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N0KFQ > TODAY 11.11.12 20:15l 75 Lines 3622 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Nov 11
Path: IZ3LSV<F1OYP<N9PMO<KC5CNT<N0KFQ<KB0WSA
Sent: 121111/1803Z 31107@KB0WSA.MO.USA.NA BPQK1.4.53
...
Nov 11, 1918:
World War I ends
At 11 o'clock in the morning of the 11th day of the 11th month of
1918, the First World War--known at the time as the Great
War--comes to an end.
By the end of autumn 1918, the alliance of the Central Powers was
unraveling in its war effort against the better supplied and
coordinated Allied powers. Facing exhausted resources on the
battlefield, turmoil on the home front and the surrender of its
weaker allies, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire,
Germany was finally forced to seek an armistice with the Allies
in the early days of November 1918. On November 7, the German
chancellor, Prince Max von Baden, sent delegates to Compiegne,
France, to negotiate the agreement; it was signed at 5:10 a.m. on
the morning of November 11.
Ferdinand Foch, commander in chief of all Allied forces on the
Western Front, sent a message by telegraph to all his commanders:
"Hostilities will cease on the entire front November 11 at 11
a.m. French time." The commanders ordered the fighting to
continue throughout the morning of November 11, prompting later
accusations that some men died needlessly in the last few hours
of the war. As the historian John Buchan has written of that
memorable morning: "Officers had their watches in their hands,
and the troops waited with the same grave composure with which
they had fought." As watch hands reached 11, "there came a second
of expectant silence, and then a curious rippling sound, which
observers far behind the front likened to the noise of a light
wind. It was the sound of men cheering from the Vosges
[mountains] to the sea."
The Great War took the life of some 9 million soldiers; 21
million more were wounded. Civilian casualties caused indirectly
by the war numbered close to 10 million. The two nations most
affected were Germany and France, each of which sent some 80
percent of their male populations between the ages of 15 and 49
into battle. At the peace conference in Paris in 1919, Allied
leaders would state their desire to build a post-war world that
would safeguard itself against future conflicts of such
devastating scale. The Versailles Treaty, signed on June 28,
1919, would not achieve this objective. Saddled with war guilt
and heavy reparations and denied entrance into the League of
Nations, Germany complained it had signed the armistice under
false pretenses, having believed any peace would be a "peace
without victory" as put forward by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson
in his famous Fourteen Points speech of January 1918. As the
years passed, hatred of the treaty and its authors settled into a
smoldering resentment in Germany that would, two decades later,
be counted--to an arguable extent--among the causes of the Second
World War.
But that would all come later. On November 11, 1918, the dominant
emotion for many on and off the battlefield was relief at the
coming of peace, mixed with somber mourning for the many lives
lost. In a letter written to his parents in the days following
the armistice, one soldier--26-year-old Lieutenant Lewis Plush of
the American Expeditionary Force (AEF)--eloquently pondered the
war's lasting impact: "There was a war, a great war, and now it
is over. Men fought to kill, to maim, to destroy. Some return
home, others remain behind forever on the fields of their
greatest sacrifice. The rewards of the dead are the lasting
honors of martyrs for humanity; the reward of the living is the
peaceful conscience of one who plays the game of life and plays
it square."
73, K.O. n0kfq
N0KFQ @ KB0WSA.MO.USA.NA
E-mail: kohiggs@gmail.com
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