Searching for North Dakota’s WWI Memorials

As part of the centennial remembrance of World War I, two North Dakotans are busy combing the state for monuments, parks, memorial buildings, and plaques that honor those who served in World War I.  Susan Wefald of Bismarck is searching for those memorials dedicated between 1918 and 1941 and Robert Greene of Arvilla is participating as he works to locate all veterans’ memorials in the state. 

In 2015, Wefald started hunting for World War One Memorials.  In January of that year, she read a magazine article about Mark Levitch of Washington, DC, who was conducting a nationwide search for World War monuments.  Levitch is project director of the national World War I Memorial Inventory Project.  The article reported that he was hoping to find a person or organization in each state willing to help him locate the monuments and memorials.  Wefald contacted Levitch and volunteered for the work in North Dakota. 

Two years later, Wefald has identified 45 buildings, parks, monuments, memorials, and plaques in North Dakota built between 1918 and 1941 and dedicated to WWI veterans.  As she continues her search, she welcomes tips from the public.  “I have had a wonderful time learning the stories of these memorials by reading old newspaper articles, interviewing community citizens, and reading old guidebooks to the state,” she commented.  “I have also enjoyed traveling across the state to visit these important monuments.”

During her search she realized that North Dakota had a World War I monument that dates to May of 1918 located in Minot’s Rose Hill Memorial Park.  That was unusual because most monuments were dedicated after Armistice Day on November 11, 1918.  In the case of this monument, the Girls Military Squad of Minot had raised funds and erected it on Memorial Day 1918.  Levitch believes that this monument appears to be the first permanent memorial in the nation dedicated to local soldiers who died in the war.  “I was thrilled to know that this beautiful 1918 marble monument erected by Minot women was so important,” said Wefald.

Wefald turns over all information she finds to both the North Dakota Historical Society and the national World War I Inventory Project.  Information about the World War I memorials and monuments is located at the State Historical Society of North Dakota’s website.

Although Wefald’s emphasis has been to locate only memorials dedicated exclusively to World War I veterans, Robert Greene has been touring the state identifying monuments dedicated to North Dakota veterans who have died in any war. Greene has taken on this project on behalf of the American Legion.

“Almost every town and city in the state has a veteran’s monument of some kind,” said Greene.  “I have found monuments dedicated to Civil War soldiers as well as those dedicated to the War on Terror.”  He has collected information on more than 200 veterans’ monuments in North Dakota.

Greene and Wefald share information with each other, as both serve on the North Dakota World War One Centennial Committee.  “We are both committed,” said Wefald, “to preserving these public monuments which celebrate the contributions made by men and women in service of our country.” 

Among the WWI monuments and memorials that the two have identified are courthouses and public halls in Belfield, Bismarck, Bottineau, Cando, Devils Lake, Dickinson, Flaxton, Kenmare, Linton, Mandan, Minnewaukan, Minot, Mohall, Mott, New England, Noonan, Rolette, Rugby, Stanley, and Towner. 

Monuments and plaques exist at Williston, Wahpeton, Pembina, Steele, Minot, Northwood, Leeds, Lisbon, Hankinson, Drayton, Drake, Carrington, Amidon, and at the bridge between Bismarck-Mandan.  Other memorials include parks at Grand Rapids and Spiritwood Lake, the 1927 University of North Dakota memorial football stadium, the Jamestown College gymnasium, and the Liberty Memorial Building and its nearby French boxcar on the capitol grounds at Bismarck.

Liberty Memorial Building

A Real Live Hornet’s Nest

Anton Peterson’s WWI War Diary

Edited by Susan Wefald

Excerpts from Corporal Anton Peterson’s diary while he was waiting to return home after WWI.  Although most soldiers wrote home,  letters were censored, containing little about their war experiences.  Peterson’s diary, however, contains vivid accounts of battles, travel, and army food.

Peterson was 30 when he joined the National Guard in Fargo in 1917.  He served overseas from December 1917, to July 1919 and.  was recognized for gallantry in action and especially meritorious service. 

The complete diary is in the State Historical Society Archives. 

