- Welcome to University Place Presents.
I'm Norman Gilliland.
We'll begin at the end.
Corporal Francis Webster was killed in action
on the morning of October 14th, 1918,
somewhere in France, hit by a piece of German shrapnel.
And yet, when we look through his letters,
his diary, and his artwork, we can't help somehow hoping
that he was going to live through the war after all.
And in a way, he did because those works of art
and those letters and the diary entries
all bring him back to life again
and give us a window onto what he experienced
in the trenches in France in World War I.
With me is the editor
of The Letters, Diary, and Artwork of Francis Webster.
It's called Somewhere Over There,
and the editor is Darrek Orwig.
Welcome to University Place Presents.
- Hey, thank you, it's great to be here.
- How did you come across this trove of art
and letters and diary entries from Francis Webster?
- So I was at the Iowa Gold Star Military Museum
which is located at Camp Dodge,
just on the north side of Des Moines,
and I was actually doing research
on Francis Webster's regiment, the 168th Infantry,
which was a federalized National Guard unit.
So I'm there and I'm doing research,
I'm goin' through other letters,
other images that are in their collections,
and then I start speaking with the curator,
and he shared with me a collection that was coming in,
and this was Francis Webster's collection.
And it was boxes that were still addressed from the family.
They were being sent in from across the nation
from his family who had moved a few states away.
And as I took a look at it, I saw a variety of his artwork,
illustrations that had been submitted to a Des Moines area
newspaper, and they had been curated by that newspaper
then given to the family after the war.
There was also Webster's diaries, some of which pre-date
to when he was in college and when he was first
starting to have a relationship with Ding Darling,
the famed political cartoonist.
And other boxes were some of things
that were with him when he fell in action.
So it was a very large collection,
and I was able to gain access to it,
and I realized right away, this is a story
that would really tell the big story
of America's involvement in World War I
through a much smaller one.
- Did he have to go into World War I?
Was he drafted?
- He was not drafted, he was a volunteer.
So at the time the war was declared,
he was serving as a superintendent
in a rural community school district,
and he had served one year, had done a lot
with community development and really had
a lot of support from the community.
After one year, he was chosen to have a contract renewed,
and so it came with a significant pay raise.
But right around that same time was when
America declared war, and he chose to be a soldier.
He had a chronic lung condition,
he had arches that were startin' to fall a little bit,
and he had weak ankles, so he enlisted
and went in very enthusiastic to serve his nation.
- But he was already a cartoonist of some note,
and did he play on that at all to get himself into uniform?
- He didn't quite play on it when he was enlisting,
but a short period after he enlisted,
his company commander, Captain Fleur,
realized he had incredible artistic talent,
and they were using it at first
for like military-type purposes,
he was practicing mapping and communication
of physical features on the landscape.
And then, as Webster was drawing, he started reaching out
to some of his contacts in the Des Moines area.
He attended college in Des Moines, and this is where
the regiment was mustering, this is where they were
forming up at, there at the state fairgrounds.
So as he's training and learning the drill
and learning how to do all the things that he needs to,
he realizes that the folks on the home front,
the families of the loved ones he was serving with
didn't quite understand what they were doing.
So he started doing these illustrations,
started using those connections with these Des Moines area
newspapers, and they start running his artwork.
- And so he's actually just barely
out of college at this point.
- Yeah, so he was only about a year out of college or so.
He had went to college when he was 16, still fairly young,
and his first year of college was in the 1913, 1914.
He takes a summer off, and he has this moment
where he really decides, or he has this transitionary-type
moment where he decides he really wants to focus
his life on helping other folks,
and he starts trying to learn all the traits that he can,
really studying how he can self-improve himself.
And as he goes into his sophomore year,
that's after the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated.
- Which started World War I. - Exactly, yeah.
So in those months in that first part of the fall semester,
there's news comin' back from the battlefields of France
and Europe talking about substantial casualty losses,
and people are anxious to learn more news about that.
So Francis starts working with Ding Darling,
this famed political cartoonist who's workin'
with Des Moines Register and starts,
initially it's kinda freelance work,
you know, he'd do some concepts of illustrations
and then he'd give those over.
And so he was very involved with documenting the war
and being involved with that prior to enlisting.
- He's enlisted in what, like the Iowa National Guard?
- Absolutely, yeah, so he's with the Iowa National Guard.
He enlists, but the problem is there's only
a few hundred thousand troops in America,
and they need millions to be able to fight
on the Western Front.
So he arrives there, they're short on firearms,
they're short on all the material they would need
to fight a modern war.
There's also a shortage of uniforms.
So he writes back to his parents.
He served as an assistant Scoutmaster,
(Norman laughs) and he writes back
to get his Boy Scout uniform so he has some
look of being a soldier anyway, some kind of uniform.
So his company commander kinda takes pity on him.
He'd been in the service for a number of years
and loans him a number of uniform items then
until uniforms could be actually issued.
- And so from then Iowa National Guard,
he somehow becomes federalized?
- Yeah, so at first it's a state unit.
You know, that's kinda they'd followed in the Civil War
and with the Spanish-American War.
They realized that they were gonna need a lot of soldiers
in World War I, so you had the regular Army,
you had the National Army, which is mostly conscripts
and draftees, and then you have the federalized
National Guard soldiers who are these citizen soldiers
that are workin' on farms and mills and store shops
on Main Street, and then they're drilling on the side,
just like today's modern National Guard.
- I gather it takes him a while, though,
even once he's in uniform, to actually feel
that much like a soldier?
I mean, the typical story would be that
we spent hours a day just marching
and doing these kind of routine things stateside.
- Yeah, so he enlists, and it's kinda a very
surreal-type experience 'cause they're not
at a traditional military base.
What they are, is they're at the state fairgrounds.
