Ridgewood's World War I soldiers to be honored on Veterans Day

From North Jersey.com: Ridgewood's World War I soldiers to be honored on Veterans Day
American Legion Post 53 is planning a Veterans Day rededication of 14 plaques dating back to 1931 and honoring World War I casualties.

The plaque rededication is one of several historical renewal projects throughout the village that the Legion hopes to complete over the next two years, according to Legionnaire Chris Stout.

On Armistice Day in 1931, intertwined with the initial dedication of Graydon Park, Post 53 planted 14 white ash trees, each in memory of a Ridgewood soldier who died during World War I. Each tree was also accompanied by a plaque bearing the soldier's name. The ceremony was conducted in part with a nationwide movement to plant 10 million trees in commemoration of the 200th birthday of George Washington.

Stout, who presented plans for the rededication to the Village Council during a work session in early July, said the ceremony is the culmination of years of research and planning.

"We basically rediscovered the initial plaques several years ago and thought that was kind of cool," he said in an interview. "Then we realized a lot of them were gone. We thought it was too bad that that event would completely disappear."

Over the 80 years since the original dedication, some plaques and trees disappeared. According to Stout's presentation, four of the trees remain, while only two plaques are still visible at Graydon Park. Several vacant cement bases remain near the original trees, while some have disappeared entirely. Stout currently has possession of two of the missing bronze plaques, and discovered one at the southeast corner of Graydon, three feet below the sand, with a metal detector.

While Post 53 initially wanted to plant 14 more trees and create an equal number of new plaques for the rededication, members eventually decided that it would be easier to consolidate everything into a single monument. The plan is now to place a plaque honoring all 14 soldiers on a boulder – a structure similar to the 9/11 memorial located in Van Neste Park – and install it in the northwest corner of Graydon Park, near The Stable parking lot. The plaque will display the names of all 14 original honorees, along with the dates and locations of their deaths.

Instead of planting new trees, the Legion will "symbolically adopt" an existing red oak in that section of the park, according to Stout.

Early plans placed the monument at the corner of Maple and Linwood avenues, but Post 53 decided to move it to a more convenient location for accessibility purposes. The new location will allow visitors the option to park at The Stable and increase traffic through the area, giving the display more attention, according to Stout.

"We wanted it to be a special spot," he said.

The project represents a collaborative effort between Stout and two local historians, Ridgewood Library reference librarian Peggy Norris and historian Joe Suplicki. Stout's role has been to focus on the military side of the research, while Norris and Suplicki have honed in on Graydon Park's own history. To this end, Post 53's plans include an interpretive panel that will accompany the memorial plaque and will detail the history of the area many residents know exclusively as Graydon Pool. Norris and Suplicki have worked on the text that will appear on the panel.

"I think it's a nice thing to put into Graydon Park, for local historians," Stout said. "People will be able to go and see the history of the park."

The total cost of the proposed change, including a commemorative bench donated by the Ridgewood A.M. Rotary Club, will be around $2,000; funds were approved by the Village Council last year, Stout said. To allow for easier handicapped and wheelchair access, Stout is considering installing a path to be paid for with a brick sale.

At the council meeting, Deputy Mayor Tom Riche spoke in support of the brick sale and the project in general, citing his father, a retired Army lieutenant colonel.

"Any time we have an opportunity to honor those who have served, we should seize that moment," he said in a later comment. "This project not only commemorates those veterans of WWI, but will provide a place of solace and reflection for all those brave men and women who followed them. A commemorative brick dedicated to Lt. Colonel John V. Riche would, with humility, take its place beside other true American heroes."

Stout hopes that the fence along Maple Avenue can be modified to allow access to the monument without a pool badge.

"It's a public park," he said. "We're hoping the town will be able to redo the fence in such a way that people will be able to visit."

Post 53 is now knee-deep in planning for the Veterans Day rededication on Nov. 11. Stout will be the emcee for the event and will give a presentation on the military side, while Norris will discuss Graydon history. Stout also has placed a request with West Point Academy for a marching band, a color guard and a choir to attend the ceremony.

"If that happens, it's going to be a sensational event," he said.

Stout said that Tim Cronin, director of Parks and Recreation, has agreed to help uncover and dig up any missing plaques after the pool season ends. Plaques may be under several feet of sand or absorbed into the fully grown trees. All the original plaques that can be recovered will be on display at the ceremony, and subsequently entered into the historical reserves at the Ridgewood Public Library.

Stout envisions this project as the first of many that can renew interest in Ridgewood's history. He specifically cited the flag pole at Veterans Field as a possible candidate for rededication, and hopes to prepare a similar event for Veterans Day in 2012.

"Little by little, we can show and publish and display the history of the village around town, so people who are interested can learn," he said.

The project is slated to be officially voted on by the Village Council at an Aug. 3 work session.

Burials honor Civil War, World War I veterans

The De Soto Explorer: Burials honor Civil War, World War I veterans

Sun Rodgers of Leavenworth and Betty Wright of Shawnee cried and clung together during funeral services Tuesday at Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery.

The two Gold Star Mothers didn’t know the 14 veterans and three veterans’ wives who were buried in a military funeral orchestrated by the Missing in America Project, but they said the experience was still an emotional one. It brought fresh to mind the sons they had lost — Sun Rodgers’ son, Sgt. Ricky Rodgers, to an illness in 2005 while stationed at Fort Polk, La.; and Betty Wright’s son, Pvt. Shawn Wright, to suicide in 1991 while home on leave.

Shortly after their deaths, Ricky Rodgers and Shawn Wright received appropriate burials with military honors. But the honors bestowed on the 14 veterans buried Tuesday were long overdue.

Pvt. George McCarthy served in the Civil War and died in 1946 at the age of 102. He was cremated and his ashes sat unclaimed in the storage of Missouri-based funeral home D.W. Newcomer’s Sons for more than 60 years. The remains of the 13 other veterans, all of whom served in World War I, suffered a similar fate, having no one to claim them for decades.

No one, that is, until the Missing in America Project stepped in. The California-based national nonprofit organization works closely with funeral homes to verify and give proper burial services to the veterans left unclaimed by family members. Linda Smith, head of operations for the organization, says any given funeral home in the United States could have anywhere from 10 to 1,000 sets of cremains of veterans in its storage. Usually state laws dictate that funeral homes must hold onto cremains until such time as they are claimed, Smith said. It is the Missing In America Project’s goal to claim and validate as many of these unclaimed veterans as possible, making sure each and every one is buried, with appropriate military honors, in a national cemetery.

But it’s not an easy goal to achieve. Smith said it took about a year for the Missing in America Project to go through the process of proving the 14 veterans buried Tuesday at Fort Leavenworth were, in fact, veterans. She said funeral homes give Missing in America lists with names of those among their store of unclaimed cremains they believe to be veterans. Then Missing in America researchers must go through whatever records are available, using such means as genealogy websites and historical society websites, to prove their identities. Missing in America also works to verify the unclaimed cremains of family members of veterans.

Thus far, Smith said, the organization has been responsible for the burials of more than 1,000 veterans whose ashes were formerly unclaimed. She said the long process of getting them from the shelf of a funeral home to the ground where they should rightfully be is a rewarding one.

