Episode 16 of Let's Talk Clermont. We take a brief moment to talk about Clermont County’s housing study. Then we sit down with Gary Knepp to talk about WWI heroes, Korea’s missing soldiers, and his own experience visiting battle sites from the Vietnam War. Stick around for a rundown of July events and this week's Olivism. Be sure to share your story tips to keep the Clermont conversation rolling!
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Unknown:
We've been living in sin so long. All
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Welcome to episode 16 of Let's Talk Claremont. Thanks for everybody who's, tuning in. Really appreciate it. As I've said in previous episodes, we're getting a lot of really positive feedback. So it seems like people are liking what we're doing, which is great. And if you're new here, welcome. What we're gonna do is we're gonna talk about a little bit of news, then we'll get to the interview, and then we'll talk about some events going on around the county. So with that, the for news this week, I only really found one thing that I thought was interesting, and it's at Clermont County. They recently did a housing study. The first ever comprehensive housing study for Clermont County, and it confirmed that, our county is growing faster, than the housing stock can keep up.
The county commissioners partnered with Urban Partners who are out of Philadelphia, I believe, and they had a couple of of key findings from this study. The first is that Clermont County is growing rapidly, and it's projected to continue growing for the next twenty years. In fact, they found that currently, there's about 209,862 people in the county. So and that number is gonna go up over the next twenty years. The other thing that they found is that household sizes are getting smaller, which I take to mean that the amount of people living in a house is smaller, but the new homes that are being built are getting larger, which is kind of making it more difficult for people to get housing.
They also found that even with new and ongoing multifamily, construction, like rental properties, vacancy rates for rental housing remain critically low. Growth potential for non urban areas is limited by infrastructure capacity. This is this next thing that they found, that despite relatively high median household income, I didn't know that Claremont County had relatively high median household income, but despite that, 19,000 Claremont County, households are struggling with, housing cost burden. And that means that the combined cost of their mortgage, taxes, insurance, and utilities exceeds 30% of their income, which is, obviously not a very good thing.
And finally, they found that land use and zoning policies as well as community opposition significantly restrict housing production. So based on these findings, they had a couple of the urban partners had a couple of recommendations, for the County. The first was to foster more community support for diversified housing stocks. So not just, you know, trying to increase support for housing in general but for many different kinds of housing. They said that we should target development and growth in high demand areas which honestly should be obvious. You don't wanna build houses where people don't wanna live.
They said that we need to do a better job of preserving and improving, the aging housing, so kinda older houses. They suggested that we, expand housing options for, growing senior population. And finally, they said we should reduce barriers to entry for first time homebuyers. And that last one, I don't think is, particularly unique to Clermont. I think, you know, you hear a lot about how it's getting harder and harder for first time home buyers to actually buy a home. So that is all the news that we have for today, and that will lead us into our pitch for value for value. We are a value for value podcast. And what that means is that if you find value in what we're doing, we just ask that you return a little bit of value in the form of time, talent and treasure.
As I said previously, treasure is great. Money is wonderful. And if you wanna send us some money, get in touch, we'll make that happen. I'm also very close to putting together a system that will make it much much easier for people to donate to this show. But time and talent are equally as important. We wanna talk to the people you wanna hear from, and we wanna talk about the news that's important to you. So get in touch. Let us know what's going on in your neck of the woods. Let us know who should we should be talking to. If you know somebody that's doing something interesting, that could be a small business owner, that could just be a community member that's doing cool things. Honestly, it could be a complete weirdo who just does weird things.
I love talking to weirdos as a fellow weirdo. So, you can get in touch with us on our Facebook page, Let's Talk Claremont podcast on Instagram at Let's Talk Claremont. You can email us infoletstalkclaremont dot com. I also have a newsletter if you go to the web page, letstalkclaremont.com, you can sign up for it and we'll let you know when an episode comes out. And I'm kind of experimenting with it, so there's some other things in there, but nothing's really set in stone yet. So sign up for that if you wanna if you wanna hear when a new podcast is out and, you know, some other fun stuff. And follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever it is you get your podcast.
That really helps us, and it helps you. It'll let you know when a new episode comes out, and then you can listen to it. So for our interview today, we're talking with Gary Knepp. He is a part time, I guess, I should probably say partly retired lawyer. He still does some public defending, but he's also a local historian. And he has written many, many, many books, on all kinds of historical topics ranging from the underground railroad to a legal history of Clermont County, which I think would be interesting, but I'm not sure if everybody wants to hear about some dry legal history of of Clermont. But today, we're talking about, veterans of World War one and the Korean War that are from Clermont County.
We also talk a little bit about his time in Vietnam. He went he actually traveled to Vietnam, to visit some former battle sites, from the Vietnam War. Overall, Gary, he he's just a wealth of historical knowledge, both Claremont history and general history. And we're gonna definitely have him back on again because we barely talked about all the stuff he knows about, and we'll probably talk about the Underground Railroad, you know, Ulysses s Grant. But for the next one especially, he's got, I guess, a lecture on true crime. So we're gonna talk about some true crime of Clermont County in the future. And hopefully, that won't be too far in the future.
So, thank you to Gary for sitting down with me and, I hope you really enjoy the interview. So let's just I guess we'll just get started then. Yeah. And the way I start all of these things is just tell us who you are and and what you do.
[00:07:26] Unknown:
I'm Gary Knepp. I am a partially retired attorney, and I work as a public defender now, for the Klamath County Juvenile Court. And then the rest of the time, unfortunately, I get to spend doing my history stuff. Unfortunately? Yeah. I like it. It seems like a pretty fun pastime. Yes. I'm fortunate that I have the, the ability right now to continue to do that, I work on the history and also work part time. It fits pretty well from from what I'm doing. But I've lived in the Milford area all my life, and, I've always been interested in what was going on in the community and the history of it. I I served a couple of terms as city councilman in Milford and as a board of education member in the Milford School District. I served two terms there too. So I've been in and out of the government and around. You've been around the county Yeah. A little bit. What what drew you to history originally?
I think it would I I stretch it back, and I've wondered that question. And I bring it back to, I think, my father Mhmm. Who was a, really, inspiration to many people in the community. And as far as the history is concerned for me, he wanted to make sure that I knew about Winston Churchill. Mhmm. So he got me books on Winston Churchill tapes. And so I listened to him and that's kinda sparked me and then he did the same thing with civil war. Mhmm. And those are the two areas today. One of the two areas that today I still continue actively searching. So I think that's what it is. And what I try to do in writing in my history and talking, I give lots of lectures, maybe 20 a year or more, is that I try to put the common person in the middle of an extraordinary event such as World War two, the civil war, underground railroad, and try to and try to help people understand what their reaction was and what make may hopefully make the reader think, how would I have done that? Yeah. How would I have survived the middle of a of a gunfight, you know, and and things of that sort. And so that's that's the approach that I try to take is is to tell that with context,
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these personal stories. So real briefly before we get into specifics, because you've written histories on a wide range of subjects. Can you just talk about some of the things that you've written history on? You want me to get, like, a titles? Oh, yeah. Titles and topics. And
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one of my earliest books was an autobiography of Henry Clark Corbin. Okay. He was a lieutenant general from Clermont County and was a friends of presidents from Grant up through McKinley. Okay. And, so he had this is his, memoirs, and I published those edited publish them. I got the these out of the Library of Congress. One of my earlier books is Freedom Struggle. It's It's about the history of the Underground Railroad and more specifically the anti slavery movement in Claremont. I've got into this project when the convention visitors bureau named me the historian for the Claremont County Bicentennial back in the year February, and we decided we wanted to give a legacy project to the community.
And there's always been talk about the Underground Railroad in Claremont County, but, nobody had really done the work to fill fill it out. So that's what, that's what this book is about is what my findings and I I stress it's the anti slavery movements a little bit bigger than just the, you know, underground railroad, wider topic. And as a result of that work, I was a co I developed the, Claremont County Freedom Trail Okay. Which has 19 sites that have been accepted by the National Park Service and two programs of the my my lectures and bus tours been approved by the National Park Service.
And at one time, we led the nation in the number of sites that were in the network. I think Greg was talking about that. It was it was pretty amazing for one county to be able to accomplish all that. And this book is called Musings from the Land of Clear Mountain. Clear Mountain means is Clermont County. It means Oh, yeah. In French. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what this is my take on Clermont County history. What I found interesting is not the history, it's a history. Okay. And I have a lot of different topics in there. Some of the people, war, of course, war since military history is one of my important things.
My my daughter was the illustrator. Okay. She's now a graphic designer. So she moved from I'm not telling you what I commissioned her, but that was her first commission project. And so I have stuff in there about history or religion and different things. Yeah. This is Forgotten Warriors. Mhmm. It's about the forgotten war of of Korea. Mhmm. I was particularly interested in this because my dad was a combat veteran. And, I you know, he's we were growing up, we could tell that there was some remnants of the war occasionally servicing with him. Yeah. And, so I got very interested in that because I have these men have never ever received the recognition that they deserve for their service, and they served under some of the most difficult times. So I was gonna say it was a pretty nasty conditions in Korea. Yeah. There are four million people killed in three years in Korea. Wow. And 33,000 plus, were were Milford are, Americans. Mhmm. 19 from Clermont County. Wow. And, so I I just I was really driven by personal relationships with some of these men. They were the fathers of my friends Yeah. When I was growing up because I was a Korean war baby. Yeah. And, finding, you know, out about that section and putting it together with my photographs that my dad had taken, the fathers of some of the kids that I went to high school with. It just all kinda melded together in a book. There's my my dad. Nice. I see the resemblance.
And there's one other picture that I think, if I could find it, that was very unusual for him was that he's hardly ever sat down and done anything. He's always busy running around. So I found this picture of him wrapped out sleeping. No nobody everybody that saw this couldn't believe that they actually He was actually slept. Yeah. I'll hold off on the this one. It's okay. Yeah. That works. This was the first book that I published, although this is the second edition. This is To Crown Myself with Honor by Asbury Gatch. Got one of the Gatches, the founders of of Claremont County, Milford in particular. He was captain of the ninth, volunteer cavalry and company l, and he went through, through Tennessee down into Alabama and Georgia. And this was a very important raid called the Russo raid. K. And he's got some details that you found, and I found nowhere else about the Russo raid that was in this book.
One of the fun things I did with this project is I I was just getting ready to go to law school when I was finishing working on this. And I drove to Alabama to track where the where he went and see what I could find. And I found a I found a home that he described in great detail in this little town, Mooresville in in Alabama. You found the actual home? I found the home. I went up to the homeowner. I said, I've got this description of this room. She said, well, come on in. Let's take a look. So from the description, we figured out what room he was at even then.
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And then so you found, like, the room that he was He was sitting he was recuperating Yeah. Yeah. From sickness.
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So that that was a that was a real fun thing to do. And, based on that it's still Yeah. Around. And the house is in perfect condition. It's it's about four or five streets. It's beautiful antebellum homes. They then showed me this big, what do you wanna call it? A a document that says this these people were friends of the union. Do not harm them. Yeah. Signed by the commanding general. That's really cool. Yeah. So this is the first book that I published. And this one is Beyond the Names. This is about the, 39 men from Claremont County who were killed during Vietnam war in Vietnam during the war.
I'm I was really proud of this work, dealing with, previously with deceased individuals. Mhmm. Gave you one perspective, but dealing with people who still remember and mourn these guys every day Yep. Made it made me very sensitive to that. And and I That's a big responsibility for honoring the memory. Right. And that's that was I took that very seriously. I traveled twice to Vietnam, twice to Washington DC in the in the archives, and put what I could in into it. And I've for I was very surprised and received a national service award from the Vietnam Veterans of America for contributions based, on this book. Yeah.
So, I still run into people who say, I read your book. He was my friend. You know, tell me he tells me a story or something like that. Yeah.
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So, Vietnam was a was a a real trip, and I loved it. Well, it's one of those I mean, it's you talk about the civil war and even World War two, and those have kind of almost become memory and myth at this point. Right. Whereas Vietnam, I think, you know, a lot of people still it's still been the forefront of their minds. You know? That And there's still men dying from Vietnam with, with cancer related to agent noise. Stuff.
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So it's still with us. Even though these guys are now pushing their seventies and eighties. Yeah. And with Vietnam or with Korea, they're in their nineties and beyond. Yeah. So the clock has been ticking as we go further. But I found that the people I was in I just traveled through the South Vietnam. I had a a guide who I told him the places I wanted to go. And I found the places I wanted to go because I went to I got the guys names. I went to national archives and looked through the command reports and figured out where they were killed Really? Within that fragment of of that record. And, I took the military grid coordinates that I have Mhmm.
Based on military maps, huge ones. And I had a friend who's a techie, and he translated the, military grid figures into GPS. And I brought a GPS monitor, with me. And so I went walking, you know, riding or walking through South Vietnam Yeah. Finding these way stations as to where these guys these things happen.
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Wow. And I've heard and you can tell me firsthand. I've heard that the the Vietnamese are actually pretty receptive to Americans. Like, the the I don't it doesn't seem like they have any much animosity.
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That that's true. I I've been told that it's a little bit different than what would used to be North Vietnam. Sure. They're not as friendly. They don't have good memories in America because they have mostly bombs as you know, I remember. But the people in South Vietnam, I I agree. They they really like Americans. They like being alone. I think it's more than just a dollar. Yeah. I I'm gonna forget one trip that I was up in the, on the boonies looking for this, airstrip that this guy from Claremont helped to build. Mhmm. And it was an asphalt, and it was in perfect condition. Really? Probably hadn't been used for airplanes for since the end of the war. And the locals used it to dry their crops. Okay.
And it would take the bucket the bowl bowls and flow it up so that the crops would would filter out. And I looked up and I saw this bowl got caught in the wind and it was rolling down, and I ran after the bowl. And a little mama sama and her, Vietnamese pajamas, as they called, came up to me and said, oh, thank you. Number one.
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Number what? Number one.
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That was what they call the the Americans. Okay. You're number one? Number one. Yeah. And so she's recognizing that I'm an American Yeah. Yeah. And smiling, while you know, we so we had a intercultural moment there. It was it was very fun. So when you were looking for these places in Vietnam, were you, like, out in the jungles and the, like, in the rural parts of of Vietnam where these guys were? In some cases. Some I did have a guide Okay. Which was indispensable when trying to find where we're going. You could probably go to Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City and not have a guide Yeah. Like any place. But if you go out in the countryside, you gotta have somebody knows the ropes and how to get there.
And, he got me to a lot of places that I don't think most Americans would ever see. Yeah. There's nothing there's really not much left of the old Vietnam. Occasionally, you you'll be able to find some things. Like, I went to a Montagnard village. The Montagnard are the, the native Vietnamese, the, the American Indian Okay. Cognate. And as we're walking through the village, they're trying to trying to get up a, a little bit of tourism business. And, but I saw a hut that was fabricated from hundred and fifty five millimeter shell casings that The United States had used in the yeah. And they put this all together Yeah. Yeah. With a thatched roof.
Really? Yeah. And they That's wild. Yeah. I was kinda I was like, yeah. I couldn't believe it when I saw it. And then they also made a card out of some of the wheels from The US vehicles. Oh, really? Cool car. Yeah. That's kinda wild. Yeah. And then, they, they the some of the the native, the natives there were dancing, some of them Montagnard type dances. And they had brought in a, a jar, a big jar of rice wine Mhmm. That had, straws out of it. I was the only tourist there. And I said, do I really wanna do this, or am I gonna wipe myself out? Yeah. I said, what the heck? I may never come by it again. Yeah. And so I sucked down some, rice wine, and it was pretty good. It was good rice wine. It was good rice wine. Yeah.
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Now do they kind of an aside, I suppose, but do they still have
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the problems with unexploded ordinance still? They do? I worked with a, organization called Peace Trees Vietnam. Okay. And that was one of the things that they do as they go out and they still have that, unexpected ordinance. And so I was working with them on a project. And then, the area where the, Idrang Valley, which is if you remember the movie We Were Once and Young with with, what's his name? Mel Gibson? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That area in reality is still,
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That was the one the movie about the,
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air cap. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You could go there, but, you couldn't go very far into it Yeah. Because they still have the unexploded ordinance there, and they don't want obviously, they don't want anybody to get hurt. Yeah. But, that was, the other thing I wanted to say is that the public the people, you go into a museum and it is pretty still anti American. Yeah. It's talking about running dogs and imperialist dogs and stuff like that. And the people It's still a communist country. Right? Like, it's not Yeah. It's not free. Yeah. And the people, would look around locals will look around. Didn't see anybody from the government. He says, don't pay attention to that. We love Americans. And they Just government propaganda. Yeah. They made it make a game out of doing little things to to go off or put something over on the government. Yeah. It's their their way of coping, I guess, with the lack of freedom is a problem. I mean, I like getting one over on the government myself. Yeah.
[00:22:46] Unknown:
Well, oddly enough, I think the unexplored in ordnance is a good segue to the other book that you wrote over there. Like I said on the phone, I've got kind of a soft spot for World War one because it's it's just a fascinating
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conflict. Mhmm.
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So if you could talk about that a little bit and claim the men from Claremont County that played a role in that war. And I think And a couple women. And a couple women. Before we get into that, could you just set the context of World War one and kind of Yeah. The role America really played in in the war?
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It is often overlooked what a human catastrophe Yeah. World War one was. And probably as many as twenty million people killed during the war, ten of ten million of whom were civilians. Yeah. So it infected then there was the outbreak of Spanish flu, which killed maybe as many as twenty more million. Yeah. So during that that period of time, that four years of World War one, it was pretty disastrous. Yeah. It also destroyed in a geopolitical sense, it was very important because it destroyed four
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kingdoms. Yeah. What was it? The, Ottoman, Austria, Hungary? I'm gonna miss some Russian. Russian and German. And German. Right. And then, of course, the Russians
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just transferred it over to the Soviet Union. Yeah. And then Britain and France, although they were victorious, they were drained raw, drained without much money or Yeah. Bodies left. And that's one of the things that characterizes, I think, that war is just the absolute carnage.
[00:24:20] Unknown:
Yeah. When you look at some of the art and artists that come out of that, I've read some World War one poetry, and it's just some of the most visceral,
[00:24:30] Unknown:
gruesome stuff you could ever read. Yeah. It was it was that and that's the way the war was. One of the reasons for that, I think, is the introduction of technology. Mhmm. You had the, submarines, unrestricted warfare for the first time. You had a tank. You had the development of the airplane. Mhmm. Rapid firing accurate, artillery. Yep. The use of widespread use of machine guns that were portable, and the use of gas. Yeah. And all those things are very killing, you know, lethal, and it was is reflected in that. US tried to stay out of the war, and, we became the war suppliers.
