Martin Bender
By November 1918, Germany recognized “The Great War” was lost. The Allies were attacking with considerable success in the Meuse-Argonne region of northwestern France with a force of 1,200,000 American and 800,000 French soldiers. Within Germany itself, unimaginable food shortages and starvation caused rioting. In late October there was mutiny within the German Navy. The German Army was plagued by mass desertions and the Spanish Influenza epidemic.
On Nov. 8, Germany dispatched a delegation to France to negotiate terms for an armistice. The French immediately escorted the delegation to a secret location in the Compiegne Forest near Paris. Armistice talks commenced in the personal railroad carriage of Allied Supreme Commander French Marshal Ferdinand Foch but the major impasse to any agreement was the Allied position that Kaiser Wilhelm II could not remain in power in Germany.
The German delegation learned from a newspaper report the Kaiser had abdicated and fled to the neutral Netherlands on Nov. 9. Governance in Berlin had been passed to Fredrich Ebert, a Social Democrat, and the Socialist Council of the People’s Delegates. An end to the war was the council’s primary focus.
At 5 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918, in the Allied Commander’s train car the armistice was signed to bring World War I, “The Great War,” to an end. All hostilities were to cease exactly on “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.” The six-hour delay to 11 a.m. Paris time was considered necessary for the word of the Armistice to be disseminated on both sides to all levels of command.
Absent from the orders to end hostilities at 11 a.m. was any additional direction. Field commanders used the six-hour delay to make a final charge into “no-man’s land.” Artillery batteries were without restraint to fire off their stockpiled ordinance. When the fighting finally stopped at 11 a.m., nearly 11,000 more Allied and German soldiers were dead, wounded or missing in action. The American Expeditionary Force suffered nearly 3,500 casualties that morning. It was the highest single day U.S. casualty number during the war.
By the terms of the 1918 Armistice and the subsequent Treaty of Versailles, Germany was forced to accept full responsibility for WWI, pay reparations, surrender territory to France and Poland, and accept limitations as to the size and makeup of any future German armed forces. It is historically accepted that these and other harsh provisions against Germany set the stage for the rise of the Nazi party and eventually World War II.
After occupying France at the beginning of World War II, Adolf Hitler symbolically sought revenge for the prior humiliation of Germany. In June 1940, the French surrender was signed at the same location and in the same railroad car where the WWI Armistice had been signed 22 years earlier.
In 1938, to honor World War I veterans, Congress designated November 11 “Armistice Day.” In 1954 Congress expanded the significance of the day to honor veterans of all wars by designating November 11 “Veterans Day.”