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Western Front Association East Coast Chapter
The East Coast Chapter of the Western Front Association
welcomes enthusiasts as well as amateur and professional historians
interested in the study and commemoration of the Great War, 1914-1918.
Adding a Page of Your Own
US Marines in Belleau Wood
"Detroit's Own" Polar Bear Memorial Association
American Troops in Northern Russia, 1919
Dreadnoughts
Austro-Hungarian Dreadnoughts, 1915
First Division AEF
First Division Museum
The Sergeant Alvin C. York Project
The Sergeant York Discovery Expedition
Ask any British student about the Somme or any French or
German student about Verdun and you are likely to get a
quick response. It may be a response about an ancestor who
fought in one of the war's titanic battles or it might be a
response influenced by a work of fiction like Blackadder,
Oh! What a Lovely War, or All Quiet on the Western Front. It
might even be the now fashionable response of dismissing the
war as a fratricidal relic of Europe's "old" age of
nationalism and rivalry. These responses might well be
slightly inaccurate or even wildly so, but the war remains
enough of a part of the living memory for Europeans to
elicit certain emotional and historical triggers. This
continued sense of relevance for Europeans is, of course,
entirely natural given the great destruction the war brought
and the impact the war had on European history.
American students, by contrast, are unlikely to have such
close associations to World War I. The war for Americans was
a brief event, and a relatively small proportion of
Americans saw any sustained military action. The United
States was never attacked and there is no single moment
associated with the war in American memory as the Somme is
in British memory. The war, moreover, falls in between two
much larger and more emotive events in American history, the
Civil War and World War II. American students might thus be
forgiven for not responding to Belleau Wood or the Meuse-
Argonne in the same ways they might react to Gettysburg or
Pearl Harbor.
That contrast is the first point I always make to my
students. Whereas for the United States, World War I is a
little-known and arcane period in history, for Europeans it
is absolutely formative. For France and Great Britain
especially, World War I (known as the Great War or La Grande
Guerre for a good reason) remains the war both in the
popular imagination and among scholars. While one compares
humanitarian catastrophes at one's own peril, a few numbers
may make the case. The British Empire suffered an estimated
908,000 deaths in World War I, or more than twice the number
of World War II. Put another way, the British had more men
killed on one day of World War I (July 1, 1916, still the
bloodiest single day in the history of the British Army)
than it suffered in the first month of operations on and
subsequent to D-Day. For France, of course, the contrast is
even more stark: an estimated 1,300,000 Frenchmen died in
World War I compared to 567,000 in World War II.
A simple car ride along any of World War I's many
battlefields will prove the point to those less
statistically inclined. On many battlefields, such as
Verdun, Champagne, and the Somme, the war still speaks
through the massive shell holes and mine craters that
continue to scar the landscape 90 years later. An observant
tourist can also see signs reading village detruit
(destroyed village), marking a place that was quite
literally pulverized during the war and never rebuilt. The
French burial custom has been to build massive cemeteries
such as the ones at Verdun, Les Islettes, or Notre Dame de
Lorette that impress by their sheer size. Ossuaries
containing the remains of thousands of inconnus (unknown
soldiers) stand as silent witnesses to the awesome power of
modern weapons, most importantly artillery, to kill men
without leaving sufficient remains to allow for
identification or burial. The British have preferred to
build smaller, more numerous cemeteries with the unique
touch of including a personal statement from the family on
the headstones. The Germans, too, built cemeteries with
black, solemn crosses that stand in stark contrast to the
gleaming white marble to be found in the American ones.
Driving away from the battlefield, a traveler might stop at
any of a number of appealing French or Belgian towns to have
a coffee or meal and try to get the horrors of what they
have just seen out of their minds. But it will not take much
imagination to see the impacts of the war in any town near
the western front. Some, like Arras or Ypres, will have post
cards for sale showing the astonishing destruction and
devastation that left them mere piles of rubble. Others will
have place names like Place Foch or Avenue Joffre named to
honor the heroes of the war. One might even see an Avenue
Haig or a Rue Pershing thrown in. Every French town, no
matter how small or how far from the western front, will
have a statue near the town hall commemorating the young men
who died pour la patrie from 1914-1918. If one looks very
closely, one will see a tragic recurrence of family names on
such statues and, often on the back, the addition of a
smaller number of names from the war of 1939-1945, seemingly
added as an afterthought.
For Europeans, the war is the epochal event of the century.
Without it, there would have been no great depression, no
fascism, no Second World War, and no concentration camps. We
will never know, of course, what the estimated 8 million
Europeans who died in the course of the war might otherwise
have contributed to politics, to medicine, or to art. What
we do know is that Europe is still suffering from that huge
loss of its best men and is still struggling to figure out
how to even cope with their memory.
The American experience of World War I must therefore be
kept in its proper perspective. Americans who do not
understand what the war did to Europe will never really
understand the Europe that emerged. Europe's ambivalent
attitude toward the United States, its drive toward
unification, and the relatively recent coming together of
the French and German governments will all come into sharper
focus if they are set against the backdrop of the killing of
1914-1918. Americans, a European might say over coffee in
Arras, do not really understand war because it has not
touched us as it has them.
