Famous People Of The Great War
They also served the little known world war one service of soon to be famous.
They were not famous at the time, but history would remember these writers, actors, politicans and popes more for what they would accomplish later than for the war.
Not famous commanders or generals, but individuals who later became famous and what they did in the Great War. The people on this list were all extraordinary. Some of their roles may look small and insignificant, and some of them were rather unknown at that time - but in the years to come the world was going to hear from them and they would be remembered long after the generals faded away.
World war one seemed to be the war of choice for some of the best writers of the 20th Century- Ernest Hemmingway, being rejected for combat due to a bad ear from boxing, served as an Ambulance driver in Italy, being wounded and decorated by the Italian government. Ambulance driver was also the wartime gig of a certain teenager named Walt Disney who lied about his age and went to France in 1916. It was reported that he made a sizable side income painting medals and camouflage on captured German helmets to be sold as souvenirs. The Trenches of France saw an young English officer, CS Lewis (of Chronicles of Narnia fame) being wounded at the Battle of Arras alongside another young officer named JRR Tolkein who later wrote a trilogy about a set of rings. Hugh Lofting, creator of the Doctor Doolittle books was wounded by a German grenade in France. Novelist James Cain was in France also, with the US 79th Infantry before he wrote the Postman Always Rings Twice. Not to be outdone American literature greats William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler trained to fly warplanes with the Canadians although they never saw combat. Somerset Maugham was said to have written several parts of what would become his masterpiece ‘Of Human Bondage’ while serving as an intelligence officer spying for his majesty’s secret service in Russia.
Movie stars were well represented in the first of the modern wars. A young Hungarian officer named Bela Blaskos was wounded three times fighting the Russians in the Carpathians before being invalided out of the service in 1916. Fifteen years later, with his name changed to Bela Lugosi he scared the pants off of the world wearing a new uniform in which he would always be remembered, that of Count Dracula. Humphrey Bogart was a helmsman aboard the huge troop transport ship USS Leviathan before he sailed on the African Queen. An ear infection nearly killed silent film star Buster Keaton while he was serving as a corporal with the US 40th Infantry Division in France. English screen actors Claude Raines and Basil Rathborne who are best remembered by their roles as the Invisible Man and Sherlock Holmes both fought in France while infantry officers with the Royal Army.
The ranks of the Great War’s armies also contained men who would someday transcend the stars themselves. Walter Gropius, architect and founder of the Bauhaus, earned an Iron Cross in the trenches serving his kaiser. When you look up in the sky at night and wonder who proved the theory of an expanding universe, think of Edwin Hubble, the man the Hubble Telescope is named in honor of. Mr. Hubble in 1917 was an artillery officer in the US army in France, after training with another young man named Harry Truman who was to later make a name in politics for him. A very spiritual Italian Army medical corpsman, Sgt Angelo Roncalli lived through his time in hell during the battles along the Isonzo River to become Pope John XXI in 1958.
One of the most famous editors in modern history was a part of a tragically ironic story from the Great War. In 1915 in the German army a young man named Otto Frank enlisted as a machine gunner, fought at the Battle of the Somme and showed extraordinary courage under fire. He was made an officer and finished the war highly decorated. In 1933 Otto, who was a Jew, moved from his home in Germany to Amsterdam in Holland once Adolf Hitler (who had served as a corporal during the war with a Bavarian Regiment) came to power. Otto Franks daughter was Anne Frank. The teenage Dutch girl who was exterminated in a Nazi concentration camp for the crime of being Jewish. After the Second World War, Otto was the publisher and defender of Anne Frank’s Diary-one of the most touching chronicles of the Holocaust.
