Harry Truman decides to join the war

Harry S. Truman decides to join the war in 1917, although age, poor eyesight, family obligations, and his work as a farmer all offered reasons to remain at home. His choice transformed a distant conflict into a personal commitment: he left his sister to shoulder responsibilities for their household, asked Bess Wallace to wait for him, and began organizing an artillery unit. The episode joins patriotic idealism to its private costs, and anticipates the weight Truman would later place on the consequences of decisions made in wartime.

The decision against staying home

When the United States entered the war, Truman was living in Grandview, Missouri. The conflict might have remained for him a subject in the Kansas City newspapers and magazines, but several circumstances made his enlistment unexpected. He had turned thirty-three in the spring of 1917, two years beyond the age limit established by the Selective Service Act; he had been out of the National Guard for nearly six years; and his eyesight fell well below the armed services’ stated standards. He was also the sole supporter of his mother and sister. As a farmer, he was expected to remain on the land, which President Woodrow Wilson had described as essential to the nation’s fate.

Truman nevertheless chose to go, almost from the time of Wilson’s April 1917 call for a declaration of war. The book presents this not as an unavoidable summons but as a turning point he made for himself. He disliked guns, had never been in a fight, and had not previously risked his life for anything. Yet he considered military service “a job somebody had to do.” He did not want to be a “slacker,” whatever his age or physical limitations, and believed that people who knew and cared for him could not expect him to stay behind.

His reasons combined obligation with an idealistic picture of the conflict. He thought the war would soon end once Americans entered it, and dismissed the prospect of being hit by a German bullet. He felt that the United States owed France something for Lafayette and was moved by Wilson’s wartime appeals. Above all, he imagined enlistment as participation in a noble crusade across the Atlantic. The remembered language of making the world safe for democracy helped turn the decision into a moral and generational cause, even as the long years of European slaughter stood in contrast to the young volunteers’ hopes for a brief, heroic war.

The cost to family and courtship

The decision shifted burdens onto the people closest to Truman. He left responsibility for the farm and care of their mother to his sister, Mary Jane Truman. She later recalled simply that “We got through,” but her brother’s departure altered the course of her life. At twenty-eight, unmarried and still living in Grandview, she had been sociable and popular; afterward, the worries and duties that had weighed on Truman since their father’s death became hers. She had little social life beyond Grandview and, in the book’s account, less room to shape a life of her own. Truman later acknowledged that his departure had been a severe blow to his mother and sister. Mary Jane, who adored him, also thought his idealism and overzealousness could make him self-preoccupied.

Bess Wallace proposed that they marry at once after Truman announced his decision. He refused, arguing that she should not bind herself to a man who might return crippled or not return at all. They would wait until he came home whole. The exchange makes the danger more than a patriotic abstraction: the choice placed a future marriage in suspense, with no assurance that it would take place. In a letter to Bess written in 1942, Truman looked back on their June 28, 1919, wedding as the happiest day of his life, confirming the eventual reunion without erasing the uncertainty that had preceded it.

From conviction to military service

Truman’s enthusiasm quickly became visible and practical. He painted the Stafford automobile bright red and drove around Kansas City in his new uniform, which he wore constantly. The book describes this as a period of unusual excitement and focus: military life gave his days a purpose he had not previously experienced. His convictions also made him an effective recruiter.

He rejoined the Missouri National Guard and began organizing an artillery battery. Expecting to be made a sergeant, he was instead elected first lieutenant by the men. Officers in the Guard were still chosen by their troops, as in Civil War days, and the election mattered personally: Truman had never before been elected to anything. Drilling began in May in Kansas City, in the streets opposite Union Station and inside Convention Hall. The unit later became part of the 129th Field Artillery, attached to the 60th Brigade and the 35th Infantry Division.

The physical examination required for regular Army service exposed the gap between his enlistment hopes and his body’s limitations. His brother Vivian said that Truman passed the vision test by memorizing its chart. The examination record showed uncorrected vision of 20/50 in his right eye and 20/400 in his left—effectively blindness in that eye. He was five feet eight inches tall and weighed 151 pounds; the rest of the examination was recorded as normal. The detail sharpens the nature of his choice: he did not enter with the physical qualifications he believed a soldier ought to have, but found a way through the barrier and went on to lead the battery.

A decision remembered alongside later wartime choices

Truman later described himself as having been “stirred heart and soul” by the war’s messages and by the same emotional force that moved many Americans. He played stirring songs such as “Over There,” “Goodbye Broadway, Hello France,” and “Keep the Home Fires Burning” on the piano. The music and the red automobile belong to the episode’s forward-driving mood; Mary Jane’s changed life and Bess’s postponed marriage mark what that mood risked leaving behind.

The decision also offers a contrast with Truman’s later role as a wartime president. When considering the atomic bomb, he recalled that his advisers believed it should be used and that an invasion of the Japanese home islands could cost at least a quarter of a million American casualties. He wrote that he did not like the weapon. In an August 9, 1945, reply to Senator Richard Russell, he regretted the prospect of wiping out whole populations and said he would not do so unless it was absolutely necessary; he also expressed concern for Japanese women and children. These later judgments do not undo the idealism of 1917, but they show a changed vantage point: the young volunteer had imagined war as a necessary and noble undertaking, while the president had to weigh military aims against the deaths of civilians and soldiers. The first decision began his military path; the later ones made the human cost of such choices impossible to leave at the edge of the story.