GEOFFREY GAMBLE -- MEMORIAL DAY 2017 TALK EAST FERRY JAMESTOWN, RI 2017-05-29-1000 EDT "It has been said that happiness is the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations. What that means in plain English is that we cannot be unhappy missing things that we don’t know exist. • We often make the mistake, in studying history, of imagining and putting ourselves, with all of our modern expectations, into the past and, without televisions, laptops, cellphones, Facebook, and air conditioners, we would soon be miserable. • I was born in the house at 10 Union Street - right next door to the Community Center - at the end of World War II - before any of these things existed, and, I can tell you, that the people who lived here then were happy - at least as happy, and maybe even more so - than we are today. • While we honor those who have been untimely taken from their families in war, who lived during the Depression, we should never pity them as unhappy - we should instead mourn the fact that their joy in life was cut all too short. • With this in mind, this morning I want to share with you some thoughts not only on two Jamestowners killed in action in World War II, but some others we often overlook.
• In the 1930/s Jamestown’s population was about 1,600, and everybody knew just about everybody else like part of an extended family. • 10 other Jamestown military men lost their lives in World War II in addition to those killed in action. • They died tragically by misadventure. Their families suffered their loss just a grievously as those whose sons were killed by the enemy. • These included men such as Navy officer Charles Brooks, Jr., who was died after being gored by a water buffalo while swimming in the Philippines, and Aviation Cadet David Masterson, who was killed in a flying accident while training. • Jamestown has had additional losses over the years as well. Corporal Charles Lee of the 109th Coast Artillery Regiment was accidentally killed at Fort Greble on Dutch Island in 1912, when the cannon he was firing exploded. He is buried in the Four Corners Cemetery.
But today we especially honor the 2 Jamestowners killed in action in World War II. Both were born and grew up on this island during those difficult days of the Great Depression. • Howard Arnold lived with his 5 brothers and sisters on Cole Street. Francis Zweir lived over towards the West Ferry on Narragansett Avenue with his older brother and 2 sisters. His Mother died when he was 16. • Franny’s brother, Stephen Zweir, Jr., for many years Postmaster of Jamestown, passed away at the age of 98 two weeks ago. He served as a sergeant in the Army Air Corps in World War II and was the oldest member of the Arnold - Zweir American Legion Jamestown Post. • To help support his family, Howard Arnold had to quit school after the 8th Grade and found a job as a truck driver delivering coal around Jamestown until the war came along.
Franny Zweir graduated from LaSalle in 1939 and attended the University of Rhode Island - then Rhode Island State College - before joining the army in December 1942. He along with his neighbor and close friend, Joe Chesbro, were assigned to the 358th Infantry Regiment. • The 358th landed at Utah Beach on 8 June 1944, the day after the initial D-Day landings. Howard Arnold joined the 104th Infantry Regiment. In August of 1944, this regiment shipped out to Cherbourg, France, and waited there in reserve.
The Western Front in Europe in the Fall of 1944 stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss Border near Geneva. It was 400 miles long. Here in America that would be like a line of soldiers lined up from Boston to Baltimore. • Think how long it would take you to drive such a distance even at 60 miles an hour on an interstate highway. If you stationed one soldier every 10 to 15 feet along that line it would take minimum of a quarter of a million men to cover the battlefield theatre. • But that would only make for a thin line. To fight and win, you need countless troops in reserve, logistical supply personnel, transport, and artillery. So the total number of US troops there in Western Europe to fight was close to 2 million.
But it was on that thin front line that our two Jamestowners were to be found in the early Autumn of 1944. • By late August, the U.S. Third Army, led by General Patton started to run low on fuel. This situation was caused by the rapid Allied advance through France. • In the beginning of September 1944, using the last of its remaining fuel, the Third Army managed one final push to capture key bridges over the Meuse River at the French towns Verdun and Commercy. • Five days later, however, the critical supply situation effectively caused the Third Army to grind to a halt, allowing previously routed German forces to regroup and the reinforcement of their strongholds in the area. • Soon after, the Third Army came up against Metz, part of the Maginot Line and one of the most heavily fortified cities in Western Europe. The city could not be bypassed, as several of its forts had guns directed at the Moselle River crossing sites and the main roads in the area. • In the following Battle of Metz, the Third Army, while victorious, took heavy casualties. During the first week in October, Private First Class Howard Arnold and the 104th Infantry Regiment was ordered from Normandy to the Third Army front in the region of Lorraine, southwest of Metz, and went into the front line. • There in the Moncourt Woods between Nancy and the German border, the Regiment and PFC Arnold took up the fight. In an open pasture as the line moved forward around the tiny village of Bezange-la-Petite, he was killed by machine gun fire on 8 October 1944. He was 27 years old. • Bud Walsh says that Howard’s father, Fred Arnold, showed up late for work for the Highway Department here in Jamestown a few days later, apologizing for his tardiness, saying that he had just received a telegram from the War Department that his boy had been killed in action. • Imagine going to work on the day you found out that your child was killed in action.
