Brothers weathered Great War together

StatesvilleRecord&Landmark: Brothers weathered Great War together

Jim Sloan, 71, a U.S. Army veteran, was kind enough to show me some memorabilia he has from World War 1: a gas mask cover, a French bugle, a magazine printed by the 81st Division, a bugler's cloth insignia, some photographs and a letter.
Two Iredell County brothers, Ernest Neal Sloan Sr. and George Norman Sloan, Jim's father and uncle, respectively, served together in the U.S. Army in World War I. The brothers were overseas for 22 months. Brothers serving together in the same unit was discouraged by the War Department, but somehow the brothers enlisted together and stayed together. The family story is that they told the officials they might be "distantly related." George was a bugler and a communications runner and is known to have been in Company "B" of the 321st Infantry Regiment, 81st "Wildcat" Division, while his younger brother Ernest (Jim's father) was a machine-gunner and was said to be in the "same unit," but it is unclear if they were in the same company, regiment or brigade.
Up through the American Civil War, brothers had often served together in the same unit. If one brother was injured or sick, his brother could do something toward helping his sibling. But this arrangement was a two-edged sword: If the brothers' unit was engaged in heavy combat, the loss to a single family could be catastrophic.
Originally composed of drafted men from North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida, the men of the Wildcat Division were trained at Fort Jackson, near Columbia, S.C., and then received further training at Camp Sevier, near Greenville, S.C.
On Oct. 19, 1918, the division was attached to the First U. S. Army and with that organization was initiated into real combat. The 81st Division soldiers were ordered "over the top" to attack the German trenches on the very morning the armistice was to take place --- Nov. 11, 1918. Unfortunately for the German and American troops, there was no official word that the fighting was about to cease. The Wildcats slowly advanced through the heavy fog and withering German fire and made their way between the trenches, a barren, treeless, muddy area dotted with artillery shell holes and barbed wire called "No Man's Land," and made it to the German positions. At precisely 11 a.m., firing abruptly stopped all up and down the line.
Although in action for only about a month, the Wildcat Division sustained 1,104 casualties, 248 killed or dead from wounds and 856 wounded, in November 1918. Although not officially part of the 3rd Army --- the Army of Occupation --- it was not until June 1919, seven months after the cessation of hostilities, that members of the division were shipped home and released from service. The 81st was officially deactivated at Hoboken, N.J., on June 11, 1919.
Back in civilian life, George went to college and became a Methodist preacher. This calling did not last long as he had been exposed to poison gas while service in the war and developed tuberculosis and spent much time in sanatoriums. He died in 1930 at the age of 38. His obituary in The Landmark stated "he was said to have been one of the most promising young ministers of his church in this state." George married, but had no children.
Brother Ernest became a farmer and also worked as a custodian at Central School and worked for the schools' maintenance department in the summer. He was generally a quiet man and spoke little of his experiences in the Great War. Ernest survived his brother by 45 years, dying in 1975 at the age of 79. Ernest was survived by son Jim, three other sons and four daughters.
His Uncle George died nine years before Jim was born. Jim said his father was "the greatest man I ever knew." Both men are buried at Mountain View United Methodist Church Cemetery in north Iredell.

* * *

George Sloan sent the following letter, slightly edited for readability, to his home from France. The letter was written while on the march, some two weeks after the cease fire and Armistice. It has not been published previously. The religious service referred to may have been a thanksgiving service, the men thanking God that they had survived and would be going home.

France, 11-24-18 Dear Father:

As this is Father's day we are all requested to write to "Dad" with the promise that it won't be censored. I have been on the front twice, first on the Vosge sector which was a quiet sector. We went into the trenches on Sept. the 19th and held this front about 21 days. Moved back for a two weeks rest and then hiked several miles and rode some in boxcars to the Historic Verdun front at which place we "went over the top" in a big drive on Oct. 10th. We had to drive over a big marsh --- mud and water and lakes. On the night of the 10th I slept(?) in a water ditch partly filled with water. Under a heavy shell fire early in the morning I was told to get on my pack. We was going to move up; I got up and plunged into the chilly water the shells were falling all around and I was expecting every one that came whistling over to have my name on it. I can't imagine how I ever got through alive.

