This picture is labelled “A group of ”Devil Dogs“. The boches friend Niederbreitbach Germany 5/11/19”. I’m not sure who typed that. I think the man all the way to the right is Walt, but Grandma Bonjour thought it was Kurt. The brothers looked so similar!

I didn’t know what “boche” meant, apparently it’s a disparaging term for Germans. Not too surprising. To further disambiguate this label, this quote is from a Marine recruiting Web site: “…in World War I during the 1918 Château-Thierry campaign near the French village of Bouresches, Marines assaulted a line of German machine-gun nests on an old hunting preserve known as Belleau Wood. The fighting was terrible. Those Marines who weren’t cut down by the enemy guns captured the nests in a grisly close-quarters battle. The shocked Germans nicknamed their foes, teufelhunden [sic] (devil dogs).” (The correct German would be “Teufelshunde”.)The “devil dogs” nickname appears to have been a myth, invented by some journalist, but it stuck and even the Marines today believe it.

Katy(posted on Nov 5, 2010 at 10:13 am)