"The day the guns fell silent At 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918, bugle calls ended the ‘war to end all wars.’ After four years of carnage, you could hear the ticking of a watch" (WaPo).
A hundred years ago.
The armistice was signed at 5:10 a.m. in a railroad car in the Forest of Compiegne, northeast of Paris, an event described in Persico’s 2004 book, “Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour.”
But it didn’t go into effect until 11 a.m.
All the soldiers had to do was stay alive until then.
“I am as nervous as a kitten,” the British sergeant Cude wrote. “If I can only last out the remainder of the time, and this is everyone’s prayer. I am awfully sorry for those of our chaps who are killed this morning and there must be a decent few of them too.”
Indeed, in some places the war went on insanely right up to 11 a.m....
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The front was moving in the end, a German attack having failed and a counterattack succeeding, and the Germans lacked the resources to hold. The Allies were building resources.
The last American casualty took place at 10:59. What a waste.
I’ve often thought about that. In every war, there are people who die after the outcome is decided. To me, those are the saddest deaths of all.
Indeed. It was a war nobody wanted to start with. Just a couple of idiot Austrian generals wanted to put some pesky Serbs in their place, and then there was just one damn thing after another.
The formal monuments are too large and grand. How do you properly commemorate such a colossal and enduring mistake? Those endless rows of little white crosses have far more impact. They're the true monument to that war's stupidity and cruelty. You won't see any German graves, though. The German dead were bulldozed into unmarked graves. All the monuments, all the little white crosses are a tribute to man's invincible ability to endure hardship and death in order to inflict hardship, death and humiliation on disagreeable people.
Hitler pointedly made the French sign their surrender in that same car. While commemorating the massive relief that the Armistice brought, let's also remember the colossal mistake in its wake that virtually assured another, even nastier, war.
Napoleon used to write commemorative letters to the relatives of fallen soldiers. He wrote those relatives how much he envied the fallen soldier for his glorious death. There is no reason to believe that he was being cynical. Napoleon really did think it was fitting and sweet to die for the cause that he espoused, i.e. liberty, equality, fraternity and the further aggrandizement of Napoleon. He caused a million men to die before their time and, for the most part, the soldiers thought it was a fine thing to die for their country.......In WWI, at least towards the end, the soldiers were less enamored of patriotic gore. The WWI soldiers never got to flash their sabres in a calvary charge. They were vaporized in their dugouts or cut down within minutes, sometimes seconds, by machine gun fire after going over the top.......If WWI can be said to have any benign consequences, it is the simple fact that people nowadays regard war as more sordid than glorious. Not that they stop waging it, but they're far less enthusiastic about the whole enterprise.
American troops were ordered to attack late on the morning of November 11. IIRC scores died and the last German casualties were inflicted by American troops after 11:00. There were Congressional hesrings after the troops came back, but they went nowhere.
"The armistice was signed at 5:10 a.m. in a railroad car in the Forest of Compiegne"
With a touch of Pouring Salt in a Wound, Hitler used that same railroad car when France signed its capitulation in June 1940.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiegne_Wagon
I would encourage everyone to listen to Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History” podcasts on World War 1 “Blueprint for Armageddon “.
What happens when you put 19th century armies in a 20th century (and its new technology) battlefield?
Of course, we've still got soldiers dying in Afghanistan (mayor of Ogden, UT last week) and no one seems particularly upset. The USA hasn't won a war since WWII, but by somehow inheriting the White Man's Burden from Britain, we've sort of achieved the WWI "neverenders" vision of the future.
“It was a war nobody wanted to start”
The German military had a detailed plan for day to day tactics and strategy to quickly win such a win. That would suggest that “someone” wanted the war to start.
PS. The Germans desire to get the Russians out before the Americans came in facilitated the rise of Communism and the fall of the Romanoffs.
The Second World War ended with demands for unconditional surrender and nuclear weapons because the First World War ended with an armistice.
To read Wilfrid Owen is to weep. Fifty years ago, I'd just graduated law school and moved to San Diego. My wife was pregnant with our first child. Our next door neighbors were an "elderly couple' (i.e. less than the age I am today). They delighted in our little daughter and brought her stuffed animals for her crib. When I went to their home next door, I noticed the photo of a young sailor in uniform on the mantel. He was their only child--and had died in the Pacific in 1942. Some wounds never heal.
"The German military had a detailed plan for day to day tactics and strategy to quickly win such a win. That would suggest that “someone” wanted the war to start."
Disagree, at least as far as your implied point that this was unique to Germany. Everybody had plans for fighting and winning a continental war.
Ludendorff begged for an Armistice, then claimed he'd been stabbed in the back when he got one. The Germans believed that Wilson could get them a sweet treaty deal, but Clemenceau and Lloyd George proved otherwise.
There were three thousand American casualties on Armistice Day, including three hundred dead.
Sadly, the French, Belgians, and British totally fucked the Germans.
They forced the Germans to give them free coal. When the Germans got tired of sending all their coal, the French invaded in 1923 and took it.
Hitler was in prison in 1923, and as a veteran of the war, he was pissed that the German leadership were all squatting like the fucking NFL.
We all know how that turned out.
40,000 people were rubbed-out on the Eisenhower Freeway system last year (+/-).
War is safer than driving
Sure, people get killed, but they are carrying rifles. They all deserve to get killed by shooting at each other.
The Fussell book is outstanding and a must read for those interested in WWI and the literature that it begat.
