Original subtitles

At 2.50 a.m. on November 11, 1918, the Associated Press flashed the

announcement that an armistice to end World War I had been signed at 5 a.m.

Paris time.

Overlooked in the excitement was that hostilities were not to cease until 11 a

.m. Paris time.

Factory whistles hooted.

People began pouring into the streets, banging pots and pans.

The celebration was premature.

War still had six hours to run.

Even though it was certain that it would end at 11 o'clock, men were being sent

to fight and to die in those final hours.

Why, when it was known to the last minute that the war would end, and end

with Allied victory?

were men still sent into battle.

Edwin James, correspondent of the New York Times covering the 26th Yankee

Division, was stunned by the scene.

He wrote, Reaching the front this morning, expecting to find quiet

reigning, in view of the imminence of the secession of hostilities, I found

the attack in full swing.

Why did French Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch and American AEF Commander John

Pershing order their armies to fight to the last minute, the 11th hour of the

11th day of the 11th month?

Why didn't they stop fighting when the Germans signed the ceasefire rather than

six death-filled hours later?

On that last day of World War I, the American forces alone suffered

casualties of over 3,200 men.

The fact that more men were casualties on November 11,

1918, than on D-Day, June 6, 1944, is more than just a historical curiosity.

That senseless sacrifice of men in the last 24 hours

is in microcosm.

World War I.

So what happened on the last day is emblematic of what happened four years

preceded it.

It was a war with a senseless beginning.

In 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, visited

Sarajevo. Young Bosnian Serb nationalists, including a 19-year-old

named Gavrilo Princip, plotted his assassination.

The capture of the assassins revealed no deep international plotting.

But the murder set off a tumble of diplomatic blunders that plunged 20

countries into a disaster that would slaughter a whole generation of youth,

over 8 million soldiers, and a great European civilization.

The Great War began on August 4, 1914.

Germany launched the opening attack.

With its crack army and superior war plans, it planned to finish the war

early with a crushing flank attack on Paris through neutral Belgium.

But a brave French counterattack on the river Marne caused their plan to

founder.

Soon, both sides were locked along trenches that stretched some 600 miles.

The soldiers of previous European wars had mostly fought in short, vicious

battles of maneuver, where mobility and strategy were quickly decisive.

In 1914, the strategy would shrivel to a matter of who could kill fastest and in

the most massive numbers.

One of the aspects of World War I was in terms not of technology, but of

demographics.

The last time that the major European powers had fought was actually 100 years

before in the Napoleonic War, when the population of Europe was 180 million.

By 1914, it was 390 million, and it became quite possible

to run lines from the Swiss Alps all the way to the English Channel,

two opposing lines.

No flanks to turn.

Stalemate was almost a guarantee.

Stalemate meant attrition.

The aging military leadership all through the war failed to develop new

tactics and retain the verities of bygone wars.

Typical was the man who would be the British Supreme Commander at the war's

end, Sir Douglas Haig.

Sir Douglas Haig...

was a man who was still caught up in the 19th century form of warfare.

In much ways, he was like American officers who had been trained to fight

the Native Americans on the Western frontier.

Quick sort of open warfare, quick charges, that sort of thing.

Neither Haig or some of the American officers early on recognized the fact

that the First World War was a war of technology.

World War I was a particular horror.

The use of gas, the use of airplanes bombing cities, the use of tanks, and

most of all, the use of machine guns mowing down people in roads was

particularly terrible, particularly horrific.

Even deadlier was the introduction of light, accurate, fast-firing artillery.

A recoiling barrel meant that the gun carriage stayed in position after each

shot and the crew could remain in place.

Rates of fire and casualties soared.

Repeatedly, artillery was lined up, a gun every six yards for 15 miles, and

the objective pounded with perhaps four million shells.

Then infantrymen would advance over open, featureless terrain, perhaps 120

,000 of them.

walking into the steel shredder.

French casualties in the first two months of the war, dead, wounded,

prisoners, and missing, came to 360,000.

