# A Question About The WW1 Armistice **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 15, 2010, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-about-the-ww1-armistice/536235 "2010-04-15T17:38:24Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-about-the-ww1-armistice/536235/1 "2010-04-15T17:38:24Z")
In one of the Harry Turtledove tales, there is a story about the end of the Great War. Supposedly, he is with a British cavalry unit, which has orders to launch an attack on German position-scheduled for 9:00 AM, on Nov. 11, 1918. Everybody knows that there is going to be a cease-fire at 11:00 AM, but the plan is to launch the attack anyway-it goes ahead, and many men are killed and seriously wounded. Did this kind of idiocy actually happen in the days before the cease fire? Did the troops know that the war was about to end? I would imagine it would be hard to order men to go to their deaths, knowing that the whole disaster was about to be called off! I know that there were many incidents (at Christmas) where both sides stopped shooting at eachother, and actually fraternized a bit. It must be a bummer, being ordered to fight, when you know the whole thing is pointless. ---
**Author:** ![Jormungandr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a6a055/32.png) [@Jormungandr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jormungandr)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 5:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-about-the-ww1-armistice/536235/2 "2010-04-15T17:44:55Z")
It’s been a while, but yes. Generals such as John Pershing were still ordering attacks up to and even after the armistice. > **[Wasted Lives on Armistice Day](https://www.historynet.com/wasted-lives-on-armistice-day/)** > > Did American commanders needlessly send doughboys to their deaths during the hours before the 1918 armistice went into effect? ---
**Author:** ![Mk\_VII](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Mk\_VII](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mk_VII)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-about-the-ww1-armistice/536235/3 "2010-04-15T19:51:22Z")
In some places they went at it hammer and tongs right up to the last. The poet Wilfred Owen was killed on 4th November, one week before the ceasefire. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 8:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-about-the-ww1-armistice/536235/4 "2010-04-15T20:25:47Z")
[More here.](http://www.historynet.com/world-war-i-wasted-lives-on-armistice-day.htm) Pershing was not nearly the only one to do it. One vignette: > [@](#): > > Hotshot commanders nevertheless managed to find reasons to advance. Stenay was a town held by the Germans on the east bank of the Meuse. The 89th Division’s commander, Maj. Gen. William M. Wright, determined to take Stenay because ‘the division had been in the line a considerable period without proper bathing facilities, and since it was realized that if the enemy were permitted to stay in Stenay, our troops would be deprived of the probable bathing facilities there.’ Thus, placing cleanliness above survival, Wright sent a brigade to take the town. As the doughboys passed through Pouilly, a 10.5cm howitzer shell landed in their midst, killing twenty Americans outright. All told, Wright’s division suffered 365 casualties, including sixty-one dead in the final hours. Stenay would be the last town taken by the Americans in the war. Within days, it too could have been marched into peacefully rather than paid for in blood. But why? Gen. Sherburne: > [@](#): > > I cannot feel that Gen. Pershing personally ordered or was directly responsible for this attack. If there is any obligation or liability upon him it is from not stopping what had already been planned….Our Army was so run that division and brigade and even corps commanders were piteous in their terror and fear of this all-pervading command by the General Staff which sat in Chaumont….They did not look upon human life as the important thing. In this, to a certain extent, they were right; you cannot stop to weigh in warfare what a thing is going to cost if the thing is worthwhile, if it is essential. But I think on the 9th and the 10th and the 11th they had come pretty near to the end of the War and knew they were pretty near the end. But they were anxious to gain as much ground as possible. They had set up what, in my opinion, is a false standard of excellence of divisions according to the amount of ground gained by each division….It was much like a child who had been given a toy that he is very much interested in and that he knows within a day or two is going to be taken away from him and he wants to use that toy up to the handle while he has it….A great many of the Army officers were very fine in the way that they took care of their men. But there were certain very glaring instances of the opposite condition, and especially among these theorists, these men who were looking upon this whole thing as, perhaps one looks upon a game of chess, or a game of football, and who were removed from actual contact with the troops. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-about-the-ww1-armistice/536235/5 "2010-04-15T20:33:01Z")
