Remembering the World War I Generation This Veterans Day

Although Veterans Day began as a celebration of the Armistice of 1918, World War I is no longer a part of the American imagination. Instead, Americans (and the West more broadly) look to World War II as the key event of the 20th century into which mature Americans arrived.

It is, of course, fitting to have a day to honor the veterans of every armed conflict in American history, including World War II. But there is both a sadness and a historical blindness to our forgetting of the original “World War” and our place in it. The generation that fought the “Great War” was every bit as heroic as that of their sons in World War II—and deserves to be remembered.

In his best-selling The First World War, historian John Keegan wrote that even before the U.S. had entered the war, there were Americans who had already joined the fighting with the British and Canadian armies as well as the French Foreign Legion. “A large group of American pilots,” Keegan writes, “was already serving in the French air force, where they formed the Lafayette Escadrille, one of the leading air-fighting units on the Western Front.”

Though the U.S. Army was at a low in the beginning of 1917, with only a little over 100,000 men, by the latter part of the year, American Expeditionary Force commander General John “Black Jack” Pershing was planning to have eighty divisions with almost three million men to turn the tide in the war. By March 1918, 318,000 men were in France—with nearly one million more set to arrive over the next five months.

The U.S. had decided conscription was the way to assemble this large army. 24 million young men registered, of which 2,810,000 were drafted. One of them who was called up was my paternal great-uncle, George Bryant Harbaugh.

Thanks to Lori Samuelson, a genealogist and historian (and the wife of my cousin, George’s grandson), I was able to read the letters that George wrote to his fiancée, a young first-generation Swede named Elsie Wilhelmina Johnson, during the “War to End All Wars.”

In Thanks to the Yanks: WWI Letters from an Indiana Farm Boy to His Sweetheart, Samuelson presents images of original letters from George to Elsie (and a few other related letters to and from George) along with transcriptions, a narrative at the beginning of letters from each place, and notes about and pictures of people and places involved.

The first letter is from the new conscript dealing with the side effects of mandatory vaccinations at Camp Taylor, Kentucky, on April 2, 1918. The last is from the U.S. Army Base Hospital at Camp Sherman, Ohio, where the veteran, desperate to finally be with his beloved, underwent surgery to fix a shell wound that had not healed properly.   

A native of Northern Indiana and one of 11 children born to George Frederick and Margaret Long Harbaugh (see my review of Samuelson’s book Perseverance Amidst Adversity: The Ancestry of Three George Harbaughs here), George was 22 and living in Miller, Indiana, when he was drafted. In his job as a watchman for the Elgin, Joliet, and Eastern Railroad, he had already had a shootout with a disgruntled mill worker. Despite attempts by his employer to get him an exemption from service, George was called up anyway.

At Camp Taylor, George and his company of 250 men trained and drilled constantly, singing songs that included “Indiana,” “Tipperary,” “My Little Girl,” “There’s a Long Trail,” and “Over There.” He reports that his “army rifle is a dandy” and he is “pretty good in shooting.” He recounts meeting soldiers from Kentucky hollers who had never seen trains and had little education. He laments that some men “get the big head when they get to be corporal,” but admits “most of them are just dandy fellows.”  

While George reports books and magazines available, he writes to Elsie that they have little attraction for him; he has been reading the Bible she gave him. In fact, a patriot that he is, his letters indicate that his heart is constantly with Elsie, for whom he had yet to get an engagement ring. He laments that she hasn’t sent him her ring size, worries about whether she is okay with him telling other Hoosiers about their engagement since she doesn’t have the ring, and worries about whether she’ll wait for him to return. “Do you think you can wait a year, or even two, for me?” he writes. “I hope the war will be over sooner than that, but it may last that long yet, and I would sooner die on the field of battle than come back and find the girl I love married to someone else.”

And lest Elsie fear she’s simply being strung along, he tells her, “You need have no fear of my writing to other girls. I could write to dozens if I wished, but there is only one I care to write to and you know her, don’t you?”

