate devotion of which many of us are incapable.” The El Paso Times ran a more sharply pointed memorial reflecting the climate of the times: “It is with some bitterness that one realizes that had the ‘alien laws’ now in force in this country been in effect when Sam Dreben reached our shores, he would have been barred. We would have no place for the immigrant boy who proved one of the greatest heroes of the American Army.”
“He had one great, tremendous love, and that was love of his adopted country and his country’s flag,” wrote Dreben’s friend Damon Runyon in his newspaper column. “It was his religion. I have known many thousands of men who have worn the uniform of the American Army but I have never known a man who held it in such absolutely devout love as Sam Dreben.”
Many an immigrant family sent their son to war in ignorance of the laws of the land. Did a foreign-born boy have to serve if he hadn’t yet declared his intention to become a citizen? On what grounds could an alien request an exemption? If he did serve, what would he be paid? If he died, what would happen to his body?
When their sons failed to return from France, these same families learned the answers to all of these questions to the letter and the decimal point. The War Department rose splendidly to the occasion of death in war. Bereaved families were, eventually, informed in exhaustive, repetitive detail of everything the army knew about their sons’ earthly remains and the financial arrangements they had made before they died. For many immigrant families, the official response to the death of a son profoundly affected their futures in the United States, both emotionally and financially. For some it determined their very survival.
Private Max Cieminski died in action in the Aisne-Marne offensive on July 22, 1918, and was buried the following day near where he fell outside the village of Trugny, France. His death and burial set in motion a series of actions and reactions in the Cieminski family that continues to this day.
On June 10, 1919, almost a year after he was killed, Max’s body was disinterred and reburied with thousands of other American soldiers at a large military cemetery outside the French hamlet of Seringes-et-Nesles. Two years after his reburial, Congress authorized this ground as a permanent American military cemetery and designated it the Oise-Aisne Cemetery—the second largest of the eight permanent World War I military cemeteries in Europe. At this point the army got in touch with the Cieminski family to inquire about their wishes in regard to the final resting place of Max’s body. The Cieminskis responded that they wanted him returned to Wisconsin. Nearly three years after his death, the process of bringing Max home began.
A small folder stored at the National Archives documents exactly how and when Max’s body got from Seringes-et-Nesles in France to Polonia, Wisconsin. This folder is the most thorough and detailed record of Private Cieminski’s war service, all of it, unfortunately, posthumous. A “report of disinterment and reburial,” dated May 17, 1921, notes that the body was originally buried in a “5 ft. earthen grave, uniform, burlap, disintegrated, unrecognizable”; the report indicates that it was impossible to determine his height or weight; under “wounds or missing parts” is noted: “left shoulder blade shattered, G.S.W. in base of skull, left upper arm missing.” The only intact identifying marks were the ornaments on his collar: Max’s buttons indicated that he served with Company B, 345th Regiment, United States National Army. His remains were exhumed from the Oise-Aisne Cemetery, transported to Antwerp, placed on board the SS Wheaton, and shipped to Hoboken, New Jersey. On July 20, in the care of one Sergeant James V. Hendrix, the coffin was placed on a car of the Soo Line Railroad and sent west via Minneapolis and Sault Ste. Marie to Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Here, Sergeant Hendrix surrendered the coffin to Max’s brother, Boleslaw. On July 22, Boleslaw signed a receipt stating that he had received the body “in satisfactory manner and condition,” and Sergeant Hendrix returned east to his post.
The official record ends here and family lore takes over. At some point between the arrival of Max’s body in Stevens Point on July 22 and his funeral at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Polonia on July 26, Boleslaw opened the coffin and looked inside. What he saw devastated him. Not only did the pile of bones and rotting flesh wrapped in burlap bear no resemblance to the smiling blue-eyed young man he had last seen three and a half years earlier—but the brass buttons on the corpse’s uniform convinced Boleslaw that this was not in fact his brother. Max had died while fighting with Company C, 102nd Infantry, 26th Division—but the brass collar ornaments on these remains were stamped Company B, 345th Infantry Regiment. Not Max’s unit—not even close.
