Military Monday: WWI Veteran Ormond Brosius

 

By US government related, H.R. Hopps 1917 http://www.dhm.de/lemo/objekte/pict/pl003967/index.html [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Halfway through the year, it finally dawns on me that this year is the one hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I. And so, rather belatedly, but fortunately not too late, I have decided to do a series of short posts on members of my family who served in that war. Some posts will be much shorter than others due to lack of information, but I feel I ought to share what I can.

This week I thought I would start with my great-uncle Ormond Brosius, because he seems the least distant from me, being the only WWI veteran in my family who I actually met. Granted, I don’t recall the meetings, having been a newborn at the time, and then again when I was about a year old, but I do recall his cabin up in the Grand Tetons. We visited there when I was seven or eight years old, years after his death. And my whole life my dad has delighted in sharing the wild second- and third-hand stories he remembered about his uncle. But today the focus is on his service in WWI.

In April of 1917, just a couple weeks after the United States declared war on Germany, Ormond enlisted in the U.S. Army. In 1979, he recounted the experience in a conversation with his brother Lowell. Oh, and I better warn you that there is some profanity in this transcription.
 

Ormond: Yes. I had to lie.

Lowell: Stay young, that’s the way.

Ormond: There was three of us. When war was declared there was three of us.

Lowell: Yeah, I know. Ma told me.

Ormond: Frank Geller and myself and Burt Sheridan. We got on the Missouri-Pacific and went up to Wichita to enlist. Well, they told their right age. I was 16, see, and they was 18. So we got in this line. They didn’t ask…

Lowell: That’s where the old bullshit started flying, huh?

Ormond: These boys was in the league of the [infantry?]. Ol’ Burt says, “I’m 18.” This old boy wrote it down. “Go on.” And Frank Geller was a-next. And they told him—

Lowell: Was this Mrs. Geller’s—

Ormond: Yes, Mrs. Geller that you was reading about. She just lived across the street. When they come to me, I told the truth. I said, “16.” And he said, “Young man, you come back in a couple of years.” So, the next morning I got right in this line, and when I got there I told them, “18.” “Go right ahead.” See? That’s how that happened. See. Boy, it pays to be a liar sometimes.

Lowell: Yeah, sometimes it does.

Ormond, in his mother's handwriting, "the day he inlisted."

His enlistment date was 24 Apr 1917. Presumably, the most part of the following year was spent in training. He was initially assigned to the 18th Field Artillery, and was already a sergeant by the time he sailed aboard the Aeolus from the port of Hoboken, New Jersey on 23 Apr 1918. He is said to have served in five major campaigns. Based on the units in which he is known to have served, these campaigns seem to have been the Second Battle of the Marne (15 July-6 Aug 1918), for which the 18th Field Artillery received the Croix de Guerre. This battle seems to have been broken up into three separate campaigns in which Ormond might have been engaged: the Champagne-Marne Offensive (15-18 July 1918), the Battle of Champagne (15 July 1918), and the Aisne-Marne Offensive (18 July-6 Aug 1918). He was also likely at the Battle of St. Mihiel (12-15 Sept 1918) and the Meuse-Argonne Offensive (26 Sept-11 Nov 1918).

The war ended on 11 Nov 1918. Ormond recalled his experiences following the armistice in his continuing 1979 conversation with his brother Lowell. My mom, Sugar, also got in on this part of the conversation a little.

Ormond: They put us, you know, we was regular army. And after November the eleventh, they quit fighting, you know. And they took us, we went in there, and all them little towns, Bulge, Kottenheim, [Main?] and all of them. They were only about three or four kilometers from one town to the other, see. And I was a sergeant. And I had twenty-six men. And they told me to put one man in a village, you know, a house, and I stayed in a house. And if I told you how many children or kids that old lady had, you wouldn’t believe me, so I won’t tell you. But I lived with them. And I didn’t know no more German than that horse that’s over there.

Sugar: Ha ha! What horse?

Ormond: So when I sit down to the table, all them kids. Now, she had [zweif swanson?]. Can you tell me what that was?

Lowell: I’ll tell you something, you know something. I can understand German now, and I can talk. I can eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben. But to talk it anymore, I can’t… ’Cause I used to have to, you know, when I was young. Oh yeah, that’s Swiss, it’s the same thing. There’s high and low German.

Ormond: Well, that’s the way… And we’d sit down at this table, you know, with all these kids around. This is a big old lady. They didn’t have nothing to eat over there but kartoffeln, or potatoes, see.

Lowell: Rutabagas is another one that they...

Ormond: Yeah, and carrots, and stuff like that. And I’d point at something. We had a schoolteacher there, that stayed with them, old lady and them kids. And I’d point at something, and the kids would all tell me, you know. It didn’t take me long and I was talking—

Lowell: You can pick that up. It’s not that hard.

Sugar: If you wanted your food, you said it.

Ormond: Yeah. So one day they sent an orderly down from headquarters after me, for me to come to headquarters and I didn’t know that there was anybody there that understood English. And it made me mad, and I got to cussing and this schoolteacher, she was a German woman, but she’d been in Chicago one year teaching school. And she was there on a vacation. And they kept her, see. And she could talk English as good as I could. But I didn’t know it. And she could tell what I was saying. And she told me I ought to be ashamed of myself.

Eventually Ormond was sent back to the U.S. He traveled from Brest, France aboard the U.S.S. Madawaska to Brooklyn, New York, on 12 Aug 1919, arriving on 23 Aug 1919. His recorded release from service date is 22 Aug 1919, which seems curious given his date of arrival. I am not yet proficient enough in WWI research to know whether that is a regular procedure or a likely error.

Ormond, age 18, in Army uniform

Sources:

Find A Grave, “Find A Grave,” database and images, Find A Grave (www.findagrave.com : accessed 9 Nov 2009); Ormond John Brosius (Memorial #39305605); record added 10 July 2009 by Lovell Cemetery.

Ormond Brosius (Portland, Oregon), recording of conversation with family and friends by Sugar Brosius, Aug 1979; audio cassette, digitized to mp3 format privately held by Amber Brosius.

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, “U.S., Department of Veterans Affairs BIRLS [Beneficiary Identification Records Locator Subsystem] Death File, 1850-2010,” database, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 13 Apr 2015), entry for Ormond Brosius; citing Beneficiary Identification Records Locator Subsystem (BIRLS) Death File. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

“U.S., Army Transport Service, Passenger Lists, 1910-1939,” online images, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 9 Jun 2018), manifest, Aeolus, 23 Apr 1918, entry no. 40, for Ormond J. Brosius, service no. 1,042,684.

“U.S., Army Transport Service, Passenger Lists, 1910-1939,” online images, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 9 Jun 2018), manifest, U.S.S. Madawaska, 12 Aug 1919, entry no. 1, for Ormond J. Brosius, service no. 1042684.