Original subtitles

now countries with no reason to join the war but promises of plunder came in for

some the gains would come and cheaply for most it would be a valueless meat

grinder the nations that came in later came in

chiefly for what they could get out of it japan italy bulgaria whatever

The German overseas empire was the first casualty of the war. The Japanese came

in and picked up their Asian possessions.

The British picked up their African possessions.

So the German empire abroad ceased to exist in 1950.

Italy had come in for a grab bag of promises of a handful of small

territories in the Adriatic and the Aegean seas.

The cost would be calamitous.

as Italy's armies hurled themselves throughout the war into broken

offensives against well-defended mountain crags.

The Balkans chose sides frenetically.

The Greeks, Serbs, Albanians, Montenegrins, and later the Romanians

joined the Allies.

Bulgaria went with the Turks and Central Powers.

Portugal and Brazil contributed corpses.

Britain and France's attempt to aid Serbia from the south by landing at the

Greek port of Salonika stalemated 600,000 men so utterly that laughing

Germans called it the Allies' largest concentration camp. With the armies at a

standstill, the navies had come forward to widen the misery.

The Royal Navy expanded the sea blockade of any militarily useful shipments to

Germany to include grain, flour, and other foodstuffs.

This blockade was so effective in cutting off maritime supplies to Germany

and to the other Central European nations that Germany was soon reduced to

a near starvation level.

The furious Germans casting about for a weapon of retaliation seized upon their

growing submarine fleet.

Germany threatened to sink any ship in the British Isles' combat zone without

warning.

Shortly, all neutral shipping was being blockaded out of both countries.

Ships went down briskly.

Britain was actually more vulnerable at sea than the Germans were. Britain

imported 64% of her foodstuffs when the war started, Germany only 25%.

The British blockade forced the use of the submarine as a commerce raider. But

it was a new kind of weapon.

Its character, its weakness, its relative vulnerability on the surface

required that it attack without warning if resistance was offered.

a peaceful prosperous united states with a heavy german immigrant population had

grumped about unsportsmanlike conduct neutrality and the loss of markets but

followed the aloof lead of president wilson a plague on all of troublesome

europe

When the Cunard liner Lusitania sailed from New York in the face of printed

warnings from Germany, with a passenger register that included a heavy list of

American celebrities, the outcome of the Great War swung fatally.

On a clear May 1st, in sight of the coast of Ireland, Walter Schweiger,

commanding the German submarine U-20, prepared to sink his country along with

a speeding liner.

Schwager's torpedoes slammed into the Lusitania and she went down in 18

minutes. 1,198 people, including 128 Americans, drowned.

After that, there was never a doubt that the United States would fight this war.

The righteous rage of the United States would never be assuaged.

Germany sprayed gasoline on rising flames by refusing to apologize or pay

compensation and lionized Schweiger in its national press.

President Wilson's attempt at a calming statement that there is such a thing as

a man being too proud to fight backfired.

He was scorned as craven for wanting to protect his people.

from the ever newer horrors that had been appearing on the Western Front.

In front of Ypres, with a soft breeze blowing toward the French lines on a day

of golden sunshine, colonial troops described two greenish-yellow clouds

drifting toward them over five miles of front as mists seen over water meadows

on a frosty night.

In 15 minutes, 5,000 men met slow death.

10,000 were maimed and utter panic took hold as the heavier-than-air chlorine

gas dropped into the trenches.

Even the Germans were astonished at the devastation and not prepared to exploit

the 4.5-mile gap opened in the line.

With the surprise of the terror weapon lost, poison gas became just one more

deadly artifact.

with gas barrages, fired by artillery and released by gas cylinders, a new

constant.

Phosgene and mustard gases joined chlorine in the death brigade, and whole

companies of soldiers, blinded and asphyxiating pitifully with ruined

lungs, were soon commonplace.

The smothering gas mask became as dreaded as the maiming.

The battles, along with the villages and terrain features that named them, went

on. But Artois, Aubert Ridge, Second Ypres, Vimy Ridge, Champagne,

Luce, gained nothing but the growing list of torn men now nourishing the

bright poppies.