Yeah. We supplied, money for we became the greatest creditor in the world as a result of that. Yeah. We also saw That was one of the things that coming out of that war
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kind of precipitated the rise
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of America as a superpower. Right? Like, because, I mean, you know Great Britain was a superpower Yeah. Until this war Yeah. Really drained her, and got in that way of of them continuing with their position. The one of the interesting things about the war, we have to tend to say that the the results of World War one laid the groundwork for World War two. Mhmm. Some historians are talking about it really was not two wars. It was one war separated by an armistice. Yeah. So you're fighting the same over the same territory. You're doing everything same as just as 20 The Schlieffen plan. It was they did the in World War two, they did the exact same thing. Yeah. They came right around through Belgium. Yeah. So I think it's an interesting point to to think about. It could very well be that it was accurate about that. Just to give you an example, when I talked about the casualty figures, the Battle of Somme, which is one of the biggest ones, had in France had over a million casualties. Yeah.
The British lost 300,000 in that one battle. And on the first day, 19,000.
[00:26:31] Unknown:
Oh. We're dead. Oh, it it gives me chills thinking about that. It's just and I've heard the artillery strikes described as just
[00:26:39] Unknown:
waves of earth. Yes. It was rolling thunder. So Yeah. It's kind of what they had, and they would their attacks against each other's lines were based on, that rolling thunder Yeah. Giving them space to go before. Right. When the artillery stopped, then the other side's machine gun started on them, and it Yeah. It was it was futile for the most part. I'm trying to do anything about that. Before I I have a section in the book called before our war Mhmm. Like, what was going on in World War one before we got there, ending with the Zimmer Telegram, which is one of the stupidest things that to Mexico. Yeah. Mexico said the Germany said, she's going to the side of Mexico or come on our side, and we'll give you Texas back. Yeah. Right.
That was a pretty stupid thing. And that and that pretty much Well, no. I don't think anybody really took America that seriously as a
[00:27:31] Unknown:
global power. I mean, it was all the antiquity of Europe and Yeah. I think they had the view of America as k. It was kinda like backwaters. You know? It was like But the one thing they knew about is America had men. Yeah. And they've been bled dry Yeah. By the time America came in.
[00:27:48] Unknown:
So they had virtually no expectations of them being Americans being particularly good fighters or helping them out. But, boy, they could sure stop a bullet. Yeah. Yeah. And I think Pitching that war was kind of what was required. Yeah. And then that's that's where I think they thought about us. Yeah. Things changed a little bit with some people, but they still had that European smugness about them. Yeah. And they, you know, they just got their hand handed to them, and they're still that smug. Yeah. But the the thing that I found really interesting about this whole project was the number of men of people from US who fought for foreign powers during the war before we got in. Like as a volunteer or a mercenary or something? Yeah. Volunteers.
It was just shocking to me that there were that many. I can go over a list here and give you some of the ideas of what was going on. And France was one of the big ones, of course. Americans went to, enlisted in the French foreign legion Yeah. And served there. Alan Seeger is one of the poets you were talking about, was in France. Wrote a very famous poem called I Have a Rendezvous with Death. He wrote that two weeks before he died. Oh. John Kennedy said that was his favorite poem. Really? And it's it's very I don't know if I've read that one. I'm It's very dark. Yeah.
[00:29:08] Unknown:
That kind of thing.
[00:29:10] Unknown:
The, our British our flyers flew in the Lafayette Escadrille, which is the French French air, air force. One of the things they had was the airmen always took this hottie, I'm cool kind of approach to things. And why they had, the mascots or cups, two cups, a lion cups called clubs and soda. There are many drinks that they had. Yeah. More than 300 Americans flew in the Royal Air Force. 300? Mhmm. Okay. Now the one that's really fascinating was Canada. 35,000 Americans fought in the Canadian army during that the war. Really? And they they were part they called them the American Legion of the of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Yeah. And we had several from Clamont County who were in there. Really? What were these guys' motivation? I I think they they felt for the people that that that that propaganda machine in World War one was very good from the British and the French Mhmm. Portraying the Germans. Now the Germans were bloodthirsty and, you know, they were not nice people, but I think they kinda overdid the they they made them look like demons and Yeah. And so I think it motivated some of these young men from the from the around Claremont, hell of in The United States to get involved in in the war. Well, that time, presumably, some of them might have been
[00:30:38] Unknown:
not far removed from people who'd come over from Europe. Yeah. There were a lot of second generation
[00:30:44] Unknown:
Americans, and they they went to the home country. There were some, men from Mill from Ohio. I keep saying that. Some people from, the areas of the Northern part of The United States that wound up fighting for the Germans. Yeah. They went over into the homeland Yeah. Made more contacts with them. That happened pretty I don't know how widely it happened in World War two as well. I think some Americans wouldn't fought. Yeah. It's it's it's a little Germans. And then there were 23,000 Polish who fought against the Russians in the nineteen twenties. It was kind of an outrage for that. Yeah. One of the problems that they found, they didn't realize that our soldiers who went over to fight didn't realize that, they by pledging allegiance to go into a foreign nation, they lost their American citizenship. Really? And so a special act of congress had to be done to restore their so their American citizenship.
So that was kind of an interesting thought that I I hadn't I wouldn't have known before. So I'll give you a couple examples of some of the men from Milford. I keep saying Milford. Sorry. We're in Milford. From Claremont County, in in that area. Dale Hardy was from Canada. He, fought for Canada. He was from Goshen. When he was over in Scotland, he married a a Scottish girl. And, he, wrote a very interesting article, a letter back about what was going on and how they they couldn't sleep much because the the activities at night, the bombing, and it wasn't bombing. They had to be digging and Yeah. Working in the the car the barbed wire and just a real interesting piece that he wrote about. It appeared in one of the newspapers.
And there was Clyde to Williger. There was a lot of in this area. I'm gonna say that. In this area. Clyde looked like a young, Ernest Hemingway. Okay. With a beard in there. Yeah. Yeah. But he was a doctor, and he volunteered to serve in the British army. And he had time in the trenches, on the hospital ships, and in the hospitals. He got a a leave of absence, and he came, back to Milford where he was from and gave a lecture to the the students, of Milford High School about his experiences in, the war. And, he noticed a young coed, was staring at him an awful lot, and they were staring back. And I think they were making eyes during that context, and then they went out. Yeah. And shortly after that, they got married. And then he resigned from the British army to go in the American army and, we're back here in The United States.
Alice Stewart Stewart was a Milford High School graduate, was very talented musically, very bright student, but she had to stay she stayed home and gave up her dreams because her parents needed the income that she could produce. Mhmm. She decided, let's say, that was over. She went to the, became a nurse and then worked for the Red Cross in France if we're done, which is another one of the horrible places. So she spent a lot of time there, dealing with some of the worst, cases that are around under bombardment from time to time by by the war spilling over. And as a result of her work there, the French awarded her a Croix de Guerre Oh, really? Which is the top the the highest award for a non French soldier. So that was a big award for her to get.
She came back to Milford and left very soon after that and, became a nurse. Continued her nursing duties and education. Died at age 95 and never had been married. Wow.
[00:34:31] Unknown:
That had that would have had to have been one of the I mean, it wouldn't have been great to be a soldier, but to be a a nurse or a doctor, seek oh, man. I just I couldn't imagine. It takes a lot. Yeah.
[00:34:45] Unknown:
So that's a some parts of it I I talked about in the book about mobilizing for war. What were some of the camps that they went to and the training that they received? There are 4,700,000 Americans who served in Korea or in World War one. 2,700,000 were overseas. 1,390,000. I'm just giving these figures here. Yeah. Western Front, and that included Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg. And then there were some that were in the, Polish or the, the polar bear expedition. Are you familiar with that? I'm not familiar with that. The British, talked us into going in and trying to over to overthrow the Bolsheviks, the Russian communist.
And so there were several 100 several thousand men from Clara from, The United States that participated in what was called the Polar Bear Expedition. And some of them died in, in that fight. But eventually, they they just figured there's nothing this little group of people can do to overthrow the Soviets. And, the American Legion Post in Milford is named after Victor Steer. The the tradition, was to name somebody from your area that was killed in the war. Mhmm. Fortunately, for Milford, there were no deaths. Really? Yeah. And so From World War one. Right. Really? Yeah. No no deaths at all. So they looked around for a guy in Ohio who had would be worthy of being remembered that way. And Victor Steer was the guy they chose from Upper Ohio who was in the polar bear expedition and was killed charging a, a a Soviet, gun emplacement.
And he received the silver star for what he did. So that's where the Where where was the polar? Was it South South Russia? South Russia. But it was still cold. Yeah. Yeah. Lower Siberia area. Mhmm. And again, that's not something very few people have even heard of is the Polar Bear expedition, but it was it was an interesting episode of that war. There are 53,513 battle deaths. Two hundred and four thousand were wounded. I think we were just in there from '8 from August, of 02/2018. Yeah. So it wasn't very much time. Almost half of those died in one battle, Muse, Argonne.
And then there were 63,195 that died of disease and accidents. Yeah. An estimated forty seven thousand Spanish flu. Wow. The Spanish flu just took over in the trenches and just wiped everybody out. One of the fun things that reading through letters that I've received that I've discovered on the written by Clima County boys is that they were farm kids. Mhmm. So what they knew was farming. Yeah. And the letters are often filled with comparisons between French farming techniques and and ours. Really? Yeah. And it was kind of fun that they they talked about the stone. They didn't have trees, so they had to have stone houses Mhmm. And stone fences instead of trees, wood fences like we have. And he talked about the the village got together in a in a area, and then they walked out to their farm fields. Mhmm. Ours is exactly opposite.
You know, ours is stretched out across the country, and then you have the little communities that you go into. So they they knew that very quickly. Oftentimes, when they weren't on duty, they did farm work. Yeah. To keep busy and to help the French people. Really? And they slept in the barn sometimes. And I found very interesting the relationship with the the Claremont County boys and the French girls.
[00:38:25] Unknown:
Did did they, take a shining to the French girls? Absolutely.
[00:38:28] Unknown:
And from what you can tell, the the French girls kinda like the American boys. Those things happen. Yeah. Especially in wars. Yeah. And there were virtually no men of of young age. Yeah. There. They were at the war. They were killed in the war. So that's what happened. One of the guys talked about finding how do you communicate? And not many guys in Claremont County could speak French. Right. Probably half a dozen at the most. So So how do you communicate and get your point across that you wanna make? And they told the story of one of the guys who had a French English dictionary. Mhmm. And so they would communicate the word that they wanted to to the French, and the French girl would back a back and forth. So through the use of the book, they were able to communicate.
And he said some some they really got to know each other, you know, after a while. Yeah. And the guy wrote, he says, it's not me, mom. I didn't do that.
[00:39:21] Unknown:
He says other guys. So he's writing this to his mom, and he's saying, like, this is what's going on. Not me. I'm I'm I'm your little boy. It's not Yeah. Didn't happen that way. Did they bring these women back?
[00:39:34] Unknown:
Some of them? Some were married. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Probably not as many as World War two. Okay. They tried anti fraternization Yeah. Policy. It works sometimes. Yeah. Most of the time, it didn't. And one of the other things that they, they try to divert guys from some pursuits on r and r or restaurant relaxation. So the YMCA opened up a lot of cantinas without beer Mhmm. Without liquor, without French girls, and giving them cigarettes or selling them at a local at a slower a lower price Mhmm. And, paper to write home to Okay. Their mom. So that's the way they wanted them to spend it. Right. But more than one of the guys talked about the the cathedrals that they saw and how impressive those buildings were, and that really locked onto their their belief or their amazement of the community.
Would you like me to read a letter? Yeah. I think that'd be great. Letters often said over there Mhmm. Somewhere in Germany or some because they were heavily censored, and the Americans believe that getting any hint about where one guy was stationed might have helped the enemy find out what's going on. Yeah. And most of the letters up to the the, armistice day were pretty bland. Yeah. And didn't tell a lot of the detail. Of course, a lot of the times, the guys wanted to spare their mom Yeah. The details, and they'll say, well, we'll talk to your dad at some point. Yeah. And the army, thought it would be a good idea to suggest a certain date, that you write your dad.
Really? Specifically, your dad and tell him what was going on because I guess they figured that they weren't gonna tell their moms. Right. So they're telling their dads and hopefully that that would, encourage some communication about things Yeah. When they got back home.
[00:41:25] Unknown:
Well, that too during World War one, they didn't have any concept. Why did they call it being shell shocked? But they didn't have any concept of PTSD or anything like that. Well, it is it was shell shocked, and that was first diagnosed by the British doctors.
[00:41:40] Unknown:
And, of course, we called the PTSD. They called battle fatigue. Mhmm. In the civil war, it was called nostalgia. Yeah. And I would imagine among the Greeks and Romans, they probably had the same Yeah. Situation, so they had a word for it. I'm not sure. I'm not I don't speak that language, but it's something that, I it's it's with every Yeah. Every battle, every war, every soldier that sees war. It's just something that you're not supposed to see Yeah. And makes it difficult to cope with sometimes. Yeah. This book, this letter is by Paris Turner, who was with the sixth unit infantry, and he lived at that one. Okay. So I'll I'll read this letter. I think it's pretty the most interesting letter that I found.
I'm I surely consider myself lucky to be alive. We had just been in a big battle, and now we're at the rest camp. And surely, all need the rest we can get. I'm so tired. I can hardly walk. We had such a long, hard fight of it. Mother, you and this is one to the mother, surprisingly. You can't imagine what an awful thing it is to take the life of another. One never thinks about it at the time, but when it is all over, it comes back to one. But it is the only way. And when we entered a certain town, I saw an officer trying to get away on his horse, and I shot him with my pistol. And you might have you you ought to have seen how he pretty pretty rolled off the horse.
I got his horse and the rest of his belongings and turned them over to a lieutenant. And I made up my mind after that awful things that I had seen the Germans do that I would not take any prisoners. Oh, man. I'll take a little diversion here about that. Germans had one of the things that they did if they surrendered, they say, comrade. Mhmm. It was a way the way they say they were trying to get friendly with the with the American troops. And as soon as Americans turned their back, they shot them. Really? And that had a ripple effect on the other side of the Americans said, well, if you're gonna shoot our guys, we're we're not playing the games with you. So they started executing prisoners as well.
[00:43:48] Unknown:
So it's one of those You hear the stories about Germans in World War one and World War two like that, which is very ruthless. Yeah. They they're different fighters than what we put out.
[00:43:58] Unknown:
One sees, some awful things here with the dead and dying and all that goes to make up a battle. One of the most pitiful sights I have ever seen was a boy, a mere child in the field. I saw that he had something clutched to his breast. I looked to see what it was, and it was a Bible clutched to his breast. And on it was written, my son, always keep this book in your left pocket near your heart. It's almost okay. Your loving mother, the poor kid, was all torn to pieces by shrapnel. I suppose you had heard how the Germans try to work their tricks on Yanks. Camarade doesn't always mean surrender. They're always looking for a trick and up to kill you the next minute is not. When you capture them, they will fall on their knees and pray for you to spare them and then shoot you in the back at the next minute.
Speaking of praying, mother dear, I think many of the boys who before the war thought little or not of such things surely have learned that it is our comfort. You know, it's that old saying, there are no atheists in foxholes. Yeah. Yeah. When the shot and shell were flying around us, we remember the lessons mother taught us. I surely have learned that lesson. I've not heard from this couple guys' names here or any of the other Bethel boys. I'm sorry to hear that Archie Boyd was killed in battle. That was who we got from Bethel from Claremont. Well, mother, I will close hoping to receive an answer. Love to all.
Oh, man. So that was that was a very poignant letter. How how old was he? I don't know. I think he was he was a youngster probably in '18, '19. Just some foreign boy from Bethel. Yeah. Man. And then suddenly, you're in the middle of France
[00:45:45] Unknown:
in a trench. Yeah.
[00:45:47] Unknown:
Trying to keep your your head head on your shoulders. Yeah. There were 19 men from Claremont who were killed. Okay. Half were by disease. Yeah. I'm I got that wrong. That '19 was a different war. I think it was 47.
[00:46:03] Unknown:
Yeah. It's actually 47. I'm sorry if you mentioned this before. How many
[00:46:07] Unknown:
people from Claremont were actually involved in World War one? That's very difficult to judge. The records still aren't good, and I've I've spent some time in it. I think probably a couple thousand. Okay. During the civil war, there were between four and five thousand from Claremont. Okay. Our population was roughly the same, believe it or not, in 1918 as it was in the civil war, and it was about 35,000.
[00:46:28] Unknown:
Really? Okay. That's interesting. It's about the same. Yeah. I
[00:46:32] Unknown:
I really haven't discovered the reasons for that, except I know that many of the the African Americans who were living there left after the after the civil war was over. His father lived here at that time. Forty six were dead from Clermont County, including Lucy Jennings, a nurse from New Richmond who died at, Camp Sherman, from the virus, from the flu. Mhmm. Archie Boyce, we mentioned already, he's from Bethel. He was in the rainbow division. He's buried at Muse Arms Cemetery along with 20 214,000 other soldiers. Okay. It's a huge cemetery, if you can imagine. I got one more story of death. Mhmm. It's an interesting one.
It was a real mystery for me to deal with. I do oral history as well as more traditional history, and I always enjoy the oral history talking to people and trying to put together their stories Mhmm. And then deconstruct them Yeah. And take it phrase by phrase and try to figure out what was what was true, what wasn't true Yeah. And then put it back together again once it once I try to put it together from my perspective. Well, I was talking to a guy who told me, asked me if I knew the story of Roy Lee Hastings, which I did not.
And he said that, the story was that Hastings was killed in World War one. He was vaporized basically by an artillery shell, which those things happen with more than one. There's a cross from a from the Croswell family was killed, the same manner, and he says he's got a gravestone, but no body there. Yeah. And so, but they had no body there. They wanted to convince the mother that the boy was in the in the box. Yeah. And so they filled sandbags and put them in the box. And then, she of course, it was they didn't get the body from France until 1921. So it was three years afterwards. You're not gonna have an open casket Yeah. In that situation. So they were able to get away with it and bury it. Yeah.
I found the grave, in the in the cemetery. But I thought that the story had some flaws just from what I was feeling. Yeah. Imagine you get a sense of that doing Yeah. As you do enough of this, you know, you get that feeling. But one of the things that was interesting that brought me to the partially to the attention, there was a story and it was also I got contacted from France,
[00:48:57] Unknown:
about, Somebody from France actually got in touch with you. Yeah.