For that, of course, we can all be very grateful. Although
the war did not result in destruction for Americans on the
European scale, it nevertheless had deep and often forgotten
impacts on America. Perhaps most importantly, it led to
fundamental, long-term changes in the way America (and
Americans) relate to the outside world. It is hard to
imagine today, but when Woodrow Wilson went to Paris for the
postwar peace conference in early 1919, it marked the first
time ever that a sitting American president had visited
Europe. This was due to much more than the limits of
transportation technology. It reflected instead an American
mindset that clearly relegated European affairs to the back
burner.
Woodrow Wilson forever changed that attitude, and with it he
changed much more. Wilson committed America to international
sponsorship of an idea of foreign policy based around the
high-minded quest for democracy, capitalism, and freedom.
While not all Americans have seen the problem in the way
Wilson did and while even Wilson did not fully believe in
all of the consequences of his own idealism, his way of
viewing the world has bequeathed a legacy to every American
leader since. Echoes of his belief in the use of American
power to pave the way for ideals that would in turn secure
the freedom and peace of peoples everywhere has influenced
American foreign policy ever since. Presidents of both
parties, down to the present day, have used Wilson's ideals
and his language as the basis for their global involvement.
To many Europeans, these ideals have come, as Wilson hoped
they would, as a breath of fresh air to a continent
hopelessly mired in ancient hatreds. To others, they have
come as a lofty intrusion from a society that they see as
having more power than wisdom. Georges Clemenceau, France's
hard-bitten premier, famously dismissed Wilson's idealistic
Fourteen Points with the witty, "God Himself only gave us
ten." In some versions of the anecdote, the anti-clerical
Clemenceau followed that quip with "and we soon enough
learned to break those." His principled distaste for
Wilson's idealism notwithstanding (Clemenceau derisively
called him "the professor"), Clemenceau had a deep
admiration for America. As a young journalist, he had
covered the end of the American Civil War, spoke English
with American idioms, and had an American wife, at least
until he had her deported on trumped up charges. His
experiences with America are a symbolic microcosm of those
of his French countrymen, and, more generally, Europeans
across at least the western part of the continent.
Clemenceau and Wilson did agree on their shared dislike of
communism. Although it is now hardly more than a footnote,
even in American histories of the war, the United States
sent an expedition to northern Russia from 1918 to 1920 to
assist the noncommunist Whites in the Russian Civil War.
Although ultimately unsuccessful in stopping the spread of
Bolshevism, the incident showed Wilson's faith in the
ability of even small numbers of American soldiers to
influence world events. It can also be seen as the first
real American shot in the Cold War, and one that Josef
Stalin never fully forgave or forgot.
Historians short on space and teachers short on time like to
contrast the interventionist Wilson to the supposedly
isolationist years that followed. But the contrast is not
entirely accurate. The United States rejected the Treaty of
Versailles and refused to join the League of Nations, but
those events are only part of the story. The United States
did participate in a number of international conferences and
programs designed to reduce world tensions; in many cases
the United States provided the key leadership. These
conferences included the Washington Conferences on Naval
Disarmament, the Kellogg-Briand Pact that aimed to eliminate
war as an act of statecraft, the Dawes and Young Plans to
refinance German war debt, and the promotion of
international trade in the hopes that nations that trade
together would not go to war against one another. American
isolationism, to the extent that it even existed, is
therefore best seen as a desire not to go to war; it was not
a desire to bury the nation's collective heads in the sand.
The distinction is critical. A rough analogy might be found
today in the environmental movement, where the United States
is a recognized player and sometime leader, but only on
American terms, as the continued American refusal to sign
the Kyoto Accords demonstrates.
The war had equally dramatic impacts on the American home
front. The idea of intervening in a bloody and inconclusive
European war for unclear gains generated tremendous
controversy. Conservatives and many east coast elites
supported American entry into the war in large part because
they believed that the nation's honor had been impinged by
repeated German insults such as submarine warfare and the
notorious Zimmerman telegram promising Mexico parts of
American territory in exchange for military intervention.
Even before America entered the war, hundreds of young men
from "good families" and Ivy League universities had
volunteered their services for the French cause in the
French Foreign Legion and an all-American fighter squadron
called the Lafayette Escadrille. Among the Escadrille's most
vocal supporters was the former president and Wilson nemesis
Theodore Roosevelt, who praised the courage of young
Americans willing to risk their lives and their American
citizenship to fight for a cause that they believed to be
just.
But not all Americans responded as Roosevelt did. In the
Midwest and South there was widespread suspicion of entering
the war and lukewarm feelings about America's potential
British and French allies. Although few Americans supported
the Central Powers after the callous German sinking of the
Lusitania in May 1915, there was a deep chasm between anti-
German sentiment and a desire to send American troops "Over
There". The problems of Europe were a long way from the
minds of most Americans and, censorship notwithstanding,
Americans could read the newspapers and understand how
murderous the battlefields of the western front were.