“It’s sad that they are sitting in funeral homes, but when you find them it gives you a sense of accomplishment to get these guys honored like they should have been,” she said in a news conference after Tuesday’s services. Smith noted that all of those buried Tuesday came from D.W. Newcomer’s Sons, which operates several funeral homes throughout the Kansas City metro area.

The mood during Tuesday’s ceremony was somber and respectful, as honors were first bestowed on McCarthy, followed by the 13 World War I veterans and three wives. Posting of the U.S. National Colors was conducted by members of the Kansas National Guard. Civil War re-enactors then carried McCarthy’s urn to the honors table, where military honors were performed by members of the Kansas National Guard, who slowly and methodically unfolded and re-folded an American flag. A gun salute was performed and “Taps” was played by Samuel Young, one of the re-enactors.

The re-enactors then transported McCarthy’s urn to the selected gravesite.

A separate, but similar, ceremony for the World War I veterans followed and included words from guest speakers retired Lt. Gen. Robert Arter and Col. Roger Donlon.

The services were closed by William Owensby Jr., director of the Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery complex for the National Cemetery Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs. He said his organization had been and would continue to work with the Missing in America Project to find and bury any and every unclaimed veteran throughout the country.

Following the services, and with tears still in her eyes, Wright talked about what seeing the veterans finally reach their final resting place at Fort Leavenworth had meant to her.

“It’s always moving, it’s always important that these honors are paid to whoever deserves them and to identify these soldiers from so long ago, and finally give them their due honor and respect, is just very emotional,” she said.

Wright said she had just recently gotten involved with Missing in America herself as a volunteer, wanting to be a part of what she said was “finding these soldiers, veterans, that are right now, they’re forgotten. And we don’t want to forget anyone.”

The following World War I veterans and wives were buried Tuesday:

Lt. Col. Ernest Mark and wife, Frances Mark; both discovered by their daughter, dead of poisoning, on June 1, 1937
Maj. Albert Duval; died in 1959
1st Lt. Charles Shumaker and wife, Alvira Shumaker; Charles Shumaker died in 1943; no date of death listed for wife
Sgt. 1st Class James McDonald; died in 1951
Sgt. Roy Robbins; died in 1952
Sgt. William Kinney; died in 1932
Pvt. John Carpenter and wife, Marnodie Carpenter; John Carpenter died in 1967; no date of death listed for wife
Pvt. Cyrus Dorr; killed in action in 1918
Pvt. John McFadyean; died in 1941
Pvt. Ralph Lowe; died in 1960
Pvt. Ralph Wilson; died in 1952
Pvt. John Lawing; died in 1957
Pvt. Jerome Joffee; died in 1953.

Walter Reed hospital closing its doors after century

BBC News: Walter Reed hospital closing its doors after century
The US Army's flagship hospital in Washington, which has treated presidents and servicemen for more than a century, is closing.

The Walter Reed Army Medical Center will move to a new location in the state of Maryland in August.

A closing ceremony has been held at the facility, where hundreds of thousands of US troops have received treatment.

The shutting of Walter Reed, which opened in 1909, had been planned since 2005 as a cost-cutting measure.

The 80-bed hospital was the subject of a 2007 scandal about substandard living conditions for wounded troops in outpatient care, which ultimately led to improved care.

Patients and staff members celebrated the hospital's history at a ceremony on Wednesday on the parade grounds in front of the facility, which has accommodated troops who served in conflicts from World War I to the war in Afghanistan.

The Army will hand over the red-brick building, located six miles (10km) from the White House, to the state department and the District of Columbia on 15 September.

In 2005, a government commission voted to close the hospital and consolidate its operations with the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and a hospital in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, in order to save money.

A host of presidents and US commanders have died at the facility over the past century, including President Dwight D Eisenhower, Gen Jon J Pershing and Douglas MacArthur.

The new facility in Maryland will be called the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Pennsylvania: Traveling World War I exhibit visits Harrisburg today

From The Sentinel: Traveling World War I exhibit visits Harrisburg today
The "Honoring Our History Tour," a traveling exhibit of the National World War I Museum at the Liberty Memorial, will be hosted by the State Museum in Harrisburg from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. today.

The exhibit is part of the 75th anniversary observance of the financial firm Waddell & Reed and is visiting cities in which the company has offices. Founders Chauncey Waddell and Cameron Reed were World War I veterans, according to the museum's website.

The museum is in Kansas City, Mo.

The exhibit uses a custom 18-wheel truck as its traveling gallery, according to the museum. It offers a free, interactive and educational experience designed by the museum.

The exhibit trailer will be parked in front of the North Office Building in the Capitol Complex on North Street, a short walk east of The State Museum.

Donations to support the non-profit museum, and funds raised at each stop for the traveling exhibit will be divided equally between each local museum and the National World War I Museum.

For more information, go to www.theworldwar.org or www.statemuseumpa.org.

Mimi Leder to Direct New Adaptation of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

From Collider.com: Mimi Leder to Direct New Adaptation of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is an incredibly powerful and harrowing book about World War I and the 1930 film adaptation (which won Best Picture) nails the heart of the novel despite the inability to show the graphic violence Remarque describes. Seventy-one years later, director Mimi Leder (Pay It Forward) will helm a new adaptation from a script by Ian Stokell and Lesley Paterson. “With this version, most of it takes place in the last 24 hours of the war. WWI fighting was brutal, hand-to-hand and ugly, and it practically wiped out a generation of young men,” Leder tells Deadline, adding “What is so compelling is the catastrophic levels of violence, this mind-numbing savagery, and what happens to a boy who in the journey to becoming a man has to become an animal.”

Hit the jump for Leder’s additional comments on her plans for the adaptation and my concerns with her take on the project.

Leder is right when she says that All Quiet on the Western Front is as relevant today as it was when Remarque published it in 1929.

“War destroys the humanity of this young man, stripping away his ability to feel, and making him act like a beast. Taken with the emotionality of how this young boy joined the war out of nationalism as many of our boys do to keep America safe, there is a message here about what happens to them and the politicians who are making war. It’s alarming how little this has changed. There is an opportunity to make a great film about war, but it is also an anti-war film, an un-romanticized version of war and its consequences.”

I understand the need for Leder to take a different approach with her adaptation, and I don’t necessarily mind that there’s a message about how war can turn good men into monsters. And I’m also glad that she’s keeping World War I as the setting and attempting to draw a parallel to our current wars rather than directly set it in the present day. However, the parallels have become tougher because war has changed so drastically since 1930.

Remember, in 1930, World War I was only eleven years in the past and those who had fought and survived could see the movie and remember the battle. Although it’s told from the perspective of a German soldier, one of the grand ironies is that soldiers on different sides can have the same experience despite being “enemies”. But our current wars are more complicated. A soldier can’t always tell the difference between a peaceful civilian and “the enemy”. Furthermore, World War I wasn’t about occupying other countries and installing systems of government.

But the remake has and edge on the original because in 1930 they didn’t know a second World War was less than a decade away and one of its causes was the massive debt forced on Germany due to their defeat in the first World War. Leder, Stokell and Paterson will have a challenge if they hope to find the common thread of history and how World War I can still be seen in the 20th and 21st century. It’s not enough to say “Look how brutal war can be and damn those heartless politicians who send men and women to die.”

