Parade welcomed back WWI soldiers

Wartime tales about Bibles stopping bullets are often discounted as apocryphal, but two friends from Donora swore by their World War I battlefield experience.

Thomas Jordan and Louis Johnson served with many other Western Pennsylvania soldiers in Company B of the 111th Infantry Regiment. The 111th was part of the Army’s 28th Division that had been created from multiple Pennsylvania National Guard units. When the soldiers returned to Pittsburgh 100 years ago, large and boisterous crowds lined city streets to welcome the men back from European battlefields.

Jordan, a mechanic, and Johnson, a cook, “had enlisted together, saw service together and returned the same way,” The Gazette Times reported on May 8, 1919. “During all the training and fighting … they were inseparable.”

Both men had earned battlefield attention.

Jordan earned the Croix de Guerre, a French medal received for battlefield bravery, in July 1918. Jordan was honored “for silencing a German machine gun which was mowing down his comrades,” the newspaper story said. “Johnson broke into prominence when a sniper’s bullet, speeding toward his heart, was halted by a New Testament carried in his breast pocket.”

His friend Jordan then shot and killed the enemy soldier who had fired on his buddy.

Both men were among many soldiers interviewed at Forbes Field in Oakland at the start of the city’s welcome-home celebration. An estimated 3,000 doughboys then marched 3 miles from Forbes Field to a reviewing stand on Liberty Avenue near Pittsburgh’s Point.

As part of the Army’s 28th Division, the 111th had taken part in some of the fiercest fighting during the last months of the war: Chateau-Thierry, St. Mihiel, Argonne Forest and Metz.

There were “hundreds of thousands of men and women, boys and girls, [who] shouted themselves into voiceless ecstasy yesterday afternoon,” The Gazette Times’ reporter wrote. As the returning soldiers arrived at the Point, “Up leaped the thousands seated in the stands, up leaped the other thousands packed to suffocation along the sidewalks. Mayor [Edward V.] Babcock, his voice trembling, tried in vain to shout a greeting.”

The anonymous writer covering the day’s events sought to sum up the spirit of the event in a description of one woman’s reaction to the return of the Pittsburgharea troops:

“In the stand to [the mayor’s right] a stout and motherly looking woman reached her arms down toward the stalwart soldiers. ‘My boys,’ she sobbed.

“Thus in two words an unknown mother of a soldier epitomized the spirit of Pittsburgh yesterday.”