So they're out there, and they're training,
they're staying in some of the buildings
that they would be showing livestock in,
and the State Fair happens, so there's kids showing sheep,
(Norman laughs) and then Henry,
or Francis and his comrades,
they're marching and drilling and doing a lot
on show for the folks who were coming.
- As an artist, then he worked in what media?
He was a cartoonist. - He was!
Yeah, he was a cartoonist, so he did a lot
of pen-and-ink-type drawings.
Real early on, he's developing concepts for Ding Darling,
and then later on, he's involved with Ding Darling.
So when he's at the state fairgrounds,
he starts reachin' out to these newspapers,
and there's some of his real early ones,
he's depicting life there at the state fairgrounds.
He's illustrating soldiers comin' in from the country
who maybe weren't used to modern plumbing,
you know, (Norman laughs)
indoor plumbing, and so he's talkin' about soldiers
who might not have been used to bathing on a regular basis.
He's doin' cartoons about the supply sergeants
who are gaining quite a bit of weight.
- [Norman] While everybody else presumably is losing.
- Exactly, yeah, yeah.
He's learning how to be a bugler as well.
He enlisted initially as a bugler.
Later, he's promoted as a corporal.
So he's trying to get used to the military bugles,
and he does one cartoon where he's showing
his bugling being so bad, the Germans just,
"Give it up and surrender," so yeah.
- [Sam] We left Camp Mills a week ago last Thursday
and traveled 1100 miles toward France,
and the boilers on our ship went bad,
and we had to leave our convoy
and the other transports and come back.
We were crowed on the ship and were seasick
but had a pretty good time nevertheless.
We are in a fine camp here.
We got here last night, and tents were waiting for us.
We are in a harbor just a little ways
from the Statue of Liberty.
- They leave the state fairgrounds,
and they head over to New York,
to Camp Mills, and then from there,
they start journeying across the Atlantic.
They get out there in this captured German boat
that retrofitted for American soldier transporting,
and the boilers go bad, they have to limp back in,
and they have to get on another ship.
And this one's a British ship,
which was a pretty typical experience
for a lot of American soldiers heading over to Europe.
There was just a shortage of good transport ships,
so they were relying quite a bit on the British.
And then they arrive in there in England,
and then they start, they arrive at the ports,
and they start marching through the villages,
and people are out,
they know people are standing in the doorways,
they're lookin' out the windows at 'em, and--
- [Norman] They've kind of seen it before.
- Yeah, absolutely.
In 1914, as soldiers are marching off to war,
this is a very similar-type experience.
And the British, they had suffered quite a bit
during the conflict already.
The Battle of Somme, just a little over a year earlier,
about 57,000 men were wounded in one day.
Another 20,000 were killed in one day.
So just substantial casualties were being suffered,
and the troops that were marching off
to the Western Front from England at this point
weren't the same type that they had back in 1914.
They're younger, they may not have been the best fit
to be soldiers, you know, a few years earlier,
but they were rounding 'em up and bringin' 'em
up there to the Front.
- [Sam] At present, we are in a small village,
and are billeted by barns.
The houses and barns are all of stone
with red tile roofs, and the peasants live
in the same buildings with their cattle and chickens.
Nearly all of the men we see are in some sort
of military uniform, and we have seen soldiers
from a good many nations since we left the States.
- So this is, again, he's maybe 21 years old
and probably hasn't traveled much outside of Iowa,
and suddenly, he is in the world.
- For sure, yeah.
They arrive in France, and they see all
these different nationalities.
There's Serbians there, there's Russians, French, British,
you name it, this very global experience as they land.
And they're only there for a short period,
and so as they start goin' off on the trains
to get closer to the front lines,
they're seeing their first German soldiers, as well.
They're out, they're prisoners of war
who are out workin' in the fields.
And so they see them, it's the first glimpse of the enemy,
and as they keep travelin' by train,
they arrive in these villages where they can be billeted at.
There wasn't very large camps for them to train,
so what they're doing is placing 'em in these villages.
It's some stone architecture, red clay roofs.
And then something that he noted,
and a lot of others did, too, was that they were seeing
these massive piles of manure out in front of these barns!
And they realized that that was a sign of wealth
for these French farmers that if you had a big pile,
you had a lot of animals, and therefore,
you were fairly wealthy.
- And what kind of equipment, then, did he have
by the time he got to France?
- So after receiving some initial training,
they bring him into the trenches,
and atop his head, he's wearing,
they would wear a steel helmet.
For Francis Webster's regiment,
a lot of 'em are British-style helmets.
America was still struggling with making
its own type of helmet and a lot of its own gear.
It wasn't quite ready for this modern-type warfare.
So on their chests, they're wearing
a British gas mask or a small respirator.
They'd be strapped right onto their chest
when they're close to the front lines.
Across their waists, they're carrying a belt
that would carry a .45 caliber pistol,
some extra clips or magazines, and then a canteen.
They're also wearing rubber boots as well
because the conditions in the trenches,
it's a little lower, and with snow and the frost leavin'
the ground, it's getting pretty mucky and pretty wet.
So they go in there, there's some American technology there,
but there's a lot of foreign stuff at the beginning.
As the war proceeds and the American industry catches up,
then there's a lot more American-type equipment.
- More standardized would be helpful--
- Absolutely, yeah. - In combat situation.
- For sure.
- [Sam] Got up at two a.m. and helped
Corporal Morrison make out his reports.
Went to sleep for a few minutes.
We were awakened by a heavy bombardment,
and Captain Fleur called us out.
Some of us went to a bombardment cave
where we got the gas alarm.
Then we went out to gun number 16 and found Captain Fleur.
Helped carry sandbags to the squads that were fighting.
Battle ceased at about six a.m.
