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| Pvt. John DeWitt, Rainbow Division |
Background
One day in 2020 Dr. John Chase was called to Lincoln, NE, to help sort through his grandfather's recently discovered wartime letters. His grandfather, John Dewitt, was a World War I veteran, and John's sister Abby had discovered the 80 long-forgotten letters written from various military posts and the battlefields of France.
Reading them, Dr. Chase came to realize he did not know much about the nature of his grandfather's service — that he had the dangerous job of battalion runner, and that he had been gassed and wounded in one of the most dramatic moments of the war in the Second Battle of the Marne. He was floored, and he resolved to learn as much as he could about John Dewitt and his comrades, what they fought for, and what they had gone through. The result of his effort had been the recent publication of the a 255-page book titled Searching for John Dewitt. The volume combines excerpts from the letters with commentary with fresh insights and discoveries from his grandson.
John Dewitt, American Soldier
John Dewitt was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on 30 August 1896, the first of seven children. Three of his brothers would die in childhood. His surviving three sisters, Anne, Mary Clare, and Helen, we addressed in his letters home as “the girls.” His father, also named John, worked as a brakeman on the C.G. and W. railway. When the future Doughboy was around ten years old, he moved with the family 400 miles southwest from the Minneapolis St. Paul area to Council Bluffs, Iowa. As a young boy in Council Bluffs, John Dewitt got a job at a local firehouse caring for its horses.
When America joined the World War, he entered the service and became part of the 42nd Rainbow Division's 168th Infantry—made up mainly of Iowa National Guardsmen—and was sent to France. Since his division was one of the earliest to arrive in France, John saw a lot of action and had a very dangerous job. He was a runner in the front line, tasked with carrying messages from his command post, through and over the trenches.
He would be awarded a Purple Heart for getting gassed by chemical weapons and being shot in the leg in August 1918 helping to stop the last German offensive of the war. When he returned to Iowa, he helped form an American Legion post, a group in which he remained active for the rest of his life.
Back stateside, he became a traveling salesman, with a long route through Texas and Oklahoma, but his heart was not in it. He decided to take advantage of the small funds available to returning veterans and enrolled in Creighton University Law School in Omaha. He took the Iowa State Bar Exam and passed without needing to graduate. In 1927 he would meet, court, and marry Helen Brennan, a city girl from Omaha. John and Helen moved to Griswold, Iowa, in 1932, where he practiced law and the couple raised their children, Maribeth and Jack. Doughboy John Dewitt died on 1 December 1975.
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| John Dewitt Reading a Burial Tribute to a Fellow Doughboy |
A Selection from Searching for John Dewitt
May 1918 was unlike anything John Dewitt and the rest of the Iowa 168th had experienced —four turbulent weeks of continuous raids into no-man’s-land bookended by two memorable events. The month began with an unrelenting American bombardment of the German lines that started in the early morning hours of 1 May 1. It ended with an ominous and lethal phosgene gas attack on the Americans that killed or maimed scores of men.
Still, despite the clamor, things were beginning to look up. The Americans were starting to make a difference in the four-year-old war, though the advances came at a great price. Patrols left the safety of the American lines to the point where they seemed nonstop. The Americans began to feel they dominated no-man’s-land. If he did not already know by then, weeks into his job as a battalion runner, John Ryder Dewitt had learned that war was a serious and unforgiving enterprise.
The phosgene attack at the end of the month, besides offering a taste of the depths to which both the Germans and Allies had sunk, prompted my grandfather to mention the possibility of his own demise to his mother, which of course he shrugged off. In his letter home, he only hinted at the gas attack that caused his introspection— dancing, I suppose, with the censors about how much he could reveal. The attack had left him uncharacteristically pensive, when he wrote home:
May 28, 1918
At the Front
Well Mother dear, this is about all the news here I am able to tell. I think the people of Iowa will get quite a shock between now and when you get this letter.
Don’t ever worry about me when you hear rumors, which I suppose circulate around. Wait until you get official notification from Washington. If I am called, you may rest assured I am not afraid to go to the Maker and that I am better off. There is no reason to be alarmed. I just thought this was as good a time as any to write it.
That gas is certainly awful stuff. I fear that more than anything else.
John
May was a month of heated battles, and for battalion runners, an abundance of chances to tease fate, or as my grandfather phrased it, opportunities to meet his Maker. The momentum for the war had turned in favor of the Americans and Allies and he was swept up in the current.
In his dedication, Dr. John Chase wrote: "I hope this book will encourage families to ask their veteran relatives about their military service and not have to learn about it by reading long-lost letters 100 years later."
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