We’ve seen that movie plenty of times and oddly, that’s not the most affecting moment in the original. The moment that sticks with me is when the protagonist is on leave and is brought into to speak to students at his old school. The war is kept so distant from the people that the young men in the classroom are just like him before he went to fight. They’re eager, they’re nationalistic, and they have no idea of the horrors involved. We can see that parallel today as the lack of a draft, the media focusing on other matters (most of them far less important than the war), and placing the burden on military families keeps the war out of sight and out of mind. The nation is certainly weary of fighting two wars but not enough to make the effort to stop it.

Last year we reported that Daniel Radcliffe was attached to star, but it’s unknown if he’s still on board. Filming is set for late 2012 and Leder says “We need a battlefield and an old village so we’ll go where the financing takes us,” which makes it sound as if the film is still isn’t fully funded yet.

On a non movie-related news note (but one that’s relevant to this story), please consider donating to Not Alone, an organization that helps veterans to deal with the combat stress and PTSD.

World War I exhibit's sponsors donate to tidy doughboy statue

From Post-Gazette.com: World War I exhibit's sponsors donate to tidy doughboy statue

As a traveling World War I exhibit was being set up in the parking lot across from the Heinz History Center Friday, its sponsors, Waddell & Reed, presented Lawrenceville United with a $7,500 check the size of a beach towel.

The money it represents will help the neighborhood group care for Lawrenceville's most notable gateway: the statue of the World War I doughboy and the landscaping around it.

Thomas Butch, president of Waddell & Reed, a mutual fund company, said the doughboy statue is one of the city's icons. It is also the logo of the branding campaign that Lawrenceville stakeholder groups began several years ago.

"In contemplation of our stop here, we got in touch with the folks who tend to the care of that site." said Mr. Butch.

"On behalf of the thousands of residents and business owners in Lawrenceville, thank you," said Lauren Byrne, executive director of Lawrenceville United. "This means a great deal to us."

The exhibit is in Pittsburgh through today, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and free to the public. It is in an 18-wheeler and holds a slice of the National World War I Museum in Kansas City, Mo.

The traveling exhibit will visit 75 cities this year, the 75th anniversary of Waddell & Reed, which is also based in Kansas City. The company's founders were veterans of World War I.

Mr. Butch, a trustee of the National World War I Museum and a native of Mt. Lebanon, said the sponsorship of the traveling exhibit is a unique way to celebrate the company's anniversary, "to tell the larger story and raise consciousness about that war."

The doughboy statue, which sits at the convergence of Butler Street and Penn Avenue, was erected in 1921.

World War I Returns to Center Stage

The New York Times: Theater: World War I Returns to Center Stage

“WORLD WAR I is thought of as this old-fashioned war,” the director Garry Hynes said, “but to my point of view it has the force of an apocalypse.”

Ms. Hynes, whose Druid Theater production of the 1928 Sean O’Casey play “The Silver Tassie” arrives on Sunday as part of the 2011 Lincoln Center Festival, is hardly alone in feeling the urge to remind people just how bloody the conflict stretching from 1914 to 1918 was. “The war to end all wars,” as Woodrow Wilson optimistically called it, failed woefully in achieving that goal, to the point where the historian Adam Hochschild titled his acclaimed recent book about the period “To End All Wars.”

But the era has spawned a cultural cottage industry of material about the war, encompassings film (Steven Spielberg’s “War Horse” is due out in December), literature (“Bright’s Passage,” a first novel from the singer-songwriter Josh Ritter, about a West Virginia farm boy who survives the war through rather miraculous means, was released in June) and art (a recent Museum of Modern Art exhibition spotlighted the harrowing war-themed works of Otto Dix and Max Beckmann).

In a telephone interview Mr. Hochschild credited the surge in interest to several novels written in the 1990s, most notably the “Regeneration” trilogy by Pat Barker. But in recent years the highest concentration of war-themed projects have been seen on the stage. First came a revival of the 1928 R. C. Sherriff play “Journey’s End,” which follows a tense British infantry company holed up in the trenches of Saint-Quentin, France. The production, with its memorable curtain call displaying the names of some 6,000 dead soldiers, won critical accolades in 2007 but never caught on at the box office. It won the Tony Award for best revival a few hours after closing.

That production had transferred from London, as did the next major play about World War I to reach Broadway, the current “War Horse” at Lincoln Center. The adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s young-adult novel about an English youth roaming war-ravaged France in search of his loyal horse (portrayed by a life-size puppet) connected with both critics and audiences; it won five Tonys last month. (Mr. Spielberg’s “War Horse” is a puppet-free adaptation of the novel.)

Not content with the plays already set in the period, directors are also transplanting the works of Shakespeare to these killing fields, as with the “King Lear” that is part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s five-play residence at the Park Avenue Armory. “ ‘Lear’ is the ultimate play of collapse,” said its director, David Farr. “Nothing is left by the end. Not faith, not life, not breath, not even reason. The old world has been dismantled, but is there a new one? This was, I think, what many people felt at the end of World War I.”

Daniel Sullivan made a similar shift with his Public Theater production of “All’s Well That Ends Well” in Central Park this summer, although he allowed that the move had less to do with the war than with the technological advances that accompanied it. “Actually I just wanted to see Helena cure the king with a hypodermic needle,” he said.

Modernity plays a crucial role in several of these pieces, although rarely in such a beneficial fashion. The horrors of war occur offstage in “The Silver Tassie,” but O’Casey does include a scene in which two middle-aged men are reduced to, as one of them puts it, “hot and quivery” wrecks at the prospect of operating a telephone.

“War Horse,” meanwhile, takes a far darker view of change. In a deeply symbolic moment near the end of the play Joey, the title character, is nearly run over by a tank.

“There’s a historical hinge around this period — from a tool-based to a machinery-based understanding of warfare,” said Tom Morris, who, with Marianne Elliott, won a Tony for directing “War Horse.” “Our ability as humans to do a lot of damage in war took a huge leap forward.”

One result of this expanded capacity was the reliance on trench warfare. Mr. Hochschild estimated that more than 85 percent of American fatalities occurred in the muddy trenches of northern France and Belgium, which shielded both sides from at least some of the carnage but had its own dangers: gangrene, cholera, dysentery, typhus. Such forced close quarters would seem to be a natural for depiction on the stage, but of the five plays mentioned, only “Journey’s End” focused solely on the trenches.

While one of the four acts in “The Silver Tassie” involves the trenches, the script roams so far and wide that W. B. Yeats, a founder of the Abbey Theater in Dublin, famously objected to the play on structural grounds, setting off a feud with O’Casey that played no small role in his departure from Ireland.

“I always get the feeling that O’Casey sat down with this play and wrote like his pen was on fire,” said Ms. Hynes, who was the artistic director of the Abbey in the early 1990s.

