On an Autumn day in 1985, Clell Cecil Olds recounted how, more than 68 years prior, he had been drafted into the U.S. Army to fight in the First World War. When he left his home in Paris, Tennessee, he left behind his family farm, a steady job in a clay pit, and Thelma Elizabeth Wright: the woman who would become his wife when he made it home safe.^[1] Olds did not know yet that he would cross over to fight on the front in Europe, but he did know there was a chance he would never see home again. After boot camp and training at Camp Gordon, Olds was a private first class with the 6th Infantry Headquarters Division, serving in a pioneer platoon. He would use the demolitionist’s tools of the trade: dynamite, Sheddite, and TNT, to aid the war effort.

When it was finally time to cross over, the journey to Brest, France, from Chickamauga Park, Georgia, was a hellish, 12-day slog on the freighter USS Covington. When he returned stateside by way of Fort Oglethorpe in February 1919, both he and the world around him had changed forever. Olds was wounded in the Argonne Forest a month before Armistice Day, and gave a grisly, spine-chilling account of seeing his brothers in arms (including a good friend of his) returning from the front after a gas attack. He said the men “were vomiting and it would be just the blackest stuff you have ever looked at in your life. They were just stumbling along, a lot of them...”^[2] But the things he recalled with the most clarity and fondness were the mundane and easily overlooked: marching orders, place names, gorgeous mountain vistas, French villages and their inhabitants, living conditions, and food. His most vivid accounts were not of being wounded or losing friends, but of life at camp and trekking around the pristine mountain lakes of France’s Vosges region. To me, this says that the most profound moments of his wartime experience were not the heroic sentiments behind his service or combat traumas he faced, but rather the eye-opening, life-changing experiences he had along the way.

The war was a coming-of-age experience for both American soldiers and the United States itself. While it was far from easy for Olds, his account was not that of a jaded combat veteran recounting endless horrors. His wartime experience changed him in far more ways than one. When he came back home, his views on the war and the Europeans he encountered were different from when he had left. His first-hand experience showed him new perspectives that defined his memories of the “Great War.” For Olds and many Lost Generation Jackson Purchase residents like him, World War I represented their first (and often only) experience with global cultures through life overseas. Through seeing both the war and foreign cultures firsthand, Jackson Purchase veterans of WWI experienced shifts in their perspectives of the rest of the world, the war and its justification, and their own society.

This project fits into a greater context of social histories of the First World War, histories that have become particularly popular since the centenaries of WWI marked from 2014 to 2018. The First World War includes the same topics of ethnic and racial identity, the perception of “otherness” in the enemy, whether American entry into foreign wars is justified, and the impact of media efforts or first-hand learning on these perceptions, as more oft-covered wars like World War II and the Vietnam War. It gets much less historiographic analysis in its own right, however.

What seems most significant to me, in terms of telling a social history of the war, is analyzing and understanding why soldiers felt the way they did about their wartime experience. This project is based on a series of interviews of World War I veterans, conducted for the Jackson Purchase Oral History Project in the late 1970s and 1980s, that have preserved their stories for the past 40 years. As a resource for historiography, they are largely untapped. Through them I hope to allow these veterans of the Great War to express their own sentiments from their time in the service.

In his seminal work on doughboys’ accounts of their military service, historian Edward A. Guttierez cautions that a story always changes with the telling, and that just as memories are flawed, they are also subject to reinterpretation and reframing with age.^[3] The Purchase Area veterans interviewed in the 1970s and ‘80s had decades to forget or reshape their narratives to fit cultural norms, whether intentionally or not. With that in mind, it is best to try to fill in the gaps of primary source narratives with the broader works of Great War historians. This work fits into the greater national and global trend that overseas military experience, regardless of time period, leads to shifts in veterans’ perspectives on cultural and social topics.

^[1] “Obituary of Clell Cecil Olds,” The Commercial Appeal, July 25, 1992, A8.

^[2] Clell Cecil Old, Interview by Peggy Pritchard, September 10, 1985, transcript, Jackson Purchase Oral History Project, Pogue Special Collections Library, Murray, KY.

