Armistice Day 1918

Earlier posts on this blog have outlined the stories of the first-generation 'Lithuanian Anzacs', men of various ethnicities who had been born in czarist Russia within the borders of present-day Lithuania in the late 19th century and who served with the First AIF (Australian Imperial Force) during World War I. As we approach the centenary of the end of that war, I thought it would be interesting to look back at where some of them were on Armistice Day 1918.

By the end of the European summer in 1918 it was becoming clear that the Great War was coming to an end and that the Central Powers were near defeat. An armistice with Bulgaria came into effect on 30 September 1918, followed by Turkey a month later, then Austria-Hungary on 3 November and finally Germany on 11 November. Nevertheless, the fighting continued on the Western Front right up until the 11th of November. Reports from the field record an abrupt end to the bombardment at 11am and an eerie sense of numbness, exhaustion and quiet on the front lines. In contrast, celebrations had started earlier in the day in many towns and cities across the world, later followed by bonfires and fireworks near some of the front lines that evening.

Martin Place, Sydney, 11 November 1918

 Lithuanian Anzacs on 11 November 1918

At least 40 'Lithuanian Anzacs' served overseas during World War I and nearly half this number were still in Europe at the end of the war.  Many of their stories have been outlined previously (click on their names below). A summary was also posted earlier [click here].

The longest-serving were Stanislaw Urniarz (Stasys Urniežius) and Militan Schatkowski (also known as Militan Oldham) who had both enlisted four years earlier, in November 1914. On Armistice Day 1918 Private Urniarz was still in the field in northern France, working at the 2nd Australian General Hospital; soon after he was permitted to proceed on furlough to the UK. Private Schatkowski/Oldham had already been in the UK since early 1917 and was working for the Australian Red Cross in London on Armistice Day.

Several of the Lithuanian Anzacs had been wounded on the Western Front and transferred to England by November 1918. Private William Frank Jaks was severely wounded in September and invalided to England; he met Armistice Day at the Reading War Hospital. Private Gerard Skugar, wounded in August, was at the Devonport Military Hospital (Plymouth). Private Leo Gordon was wounded in action for the second time in October and was at the 1st Auxillary Hospital at Harefield on Armistice Day. Private Paul Finn, wounded in action for the third time in August, was in medical repatriation in England. Others in England for medical reasons included privates Harry Cooper, Joe Caplan, Anthony Januski and sapper Ishai Belkind.

Some had suffered wounds but were still active combatants in the field as Armistice Day dawned, including Private Heyman Wolfson (enlisted in 1915, wounded in 1916).

A few were fortunate to meet Armistice Day in the field and to have survived the war without apparent major injury, including: Corporal Emerick Schimkovitch (enlisted in January 1916, in the field in France from October 1916); Private William Kalinowsky/Kalin/Kalinauskas (enlisted September 1916, in the field from December 1917); Driver Joe Ipp (enlisted February 1917, in the field from November 1917); Private Stanley Zygas/Stasys Žygas (enlisted September 1917, in the field from April 1918).

Still others had enlisted late in the war and had been sent overseas but not yet entered the field of battle. David Wishman enlisted in May 1918, disembarked at London at the end of September as a private with the 34th Bn and and was still in the UK on Armistice Day. 


And lastly, there were those who did not survive the war and could not return home. Six men were killed in action or died from wounds received in action:

• Charles Oscar Zander (died 22 August 1916 during the Battle of the Somme, France, no known grave, commemorated at Villers-Bretonneux);
• John Brenka/Brenke (died 23 August 1916 in the Battle of the Somme, France, buried at Boulogne East Cemetery);
• Anthony Puris (died 10 May 1917 in the Somme, France, buried in the vicinity of Noreuil, no known grave, commemorated at Villers-Bretonneux); 
• John Lovriaen (died 20 September 1917 in the Ypres campaign, Belgium, place of burial unknown);
• Franc Matzonas; (died 11 November 1917 in the battles for Beersheba, Palestine, buried at Beersheba War Cemetery (Israel)); and
• David Minor (died 11 May 1918 in northern France, buried at Meteren Military Cemetery).

https://www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/armistice/62000-Poppies-Display
Handcrafted red poppy flowers on the Australian War Memorial's grounds representing the almost 62,000 Australians who lost their lives during the First World War.

  





  

South Australia

Much material on Lithuanian migrants in South Australia has already been published by Daina Pocius on her South Australian Lithuanian History blog (SAlithohistory.blogspot.com).  Daina has been posting since January 2008 and has amassed a huge amount of information; her blog was listed as one of the "50 blogs you need to read" in Inside History magazine's 2014 annual genealogy blog awards.