She said that “Tassie,” with its fragmented, sprawling narrative, represents the road not taken for Irish theater. “One must remember that the Abbey would have closed if not for the success of ‘Juno and the Paycock’ and ‘The Plough and the Stars,’ ” she said, referring to two of O’Casey’s earlier plays. But as a result of the skittishness of Yeats and others, she added, “Ireland got stuck with a kind of calcified, aberrant naturalism.”

Nearly every director interviewed for this article said the resurgence of plays about World War I — a conflict that many historians now believe to have been unnecessary, Mr. Hochschild noted — may stem from public ambivalence toward the current United States military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“We’re sufficiently distanced from the First World War to convey the pure horror without getting messed up in the politics of it,” Mr. Morris said of “War Horse,” “and that makes it a more powerful way to discuss any war.”

The use of previous conflicts to illuminate current ones is nothing new: Mr. Hochschild cited the popularity of “M*A*S*H,” which was set during the Korean War but widely accepted as a response to Vietnam; and Ms. Hynes said that at one point she considered dressing her “Silver Tassie” cast in clothes that would evoke more contemporary battles.

Mr. Morris did point out one aspect of World War I that might make recollections of it more palatable for audiences, at least in the United States. “Michael Morpurgo told me it was the ultimate example of the Americans going over, sorting things out and coming home. He added, ‘And probably the last one.’ ”

Final honours for fallen grandfather

From Sydney Morning Herald: Final honours for fallen grandfather
JOHN Sheridan had four lines to play with when considering the epitaph that would be etched on to his grandfather's headstone. But in the end he opted to keep it simple. The inscription reads: ''Though death divides, his memory lives on.''

Mr Sheridan's grandfather, Captain Thomas Francis Sheridan, was killed 95 years ago almost to the day but it was only last year that he was buried in a single grave. Today his headstone will be unveiled at an evening dedication ceremony held in a small farming village in northern France.

Captain Sheridan was killed at the Battle of Fromelles in 1916. In April this year John Sheridan heard his grandfather's remains had been identified. One of 250 British and Australian soldiers buried by the Germans following an overnight battle, Captain Sheridan is among 110 Diggers science has been able to identify by name.

Advertisement: Story continues below Mr Sheridan has made the trip from his home in Blackburn South to the compact one-church village in northern France to attend today's ceremony.

''The reason I want to do this is because my father always wanted to know what happened to his father and he can't - but I can do it for him,'' Mr Sheridan, 67, said before he left Melbourne.

''I also want to go on behalf of my grandmother, too,'' he added. ''It's going to be quite overwhelming, I think.''

In his luggage will be some of the postcards his grandfather wrote to his wife Teresa and five-year-old son Jack - including one Army-issue card written the day before he was shot in a German trench after making it across enemy lines. By the time the postcard was franked ''July 20 1916'' at the field post office, Captain Sheridan was almost certainly dead.

Mr Sheridan said he was keen to donate some of the photographs to a new museum, being built as part of a wider project to develop the Western Front Remembrance Trail to which the Australian government will contribute $10 million over four years with local authorities.

Today marks the 95th anniversary of the Battle of Fromelles, considered the worst 24 hours in Australian military history. More then 5530 Australians were killed, wounded or missing in one overnight battle that failed to gain any territory or strategic advantage.

Of 250 soldiers found in the mass graves, 140 are unidentified - but testing will continue until 2014.

The Australian Army's Major Jason Kerr, who is in charge of reinterments for the joint Australian-British project, said several DNA test swabs were sent to London for analysis earlier this month ahead of the next identification board meeting in March. ''We'll keep going with it,'' he said.

Major Kerr said anyone who believes they may be related to an Australian soldier buried at Fromelles should visit www.army.gov.au/fromelles or call 1800 019 090.

A Black World War I Hero May Finally Receive the Medal of Honor

Henry Johnson

From The Moderate Voice: A Black World War I Hero May Finally Receive the Medal of Honor
CODA: Commenting on “Today, a Grateful Nation Presents Its Highest Military Honor,” Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés reminded us about a black regiment during the Civil War. This is the story of a member of New York City’s all-black 369th Infantry Regiment — the famous “Harlem Blackcats”—who distinguished himself through combat heroism during World War I on a French battlefield.

Yesterday, Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Petry became only the second living recipient of the Medal of Honor for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at a White House ceremony where President Obama said the medal “reflects the gratitude of our entire nation.”

And it does. Petry received the Medal of Honor for his heroism during a fire battle in eastern Afghanistan when he, already wounded, retrieved and threw a live grenade away from his fellow Rangers, preventing the serious injury or death of his comrades. But as he released the grenade, it detonated and catastrophically amputated his right hand.

There is absolutely no doubt that Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Petry deserves our nation’s highest honor for exemplifying “gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of one’s own life above and beyond the call of duty.”

However, there are other cases of heroism where — in my opinion and in the opinion of others — such gallantry and intrepidity deserving of our nation’s highest honor for bravery in combat is yet to be recognized or where such recognition has been very slow in coming.

One such case is Marine Corps Sgt. Rafael Peralta, who in a fire battle in Fallujah, Iraq, in November 2004, while himself mortally wounded, shielded his fellow Marines from serious injury or even death by pulling an enemy-thrown grenade to his body, thereby absorbing the blunt of the blast and giving his life in the process.

Peralta was recommended for the Medal of Honor by the Commandant of the Marine Corps — a recommendation that was endorsed by the Secretary of the Navy. Instead he received the Navy Cross.

There has been a huge outcry at this injustice, by fellow Marines, the media, elected officials, the American people and by Sgt. Peralta’s family, who refused to accept the Navy Cross. Numerous articles have been written on this, including by this author, here and elsewhere.

Today, let us rejoice that we have a second living Medal of Honor recipient from the Afghanistan War, but let us not give up on Sgt. Peralta, just as so many have never given up on Henry Lincoln Johnson, a member of New York City’s all-black 369th Infantry Regiment — the famous “Harlem Blackcats” — who 93 years ago “displayed extraordinary valor” on a French battlefield when at least 200 African-American members of his Regiment were killed and another 1,300 were wounded. Johnson himself was shot three times and suffered 21 debilitating knife wounds.

The 369th’s approximately 3,000-man volunteer unit was lent to the French army by General John J. Pershing, who commanded the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF).

A recently unearthed memo, signed by Gen. Pershing, details the heroism of Private Johnson and of Private Needham Roberts, Johnson’s comrade on sentry duty the day of the battle:

Reports in hand show notable instance of bravery and devotion shown by 2 soldiers of American colored regiment operating in French sector. Before day light on May 15 Private Henry Johnson and Private Roberts while on sentry duty at some distance from one another were attached by German raiding party estimated at 20 men, who advanced in 2 groups attacking at once from flank and rear. Both men fought bravely in hand to hand encounters, one resorting to use of bolo knife after rifle jammed and further fighting with bayonet and butt became impossible. Evidence that at least one and probably second German was severely cut. Third known to have been shot. Attention drawn to fact that the 2 colored sentries first attacked continued fighting after receiving wounds, and despite of use of grenades by superior force, and should be given credit for preventing by their bravery the taking prisoner of our men. Three of our men wounded, of whom two by grenades but all are recovering, and wounds in two cases are slight.
It is this memo, along with an eyewitness account and a letter to Johnson’s wife from Johnson’s commanding officer, that may be the additional evidence that confirms that “Mr. Johnson is a hero and deserves the Congressional Medal of Honor,” according to Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden.