So we went forward until 11:00 a.m. when orders came to cease firing. We found that we had advanced about 2 kilo[meter]s, lost five men and about 8 wounded in Co. B. The Germans told us that they laid down the heaviest barrage on us that morning they ever put on this front and never knew of anyone advancing our Infantry under such heavy shelling.

We were fighting the 5th Prussian Guard, Germany's very best troops. I don't want to seem to brag but the 81st Division did something that the famous 26th [Division] failed to do. The French told our general before we started to drive that it was impossible to drive over such a marshy district, but when the firing stopped we was across and had them on the run toward German soil. Sounds good, Eh?

We have hiked many, many miles since coming here. We are on a 200 kilo hike now. It is likely we will sail for the U.S. soon. My feet is sore but I am too ambitious to "fall out." It is very cold and don't often get by any fire, sometimes have to sleep on the frozen ground. I am so cold now I can't half write.

Well, I have preached to my comrades some. While we were in the trenches I held services for them. I am trying to live out my good training wherever I go. I feel like I want to tell you this.

The first time I held services the commanding officer and officers gathered around me in a barn yard. I was feeling the best I ever felt in my life.

We open[ed] by having prayer and it wasn't long before you could hear weeping all around. The Spirit seemed hovering over us. After the prayer I talked and it seemed I got lost in myself. I forgot all about my captain being a big college professor and the officers being college graduates. As soon as I finished the captain made the remark that without exception that was the best service he ever attended. I never heard such high tribute paid me as he did. I give God all the glory. This is the best news I could think of to write you for Xmas, so I close by hoping you all will have a real fine Yuletide.

Your devoted son

Geo. N. Sloan

Co. B, 321st Inf.

***

During and right after the First World War the conflict was known as "The World War," or "The Great War." Many also believed that it would be "The War to End All Wars."

As we now know, it was not.

O.C. Stonestreet is a columnist for the R&L.

World War I memories surface in basement flood at Bay Village hom

Cleveland.com: World War I memories surface in basement flood at Bay Village home
Life is like a flooded basement. You never know what's going to surface.

Such was the case -- or trunk, specifically -- when 6 inches of icy water gushed into the basement of Linda Manoloff's Bay Village home in February, and soggy boxes of memories poured out in the subsequent cleanup.

Among them was an old wood and metal trunk that Manoloff's husband, Samuel (now deceased), packed when the couple cleaned out her father's house in New York after he died in 1970.

She hadn't seen what went into the trunk, but her eyes widened when she saw what came out of it, including her father's wool, button-fly, moth-holed World War I uniform. With leggings.

And a vintage gas mask, too. Old letters written during the war. Postcards depicting scenes of World War I. Military buttons, photos and decorations. A veritable time capsule of the so-called "war to end all wars."

Manoloff, 72, was stunned at the find. "Oh my gosh, this stuff was here all along and I never knew it," she said. "I was too busy bringing up kids and teaching." (Among those three children is Plain Dealer sportswriter Dennis Manoloff.)

She remembered that her father, Fred "Fritz" Bittner, never talked much about his military service, but she did know that he'd grown up on a farm outside Rochester, N.Y., and joined the army right after graduating from high school in 1917.

Severe illness kept Bittner from joining his unit when it left for Europe, and the war ended while he was hospitalized in Indiana. After graduating from the University of Rochester, he worked as an engineer.

And, "he pack-ratted," said Manoloff, who remembered that when they were cleaning out his house after his death, they found filing cabinet drawers filled with empty tooth-powder cans and old razor blades, and a map to sealed mason jars filled with coins buried around the property.

She pulled out the gas-mask instructions which advised: Read this booklet until you know by heart what it contains.

"Not memorize. 'Know by heart.' I found that so touching," she said.

