A Doughboys War: Letters Home

By Thomas Lindholtz

One hundred years ago on April 28, 1917, 25-year old Thomas D. Lindholtz enlisted in the US Army for service in World War I. The War had begun in Europe in 1914, but America did not enter the conflict until 1917. During his 13 months of service he wrote over 60 letters home to his parents and sister. Those letters, which provide a window back in time to life in America, the Army, and a particular family, are set in the context of what was going on in the world and in American society at the time. Then, as now, when a soldier leaves home his family's life doesn't stop. Now, a GI in the Middle East can Facetime with his family at home to deal with issues or express his love. In WWI the soldier had to use a slow, trans-Atlantic mail system by ship. But it turns out that the experience of a soldier 100 years ago informs our understanding of soldiers today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781365918308

Book preview

A Doughboys War: Letters Home

A Doughboy’s War

Letters Home

Pvt. Thomas Dahl Lindholtz, 1918

A Doughboy’s War

Letters Home

Thomas E Lindholtz

Thomas E Lindholtz Publishing

2017

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas E. Lindholtz Publishing

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2017

ISBN

Thomas E. Lindholtz Publishing

8570 El Cielito Court

Elk Grove, CA  95624

U.S. trade bookstores and wholesalers: Please contact Thomas E. Lindholtz Publishing,  Tel: [phone] or email .

Dedication

From my earliest memories I can recall hearing my father talk about his father, the grandfather I never knew but whose first name I carried.  I wish you could have known him.  You would have loved him.  He would have been so proud of you.  These kinds of sentiments have been expressed repeatedly down the years with the wistfulness of an opportunity lost.  And I, myself, grew to feel that wistfulness toward a man I could only imagine.

One of the great honors that can be bestowed upon a man (I say ‘man’ because I write as a man) is to be named for his father.  All my life I have envied my brother this honor.  He is fortunate, indeed.  But if there is a greater honor it is this: to be named after someone that his father admires and would have his son emulate in his life and character.  It has only been as I have gotten older, and named my own son, that I realized the truth of this.

As a result, this project is dedicated to my grandfather, Thomas Dahl Lindholtz, to my father, Dr. Richard Joseph Lindholtz, who named me for him, and to my son, Richard David Lindholtz, who I named for the man I then most admired … and still do.

Contents

Preface

The Historical Context

The Political Context

The Immigration Context

The Personal Context

Another Family

The War Begins

1914

1915

1916

1917

1918

You’re In The Army Now, April 1918

May, 1918

June, 1918

July, 1918

August, 1918

September, 1918

October, 1918

November-December, 1918

1919-Home

Epilogue

The Politicians

The Soldier

Appendix

Memories Of My Dad, by Richard J. Lindholtz

Preface

When I was a boy from time to time I would go into my parent’s bedroom on some errand.  Sometimes I was looking for Dad or Mom, sometimes looking for something in particular.  But sometimes, as boys are wont to do, I was just poking around looking for interesting curiosities.  Nearly as far back as I can remember I recall seeing a smallish red box on a high shelf in Dad’s closet with some papers sticking out of it.  The box must have been about 2 ½ or 3 inches square on the end that I could see, and I later discovered it was about 6 or 7 inches long.  Dad was an optometrist and, as I recall, it was a box that had probably originally been used to ship glasses frames from the manufacturer to Dad’s office.

When I was young it was on a shelf too high to reach.  When I was older I never bothered with it because I couldn’t imagine anything that fascinating in a small box of papers.  I could hardly have been more mistaken.  Although it belonged to Dad, and although he knew generally what was in it, I’m not sure he knew specifically, nor do I think he ever did anything with it.  In any event, the box just sat there for years on end.  We moved into that house in 1952; I was 5 years old.  Dad and Mom sold the house and moved to a retirement community in 2000.  I imagine that box sat there, untouched as far as I know, for most, if not all, of those 48 years. 

In preparation for their upcoming move, Dad & Mom were cleaning up the house one day when I went over to visit.  Dad told me he had something for me and headed off to the rear of the house.  In a few minutes he came back with that recognizable, but unfamiliar, red box.  He said simply, You might be interested in these.  These are some letters your Grandpa Lindholtz wrote home to his mother during World War I.  Thereupon Dad gave me the small red box containing some old letters from the man I knew only as a name: Grandpa Lindholtz.  My grandfather, Thomas Dahl Lindholtz, died before Dad & Mom married; I had never known him except by Dad’s occasional references to him. 

So, being a dutiful son, I accepted the box.  Being a respecter of tradition, I took the box home and placed it on a shelf in my closet.  But because he was only a name, my occasional notice of it sitting there was not translated into any particular action with regard to the little box of letters.  And so it sat, on a shelf, in the closet.

But a while back I ran across the little red box of letters again and I asked myself, If not now, when?  So, I decided to read through a few of them.  They were not in any particular order.  Indeed, I was later to discover that it would be a major sleuthing challenge to put them into chronological order.  But I simply pulled the first letter from the front of the box.  The first one was captivating.  It conveyed a man, and a family, of grace and love for one another.  If that wasn’t enough, I began to discover that these nearly century old letters provided a fascinating window in time, back to a world now long gone; a victim of modernity.  So I read another.  And another.  And soon I realized that I had to share this with the rest of his progeny.

But how to do it?  The letters and envelopes written on cheap paper and now nearly 100 years old, were yellowed and fragile.  Some literally falling apart as I unfolded them.  So I realized that they could be shared and preserved only through the magic of technology.  I began the slow process of deciphering someone else’s handwriting, even if graceful, and keying them into the computer exactly as written.  I didn’t tell anyone I had begun the project for some time, concerned that the burden of the task would dissuade me from completing it.