Sen. Wyden, New York Sen. Charles Schumer, Portland City Commissioner Nick Fish and many others have sought the Medal of Honor for Sgt. Johnson. They include Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., former Albany N.Y. Mayor John McEnery, former N.Y. Rep. Joe DioGuardi, former N.Y. state Rep. Michael McNulty and Johnson’s son, Tuskegee Airman Herman Johnson.

While the French government quickly rewarded Johnson’s daring with its highest possible award for valor, the Croix de Guerre Avec Palme– making him the first American of any race to receive France’s highest military medal for heroism in battle — his own country was slow, even reluctant, in awarding Johnson his due honors. In 1996, long after his death, Johnson finally received the Purple Heart and, in 2003, Schumer helped obtain the Distinguished Service Cross for Johnson.

In early May, Schumer and Wyden sent 2,000 pages of new information to Robert Much, the Secretary of the Army, arguing that Johnson should have been awarded the medal long ago.

“After a 93-year quest fraught with racial discrimination and hampered by military bureaucracy,” Johnson’s supporters, including Sen. Schumer, believe they have finally built an “ironclad case” to award the Medal of Honor posthumously to Sgt. Henry Johnson, an African-American hero who “fought with uncommon bravery in World War I.”

Knee-deep in blood-soaked battlefields

The Jerusalem Post: Knee-deep in blood-soaked battlefields

Wars can only be justified when they serve life-affirming values, not the glory of kings or generals

The two sides of war – useless carnage on the one hand, necessary heroism on the other – were consistently in evidence as I toured the World War I and II battlefields of Belgium and France with my wife and older children.

In Flanders and at the Somme, where millions of soldiers lost their lives in the First World War to capture a few yards (which were quickly recaptured by the enemy), the feel of death lingers nearly a century later. Everywhere around the towns of Albert at the Somme and Ypres in Flanders there are graves, endless mounds of graves – so many that it would take weeks to visit them all. Military cemeteries dot the landscape with the ubiquitousness of Starbucks or McDonald’s.

Each cemetery has hundreds and often thousands of headstones.

Never have I been surrounded by so much death. A single British memorial at Thiepval lists the names of 72,000 soldiers whose bodies were never recovered.

The pockmarked, cratered battlefields where so many soldiers died in vain are likewise everywhere along the massive “Western Front,” which extended from Switzerland to the North Sea. Nearly 100 years later, the cemeteries are still beautifully maintained by the British, Canadian, Irish and South African governments. The famous poppies that came to define World War I still grow between the graves and on the side of the road, reminiscent of John McCrae’s unforgettable poem, “Flanders Fields.”

And the overwhelming emotion felt by the visitor a century later is a sense of the utter stupidity and futility of war. Painful as it is to say, those millions of men, including the 400,000 British casualties of the Somme offensive which yielded only a few hundred yards (which the Germans retook just months later), died for nothing.

Not that the military cemeteries would ever admit as much. In nearly all of them, the first words you encounter, etched in bright stone, are “They Fought for Freedom,” or some such banner. But the truth isadd that they fought for the limitless egos of European imperialists and the megalomania of clueless generals.

BY DRIVING southwest for just three hours, however, you see the beaches of Normandy, and a uniquely American face of war. Just as I can scarcely describe the feelings of horror I experienced amid the tombstones of the Somme, I struggle to convey the inspiration of fulfilling my lifelong dream to stand on the invasion beaches of D-Day. On the British and Canadian beaches of Sword, Juno and Gold, and especially on the American beaches of Omaha and Utah, heroism glimmers from every particle of sand, and bravery shimmers from the crest of every wave. Here was war with a noble, human objective. Not to win “glory,” but to defeat evil. Not to expand empire, but to crush tyranny.

Omaha Beach should be an American Mecca – a place of required pilgrimage for every US citizen. As I stood on the vast expanse of that beach, I closed my eyes and tried to see the nearly 3,000 Americans who died storming a heavily fortified stretch of shoreline, dodging machine gun nests, evading mortar fire, jumping from tanks hit by German 88-mm.

cannons, until they could fight no more, falling amid the withering German crossfire in defense of people they had never met.

Walking among the perfect rows of silent crosses and Magen Davids of the 10,000 Americans interred at the Omaha Beach cemetery, you can still feel the tremor of millions of soldiers hurling themselves against Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall” to liberate a continent that Americans had themselves abandoned 150 years earlier because of its limits on human freedom. To witness the scale of the effort – like the remnants of the mammoth artificial “Mulberry” harbor at Arromanches, built in the absence of a captured port to feed and supply the immense army – is to be rendered small as you bear silent witness to those justly labeled “The Greatest Generation.”

Americans do not fight wars for medals or conquest. They fight for liberty and freedom. Colin Powell expressed it best: “Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our border. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.”

THOSE NOBLE ideals should guide the current debate as to whether America should be participating, with the French and English, in the fight against Muammar Gaddafi, as more Republicans join the criticism of President Barack Obama for bombing Libya without congressional approval.

As with any nation, there are limits to our manpower and resources. America should not have to be the world’s policeman – a goal originally set for a now toothless and corrupt United Nations. But as someone who has criticized Obama in the past for showing weakness toward Iran in 2009 and doing next to nothing about Syria this year, I strongly applaud his efforts to bomb the hell out of Gaddafi’s thugs, who are slaughtering their own people.

I am amazed that any Republican would feel differently.

The British humiliated themselves by freeing the Lockerbie bomber in what seemed to be capitulation for an oil deal favoring BP. Likewise, the French condemned America for removing Saddam Hussein, a man who gassed thousands of children. But both nations have found a measure of redemption in their bold campaign to punish Gaddafi for brutalizing innocent people. And the thought that the United States should not, at the very least, participate with drones, logistics and ordinance, even as British and French pilots carry the heaviest load to pummel a bloodthirsty tyrant, runs contrary to every American value.

It was we Americans who inspired our European brethren to put aside war as an instrument of glory and employ it solely as an apparatus to protect dignified life.

It was we who saved Britain from invasion and France from occupation.

And now that they, too, are fighting to protect complete strangers, we dare not retreat from values midwifed by generations of brave Americans.

The writer was the London Times Preacher of the Year in 1999, and is the international best-selling author of 25 books, including An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Judaism (Duckworth).

Book Review: Exploring a war's clashing ideals

The Vancouver Sun: Exploring a war's clashing ideals

In 1914, at the onset of the Great War, the explorer Ernest Shackleton set off for Antarctica. He was out of reach of the rest of the world, trapped in the ice after his ship had sunk, for nearly two years. When he finally made it to a whaling station, his first question was: "When was the war over?" He was told: "The war is not over. Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad."

A world gone mad is the way many saw the conflict that wreaked unbelievable carnage across Europe, resulting in the deaths of more than eight million soldiers and almost twice that number of civilians.

Nearly a century has passed since the First World War began, but the images of the time remain with us: Flanders Field with its rows of red poppies between the crosses, the horrors of trench warfare and poison gas, the destruction at the battle of the Somme and Gallipoli.

