H.R.1572 – To award a Congressional Gold Medal to the female telephone operators of the Army Signal Corps, known as the “Hello Girls” now has
300 cosponsors in the House of Representatives. Thank You Again! to each one of you who Made The Call to your Senators and Member of Congress, and asked them to cosponsor this legislation. Both H.R. 1572 and its Senate companion bill, S.815, are now available and have been ready for the House to vote on for weeks…but there’s a problem: Congress recessed for Thanksgiving without voting on either bill. 

Congress returns on December 2, and during the remainder of this “lame duck” session there will be mandatory legislation to pass to fund the government, and many, many other important things happening. But let’s not let them miss this call!  The legislation needs to go to the House Floor for a vote, and what goes to the floor is determined by the House Majority Leader, under the oversight of the Speaker of the House. They need to hear the call from you that this important legislation has earned a vote in the House!

Already this week well-known American historians, authors, playwrights, and filmmakers who have published works about the Hello Girls have delivered letters to the Speaker of the House and the House Majority Leader calling for a House vote on the legislation. Americans everywhere are asked to contact the Speaker of the House (202-225-4000) and the House Majority Leader (202-225-0197), and encourage them to bring to the floor either S.815 or HR 1572 for a vote as soon as possible after Congress reconvenes on December 2. You can also contact your own Representative, and urge them to reach out to the Speaker and the Majority Leader as well.  The World War I Centennial Commission has provided an online toolkit at https://ww1cc.org/hellogirls that makes it simple to send emails to your Representative in just a few minutes, or to call their offices and leave a voice message.

The Hello Girls waited almost 60 years for America to recognize their service as America’s First Women Soldiers in World War I. The brave Hello Girls earned and deserve the recognition of a Congressional Gold Medal, When their nation called in 1917, the Hello Girls answered!  Please tell the House Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House to answer their call for recognition in 2024!

The public is invited to a festive event in Washington DC commemorating the 110th Anniversary of the 1914 Christmas Truce on the Western Front. Please join us for the launch of the second volume of Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy’s IN THE CENTENNIAL FOOTSTEPS OF THE GREAT WAR, accompanied by a photo exhibit and a festive rooftop reception. This remarkable book offers a comprehensive visual journey through World War I sites worldwide, chronicling the conflict year by year with stunning imagery and rich historical insights. Find out more about this festive event, and RSVP to attend in person in Washington, DC.

Christmas in the Trenches is a military re-enactment of the 1914 Christmas truce taking place 110 years ago during World War I on Saturday, Dec. 14 at 10am at the Midway Village Museum, 6799 Guilford Road, Rockford, IL. The soldiers in the Western front of the Great War called unofficial ceasefires during the week of Christmas. Enemies came together to decorate, exchange gifts, sing carols, and even play football. Find out more about this special historical event, and how to receive a special holiday trench tour!

Green-Wood Cemetery served as the backdrop on the afternoon of Saturday, Oct. 26, to grant U.S. Army signal corp. operator Grace Banker her rightful place in the history books. Banker led America’s first women soldiers overseas in March 1918 during the First World War. 70 bilingual women, known as the “Hello Girls,” operated switchboards under battlefield conditions and provided vital communications between the American Expeditionary Forces and the French military, including front-line combat support. Banker’s remarkable legacy was honored in collaboration with the United War Veterans Council and Grace Bankers family with the unveiling of a bronze plaque and Army Veteran medallion at her gravesite. Read more about this long-overdue event, and learn how at the time of her burial, Banker received neither military honors nor a marker denoting her service to her nation.

The collier U.S.S. Cyclops was lost at sea during World War I.  The ship was headed to Baltimore, Maryland with a massive cargo of war materiel.  She never arrived at her destination. Marvin Barrash, grand nephew of a crewman aboard the Cyclops, who has written three books about the missing vessel, and supported many searches for the ship, writes in a new article that “The word mystery must now be removed from the saga of the U.S.S. Cyclops.”  Learn more about the lost great ship, and why, more than one hundred years since her loss, “The time to know the facts concerning the loss of the 309 Americans and their ship is now.”