Germany had suffered 241,000 casualties. The British had lost 30,000 men

in the first month.

Every man who had survived to these last few days of the war was for the moment a

victor over stupendous odds and misguided leadership.

No amount of futile deaths in huge offensives that went nowhere had ever

dented the assumption of the opposing general staffs that only a few hundred

thousand more guns and men would produce a breakthrough and victory.

A junior officer wrote nervously, They decided that all they needed was another

and more copious supply of men and a larger quantity of ammunition.

And he feared that the generals would want just one more try at literally the

11th hour of the last day.

Since the war on the Western Front was a war of attrition, The generals had to

harden themselves to the losses of these troops, and apparently they did so

rather well because they kept pouring these young men into untenuous

situations.

So you had these generals which seemed to the average soldier in line.

who were coming up with just ideas of offenses of throwing them out into no

man's land with little territory gained.

The generals began using the word attrition more and more openly in

describing their strategy. In short, to see which side could bleed the other to

death first.

As the last day of the war approached, It was as though the months and years

before had never happened at the slaughterhouses of the Somme, at Verdun,

at Ypres, at Arras, and Passchendaele.

As if futile headlong charges, fast-firing long-range artillery, and

the machine gun had never been invented, and as if troops had never piled up on

the wire.

The last day of the war was about to be fought, and it would look very much like

the first day.

By 1918, Britain, France, and Germany were all bled white by four years of

stupefying battles of attrition.

Russia had quit the war, freeing German armies for the Western Front.

But America was about to enter the fight on the Allied side.

The German general, Erich Ludendorff, launched an all-out last-ditch offensive

to end the war before the fresh, aggressive American troops could arrive

in overwhelming force.

One of the reasons that Germany sought an armistice was the failure of the

Ludendorff offensive that began in March of 1918.

Ludendorff and German general staff had put a tremendous amount of changes in

effect in the German army using small 10 to 11 man organizations with portable

weapons. like flamethrowers and light machine guns, using infiltration tactics

to break into the rear of the Allied forces and continue an offensive.

Ludendorff's tactics were initially a stunning success, pushing the Allies

steadily backwards for many miles with heavy losses.

But the Allies soon developed a counter strategy to give ground to bend

backwards until the German offensive had overstretched and outrun its supply

lines. Only when the exhausted attackers slowed and halted did the Allies re

-engage them frontally and drive their thrust back with uncountable casualties.

And quickly the Germans saw that they had used their last strength to repeat

the last four futile years.

With this final draining exercise, Germany came to the decision to seek an

armistice.

Germany was collapsing beyond its battlefields. At home, the starving

people were rioting in the streets.

The German Navy was in rebellion.

With the realization that Imperial Germany was disappearing, the military

leadership had to stop fighting as soon as possible in order to get reliable

troops back home to restore order.

Their motivation for an armistice was nothing less than the salvation of

Germany as a nation.

The armistice, November 11, 1918, actually stemmed from an event that

happened in January of 1918, and that's when President Woodrow Wilson offered

his 14 points to conclude the war.

Among those were that Germany had to give back all of the ground that she had

gained during World War I, as well as...

Alsace-Lorraine, a piece of French territory that had been taken by the

Germans in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

When Germany was running out of steam in the fall of 1918, they quickly

grasped Farrell Wilson's 14 points, and it was on that document

that they made their appeal for peace.

because it was the best deal they could get.

On November 8, 1918, German and French negotiators met in a rail car in

Compagnie, France, to begin armistice talks.

The Allies were fully aware of the terms the Germans were willing to accept,

which took away any need to fight one additional day for territory already

conceded.

But immediately, negotiations took a grim turn.

Ferdinand Foch, who was the Allied commander-in-chief, led the delegation

at Compiègne in the railroad car to discuss negotiations for the armistice.

And by this time, Foch was an angry man. I think that best describes him.

He was willing to take little concessions from the Germans.

And so therefore, to be able to sit down with the German army that had caused

such devastation, caused such financial loss, and to have a peaceful negotiation

with them was something beyond him.