Went to Post 14 and 18 with Captain Fleur.
Corporal McKee was killed at Post 18 this a.m.
Shrapnel tore a hole through his helmet.
I saw his body at the infirmary.
- When he sees that hole torn through the helmet,
he had to wonder, we're by no means invincible
even in our state-of-the-art combat gear.
- It was likely his first Allied causality
that he had seen at that point.
You know, it was a guy he'd served with.
It was a guy in his company from Des Moines.
This raid was, what happened was,
there was very highly trained Bavarian stormtroopers
who came across specifically for the purpose
of capturing American soldiers to bring back
to parade about for PR purposes.
And so they came across these National Guardsmen
from Iowa who are also highly trained,
and they were able to repel the attack.
And they suffered quite a few casualties.
There was an officer from Des Moines
who was direct hit, struck his trench shelter
and caved it in and killed him.
There was a couple other men who with a mortar group.
They were hit by a shell, and a few of the men,
they're still missing today.
They never found 'em, they just
disappeared after the shell hit.
So I think it was very much a reality check
of what they were in for here on the Western Front.
- Now, we're going to, of course, be hearing
just a fairly small sampling of these letters
and journal entries of Colonel Webster,
but what kind of personality do you see in him
before he leaves, and how does the war
affect the tone of his writing, do you think?
- So at the very beginning of it,
he's very enthusiastic to get involved.
And he does an illustration that's in the book
where he talks about how he just can't wait
to get out of the state fairgrounds
and get to the, get across the Atlantic
and then from the Atlantic, getting into the trenches
and then making contact with the enemy.
And then at the very end of this illustration,
he writes about how he can't wait to just get home
and eat one of his mom's lemon pies.
So there's a lot of contemplation that's happening there.
They go back to the billets after this battle,
and they realize just how horrible fighting can be.
And this isn't a major battle by any means.
This is essentially a large trench raid,
and there's a lot worse that comes.
- [Norman] Does he give you any sense
of the psychological effect on the other soldiers,
I mean, in the artwork in particular?
- Some of his artwork, he shows men sitting there
thinking about what they went through,
and they're processing those experiences.
His own writing, you tell as you go through his letters
and through his diary entries, you can notice
that his perceptions are changing a little bit.
Not greatly, he's still trying to be very upbeat
with his artwork, especially what he's sending
back the Des Moines newspapers.
There's no doubt that he knew that reports
of these battles were going back to families
on the home front, and so he's doin' this artwork
as a way of trying to find the humor.
'Cause you get all these guys together,
it's not all gloom, you know.
As they're back, there's those senses
of camaraderie, there's the practical jokes,
there's the fun that they're having.
- And he's not officially, we've said,
a combat artist by any means.
Well, what's his actual official capacity as a soldier?
- So as the war goes on, it doesn't take long,
he's promoted from being a bugler up to being a corporal,
and initially he's with the platoon headquarter section
of the machine gun company, then later on,
he becomes a corporal of a machine gun squad.
So what he's doing is he's serving as a soldier first,
and then secondarily, he's very motivated to draw images
of what he's experiencing on the Western Front.
The American Expeditionary Forces,
the American army that was over there in France,
they had specific artists they had hired, a handful of 'em.
These were professional commercial artists who went
over there with the task to draw what was goin' on
and to do it in a very patriotic way
that would kinda stir support for the war on the home front.
There was an order that said they couldn't be
on the very front lines, though, so these guys,
they're documenting the war, and what they're seeing
is the aftermath of combat, so they're seeing
the crumpled bodies out in the fields,
they're seeing destroyed trenches,
they're seeing buildings that are just in ruins
and guys being carried back on stretchers.
Webster is up there on the very front lines,
he's doing these illustrations.
One of these professional artists they hired,
he's actually, he writes back and complains in a letter
how difficult it is to do quality drawings
with only three hours of sleep and in rainy conditions,
and here's Webster who's so motivated
to share a story and make sure it's gettin' back
to the home front and also documenting
what his regiment's going through,
just because they're citizen soldiers, and there's,
sometimes they weren't viewed on the same level
as a regular army, as professional soldiers.
- So in a sense, he had an advantage over, say,
a professional combat artist in that as a cartoonist
or as somebody doing sketches or even these watercolors,
relatively simple, relatively easy to transport.
- For sure, and as the war progresses and they get less
in the trenches and more out in the open areas,
he's more on the move, he does less watercolors
and more pen-and-ink and charcoal-and-pencil-type drawings,
just because it's less gear to carry.
- And so you're saying that he does not
send any of these home if they have pictures of Allied dead.
- No, the artwork that he was sending back home
was very much to create a positive spin
on what they're experiencing, and at first when he starts
sending 'em home, there's a very small censorship office.
His commanding officer and a lot of the officers
in his regiment, they're supportive
of him doing this artwork.
His captain's actually letting him sit
at his desk to do some of it.
And so he's creating, he's sending it home.
The censorship office, though,
starts expanding as the war goes on.
There's more soldiers, and they're lookin'
for this kinda stuff goin' back over
that could provide damaging information
to enemy spies and just the enemy in general.
So he's very careful to write in his artwork
that he's sending home "somewhere in France,"
that way it's very vague, and after some artwork
gets gobbled up by the censorship office,
he starts sending it to his parents
so it doesn't raise any alerts as it's goin' through.
And his officers were very supportive
'cause they wanted to make sure the National Guard story
was preserved and shared for the folks
in America at the time and for future generations.
- Now, as a machine gunner, does he ever write about
shooting at people?
- He does, yeah, he writes about shooting at people.
With the machine guns, they're these very large
French Hotchkiss machine guns.
The American machine guns in the inventory when they first
went to war, many of them just weren't appropriate
for what the conditions were on the Western Front.