Geoffrey sniffed Gilets Grignotes. I am nibbling them. As Kitchener and French

faded, With the prospect of quick victory, General Sir Douglas Haig, scion

to a whisky fortune and a man who had failed his Camberley staff college

exams, became head of the British Expeditionary Force.

On the home front, England confronted a war that did not end.

Posters exhorted volunteers to replace the massacred professionals.

The Munitions Act put the whole industrial structure on a war footing.

Strikes were forbidden.

Munitions workers were frozen into their jobs.

And women were invited to leave the kitchen for the plant.

It was deemed morally responsible for a woman to rent her own flat,

to wear new fashions, to smoke in public, etc.

The war had won the European woman a new fashioned kind of independence.

They deserved, they felt, a reward come the end of the war.

The reward was suffrage.

Death arrived at home, too.

From 1915 through 1917, immense German airships called Zeppelins, after their

designer, were raiding England.

The Germans were bombing cities at far distance from the front.

In those days, we tend to forget this, the Germans were very enthusiastic about

bombing cities.

The rapid development of anti-aircraft guns and fighter planes softened the

threat, and for the first time in history called attention to a new breed

of hero, one who lived in the clouds.

Barely ten years after the Wright brothers first flew, knights of the air

were dueling miles above the earth.

Pistols and bricks had been replaced as weapons by synchronized machine guns and

finned bombs.

A whole vocabulary was invented.

Dogfight, air raid, strafing, spad, Newport, Fokker, spin, loop, aerodrome,

and most importantly, ace.

While the artilleryman who killed a thousand men a day on the Western Front

was ignored,

Air kills by the dashing pilots were counted in daily headlines.

Von Richthofen, Bishop, Fonk, Boelcke were national gods.

Max Immelmann and Raoul Loughberry gave their names to classic air maneuvers and

became immortal.

Unfortunately, becoming immortal often involved a wingless three-mile fall to

earth while being caressed by flames.

Infantrymen who swept up the remains sometimes felt lucky, though not for

long.

The murderous standoff that the Great War had now become went to sea.

A mutually sought showdown between Britain's vast Grand Fleet and Germany's

huge High Seas Fleet took place on May 30.

Admiral Sir John Jellicoe's split force blundered into the German fleet under

Admiral Reinhard Scheer off the Jutland Peninsula, and something like a knife

fight with 14-inch guns began.

German gunnery and armor gave better than it got.

A massive 117,000 tons of English warships went down, compared to the 61

,000 tons of German losses.

It decided nothing and everything.

Jutland was a tie.

If anything, the Germans came out a little bit on top. They sunk more ships.

On the other hand, the German Grand Fleet was chased back to their bases

and they never emerged again. From that point on, the blockade of

Germany was not challenged.

Back on the trembling earth, Austria finally crushed Serbia with German help,

and the Russian armies were driven off in front of Prussia.

But decision did not appear.

The public regard for the heroic Lord Kitchener had fallen so low at the time

of his death in a submarine attack that the House of Commons was considering a

motion to reduce his salary.

Into his place as war minister stepped explosive, powerful David Lloyd George.

english leadership was back but english war strategy remained insanely the same

douglas haig was about to commit a military blunder so great that its

cost and horror would haunt the soul of england for the rest of the twentieth

century

Haig launched an enormous offensive along an 18-mile front against the

impregnably fortified chalk hills overlooking the Allied trenches along

the Somme. He looked on with stubborn confidence as German machine guns and

artillery methodically hollowed out the best of a whole generation of English

manhood.

They lost 60,000 troops in one single day.

That attack had implications that went far beyond the battlefield.

The British, Australians, and Canadians would never forgive the British tactics

and techniques that were used on the Western Front in 1916.

That undercut the British Empire.

the graduates of what they call public and we would call private schools, who

are the lieutenants and the captains, are killed first.

And what happens, therefore, is that you have, if you will, an inversion of

the social pyramid, that the next generation of doctors Lawyers,

civil servants, engineers, political leaders are the people who get killed

first.

The warrior poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote, I gaze down into the dark green

glooms of the weedy little river, but my thoughts are powerless against

unhappiness so huge.

Gains were pallid. The murder went on.

Haig drove his slaughterhouse until November, when there was simply nobody

left to feed it.

