A Veterans Day remembrance

My grandfather and World War I

I never knew my mother’s father. He died 20 years before I was born. But I inherited his gas mask and doughboy helmet from his brief involvement in France in World War I, which I recently donated to my hometown’s museum; my brother inherited his bayonet, which disappeared around the time of his death in 2016.

The family used to visit his grave in Dunn’s Greenwood Cemetery, more so after my grandmother’s death 50 years after his. And on Veterans Day, my younger sister and I still make sure that his grave has an American flag on it (along with my father’s and brother’s graves; all were Army veterans).

I like to think about him occasionally, in part because my grandmother told me me once, in her last years, that I reminded her of him, the way I laughed. I also had blue eyes, a relative rarity in the family. (She actually smiled when she said that, a rare occurrence for my usually sharp-tongued grandmother.)

Mother had mixed memories of him; she loved him fiercely, as most six-year-olds must, for the memories he left her and three siblings when he passed. But normally, she said little about him. On her own deathbed, 90 years, almost to the day of his passing, Mother told my sister Beth and me that she heard his voice from the “other side”—a fairly common claim, I have heard, among the dying. Her mind was still sharp; she was in complete command of her faculties, as always, having just balanced her checkbook before coming to the hospital. But she was also well aware that her time was coming, and she was ready to join all those who had gone on ahead.

He graduated from the local high school, and started but did not finish any higher education. “Pete,” as his friends called him, was something of a rascal as a young man, I have learned—tossed out of at least one boarding school for unspecified behavior, almost certainly involving insubordination, smoking, or general rowdiness, I speculate. But his well-to-do family bailed him out of his minor scrapes; my great-grandfather was a prosperous businessman, owning much real estate and a variety of businesses. “Pete” was a play on his father’s initials, P. T.; he was the only surviving son, having lost four brothers as infants or toddlers, and had one younger sister, Bessie, born 10 years later, who was a loving fixture of my childhood, an educator with a master’s degree.

He was working in Grandpa Preston’s automobile garage as a mechanic in 1917, when he was called up for service in the draft. He was 21, still single, when his registration card was issued in the late spring of 1917, describing him as of medium height and medium build, with blue eyes and light-colored hair.

Page 1 of Grandpa’s draft registration card from 1917. In author’s possession

I know he was among nine young men from Dunn who were drafted into the Army on the same day in September, as the U.S. Army began gearing up to send the American Expeditionary Force to France to fight Germany.

In early fall, he was dispatched for basic training to a brand-new regional military facility called Camp Jackson (named for the former U.S. president; now Fort Jackson), still under construction near Columbia. He was eventually assigned to the Eighty-first Division at the huge complex, requiring six months just to construct its first phase, including necessary utilities, infrastructure, and railroad tracks. Helping build the base may have been part of his earliest duties.

According to The Birth of Camp Jackson, published by the U.S. Army Basic Combat Training Museum in 2016, “more than 1,500 buildings were completed [by December 1917],” and 550 buildings were later added. Its original building inventory included “119 Officer's quarters, 402 Enlisted barracks, 403 lavatories, 35 additional mess halls, 189 stables, 26 support administrative buildings, 13 post exchanges, 12 guard houses, 51 store houses, 16 shops, 3 garages, 102 sheds, 4 magazines, 7 civic buildings, 3 fire stations, a post office, a laundry building, a bakery, a telephone/telegraph building, a sewage disposal building, and a base hospital with more than 60 buildings.”

At Camp Jackson, Grandpa Vernon was assigned to a machine gun company within an infantry batallion, the 322nd. His batallion was then transferred for specialized training to Camp Sevier, near Greenville, South Carolina, where more than 100,000 new soldiers were eventually trained, according to the South Carolina Encyclopedia:

Camp Sevier was a temporary cantonment site in Greenville County created to train federalized National Guard soldiers during World War I ... named in honor of the Revolutionary War hero John Sevier … Soldiers from South Carolina began to occupy the site, four miles northeast of the city of Greenville, on July 10, 1917. Construction began a week later, and … during the next two months, various National Guard units from South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee began to arrive at the camp. Before training could begin in earnest, land had to be cleared and facilities constructed. Once all units had reported, soldiers were trained in a range of common infantry skills and in new modes of warfare, such as gas defense and the use of the machine gun. Covering some nineteen hundred acres, the camp provided ample room for artillery instruction as well.

