From Wentworth to the Western Front: The World War One Odyssey of Private John Warns

By Rich Lofthus

World War One is the event that set the stage for the modern world and transformed the United States from an isolationist promised land to a crusading state, willing to go to war for ideological reasons. “From Wentworth to the Western Front” examines the war front and the home front of World War One from the perspective of the Private John Warns family correspondence. The story that emerges reveals the dramatic extent to which rural America was drawn into the maelstrom of events surrounding World War One.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Sep 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781483490885

Book preview

LOFTHUS

Copyright © 2018 Rich Lofthus.

Art Credit: Warns Family Photos

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-9089-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-9088-5 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 09/17/2018

PREFACE

From Wentworth to the Western Front: The World War One Odyssey of Private John Warns is structured around the World War One correspondence of the John Warns family and seeks to place that correspondence into the wider context of the World War One era. In nearly all instances the letters appear in the narrative in the chronological order in which they were written and received. In the spirit of trying to preserve the voice of those who wrote the letters, the authentic spelling and grammar has been preserved, with a few exceptions in which the author determined that slight corrections were required to enhance the reader’s ability to understand what the original writers intended to convey.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the late Marvin and Leona Warns, son and daughter-in-law of John Warns, for their dedication to keeping the memory of John Warns alive by collecting and preserving the letters and other materials referred to in this book. In 2003, fifty-one years after the death of John Warns (1952), they decided that although John Warns had labeled the Warns family correspondence as private, not for public viewing, enough years had passed, and it was time to tell this World War One story. Marvin and Leona then entrusted me with the awesome privilege of access to a goldmine of primary sources that they had faithfully collected and preserved over several decades. In 2006 an article entitled Over Here, Over There: The World War One Correspondence of the Private John Warns Family was published in the journal entitled South Dakota History. In the ensuing years, the Warns family continued to release items they had collected, and in 2009, Lloyd Schoenefeld, son of John’s sister Anna Warns, contributed numerous letters that John Warns wrote to his sister Anna. On numerous occasions Marvin and Leona met me in towns across the upper Midwest (Fargo, North Dakota, Inwood, Iowa, Mobridge, Aberdeen, Britton, Sioux Falls, Wentworth, Pierre and Yankton, South Dakota) and supplemented my South Dakota Humanities Speaker’s Bureau presentations of this story with displays of John Warns’ World War One memorabilia. At one of the presentations in Sioux Falls in 2012, Marvin Warns informed me that he was ill and would no longer be able to make these trips. Marvin passed away in 2012 and Leona passed away in 2018, and I regret that they are unable to witness the completion of this project. I want to thank my colleague, Jason Heron, for his constructive comments and editing of the manuscript. I would also like to thank various student assistants who contributed to this project: Crystal Miller, Mandy (Carlson) Hanson, and especially Michaela Ramm, who worked closely with me as we integrated numerous letters into the narrative in 2014. Her interest and encouragement inspired me to carry on, and her direct assistance proved that four eyes are better than two when it comes to reading early twentieth-century handwriting. Thanks also to former students Caitlyn Oien and Samantha (Blake) Lindholm, who made the supreme sacrifice of missing a day of classes and supported me by attending a presentation based on this story at the 2014 Dakota Conference in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Rich Lofthus

August 3, 2018

Yankton, South Dakota

CHAPTER ONE

Explosion

I am inclined to think that Sherman slandered hell when he compared it to war.

- Gil

A fter a would-be assassin’s bomb was deflected off their car and wounded someone in another car, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his consort Sophie had to wonder what was around every corner as their motorcade maneuvered through the streets of Sarajevo on 28 June, 1914. Undeterred, Archduke Ferdinand visited the town hall and spoke at a reception. Back on the streets of Sarajevo, as the motorcade paused to re-direct at 10:30 A. M., the Archduke’s car was motionless just five feet from Serbian nationalist Garvilo Princip. Princip fired two shots, hitting the Archduke’s jugular with one and the abdomen of the Duchess with the other. By 11:00 A. M. the future King of Austria-Hungary and his wife were dead. ¹ In the tumultuous summer of 1914, the Archduke’s assassination plunged the continent of Europe into one of the most destructive wars of all time. The Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary engaged the Allied powers of Great Britain, France and Russia in what would become a long, indecisive struggle featuring trench warfare and stalemate. President Woodrow Wilson was well aware that the United States had recently experienced a massive influx of immigrants, whose ties to the various European countries created a confusing patchwork of divided loyalties. ² Consequently he proclaimed that the United States would remain a neutral power. Over five-thousand miles away from the catastrophic events in Europe, the family of Peter and Dora Warns had established a farm and family in rural Wentworth, South Dakota. As German-Americans they were members of the largest (8.3 million) and most affluent immigrant group in the United States, a group that, according to a 1908 survey, was ranked as the most admirable. ³ As World War I entered its initial stages, these German-American residents of one of the most isolationist locations in the United States could not have anticipated that one day the United States would declare war on Germany in a turn of events that would dramatically impact their family.