By the end of the dismal year of 1916, 607,000 English soldiers had fallen.

With the professional army long gone and the corps of the volunteer army thrown

away on the Somme, the conscription that had begun in 1915 had to feed the death

machine.

Married men fell with the bachelors. Whole communities were enlisting in PALS

regiments, perhaps most notably the Liverpool PALS. These men would all go

into training together, be organized into regiments and brigades together so

that whole communities and local districts were going into battle as one.

This was disastrous in the 1916 and 1917 offensives when whole communities were

wiped out.

It was the vilified Winston Churchill who was a leading impetus for a new

weapon to break the stalemate.

He supported Colonel Ernest Swinton's plea to develop a motorized armored

vehicle. The top-secret weapons were shipped undercover and marked as water

carriers, which quickly became...

tanks one doubting general insisted on the higher value of the horse no damn

design changes but tanks would be heard from with increasing vehemence

especially in light of what was about to happen at verdun falkenhayn in one of

those great cynical western front moments decided to attack

verdun not to gain territory

but to kill people.

You don't tell people this because you cannot tell your own troops that they're

being sent into battle not to win this or crush that or break something else.

They're being sent into battle simply with the intention of killing more of

the other guys than you're losing yourself.

The nominal target was the system of forts that had Fort Douaumont as a hub.

The attack against it was called Operation Gericht, meaning place of

execution.

Shells fell at the rate of 100,000 rounds per hour.

Scarecrow Frenchmen blackened uniforms in tatters rose up from the charnel

house to defend.

French trenches collapsed.

Pillboxes shattered.

Douamont fell.

Calm, decisive General Henri-Philippe Pétain began a climb into history when

he was ordered in as the savior of Verdun.

He ended an order of the day with the enduring words, they shall not pass.

Nobody did on either side.

It was after almost six months of slaughter that exhaustion and empty

ammunition dumps brought the Battle of Verdun to a halt.

France had lost 500,000 men.

Germany had lost 400,000.

Falkenhayn had been somewhat right in his estimate of outcome, except that he

was not one step closer to victory.

As his men died in mud, others died in sand.

World War I was the first war where oil made a great deal of difference, and

that was located in the Middle East.

The British wanted to expand their colonial empire to take control of some

of that oil.

So huge numbers of troops were put into Egypt and then into Mesopotamia.

The British Middle Eastern campaign would go from defeat in Mesopotamia to

signal success in front of Palestine under General Sir Edmund Allenby.

Colonel T.E. Lawrence would fan the flames of Arab revolt against the Turks

and enter mythology as Lawrence of Arabia.

Between Lawrence's slashing ambushes and Allenby's deft handling of a 400,000-man

army, the Turks would be smashed throughout the war, from Aqaba to

Tafila, from Gaza to Beersheba and Jerusalem.

In Europe, the caste changed.

Von Falkenhayn was replaced as commander of the German army with the hero tandem

of Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

Prime Minister Asquith, devastated by loss of his son in battle, was replaced

by the fiery David Lloyd George.

As the French kicked Joffre upstairs, General Robert Nivelle, a hero of

Verdun, stepped in as commander-in-chief of the Western Front.

For all his role in the Somme tragedy, Haig was made a field marshal.

In the East, Russia's General Alexei Brusilov gathered all equipped for a

grim mauling of the Austrian defenses over a 200-mile front.

The Brusilov Offensive was one of the great battles of 1916, and

though the Russian losses were dreadful, they gained

back a huge amount of territory that they had lost the year before.

but it was the last great gasp of the russian army as it reeled and died of

exhaustion of men and supplies but suffering without progress had begun to

rot russia from within and that would have consequences much beyond arms

as nineteen seventeen

opened czar nicholas was afield with his dissolving armies as his empire went

unruled

Heavy rioting began in Petrograd, and police machine guns killed hundreds.

Soon the storm spread to other cities.

What shall I do, the desperate Tsar asked advisors.

You must abdicate, was the answer.

He did, and the Romanov dynasty died on March 16, 1917.

To destabilize its enemy, Germany smuggled into Russia the arch

-revolutionary Nikolai Lenin from his exile in Zurich.