Ask these gentlemen what they want was his shockingly dismissive opening

statement. When the Germans stammered that they expected to discuss armistice

terms, Foch stonewalled them again with, Tell these gentlemen I have no proposals

to make.

What Foch wanted was Germany's admission that she alone had sought armistice.

Obtaining that, he then hammered her delegates with a humiliating and

merciless list of thirty-four demands for territory and reparations.

Unable to forge a ceasefire on the spot, the Germans had to make time-consuming

communications with Berlin to present the harsh terms to their homeland

leadership.

Foch gave the Germans 72 hours in which to agree to the armistice.

And during this time, brave men were dying, and when it was quite obvious,

that the Germans were going to sign up for an armistice, and there was no need

for any more dying.

So here's a 72-hour period of time when people on both sides were

sacrificing their life for no good reason.

Let us stop the fighting during those 72 hours.

Let's not have senseless killing while we talk.

But Foch was adamant. He had lost a son in this war.

He had lost a son-in-law on the same day. He had seen his country devastated.

And as he put it to his staff, we're going to hold the swords to the back of

the Hun to the very last minute.

The Allies were certain to demand that Germany's despised leader, Kaiser

Wilhelm, step down as part of negotiations, and his staff asked him to

do so.

Wilhelm, ever raging to continue the war to the last soldier, refused.

Some of their leaders had talked to him on November 8th, brought up the fact

that he was going to have to abdicate the throne.

He didn't accept it. Finally, on the 9th, he does accept it. Then you have to

move him out of Germany. So all during this time, battle is still going on on

the Western Front.

An average of 2,250 troops on all sides were dying on the Western Front every

day that the fighting went on.

The Germans finally realized that more time would buy them nothing but more

death and returned to the negotiating table.

The German and Allied representatives who meant to arrange an armistice on the

morning of November...

11th signed at five o'clock that morning however the ceasefire was not to take

effect until 11 o'clock so we have six hours of a decisional

no man's land what's to happen between them the only order that was given

was to stop fighting at 11.

and so we had a situation where commanders had to determine what were

they going to do with their divisions in that interim And essentially, there were

two groups. There were the professional career officers who saw a fast-fading

opportunity for glory, victory, perhaps promotion.

And you had a more sensible, humane factor who reasoned, this war is going

to be over. Why should I send my men to die today for territory that they can

walk into peacefully tomorrow?

At 5 a.m. Paris time, on November 11th, on paper, the war was over.

It was a moment that should have unleashed joy and salvation for the

soldiers.

But on the last day of World War I, many officers would decide to keep fighting

for the last awful second.

The armistice ending the Great War on November 11, 1918, had been signed at 5

a.m.

But the fighting on the last day of World War I was to rage on until 11 a.m.

On the German side, a young veteran, Herbert Salzbach, had been pondering his

personal good fortune.

in these closing minutes.

I do not believe, he confided to his diary, that there are many soldiers who

were stationed at the front for fifty months and are coming home, as I am now,

unwounded. But suddenly he was looking at a menacing advance of enemy troops.

A brown mass was emerging from the American line, as if the ground itself

were moving.

What lunacy was this?

The war was over and lost.

The German officers had read them the ceasefire order earlier that morning.

They had no desire to kill more.

Yet, they still had a mission.

Here was an army that had a very definite mission, and that is to cover

the withdrawal of their forces so that organized units could go back into

Germany and create stability.

and to eliminate rioting in the streets and to save the German government.

And these soldiers were completely baffled by American organizations that

were attacking at the last minute.

The advancing Americans were soldiers of the 26th Infantry Division.

They were one of the divisions delivering an attack planned before the

armistice, then canceled, then reinstated.

when there were no confirming orders to stand down from the assault.

A look at the mindset that kept the fighting going to the eleventh hour

could be found in a letter sent by a tough American artillery captain, busy

raining fire on his enemy to the last second.

To his fiancée he wrote, It is a shame we can't go in and devastate Germany and

cut off a few of the German kids' hands and feet and scout the few of their old

men.