So, rather than replicate what has already been published on the SA Lithuanian History blog, what follows here is a brief commentary and summary of early Lithuanian migration to South Australia.

Lithuanian histories in South Australia before the First World War are problematic:

• the story of Lithuanians amongst the early religious migrants to South Australia has gained much currency, both in Australia and Lithuania.  Luda Popenhagen (Australian Lithuanians, pp16-17), for example, wrote that the first Lithuanians to settle in South Australia were religious refugees from Prussia who arrived with other Lutherans aboard the Skjold in October 1841.  The Lithuanian VARNAS/VARNO family together with other German Lutheran migrants apparently established a new settlement near Adelaide, which they called Lobethal ('valley of praise').  This account appears to have originated from a 1958 article in the Australian Lithuanian weekly Mūsų Pastogė which reported research by Jonas Vanagas, the founder of the Lobethal museum.  However more recent attempts to confirm the existence of this early Lithuanian family have not been successful.  The search continues ..

• another hint of early Lithuanians in South Australia appeared in the US-published Lithuanian Encyclopedia (quoted in Metraštis No 1, p11) which recorded that Lithuanians were employed in an Adelaide glass factory in the late 1880s  and that they had established their own club and chapel.  Again, this claim has not been verified by more recent research.

Previous posts have looked at the Lithuanian Anzacs who reached South Australia in the second decade of the twentieth century and enlisted there:

• John BRENKA (arrived in Australia 1914);
• William Frank JAKS (1914);
• Heyman WOLFSON (1910);
• Charles Oscar ZANDER (1911); and
• Stanley ŽYGAS (1911).

Of these, only Stanley Žygas settled in Adelaide after the war.

Nevertheless, there are fragments of information which show an earlier presence.  Previous posts have looked at nineteenth century settlers from the Memel (Klaipėda) region who came to South Australia, such as John RUSSELL (arrived 1859) and Otto REIGERT (married at Light Pass in 1886).  Later arrivals with links to Lithuania include:

• Lena OBERMAN (nee Todras), born at Kedainiai in 1855, arrived in Australia with her husband Louis and son Joseph in 1892; Lena died in Adelaide in 1934 and Joseph in 1943 (source: www.oberman.org.au/lithuania.htm); 

• Frank GRIFF, possibly from Zagarė, who had arrived in Australia in 1904 and established himself as a successful businessman in Broken Hill, moved to Adelaide with his wife Sophie in the late 1930s (source: Jews of the Outback, pp 131-132) 

• Jacob David GOCHIN, born at Papilė in 1883, married Hannah Morgenstein at Adelaide in 1924 (source: Ancestry.com);

• Antanas (Antone) VIRBICKAS, born at Aukštakalnis around 1888, arrived in Australia 1924 and worked as a wharf labourer at Port Adelaide at least until 1953 (source: Trove);

• Frank (Pranas) ŠEŠKAS and Max Martynas KORALLUS were living in Port Pirie in 1928 (source: Trove).  

Metraštis No 1 (p11) refers to a 1953 article in Mūsų Pastogė which reported that there had been Lithuanians living in Adelaide in 1930 but that unemployment, poverty and hardship had forced most to move to the eastern states; by the early 1950s there were only a few of the early Lithuanians remaining in Adelaide. 

Lithuanian Anzacs on the Western Front #2

This post continues with those servicemen who appear to have been of ethnic Lithuanian background.  Clicking on their names will take you to their service record held by the NAA;  much of the additional information is courtesy of Elena Govor's Russian Anzacs project, http://russiananzacs.net/

Adolph Ignatieff MISHKINIS/Adolfas MIŠKINIS. Born in 1889 in Zarasai he left home aged 13, became a seaman, and lived and worked in the USA and Canada.  He arrived in Australia in September 1915 and enlisted almost immediately, in November 1915 in Melbourne, serving as a private and lance corporal in the 5th and 46th Battalions in France, Belgium and England.  Severely wounded in action in 1916 and 1917, he was returned to Australia in 1918 and medically discharged later that year.  Adolfas was naturalised as a British subject in 1919, married May Curtayne in the early 1920s and raised a family.  His two sons went on to serve for Australia in the Second World War.  Adolfas settled in Ballarat where he died in 1957.