The war continues to fascinate us, and American historian Adam Hochschild, who combines history and narrative in a readable and interesting fashion, re-examines the conflict as a "clashing set of dreams," counterpoints of loyalty and rebellion. From the British point of view, he shows the enthusiasm for a war that everyone thought would be over in a few months, juxtaposed with the growing number of antiwar protesters, many of whom suffered in prison as a result of their opposition.

Hochschild introduces an eclectic cast of characters and traces their lives through the war years: military commanders and politicians, labour organizers and journalists, suffragettes and novelists.

Keir Hardie was a Scottish socialist and labour organizer who became a member of Parliament and an outspoken pacifist; Emily Hobhouse was a welfare worker who had been outraged at the British treatment of women and children in the Boer War, and continued her outrage through the next war; her cousin, Stephen Hobhouse, was a prominent Quaker and conscientious objector who was jailed for his beliefs; Charlotte Despard was a pacifist whose brother, John French, was a top military commander; Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Sylvia were both women's rights advocates, although the mother was pro-war while Sylvia opposed the conflict.

For their opposition to the war, more than 6,000 dissenters spent time in jail. A rule of silence was imposed on conscientious objectors, but they learned to communicate in unusual ways. One dissenter, Fenner Brockway, editor of the Labour Leader, produced a clandestine newspaper in prison on 40 squares of brown toilet paper -the subscription price was extra sheets of toilet paper from each prisoner's supply.

In the days before radio and television, the written word became a powerful tool for both the pro-war camp and the opposition. As John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, put it: "So far as Britain is concerned, the war could not have been fought for one month without its newspapers." The tabloid John Bull called the conscientious objector "a fungus growth, a human toadstool that should be uprooted without further delay."

Newspapers were mobilized for the war effort -and they were rewarded after the war, when 12 knighthoods and six peerages were bestowed on correspondents, editors or owners. And not just newspapers: prominent authors were called up to do their patriotic duty. H.G. Wells, Thomas Hardy and Arthur Conan Doyle fed the propaganda machine.

On the dissenting side, Bertrand Russell opposed the war from the onset, and was jailed for six months for his antiwar writing. In 1916, he wrote to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, appealing to him to start peace talks, and toured Britain to drum up support for a negotiated peace.

Opponents usually emerged from the left end of political spectrum, but not always. In 1917, aristocratic landowner Lord Lansdowne, former viceroy of India and secretary for war, who also lost a son in the war, published an open letter in the Daily Telegraph, calling for a negotiated peace. Though he believed Britain would be victorious, he wrote that "war will spell ruin for the civilized world" and correctly predicted the next war would be worse.

What was amazing about the conflict was the scale of death, and the toll it took on the young men of the world. By 1916, the death toll surpassed the entire decade and a half of the Napoleonic Wars. More than 35 per cent of all German men between 19 and 22 were killed in the four years; one half of all Frenchmen 20 to 32 were killed in the conflict.

It was a war that crossed class lines -unlike modern wars where working class and poor young people enlist, the Great War attracted men of the upper classes in great numbers. For example, of the men who graduated from Oxford in 1913, 31 per cent were killed. Even the son of British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith died on the battlefield, as did the son of Rudyard Kipling, the pro-war poet.

Out of the carnage, social reform resulted. Women got the vote in 1918, albeit with some conditions at first. Activist Emmeline Pankhurst persuaded the government to let women work in the munition factories, to take the place of the men at the front, and pushed for equal wages.

Hochschild has a flair for turning history into deeply moving human drama, as he did in Bury the Chains, about the anti-slavery abolitionists and King Leopold's Ghost, which described the colonial horrors of the Belgian Congo. To End All Wars is a gripping narrative, but is also profoundly sad. So much death, so many young men in cemeteries across Europe, soldiers from as far away as Senegal, Jamaica and Australia fighting in a complicated conflict that solved nothing.

As he writes: "Part of what draws us to this war, then, is the way it forever shattered the self-assured, sunlit Europe of hussars and dragoons in plumed helmets and emperors waving from open, horse-drawn carriages."

Hochschild's book is an original account of the conflict that continues to fascinate us.

Cheryl Purdey is a local freelance reviewer.

To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

Adam Hochschild Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Boston 450 pp; $34.95

Nameless soldiers of World War I forgotten

International The News: Nameless soldiers of World War I forgotten

“To the glory of God and in memory of our comrades of the Baluch Infantry Group who laid down their lives in the Great War 1914-1918.”

This is the engraving on a prominent landmark in Karachi, which reveals a small and completely forgotten history of the city. This commemoration is for the officers and soldiers of the Baloch Regiment which fought in World War I as part of the British Army.

When we think of Karachi today, a picture of a bustling, disorganised, unplanned and polluted city comes into mind with its huge populace bursting at its seams. Many of us travel the roads of Karachi without having time to look at the history strewn around us. For many who spend their lives travelling the city to and from work, small historical impressions of the glory that was hardly make an impression and they have no idea that their city, which is riddled with serious problems like terrorism, crime, target killings, political rioting, gang wars, loadshedding and water shortage, has a soul and a personality – which it is fast losing.

But Karachi has a trove of historical treasure, you just have to stop and listen to the silhouettes of yesterday whispering their stories to you. And if you listen hard enough, you will hear the hundreds of soldiers coming and going from Karachi to fight in the First World War. There are a few reminders of the Indian soldiers who fought for the British army in Pakistan; one of these memorials is the memorial column situated behind Frere Hall in Karachi. This column commemorates Indian soldiers who laid their lives in this war for their British rulers.

A brief history of the WWI
The First World War began in the summer of 1914 and was fought for almost four years ending in November of 1918 and was fought mainly in Europe between the ‘great powers’ of the time, although battles were also fought in Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, China and off the coast of South and North America.

At that time it was not called the World War I since the world hadn’t engaged it the Second World War yet. At that time it was called the Great War, The War in Europe or The World War.

This war was triggered by the assassination of Austria-Hungary heir to throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914. Even though this war was among the European countries, soldiers were also recruited from the colonies of the participants, like India.

Tribute to the fallen
The commemoration column in Karachi hails the officers and soldiers of the Baloch Infantry group who gave their lives in this war. The Indian unit that that fought under the British rule in this war the 10th Baloch Regiment which comprised of soldiers from the 124th Duchess of Connaught’s Own Balochistan Infantry, the 126th Balochistan Infantry, the 127th Queen Mary’s Own Baloch Light Infantry, the 129th Duke of Connaught’s Own Balochis, and the 130th King George’s Own Balochis Jacobs Rifles respectively. This regiment fought in the First World War and earned many awards for courage. To pay tribute to the bravery of the officers, JCOs and men of the 10th Baloch Regiment who died in the battle the British Government erected a monument in the gardens of Frere Hall in Karachi.

Although the names of the soldiers are not mentioned, the number of the nameless soldiers can be seen in the Urdu and English engravings on the stone column. The engravings tell you the number of British and Indian officers, Indian other ranks and followers who died in the First World War, with the ‘Indian other ranks’ personnel running into the hundreds.