On Dec. 14 (1917), we got orders to sail for France.  This is when the boys first began to think of home and the good times they used to have.  We loaded on the Vaterland at twelve o’clock that day and sailed about seven o’clock on the morning of the 15^th.  We all yelled good bye to the Statue of Liberty and hoped that it would not be long before we would return to it. 

Jan 3 [1918]--We entrained for La Courtine France. We were put in cattle cars, forty men in a car and the cars were about half as large as the ones in U.S. Of course it was not so bad, half of us could sit down and take a rest while the other half stood up and kicked their feet to keep warm.  

After dark, Corporal Hamilton got out and stole a stove which we rigged up, and it sure helped us to keep warm. Of course, the ones next to the stove got all the heat. Cpl. H. also hooked a ten-gallon jug of whiskey. Benson and I got a box of chocolate containing 200 bars. We ate candy and drank whiskey until we were hardly able to take care of ourselves.  We arrived in La Courtine on January 4, after a hard, disagreeable trip.

After travelling 4 days in a box car] we landed at Huddlecourt and we sure were a hungry bunch of boys. Shortly after we lit we got dinner and everybody ate until they could hardly walk. We shaved, washed, and brushed up. Well, we began to feel better now. The next day we were all ordered to have our hair cut… The first time we fell in, it was snap out of it, shape it up.  You are not in the National Guard now, you are in the regular army.

On the 15th we started for the trenches. We had two blankets, one suit of underwear, our toilet articles, reserve rations, and one hundred rounds of ammunition. We had some load. It rained and the roads were sleet. It was hard hiking and some of the boys had to be taken in on the ambulance. I was all in but the last five kilometers I hiked on my nerve. 

 [January 22—March 7 – Ansinville] Our company stayed in this town one week, we went up to the lines every nite and worked on the trenches.  I saw Mervin Armstrong one day and he had the experience of sticking his head over the Parapet and letting a German sniper take a crack at it. The ball went thru his helmet but did not hurt him.

Our company went into the front lines one nite, and it sure was cold, wet, and disagreeable. We had to wade in water knee deep before we reached our position, and I tell you it was no fun to stand on post all nite soaked to the skin. Tobacco was very scarce, and the chow was worse.

About six o'clock that morning our artillery put over a barrage on the Germans. Pvt Fascena and I were on an outpost, and we were almost frozen stiff, but when the barrage quit, I was as warm as if I had been next to our big heater on a cold winter day. Leave it to me, there were a good many of the boys who [thought] the same as I did, and that was the world had come to an end. The heavens were all red from the flares of the guns, and our trenches and the German trenches were only seventy five yards apart…  A few of the shells fell in our lines, but no one was killed.

We slept in barns and old houses which had been shot to pieces. We always got one day rest after being relieved from the lines. Some-times we would not get as far back as Ansenville after being relieved. We would have to stop at Scherprey, a small town all shot to pieces.  Fritz [the Germans] would always throw over a few gas shells at nite in this town so that we could not sleep.

On the night of March the seventh we were relieved… We got paid a few days after we got here [Traveray] and eggs were quite plentiful here.  L.D Johnson and I bought two dozen eggs, cheese, butter, bread and jam and went down to the creek and had a good big feed.

On the sixth of May Fritz put over a six-hour heavy gas attack.  The casualties were very heavy in our battalion.  C Co. casualties were about seventy-five percent…The next day a report came out that we were going to be relieved, as we did not have men enough to hold the lines.  However, we were not relieved.  We stayed on the front lines for twenty-one days without being relieved.  We could not get enough water to shave with, and I guess that if the Germans had come over, we would not have needed to fire a single shot because we all looked so tough that we would have scared the devil.

June fourteenth we moved to the front lines at Grievennes.  This is where a wealthy Frenchman had his park and chateau, but it did not look like a park now.  It was all shot to pieces and the ground was covered with dead Germans…  It stunk so that lots of the boys went to the hospital with influenza. 

