Forgotten piece of Great War history

Carrying a wounded man out of the front line trenches, Private Irwin Hart was 28 years old when he fell at Vimy Ridge, shot and instantly killed by enemy fire.

He died with thousands of Canadians in a battle that came to define the young country. But despite his sacrifice, and his name carved into the limestone of Canada’s towering Vimy Memorial, Hart was from Weeping Water, Neb. He was American.

Hart had no prior military experience. He was 5-foot-10, a Baptist, and last lived in Chicago, listing “clerk” as his trade on attestation documents. He enlisted in Windsor, Ont., a little over a year before the United States joined the Great War on April 6, 1917.

Hart is part of a forgotten piece of history. It’s estimated tens of thousands Americans went north to fight in the First World War before April 1917, a period when the border between the two countries was more porous, but the U.S. clung to isolationist principles.

“Beginning in 1914, it started out as a quiet sort of thing with the Americans going over to Canada,” says Chris Dickon, author of Americans at War in Foreign Forces. But as time wore on, American recruits became an open secret.

The U.S. had maintained a position of neutrality through much of the war — not wanting to be pulled into a battle far from its borders. But some Americans felt strongly about joining up.

One New Jersey recruit in the Canadian Expeditionary Force told The Graphic in 1916: “I have come over because I felt it my duty to do something … and there are many more like me who are itching to get into it.” Others were more mercenary in spirit, with many newspapers noting much better pay for soldiers in Canada.

It wasn’t legal for Canada to recruit in the U.S., but posters and pamphlets explaining where to enlist were common along the border.

“It was accepted that Canada wanted Americans in its forces,” Dickon says.

The CEF even kept these men together for awhile, creating the 97th Battalion in Toronto in 1915, also known as the American Legion. Other American-based battalions formed in other provinces. But the U.S. government eventually asked Canada to drop “American Legion” from the name and its members were later absorbed into other battalions.

Though Canada gave the official number of U.S. recruits as 35,000, that number is a bit ambiguous given the fluid border and the high amount of intermarrying between Canadians and Americans at the time.

Those who made it back home were able to keep their U.S. citizenship, but it was a different story for the dead. Dickon estimates approximately 3,500 Americans were killed fighting with Commonwealth forces.

“They’re still buried in Europe, often as Canadians, not as Americans.”