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The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
June 2013
On Sale: May 21, 2013
528 pages
ISBN: 0547554435
EAN: 9780547554433
Kindle: B008LQ1XII
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
In 2003, 85 years after the armistice, it took Richard Rubin
months to find just one living American veteran of World War
I. But then, he found another. And another. Eventually he
managed to find dozens, aged 101 to 113, and interview them.
All are gone now.
A decade-long odyssey to recover
the story of a forgotten generation and their Great War led
Rubin across the United States and France, through archives,
private collections, and battlefields, literature,
propaganda, and even music. But at the center of it all
were the last of the last, the men and women he met: a new
immigrant, drafted and sent to France, whose life was saved
by a horse; a Connecticut Yankee who volunteered and fought
in every major American battle; a Cajun artilleryman nearly
killed by a German aeroplane; an 18-year-old Bronx girl
“drafted” to work for the War Department; a machine-gunner
from Montana; a Marine wounded at Belleau Wood; the
16-year-old who became America’s last WWI veteran; and many,
many more.
They were the final survivors of the
millions who made up the American Expeditionary Forces,
nineteenth-century men and women living in the twenty-first
century. Self-reliant, humble, and stoic, they kept their
stories to themselves for a lifetime, then shared them at
the last possible moment, so that they, and the World War
they won – the trauma that created our modern world – might
at last be remembered. You will never forget them. The
Last of the Doughboys is more than simply a war story:
It is a moving meditation on character, grace, aging, and
memory.
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