The uniform and war memorabilia will be kept in a safer and drier place until Manoloff figures out what to do with it.

But before she packs it off again, would she consider trying it on for size? You know, literally get the feel of history?

"Oh no," Manoloff said, waving the notion aside like a pesky fly. "It looks terribly . . . itchy."

Catapult Aircraft: Seaplanes that Flew from Ships Without Flight Decks

Catapult Aircraft: Seaplanes that Flew from Ships Without Flight Decks, by Leo Marriott
Pen & Sword Aviation, 2006
157 pages plus Appendices, Bibliography and index
Library: 623.746 MAR

Description
During World War I, the navies of the opposing forces discovered the value of aerial reconnaissance and many experiments were made to allow larger warships to carry one or sometimes two aircraft aboard. In the early days these were float planes that were lowered by crane into the sea and then lifted back aboard upon their return. This was a length affair and when a speedy departure was necessary, time was of the essence. A new system was devised so that a powerful catapult system or a short ramp could, with the added speed of the ship, get an aircraft airborne in a fraction of the time previously required. Thus was born a highly specialized type of aircraft.

This book includes all the major designs that flew in the First and Second World Wars and includes aircraft used by all the combatants. It looks at how the aircraft evolved and how the warships were modified to accommodate the aircraft and the catapult system. Eventually these fixed-wing aircraft were superseded by the helicopter in the early post WW II years.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Glossary
1. British and Commonwealth Navies
2. United States Navy
3. Imperial Japanese Navy
4. Germany
5. Italy
6. France
7. Other Nations
Appendix 1: Aircraft and Submarines
Appendix 2: Aircraft Technical Data
Bibliography
Index

Tommy's War: British Military Memorabilia, by Peter Doyle

Tommy's War: British Military Memorabilia 1914-1918, by Peter Doyle
The Crowood Press, 2008
Oversize, 201 pages, plus Suggested REading , Bibliography and index. Full color photos scattered throughout
Library: 940.4075 DOY

Description:
The First World War has left an almost indelible mark on history, with battles such as the Somme and Passchendaele becoming watchwords for suffering unsurpassed. Five million men of the British empire bore arms in this great conflict; almost a million were to lose their lives, and a great many more were scarred for life, physically and emotionally.

As the last veterans pass away, so direct memory of life in the trenches will pass with them; in future, only archives and published accounts will be available to those wishing to find out what it was really like to be a British soldier - Tommy Atkins - in the War.

Yet what is missing from the growing literature of the GReat War is an appreciation of what the objects so closely associated with four years of warfare "in the trenches" really looked like, how they were used, and what they meant to Tommy himself.

This book fills the gap, providing a visual reference that is usually only provided by the contents of museum cases. Through a multitude original surviving objects of Tommy's life - the recruiting posters and patriotic song sheets, uniforms and weapons, postcards and keepsakes, barbed wire and hand grenades, amongst others, Peter Doyle tells the story of what it was really like to serve as an infantryman in the Great War, principally on the Western Front, buut also in the other "sideshows" across the world.

Through an exploration of what anthropologists and archaeologists call "material culture" it recounts the sory of Tommy Atkins, from enlistment to demobilization, from trenches to memorials-and creates a unique visual encyclopedia of the time.

Contents
Foreword by Professor Richard Holmes
Preface and Acknowledgments
1. Introducing Tommy's War
2. Joining Up
3. Tommy's Uniform and Equipment
4. Up the Line
5. On Rest and At Home
6. Aftermath
Suggested REading
Bibliography
Index

Booklist: The Living Unknown Soldier, by Jean-Yves Le Naour

The Living Unknown Soldier: A Story of Grief and the Great War, by Jean-Yves Le Naour
Translated by Penny Allen
Metropolitan Books, 2002
204 pages plus notes. 8 pages of b&w photos
Library: 940.412 LEN

Description
In February 1918, a derelicy soldier was discovered wandering the railway station in Lyon, France. With no memory of his name or his past, no identifying possessions, marks or documents, the soldier-given the name Anthelm Mangin-was sent to an asylum for the insane. When, after the Great War ended, the authorities placed the soldier's image in advertisements to locate his family, hundreds of "relatives" claimed him-as their father or son, husband or brother who had failed to return from the front.

