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December 20, 2010

Loraine Anderson: No mistaking heroism

By LORAINE ANDERSON Local columnist

Newspapers record the daily history of the communities they serve. That's an important job, though it may not be recognized until decades later.

An uncorrected error can live long beyond the reporter who made the mistake.

Unfortunately, the Record-Eagle's Nov. 21-22 package on World War I area veterans and life on the homefront included a couple of errors, mostly because of lack of complete or accurate information at the time. I want to devote this column to clearing the historical record and also elaborating on the original report.

First, World War I soldier Clarence Allen, who was the first area war death reported by the Record-Eagle in 1918, was the son of Walter and Carrie Allen, not "Walton."

Second, Lt. Harry Holliday, one of two World War I soldiers for whom American Legion Post Bowen-Holliday is named, was not a Navy ship doctor during World War II as reported in the Nov. 22 World War II feature about the American Legion Bowen-Holliday Post. He was assigned to an Army machine gun company in the 30th Regiment of Regulars.

His father, Traverse City physician G.A. (George Arthur) Holliday, was a doctor, however, who served in the Army Medical Corps on both ship and land.

If there is a silver lining to any reporting mistake, it's that the process of correcting errors often leads to new sources of information unavailable at the time the mistake was made.

That's what happened with the short Bowen-Holliday story that ran on Nov. 22.

Larry Bensley, a Traverse City native who now lives near Omena, noticed the Holliday mistakes and provided the Record-Eagle with additional information from a family scrapbook kept by his grandmother. Harry Holliday was his uncle, but died at age 25, almost two decades before Bensley was born, of infected battle wounds.

According to news clippings and records in the scrapbook, the younger Holliday sustained serious wounds on July 15, 1918, near Mezy, France, during a shelling attack, but stayed with his platoon of gunners for 10 hours, protecting its flank with a pistol and hand grenades until injured again by a grenade. He died Oct. 6, 1918, at an American field hospital in Savenay, France.

Congress posthumously awarded him a Medal of Honor and the War Department a Distinguished Service Cross in 1919 for "extraordinary heroism" in the Mezy battle. France also awarded him the Croix de Guerre.

Holliday was a 1912 graduate of Traverse City High School and a 1916 graduate of Olivet College.

There's much more to the Holliday story, but that will have to wait for another time.

Associate Editor Loraine Anderson can be reached at 933-1468 or at landerson@record-eagle.com. She also writes a local history blog in our online history section at www.record-eagle.com/history.

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