Lost Generation: Toledo-centric documentary focuses attention on World War I

May 30—"Nobody knows anything about World War I."

Behind his thick-rimmed glasses, Howard Sweet's crystal-blue eyes flit past the camera and back. Pushing against the collar of his navy-blue dress shirt is a tie strewn with American flags. The plainness of his tone belies the intensity of the recollections to come.

"Very few people know anything about the war," Sweet repeats. "It's World War II, the Korean, Vietnam War, and so on and so forth."

The Vietnam War had not been over for a decade when he spoke those words, the graininess of his visage betraying the age of the footage. Compressed in the unassuming frame is a century of time — a man in 1986 sharing the memories of a war he fought in 1918 with an audience in 2021, still speaking long after he, like every one of his brothers in arms, had fallen silent.

"We are the forgotten people."

So begins Glimpses from the Great War, a documentary film more than 30 years in the making by the man sitting across from Sweet, his face hidden behind the camera: Jim Nowak, a part-time filmmaker and full-time serviceman from Toledo. The documentary, released on December 30, 2020, is available for streaming through GlimpsesFromTheGreatWar.us.

The 53-minute film tells the story of World War I through the eyes of Pvts. Howard Sweet and William Claus, both Toledoans who served together in the Ohio National Guard's 37th "Buckeye" Division with the 135th Field Artillery from 1917 to 1919. Their journey took them from Toledo's Camp Walbridge to Alabama's Camp Sheridan, across the Atlantic Ocean and onto the shores of Liverpool, ultimately catapulting them onto the hellish front lines of the Meuse-Argonne Campaign in France — the deadliest battle the United States has ever fought.

Encapsulating time

The last surviving veteran of the World War I died in 2012, but the last stories of the war didn't die with her. Nowak's film provides a glimpse of why. While Claus passed in 1993 and Sweet in 1994, Nowak interviewed both in 1986.

That foresight came from his experience with his grandmother. He always intended to sit down with her and record for posterity the troves of family folklore stockpiled in her remarkable memory.

"I waited a little too long to get those stories," Nowak recalled. The cancer stole his grandmother's voice first, then her sight. Her memories passed with her, leaving behind a regretful Nowak painfully cognizant of the fragile wispiness of our life stories — "If they're not captured, they just disappear."

Anxiety at the prospect of losing precious oral histories and an enduring fascination with military narratives led Nowak to Sweet and Claus. He shot the interviews for their own sake, just to have them "in the can." Not until 2015, as the centennial of the First World War's conclusion loomed, did he begin working on a documentary centered on them. The scope of project quickly grew beyond his expectations, and by 2016 he was touring French battlefields and cemeteries.

While perusing an antique store in downtown Toledo, Nowak discovered several selections of sheet music composed and published in Toledo between 1917 and 1923. Since recording technology was primitive and expensive then, songs were sold as sheet music and shared through live performances.

In a bit of "divine guidance," Nowak said, the perfect performers came to him. Early in 2015, Janaye Ashman, then a 21-year-old music major at the University of Toledo, filled in at a St. Pius X Parish service, and just like that Nowak found his pianist and vocalist. She then helped him find another vocalist, her classmate Spencer J. Wilhelm. The stage was set to recreate, and for the first time record, century-old pieces of Toledo music.

Ashman had never performed such period music before, and finding the right interpretation of a song she'd never heard proved an intriguing challenge.

"You can't look this stuff up on YouTube," Ashman said. "The sheet music is it."

One song, "Off to the Front," celebrates America's entry into the war with a paean to Uncle Sam and the patriotism of his young men; another, "We Are Coming, Bill, to Get You," confidently predicts the downfall of Germany's ruler Kaiser Wilhelm II, pejoratively nicknamed Kaiser "Bill."

"It truly is a time capsule to hear the style of music back then," said Nowak. "It wasn't all scratchy like we hear it now; it was live, that's how they performed it."

That desire to make the past present, as real and immediate as today, drove Nowak to clean and colorize more than 180 historical photos, many donated by Howard Sweet to the Toledo Lucas County Public Library. He used whatever reference points he had, such as a WWI uniform in his collection, to ensure maximal accuracy. Preparing each photograph took an average of 90 minutes — "Do the math," Nowak said with a laugh.

Throughout the film, Nowak encourages viewers to think of then as now by first presenting the photos in their original black-and-white before transitioning to color. He also included footage he'd shot in 1984 of war reenactments in Pennsylvania for his Emmy-winning feature, World War I: A Regional History. At the time he'd aimed for realism not by colorizing the footage, but by deliberately shooting it on black-and-white film. The collage of colorized photos and monochromic video is suitably immersive.

Aside from Sweet and Claus, Nowak interviewed Sgt. Joshua Mann, the Ohio National Guard's official historian; Florence Lamouse, a battlefield guide in France; and Manon Bart, an interpretative guide with the American Battle Monuments Commission. The latter two contextualized the Meuse-Argonne Campaign, where more than 1.2 million American soldiers fought and 24,000 died.

"The biggest battle America has fought until today, and most people can't name it," said Nowak. What greater evidence of Sweet's contention that Great War veterans are "the forgotten people"?

A rather different attitude prevails in France, where Nowak only managed to reserve a session with a battlefield guide on his eighth try due to popular demand.

"For the Europeans, World War I is still so incredibly alive," said Nowak. He's dedicated himself to shifting American attitudes in that direction, even if only slightly. "I've kind of become a missionary in trying to help people understand."

'Why me?'

Nowak was driving south on I-75, just past the exit to Collingwood, when he found himself face-to-face with a car careening wildly down the expressway. The impact shattered Nowak's ribs, fractured his left leg, scarred his face, and plunged him into a three-day coma. The date was January 9, 1980, and he was 23 years old.

"I wasn't supposed to live, but I guess it was too early," Nowak said.

"Why me?" he asked himself for years after, until finally he asked, "Why not?" He still had things to do, communities to give back to. His long-term injuries ruled out federal service overseas, but not local service with the Ohio Military Reserve. Twenty years after joining, he's a lieutenant colonel.

Serving runs thick in his blood — his father in World War II, his grandfathers in World War I (he snuck a few photos of them into the documentary), his great-great-grandfather in the Civil War, and his seventh great-grandfather in the Revolutionary War. His time in the service has reinforced his respect for "anyone who's done any service in any capacity." In that sense, his documentary is a tribute not just to veterans of the Great War, but veterans everywhere.

"You don't know what's going to happen when you raise your right hand and pledge the oath," said Nowak. "That's part of the experience. That's what I tried to capture. The boys didn't know if it would be a one-way ticket or if they would be doing paperwork in the rear area." Sweet and Claus survived the war, but many of their fellow doughboys perished in gas attacks and the 1918 pandemic. The shared adversity forged a lifelong bond "that anyone who's served in uniform together understands."

Since its release, Glimpses from the Great War has won multiple honors in international film competitions, including the Short, Tight & Loose Global Film Festival Competition, the Spotlight Documentary Awards, the IndieFEST Film Awards and the Accolade Global Film Competition.

"Like many things in life, if I knew what it would take going into it I would probably have said forget it, but I have no regrets," said Nowak. "I hope I've told a story that honors our local people who served."

First Published May 30, 2021, 10:50am