Unidentified soldiers on parade at Camp Sevier, 1918. Pubblic domain photo

While in training, he was promoted to sergeant from private, having demonstrated a certain amount of leadership potential. It was from Camp Sevier in late July 1918 that his batallion and others finally began their trip to Europe, aboard trains to their last U.S. stopover in Camp Upton, on New York’s Long Island. Their ship took 12 days to cross the Atlantic, arriving in August at Liverpool, England, where he sent his father a telegram announcing his arrival.

The only photo I have of him in uniform, undated, shows him against a fake backdrop of the Statue of Liberty. It may have been taken at Camp Upton, before he left for France, or even after the war.

My grandfather, Sgt. Vernon H. Massengill, in his World War I uniform. Property of author

The “Wildcat” shoulder patch insignia—called “Tuffy”—worn by my grandfather’s 81st Division. Courtesy North Carolina Museum of History

By early September, the entire 81 st division, nicknamed the “Wildcats”—now assigned to the 161 st Infantry Brigade—had crossed the English Channel, for training with the French Army at the 16 th Tonnerre Training Area. From there, they marched to the vicinity of Bruyeres in the Vosges Mountains region.

As part of the French Seventh Army, the 81 st division then advanced to the St. Dié sector, where they fought off German trench raids and endured regular bombardments by German artillery.  The division then began advancing against German forces, helping to secure a memorable victory at St. Mihiel, and moved toward a new showdown at Verdun, in what came to be called the Meuse-Argonne Offensive of the American First Army.

Even though it was quite late in the war when the Wildcats began fighting alongside their French allies, they lost no time in stepping up to the challenge. The battles were still alrmingly intense, even on the eve of the approaching Armistice. On November 9, 1918, soldiers of the 322 nd regiment began attacking German positions along the Moulainville-Moranville road. 

According to the official account of the American Battle Commission (1944), the soldiers fought bravely for more than 8 hours:

… the 322nd Infantry, attacked at 9 a.m. … Company F, the right assault company, flanked its opposition by advancing against Moranville from the south, while Company E attacked the town from the northwest. About noon a gap of about 200 meters opened between the two assault companies. The 3rd Battalion placed two platoons in this gap at 2:30 p.m. These platoons advanced east against Moranville.

At 3:30 p.m. Company M, which had been sent to reinforce a platoon of Company K, came up from the southwest against the town while the remainder of Company K attacked from the west. At 4 p.m. the firing line was still further supported by the entry into the fight of one platoon from Company I, which had taken the place of Company H as left support company of the 2nd Battalion.

At 4:30 pm. Company F was ordered into position with its left on the town. Its line extended 300 meters across the filled to the south of Moranville. Moranville was captured about 5 p.m.

Machine guns like the M1917 Browning rifle, which my grandfather may have operated, fired between 500 and 600 rounds per minute, with an ammunition capacity of 250 cartridges per box, eight boxes per gun. Its range varied, depending on the type of ammunition used, from about 3,500 yards (roughly 2 miles) to more than 5,000 yards, according to Wikipedia, with 24 machine guns per batallion.

The fighting continued, with mixed results, for the next two days, until the surprise announcement of the armistice between the Allies and Germany at 11 a.m. on November 11. The first Armistice Day—now called Veterans Day—would be commemorated a year later.

The 81 st division’s regiments had suffered 248 men killed and 856 men wounded. Grandpa Vernon’s 322 nd regiment alone lost 57 of its 3,000-plus men, with another 217 wounded—both small but very personal fractions of the 53,000 soldiers lost in combat.

Test firing an M1917 Browning machine gun at Thillombois, Meuse, France, on Oct. 5, 1918. (Photo courtesy U.S. Army Military History Institute, WWI Signal Corps Collection)

Grandpa was not injured physically, as far as I can tell. For his efforts, he was awarded a World War I Victory Medal with a single silver star, signifying gallantry in action. But I believe he suffered psychologically, that he was badly scarred by the sheer volume of death around him. Perhaps he was even plagued by what was dubbed “battle fatigue,” a type of post-traumatic stress disorder—which may have led to a later struggle with severe alcoholism, which contributed to his early death.

* * * * * * *

After the Armistice was declared, Grandpa and most of the U.S. soldiers who had now stopped fighting remained in France for another six months. Many of them lived in small French villages, where they became fast friends with French families. And the family scuttlebutt—inadvertently disclosed in a careless moment, never fully explained—was that he liked France so much that he decided not to come home. Technically, I guess he hid out—went AWOL—and my great-grandfather ended up bailing him out once again, by paying to have him located and returned to his unit before it sailed home in May 1919.