Moreover, Americans were making money from their definition
of neutrality, which permitted trade with both sides. Why
put American safety and security at risk? Why kill the goose
that laid the golden eggs?
Germany's decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare
in April 1917 may have convinced Wilson and his advisers of
the need for war, but millions of Americans remained
unconvinced. The administration was worried about active
opposition to the war from radical labor groups like the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), anti-British Irish-
Americans, and ethnic Germans living in the Midwest and in
most major cities. Aware of the need to build consensus and
ensure support for the war, the government engaged in a
massive public relations and propaganda campaign, the like
of which the country had never seen. Newspapers and books
combined with new media like movies to saturate the American
people with images and ideas to promote the war. As with all
propaganda, it is hard to know exactly how average Americans
responded to these images. But Americans did rally around
the flag and even opponents of the war generally gave the
government its support once the country was officially at
war.
The American experience of war may have been brief, but its
impacts on the home front were dramatic. Among the groups
most deeply affected were African-Americans, thousands of
whom moved north to take jobs in the now booming northern
factories. This "great migration" was a transformative event
in African-American history as individuals and entire
families left the sharecropping south and came north. While
the jobs paid well and offered an escape from the Jim Crow
racism of the south, problems and violence emerged when
white workers came back and demanded their jobs. Many also
demanded that African-Americans return to the South as well.
Nineteen-nineteen was a year of terrible racial violence
characterized by widespread lynching. African-American
deaths due to racial violence in the turbulent period 1917-
1923 appear to have at least equaled, and may have exceeded,
the number of African-American battle deaths. This figure is
a function both of the general exclusion of African-
Americans from the battlefield and the intensity of racial
tension in the immediate postwar years.
The extent to which the war made the United States a
"nation" remains a point of considerable debate among
scholars. Some argue that the mass movement of people across
the nation, the shared military service of Americans (in
segregated units) raised across the nation, and increased
government standardization of the economy all point to the
emergence of a national mindset. World War I was the first
large-scale crisis that required a shared response from
Northerners and Southerners, Easterners and Westerners, city
dwellers and farmers, men and women. The country had
national heroes like John Pershing (born in Missouri), Alvin
York (born in Tennessee), and Eddie Rickenbacker (born in
Ohio). Having worked together to meet a common challenge,
America, these scholars argue, was ready to face the 1920s
era of mass media as people who identified themselves as
Americans first and foremost.
This narrative is compelling, but it is not the full story.
America remained deeply divided along numerous fault lines,
especially that of race; the United States Army raised two
African-American divisions for military service, but it
treated one so brutally that it performed badly in combat
and it gladly dispatched the other to the French Army, under
whose guidance it won numerous citations. Most of the
divisions in the United States Army, moreover, were National
Guard units connected to a state. Many of the largest and
most important monuments to the Americans on the Western
Front are dedicated not to the United States Army, but to
state units like the 28th Division from Pennsylvania,
memorialized at Varennes in one of France's largest World
War I monuments.
Perhaps what makes this complex war ultimately so difficult
to teach is the absence of an easy and straightforward
narrative. Although we recognize the limits of grand
narrative, there is a simplicity in teaching the Civil War
as the end of slavery and World War II as the destruction of
Nazism and Japanese totalitarianism. World War I's narrative
is much more complex and ultimately less satisfying to most
students. Nevertheless, it is a critical part of American
history and deserves a greater place in the curriculum than
the parenthesis to which it all too often gets relegated.
Click "Add a New Page" in the left column to start your page. Click "Easy Edit" to begin working on your page. You can type text and paste information right in your page. The interface works like a word processing program with the abilities to add images, video, and links to other websites. Choose fonts, colors, and check your spelling just as you would with a word processing program. The are icons to click that allow you to add "Photo" and "Link". The "Video" icon enables you to add video from the internet. Click "Save" when you are done working. You can return and update your page anytime.
Mike O'Neal-“Dunkirk to Vittorio Veneto: New Jersey's Aviators in the Twilight of the Great War”
Marc Romanych-“Germany’s Wonder Weapon – the 42cm ‘Big Bertha’ Howitzer”
Clayton Donnell-“Fortress Antwerp”
Jon Guttman-“Pusher Aces of World War I”
For announcements and information pertaining to the national branch of the WFA click the link below.
