Henry Gunther

Not to be confused with Henry Gunter.

Henry Gunther
Portrait of Gunther which appears on his grave
Born	(1895-06-06)June 6, 1895 Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
Died	November 11, 1918(1918-11-11) (aged 23) Chaumont-devant-Damvillers, Meuse, France
Buried	Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery, Baltimore
Allegiance	United States
Service / branch	U.S. Army
Years of service	1917–1918
Rank	Sergeant (up to July 1918 or later) Demoted to private Posthumously restored to Sergeant
Unit	313th Infantry Regiment, 79th Division
Known for	The soldier who died one minute before the end of World War I
Battles / wars	World War I Meuse-Argonne Offensive †
Awards	Distinguished Service Cross

Henry Nicholas John Gunther (June 6, 1895 – November 11, 1918) was an American soldier and possibly the last soldier of any of the belligerents to be killed during World War I.[1][2][3] He was killed at 10:59 a.m., about one minute before the Armistice was to take effect at 11:00 a.m.[2][4]

Gunther had recently been demoted, and was seeking to regain his rank just before the war ended.[3]

Early life

Henry Gunther was born into a German-American family in east Baltimore, Maryland, on June 6, 1895.[2][3] His parents, George Gunther (1869–1919) and Lina Roth (1866–1938), were both children of German immigrants.[2][5] He grew up in Highlandtown, an East Baltimore neighborhood heavily influenced by German immigrants,[3][6] where his family belonged to Sacred Heart of Jesus Roman Catholic parish.[5] Henry Gunther worked as a bookkeeper and clerk at the National Bank of Baltimore.[2][6] He had joined the Roman Catholic service order for laymen, the Knights of Columbus, in 1915.[5][7]

Military service

Being of recent German-American heritage, Gunther did not automatically enlist in the armed forces as many others did soon after the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917. In September 1917, he was drafted and assigned to the 313th Infantry Regiment, nicknamed "Baltimore's Own"; it was part of the larger 157th Brigade of the 79th Infantry Division. Promoted as a supply sergeant, he was responsible for clothing in his military unit, and arrived in France in July 1918 as part of the incoming American Expeditionary Forces. A critical letter home, in which he reported on the "miserable conditions" at the front and advised a friend to try anything to avoid being drafted, was intercepted by the Army postal censor. As a result, he was demoted from sergeant to private.[3][6]

Gunther's unit, Company 'A', arrived at the Western Front on September 12, 1918. Like all Allied units on the front of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, it was still embroiled in fighting on the morning of November 11.[8] The Armistice with Germany was signed by 5:00 a.m., local time, but it would not come into force until 11:00 a.m. Gunther's squad approached a roadblock of two German machine guns in the village of Chaumont-devant-Damvillers near Meuse, in Lorraine. Gunther got up, against the orders of his close friend and now sergeant Ernest Powell, and charged the position with fixed bayonet. The German soldiers, already aware of the Armistice that would take effect in one minute, tried to wave Gunther away. He kept coming, and fired "a shot or two".[3] When he got too close to the machine guns, he was hit by a short burst of automatic fire, dying instantly.[9] The writer James M. Cain, then a reporter for the local daily newspaper The Sun, interviewed Gunther's comrades afterward and wrote that "Gunther brooded a great deal over his recent reduction in rank, and became obsessed with a determination to make good before his officers and fellow soldiers".[3]

American Expeditionary Forces commanding General John J. Pershing's "Order of The Day" on the following day specifically mentioned Gunther as the last American killed in the war.[9] The Army posthumously restored his rank of sergeant, also awarding him a divisional citation for gallantry in action and the Distinguished Service Cross. Several years later, a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in east Baltimore, number 1858, was named after him.[2][3][10] The post honoring Gunther closed in 2004.

Gunther's remains were returned to the United States in 1923 after being exhumed from a military cemetery in France, and buried at the Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery in Baltimore.[2] Subsequent investigations revealed that on the last day of World War I, during the armistice negotiations in the railroad cars encampment at the Compiegne Forest, French commander-in-chief Marshal Foch refused to accede to the German negotiators' request to declare an immediate ceasefire or truce so that there would be no more useless waste of lives among the common soldiers. The failure to declare a truce, even between the signing of the documents for the Armistice and its entry into force "at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month", caused about 11,000 additional men to be wounded or killed – far more than usual, according to the military statistics.[11]

Memorials

Commemorative plaque at the grave of Henry Gunther in Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery in Baltimore, unveiled on November 11, 2010.

On "Veterans Day" (in France, "Armistice Day"), November 11, 2008, a memorial was constructed near the place in Chaumont-devant-Damvillers in Lorraine where Gunther died.[12] Two years later on the same remembrance holiday observance, November 11, 2010, a memorial plaque was also unveiled at his grave site in America[5] at 10:59 a.m. by the German Society of Maryland.

See also

• Albert Mayer, the first soldier killed, 1914
• George Edwin Ellison, the last British Army soldier killed, 1918
• George Lawrence Price, the last Canadian Army and British Empire/Commonwealth soldier killed, 1918
• Marcel Toussaint Terfve, the last Belgian soldier killed in World War I, 1918
• Augustin Trébuchon, the last French Army soldier killed, 1918
• John Parr, the first British Army soldier killed, 1914
• Jules-André Peugeot, the first French Army soldier killed, 1914
• History of the Germans in Baltimore

References

1. Hayes-Fisher, John (October 29, 2008). "The last soldiers to die in World War I". BBC News. Retrieved October 24, 2012.
2. Meyer, Eugene (November 1, 2008). "The Unknown Soldier". Maryland Life. Archived from the original on December 29, 2010. Retrieved October 25, 2012.
3. Rodricks, Dan (November 11, 2008). "The sad, senseless end of Henry Gunther". Baltimore Sun. Archived from the original on 2014-10-06. Retrieved October 24, 2012.
4. Persico, Joseph E. (2004). Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918: World War I and Its Violent Climax. New York: Random House. p. 351. ISBN 0-375-50825-2.
5. "Dedication of the Memorial to Brother Knight Henry N. Gunther" (PDF). Maryland State Council of the Knights of Columbus. 2011. Archived from the original (PDF) on April 2, 2014. Retrieved October 25, 2012.
6. Persico, p. 134.
7. Bauernschub, John P. (2008). The Knights of Columbus: Fifty Years of Columbianism in Maryland. Wildside Press. p. 209. ISBN 9781434474278.
8. Persico, pp. 134-135.
9. Persico, p. 351.
10. Persico, p. 394.
11. Persico, p. 378.
12. "Un drapeau pour Henry Gunther". L'Est Républicain (in French). November 9, 2017.