[00:49:01] Unknown:
That's one of those interesting things. I have history buddies from France, Vietnam
[00:49:07] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:49:08] Unknown:
Netherlands. That's really cool. And so we talk every once in a while about different things. But anyway, the story was that, they had buried this guy Mhmm. In, the cemetery that that was there. That was later overrun in World War two and defaced by the Germans. And so this little French community was trying to reconstruct the the gray the cemetery, that had Americans buried in it, and they wanted me to come over and speak. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the time to get together to do it. Yeah. But it made no sense to me if there was an empty box. So if there was the guy, there was nothing left, to be put in the box.
Why would they take up the valuable space Yeah. For an empty box? Yeah. And that's what the first under flyings that I was looking at. I did find information about their early lives, and they lived in Neville and Aberdeen, and his dad worked on a farm. And, it didn't seem that, Roy went to school, but he could read and write. Mhmm. He enlisted in the army in July 1917, and then went to, train in, various parts of the various parts of the American South. And he, was put in an infantry company. Private Hastings was killed in action on 09/29/1918. This was in the area known as Alsace Lorraine. Mhmm. A French and German background.
That much is certain. What's less certain is how he was killed and what happened to his remains. So I in the book, I tell the story, but I've mentioned about the the idea of the empty box. Regiments official history list Hastings as, one of its 42 members who were killed in action. The author described the events of the early morning of September 29. A raid of a 102 men upon German lines was scheduled to, quote, go over the top at 04:30AM. The allied artillery barrage that began, as you were talking about, before the raid, drew an intense counter barrage by the family.
So heavy was the fire, that, that the greater part of the Raiders were unable to penetrate their objective. Of the 102 man raiding party, forty six became casualties. Eight men were killed, quote, instantly, and three more died of their wounds. So, he was originally buried at the military cemetery in France. As as I mentioned, his remains were transferred to Neville where he was living at the time. And then, there was a letter that was written to his brother. Private Hastings was a volunteer, and this is from the army. I knew him as a member of the company m and consider him an excellent soldier. He was president in the dugout before the raid and was jolly in good mood. He is always, wanting to go out with scouting parties.
So we went over the top at 04:30. We're within yard 10 yards of the enemy guns, and we all tried to get in the shell holes. I did not see Hastings after we got into no man's land, which is between the trenches. And then he found him. I carried his body thirty minutes later when I recognized him. So you got an eyewitness that claims they saw him, and I thought that was pretty telling Yeah. Kinda story. But, it was an interesting, aftermath Yeah. Of the war as people were trying to cope with various aspects of it.
[00:52:34] Unknown:
So can you talk about if you're a, a young man from Clermont County and you're either a draft or a volunteer, what what's where do you start this journey? I mean, where where were they training, and then where do they typically ship
[00:52:49] Unknown:
to? Well, there's nothing typical. Yeah. I think it varies. Fair enough. They still had a tendency in those days to raise men as a as a group from one community. Mhmm. With Vietnam and World War two, they decided not to do that any longer because, it had a tendency to one bomb went off in a bad place. You Yeah. Dozens and dozens of casualties. There's all your young men from Claire Monck. Yeah. So they don't do that anymore. Yeah. One of the areas that they thought was should be used as a training training center would be at the armory in Batavia.
Okay. Though they didn't use it. And it was kinda surprising why they nobody really knew why they didn't since it was a much better facility than where the men originally went to. They went to Camp Campbell Okay. Which is on the Fairgrounds Of George Brown County. Mhmm. So they went to the Fairgrounds Of Brown County, and they slept in the pig barns. Really? Yeah. And people were asking, why in the world are you doing this? This is Ohio National Guard unit. Why in the world are you doing that when you got this modern facility in Batavia that has electricity and water? Yeah. And and, you know, it's a good place to stay. But that's not the way they do things.
There were eight men who were chosen randomly from that facility at that camp when they were there, to be in the rainbow division. Okay. Which is a division that earlier. Yeah. The Rainbow Division, again, that they give the the term rainbow means that they took people from every Okay. Every state, and put them together into one division, which was, the division that Douglas MacArthur served in during World War one. Okay. Douglas MacArthur was the highest, meddled, officer. Got most of the high awards, in World War one. Although, he had, like, eight silver stars. Really? Yeah. I didn't know that about him. And he didn't, but he didn't, get the the medal of honor until World War two. Yeah.
[00:54:46] Unknown:
Because that's what he's most famous for, I suppose, is is involvement in World War two and Yeah. Probably a little bit after World War two when he started,
[00:54:54] Unknown:
I think, making people a little grumpy. Yeah. He's he's he's an interesting guy, and there's a lot of good things to say about him and some bad things that sometimes gets overlooked. Yeah. So from there, the different points, that people would go, to do the more their training. One of the places was at, Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama. Okay. That was the home of the many of the Ohio National Guard, and they formed a division of Ohio National Guardsmen, the thirty seventh division called the Buckeye Division. So they a lot of Ohioans were at that place.
One of the largest camps in The United States was at Camp Sherman in Chillicothe. Okay. But in general, the men received pretty poor training. Mhmm. They did not impress the men from France and as they were hoping that they would get these new guys. Again, gunfighter. But they didn't think that about the marines. They they respected the marines. And the marines were very selective in who they chose, and they spent a lot of times, they still do, firing the weapons with marksmanship. And the Germans could not believe how good they shot. And that's, where they got the name Devil Dogs. Okay. It was from the Germans during the big battle of Meuse Argonne. So the the unlike this, there was a little bit more, I don't you would call, regularity or common, aspects of the training, in World War one as opposed to civil war. Mhmm.
This is one of the buildings
[00:56:26] Unknown:
in in Belgium Okay. That these guys saw and were so impressed with that. It looked like a big cathedral. Could you imagine you're you just especially in the early nineteenth century, I imagine this place was very rural. Yes. And, you know, you you're suddenly swept off to Europe and you see these. Cincinnati would be a a major show shock for some of them. You know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's what that's
[00:56:48] Unknown:
Here's a picture of some of the Camp Sheridan guys from Ohio. Yeah. There's another picture of of that. Camp Sheridan also had tents. We laid look at all those tents out there. Yeah. It's amazing in in the numbers. Well, it's also interesting to think about
[00:57:05] Unknown:
because World War one, they they were still using horses. I mean, you hear about the beginnings of the war, about how, you know, the French and the Germans, you know, they go out in this, like, bright colored uniforms, and it's, you know, it's almost like they're in the Napoleonic wars still. Yep. They are. Some of them, that's the way it
[00:57:21] Unknown:
wasn't. This is the only known photograph of company m that I'm aware of, the one that's, the Ohio National Guard trained in, Brown County.
[00:57:30] Unknown:
At Camp Campbell Brown County Fairgrounds. That's crazy that they stuck them in
[00:57:35] Unknown:
just right in the fairgrounds and started training them up. Well, they had they had at least ground that was that could be trained, but Yeah. The facilities were not exactly great. Yeah. One of the this Belgian this photograph that I showed you once before, this is one of several of, postcards that a man from Milford, Howard Davidson, collected. He was a, ambulance driver, so he traveled all over the country Mhmm. And collected over a 100 of these, like, postcards. So I've included some shots in here to give some, feel for what these guys were seeing. He donated his family donated his complete uniform, including boots, putets, hats, gas mask, and everything to them. And then included in that was a the postcards and the, the diary, which I transcribed in the into the book. That's that's crazy.
[00:58:27] Unknown:
So what when these guys got back, what what did they do? I mean, did they just start families? Or
[00:58:35] Unknown:
Yeah. Pretty much. Go go back to work. Someone went back back to the farm. You know? They left the farm a year ago. I looked at the discharge papers that were left with the county auditor, after the war. So guys would come in the final paperwork, and they had a survey and different things. So I was reading through that and keeping track of all the various occupations. And, there were some occupations there that, were a little unusual. I didn't think of a car mechanic. Well, you know, 1919. Yeah. I mean, started having cars. Yeah.
[00:59:07] Unknown:
Growth industry. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:59:10] Unknown:
They had that. And as I mentioned, farms, selling insurance. Yeah. So they're they were definitely working towards the twentieth century economy, as they were developing it. But the they had an Armistice Day commemoration every year. Mhmm. And the first one I I found in newspaper article that I included in here, and they would get together and they drive their machines, which they call cars. Yeah. And they just traveled around the county blowing horns and people shouting and cheering and and happiness that the war was over. I then came across an article on the paper, and I never was able to find a follow-up on it, that they dedicated in a World War one memorial, in Batavia on the courthouse grounds.
And it looked like they had captured was composed of was capturing German, cannons. Okay. And they pulled them together with with, chains, but I never saw another mention of it. I looked all through the newspapers I could find. Nobody in in Batavia ever heard of it before. Yeah. It's obviously there. Yeah. It was just gone, but, people used to sell commemorate Armistice Day. Because it that was Memorial Day. Well Was originally Armistice Day? No. Veterans Day. Veterans Day. I'm sorry. Yeah. Veterans Day, kind of, in my my opinion, put World War one behind because Yeah. It was for all men who serve all men and women who served as Veterans Day, and they don't remember the armistice Yeah.
The way they do that.
[01:00:40] Unknown:
So did any of these guys serve in World War two?
[01:00:45] Unknown:
I'm sure. Yes. Some did. Oh, one of the it's not World War not World War one, but World War two. After the war was over in World War two and Korea broke out, the government drafted some members of World War two, and they were not very happy because they had started the family, their career. And one of them was Ted Williams, a ball player. Oh, really? Yeah. Ted Williams was, trained as a, jet pilot. Yeah. Panther, which is one of the worst of the they could barely get up in the air. And a guy told me a story that his brother he swore his brother, Saul. They were his brother was a pilot. And so he was in the area when, that incident happened. The incident with Ted Williams is he had kind of a a crash landing Yeah. As as, landing wheels wouldn't go down. And so he's bumped his on the belly of his plane Yeah. Down the and then when he got out, it caught fire.
So Williams went into the mess hall, and somebody yelled at him, hey, Williams. He buzzed his hands up. Safe. And, Williams was not amused.
[01:01:57] Unknown:
Safe. Well, it's probably a a good transition to the other war that you don't hear a lot about is Korea. Mhmm. You mind talking about that and the role Claremont played in the Korean War? Sure.
[01:02:13] Unknown:
There's so much about Korea that is unknown. So much to me, I think, is fascinating. And the the fact that they got very little credit or even knowledge of what they did is, beyond me. I don't understand it. Well, can you set the context for the war too? Yeah. The war started in 06/25/1950 when the North Koreans crashed across the 30. Mhmm. There were American troops that were in the area, but not very many. Not enough to stop a 135,000 with tanks and, coming across Russian two seventy four 74 tanks. And, so they were the Americans were thrown. What are we going to do? Mhmm.
Truman was awakened early, and they decided they were gonna have to stop him. Where are the troops gonna come from? Well, they came from Japan. Mhmm. The Japanese the American eighth army defeated the Japanese in World War two and was highly respected for what they were able to do. But this was not the same army, that they saw in World War two. Yeah. These guys are basically flabby. Mhmm. Their training was not very good. The officer corps was too old and hidebound. Mhmm. And they were just not ready. Even though it's been just five years, Americans were not prepared for the war. In addition, they reduced the American, military, from 12 by 92% Yeah. In World War two. They slashed the government the defense budget down to the bone Mhmm.
Air force, the new branch. Yeah. Because it was felt that we've got nuclear weapons. Nobody's gonna be naive enough to do that because we'll just drop Obama. Yeah.
[01:03:52] Unknown:
Not this time did did Russia have the bomb? Within where they This is 1959. Yeah. There is around this time. Yeah.
[01:04:00] Unknown:
So they decided to send a task force of about 400 men and figured that could take care of it. They'll just run when they see us. Yeah. And it was a disaster. Yeah. Our rifle, muzzle or rifle barrels were pitted, and they couldn't shoot straight. Yeah. Ammunition blew up in our guy's face. The bazooka shells that were designed to take out a tent tank just bounced off. They didn't have radios between the men and the pilots to help with the ground support, and so there was a lot of unnecessary friendly fire casualties. And we got a rear end kit. Yeah. And, we we put more men in, and then we tried to tried to plug the hole.
One of the guys I interviewed in the book, was a friend of mine, Lou Leslie, was in the twenty seventh infantry. They call it the tip of the spear or the fire brigade. And he was just he said, Gary, to this day, I can't tell you where I was because we were traveling around by night, and these trucks are waiting to stop the North Koreans. And the next time they come in, and he said it was just chaos. Well, they won the presidential unit citation twice, which is unheard of, and he was in the middle of that. He tells a funny story about when the war started. He was up near Fujiyama, Mount Fuji Mhmm. Training, for a little bit.
And, they got word out that orders were in that they were to drop everything but their backpack and their ammunition and and gun and get on the train and go back to Tokyo. So he said they were driving. He was in this train going through, Central Japan, and he saw a bunch of Japanese people running all around, scatter, scatter. He rolled down the window of the train, and he said, what's going on? And he said they said, war. War. And so where's the war? In Korea. Korea. He said he turned to his friends and says, where the hell is Korea? Where is Korea? And that was the attitude of most Americans. They didn't know what it was. But there for a while, it was a it was a touch and go situation where, American troops were being pushed down the peninsula the Korean Peninsula, and it looked like there was gonna be another Dunkirk style. Yeah.
[01:06:04] Unknown:
And Dunkirk was that famous where the Germans pushed the British to the sea. Right. And they escaped about 300,000
[01:06:09] Unknown:
men on the boats and saved them. Which is also another good movie. Yes. It was. I've enjoyed that. So it was it was pretty bad like that, until they finally stabilized things. And then MacArthur came in with his operation chromite at in Chon and put them in a pension movement. The eighth army pushed them out, and then they moved moved them back up to a 30 Eighth parallel. And then they decided, we got the North Koreans on the run. We just don't wanna hold the line. We wanna push them back. And so let's go take North Korea. Yeah. So they went into North Korea, and there was the further in the north, they moved, and, there was a lot of mistakes. I won't go into all the details on the mistakes that the that MacArthur and his men made.
There was a lot of reports coming in from the field saying we Chinese are here. Mhmm. And MacArthur wouldn't believe it. Yeah. Choe Enlai, the bread the Chinese prime minister premier talked to somebody and said, you know, leave now before we come in. The other, diplomats were mourning them the same thing. And the evidence was very clear that they were coming. Mhmm. And, MacArthur just wouldn't believe it. And he he still had this idea that Asians were inferior, that they couldn't mess around Americans. So right it's a couple days before Thanksgiving, and the Americans decided every soldier in Korea was going to get a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings and and flying them out in the helicopter to make sure they got them.
Well and the man from right before then, the the weather the temperatures dropped, down to sometimes forty, fifty degrees below zero. Really? A 20 mile an hour headwind coming in from Siberia and about 18 inches of snow. And so one night, they heard this horrible sound coming out, horns and bells and screams and everything. And out of the snow flurries came the, you know, the Chinese. Yeah. And it was all it was in the beginning days again. People were mushing down Yeah. Pushed off. It looked like the marines were going to be captured, and they were moving in the different direction towards, Port City that they could leave.
And, one of the newspapers before says, this is not, marines. Marines never retreat. Mhmm. He says, retreat hell. We're fighting in a different direction. We're fighting in a different direction. And they got most of the people back plus about a 100,000 Korean refugees Really? That that got on this boat and it there were this incredible numbers of people crammed into these boats to get them to save them. And there was 11,000 on one ship called the SS Victory. It was a cargo ship. And people were packed in so tightly that they couldn't sit. There was no way to go to the Houston restaurant. Yeah. And so in the morning when they woke up, when the guys opened up the the cargo doors, it was just an incredible mess. Yeah. It was on Christmas day.
And so they called it a Christmas victory, and there were seven or eight, children who were born during that Really? Travel. Yeah. That's wild to think that,
[01:09:24] Unknown:
man, to have a kid in that kinda
[01:09:26] Unknown:
condition would be Yeah. It just that's unspeakable. You can't imagine it. So, they stopped him again, and we got a new, commanding general, who was a real go getter, hard charging, individual. I think one of the most underrated soldiers in American history. He was wore a couple of hand grenades on his chest. Yeah. They called him iron old iron tits. And he, just really over, overwhelmed, the Chinese and the North Koreans with what he was doing. And, unfortunately, I've had a a brain stem, and I forgot the guy's name. But he was, he was Matthew Ray Ridgeway. That's a Ridgeway.
He was an airborne commander in World War two, and just really went all out to and stop them. And then they went into a stalemate that became the war became like, trench warfare of World War one. Mhmm. Unlike, some places, you know, they they lived in bunkers. Mhmm. My my dad was in the war. He was during this period of time, the second period of time. Instead of massive numbers of men and machines rumbling up and down the countryside, they had small units. And they go out eight and ten units at a time. Eight and ten men at a time Mhmm. In the middle of the night. No GPS.
The compass and sometimes a map that might be able to be read, in the in the moonlight. You didn't wanna get your light out too much because he identified your position. He was out one night on one of those kind of patrols. He was walking point, which is the head of the column. Of the column. He had his Thompson machine gun. He got a Thompson machine gun from a French soldier that he that liked him. Mhmm. The French were even though they were fighting in, in Vietnam at the point, they, had a company of, French foreign legion attached to the regiment that my dad was in. Okay. And so he made friends with him, and they gave him this machine gun. Mhmm. The Thompson machine gun like the like the gangsters used to use. Gun. Yeah. Yeah. And so we were walking along this outcropping of, boulders and things like that, and he felt a push.
And he he said, what the hell? How did I go down? Well, immediately, the North Koreans are the enemy. They didn't know who they were at that time, opened up fire. And, they scooted out of there, obviously. And there was no moonlight or anything shining it. And so when they got back in the morning back to their lines, I said, where's Bradley? They didn't know where Bradley was. Yeah. And they said, we've got it. We can't leave him out there. He never came back. Nobody ever saw him again. So my dad went out because he was close friends with Bradley, and several other guys. And they looked up and they saw Bradley stretched out like he's on a cross. Mhmm.
And they didn't know at that time whether it was North Koreans or the Chinese. The North Koreans had tendency to booby trap American bodies. Mhmm. And so they had to go up and look to make sure, and they tie some camo wire around his legs Mhmm. And pulled him down, and he didn't explode. So it was obviously Chinese they had fought. Yeah. But my my father believes, believed up to the day he died that Paul Bradley saved his life. Yeah. It was Bradley who pushed him down and took the bullet for him. Yeah. So that that was the the second phase of the war was these small units. And you have places like, Pork Chop Hill and, Heartbreak Ridge and those names that you associate more with it. Mhmm. Turwon Valley, those places.
