By Dan Rosenberg
After writing this column for over twelve years, I thought I’d try something a little different for inspiration. I did a simple search on the Internet for “unusual coincidences.” As you might imagine I was flooded with results.
However, the first one struck me. The title was “40 Amazing Coincidences You Won’t Believe Actually Happened.” Regular readers of this column are likely laughing, as I did, as we do not doubt the presence of such Random Connections. One of the forty resulted from World War I.
Read about some amazing coincidences via this link: https://theconnectionsnj.com/category/random-connections/
Twenty million people died in World War I. The first British man to die in the war was John Parr from London, and the last was George Ellison from Leeds.
Between the firing of the bullet that killed Parr and the shot that struck Ellison down, about 750,000 British soldiers were killed. In a remarkable coincidence, just a few yards of lawn stand between the two men’s graves today.
The bodies of these men, the first and last British soldiers to die in the 1914 – 1918 conflict, face each other in a cemetery in Belgium.
Parr, killed by rifle fire as he scouted ahead on his bicycle in the first tentative British advance on the city, was buried by the Germans here on ground donated by a Belgian landowner after it was decided by Kaiser Wilhelm’s government in 1917 to honor all those, on both sides, who had died in the area.
The remains of Ellison, who was killed ninety minutes before the armistice in a last pointless advance when it was clear to all that they were on the cusp of peace, were brought here from a field grave by the British in the 1920s. There was no knowledge at the time of the significance of the plot opposite.
The above story about British soldiers got me thinking about my great-uncle, Edward Davis, born in 1890, from Toledo, Ohio. He was one of 53,402 Americans that died in combat during the First World War, according to Wikipedia.
That prompted me to search for the last American killed in combat. Again, according to Wikipedia that is Henry Gunther, who was reportedly killed at 10:59 AM, one minute before the Armistice on November 11, 1918.
Throughout my life, I was told my great-uncle was killed in a battle shortly after the Armistice, as news of peace did not reach his position due to poor communications.
I find Wikipedia a valuable and reliable resource, but not 100% accurate. Could it be wrong in this case? Was my great-uncle the last battle casualty of the War and not Henry Gunther?
I checked with a distant cousin, who has done extensive research on our family tree. It turns out that my great-uncle Edward died on October 3, 1918, over a month before the Armistice.
Little did I know when looking for material for this column that I would find a mistake in the storytelling of our family’s history.