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1921
The conflict: the Wars section counts the St. Joseph County section of the state's 1921 Gold Star Honor Roll at ninety-four names; the War Heroes section counts the same section at a hundred and nine — a hundred and two full service records and seven more names on a closing list. Both counts were taken from the same book.Indiana World War Records: Gold Star Honor Roll (Indiana Historical Commission, 1921), the St. Joseph County section, pages 554 to 575, where the Scott County section begins on page 576.
What the roll counts: the commission states its method in its own introduction. The names were drawn from the casualty lists of the United States Official Bulletin, from the Indianapolis newspapers' casualty lists through 1920, and from the Adjutant General's lists of July 1920; they were classified, in the commission's words, "according to the county in which they had lived," and verified by committees in each county, working from questionnaires. It is therefore a county roll, not a city roll — the men of Mishawaka, Lakeville, North Liberty and New Carlisle stand in it beside South Bend's, because the county is the frame — and it is a roll of the dead in service from all causes: killed in action, died of wounds, and died of disease, accident and other causes in the camps, at sea and in the hospitals. Across the state the volume carries 3,354 sons and 15 daughters of Indiana.
The re-count: the section carries a hundred and two complete biographical records, running alphabetically from Cecil Ross Barkley on page 554 to Lott Albin Zell on page 574 — each a full entry: parentage, birth, occupation, enlistment, service, death and burial. It then prints a closing subhead in its own words — "Names reported from St. Joseph County for whom complete records could not be obtained" — and under it seven names, each with a short service-and-death line: Ward Lester Adams of Mishawaka, chief electrician, U.S. Navy, died at sea 28 September 1918; Ira D. Betson of South Bend, Company A, 26th Infantry, died 6 October 1918 of wounds received in action; Frank Daniels of South Bend, Company M, 18th Infantry, died 3 May 1918 of wounds received in action; Floyd E. Godfrey of Mishawaka, Company A, 61st Infantry, killed in action 12 October 1918 in the Meuse-Argonne; Jan Kowlczyk of South Bend, 158th Depot Brigade, died of pneumonia 6 October 1918 at Camp Taylor; Julius Van Camp of Mishawaka, Company B, 113th Engineers, died 24 February 1918 at Camp Taylor from accidental causes; and Joseph Van de Putte of Mishawaka, Company H, 16th Infantry, died 6 June 1918 in France. A hundred and two and seven make a hundred and nine names — the War Heroes count, and its composition, are the printed volume's own. The Wars count of ninety-four does not survive the re-count: it undercounts the complete records by eight and omits the seven-name closing list entire, and no clean portion of the printed roll — no page range, no letter range, no cause — yields ninety-four.
How the re-count was checked: three enumerations agree. Counted by their headings, the complete records number a hundred and two. The volume's own index points a hundred and seven names to pages 554–575 — every name in the section except two: Major August F. Luedke, whose entry stands at pages 562–563 but whom the index mispoints to page 363, the volume's own error, and Private Steve Mikula, whose entry stands on page 564 but who does not appear in the index at all. A hundred and seven, with Luedke restored, is a hundred and eight index witnesses to a hundred and nine printed names, Mikula the one man the index simply missed. The transcriptions of this roll that circulate online cannot be counted by form alone, and this is part of how a count like ninety-four happens: in the archive's machine text of the volume, Mikula's heading is garbled past recognition, and in the best-known online transcription the McAlpine brothers and Lieutenant McInery are carried in forms a mechanical count drops. The printed volume governs; counted from it, the roll is a hundred and nine.
The causes, re-tallied on the hundred and two complete records: the phrase "killed in action" stands in twenty-five records, and a twenty-sixth battle death is phrased otherwise — First Lieutenant Arnold Matthew McInery of the 9th Infantry, "Killed at Soissons July 18, 1918," his company decorated with the Croix de Guerre with Palm, the fact stated in his entry. Nine of the hundred and two died of wounds. Disease is the roll's largest killer, as it was the war's: pneumonia is named in forty-one of the hundred and two records and influenza in eight, several of them jointly in the autumn of 1918 — among the influenza dead the two McAlpine brothers, James Robert, a Student Army Training Corps private who died at Ann Arbor on 18 October 1918, and Malcolm W., a first lieutenant of the Air Service who died in France four days later. The remainder died of other named diseases — diphtheria, appendicitis, meningitis, typhoid, empyema — and by accident, among them Major Luedke himself, "died from accidental causes" at Camp Taylor on 3 June 1919, and in camp, at sea, and in hospitals at home and in France where the entry names no cause. The banked Wars entry's figures conform at assembly: its "twenty-four killed in action" becomes twenty-five by the phrase and twenty-six by substance, and its "pneumonia named in 43 of 94" keeps neither number — the true statement is forty-one of a hundred and two. The War Heroes entry stands as printed.
Sources:
- 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) — the St. Joseph County section, pp. 554–575, read entire from the printed volume (the archive.org copy, goldstarhonorrol00indi), with the volume's introduction for its method and its index for the cross-check; the closing seven-name list at p. 574.
- The banked Wars and War Heroes sections of this history, whose two counts (94; 109 as 102 + 7) this re-count was worked to settle.