Source: NAA

Anthony (Antanas) PURIS.  Born in 1888 in the village of Padustis (not far from Zarasai), he was working as a miner at Newcastle NSW when he enlisted in July 1915.  Anthony served as a private in the 19th and 4th Battalions in France, was wounded in 1916 and killed in action in May 1917.  He was survived by two brothers in Padustis village (Padusčio kaimas); his service is commemorated at Villers Brettoneux in France and the Australian National War Memorial.



Stanislaus URNIARZ/Stasys URNIEŽIUS.  The following is abridged from my post of 2 April 2015 on Lithuanian Anzacs in Egypt and Palestine:
Born in Vilnius in 1874, Stasys arrived in Australia with his wife Elzbiet/Elizabeth aboard the Ophir in April 1904.  He worked as a tailor in Sydney and was naturalised in 1906.  At he outbreak of World War One, even though he was already 40 years of age, he enlisted and embarked for Egypt in November 1914, serving with the Australian Army Medical Corps at No 2 Australian General Hospital in Cairo until March 1916 when the hospital was transferred to France. He remained in France and England until the middle of 1919, returning to Sydney together with his wife in July 1919.  They left Australia together in late 1920 for England and then Lithuania.  The photo opposite, courtesy of the Australian War Memorial's collection, shows that Pte Urniarz (back row, 8th from the left) was a staff member of the hospital's operating theatre and X-ray department while in France. 

Stanley (Stasys) ŽYGAS.   Born in 1886 in the small town of Surviliškis, he left Lithuania in 1907 and made his way around the world as a sailor visiting Germany, Argentina, England and finally reaching Port Adelaide in 1911.  He became a naturalised subject in 1915, worked in South Australia and Tasmania as a sailor, then an agricultural labourer, handy man, and finally as a fitter and turner before enlisting in Adelaide in September 1917. Stanley served with the 32nd and 50th Battalions on the Western Front, married Kathleen Green in England and they returned to Australia in December 1919.  He became self-employed, operating a mechanical workshop 'Zygas and Son' in Adelaide and died in 1975.  The link here will take you to a WW1 era photo of Stanley at the Russian Anzacs site.

Sources:  NAA and Russian Anzacs.  Additional material courtesy of Ancestry.com; AWM; and Metrastis No 1.

What's in a name?

When I was growing up in Adelaide I was well aware that some Lithuanian DP families had shortened their surnames after arrival in Australia in order to make them easier to pronounce in a society and culture dominated by English speakers. For example:

• Stasiškis became Statkus;
• Vasiliauskas became Vaskas;
• Venslovavičius became Vens.

First name simplifications (Antanas to Anton, Pranas to Frank, etc) were even more common. I went through the Australian educational system being known as John rather than Jonas. It was only later that I realised there was also an economic dimension to such name changes; your competitiveness in the jobs marketplace is improved if you have a more local-sounding name.

What was also clear was the fact that many families chose not to dilute their identity and used their 'difficult' Lithuanian names in both the confines of the Lithuanian community and in wider society.

Early Lithuanians and name changes

As with the DPs, many of their predecessors also chose to simplify or anglicise their names. Some did so in Australia, others while they were resident in Britain, North America or elsewhere before arrival in Australia:

Kazys (Key) and Jadvyga Brazauskas (Braz), Sydney
 (source: Metrastis No. 1)

• Stasys Žygas became Stanley Zygas;
• Aisikas Segalis became Isaac Segal; and
• Kazys Brazauskas became Key Braz.

However, the pattern of name changes for early Lithuanians seems broader. There was likely more pressure on them to assimilate or disguise their cultural identity:

• Jonas Vedrinaitis became John Wedrien;
• Zigmas Baltrušaitis became Sid Bolt.

Jonas Vedrinaitis/John Wedrien, Sydney
(source: Metrastis No.1)

Others made more wholesale changes:

• Jonas Zeleniakas became John Green;
• Kazys Astrauskas became Charles Ashe;
• Juozas Plaušinis became Joe Miller;
• Zale Zapolski became Levi Zalman;
• Lozoraitis became Brown, Petraitis became Patrick, Ruzga became Ross.

Further complications for the amateur historian arise when people are known by or use several variations of a surname, for example:

• Piliulis/Paliulis/Phillules;
• Mikėnas/Makeness/Mekenass;
• Čepkauskas/Capouski/Cepkouski.

Also, even without simplified or anglicised names, some people alternated their names depending on the cultural context they were in:

• Max Lipschus (a german name) from Memel/Klaipeda was known to the Lithuanian community as Maksas Lipšius;
• Stanislaus Urniarz (a polish name) from Vilnius was known as Stasys Urniežius.