Frank Harold Watson, Diary of World War I, March 1918 - July 1919

PREFACE




When I took a typing class in the 9th grade, my grandfather asked me if I wanted to practice by transcribing his diary from World War I. I said, "Yes." By the time I was halfway through, I became busy with other things and never finished it.

After moving to Monterey, I asked Mom and Dad what happened to the diary. They did not even remember its existence. I guessed that it must be lost. Then years later, while cleaning out the garage, I found a box with things I'd saved from high school. In the box was the section I typed and the rest of the hand-written diary. The part I had done was in a faded black binder with yellowed sheets of paper. The original diary was in loose pages, 5 1/2 by 8 inches, in blue ink, still well-preserved.

I have re-transcribed it for the family, so they can learn a little more about my cherished grandfather, Frank Herald Watson.

As you remember from my father's book about his family, Grandpa Watson had to drop out of school after the 8th grade. He was smart, but not educated. His diary had a lot of run-on sentences, lack of punctuation, and spelling errors, most of which I corrected. Otherwise it is in his words.

In some places, it appears that he went back later and wrote about what happened on a particular day.

Grandpa Watson was 39 when he enlisted in the army. I have always wondered why he decided to do so. According to my father, the English were running out of men to fight the war and were rounding up Englishmen in the United States for the English army. To avoid this, my grandfather volunteered for the Americans.

I researched the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News for the first three months of 1918 and could find no stories about that. Perhaps it was a rumor.

I also questioned why he would leave Grandma at this time since she had lost two children during the previous year. My dad had no memory of his older sister, Gertrude, or his younger brother, Philip. Gertrude was born in Medford, but the state of Oregon had no record of her birth. Santa Clara County had no record of her death. From the diary, it appears that she died April 23, 1917, less than a year before Grandpa left. She was about five or six years old, according to Dad's memoir.

Records from the County of Santa Clara show that Philip was born in San Jose on January 17, 1917 and died on August 11, 1917. The death certificate states that he died of a "inanition" with complications relating to a "tubercular condition of the glands." I was curious about the cause of death. Inanition was a term that was used to explain the death of many babies in the early 1900s. It is a condition in which a baby dies because the mother is unable to adequately nurse her child. I am guessing that Grandma in her grief over the death of Gertrude may not have been able to provide sufficient milk. The term, inanition, was not used after 1920.

While working on this project, I found a number of letters Grandpa Watson had written to Grandma while he was away in the army. They reveal a romantic side of my grandfather that I never saw. I have included a few of them in this book.

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A final word: The diary is not politically correct, but reflects the white male attitudes of the times. It is difficult for me to square some of his racially prejudiced words in the diary with the man I loved, but the world was different then. When I knew him, I never heard him utter any prejudicial language. I am grateful that his diary and letters survived.

- Carol Kaplan 2020