US Marines in the Great WarHistory of World War I at DCCC Online Assignment
WFA Membership Form
The Western Front Association
Florida & Gulf Coast Chapter
Annual Seminar – February 26-27, 2010
The Hilton Garden Inn – Tampa North
13305 Temple Terrace Boulevard
Temple Terrace, Florida
I-75 exit 266
(813) 342-5000
Friday, February 26
9:00 am George Thompson, 1914 – Swan Song of the Austro-Hungarian Army
10:00 am Peter Pastor, The Hungarian Home Front during World War I
11:00 am János Angi, The Wartime Role of István Tisza and Mihály Károlyi in Hungarian Memory
Noon Buffet Lunch at the Hotel
1:30 pm Richard Hall, World War I in Bulgaria
2:30 pm Michael Barrett, The Romanian Campaign of 1916
3:30 pm Lt. Col. Winfield Scott, The First Fall of Baghdad: British Tragedy to Triumph on the Tigris, 1916-1917
6:30 pm No Host Dinner at Dunderbocks Restaurant
Saturday, February 27th
9:00 am Dennis Laffer, The Armenian Holocaust
10:00 am Steven Béla Várdy, The Impact of the Treaty of Trianon on Hungary
11:00 am William Dean, Fighting a Two-Front War: France & Morocco at the Outbreak of WWI
Noon Buffet Luncheon at the Hotel
1:30 pm Kees Botherbloem, Early Russian Analyses of the First World War
2:30 pm Carolyn Lowry, At What Cost: Spanish Neutrality in WWI
3:30 pm Grayson “Jack” Tunstall, Contrasts: The Eastern and Western Fronts
To register, mail a check for $95 made out to Leonard G. Shurtleff, 6915 NW 49th Street, Gainesville, Florida 23653-1152. If you need more information, contact Len Shurtleff at lshurtleff @aol.com or telephone (352) 379-3299.
For hotel reservations, call the Hilton Garden Tampa-North directly at (813) 342-5000 and ask for the WFA rate of $99 per night.
WFA Membership Form
The Western Front Association
Florida & Gulf Coast Chapter
Annual Seminar – February 26-27, 2010
The Hilton Garden Inn – Tampa North
13305 Temple Terrace Boulevard
Temple Terrace, Florida
I-75 exit 266
(813) 342-5000
Friday, February 26
9:00 am George Thompson, 1914 – Swan Song of the Austro-Hungarian Army
10:00 am Peter Pastor, The Hungarian Home Front during World War I
11:00 am János Angi, The Wartime Role of István Tisza and Mihály Károlyi in Hungarian Memory
Noon Buffet Lunch at the Hotel
1:30 pm Richard Hall, World War I in Bulgaria
2:30 pm Michael Barrett, The Romanian Campaign of 1916
3:30 pm Lt. Col. Winfield Scott, The First Fall of Baghdad: British Tragedy to Triumph on the Tigris, 1916-1917
6:30 pm No Host Dinner at Dunderbocks Restaurant
Saturday, February 27th
9:00 am Dennis Laffer, The Armenian Holocaust
10:00 am Steven Béla Várdy, The Impact of the Treaty of Trianon on Hungary
11:00 am William Dean, Fighting a Two-Front War: France & Morocco at the Outbreak of WWI
Noon Buffet Luncheon at the Hotel
1:30 pm Kees Botherbloem, Early Russian Analyses of the First World War
2:30 pm Carolyn Lowry, At What Cost: Spanish Neutrality in WWI
3:30 pm Grayson “Jack” Tunstall, Contrasts: The Eastern and Western Fronts
To register, mail a check for $95 made out to Leonard G. Shurtleff, 6915 NW 49th Street, Gainesville, Florida 23653-1152. If you need more information, contact Len Shurtleff at lshurtleff @aol.com or telephone (352) 379-3299.
For hotel reservations, call the Hilton Garden Tampa-North directly at (813) 342-5000 and ask for the WFA rate of $99 per night.
The WFA East
Coast Chapter
The Fall 2009 WWI History Seminar !
Saturday November 7 – Maryland War Memorial, Baltimore
Coast Chapter
The Fall 2009 WWI History Seminar !
Saturday November 7 – Maryland War Memorial, Baltimore
Mike O'Neal-“Dunkirk to Vittorio Veneto: New Jersey's Aviators in the Twilight of the Great War”
Marc Romanych-“Germany’s Wonder Weapon – the 42cm ‘Big Bertha’ Howitzer”
Robert-Lembke-"Flamethrowers in the Great War: Exploding The Myths"
Clayton Donnell-“Fortress Antwerp”
Jon Guttman-“Pusher Aces of World War I”
Valor Tours, Ltd. 2010 Western Front Tour.
When: May 4-11, 2010
Cost: $2,950 per person, land costs only, twin share, sgle suppl.
available
Major Stops & Site:
1st and 2nd Battles of the Marne,
Belleau Wood, Chateau-Thierry
Reims, Champagne, Blanc Mont
Verdun, St. Mihiel, Meuse-Argonne
When: May 4-11, 2010
Cost: $2,950 per person, land costs only, twin share, sgle suppl.
available
Major Stops & Site:
1st and 2nd Battles of the Marne,
Belleau Wood, Chateau-Thierry
Reims, Champagne, Blanc Mont
Verdun, St. Mihiel, Meuse-Argonne
mike.greatwar@gmail.com
Valor Tours, Ltd. 2010 Gallipoli Tour
Propaganda Posters
More Posters
Valor Tours, Ltd. 2010 Gallipoli Tour
When: September 12-20, 2010
Cost: $3,850 (estimated) dbl. occupancy, all land costs and meals included, single supplement available.
Itinerary: Istanbul, Troy, Canakkkale, Cape Helles, Krithia, Anzac, Lone Pine, Chanuk Bair, the Nek, Suvla Bay, Naval Sites and Forts
Cost: $3,850 (estimated) dbl. occupancy, all land costs and meals included, single supplement available.