They were very archaic.
So they're usin' a lot French machine guns in his unit,
and it's more a long-range weapon,
so he's seeing 'em more as masses of soldiers
or more as they're firing at a position
versus up close and engaging 'em that way.
- So it's not really an ultimately very personal experience
for him in combat, that's actually more
impersonal and almost arbitrary.
- In a way, yeah.
He's still there on the battlefields.
He's seeing the enemy, and the enemy's
sighting them in as well, and it's,
they're very close to it, and he's coming across
enemy dead as they're advancing across positions
or as they're on these battlefields.
But yeah, it's definitely not up close.
I don't know of any cases where he had to pull out his pistol
to take care of an enemy soldier.
- But there was gas.
- There was, yeah.
Poisonous gas was something that was
a huge challenge on the Western Front, and Francis Webster,
in their trenches they had these shelters constructed
that they could sleep in.
There was like wooden bunk beds in 'em and tables and such,
and they would have curtains that would go down
across the openings that were treated.
That way, gas couldn't get into 'em.
- [Sam] At 1:15 a.m., a large gas shell exploded
at the entrance of our dugout.
I was just getting up to go on guard,
and Bertholf and I were at the door
when a cloud of brown fog began to come in.
We put on our masks and yelled to wake up the others.
For several minutes, the Germans bombarded us,
and I took the guards out to the pits with masks on
and shells flying all around us.
Barrage ceased at two a.m.
Captain Fleur and Art McCullough killed by gas.
16 sent to hospital from company gassed.
We had to eat our reserve hardtack and canned salmon
today because the Boche gassed the chow in our kitchen.
- The Boche referring to the Germans.
That was a French term, a derogatory term for the Germans
in World War I. - Absolutely, yeah.
So this gas attack happens, this is their first real
major taste of poisonous gas, and Webster is preparing
to leave his dugout when it all takes place.
About a day or two later, he's going out on guard.
He's with another soldier,
and another gas attack is launched.
And it came out of these metal gas projector tubes,
and as the shells came up, they were glowing
from the heat, these metal canisters,
and it almost looked like fireworks up in the sky.
The other soldier who's on guard with him
freezes up, the shells are comin' down around 'em,
Francis puts on his mask, and this other soldier's
still scared, he's completely frozen,
doesn't know what to do, and so Francis takes his gas mask,
pulls it away, and yells out to him to put on his mask.
And as he's doin' that, the takes a big whiff
of phosgene gas, it hits his lungs, it's a very deadly gas,
and he's a casualty at that point.
So he's evacuated from the trenches, they bring him back,
and they're treating his lungs, they're goin' through
the whole process of shaving his head
to make sure there's no gas-infected hair,
treating his eyes, you know just this whole
very rigorous treatment process.
And as he's there recovering, he does an illustration,
and there's no paper available,
he's away from his bag of artist supplies,
so he takes a piece of Red Cross stationery,
flips it on the back and then does this illustration on it
and then sends it back to a newspaper in Des Moines
to be able to show that he's recovering,
and this is the recovery process of these soldiers.
And he cracks a joke about is this heaven,
or is this Des Moines or am I in heaven.
(both laughing)
You know, or something like that.
But he's trying to spin some humor on it
even though he just had this, there's so much loss
happening 'cause of this gas that happened
in the area of the trenches they were at.
And he recovers within about the course of a month,
and then he rejoins his regiment around the first of July.
- Well, it's remarkable that he could look at himself
in his own condition, pretty sorry condition
given the gas attack, and make a cartoon out of it.
And I suppose part of that may have been for the sake,
do you suppose, of encouraging his parents
not to worry too much about him?
- I'm sure there's some, partly his parents
and also the parents and loved ones
of the soldiers he was serving with as well.
- [Sam] Open warfare.
We advanced across wheat fields
under heavy fire and rain of bullets.
We fired our gun in a hollow and then from a hilltop
in advance of our own infantry.
We could see the line of advancing Germans.
Sutherland, Papa George, and I were on the gun.
We drove back two attacks, one after dark.
Heavy bombardment of high explosives,
trench mortars and gas shells.
We were under heavy fire all day.
Sergeant Collins was killed about noon
and buried in a blanket this afternoon.
Baird's leg was shot off as he was sitting beside me.
Sergeant Anthony was gassed.
I was make acting sergeant.
- A little hard to tell whether he was proud
of that promotion or just sort of in awe
of how fortunes could turn so quickly in war.
- I think, yeah, I think that he's just documenting
how much everything moves so fastly in this battle.
So what happens is he rejoins his regiment in July.
He's there in the Champagne region initially,
and a large German offensive happens,
and it's pushed back by the Allies, it's stopped.
And from then, the Allies then go on the offensive,
and it goes into open warfare.
So they're leavin' these trenches,
and they're going out and they're fightin'
in wheat fields and wood lots and cow pastures
and these little stone villages, and they're tryin'
to push the Germans back out of the ground
they've already captured.
So during this time, there along the Arc River
near Chateau Thierry, about 70% of the regiment is lost
from gas, from wounds, from death.
So it's this very traumatic experience that happens.
Webster is up there on the top of a hill.
There's a German assault happening, and they pull back.
They're havin' problems having their
machine gun fire be effective with these Germans
that are advancing towards 'em.
So as there's mustard gas comin' around,
and there's heat, you know, it's very warm temperatures
in July in France, their gas mask lenses are fogging up,
so they pull back down that top part of their mask,
knowing that they're gonna get gas in their eyes,
just to make sure they can sight those machine guns
and be able to stop this counterattack.
And they're successful with it,
but the next morning he wakes up,
and he's temporarily blind, so he gets ordered off the hill,
him and some of his comrades, and they have to be
brought back through this valley of farm fields
and pastures as there's shells coming down,
there's German planes flying overhead,
and they're able to get back to the aid station again.