From that moment, Lenin worked his way furiously toward ousting all other

attempts at leadership, and Russia began a long slide out of the war.

But whatever the Germans were gaining in Russia, they had been throwing away in

the United States with their sabotage, submarine warfare, and general ham

-handedness.

Germany's talent was in uniform.

It certainly wasn't in their foreign office.

Their foreign minister, Alfred Zimmerman, sent a telegram to Mexico

offering an alliance and the possibility of retrieving Arizona, New Mexico, and

Texas. He sent that telegram over an American-owned undersea cable. It was

obviously intercepted.

and the Americans learned what he was going to do.

And then when it was published in the papers, he doubled his ignorance by

admitting that that was his own telegram.

After the Zimmerman telegram episode, war between the United States and

Germany is inevitable.

Woodrow Wilson, who was elected to his second term in 1916, on the slogan that

he kept us out of war was not a pacifist, as many are inclined to

believe. He was, in fact, an interventionist.

He must lead the American people into this war that he did not want but was

now inevitable.

He brings his message to Congress on the 2nd of April, pointing out to the

members of Congress that the Americans have no quarrel with the German people,

but America must make the world safe for democracy.

The anti-war forces in America crumbled and cries of kill the Kaiser and on to

Berlin rang out.

Wilson signed the Declaration of War.

The United States Army that began to prepare itself for war in Europe was as

hollow, depleted, and unprepared as any great nation's army had ever been.

It stood at 200,000 men and without a semblance of modern equipment.

It would take a dominating leader to shape it up.

They had him in a new commander.

John Pershing was a cavalry officer, West Point graduate.

He had fought in the last of the Indian Wars. He had done well in the Spanish

-American War.

He had commanded the 10th Cavalry, the Black Buffalo Soldiers. That's where he

got the nickname Black Jack.

He had done well in the Philippines in the insurrection.

President Roosevelt jumped him from the rank of captain to brigadier general.

Pershing is more important as a symbol, as the man who

seemed to be holding it all together.

Not one American soldier would be lost in the immense transfer of American

troops to Europe in 1917.

Rear Admiral William Sims had met with the British and within weeks had his

destroyers on line to help protect the huge convoys.

The bled-dry French and British were delighted.

They wanted every man.

Lafayette, we are here, barked Colonel Charles E. Stanton on July 4, 1917,

after the Americans had arrived in France to a rapturous French reception.

The citizens could not know that Pershing's big, rough army had been

taught to march but was still learning to fight.

They were months away from use on the front.

Pershing was determined to maintain the integrity of the American army, but he

was enough of a realist to know that he had to detach American units to British

command and French command in times of emergency.

In the meantime, maddeningly true to the mistakes of his predecessors, General

Robert Nivelle mounted another offensive to win the war, founded on all the old

impossibilities.

Although his attack around Arras could not advance, losing 187,000 men in 10

days, it would have one grand result, mutiny.

The army said, we've had it.

and they just refused to fight. Men streamed back to towns in the rear,

tried to commandeer trains to go to Paris.

They were barely stopped, and eventually ringleaders were rounded up.

A handful of drumhead executions went some distance into repairing the army,

but nothing went so far as getting rid of Nivelle and bringing in General

Pétain. to balance leadership with compassion.

He nursed the demoralized army back to health.

But it was tired and nowhere near replacing its losses.

It needed bodies, strong, fresh American bodies.

Georges Clemenceau, the new French Prime Minister, wanted things to hurry up and

said so loudly.

Concurrently, Field Marshal Haig, attempting to seize the submarine ports

and divert the Germans from the French sector, was writing tens of thousands of

new names on the cenotaphs of British villagers.

He chose Flanders for his latest dream of penetration, notably in front of

Ypres for a third battle in a sorry bogland before ravaged villages.

One, a magnet for mud and death called Passchendaele, would be remembered with

shudders for generations.

There was nothing like the mud of the Great War.

It was a liquid sea.

The horses drowned in mud.

The wounded slipped beneath wood and died not of their wounds, but actually

being drowned as well.

You couldn't supply troops.

You couldn't move. It put a mental state into a soldier that was automatic

depression.

However, there was a glimmer of hope at Cambrai.

where an attack led by 324 tanks, speeding at one and a half miles per

hour, gained more ground in six hours than had been taken around Passchendaele

in four months.

