Antonio Pierro—a dapper, dark-eyed young private in the field artillery—spent the morning of October 17, 1918, feeding shells packed with phosgene gas to the big guns in the Argonne forest in France. Tony’s unit—the 82nd “All-American” Division’s 320th Field Artillery—opened fire on the tiny village of Champigneulle at 6:10 A.M., and they kept it up until they had laid down twenty-six hundred rounds of phosgene. When that cloud of poison proved ineffective against the German occupiers, the All-Americans fired off an additional twelve hundred phosgene rounds just before noon. The second barrage did the trick—or seemed to. The Germans left Champigneulle and streamed into the nearby scrap of woods, the Bois des Loges, where they proceeded to slaughter the faltering, inexperienced American infantry.
Before the battle, Tony had transported artillery shells to the front with a horse and cart. Now the cart was piled with the bodies of men who died that day trying—and failing—to seize that bit of woods. Hundreds of American soldiers would perish in the Bois des Loges in the final weeks of October 1918, but Tony was one of the lucky ones. I know to the last decimal just how lucky because eighty-eight years later I sat down with him in the sunny back garden of his house in the seaside town of Swampscott, Massachusetts, and prodded him to ruminate on his life and times. It was July 8, 2006, and Tony Pierro was halfway through his 111th year. One hundred and ten years old. To me it seemed inconceivable to be face-to-face with someone who had gone to war when Woodrow Wilson was the commander in chief.
But service and survival were not the only extraordinary things about Tony Pierro. The very fact that he was living out his days in this lovely, prosperous, quintessentially American setting was in itself a remarkable feat, the final chapter in a humble epic that had begun in an impoverished hill town in the south of Italy. For Tony was not only a soldier but an immigrant. Though he fought in France with the All-Americans, at the time of his service he was not technically an American at all. Born in the far south region of Basilicata in 1896, Tony had emigrated to Massachusetts in 1913 at the age of seventeen. Like millions of other immigrants in the first decades of the twentieth century, he passed through Ellis Island, moved in with relatives who had come before him, and went to work at the first job he could find. Four years later, when the army mailed him a letter ordering him to report for duty, Tony went to war. Even though he was still a citizen of Italy, Tony fought for the United States. Some half a million other immigrants from forty-six different nations did the same. At the height of the nation’s involvement in the worldwide conflict that became known as the Great War, fully 18 percent—nearly one in five—of the 4.7 million Americans in uniform had been born overseas.
Tony Pierro didn’t say much about how fighting with the All-American Division had changed his life or his relationship with his adopted country. He didn’t have to: the facts spoke for themselves. Nearly nine decades later he still had his discharge papers; he was still proud that he had chosen to serve with the American Expeditionary Forces instead of returning to Italy (our ally in that war) to serve in the Italian army; he still remembered his joyous disbelief when the Armistice was declared on November 11, 1918; he still loved his country, by which he meant the country in whose military he had served.
Tony did not choose to fight in the Great War. It was not a conflict he had a stake in or really understood. He had no great love for the discipline or privations of army life. Nonetheless, he fought bravely and loyally. In fighting for the United States of America, he and thousands of immigrants like him became Americans.
God knows, military service was the last thing most of these men had in mind when they and their families came to this country. Many, in fact, had emigrated expressly to avoid mandatory military service. Before the war the United States had no draft; its army was tiny compared to the behemoths massing in Europe, and its military culture quiescent. Had Tony Pierro remained in Italy, Meyer Epstein in the Russian Pale, Andrew Christofferson in Norway, Joe Chmielewski in the Russian section of Poland, all of them would have faced compulsory military service. They came to America for freedom, and freedom from the army was a big part of it. They came to America not to fight but to work—and America obliged, however grudgingly, with dirty, backbreaking, unskilled jobs. Tony dug a rich man’s garden; Meyer hauled radiators through the streets of New York; Andrew reaped wheat on the prairie; Joe mined coal in the hills of western Pennsylvania. Americans gave them work—but as more and more of them poured in, Americans began to doubt the wisdom of keeping the golden door open. They worried about what all these foreigners would do to the strength and purity and complexion of the population. By the early twentieth century, some 14 percent of the country was foreign-born—and every year hundreds of thousands of fresh immigrants were arriving from the ghettoes of eastern Europe and the blasted villages of southern Italy. The likes of Tony Pierro and Meyer Epstein and Epifanio Affatato and Peter Thompson were fine to build and dig and haul—but what if they were called on to fight? Would they? Could they?
