![]() ![]() The VFW Post honoring the name of Sergeant Gunther has since ceased to exist. Several years later, a post, number 1858 of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in east Baltimore, was named after him. The Army posthumously restored his rank of sergeant and awarded him a Divisional Citation for Gallantry in Action and the Distinguished Service Cross. ![]() Pershing's " Order of The Day" on the following day specifically mentioned Gunther as the last American killed in the war. Īmerican Expeditionary Forces commanding General John J. Cain, then a reporter for the local daily newspaper The Sun, interviewed Gunther's comrades afterward and wrote that "Gunther brooded a great deal over his recent reduction in rank, and became obsessed with a determination to make good before his officers and fellow soldiers". When he got too close to the machine guns, he was shot in a short burst of automatic fire and killed instantly. The German soldiers, already aware of the Armistice that would take effect in one minute, tried to wave Gunther away. Gunther got up, against the orders of his close friend and now sergeant Ernest Powell, and charged with his bayonet. Gunther's squad approached a roadblock of two German machine guns in the village of Chaumont-devant-Damvillers near Meuse, in Lorraine. The Armistice with Germany was signed by 5:00 a.m., local time, but it would not come into force until 11:00 a.m. Like all Allied units on the front of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, it was still embroiled in fighting on the morning of November 11. Gunther's unit, Company 'A', arrived at the Western Front on September 12, 1918. As a result, he was demoted from sergeant to private. A critical letter home, in which he reported on the "miserable conditions" at the front and advised a friend to try anything to avoid being drafted, was intercepted by the Army postal censor. Promoted as a supply sergeant, he was responsible for clothing in his military unit, and arrived in France in July 1918 as part of the incoming American Expeditionary Forces. In September 1917, he was drafted and quickly assigned to the 313th Infantry Regiment, nicknamed "Baltimore's Own" it was part of the larger 157th Brigade of the 79th Infantry Division. Military service īeing of recent German-American heritage, Gunther did not automatically enlist in the armed forces as many others did soon after the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917. He had joined the Roman Catholic service order for laymen, the Knights of Columbus, in 1915. Henry Gunther worked as a bookkeeper and clerk at the National Bank of Baltimore. He grew up in Highlandtown, an East Baltimore neighborhood heavily influenced by German immigrants, where his family belonged to Sacred Heart of Jesus Roman Catholic parish. His parents, George Gunther (1869–1919) and Lina Roth (1866–1938), were both children of German immigrants. Henry Gunther was born into a German-American family in east Baltimore, Maryland, on June 6, 1895. ![]() Gunther had recently been demoted, and was seeking to regain his rank just before the war ended. He was killed at 10:59 a.m., about one minute before the Armistice was to take effect at 11:00 a.m. Henry Nicholas John Gunther (J– November 11, 1918) was an American soldier and possibly the last soldier of any of the belligerents to be killed during World War I. ![]()
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