In Italy, the Germans went to the aid of their hapless Austrian ally and smashed

their foes for them.

In the fall of 1917, they drove into the Italian army in the Battle of Caporetto

and broke it in 20 days.

Of the 305,000 men Italy lost, 275,000 surrendered.

The Italians would need all their fortitude to recover as a fighting unit.

Much more important, Russia was about to leave the alliance, taking along its

millions of rebelling soldiers.

As 1917 waned, Lenin's Bolshevik revolutionaries struggled to throw over

the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky and replace it with a Bolshevik

dictatorship to take Russia to a separate peace.

And when Petrograd regiments stopped recognizing his rule, Kerensky left the

city on November 7th and Lenin was in command.

Cries to end the war went up.

The Bolsheviks made a separate peace at Brest-Liflotz with the Germans.

This enabled the Germans to move a great number of men from the Eastern Front to

the Western Front.

Ludendorff saw that 1918 was going to be make or break for Germany.

Huge numbers of Americans were coming in.

So he had to destroy the Allied armies that were on the lines in early 1918

before the Americans came.

Ludendorff designed an entire new tactical doctrine for the German army in

the winter of 1917-1918.

Infantry was composed into small packets, 12-15 people apiece,

armed with or built around machine guns or flamethrowers.

The key was to infiltrate and then bypass, to go for the rear and keep

going. The attack began in the fog.

on March 21st.

There was an enormous artillery preparation, short, very violent.

Gas and high-explosive rounds next.

When the German infiltration units hit the British front lines, the British

simply crumbled.

There were eight British battalions of 6,000 troops there. Only 50 survived.

Their front disintegrated into isolated islands with the German tide flowing

around them.

Dugouts collapsed and ammunition dumps exploded.

The Germans in what they called Operation Michael had their

breakthrough.

The communications hub of Amiens was the immediate target to split the French

from the British.

Then it would be on to Paris and the English Channel.

Ludendorff smelled victory.

Operation Michael was a huge success on the first day. In 24 hours, the Germans

gained more ground than the French and British had gained in 140

days two years before.

Then their offensive ran out of gas.

They reached the old battlefields of the Somme, which were literally a desert.

And there was no water. There were few real tracks through it.

When they got to the other side, their troops started to loot.

They found the kind of food supplies that they hadn't seen in four years, and

the attack ground to a halt.

The Allies needed an overall commander.

General Ferdinand Foch gave his qualifications.

I would fight without a break.

I would fight in front of Amiens. I would fight in Amiens. I would fight

behind Amiens.

I would fight all the time. I would never surrender.

He was chosen.

Operation Michael had overrun 1,250 square miles of countryside and captured

90,000 prisoners.

Ludendorff regrouped his exhausted forces to go farther.

In these battles, 838,000 soldiers would be killed, wounded, missing, or

captured. Nobody could afford such losses.

But the Germans could not replace theirs, and the Yanks, at last, were

coming.

Indeed, they were there.

The first American offensive action at a small village named Contigny showed the

American people that the American fighting man was now in the fight and

could discharge himself very well, and it also showed the German high command,

that the American fighting man was someone to be contended with.

The emergency that brought the Americans into their first big-scale action came

when a whirlwind German attack drove a strong salient into the French and

British lines behind Chemin des Dames Ridge.

Pershing released the United States 2nd Division with its Marine Brigade under

General James G. Harbord to the beleaguered area on Foch's frantic

request. It was May 30th, Memorial Day.

Coming up to Chateau Thierry, past retreating Frenchmen yelling, La guerre

est finie, the Americans found themselves caught against a riverbank

and beating back a determined enemy with point-blank use of machine guns and

artillery.

Again Paris was threatened, and again the French government packed to leave,

refugees streaming out before them.

Pershing cabled, The possibility of losing Paris has become apparent.

On June 1st, the American 3rd Brigade and the Marine Brigade started up the

Paris-Metz Road to relieve the embattled French.

The Germans, wheeling from Chateau Thierry, moved astride that road and

drove into Belleau Wood, a dense hunting preserve.