And so he goes back to the hospital then,
and he's there for quite a while.
He has poisonous gas in his eyes, his vision returns,
and mustard gas is a very nasty kind of gas.
It causes burns, and there's a lot
of serious things that can come out of that.
So he recovers, he gets back up to full strength.
He rejoins his regiment then, and it's just as they
completed another battle, it's the St. Mihiel drive,
and just as they're continuing to advance,
he catches up with them, he's seeing the massive
amounts of German prisoners marching to the rear,
and he seeing the evidence of war.
And he gets there, and they're deployed into what's called
the St. Benoit sector, and they're, rather than being
these big, deep trenches with deep dugouts,
they're in basically what we call foxhole today.
They're shallow pits, and to protect against shrapnel
and then this constant rain that was
happening at the time, it rained for 47 days.
At some point in each of those 47 days, it was raining.
So they logs and they take earth,
and they cut brush to pile over the top of it
so that enemy airplanes and artillery
can't locate where they're at,
and they're fighting in these foxholes, very similar to how
they would fight like in World War II.
They're fightin' in these foxholes,
and near them is where the Meuse-Argonne Offensive's
happening, which is one of the bloodiest
campaigns in American history and where half
the casualties suffered by the Americans
in World War I are lost at.
And so that's happening just next to him.
- So how long has he been in combat by now?
- So he's been in combat quite a bit.
There's times that he's in the trenches
where there's just occasional shells comin' in,
or a plane spots him and fires a burst
of machine gun fire at him.
So there's these small-type experiences with warfare,
there's these major experiences as well.
So they're in contact with the enemy quite a bit.
They end up being raided as one of the,
their division, the 42nd Rainbow Division
is rated as one of the top U.S. divisions.
And they take kind of pride from German prisoners
and they capture 'em, and they're kinda scared,
they're the 42ndn Rainbow Division.
(Norman laughs) Yeah, yeah.
- [Norman] Their reputation precedes them.
- You bet.
- And so as a participant in combat for,
you would think even a week or two weeks,
how does he view the new recruits coming in
as the war grinds on?
- So what happens is, they need millions of men
on the Western Front, and they're scrambling
the entire time to get these men up there.
The regiment lost 70% causalities in July,
so there a lot of replacements coming in.
There's men that can barely speak English,
they're recent immigrants.
There's men who received between one week
to a month of training.
So enough where they can salute
and they can do the manual of arms
with their rifles, and that's about it.
They don't know how to load their rifles,
some of 'em don't know how to throw a grenade,
they don't know how to do any extended formations
like skirmish lines, and these guys are comin' up,
and the task falls to Francis and other non-commissioned
officers, corporals, and sergeants and officers as well
to try to give these guys some very abbreviated
training and get them up to speed.
They just don't have the skill set, though,
as the guys who've been serving there
and who had much stronger training
while at the state fairgrounds and while citizen soldiers
for the years prior to that, Americans entry into the war.
So you have a very mixed skill set
of his regiment at this point.
- Would that be true, you suppose, also of the Germans?
Did he have any sense that the Germans
were also wearing down?
- So at the St. Mihiel drive, the Germans,
St. Mihiel is a salient that kind of jutted out
into the Allied lines, and as the Americans struck that,
as they started assaulting it, the Germans were preparing
to fall back, and so massive amounts of prisoners
are captured, massive amounts of equipment,
so they can, and a lot of the men they're finding
as prisoners, they're very young men
or they're very old men, and the Germans
are losing a lot casualties as well.
And they can sense it's startin' to wear down.
I don't think anyone thought it was
gonna end by Christmas of 2018,
or 1918. - Almost 2018.
- Yeah, yeah, but I think a lot of folks thought
it was gonna continue into 20, or into 1919,
and so the Meuse-Argonne is one,
the last battle, the last offensive
of America's participation in the war.
- The World War I poetry of some of the other participants
on the American side and the English side
and particularly the ones we are familiar with,
there's a kind of a spectrum of at least the most
familiar poems in terms, there's some fatalism,
there's a little bit of sense of carrying
on the fight after I'm gone.
What kind of sense do you get from Francis Webster
at this point as we get into 1918?
- So he's,
after his, the materials that were with him
were sent back to his family.
One of his siblings, they write a brief poem,
and basically what the focus is is that Webster
put his trust in God and to tell his family not to be upset
that he was killed because it was God's will.
And so I think as the war progresses,
Francis is putting his trust in God
as he's serving on the Western Front.
You know, if he's meant to be killed,
he's meant to be killed.
If he's meant to get through it, he'll get through it.
And I think that's probably one of the ways
you just process what you're seeing
when you're seeing these massive amounts of casualties
and when you're seeing guys who're right next to you
gettin' their leg blown off or being struck
and them versus you.
I think you just start takin' on that kind of mentality.
- And what sort of, we didn't really get into this
too much, Darrek, but the family background
that would give him that kind of attitude?
- So yeah, his father was a Baptist pastor,
and so in his youth, his dad would move around
quite a bit with the family.
They'd be in one community for a year or two
and then kinda bounce around.
So he came up with this very, he was raised
in a very Christian upbringing.
And I think also this moving around also helped him
with a sense of humor that you see
in a lot of his artwork, too.
I think when he moved, he had to scramble to be able
to make new friends, and so I think he was pretty good
on his feet at being funny, and I think a lot
of that shows in his artwork as well.
But yeah, very much he was the son of a Baptist pastor.
- Do have a sense that his attitude toward Germans
developed during the course of the war?
- It's, he wasn't a guy who took
a lot of souvenirs from dead Germans.
Some of his comrades certainly did,
belt buckles and helmets and buttons and all that.
