The Son of an American Legion Founder Led a Guerrilla Campaign of Terror Against the Nazis

In WWI, Wood Sr. received the Legion of Merit and a Purple Heart as well as the French Croix de Guerre and Legion of Honor.

By today’s standards, Eric Fisher Wood Sr. would probably not have joined the National Guard, let alone join two armies to fight in the trenches of World War I.

Wood Sr. was born into a prominent New York City family, educated in private schools and a graduate of both Yale and l’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. With a Ph.D. in civil engineering and with his socioeconomic pedigree, Wood could have just returned to New York and sat out the Great War entirely. Rather than sit out the war, he first joined the American Ambulance Corps, then in 1917, moved on to the British Naval Reserve. When the United States entered the war, he then joined the U.S. Army. As assistant chief of staff for the 88th Division, he was wounded at Meuse-Argonne. He also served as a colonel in the 107th Field Artillery. By the time the war ended, Wood Sr. received the Legion of Merit and a Purple Heart as well as the French Croix de Guerre and Legion of Honor.

In the years after WWI, Wood Sr. was instrumental in the creation of the American Legion. Under the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Wood was one of the original members of the executive committee that would oversee the founding of the veterans organization, establishing a provisional central office and serving as secretary of its first caucus in Paris in 1919 and its second in St. Louis later that year.

But Wood Sr’s proudest achievement may have been having a son who would make his own name in the next world war.

Like his father, Eric Wood Jr. could also have avoided serving. He was born in Santa Barbara, California, to his storied father and Baroness Vera de Ropp, daughter of a Russian noble. When World War II broke out, the elder Wood joined Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s general staff. Likely because of his WWI experience of being gassed on the battlefields of France, he tried to get his son to sit out the Second World War at the family farm in Pennsylvania.

The younger Wood did as he was told, but every bit his father’s son, he still joined the Pennsylvania National Guard. An artillery officer, he was eventually called to active duty in 1943, and by December 1944, he was on the front lines in Belgium.

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