On December 12, 2025, the Doughboy Foundation and the French Embassy to the United States will honor and celebrate that miracle of shared humanity with the 1914 Christmas Truce Concert at the National World War I Memorial in Washington, DC. After Daily Taps at 5:00 pm, the Chorale de l'Ambassade de France will sing a selection of carols starting at 5:15 pm. The concert is open to the public at no charge.  Learn more and RSVP here.

Following the carols at the Memorial, we hope you’ll join us for a festive cocktail reception to benefit the Doughboy Foundation, which will include a special performance by the Doughboy Foundation’s American Expeditionary Forces HQ Band Brass Quintet. The group will play holiday and patriotic music appropriate to the season. Find out more, and buy tickets to attend the 1914 Christmas Truce Cocktail Reception. Cheers!

Italian Aviation in the First World War, Vol. 1, Operations by James Davilla, MD. will be the topic of discussion at the December 2 online session of the World War I Historical Association’s “14-18 Book Club”. The host discussant will be Steve Suddaby. He was the first president of World War I Historical Association in 2011 with the merging of the Western Front Association – US Branch and The Great War Society.  Suddaby has published articles in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia on World War I aerial bombing campaigns.  Read more, and learn how to attend this free online event.

"On Thursday, July 10, 2025, Daily Taps at the National World War I Memorial was sounded in honor of my grandfather, Private Roy Hawk, U.S. Army, Sixth Infantry Division (1918-1919). While watching the bugler find his spot below the American Flag on a warm summer evening, I gratefully remembered the countless hours I spent with letters written by Roy Hawk and Mabel Ruth Thornton, my grandparents, between 1917 and 1919."  Those countless hours spent by author James Hawk (left) yielded a wonderful and timeless book about two Americans who answered their country’s call during The Great War. Learn more about My Dear Mabel, which celebrates "the lives of two young patriots whose future happiness was inextricably tied to the dangerous and worrisome events of an era." 

Historian Richard Walling  takes a look at the fateful events of May 14, 1918 that created heroes and a legend, but left questions that should be considered: "When two men of the 15^th New York fought against a raiding party in the very early morning hours of May 14, 1918, their story became a cause celeb and national news. Three other men present that night, two of whom were replacements, were left out of the narrative."  Read about the circumstances that made heroes of Henry Johnson and Neadom Roberts,but have seemingly obscured the names of three other Doughboys who perhaps "became superfluous to the story."

“How did you get started?”  It's a question that WWI Doughboy reenactor Eli Taylor gets a lot – in fact, it's "Hands down the most common question I get asked at any event I go to."  So it all started out as a senior year project...but let's let Eli tell the whole story. Learn how a fascination about "military history and its evolution through the ages" was the catalyst for Eli's deep dive into WWI reenacting, and how "Even though I feel like I’ve just started, I’m excited about what I have done and look forward to more events in the future."

Often regarded as the first modern war, World War I was the first conflict to use machine guns, tanks, planes, and chemical warfare on a mass scale. This, coupled with the international nature of the conflict, led to unprecedented casualties on the battlefield. Morphine was a common drug of choice for military physicians hoping to provide pain management to injured soldiers, and it was especially effective for men who had been gassed or contracted tuberculosis. The prescribed use of morphine during the war, however, often resulted in an addiction that followed Veterans when they returned home. Read more, and see how, while the American public generally praised World War Veterans for their service, Veteran drug addicts frequently struggled to reassimilate into a society that equated addicts with dangerous criminals.

On July 13, 1918, George “Nevin” Oswald found himself 2,000 miles off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, sailing for France with 20,000 other soldiers of the 79th Division. “I think I can take care of myself,” Nevin wrote in a letter to his parents while at sea, “and trust me, I won’t be foolish.” Little did Nevin know that his division would ultimately fight in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, one of the deadliest campaigns in American military history and the final Allied offensive of World War I. Learn more about Nevin’s story, preserved in his letters, one example of Washington County’s many veterans who served in the Great War.