I’ve transcribed his graceful script and, to preserve his graceful hand, have scanned numerous images of the letters showing the kinds of paper he had to write on and the post cards he sent home.  In the process I’ve come to have a new and profound appreciation for two things; one broadly applicable, the other more personal.

The broadly applicable insight is the bi-polar nature of the changes in our society.  In some respects my grandfather’s world was very much like our own.  The pressing social issues of the day included rapid advances in technology, immigration, war in other parts of the world, the question of whether to engage or remain neutral, and a President who seemed, to many, to be incapable of effectively addressing these things.  Over and over I recognized today’s issues in the issues of Tom’s world. 

On the other hand, there seemed to be some huge changes that had taken place. There was an optimism and idealism then that is fading or gone today. Young men graduating from elite Ivy League colleges were idealistically inspired, even self-sacrificially, toward much more humanitarian ends; Harvard students dropping out to go to war, Harvard graduates enlisting in the French Foreign Legion to fight for the freedom of people in France.  It seems a far less common characteristic in an age where a sense of entitlement seems more typical.

The personal application has been a new and profound appreciation of a man that I wish I could have known.  I have seen hints of personality and character that I see reflected in my father, my brother and myself.  It has challenged me to live up to the legacy of the name I carry.  It has become a thoughtful exercise to reflect on the role of family heritage and what I have received…and what I have passed along.

Thomas Ethan Lindholtz

Elk Grove, California

Summer, 2017

The Historical Context

"Those who do not remember the past

are condemned to repeat it." – George Santayana

The Political Context

Late-19th Century to 1914

At first it was The Great War.  Then it became The War to End All Wars; that pretty much ended in 1939.  Now we know it as World War I.  It was one of the most deadly wars in the history of mankind.  It was the context that consumed the world for more than four years, and it was the setting in which Thomas D. Lindholtz spent a year of his life.  But WWI did not come about in a vacuum.  The stage had been set years earlier and the tensions built to a crescendo slowly.  The cymbal clash that seemed to trigger the deadly flow of events, the assassination of a minor prince in an obscure country, was really a small note that merely served to ignite the fuse of the already heightened emotions in central Europe.  It is the purpose of this chapter and this book to help the reader understand some of the events of history and how they affected the lives of people at the time.

The late 19th Century was a time of tumult with wars and revolutions in Europe.  The wars were, in a sense, the playground and playthings of kings and emperors, princes and politicians, played out at the expense of the common people in their domains.  Wars were fought to build empires at the expense of neighboring countries.  One of these wars was the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71. It pitted France against Germany, and it grew out of French concerns about a growing and powerful Germany uniting various smaller principalities and duchies on the east.  The war lasted about 10 months and Germany decisively defeated the French. In May, 1871, the Treaty of Frankfurt am Main brought the war to an end.  In the treaty France ceded to Germany the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, had to pay a five billion franc reparation, and accepted German occupation until the debt was paid.  The growing power of Germany accompanied by the decline in French power and prestige set the stage for an atmosphere of bitterness and competition between the two countries.

There was an optimism rampant at the turn of the 20th century that persuaded most world leaders that the general increases in knowledge and the emerging economic growth of industrialization would render a wholesale general war in Europe impossible.  But there was one man, at least, who held a contrary opinion.  Winston Churchill, then about 27 years old, thought a widespread war not only likely, his experiences on the battlefield persuaded him that it would be war in a new and terrible form.  In a speech to the House of Commons in May, 1901, Churchill predicted:

A European war cannot be anything but a cruel, heartrending struggle, which, if we are ever to enjoy the bitter fruits of victory, must demand, perhaps for several years, the whole manhood of the nation, the entire suspension of peaceful industries, and the concentrating to one end of every vital energy in the community. I have frequently been astonished since I have been in this House to hear with what composure and how glibly Members, and even Ministers, talk of a European war. I will not expatiate on the horrors of war, but there has been a great change which the House should not omit to notice. In former days, when wars arose from individual causes, from the policy of a Minister or the passion of a King, when they were fought by small regular armies of professional soldiers, and when their course was retarded by the difficulties of communication and supply, and often suspended by the winter season, it was possible to limit the liabilities of the combatants. But now, when mighty populations are impelled on each other, each individual severally embittered and inflamed — when the resources of science and civilization sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury — a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.

At the same time, in southeastern Europe and western Asia, the Ottoman Empire dominated by Turkey was experiencing a decline from its previous glories.  In 1876, the government instituted a number of modern reforms in order to try to catch up with the changes taking place in Europe.  Among these reforms were the development of the Empire’s first constitution and a shift from religious law to secular law.  The reforms only lasted a couple years and then the sultan suspended the constitution and the parliament.  One factor behind this was that the Christian population of the Ottoman Empire, mostly ethnic Greeks, began to outstrip the Muslim population in their economic well-being.  This was in turn partly due to much higher educational attainment due to both a difference in education participation rates, and the fact that Muslim children were required to spend time learning Arabic and Islamic theology.  The ethnic animosity that resulted, along with other wars, notably the Crimean War and the Russo-Turkish War, resulted in ethnic oppression.  In 1908, the Young Turk Revolution brought about the re-instatement of the constitution and the parliament and a return to a secular-based government.  The Empire would lose substantial parts of its territories, including the Balkans, and ethnic cleansing in those areas occurred based on past animosities.

The Young Turks, led by Mustafa Kemal, or Ataturk (later president of Turkey) did not gain control of the Empire until 1913, but were responsible for driving change.  Much of this occurred through secret societies which grew out of the disorder within the military.  One such society, in the Serbian Army, was called the Black Hand and it was blamed for aiding the young assassin who plotted the killing of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.  This was that small note that merely served to ignite the already heightened emotions in central Europe that was WWI.  But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

In 1911, another conflict between