Henry Gunther of Baltimore died at one minute before the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month - the last soldier killed in the four-year insanity of World War I. This Veterans Day 2008 marks 90 years since the armistice of 1918 and the deaths of Henry Gunther and nearly 3,000 other men - American, British, French, German - whose senseless loss in the final hours form the ultimate metaphor for the bloody lunacy of "the war to end all wars."
While the story of Henry Gunther was once legend in Baltimore, the generation that grew up with it is long gone. That generation would have regarded Gunther as the last brave American to die in the nation's noble effort to end a long, horrible conflict of dubious purpose in Europe.
Today, looking back through the lens of history, we might see Gunther's death differently - as foolish, unnecessary, ironic, like "the Great War" itself - and it would be logical to conclude, based on the archives, that Henry Gunther died trying to prove something. There was a lot of that going around in the final hours of World War I, but principally among Allied officers, not the unfortunate troops they commanded.
The historian Joseph Persico, who tells the Henry Gunther story in his excellent 2004 book on the war's climax, estimates conservatively that all sides on the infamous Western Front suffered 10,944 casualties in the nearly six hours between the time the armistice was signed (5:10 a.m.) and 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918, the agreed-upon hour of cease-fire.
Of that number, 2,738 were deaths - more than the average daily rate throughout the war.
This didn't happen because of poor communications. As Persico points out, it happened because Allied commanders, fully aware of the looming peace, demanded more war. They sent orders through the trenches for troops to advance, to take towns, to root out German machine gun nests. In some cases, orders for attack were rescinded and reinstated within an hour of the war's appointed end. Some troops thought their commanders were playing cruel jokes on them as the clocked ticked toward 11.
Persico writes in 11th Month, 11th Day, 11th Hour that Germany wanted a cease-fire as early as Nov. 8. Had that proposal been accepted, Persico estimates, nearly 7,000 more men might have survived the war.
Among them might have been 23-year-old Henry Gunther, the son of German-American parents in the Highlandtown section of Baltimore.
Instead, he died in the war's last minute.