Francis writes at one point, and this is in July of 1918,
that there's, he coulda taken a number of souvenirs,
but he chooses not to, and at one point,
he's walkin' across a battlefield, there's an illustration,
and it's of some German soldiers with a few women,
they're sitting like on a cart or a wagon,
and he picks that up off the battlefield.
That's really his only souvenir he picks up
as he's in this particular battle.
And on the back he writes, "Found this on the ground
"after some Boche dropped it," you know?
He's fighting, there's certainly an enemy,
and you see also during the St. Mihiel drive, too,
they're interacting with these prisoners.
And these are young men, so they're takin' a lot
of equipment that they need, you know,
shoes are startin' to wear out,
shirts are startin' to wear out or get very full of lice,
and so they're findin' things that they can wear
that's German just to kinda make up for the lack
of material that's coming up to them in the front lines.
And there's one illustration he does where
they find a box of candy and chocolate, cigars,
all kinds of stuff, and they're goin' through it
as the Germans are kinda standing back behind
as they're sifting through it, yeah.
- The war, of course, progressed in a technological sense.
Did he see any of the other innovations of war,
I use the term very loosely here,
in addition to the introduction of gas?
- Yeah, so airplanes were very archaic
during the time period, and they were very common
on the Western Front.
So there's one illustration he does where he
depicts a soldier with his backpack and his canteens,
all his gear, and he writes with a little arrow, "two tons."
And then he, the guy's lookin' up,
and there's like a little balloon, and it says,
and he's lookin' up at a plane, and he says,
"Gosh, I should have been in the aviation," (laughs)
you know, securing all of this gear and being
in the muck and mud and everything.
But one of his last drawings is he's in this bivouac,
this encampment, they're in pup tents,
and they're in shelters made out of corrugated steel,
almost like a camp kind of area.
They pull 'em off the front lines for a little bit to count,
help them get ready for the Meuse-Argonne Offensive
and work with these replacements.
And so they're in this camp, and that's when
there's a Allied observation balloon,
it's full of helium, it's way up there in the air,
and a German aviator cuts through the lines
or through the defenses of it and comes up close,
and fires into it and ignites it.
So the thing's startin' to burn up,
and the guys who are in it, the Allies,
they jump out with parachutes.
These are very basic, archaic parachutes,
they're comin' down, and then the German plane spins around,
and he's taken down then by an Allied airplane,
so he comes down.
But Webster did this illustration
that's showing this burning observation balloon
and the guys parachuting out, and then him and his comrades
down at the bottom just kinda cheering it all on,
this show they got to watch from their bivouac.
So that's one of his last illustrations,
and he sent that then back to a Des Moines newspaper
where they published it then.
That was one of his last published pieces of artwork,
from the period of the war anyway.
- Now, we have letters, of course, from Francis Webster.
Do we have letters from home to him
that give us some sense of what they were thinking,
what they were hoping?
- Yeah, there's a few letters that came
in from home that were preserved.
His father at one point, he's lookin' at joining
the YMCA and goin' over there to be a volunteer.
The YMCA, they were, they supplied
a lot of comforts to soldiers.
They would have areas towards the front lines
where they would sell, you know, cigarettes,
people smoked a lot back then. (laughs)
- [Norman] It was one of the least of the health hazards.
- Exactly, yeah, yeah.
And you know, chocolates and stationery,
things of that nature, and sometimes these YMCA positions,
they could be causalities as well.
In that first gas attack they experienced,
a couple YMCA men start movin' up towards the front,
and they become fatalities.
So Francis's dad is writing him,
talking about how he wants to be a part of it,
and Francis is a little unsure about his dad
coming over to the Western Front, and he's like, you know,
just the what's taking place over there.
I think he realizes his dad has no idea
what he's gonna experience.
- Just as probably Francis didn't either when he went over.
Do we have accounts from his fellow
soldiers as to what he was like?
- Yeah, so a lot of his fellow soldiers,
they describe him as a very likable guy.
He became very famous throughout the regiment.
Everyone knew him as the machine gun cartoonist. (laughs)
And so he's sending artwork back to the home front,
and you know, their loved ones are talking about it,
they're referencing him.
As I was writing the book, I took a look
at the collections of a few other soldiers who served
with Webster, and some were in different platoons,
they weren't very close with him,
but they're making mention of him as well
periodically in their writings.
So most of his company knew him,
and a lot of the men throughout the regiment
knew him as well as this cartoonist.
- And back home, were people then
responding to him, to his cartoons?
Was he sort of a celebrity back in Iowa, also?
- A little bit, yeah.
You see some of the newspapers, and the Des Moines Capital,
they report there was a big following of his artwork.
When things came in from the Western Front,
they would put it on the front page,
and that way people could see it.
And he would oftentimes just write
a real brief description of what went with
those illustrations, and it would be
reproduced and printed then in the newspaper,
and there was a lot of clippings that were saved.
They worked with a few other collections
of National Guard soldiers from that time period,
and some of the clippings are there from one
of their families and cut 'em out and gave 'em to 'em.
So it was something that I think people on the home front,
they were hungry to learn more about their soldiers.
During the war, there was the
Committee on Public Information which limited
a lot of what could be shared from the Western Front
to the home front, and this happened almost right away
as America entered into the conflict,
and it limited what could be shared in the newspapers,
publications, just, there's a lot,
there's been a number of books written on it as well.
And so it's, the information was very limited,
and Ding Darling writes him at one point and says,
"It's great what you're doin' here,
"because we're so hungry for learning more
"about what's happening in the trenches over there."
- And of course, a little bit of the irony is that
Francis Webster didn't have that much
knowledge of what was actually the big picture.
- For sure, so he's, you know, a lot of it is
he's serving with his division, he's serving with his unit.