Nonetheless, the funeral went ahead as planned on July 26. Friends of Max who had fought in the war put on their uniforms and carried the coffin to the church cemetery; a volley was fired in tribute as the body—someone’s body—was lowered into the ground. The Cieminskis wept in grief and bitterness that their young man had given his life for his country, but his country did not even have the decency to send the proper body home for burial.
Before he went to war, Max had told his sister Mary that he was making her the beneficiary of his war risk insurance policy. He promised that no matter what happened to him, she and her daughter Marguerite, his favorite niece, would be taken care of for the rest of their lives. Mary had wondered at the time what Max was talking about. Now she found out. Every month, Mary received a check for $57.50—not a huge sum of money even back then, but enough, as it turned out, to keep Mary and her family going through the Great Depression. For the rest of her life, Mary remembered Max in her prayers and grieved for him.
In 1984, Marguerite, who had been eight years old when her uncle died, petitioned the army to award Max the Purple Heart. Sixty-six years after he died in a wheat field in central France, Max Cieminski received his medal.
Marguerite’s son John Riggs, himself a decorated Vietnam War veteran, says that his mother and grandmother never got over the ordeal of burying the wrong body. The psychic wound never healed. Now Riggs believes that his relatives may have suffered needlessly. Reopening the files after I contacted him, Riggs realized that the brass ornaments on his great-uncle’s tunic collar—345th Infantry, Company B—were in fact the insignia of the unit he had trained with at Camp Pike in Arkansas. “When I left Vietnam,” Riggs wrote me, “I was not issued a dress uniform until I got to Oakland. Then they gave it to me, and everything to put on it to go home in.” Riggs speculates that the outdated brass ornaments on Max’s collar may have been the result of a similar army oversight. He has now concluded that the body shipped to Stevens Point in 1921 was in fact his great-uncle, Private Max Cieminski.
The body of Tommaso Ottaviano was also brought back to the United States for burial at the request of the family. Tommaso’s mother, Antonia, had made contact with the army on April 26, 1920, stating her desire to have “the remains of my son sent to my home,” and the process of exhuming and shipping the body was carried out that September. Unlike the Cieminskis, the Ottaviano family at least had the solace of paying their final respects to a body they believed had been their son and brother. Tommaso’s headstone in the North Providence cemetery bears his photograph in his Doughboy uniform and this inscription:
TOMMASO OTTAVIANO
310TH INF. CO. I
FOUGHT AND FELL IN FRANCE
NOV. 22, 1918
AGE 22 YRS 6 MOS
BORN IN ITALY
In his last letters to his mother, Tommaso had written anxiously and repeatedly about his army life insurance—and his foresight in this matter ended up providing his family with a sizable legacy. According to his great-nephew John Ricci, Tommaso had actually taken out two insurance policies totaling $15,000—a considerable sum in the 1920s. With the proceeds of her son’s insurance, paid out over a period of twenty years, Antonia built a two-family home in North Providence. The ground floor was rented out, but the upper floor and the big vegetable garden in the backyard served as the Ottaviano family anchor for the next two generations. Without her son’s sacrifice, Antonia would never have been able to afford this house.
But Tommaso’s legacy went beyond the material. “He was the family hero and martyr,” says his great-niece, Pamela Ottaviano Rhodes. “He was the oldest son and in the family he was revered like a saint. We still talk about him when the family gets together. He remains a touchstone for us.” Pamela notes that her father, Otto, son of Tommaso’s brother Ascanio, was obsessed all his life with his uncle’s military service. In 1989, after extensive research in regimental histories and army records, Otto brought his family to France to seek out the place where Tommaso fought and was fatally wounded in the autumn of 1918. “We walked on the road leading over the hill,” Pamela recalls, “and we entered the Bois des Loges where Tommaso was shot. I was surprised at how little had changed. My father found artillery shell casings in the woods. To me that ground is soaked in blood.”
