By: Warren Bernard Offutt, his son.
My father was inducted into the US Army on Dec 9, 1917 at New York, NY, and received his basic training at Camp Upton, NY. His papers list him as 25 years old at time of induction, a bank teller by occupation, brown eyes, brown hair, medium complexion, 5 ft 7 in height.
He shipped out to France on Apr 13 1918 after 4 months of basic training at Camp Upton. He was promoted to Corporal 10/18/1918 and to Sergeant 4/9/1919.
He was a machine gunner, serving in Company B of the 306th Machine Gun Battalion. (In WW-I, machine gunners had the highest mortality rate of all the doughboys: when they asked him what he would like to be, he asked for assignment as a Warrant Officer. So, in true Army fashion, he was assigned to a Machine Gun Battalion.)
His papers indicate he saw action in the following battles:
Baccarat Sector June 21 to Aug 4, 1918
Vesle Sector Aug 11 to Aug 18, 1918
Oise-Aisne offensive Aug 18 to Sept 16, 1918
Meuse-Argonne Offensive Sept 28 to Nov 11, 1918
At war's end, he arrived back in the US on Apr 22, 1919 and was honorably discharged May 9, 1919 at Camp Upton, NY, receiving a $60 mustering out bonus. His discharge papers were signed by Lewis M. Scott, Major Infantry.
Those records are consistent with the stories I remember him telling before he died. He had some close calls. Three that I remember him describing in detail were:
During a march in the Argonne Forest, his squad came under fire from German sniper(s). All members of his squad jumped into a ditch, but he started to set up the machine gun tripod to return fire. He was struck by a sniper's bullet, but the bullet struck the frame of the pistol on his hip, which saved him from a wound.
As he told the story, after that bullet struck, "...brave Willie jumped into the ditch, too!". (He sometimes was called Willie, and occasionally referred to himself that way.)
On another occasion, he and his squad were bivouacked in an abandoned French barn when a German shell came through the roof. Not knowing if it had a delayed fuse, they made record time running out of the barn. It turned out to be a dud.
The story he told with the greatest detail, however, occurred when he was dug in on the side of a hill facing away from the Germans, awaiting orders to commence machine gun fire. He had found a piece of roofing tin which he propped up on two sticks to make a shed roof over his foxhole to keep the rain out. A German shell struck the hill some small distance above his position, throwing up a quantity of dirt which rained down on the tin roof, collapsing the supports. When he tried to push it free, he was unable to move it because of the weight of the dirt. As he described it, he then set a record for reciting "Hail Marys" as he dug around the edge of the tin and was rewarded after some minutes by seeing a tiny glint of light, showing him the way by which he dug himself out. The machine gun, emplaced just above his foxhole on the hillside had been blown out of position and damaged...
Still another story he told, of quite a different sort, was connected with the fact that he was a skilled violinist. He took a fiddle with him to France. During a lull in the fighting, he gave a violin recital in a small town French church, to which many of the local French people came to enjoy as a respite from the war. During the recital, one of his violin strings broke. He said it was no big deal for him, he simply moved up one octave and finished the piece on the remaining strings. He was amazed to find that the French farmers were astonished at this virtuoso performance, and hailed him as a musical genius. He rarely played in the later years, only doing so after being pestered by us kids, "Dad, get the fiddle out and play for us". In spite of no practice for years, at least to my teenage ears he sounded just as expert as any violinist I heard on the radio.
He brought back as a souvenir a captured German dress helmet, the old style with a spike on the top. He said it was a German Major's helmet. I remember seeing it as a kid many times hanging on the wall of our rec room, but have no idea what became of it. He said he found it behind a door in a French house that had been occupied by the Germans before the Allied advance.
By the way, one wonders if some of the war stories my father brought back grew in their dramatic content as the years passed. I am inclined to think not. They were very stable in their details over the 30 or 40 years I remember hearing them; also, by nature my father was a very conservative person (retired as a manager of Chase Bank in 1955), and a rather quiet, gentle person, not given to exaggeration or embellishment.