The last American killed in WWI died one minute before 11
Henry Gunther of Baltimore was killed at 10:59 a.m. on 11 November 1918, one minute before the First World War armistice - widely called the last American killed in the war. The catch: he wasn't the last man killed that morning.
- Claim
- The last American killed in WWI
- Catch
- NOT THE LAST MAN
- Verdict
- One minute before 11 — and they tried to stop him
The fact gets shared as a piece of trivia: an American soldier died one minute before the First World War ended. It's true — Henry Gunther of Baltimore fell at 10:59 a.m. on 11 November 1918, sixty seconds before the armistice took effect at 11:00. What the trivia version leaves out is almost everything else: who he was, why he was there, and that the Germans tried to wave him off.
A sergeant busted to private
Henry Nicholas Gunther was born in Baltimore in 1895, the son of German immigrants, and worked as a bookkeeper before the war. Drafted in September 1917, he made sergeant in Company A of the 313th Infantry Regiment, 79th Division. Then military censors intercepted a letter he wrote home criticising conditions and the war itself, and Gunther was demoted to private. He spent the rest of his service trying to win his rank back, writing to a friend that he would "make good" before the war ended.
The last morning
On 11 November his division was ordered to keep advancing until eleven o'clock. The armistice had been signed at 5:10 that morning in a railway carriage at Compiegne, but the war would not end for another six hours. At ten fifty-nine Gunther ran alone at a German machine-gun position near Chaumont-devant-Damvillers. The Germans saw him coming and waved him off, shouting that the war would end in a minute. He charged anyway and was killed by machine-gun fire. His body was recovered after the ceasefire and buried in a French cemetery; in 1923 his remains were brought home to Baltimore.
The catch
Gunther was the last American killed - but not the last man. A Canadian, George Price, fell at 10:58 near Mons, and a Frenchman, Augustin Trebuchon, at 10:50. And Gunther's death came six hours after the armistice had been signed: men on both sides kept dying while everyone knew the war was over.
Some accounts say Gunther charged to win back the rank he had lost. That is an interpretation, not a proven fact; the record does not say why he ran.
Verdict
One minute before eleven - and the enemy tried to stop him.
Sources
- U.S. Army records, 313th Infantry Regiment, 79th Division (U.S. National Archives)
- Contemporary press reporting, November 1918
- Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour (2004), for the armistice signing time and the last-morning context
Estimates of casualties on the final morning are disputed by historians and are not used in this short.
The images in the video are AI-generated illustrations, not archival photographs.
SOURCES
- U.S. Army records, 313th Infantry Regiment, 79th Division (U.S. National Archives)
- Contemporary press reporting, November 1918
- Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour (2004), for the armistice signing time
- Note: estimates of casualties on the final morning are disputed by historians and are not used in this short
The images in this video are AI-generated illustrations, not archival photographs.
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