War to End War

Nearly 100 years ago today, the guns of World War I went silent at the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11 month in 1918.

It was believed to be "The War That Will End War," as British author H.G. Wells first described in a collection of newspaper articles that were published in a book at the outbreak of war in August 1914.

 

Three years later, President Woodrow Wilson, in arguing for America’s involvement in the war, and only months after getting re-elected on the promise not to go to war, stated it would be “the war to end war,” a term he only used once, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s “Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking.”

Next year we will observe the 100^th anniversary of the start of World War I, which lead to nine million combatants killed and another nearly eight million missing. In France, at the battlefield of Verdun, a battle that raged for 300 days and took an estimated 250,000 lives, there is a national cemetery containing the remains of 130,000 unknown soldiers.

World War I was the first conflict of the industrial age and with it came industrial horrors, machine-driven weapons – tanks and aerial bombardments – and chemical weapons, which, as recently seen in Syria, remain with us today.

As the last century has shown, it was not the war to end war. The peace negotiations in Paris that followed the armistice on Nov. 11, 1918 ensured there would be a Second World War by how the victors treated the vanquished.

The allies had little concern about the consequences of leaving a nation like German nearly destitute and little thought as to how a family of nations should behave toward one another. It would take World War II and the creation of the United Nations to begin dialogue on that concept.

In scope of nations involved and scale of destruction, World War I was unprecedented in history until World War II. Since those wars, America’s involvement in conflicts has become longer. The United States was in the First World War for 18 months before that war ended. It fought in the Second World War for three years and eight months.

The Vietnam War, 1955-1974, was 19 years and five months and our fighting in the Middle East, in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been going on nearly 13 years.

All of these wars and so many smaller ones not mentioned have links, directly and indirectly, to the outcomes of World War I. It wasn’t a war to end war; it was a war that spawned wars.