According to John Ricci, Tommaso inspired his family’s continuing tradition of service in the U.S. Armed Forces. John’s father, Basil, fought with the army air force during World War II, and after the war he put in twenty-eight years in the army reserve—as did Basil’s brother John. “Tommaso did what his country asked him to do,” John Ricci says today. “These immigrant families worked hard, they sent money back to the old country, they prospered if they were lucky. That’s the American way. Military service is part of paying your dues in this country. They learned to be Americans, and their sons went to war and sometimes didn’t come back. We all look to Tommaso—he was the first.”
Pamela Rhodes has a different perspective. “The family did buy into the American dream. Others did serve in the wars that came after. Yes, there was pride in Tommaso’s sacrifice. But there is also a lingering feeling that this was a lot to ask—the life of a young man, an oldest son with everything ahead of him. It was a lot to ask of my family.”
Matej Kocak had told his superior officers that he had “no relatives or friends” to be notified of his death—but in time the army tracked down his family both in Binghamton, New York, and in the newly created nation of Czechoslovakia. There were two pressing matters to take up with the Kocaks: first, where to send the two Congressional Medals of Honor (one each from the army and the navy) that Sergeant Kocak had been awarded posthumously for his “extraordinary heroism” at Soissons on July 18, 1918; second, where to bury the hero’s body.
Kocak had dedicated his entire American life to the marines, and in the end, only the marines turned out to be interested in the final disposition of his remains and medals. Though military authorities made numerous attempts to contact Kocak’s sister-in-law, Julia, in Binghamton, she failed to reply or acknowledge receipt of the correspondence. Julia’s life in America had not been easy—her husband was institutionalized for mental illness before the war, and on November 4, 1918, just a week before the Armistice, their seven-year-old son John died. Perhaps the burial of a brother-in-law she had rarely seen and never heard from was of little interest to her. On May 21, 1921, Kocak’s case was closed and the final decision was made to leave the body in France. On October 13, 1921, the remains—“badly decomposed, features unrecognizable”—were placed in a casket and reburied at the Meuse-Argonne Cemetery in the shadow of Montfaucon.
Sergeant Kocak’s medals—not only the two MOHs but also the French Croix de Guerre with Palm and the Italian Croce al Merito di Guerra—continued to generate official correspondence. Finally, on August 20, 1925, they were sent to Julia Kocak. Presumably Julia took them with her to Czechoslovakia when she returned to go to work as a housekeeper for her parish priest.
Word of Kocak’s heroism and death eventually made its way to his parents in Czechoslovakia. In July 1937, his mother, Roza, now a widow, applied to the army for “adjusted compensation” for her son’s pay, and her application was approved. At the height of the Depression and on the eve of the next war, Roza Kocak received a check for $563.75.
There is one final item of interest in the file: in 1943, twenty-five years after the marine’s death, the city of Binghamton decreed the day of his death—October 4—Sergeant Kocak’s Memorial Day. The stated purpose of this holiday was to encourage “increased participation in the American war effort” on the part of Slovak Americans. General Pershing, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. , Josephus Daniels (Wilson’s secretary of the navy), and Governor Thomas Dewey were among those who contributed testimonials to the Slovak Marine’s bravery—and a “liberty ship” was named for him. At some point, the city of Binghamton quietly forgot about the holiday, and October 4 came and went without any further mention of Kocak.
The military has been more faithful. Over his grave in the Meuse-Argonne Cemetery stands a white marble cross with an inscription capped by a five-pointed star. Among the 14,246 crosses and Jewish stars planted in perfect rows in this beautiful garden of the dead—the largest American military cemetery in Europe—Kocak’s marker is one of ten in which the chiseled letters have been etched in gold. Nine crosses and one Star of David at Meuse-Argonne gleam when the sun strikes them, signifying the burial place of a Medal of Honor winner.