[July 18] On the second day we ran into a real live hornet's nest. We lost quite heavy here. Our Major gave us orders to retreat and we did. We fell back about four hundred yards and took up another position. About eleven o'clock we went forward again, but in vain. We did not fall back this time, but they held us so that we could not break their lines. Our tanks were all out of commission by this time so we had to depend on our hand grenades and rifles to do the work. We had advanced so fast that our artillery was of very little good. We flopped in the wheat which was waist high and took what little cover we could find. The squad I was in was still together and not a single one wounded. The seven of us lay down in a squad column about ten feet apart. The balls were dropping all around us… 

[Early September 1918]  They got us packed into box cars about thirty five strong in each car, threw in a box of hard bread and a case of corned beef in each car and started out.  We were on the road five days and nites before we were unloaded.  When we were unloaded that eve we had fifteen kilos to hike to reach battalion headquarters.  Here we got some hot coffee and slept wherever we could find a place to flop.

The next morning was Sept. 6^th.  I found my company.  They were camped in some woods close to Verdun.  It was raining, and everybody had pitched pup-tents. I crawled in with L.D. Johnson and his squad.  We stayed there for a few days and then we got orders to make another hit on the Huns.  The nite of Sept. 11^th we started for the lines.  We hiked all nite in the rain and mud and got into position before day-break the next morning.  We thought we were in position, but we were not because everybody was lost.             

The 10^th of November we started to hike towards the rear.  We heard that the guns were to stop at eleven o’clock the next day, but we did not believe it.  Everybody thought we were making a flank movement….We camped with our company that nite and occasionally there was a gun which would fire.  When we would hear a gun fire everybody would say, “Now do you believe that peace has come?”

[November 13, 1918]  We camped in some woods near Verdun and during the night there was a continual celebration…. All a fellow could see for miles that night was skyrockets being sent into the air, and all kinds of them.  Of course this was stuff which had been captured from the Germans.  Now we were allowed to smoke and built fires after dark, the first time since we came over here, that is when we were near the lines.  It sure looked funny to see fires on every hill, in the woods and all over….

We learned that we were going to hike into Germany and form our lines there, stay there a short time, and then sail for the U.S.  You can imagine how the boys of the 1^st Division felt to hear this news because they had been the first over and wanted to be the first back. 

Susan Wefald was the first woman to serve on the North Dakota Public Service Commission  (1993-2008). Now retired, she has authored two books, plays violin in the Bismarck Mandan Symphony,  and enjoys serving on non-profit boards.

Great War Witnesses Startling Birth of New Deities

By Joseph T. Stuart

It de-secularized the state and, instead of religion, made politics the highest expression of human values.  The mobilization of entire societies during the Great War dramatically increased expectations for state involvement in the lives of people. Powerful political religions that claimed absolute adherence arose out of the political vacuum left behind by the collapse of four empires in Russia, Italy, Germany, and Turkey.

For example, through the Russian Revolution, Lenin rose to power in Russia.  He created a brutal regime that posed as the ultimate arbiter of value and meaning – killing or exiling dissenters.  “The war has left throughout Europe a mood of disillusionment and despair which calls aloud for a new religion,” the British agnostic philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote after touring Russia in 1920.  “Bolshevism has supplied the new religion.”

Mussolini and his followers also derived meaning and purpose from their wartime experience.  In 1932 he wrote that fascism is a “spiritual attitude” and the fascist state a “spiritual society” outside of which no values exist. “Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist state – a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values – interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people,” he noted.

In Germany, Adolf Hitler resolved to go into politics as a continuation of his wartime experience of unified national purpose.  Hitler believed that a people needed a common faith.   Writing to him in 1926, Josef Goebbels, future minister of propaganda, wrote, “You gave a name to the suffering of an entire generation who were yearning for real men, for meaningful tasks.  …What you uttered is the catechism of a new political credo amid the desperation of a collapsing, godless world.   …A god gave you the strength to voice our suffering.”   Nazism de-secularized the state by giving it the ultimate spiritual meaning.  It joined church and state, so to speak, into one, powerful force.

In this way, the Great War witnessed one of the most startling births of new deities in the history of the world – those of Class (Communism), State (Fascism), and Race (Nazism) for which people killed.

These new European deities inspired parallel political-religious movements around the world – such as nationalism in Turkey and the backlash seen today as Islamic terrorism tries to restore the Caliphate after it disappeared there immediately after the Great War.

