World War 1 Centennial

Sunday marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War 1.  On November 11, 1918, the Allied nations signed an armistice with Germany, ending the war at 11:00am that day.  Since 1919, many of the Allied nations have marked the day as a National Holiday, either calling it Armistice Day (France and Belgium), Remembrance Day (Canada), or Veterans Day (United States). 

The war began in 1914 in the Balkans when Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was set to take over the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  This set off a chain of alliance building with Germany, the Turkish Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria siding with Austria-Hungary and almost all of the rest of Europe and Russia coming to the defense of Serbia and the other Balkan nations that opposed the empire.  The United States eventually joined the war, when Congress granted President Woodrow Wilson’s request to declare war on Germany on April 6, 1917.  The United States declaration was essentially a long-brewing reaction to the sinking of the RMS Lusitania by a German U-Boat in May 1915.

The Great War lasted just over four years, but caused 16 million deaths of both soldiers and civilians as a direct result of the fighting.  It also was a contributing factor to the spread of the Spanish Flu epidemic, which was responsible for 50-100 million deaths worldwide.  The global scope of the war and the introduction of advanced technology such as U-Boats, aircraft, and chemical warfare led many to dub it the “war to end all wars.”  While the United States troops were chiefly involved on the Western Front, fighting also took place in Russia, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific regions.  Many of these areas saw lingering hostilities after the war and the two decades between Armistice Day and the start of the Second World War involved pockets of unrest.  The Russian and Irish Civil Wars followed quickly after the war and four major empires ended as a result of the war, with uprisings against colonial rule in many regions, spanning from Europe to the Middle East and Asia.

The war also had a lasting impact on the world aside from global politics, with the high number of casualties and permanently disabled veterans leaving many nations short of a valuable commodity, young men able to enter the workforce.  While this did not equate to more opportunities for women post-war, the contribution women made during the war did open the door for a larger debate over women’s rights, particularly the right to vote.  It is no coincidence that women’s suffrage was a key issue immediately after the war and one that seemed quickly resolved compared to the difficult fight for the right to vote prior to WWI.  Likewise, the number of disabled veterans returning home did not have an immediate impact on how society treated the disabled, but veterans groups helped push for legislation to aid the disabled.

In terms of healthcare, the use of chemical warfare led to long-term side effects for the medical community to deal with, both during and after the war.  During the war, medical corps workers often had little in terms of supplies on hand, yet dealt with more severe wounds then had been seen in prior conflicts.  Many advances in medicine, such as anesthesia, the search for antibiotics, and even ambulances were a result of the rush to find a way to aid injured soldiers on the front.  Afterward, prosthetics and long-term care strategies were developed to deal with the ongoing health consequences of wounds and chemical exposure.  In mental health, the term shell-shock was first used to describe the emotional disturbance soldiers experienced after long-term exposure to warfare. The term has since been replaced with the name post-traumatic stress disorder.

Because the war had such a global and long-lasting impact, there has been no shortage of books and movies covering the various aspects of the conflict, from the fighting to the home front.  Below are three lists of titles that show the war from many sides.

Classics – as one would expect, several books were published during and right after the war with many now recognized as classics.  You may have already read these for a school assignment, but they are all worth reading again.

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Remarque’s novel is perhaps the best known and widely read work about the war.  Paul Baumer is a 19-year-old recruit in the German Army in 1917 when he is sent to France and the Western Front.  His tale is spun in the author’s superb prose, that touches on not just the details of what life was like in the trenches, but how the war impacted the soldiers emotionally and how they viewed the political justifications for the war.






A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

While Remarque’s novel takes place in the prime conflict of the war, Hemingway’s takes place behind the lines of the Italian Front.  Fredric Henry is an ambulance driver for the Allies, but this is not a job without dangers and Henry ends up wounded and faced with moral decisions through the book.  The novel is mostly a love story set against the backdrop of the war, complicating the decision Henry must make.






August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Russian Front is the scene for this novel, the first in the four-part Red Wheel series.  Colonel Vorotyntsev is sent to the front to gather a status report of the Russian Second Army for officers back home.  He encounters a unit in the midst of a heavy battle at Tannenberg and ends up joining the fight instead of filing his report.  Unlike the armies depicted by Remarque and Hemingway, the Russian group is far less organized and prepared for the modern warfare they face. 

Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo

Trumbo’s novel is about the horrors of war as told by Joe Bonham, a severely injured soldier.  The entire novel takes place in Joe’s head, over the course of four years, as he lies in a hospital bed with no limbs, face, or senses.  The internal dialog focuses on the whys of war – why start one, why send lower classes to fight, and why try to save the lives of soldiers so disfigured they will never be able to live a normal life.






History Books – while there are plenty of books detailing the battles of the war, these delve deeper into different aspects of the conflict.

The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman

The 1963 Pulitzer Prize-winning book is considered one of the best WWI histories ever published, with Tuchman detailing the causes of the war and the earliest fighting.  The comprehensive work covers not just the Western Front, but looks at the Russians and the naval battles as well.  The book has also been published as August 1914.





Dead Wake by Erik Larson

Larson’s book at times reads more like a novel than a non-fiction book, as he introduces the passengers aboard the final crossing of the RMS Lusitania as if they were characters in a work of fiction.  In addition to the passengers, Larson provides political background and some history about the war to put the crossing in context of what was going on in the North Atlantic.  The story of the ship is alternated with that of U-20, the German U-Boat that sank the Lusitania in May, 1915.  This set-up leads to a back-and-forth account that provides suspense that is only topped by the fear and vivid reality with which Larson describes the aftermath of the sinking.


The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

How does a book about women contracting cancer and radiation sickness from radium exposure at work in a U.S. watch manufacturer end up on a list of books about Word War I?  The company was primarily a defense contractor and the main plant in Orange, N.J. started making watches for doughboys in 1917.  The radium was included in Undark paint that made the watches visible at night in the dark forests and trenches of France, allowing the army to coordinate troop movement and battles.  Radium Corporation continued to use the paint, and expose the women who painted the watch dials, into the 1920s.  Moore’s book tells the story of the women who became casualties of the war on the home front simply because the worked in a factory that supplied equipment for troops.


The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark

Earlier in this post, I noted Precip’s assassination of Ferdinand as the cause of the start of the war.  Well, it was much more complicated than a single shot from a single gun and Clark provides a gripping, detailed account of the complicated history and social causes of the war.  While staying mostly away from describing the battles, Clark still manages to weave a suspenseful account of the political discussions and events that escalated civil unrest into global conflict.





Movies 

Gallipoli and Lawrence of Arabia

While many people are aware of why World War II was a global conflict with both the European and Pacific theatres, not many are aware of how far-flung the fighting of World War I was, stretching past Europe and into the Mediterranean and Africa.  These two movies focus on those non-European campaigns.  In Gallipoli, director Peter Weir tells the story of Australians (Mel Gibson is Frank Dunne) at the key battle in Turkey.  The sole major victory for the Ottoman Empire kept the Allies from establishing an easier path to the Russian Front in a battle that lasted almost a full year.  Lawrence of Arabia is the story of T.E. Lawrence, the British colonel who was a key player in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire.  As a liaison between the British Army stationed in Egypt and the Arab forces, Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) helped solidify the working arrangement that led to a successful campaign in the desert.

War Horse

A farmer raises a thoroughbred horse that he is too stubborn to sell at market and the horse is adopted by his son, who works hard to transform him into a working animal to try and save the family farm.  Weather issues wreak havoc with his plan and the outbreak of the war provides an opportunity for the farmer to make some money by selling the horse to the British Army for their cavalry.  The son is crushed by this, but vows to be reunited with his horse.  The war then becomes the focus and the film’s real value in terms of history is how it shows the transition being made by the armies of the day.  The expectations of how a war is fought at the beginning are vastly different from the reality of how they were fought by the end.


Joyeux Noel

In 1914, when the war was still in the early stages and following more typical rules of engagement, the armies involved called for a series on unofficial truces and allowed their troops to not only relax a bit, but mingle with their enemies.  In some locations the armies held soccer games or decorated trees in the no-man’s land between their trenches.  The film follows three soldiers (one French, one German, and one Scottish) during one of the truces, as they celebrate the holiday with song and gifts.




The Legends of the Fall

The film begins before the war and carries over to almost a decade later, with one brief scene 50 years in the future.  The Ludlow family of Montana includes three brothers who find their way to the battlefields of Europe via the Canadian Expeditionary Force.  The return home sees the family deal with the devastation caused by the war.

- Laura N., Information Technology