[01:13:05] Unknown:
I'd I'd to be honest with you, I just don't know much about the Korean War because it's Nobody does. I mean, it's in high school, you you learn about civil war, World War two, Vietnam, and then
[01:13:17] Unknown:
that's pretty much it. It's like a Korea has forgotten. Paragraph. It's Korea has just jumped over. Why do you think that is? I don't know. I've made it a mission of mine because of the my my dad's connection, and I knew a number of these guys I interviewed with. As I mentioned, they were friends of my fa friends of my my friends, my fathers of my friends. And I I still don't know. It could be because we were the way we treated our soldiers in the beginning especially was shameful. Yeah. Not preparing them to go out to war. And that's something that The United States, unfortunately, hasn't learned the lesson. World War one, World War two Yeah. We were unprepared. And I think today, they cannot, in any way, trust that, we would be able to survive the sneak sneak attack like was done before because things are much quicker. The oceans aren't providing the moat to keep people out. Yeah. And so if we don't keep ourselves prepared one of these days, it's gonna really sting. Yeah.
But I don't know why the rest of it as I said, there's there's plenty of interesting stuff,
[01:14:20] Unknown:
about the war that I think people would would like to to know about. Yeah. And I don't know. What what's one of the things you find most interesting about? I mean, obviously, you have the connection with your father, but what are some of the other things that really draw you to it?
[01:14:33] Unknown:
The POWs. Okay. The situation where they're brainwashed. The fact that there's nearly 8,000 Americans' bodies still in Korean soil. See, I didn't know that either. They they were brainwashing
[01:14:44] Unknown:
American Yes. How How did they do
[01:14:47] Unknown:
that? Reeducation. Okay. Except the same things that the Viet Vietnamese were using against,
[01:14:53] Unknown:
their political prisoners. So these guys would literally be brainwashed and, like,
[01:14:58] Unknown:
come back as, I don't know, communist. It didn't really it really didn't work very well. Okay. It worked some. There were several of them that, defected and went to North Of Korea lived in North Korea. That that interested me in how they went about doing that in the lives of the guys is gruesome. There's a a man from, Batavia whose father was a POW and said that he would the son would say, I'm starving. And dad would get upset with him and say, you don't know what starving is, son. Yeah. And then he'd tell him again, well, you know, this is what I had to eat when I was there. But, and then when Trump first went over to Korea in his first administration, the Koreans gave 50 bodies back Yeah. Remains of 50 bodies Yeah.
As a leverage. So it's being used as a leverage. To this day. Still. Yeah. Yeah. There was one guy from Claremont. I don't know if you wanna know the story about his being Yeah. Missing in action and presume as POW. James Pates Okay. From Loveland, was a Loveland High School graduate. I was really getting into swimming, and they thought he was Olympic hopeful for 1,500 meters, which is a heck of a swim. Yeah. He was in the he was in the they call it the chicks, the regiment. And, he was there in the very early days when we were very outnumbered, and, his position was easily overrun, because there's just not enough men to fight the the numbers of Koreans that were coming down. And he his whereabouts were unknown for a while. And when The US took up took back, Seoul, the capital, they went to a girls' school, and they found a blackboard with names up on there. They they believe that the Koreans are keeping track and keeping score of who the guys were that they had, and one of them was paid. Okay.
What happened to him? What his beliefs happened to him was that, he was put on a train to go north to the Korean war camps, POW camps. And, it was strafed by American Oh, really? Fighters who did not know that that was full of POWs. Yeah. So they pulled into a tunnel. The train did waited for the American pilots to to leave. I think they were probably Corsairs that were fighting. Fifteen minutes? So, they put the guy they put all the guys told them all to get off the train because they were gonna feed them. They gave them their old rice bowls and stuff. And after they got them off the train, they started massacring the machine guns. Yeah.
And, then they they took off and they left the bodies there, for Americans to find. Americans found the the bodies. They took them to a cemetery in North Korea and buried them. Okay. And that is where it is believed that mister Pate says to to this day. To this day in North Korea. Yeah. Wow.
[01:18:09] Unknown:
I I knew none of that. Are there are there any other Claremont County
[01:18:15] Unknown:
men that just never came back? Yeah. Yeah. There was one from Batavia. Erlanger Erlanger. This is a photograph of the guy who was at POW camp. Okay. But you can just see his eyes. Yeah. This is a picture of that guy or gang.
[01:18:40] Unknown:
So how many, not just from Clermont County, but
[01:18:43] Unknown:
It's our gang. And he's just He's just missing. He he was out on patrol. They were fighting the Chinese, and they they they came back to look for him, and there's nothing. Nothing. I don't know whether he was a p o w p o w, but he's probably killed.
[01:18:58] Unknown:
Is that a particular issue with the Korean War and and Vietnam War that all these POW MIA guys are just unaccounted for?
[01:19:09] Unknown:
Most of the Vietnam are accounted for or have changed their status. There was one guy from Claremont County. His name is Robert Gumbert, who was out on patrol in a little village called Duque Pho. And, he crossed into a over hedgerow, and it is a huge explosion. Mhmm. One of his friends was looking back, and this is what I I was able to talk to these guys, and it was really interesting to still have them alive and willing to discuss their situations. He said he was just he turned around when the explosion looked, and he looked back and Dumbert wasn't there. Just He just disappeared.
[01:19:45] Unknown:
Yeah.
[01:19:46] Unknown:
But he said that, there was a bunch of paper that was up in the air, and it looked like snowflakes coming down. And so probably the letters from his girlfriend Yeah. That he kept in his mucksack. For a long time, his, status was unclear, And his father was very upset because they first, they called him MIA, and he said, well, it's not MIA. Then they went to MIA BNR, which is body not recovered. Mhmm. And after about fifteen or twenty years of fighting with the Department of the Army, they decided to declare declare him killed in action. So a couple years ago, they had a ceremony in Arlington Okay. And erected a stone.
One of the two the differences, between, recovery of, of, Vietnam veterans versus recovery of Korean is that we are on fairly decent terms with Vietnam. And that was one of the Yeah. One of the negotiating points to normalize relationship was to give us that opportunity. The other thing is the, the bones, the remains will not last as long in Korea and Vietnam as they do in Korea. Yeah. Because Korea is much milder climate, right, than I mean, it's It's mild above 40 below zero. But Well, yeah. I mean And the soil the soils aren't as active with my microbes, and so they Yeah. They feel like the the bones have been consumed. Yeah.
[01:21:07] Unknown:
Well, I've we've got fifteen minutes. So I'm yeah. I think I'm gonna call this a successful, hopefully, just first podcast because I'd love to have you on again. But before we go, why don't you tell everybody where they can get your books and and, I guess, how to interact with you? Or Yeah. Plug plug away. Yeah. Thanks. I appreciate that.
[01:21:31] Unknown:
My book books are with me now. Okay. I still have a publisher, but most of them are have passed through the publication stages. I have them, and they I I give 10 to 15, maybe 20 speeches a year. Okay. And I always bring the book. So if you see me somewhere, speaking engagement, that's usually we'll have the books available. I'm working on my new book. Oh, what are you writing? It's a history of Camp Denison, a civil war camp. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Over in Camp Denison, at Hamilton County, right on the banks of Little Miami River, it acted as a major training facility, hospital, and discharge center for the Union Army during from '61 to '65.
And I've been involved in researching this for over twenty years. Okay. I now have a friend who's gonna help me with some illustrations and will be well illustrated, talking about much of what happened at the camp, its contact with Morgan's raid. Okay. And, some of the the second, integral part of the book is looking at the lives of the men that I could detect who were from Camp Dennis. And what did they do in the war? Yeah. What impact did these guys have on the major battles? And we think my estimates is there are probably over a 100,000 or more men.
We had a 2,300 bed hospital that was there. And, I was doing some research some time ago. I was at the National Archives. And I went to the hospital records, and they had patient books. Okay. And they were tied with a ribbon. Those patient books hadn't been opened since the end of the civil war, I'm sure. So I very carefully took a call. So they were, like, patient books from the civil war? Yeah. From the hospital at Camp Denison. That's crazy. And they were talking on the the guy's name, his regiment, what he was there for, gunshot wound. Yeah. He had disease, smallpox, venereal diseases, whatever it was, he had them all listed down there.
It was very interesting. That's crazy.
[01:23:31] Unknown:
So where, where will you be speaking next?
[01:23:35] Unknown:
At Camp Denison. Okay. It's before the sons and union veterans, and that's in July. Okay. Sons and daughters of union veterans. And then I have a my next presentation is the third Saturday, of August, and that's at the, Claremont County Historical Society. And the topic will be the the Korean War.
[01:23:58] Unknown:
Awesome. And I'm sorry. What which historical society? Claremont. It's at the it's Claremont the Potavia Branch Library. Okay. And we'll say one other thing before I know we're getting run out of it. I guess what we should just say for everybody who's listening, we're at the library, and it's about to close. So The,
[01:24:13] Unknown:
I worked with, my father and several others, and we developed my dad's project primarily. We developed a Korean War Memorial. Okay. That's in, Miami Woods. Miami you know, one of the one of the campy, parks in Miami Township, Miami Woods. It's called the Spirit Of 76 Park. Okay. And it is really something to see, and I'm I have, some, some photographs to present to them, to share with the the, people there that they, what was what went on with that memorial. Okay. Excellent.
[01:24:48] Unknown:
Well, thank you so much. And like I said, if you're up for it, I think I'd love to do another one of these because we didn't even talk about Grant or the Civil War or anything like that. So Yeah. I that'd be fun. I I
[01:25:01] Unknown:
was a co chair of the grant, celebration for the bicentennial. And, went to the point where I, spoke for the continuing legal education with the topic Grant as our first civil rights president. And I'd love to talk about that because
[01:25:18] Unknown:
Greg mentioned that in passing. And I after talking with Greg, I really had a different view of Grant. I mean, I I knew it was kind of overblown, that whole drunkard butcher thing. But
[01:25:30] Unknown:
I I don't think enough people think of him as the first civil rights president. No. I don't. Very few think of him as well. Yeah. That one was almost all legal, discussion. I I most of the time, I do not go into the dry legal stuff, more the interesting stuff, God.
[01:25:45] Unknown:
Well, I I don't know. I find dry legal stuff interesting from time to time. But, anyway, thank you so much.
[01:25:52] Unknown:
Thank you, miss. And I appreciate it. Thank you. At some point, we wanna talk about one of my the most well attended
[01:26:01] Unknown:
lectures that I give as on true crime in Claremont. That's the other thing. I've we talked about, like, a a fraction of the thing, a wealth of knowledge. So I'm definitely gonna be bugging you again to do this. Well, thanks. Thank you. Good talking to you. It's good talking to you. Thanks again to Gary for sitting down with me. Love the love the interview, and we're we're gonna have him back on again, obviously. Like I said in the introduction to talk about some true crime. So with that, let's talk about some events going on around the county. First up, we have the sweetheart stroll on July 18 at 08:30PM at Clingman Park.
Like all the other sweetheart strolls, you go to Clingman, you get yourself an antique style lantern and a map, and then you just get to have a nice walk through through the trails. Great for couples, quiet family walks or if you just wanna get out and walk around the woods with a lantern, you can do that too. And it is completely free. Next up, we have Hoots and Hops on July 18 from 6PM to 10PM at the Cincinnati Nature Center. And as the title would suggest, this is, hops being, you know, beer. This isn't a kid friendly event, but there there will be, four beer sample stations, and your ticket includes one pour from each.
There'll be some food trucks, there'll be some acoustic music, and a meet the owl encounter so you can drink some beer and meet an owl, which, actually sounds pretty cool. All proceeds are gonna go to support wildlife rehab programs. Tickets are $50 and it is advanced only. So go to the Cincinnati Nature Center to get your ticket because you can't get them there. Union Township Summer Concert, Michelle Robinson Band, July 18, seven to 9PM at the Union Township Civic Center Amphitheater. This is part of their free summer concert series. Obviously, the Michelle Robinson band is gonna be performing.
And there's also at 4PM, there'll be a farmer's market and food truck and food trucks. So get there a little early, get yourself some food, check out the farmer's market, and then enjoy the concert. Next up is the annual butterfly count, July 19, 9AM to noon. It'll start at Shore Park, and then it'll go to Sycamore And Clingman Parks. And what'll happen is, is you'll get yourself an ID sheet and then you'll split into some teams and you'll just log species butterfly species for the North American Butterfly Association. And there'll be a wrap up and some popsicles afterwards and which sounds pretty great. Who doesn't love a popsicle?
I tell you bring some water and a sun hat because it's July in Ohio, so it's gonna be pretty hot, I imagine, and it is free. And I I I will be there. I went to the information center, session rather with my daughter. I think it was last week. We learned about all the different butterfly species. We went out and looked for some butterflies towards the end of it, and so we'll be there as long as she can handle it. I don't know if we'll make it till noon, but, so come on out and you can meet me and my daughter, Olive. Miami township concert with Andy Rush, July 19, 6PM to 8PM at Miami Riverview Park.
Local loop artist, Andy Rush, and he layers jazz guitar, pop vocals, and beatbox rhythms into a full band sound, which sounds pretty interesting if you ask me. There'll be some food trucks. They tell you to bring lawn chairs unless for some reason you like standing and it is free. This yeah. It's this weekend, Clermont County Fair. July 20 is when it starts. 9AM at the fairgrounds, at Fremont County Fairgrounds. And I think everybody's pretty familiar with what the county fair is, but that should be really fun. I I love county fairs. Night out, night out at the park, starry night, July 22, 07:30 to 09:30PM at Clingman Park. The Dreamweaver storytelling troupe will be there and obviously telling stories. There'll also be some nature activities, and that's pretty much it. If you wanna go hear some stories at night and, do some nature activities.
You do need to register and you need to register through the Clermont County Public Library, so that is not through the Parks Department. Christmas in July at East Fork. It's gonna be July, 9AM to 9PM at the campground shelter of East Fork State Park. It's a summer celebration, for campers and visitors at, East Forks Campground. Some of the activities are gonna be campsite decorating contest, holiday themed games, and just in general, some family fun and a playful nod to Christmas spirit. And I think that's great. I always get a little I always miss Christmas about this time of year and start really looking forward to it. So I think Christmas in July is a fun thing to do. If you're a registered camper, there's no charge.
Day visitors, you should check, check East Fork State Park for for participation details. Creek days at the park, July 25, 1PM to 3PM at Sycamore Park. This is gonna be a naturalist led kids and adult, creek play session. You'll discover some aquatic creatures. I imagine we'll talk about some fossils. So if you and your kids wanna go stomp around the creek and learn about, what's in creeks, we'll check that out. Another Union Township summer concert. This is gonna be with Tom the Torpedoes, and they're a Tom Petty tribute band. It's on July 25, seven to 9PM at the Union Township Civic Center Amphitheater. And again, this is part of their, free summer concert series.
You get to hear Tom the torpedoes. And, again, at 4PM, there will be a farmer's market and food trucks. So get there a little early, get yourself something to eat, browse around the farmer's market, and then listen to the concert. I man, I really wanna try to go to this one. Madcap Puppets, Monsters of Baseball, July 26, 10AM, at the Union Town excuse me. The Union Township Amphitheatre. Giant puppets, and I don't know how giant. I'm I really hope it's like big bird giant, but that that would be kind of crazy. But giant puppets bring the history and tradition of baseball alive through songs and stories. So if you're, a history a fan of baseball history or wanna learn more about baseball history and wanna hear it from giant monster puppets, I that that's that's the ticket.
Next up, we have foraged tea time and hike summer sun tea on July 26, 11AM to noon at Clingman Park. You go there and some naturalists will help you identify some native plants that you can brew into a sun tea. It is free, but you do need to pre register. East Fork State Park Trail Run, part of the dirt day series, July 27 at 08:30AM, the South Beach Beach area of East Fork State Park. You can do either a 5.6 mile or a 10.8 mile, wooded trail race. All experience levels are welcome. There is an early start option at 8AM if you wanna get out there a little earlier, and it does cost $22.50 to register.
Let's see. Next up, America two fifty, the Bethel Mural Ribbon Cutting on July 30 from 2PM to 3PM. And it's just gonna be a ceremony to unveil the United in Service Mural, commemorating the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the United States. It's open to the public and, obviously, there'll be a ribbon cutting, some brief remarks, and then just a general celebration of local art and history. And the last thing we have is Heritage Crafts Sun Printing, August 2. There'll be two sessions, one at 1PM and one at 3PM, and this is gonna be at Clingman Park. And you get to create your own cyanotype prints.
I'm not really sure what cyanotype is, why I guess it's printing things with the power of sunlight. But it's a workshop and a naturalist artist is gonna show you how you arranged forage leaves and objects, on special light sensitive paper, on a tote bag and then you expose them to some sun and you get beautiful blue and white prints. You also get to take home your one of a kind, printed tote bag. You do have to register and you can only register for one of the two events and, all ages are welcome. So that's all we have for events and that will lead us into our value for value pitch. We are a value for value podcast. That means if you find value in what we're doing, all we ask is that you send a little value back in the form of time, talent, or treasure. You can, connect with us on Facebook, Let's Talk Claremont podcast, Instagram at Let's Talk Claremont.
You can sign up for our newsletter on our website, let'stalkclaremont.com, and you can always email us info@let'stalkclaremont.com. And, I wanna hear from you. I wanna I wanna know who you want, me to talk to and what kind of news you want us to talk about. Let me know. And this is we really want, you know, to to be a community effort here. So and I'm one guy, you know, I can't I can't find all the news and all the people. So if you know somebody that we should be talking to or you know something we should be talking about, get in touch. And we are going to sign off with our oliveism and I think I need to find a better name for that. I don't know. Oliveism is not quite rolling off the tongue. I'll have to think about that. But for this one, it was the other day and her and my wife went to the grocery store and she insisted on wearing, quite frankly, a ridiculous dress. It's like this this black puffy I mean, it would be more better suited for a wedding or, some kind of party than it would be the grocery store. She insisted, and so they went in that dress. When they came back, she came bounding into the door.
And before she said anything, she said, dad, I gotta change my dress. It's all wet from ice cream and blood. I was kind of shocked. I had no idea what they were doing or what what possible activity would get you covered in ice cream and blood, but it turns out she just picked a little scab on her leg or something like that. It wasn't like she was covered in blood, and she was fine. But, initially, it was quite a shocking statement. So that's all we got. I really appreciate you listening and we will see you next time.