China is another example.  To inspire Chinese nationalism, western-educated Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Republic of China, appealed in 1921 to American President Wilson’s idea of the “self-determination of nations.  But a rival movement would ultimately take over China in 1949 – the Chinese Communist Party, directly inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917.  The Chinese Communist political religion reached its height under Mao Zedong and his Cultural Revolution, complete with rituals, morality, a sacred text, the deification of Mao, and the inculcation of a sense of profound belonging and undivided allegiance.  The Great War paved the way to that totalitarian transformation of the world’s most populous country.

In the U.S., the war helped clarify America’s political faith.  University of North Dakota student William Greenleaf wrote at war’s end about America as “the composite of the world’s best ideals, the promise of the world’s future.”  Progressive clergy gave the upheaval a transcendent meaning by interpreting it as a total war for righteousness.  America, as the world’s political messiah, would make the world “safe for democracy,” as President Wilson put it.  Ever since most American presidents have shared his redemptive goals in foreign policy.

In France, a nationalist movement supported Catholicism as the state religion and gained immense prestige, despite its eventual condemnation by the Vatican.  Socialism, in the form of the Labour Party, was the real draw in Britain after the Great War.  One British historian noted in 1932 that socialism elicited religious emotion through its appeal to social salvation. “The type of man who a century ago would have been a revivalist or even the founder of a new sect, today devotes himself to social and political propaganda.  And this gives Socialism a spiritual power which the older political parties did not possess…”

In all these ways, the Great War created a tremendous impetus toward the de-secularization of the state, towards making politics the source of all values.  That alone justifies the characterization of the Great War as the “original sin” of the Twentieth Century.

Joseph T. Stuart, Ph.D., is associate professor of history at the University of Mary in Bismarck.

Dr. Quain: A Hero to Nurses and Savior of Soldiers

By Joseph T. Stuart

Although the U.S. did not enter the Great War until 1917, a number of Bismarck residents left to serve in the conflict before then, fighting alongside British troops or as nurses with Canadian forces.  The story of Dr. E.P. Quain is particularly fascinating because he witnessed both the beginning and the end of the conflict.

A cultured gentleman born in Sweden, Quain arrived in Bismarck in 1899 and three years later started the renowned Quain and Ramstad Clinic – now Sanford Clinic.  Some of the North Dakota nurses who served in the war received through Quain’s clinic, said one, “a most wonderful training, one that any nurse would prize.”  A nurse from the eastern U.S. told Wanda Dreger, a Bismarck nurse, that “If he is one of your surgeons from your hospital, I am envious of you.”

As soon as the U.S. declared war, Quain went to Washington to offer his services.  Returning to Bismarck, he organized a mobile surgical section with volunteer Bismarck nurses under his command and equipped largely by local organizations.  Connected to a base hospital in France, Quain – a hero to the nurses – led his unit to the front lines of battle. 

One nurse who served with him remembered thousands of patients passing through the hospital and the front so near she could hear the continuous roaring of guns.  “Yet there was a feeling of satisfaction to those who flung themselves into the work of binding the wounds and alleviating suffering humanity as nobly as did those nurses,” she wrote.

Three years before, Quain had toured medical clinics throughout Europe and found himself stuck in London as the war broke out in the summer of 1914.  In an interview upon finally returning home to Bismarck in September, he told of fellow Americans fleeing the Continent to London to escape the conflict.  The Londoners treated the forlorn American travelers with great kindness, opening hotels for them.   Dr. Quain witnessed the huge crowds of people cheering in the streets at the outbreak of war, unaware of the years of misery ahead.

In his 1914 interview, Quain told the Bismarck Tribune of the high type of civilization achieved by Germany.  “Their cities are beautiful, with clean streets, fine buildings, great, airy parks, and their hospital buildings are models.  Germany was making wonderful progress industrially; everybody was happy, busy, prosperous.  Now, in Germany, and over all Europe, this prosperity has given way to terrible uncertainty, business establishments are ruined, homes are wrecked, thousands and tens of thousands of widows and orphans must appeal to a nation already strained in every fibre.”

Europe stood at the height of prosperity and global dominance in 1914.  The period before the war has been remembered as the Golden Age, the Gilded Age, or the Belle Epoque.  It was an era of peace, prosperity, and artistic and technological innovation. 