But what's really unique about it is that he's
one of the first soldiers to go over there.
The 42nd Division was the first American divisions
to arrive in France, not the first, but one of the first,
and so they're over there, and they're experiencing
much of the American experience over there in the war.
So they're training with the French,
learning how to use this modern military equipment,
and they're in the trenches in the early part of the war,
and then in the summer of 1918,
they're fighting in open warfare,
and they're part of the St. Mihiel drive.
And then later, in the Meuse-Argonne when half
the American casualties are lost, Francis is one of those.
- What did he think of the French?
- So with the French, he held 'em in pretty high regard.
A lot of the soldiers in his regiment did.
So they were serving with the French
for a good chunk of the war.
So he did a lotta illustrations of French peasants,
of French girls sometimes, and just some of what
he was seeing in these villages.
And in his bag of equipment, there was also
a French phrase book, and he does an illustration
where he's tryin' to learn how to,
so he can communicate with a French girl there.
He's illustrating soldiers coming back
from the front lines and interacting with their families
before heading back over to the Front.
So he holds 'em in pretty high regard.
There's one time, and it's in the book,
him and some of his fellow soldiers,
I think they see their first French soldier
up close and personal, and the guy's on leave,
and he's this grizzled veteran,
and they wanna take a picture of him and talk to him,
and I don't think he really wanted much to do with it.
So one of the guys offers him a bag of American tobacco,
and then he posed quite a bit for some photos.
And they were working very closely together.
Real early on when they're in the trenches, they are,
it's almost like a one-to-one ratio,
French and American soldiers, and then it turns into
a much lesser ratio, and then towards the end,
there was mostly just all Americans
that are serving in French armies.
So a great example is the Battle of Champagne
in early July of 1918.
They're there with the French Fourth Army,
and so the 42nd Division is the only National Guard
division that's there other than a regiment
of African-American soldiers who are
kinda aligned with a French unit.
They were taken from the American military
and put into the French.
And so they're there on the lines, mostly French
just with some Americans kinda scattered between,
along the front lines.
So it's, there's very much a lot of interaction
between the French and the Americans,
and much of it was very positive.
- Did he ever say anything about
German way of conducting warfare?
I mean, did he feel that sides were balanced
in the terms of the way they conducted warfare?
Did both sides use gas?
- Yeah, so both sides used gas,
and the Germans were the first to start using it,
and then the Allies caught up with it.
So there's a lot of gas shells that were fired
by the Americans, just as there was those
fired by the Germans, too.
And right after they arrived into the trenches,
they go and it's kinda a quiet sector.
They write about how there was German soldiers
like hanging laundry on the barbed wire to let it dry.
And the French and the Germans on either side,
they kinda had this truce where, you know,
you don't fire at me, I'm not gonna fire at you,
and there would just be a standard number of shells
they were supposed to fire, and they just
kinda throw 'em off in that direction.
And it was, for their part of the Western Front,
they're tryin' to keep kinda quiet.
- Civilized. - Exactly, yeah, yeah.
And so the Iowans get in there,
and they start seeing these Germans walking and exposed
and hangin' laundry up, and they start
engaging 'em right away. - Oh, really.
- They start firing towards 'em, because--
- Didn't quite know the informal rules?
- And I think they were there to try to finish,
to help finish the war, and so I don't think they wanted
to have that kind of relationship with the Germans.
So there was, they started shooting,
and the sector become aggressive very quickly.
And that's around that same time period
when this massive raid happens.
So the Germans were planning a massive raid,
and at the same time, this was all coming together.
They brought in specialized Bavarian stormtroopers
from another part of the line, brought 'em in,
and my understanding is there was even like
little training areas that kinda replicated
where they would be advancing across.
That way, they were very well-prepared for when they
went across no man's land into the Iowans' positions.
A similar thing had happened with an Iowan
a few months prior, in November of 1917
where the first casualties of the war were lost,
that he was an Iowan, and I think a lot of men
from Webster's unit, they knew what would happen
if they were taken in an assault like that,
they'd be paraded before the German media.
So they fought very aggressively back with 'em.
- And so in that last battle in which Francis Webster
was involved, what was the big picture of that?
- So he Meuse-Argonne is this, was this massive offensive.
It's a very wooded and hilly-type terrain.
It looks like a lotta areas in Wisconsin, really.
And it's sorta broken-type ground,
a lotta elevated positions, and it was massive amounts
of barbed wire, very thick stretches of barbed wire
on top of all these ridges and hill tops.
There's artillery, there's machine gun emplacements,
and when the assault first happens,
when the offensive first begins,
they start sending divisions in,
and some of those divisions are completely wiped out,
not completely, but largely shattered
as they're moving in, and some heavy casualties
are suffered, and it's just large amounts of troops
that are being deployed into this.
When Webster's unit, when they come into it,
the 1st Division had already been fighting,
and so there was American dead from the 1st Division
scattered across the battlefield.
It's a very apocalyptic-type feel.
And even before they go into the Meuse-Argonne,
as they're goin' into it, because there had been fighting
over this area for some time, there was windrows
of bleached, sun-bleached skeletons laying out there
from where lines of French troops
had got caught up in barbed wire
or been hit by machine gun fire or artillery,
and they were still out there.
And some of the soldiers were takin' pictures.
They'd never seen like it before.
Webster didn't do much with takin' pictures
or illustrations of it, but a number of his comrades did.
And so the Meuse-Argonne is this very large offensive,
and they kept pounding away at the Germans,
and the 42nd Division's then brought into it.
They're serving pretty closely to the 32nd Division
at this time, too, the Wisconsin National Guard,
and they started coming into an area
which is called Hill 288 and then Cote de Chatillon,
which is just behind it.
These were very large positions.
