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Frank Buckles Turns 109
Monday, February 1st, 2010
Sometimes history is not about what happened but about what has disappeared or quietly ceased to exist while no one was looking. One of those silent erasures is occurring right now with the passing of the generation of soldiers that fought in the Great War. Some 4.7 million Americans either enlisted or were drafted to fight in the war to end all wars – but Frank Woodruff Buckles, a West Virginia farmer who celebrates his 109th birthday today, is the last of the last.
Buckles would be the first to admit that he was not a major player in the conflict that killed more than 9.5 million soldiers and set the course for modern history. Fibbing his way into the army (he was underage) in August, 1917, he shipped out to England in December, 1917 and spent the duration of the war driving officers around and delivering their messages far from the front lines. “I wasn’t disappointed that the war ended,” he told a reporter recently, “but I would have liked to accomplish what I had started out for.”
Still, though he didn’t see any action, Buckles conveys a visceral sense of what it was like to serve when Woodrow Wilson was commander in chief. Until someone invents a time machine, nothing in the historian’s bag of tricks can match this experience of living through it. Four years ago, a dozen American World War I veterans were still alive, so the visceral sense of the past was that much richer in texture, detail, anecdote and emotion. At that time, I had just embarked on research for a book about the immigrant experience in the Great War – and learning that two of these surviving veterans were foreign-born, I moved heaven and earth to meet them. These were encounters I will never forget.
Italian-born Antonio Pierro, 110 at the time of our meeting, reminisced about the snakes in his family’s orchard back in the southern Italian province of Basilicata, shuddered at the memory of the shells that fell near him in the Argonne forest in the autumn of 1918, and smiled wanly when his nephew mentioned the name of a French girl he had fallen in love with. The young Pierro was stunned when someone called him a “wop” on the chow line at training camp. Nonetheless, he went on to fight bravely with the 82nd Division’s field artillery. He died on February 8, 2007, a few months after our interview.
Samuel Goldberg, a 106-year-old Russian-born Jew, harbored a fierce engagement with a past he remembered in minute detail. Like Buckles, Goldberg had to wiggle his way into the army – at 104 pounds he was underweight, but Uncle Sam was hungry for soldiers in the spring of 1918, and Goldberg secured a waiver. The skinny eighteen-year-old intended to sign on with the Signal Corps, but the recruiting officer convinced him he’d be better off in the cavalry. Goldberg told me that on his first day of boot camp at Fort Oglethorpe the drill sergeant did a double-take when he got to his name and snorted, “Jesus Christ, a Jew in the cavalry. I’m surprised they let a little guy like you in.” But nobody was snorting when they saw Goldberg drilling with a saber. Ninety years later, he was still proud of the respect he commanded and muscles he acquired. Goldberg died on December 10, 2006.
What I took away from these interviews was the sense of the melting pot in action. “Regular” American guys entered the army expecting immigrants to be lazy, cowardly, untrustworthy, clannish and incomprehensible. But after enduring mud, gas, shelling and machine-gunning side by side with Jews, Italians, Poles and Slovaks, most American-born Doughboys came to accept foreign-born recruits as one of them. The immigrants themselves, fully one-fifth of the American armed forces, assimilated by serving. They weren’t citizens, many of them spoke only halting English when they enlisted or were drafted, their deepest loyalty was to family, religion, or the heritage of their culture of origin. But the army made them Americans. The ethnic slurs continued despite the army’s attempt to stamp them out; but the names lost their sting when they were tossed around by buddies.
Tony Pierro and Sam Goldberg did not have any insights to share with me into military tactics, politics or diplomacy: but in the course of the hours we spent talking, they did powerfully summon up the tensions, hopes and aspirations of a time when American soldiers from 45 different countries marched to the front singing “Over There” and “K-K-K-Katie” in unison. When Frank Buckles passes, the last reverberations of those grand old tunes will pass with him.
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