The 11th Hour Of The 11th Day Of The 11th Month

Czarist Russia gave up in December 1917. Tens of thousands of German and Austrian soldiers were freed to redeploy to the Western Front and finish off the exhausted French and British armies.The late-entering United States did not declare war on Germany and Austria-Hungary until April 1917. Forgotton anne. Six months later, America had still not begun to deploy troops in any great number.Then, suddenly, everything changed. By summer 1918, hordes of American soldiers began arriving in France in unimaginable numbers of up to 10,000 doughboys a day. Anglo-American convoys began devastating German submarines.

Armistice Day - 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month. The Two Minutes of Silence was started by Sir James Percy Fitzpatrick. He was born in King William's Town in 1862 and died in Uitenhage in 1931, eldest son of James Coleman Fitzpatrick, judge of the Supreme Court of the Cape Colony, and Jenny Fitzgerald, both from Ireland. The couple had 4 children: Nugent, Alan, Oliver, and Cecily.

The German high command's tactical blunders stalled the German offensives of spring 1918 - the last chance before growing Allied numbers overran German lines. Nonetheless, World War I strangely ended with an armistice - with German troops still well inside France and Belgium.

Revolution was brewing in German cities back home.The three major Allied victors squabbled over peace terms. America's idealist president, Woodrow Wilson, opposed an Allied invasion of German and Austria to occupy both countries and enforce their surrenders.By the time the formal Versailles Peace Conference began in January 1919, millions of soldiers had gone home. German politicians and veterans were already blaming their capitulation on 'stab-in-the-back' traitors and spreading the lie that their armies lost only because they ran out of supplies while on the verge of victory in enemy territory.The Allied victors were in disarray.

Wilson was idolized when he arrived in France for peace talks in December 1918 - and was hated for being self-righteous when he left six months later. The Treaty of Versailles proved a disaster, at once too harsh and too soft.

Its terms were far less punitive than those the victorious Allies would later dictate to Germany after World War II. Earlier, Germany itself had demanded tougher concessions from a defeated France in 1871 and Russia in 1918.In the end, the Allies proved unforgiving to a defeated Germany in the abstract but not tough enough in the concrete.One ironic result was that the victorious but exhausted Allies announced to the world that they never wished to go to war again. Meanwhile, the defeated and humiliated Germans seemed all too eager to fight again soon to overturn the verdict of 1918.The consequence was a far bloodier war that followed just two decades later.