Andrew Christofferson, having tossed his gun in the air on the final day of war, was discharged from the army at Fort D. A. Russell in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on June 29, 1919, and went back to his homestead north of Chinook, Montana. It was the source of some pleasure to Andrew that he now owned the land free and clear (the Land Office at Havre had issued the patent to the claim on March 5, 1919) but not much. By now Andrew knew all too well how hard it was to make this dry land yield a crop he could live on. He lasted four winters shivering out there by himself, and then, in 1923, he packed up his few possessions, moved into Havre, and went to work as a carpenter. It was the right move. Andrew proved to be a gifted carpenter—precise, patient, meticulous, painstaking—and he rarely lacked for work. He built his own house and the houses of many folks throughout the county; but the building he was always proudest of was his church. When a group of Christians in Havre got together to start an Assembly of God church, Andrew was among them. Since he was the only member of the fledgling congregation to own an electric saw, he practically constructed the new church building himself. Christian faith had been Andrew’s rock and his anchor ever since his conversion at that Nazarene camp meeting back in North Dakota before the war; when he joined Havre’s Assembly of God, he dropped his anchor for good. “He was in church every time the doors were open,” as one who loved him put it.
In 1925, Andrew married Juline Ostrem, the sweetheart he had left behind in Norway fifteen years earlier and had faithfully loved and waited for ever since. They had three sons, but their happiness together did not last long. Juline fell sick and died in 1938. Three years later, Andrew married again and started a new family. He fathered four more children, the last one, Norman, born when he was sixty-five.
Andrew’s sons, like Epifanio Affatato’s, were always after their dad to talk about the war—but he wouldn’t. “My father was not an emotional man,” says Norman today, “but he would tear up whenever I tried to talk to him about the war. I don’t know what he saw, but it must have been horrendous.”
One legacy of the war that impressed itself on all the Christofferson children was their father’s absolute ban on guns. As his daughter Nellie wrote, “Dad made a vow when he tossed his gun in the air on Armistice Day—he never again would pick up another gun, and he would not allow one in his home. I recall as a little girl, a friend of one of my older brothers brought a BB gun into the house to show it to my brother. Dad happened to meet the young man at the door, and in no uncertain terms, he told the boy, ‘Get that thing out of my house! I saw enough guns in the war, and I will not allow one in my home!’ Such forceful language was rare for Dad.” Andrew become a U.S. citizen soon after the war, and he never skipped an election and always admonished his children to vote.
When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, this gentle Christian carpenter—a man who rarely raised his voice in pain or anger—threw himself on his bed and wept for all his family to see. “But I fought the war to end all wars!” Andrew cried. “Why am I sending my sons to war?” He had believed President Wilson’s vow implicitly and it broke his heart to see his sons go off to fight another war.
On November 15, 1988, the Havre Daily News ran a photo of Andrew and his second wife, Ruth, with a caption noting that at ninety-eight years old he was Havre’s oldest living World War I veteran. In the last months of his life, Andrew’s Norwegian past resurfaced. One of his sons recollects that the week before his death Andrew quit speaking English and reverted to Norwegian. He had never told his children much about the old country—but now he described in great detail the place where he had grown up and the people he had known. His daughter Nellie remembers being roused by song at three in the morning when she was staying with her father in the last days of his life: Andrew was standing in his bedroom by himself and singing the Norwegian national anthem.
Andrew Christofferson read his Bible so often that he had to bind the volume with electrician’s tape to hold it together. That beloved book was beside him when he died on December 12, 1988, at the age of ninety-nine.
Whoever advised Samuel Goldberg to enlist in the cavalry was a wise fellow. For sixteen months, while his compatriots fought and died and inhaled poison gas in the trenches of Europe, Sam patrolled the Mexico–New Mexico border on the lookout for German attacks that failed to materialize. He never made it to France, never saw any action. The war gave Sam nothing to brag about, but nothing to complain about either. If anything, when he was discharged on September 27, 1919, he was healthier than when he went in. The New Mexico climate agreed with him. No more scrawny Jewish kid from the ghetto. Sam’s mother commented that he ate like a truck driver when he stopped off to visit her after his discharge.
