It’s quite literally the “Great War Memorial.” There is a separate WWII memorial that is not as big, and the famous “Soldiers and Sailors Monument” in the Circle that includes several wars.
Here is a PDF link about the WWI memorial:
http://homepage.mac.com/dmhart/Teaching/WarMemorial/IWMM.pdf
FWIW, I’ve seen the Indianapolis monument, but not the Kanasas City monument, although I’ve read Willain S. Triplet excellent memoir “A Youth in the Meuse-Argonne: A Memoir, 1917-1918” about his experiences in the Kansas-Missouri 35th Infanty Division. Like E. E. Cumming’s WWI memoir “the Enormous Room”, Triplet captures the essential experience of all young guys sent out in uniform: 'fucked up and far from home." When you are a young man it’s just a big, silly adventure, but when you’re older you can’t help but look back and say **“Holy Shit!” **
And in IMHO, the adventure involved the First World War, the shit was shitiest, and the holy was the holiest.
Regardless of what they’ve put up in KC or Indianapolis (or Washington DC, if you care to compare the recent, splashy WW2 monument with the crumbling tooth-stump erected in commemoration of WWI), or even the Somme monument where Belgian buglers have sounded “last call” every night since the night when the Nazis were still on the edges of the town in 1945; still the best WWI memorial is the one you are willing to create in your heart. Hollywood can’t be expected to take care of that, nor the book-publishing business. It’s really up to we who feel an obligation to our fellow human beings who’ve had to live through that experience; although not our own experience, aknowlegable in its enormity nonetheless.
(scraping sounds as Slithy Tove climbs off the soapbox)
Again, I think you’re taking “The generals in WWI were not all total idiots” and somehow misinterpreting it to mean “the generals of WWI were all geniuses and never made any mistakes.” I’m sorry, but I think there’s a bit of fallacy-of-the-excluded-middle happening in most discussions of that war, and this rather irrelevant comment is a perfect example. Of course you’re going to find examples of catastrophic decisions. I can find plenty of idiotic generals in any war. World War II was full of them, but nobody claims WWII was idiotically fought.
So, uh, who won the war, and why?
The Allies won the war, and they won it largely due to attrition. Germany was not defeated by brilliant operational maneuvring; they were beaten down by attrition. Was it a close call? Sure. It still turned ot the way it did, though.
Better use of tanks would have had virtually no impact on the course of the war of the number of casualties. You’re absolutely right that they were poorly used at first, of course, and I gess one life saved’s worth better thinking. But they didn’t exist in large numbers until late in the war.
Agreed. No evidence existst to the contrary to anyone’s satisfaction.
Whoa, Nelly! that’s too simple. While one school of strategy sees that the Central Powers had the laws of attrition against them, another school favors them by virtue of their holding the interior lines (Simply illustrated: the British had more to worry about 80 million civilians starved of American food and 4 million soldiers starved of American shells than the Germans were about British submarines sailing down the Rhine and torpedoing German trains as they crossed into German-held France)
Plus, if “attrition” were the be-all and end-all of WWI, 175 million Russians would have trumped 80 million Germans & German-speaking Austrians (discounting non-German Austian subjects). And yet the Germans held sway over an occupied Russia to an extent that the Nazis never, ever enjoyed.
Ok RickJay, you’re worthy of better than this. This is the "que sera sera, " throw your hands up in surrender synopsis of history.
Try this: Woodrow Wilson switched from “too proud to fight” (but not too stupid to regulate war-profiteering American businessmen) do-goodism to His well-intentioned meddling 14 Points - aka “No Fault” war insurance aka “oly-oly-oxen-free” do-goodism. Taking this promise at face value, the Germans abandoned their trenches and went home. The French, however, walked right after them like wolves following a pregnant cow elk with a tasty calf birthed halfway out her cleave. The Germans saw the 14 Points as a relief for all; the French as a breach to be exploited by themselves. Young Hilter seethed. Mature Hitler reaped
If ony the French had not not shot, transferred and driven into artillery zones their discontents from the mutinies of 1916, the “bacillus of mutiny” might have spread and the French army might have been the one which said “fuck it - Wilson promised us all an equal peace” and yeilded the field unwittingly to a more cynical opposition in 1918. Too bad the German Army, the one which you say fell to attrition, but, for mysterious reasons which don’t jibe with that philosophy only had to shoot less than two dozen out of its millions of members for desertion as opposed to the hundreds the British and French shot of their own was not noticably affected with the “bacilus of mutiny” and so cured of it decisively by 1918. The remnants had learned to do as they were told - and the British had been told by Lloyd George to “Win the War,” and the French its equivalent by Clemenceau*; not Wilson’s mamby-pamby 14 points.
(hey, don’t that Great War make for a Great Debate?)
*regardless of what one might think of the virtues of “stay the course,” historically it’s been shown to come back and bite a nation on the ass even when it pays off in the short run.
Can we say, in light of the recent problems in “the former Yugoslavia,” that WWI ever ended?
The problem with that thinking, to me, implies that the mess that is the Balkans started with WWI. Which is rather emphatically not the case.
As a matter of fact, you could argue that WWI was started, in part, by the ongoing problems in the Balkans.
It’s all a rich tapestry. You could trace the roots of almost any European war toan earlier war. I’m sure you could link WWI to the Thirty Years’ War without much difficulty.
Aeschines: I stand corrected. And here I had been thinking for the longest time that KC had the only WWI memorial.
Well said. Well said indeed.
And the Balkan Wars preceded WWI by what, maybe 18 months or so?
