> On November 11, 1918, Armistice Day, the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) on the Western Front in France suffered more than thirty-five hundred casualties, although it had been known unofficially for two days that the fighting would end that day and known with absolute certainty as of 5 o’clock that morning that it would end at 11 a.m.
I'm from the UK.
I understood the Americans weren't really in the mood for letting Germany off lightly, and wanted to keep fighting. The British were happy to let the hours tick down. Which makes it all the more unusual.
There is an interesting article from The New Yorker [1] about the last hours before the Armistice took effect:
> Worse yet, British, French, and American commanders made certain that the bloodshed continued at full pitch for six hours after the Armistice had been signed. The delegates in Foch’s railway carriage put their signatures to the document just after 5 a.m. on November 11th, and the key terms were immediately radioed and telephoned to Army commands up and down the front on both sides. Nonetheless, Allied soldiers scheduled to attack that morning did so until the very last minute.
Since the armies tabulated their casualty statistics by the day and not by the hour, we know only the total toll for November 11th: twenty-seven hundred and thirty-eight men from both sides were killed, and eighty-two hundred and six were left wounded or missing. But since it was still dark at 5 a.m., and attacks almost always took place in daylight, the vast majority of these casualties clearly happened after the Armistice had been signed, when commanders knew that the firing was to stop for good at 11 a.m. The day’s toll was greater than both sides would suffer in Normandy on D Day, 1944. And it was incurred to gain ground that Allied generals knew the Germans would be vacating days, or even hours, later.
In some cases, men wanted to fight, especially Americans, who hadn’t been worn down by four years of combat. Private Henry Gunther, of Baltimore, became the last American to be killed in the war, at 10:59 a.m., when he charged a German machine-gun crew with his bayonet fixed. In broken English, the Germans shouted at him to go back, the war was about to stop. When he didn’t, they shot him. Lieutenant General Robert Bullard, the commander of the U.S. Second Army, was openly disappointed to see the fighting end. On November 11th, he wrote about how he went “near the front line, to see the last of it, to hear the crack of the last guns in the greatest war of all ages. . . . I stayed until 11 a.m., when all being over, I returned to my headquarters, thoughtful and feeling lost.”
Some commanders were eager for glory and promotion, others for revenge: before the fighting stopped, British and Canadian officers were determined to capture the Belgian city of Mons and its surroundings, which British troops had been forced to abandon in 1914. In other cases, Allied officers and men feared severe punishment if they disobeyed orders to attack. Artillerymen on both sides were eager to shoot off all their ammunition to avoid having to load and take away the heavy shells; some, at least, had the decency to aim their guns at an angle where they were unlikely to kill anyone. A few Allied generals held their troops back when they heard that the Armistice had been signed, but they were in the minority.
And so thousands of men were killed or maimed during the last six hours of the war for no political or military reason whatever. Among the many victims were troops of the American 92nd Division, part of Bullard’s Second Army. The U.S. military was rigidly segregated, and the men of the 92nd were black. All their higher-ranking officers, however, were white, often Southerners resentful of being given such commands. “Poor Negroes!” Bullard, an Alabaman, wrote. “They are hopelessly inferior.” After already enduring discrimination and fear at home—sixty black Americans were lynched in 1918 alone—and being treated as second-class citizens in the Army, these troops found themselves, after the Armistice had been signed, advancing into German machine-gun fire and mustard gas. They were ordered to make their last attack at 10:30 a.m. The 92nd Division officially recorded seventeen deaths and three hundred and two wounded or missing on November 11th; one general declared that the real toll was even higher. The war ended as senselessly as it had begun.
The war was extended for a sound byte. The elite Powers that Be let these young men continue to kill each other for a cute quote for the history books:
“And on the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, the guns fell silent.”
A peace deal has to be set to come into effect at some point in the future so that the message can be spread along a very long line of soldiers, some of whom may not have regular radio contact or be in small pockets. Not only do you need time to inform everyone, you also have to set it at a specific time after everyone is informed, so that you can make preperations with that in mind - for example, getting ready to recover stranded wounded after the ceasefire.
That would be incorrect for 99% of cases in the war. Commanders were trying to get into the best possible position for continued bargaining and/or the armistice was broken.
Who wants to be the position that's overrun because at the last second, the other guy decides to storm your position?
There was no way to instantly let everyone know at 5 AM that they should stop fighting; some hours were surely needed to get the word out.
If anything the "cute quote", or poetry of the "eleventh hour, ..." phrase helped to shorten the killing. Lloyd George had instructed that the armistice should be set to come into effect at 2:30 PM (so that he could announce it triumphantly in Parliament), but Admiral Weymss, British naval representative in the negotiations, took it upon himself to bring the time forward to 11 AM to minimise the loss of life, as well as for the poetry of the moment. (The Prime Minister was not pleased!)
The surrender was only signed at 5am that day (Paris time). It is reasonable that it would take some time to inform all troops and prepare for a ceasefire.
There were many injustices and crimes during the course of the war but I would not go as far as to say the Generals let fighting continue for their amusement.
> On November 11, 1918, Armistice Day, the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) on the Western Front in France suffered more than thirty-five hundred casualties, although it had been known unofficially for two days that the fighting would end that day and known with absolute certainty as of 5 o’clock that morning that it would end at 11 a.m.