Today in History The Last Doughboy February 1, 1901 In 2003, the writer Richard Rubin set out to interview the last surviving veterans of World War 1. Thats no typo, the people he sought were over 101, one was 113. It could not have been easy, beginning with the phone call to next of kin. There is no delicate way to ask the question, Is he still with us, and invariably the answer was no. But sometimes, the answer was yes, and Rubin would ask for an interview. The memories these people sought to bring back were 80 years old and more, and some spoke only sparingly. Others were fountains of information, speaking as clearly as if their memories were only yesterday. There was J. Laurence Moffitt of Orleans, Massachusetts. Today, we see the Yankee Division only on highway signs. At 106, this man was their last surviving member, with a memory so clear that he could recall every number from every fighting unit of the 26th Division. There was Anthony Pierro of Swampscott, Massachusetts, who served in Battery E of the 320th Field Artillery, and fought in several major battles of 1918, including Oise-Aisne, St. Mihiel, and Meuse-Argonne. There was Arthur Fiala, who traveled across France in a boxcar marked “40-8, (40 men or eight horses). Or Howard Ramsey, who started the new cemetery in France that we now know as the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery. “So I remember one night, he said, It was cold, and we had no blankets, or nothing like that. We had to sleep, we slept in the cemetery, because we could sleep between the two graves, and keep the wind off of us, see?. In all, Rubin interviewed dozens of these men, and a few women. Their stories can be found on their own You Tube channel, and their words are far more powerful than anything I could write about them. Frank Woodruff Buckles, born with the name Wood Buckles, is one of them. Born on this day in 1901, Buckles joined the Ambulance Corps of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) at the age of 16. He never saw combat against the Germans, but he would escort 650 of them back home as prisoners. In 1940, Buckles was a civilian, working for the White Star Lines, and the WR Grace shipping companies. His work took him to Manila, in the Philippines, where remained after the outbreak of WWII. Buckles was helping to resupply U.S. troops when he was captured by Japanese forces in January 1942, spending the next three years and two months as a civilian prisoner in the Santo Tomas and Los Baños prison camps. Corporal Frank Buckles passed away on February 27, 2011, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, the President of the United States in attendance at his funeral. He was the Last of the Doughboys.
Posted on: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 12:38:46 +0000
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