We've been living in sin so long. All
[00:00:21] Unknown:
Welcome to episode 16 of Let's Talk Claremont. Thanks for everybody who's, tuning in. Really appreciate it. As I've said in previous episodes, we're getting a lot of really positive feedback. So it seems like people are liking what we're doing, which is great. And if you're new here, welcome. What we're gonna do is we're gonna talk about a little bit of news, then we'll get to the interview, and then we'll talk about some events going on around the county. So with that, the for news this week, I only really found one thing that I thought was interesting, and it's at Clermont County. They recently did a housing study. The first ever comprehensive housing study for Clermont County, and it confirmed that, our county is growing faster, than the housing stock can keep up.
The county commissioners partnered with Urban Partners who are out of Philadelphia, I believe, and they had a couple of of key findings from this study. The first is that Clermont County is growing rapidly, and it's projected to continue growing for the next twenty years. In fact, they found that currently, there's about 209,862 people in the county. So and that number is gonna go up over the next twenty years. The other thing that they found is that household sizes are getting smaller, which I take to mean that the amount of people living in a house is smaller, but the new homes that are being built are getting larger, which is kind of making it more difficult for people to get housing.
They also found that even with new and ongoing multifamily, construction, like rental properties, vacancy rates for rental housing remain critically low. Growth potential for non urban areas is limited by infrastructure capacity. This is this next thing that they found, that despite relatively high median household income, I didn't know that Claremont County had relatively high median household income, but despite that, 19,000 Claremont County, households are struggling with, housing cost burden. And that means that the combined cost of their mortgage, taxes, insurance, and utilities exceeds 30% of their income, which is, obviously not a very good thing.
And finally, they found that land use and zoning policies as well as community opposition significantly restrict housing production. So based on these findings, they had a couple of the urban partners had a couple of recommendations, for the County. The first was to foster more community support for diversified housing stocks. So not just, you know, trying to increase support for housing in general but for many different kinds of housing. They said that we should target development and growth in high demand areas which honestly should be obvious. You don't wanna build houses where people don't wanna live.
They said that we need to do a better job of preserving and improving, the aging housing, so kinda older houses. They suggested that we, expand housing options for, growing senior population. And finally, they said we should reduce barriers to entry for first time homebuyers. And that last one, I don't think is, particularly unique to Clermont. I think, you know, you hear a lot about how it's getting harder and harder for first time home buyers to actually buy a home. So that is all the news that we have for today, and that will lead us into our pitch for value for value. We are a value for value podcast. And what that means is that if you find value in what we're doing, we just ask that you return a little bit of value in the form of time, talent and treasure.
As I said previously, treasure is great. Money is wonderful. And if you wanna send us some money, get in touch, we'll make that happen. I'm also very close to putting together a system that will make it much much easier for people to donate to this show. But time and talent are equally as important. We wanna talk to the people you wanna hear from, and we wanna talk about the news that's important to you. So get in touch. Let us know what's going on in your neck of the woods. Let us know who should we should be talking to. If you know somebody that's doing something interesting, that could be a small business owner, that could just be a community member that's doing cool things. Honestly, it could be a complete weirdo who just does weird things.
I love talking to weirdos as a fellow weirdo. So, you can get in touch with us on our Facebook page, Let's Talk Claremont podcast on Instagram at Let's Talk Claremont. You can email us infoletstalkclaremont dot com. I also have a newsletter if you go to the web page, letstalkclaremont.com, you can sign up for it and we'll let you know when an episode comes out. And I'm kind of experimenting with it, so there's some other things in there, but nothing's really set in stone yet. So sign up for that if you wanna if you wanna hear when a new podcast is out and, you know, some other fun stuff. And follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever it is you get your podcast.
That really helps us, and it helps you. It'll let you know when a new episode comes out, and then you can listen to it. So for our interview today, we're talking with Gary Knepp. He is a part time, I guess, I should probably say partly retired lawyer. He still does some public defending, but he's also a local historian. And he has written many, many, many books, on all kinds of historical topics ranging from the underground railroad to a legal history of Clermont County, which I think would be interesting, but I'm not sure if everybody wants to hear about some dry legal history of of Clermont. But today, we're talking about, veterans of World War one and the Korean War that are from Clermont County.
We also talk a little bit about his time in Vietnam. He went he actually traveled to Vietnam, to visit some former battle sites, from the Vietnam War. Overall, Gary, he he's just a wealth of historical knowledge, both Claremont history and general history. And we're gonna definitely have him back on again because we barely talked about all the stuff he knows about, and we'll probably talk about the Underground Railroad, you know, Ulysses s Grant. But for the next one especially, he's got, I guess, a lecture on true crime. So we're gonna talk about some true crime of Clermont County in the future. And hopefully, that won't be too far in the future.
So, thank you to Gary for sitting down with me and, I hope you really enjoy the interview. So let's just I guess we'll just get started then. Yeah. And the way I start all of these things is just tell us who you are and and what you do.
[00:07:26] Unknown:
I'm Gary Knepp. I am a partially retired attorney, and I work as a public defender now, for the Klamath County Juvenile Court. And then the rest of the time, unfortunately, I get to spend doing my history stuff. Unfortunately? Yeah. I like it. It seems like a pretty fun pastime. Yes. I'm fortunate that I have the, the ability right now to continue to do that, I work on the history and also work part time. It fits pretty well from from what I'm doing. But I've lived in the Milford area all my life, and, I've always been interested in what was going on in the community and the history of it. I I served a couple of terms as city councilman in Milford and as a board of education member in the Milford School District. I served two terms there too. So I've been in and out of the government and around. You've been around the county Yeah. A little bit. What what drew you to history originally?
I think it would I I stretch it back, and I've wondered that question. And I bring it back to, I think, my father Mhmm. Who was a, really, inspiration to many people in the community. And as far as the history is concerned for me, he wanted to make sure that I knew about Winston Churchill. Mhmm. So he got me books on Winston Churchill tapes. And so I listened to him and that's kinda sparked me and then he did the same thing with civil war. Mhmm. And those are the two areas today. One of the two areas that today I still continue actively searching. So I think that's what it is. And what I try to do in writing in my history and talking, I give lots of lectures, maybe 20 a year or more, is that I try to put the common person in the middle of an extraordinary event such as World War two, the civil war, underground railroad, and try to and try to help people understand what their reaction was and what make may hopefully make the reader think, how would I have done that? Yeah. How would I have survived the middle of a of a gunfight, you know, and and things of that sort. And so that's that's the approach that I try to take is is to tell that with context,
[00:09:22] Unknown:
these personal stories. So real briefly before we get into specifics, because you've written histories on a wide range of subjects. Can you just talk about some of the things that you've written history on? You want me to get, like, a titles? Oh, yeah. Titles and topics. And
[00:09:40] Unknown:
one of my earliest books was an autobiography of Henry Clark Corbin. Okay. He was a lieutenant general from Clermont County and was a friends of presidents from Grant up through McKinley. Okay. And, so he had this is his, memoirs, and I published those edited publish them. I got the these out of the Library of Congress. One of my earlier books is Freedom Struggle. It's It's about the history of the Underground Railroad and more specifically the anti slavery movement in Claremont. I've got into this project when the convention visitors bureau named me the historian for the Claremont County Bicentennial back in the year February, and we decided we wanted to give a legacy project to the community.
And there's always been talk about the Underground Railroad in Claremont County, but, nobody had really done the work to fill fill it out. So that's what, that's what this book is about is what my findings and I I stress it's the anti slavery movements a little bit bigger than just the, you know, underground railroad, wider topic. And as a result of that work, I was a co I developed the, Claremont County Freedom Trail Okay. Which has 19 sites that have been accepted by the National Park Service and two programs of the my my lectures and bus tours been approved by the National Park Service.
And at one time, we led the nation in the number of sites that were in the network. I think Greg was talking about that. It was it was pretty amazing for one county to be able to accomplish all that. And this book is called Musings from the Land of Clear Mountain. Clear Mountain means is Clermont County. It means Oh, yeah. In French. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what this is my take on Clermont County history. What I found interesting is not the history, it's a history. Okay. And I have a lot of different topics in there. Some of the people, war, of course, war since military history is one of my important things.
My my daughter was the illustrator. Okay. She's now a graphic designer. So she moved from I'm not telling you what I commissioned her, but that was her first commission project. And so I have stuff in there about history or religion and different things. Yeah. This is Forgotten Warriors. Mhmm. It's about the forgotten war of of Korea. Mhmm. I was particularly interested in this because my dad was a combat veteran. And, I you know, he's we were growing up, we could tell that there was some remnants of the war occasionally servicing with him. Yeah. And, so I got very interested in that because I have these men have never ever received the recognition that they deserve for their service, and they served under some of the most difficult times. So I was gonna say it was a pretty nasty conditions in Korea. Yeah. There are four million people killed in three years in Korea. Wow. And 33,000 plus, were were Milford are, Americans. Mhmm. 19 from Clermont County. Wow. And, so I I just I was really driven by personal relationships with some of these men. They were the fathers of my friends Yeah. When I was growing up because I was a Korean war baby. Yeah. And, finding, you know, out about that section and putting it together with my photographs that my dad had taken, the fathers of some of the kids that I went to high school with. It just all kinda melded together in a book. There's my my dad. Nice. I see the resemblance.
And there's one other picture that I think, if I could find it, that was very unusual for him was that he's hardly ever sat down and done anything. He's always busy running around. So I found this picture of him wrapped out sleeping. No nobody everybody that saw this couldn't believe that they actually He was actually slept. Yeah. I'll hold off on the this one. It's okay. Yeah. That works. This was the first book that I published, although this is the second edition. This is To Crown Myself with Honor by Asbury Gatch. Got one of the Gatches, the founders of of Claremont County, Milford in particular. He was captain of the ninth, volunteer cavalry and company l, and he went through, through Tennessee down into Alabama and Georgia. And this was a very important raid called the Russo raid. K. And he's got some details that you found, and I found nowhere else about the Russo raid that was in this book.
One of the fun things I did with this project is I I was just getting ready to go to law school when I was finishing working on this. And I drove to Alabama to track where the where he went and see what I could find. And I found a I found a home that he described in great detail in this little town, Mooresville in in Alabama. You found the actual home? I found the home. I went up to the homeowner. I said, I've got this description of this room. She said, well, come on in. Let's take a look. So from the description, we figured out what room he was at even then.
[00:14:39] Unknown:
And then so you found, like, the room that he was He was sitting he was recuperating Yeah. Yeah. From sickness.
[00:14:45] Unknown:
So that that was a that was a real fun thing to do. And, based on that it's still Yeah. Around. And the house is in perfect condition. It's it's about four or five streets. It's beautiful antebellum homes. They then showed me this big, what do you wanna call it? A a document that says this these people were friends of the union. Do not harm them. Yeah. Signed by the commanding general. That's really cool. Yeah. So this is the first book that I published. And this one is Beyond the Names. This is about the, 39 men from Claremont County who were killed during Vietnam war in Vietnam during the war.
I'm I was really proud of this work, dealing with, previously with deceased individuals. Mhmm. Gave you one perspective, but dealing with people who still remember and mourn these guys every day Yep. Made it made me very sensitive to that. And and I That's a big responsibility for honoring the memory. Right. And that's that was I took that very seriously. I traveled twice to Vietnam, twice to Washington DC in the in the archives, and put what I could in into it. And I've for I was very surprised and received a national service award from the Vietnam Veterans of America for contributions based, on this book. Yeah.
So, I still run into people who say, I read your book. He was my friend. You know, tell me he tells me a story or something like that. Yeah.
[00:16:15] Unknown:
So, Vietnam was a was a a real trip, and I loved it. Well, it's one of those I mean, it's you talk about the civil war and even World War two, and those have kind of almost become memory and myth at this point. Right. Whereas Vietnam, I think, you know, a lot of people still it's still been the forefront of their minds. You know? That And there's still men dying from Vietnam with, with cancer related to agent noise. Stuff.
[00:16:41] Unknown:
So it's still with us. Even though these guys are now pushing their seventies and eighties. Yeah. And with Vietnam or with Korea, they're in their nineties and beyond. Yeah. So the clock has been ticking as we go further. But I found that the people I was in I just traveled through the South Vietnam. I had a a guide who I told him the places I wanted to go. And I found the places I wanted to go because I went to I got the guys names. I went to national archives and looked through the command reports and figured out where they were killed Really? Within that fragment of of that record. And, I took the military grid coordinates that I have Mhmm.
Based on military maps, huge ones. And I had a friend who's a techie, and he translated the, military grid figures into GPS. And I brought a GPS monitor, with me. And so I went walking, you know, riding or walking through South Vietnam Yeah. Finding these way stations as to where these guys these things happen.
[00:17:42] Unknown:
Wow. And I've heard and you can tell me firsthand. I've heard that the the Vietnamese are actually pretty receptive to Americans. Like, the the I don't it doesn't seem like they have any much animosity.
[00:17:57] Unknown:
That that's true. I I've been told that it's a little bit different than what would used to be North Vietnam. Sure. They're not as friendly. They don't have good memories in America because they have mostly bombs as you know, I remember. But the people in South Vietnam, I I agree. They they really like Americans. They like being alone. I think it's more than just a dollar. Yeah. I I'm gonna forget one trip that I was up in the, on the boonies looking for this, airstrip that this guy from Claremont helped to build. Mhmm. And it was an asphalt, and it was in perfect condition. Really? Probably hadn't been used for airplanes for since the end of the war. And the locals used it to dry their crops. Okay.
And it would take the bucket the bowl bowls and flow it up so that the crops would would filter out. And I looked up and I saw this bowl got caught in the wind and it was rolling down, and I ran after the bowl. And a little mama sama and her, Vietnamese pajamas, as they called, came up to me and said, oh, thank you. Number one.
[00:18:59] Unknown:
Number what? Number one.
[00:19:01] Unknown:
That was what they call the the Americans. Okay. You're number one? Number one. Yeah. And so she's recognizing that I'm an American Yeah. Yeah. And smiling, while you know, we so we had a intercultural moment there. It was it was very fun. So when you were looking for these places in Vietnam, were you, like, out in the jungles and the, like, in the rural parts of of Vietnam where these guys were? In some cases. Some I did have a guide Okay. Which was indispensable when trying to find where we're going. You could probably go to Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City and not have a guide Yeah. Like any place. But if you go out in the countryside, you gotta have somebody knows the ropes and how to get there.
And, he got me to a lot of places that I don't think most Americans would ever see. Yeah. There's nothing there's really not much left of the old Vietnam. Occasionally, you you'll be able to find some things. Like, I went to a Montagnard village. The Montagnard are the, the native Vietnamese, the, the American Indian Okay. Cognate. And as we're walking through the village, they're trying to trying to get up a, a little bit of tourism business. And, but I saw a hut that was fabricated from hundred and fifty five millimeter shell casings that The United States had used in the yeah. And they put this all together Yeah. Yeah. With a thatched roof.
Really? Yeah. And they That's wild. Yeah. I was kinda I was like, yeah. I couldn't believe it when I saw it. And then they also made a card out of some of the wheels from The US vehicles. Oh, really? Cool car. Yeah. That's kinda wild. Yeah. And then, they, they the some of the the native, the natives there were dancing, some of them Montagnard type dances. And they had brought in a, a jar, a big jar of rice wine Mhmm. That had, straws out of it. I was the only tourist there. And I said, do I really wanna do this, or am I gonna wipe myself out? Yeah. I said, what the heck? I may never come by it again. Yeah. And so I sucked down some, rice wine, and it was pretty good. It was good rice wine. It was good rice wine. Yeah.
[00:21:08] Unknown:
Now do they kind of an aside, I suppose, but do they still have
[00:21:12] Unknown:
the problems with unexploded ordinance still? They do? I worked with a, organization called Peace Trees Vietnam. Okay. And that was one of the things that they do as they go out and they still have that, unexpected ordinance. And so I was working with them on a project. And then, the area where the, Idrang Valley, which is if you remember the movie We Were Once and Young with with, what's his name? Mel Gibson? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That area in reality is still,
[00:21:45] Unknown:
That was the one the movie about the,
[00:21:48] Unknown:
air cap. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You could go there, but, you couldn't go very far into it Yeah. Because they still have the unexploded ordinance there, and they don't want obviously, they don't want anybody to get hurt. Yeah. But, that was, the other thing I wanted to say is that the public the people, you go into a museum and it is pretty still anti American. Yeah. It's talking about running dogs and imperialist dogs and stuff like that. And the people It's still a communist country. Right? Like, it's not Yeah. It's not free. Yeah. And the people, would look around locals will look around. Didn't see anybody from the government. He says, don't pay attention to that. We love Americans. And they Just government propaganda. Yeah. They made it make a game out of doing little things to to go off or put something over on the government. Yeah. It's their their way of coping, I guess, with the lack of freedom is a problem. I mean, I like getting one over on the government myself. Yeah.
[00:22:46] Unknown:
Well, oddly enough, I think the unexplored in ordnance is a good segue to the other book that you wrote over there. Like I said on the phone, I've got kind of a soft spot for World War one because it's it's just a fascinating
[00:23:00] Unknown:
conflict. Mhmm.
[00:23:02] Unknown:
So if you could talk about that a little bit and claim the men from Claremont County that played a role in that war. And I think And a couple women. And a couple women. Before we get into that, could you just set the context of World War one and kind of Yeah. The role America really played in in the war?
[00:23:22] Unknown:
It is often overlooked what a human catastrophe Yeah. World War one was. And probably as many as twenty million people killed during the war, ten of ten million of whom were civilians. Yeah. So it infected then there was the outbreak of Spanish flu, which killed maybe as many as twenty more million. Yeah. So during that that period of time, that four years of World War one, it was pretty disastrous. Yeah. It also destroyed in a geopolitical sense, it was very important because it destroyed four
[00:23:52] Unknown:
kingdoms. Yeah. What was it? The, Ottoman, Austria, Hungary? I'm gonna miss some Russian. Russian and German. And German. Right. And then, of course, the Russians
[00:24:02] Unknown:
just transferred it over to the Soviet Union. Yeah. And then Britain and France, although they were victorious, they were drained raw, drained without much money or Yeah. Bodies left. And that's one of the things that characterizes, I think, that war is just the absolute carnage.
[00:24:20] Unknown:
Yeah. When you look at some of the art and artists that come out of that, I've read some World War one poetry, and it's just some of the most visceral,
[00:24:30] Unknown:
gruesome stuff you could ever read. Yeah. It was it was that and that's the way the war was. One of the reasons for that, I think, is the introduction of technology. Mhmm. You had the, submarines, unrestricted warfare for the first time. You had a tank. You had the development of the airplane. Mhmm. Rapid firing accurate, artillery. Yep. The use of widespread use of machine guns that were portable, and the use of gas. Yeah. And all those things are very killing, you know, lethal, and it was is reflected in that. US tried to stay out of the war, and, we became the war suppliers.
