Book Review: Searching for John Dewitt

Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski

A heartwarming work of narrative nonfiction about a grandson exploring his grandfather’s letters from WWI

In 2020, author John Chase learned about a cache of eighty perfectly preserved letters from his grandfather John DeWitt to his parents, written during his time training as a soldier stateside and his deployment to Europe over the summer of 1917 to the fall of 1918. Those letters would send Chase on an unexpected journey to learn more about his grandfather’s experiences—especially his highly dangerous assignment as a trench “runner”—and reveal aspects of the man he never knew. 

Searching for John DeWitt chronicles Chase’s attempt to read between the lines of DeWitt’s letters home to family in Council Bluffs, Iowa, to get a fuller picture of DeWitt’s actual wartime experiences. 

Intrigued by DeWitt’s role as a runner, Chase used the letters—almost all “upbeat and optimistic, unfailingly cheerful”—as a springboard to research more about DeWitt’s regiment, the 168th Regiment of the famed Rainbow Division, and the dangers trench runners encountered. What Chase discovered would lead to a newfound respect for his grandfather and understanding of why “he chose not to disinter the darker memories of his time … He buried those memories like he had buried so many of his comrades.”

DeWitt volunteered for the U.S. Army in June 1917 when he was twenty years old. Recruits heading into the American Expeditionary Force under the command of General John “Black Jack” Pershing received six months of military training stateside before shipping out overseas. DeWitt would train at both Camp Dodge in Iowa and Camp Mills in New York, and Chase points out that his grandfather’s enlistment window showed impeccable timing—any sooner and he may have been sent off from   Camp Dodge to chase Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and any later he may have returned to Camp Dodge in 1918 after being wounded, right in the midst of the Spanish Flu epidemic that decimated the installation. His time in France also coincided with the availability and improved quality of gas masks in 1918, another instance of DeWitt’s lucky timing.

Mixing family memories with compelling historical storytelling, Chase illuminates DeWitt’s training period through liberal quoting of his letters. One thing stood out immediately to Chase, and that was his grandfather’s chipper attitude in letters to his mother…and the frustrating lack of details. 

Parsing DeWitt’s letters closely led to a “Damascus Road” moment for Chase, as he realized that DeWitt and hisfather agreed when he enlisted to not worry his mothers or sisters in his letters home. But this also fired up Chase’s desires to dig into the historical records of the 168th and elsewhere to form a fuller picture of the horrors DeWitt endured. 

“I realized my grandfather’s notes home were like the North Atlantic icebergs he and his fellow soldiers dodged on their way to France in November 1917 … beneath the surface was a more important story, not just about my grandfather, but about an entire generation of young men now for the most part forgotten.”

When DeWitt was assigned as a Battalion Runner in April 1918, he hid the fact that runners were “expendable and often killed” ferrying messages across bombed-out craters and trenches, German bullets whizzing all around them. It was work DeWitt relished, according to Chase, and he chalks up his grandfather’s calm and courage to his sense of mission and his deep Catholic faith.

Chase relies on two histories, History of the Rainbow Division by Raymond Tomkins and The History of the 168th by John Taber, to tell a mini history of the unit’s experiences and imagining where DeWitt fit into those movements. Through this amateur sleuthing, Chase paints a fuller portrait of his grandfather’s movements and engagements, aligning them as he can with the letters’ selective information. What shines through is a devout, courageous, and honor-bound young man eager to make his parents and nation proud. Dewitt is a pleasure to read. Those looking for more about the inspiring people and the families they left behind in WWI will cherish the chance to meet him in this book.

During a German bombardment and gas attack around the village of Suippes on July 15, 1918, DeWitt would take shrapnel in his left leg (which he dutifully reported to his mother from the hospital) and was gassed, as well (which he did not tell his mother). His heroic actions as a runner in that battle earned DeWitt a Purple Heart medal, a surprising fact that “Grampa” never mentioned, Chase says. In looking over his grandfather’s year in the war, Chase concludes it definitively changed him:

“He had emerged as a man who had seen much death and violence and unholy chaos, and he had not flinched.”  

Searching for John DeWitt is a touching testament to the lived experiences of American veterans of WWI, an invaluable reference for historians, and a poignant tribute by a grandson to a beloved grandfather. Highly recommend.

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