Farther north, PVT Zweir and the 358th Infantry Regiment had fought their way through France and into Belgium. As the winter set in, it turned bitterly cold and snow began to fall. It was the coldest winter in a century. • The Germans launched their last desperate attempt to win the war in what has become known as the Battle of the Bulge. • On 8 January 1945, the 358th Infantry was in position on the ridges of the High Ardennes Forest waiting to cross the Wilz River some 5 miles to the east of the besieged City of Bastogne. • The river is only about 30 feet wide, but it rushes like a mountain torrent. Because of this, it didn’t freeze solid. • As they were crossing the water in rafts on 15 January 1945, they came under heavy fire from the 1st SS Panzer Corps who were in position on the hill on the north side of the river among the pine trees. • Private Francis X. Zweir, along with 4 others in his company, was killed during the crossing. Franny Zweir was 22 years old, two weeks short of his 23rd birthday.
PFC Arnold lies today in the American Military Cemetery in Lorraine, France. Private Zweir sleeps in the American Military Cemetery just outside Luxembourg City. His grave is not far from that of General George S. Patton. • When I was very young, I once asked, Steve Zweir, Senior, Private Zweir’s father, why he did not bring Franny home after the war. • Only a child would ask such a question. He thought for a while, smiled wistfully, and told me that he wanted his son to lie in the ground he died to free. • To paraphrase the soldier poet Rupert Brooke, who died 100 years ago in World War I: • In the rich earth of the two cemeteries in which PFC Arnold and PVT Zweir lie far from home, a richer dust in each is concealed, forever a part of Jamestown.
Never forget that they, too, knew happiness and laughter, among family and friends, here under the stars of a summer evening in the vault of heaven. • We honor them not only by remembering their sacrifice, but by living our lives in the freedom they secured for us, and in happiness on this island, which is their continuing gift to us all. • Thank you.
GIFT OF REVOLUTIONARY WAR RELIC Now, if I can take just a moment more of your time, I want to ask Diane Rugh, the Vice President of the Jamestown Historical Society, to come up here to accept a gift. • As some of you may know, Jamestown was the scene of its own Revolutionary War Battle, or Skirmish, on Sunday, December 10, 1775. • Very early in the morning of that day, the British landed upwards of two hundred Marines and Sailors near this very spot and marched them up Narragansett Avenue, then known as the Ferry Road, to the West Ferry in search of cattle, sheep and poultry to feed the British Forces in Newport. • As they returned with their plunder, driving the cattle before them, they burned houses on both sides of the road - 16 in all by the time they were through - rendering some 200 Jamestown men, women, and children homeless and without food in the middle of winter. • As the British troops reached the Four Corners on their return to the East Ferry, they encountered 40 or 50 Jamestown Minutemen arrayed across the road between the Cemetery and the Baptist Church who fired on them over the heads of the cattle and sheep. • One Royal Marine Officer was killed and 6 or 7 Redcoats were wounded.
Today, I am giving the Historical Society the badge that was on the hat of that Royal Marine Officer. • As you will be able to see, he was shot through the head. The badge, itself contains the Royal Crest of England. • It was given to me by Harry Wright just before he died in 1951. As a young man, in 1910, he had worked on paving he North Road starting at the Four Corners and discovered it in the ground there. • The Officer’s hat was likely trampled under ground by the cattle who stampeded in the Skirmish, and then it was lost for 135 years. • This Officer could be buried at the Four Corners or, more likely, ‘buried at sea’, after a ceremony on one of the British ships in Narragansett Bay. • But the badge survives as a reminder that there once was a time when war was not so distant. • It is tempting to look at this relic with its musket ball hole and think that this British officer got what he deserved. • That would be wrong. • The Jamestown Minutemen did not fight because they hated what was in front of them. They fought because they loved what was behind them. • This has always been the case with the American Armed Forces. Let us pray that it always will be. • It is my great pleasure to give this badge to the Historical Society."