Less than two miles behind the front lines during World War I, some American women telephone operators sat at switchboards that shook severely from the sounds of the big guns they could hear coming over the wires during the battles fought by the U.S. Army. Now a campaign is being waged to get the “Hello Girls” awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award, before the end of the current Congress to recognize their often forgotten, but critical, service to the U.S. war effort. Read the entire article from the Times Union newspaper, and find out how 52 New Yorkers were in the ranks of the “Hello Girls” during a critical phase of World War I.

More than a century after the fighting stopped in November 1918, the legacy of the more than 4.7 million U.S. service members who served in World War I has been brought to life through a towering display illuminated for the first time in late September at the nation’s monument commemorating the Great War. A Soldier’s Journey, a complex story of triumph and sacrifice that defines America’s involvement in the war through a series of scenes featuring a recurring figure: a soldier who answered the call to serve in battles that raged an ocean away. Learn more about the sprawling 25-ton bronze composition that combines 38 total figures to tell the story of the war, capturing the broad range of American men and women from all walks of life who answered the call.

Jill Frahm, PhD, teaches history courses in the General Education department at Dakota County Technical College (DCTC) in Minnesota. Jill co-chairs the department and also serves as the college’s Rotaract Club faculty co-adviser. She began teaching at DCTC in 2012. Although she is fascinated by history across the gamut of times and places, Jill has focused her research on unconventional women and men in the years between the Civil War and World War I. Learn how one area of keen historical interest for Jill is the Hello Girls, the American telephone operators who served with the U.S. Army in France during World War I, and their extraordinary but contemporaneously dismissed contributions to American combat success in that conflict.

The Chickasaw Nation is filled with stories passed down from generation to generation. Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer’s book “Otis W. Leader: The Ideal American Doughboy” recounts the story of a First American World War I veteran. The book was featured at the Library of Congress National Book Festival in August and won two Oklahoma Book Awards. A “story archaeologist” who looks at past lives and events to share with the world, Sawyer weaves together the story of Otis W. Leader’s journey during the war in her book. Read more about this award-winning book, and learn how “Leader’s mind was set to serve his country even before America entered the war. He knew he wanted to do his part.”

Native American women, like their male counterparts, share a proud tradition of military service. During World War I, 14 Native American women were in the Army Nurse Corps. Charlotte Edith Anderson Monture (left), a Mohawk from Ontario, Canada, graduated from nursing school in New York in 1914 and found work there. In April 1917, when the United States entered the war, she volunteered for the Army Nurse Corps. In February 1918, she sailed to France where she treated wounded soldiers in the hospital and on the battlefield. Find out more about Monture, and all the other brave women who have raised their hands to serve their nation over the last 248 years.

Many Native American tribes had Code Talkers who served in both world wars. Code talkers were useful because their languages weren’t understood by enemy forces, and the code talkers could transmit secret messages to and from the battlefield without being deciphered. World War I code talkers included the Choctaw, Cherokee, Comanche, Osage, Lakota and Cheyenne Nations. Learn more about WWI and WWII Native American Code Talkers, and how they had to get creative with military terms that were not native to their language.

During World War I, Berkeley County, SC was the home of 534 service members between 1917 and 1918. Due to some painstaking work by Berkeley County Museum Director Chelsy Clark Proper, the names of all people with Berkeley County connections who were born or lived in the county and who enlisted in the U.S. forces during WWI, are now listed on Berkeley County Museum’s website. Read more about the “labor of love” compiling this exhaustive list, and why “Providing and finding as much information as possible is her goal.” 

The portrait of Pvt. Foster Stevens (left) in his Marine uniform during World War I belongs to Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick, Stevens’s grandnephew. Stevens was killed in France during the waning days of World War I, just nine days before the war ended.. The exact circumstances of Pvt. Stevens’ death were an unsolved mystery for the family, and a preoccupation of Warrick. Read  more about Pvt. Foster Stevens, and learn how, according to Warrick, “I convinced myself that the details of Foster Stevens’s final day were forever lost to time. Until, suddenly, they weren’t.”