However, the seemingly endless slaughter of the Great War destroyed the faith of Europeans in their own values.  It ended an age, and Dr. Quain saw it happen – both at the outbreak and at the exhausted end in the Armistice of 1918, as his surgical section worked to clean up the mess.

Joseph T. Stuart, Ph.D., is associate professor of history at the University of Mary in Bismarck.

ND Rhodes Scholar Was an Eyewitness to History

By Tracy Potter

North Dakota’s sixth Rhodes Scholar was David Nelson of Mayville, who went off to Oxford in September 1914. The world the 23-year-old Nelson was entering was changed forever the previous June as Otto Von Bismarck had predicted, “out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.”

Oxford was abuzz over Germany’s occupation of neutral Belgium, and resultant humanitarian crisis. Herbert Hoover’s Commission for Relief in Belgium inspired students internationally to coordinate delivery of necessities to Belgium. Oxford led the way, and David Nelson joined in.

He wrote his parents from neutral Rotterdam December 6, 1914.  “I hope N.D., which is prospering because of this war, will be generous in her aid to the Belgians.…   One meets people of all the warring nations in Holland; it is the most interesting spot in Europe at present.” 

Nelson crossed into Belgium that week. German officers were “uniformly courteous” and “pay for all they get” at cafes. He was impressed at the lightness of the occupiers’ boot on public life. “Germans, as a rule, treat us very finely. They even stretch the rules in our favor now and then.”

Over the course of two years, Nelson’s attitude about the Germans would change dramatically.

Doing well by doing good, the Rhodes Scholar determined Münchener was the last word in beer. The work was as gratifying. A Belgian told him “We have had many kind words from others; they have said many encouraging things to us, but you Americans have done things.” In Spa, he heard a speech by the burgomaster, the town band playing “Yankee Doodle,” and chants of “Vive L’Amerique” from the crowd.

Nelson returned briefly to Oxford in October 1915, but the war proved too seductive. Five weeks into his term he wrote home that he was thinking about delivering clothing to Dunkirk and might spend Christmas helping the American Hospital in Paris. That turned into a much longer commitment. He joined the American Ambulance Field Service, volunteers aiding wounded French and British soldiers.

Nelson was assigned a converted Ford, in service since the First Battle of the Marne. Work meant keeping his ambulance operating and driving casualties from front-line aid stations to forward field hospitals over roads filled with treacherous potholes from shelling. Driving at night was the worst. Lights were forbidden to avoid unwonted attention from artillery and aircraft. Often roads were clogged with troops and ambulances needed to crawl along, trying not to drive into the ditch.   

Nelson came to resent German actions. In a 1916 letter to his mother, he mentioned the torpedoing of a passenger boat from England to France. "Another example of Germany's benevolent regard for neutrals. Dutch, Norwegian, and Swedish ships are being sunk every week without warning…."

"To most of the people at home who are so far away from the war it appears, I suppose, as a detached affair; it does not affect them personally, and they consider Europe mad to be killing off its best men in a useless struggle. Here it is necessary to get to solid ground, …. Now if you are a moral person, you must take sides … you have an interest and a very real interest in seeing the cause of right and justice triumph. To me, it is clear beyond a doubt that the great preponderance of right is on the Allied side, and therefore my sympathies and any help I can give are for them."

In 1917, America joined the war, and Nelson was at Fort Snelling becoming a 2^nd Lieutenant in the Field Artillery. Eight additional months in Divisional Intelligence School, and he pined to return to the war. The Army had other plans. Nelson was posted to the General Staff in Washington, D.C., and there he stayed until the Armistice.

Nelson returned to Paris as an attaché to the postwar Peace Conference where he was an eyewitness to history. From the Hôtel de Crillon, Nelson saw “the entry of President Wilson into Paris. Every street and square along the line of march was packed with people. French soldiers were lined up three deep the whole distance to control the crowds and keep the way clear. I have never seen so dense a mass as was gathered on the Place de la Concorde...

 "Everyone says that the reception which the President received surpasses any which has been seen in Paris... The midinettes decided that it was a rare opportunity to obtain American oversees caps; they would surround any Americans they might see and unless you were wary your cap was gone. The Americans usually retaliate by stealing a kiss. It was amusing to see the large number of bareheaded Americans; I imagine that half of Paris was supplied with American caps.”