One more quote: > [@](#): > > American forces weren’t alone in launching assaults on the last day. The British high command, still stinging from its retreat at Mons during the first days of the war in August 1914, judged that nothing could be more appropriate than to retake the city on the war’s final day. British Empire losses on November 11 totaled some twenty-four hundred. The French commander of the 80th Régiment d’Infanterie received two simultaneous orders that morning: one to launch an attack at 9 a.m., the other to cease fire at 11. Total French losses on the final day amounted to an estimated 1,170. > > The Germans, in the always-perilous posture of retreat, suffered some 4,120 casualties. Losses on all sides that day approached eleven thousand dead, wounded, and missing. > > Indeed, Armistice Day exceeded the ten thousand casualties suffered by all sides on D-Day, with this difference: The men storming the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944, were risking their lives to win a war. The men who fell on November 11, 1918, lost their lives in a war that the Allies had already won. Had Marshal Foch heeded the appeal of Matthias Erzberger on November 8 to stop hostilities while the talks went on, some sixty-six hundred lives would likely have been saved. ---
**Author:** ![joebuck20](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/74df32/32.png) [@joebuck20](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/joebuck20)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-about-the-ww1-armistice/536235/6 "2010-04-15T21:11:09Z")
I believe some commanders justified these actions by claiming that they needed to capture important positions just in case the Germans, for whatever reason, decided not to honor the armistice. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2010, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-about-the-ww1-armistice/536235/7 "2010-04-15T23:14:29Z")
There was also a bunch of artillery gunners who wanted to be able to claim they had fired the last shot of the Great War. So when 11:00 arrived there were guns being fired all up down the line. And of course, when they heard other gunners trying to be the last one, many of the gunners reloaded and fired again so their second shot would be the last one. It ended up with some artillery gunners continuing to fire for days after the ceasefire in an attempt to fire the last shot - some officers finally had to go up and confiscate their shells to stop it. ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2010, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-about-the-ww1-armistice/536235/8 "2010-04-16T13:49:05Z")
Yet another reason why WWI generals have such bad reputations. And, speaking _generally_, troops are highly sensitive to rumors of impending peace to the point of obsession. This concerns a slightly earlier war, and I don’t remember my source right now, although it was almost certainly the writing of Foote or Catton, but the soldiers at the end of the American Civil War were keenly aware that they didn’t want to die on the last day of fighting. I’m paraphrasing from memory as well as summarizing, of course. When Lee’s line had been broken and the Army of Northern Virginia began its last retreat, the Confederates were exhausted , suffering from months and years of malnutrition, grossly outnumbered, and in many cases badly armed, as they had abandoned a lot of cannon and even in some cases their firearms. The Union soldiers, driven by the relentless Sheridan, pursued them energetically, and finally brought them to bay, after a chase of several days. Everyone on the Union side knew this was the end and wanted to make sure of it…but. As the Union line got organized to charge home one last time, the soldiers looked across the field at that ragged gray line with so few men in it…and, the soldiers wrote afterward in their diary, suddenly they recalled just how dangerous the Army of Northern Virginia really was. These men would die hard, killing as many bluecoats as they could, even in their disadvantaged state. The Union soldiers got cold feet and thought about dying on what they now saw was almost certainly the last day of the war, in the last charge. One of them wrote that they cursed themselves for having so eagerly given chase that they were now in the front lines for the last killing. But they were hard men too. They gripped their weapons and prepared to step out, drums rolling, for that last desperate fight. And then a lone rider came out of the long gray line with a piece of white cloth. No order needed to be given. The charge was not made – now, it could _never_ be made. I don’t think any general alive could have gotten them to keep fighting at that point. The soldiers stared, and waited. ---
**Author:** ![Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ccd318/32.png) [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2010, 2:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-about-the-ww1-armistice/536235/9 "2010-04-16T14:25:33Z")
I just today finished a history of the Allied air attacks on Japan. Some US (and more Japanese) fighter pilots were killed after the surrender. Force of habit mainly, it seems. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2010, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-about-the-ww1-armistice/536235/10 "2010-04-16T15:51:40Z")
> [@](#): > > I just today finished a history of the Allied air attacks on Japan. Some US (and more Japanese) fighter pilots were killed after the surrender. Force of habit mainly, it seems. There was a large number of Japanese officers who launched suicide attacks against the Americans after hearing that Japan had surrendered. Their idea was that it was more “honorable” to die than to live on after a surrender. (Some of them also probably feared being arrested for war crimes.)