Yeah. We supplied, money for we became the greatest creditor in the world as a result of that. Yeah. We also saw That was one of the things that coming out of that war
[00:25:18] Unknown:
kind of precipitated the rise
[00:25:21] Unknown:
of America as a superpower. Right? Like, because, I mean, you know Great Britain was a superpower Yeah. Until this war Yeah. Really drained her, and got in that way of of them continuing with their position. The one of the interesting things about the war, we have to tend to say that the the results of World War one laid the groundwork for World War two. Mhmm. Some historians are talking about it really was not two wars. It was one war separated by an armistice. Yeah. So you're fighting the same over the same territory. You're doing everything same as just as 20 The Schlieffen plan. It was they did the in World War two, they did the exact same thing. Yeah. They came right around through Belgium. Yeah. So I think it's an interesting point to to think about. It could very well be that it was accurate about that. Just to give you an example, when I talked about the casualty figures, the Battle of Somme, which is one of the biggest ones, had in France had over a million casualties. Yeah.
The British lost 300,000 in that one battle. And on the first day, 19,000.
[00:26:31] Unknown:
Oh. We're dead. Oh, it it gives me chills thinking about that. It's just and I've heard the artillery strikes described as just
[00:26:39] Unknown:
waves of earth. Yes. It was rolling thunder. So Yeah. It's kind of what they had, and they would their attacks against each other's lines were based on, that rolling thunder Yeah. Giving them space to go before. Right. When the artillery stopped, then the other side's machine gun started on them, and it Yeah. It was it was futile for the most part. I'm trying to do anything about that. Before I I have a section in the book called before our war Mhmm. Like, what was going on in World War one before we got there, ending with the Zimmer Telegram, which is one of the stupidest things that to Mexico. Yeah. Mexico said the Germany said, she's going to the side of Mexico or come on our side, and we'll give you Texas back. Yeah. Right.
That was a pretty stupid thing. And that and that pretty much Well, no. I don't think anybody really took America that seriously as a
[00:27:31] Unknown:
global power. I mean, it was all the antiquity of Europe and Yeah. I think they had the view of America as k. It was kinda like backwaters. You know? It was like But the one thing they knew about is America had men. Yeah. And they've been bled dry Yeah. By the time America came in.
[00:27:48] Unknown:
So they had virtually no expectations of them being Americans being particularly good fighters or helping them out. But, boy, they could sure stop a bullet. Yeah. Yeah. And I think Pitching that war was kind of what was required. Yeah. And then that's that's where I think they thought about us. Yeah. Things changed a little bit with some people, but they still had that European smugness about them. Yeah. And they, you know, they just got their hand handed to them, and they're still that smug. Yeah. But the the thing that I found really interesting about this whole project was the number of men of people from US who fought for foreign powers during the war before we got in. Like as a volunteer or a mercenary or something? Yeah. Volunteers.
It was just shocking to me that there were that many. I can go over a list here and give you some of the ideas of what was going on. And France was one of the big ones, of course. Americans went to, enlisted in the French foreign legion Yeah. And served there. Alan Seeger is one of the poets you were talking about, was in France. Wrote a very famous poem called I Have a Rendezvous with Death. He wrote that two weeks before he died. Oh. John Kennedy said that was his favorite poem. Really? And it's it's very I don't know if I've read that one. I'm It's very dark. Yeah.
[00:29:08] Unknown:
That kind of thing.
[00:29:10] Unknown:
The, our British our flyers flew in the Lafayette Escadrille, which is the French French air, air force. One of the things they had was the airmen always took this hottie, I'm cool kind of approach to things. And why they had, the mascots or cups, two cups, a lion cups called clubs and soda. There are many drinks that they had. Yeah. More than 300 Americans flew in the Royal Air Force. 300? Mhmm. Okay. Now the one that's really fascinating was Canada. 35,000 Americans fought in the Canadian army during that the war. Really? And they they were part they called them the American Legion of the of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Yeah. And we had several from Clamont County who were in there. Really? What were these guys' motivation? I I think they they felt for the people that that that that propaganda machine in World War one was very good from the British and the French Mhmm. Portraying the Germans. Now the Germans were bloodthirsty and, you know, they were not nice people, but I think they kinda overdid the they they made them look like demons and Yeah. And so I think it motivated some of these young men from the from the around Claremont, hell of in The United States to get involved in in the war. Well, that time, presumably, some of them might have been
[00:30:38] Unknown:
not far removed from people who'd come over from Europe. Yeah. There were a lot of second generation
[00:30:44] Unknown:
Americans, and they they went to the home country. There were some, men from Mill from Ohio. I keep saying that. Some people from, the areas of the Northern part of The United States that wound up fighting for the Germans. Yeah. They went over into the homeland Yeah. Made more contacts with them. That happened pretty I don't know how widely it happened in World War two as well. I think some Americans wouldn't fought. Yeah. It's it's it's a little Germans. And then there were 23,000 Polish who fought against the Russians in the nineteen twenties. It was kind of an outrage for that. Yeah. One of the problems that they found, they didn't realize that our soldiers who went over to fight didn't realize that, they by pledging allegiance to go into a foreign nation, they lost their American citizenship. Really? And so a special act of congress had to be done to restore their so their American citizenship.
So that was kind of an interesting thought that I I hadn't I wouldn't have known before. So I'll give you a couple examples of some of the men from Milford. I keep saying Milford. Sorry. We're in Milford. From Claremont County, in in that area. Dale Hardy was from Canada. He, fought for Canada. He was from Goshen. When he was over in Scotland, he married a a Scottish girl. And, he, wrote a very interesting article, a letter back about what was going on and how they they couldn't sleep much because the the activities at night, the bombing, and it wasn't bombing. They had to be digging and Yeah. Working in the the car the barbed wire and just a real interesting piece that he wrote about. It appeared in one of the newspapers.
And there was Clyde to Williger. There was a lot of in this area. I'm gonna say that. In this area. Clyde looked like a young, Ernest Hemingway. Okay. With a beard in there. Yeah. Yeah. But he was a doctor, and he volunteered to serve in the British army. And he had time in the trenches, on the hospital ships, and in the hospitals. He got a a leave of absence, and he came, back to Milford where he was from and gave a lecture to the the students, of Milford High School about his experiences in, the war. And, he noticed a young coed, was staring at him an awful lot, and they were staring back. And I think they were making eyes during that context, and then they went out. Yeah. And shortly after that, they got married. And then he resigned from the British army to go in the American army and, we're back here in The United States.
Alice Stewart Stewart was a Milford High School graduate, was very talented musically, very bright student, but she had to stay she stayed home and gave up her dreams because her parents needed the income that she could produce. Mhmm. She decided, let's say, that was over. She went to the, became a nurse and then worked for the Red Cross in France if we're done, which is another one of the horrible places. So she spent a lot of time there, dealing with some of the worst, cases that are around under bombardment from time to time by by the war spilling over. And as a result of her work there, the French awarded her a Croix de Guerre Oh, really? Which is the top the the highest award for a non French soldier. So that was a big award for her to get.
She came back to Milford and left very soon after that and, became a nurse. Continued her nursing duties and education. Died at age 95 and never had been married. Wow.
[00:34:31] Unknown:
That had that would have had to have been one of the I mean, it wouldn't have been great to be a soldier, but to be a a nurse or a doctor, seek oh, man. I just I couldn't imagine. It takes a lot. Yeah.
[00:34:45] Unknown:
So that's a some parts of it I I talked about in the book about mobilizing for war. What were some of the camps that they went to and the training that they received? There are 4,700,000 Americans who served in Korea or in World War one. 2,700,000 were overseas. 1,390,000. I'm just giving these figures here. Yeah. Western Front, and that included Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg. And then there were some that were in the, Polish or the, the polar bear expedition. Are you familiar with that? I'm not familiar with that. The British, talked us into going in and trying to over to overthrow the Bolsheviks, the Russian communist.
And so there were several 100 several thousand men from Clara from, The United States that participated in what was called the Polar Bear Expedition. And some of them died in, in that fight. But eventually, they they just figured there's nothing this little group of people can do to overthrow the Soviets. And, the American Legion Post in Milford is named after Victor Steer. The the tradition, was to name somebody from your area that was killed in the war. Mhmm. Fortunately, for Milford, there were no deaths. Really? Yeah. And so From World War one. Right. Really? Yeah. No no deaths at all. So they looked around for a guy in Ohio who had would be worthy of being remembered that way. And Victor Steer was the guy they chose from Upper Ohio who was in the polar bear expedition and was killed charging a, a a Soviet, gun emplacement.
And he received the silver star for what he did. So that's where the Where where was the polar? Was it South South Russia? South Russia. But it was still cold. Yeah. Yeah. Lower Siberia area. Mhmm. And again, that's not something very few people have even heard of is the Polar Bear expedition, but it was it was an interesting episode of that war. There are 53,513 battle deaths. Two hundred and four thousand were wounded. I think we were just in there from '8 from August, of 02/2018. Yeah. So it wasn't very much time. Almost half of those died in one battle, Muse, Argonne.
And then there were 63,195 that died of disease and accidents. Yeah. An estimated forty seven thousand Spanish flu. Wow. The Spanish flu just took over in the trenches and just wiped everybody out. One of the fun things that reading through letters that I've received that I've discovered on the written by Clima County boys is that they were farm kids. Mhmm. So what they knew was farming. Yeah. And the letters are often filled with comparisons between French farming techniques and and ours. Really? Yeah. And it was kind of fun that they they talked about the stone. They didn't have trees, so they had to have stone houses Mhmm. And stone fences instead of trees, wood fences like we have. And he talked about the the village got together in a in a area, and then they walked out to their farm fields. Mhmm. Ours is exactly opposite.
You know, ours is stretched out across the country, and then you have the little communities that you go into. So they they knew that very quickly. Oftentimes, when they weren't on duty, they did farm work. Yeah. To keep busy and to help the French people. Really? And they slept in the barn sometimes. And I found very interesting the relationship with the the Claremont County boys and the French girls.
[00:38:25] Unknown:
Did did they, take a shining to the French girls? Absolutely.
[00:38:28] Unknown:
And from what you can tell, the the French girls kinda like the American boys. Those things happen. Yeah. Especially in wars. Yeah. And there were virtually no men of of young age. Yeah. There. They were at the war. They were killed in the war. So that's what happened. One of the guys talked about finding how do you communicate? And not many guys in Claremont County could speak French. Right. Probably half a dozen at the most. So So how do you communicate and get your point across that you wanna make? And they told the story of one of the guys who had a French English dictionary. Mhmm. And so they would communicate the word that they wanted to to the French, and the French girl would back a back and forth. So through the use of the book, they were able to communicate.
And he said some some they really got to know each other, you know, after a while. Yeah. And the guy wrote, he says, it's not me, mom. I didn't do that.
[00:39:21] Unknown:
He says other guys. So he's writing this to his mom, and he's saying, like, this is what's going on. Not me. I'm I'm I'm your little boy. It's not Yeah. Didn't happen that way. Did they bring these women back?
[00:39:34] Unknown:
Some of them? Some were married. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Probably not as many as World War two. Okay. They tried anti fraternization Yeah. Policy. It works sometimes. Yeah. Most of the time, it didn't. And one of the other things that they, they try to divert guys from some pursuits on r and r or restaurant relaxation. So the YMCA opened up a lot of cantinas without beer Mhmm. Without liquor, without French girls, and giving them cigarettes or selling them at a local at a slower a lower price Mhmm. And, paper to write home to Okay. Their mom. So that's the way they wanted them to spend it. Right. But more than one of the guys talked about the the cathedrals that they saw and how impressive those buildings were, and that really locked onto their their belief or their amazement of the community.
Would you like me to read a letter? Yeah. I think that'd be great. Letters often said over there Mhmm. Somewhere in Germany or some because they were heavily censored, and the Americans believe that getting any hint about where one guy was stationed might have helped the enemy find out what's going on. Yeah. And most of the letters up to the the, armistice day were pretty bland. Yeah. And didn't tell a lot of the detail. Of course, a lot of the times, the guys wanted to spare their mom Yeah. The details, and they'll say, well, we'll talk to your dad at some point. Yeah. And the army, thought it would be a good idea to suggest a certain date, that you write your dad.
Really? Specifically, your dad and tell him what was going on because I guess they figured that they weren't gonna tell their moms. Right. So they're telling their dads and hopefully that that would, encourage some communication about things Yeah. When they got back home.
[00:41:25] Unknown:
Well, that too during World War one, they didn't have any concept. Why did they call it being shell shocked? But they didn't have any concept of PTSD or anything like that. Well, it is it was shell shocked, and that was first diagnosed by the British doctors.
[00:41:40] Unknown:
And, of course, we called the PTSD. They called battle fatigue. Mhmm. In the civil war, it was called nostalgia. Yeah. And I would imagine among the Greeks and Romans, they probably had the same Yeah. Situation, so they had a word for it. I'm not sure. I'm not I don't speak that language, but it's something that, I it's it's with every Yeah. Every battle, every war, every soldier that sees war. It's just something that you're not supposed to see Yeah. And makes it difficult to cope with sometimes. Yeah. This book, this letter is by Paris Turner, who was with the sixth unit infantry, and he lived at that one. Okay. So I'll I'll read this letter. I think it's pretty the most interesting letter that I found.
I'm I surely consider myself lucky to be alive. We had just been in a big battle, and now we're at the rest camp. And surely, all need the rest we can get. I'm so tired. I can hardly walk. We had such a long, hard fight of it. Mother, you and this is one to the mother, surprisingly. You can't imagine what an awful thing it is to take the life of another. One never thinks about it at the time, but when it is all over, it comes back to one. But it is the only way. And when we entered a certain town, I saw an officer trying to get away on his horse, and I shot him with my pistol. And you might have you you ought to have seen how he pretty pretty rolled off the horse.
I got his horse and the rest of his belongings and turned them over to a lieutenant. And I made up my mind after that awful things that I had seen the Germans do that I would not take any prisoners. Oh, man. I'll take a little diversion here about that. Germans had one of the things that they did if they surrendered, they say, comrade. Mhmm. It was a way the way they say they were trying to get friendly with the with the American troops. And as soon as Americans turned their back, they shot them. Really? And that had a ripple effect on the other side of the Americans said, well, if you're gonna shoot our guys, we're we're not playing the games with you. So they started executing prisoners as well.
[00:43:48] Unknown:
So it's one of those You hear the stories about Germans in World War one and World War two like that, which is very ruthless. Yeah. They they're different fighters than what we put out.
[00:43:58] Unknown:
One sees, some awful things here with the dead and dying and all that goes to make up a battle. One of the most pitiful sights I have ever seen was a boy, a mere child in the field. I saw that he had something clutched to his breast. I looked to see what it was, and it was a Bible clutched to his breast. And on it was written, my son, always keep this book in your left pocket near your heart. It's almost okay. Your loving mother, the poor kid, was all torn to pieces by shrapnel. I suppose you had heard how the Germans try to work their tricks on Yanks. Camarade doesn't always mean surrender. They're always looking for a trick and up to kill you the next minute is not. When you capture them, they will fall on their knees and pray for you to spare them and then shoot you in the back at the next minute.
Speaking of praying, mother dear, I think many of the boys who before the war thought little or not of such things surely have learned that it is our comfort. You know, it's that old saying, there are no atheists in foxholes. Yeah. Yeah. When the shot and shell were flying around us, we remember the lessons mother taught us. I surely have learned that lesson. I've not heard from this couple guys' names here or any of the other Bethel boys. I'm sorry to hear that Archie Boyd was killed in battle. That was who we got from Bethel from Claremont. Well, mother, I will close hoping to receive an answer. Love to all.
Oh, man. So that was that was a very poignant letter. How how old was he? I don't know. I think he was he was a youngster probably in '18, '19. Just some foreign boy from Bethel. Yeah. Man. And then suddenly, you're in the middle of France
[00:45:45] Unknown:
in a trench. Yeah.
[00:45:47] Unknown:
Trying to keep your your head head on your shoulders. Yeah. There were 19 men from Claremont who were killed. Okay. Half were by disease. Yeah. I'm I got that wrong. That '19 was a different war. I think it was 47.
[00:46:03] Unknown:
Yeah. It's actually 47. I'm sorry if you mentioned this before. How many
[00:46:07] Unknown:
people from Claremont were actually involved in World War one? That's very difficult to judge. The records still aren't good, and I've I've spent some time in it. I think probably a couple thousand. Okay. During the civil war, there were between four and five thousand from Claremont. Okay. Our population was roughly the same, believe it or not, in 1918 as it was in the civil war, and it was about 35,000.
[00:46:28] Unknown:
Really? Okay. That's interesting. It's about the same. Yeah. I
[00:46:32] Unknown:
I really haven't discovered the reasons for that, except I know that many of the the African Americans who were living there left after the after the civil war was over. His father lived here at that time. Forty six were dead from Clermont County, including Lucy Jennings, a nurse from New Richmond who died at, Camp Sherman, from the virus, from the flu. Mhmm. Archie Boyce, we mentioned already, he's from Bethel. He was in the rainbow division. He's buried at Muse Arms Cemetery along with 20 214,000 other soldiers. Okay. It's a huge cemetery, if you can imagine. I got one more story of death. Mhmm. It's an interesting one.
It was a real mystery for me to deal with. I do oral history as well as more traditional history, and I always enjoy the oral history talking to people and trying to put together their stories Mhmm. And then deconstruct them Yeah. And take it phrase by phrase and try to figure out what was what was true, what wasn't true Yeah. And then put it back together again once it once I try to put it together from my perspective. Well, I was talking to a guy who told me, asked me if I knew the story of Roy Lee Hastings, which I did not.
And he said that, the story was that Hastings was killed in World War one. He was vaporized basically by an artillery shell, which those things happen with more than one. There's a cross from a from the Croswell family was killed, the same manner, and he says he's got a gravestone, but no body there. Yeah. And so, but they had no body there. They wanted to convince the mother that the boy was in the in the box. Yeah. And so they filled sandbags and put them in the box. And then, she of course, it was they didn't get the body from France until 1921. So it was three years afterwards. You're not gonna have an open casket Yeah. In that situation. So they were able to get away with it and bury it. Yeah.
I found the grave, in the in the cemetery. But I thought that the story had some flaws just from what I was feeling. Yeah. Imagine you get a sense of that doing Yeah. As you do enough of this, you know, you get that feeling. But one of the things that was interesting that brought me to the partially to the attention, there was a story and it was also I got contacted from France,
[00:48:57] Unknown:
about, Somebody from France actually got in touch with you. Yeah.