General Harbour told his Marines, We dig no trenches to fall back on. The Marines

will hold where they stand.

There would be three weeks of very vicious fighting, a hard-fought battle.

At the end of the three weeks, the Marines could say, Belleau Wood,

entirely Marine.

It was a small victory, but it was one that caught the American public's

imagination.

It was splashed over the front pages of all of America's newspapers, Marines

Save Paris at Belleau Wood.

This bothered the army then, and in some quarters, it still bothers them.

Enthusiasm was wild in America. The people on the home front endured

meatless, gasless, and lightless days.

They were told, lick war stamps and lick the Kaiser.

Movie stars staged monster Liberty Loan rallies, and a quarter of the adult

population signed on.

ludendorff still held powerful cards but cabled ominously of the american

fighters personnel must be called excellent spirit of troops is high moral

effect of our fire does not materially check advance of infantry

Americans were widespread in the forces that now opposed a series of desperate

hammer blows from Ludendorff.

He termed these his Friedensturm, or peace offensive.

A very large penetration had occurred between the Aisne and the Marne rivers,

thrust like a dagger pointed at Paris and the communications of Paris.

It needed to be dealt with and pinched off.

The Americans devised a plan to do this and restore the line.

in july of 1918 and had engaged more than 300 000 americans

and sustained casualties of 67 000 during the campaign the restoration of

the line sent the germans back on their heels one more time

the stage was set for the formation of the

first american army

John Pershing's dream of an American army fighting in France under its own

commanders was about to come true.

August the 8th, 1918, was the turning point for Hindenburg and Ludendorff. On

that day, Australians and Canadians attacked under Haig's command

using 450 tanks and achieved immense success against the Germans. The Germans

started surrendering, surrendering in droves.

When Ludendorff rushed in reinforcements, they arrived in the rear

areas and they were met with jeers and not cheers.

The German troops there saying that the reinforcements were simply prolonging

the war.

Pershing got his first chance to show what an American army could do in

September at Sammy Hill, a bulge in the line.

He pitched off at Samahill salient in classic fashion, hitting the shoulders

from both sides.

Some folks say that the Germans were already withdrawing from Samahill. Well,

perhaps they were, but they were withdrawing because they knew the

Americans were coming.

Foch had demanded American troops be blended into his forces.

For a huge critical Meuse-Argonne offensive coming hard after the Samy Yel

operation, and Pershing had refused him. Do you wish to give battle? Foch had

taunted. Pershing had snapped back, certainly, but as an American army. When

Foch said, I insist, Pershing replied, You may insist all you please, but I

decline absolutely to agree.

On September 26th, the Americans were fighting in the Meuse-Argonne.

as a unit under their own commander.

Meuse-Argonne was the first seriously contested American offensive and it

floundered.

Pershing had ordered an attack on line and that meant that any serious

resistance received in one sector would stop the entire line.

The Americans were fast learners, however.

A person changes instructions to his commanders.

They would no longer have to attack on line.

He gave initiative to battlefield commanders.

He was running out of troops, so he stripped down the rifle companies from a

strength of 250 to 175.

Also, he started stripping out troops from divisions in the rear.

And then he fired commanders. He fired several division commanders and one of

his two corps commanders.

So when the attack resumed in mid-October, the Americans had it right

and they started moving.

On the American front, the Germans had established four successive defense

belts up to 20 miles deep.

On one flank, the Germans held dominating heights looking down the

Americans' throats.

It was the greatest concentration of defenses that American troops would meet

in two world wars.

Foch's attitude was, you asked for it, you got it.

But the Americans drilled forward with growing unstoppable confidence and

power.

In the words of the once skeptical General Ludendorff, when asked who won

the war, was heard to say, the American infantry.

The Germans and their allies were suddenly cracking everywhere, from the

Western Front to Greece to the Middle East.

The new replacements that are coming in from German urban areas and the

siphoning off of the very best German soldiers as storm troop soldiers has

resulted in a qualitative lessening of the fighting quality of the German army.

Ludendorff, the Iron Man, now suffered complete nervous collapse, alternately

weeping and raging at his staff, his Kaiser, and his people for the war's

failure.

Socialists wearing red armbands surged through Germany's streets, mugging

German officers and tearing off their epaulets and decoration.

