Belfast veterans honor namesake of Legion post

BELFAST – As American forces wage war in foreign lands, Belfast area veterans gathered at the Frank D. Hazeltine American Legion Post to honor the memory of the post’s namesake, who was killed in action in World War I.

In a dedication ceremony held Saturday, Hazeltine’s nephew Frank Shaw, a retired US Army colonel, was on hand to dedicate a monument and flagpole in honor of his uncle.

Lt. Hazeltine was killed in action in France while serving with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I. His remains are buried in a cemetery in France honoring American men who fought to save that country. The Legion post was named in Hazeltine’s memory in 1919.

“A bullet took him to his last bivouac,” Hazeltine’s brother said in a letter mailed from France to their parents after his brother’s death. Maj. Charles B. Hazeltine served with the 29th Division.

Frank Durham Hazeltine was the first officer from Belfast to die in World War I. He was 23 at the time of his death.

Shortly after the soldier’s death, the Hazeltine family donated a plaque in his memory to the First Church. The plaque bears the legend, “Having fulfilled his course in a short time, he fulfilled long years.”

The bronze plaque had hung in the church entryway until earlier this year. Shaw decided that the plaque’s real home should be the American Legion hall named after his uncle, and post officers readily agreed.

The Legion mounted the plaque on a granite memorial beside a flagpole on high ground overlooking High and Market streets.

“This is a very fitting memorial for my uncle for whom I was named,” Shaw noted during the ceremony. “People may have forgotten who he was or what he did … I feel very comfortable that this is the place it should be.”

Hazeltine was a senior at Bowdoin College when he enlisted to serve his country. He had been an exemplary leader of the school’s Reserve Officer Training Corps and was commissioned as a second lieutenant of infantry in August 1917. He landed in France that September and joined the 101st Infantry’s Yankee Division.

On the night of July 15, 1918, Hazeltine’s platoon was shelled by German forces using mustard gas. He suffered burns and was hospitalized. When he returned to duty with his old outfit a month later, he was given command of his own platoon. He was killed on Sept. 12, 1918, at St. Mihiel, one of the crucial battles that led to the cessation of hostilities and the November armistice.

Louis A. Donahue, an Army lieutenant who served with Hazeltine, wrote a letter to the fallen officer’s parents describing Hazeltine’s courage and valor during the battle. The men in his platoon were on the front lines leading the attack and came under furious bombardment by German machine guns and artillery.

“The wet night was scarred with the unholy flashes of the guns, and overhead the black was a screeching madness,” Donahue wrote. “The story of the attack is that of small groups of men, working ever forward toward the terrific seething and pounding of our barrage out of the very midst of which the Boche machine guns are frantically sputtering. Small groups of men plunging onward through masses of tangled wire, over ground that shakes as though with some relentless earthquake.”

In his letter to his parents, Maj. Charles Hazeltine praised his brother and observed that “the shock of his parting was lessened by the knowledge that he died as he had lived, true to all his fine ideals … We know now that that death was truly magnificent in its example to us all, and that he met it in his splendid youth and strength with high courage and a fine clean heart.”

After breaking the enemy’s resistance, the American Army moved forward and secured the battlefield. It was while walking along the Vaux-St. Remy Road after the battle that Donahue came upon a small, makeshift wooden cross near a shell hole.

It was placed there by the men of Hazeltine’s platoon and carried the inscription: Lt. Frank D. Hazeltine, Co. B, 101 Inf. Killed in Action, Sept 12, 1918.