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Date: 10/15/2019
SOUTHWICK – Local soldiers who served in World War I will be honored during a presentation on Oct. 19 at 2 p.m. in Southwick’s Town Hall auditorium.
Rob Wilson of Hatfield will be giving the presentation on soldiers from Hatfield and Southwick who fought in one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history. Wilson said that his research came with help from the Hatfield and Southwick Historical Societies.
“The focus of this is not about World War I as a whole, it’s more about the people who served in the war and their experience in it to help people understand what it was like on the ground,” he said.
Wilson’s focus will be on Jim Day, Peter Balise and Marian Billings of Hatfield as well as Orlo Jackson of Southwick. He said he was able to research and put together their stories because records of their letters, documents, memoirs and newspaper articles that were preserved.
Jackson, the only soldier from Southwick that Wilson was able to research, did not join the conflict at the start. He was training in Camp Devens in Massachusetts before he was deployed to France sometime in the summer or fall of 1918, the final year of the war.
Wilson has been doing historical research like this for five years, specializing in the American Civil War. He is the retired former director of a veteran’s organization, from which he said he has an interest in military history and veteran’s issues.
“It’s really fascinating to read the memories and memoirs and to get inside the heads of these people,” said Wilson.
He added that he wanted to focus a little bit on the story of Marian Billings as well. Billings was an American Red Cross worker that served in Europe during the war. She was one of 8,000 such women workers at the time, although not all of them served in Europe during the conflict. She arrived in France along with more than 5,000 other American Red Cross workers in August of 1918, around the same time as the Battle of Amiens in France began to turn the tide of the war against the Central Powers.
Wilson said that thousands of women served different roles like Billings throughout the war and they were instrumental in the course of it all. Part of his goal is to tell the story of some of these women because they are rarely told.
“What they witnessed is pretty amazing,” said Wilson.
Wilson’s presentation is open to the public.