Letters from the Western Front

With just 56 dissenting votes, the Congress of the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. The Great War had then been raging for almost three years, yet the U.S. Army still numbered scarcely 100,000 men. By the time of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, 4 million men had joined or been drafted into the Army. Half of them went to France with General John J. Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force; more than 100,000 never returned. Fifty-three thousand died in battle, and 63,000 succumbed to accidents and disease—making World War I the last American war in which the toll of noncombat deaths exceeded the number of those killed in action.

The vast American conscript Army of 1917-1918 mirrored the predominantly rural, surprisingly backward and astonishingly polyglot society from which it was drawn. As a failed farmer from Grandview, Mo., Captain Harry S. Truman exemplified the background of a majority of World War I servicemen—though at 5 feet 8 inches in height, Truman stood a full inch taller than the average doughboy. As a high school graduate, Truman also had twice as many years of education as the typical white recruit, and three times more than most black soldiers, who were mustered into segregated units and assigned almost exclusively to noncombat duty. Nearly one draftee in five was foreign-born, reflecting the historic flood of immigrants over the preceding three decades. Censors had to scan letters penned in 49 different languages. A wartime joke had it that when one officer called his unit’s roll, not a single man recognized the pronunciation of his name; but when the officer sneezed, 10 men stepped forward.

To a degree that would baffle later generations, young Americans in 1917 went off to war filled with enthusiasm and uncritical patriotic fervor. William Langer, later a distinguished historian at Harvard, recalled with some wonderment his generation’s "eagerness to get to France and above all to see the front."

One would think that, after almost four years of war, after the most detailed and realistic accounts of murderous fighting on the Somme and around Verdun, to say nothing of the day-to-day agony of trench warfare, it would have been all but impossible to get anyone to serve without duress. . . . [But] we men, most of us young, were simply fascinated by the prospect of adventure and heroism. Most of us, I think, had the feeling that life, if we survived, would run in the familiar, routine channel. Here was our one great chance for excitement and risk. We could not afford to pass it up.

John Dos Passos, who later wrote a sensitive novel about his war experience, Three Soldiers, recollected that "we had spent our boyhood in the afterglow of the peaceful 19th century. . . . What was war like? We wanted to see with our own eyes. We flocked into the volunteer services. I respected the conscientious objectors, and occasionally felt I should take that course myself, but hell, I wanted to see the show."

Pershing held the bulk of his forces in reserve until enough doughboys had arrived to be constituted as a separate American Army and assigned their own sector of the front near the old fortress town of Verdun. There, the Americans fought two large-scale actions in the waning days of the war: a four-day push to eliminate the St. Mihiel salient southeast of Verdun, and the 47-day agony of the Meuse-Argonne battle, a bloody, largely inconsequential campaign that engaged some 1.2 million U.S. troops and inflicted 120,000 American casualties. It was still grinding on when the Armistice was declared on November 11.

Bogart Rogers, whose letters from the front to his sweetheart back home at Stanford are excerpted here, was not alone in his offering of thanks that the war had made it possible for him to have "seen a small bit of the world and taken a chance." That sentiment was faithful to the feelings of countless World War I veterans. But neither was he alone in his conclusion that war was not worth the sacrifice, that "it’s all wrong." Americans in their millions, veterans and civilians alike, came to the same conclusion in the war’s aftermath. They repudiated the Treaty of Versailles that their own president, Woodrow Wilson, had done so much to shape, said no to membership in the League of Nations, Wilson’s brainchild, and retreated ever more deeply into their historic isolationism even as former Lance-Corporal Adolf Hitler brewed a vastly more destructive war to avenge Germany’s defeat.

These letters speak to us in the voices of a vanished era. It had its peculiar follies as well as its distinctive glories, and it spawned its own particular kind of war—unfortunately not the last one in which lonely young men would be required to swallow their fear and face battle as best they could.

David M. Kennedy, ’63, is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford and the author of Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, due out in April 1999.

Over There



		FLYER: Rogers

Bogart Rogers was a 19-year-old Stanford sophomore when he decided to join the Royal Flying Corps. After training in Texas and Canada, Bogart sailed to England on the USS Tunisian in January 1918. He was assigned to the 32nd Squadron, one of six fighter squadrons in the newly formed Royal Air Force’s 9th (HQ) Brigade on the western front in France. He wrote home almost daily to his sweetheart, Isabelle Young, who was living in the Kappa Alpha Theta House at Stanford.

April 28, 1918

Dearest Isabelle,

So this is Paris!!! Oo la la!! But it doesn’t happen to be Paris at all but only a godforsaken depot some little distance from the front——and a more forlorn looking spot can’t be imagined. We finally arrived here about 2 a.m. after a ride on a French train that would make some much vaunted Peninsula trains—the 10:35 or the 4:40 for instance—look like lightning expresses.