My own fascination with World War I came in Arizona. I was at Luke Air Base (It probably has a more involved title now) for some sort of cermony or something. I was very young at the time and I found myself seated next to an old timer who was laughing his head off. Apparently he knew Luke during the Great War (or knew a great deal about him) and he said 1. The only way Luke would have had anything to do with such a ceremony was dead. 2. That if Luke would have come down alive from his final flight, he would have been court martialed. 3. Since he didn’t, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
I thought the old coot was crazy so I looked it up, and he was pretty accurate. Ever since then I have been very interested in WWI.
From British officers going over the top with little more than a riding crop, to the war being one of the big reasons for wrist watches, to machine guns mowing down cavalry charges. Even the sort of allied invasion of what had just become the Soviet Union from its eastern end. I find it all fascinating.
Just in case other Dopers are as ignorant of Lt. Frank Luke as I had been here’s a couple of links about him.
If one wants to consider chilling: His fame stems from a period when he’d begun going after heavily defended German observation balloons. He shot down his first balloon on Sept. 12, 1918. He was killed on Sept. 29, 1918. (I find it interesting that the Wiki article supports the claim that Luke shouldn’t have been in the air on the 29th, while the Air Force’s article claims he did have permission, even though he’d been grounded. I know which article I find more believable.)
Over here you can judge the extent to which WWI is appreciated by the fact that if you were arranging to meet a stranger in an unknown English village you could say “I’ll meet you at two o’clock by the War Memorial” and he’d almost invariably say “OK” rather than “What?”. IOW you can take it as a given almost anywhere in the country that a village has a War Memorial - invariably a Great War memorial though usually with a WWII addendum - and that everyone either knows where theirs is or knows they could find it with a few minutes’ enquiry.
As a statistical oddity, we have about the place a few “Thankful Villages” - which sent men off to WWI and got them all back alive. In all the country there are between thirty and forty - that is, about one per county. One of these was awarded the courtesy title of “Bravest Village” because it managed to muster 12 men out of a total population of 39 (sic).
Yeah, Luke was a crazy mo-fo, but, if you think of the value of the information gathered by those balloons–there was a reason they were so heavily defended–shooting down one of them did more for the war effort, and saved more Allied lives, than just about anything else a fighter pilot could do. Luke earned that CMoH.
As for his final gunfight, could you expect anything else from a kid raised in Arizona at the turn of the century?
dropzone, no argument with the value of taking down the balloons. Nor with the validity of Luke’s CMoH.
What I was trying to express (and I admit I did it very poorly) was my cynical reaction to the way that the Wiki article mentioned that Luke was in the air, against orders, while the Air Force’s article makes the point of trying to paint a figleaf on Luke’s action: he had been officially grounded, but he had “special” permission to go up that last day. It really reads like some modern day Bowdlerizing by some tight-assed officer who believes it vital that no hero shown up to modern soldiers should be ever described as having gone against orders. (Not that I have a jaded view of zeros, or anything…)
As for the final gunfight, I think that at least as much of the ‘credit’ for that decision should be given to the wartime propaganda against the Germans, as to his upbringing in Arizona. Certainly, looking back on the anti-German propaganda in something like, Rilla of Ingleside, it looks very, very surreal to readers familiar with a regieme like WWII’s Germany, or the Khmer Rouge. Also, an honest look at the history of WWI, and the actions going up to it, leaves me feeling that whatever else one might want to say about US isolationism in general it’s difficult to disagree with the general US belief during the first several years of the war that it was simply the same European powers doing the same kind of idiocies they’d been doing for decades.
Complete agreement with your second paragraph. I was just pointing out, even without Luke’s last mission, his speciality was highly valuable, though his career was doomed to end quickly.
However, by 1918, pilots would’ve known that they would be treated well in captivity, and that the propaganda was just that and intended to keep up the war effort at home. His gunfight was showboating, but, as everybody, including, if you forced him to be candid, the AF flack who wrote his page, would agree, Frank Luke was freakin’ nuts, in a “I’m glad he was on OUR side” way. AND a showboat.
I think that had a particularly large role in the emphasis on WWII over WWI in the US collective consciousness. The Duck and Cover generation can look back to WWII as the beginning of the threat that loomed large in our thoughts for decades. If we had been worried about the Soviets dropping mustard gas rather than nukes on our heads, WWI would probably have a more prominent place in national memory.
Of course, it’s not the only reason. The lack of ambiguity in fighting the Nazis (as others have described up-thread) certainly is a huge contributor as well. Was there ever a group more useful to Hollywood as bad guys?
Maybe the Stalinists who were our allies? Sort of in parallel with complaining about how World War I is largely forgotten, we might as well complain about how half of World War II is conveniently forgotten.
But ironically, World War I set the pattern for that, as well. If people think of World War I at all, they think of the trenches and the Western Front. The war was vastly bigger than that.
Here is one good example of how the image of WW1 is distorted.
Poison gas is reckoned to have killed around 30-40 thousands, and given the full total of deaths, this large number is actually not a huge part of it.
Compare that to the alpine war in the Dolomites, in just two years over 50 thousand were killed in avalanches alone , plenty more died of cold,and they still turn up bodies from time to time, and yet, somehow, the image of fighting in snow doesn’t evoke the image of WW1 anything like as well as the actions at places such as Ypres where poison gas was used.
I would attribute that to poison gas being a new way to kill people. We’ve faced death by cold for time uncounted, but poison gas was a new horror unleashed in WWI. There’s a similar focus on nuclear weapons in WWII. The nukes seem more horrific than the equally-lethal firebombings in part because they are new (although the fact that the destruction comes from a single device obviously plays no small part).
It’ll never happen. The Nazis were not only evil, they also had really cool, evil-looking clothes. Even the fanciest Soviets wore baggy, ugly, ill-fitting clothes, and, if they didn’t, they’d have to just so that movie audiences didn’t think they were Nazis.