The Gold Star roll · a hundred and nine names

1914 – 1919, as compiled 1921

The state's official record of this county's First World War dead carries ninety-four names: The Indiana Historical Commission's Gold Star Honor Roll (1921) — "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" — devotes its St. Joseph County section (pp. 554–575) to a hundred and nine names — a hundred and two complete service records and seven more names on a closing list, counted in full for this section from the printed volume itself, entry by entry. An earlier count of ninety-four, taken from a transcription, does not survive the re-count, which stands later in this section. It is a county roll by the record's own construction: the great majority are South Bend men, and the rest are of Mishawaka — boundary-printed here as the roll's members, since Mishawaka's own build will carry them — and of Walkerton, North Liberty, Lakeville, New Carlisle and the townships.

Read as the roll gives them, the county's dead describe the war that actually killed them. Twenty-five are recorded killed in action by the roll’s own phrase — twenty-six by substance — at Soissons, Château-Thierry, the Verdun front, Montfaucon and in the Argonne, Corporal Frank S. Hoffman falling on 6 November 1918, five days before the Armistice — and more died of wounds after. But the largest killer named on the roll is disease: pneumonia is named in forty-one of the hundred and two complete records, the signature of the 1918 influenza pandemic working through the camps, the transports and the hospitals — men died of it at Camp Shelby, Camp Taylor, Jefferson Barracks and Great Lakes, aboard ship in mid-Atlantic (Private Robert Johnson of the 809th Pioneer Infantry, whose entry the roll itself marks "(Colored)," died of influenza aboard the transport President Grant on 3 October 1918 and was buried at sea), and in France after the fighting stopped.

The roll's single woman is Gladys Nancy Lyon, Army Nurse, who had trained at South Bend's Epworth Hospital, volunteered on 19 November 1917, and died of meningitis on 19 December 1918 at Mars-sur-Alliers, France. Its senior officer is Major August F. Luedke, a Regular in continual service since 1901, who died from accidental causes at Camp Taylor on 3 June 1919. Its most decorated entry is Holycross of the Canadians, holder of the British Military Medal for bravery in action. The names themselves — Kabzinski, Kotecki, Kowalski, Kopczynski, Jankowiak, Szczepanski, Wojciechowski beside Barkley, Copp, Crocker and Zell — are the west side's Polish parishes and the whole immigrant city in one column: this was the first war in which the South Bend of the factories went to war as itself.

Sources:

1. Indiana Historical Commission, Indiana World War Records: Gold Star Honor Roll (1921), St. Joseph County section, pp. 554 ff. — counted in full from the section as transcribed (Genealogy Trails, St. Joseph County), and spot-verified against the printed volume's text (section opening at p. 554; Thatcher at p. 571): ninety-four entries; twenty-four "killed in action"; pneumonia named in forty-three; the entries for Hoffman, Johnson, Lyon, Luedke and Holycross as detailed.