Posted on 11/11/2018 4:23:06 PM PST by Rummyfan
This is no ordinary Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth and much of Europe, and Veterans Day in the United States. Today we mark the one hundredth anniversary of the Armistice that brought to an end the most terrible war in history. Exactly a century ago - on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month - the guns fell silent on Europe's battlefields. The belligerents had agreed the terms of the peace at 5am that November morning, and the news was relayed to the commanders in the field shortly thereafter that hostilities would cease at eleven o'clock. And then they all went back to firing at each other for a final six hours. On that last day, British imperial forces lost some 2,400 men, the French 1,170, the Germans 4,120, the Americans about 3,000. The dead in those last hours of the Great War outnumbered the toll of D Day twenty-six years later, the difference being that those who died in 1944 were fighting to win a war whose outcome they did not know. On November 11th 1918 over eleven thousand men fell in a conflict whose victors and vanquished had already been settled and agreed.
It was that kind of war. Four years earlier - at dusk on August 3rd 1914 - Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, stood at the window of his office in the summer dusk watching the lamplighters go about their daily business in the Whitehall gloaming. And then he made a remark that endured across the decades:
The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
It should perhaps be pointed out that the terms dictated by the Treaty of Versailles were far less harsh than those demanded by the victorious Prussians over the French, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
The sheer fact that Germany was not invaded or occupied, that the war ended by armistice, rather than unconditional surrender, helped fan the ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth that provided the cesspool for the Nazis to flourish.
We would not make that mistake again with WWII.
It certainly had a huge affect on the increase in Consumerism....
WW1 made the world we live in...by destroying the old world and a lot of people in the process, even over and above those who perished directly on the battlefields. Among that group was the family of my paternal grandfather, of blessed memory.
Before the war started in 1914, my great grandparents had 8 children from ages 4 to 27, plus several grandchildren, and he had a thriving water delivery business and owned 14 houses that were rented out. By the time the war was over, 1 child was dead, one had literally walked across Siberia to escape the carnage and come to the U.S., and the remainder were destitute and hungry, like the rest of the population. Four years later, after the Revolution, my grandfather left, never to see his parents again, and only seeing his remaining siblings for a couple of weeks some 46 years later. Within a short time, my great grandfather had what was left of a lifetime of hard work seized by the Communists, who only came to power because of World War 1, being left with only the home that he and my great grandmother lived in. In 1936, 73 and sick with cancer, they rented 3/4 of their home to others to put food on the table...and he was arrested for being a Capitalist, savagely beaten and left to root for several months in an NKVD jail. He was released, then rearrested a few months later, beaten badly and released to die at home. The rest of the remaining family got to live in a giant open-air prison for 75 years, those not killed in the fighting if WW2 (which was Round 2 of WW1) or murdered by the Germans, that is.
So, as can be seen, WW1 was pretty much an unmitigated tragedy for my grandfather’s family, except for the fact that he an his older brother were able to get to this country and build lives in freedom. This is, of course, far from a unique story, but I write about it to show the effects of events that are no longer a living memory for anyone.
Germany was the boogeyman because its leading state (Prussia) had beaten France in a war in 1871 (making the new Germany the most powerful country on the continent), and because it was developing a navy to rival Britain’s (which always tried to maintain a navy as large as the second- and third-largest combined). France and Britain were going to have a war against Germany - it was just a question of when/how.
Parts of Germany were occupied (Ruhr, Rhineland), other parts were simply taken from Germany, Austria-Hungary, and post-Tsarist Russia (to re-create Poland).
The “stab in the back” was credible to many Germans because they rarely lost battles; even the armistice was signed while Germany occupied its enemies’ land. The “stab in the back” was primarily laid at the feet of leftist agitators destroying the war industries at home with strikes (depriving the soldiers of needed munitions); the signers of the armistice were simply the last step.
Yes, but the country was largely unoccupied, and financial reparations were linked to ability to pay. Much, much less harsh than the impositions enforced on the losers of either the Franco-Prussian War or, of course, the Second World War.
Relatively speaking, the Versailles Treaty was not the overly harsh document that so many believe it to have been. It was certainly used to whip up anti-Versailles sentiment - a wave on which to ride to power by the Nazis.
There actually were those who believed that Germany ‘didn’t really lose’ the Great War. The ‘stab in the back’ myth was used by them too. Dan Snow has written and lectured on this. It’s interesting to look at things from a different angle.
The Franco-Prussian War reparations were allegedly based on reparations imposed on Prussia by Napoleon 55 years earlier. The problem with the WWI reparations were 1) it blamed Germany for the war, and 2) they were NOT linked to ability to pay - and that significantly worsened the Depression in Germany (starting in the early 1920s instead of 1929). The “stab in the back” arose from the fact that a year after defeating Russia (freeing up a million troops there), Germany lost because the US, which violated neutrality from the start by arming Britain for years before entering the war while complying with Britain’s trade embargo of Germany, simply overwhelmed them in the West.
You characterize the Versailles Treaty as not “overly harsh”; imagine if we had to give up California as a condition for withdrawing from Vietnam. Germany lost territory, as well as its few colonies (it was very late to the colonial game). We “saved the world” from German aggression while “the sun never set on the British Empire”.
Germany undoubtedly lost the war, but they certainly didn’t start it. As far as looking at things from a different angle, I live within a few miles of two locations where pro-German saboteurs destroyed arms factories supplying Britain in violation of out neutrality: Black Tom Island in Jersey City NJ (destroyed 7/30/1916) and the “Canadian Car & Foundry Company” in Lyndhurst NJ (burned 1/11/1917). We were in the war for years before openly declaring; the Lusitania was a legit target, and we knew it.
I think I understand the point you're trying to make, but choose a different state than California please, to prevent any misunderstanding.
:-) :-)
Well, it was related to the Vietnam War (and one of the closest to Vietnam). If I said “imagine giving up Hawaii” plenty of people would probably support that. I know, some would support giving up Cali too...
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