^[3] Edward A. Guttierez, Doughboys on the Great War: How American Soldiers Viewed Their Military Experience, (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 7.

When American troops crossed the Atlantic starting in 1917, they experienced a variety of new languages, culture groups, ethnicities, and nationalities. Jackson Purchase veterans in particular had not experienced these, as the vast majority were farmers or in the working class. These men had likely not spent time outside of their own counties. Thus, the experiences of crossing over and living abroad were jarring; changing Jackson Purchase doughboys’ views on their allies and enemies, people of other ethnicities, the European nations that hosted them, and their own country by comparison.

For the first time, many Jackson Purchase veterans were made to confront “otherness.” These “others” included French citizens, their European allies, and German soldiers and POWs. Encounters with them served not only, as one would at first believe, to widen the gaps between Americans and Europeans, or citizens and soldiers, but also to establish a sense of common belonging and humanity. The American Expeditionary force was nominally kept separate from British and French divisions as a means of creating American unity.^[1] But in spite of this, troops and civilians on both sides came together. They mingled on either side of the front when soldiers marched through populated areas, camped in the countryside, and occupied enemy territory.^[2]

This mingling led to a cultural and social exchange which tied the allies closer together and opened soldiers’ eyes to both the similarities and differences between not just their allying nations, but their German enemies as well. At both a national and individual level, these disparate groups were united by either shared sacrifice or, at the war’s end, a desire to rebuild, return home, and move forward.

Soldiers came to love their allies, but in some ways an even stronger relationship emerged between AEF forces and Rhinelander Germans after the war ended. The American zone of occupation was considered the most effective and compassionate of the four. American-sponsored aid programs showed stark contrasts with the more resentful French zone occupiers, and AEF troops reportedly showed more respect and courtesy for local villagers’ individual rights than the Germany Army itself had done.^[3] Jackson Purchase residents like Fritz Metzger who were part of the occupation force appreciated German hospitality and genuinely liked the Germans they dealt with.^[4]

^[1] Michael S. Neiberg, Fighting the Great War: A Global History, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 325.

^[2] Emmanuelle Cronier and Victor Demiaux. 2018. “Encountering the Other in Wartime: The Great War as an Intercultural Moment?” First World War Studies 9 (2): 141–50.

^[3] Guttierez, 137.

^[4] Fritz Metzger, Interview by Mark Fuller, December 3, 1982, transcript, Jackson Purchase Oral History Project, Pogue Special Collections Library, Murray, KY.

Kentuckians had varying opinions on whether or not the war was worth entering, but at first, the war was a foreign conflict that mattered less than local economics. When President Wilson announced American entry to the Great War, it was third-page news in The Murray Ledger behind articles on the tobacco market.^[1] Kentucky legislators’ initial arguments against President Wilson’s establishment of the Selective Service hedged heavily on the fact that the draft was bound to disproportionately affect lower-class workers and farmers, thus harming the state economy.^[2]

Even Purchase Area farm boys with established careers like South Fulton’s Carl Milam, who was well into his 30s, were drafted and sent to Europe. Milam’s objections to crossing over, like those of many Purchase residents, weren’t on moral or political grounds like Kentuckians of Irish and German descent. Rather, his concerns were far more practical: he didn’t want to leave his widowed father to take care of the farm on his own. Milam, who had every right to object to being drafted, still felt the war was worth fighting. He said joining the war was a show of good neighborliness to America’s allies.^[3]

For the veterans of the AEF, especially those from the Purchase region, wartime experience only solidified soldiers’ patriotic resolve. This is because their experience was somewhat different from that of their European allies. American forces spent only one year on the frontlines, with an average of 327 Americans dying per day. The French, over the more than four years of fighting from 1914-18, lost 897 men every day.^[4]

When they first enlisted to fight or answered the draft, most Jackson Purchase veterans cited their national pride and sense of duty as their reason for signing up. Of the Purchase Area veterans interviewed, the majority either enlisted or tried to enlist before being drafted, and of those who were drafted most said they were glad to have done their duty regardless. This sense of obligation and honor was so strong that it still permeated their narratives 70 years after their original tours of duty.

