Off the John F. Kennedy Drive path in Golden Gate Park is the Redwood Memorial Grove, across from…read morethe entrance to Stow Lake. In a clearing to your right you will see The Doughboy War Memorial made of bronze and natural stone. Doughboys were well-meaning boys who were transformed by their World War I military experiences.
We stood here for awhile on this Hallowed and Sacred ground in silent reverence. For us to understand how and why our present world is the way it is, look to history for answers. The Doughboy War Memorial started 6 November 1927 with a parade from Oak and Stanyan streets to the Grove of Memory off of "Main Drive" (now JFK Drive) near Fulton Street and 16th Avenue
The Doughboy statue was unveiled at the Grove in a ceremony 1 June 1930. The Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West planted 39 saplings to commemorate 39 Native Son Doughboys who died in World War I and in the Spanish-American War (the 1898 war in which the US took possession of the Philippines, Guam, Cuba, and Puerto Rico). The 39 is a subset (not counting the Spanish-American War dead) of the 748 names memorialized two years later on the Gold Star Mothers Memorial Boulder located at the nearby Heroes Grove War Memorial.
The plaque's inscription marks end of World War I as 2 July 1921, long after Germany surrendered 11 November 1918. The reason for that much later date is that US Senate refused to ratify 28 June 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Many senators were opposed to US participation in the League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations, that was established by the treaty. It was not until 1921 that Congress passed a resolution officially ending US participation in the war. President Warren G. Harding signed that resolution 2 July 1921.
The result was that Doughboys continued in combat. They were fighting Russians in an attempt to overthrow the new Russian government who had overturned during the Russian Civil War the then Emperor of Russia, an elite monarchy who harshly ruled the people from 1721 - 1917. President Wilson ordered two strategic armed interventions against the new Russian government. Estimates are that nearly 450 US Doughboys died in those campaigns.
In 1951, the names of the 16 Native Sons who died in World War II were added to plaque. No one has added any names of the many dead from the many wars the US has fought since the end of World War II.
Thanks to Marc Norton for the history.
March is National Disability Awareness Month
If you think you have it tough, read history books.
Harry Zander and his friends enlisted Spring 1917. He trained at Camp Gordon, Georgia. Private Zander and his unit of US Army's 3rd Division sailed from New York in Spring 1918. His first hint of the hell of war came in late June 1918 when he encountered Marines just returned from brutal fighting in Belleau Wood. "Their uniforms were simply filthy," he recalled; "their beards had grown long and shaggy, and there was a hard cold look in their eyes. All lines of sympathy and civilization were gone from their faces, and some of the men had a peculiar blank stare in their eyes."
The realities of World War I trench warfare were horrifying and nauseating. Cold and wet produced trench foot and respiratory illnesses. Rats, flies and nits carried all manner of potentially fatal diseases. Tuberculosis and influenza were rampant.
"In the trenches men lived a life of primitive instincts -- fear, hunger, thirst -- and with physical extremes, deafening noises, sudden flashes, extreme cold, and agonizing pain," wrote John Ellis in Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I. Ellis continued, "a brotherhood of the damned."
In late 1919, US Army Private Harry Zander found that where 18 months before "waiters and civilians had fallen all over themselves to give him a chair, now it was filled with brusque businessmen who were no longer concerned over the man in uniform," recounted Dixon Wecter in When Johnny Comes Marching Home.
Years later, Veteran Harry Zander happened across a Doughboy comrade walking a streets of his native Atlanta, Gorgia. "Miller," he stammered with tears in his eyes, and took his old friend by the hand. It was a painful encounter.
"Miller was shabby and worn looking," Zander remembered. "He had not even had a shave in days-his scraggly beard attested to that, and his red hair too, had lost its lustre and was dull and mixed with a lighter shade. Only his eyes were the same . . . the same haunted fearful look I remembered so well out there on the battlefield. I knew that for Miller the hell of war was not ended . . . that he still lived those days over again . . . the result of which faced him continually."
July 1932, some 15,000 destitute unarmed Doughboys, 67% had Served overseas and 20% were Service-disabled, gathered in Washington to petition for help. They were violently dispersed by an attack by military. VFW condemned it as "morally indefensible."