During the past 250 years, the United States Marine Corps has admirably defended the liberty of our nation from myriad enemies around the globe—from the “Halls of Montezuma” to the “Shores of Tripoli” and in such well-known campaigns as Belleau Wood, Guadalcanal, Inchon, Khe Sanh and Kabul, just to name a few. However, in the 1920s, the Marines were deployed in a little-known role a lot closer to home. In 1920 and 1921, there was a rash of violent robberies of the U.S. Mail that resulted in the deaths and wounding of some postal employees and the theft of large sums of money. Read more about these postwar troubles, and find out how the ultimate solution was, as so many times it has been for our nation, to Send in the Marines.

In 1919, the United States Army awarded Grace Banker a Distinguished Service Medal. According to the medal citation, Grace “served with exceptional ability as chief operator in the Signal Corps exchange at General Headquarters, American Expeditionary Forces, and later in a similar capacity at 1st Army Headquarters…” during WWI. Despite this honor, neither the United States government nor the Army considered Banker a veteran of World War I until 1977. Find out more about Banker and the thousands of other American women who served their country without ever being recognized as servicemembers or veterans in their lifetime. and why honoring veterans means continuing to see — and name — all who have served.

Over the past decade, the construction and development in Chamblee is mind-boggling, unrecognizable with a population swell of business, apartments, and motorists. Chamblee’s past is mostly forgotten because its future seems bigger, brighter, more interesting. Learn how this once-small town once housed one of the biggest American military bases in the country, an anchor for American involvement in World War I. 

Some people move for jobs, others for love. But a small, curious group packs up boxes for something else – an echo. They move to explore ancestors’ WWI experiences, following faint stories across borders and generations. For them, the act of relocation is less about geography and more about continuity. Streets, fields, and old train stations become living archives. The air holds family residue – loss, otherworldly courage, and the strange poetry of survival. Take a closer look at how, a century ago,WWI forced millions to scatter, and how descendants now trace that dispersal backward, closing the loop.

On Sept. 15, 1918, Corporal Lee Duncan walked through the bombed-out ruins of a German camp near Flirey, France. There, he found a kennel that housed military-working dogs meant for the German army. Most were dead, but he discovered a starving German shepherd mother with her litter of five newborn puppies. Their eyes hadn’t even opened yet. Duncan had no idea that one of those puppies would soon become the face of Hollywood and save a then-unknown film studio called Warner Bros. from bankruptcy. Read more about how a woebegone puppy smuggled home from the French battlefields earned $1,000 per week at Warner Bros.—more than most human actors—and starred in 27 films between 1922 and 1931. Woof!

Australian soldiers slipped the letters into a bottle, closed the cap, and pitched it overboard from a ship in the Pacific Ocean as World War I battlefields beckoned them both. The bottle was a time capsule that would be delivered by fate—and it arrived for overjoyed ancestors last month—more than 100 years after the bottle first hit the water. On October 9, Peter Brown and his daughter Felicity found the Schweppes-brand bottle resting just above the waterline at Wharton Beach on the south coast of Western Australia. Learn how, nestled inside the bottle, were letters written by two Australian Army privates, Malcolm Neville and William Harley, originally dated August 15,1916, and what messages their missives carried a century later.

On November 6, 1918, a United States Army Air Service pilot engages in an action that would earn him a Distinguished Service Cross. William “Bill” Vail was then flying a Spad fighter plane over the skies of France. His action was one of the final aerial battles of World War I. First Lt. Vail was on patrol with another pilot that day. He and Lt. Josiah Pegues were flying near the Argonne Forest, with Pegues in the lead. Suddenly, the two pilots spotted a German observation plane. Pegues dove toward it, since he was in the lead. Read more, and see how neither pilot saw that more enemy were directly overhead, and now those enemy had set their sights on Pegues, forcing Vail to engage the nine enemy planes, a virtual death sentence.

On Oct. 6, 1917, Federal agents raided the offices of the Cincinnati Volksblatt, a German-language newspaper, and confiscated letters, records, newspapers and pamphlets written in German, looking for evidence of sedition or treason.
This came six months after the United States declared war on Germany, finally entering the global conflict that had been raging in Europe for three years. FInd out why this raid, and many more like it, took place in 1917, and  how the Trading with the Enemy Act passed that year gave the postmaster general almost unlimited powers to suppress publications suspected of being treasonous.