The USS Texas, pictured at left in New York Harbor 1918, served in both World Wars, but now faces an uncertain future. Despite a recent $60 million overhaul, “the USS Texas (BB-35) is fighting its most important campaign in its long, storied life. That is the fight for this legendary steel beast to find a permanent home.” Prevented from returning to the San Jacinto battleground where she was once housed by “bureaucratic and financial challenges,” “the only battleship in existence to have seen action in both world wars that defined the twentieth century and shaped the tumultuous century we live in today” is in danger of becoming homeless. Learn more about how “one of the greatest embodiments of twentieth-century U.S. naval power is made to float aimlessly in the friendly, albeit uncertain, waters of an increasingly ambivalent Texas, the state not the ship.”

For thousands of years, countries had two force types – navies and armies, and seemingly overnight, a third – the air force, came into existence during World War I. When the U.S. entered WWI, it lacked a military air arm capable of fighting an enemy—it had just a single combat-ready squadron. However, unravished by war, the U.S. had plenty of potential. Writing for the Simply Flying website, author Aaron Spray looks at the slow start then rapid growth of U.S. air power in the Great War, albeit without home-grown equipment.. Find out how the US aviation industry in 1917 didn’t exist on a level to support the design and build of thousands of airplanes, so all fighter planes flown by U.S. pilots in American service in the war were European.

“The hidden story of the U.S. Navy’s first Black commissioned officer spans five decades, three continents, two world wars, two wives from different countries, and one hell of a journey for an Indiana farm boy. For mutual convenience, both he and the United States Navy pretended that he wasn’t Black. This story had almost been erased from history until the determined efforts of one of his extended relatives, Jeff Giltz of Hobart, Indiana, brought it to light.” Read all the rest of Reuben Keith Green’s article on the Center for International Maritime Security website, and learn more about Lieutenant (junior grade) William Lloyd Garrison Payne, and why “understanding the racial and political climate during which he received his commission is crucial to understanding the importance of his place in Navy history.“

More than 100 years after a monument was placed to honor the “Clallam County boys” of Washington state who died in World War I, family and community members gathered to rededicate a new plaque to honor their sacrifices. The new plaque is a “lasting testament to remember these men.” Learn more about the update plaque, which is intended to honor the “memory of the Clallam County Boys who fought and died in the world war and of their heroic mothers.”

Sergeant Paul Maynard of Torrington, CT served as a machinist in the famous 26th Infantry Division, known as the “Yankee Division,” as most of its men hailed from southern New England. After experiencing some of the fiercest fighting of the war in northern France, the 21-year-old Connectican was mortally wounded while attempting to protect comrades under heavy fire during the final days of the bloody Meuse-Argonne offensive. Maynard died from his wounds on November 11, 1918 — the same day the Armistice ended hostilities. Read about how members of Maynard’s extended family discovered a long-lost cache of the sergeant’s WWI letters, which shed light on the front-line experience of the young men who made up the bulk of the Yankee Division.

“On November 11, 1918, the world stood on the brink of peace, but for thousands of American soldiers on the front lines in France, the war’s final moments were anything but peaceful.”  On his “Dave Does History” website and podcast, Dave Bowman goes on to recount the last morning of WWI, when American Doughboys were ordered to launch one final push just hours before the guns would fall silent. Read the entire article and listen to the audio podcast here.

The carnage of World War I drove advances in new techniques and tools to collect and store blood and offer safe transfusions. Though military medicine had improved in the later years of the 19th century, nothing would prepare the armed forces for the absolute carnage of WWI. The development of blood banks and an increase in successful transfusions helped put a small dent in the war’s fatalities and improved recoveries for wounded soldiers. Learn more about how caring for the war wounded led to rapid improvement of transfusion techniques, and advances in the development of anticoagulant and short-term storage techniques—all vital elements to setting up the effective and safe blood banks that the world has now.

After enduring shellfire for three days and being sustained with only two rationed meals, Wisconsin Doughboys attached to the 57th Field Artillery Brigade witnessed their unit’s first great victory in the Great War in Fismes, on August 6, 1918.] As a reward, their parent division, the 32nd Infantry Division, was relieved by the 28th Infantry Division. However, the 57th’s artillerymen received different orders. Author Rory Fehring takes a hard look at how battlefield necessity and headquarters complexities can create changes in force structure that “may significantly bury the legacy of an organization.”

