To the very end

Yesterday we talked about how, one day, the pandemic will end, and there will have to be the one person known as the last to succumb to the COVID-19 virus. What a shame, when it could be prevented.

There's a story about another "last death" that might have been prevented as well, and it comes from the end of World War I, and it involves a soldier from Baltimore!

The date is November 11, 1918. The time is 5 AM. The location is a railroad dining car in a dark forest north of Paris, where German, British and French officials have met to sign an armistice ending the war. The Allied commander, Ferdinand Foch, rejects the Germans' request to end the shooting at once. Foch says let's stop shooting at 11 AM so we can get the word to the soldiers on the front lines.

Foch tried to make it seem all practical, but the underlying goal was to end what was foolishly called "The War To End All Wars" at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. So, ok. End it on a splashy note. Never mind that 3,000 more soldiers died between 5 AM and 11 AM, and one of them was an American private who was out to regain his good reputation at the very end.

One of the groups still in the fighting for those hours was the 313th Infantry Regiment of the 79th “Liberty” Division, a regiment known as "Baltimore's Own," since most of its soldiers came from the city not yet known as Charm City.  “There will be absolutely no let-up in the carrying out of the original plans until 11 o’clock,” said subordinate brigadier general William Nicholson, as he kept his men fighting. 

The men of the 313th were deep into the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Some ten miles north of Verdun, they had just seized the town of Ville-devant-Chaumont.

And one of those Baltimore soldiers was Private Henry Gunther, who had left behind a fiancée and and a nice job at a bank when he was drafted into the Army. He had just left for the war the previous July and was serving as a supply sergeant.

But he made the mistake of writing a letter to a friend at home, complaining about Army life and advising his buddy to avoid serving at any cost. Army censors read the letter, and he was busted down to private. AND THEN his fiancée got word of the demotion, and she dumped him.

As these things go, those were two tough blows, and Gunther was no longer the same cheerful guy. Perhaps it was to save his reputation that he volunteered to serve as a runner (a carrier of information in those pre-walkie talkie days.) He was injured by shrapnel in his hand in that duty, and could have been sent home, but he demanded to stay in the fight.

So it was that at 10:44 AM on November 11, the regiment was told to stop the fighting in 16 minutes. Realizing the war would be over after those minutes passed, Gunther took the opportunity to attack a German roadblock/machine gun nest with his rifle and bayonet, and as his comrades called for him to stop, the Germans stopped him with five shots to the temple.

He was declared dead at 10:59 AM.

General John Pershing, chief of the American Expeditionary Forces, logged Gunther's death as the last among American troops.

Most people familiar with the man and his death believed that his shame over the demotion that dishonored himself and his family was too much to bear, so he was trying to redeem himself. 

His burial place, fittingly enough, is in the Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery in Baltimore. He received the Distinguished Service Cross and was posthumously promoted back to sergeant after the war.