The questions took on a new edge when Europe went to war in August of 1914. Most of the immigrants came from the belligerent nations. How would they react? Would Slavs, Italians, Poles, and Germans return “home” to fight for their native lands? Or would they import the conflict into the streets of New York, Chicago, Buffalo, Boston? Anti-immigrant sentiment had been intensifying as the numbers of aliens rose, and now it exploded. Politicians insisted that hyphenated Americans must choose—100 percent American or not American at all. After the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, fear of foreigners fused with fear of Bolsheviks. Wild rumors circulated of an alien fifth column poised to poison reservoirs, blow up munitions supplies, undermine the government. It was Europe’s war, but Europe’s wretched refuse was smuggling the horror into the cities and towns of America.
Everything changed, as it always does, when the nation declared war on April 6, 1917. The United States needed an army—a sizable army—in a hurry, and immigrants overnight went from being a dangerous threat to a valuable resource. Valuable, but unstable. The fundamental issue was, would they fight? But the more pressing question was, would they understand orders? When Tony arrived at Camp Gordon for training in the fall of 1917, three-quarters of his fellow recruits did not speak English. The enlistees from New York pouring into Camp Upton on Long Island spoke forty-three different languages. To talk of cannon fodder was distasteful in time of war, but these swarthy, brutal, jabbering aliens did not even know what a cannon was. If they weren’t cowards, they would be traitors. Or spies. How would they fight when they couldn’t even drill?
Everything changed, as it always does, when the men went into battle together. Tony Pierro had never wanted to be a soldier. Neither did Meyer Epstein, Tommaso Ottaviano, or Max Cieminski. But all of them shipped out to France in the spring and summer of 1918. All of them got crammed in boxcars, transported east to the front line, marched down roads deep in mud and strewn with corpses, handed rifles. And when they were told to go over the top, they did it—and so did the overwhelming majority of other foreign-born soldiers. Most of them didn’t give a damn about making the world safe for democracy. God and country were the last things on their minds. They fought not for an idea but because the sergeant ordered them to fight, because their buddy was fighting, because they were part of a platoon. But in the end, they also fought because they were Americans. Maybe in the grand scheme of things they were cannon fodder, another 150 pounds in the avalanche of flesh that the generals were piling on the enemy—but to the amazement of their officers, and sometimes themselves, they fought like American soldiers.
“Our minds were becoming warped,” said Italian immigrant Giuseppe ( Joe) Nicola Rizzi—Woppy to his buddies—of what happened to him and his comrades in the 35th Division after weeks of bloodshed in the Argonne. “I had become as vicious as the rest. Our nerves were mighty strained. We were crabbing about everything in general—hunger, cold and fatigue. Still, the last puff of a cigarette would be split up; the last bit of chewing tobacco was passed around; the last can of corned willie shared. You see, we were all buddies.” War has its own strange alchemy. Soldiers fear and hate and grouse about every minute of it—and yet nothing else in their lives compares to the intensity, the selflessness, the significance of combat. “Combatants live only for their herd,” writes war correspondent Chris Hedges in his searing book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. “Those hapless soldiers who are bound into their unit to ward off death. There is no world outside the unit. It alone endows worth and meaning. Soldiers will die rather than betray this bond. And there is—as many combat veterans will tell you—a kind of love in this.” In World War I, this bond became especially powerful for the foreign-born. To their fellow soldiers they were kikes, wops, micks, hunkies—no matter how the War Department tried, they couldn’t stamp out these ethnic slurs. But after the battles fought at Soissons, Blanc Mont, Montfaucon, the Hindenburg Line, and the Bois des Loges, the slurs became terms of camaraderie. As Joe Rizzi said, “You see, we were all buddies.”
