Sunday is 100 years since the end of World War one ,
Remembrance day as it's known in the UK. And Veterans day here in the USA,
Tip of the hat to all that lost their life's in the war to end all wars.....
PS, there are a lot of audio accounts on BBC radio , podcasts etc , with first hand accounts taken from those that were there at the time , nice thing with BBC is they have an archine to use for the last 80 years or more
We call it Remembrance Day here as well. My grandfather fought at Vimy Ridge. I’ll be standing with others in my small village tomorrow to pay respects.
I posted this in the picture thread, but 100 years ago today, my grandfather arrived at the front. Fortunately, the war ended the next day. He ended up guarding the bridge at Remagen. Oddly enough, my wife’s grandfather guarded what was left of it after WWII.
My great-grandfather volunteered for WWI, but was rejected because he was he was 44 and suffered recurring attacks of the yellow fever he contracted in Cuba fighting in the Spanish-American War. Another great-grandfather fought in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry in WWI, but I don't know much more than that about his service.
Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column
November 11, 2018
Pier 54 on the Hudson River is a short walk from our church. On display are pictures of the Titanic and the Lusitania, which is not encouraging for public relations. The Titanic was supposed to berth there, but instead the Carpathia arrived with surviving passengers. Seven years before, my grandmother had sailed on the Carpathia.
The sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat brought the United States into the Great War. Film footage shows passengers arriving at Pier 54 to embark on May 1, 1915. Of the 1,962 passengers and crew on the Lusitania’s manifest, 1,198 died. Toscanini had planned to be on board, but took an earlier ship after bad reviews of his performance of Carmen. Jerome Kern missed the ship when his alarm clock failed—otherwise, we’d not have “Ol’ Man River” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” The dancer Isadora Duncan cancelled her ticket to save money, and the actress Ellen Terry backed off because of war jitters.
One casualty of the Lusitania sinking was Father Basil Maturin, Catholic chaplain at Oxford University, returning from a lecture tour. He spurned a lifeboat and gave away his life jacket. That was reminiscent of Monsignor John Chadwick, later pastor of the Church of Saint Agnes here in Manhattan, who barely survived the sinking of the Maine which incited the Spanish-American War. The monsignor was hailed as a hero by the sailors he saved.
If his chauffeur had not taken a wrong turn on the streets of Sarajevo in 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand might not have been assassinated, and the domino effect of national alliances would have not brought on the collapse of empires. At the Somme, more than one million troops were killed or wounded, and the war’s total casualties were 37.5 million dead or wounded. One year after the war, there was only one man between the ages of 18 and 30 for every 15 women. Each town and school in Britain has memorials to those lost. Both of my own grandmother’s brothers were killed in Ypres, and that was considered the norm. The United States lost 116,000 men with over 200,000 wounded. Europe has never really recovered. Military strategists were not prepared for modernized combat, and it has been said that the armies were lions led by donkeys. In a macabre way, the chief winners of that cultural suicide were Lenin and Hitler.
Today is the one-hundredth anniversary of the Armistice signaled by a bugle at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year. The poet Siegfried Sassoon, decorated for bravery, was latterly put in a psychiatric ward for begging an end to the killing. He became a Catholic and is buried near the grave of Monsignor Ronald Knox whom he admired. In tribute to one of his fallen comrades, he wrote:
I know that he is lost among the stars,
And may return no more but in their light.
My knowledge of WW I is pretty much limited to what I picked up watching a 10 part series on Prime, but this seems pretty accurate:
The first hour was on the origins of the war. Basically, everybody thought someone else was going to start something and were afraid of either being left out or on left on their own, so they all jumped in, except, initially at least, the U.S. There really is no reason this ever should have been anything other than a regional conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. What it degenerated into was simply mind-boggling. It was probably the single most depressing thing I have ever watched.
I highly recommend Barbara Tuchman's Pulitzer winning history of the start of the war, The Guns of August. Lots of parallels to today.
I've posted about my grandfather on the photo discussion, so I won't repeat the whole thing again.
Summary: wounded by a machine gun, which also killed his sergeant on the same burst.
He kept firing his Spingfield and ducking the return fire until they surrendered, then saved the German soldiers lives when they were going to be bayonetted.
This is his military ID prior to being redeployed back to the front. He was the most intense person I have ever known, but also a very quiet man. He served again in WWII.
He survived the Spanish flu epidemic that killed as many people as the war, and lived to be 100.
I heard this one on a telecast from the memorial at Vimy Ridge yesterday. There were 66,000 Canadians killed in WWI, 11,000 were never buried.
My great grandfather was a Canadian trooper in the First World War. After surviving a gas attack he returned to Saskatchewan where his damaged lungs couldn’t cope with the cold. He emigrated down to Indiana where he had one son before dying in a train vs truck accident.
That son was my Grandfather who served in the Coast Guard during WWII.
My Grandfather. He left for Europe as a farm boy from the Catskills, 5'3" tall with a uniform that didn't fit. He returned from WW1 a Corporal with medals in marksmanship, a purple heart, blind in one eye from gas attacks in the trenches, and deaf in one ear from explosions.
He was a sweet and funny man, a prolific and creative cusser with a level of skill and artistry Jean Shepard would have really appreciated. When I was 10 he shot a red squirrel that had been breaking into the basement and knocking over grandma's pickle jars. He was furious with that squirrel. He shot it out of the top of a tree 100 yards away. I was amazed and shouted. "Grandpa, you're such a great shot! Have you killed anything else?" He was uncharacteristically quiet and wouldn't look at me. He went into the garage, took apart the .22 and put it away. He was crying and I couldn't understand why. I do now.
In reply to GladlyTheCrossEyedBear :
Thank you so much for posting the photo, and sharing your grandfather's history.
In the 6 hours between the signing of the Armistice and it taking effect at 11:00 AM 3000 soldiers died.
A US Army 37 mm gun crew, in combat during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in the fall of 1918. (AP)
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