Itinerary: Istanbul, Troy, Canakkkale, Cape Helles, Krithia, Anzac, Lone Pine, Chanuk Bair, the Nek, Suvla Bay, Naval Sites and Forts
mike.greatwar@gmail.com
Propaganda Posters
More Posters
WFA/GWS National Seminar
at
The National World War I Museum
Kansas City, MO
11-13 September 2009
The Three Ts of Pursuit Air Superiority: Technology, Tactics, and Techniques
Bob Denison
Technology and the Treaty
Dana Lombardy, Great War Society President
Air Bombing Technology
Steve Suddaby, WFA Vice President
American Innovation during the War Using Archival Documents as Case Studies
Mitchell Yockelson, National Archives
They Were Fighting Men
Pellom McDaniels, University of Missouri
Beyond Incompetence: Why the AEF Lacked Fleets of Tanks in 1918
Patrick Osborn, National Archives and Karl Klusewitz
DADA: A World Turned Upside Down
Jan Schall, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Grenades: An Explosive Topic!
Doran Cart, WFA President
WWI Communications Technology: From Feathers to Frequencies
David Beer, University of Texas
Bloody Christmas 1918: The Battle of the Kaiser's Army
Scott Stephenson, Command and General Staff College
Wilson and Lenin-Whose Influence is Greater
Croby Kemper III, Kansas City Public Library
Past Seminars
at
The National World War I Museum
Kansas City, MO
11-13 September 2009
The Three Ts of Pursuit Air Superiority: Technology, Tactics, and Techniques
Bob Denison
Poetry Reading
Mary Swanson
Mary Swanson
Technology and the Treaty
Dana Lombardy, Great War Society President
Air Bombing Technology
Steve Suddaby, WFA Vice President
American Innovation during the War Using Archival Documents as Case Studies
Mitchell Yockelson, National Archives
They Were Fighting Men
Pellom McDaniels, University of Missouri
Beyond Incompetence: Why the AEF Lacked Fleets of Tanks in 1918
Patrick Osborn, National Archives and Karl Klusewitz
Jan Schall, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Grenades: An Explosive Topic!
Doran Cart, WFA President
WWI Communications Technology: From Feathers to Frequencies
David Beer, University of Texas
Bloody Christmas 1918: The Battle of the Kaiser's Army
Scott Stephenson, Command and General Staff College
Technology and Tactics: Battle of Caporetto and its Effect on WWII Tactics
Gaetano Cavallaro
Wilson and Lenin-Whose Influence is Greater
Croby Kemper III, Kansas City Public Library
Past Seminars
For announcements and information pertaining to the national branch of the WFA click the link below.
Visit the WFA East Coast Chapter's website at the link below.
Links to World War One Battlefield Tours
Spring 2009 Battlefield Tour
Valor Tours
Bartlett's Battlefield Journeys
Spring 2009 Battlefield Tour
Valor Tours
Bartlett's Battlefield Journeys
US Marines in Belleau Wood
"Detroit's Own" Polar Bear Memorial Association
American Troops in Northern Russia, 1919
Dreadnoughts
Austro-Hungarian Dreadnoughts, 1915
First Division AEF
First Division Museum
Scholars and historians are in debate over the location of Alvin C. York's Great War heroics. The Sergeant Alvin C. York Project and The Sergeant York Discovery Expedition represent some points of view. Visit their sites for details about their theses.
The Sergeant Alvin C. York Project
The Sergeant York Discovery Expedition
Interested in Trench Art?
Visit these sites.
Trench Art Collector
Trench Art Website
Trench Art Article
Visit these sites.
Trench Art Collector
Trench Art Website
Trench Art Article
WHAT STUDENTS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WORLD WAR I
by Michael Neiberg
Ask any British student about the Somme or any French or
German student about Verdun and you are likely to get a
quick response. It may be a response about an ancestor who
fought in one of the war's titanic battles or it might be a
response influenced by a work of fiction like Blackadder,
Oh! What a Lovely War, or All Quiet on the Western Front. It
might even be the now fashionable response of dismissing the
war as a fratricidal relic of Europe's "old" age of
nationalism and rivalry. These responses might well be
slightly inaccurate or even wildly so, but the war remains
enough of a part of the living memory for Europeans to
elicit certain emotional and historical triggers. This
continued sense of relevance for Europeans is, of course,
entirely natural given the great destruction the war brought
and the impact the war had on European history.
American students, by contrast, are unlikely to have such
close associations to World War I. The war for Americans was
a brief event, and a relatively small proportion of
Americans saw any sustained military action. The United
States was never attacked and there is no single moment
associated with the war in American memory as the Somme is
in British memory. The war, moreover, falls in between two
much larger and more emotive events in American history, the
Civil War and World War II. American students might thus be
forgiven for not responding to Belleau Wood or the Meuse-
Argonne in the same ways they might react to Gettysburg or
Pearl Harbor.