The immense gravity of warfare has a profound impact on soldiers, and most of all on those who have seen combat. The war was easily justifiable for those back home who had not been in the trenches, but the archetypical doughboy quickly lost his taste for warfare after seeing combat. The Great War proved to a generation of veterans that war, no matter how just, should always be a last resort.^[5]

The war sent home soldiers who had seen the brutality of a World War firsthand, and deeply hoped there would not be another.^[6] Their experiences in Europe made Jackson Purchase veterans into better-educated and wizened men who had seen the damage modern warfare was capable of.

One of the most important things Jackson Purchase veterans learned was the value of human life. The humanity of the average soldier was central to their military experience. Going to war was seen as a miserable but necessary job; the vast majority of soldiers did not relish in killing their enemy. Combat was absolutely horrid and at any moment, you or one of your friends could die. Depending on a soldier’s personal views and morals, killing was rationalized in a variety of ways. But only very rarely, and under dire circumstances, was it done without any feelings of guilt.^[7] Even in the darkest moments of a soldier’s experience, their empathy still shines through. Every soldier on the front was a human being with a home, friends, and a family. The vast majority of those present realized that. This weighed heavily on soldiers’ hearts and minds. For most Jackson Purchase veterans who served on the front or met German people, the “dreaded Hun” was not the demon he was made out to be in propaganda. They saw humanity in the foes they faced.

^[1] The Murray Ledger, "The Murray Ledger, April 12, 1917" (1917). The Murray Ledger. 483. https://digitalcommons.murraystate.edu/tml/483

^[2] David J. Bettez, Kentucky and the Great War: World War I on the Home Front, Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. 86. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1f5g5vw.

^[3] Carl Milam, Interview by Ted Belue, October 2, 1982, transcript, Jackson Purchase Oral History Project, Pogue Special Collections Library, Murray, KY.

^[4] Guttierez, 173.

^[5] Ibid, 148.

^[6] Ibid, 172.

^[7] David Taylor, Memory, Narrative and the Great War: Rifleman Patrick MacGill and the Construction of Wartime Experience, 39, Liverpool University Press, 2013.

Their time in Europe and participation in the war effort provided Jackson Purchase doughboys with a new perspective from which to view their own society back home. On a national scale, the Great War was a moment for every stratum of American society to play their part: from women working to maintain the homefront to African-Americans and ethnic minorities striving to prove their American-ness on the frontlines. Thus, the niche each group filled and the lofty heights to which they rose to accomplish the tasks set for them defined the new place in American society they found after the war. Ethnic immigrants and African-Americans sought to fight for their civil rights and citizenship out of a sense of national pride and desire to showcase their capabilities. All those who served expressed a remarkable patriotism, one that was molded, even amplified, by their wartime service. Those who had risked life and limb for their country above all looked back to their home country as the best in the world: otherwise they likely would not have served. Expressed above all was the idea that the lessons taught by World War I were lessons that they would never forget.[1] Black Jackson Purchase veterans like Rev. William Davis of Paducah were segregated from white soldiers. Their World War I experience was bookended by the racism they faced in the South both before and after their military service. Before he crossed over the Atlantic, Davis experienced a race riot during his training at Camp Merritt, New Jersey. An innocent man was killed by a national guardsman amidst a conflict over black soldiers trying to enter the camp's canteen. Once he reached Europe, Davis had to enlist in a French division if he wanted to fight on the front. The general sentiment among the American Expeditionary Force at the time was that black soldiers should be kept in positions as stevedores and day laborers, rather than in combat roles. This oppression of African-Americans was unforgettable and unforgivable for Davis, and he said "I want everybody to know that because of that little misery that they done to us."[2] Stories like Rev. Davis' and the others showcased in this project offer an important look into veterans' experiences as they remember them. These memories can engender a strong sense of connection between communities and their histories, so long as they don't go untold.

[1] Guttierez, 153-4.

[2] William G. Davis, Interview by Bill Peyton, September 25, 1979, transcript, Jackson Purchase Oral History Project, Pogue Special Collections Library, Murray, KY.