There is a grave yard in Pakistan which has graves of soldiers who fought in both the world wars but we will never know anything about who they were, about their families, their loved ones. The least we can do is revisit this part of history of those of our people who laid down their lives for a war that wasn’t theirs so many years ago.

Black World War I Veterans Are Remembered in West Virginia

BET.com: Black World War I Veterans Are Remembered in West Virginia
A new interactive exhibit in West Virginia's Kimball War Memorial that extols the lives, and service, of Black soldiers during the First World War period was recently unveiled in Kimball.

In the 1920s, the building had been lobbied for by 1,500 African-American WWI veterans, many of whom had worked in local coalfields near the town of Kimball, when they saw that white former soldiers in another town had a memorial in their honor.

In 1928, the memorial was dedicated. No one knew that it would be country’s only memorial dedicated to Black World War I veterans, and eventually the nation's first all-Black American Legion Post.

The permanent interactive display, Forgotten Legacy: Soldiers of the Coalfields, was created by West Virginia University faculty and students. They spent four years researching, collecting material and developing a display “relating to Black World War I veterans, particularly those from West Virginia's southern coalfields.”

The exhibit focuses on coal and community, the pre–war lives of the enlisted men, their service in combat units and the socioeconomic climate the soldiers found when they returned. In the mid–2000s, the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D–W.Va., helped allocate money to have the building renovated.

Read more about Black soldiers in WWI, African-Americans in the U.S. Army and Black history at Arlington National Cemetery, A Chronology of African-American Military Service: From the Colonial Era Through the Antebellum Period.

Archduke Otto von Habsburg

The Telegraph (UK): Archduke Otto von Habsburg

Archduke Otto von Habsburg, who died on July 4 aged 98, began his public life as the infant Crown Prince of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire, and ended it as Father of the multinational European Parliament.
Within that neatly closed circle lay all the major political dramas of the 20th century, most of which he witnessed and some of which he influenced. He was centre stage for one of them — the unequal struggle against Hitler for the survival of his Austrian homeland, which he tried to conduct as an exiled Pretender in the 1930s. Not for nothing did the Führer call the triumphant march-in of March 12 1938 “Operation Otto”.

All that seemed unimaginable to the world in which young Otto, as he was known, started life during the deceptively tranquil Indian summer of the 650-year-old Habsburg monarchy. He was born third in line to the throne on November 12 1912 in the small Vienna palace of Hetzendorf and christened with a string of names demonstrating that the blood of all the Roman Catholic royal families of Europe flowed in his veins: Franz Josef Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xavier Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius.

His father, the Archduke Karl, was a great-nephew of the ruling Emperor Franz Josef, and was then serving as an infantry major-commander at the regimental barracks in the capital. His mother was the former Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma, and their marriage the year before had been that rare event in a dynasty plagued with so many matrimonial mishaps and misalliances — a happy union of two people perfectly matched in attractiveness, temperament and lineage. Their firstborn was to follow the prescription almost to the letter in his own marriage 38 years later.

At the time of his birth, the 11-nation monarchy still seemed safe, if somewhat wobbly, and his own time at its helm still fairly distant. One Viennese newspaper hailed the newborn prince as the future monarch who “according to the human calculations, will be called upon to steer the future of Europe in the last quarter of the 20th century”.

The assassination at Sarajevo on June 28 1914 of the heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, alongside his morganatic wife, put a brusque end to all such calculations. Indeed, the First World War which broke out six weeks later was to spell the doom of Europe’s continental empires, that of the Habsburgs included.

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Half way through the war, in the early hours of November 22 1916, the old emperor Franz Josef, who had ruled for a record-breaking 68 years, died at last.

An era, as well as a reign, was over, but the succession was smooth. Otto’s father automatically became the new emperor, and he, aged four, the new Crown Prince. His first ceremonial appearance came on November 30 1916 when he walked, a tiny figure in a white fur-trimmed tunic, between his parents behind the hearse of the late ruler at the great funeral procession in the capital.

A month later he was greeted with wild enthusiasm by the monarchy’s Magyar subjects when his father was crowned in Budapest as the new King of Hungary. The official photograph shows the young boy, dressed in ermine and velvet with a great white feather in his cap, sitting between his parents in their ornate coronation robes.

He always retained vague memories of those events, but these became much sharper when, two years later, the monarchy collapsed under the combined pressure of domestic upheaval and defeat on the battlefield.

The beginning of November 1918 saw him and his siblings stranded in a royal shooting lodge near Budapest, where an armed revolution had broken out. They were rescued by one of their Bourbon uncles, Prince René, who smuggled them across the border to rejoin their parents in the Schonbrunn Palace of Vienna. Otto had a child’s eye view of the collapse of the monarchy, abandoned by the aristocracy it had created.

On November 11 1918 the Emperor Karl, though not formally abdicating, “renounced participation in the affairs of state”. That same night they fled the deserted palace, heading at first for Eckartsau, their privately owned shooting lodge 40 miles north-east of the capital.

The winter there passed fairly calmly, but by the spring their tiny self-styled “court” was under threat from Left-wing agitators. (Austria had promptly declared itself a Republic after their flight from Vienna.)

Their rescuer now was not a family member but a British Army officer — Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Strutt, dispatched on the personal authority of King George V with orders to escort the beleaguered Austrian emperor and his family to safety. This Strutt accomplished in some style, reassembling their royal train for the journey into Switzerland on March 25 1919. Otto never forgot the experience. Whenever he heard in later life complaints about British indifference to the Habsburgs’ fate he would reply: “Yes, but there was always Strutt.”


The two and a half years of their Swiss exile were marked by the two attempts of the ex-Emperor to regain his Hungarian crown. Both were blocked in Budapest by Miklos Horthy, who had now ensconced himself in power as Regent. After the ignominious failure of the second restoration bid the family were exiled by the allied powers to Madeira, where Karl died, a broken man, on April 1 1922. That same day the nine-year-old Otto heard himself addressed as “Your Majesty” by the tiny household-in-exile. To the end of his days he remembered the shock it gave him: “Now it was my turn.”

Under the protection of their kinsman, King Alfonso XIII of Spain, the family moved to Lequeitio on the Spanish Basque coast. Otto remembered the seven years they spent there as their most tranquil time of exile. They were also, for him, the most hardworking. Under the strict supervision of his mother he took, under various tutors, the Matura (roughly, English A-levels) in both German and Hungarian. His further education was also the motive for their next move — to the gloomy castle of Hams at Steenokkerzeel, in Belgium, so that Otto could take his degree at the nearby university of Louvain. It was at Hams that Otto reached his 18th birthday and was duly declared, in a family ceremony with few outside guests, “in his own right sovereign and head of the house”.

However ghostly that title appeared, it was enough to impress the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler, who was manoeuvring to seize power in Germany. When in the winter of 1931-32 the young Pretender spent a few months studying in Berlin Hitler twice suggested a meeting.

The first invitation came from Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, the dim-witted Nazi son of the exiled Kaiser, and the second via Goering himself. Otto refused both times on the spurious excuse that he had not come to Berlin to discuss politics (in fact, he was doing nothing but). Hitler was incensed by the snub and it touched off a six-year battle between the two men for the fate of their Austrian homeland.

