Veterans Day began as Armistice Day

That conflict officially ended when the Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, but fighting had ceased seven months earlier when an armistice went into effect on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, Nov. 11, 1918. 

That’s why President Woodrow Wilson set aside Nov. 11 as a day to be filled with “solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations."

The nation did in fact feel a debt to those who fought, and particularly those who died, in that war, but in many instances, Americans did not have the same attitude about this Great War as they did about World War II.

There was no Pearl Harbor to mobilize public sentiment in World War I. The infamous bombing that brought the United States into World War II stirred young men and women to rush to volunteer for the fight, and for folks at home to make sacrifices to support the war effort

That wasn’t the case in World War I — a war that the United States was drawn into reluctantly. 

American public opinion was divided, with most Americans thinking until three years after the war began in Europe that the United States should stay out of it. 

By early 1917, however, Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare began to change opinion, and Wilson went to Congress calling for a declaration of war on Germany after submarines sank seven U.S. merchant ships.

But there were still a lot of people who disagreed with the decision, a good number of them in Louisiana

The state did its duty. We sent more than 70,000 soldiers, sailors, and fledgling aviators into the armed forces during World War I, but, unlike World War II, the great majority of these were draftees, not volunteers. 

Many Louisianians, particularly small farmers and merchants — which made up the majority of the state — viewed this war in the same way as the Civil War, as “a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight.”

They were reluctant to leave farms that they had been struggling to keep going at a time when they saw a chance of finally making a little money.

Disruption of the world market depressed farm prices at the beginning of the war, but they had begun to gradually increase as the United States took on a larger role in supplying food and other materials to England and France. 

Then prices for cotton, sugar, timber, and Louisiana crude oil doubled when the United States entered the war. 

Folks who supplied those goods were not eager to leave the farm just when things were turning in their favor.

Workers suddenly found plenty to do at shipyards and military facilities in the state.  Airfields were built all around the state to train pilots and to keep submarines away from our shores.

Armstrong and the Lakefront airports in New Orleans both began as army airfields, as did current municipal airports in Baton Rouge, Lake Charles, Alexandria, Pineville, and DeRidder.

But, when they were called, our young men and women, like those from all across the nation, did what was asked of them.

In all, the United States mobilized more than 4 million troops during World War I.  More than 110,000 of them died in faraway places, 43,000 of them from a terrible flu epidemic that swept through the ranks.

Scanning a list of war dead, I count some 40 men from Acadiana who were killed in World War I. Fifteen men from Louisiana won the Distinguished Service Cross for valor in that war.

 

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You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jhbradshaw@bellsouth.net or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.