The fleet mutinied against Admiral Scheer's order, putting it to sea for a

last battle.

murdered officers, and sailed back to port with red flags flying.

On October 4th, armistice negotiation offers were sent secretly to America's

president, with the feeling that the liberal idealistic Wilson, who had

written a rather gentle 14 points of basis for world peace, would be the

spokesman they wanted against the ferocious French, British, and Italian

belligerents.

Wilson was seeking to put himself in the position of Arbiter Mundi, Empire of the

World, able to, if necessary, dictate the peace settlement.

He had in mind dictating, if necessary, to the Allies as well.

The Hindenburg Line was broken.

Turkey would quit the war on October 30th, Austria on November 3rd.

The Kaiser now dismissed Ludendorff. The old German god of war donned a false

beard and dark glasses and fled to Sweden.

It was the finish.

A German armistice commission met at 7 a.m. in a railway car on a siding in

Kompienfars.

And when a German asked for his proposals for an armistice, an icy

Marshal Fosch growled, I have no proposals to make.

The Allies were willing to keep fighting.

The Germans gasped at the terms that ended their hopes of keeping anything

for themselves.

The Great War was to end at 11 a.m. on November 11.

Retreating German armies wantonly destroyed towns, orchards, coal mines,

and art treasures.

The bitterness would soon be richly returned.

by demands that economy-shattering German indemnities repay ravaged

civilians $32 billion for damages of the war.

The cream and gold imperial train rolled out in darkness and deposited the Kaiser

across the Dutch frontier.

He spent his years of asylum in numbing disregard.

On November 11, remembered forever as Armistice Day, Hindenburg wept and the

guns of the Great War fell into eerie silence.

Birds were heard again.

Troops wandered out of their animal lairs and blinked in the quiet sunlight.

There was little drinking, survival being intoxication enough.

The Allied home fronts exploded in hysterical joy as mixed consternation

and relief swept a bewildered German public.

A German corporal named Adolf Hitler, then huddled in a sentry box guarding

Russian prisoners at Traunstein, would have the day's events burned into his

seething brain.

The peace settlement, group of settlements that is then made with

Germany, with Austria, with Hungary, with Bulgaria, with Turkey, is a whole

series of treaties.

negotiated in and signed in Paris and its suburbs.

And these treaties are often very heavily criticized.

The terrible dissatisfaction of the Germans with it was essentially

dissatisfaction over the fact that they hadn't won the war.

That having lost the war, they were not going to get everything they had hoped,

I must say.

does not seem to me particularly surprising.

When asked by a shocked German what history would say of this, the French

Tiger Georges Clemenceau would say, it will not say that Belgium invaded

Germany.

In trying to sum up the war, there was no language that could really express

what had happened.

All of the widows, the orphans, the lost limbs, the millions of dead, it was mind

-boggling and it was mind-numbing.

There was no way to express what had happened.

Dead or wounded, over 9 million Russian soldiers had fallen, along with better

than 7 million Germans, 7 million from Austria-Hungary, 6 million from

France.

and 900,000 from the British Empire.

More than 200,000 Americans fell in just seven months of battle.

The Great War had killed 22 million.

Soldiers of the American Expeditionary Force's four black regiments, who had

piled up battle casualties in the Argonne, were told that they could

either be discharged to stay with French girls they had married, or return home

alone.

Wilson returned home to begin a long fight with Congress in his desire to

have the United States enter a League of Nations.

He was bringing his case to the people on grueling tours when a stroke took him

out of the last fight of the Great War, and a losing one.

His League would die without America.

The American Expeditionary Force and the other Allied armies came home to the

greatest parades there had ever been, but the cost of the Great War was

greater than could ever be shown.

Gone with so many soldiers was a centuries-long age of hope in the

possibilities of human intelligence, of kindness and greatness.

The German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires, had ended their

time at the center of Europe, and the British Empire had been fatally wounded.

American innocence was in the past.

What had been lost in art, treasure, health, genius, and joy could never be

reckoned.

Nor could the tears of those who waited forever for the return of the 22 million

who slept under a shattered world.

These wounds couldn't heal.

And so in 21 years, the bleeding would begin again.