The man behind the shocking sentiment, Captain Harry Truman, would one day

manifest that hardness as President of the United States during World War II.

Elsewhere on the last day, American Lieutenant Harry Renigle had rushed back

to his unit from the hospital when he heard the armistice rumors.

He found his comrades jubilant, then suddenly plunged into stunned silence

when the attack order was renewed.

At 10.35 a.m., bayonets fixed. They went over the top.

At 10.55 a.m., a shell exploded a dozen yards from Renegade.

I hurried over, and there lay five of my best men, one fatally injured with a

hole near his heart.

He said, You know, We all expected things to cease today, so I wrote my

girl we were to be married when I returned.

There would be no wedding.

Near the center of the American front, Marine Elton Mackin had survived 156

days at the front.

Whether he would survive the last day depended heavily on the actions of his

commander, General Charles P. Summerall.

Summerall was a tough officer.

On the eve of the armistice, he calls his subordinate commanders together and

says, I want you to cross the Mears River during the night.

And then he added, rather cryptically, I don't expect to see any of you again.

The orders passed down from Samaral announced the astonishing goal of their

final attack of the war.

It was to provide support for an operation planned for November 14th,

three days after the armistice.

Elton Macken, tagged three times for medical evacuation, had torn up his

ticket to remain with his fellow Marines as they went forward.

Enemy Maxims embedded in the hills knocked down men like target soldiers in

a shooting gallery.

Still, they kept coming.

By early morning, the Marines and the infantrymen of the 89th Division had

crossed the Meuse River and taken the town of Puy.

Elton Macken survives, gets across the Meuse River.

However, that crossing has cost the American army 1,100

casualties in the very last hours of the war.

The very next morning, when the fighting stops,

General Summerall goes down to the riverbank and takes a few steps out onto

one of these bridges, turns around, and goes back to his chateau headquarters.

General Summerall's personal risk in the operation had involved nothing more than

the danger of getting his feet wet in a photo opportunity.

Summerall, like all the American officers, could claim that on this last

day of the war, he was just interpreting the orders of his American commander,

John Pershing.

John Pershing knew that President Wilson wanted to get this war over as soon as

possible.

But no one from Washington was telling him precisely what to do.

He took a very ambivalent attitude towards whether or not units should

continue fighting or not.

Pershing was of the opinion that an armistice, simply a ceasefire, would not

be sufficient to deter Germany from again attacking in Europe and being

an aggressive nation.

So he was not enthusiastic at all about the armistice.

Pershing was content to issue no commands that would prevent his

ambitious officers from going on fighting and punishing the hated enemy

until the last possible second of the war.

Among the divisions engaged on that last day was the 81st Infantry Division.

The 81st in those final hours lost 365 men.

Why?

The men had been hoping that their war was over, that within hours they would

go on to lead full lives, go home, marry, have children, pamper

grandchildren.

So why are they sent forward?

The general who commanded the division had information that there were bathing

facilities in the town of Stenae. And so the town is taken.

It's the last city that the Americans take in World War I.

And for this indefensible reason, men have given their lives.

By November 11, 1918, the war on the Western Front had dragged on over four

horrible years.

But even as word finally reached the front that an armistice was coming in a

few hours, soldiers continued to die.

The New Englanders of the 26th Yankee Division were taking casualties from

German Maxim machine guns at the very moment their neighbors, back in Boston,

Providence and New Haven began spilling into the streets to celebrate the end of

fighting.

A tragic 192 of these men, whose return was already being cheered, were doomed

to fall in these last senseless hours.

The amazing thing about the motivation of soldiers on November 11th, some who

even knew, that in a few hours the armistice would go into effect, was they

would attack, simply because their comrades were attacking.

And so they went with them.

Why the doomed soldiers went forward with their units could only be explained

by the superhuman bond they had formed with one another.

A soldier wrote in his war log, We give away anything we have if we think the

other fellow needs it more than we do.

I like the unselfish attitude up here so much that in many ways I wish I could

live on the front forever.

