Armistice Day

Eighty-eight years ago, the Germans signed a peace treaty surrendering the Allied forces, ending World War I, the bloodiest and most senseless war in human history. Actually, that's not entirely true. They signed a peace treaty on November 10th, but everyone involved thought it would be cool if the war would end at 11:00 on 11/11. So they signed a treaty and then issued orders for the two armies to keep killing each other right up until the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Of all the reasons the military leaders of World War I are going to hell, this has to rank up there. They just casually killed a few hundred people because they thought it would be neat.

OK, more people died during World War II thanks to the Holocaust and the outright murder of the Russian peasantry. World War I is only bloodier if you limit it to military casualties. Not that World War I didn't have its share of horrible war crimes. the term "holocaust" was first used to describe the one million Armenians the Ottomans murdered. A systematic genocide the US still won't officially condemn because the Turkish government still denies it ever happened.

Pretty much every awful thing from the Twentieth Century comes from World War I: Nationalism, Yugoslavia, genocide, the partition of the Middle East, the collapse of colonialism in Africa (which seemed like a good idea at the time but we ended up with Rwanda and the Sudan), poetry which doesn't rhyme, modern art, doughnuts... ok, those were good. But you get the point.

Despite the Great War's tremendous importance, it is virtually forgotten. I went to Books A Million to pick up a book on WWI and despite having an entire aisle dedicated to military history, 80% of those books were on either the Civil War or World War II. And they had exactly zero books on the Great War. Zero.

So, here is your bit of WWI knowledge: the bloodiest battle in US history is not Normandy or Gettysburg: it is Meuse-Argonne. Officially, 26,277 Americans were killed and 95,768 Americans were wounded. There are no official numbers, but the Battle of Bellau Wood may be the bloodiest day in US military history as the AEF thought it would be a good idea to try and attack without artillery support. The army took huge casualties but took the German position, in a move thought to be impossible. The casualty list was so horrifying that it was simply listed as part of another major battle (2nd Marne). The Battle of Bellau Wood never officially happened. The soldiers are lost, forgotten to memories.

They were heroes. I remember them.