That contrast is the first point I always make to my
students. Whereas for the United States, World War I is a
little-known and arcane period in history, for Europeans it
is absolutely formative. For France and Great Britain
especially, World War I (known as the Great War or La Grande
Guerre for a good reason) remains the war both in the
popular imagination and among scholars. While one compares
humanitarian catastrophes at one's own peril, a few numbers
may make the case. The British Empire suffered an estimated
908,000 deaths in World War I, or more than twice the number
of World War II. Put another way, the British had more men
killed on one day of World War I (July 1, 1916, still the
bloodiest single day in the history of the British Army)
than it suffered in the first month of operations on and
subsequent to D-Day. For France, of course, the contrast is
even more stark: an estimated 1,300,000 Frenchmen died in
World War I compared to 567,000 in World War II.
A simple car ride along any of World War I's many
battlefields will prove the point to those less
statistically inclined. On many battlefields, such as
Verdun, Champagne, and the Somme, the war still speaks
through the massive shell holes and mine craters that
continue to scar the landscape 90 years later. An observant
tourist can also see signs reading village detruit
(destroyed village), marking a place that was quite
literally pulverized during the war and never rebuilt. The
French burial custom has been to build massive cemeteries
such as the ones at Verdun, Les Islettes, or Notre Dame de
Lorette that impress by their sheer size. Ossuaries
containing the remains of thousands of inconnus (unknown
soldiers) stand as silent witnesses to the awesome power of
modern weapons, most importantly artillery, to kill men
without leaving sufficient remains to allow for
identification or burial. The British have preferred to
build smaller, more numerous cemeteries with the unique
touch of including a personal statement from the family on
the headstones. The Germans, too, built cemeteries with
black, solemn crosses that stand in stark contrast to the
gleaming white marble to be found in the American ones.
Driving away from the battlefield, a traveler might stop at
any of a number of appealing French or Belgian towns to have
a coffee or meal and try to get the horrors of what they
have just seen out of their minds. But it will not take much
imagination to see the impacts of the war in any town near
the western front. Some, like Arras or Ypres, will have post
cards for sale showing the astonishing destruction and
devastation that left them mere piles of rubble. Others will
have place names like Place Foch or Avenue Joffre named to
honor the heroes of the war. One might even see an Avenue
Haig or a Rue Pershing thrown in. Every French town, no
matter how small or how far from the western front, will
have a statue near the town hall commemorating the young men
who died pour la patrie from 1914-1918. If one looks very
closely, one will see a tragic recurrence of family names on
such statues and, often on the back, the addition of a
smaller number of names from the war of 1939-1945, seemingly
added as an afterthought.
For Europeans, the war is the epochal event of the century.
Without it, there would have been no great depression, no
fascism, no Second World War, and no concentration camps. We
will never know, of course, what the estimated 8 million
Europeans who died in the course of the war might otherwise
have contributed to politics, to medicine, or to art. What
we do know is that Europe is still suffering from that huge
loss of its best men and is still struggling to figure out
how to even cope with their memory.
The American experience of World War I must therefore be
kept in its proper perspective. Americans who do not
understand what the war did to Europe will never really
understand the Europe that emerged. Europe's ambivalent
attitude toward the United States, its drive toward
unification, and the relatively recent coming together of
the French and German governments will all come into sharper
focus if they are set against the backdrop of the killing of
1914-1918. Americans, a European might say over coffee in
Arras, do not really understand war because it has not
touched us as it has them.
For that, of course, we can all be very grateful. Although
the war did not result in destruction for Americans on the
European scale, it nevertheless had deep and often forgotten
impacts on America. Perhaps most importantly, it led to
fundamental, long-term changes in the way America (and
Americans) relate to the outside world. It is hard to
imagine today, but when Woodrow Wilson went to Paris for the
postwar peace conference in early 1919, it marked the first
time ever that a sitting American president had visited
Europe. This was due to much more than the limits of
transportation technology. It reflected instead an American
mindset that clearly relegated European affairs to the back
burner.
Woodrow Wilson forever changed that attitude, and with it he
changed much more. Wilson committed America to international
sponsorship of an idea of foreign policy based around the
high-minded quest for democracy, capitalism, and freedom.
While not all Americans have seen the problem in the way
Wilson did and while even Wilson did not fully believe in
all of the consequences of his own idealism, his way of
viewing the world has bequeathed a legacy to every American
leader since. Echoes of his belief in the use of American
power to pave the way for ideals that would in turn secure
the freedom and peace of peoples everywhere has influenced
American foreign policy ever since. Presidents of both
parties, down to the present day, have used Wilson's ideals
and his language as the basis for their global involvement.