The War to End All Wars... kinda like the End of History meme
Paco Wové is right. The 19th century system of alliances and "balance of powers" was like a logjam built up in a river. If anyone disturbed the right log, the dam would break and the whole thing come loose - and the Austrians happened onto it without any intention of starting anything big.
Hagar responds: Paco Wové is right. The 19th century system of alliances and "balance of powers" was like a logjam built up in a river. If anyone disturbed the right log, the dam would break and the whole thing come loose - and the Austrians happened onto it without any intention of starting anything big.
Exactly so. Not just in 19th century Europe but 16th century Japan [sorry--my hobby horse]. The logjam is a great analogy. But will we ever learn from history? EVER???
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Eagles
Basically it was a war between cousins according to this histerical drama
This is a good place to recall that the Poles are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the re-constitution of their national state today.
Vonnegut on the last American to die via Paul Campos>
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/11/november-11-1918
Second Phil’s recco of the Carlin podcast. I’ve read a hundred good books about WWI but Carlin does a great job of summarizing the horror and highlighting how alien this whole thing seems to the 21st century mind. I don’t agree with everything he says (he waaay overemphasizes Princip’s importance in making the war happen) but it’s a masterpiece of the podcasting art. If there is such a thing.
My wife's great uncle was a private in the British army in WWI, and last year on a trip to Belgium for the Christmas markets in Brugges, Ghent and Brussels, we took a side trip to Ypres to visit the "Fields of Flanders" WWI museum and to see if we could find her great uncle's burial plot and determine how he died. We were able to find the burial plot and also got a lot of information on her uncle's unit from the museum archives with help from one of the archivists. Her great uncle was killed in the last German offensive near Ypres a couple of months before the end of the war. The whole visit was a moving experience, and I would rate the museum one of the best I have seen on any subject. If you get a chance to visit Belgium I highly recommend you consider spending a few hours in the museum and visiting a few of the grave yards that are scattered around the Flanders area. The local Belgians were extremely knowledgeable about the various battles that occurred on the Western Front and still grateful for the sacrifices that so many Americans, French and British made during the war.
I liked the Robert Service book, Goodbye To All That. He described the minutiae of both his experience in the trenches and of his difficulties in protesting the war. His friend Siegfried Sassoon was a highly decorated officer who wished to lead a committee of such officers in protesting the war. Service tactfully told him that it would not be politic to have someone named Siegfried leading the anti-war efforts......Hemingway's A Farewell To Arms was the novel most admired by veterans of that war. Hemingway was materially helped in his research for that book by the fact that he only spent eighteen minutes in actual combat in that war. The actual experience of trench warfare was so overpowering and deadening that it did not encourage imaginative retelling.......The generals --the chateau generals--take a lot of the blame for the carnage, but the technology of that era was such that no victory could be achieved without massive casualties. Ultimately, it was the politicians who persevered in the quest for victory who were most responsible. Of course, in Germany it was the generals who were the political leaders. It's a tragedy that Ludendorff and Hindenburg were not demonized or, at least, discredited by the German people after that war.
Let us now turn to the eastern frontier of Germany.
Here we first encounter one of the great new facts. Only a prodigy could have brought about the rebirth of Poland. Before that event could come to pass, it was necessary that every single one of the three military Empires which had partitioned Poland should be simultaneously and decisively defeated in war, or otherwise shattered. If the Powers which had devoured Poland stood together in a Drei-Kaiserbund, there was no force in the world which would or could have challenged them.
If they warred on opposite sides, at least one would emerge among the victors and could not be despoiled of its possessions. But the astounding triple event had occured: Russia had shattered Austria; the Bolsheviks, aided by Germany, had destroyed Russia; and Germany herself had been overpowered by France and the English-speaking world.
So all three parts of sundered Poland were free at the same moment; and all their chains -- Russian, German and Austrian -- fell to the ground in a single clash.
The hour of Destiny had struck; and the largest crime in European history, triumphantly persisted in through six generations, was now to pass away.
--Churchil, The World Crisis
See the Althouse portal for Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? by David Fromkin for a convincing argument that Germany bears most of the blame for the start of the war. (And for the Kaiser's surprising attempts to head off his own government). It's a short read (from a series of lectures I think) and worth your itme.
Yeah, the fighting took place all the way up to 11 AM.
Harry Truman was proud his battery's 75mm's keep firing at the Germans all the way till 11:00.
Some American Generals ordered assaults for the last few hours, even though they knew the cease fire was at 11. They didn't trust "the Boche" to keep the armistice and suspected a trick.
WW1 was America's first "Globalist" war. The idea was to go on a Crusade to make the world safe for Democracy and then create a League of Nations that would end war forever.
Its the kind of war, McCain would've been 110% for, and Trump would've been against.
I think Tuchman's "Guns of August" is still the best book on how war came.
Interesting fact: Mencken covered the war from the German side - made a visit to the Western Front - and wrote a book about it. But its not really that good, and its hard to find.
Of course he went France before April 1917.
There is an audio recording of the moment the guns fell silent floating around the internet. I listened to it today.
I can only imagine what went through the minds of the soldiers when that moment finally came. It must have seemed to be forever in coming.
I noticed there was no cheering after the guns fell silent, but then it was not explained where the recording was made or who might have been around.
Robert Graves, not Robert Service, wrote Goodbye to All That.
"The actual experience of trench warfare was so overpowering and deadening that it did not encourage imaginative retelling"
I mentioned to my spouse just yesterday that I valued Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End because it was one of the few novels that attempted to describe the Western Front trench warfare experience by somebody who had actually been a front-line soldier.
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