I met Sam in the summer of 2006—ninety-nine years after he had landed on Ellis Island, eighty-eight years after he had joined the cavalry. At 106, he was the last living Jewish immigrant to have served in the American military during World War I—a scrappy, witty, outspoken, fearlessly opinionated man. Sam’s eyes, though watery and weak, were still bright blue, his grip firm, his memory unbelievably sharp. Over the course of two hours, he told me about the blood he had seen during pogroms in Lodz, the stench of the immigrant ship that had brought his family to America, his fierce anger toward his bully of a father, still festering all these years later. He told me about the jobs he had held in the automobile business, his Irish pals in the old neighborhood in Newark, his occasional brushes with anti-Semitism. He said little about his wife and kids. Sam refused to draw any deep meaning from his experience as a Jew in the cavalry during the war. He was still angry at the bastard Polish sergeant who had tried to humiliate him by threatening to issue him a baby blanket. The part of his military service that seemed to bring Sam most pleasure was the memory of his best buddy, a fellow named Edward Moellering. Moellering was a German American from St. Louis who had grown up next door to a Jewish family and picked up Yiddish from hanging around with their kids. When the Jew and the German discovered that they both spoke Yiddish, a friendship sprang up. “That guy could do anything,” Sam told me of his pal, “play the bugle, the drums, run the fastest hundred-yard dash. He was amazing.” It pleased Sam no end when he overheard another soldier say, “Whenever you see Moellering, you see Goldie.” They were that tight.
When I got up to leave, I was practically trembling from the intensity of having talked at length with someone who had been alive for so long and remembered so much. “I’ll send you a copy of my book when it’s finished,” I promised. To which Sam replied, “I hope I don’t live that long”—said not in bitterness but with the inexpressible weariness of having lived beyond his time. Samuel Goldberg died five months later on December 10, 2006.
You get in the army in wartime, your life is not yours,” Tony Pierro told William Everett, the producer of a radio documentary about the last surviving World War I veterans, in the summer of 2006. “You’re there to be used. You have an enemy, you want to kill him—get a hold of the enemy and kill him so he won’t shoot at you. Shoot to kill.” Tony’s words were fierce, but if you listen to the interview, his voice comes across as kindly and relaxed. A sweet old gent summoning up another world, another time. Tony went on to say how happy he had been when the war ended and he got to resume his civilian life: “It’s nice to be in peace now and do what you want. You do it your way—do what you want—nobody tells you what to do. I want to forget all those bad days. Thank God I came out alive.”
Everett had spoken with Tony shortly before my own interview was scheduled, and I phoned him to ask how it went and get some advice. Tony was lucid, Everett said, but hard to get through to: it wasn’t that his memory was gone, he just didn’t care to say much. The one thing he still seemed to respond to was women, and Everett advised me that my interview would go better if I had a pretty young woman with me. So I pressed my daughter Emily, who fits the bill, into service when I visited Tony in Swampscott, Massachusetts, on July 8, 2006. Tony did indeed light up a bit when he saw Emily and pressed her hand warmly—but in the course of the interview he spoke little, and only after being pumped by his brother and his nephew. The only time Tony truly became animated was when the conversation turned to Magdalena. Then the ghost of a smile played on his face, his large faded eyes flickered inside their wrinkles, and he crooned deep in his throat, “Ahh, Magdalena.” Somehow it was heartening to me that love was more enduring than war.
As we sat in the sun in the immaculate backyard garden of the Pierro home in Swampscott that summer day, I felt a great sense of gentle calm coming from Tony. His brother and nephew talked about how fanatical he used to be about keeping his car perfect and his house spotless, how guys used to call him the Duke because he dressed so neatly for his job as manager of an auto body shop and later when he worked on small aircraft engines at a General Electric plant, how sad he and his wife Mary had been that they couldn’t have children. But all of that seemed long behind him. Most of the time, Tony appeared to be dreaming—dreaming deep beneath the calm clouded surface of consciousness. His nephew Rick showed me a photograph of Tony in his Doughboy uniform—spruce, back straight, dark brows nearly meeting over his nose, bright eyes fixed intently, boldly on the camera—and I tried to imagine that youth inside the old man in the baseball cap. As we got up to leave, Tony bent over and kissed my daughter’s hand.
Antonio Pierro died on February 8, 2007, just days before his 111th birthday. He had been the oldest living American and the oldest man born in Italy, and he was the last foreign-born American soldier to have fought in the Great War.