To many Europeans, these ideals have come, as Wilson hoped
they would, as a breath of fresh air to a continent
hopelessly mired in ancient hatreds. To others, they have
come as a lofty intrusion from a society that they see as
having more power than wisdom. Georges Clemenceau, France's
hard-bitten premier, famously dismissed Wilson's idealistic
Fourteen Points with the witty, "God Himself only gave us
ten." In some versions of the anecdote, the anti-clerical
Clemenceau followed that quip with "and we soon enough
learned to break those." His principled distaste for
Wilson's idealism notwithstanding (Clemenceau derisively
called him "the professor"), Clemenceau had a deep
admiration for America. As a young journalist, he had
covered the end of the American Civil War, spoke English
with American idioms, and had an American wife, at least
until he had her deported on trumped up charges. His
experiences with America are a symbolic microcosm of those
of his French countrymen, and, more generally, Europeans
across at least the western part of the continent.
Clemenceau and Wilson did agree on their shared dislike of
communism. Although it is now hardly more than a footnote,
even in American histories of the war, the United States
sent an expedition to northern Russia from 1918 to 1920 to
assist the noncommunist Whites in the Russian Civil War.
Although ultimately unsuccessful in stopping the spread of
Bolshevism, the incident showed Wilson's faith in the
ability of even small numbers of American soldiers to
influence world events. It can also be seen as the first
real American shot in the Cold War, and one that Josef
Stalin never fully forgave or forgot.
Historians short on space and teachers short on time like to
contrast the interventionist Wilson to the supposedly
isolationist years that followed. But the contrast is not
entirely accurate. The United States rejected the Treaty of
Versailles and refused to join the League of Nations, but
those events are only part of the story. The United States
did participate in a number of international conferences and
programs designed to reduce world tensions; in many cases
the United States provided the key leadership. These
conferences included the Washington Conferences on Naval
Disarmament, the Kellogg-Briand Pact that aimed to eliminate
war as an act of statecraft, the Dawes and Young Plans to
refinance German war debt, and the promotion of
international trade in the hopes that nations that trade
together would not go to war against one another. American
isolationism, to the extent that it even existed, is
therefore best seen as a desire not to go to war; it was not
a desire to bury the nation's collective heads in the sand.
The distinction is critical. A rough analogy might be found
today in the environmental movement, where the United States
is a recognized player and sometime leader, but only on
American terms, as the continued American refusal to sign
the Kyoto Accords demonstrates.
The war had equally dramatic impacts on the American home
front. The idea of intervening in a bloody and inconclusive
European war for unclear gains generated tremendous
controversy. Conservatives and many east coast elites
supported American entry into the war in large part because
they believed that the nation's honor had been impinged by
repeated German insults such as submarine warfare and the
notorious Zimmerman telegram promising Mexico parts of
American territory in exchange for military intervention.
Even before America entered the war, hundreds of young men
from "good families" and Ivy League universities had
volunteered their services for the French cause in the
French Foreign Legion and an all-American fighter squadron
called the Lafayette Escadrille. Among the Escadrille's most
vocal supporters was the former president and Wilson nemesis
Theodore Roosevelt, who praised the courage of young
Americans willing to risk their lives and their American
citizenship to fight for a cause that they believed to be
just.
But not all Americans responded as Roosevelt did. In the
Midwest and South there was widespread suspicion of entering
the war and lukewarm feelings about America's potential
British and French allies. Although few Americans supported
the Central Powers after the callous German sinking of the
Lusitania in May 1915, there was a deep chasm between anti-
German sentiment and a desire to send American troops "Over
There". The problems of Europe were a long way from the
minds of most Americans and, censorship notwithstanding,
Americans could read the newspapers and understand how
murderous the battlefields of the western front were.
Moreover, Americans were making money from their definition
of neutrality, which permitted trade with both sides. Why
put American safety and security at risk? Why kill the goose
that laid the golden eggs?
Germany's decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare
in April 1917 may have convinced Wilson and his advisers of
the need for war, but millions of Americans remained
unconvinced. The administration was worried about active
opposition to the war from radical labor groups like the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), anti-British Irish-
Americans, and ethnic Germans living in the Midwest and in
most major cities. Aware of the need to build consensus and
ensure support for the war, the government engaged in a
massive public relations and propaganda campaign, the like
of which the country had never seen. Newspapers and books
combined with new media like movies to saturate the American
people with images and ideas to promote the war. As with all
propaganda, it is hard to know exactly how average Americans
responded to these images. But Americans did rally around
the flag and even opponents of the war generally gave the
government its support once the country was officially at
war.
The American experience of war may have been brief, but its
impacts on the home front were dramatic. Among the groups
most deeply affected were African-Americans, thousands of
whom moved north to take jobs in the now booming northern
factories. This "great migration" was a transformative event
in African-American history as individuals and entire
families left the sharecropping south and came north. While
the jobs paid well and offered an escape from the Jim Crow
racism of the south, problems and violence emerged when
white workers came back and demanded their jobs. Many also
demanded that African-Americans return to the South as well.
Nineteen-nineteen was a year of terrible racial violence
characterized by widespread lynching. African-American
deaths due to racial violence in the turbulent period 1917-
1923 appear to have at least equaled, and may have exceeded,
the number of African-American battle deaths. This figure is
a function both of the general exclusion of African-
Americans from the battlefield and the intensity of racial
tension in the immediate postwar years.
