By Roger Dahlin
During WW1 Elsie Janis was known as the “Sweetheart of the AEF”. The attached photo shows her with a WWI steel helmet that was made especially for her with a bent rim to provide a more feminine appeal.
The American Expeditionary Force [AEF] also known as “doughboys” were the men that fought under General “Black Jack” Pershing in France during WWI. Elsie Janis, was a singing, cartwheeling Broadway vaudeville star, who entertained American servicemen in France, on her own, long before the USO tours of future wars. She sang multiple times a day from truck backs, tabletops, on the road in camps and hospitals in mud and rain. Elsie identified as a “doughgirl” the tomboy pal or kid sister to tens of thousands of doughboys. And, Janis was no flash in the pan. She had a lengthy and illustrious career as a multi-talented songwriter, actress, silent movie star and director, dancer, and singer. And, yet, 100 years later, this darling of WWI has faded from public consciousness.
In 1915 Janis’ starred in a London play opposite the dashing Basil Hallam, a British actor she met in New York two years earlier. Their romance, that included talk of marriage, came to a tragic end in August 1916, when Hallam, serving in the British military, died during the Battle of the Somme.
According to Janis’s biography “The Big Show” it was during her 1915 engagement in London that she stumbled into her vocation as an entertainer and morale booster of troops. She stated “The wounded were coming home in thousands; the camps were full; and I spent every spare moment I had, and some I did not have, singing in hospitals and camps”.
Born in Marion Ohio, she started performing at age two. On Christmas of 1899, at age 10, she performed at the White House for President William McKinley, even imitating the President, capturing his rigid posture and deep voice.
When the United States declared war on April 6, 1917, she had a new resolution “From that time on I had but one idea, and that was to get to France and do for our boys what I had done for the others”.
Janis spent the summer of 1918 visiting military hospitals and singing for wounded soldiers. General John Pershing, the American commander in France, named Janis an Honorary General and gave her a Cadillac with an AEF Headquarters logo.
My Dad, Carl Dahlin, served with the 77th Division during WWI made up of approximately 95 % men from New York City. He was attached to the 306th machine gun Battalion Company B. On July 12, 1918, during front-line relief duty, the men, along with my father, attended a concert given by Elsie Janis in Bertichamp France. The Salvation Army had taken over an old abandoned factory for the event. As might be expected, the men from New York City went wild.
To give you some insight where Janis entertained, two weeks earlier the machine gunners were in Pexonne, a bombed-out village in northeastern France that was close to the front line. A few civilians were still living there in spite of the war. Pigs, oxen, cows, horses and people with wooden shoes all mingled together. On July 4, 1918, the Germans attempted to reach the men’s trenches but because of advanced warning, heavy artillery and machine gun fire the Germans fled.
My dad arrived in Callais France on April 30, 1918; close to the time the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes declared “Elsie Janis is as essential to this army as a charge of powder is to a shell”
Elsie Janis had a lasting romance with her generation of American soldiers. Four hundred of them, middle aged, many squeezed into their old uniforms, marched in her funeral procession in 1956. Her tombstone reads. “Sweetheart of the A.E.F.”
