From Camp Lee to the Great War: Episode 64 [May 31, 1919]

From Camp Lee to the Great War: The Letters of Lester Scott & Charles Riggle

"I think we will start for Camp Lee the 2nd to be mustered out of the Army. I think I will get home some day next week. Gee but I would like to see all of you. It been nearly a year and a half since I saw you..." In his twenty-second and final letter home dated May 31, 1919, PFC Charles “Dutch” Riggle, a WWI soldier from Wheeling, WV, is writing from Camp Stuart in Newpoert News Virginia, having just returned from France. He tells his brother James “Abe” Riggle that he didn't get sick on the long journey overseas. He thinks he'll soon be sent back to Camp Lee to be mustered out of the Army. He tells his brother to watch the Wheeling newspapers for word about the troops coming home. Elsewhere on the same day, Howdy Wilcox won the Indianapolis 500 in five hours and forty minutes. By comparison, the 2019 winner took just two hours and fifty minutes. With the war over, the effort to cross the Atlantic ocean by airplane was resumed. On May 31, 1919, the Curtiss seaplane NC-4, a US Navy plane commanded by Albert C. Read, made the crossing with six stops before finally landing in England in 23 days. The first nonstop trans-Atlantic flight would be made by Charles Lindbergh eight years later in 1927. He made it from New York to Paris in just 33.5 hours. A modern jet plane can make the same flight in about 9 hours. Charles “Dutch” Riggle was drafted into the US Army in 1917 and trained at Camp Lee, Virginia, where so many Wheeling draftees and volunteers—including his sister-in-law Minnie Riggle’s brother, Lester Scott—were trained. Dutch Riggle was a Private First Class in Battery F of the 314th Field Artillery Supply Company, in France. Riggle was a farm boy with little formal education who grew up in the hills of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He spelled many of his words phonetically. His letters have been transcribed exactly as they were written. This is his twenty-second and final letter home, dated 100 years ago today, May 31, 1919.