As we were leaving, a Red Cross train pulled in direct from the front and filled with nice fresh cases. More rude awakenings.

I’m going to try to send you my ring, dear, and possibly it can be done from here. In England they would neither register it nor insure it for America.

Things are looking up, and there ought to be plenty to write about from now, henceforth and forevermore. Amen.

Considerable love from

May 21, 1918

My Dear,

To put it candidly it’s as hot as hell, providing that well-known summer resort is all it’s supposed to be. I was up just before lunch fooling around, no coat, no helmet, no collar, sleeves rolled up, and it was hotter in the air than on the ground. Of course it gets a bit chilly up along the ceiling, but around 2,000 or 3,000 it’s unbearable.

Concerning the strange story of the missing man, there isn’t much that can be said within the censor’s limits. He was on a patrol the other morning and suddenly went down. The poor devil fell short in no-man’s-land by a matter of a few feet, the Huns firing everything they could get their hands on him. When his machine crashed in a shell hole, he jumped out and dived into an old trench. Apparently it had been a communication trench. One end of it led to the German line, the other to ours. Of course this chap turned the wrong way and ran smack into the Hun outposts. Just a few more yards in his glide or a turn to the left in the trench and he wouldn’t be a German prisoner now.

As a consequence I’ve a new roommate, a rather nice sort of a boy who unfortunately looks as if he’d lost the last friend. Honestly, Izzy, when I wake up in the morning and look over at him I can hardly keep from weeping. A more melancholy looking person can’t exist.

That’s all for now, lover. I think of you lots and lots and wish we might be together.

Considerable love, Izzy dear.

June 13, 1918

Dear Lover,

We were coaxed out at 3 a.m., dressed in the dark, stumbled over to the mess for an egg and some coffee, somnambulated up to the aerodrome, waited for a ground mist to clear and left the ground on an offensive patrol at 5. When you start out on a show that early, you’re generally about half awake, but two hours of fresh air and a lively scrap knock all the slumber out of you. And when you get back you’re unable to get to sleep again. Ain’t it awful?

We had a lovely affair this morning and got one Hun in flames—not me, but another chap, Captain Claydon. I managed to shoot one off of this fellow’s tail and chased another down to 2,000 feet, which I later regretted as climbing back toward the line the Huns on the ground put up a barrage of nice incendiary and explosive bullets. It wouldn’t be so bad if you couldn’t see them, but they look like streams of fire and put the wind up your old friend Rogers.

Probably all this war talk gets tiresome, but in these busy days it’s our chief supply of news.

Considerable love,



		LOVE AND WAR: Rogers married his college sweetheart shortly after the war.

June 27, 1918

Dearest Isabelle,

Last night’s patrol was a great affair. We were to bring back some bombers and by the time we had escorted them across the line it was 9 o’clock and getting dark. We headed for home in a hurry, and it was pretty hard to see where we were going. Then we started firing lights, both to keep the flight together and to attract attention on the aerodrome. They sent up a lot of lights in return and everyone got back safely. One chap crashed as it was quite dark, and I came too close to scuttling my kit for comfort, hit with an awful bump and bounced all over the place.

Yesterday for the first time I carried a nice red and yellow streamer on my tail as deputy leader of our flight.

At present I’ve completed the daily exercise, a couple of sets of tennis, helped give a little white puppy his first bath, and am sprawled out on my tummy in the sun writing this. It’s a glorious day, dear, and I can’t help but think how nice it would be roaming the hills somewhere with you, or driving, or sitting in a hammock, or just being with you anywhere.

We really lead a very prosaic life out here. About the only things worth writing about are unimportant. But there’s one thing that is important—at least to me. I love you.

’Bye, dear,

July 1, 1918

Dearest Izzy,

For the last four days, we’ve done the same show in the same place at the same time with the same bunch of bombers. This morning we had a climbing contest with six Huns, but they were above at the start and also at the finish. They went down on our bombers over the objective, but lost one machine for their pains.

Yesterday, we ran into four Huns, two triplanes and two Fokker biplanes, and had a little tiff but nothing important happened.

In about half an hour, we are going up on our own—a roving commission with nobody to worry about. Our instructions are to get Huns. I’m going with six fellows on top as deputy leader, and we’ll probably spend most of our time about 20,000 where it’s a bit cool and the old kite very sloppy on the controls. This morning we were around 18,000 and the old bus wobbled and slipped all over the place.

Must put on the sweater and the flying boots and away for a crash into the atmosphere.

Much, much love to Isabelle,

November 4, 1918

Dearest,

I’ve never felt less like writing than I have the last few days.

Our present quarters are in an old French ch