Schmidt, Fred J. Papers

Sergeant, Battery D, 129th Field Artillery, 1918

The papers of Fred J. Schmidt include letters he wrote to his family during and immediately after World War I, letters he received from President Harry S. Truman, and other items mostly relating to Schmidt’s military service and his friendship with Mr. Truman, who was his commanding officer during the war.

Size: 5 linear inches (about 300 pages).
Access: Open.
Copyright: The donors donated to the U.S. government his copyright interest in all writings in this collection. Documents created by U.S. government employees in the course of their official duties are also in the public domain. Copyright interest in other documents presumably belongs to the creators of those documents, or their heirs.
Processed by: Jim Armistead and David Clark (2015); Jim Armistead and Randy Sowell (2019).

Fred J. Schmidt was born in Tipton, Missouri on March 11, 1896 and died in North Kansas City, Missouri on March 3, 1954. He served as a sergeant in Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery under the command of Captain Harry S. Truman during World War I. He was married to Isabel Schmidt and worked as a food broker for the Simpson – Schmidt Brokerage Company. He also served as secretary of the association of Battery D veterans.

The papers of Fred J. Schmidt include letters he wrote to his family during and immediately after World War I, letters he received from President Harry S. Truman, and other items mostly relating to Schmidt’s military service and his friendship with Mr. Truman, who was his commanding officer during the war.

Schmidt’s letters to his family make up most of the collection. Dating from 1917 to 1919, the letters describe his experiences as a soldier in Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery Regiment. Schmidt wrote one of these letters while he was at Camp Doniphan in Oklahoma. The others were written while he was in Europe. The collection also contains correspondence from President Truman to Schmidt, dating from 1948 to 1952.

The rest of the collection - consisting of envelopes, samples of European currency, photographs, postcards, and programs - pertains for the most part to Schmidt’s wartime military service. There are several items relating to President Truman’s Inauguration in 1949, which was attended by Schmidt and many other Battery D veterans, and a 1975 newspaper article about Bess Truman.

Materials in the Harry S. Truman Papers relating to Fred J. Schmidt can be found in the Post Presidential Papers (General Correspondence File) and the President’s Personal File (PPF 3852).