My grandfather Frank Severin Gustaf Erickson (laying on ground, smoking a pipe), while he was serving with the American Expeditionary Force in the 308th Infantry - 77th Division - Company H. Here his company was taking a break somewhere in the Argonne Forest on the Western Front in France - October 1918.

Frank began his military training at Camp Lewis, near Tacoma, Washington in late 1917, then onto Camp Kearny near San Diego, California. Then in the Summer of 1918 he and his Company C were off by train to complete their training at Camp Upton in Yaphank (Long Island) in Suffolk County, New York.

Frank shipped out of the Brooklyn Harbor bound for Liverpool, England on August 8th, 1918 on the troop ship Nestor. Then he and the men boarded a train to the English Channel and an eventual crossing into France where he would begin serving on the front with the 77th Division.

As things turned out, he was soon involved with the Meuse Argonne Offensive. By early October Frank would call himself a very fortunate surviving member of what is referred to as 'The Lost Battalion.'

His experiences in the Argonne Forest were intense and where mere survival was of high hopes. Living through serious and brutal confrontations with the Germans, a lack of food and water, Frank along with the other men fought to the point of pure exhaustion.

The men that survived were indeed the men that had seen too much, watching countless comrades die in the Argonne. The dark days had began on October 2nd, when the Division under the command of Major Charles Whittlesey became surrounded by the Germans. By October 8th it ended when a handful of survivors were able to escape through a pocket of the Argonne.

The Lost Battalion, the name given to the nine companies of the United States 77th Division of the American Expeditionary Force, consisted of 554 men that were surrounded by German forces in the Argonne Forest in France between October 2nd through the 8th of 1918.

Roughly 197 were killed in battle and approximately 150 went missing in action and or were taken prisoner. Only 194 remaining men walked out alive. A photograph of the the men of the 308th that escaped out of the pocket of the Argonne is below.

The Meuse-Argonne Offensive, also known as the Battle of the Argonne Forest, was a major part of the final Allied offensive of World War I that stretched along the entire Western Front. It was fought from September 26, 1918, until the Armistice on November 11th, 1918, a total of 47 days.

The Meuse-Argonne Offensive was the largest in United States military history, involving 1.2 million American soldiers, and was one of a series of Allied attacks known as the Hundred Days Offensive, which brought the war to an end. The battle cost 28,000 German lives and 26,277 American lives, making it the largest and bloodiest operation of World War I for the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), which was commanded by General John J. Pershing.