Looking for John Dewitt
by John Chase
Style: Memoir / WWII
Print Size: 257 pages
Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski
A heartwarming work of narrative nonfiction a few grandson exploring his grandfather’s letters from WWI
In 2020, creator John Chase discovered a few cache of eighty completely preserved letters from his grandfather John DeWitt to his mother and father, written throughout his time coaching as a soldier stateside and his deployment to Europe over the summer time of 1917 to the autumn of 1918. These letters would ship Chase on an surprising journey to study extra about his grandfather’s experiences—particularly his extremely harmful project as a trench “runner”—and reveal facets of the person he by no means knew.
Looking for John DeWitt chronicles Chase’s try to learn between the traces of DeWitt’s letters house to household in Council Bluffs, Iowa, to get a fuller image of DeWitt’s precise wartime experiences.
Intrigued by DeWitt’s function as a runner, Chase used the letters—virtually all “upbeat and optimistic, unfailingly cheerful”—as a springboard to analysis extra about DeWitt’s regiment, the 168th Regiment of the famed Rainbow Division, and the hazards trench runners encountered. What Chase found would result in a newfound respect for his grandfather and understanding of why “he selected to not disinter the darker recollections of his time … He buried these recollections like he had buried so a lot of his comrades.”
DeWitt volunteered for the U.S. Military in June 1917 when he was twenty years outdated. Recruits heading into the American Expeditionary Pressure below the command of Common John “Black Jack” Pershing obtained six months of navy coaching stateside earlier than transport out abroad. DeWitt would practice at each Camp Dodge in Iowa and Camp Mills in New York, and Chase factors out that his grandfather’s enlistment window confirmed impeccable timing—any sooner and he might have been despatched off from Camp Dodge to chase Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and any later he might have returned to Camp Dodge in 1918 after being wounded, proper within the midst of the Spanish Flu epidemic that decimated the set up. His time in France additionally coincided with the supply and improved high quality of gasoline masks in 1918, one other occasion of DeWitt’s fortunate timing.
Mixing household recollections with compelling historic storytelling, Chase illuminates DeWitt’s coaching interval by means of liberal quoting of his letters. One factor stood out instantly to Chase, and that was his grandfather’s chipper perspective in letters to his mom…and the irritating lack of particulars.
Parsing DeWitt’s letters carefully led to a “Damascus Highway” second for Chase, as he realized that DeWitt and hisfather agreed when he enlisted to not fear his moms or sisters in his letters house. However this additionally fired up Chase’s needs to dig into the historic data of the 168th and elsewhere to kind a fuller image of the horrors DeWitt endured.
“I noticed my grandfather’s notes house have been just like the North Atlantic icebergs he and his fellow troopers dodged on their solution to France in November 1917 … beneath the floor was a extra essential story, not nearly my grandfather, however about a whole technology of younger males now for probably the most half forgotten.”
When DeWitt was assigned as a Battalion Runner in April 1918, he hid the truth that runners have been “expendable and infrequently killed” ferrying messages throughout bombed-out craters and trenches, German bullets whizzing throughout them. It was work DeWitt relished, based on Chase, and he chalks up his grandfather’s calm and braveness to his sense of mission and his deep Catholic religion.
Chase depends on two histories, Historical past of the Rainbow Division by Raymond Tomkins and The Historical past of the 168th by John Taber, to inform a mini historical past of the unit’s experiences and imagining the place DeWitt match into these actions. By means of this beginner sleuthing, Chase paints a fuller portrait of his grandfather’s actions and engagements, aligning them as he can with the letters’ selective info. What shines by means of is a religious, brave, and honor-bound younger man desperate to make his mother and father and nation proud. Dewitt is a pleasure to learn. These searching for extra concerning the inspiring individuals and the households they left behind in WWI will cherish the prospect to satisfy him on this ebook.
Throughout a German bombardment and gasoline assault across the village of Suippes on July 15, 1918, DeWitt would take shrapnel in his left leg (which he dutifully reported to his mom from the hospital) and was gassed, as effectively (which he did not inform his mom). His heroic actions as a runner in that battle earned DeWitt a Purple Coronary heart medal, a stunning indisputable fact that “Grampa” by no means talked about, Chase says. In trying over his grandfather’s 12 months within the battle, Chase concludes it definitively modified him:
“He had emerged as a person who had seen a lot dying and violence and unholy chaos, and he had not flinched.”
Looking for John DeWitt is a touching testomony to the lived experiences of American veterans of WWI, a useful reference for historians, and a poignant tribute by a grandson to a beloved grandfather. Extremely advocate.
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