Frank Buckles: The Last of the Doughboys

What do historians lose when a generation passes?  This is not an academic question.  Four years ago, a dozen of the 4.7 million Americans who served in the American Expeditionary Forces were still alive, but today the ranks have thinned down to one solitary survivor – Frank Woodruff Buckles, a West Virginia farmer who celebrated his 109th birthday on February 1.  When Buckles goes, a powerful but ineffable connection with the past will go with him.  But what exactly is the nature of such a loss?

I can shed some light on this subject because in the summer of 2006 I had the privilege of interviewing two Great War veterans for a book I was writing about the immigrant experience in the war.  Italian-born Antonio Pierro was 110 when we sat down together in the backyard of the tidy house he shared with his brother and nephew in the coastal Massachusetts town of Swampscott.  Samuel Goldberg, a 106-year-old Russian Jew, talked with me for two hours in his apartment and in the dining room of an assisted living facility outside of Providence, Rhode Island. 

Neither man had ground-breaking insights into the politics or social issues of their day. Neither cared to address the larger questions of how immigrants fared during and after the war or to extrapolate from their personal experience.  Nonetheless, I came away from these conversations with a visceral sense of what it was like to be alive when Woodrow Wilson was commander-in-chief.  What I gained was perhaps more akin to poetry than history – an impression of the past that was more textured, emotionally complex, and, in some ways, more baffling than anything I gleaned from books, diaries, letters, photos or film clips.  These interviews deeply colored my understanding of the era and shaped the narrative of the book that became The Long Way Home. 

Goldberg, who emigrated with his mother and siblings in 1907, was spry, sharp and intensely focused; his recall of ten decades going back to pogroms in the Russian Pale of Settlement and the unbearable stench of the immigrant ship was astonishing.  He told me that the Newark neighborhood his family moved to was so uniformly Jewish that “if a dog came around he’d have to prove he was Jewish before they let him in.”  When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, Goldberg decided to enlist not because he wanted to make the world safe for democracy or because he had an urge to kill Huns but because “I’d been on my own since sixteen after my son-of-a-bitch father kicked me out.  I figured the army would be a good experience.”  He intended to sign on with the Signal Corps, but the recruiting officer convinced him he’d be safer in the cavalry, so even though he was afraid of horses and, at 104 pounds, was too scrawny to lift a saddle, that’s where he ended up.

The first day of boot camp at Fort Oglethorpe near Chattanooga, Tennessee, the Polish-American drill sergeant did a double-take when he got to the name “Goldberg” on the roster.  “Jesus Christ, a Jew in the cavalry,” the cocky sergeant snorted.  “I’m surprised they let a little guy like you in.”  Eighty-eight years later, Goldberg was still fierce when he recalled how he faced down that “bastard of a sergeant” and went on to win respect from the other guys for his prowess at saber drill.

Tony Pierro was less forthcoming. It wasn’t that his memory was gone, but he seemed to have lost the urge to revisit the past.  But after some prodding from his brother and nephew, Pierro did reminisce a bit about the snakes in his family’s orchard back in the southern Italian province of Basilicata, the thunder of shells falling all around him in the Argonne forest in the autumn of 1918, and his relief when the armistice was declared.  “It’s nice to be in peace,” he said, “nobody tells you want to do.”  Pierro smiled wanly when his nephew mentioned the name of a French girl he had fallen in love with.  Later, I found an earlier interview in which Pierro described his outrage at being called a “wop” on the chow line at training camp. 

Sam Goldberg died five months after our interview on December 10, 2006; Tony Pierro’s death came two months later on February 8, 2007.  And now the sole surviving doughboy is Frank Buckles.

While I was sitting with Goldberg and Pierro, shouting my questions loudly enough to make myself heard and writing down their answers - halting in Pierro’s case, detailed and often combative in Goldberg’s - I felt a bit let down.  Neither man addressed the themes and issues at the heart of my book. 

Only later, when I studied the interview transcripts, did I sift out some flakes of gold.  These centenarians had, in their own idiosyncratic way, given me a sense of the melting pot in action.  Being called a wop or ridiculed as a Jew in the cavalry still hurt, nine decades later – but the pain was only part of the story.  Pierro and Goldberg were tough, scrappy immigrant kids from the humblest backgrounds.  Their expectations were low, their horizons limited.  The ethnic slurs really didn’t surprise them.  That’s what life was like.  What did surprise them was how permeable the barriers between ethnic groups proved to be in the military – and how quickly they and their comrades put these differences behind them.  Goldberg, accustomed to Newark’s Jewish ghetto, became the buddy of a German-American gentile from St. Louis.  Pierro, though he got a furlough to visit his mother and younger siblings at their home village in Basilicata, had no intention of staying in Italy – nor of settling down in France with his French sweetheart.  By the end of the war, he realized he had transferred his loyalty to the U.S.

 In a sense, Pierro and Goldberg and tens of thousands of immigrants like them assimilated by serving.  The pride their immigrant families took in their service is still palpable two, and even three, generations later.  I know this because “pride” was a word that came up in every one of my interviews with the descendants of foreign-born Great War veterans.

It would be too simplistic to say that the army made these aliens Americans – but it most certainly opened doors that had remained closed after they had left Ellis Island and settled into America’s towns and cities (or ghettos within those cities).  Not only the soldiers themselves but also their families were happy to walk through these doors.  The fact that one in five of the soldiers in the American Expeditionary Forces was foreign-born suggests the scope of this social shift.  By comparison, about 5 percent of the troops currently on active duty in the U.S. Armed Forces were born overseas.

For all their reticence about the big issues, Tony Pierro and Sam Goldberg did powerfully summon up the tensions, hopes, aspirations, grievances and satisfactions of life in a polyglot, multi-ethnic army.  This was an army in which guys born in 45 different countries learned to speak English by singing “Over There” and “K-K-K-Katie” in unison with their comrades.  When Frank Buckles passes, the last reverberations of those grand old tunes will pass with him.