The climax was reached in February and March of 1938 when a Nazi takeover in Vienna seemed imminent, prompting a short-lived show of defiance from the Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg — a monarchist at heart but without the strength of his convictions. His vacillation prompted a remarkably courageous offer from the young Pretender to return from exile to take over the reins of government in order to repel Hitler. Schuschnigg dithered but eventually rejected the idea — perhaps just as well for Otto, who was already high on the Gestapo’s wanted list.

He had moved close to the top of that list by the time, two years after the Anschluss, that German armies swept into France and Belgium. The exiled Habsburgs got away from Hams only a few hours before Goering’s bombers attacked the castle, and then they joined the vast stream of refugees heading south. They eventually reached Lisbon, where they were still being hounded by the Gestapo. President Roosevelt (whom Otto had met in Washington just before the fall of France) then honoured his offer of “hospitality in an emergency” and they were all flown by Clipper seaplane to the United States.

As Otto von Habsburg later admitted, he wasted far too much energy during those wartime years in America on the faction-fighting among Austrian refugee groups instead of concentrating on the broader political picture. But, thanks largely to his personal ties with the President, he was able to repair the image of Austria so tarnished by its supine surrender to Hitler in the Anschluss. And, in the last months of the war, he worked closely with the White House in the vain attempt to lure Horthyite Hungary over to the Allied side.


Churchill, whom he met at the Quebec Conference, warmly supported the vision of a post-war conservative federation in Central Europe. Stalin put paid to those visions, however, and it was to a Communist-controlled Danube Basin that Otto returned in the spring of 1945.

He made a brief foray into Western Austria but was expelled by the reborn Austrian Republic, which had reaffirmed the anti-Habsburg legislation of 1919. He then faced a personal crisis — without a valid passport, a home or any regular income. He solved the last problem by embarking on a career as a journalist and public lecturer. This was exhausting but highly remunerative and, within five years, he had paid off all his wartime debts and was enjoying a comfortable income.

He could now think of finding a home and founding a family. The ideal partner appeared by chance in 1950, when he visited a refugee centre near Munich. Working there as a nurse was Princess Regina of Sachsen-Meiningen, herself a refugee whose father, Duke George III, had died in a Soviet concentration camp. The ideally-matched couple were married a year later and settled in a comfortable villa at Pocking, near Lake Starnberg in Bavaria. Their first five children were all girls, and it was not until 1961 that the birth of Karl Thomas, the first of two sons, assured the line of direct succession.

This prompted Otto to renounce his own dynastic claims and pursue what had long fascinated him, a full-time career in politics. He acquired dual German-Austrian nationality, and in 1979 was elected to the European Parliament as Christian Democrat member for North Bavaria. There he stayed for the next 20 years, becoming the highly regarded Father of the House and its only member to have been born before the First World War.

He proved an accomplished debater with a fluent command of seven European languages. Though he spoke on a variety of topics, his abiding theme was the need to bridge the East-West division of the continent and ultimately to bring all the nations of the old monarchy within the new European Union. He continued to work successfully at this even after his retirement, using the pan-European movement as his principal platform. He had been the president ever since the death of its founder, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, in 1972.

On October 3 2004, Pope John Paul II beatified Otto’s father, Emperor Karl. It was an important event in Otto von Habsburg’s life, and one that perhaps softened the blow that had occurred five years earlier.

He had hoped that his son Karl would carry on the Habsburg name in the European Parliament, but in 1999 the young archduke — who had been sitting alongside his famous father as a Right-wing member for Western Austria — was dropped by his party after a controversy over the financing of his campaign funds. A subsequent attempt to launch Karl on to the Austrian domestic political scene proved a dire, if gallant, failure.

Otto von Habsburg’s wife, the Archduchess Regina, died in February 2010.

To End All Wars: How the First World War Divided Britain, By Adam Hochschild

The Independent (UK): To End All Wars: How the First World War Divided Britain, By Adam Hochschild

Reviewed by Sarah Burton
The first substantial point Adam Hochs-child's book makes is that the destructive force of the First World War remains with us: 900 tons of unexploded munitions are still collected from its battlefields each year. Since 1946 more than 630 démineurs have died in the process. In 1991 alone, when France was building a new high-speed rail line, 36 people were killed excavating the track bed.

Less lethally, but just as powerfully bringing the scale of the carnage home, Belgian farmers today regularly plough up skeletons of those "missing in action – presumed dead": men who were ordered to shoot and blow each other up; men who were willing and men who weren't; men who before the war would have had no argument with each other; but all dead men, and mostly very young dead men. The figures remain mind-boggling: in France alone, half of all men aged 20 to 32 at the outbreak of war were dead by the time it was over.

Like the unexploded shells against which French tractor-drivers affix steel plates to the base of cabs, Hochschild states, "the First World War has remained in our lives, below the surface, because we live in a world that was so much formed by it and by the industrialised total warfare it created". I beg – only slightly – to differ. I do not think the Great War remains below the surface; we cannot get enough of it. The general horror of trench warfare and the often pointless sacrifice of a whole generation continue to fascinate us, rather in the way that dinosaurs appeal to seven-year-olds. The Great War, rightly or wrongly, has come to represent suffering of a kind and on a scale we expect never to experience in our lifetimes..

Hochschild pays close attention to those who campaigned against the war in the face of an irresistible tide of patriotic fervour, sustained by a propaganda machine which churned out emotive material by the likes of John Buchan and Rudyard Kipling, and led women to show their disgust at men who had not joined up by thrusting white feathers into their hands. These pacifists - Bertrand Russell, Sylvia Pankhurt, Keir Hardie, to name but a few - and the many other trade unionists and socialists for whom "a gun was a weapon with a worker at each end" foresaw the utter madness that we now, on the whole, recognise the Great War to have been. Hochschild also recognises the agonising point that even when support for the war was at its lowest ebb, there was a strong sense that to make peace would be to negate the value of the millions of lives already lost. The killing continued in order, in one sense, to honour the dead.

In common with two admirable accounts of the social effects of the Great War – Virginia Nicholson's Singled Out and Juliet Nicolson's The Great Silence - this book weaves together empirical evidence and individual narratives. The survey benefits from nearly all the individuals concerned being connected in some way by ties of family, friendship or love: a strategy which demonstrates how as much as dividing a nation, the Great War divided families.

The immense social pressure to support the conflict was also sustained by heavy censorship preventing the reporting of demonstrations and strikes at home, and of mutinies in the armed forces.

Fears of revolution in Germany and Britain were very real to those in possession of the facts, and they made sure those facts did not reach the wider populace. Pacifists were intimidated, imprisoned and executed. History was rewritten not just in print but in the more seductive medium of film. The tank, initially a disaster on the battlefield, became a movie star: 20 million people flocked to a film made in 1917 portraying the "wonder weapon". Capitalising on its popularity, the government deployed 168 tanks (recalling some from France) to towns and cities throughout Britain as "tank banks". People queued to buy war bonds through an opening in the side.

To End All Wars is rich in the detail of how support for the war was manufactured and sustained, and how those opposing it were made to appear unpatriotic, cowardly, or even "mad". It is a lesson for our time, and all time.