Thank you for stopping by to check out B.E.F. The Whole Story of the Bonus Army.  The is the story of the 1932 march on Washington by tens of thousands of World War I veterans who were eventually driven out of the Capitol by the U.S. Army at the order of President Hoover.

Walter W. Waters was an Army sergeant who had served in Europe during the first World War. Like millions of other Americans during the great depression, he struggled to find a livelihood for his family, with little luck.

In 1932, he led 300 veterans in a cross-country odyssey to petition Congress for release of the promised bonus for World War I veterans.  Eventually, more ten thousand veterans gathered in DC.

They were driven out.  From Waters’ account of the tragedy:

“The troops stopped at the buildings in the Pennsylvania Avenue area and took them one at a time. Each one housed forty to a hundred men. The men were chased out with drawn bayonets and gas bombs. The men of the B.E.F. had come to Washington, hoping to get something from the Government. They were getting it—the most modern type of tear gas.”

While a number of accounts of the Bonus March exist, this is one of the only first-hand accounts, written by one of the leaders of the movement.