Marshaling a vast array of original material, from letters and newspaper articles to accounts of battlefield deaths, hospital reports, and police files, French historian Jean-Yves Le Naour meticulously re-creates the long-forgotten story of the single soldier who came to stand for a lost generation.

With humane sympathy and the skill of a novelist, he recounts the twenty-year court battles waged by the families competing to take the amnesiac soldier home. In the process, he portrays not just the fate of one individual but the rank and file's experience in the trenches, as well as an entire nation's inconsolable grief at the loss of more than one million of its men.

Dramatic, taut and powerfully relevant to our own times, this heartrening history depicts the pain and turmoil of a society that, without bodies to bury, is caught between holding on and letting go.

Table of Contents
1. The Soldier without an Armistice (1918-1922). (pg 5-37)
2. The Impossible Grief for the Missing (pg 38-79)
3. The REturn of Colonel Chabert (pg 80-106)
4. The Pilgrimage to Rosez (pg 107-124)
5. Against All Odds: Three Accounts of GRief (pg 125-147)
6. Lemay vs. Monjoin (pg 148-168)
7. The Double Death of Anthelme Mangin (pg 169-199)
Conclusion
Notes

WAR MEMORIAL GARDENS ISLANDBRIDGE, DUBLIN

IrishTimes: WAR MEMORIAL GARDENS ISLANDBRIDGE, DUBLIN
Royal destinations: THE IRISH National War Memorial Gardens, to give the location its full, official title, is the memorial dedicated to the 49,400 Irishmen who died in the first World War.

The memorial, recognised as one of the most beautiful of its kind, has a chequered history replete with good intentions, followed by indifference and neglect, before, in recent years, finally being granted an official place in the nation's narrative.

The gardens were designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, the great English memorialist and one of Britain's foremost architects of the 20th century. His works include the vice-regal palace of New Delhi. As one of the three principal architects hired by the Imperial War Graves Commission, he designed numerous war memorials, the Cenotaph (meaning empty tomb) in Whitehall, London, being chief among them.

Lutyens's Irish creations include Heywood Gardens in Laois, extensions and alterations to Lambay Castle on Lambay Island, similar changes to Howth Castle and Stormont House in Belfast, designed as a home for the speaker of the Northern Ireland parliament. He was also commissioned to design the unbuilt Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.

His design for the Islandbridge memorial included a sunken, circular Garden of Remembrance with rose beds, overlooked by a pair of matching, square book rooms.

The garden encloses a so-called War Stone, a piece of granite symbolising an altar. The way to the garden is via Lime Avenue on which sits a small, dome-shaped open temple held aloft by six pillars.

The memorial was probably the last to be erected to the memory of those who sacrificed their lives in the first World War and is one of the finest, if not the best in the world, according to the British Legion Annual (Irish Free State Souvenir Edition 1925-1935).

The idea of a war memorial to commemorate all Irish men and women who died in the first World War originated at a meeting in 1919 at which a trust fund was established. It took until 1924 for an organising committee to be established which debated the merits of St Stephen's Green and Merrion Square as possible sites. Discussion continued until December 1930, when WT Cosgrave suggested the Islandbridge site, then known as the 60-acre Longmeadows Estates. Cosgrave recognised the importance of the memorial, whose supporters insisted it should be an all-Ireland monument. "A project so dear to a big section of the citizens should be a success," he said. His successor, Éamon de Valera,

was also supportive, approving grants and allowing construction to begin in 1932.

The memorial was built by unemployed ex-servicemen, half of them ex-British army soldiers, half ex-Irish Army men. To maximise the work, mechanical equipment was restricted and even granite blocks several tonnes in weight from Ballyknocken and Barnaculla were hauled into place.