They're on the landscape, they provide commanding views
of the surrounding area, and it's part of this massive
German line through that area,
and they begin engaging that.
And so they are successful in attacking it,
and they capture this ground with quite heavy losses,
and the war continues to proceed,
they're relieved off the lines,
and then they're involved into the very end
in the drive to Sedan as they're gettin' closer and closer
into areas that hadn't been really
fought over yet in World War I.
So it wasn't these moonscape-type areas
as they started getting beyond the Meuse-Argonne,
and then that's when the Armistice then takes place.
- So as we follow Francis Webster into October of 1918,
by now does anybody have a sense that this war
is going to end within a month?
- I don't think anyone thought the war
was gonna end in a month, but it was, you could definitely
see that it was startin' to grind down quite a bit,
and so there's still a number of prisoners
that are being captured, and there's new divisions
comin' in from America, and replacements
are coming in in pretty large amounts.
The American military is looking at probably
peace in 1919, you know, realistically,
but it comes to a close very quickly
in October and early November.
- And we find Francis Webster, what,
walking through the woods, not right in the immediate
front lines of combat on October 14th of 1918?
- So yeah, October 14th, the day that he's killed,
they're preparing for a large massive assault,
and it's on Hill 288, 1st Battalion of the 168th Infantry
is the ones who are leading it, and Francis Webster
and his comrades, they're firing into, and it's kind of
broken ground kinda leading up to this hill.
There's a lotta farm fields, there's some patches
of timber, and then this rise, and it's well-wooded
and very well-fortified.
So they're getting closer to it,
and they've dug some small foxholes,
and they're preparing for, and they're supporting
the assault that's happening and firing machine gun rounds
into the German positions.
A lot of it's indirect fire where it's goin' up and over
and then into the German lines.
- And how was the news of Francis's death
conveyed to his family?
- So with Francis, his death was, they shared a telegram.
And so this, it was sent, it didn't arrive right away.
You know, there's so many casualties happening
in the Meuse-Argonne that they,
it doesn't arrive 'til after the Armistice.
So his family no doubt celebrated the Armistice
at home in Iowa-- - Terrible timing.
- Absolutely, and a couple days later,
then the telegram arrives saying, you know,
"We regret to inform you."
And it's a telegram, the type of telegram
that quite a few Iowans received.
The fight in the Meuse-Argonne, 2/3 of the casualties,
2/3 of the 1st Battalion that went up that hill
were casualties, and there was quite a bit
of loss in the regiment.
- His platoon was in front of Hill 288
on the morning of October 14th.
They had been in action but a little while
when the Germans got their range and laid down a barrage.
They withdrew to their protections.
Francis was acting section sergeant.
Frank M. Bondor was a platoon sergeant.
He and Francis had the night before made themselves
what the boys call a fox pit, a kind of grave-like hole
which was covered with logs, dirt, and brush.
But a new man, a replacement man,
who had neglected to repair a protection
for himself, climbed into their pit.
Bondor asked Francis if he should order him out,
but Francis said, "No, let him have it."
Then the two laid down in a shallow open hole,
and two minutes later, Francis was shot through
with a bit of high-explosive shell casing.
He died as they were carrying him from the field.
This last incident should not be told publicly,
but it shows the spirit of the boys.
Sergeant Bondor did not tell me of it
until the boys who were him had told me.
Then he gave fuller details.
I do not know who crawled into their pit.
I have never asked.
I do not think he was a Des Moines boy, though he might be.
The speculations or the avoidance of speculation
on the part of the father, the bereaved father
of Francis Webster.
- Absolutely.
There was a part of the letter
that Francis's father was sending to the clergy
who was going to be doing his funeral.
After Webster was killed, his comrades found him.
They wrapped him up in a German blanket,
and they brought him to an aid station.
And that's where he was placed at.
He remained there for a few days,
and he was found because of his notoriety in the regiment.
What happened when he was hit with that shrapnel
was that he was laying out there in the woods,
some guys were walkin' by him and recognized him
and then reported back, and then they took care of him.
But he was temporarily buried there on the battlefield,
just with a wooden stake, a wooden marker,
and then in 1921, when there was more room
to be able to bring deceased soldiers back to the U.S.,
his family elected to bring him over to America,
and he's buried now in a Des Moines cemetery.
So in 1921, his remains were then brought back.
He arrived at his parents' home,
and there was a visitation in their parlor in Algona, Iowa.
And then one of the soldiers who was with him,
Frank Bondor, escorted his remains then
down to Des Moines, and then he was buried
in what's called the Gold Star Plot
of a large cemetery in Des Moines,
and he's not too far away from his company commander,
Captain Fleur, and a number of other men
who served in the 168th Infantry during World War I.
- What was he carrying when he was killed?
- So at the time that he was killed,
he had a bag with him that was full of artwork,
and so he had been sending a lot of his illustrations
to these newspapers in Des Moines
that he was working with, but he also had
a number of illustrations that were with him
and watercolors that I believe that he was saving
for a book of his own after the war.
And this is a book that probably woulda came out
in 1919 if he woulda been able to make it home,
and instead, it came out in 2016.
However, when he was killed, one of his comrades then
grabbed this bag of artwork, and he took ownership of it
and took responsibility to make sure
it got back to his family, and that's where it was
curated at for almost 90 years.
And so his family had a bag of his artwork,
it still had bloodstains on the outside of it.
And then the newspaper that had published
much of his artwork, they had curated it as well,
and then those were given to his family.
So that was all in these boxes when I first,
when I first began the research on Francis.
- Well, Darrek Orwig, thank you for looking
into the life of Francis Webster and sharing it with us.
- Hey, thank you so much.
I appreciate being here.
- I'm Norman Gilliland, and I hope you'll join me
next time around for University Place Presents.