[00:49:01] Unknown:
That's one of those interesting things. I have history buddies from France, Vietnam
[00:49:07] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:49:08] Unknown:
Netherlands. That's really cool. And so we talk every once in a while about different things. But anyway, the story was that, they had buried this guy Mhmm. In, the cemetery that that was there. That was later overrun in World War two and defaced by the Germans. And so this little French community was trying to reconstruct the the gray the cemetery, that had Americans buried in it, and they wanted me to come over and speak. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the time to get together to do it. Yeah. But it made no sense to me if there was an empty box. So if there was the guy, there was nothing left, to be put in the box.
Why would they take up the valuable space Yeah. For an empty box? Yeah. And that's what the first under flyings that I was looking at. I did find information about their early lives, and they lived in Neville and Aberdeen, and his dad worked on a farm. And, it didn't seem that, Roy went to school, but he could read and write. Mhmm. He enlisted in the army in July 1917, and then went to, train in, various parts of the various parts of the American South. And he, was put in an infantry company. Private Hastings was killed in action on 09/29/1918. This was in the area known as Alsace Lorraine. Mhmm. A French and German background.
That much is certain. What's less certain is how he was killed and what happened to his remains. So I in the book, I tell the story, but I've mentioned about the the idea of the empty box. Regiments official history list Hastings as, one of its 42 members who were killed in action. The author described the events of the early morning of September 29. A raid of a 102 men upon German lines was scheduled to, quote, go over the top at 04:30AM. The allied artillery barrage that began, as you were talking about, before the raid, drew an intense counter barrage by the family.
So heavy was the fire, that, that the greater part of the Raiders were unable to penetrate their objective. Of the 102 man raiding party, forty six became casualties. Eight men were killed, quote, instantly, and three more died of their wounds. So, he was originally buried at the military cemetery in France. As as I mentioned, his remains were transferred to Neville where he was living at the time. And then, there was a letter that was written to his brother. Private Hastings was a volunteer, and this is from the army. I knew him as a member of the company m and consider him an excellent soldier. He was president in the dugout before the raid and was jolly in good mood. He is always, wanting to go out with scouting parties.
So we went over the top at 04:30. We're within yard 10 yards of the enemy guns, and we all tried to get in the shell holes. I did not see Hastings after we got into no man's land, which is between the trenches. And then he found him. I carried his body thirty minutes later when I recognized him. So you got an eyewitness that claims they saw him, and I thought that was pretty telling Yeah. Kinda story. But, it was an interesting, aftermath Yeah. Of the war as people were trying to cope with various aspects of it.
[00:52:34] Unknown:
So can you talk about if you're a, a young man from Clermont County and you're either a draft or a volunteer, what what's where do you start this journey? I mean, where where were they training, and then where do they typically ship
[00:52:49] Unknown:
to? Well, there's nothing typical. Yeah. I think it varies. Fair enough. They still had a tendency in those days to raise men as a as a group from one community. Mhmm. With Vietnam and World War two, they decided not to do that any longer because, it had a tendency to one bomb went off in a bad place. You Yeah. Dozens and dozens of casualties. There's all your young men from Claire Monck. Yeah. So they don't do that anymore. Yeah. One of the areas that they thought was should be used as a training training center would be at the armory in Batavia.
Okay. Though they didn't use it. And it was kinda surprising why they nobody really knew why they didn't since it was a much better facility than where the men originally went to. They went to Camp Campbell Okay. Which is on the Fairgrounds Of George Brown County. Mhmm. So they went to the Fairgrounds Of Brown County, and they slept in the pig barns. Really? Yeah. And people were asking, why in the world are you doing this? This is Ohio National Guard unit. Why in the world are you doing that when you got this modern facility in Batavia that has electricity and water? Yeah. And and, you know, it's a good place to stay. But that's not the way they do things.
There were eight men who were chosen randomly from that facility at that camp when they were there, to be in the rainbow division. Okay. Which is a division that earlier. Yeah. The Rainbow Division, again, that they give the the term rainbow means that they took people from every Okay. Every state, and put them together into one division, which was, the division that Douglas MacArthur served in during World War one. Okay. Douglas MacArthur was the highest, meddled, officer. Got most of the high awards, in World War one. Although, he had, like, eight silver stars. Really? Yeah. I didn't know that about him. And he didn't, but he didn't, get the the medal of honor until World War two. Yeah.
[00:54:46] Unknown:
Because that's what he's most famous for, I suppose, is is involvement in World War two and Yeah. Probably a little bit after World War two when he started,
[00:54:54] Unknown:
I think, making people a little grumpy. Yeah. He's he's he's an interesting guy, and there's a lot of good things to say about him and some bad things that sometimes gets overlooked. Yeah. So from there, the different points, that people would go, to do the more their training. One of the places was at, Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama. Okay. That was the home of the many of the Ohio National Guard, and they formed a division of Ohio National Guardsmen, the thirty seventh division called the Buckeye Division. So they a lot of Ohioans were at that place.
One of the largest camps in The United States was at Camp Sherman in Chillicothe. Okay. But in general, the men received pretty poor training. Mhmm. They did not impress the men from France and as they were hoping that they would get these new guys. Again, gunfighter. But they didn't think that about the marines. They they respected the marines. And the marines were very selective in who they chose, and they spent a lot of times, they still do, firing the weapons with marksmanship. And the Germans could not believe how good they shot. And that's, where they got the name Devil Dogs. Okay. It was from the Germans during the big battle of Meuse Argonne. So the the unlike this, there was a little bit more, I don't you would call, regularity or common, aspects of the training, in World War one as opposed to civil war. Mhmm.
This is one of the buildings
[00:56:26] Unknown:
in in Belgium Okay. That these guys saw and were so impressed with that. It looked like a big cathedral. Could you imagine you're you just especially in the early nineteenth century, I imagine this place was very rural. Yes. And, you know, you you're suddenly swept off to Europe and you see these. Cincinnati would be a a major show shock for some of them. You know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's what that's
[00:56:48] Unknown:
Here's a picture of some of the Camp Sheridan guys from Ohio. Yeah. There's another picture of of that. Camp Sheridan also had tents. We laid look at all those tents out there. Yeah. It's amazing in in the numbers. Well, it's also interesting to think about
[00:57:05] Unknown:
because World War one, they they were still using horses. I mean, you hear about the beginnings of the war, about how, you know, the French and the Germans, you know, they go out in this, like, bright colored uniforms, and it's, you know, it's almost like they're in the Napoleonic wars still. Yep. They are. Some of them, that's the way it
[00:57:21] Unknown:
wasn't. This is the only known photograph of company m that I'm aware of, the one that's, the Ohio National Guard trained in, Brown County.
[00:57:30] Unknown:
At Camp Campbell Brown County Fairgrounds. That's crazy that they stuck them in
[00:57:35] Unknown:
just right in the fairgrounds and started training them up. Well, they had they had at least ground that was that could be trained, but Yeah. The facilities were not exactly great. Yeah. One of the this Belgian this photograph that I showed you once before, this is one of several of, postcards that a man from Milford, Howard Davidson, collected. He was a, ambulance driver, so he traveled all over the country Mhmm. And collected over a 100 of these, like, postcards. So I've included some shots in here to give some, feel for what these guys were seeing. He donated his family donated his complete uniform, including boots, putets, hats, gas mask, and everything to them. And then included in that was a the postcards and the, the diary, which I transcribed in the into the book. That's that's crazy.
[00:58:27] Unknown:
So what when these guys got back, what what did they do? I mean, did they just start families? Or
[00:58:35] Unknown:
Yeah. Pretty much. Go go back to work. Someone went back back to the farm. You know? They left the farm a year ago. I looked at the discharge papers that were left with the county auditor, after the war. So guys would come in the final paperwork, and they had a survey and different things. So I was reading through that and keeping track of all the various occupations. And, there were some occupations there that, were a little unusual. I didn't think of a car mechanic. Well, you know, 1919. Yeah. I mean, started having cars. Yeah.
[00:59:07] Unknown:
Growth industry. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:59:10] Unknown:
They had that. And as I mentioned, farms, selling insurance. Yeah. So they're they were definitely working towards the twentieth century economy, as they were developing it. But the they had an Armistice Day commemoration every year. Mhmm. And the first one I I found in newspaper article that I included in here, and they would get together and they drive their machines, which they call cars. Yeah. And they just traveled around the county blowing horns and people shouting and cheering and and happiness that the war was over. I then came across an article on the paper, and I never was able to find a follow-up on it, that they dedicated in a World War one memorial, in Batavia on the courthouse grounds.
And it looked like they had captured was composed of was capturing German, cannons. Okay. And they pulled them together with with, chains, but I never saw another mention of it. I looked all through the newspapers I could find. Nobody in in Batavia ever heard of it before. Yeah. It's obviously there. Yeah. It was just gone, but, people used to sell commemorate Armistice Day. Because it that was Memorial Day. Well Was originally Armistice Day? No. Veterans Day. Veterans Day. I'm sorry. Yeah. Veterans Day, kind of, in my my opinion, put World War one behind because Yeah. It was for all men who serve all men and women who served as Veterans Day, and they don't remember the armistice Yeah.
The way they do that.
[01:00:40] Unknown:
So did any of these guys serve in World War two?
[01:00:45] Unknown:
I'm sure. Yes. Some did. Oh, one of the it's not World War not World War one, but World War two. After the war was over in World War two and Korea broke out, the government drafted some members of World War two, and they were not very happy because they had started the family, their career. And one of them was Ted Williams, a ball player. Oh, really? Yeah. Ted Williams was, trained as a, jet pilot. Yeah. Panther, which is one of the worst of the they could barely get up in the air. And a guy told me a story that his brother he swore his brother, Saul. They were his brother was a pilot. And so he was in the area when, that incident happened. The incident with Ted Williams is he had kind of a a crash landing Yeah. As as, landing wheels wouldn't go down. And so he's bumped his on the belly of his plane Yeah. Down the and then when he got out, it caught fire.
So Williams went into the mess hall, and somebody yelled at him, hey, Williams. He buzzed his hands up. Safe. And, Williams was not amused.
[01:01:57] Unknown:
Safe. Well, it's probably a a good transition to the other war that you don't hear a lot about is Korea. Mhmm. You mind talking about that and the role Claremont played in the Korean War? Sure.
[01:02:13] Unknown:
There's so much about Korea that is unknown. So much to me, I think, is fascinating. And the the fact that they got very little credit or even knowledge of what they did is, beyond me. I don't understand it. Well, can you set the context for the war too? Yeah. The war started in 06/25/1950 when the North Koreans crashed across the 30. Mhmm. There were American troops that were in the area, but not very many. Not enough to stop a 135,000 with tanks and, coming across Russian two seventy four 74 tanks. And, so they were the Americans were thrown. What are we going to do? Mhmm.
Truman was awakened early, and they decided they were gonna have to stop him. Where are the troops gonna come from? Well, they came from Japan. Mhmm. The Japanese the American eighth army defeated the Japanese in World War two and was highly respected for what they were able to do. But this was not the same army, that they saw in World War two. Yeah. These guys are basically flabby. Mhmm. Their training was not very good. The officer corps was too old and hidebound. Mhmm. And they were just not ready. Even though it's been just five years, Americans were not prepared for the war. In addition, they reduced the American, military, from 12 by 92% Yeah. In World War two. They slashed the government the defense budget down to the bone Mhmm.
Air force, the new branch. Yeah. Because it was felt that we've got nuclear weapons. Nobody's gonna be naive enough to do that because we'll just drop Obama. Yeah.
[01:03:52] Unknown:
Not this time did did Russia have the bomb? Within where they This is 1959. Yeah. There is around this time. Yeah.
[01:04:00] Unknown:
So they decided to send a task force of about 400 men and figured that could take care of it. They'll just run when they see us. Yeah. And it was a disaster. Yeah. Our rifle, muzzle or rifle barrels were pitted, and they couldn't shoot straight. Yeah. Ammunition blew up in our guy's face. The bazooka shells that were designed to take out a tent tank just bounced off. They didn't have radios between the men and the pilots to help with the ground support, and so there was a lot of unnecessary friendly fire casualties. And we got a rear end kit. Yeah. And, we we put more men in, and then we tried to tried to plug the hole.
One of the guys I interviewed in the book, was a friend of mine, Lou Leslie, was in the twenty seventh infantry. They call it the tip of the spear or the fire brigade. And he was just he said, Gary, to this day, I can't tell you where I was because we were traveling around by night, and these trucks are waiting to stop the North Koreans. And the next time they come in, and he said it was just chaos. Well, they won the presidential unit citation twice, which is unheard of, and he was in the middle of that. He tells a funny story about when the war started. He was up near Fujiyama, Mount Fuji Mhmm. Training, for a little bit.
And, they got word out that orders were in that they were to drop everything but their backpack and their ammunition and and gun and get on the train and go back to Tokyo. So he said they were driving. He was in this train going through, Central Japan, and he saw a bunch of Japanese people running all around, scatter, scatter. He rolled down the window of the train, and he said, what's going on? And he said they said, war. War. And so where's the war? In Korea. Korea. He said he turned to his friends and says, where the hell is Korea? Where is Korea? And that was the attitude of most Americans. They didn't know what it was. But there for a while, it was a it was a touch and go situation where, American troops were being pushed down the peninsula the Korean Peninsula, and it looked like there was gonna be another Dunkirk style. Yeah.
[01:06:04] Unknown:
And Dunkirk was that famous where the Germans pushed the British to the sea. Right. And they escaped about 300,000
[01:06:09] Unknown:
men on the boats and saved them. Which is also another good movie. Yes. It was. I've enjoyed that. So it was it was pretty bad like that, until they finally stabilized things. And then MacArthur came in with his operation chromite at in Chon and put them in a pension movement. The eighth army pushed them out, and then they moved moved them back up to a 30 Eighth parallel. And then they decided, we got the North Koreans on the run. We just don't wanna hold the line. We wanna push them back. And so let's go take North Korea. Yeah. So they went into North Korea, and there was the further in the north, they moved, and, there was a lot of mistakes. I won't go into all the details on the mistakes that the that MacArthur and his men made.
There was a lot of reports coming in from the field saying we Chinese are here. Mhmm. And MacArthur wouldn't believe it. Yeah. Choe Enlai, the bread the Chinese prime minister premier talked to somebody and said, you know, leave now before we come in. The other, diplomats were mourning them the same thing. And the evidence was very clear that they were coming. Mhmm. And, MacArthur just wouldn't believe it. And he he still had this idea that Asians were inferior, that they couldn't mess around Americans. So right it's a couple days before Thanksgiving, and the Americans decided every soldier in Korea was going to get a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings and and flying them out in the helicopter to make sure they got them.
Well and the man from right before then, the the weather the temperatures dropped, down to sometimes forty, fifty degrees below zero. Really? A 20 mile an hour headwind coming in from Siberia and about 18 inches of snow. And so one night, they heard this horrible sound coming out, horns and bells and screams and everything. And out of the snow flurries came the, you know, the Chinese. Yeah. And it was all it was in the beginning days again. People were mushing down Yeah. Pushed off. It looked like the marines were going to be captured, and they were moving in the different direction towards, Port City that they could leave.
And, one of the newspapers before says, this is not, marines. Marines never retreat. Mhmm. He says, retreat hell. We're fighting in a different direction. We're fighting in a different direction. And they got most of the people back plus about a 100,000 Korean refugees Really? That that got on this boat and it there were this incredible numbers of people crammed into these boats to get them to save them. And there was 11,000 on one ship called the SS Victory. It was a cargo ship. And people were packed in so tightly that they couldn't sit. There was no way to go to the Houston restaurant. Yeah. And so in the morning when they woke up, when the guys opened up the the cargo doors, it was just an incredible mess. Yeah. It was on Christmas day.
And so they called it a Christmas victory, and there were seven or eight, children who were born during that Really? Travel. Yeah. That's wild to think that,
[01:09:24] Unknown:
man, to have a kid in that kinda
[01:09:26] Unknown:
condition would be Yeah. It just that's unspeakable. You can't imagine it. So, they stopped him again, and we got a new, commanding general, who was a real go getter, hard charging, individual. I think one of the most underrated soldiers in American history. He was wore a couple of hand grenades on his chest. Yeah. They called him iron old iron tits. And he, just really over, overwhelmed, the Chinese and the North Koreans with what he was doing. And, unfortunately, I've had a a brain stem, and I forgot the guy's name. But he was, he was Matthew Ray Ridgeway. That's a Ridgeway.
He was an airborne commander in World War two, and just really went all out to and stop them. And then they went into a stalemate that became the war became like, trench warfare of World War one. Mhmm. Unlike, some places, you know, they they lived in bunkers. Mhmm. My my dad was in the war. He was during this period of time, the second period of time. Instead of massive numbers of men and machines rumbling up and down the countryside, they had small units. And they go out eight and ten units at a time. Eight and ten men at a time Mhmm. In the middle of the night. No GPS.
The compass and sometimes a map that might be able to be read, in the in the moonlight. You didn't wanna get your light out too much because he identified your position. He was out one night on one of those kind of patrols. He was walking point, which is the head of the column. Of the column. He had his Thompson machine gun. He got a Thompson machine gun from a French soldier that he that liked him. Mhmm. The French were even though they were fighting in, in Vietnam at the point, they, had a company of, French foreign legion attached to the regiment that my dad was in. Okay. And so he made friends with him, and they gave him this machine gun. Mhmm. The Thompson machine gun like the like the gangsters used to use. Gun. Yeah. Yeah. And so we were walking along this outcropping of, boulders and things like that, and he felt a push.
And he he said, what the hell? How did I go down? Well, immediately, the North Koreans are the enemy. They didn't know who they were at that time, opened up fire. And, they scooted out of there, obviously. And there was no moonlight or anything shining it. And so when they got back in the morning back to their lines, I said, where's Bradley? They didn't know where Bradley was. Yeah. And they said, we've got it. We can't leave him out there. He never came back. Nobody ever saw him again. So my dad went out because he was close friends with Bradley, and several other guys. And they looked up and they saw Bradley stretched out like he's on a cross. Mhmm.
And they didn't know at that time whether it was North Koreans or the Chinese. The North Koreans had tendency to booby trap American bodies. Mhmm. And so they had to go up and look to make sure, and they tie some camo wire around his legs Mhmm. And pulled him down, and he didn't explode. So it was obviously Chinese they had fought. Yeah. But my my father believes, believed up to the day he died that Paul Bradley saved his life. Yeah. It was Bradley who pushed him down and took the bullet for him. Yeah. So that that was the the second phase of the war was these small units. And you have places like, Pork Chop Hill and, Heartbreak Ridge and those names that you associate more with it. Mhmm. Turwon Valley, those places.