Vernon was a high-spirited guy, according to those who knew him, and liked to have fun. So there may have been a romantic entanglement, although that is pure speculation. I do know that a teenaged daughter in his adopted French family corresponded over the years to come with my great-aunt Bessie, eventually a well-educated world traveler—sort of a same-age pen-pal, I guess—even after Grandpa died in 1929.

Personally, I think he simply “went native,” after gradually finding that he liked France and his new French “family,” including a substitute sister, better than the small-town home he remembered. When the time came, he did not want to leave. Life after the war was comfortable over there, and appealing, and he doubtless had become well acquainted with French wine.

I understand that love of adventure quite well; I shared it with him. I call it the Peter Pan syndrome, and sensed it in myself, when I lived abroad while in the Foreign Service. I quickly became acclimated to new, exotic surroundings—and could easily have stayed on, at least in Jamaica, or Denmark, or even Singapore, where I lived for a year or two, or even the other countries I visited for shorter periods. Still, I always felt the need to move on—and eventually, to return home. For me, home was always North Carolina. Where my family was. Where I had grown up.

For Grandpa, North Carolina was probably less appealing as a home to come back to. It was a socially conservative place, the first state in the nation to enact prohibition—in 1908. Now the country he was coming back to in mid-1919 was perched on a tremendous era of social change, with nationwide prohibition set to take effect in January 1920, after the 19th Amendment was approved. Dunn was, then and now, a very small town …

But if he really did go AWOL, it was no longer in wartime, and he probably was not alone. As far as I can tell, he was not punished or court-martialed. He was simply found and brought home. He did return, perhaps grudgingly, to Dunn—a very dry town in a very dry state, soon to be in a very dry nation—but tried mightily to readapt to his old life. Five months after getting back, he married my grandmother—a trained schoolteacher, a few years younger, about to leave for her first paid position 100 miles away—and they began a family.

They quickly built a lovely house on Magnolia Avenue, not far from his parents’ home—probably built from a Sears Roebuck “kit,” modified to include three upstairs bedrooms, and surrounded by pecan trees. He started working, and even tried to go to church. He bought a nice car—a Cadillac convertible, I think. By the time of his death in early 1929, they had four children: one son, the oldest, and three daughters, of which Mother was the first, in 1922.

This Sears Hazelton home, ca. 1920, closely resembles my grandparents’ home. Courtesy http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1915-1920.htm

I won’t dwell on his alcoholism, which contributed to his death at age 33. In and out of expensive rehab facilities since the war, he spent much of his time working on a family farm in the next county, where Mother started school at age six—months before he died. Nothing worked for long; the early treatments were expensive, often dangerous. Mother rarely talked about it, except to explain, when pressed, why she refused to drink at all—even long after Prohibition ended—because she worried it might be an inherited gene.

But she missed him deeply. She said once that he was never mean, or violent, but would do strange things when he searched for moonshine, or got hold of it—readily available in the very rural redneck counties around Dunn—like “stealing” the family car when my grandmother went out to daytime social events, only to find the car missing when her bridge club ended—and humiliated in front of friends, forced to find a ride home, or walk alone.

Becoming a widow at age 27, with four children under 10, must have been unimaginably sad for my grandmother, whom we called “Mimi”—and even more difficult when the Depression started soon, months after Grandpa’s death. If somewhat embittered by her reduced circumstances, she remained resilient and determined, and worked her entire life, sometimes as a social worker or interior decorator, eventually as a ticket-taker at a local movie theater to qualify for Social Security. (She may have begun receiving a veteran’s widow’s pension after a new federal law took effect in 1959, but if so, never mentioned it.)

She never remarried, but somehow managed to hang on to that glorious house for the next 40 years—by renting out part of it at times, and then living in a small downstairs apartment—until she sold it and moved to Raleigh to be near her middle daughter, my aunt Marjorie. I visited Mimi occasionally in her new home—a comfortable, one-bedroom apartment in a small community of duplex-style homes—in retirement.

Having finally begun to mellow somewhat, she seemed for the first to relish the company of her nine grandchildren, and the first of her great-grandchildren, until she developed pancreatic cancer. She died in 1980, returning to Dunn’s Greenwood Cemetery to lie next to her husband.

They are together again now: the stalwart widow I knew and loved, and her beloved, rascally blue-eyed hero of a husband, whom I never met but somehow feel I know. Because I live in Florida now, I get home to Dunn less often these days. But when I do, I visit their graves, and remember.

And on Veterans Day, wherever I am, I pause and say a prayer in his memory.

Next time: Looking at the world and foreign affairs