The extent to which the war made the United States a
"nation" remains a point of considerable debate among
scholars. Some argue that the mass movement of people across
the nation, the shared military service of Americans (in
segregated units) raised across the nation, and increased
government standardization of the economy all point to the
emergence of a national mindset. World War I was the first
large-scale crisis that required a shared response from
Northerners and Southerners, Easterners and Westerners, city
dwellers and farmers, men and women. The country had
national heroes like John Pershing (born in Missouri), Alvin
York (born in Tennessee), and Eddie Rickenbacker (born in
Ohio). Having worked together to meet a common challenge,
America, these scholars argue, was ready to face the 1920s
era of mass media as people who identified themselves as
Americans first and foremost.
This narrative is compelling, but it is not the full story.
America remained deeply divided along numerous fault lines,
especially that of race; the United States Army raised two
African-American divisions for military service, but it
treated one so brutally that it performed badly in combat
and it gladly dispatched the other to the French Army, under
whose guidance it won numerous citations. Most of the
divisions in the United States Army, moreover, were National
Guard units connected to a state. Many of the largest and
most important monuments to the Americans on the Western
Front are dedicated not to the United States Army, but to
state units like the 28th Division from Pennsylvania,
memorialized at Varennes in one of France's largest World
War I monuments.
Perhaps what makes this complex war ultimately so difficult
to teach is the absence of an easy and straightforward
narrative. Although we recognize the limits of grand
narrative, there is a simplicity in teaching the Civil War
as the end of slavery and World War II as the destruction of
Nazism and Japanese totalitarianism. World War I's narrative
is much more complex and ultimately less satisfying to most
students. Nevertheless, it is a critical part of American
history and deserves a greater place in the curriculum than
the parenthesis to which it all too often gets relegated.
Links to Other Great War Websites
National World War One Museum
League of World War I Aviation Historians
Over There
US Army Heritage and Education Center
World War I Document Archive
The Long, Long Trail
BBC World War I
World War I TeacherNet
American Battle Monuments Commission
The Great War Society
Trenches on the Web
WWI Color Photos
AEF Blog
The Aerodrome
FirstWorldWar.com
The New York Military Affairs Symposium
MilitaryGenealogy.com
The Great War Forum
WWI: Experiences of an English Soldier
America's World War One Monuments
Great War Association
Letters Home
National World War One Museum
League of World War I Aviation Historians
Over There
US Army Heritage and Education Center
World War I Document Archive
The Long, Long Trail
BBC World War I
World War I TeacherNet
American Battle Monuments Commission
The Great War Society
Trenches on the Web
WWI Color Photos
AEF Blog
The Aerodrome
FirstWorldWar.com
The New York Military Affairs Symposium
MilitaryGenealogy.com
The Great War Forum
WWI: Experiences of an English Soldier
America's World War One Monuments
Great War Association
Letters Home
JeffreyLaMonica |
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, Nov 24 2009, 2:02 PM EST
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About This Update
Edited by JeffreyLaMonica
266 words added view changes - complete history) |
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| Started By | Thread Subject | Replies | Last Post | ||
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| jmgallen | World War I Speaker | 5 | Sep 27 2009, 9:52 PM EDT by jmgallen | ||
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Thread started: Jan 29 2009, 8:24 PM EST
Watch
I am a member of the Military History Club of the Missouri Athletic Club in St. Louis. At our monthly noon time meetings we have a speaker give about a 45 minute talk about a military history topic. This month our leader mentioned that we have never had anyone talk about World War I. Are there any members in the St. Louis area who are willing and able to talk on a WWI related topic to our Club? If so, please contact me at JMGallen@juno.com
Thanks!
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Speakers wanted
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| mjroman | Interest in WWI - Growing or Declining? | 8 | Sep 5 2009, 1:03 PM EDT by jmgallen | ||
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Thread started: Nov 15 2008, 10:01 AM EST
Watch
An article recently appeared in a British media outlet (The Independent; http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-killing-fields-of-the-first-world-war-979730.html) that describes how more British people visit the battlefields now than ever before. It is a good read.
In the article there is a thought provoking quote by Martin Middlebrook: "After the 80th anniversary [of the Somme] in 1996, I would have told you that two things were inevitable. We will see declining numbers of people at future commemorations. Interest in the war will gradually reduce. The opposite has been true." As we begin to approach the 100th anniversary of 1914, can we expect to see a similar phenomenon in the US? Or will our distance from the battlefields and our “lesser” experience” to that of the British dampen American interest in the Great War? Thoughts anyone? |
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| pcora | Fall WWI History Seminar - Save the Date | 0 | Aug 16 2009, 7:19 AM EDT by pcora | ||
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Thread started: Aug 16 2009, 7:19 AM EDT
Watch
The WFA East Coast Chapter will hold its Fall 2009 Seminar on Saturday November 7 at the Maryland War Memorial Building in Baltimore. Presentations will include The Battle of Antwerp, The German 42cm howitzer, and New Jersey Aviators over the Italian and Western Fronts. More speakers will be added over the coming weeks. The seminar will also include displays, door prizes, and a chapter sponsored WWI used book sale.
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