[01:13:05] Unknown:
I'd I'd to be honest with you, I just don't know much about the Korean War because it's Nobody does. I mean, it's in high school, you you learn about civil war, World War two, Vietnam, and then
[01:13:17] Unknown:
that's pretty much it. It's like a Korea has forgotten. Paragraph. It's Korea has just jumped over. Why do you think that is? I don't know. I've made it a mission of mine because of the my my dad's connection, and I knew a number of these guys I interviewed with. As I mentioned, they were friends of my fa friends of my my friends, my fathers of my friends. And I I still don't know. It could be because we were the way we treated our soldiers in the beginning especially was shameful. Yeah. Not preparing them to go out to war. And that's something that The United States, unfortunately, hasn't learned the lesson. World War one, World War two Yeah. We were unprepared. And I think today, they cannot, in any way, trust that, we would be able to survive the sneak sneak attack like was done before because things are much quicker. The oceans aren't providing the moat to keep people out. Yeah. And so if we don't keep ourselves prepared one of these days, it's gonna really sting. Yeah.
But I don't know why the rest of it as I said, there's there's plenty of interesting stuff,
[01:14:20] Unknown:
about the war that I think people would would like to to know about. Yeah. And I don't know. What what's one of the things you find most interesting about? I mean, obviously, you have the connection with your father, but what are some of the other things that really draw you to it?
[01:14:33] Unknown:
The POWs. Okay. The situation where they're brainwashed. The fact that there's nearly 8,000 Americans' bodies still in Korean soil. See, I didn't know that either. They they were brainwashing
[01:14:44] Unknown:
American Yes. How How did they do
[01:14:47] Unknown:
that? Reeducation. Okay. Except the same things that the Viet Vietnamese were using against,
[01:14:53] Unknown:
their political prisoners. So these guys would literally be brainwashed and, like,
[01:14:58] Unknown:
come back as, I don't know, communist. It didn't really it really didn't work very well. Okay. It worked some. There were several of them that, defected and went to North Of Korea lived in North Korea. That that interested me in how they went about doing that in the lives of the guys is gruesome. There's a a man from, Batavia whose father was a POW and said that he would the son would say, I'm starving. And dad would get upset with him and say, you don't know what starving is, son. Yeah. And then he'd tell him again, well, you know, this is what I had to eat when I was there. But, and then when Trump first went over to Korea in his first administration, the Koreans gave 50 bodies back Yeah. Remains of 50 bodies Yeah.
As a leverage. So it's being used as a leverage. To this day. Still. Yeah. Yeah. There was one guy from Claremont. I don't know if you wanna know the story about his being Yeah. Missing in action and presume as POW. James Pates Okay. From Loveland, was a Loveland High School graduate. I was really getting into swimming, and they thought he was Olympic hopeful for 1,500 meters, which is a heck of a swim. Yeah. He was in the he was in the they call it the chicks, the regiment. And, he was there in the very early days when we were very outnumbered, and, his position was easily overrun, because there's just not enough men to fight the the numbers of Koreans that were coming down. And he his whereabouts were unknown for a while. And when The US took up took back, Seoul, the capital, they went to a girls' school, and they found a blackboard with names up on there. They they believe that the Koreans are keeping track and keeping score of who the guys were that they had, and one of them was paid. Okay.
What happened to him? What his beliefs happened to him was that, he was put on a train to go north to the Korean war camps, POW camps. And, it was strafed by American Oh, really? Fighters who did not know that that was full of POWs. Yeah. So they pulled into a tunnel. The train did waited for the American pilots to to leave. I think they were probably Corsairs that were fighting. Fifteen minutes? So, they put the guy they put all the guys told them all to get off the train because they were gonna feed them. They gave them their old rice bowls and stuff. And after they got them off the train, they started massacring the machine guns. Yeah.
And, then they they took off and they left the bodies there, for Americans to find. Americans found the the bodies. They took them to a cemetery in North Korea and buried them. Okay. And that is where it is believed that mister Pate says to to this day. To this day in North Korea. Yeah. Wow.
[01:18:09] Unknown:
I I knew none of that. Are there are there any other Claremont County
[01:18:15] Unknown:
men that just never came back? Yeah. Yeah. There was one from Batavia. Erlanger Erlanger. This is a photograph of the guy who was at POW camp. Okay. But you can just see his eyes. Yeah. This is a picture of that guy or gang.
[01:18:40] Unknown:
So how many, not just from Clermont County, but
[01:18:43] Unknown:
It's our gang. And he's just He's just missing. He he was out on patrol. They were fighting the Chinese, and they they they came back to look for him, and there's nothing. Nothing. I don't know whether he was a p o w p o w, but he's probably killed.
[01:18:58] Unknown:
Is that a particular issue with the Korean War and and Vietnam War that all these POW MIA guys are just unaccounted for?
[01:19:09] Unknown:
Most of the Vietnam are accounted for or have changed their status. There was one guy from Claremont County. His name is Robert Gumbert, who was out on patrol in a little village called Duque Pho. And, he crossed into a over hedgerow, and it is a huge explosion. Mhmm. One of his friends was looking back, and this is what I I was able to talk to these guys, and it was really interesting to still have them alive and willing to discuss their situations. He said he was just he turned around when the explosion looked, and he looked back and Dumbert wasn't there. Just He just disappeared.
[01:19:45] Unknown:
Yeah.
[01:19:46] Unknown:
But he said that, there was a bunch of paper that was up in the air, and it looked like snowflakes coming down. And so probably the letters from his girlfriend Yeah. That he kept in his mucksack. For a long time, his, status was unclear, And his father was very upset because they first, they called him MIA, and he said, well, it's not MIA. Then they went to MIA BNR, which is body not recovered. Mhmm. And after about fifteen or twenty years of fighting with the Department of the Army, they decided to declare declare him killed in action. So a couple years ago, they had a ceremony in Arlington Okay. And erected a stone.
One of the two the differences, between, recovery of, of, Vietnam veterans versus recovery of Korean is that we are on fairly decent terms with Vietnam. And that was one of the Yeah. One of the negotiating points to normalize relationship was to give us that opportunity. The other thing is the, the bones, the remains will not last as long in Korea and Vietnam as they do in Korea. Yeah. Because Korea is much milder climate, right, than I mean, it's It's mild above 40 below zero. But Well, yeah. I mean And the soil the soils aren't as active with my microbes, and so they Yeah. They feel like the the bones have been consumed. Yeah.
[01:21:07] Unknown:
Well, I've we've got fifteen minutes. So I'm yeah. I think I'm gonna call this a successful, hopefully, just first podcast because I'd love to have you on again. But before we go, why don't you tell everybody where they can get your books and and, I guess, how to interact with you? Or Yeah. Plug plug away. Yeah. Thanks. I appreciate that.
[01:21:31] Unknown:
My book books are with me now. Okay. I still have a publisher, but most of them are have passed through the publication stages. I have them, and they I I give 10 to 15, maybe 20 speeches a year. Okay. And I always bring the book. So if you see me somewhere, speaking engagement, that's usually we'll have the books available. I'm working on my new book. Oh, what are you writing? It's a history of Camp Denison, a civil war camp. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Over in Camp Denison, at Hamilton County, right on the banks of Little Miami River, it acted as a major training facility, hospital, and discharge center for the Union Army during from '61 to '65.
And I've been involved in researching this for over twenty years. Okay. I now have a friend who's gonna help me with some illustrations and will be well illustrated, talking about much of what happened at the camp, its contact with Morgan's raid. Okay. And, some of the the second, integral part of the book is looking at the lives of the men that I could detect who were from Camp Dennis. And what did they do in the war? Yeah. What impact did these guys have on the major battles? And we think my estimates is there are probably over a 100,000 or more men.
We had a 2,300 bed hospital that was there. And, I was doing some research some time ago. I was at the National Archives. And I went to the hospital records, and they had patient books. Okay. And they were tied with a ribbon. Those patient books hadn't been opened since the end of the civil war, I'm sure. So I very carefully took a call. So they were, like, patient books from the civil war? Yeah. From the hospital at Camp Denison. That's crazy. And they were talking on the the guy's name, his regiment, what he was there for, gunshot wound. Yeah. He had disease, smallpox, venereal diseases, whatever it was, he had them all listed down there.
It was very interesting. That's crazy.
[01:23:31] Unknown:
So where, where will you be speaking next?
[01:23:35] Unknown:
At Camp Denison. Okay. It's before the sons and union veterans, and that's in July. Okay. Sons and daughters of union veterans. And then I have a my next presentation is the third Saturday, of August, and that's at the, Claremont County Historical Society. And the topic will be the the Korean War.
[01:23:58] Unknown:
Awesome. And I'm sorry. What which historical society? Claremont. It's at the it's Claremont the Potavia Branch Library. Okay. And we'll say one other thing before I know we're getting run out of it. I guess what we should just say for everybody who's listening, we're at the library, and it's about to close. So The,
[01:24:13] Unknown:
I worked with, my father and several others, and we developed my dad's project primarily. We developed a Korean War Memorial. Okay. That's in, Miami Woods. Miami you know, one of the one of the campy, parks in Miami Township, Miami Woods. It's called the Spirit Of 76 Park. Okay. And it is really something to see, and I'm I have, some, some photographs to present to them, to share with the the, people there that they, what was what went on with that memorial. Okay. Excellent.
[01:24:48] Unknown:
Well, thank you so much. And like I said, if you're up for it, I think I'd love to do another one of these because we didn't even talk about Grant or the Civil War or anything like that. So Yeah. I that'd be fun. I I
[01:25:01] Unknown:
was a co chair of the grant, celebration for the bicentennial. And, went to the point where I, spoke for the continuing legal education with the topic Grant as our first civil rights president. And I'd love to talk about that because
[01:25:18] Unknown:
Greg mentioned that in passing. And I after talking with Greg, I really had a different view of Grant. I mean, I I knew it was kind of overblown, that whole drunkard butcher thing. But
[01:25:30] Unknown:
I I don't think enough people think of him as the first civil rights president. No. I don't. Very few think of him as well. Yeah. That one was almost all legal, discussion. I I most of the time, I do not go into the dry legal stuff, more the interesting stuff, God.
[01:25:45] Unknown:
Well, I I don't know. I find dry legal stuff interesting from time to time. But, anyway, thank you so much.
[01:25:52] Unknown:
Thank you, miss. And I appreciate it. Thank you. At some point, we wanna talk about one of my the most well attended
[01:26:01] Unknown:
lectures that I give as on true crime in Claremont. That's the other thing. I've we talked about, like, a a fraction of the thing, a wealth of knowledge. So I'm definitely gonna be bugging you again to do this. Well, thanks. Thank you. Good talking to you. It's good talking to you. Thanks again to Gary for sitting down with me. Love the love the interview, and we're we're gonna have him back on again, obviously. Like I said in the introduction to talk about some true crime. So with that, let's talk about some events going on around the county. First up, we have the sweetheart stroll on July 18 at 08:30PM at Clingman Park.
Like all the other sweetheart strolls, you go to Clingman, you get yourself an antique style lantern and a map, and then you just get to have a nice walk through through the trails. Great for couples, quiet family walks or if you just wanna get out and walk around the woods with a lantern, you can do that too. And it is completely free. Next up, we have Hoots and Hops on July 18 from 6PM to 10PM at the Cincinnati Nature Center. And as the title would suggest, this is, hops being, you know, beer. This isn't a kid friendly event, but there there will be, four beer sample stations, and your ticket includes one pour from each.
There'll be some food trucks, there'll be some acoustic music, and a meet the owl encounter so you can drink some beer and meet an owl, which, actually sounds pretty cool. All proceeds are gonna go to support wildlife rehab programs. Tickets are $50 and it is advanced only. So go to the Cincinnati Nature Center to get your ticket because you can't get them there. Union Township Summer Concert, Michelle Robinson Band, July 18, seven to 9PM at the Union Township Civic Center Amphitheater. This is part of their free summer concert series. Obviously, the Michelle Robinson band is gonna be performing.
And there's also at 4PM, there'll be a farmer's market and food truck and food trucks. So get there a little early, get yourself some food, check out the farmer's market, and then enjoy the concert. Next up is the annual butterfly count, July 19, 9AM to noon. It'll start at Shore Park, and then it'll go to Sycamore And Clingman Parks. And what'll happen is, is you'll get yourself an ID sheet and then you'll split into some teams and you'll just log species butterfly species for the North American Butterfly Association. And there'll be a wrap up and some popsicles afterwards and which sounds pretty great. Who doesn't love a popsicle?
I tell you bring some water and a sun hat because it's July in Ohio, so it's gonna be pretty hot, I imagine, and it is free. And I I I will be there. I went to the information center, session rather with my daughter. I think it was last week. We learned about all the different butterfly species. We went out and looked for some butterflies towards the end of it, and so we'll be there as long as she can handle it. I don't know if we'll make it till noon, but, so come on out and you can meet me and my daughter, Olive. Miami township concert with Andy Rush, July 19, 6PM to 8PM at Miami Riverview Park.
Local loop artist, Andy Rush, and he layers jazz guitar, pop vocals, and beatbox rhythms into a full band sound, which sounds pretty interesting if you ask me. There'll be some food trucks. They tell you to bring lawn chairs unless for some reason you like standing and it is free. This yeah. It's this weekend, Clermont County Fair. July 20 is when it starts. 9AM at the fairgrounds, at Fremont County Fairgrounds. And I think everybody's pretty familiar with what the county fair is, but that should be really fun. I I love county fairs. Night out, night out at the park, starry night, July 22, 07:30 to 09:30PM at Clingman Park. The Dreamweaver storytelling troupe will be there and obviously telling stories. There'll also be some nature activities, and that's pretty much it. If you wanna go hear some stories at night and, do some nature activities.
You do need to register and you need to register through the Clermont County Public Library, so that is not through the Parks Department. Christmas in July at East Fork. It's gonna be July, 9AM to 9PM at the campground shelter of East Fork State Park. It's a summer celebration, for campers and visitors at, East Forks Campground. Some of the activities are gonna be campsite decorating contest, holiday themed games, and just in general, some family fun and a playful nod to Christmas spirit. And I think that's great. I always get a little I always miss Christmas about this time of year and start really looking forward to it. So I think Christmas in July is a fun thing to do. If you're a registered camper, there's no charge.
Day visitors, you should check, check East Fork State Park for for participation details. Creek days at the park, July 25, 1PM to 3PM at Sycamore Park. This is gonna be a naturalist led kids and adult, creek play session. You'll discover some aquatic creatures. I imagine we'll talk about some fossils. So if you and your kids wanna go stomp around the creek and learn about, what's in creeks, we'll check that out. Another Union Township summer concert. This is gonna be with Tom the Torpedoes, and they're a Tom Petty tribute band. It's on July 25, seven to 9PM at the Union Township Civic Center Amphitheater. And again, this is part of their, free summer concert series.
You get to hear Tom the torpedoes. And, again, at 4PM, there will be a farmer's market and food trucks. So get there a little early, get yourself something to eat, browse around the farmer's market, and then listen to the concert. I man, I really wanna try to go to this one. Madcap Puppets, Monsters of Baseball, July 26, 10AM, at the Union Town excuse me. The Union Township Amphitheatre. Giant puppets, and I don't know how giant. I'm I really hope it's like big bird giant, but that that would be kind of crazy. But giant puppets bring the history and tradition of baseball alive through songs and stories. So if you're, a history a fan of baseball history or wanna learn more about baseball history and wanna hear it from giant monster puppets, I that that's that's the ticket.
Next up, we have foraged tea time and hike summer sun tea on July 26, 11AM to noon at Clingman Park. You go there and some naturalists will help you identify some native plants that you can brew into a sun tea. It is free, but you do need to pre register. East Fork State Park Trail Run, part of the dirt day series, July 27 at 08:30AM, the South Beach Beach area of East Fork State Park. You can do either a 5.6 mile or a 10.8 mile, wooded trail race. All experience levels are welcome. There is an early start option at 8AM if you wanna get out there a little earlier, and it does cost $22.50 to register.
Let's see. Next up, America two fifty, the Bethel Mural Ribbon Cutting on July 30 from 2PM to 3PM. And it's just gonna be a ceremony to unveil the United in Service Mural, commemorating the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the United States. It's open to the public and, obviously, there'll be a ribbon cutting, some brief remarks, and then just a general celebration of local art and history. And the last thing we have is Heritage Crafts Sun Printing, August 2. There'll be two sessions, one at 1PM and one at 3PM, and this is gonna be at Clingman Park. And you get to create your own cyanotype prints.
I'm not really sure what cyanotype is, why I guess it's printing things with the power of sunlight. But it's a workshop and a naturalist artist is gonna show you how you arranged forage leaves and objects, on special light sensitive paper, on a tote bag and then you expose them to some sun and you get beautiful blue and white prints. You also get to take home your one of a kind, printed tote bag. You do have to register and you can only register for one of the two events and, all ages are welcome. So that's all we have for events and that will lead us into our value for value pitch. We are a value for value podcast. That means if you find value in what we're doing, all we ask is that you send a little value back in the form of time, talent, or treasure. You can, connect with us on Facebook, Let's Talk Claremont podcast, Instagram at Let's Talk Claremont.
You can sign up for our newsletter on our website, let'stalkclaremont.com, and you can always email us info@let'stalkclaremont.com. And, I wanna hear from you. I wanna I wanna know who you want, me to talk to and what kind of news you want us to talk about. Let me know. And this is we really want, you know, to to be a community effort here. So and I'm one guy, you know, I can't I can't find all the news and all the people. So if you know somebody that we should be talking to or you know something we should be talking about, get in touch. And we are going to sign off with our oliveism and I think I need to find a better name for that. I don't know. Oliveism is not quite rolling off the tongue. I'll have to think about that. But for this one, it was the other day and her and my wife went to the grocery store and she insisted on wearing, quite frankly, a ridiculous dress. It's like this this black puffy I mean, it would be more better suited for a wedding or, some kind of party than it would be the grocery store. She insisted, and so they went in that dress. When they came back, she came bounding into the door.
And before she said anything, she said, dad, I gotta change my dress. It's all wet from ice cream and blood. I was kind of shocked. I had no idea what they were doing or what what possible activity would get you covered in ice cream and blood, but it turns out she just picked a little scab on her leg or something like that. It wasn't like she was covered in blood, and she was fine. But, initially, it was quite a shocking statement. So that's all we got. I really appreciate you listening and we will see you next time.
Introduction and Episode Overview
Clermont County Housing Study
Value for Value Model Explained
Interview with Gary Nepp: Local Historian
World War I: Clermont County's Contribution
The Korean War: Forgotten Heroes
Upcoming Events in Clermont County
