The World War I Heroes Worth Teaching Your Kids by Name

Quick answer: Teach your kids the five stories below. Then go find the sixth, the one with your own family's name on it. Roughly 24 million American men filled out a World War I draft card, and you can search them for free tonight.

There's a card in the National Archives about the size of a postcard. It lists a man's height, his build, the color of his eyes, and who he worked for in 1917 or 1918. At the bottom is his signature, in his own hand.

If your family was in America a century ago, there's a good chance one of those cards belongs to your great-great-grandfather. Most people never look. They know more about the Revolutionary War than about the war their own relatives went to. About 4.7 million Americans served in World War I, and roughly 116,000 of them died, more from disease than from combat. A century later most of them are nameless, even to their own descendants.

Start with the famous ones. They give your kids a frame for the one you're about to go find.

Alvin York, who came home and built a school

York was a red-headed farmer from Pall Mall, Tennessee, who'd asked to be excused from fighting on grounds of conscience. He was turned down, and his battalion commander spent hours talking it through with him. York decided he could serve.

On October 8, 1918, in the Argonne Forest, Corporal York's patrol was pinned down by German machine guns. By the end of that morning he and the seven surviving men of his patrol were marching 132 German prisoners back to American lines. He received the Medal of Honor.

Tell your kids the next part too, because it's the part that matters.

He came home to ticker-tape parades and a pile of offers. Endorsements. Vaudeville. Movie deals. He turned nearly all of them down and went back to Fentress County, where the kids had almost no schooling. He spent years raising money and opened the York Agricultural Institute in Jamestown in 1926. It's still a public high school. Famous for one morning, useful for the next forty years. That's the lesson.

Henry Johnson, who wouldn't let them take his friend

Johnson was a railroad porter at Albany's Union Station. He served with the 369th Infantry, the Black regiment from New York known as the Harlem Hellfighters. A segregated U.S. Army didn't want them fighting beside white American units, so they were loaned to the French. They spent longer at the front than almost any other American regiment.

In May 1918, Johnson and Private Needham Roberts were on night sentry duty when a German raiding party hit their post. Both were wounded. When the raiders started dragging Roberts away, Johnson fought them off with what he had left and kept his friend from being captured. He took 21 wounds that night.

France awarded him the Croix de Guerre with palm, one of the first Americans to receive it. His own country took far longer. He died in 1929 and was buried at Arlington. The Medal of Honor came in 2015, eighty-six years too late for him to see it.

Kids get this one fast. He didn't save himself. He saved the other guy.

Charles Whittlesey and the Lost Battalion

Whittlesey was a New York lawyer who wore glasses and didn't look like anybody's idea of a war hero. In early October 1918 he led roughly 550 men into a ravine in the Argonne, and the units on either side failed to keep up. They were surrounded for five days. No food, almost no water, and at one point American artillery was landing on them by mistake.

Their last pigeon, Cher Ami, flew through the shelling with a message giving their position and pleading for the barrage to stop. The bird arrived shot through the chest and missing most of a leg. The guns stopped. Cher Ami is on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, and yes, your kids will want to go see the pigeon.

About 194 men walked out. Whittlesey got the Medal of Honor.

He also carried those five days home with him. In November 1921 he was a pallbearer when the Unknown Soldier was laid to rest at Arlington. A few weeks later he disappeared from a ship bound for Havana, and most historians believe he took his own life.

Older kids can handle that. It's the honest end of the story, and it teaches something the parades never did. The weight comes home. If it's coming home with you or someone you love, the Veterans Crisis Line is 988, then press 1. You can also text 838255.

The Hello Girls, who had to fight for the word "veteran"

General Pershing needed telephone operators in France who could switch between English and French under fire, because the men on the switchboards weren't keeping up. The Army Signal Corps recruited women for the job. More than 200 of them went overseas. They took the oath, wore the uniform, and ran the lines that carried orders during the biggest American offensives of the war. Their chief operator, Grace Banker, received the Distinguished Service Medal.

Then they came home and were told they'd been civilians all along. No discharge, no benefits, no veteran status.

Merle Egan Anderson, one of the operators, spent decades pushing Congress on it. Recognition finally came in 1977, almost sixty years later, after most of the women had died. If your daughter is thinking about serving, read this one with her and then read what the standards and the path in actually look like now.

Frank Buckles, the last one

Buckles was turned down by several recruiters before he talked his way into the Army in 1917. He was 16. He drove ambulances and motorcycles in England and France. In the next war he spent more than three years as a civilian prisoner of the Japanese in the Philippines.

He died in 2011 at 110, the last surviving American veteran of World War I. He spent his final years pressing for a national memorial in Washington, and he's buried at Arlington. The National World War I Memorial in Pershing Park held its first flag-raising in 2021. He'd worked to make it happen and didn't live to see it.

Now find your own

This is the part that actually changes something in your house. Give it one evening.

• Search the draft cards. FamilySearch has the World War I draft registration cards free to search. There were three registration days: June 5, 1917, June 5, 1918, and September 12, 1918. Try every man in the family born between roughly 1872 and 1900.
• Request the service record, and lower your expectations. A fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis on July 12, 1973, destroyed about 80 percent of Army personnel records for soldiers discharged between 1912 and 1960. Request it anyway at archives.gov/veterans using Standard Form 180. Records older than 62 years are open to the public. Navy and Marine Corps files mostly survived.
• Check the county courthouse. Many veterans recorded their discharge papers with the county recorder when they got home. Those copies survived even when the Army's didn't.
• Try your state archives. Several states compiled service abstracts or paid veterans' bonuses, and both left paperwork behind.
• If he didn't come home, search the burial database at abmc.gov. The American Battle Monuments Commission maintains the overseas cemeteries. Meuse-Argonne, in France, holds more than 14,000 Americans. It's the largest American military cemetery in Europe.
• Read the hometown paper. Small-town papers printed letters home, casualty lists and welcome-home notices. That's often where a name finally turns into a person.

The annoying part: you'll probably hit a wall. Common names, misspelled records, a fire half a century ago. Write down what you find anyway, even if it's one card and one newspaper clipping, and put it somewhere the next generation will actually see it. You'll have left the family record better than you found it, which is more than most people manage.

For the bigger picture, the National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City is the one Congress designated as the nation's official World War I museum. Its online collections are worth an evening with older kids. And when November 11 comes around, the date the guns went quiet at 11 a.m. in 1918, it's the right day to tell one of these stories at the dinner table. Memorial Day asks something different of you, and it's worth knowing the difference.

Most towns of any age have a doughboy statue, a plaque or a list of names somewhere near the courthouse. Take your kids. Read the names out loud.

One of them might be the same as yours.