In honor of Memorial Day, here is the story of a local “doughboy” (American soldier in the Great War, later known as WWI) who is memorialized right in Bossier City, as a namesake of the Gandy-Brown VFW Post #4588, and in his final resting place in the country of France. Private Guy Ira Gandy is buried in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery in some of the most beautifully tended landscapes Europe has to offer.
The Meuse-Argonne is one of the American military cemeteries maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), a government agency founded in 1923 that now manages 26 cemeteries and 35 monuments created after a variety of wars across four continents. The land is generously donated in gratitude to America, and is never taxed in these foreign countries. Forty percent of these cemeteries and monuments are in France, a nation that saw much of the carnage of the first World War on its own soil. 14,000 of the young Americans killed in France are buried in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery east of Paris in the Alsace-Lorraine region near the borders with Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany. It’s the largest American cemetery in Europe.
The white marble cross memorializing Pvt. Guy Ira Gandy in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, is a long way from Homer, Louisiana where he was born in March, 1895. He was raised in rural Claiborne Parish, but became an orphan at the age of 9 when his father John Alexander Gandy passed away. His mother Leona passed away when Guy was only six. The 1910 census lists him as a young teenage orphan living with a family in Webster Parish. By June, 1917, when he registered for the WWI draft, he is listed as living in Bossier Parish, as a “dairy” and “truck” farmer working for the major Bossier landowner W.T. Colquitt of the West Bend Plantation. Records show his three older Gandy half-siblings were living in Bossier Parish, as well. In early December, 1917, he married Glennye McGraw in Shreveport. According to an article in the Shreveport Times, before being sent to a temporary military training facility in New Orleans, he took a job with the Cotton Belt railroad, but by August, 1918 he was already departing New York City for Europe on the Aquitania with the 306th supply and ammunition trains (truck convoys) of the 81st Infantry, known as “the Wildcats.”
The 81st went to the hotly contested region of Alsace-Lorraine that had been annexed by Germany in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, a strategic and symbolic “prize” that France wanted back with a vengeance. He had barely been overseas two months when Guy Gandy, like so many soldiers, succumbed to illness. He died on October 9, 1918, at the age of 23. For Gandy, pneumonia felled him. For so many others, it was the 1918 worldwide influenza epidemic (sometimes misleadingly referred to as the “Spanish flu”) that spread like wildfire through the packed training and field camps of young men worldwide. In fact, the official history, “The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War,” Volume II: Administration, published in 1927, states that during the stay of the 81st Infantry Division in the St. Dié sector where Gandy died, battle casualties were very light, but the division suffered greatly from illness. During the period from September 20 to October23, 1918, division field hospitals admitted 1,049 influenza cases and 165 cases of pneumonia. (An uncorroborated article in the Planters Press newspaper of Bossier City on November 1, 1945, said that Gandy’s pneumonia was caused by being mortally wounded in the tiny St. Dié village of Chatillon Ser Seine on Oct 5th.)
On the same day as Gandy’s tragic death, October 9, 1918, the Shreveport Times announced that “Mr. and Mrs. Guy Gandy are proud parents of a son, who arrived Sunday, October 6. He will be called Guy, Jr., for his soldier father, who is now in France.“ The happy news of the arrival of baby Guy Martin Gandy was not clouded by the news of his father’s death until November 10, 1918, when the Times reported that Mrs. Gandy had received a cablegram informing her that her husband had died.
The first burial on Guy Ira Gandy’s Army record is the French Military Cemetery in Raon-L’Etape, Vosges, on October 10, 1918. An American field hospital of the 81st Infantry Division was located there, so it is possibly where Gandy died. Soon after, a temporary American military cemetery was established in Raon-L’Etape and Gandy was disinterred and reburied on 1/27/21. Initial burial at a field hospital would have likely meant burial in a mass grave, or at least a temporary or hastily constructed one. His final interment was at the carefully planned and maintained American Military Cemetery of Meuse-Argonne on October 17, 1921. Each time he was reburied, Glennye Gandy was notified.
Glennye Gandy’s brother Henry Ernest McGraw also fought in the Great War. He returned home and died in Shreveport in 1936 at the age of 40. Glennye married Dewitt Talmage Heard in 1925. (She passed away in 1942). Glennye Gandy Heard’s and Guy Ira Gandy’s son, Guy Martin Gandy, served in the Navy in WWII on a mine sweeper in the Pacific. He, too, returned home and lived to the age of 80.
If you have stories or photographs of people connected to Bossier Parish who served or lived through the sacrifices of WWI, please visit or contact us at the History Center. We are located at 7204 Hutchison Drive, Bossier City, LA and are open M-Th 9-8, Fri 9-6, and Sat 9-5. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org
For other local history facts, photos, and videos, be sure to follow us @BPLHistoryCenter on FB, @bplhistorycenter on TikTok, and check out our blog http://bpl-hc.blogspot.com/.
Images:
- Pvt. Guy I. Gandy from SOLDIERS OF THE GREAT WAR (IN THREE VOLUMES), Memorial Edition, Copyright, 1920, SOLDIERS RECORD PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION
- Meuse-Argonne American Military Cemetery courtesy of American Battle Monuments Commission, via Wikimedia Commons
- 306th Supply Train delivering beef in Vosges, France, October 24, 1918. US Army Signal Corps photo via North Carolina Digital Collections
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