“To go ‘home’ to the USA means more to us as immigrants fighting for our adopted country,” wrote Morris Gutentag, a Jew who had emigrated from Warsaw in 1913 and enlisted in the 77th Division (nicknamed the Liberty or Melting Pot Division because it drew so heavily on immigrants living in New York). “I was proud that I fought for and we won the war and all my family shared in that. I never regretted it.” Many felt the same way. No man could explain why he was proud of being forced to endure madness, atrocities, filth, hunger, cold, mud, disease, and the unspeakable horror of killing or being killed. But the hell was an essential part of the alchemy of war—an alchemy with the power to turn strangers, even despised aliens, into comrades.
Not that they had it easy when they were shipped back across the Atlantic after the war. Woppy may have become a term of endearment in the Argonne, but in the Red Scare era that followed hard on the heels of the war, immigrants became the target of vicious attacks and discrimination. It didn’t matter that you’d won a medal for bravery; if your name was Cieminski, Rizzi, Dreben, Kocak, or Valente, you were dangerous, subversive, potentially Bolshevik and anti-American. Immigrant soldiers came home from the war to discover that someone else had been hired to do their jobs, that the resurgent Ku Klux Klan openly advocated their deportation, that in the popular press and back-street mutterings they were being lumped together with the “Huns” they had fought in France and Belgium. Pogroms erupted once again in eastern Europe—but now the Jewish victims had nowhere to flee. In 1921 and 1924, Congress voted overwhelmingly to cut the flow of immigration from eastern and southern Europe to a trickle. The parades had barely ended when the doors started slamming shut.
But the pride that Morris Gutentag and thousands like him brought back from the war proved to be a most valuable commodity. Immigrants had learned to stand up for themselves in the army. They had picked up American slang and American swagger. They had mingled for the first time with people from outside their groups—and there was no going back to the way life had been. No one was going to convince these men and their families that they weren’t real Americans, that their pride and patriotism didn’t count.
The same holds true today. Currently about 5 percent of the troops on active duty in the U.S. Armed Forces were born overseas. “Their service is steeped in pride, but also in the paradoxes of allegiance inherent in serving under a foreign flag,” reports Patrik Jonsson in the Christian Science Monitor. Jonsson quotes a senior spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security saying that foreign-born soldiers “identify with the ideals of the United States and they are willing to fight and protect those ideals, even before they’ve secured all the liberties of citizenship.” Two key differences between our current wars and World War I are worth noting: first, today all soldiers, foreign-born and native-born alike, serve voluntarily, while the majority in both groups who fought in 1917 and 1918 were drafted; second, the largest groups of immigrant soldiers are no longer Italians, Poles, Irish, Germans, and Jews but Filipinos and Mexicans.
Different names, different faces, but the issues and feelings have altered little. The journey from alien to citizen—something American immigrants and their descendants carry in their DNA—is both hastened and skewed by war. We all bear the scars and the rewards of this journey, though for those who have fought, who are fighting now, the scars are deeper, the rewards more precious. The journeys that unfold in this book are unique, peculiar to the circumstances of the individuals and the pressures of their time and place. But the outcome is familiar. All of us have come this way; many more are coming still.