At the end of April, George is moved. A postcard he sends from Florin, Pennsylvania (“a pretty country”), has a painting of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s famous Horse Shoe Curve on it. On April 30, he arrived at Camp Upton on Long Island, New York, where he awaits his trip to Europe. Writing to Elsie on the day before her birthday, he tells her she wouldn’t recognize her “Sammy” (from “Uncle Sam”) in his steel helmet and gear. He promises never to kiss anyone else: “Not even the French and English girls ha ha.”

By May 16, he writes from “Somewhere along the Coast” on “a large vessel ready to sail.” The precautions taken with mail were in full force—and effective. In his history, Keegan observes that of those million American soldiers coming from March to August 1918, “not one had been lost to the action of the enemy in oceanic transport.”

From England, George writes that he “saw some of the most beautiful places I have ever saw,” adding parenthetically, “outside of Indiana.” When he passes to France at the end of May, he reports how the houses “are very odd” with “no modern conveniences” such as “an oil stove or a range.” And the farming is done by “American methods 100 years ago.” He is somewhat impressed by “the city where the ‘Ladies latest Styles’ originated”—Paris!

By July, however, George, who had been assigned to the 28th Division, was in combat. On July 18, the Allied forces, including the French and the U.S. 3rd and 28th Divisions, were attempting to beat back a German offensive designed to get them to Paris at Chateau-Thierry on the Marne River. George was gassed—probably mustard gas or phosgene—an injury from which he would never really fully recover. “As my name may have appeared in the paper,” he tells Elsie, “I’ll write you so you’ll know I’m still alive. Well, we were in it and I got a little used up not badly, though. I’ve still got 2 arms 2 feet 2 eyes 2 ears a nose and I can eat anything they give me….”

He expected to be back in the fight soon. From there, he went to the Battle of the Argonne Forest, launched on September 26, 1918, and part of the broader Argonne-Meuse Offensive that continued until the Armistice. Of the 1.2 million American soldiers fighting, 26,000 were killed and 95,000 wounded. That included George, who was hit by parts of artillery shells. On October 5, he wrote of a “little set to we had with the Germans on the Argonne Forests sector.” He notes that his writing proves “I’ll have at least one arm to put around you at Xmas time.”

On October 18, he reveals that he has been in bed because the wounds also include both legs. Indeed, George would be in the hospital for over two months, during which time the Armistice was signed. He doesn’t feel sorry for himself, and he worries that the Influenza epidemic has been worse back in the States. He sends mistletoe to Elsie from France, and he writes of the controversies over service stripes—some American soldiers didn’t want combat veterans to be distinguished on their uniforms.  

But mostly, he is proud of his work and desperate to be home. “We have finished the job we came over to do, so we can wait till they get ready to take us back,” he writes. By May 22, 1919, George can write from Camp Merritt, New Jersey, about his gladness at being “back in God’s country again.” Yet, it would be several more weeks due to the medical attention needed for his wounds.

When he returned, Elsie had indeed waited for him. They married at the Lutheran Church in Miller and took up residence in Elsie’s mother’s upstairs apartment. By 1924, the Purple Heart winner would build the home in which Lori Samuelson later found the packet of letters from him—from a Sears kit. George worked as a fireman and later for an ordnance plant. He was a union delegate. He invented a crystal radio featured in National Radio Weekly. His was a full life.

In 1941, when America was again on the brink of war, George counseled caution about this impending “foreign war” in a series of letters to local papers. But, he added, all Americans must agree that “This Is Our Country, the best country in all the world, and nothing shall be left undone to preserve it….”  His own son, also George, would serve in this war, becoming a German POW and taking part in the famous Black March. As Samuelson writes, “George the father came to understand the waiting, the fear, and the helpless pride his own parents must have felt decades earlier.”

I knew cousin George of World War II fame and his siblings, Betty Jean and Bob, but never met Uncle George or Aunt Elsie. He died after a work accident in 1954 at the age of 58. She died ten years later. But I am proud of them both as members of my family and as Americans.

Those World War I veterans never got a moniker like “The Greatest Generation.” But it was their bravery and public spirit that raised up sons who would also fight when called to do so. We do well to remember them. 

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.