a genealogist’s sketchbook

I just noticed (via google) that my grandfather is mentioned in a recent book on the war: Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (Holt, 1994), p. 443, on the allied advance near Soissons on 18 July 1918:

Pershing’s biographer cites the diary of Marvin H. Taylor, who recorded reaching a German machine-gun post where “he encountered a dead German machine gunner seated at his weapon, his hand still on the trigger. He was slumped over, a bullet hole in his forehead and a bayonet thrust in his throat. The gun had an excellent field of fire, and many Americans had died approaching it. Taylor was a humane man, but he laughed aloud at seeing the corpse; it seemed a fit retribution for what the gunner had done to others.”

I suppose now is as good a time as any to break out this item, something lying around unexplained among my grandfather’s WWI memorabilia (in fact, kept in a box with his own medals):

The ubiquitous Iron Cross Second Class, given to as many as four million men during WWI. The question: was this liberated from someone like the unfortunate gunner in the box near Soissons? My father and I recently admitted to each other that we had suspected the same thing. But maybe (and perhaps more likely) it came from some willing, living hand in the long lines of POWs that junior officers like my grandfather had to tend: perhaps traded for cigarettes, writing paper, decent cheese or something. Hard to say. It is not mentioned in his typed journal (though I haven’t searched all the left-out spidery text of the original letters, where it might still be found). If he never mentioned it, does that fact suggest that it may indeed have been pulled from a corpse, an act of which he was not proud? Or were such mini-trophies passed around through allied ranks without a thought, not considered important enough to mention? While still in training camp in 1917 Taylor had written of his desire to bring back a Prussian helmet. I think, in fact, that he had written this to his girlfriend, whose grandparents were all German immigrants…

It’s hard to comprehend the complexity of the context of this and similar war relics. As heirlooms go, it definitely belongs in the category of ‘what on earth do we make of this?’

I have 70 pp. (out of 250 pp. of the typescript) reasonably well edited. Will work on format & post soon—on the outside site nltaylor.net, not in the blog.

In the spring of 1917 my grandfather, aged 21, left college to become an infantry officer in the first wave of volunteers for what would be called the American Expeditionary Force in France; he was comissioned lieutenant in August and shipped to France the next month. He saw service in the heavy fighting in northeastern France (Château-Thierry etc.) in the winter and spring of 1918.

He wrote frequent letters to his father and girlfriend, and also filled two small pocket notebooks he kept with him the whole time.
(Continued)

Wilbur Floyd Whiting (1919-2006) died just over a year ago, around Christmastime. He was my grandmother’s first cousin. His mother Mamie (Marie Henriette Lembke) was my great-grandmother’s baby sister, and she and her husband Floyd were always close to my great grandparents. Wilbur, their only child, was sort of an auxiliary sibling alongside my grandmother’s five brothers and then someone who my mother saw a lot of as a child. ‘Cousin Wilbur’ was for decades the closest extended family my grandmother, and more recently my mother, had.

Wilbur was a commercial artist, draughtsman and designer, fleamarketeer, repairer of old chairs, and hoarder of stuff. In the Second World War he was in the Eighth Air Force in England. He worked on the ground, repairing and maintaining parachutes and flight leathers, and teaching the craft to others. His memorabilia from the war include astonishing binders of fabrics, grommets and stitch samples; needles the size of pencils; a formal scarf made from parachute silk; drafts of aircraft nose art; an appreciative note from a ‘caterpillar’ (a crewman who bailed out and owed his life to the parachute silk); and his own painted leather patch from the Air Service Command.

Wilbur’s whole patch collection includes his stripes (technical sergeant’s, though his separation papers call him a staff sergeant), a couple of 8th Air Force and Army Air Forces patches, and a Military Welfare Service patch, perhaps from his sweetheart. (Continued)