Change is one of the great imponderables in the life of an individual, a culture, or a nation. We crave change, or think we do, but rarely do we control or comprehend the forces that bring it about. Great fortune or misfortune, love and loss, inspiration, revelation, a truly new idea, natural or human-induced disaster, friendship, war, relocation: these are among the prime movers of personal change and, in the aggregate, social change. The immigrant soldiers who fought in the Great War experienced two of these fundamental changes almost simultaneously. In many cases just a few years or even months separated their arrival at Ellis Island from their induction in the American Expeditionary Forces. The coincidence profoundly altered the course of their lives. Some were decorated for heroism, passing cherished medals on to their sons and daughters. Some came home broken men, maimed by artillery shells or machine-gun bullets, permanently disabled by poison gas, shell-shocked, alcoholic, unreachably depressed. Some marched with chests thrust out in Memorial Day parades but awoke night after night screaming from combat nightmares. Some—too many—never came home or returned in coffins that had been carefully exhumed from battlefields or foreign cemeteries and shipped back under military escort. Every story is different. Even the ones with happy endings bring tears to the eyes. Every story concerns a life—and often the life of a family—that took a sharply different course because of the changes wrought together by immigration and war.
Tony Pierro was born in Italy in 1896, emigrated to the United States the year before Europe went to war, and entered the U.S. Army six months after Congress voted to declare war on Germany. It was a classic trajectory for immigrant men of Tony’s generation—still numerically the greatest generation of American immigration. Half a million other foreign-born soldiers shared the same fate. In the pages that follow I recount the stories of twelve of them—twelve men who epitomize what this generation of immigrants endured and how they changed in the course of their journeys from immigrant to soldier to citizen. For each of the twelve, I begin in Europe, going as far back as memory and family lore penetrate. I describe the journeys, almost always unforgettably traumatic, from village to port, from port to Ellis Island, in the reeking steerage of the immigrant ship. As the young men and their families spread out—to Boston; Brooklyn; Butte, Montana; Polonia, Wisconsin; South Fork, Pennsylvania; El Paso, Texas—their first priority was inevitably to make a living. But when the world went to war, that priority was rocked by more pressing concerns—concerns for the fate of the countries they had left behind, for family now living and fighting in the war zone. The nearly three years that passed between the outbreak of war and the United States’ entry was a period of intense strain and conflicting loyalties for these men—and that strain only increased after April 1917, when their adopted country became one of the belligerent powers. Of the dozen men I follow—three Jews, four Italians, two Poles, one Irishman, a Norwegian, and a Slovak—six were drafted, four enlisted, two were career soldiers who had spent almost their entire American lives in uniform. Three of these men died in France—two on the battlefield, one of wounds sustained in battle. Two won the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military award for valor. Together the twelve fought in every major engagement that the American Expeditionary Forces, the AEF, pursued in Europe—Belleau Wood; the Aisne-Marne offensive; Belgian Flanders; St. Mihiel, the first battle planned and executed solely by the Americans; the breaking of the Hindenburg Line at the end of September 1918; and the Meuse-Argonne offensive that won the war. The combat experiences of these dozen men—the hours in which they tossed grenades, shuddered under the pounding of artillery shells, crouched in shell holes while the air sizzled with machine-gun fire, died of raging fevers from infected wounds—do not add up to a comprehensive military history of the war. But their actions under fire do frame some of the most critical and proud moments of the war. Moments that changed both the outcome of the fighting and the outcome of the lives I have been privileged to follow. Moments that have proven to be impossible to forget.
The narrative also includes the stories of two men who died not in uniform but nonetheless in combat directly related to the war. Their deaths—the result of persecution to the point of torture of German Americans and German-speaking conscientious objectors—are also a part of the immigrant experience of this war.
Each of the men who appears in this book is remembered, loved, and honored to this day—I know this for a fact because their families have come forward to share stories, letters, diaries, grief, and, inevitably, pride. The descendants of these immigrant soldiers—children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews—cherish photos and medals, display discharge papers framed on their living room walls, preserve uniforms and helmets, pass down memories of how their ancestor came to this country, when and why he fought in the war, and what happened to him. They weren’t all heroes, these immigrant soldiers, but they all fought bravely and they are all remembered with love and with honor. This is a story that continues to unfold in the fabric of American life.