NEVER FORGOTTEN
100 years later: New Britain remembers WWI, men it sent who did not return
Gathered at a monument to their dead, its base describing the war that took them as simply “The World War,” the town of New Britain remembered 123 sons who died in the war that ended 100 years ago Sunday.
At 11 a.m., a small silver bell pealed 21 times in New Britain's Walnut Hill Park.
It rung out 100 years and five hours after World War I ended with the signing of an armistice, famously on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, in France, a time zone ahead.
But it felt fitting, given the city's sacrifice, to commemorate the war's end on New Britain time.
A group of local veterans named each of the New Britain residents who died in the war, a bell peal separating each name like a comma, the 123 of them among the roughly 1,900 Connecticut men and 117,000 Americans overall who perished.
Mayor Erin Stewart described World War I as a transformative event for New Britain, which sent not only men to the front lines, but equipment, weapons and munitions, as well, from its foundries and factories.
City residents sold bonds to raise money for the war, and The Stanley Works published a newsletter to maintain morale among its employees deployed to Europe.
The war shook the city, its boys abroad killed by war and its residents at home ravaged by influenza, but the sturdiness of the equipment it sent abroad made a name for the city's industry, Stewart said.
“That grit has stuck with the city of New Britain ever since,” she said.
Derek Barcikowski, the honorary consul- ate of the Republic of Poland in Connecticut and a leader in New Britain's Polish community, noted that many city residents enlisted in a volunteer Polish army that fought alongside the Allies in Europe for Polish independence.
The country celebrated the 100th anniversary of its independence on Sunday, and a local choir sang the Polish anthem at the base of the World War I monument, the country's colors flying alongside the American flags.
“They might have been fighting in different armies,” Barcikowski said of the Polish volunteers and the U.S. recruits, “but they were fighting on the same side, for the same freedoms.”
Seven aging riflemen, wearing satin jackets in the red and gold of the Marine
Corps, let loose a volley, cracking apart air that had not warmed much by noontime.
Someone grumbled about the noise, but it was already over, and the flags were retired.
The veterans who had been asked to stand earlier sought each other out, to ask tentatively where the other had served, and if he was going to the complimentary luncheon afterward at the Elks Lodge.
The monument — a soaring obelisk dedicated in 1927 — loomed over the ceremony, but it was not a mournful one. It was, as Gen. Ralph Hedenberg of the Connecticut National Guard said, a day “of triumph.”
“While Memorial Day is a day for somber silence,” Hedenberg, a New Britain native, said, “Veterans Day is a time of triumph.”