The Gold Star roll of the First World War: 109 names

1914 – 1918

The roll: the county's roll of its First World War dead is the St. Joseph County section of the Gold Star Honor Roll of Indiana, 1914–1918, published by the Indiana Historical Commission in 1921 — a record built from the families' own returns, carrying for each name the parents, the birthplace, the work the man left, the enlistment, the unit, and the manner and place of death. Counted name by name from the roll, it carries 109 names for St. Joseph County: 102 with full service records, and seven more the commission printed in a closing list of names "for whom complete records could not be obtained." It is a county roll — Mishawaka's dead stand in it beside South Bend's, and the county frame governs every number in this entry.

What the roll shows: most of the 109 did not fall in battle. They were killed in action at Soissons, Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, St. Mihiel, and the Argonne, and in Russia — Private Edward Richter of the 339th Infantry, killed at Kasco on 1 October 1918 in the North Russia intervention — and they died of wounds, but in the largest number they died of disease: pneumonia and influenza, in the camps at Taylor, Custer, Grant, and Devens and in the hospitals of France, above all in the autumn of 1918. Sergeant Clyde Pittman, of Company B, 321st Infantry, was killed in action on 11 November 1918 — the war's last day. The roll also carries a woman: Gladys Nancy Lyon, an Army nurse trained at Epworth Hospital in South Bend, who died of meningitis on 19 December 1918 at Mars-sur-Alliers, France, five weeks after the Armistice.

The decorated inside the roll: the roll itself records the honors of four of its dead. Private Raymond Peter Holycross, a South Bend man who crossed into Canada to enlist and served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, was "awarded British Military Medal for bravery in action" before he was killed. Corporal Howard William Dietrich was "cited by Commander of the First Division for gallantry in action," and Sergeant Sylvester Kopinski was "cited by Division Commander for bravery in action." First Lieutenant Arnold Matthew McInery, killed at Soissons on 18 July 1918, served in a company of the 9th Infantry that was decorated with the Croix de Guerre and Palm — a unit decoration, printed here as the roll prints it, as his company's honor and not an individual award. One more name in the roll carries a memorial of its own: Private James W. Swanson of New Carlisle, a Studebaker employee who died at Coblenz, Germany, on 8 March 1919 — the roll records that the American Legion post at New Carlisle was named in his honor, and his naming stands in this section's memorials entry.

Sources:

1. Gold Star Honor Roll: A Record of Indiana Men and Women Who Died in the Service of the United States and the Allied Nations in the World War, 1914–1918 (Indiana Historical Commission, 1921), St. Joseph County section — read in full and counted entry by entry in the transcription carried by Genealogy Trails; the count (102 full records, 7 incomplete) is this section's count of that roll.