One Minute Before Eleven

Signed Before Dawn

By the fall of 1918, the war had ground on for more than four years. Germany was beaten and running out of everything. Its delegates met the Allies in a railway car parked in the Forest of Compiègne, north of Paris.

Around five that morning, they signed an armistice. That's an agreement to stop shooting. It isn't a peace treaty yet.

But the shooting didn't stop at five. The terms said the guns would fall silent at eleven. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

That left six hours. So along much of the front, the attacks kept coming. Some commanders wanted one more hill or one more village before the deadline. Others simply had their orders, and nobody canceled them.

Those six hours were costly. Historian Joseph Persico estimated that on the last day of the war, close to eleven thousand men on all sides were killed, wounded or went missing. More than twenty-seven hundred of them were killed. Thousands of the casualties were American. Every one of them was a man who almost made it home.

One man on that line had spent the whole war trying to prove something. To understand what, we have to go back to Baltimore.

A Clerk from Highlandtown

Henry Nicholas Gunther was born on June 6th, 1895, in east Baltimore. His parents were the children of German immigrants. He grew up in Highlandtown, a neighborhood full of German families, German churches and German shops.

He was a bookkeeper and clerk at the National Bank of Baltimore. A steady young man with a steady job.

But in April of 1917, America went to war with Germany. Suddenly, being German-American was a hard thing to be. Families like the Gunthers were looked at with suspicion. His great-nephew later told NBC News that a local pharmacist accused Henry's grandmother of being a spy. The police took her in. She was later released.

Henry didn't rush to enlist. In September of 1917, he was drafted, which means the government required him to serve, volunteer or not.

He went into the Three Hundred Thirteenth Infantry Regiment of the Seventy-Ninth Division, a unit of a few thousand soldiers, mostly men from Baltimore. It carried a proud nickname: "Baltimore's Own."

Henry was good with numbers, so the Army made him a supply sergeant. He kept track of the gear, the clothing and the equipment for a company. A bank clerk, still counting. Just in uniform now.

It was a job made for him. And one letter was about to take it away.

The Letter

In July of 1918, the regiment shipped to France, part of the American Expeditionary Forces under General John J. Pershing.

Henry wrote home. In one letter to a friend, he described how miserable conditions were. And he urged the friend to stay out of the Army if he could.

But every soldier's letter in that war could be read by a military censor. That's an officer who checks the mail for anything that might hurt the war effort. The censor caught Henry's letter.

He was busted. Stripped of his stripes, from supply sergeant down to private, the lowest rank there is. Instead of counting uniforms, he would now carry a rifle.

I'll tell you something as a Navy veteran. Rank isn't just a pay grade. It's on your sleeve, where everybody can see it. When it comes off, the whole outfit knows. Now picture being the guy with the German name when that happens.

So what does a man do when he believes his own army has its doubts about him?

Something to Prove

His regiment went into the Meuse-Argonne offensive, the largest battle the American Army fought in that war. And Henry volunteered to be a runner. A runner carries messages by hand across open ground, because radios and phone lines were unreliable. It was one of the most dangerous jobs on the front.

After the war, a Baltimore Sun reporter named James M. Cain talked to Henry's comrades. Cain would later become a famous novelist. He wrote that Henry brooded over his demotion. In Cain's words, "He thought himself suspected of being a German sympathizer."

The division's own newspaper said the same thing more simply. From the time the regiment went into action, Henry showed "an inflexible determination to make good."

Make good. Hold on to those two words. He'd been demoted. He'd been doubted, or believed he had. And he carried a German name in an army fighting Germany.

By November, the regiment was fighting east of the Meuse River. The war had weeks left, then days, then hours. And nobody in Henry's company knew that his determination would get one last test, with the clock almost out.

Hold Where You Are

The morning of November 11th. The Three Hundred Thirteenth was fighting north of Verdun. Henry's battalion held a line between two small villages, Chaumont-devant-Damvillers and Ville-devant-Chaumont. Fog covered the ground.

At 10:44 that morning, word of the Armistice reached the battalion. Eleven o'clock was sixteen minutes away. The men were told to hold where they were.

Anyone who has worn the uniform knows that's the easiest order there is. You stay put. You let the clock do the work. After four years of war, sixteen minutes of doing nothing.

But German machine gun nests sat right ahead of them. A machine gun nest is a dug-in position built around one or two heavy guns.

And Henry Gunther got up and went forward.

His friends begged him to stay back. His sergeant and close friend, Ernest Powell, ordered him to stop.

Henry kept going, rifle in hand.

The Eleventh Hour

Now the German soldiers could see him coming through the fog. They knew the war would end in a minute or two.

Some accounts say they waved at him to turn around. Some say they fired warning shots over his head.

Think about that. In the last minutes of the war, the enemy was trying to send him back alive.

He fired a shot or two.

By the division history's clock, it was one minute before eleven. A war diary from the front says two minutes before. Either way, the clock was still running.

In February of 1919, the division's newspaper, The Lorraine Cross, told what happened next.

"The Germans called to him to go back, but he kept on. They turned their machine gun on him and he fell dead in the last minute of the war."

Almost as he fell, the firing died away. In the history's words, "an appalling silence prevailed."

When the guns stopped, the German soldiers placed his body on a stretcher and carried it over to the American lines.

The Army recorded him as the last American killed in the war, and restored his rank. He died a private. He was honored as Sergeant Gunther.

In 1923, he came home to Baltimore. His great-niece said, "They wanted him back with the family because they loved him so much."

Hero or victim? People still argue. A brave soldier, a humiliated man, or a casualty of commanders who kept attacking after the paper was signed. The men who knew him had their answer: "There is not a man in Company A but thinks Gunther 'made good.'"

Within a year, that date became Armistice Day. Today we call it Veterans Day.

As a Navy veteran, here's what stays with me. Henry Gunther spent his last minute trying to prove he belonged in that uniform. He never had to. He was already wearing it.

Eleven o'clock, on that foggy line north of Verdun. The guns are silent at last, and the Baltimore men who were told to hold where they were dig in, one man short.

Tomorrow: Ellis Island is about to shut its doors for good, and one sailor is still being held inside. Who is he, and what did he do to end up there? The Daily Muster is supported by Parcaut Supply Co. If Henry's story stayed with you, subscribe and pass it along to someone who served. Muster's done. Fair winds. I'm Ed Parcaut, and I'll see you tomorrow.