Although finished in 1939, the second World War intervened and an official opening was postponed. From 1948 small private commemorations took place under the auspices of the Royal British Legion, the charity that provides help and welfare for ex-service members. The commemorations were abandoned in 1969, however, as the political climate deteriorated due to events in Northern Ireland.

A lack of maintenance staff and official neglect reduced the gardens to a state of disrepair and at times in the 1970s and 1980s, they became a halting site for Travellers. In the late 1980s a committee of trustees, supported by the British Legion, redoubled their efforts, restoring the gardens and hosting the long-postponed opening on September 10th, 1988. But no government representative attended.

The official "opening and dedication" took place on the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme on July 1st, 2006. It was attended by President Mary McAleese - whose predecessor, Mary Robinson, had used her office to help change attitudes towards honouring the war dead - taoiseach Bertie Ahern, whose predecessor John Bruton attended an earlier commemoration in Islandbridge, and members of the Oireachtas. Also present was an Army guard of honour and the Army band.

The names of the 49,400 who died in the first World War are inscribed in two manuscripts, beautifully illustrated by the artist Harry Clarke. They are kept in the two book rooms which remain closed, because of the threat of vandalism, except by appointment with Dúchas.

'Lots and lots of love, Little Girl. Your own boy, Cap'

TheChronicleHerald.ca: 'Lots and lots of love, Little Girl. Your own boy, Cap'
In October 1917, Captain Roome crossed the English Channel and landed in France, where he waited for orders that would send him and the other "boys" into the dark uncertainty of the front lines of the Great War.

By candlelight, on a quiet Saturday night, Roome penned these words to his love, Miss Annie Belle Hollett, the woman he would one day marry.

This love letter is one of 31 he wrote to her between 1915 and 1919. They were recently discovered secreted away in a wall of the Dartmouth home he began building his sweetheart when he returned home more than 90 years ago.

Oct. 20 - 17

Base France

My Own Little Girl,

Here is Saturday evening again, so I’ll get started on a line. I’m writing under the old difficulties again, stretched off on the floor of a tent. Everything is quiet here at present. Most of the boys have gone into the city to look around. I was in last night, so I guess I’ll stick to the camp this evening.

Mailed you a card just to let you know we crossed safely. Hope you received it okay. We had a lovely trip across although of course it’s only a short run. The Channel was nice and smooth and the day fine and warm.

Had quite a march when we struck this side but good supplies and sleep put us in shape again.

It’s hard to realize that we really are in France. Everything around here looks peaceful enough. We went to a movie last night and it was funny to see everything in French. One soon picks up a word here and there though and just here a great many of the people understand English.

Don’t know how long we’ll be here, maybe some days. No mail has come in yet. I don’t think we will get any soon until we get up to the Battery. . . .

I’m writing this by the light of a candle stuck on top of my steel helmet and the grease is running all over it. But things like that are mere trifles now. Haha. Palmeter, Mac and I are still in the same tent. Guess we won’t see much of the other boys now. Still, I don’t think we’ll be very far apart and we may get a chance to see each other now and then.

Have done nothing all day but sleep and eat. Was working fairly hard yesterday morning but had the afternoon off. Guess we’ll make up for this long rest when we get to the line. They say the mud is something fierce up there now. I’ll be right in my element. . . .

Well, I have to stop for a minute, darling, and fix things up more comfortably. There, that’s better. Gee, it seems a long time since I had any mail. I suppose coming across here really makes it seem longer. . . .

Well Girlie, there is very little more that I can tell you this time. You understand why my letters will be shorter now, dear. Believe me, it isn’t that I don’t want to write just as much as in England, but there is no sense writing a letter half of which would be struck out by the censor.

Guess I’ll roll over now for an hour or so and by that time, the boys will be back. I’ll drop a card soon.

Good night and bye bye for this time.

Lots and lots of love, Little Girl.

Your Own Boy,

Cap