author
Edward Alva Trueblood
A World War I veteran wrote a vivid firsthand account of service with the American Expeditionary Forces in France, capturing both the strain of war and the everyday life of a soldier. His memoir offers a rare view of the specialized flash ranging work used to track enemy artillery.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Edward Alva Trueblood was an American writer best known for In the Flash Ranging Service (1919), a memoir drawn from his service as a private with the American Expeditionary Forces in France during World War I. The book was published in Sacramento, California, and presents his own observations of military life, travel, and front-line conditions.
What makes Trueblood interesting is the angle of his story: instead of a broad official history, he gives a personal soldier's-eye view of flash ranging, a technical artillery-support role used to locate enemy guns. That gives his writing a mix of battlefield detail and plainspoken immediacy that helps modern readers picture the war from the ground level.
Reliable biographical details about his wider life are limited in the sources available here, but memorial records identify him as having been born in 1894 and dying in 1947. Even with that sparse record, his book remains a valuable firsthand document of American service in World War I.