Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 13, 1993 TAG: 9305130232
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ARNOLD HAMILTON KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But once he marched into World War I, the allure quickly came face to face with jarring reality: thunderous booms in the distance, bursts of light shattering the night sky, mangled bodies carried out by the thousands.
"It's absolutely overpowering, the sense of being thousands of miles from home, fighting for freedom," Roche said. "We became men overnight, we kids."
Now, 75 years after America's "doughboys" captured the imagination of the world, Roche, 94, finds himself increasingly alone with his memories of this nation's first full-bore military effort in another hemisphere.
With World War I vets dying at a rate of 1,000 a month, the doughboys are preparing for what well may be a final salute - a reunion and celebration this summer in Chicago that includes the private minting of bronze medals.
For many doughboys, the commemoration is evoking melancholy, a sadness that so few of their buddies are still living. They're dismayed, too, that several of the very disputes that sparked their war - Balkan nationalism, for example - remain deadly flash points.
"You left with a feeling that you had done something to alleviate some of those problems, that you had made it easier for them to live," said Orville Rummell, now 93, an Army Signal Corps corporal who was exposed to mustard gas. "But over the years . . . it's become obvious it didn't work out to the extent that we had hoped."
Still, the war forever changed the United States.
"We made America a world power," said Roche, who lives in North Hollywood, Calif. "We saw America from the days of horses and mules, handguns with a few machine guns, and a few outdated field pieces to jet fighters and the moon landing.
"We have lived in a wonderful generation of American history."
Only about 48,000 U.S. veterans of World War I remain, according to experts, and their average age is nearly 98.
By the turn of the century, fewer than 7,000 are expected to be living.
The transformation that began with the war went beyond technology. For the 2 million doughboys, the war "opened their minds to the rest of the world," said Frank Vandiver, president emeritus of Texas A&M University and head of the school's Mosher Institute for Defense Studies.
"The U.S. tried to draw its boundaries back in, into isolationism, but it didn't work for the guys who had been there," he said. "They knew better."
At least at first, the conflagration that began in Europe held little interest for most Americans. The United States was still largely an agricultural society in 1914, its people sprinkled across the countryside, many in remote areas where news arrived slowly and where weather and crops were of paramount concern.
As tensions overseas mounted, America fought a battle with itself, an internal war between a tradition of isolationism and an emerging internationalism.
But once the president, Woodrow Wilson, persuaded Congress to declare war on Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1917, the United States mobilized a 4.7 million-member fighting force - up from about 175,000 in 1915. Eventually, 2 million soldiers fought overseas.
The four-year conflict claimed 8 million lives - 5 million on the Allied side - and left 21 million injured.
Many of the Americans who became the celebrated doughboys - a term of disputed origin applied to the U.S. infantrymen in World War I - were from small, rural towns or farms.
They averaged about a sixth-grade education. Most had never visited a big city, much less set foot on foreign soil.
Suddenly, they were herded onto ships, dispatched to foreign lands and cultures halfway around the world and thrust into a maelstrom of poison gas, machine guns and heavy artillery, the likes of which the world had never seen together in one war.
It was a frightening, disorienting experience.
"You lived constantly with the fear of whether you would stay there [in Paris] or be sent to the front. The Germans were only 20 miles outside Paris at one time while I was there," said Rummell, who lives in Woodburn, Ore. "The [artillery] shellings with the Big Berthas had a great psychological effect. And I had been up to the front three times. You could see how devastating the war was."
The war was so foreign to his experiences, growing up in Chicago in a strict Baptist family, that it "changed me considerably," Rummell said.
"It put a different value on what you did, how you did it, how you enjoyed what you got, how you lived each day," he said.
To make matters worse, America was ill-prepared for a modern war. The doughboys brought their own rifles and sidearms, but airplanes and artillery had to be borrowed from the Allies. The heavy wool uniforms, always two sizes too big or too short, were downright embarrassing.
"The other armies, they were dressed much better than we were," said Otis Garrett, 98, a retired Oklahoma City oilman who served in the Army's 5th Balloon Company. "We were dressed like a bunch of tramps. I'm not trying to feed you a line of bull - we looked like tramps.
"Our shoes were not as good; everything else was not as good; nothing we were issued was as good as our enemies' and our friends'."
Moreover, when the doughboys returned after the Nov. 11, 1918, armistice, they were given $60 and turned loose. There was no GI Bill. There were no job-training programs. There were no veterans' medical centers.
"We had little to come back to," said E.J. "Ed" Niedermaier, 97, of Dallas, an Army engineer. "The World War I veterans were slighted.
"We were promised [benefits], but time and again, they [U.S. government officials] said they didn't have the money."
As a result, the World War I veterans chartered such groups as the American Legion and lobbied for such benefits as the GI Bill and veterans' medical care.
"We didn't want the veterans of the Second World War to come back like we did - to nothing," Niedermaier said.
The soldiers who returned from World War I weren't the naive, wet-behind-the-ears doughboys who had been sent into battle amid fanfare and parading only 18 months earlier.
"All great wars change morality, and World War I was no exception," Vandiver said. "The country boys went to France and encountered ladies of the evening. They were never the same again. They didn't go home with the same morality they left with."
This summer, Chicago's McCormick Foundation, the Veterans of World War I of the U.S.A. Inc., and other groups will honor the remaining World War I veterans. The vets will receive a bronze medal that depicts Nike, the winged goddess of victory, with the words, "A grateful nation remembers. . . . They came on the wings of eagles."
As they prepare for the celebrations, several veterans say they are disappointed that the "war to end war" instead served as only an opening volley in a century replete with global conflict.
Even more troubling, former soldiers and scholars say, is that some of the conflicts that contributed to World War I continue to haunt the world.
Roger Biles, a historian at Oklahoma State University, said the disillusionment is understandable, given the expectations that greeted America's first world-war effort.
"There was such a spirit of adventure, of people getting up and going on this great odyssey, to go fight in this exotic place . . . for a just cause, and then returning home victorious," he said. "This country had never had an experience quite like that."
All of which made the disappointment greater when the Treaty of Versailles failed to solidify the peace and World War II ignited only two decades later.
"We really thought we had things fixed," Roche said. "But we didn't."
by CNB