David Nelson thought his experiences in WWI had prepared him for life without Oxford. He tried investment banking in New York but chairing Luther College’s English Department and a girl from Decorah held his interest the rest of his days. Their son, John, compiled and edited the Letter and Diaries of David T. Nelson 1914-1919.

Tracy Potter, Bismarck, travels widely with Laura Anhalt and writes in retirement from a career in heritage tourism. He is the author of “Sheheke: Mandan Indian Diplomat” and “Steamboats in Dakota Territory.”

Flu Pandemic Raged in ND and Worldwide

By Stephen  McDonough

Without a doubt, the most tragic acute infectious disease epidemic ever to hit North Dakota was the Influenza Pandemic of 1918. 

The Pandemic raged worldwide during the last year of World War I and came at a time when many physicians and nurses were out of state in military service.  The epidemic struck with such devastating force that the entire health care system was rapidly overwhelmed.

Many examples of courage and self-sacrifice occurred as North Dakotans attempted to care for thousands of severely ill friends and neighbors.

The strain of virus causing the outbreak is thought to be one called H1N1.  It was identified years later when it was recovered from an Alaskan who died in 1918 and whose corpse was preserved when it was buried in permafrost. This strain has the ability to rapidly infect lung tissue which results in overwhelming inflammation and pneumonia.  Young adults were especially susceptible, and many children became orphans when one or both of their parents died suddenly. 

The epidemic was called “The Spanish Flu” although the pandemic did not start in Spain.  But it received considerable notoriety when Spain was one of the early countries affected.

North Dakota reported 1,378 deaths although the true number was likely between 3,000 and 5,000. 

Adding to the misery was the fact that the state led the nation with the greatest percentage of nurses (20 percent) enrolled in military service.  In addition, nearly one in three North Dakota physicians also served.  That meant there weren’t enough health care providers to care for the sick.

These providers were not immune from the virus -- two doctors and four nurses died from it in military service, and three doctors and 14 nurses died in the state.  Florence Kimball, a 1913 graduate of Lisbon High School and a registered nurse serving overseas with the military, died of influenza at age 24 on Oct. 20, 1918, and is buried in France.  The Lisbon American Legion Post is named in her honor.

Many young North Dakota men enlisted during the war and the Student Army Training Corps in Grand Forks was home to 423 men.  Influenza infected two-thirds of the cadets with 29 dying, six on one terribly day.  Dr. James Grassick, North Dakota’s most famed physician, was called on to assist with their care which he did at age 68.

A review of the state’s newspapers of the time shows some of the horror produced by Spanish Flu.  The Fargo Forum reported on Oct. 26, 1918, that “Ten days ago the family of A.J. Anderson was happy and in the bloom of health.  Today the mother and two sons lie side-by-side in Riverside Cemetery, and the third son lies still in death, all victims of the Spanish Influenza.  Ester, aged 11 years, who is still in the hospital with the disease, and the father survive.”

Bill Krueger, Sr., of Plymouth Township in Grand Forks County was one who escaped infection. He served his neighbors well, carrying groceries in his Model A Ford from the town of Niagara to those out in the township. His brother, Fred, and nephew, Freddie, were not so lucky.  Both died the same day.  Since so many of his neighbors were bedridden, it became necessary for Bill to ready the bodies of his brother and nephew for their burial.   “I never did anything so hard in all my life,” he said, “as to prepare my own brother for his final departure.”

Business and life, in general, slowed to a halt during the epidemic’s peak.  Schools and theaters closed and streets were deserted.  As the outbreak waned, activity returned to normal, but many families were forever altered with children and parents in mourning.

Today, the world is periodically challenged with influenza pandemics, and the potential remains for the emergence of a new and deadly strain.  Every year, vaccine manufacturers race to prepare the right influenza vaccine just in time to prepare for the annual fall outbreak.  Hopefully, North Dakota will never have to experience an epidemic anything close to the one at the end of World War One.

Dr. Stephen McDonough is a pediatrician at Sanford Medical Center in Bismarck and is formerly the chief medical officer at the North Dakota Health Department.