terrible things done in the name of anything

[unkleE]

The title of this thread came from a recent post on another thread by Humphrey:

Oct 7, 2009 9:13:34 GMT humphreyclarke said:

the one thing that amazes me about history is the way that terrible things are done in the name of pretty much anything.

Are any of you historians students of WW1? Did anyone see the recent (in Australia, at least) BBC documentary The Last Day of World War One? I have long had an awful fascination with WW1, feeling angry and sick at heart at what so many soldiers were forced to endure, but this documentary took the cake.

The Allies and the Germans had been negotiating a cease-fire, virtually a German surrender, for several days. On the morning of the 11th November, 1918, between 5:00 and 6:00 am, the cease-fire was signed by both parties, to come into effect at 11:00 am - presumably to allow time for all field units to be notified. The generals knew about the imminent cease-fire hours beforehand.

Most field commanders stood their troops down, resting until the cease-fire, when they could safely leave their trenches. But, inexplicably, in a war characterised by enormous loss of life for very little gain in ground, some generals ordered their men to continue fighting, with continued loss of life. Incredibly, a total of 11,000 casualties (killed, wounded or missing) were sustained on Armistice Day, more than the casualties on D-Day in WW2.

Here are some of the stories of that terrible day:

• The last British soldier to die was Private George Ellison, aged 40, who had survived more than 4 years of trench warfare, artillery bombardments, gas attacks, tanks, machine guns and snipers that had killed more than a million of his fellow Britishers, only to miss out on returning to his waiting wife and child by less than ninety minutes.
  
• The last French soldier to die was Augustin Trebuchon, a runner bringing the message of the cease-fire to troops on the front line, just 15 minutes before it took effect.
  
• Canadian Private George Lawrence Price was still fighting, needlessly chasing German soldiers from houses that they would be vacating after the cease-fire, and was shot with just 2 minutes of the remaining. (It may be that Price's death was the result, not of orders, but of reckless action by his patrol.)
  
• US soldier Henry Gunther participated in a charge on entrenched German positions. The Germans, knowing the cease-fire was imminent, waved the charging soldiers back, but they kept coming, and Gunther was shot dead just 1 minute before the end.
  
• It appears that the last German soldier to die was shot after the armistice came into effect. Leutnant Tomas approached US soldiers after 11:00 to arrange the evacuation of his troops, but was shot because the US soldiers had not been informed of the cease-fire.
  
• US General Wright's troops were exhausted and dirty, and hearing there were bathing facilities available in the nearby town of Stenay, he decided to take the town so his men could refresh themselves (a few hours earlier than could have occurred after the cease-fire). That "lunatic decision" cost something like 300 casualties.
  
• US Maj Gen Sumerall sent his troops out on one last attack across the Meuse River with these words: "I don’t expect to see any of you again, but that doesn’t matter. You have the honor of a definitive success–give yourself to that."
  

War is almost always stupid (in my view) and rarely noble (though doubtless many soldiers fight for better reasons than the situation deserves), but these men deserved better commanders than they were given. Fortunately, while that wasn't in reality "the war to end all wars", the commanders do now have (in Australia at least) much greater regard for their troops.

I'm not sure why I posted this, I just find it interesting even though terrible.

[humphreyclarke]

Very interesting. It reminds me of the death of Wilfred Owen en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_Owen , although at least he was killed a week before the armistice rather than on the same day.

[eckadimmock]

It would be a very strange psychological state, I would think. I've read memoirs by former soldiers who say they were actually depressed by the end of the war. I suppose that after a long time as a soldier one becomes institutionalized, so peace is as threatening as being released from prison after a long stretch.

There's a scene in Spielberg's Band of Brothers where one soldier volunteers for a mission saying that he is new and the 'Krauts are almost licked' so he wants a chance to do something before it's over. Also, I suppose that some troops or commanders saw the final hours as a last chance to make a name for themselves, which might explain Sumerall's actions.

[jamierobertson]

My fiancee is in the army (albeit as a medic), and whilst there are some wars worth fighting (where would we be had we not resisted Hitler?) I get rather horrible chills when thinking of lives extinguished on such a scale, often for so little gain. It all seems to come down to the unbelievable foolishness of human beings, and we never seem to learn our lessons.