On the last day, this human caring was the only visible good to have come out

of all the killing.

As the clock ticked down, There was an unspoken question in the casual spending

of American life with nothing left to gain.

Why were African-American soldiers, almost unused by Pershing through so

much of the war, committed to a frontal assault in the last hours?

Were some lives worth less than others?

At the front on the last day of the war is the 92nd Division. This is an all

-black division run by white officers.

They rallied around the flag in the hope that what they could not earn in a

cotton patch or in a cornfield, they could earn on the battlefield, that is,

full American citizenship.

Still in this war, they received second-class treatment, second-class

training, second-class equipment, and second-class duties.

These troops had excelled in battle when assigned to French units, but under poor

American leadership, a few had faltered in battle, and were stigmatized.

Lieutenant General Robert Lee Bullard wrote of them, Our government seemed to

expect the same of them as of white men.

Poor Negroes. They are hopelessly inferior.

The 92nd assumes on the eve of the armistice that their war is over.

They're going to survive. They're going to go back home.

However, the next morning, there remains in force an operational plan involving

the blacks in the 92nd.

John Sherburn, a general, questions Corps commander, the Army commander, are

we really sending the men into battle at this late hour?

He's informed yes, and he describes his reaction as one of absolute horror.

On that last morning of the war, the men of the 92nd came out of their position

in a wooded area to a hail of German machine gun and artillery fire.

Some 190 of these African-American soldiers died within hours of the end of

the war.

Major Warren Ross was an officer with the 92nd. When the war ended, a

heartbroken Major Ross wrote sadly of their brave performance.

My heroic battalion. The battalion has earned undying fame for itself, its

regiment, its brigade, its division, and for the American colored race.

Hundreds of miles up the front, the town of Mons, where the British expedition

force had suffered their first major defeat in the first days of the war, had

powerful symbolic significance.

The battle survivors had been given a treasured special decoration, the Mons

star.

Now, four years later, when the British could have marched unopposed into Mons

on November 12th, they chose to attack and retake it on the 11th.

Sergeant Will Byrd was one of the first men into the outskirts.

They find three dead soldiers.

And Byrd notices, that they are wearing the Mons star.

That means that these are men who were engaged the very first day of the war.

They have survived to the very last day, only to die in the last hours.

And so the British High Command has achieved its symbolic wish.

The first defeat of the British has been vindicated by their recapture of the

city of Mons.

They are back where they started the war 700,000 British lives later.

On November 11th, the cannoneers that had created the artillery hell that had

characterized the war were not only unwilling to end their barrages, they

eagerly redoubled their fire.

In the very last hours of the war, there was a terrific bombardment.

Every side is firing off every round of ammunition they have left.

It's as though, at a country fair, they want to shoot off all the fireworks

before the festivities end.

This ammunition is being fired off randomly to get rid of it in an

expectation of the arrival of peace.

But these rounds don't make that distinction.

And in the very last moments, men are dying from this random artillery fire.

Death stayed to the very last moment of the war and was about to provide Private

Henry Gunther of the American 313th a tragic place in American history.

On this last morning of the war, Henry is positioned along a hillside

at a place called Ville de Vent-Chaumont.

Just hours left in the war, but the 313th doesn't know it. No word has yet

reached this regiment.

With 16 minutes left in the war, a runner catches up to the 313th and says,

cease fire at 11.

Nothing is said about what is to happen in these last 16 minutes.

Up ahead are German machine gun emplacements.

Henry Gunther starts approaching these machine guns.

Men alongside him, his comrades, urge him to stay back.

The Germans are appalled by this. They're waving him back.

He moves on.

He's shot through the head.

Henry Gunther dies at 10.59 that morning, with a minute left in the war,

and becomes officially the last American casualty of World War I.

According to the most conservative estimates, during the last day of the

war, principally in the six hours after the armistice was signed, all sides on

the Western Front suffered 10,944 casualties with 2

,738 deaths.

Eventually, people were going to ask why.

