The Last Casualty of World War I

Henry Gunther, a grandson of German immigrants to the United States, was an unassuming bank clerk in Baltimore when—at President Woodrow Wilson’s request—the United States Congress declared war on Germany in April of 1917. It was an uncomfortable time to be an American of German descent because his loyalty to America—and that of his family—were considered suspect.

Gunther was drafted in 1918 and sent to France. He held the rank of sergeant; he tried to do fulfill his duties, but the harsh conditions on the Western Front induced him to write to a hometown friend, gripe about the miserable wartime conditions, and urge him not to join up. Gunther’s letter was intercepted by Army censors who demoted him to a private, while his fiancée advised him by post that their relationship was over.

In 1918 the Battle of the Argonne Forest unfolded north of Verdun, and on November 11, Gunther’s unit—Alpha Company, 313th Regiment, 79th Infantry Division—encountered German troops. A nasty firefight followed, but then a message arrived; an armistice had been signed, and the war would end at 11 AM, just minutes away.

Seemingly determined to prove his grit, and redeem his earlier humiliation, Gunther charged the German machine gun nest. Knowing the fighting was about to end, they fired warning shots over Gunther’s head, shouting at him to stop. Their blood lust was spent, and it was time to go home; Gunther would not be deterred. He kept charging forward, but the Germans had no choice but to fire. At 10:59—one minute before the guns went silent, he was struck in the head and fell dead upon the churned and icy mud.

He was buried at the Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery in Baltimore, with a plaque at his grave that reads, “Highly Decorated for Exceptional Bravery and Heroic Action that Resulted in His Death One Minute Before the Armistice.” His rank as sergeant was posthumously reinstated.

For more information about the American experience in World War I, the Grateful American Foundation recommends Ed Lengel’s No Finer Company: The Men of the Great War’s Last Battalion.

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The First Official Thanksgiving

On October 3, 1863—three months after the Battle of Gettysburg, and several weeks before he delivered the Gettysburg Address, President Abraham Lincoln signed a proclamation that still shapes our lives. He was responding with remarkable swiftness to the journalist Sarah Josepha Hale, who had implored him in a letter—just a few days earlier to have “our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival…You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritive (sic) fixation, only, to become permanently, an American custom and institution.”

The decree was written in the somewhat windy style of Secretary of State, William H. Seward, and not Lincoln, who was the author:

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity (sic) and Union. 

Other presidents had declared days of thanksgiving; states had also previously observed such a day at various times during the year. But the actions of Seward and Lincoln—in the midst of a terrible war—fixed one of the most important and enduring holidays on the American calendar.

For more information about Abraham Lincoln, the Grateful American Foundation recommends the single-volume edition of Abraham Lincoln: A Life by Michael Burlingame, edited and abridged by Jonathan W. White.

Michael F. Bishop, a writer and historian, is the former executive director of the International Churchill Society and the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.

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History Matters is a feature courtesy of the Grateful American Book Prize,
an annual award for high quality, 7th to 9th grade-level books dealing with important moments in history.