WWI archive to go online
OLYMPIA — He was hit by shrapnel one week and pierced by an airplane’s machine-gun bullet the next, but what finally killed Spokane’s Shorty Austin was falling out of his bed in a French loft.
“That any accident should befall a man who had been (through) so much and done so well would seem impossible,” Austin’s commander wrote in a letter to his brother. “It was a sad day for us when we left a friend such as Samuel Austin to rest on foreign soil.”
The tragic tale of Shorty Austin’s demise lay forgotten for decades in the basement of the Spokane Public Library. It is among World War I records for nearly 300 Spokane-area men, records collected under a wartime federal directive to document The War to End All Wars.
Starting Monday, the Washington Secretary of State’s office plans to post those records – photographs, letters home, service records – on the Internet. The agency’s history Web site is at www.sec state.wa.gov/history.
“I want to try to get some of these records out to the public,” said Secretary of State Sam Reed. “It’s a shame that people aren’t aware what information is out there about their families.”
The records are especially good for Shorty Austin, who grew up in a house at 1918 E. Boone, according to the records. Drafted at age 32, he was assigned to a machine-gun battalion, and arrived in France in the summer of 1918.
Austin fought alongside the other fresh American troops in the Saint Mihiel offensive, slogging through deep mud and heavy rains alongside French Renault tanks. In late September, he was part of the Meuse Argonne assault, helping press the German lines back five miles under artillery barrages in dense fog.
Austin was hit by shrapnel, but refused to leave the front lines. On Oct. 3, 1918, a strafing German plane shot him, and Austin was hauled off to a rear-area hospital. The war ended five weeks later.
Austin died three months after that, while waiting in France to be shipped back to America. Sick, he tumbled out of the loft where he was sleeping. The fall broke his skull, and he was buried under a wooden cross, draped with his identification tag, in a French cemetery.
“Every officer and man in the Company was sorrowed with grief,” Austin’s commander wrote, in a handwritten five-page letter to Austin’s brother.
Such documents were gathered by Spokane historians at the behest of the National Board of Historical Service. In the early 1920s, they sent out surveys to hundreds of Spokane families, asking for photos, records and service information. They apparently hoped to compile the information into a book about the war, but couldn’t scrape together enough money.
Instead, the documents were packed into large boxes and tucked away in the basement of Spokane’s old Carnegie library. When the library moved to its current quarters, the boxes ended up in the basement there, too.
About 15 years ago, now-retired librarian Nancy Compau happened to stumble across the files.
“I started poking through them and thought ‘Oh my gosh, this is valuable historical information,’ ” she said. “It’s just mind-boggling, the information they had.”
Since then, people have occasionally stopped by or called the downtown Spokane Public Library, seeking information about relatives in the war. Two elderly veterans of a World War I medical unit went through the records, trying to reconstruct their own stints in France.
“They couldn’t remember,” Compau said. “They were trying to write their life stories for their kids.”
Other people came in seeking information about long-dead grandfathers they’d never known. Some had never seen a photograph of their relative.
“I’ve had people just burst into tears here,” Compau said.
Eventually, the Secretary of State’s office plans to post the rest of the Spokane collection, including information about local Red Cross nurses, and home-front campaigns to garden, roll bandages, and use less gasoline.
The state also plans to post thousands of service histories from Washingtonians who served during the war, as well as documents from Gov. Ernest Lister’s administration. Lister, who died in office in 1919, secretly set up a statewide intelligence network to gather information on left-wing radicals and purported subversives.
“It was basically spies, run out of Olympia,” said Dave Hastings, state government archives manager. “These guys reported on the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) and also on the corner butcher who happened to be German, that sort of thing.”
Initially, however, much of the information posted online will be about Spokane troops.
“So far, this is the only collection we’ve found that contains individual names we can match up with photographs,” said Marlys Rudeen, program manager for digital services at the Washington State Library in Tumwater.Some of the stories are heart-rending. Second Lt. Frank Taylor, who lived at 2937 Cook St., was cut down by German machine-gun fire in October 1918. Yet three months later, his mother was still writing letters to the Army inquiring about her son. She apparently didn’t learn of his death until February, and even then, Taylor’s commander didn’t know where Taylor had been buried.
And then there was Arthur Hugh, veteran of a long list of battles and with the injuries to show for it. He’d been shelled. He’d been gassed. He’d been in eight different field hospitals.
Hugh finally died on a hospital ship docked in New York harbor.
“To have gone through all that and died when you were almost home – that’s always a hard one to look at,” said Rudeen.
Many of the troops survived, of course, and returned to Spokane after the war. Among them: Sol Dobriner, a signal corps sergeant who had apparently not gotten his fill of the Army despite a 27-year career that began in 1880. He’d fought alongside Teddy Roosevelt in Cuba, and been injured, in 1898.
Dobriner re-enlisted in Spokane in 1917 as a second lieutenant. He was 59 years old. He spent the war training new recruits at Butte, Mont., and at California’s Fort McDowell. A wartime photograph from California shows the old soldier seated in a folding chair in front of a field tent. He’s grinning.