A historic World War I memorial in New Braunfels has sustained substantial damage after a driver, later arrested on DWI charges, crashed into it. The sculpture, depicting a soldier ominously known as the “American Doughboy,” was uprooted from its longstanding place in the town’s Main Plaza by a driver allegedly avoiding a deer. The driver was charged with DWI; the deer apparently escaped unharmed. Read more, and find out how the statue was seriously damaged along with the plaza infrastructure. 

A man is only missing if he is forgotten.

Our Doughboy MIA this month is 2nd Lieutenant Carl Abell Dudley. Born in Keene, New Hampshire, on February 27, 1889, he attended Harvard University, where he graduated in the class of 1907-1908. On December 8, 1917, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and was assigned to the Officers Training School at Camp Upton, New York. In March 1918, he sailed to France with Company C, 306th Machine Gun Battalion, 77th Division. While in France, he was promoted to Corporal, followed by Sergeant. On June 1st, 1918, he was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant and assigned to Company A, 306th Machine Gun Battalion.
On September 14, 1918, Lieutenant Dudley’s position near Merval, France, came under a German barrage. Corporal Anderson and Private Curran later recounted the incident to Graves Registration Service investigators:

Read 2nd Lt. Dudley’s whole story.

Would you like to be involved with solving the case of 2nd Lieutenant Carl Dudley, and all the other Americans still in MIA status from World War I? You can! Click here to make a tax-deductible donation to our non-profit organization today, and help us bring them home! Help us do the best job possible and give today, with our thanks.  Remember: A man is only missing if he is forgotten.

100 Cities 100 Memorials is the first book to salute America’s official centennial World War One memorials. As selected by the Pritzker Military Museum & Library, Chicago, the Congress-appointed World War I Centennial Commission, these 100 diverse monuments represent equally varied and moving stories of dedication, sacrifice, and heroism. With more than 230 archival images, vintage posters, and new photographs, this richly illustrated volume journeys from Hawaii to Maine, Idaho to Florida, and Arizona to Illinois to celebrate tributes formed of metal, stone, and memory. The compelling text provides a deeper understanding of each memorial and salutes the many organizations today that bridge past and present to maintain and honor these expressions of the nation’s heritage. “100 Cities 100 Memorials” is much more than a picture book. Through the powerful and personal narratives it tells, this volume stands as an eloquent testament to those who answered the call of duty and shaped one of the most consequential eras in American history. Purchase a copy of this amazing book now.

Lest We Forget: The Great War World War I Prints from the Pritzker Military Museum & Library. One of the nation’s premier military history institutions pays tribute to the Americans who served and the allies they fought beside to defeat a resourceful enemy with a lavishly illustrated book.  It is an official product of the United States World War One Centennial Commission and is a tribute to those who served in the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and what would become the Air Force. It serves as a lasting reminder that our world ignores the history of World War I (and the ensuing WWII) at its peril―lest we forget. 

Honoring the Doughboys: Following My Grandfather’s World War I Diary is a stunning presentation of contemporary photographs taken by the author that are paired with diary entries written by his grandfather, George A. Carlson, who was a soldier in the U.S. Army during World War I. Jeff Lowdermilk followed his grandfather’s path through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany and returned with these meticulously crafted photographs and his own engaging stories that bring the diary to life for contemporary readers. Lowdermilk’s passion for World War I and military history began as a young boy when he listened to his grandfather tell his stories about serving as an infantryman– a “Doughboy”–in Europe during the Great War.

In the Centennial Footsteps of the Great War 

This notable 2-volume work has been included in the Doughboy Shop for awareness. $2 from every copy sold in the United States will go to the Doughboy Foundation. Throughout history, all wars have been given names. But not the one to which Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy’s two-volume book is dedicated. It was simply called the Great War. The events of 1914–1918, also referred to as the First World War or World War One, and the sacrifices made by our forebears a century ago should always be remembered because peace can never be taken for granted. Understanding the reasons, circumstances, and the consequences of the First World War will help us to prevent the Third World War.

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