Each side of the Peter and Dora Warns family was deeply connected to Germany. The Warns side of their family included Peter’s father, Diedrich Jacob Warns, who was born in 1825 in Reepsholt Ostfriesland, Germany. Diedrich Jacob Warns immigrated to the United States in 1846. After serving as a Lutheran pastor in Illinois and Indiana, Jacob Warns and his wife Maria Gruber Warns, along with their sons Jacob and Peter (who was born in Holland, Indiana in 1868 and later became John Warns’ father) moved to Wentworth, Dakota Territory in 1885 and established a homestead of one-hundred and sixty acres.⁴

The Unzelman side of the Peter and Dora Warns family included Dorothea’s father John, who was born in Germany in 1827, and Dorothea’s mother Sophie Bartles, who was born in Germany in 1840. John Unzelman and Sophie met in Wisconsin and were married in 1856, and Dorothea was one of their fifteen children. In 1878 John and Sophie Unzelman moved from Wisconsin to Dakota Territory and established a farm six and three-fourths miles northeast of Wentworth. In 1883 they were founding members of a German Lutheran Church, located in rural Rutland Township.⁵ Their daughter, Sophie Dorothea (Dora) Unzelman married Peter Warns in Wentworth on 25 October, 1893. Peter and Dora Warns established a farm three miles north of Wentworth. As part of their farming operation, the Warns family raised swine and sold baby chicks to surrounding towns and counties.⁶ Their family included seven children: John, the oldest, who was born in 1895; Martha and Martin, born in 1896; Anna (nicknamed Tom or Tommy), born in 1900; Walter, born in 1903; Dorothea (nicknamed Dimples), born in 1906; and Selma (Sally), born in 1909.⁷ They were all active members of Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Wentworth, which sponsored a parochial school, and featured worship services conducted in the German language.

In the spring of 1917 the United States entered the war on the side of the Allied powers. The American public was asked to abandon neutrality and ethnic loyalties to the Central Powers, in favor of complete support for the American war effort against the Germans who were now portrayed in official United States government propaganda as barbaric Huns.⁸ While the United States had previously waged wars of expansion and become an imperial power in control of areas such as the Philippine and Hawaiian Islands, until its entry into World War One the United States had served as a form of promised land for immigrants. But when the United States interjected itself into World War One, a dramatic transformation from neutrality to a wartime America took place, and in that process the United States became a crusading state, waging war to extend its democratic ideals, establishing an ideological justification for going to war that has characterized many subsequent wars, including the failed attempt to maintain a non-Communist South Vietnam and the problematic invasion of Iraq in 2003.

John Warns, the eldest son of Peter and Dora Warns, was drafted into the army in April, 1918, and served with the Eighty-ninth Division on the Western Front. Various members of his family and the community of Wentworth, South Dakota corresponded with John during his basic training in Funston, Kansas, his time in England, his active duty on the Western Front, his service in the army of occupation that entered Germany in 1919, and while he was returning home to South Dakota. In response, John’s letters provide a rich narrative from each of these locations. The wartime correspondence of the Warns family from Wentworth, South Dakota spans the years 1915-1919, includes hundreds of letters, and when combined with other items from the period collected and preserved by the Warns family, and placed within the historical context of that time, provides us an opportunity to more fully understand one of the most dramatic turning points in United States history through the eyes of a South Dakota family.⁹

A variety of themes emerge from the Warns family correspondence: it reveals the manner in which rural South Dakota was drawn, as never before, directly into these cataclysmic world-wide events, it also demonstrates that the propaganda efforts of the Wilson administration, in its relentless drive to create monolithic support for the war, created an atmosphere in which intolerance became a virtue, and as a result, controversy appeared in Wentworth when so-called slackers questioned the war effort and farmers challenged the political status quo by attempting to join the Nonpartisan League. The lengthy letters, often over ten pages, also express the strong bonds of faith and family, especially between John Warns and his mother Dora and sister Anna, which nurtured and sustained those on the home and war