WWI Soldier Comes Home at Long Last

Probably no one briefed him on the big picture: After a long buildup, the Army was preparing for its biggest offensive operation since arriving in France, an attack on a German salient, a bulge in the line south of Soissons. The French-led assault would include the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, of which Lupo's regiment was a part.

His 2nd Battalion, with 938 men, was held in reserve July 18 as two American divisions and tens of thousands of French troops began the attack, including a push through vast, open crop fields. The advancing soldiers could see far across a landscape of deep ravines, low hills and stone farmhouses, a broad terrain studded with German artillery and heavy machine guns.

A Marine Corps officer fighting with the Army's 2nd Division recalled the battle's second day, July 19, in his diary:

"Wallace, hit in the legs, went down in the short wheat. . . . Overton was hit by a big piece of shell . . . his heart was torn out. . . . A man near me was cut in two, others would stand . . . then fall in a heap. . . . In a shallow trench . . . I found three men blown to bits, another lost his legs, a fifth his head. At one end of the trench sat a crazy man who with a shrill laugh, pointed and said over and over, 'Dead men, dead men.' "

On the third day, July 20, the doughboys of Lupo's battalion joined the battle. After passing the ruined village of Missy-aux-Bois, they were pushing east across hundreds of acres of low wheat, struggling to reach the bombed-out town of Ploisy.

He fell amid the acrid stench of manure and cordite. His skeletal remains are long past telling what killed him: a shell blast, a gust of machine-gun fire. The soldiers put him and the other man in a crater out there between the villages and kept moving.

Among the 2nd Battalion's 44 dead, wounded and missing that day was another young Ohioan, Arlow Griffith, a private in G Company. "I identified him after he was killed," a sergeant wrote, "and owing to the fact that we had to advance, I don't know where he is buried." Griffith's name is chiseled in the chapel limestone with Lupo's.

Not until the next day, Sunday, July 21, was Lupo recorded as missing. Three weeks later, back in Cincinnati, his name was in all the papers, one among dozens in long columns of tiny print, a new casualty list from overseas.

By then, Anna Lupo, whom he always listed as his next of kin, had received a wire at her home on West Ninth Street, a few lines of teletype from the War Department.

"Deeply regret to inform you . . ."

Rediscovered

The campaign, eventually known as the Second Battle of the Marne, was a victory for the Allies. After more big battles, and many thousands more casualties, the war ended in November.

The fields around Soissons stayed mostly farmland through the decades, with industrial buildings here and there. Because ancient remains have been found in the region, the law requires an archaeological survey before new construction takes place.

That was how Lupo and his fellow doughboy turned up in 2003.

The French archaeologist who determined how the men had been buried found no corroded weapons or helmets. What he unearthed, besides the bones, were scraps of clothing and boots, some uniform buttons, bits of a gas mask, a rusted canteen-cup handle and other decayed pieces of gear. There were personal items, too: the stem of a tobacco pipe, a rusted straight razor, a warped No. 2 pencil, a comb with seven teeth missing.

And Lupo's wallet.

In 2004, the bones and artifacts were delivered to the Defense Department's Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii. Anthropologists, historians and other specialists there work to find and identify missing U.S. military personnel, almost exclusively from World War II on. None had dealt with a doughboy before.

After the lab finished its work last fall, the Army searched for next of kin, eventually finding Kleisinger in Kentucky. She is a daughter of Lupo's youngest sibling, Rose, long deceased. Rose was 7 when her brother Francis went off to Camp Sherman.

So Kleisinger -- 4-foot-11 -- will get the tri-folded flag at Arlington. No old men of E Company will be there, no aged veterans of Saint-Mihiel or the Meuse- Argonne. Of the 4.7 million Americans in uniform during Lupo's war, all but a dozen or so are dead.

And his mother, in her grave 57 years.

"I used to go to church with her and help her light the candles," Kleisinger says of Anna Lupo. "She would always ask the Blessed Mother to please bring him home. And I kept telling her, you know: 'He can't come home, Grandma. He's gone.' But she could just never accept it."