Taking the daily rate of death and wounding in the Great War as a standard,

had Marshal Foch accepted Matthias Erzberger's plea to stop the fighting on

November 8th while negotiations were underway, it is likely that 6,624

lives would have been spared and 14,895 maimed, burned,

gassed, and blinded men would instead have gone home whole.

A parent supplied a heartbreaking epitaph.

To all the world, he was a soldier.

To me, he was all the world.

Soon after the war ended in 1918, members of Congress began receiving

rather poignant letters.

People wanted to know, why did a son,

a husband, a brother die in the last hours of a war?

when it was clearly known that the war was about to end.

On that last day of World War I, the American forces alone suffered

casualties of over 3,200 men.

Subsequently, when these letters became numerous enough, Congress created a

subcommittee to investigate this matter.

On November 5, 1919, almost a year after Armistice Day, General Pershing was

called to testify before the House of Representatives Committee on Military

Affairs. He was questioned by Congressman Alvin Fuller.

Fuller probed directly at why American troops were ordered over the top on the

morning of the last day.

Under the terms of the armistice, these same troops could have marched

peacefully into Germany at 11 o'clock.

Pershing cited that the leader of the Allied armies, Ferdinand Foch, had not

commanded a cessation of hostilities, and that he, Pershing, as the American

commander, had properly informed his subordinate officers of the fact of the

armistice.

But he had said nothing about what they should do until 11 a.m. His order thus

created a limbo in which these commanders were free to decide whether

to keep sending men into the meat grinder or to cease fighting at once.

Different decisions ended lives or preserved them.

Subcommittee member Oscar Brand stepped in and knifed to the heart of the matter

as he questioned the reluctant key witness, General Fox Connor, Pershing's

Chief of Operations.

Brand demanded, Would it have been best under the circumstances?

to have included in that order that hostilities should cease as soon as

practicable before eleven o'clock.

Connor stonewalled, No, sir, I do not.

Bland pursued with icy determination,

How many generals did you lose that day?

None, said Connor.

How many colonels did you lose that day?

I do not know how many were lost, replied Connor.

Bland said coldly, I am convinced that on November 11th, there was not any

officer of very high rank taking any chance of losing his own life.

He then spoke for all the unnecessarily bereaved families.

I resent that these lives were lost, and the American people resent the fact that

these lives were lost.

General John Sherburn, a decorated officer, pulled no punches in his

denunciation of the events of November 11th. He testified, They did not look

upon human life as the important thing.

They had set up what, in my opinion, was 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 was very much

interested in.

and that he knows within a day or two it is going to be taken away from him, and

he wants to use that toy up to the handle while he has it.

By the end of January, the hearing concluded.

The committee arrived at the verdict that needless slaughter had occurred on

the last day of World War I.

The full select committee on expenditures in the war adopted the

report.

Justice and the placement of responsibility were primed for arrival.

But then the politicians stepped in, wrapping themselves alternately in the

flag and raw partisan maneuvering.

The report was preparing to defame America's victorious leadership in a war

that had brought the nation onto the world stage.

The names of the generals, Liggett, Pershing, and Bullard, were going on

monuments.

Some in Congress saw a Republican plot to criticize the Army and the conduct of

the war by a Democrat president.

The report was recalled.

The recall set off three hours of acrimonious debate that changed nothing.

On March 3rd, any imputation that American lives had been needlessly

sacrificed on the last day of World War I had been struck away.

Nothing remained of the tragedy.

except thousands of broken hearts.

But on all sides, there were men who would not be returning home to wives,

to careers, to becoming parents, to becoming pampering grandparents.

They would not be returning home because of the decisions made out of vain glory

and pride by other men whose lives were not risked that last morning.

The madness of fighting to the last moment of the 11th month, 11th day, 11th

hour, soon would be forgotten in the long euphoria of armistice celebrations

and victory parades.

Nobody yet realized that victory would have its costs.

The vengeful armistice had paved the way for an even bloodier conflict.

The war to end all wars would be refought by the same enemies barely

twenty years later.

It turned out that the dying from the first day onward had been as senseless

as it had been on the last.