Inside World War I wartime in journal found at DeKalb estate sale

DeKALB – Sgt. Albert Walter Leonhard, who lived along Sycamore Road in DeKalb, was 22 when he enlisted in the military on May 23, 1917, less than two months after the U.S. officially entered World War I.

John Wright of DeKalb knows this because he recently found Leonhard’s journal 107 years later at an estate sale in DeKalb.

While combing through old things at the sale, the local collector of historical military artifacts found something he’d never encountered: a nearly completely filled out World War I Service Record. The service books allow military personnel to keep a record of their duties, enlistment dates, deployment activities and other memories.

Wright said this was the first service book he’d found worth buying since it contained so much information. It was a window into Leonhard’s life more than a century ago.

“The first thing I did when I opened this, and when I saw he’d filled out all these pages, I kept all of it and went up and bought it,” Wright said.

The service record is not an official military document but a sort of postwar diary. It was both a trove of information for the collector and contains firsthand accounts of a DeKalb resident’s experiences during the war.

Leonhard, born July 16, 1894, was a member of the 33rd Division of the U.S. Army National Guard. He was among 27,000 men who served in the division during WWI, according to the Illinois National Guard.

Wright said that was the case for most Illinois-based soldiers at the time.

“Almost everybody in the division is from Illinois,” Wright said. “Every soldier that would have enlisted or been drafted out of DeKalb goes to the 33rd Division, almost without exception.”

Of those soldiers, 798 were killed in action, 18 were captured and four were missing, according to a document that was found in Leonhard’s service record and issued by the 33rd Division Headquarters while stationed in Luxembourg.

More than 7,500 soldiers in the 33rd Division were wounded during the war, according to the division document. Leonhard was one of them.

In his wartime diary, Leonhard writes about his time recovering in a field hospital on Oct. 5, 1918, as the result of a gas attack. He was then transferred to a hospital in Liffol-le-Grand, France. It was where he remained when the armistice was signed on Nov. 11, 1918, which silenced the guns on the western front and signaled the end of the Great War, as it was called at the time.

Michael Embrey, a DeKalb-based U.S. Army veteran who heads several local veterans causes, said more than 2,000 young men from DeKalb County served in the U.S. armed forces during World War I.

“This was a small county back then, that was a lot of young men from our area,” Embrey said. ”Most people don’t know, those young men all knew how to shoot a gun, so they were excellent when they went into training. City kids didn’t know how to use a gun. Those farm boys, they could use a gun.”

Leonhard wrote that he spent time as a sniper in the trenches, recorded a hit from what he estimated to be 1,000 yards, and “surely could make them [the enemy] hit the dust.”

Leonhard took part in some of the most infamous battles of WWI, including the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, which was the largest operation of the American Expeditionary Forces of the war, according to the National Archives.

He wrote that he participated in an offensive in France’s Somme region alongside British troops from Aug. 5, 1918, to Aug. 21, 1918. Later, he entered the front lines with Australian troops north of Paris.

“Enjoyed seeing the Germans make an attack on the 40th Aus. [Australian] Batt. [Battery] and hang themselves on the wire entanglements as their barrage had missed the automatic gunners in the outpost, who mowed the Jerrys [German soldiers] down as they hit the wire,” Leonhard wrote.

Leonhard wrote that one trench he was stationed in was struck by an artillery barrage the day after he was rotated to a different location.

He also spent time ahead of the front lines, in what has come to be known as No Man’s Land – the unclaimed territory between the forward trenches of the Allied and Central Powers forces.

“We had to go out as digging parties to dig trenches in front of the front line,” Leonhard wrote. “Nearly met our Waterloo one night of this had a close call with whiz-bangs.”

“Met our Waterloo” is a phrase that means to suffer a great defeat, and references the battle that ended the Napoleonic wars. To Leonhard, the phrase referenced a battle as old to him as World War I is to the modern era.

Wright said the whiz-bangs Leonhard referenced were small pieces of artillery shot by warring nations from short ranges. He said those artillery shells “made a real loud whizzing noise” before exploding.

“Allies called them whiz-bangs,” Wright said. “He’s being hit by artillery while he’s out in the open but he thinks he’s maybe going to get killed that night.”

Leonhard was not killed, however. Wright said he tracked down Leonhard’s family, who said he lived until 1960. He was at least 63 years old.

Wright said after the war, Leonhard got married and had a career working for the DeKalb post office.

Since finding the book, Wright has learned he bought the material from the estate of Leonhard’s only daughter. He plans on returning the materials to Leonhard’s grandchild.

“I thought that this little information from his grandson helps give a little conclusion to it, as to what happened to him,” Wright said.