“The Spirit of the American Doughboy” statue has stood on Memorial Drive in honor of Appleton, Wisconsin's veterans killed in World War I since 1934, though has gone through repairs and even a replacement over the years. Writing for the  the Appleton Post-Crescent newspaper, reporter Mara Wegner digs through the paper's archives to piece together the Memorial's story from 1934 to the present, over which time it has seen a lot of ups and downs.

Ruth Charlotte Bush was born in February 1894 to Civil War veteran Theodore Bush and his wife, Charlotte Ann Arney Bush, in Kentland, IN. She had three sisters—Adah, Marie, and Alice—and writer George Ade was a cousin. After she graduated from Shortridge High School, she studied at the Bush Temple of Music in Chicago. When the U.S entered WWI she  joined the YMCA and sailed for France in February 1918 for 16 months of singing for servicemen. Read more about Ruth Bush's work entertaining wounded soldiers, and how she reflected that "how God can put smiles there amid so much suffering is a miracle I can not understand." 

A man is only missing if he is forgotten.

Our Doughboy MIA this month is Private Vernon Fenton Webb Jr. Born 04JULY1895 and generally known by his middle name of Fenton, Pvt. Webb was a resident of Union County, Lanes Creek Township, North Carolina and working on his family farm when he was inducted into the army on 19SEPT1917. He received his induction training at Camp Jackson before being sent to Camp Sevier and assigned as a member of Company D, 119^th Infantry, 30^th Division. With that unit he departed from Boston, MA aboard the transport Laomedon for overseas service on 12MAY1918. The 30^th ‘Old Hickory’ Division was one of two US divisions permanently brigaded with the British during the war. Killed in action on 29SEPT1918 in the Somme Valley sector during the great ‘Final Offensive’, word of his death was received on November 5^th and his father, Vernon Sr., was so brokenhearted that he died that December at the age of just 46. Pvt. Webb is memorialized on the Tablets of the Missing at The Somme American Cemetery, Bellicourt, France. Nothing else is known about his case at this time.

Would you like to be involved with solving the case of PVT Webb, and all the other Americans still in MIA status from World War I? You can! Click here to make a tax-deductible donation to our non-profit organization today, and help us bring them home! Help us do the best job possible and give today, with our thanks.  Remember: A man is only missing if he is forgotten.

There Will Come Soft Rains

In her attempt to understand war from the soldiers’ perspective, historian, poet, and photographer Briana Gervat traveled solo along the Western Front Way amidst stifling heat and torrential rain to record the early 20th century scars that remain within the landscape. Tolling bells at various hamlets can still be heard and the regrowth of fragrant, blossoming wildflowers can still be seen permeating throughout the overgrown trenches, rusted fences, and scraggly barbed wire. There Will Come Soft Rains details the sights she witnessed, the people she encountered, and the fears and joys she experienced as she traveled along WWI’s terrain to complete her personal odyssey to “Remember Them”.

The story of WWI and America is told in this lavishly illustrated book through the memorable art it spawned―including posters from nations involved in the conflict―and a taut narrative account of the war’s signal events, its major personalities, its tragic consequences, with timely period photographs that illustrate the awful realities of this revolutionary conflict. Most importantly, Lest We Forget: The Great War is a tribute to those who served in the U.S. Army, Navy, Marine Corps (and what would become the Air Force). It serves as a lasting reminder that our world ignores the history of World War I (and the ensuing WWII) at its peril―lest we forget.

Trench Talk/Trench Life

This handsomely illustrated hardcover book provides a succinct introduction to life on the Western Front as experienced by the Allied soldiers. Using the unique colloquial language that was developed by the men in the front-line trenches, the reader will become familiar with the wartime circumstances of the British Tommy Atkins, the French Poilu, and the American Doughboy. Based on extensive research, Trench Talk/Trench Life is a compassionate look at the muddy, chilly, wartime conditions for the steadfast soldiers of the Western Front.

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