Armistice, 1918 An Improbable Peace

A marble cross marking the grave at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, Belleau, France, of Private Hugh A. McKenna, the last American killed in action, on November 11, 1918. [New York]: [World Wide Photos, Inc.], September 21, 1939. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-55643.

Armistice, 1918 An Improbable Peace

BY BRANDEN LITTLE

Editor’s Note: Branden Little delivered this address at a Veterans Day Ceremony and Commemoration of the World War I Armistice held at the Utah State Capitol on November 8, 2018.

Private George Gidney of Brigham City and Private James Wesley Chipman of American Fork died but five days apart. 1 They fell in October 1918, in the final Allied push that would shatter the German army. In France, German artillery killed Gidney instantly. He was twenty-eight years old. Chipman succumbed to battlefield wounds received in Belgium. He was twenty-four.

Christmas came but weeks after the Armistice, and his absence was heartrending. 2

I suspect all of us have World War I (WWI) stories if we invest the time to discover them. I encourage you to do so. And should you unearth them, please consider either donating materials or having them digitally preserved by the department of Special Collections at Weber State University’s Stewart Library or by the Utah State “We Remember Them Roadshow” at the Eccles Conference Center on Saturday morning. It’s a constructive step to ensure that we retain memories of this generation.

On November 7, the Salt Lake Herald announced Chipman’s fate. News of Gidney’s death appeared in print two days later, on the ninth. The Armistice of November 11, 1918, did little to lessen the grief the two soldiers’ families had only begun to feel.

One hundred years later, the families of these two soldiers still honor their memories. Gidney’s nephew, a retiree, is one of my students at Weber State University (and he’s here today with his family). Chipman’s niece is married to my colleague in the History Department. They shared with me their relatives’ stories and their last letters written home. Wesley Chipman, for instance, was “the darling of [his] family,” who radiated joy. Christmas was his favorite time of year and he loved to decorate their tree.

We are here today to commemorate the American WWI dead and the Armistice of November 11, 1918. Gidney and Chipman ranked among the more than nine million soldiers who died in the war. Tens of millions of civilians also perished from genocidal violence, exposure to the elements, starvation, and disease. We have no accurate tally of the dead. But we can be thankful that after fifty-one months of uninterrupted slaughter, the war came to a conclusion.

On Monday evening, November 11, a local newspaper, the Ogden Standard, proclaimed, “Peace! Germans Sign Most Drastic Document Ever Drawn Up By Any Nation.” The “Greatest Day in All History [was] Being Celebrated.” We can only imagine how muted were the celebrations at the Gidney and Chipman households.

What did this allegedly drastic ceasefire demand? In exchange for Allied forces halting their devastating attack on collapsing German lines, Germany agreed to evacuate conquered lands, free prisoners of war, and reduce its army and navy to a fraction of their war strength. The Allies would also occupy some of Germany’s borderlands to ensure that these steps were completed. In truth, the Armistice was less drastic than it seemed to the Ogden Standard. Why? Let’s highlight two reasons.

First, its modest requirements bore no resemblance to Germany’s extortion of defeated Soviet Russia in early 1918. In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Berlin had forcibly acquired 1.3 million square miles of Russian territory, 90 percent of Russia’s coal reserves, one third of its arable land, and one third of Russia’s population, sixty-two million people. The Armistice merely compelled Germany to surrender its Russian plunder; it did not plunder Germany.

Second, the November 11 Armistice was not drastic because it represented merely the last of a series of armistices negotiated between the Allies and Germany’s conspirators, who recognized their imminent defeat and sought to reduce their risk of Allied conquest. Bulgaria requested the first armistice in late September, the Ottomans followed one month later, and the Austro-Hungarian and German armistices came about a week apart in November. The terms of the Allied ceasefire with Germany were virtually identical to those agreed upon by the other Central Powers. Losers in this era understood that the loss of territory and other penalties were customary terms of defeat. Even though it was beaten, Germany had a harder time admitting its defeat than its coalition partners.

Why have I titled today’s presentation, “An Improbable Peace”? Let me suggest three reasons.

First, the Armistice led to treaties that did not produce absolute peace among the signatories. Losers grumbled about the terms of treaties and treaty enforcement mechanisms. In 1919, in the Treaty of Versailles, the Allies foolishly imposed on Germany an extraordinary reparations burden it couldn’t even pay, the equivalent today of $6six trillion dollars. Germany was also unfairly obligated to accept full moral responsibility for initiating the war even though it was not solely to blame.

Ever since then, it is commonly understood that these outrageous demands stoked the fires of German hostility that exploded in Hitlerian Germany. But there is a problem with this logic. Without realizing it, we erroneously blame British and French postwar policy for starting World War II. Blaming the Treaty of Versailles for the Nazi invasion of Europe, Africa, and the Soviet Union absolves Hitler of responsibility and excuses Nazi aggression. Should the Allies have treated Germany better? Yes, they should have. But Hitler’s hate-filled actions were not the inevitable result of Versailles. His Second World War was of his own making.

This reassessment begs another question: would Germany have treated the Allies any better had it won the Great War? Germany’s brutal conquests of Belgium and western Russia give us a clue: it would have ruthlessly exploited the Allies had it defeated them. But our association of German suffering in the war’s aftermath with the rise of Nazism makes the November Armistice and the Versailles regime appear to be tragically flawed. Flawed as the treaty was, peace was improbable because unrepentant maniacs like Hitler yearned for glory.

The second reason peace was improbable was because the war’s explosive forces had shattered empires. The armistices did not alleviate peoples’ mounting burdens, and in certain cases, multiplied them as whole governments collapsed. In the ensuing chaos, civil wars and rebellions enveloped Russia, Germany, Ireland, Hungary, and parts of the Ottoman Empire. Hunger, disease, and deprivation radiated from Scandinavia to Arabia, from the English Channel to the Caucasus.

The third reason peace was improbable was that the survivors—grieving families, traumatized orphans, disabled veterans, foremost among the war’s many victims—could not simply exit the war. They could not because the Armistice itself was not a doorway to a new and peaceful world. The Gidneys and the Chipmans, along with all the peoples who had participated in this Great War, understood that their lives had changed. Many of them for the worse. Hints of these ominous changes were soon evident in coarser common language, in despairing literature, in horror films, and in empty houses of worship. The capacity to destroy en masse, to rally entire nations and fuel the fires of industrial killing for years without end, hinted at a dark future. Peace for many survivors was simply unobtainable.

At times like this we murmur, “Lest we forget.” It’s a reflexive act of commemoration. But we can repeat it often enough that it becomes meaningless. “Lest we forget” doesn’t tell us what we should remember.

Men like George Gidney and Wesley Chipman deserve to be remembered. The Veterans of Foreign Wars Post in Brigham City is named after Gidney. What should we remember about their sacrifice? Truly, there are things worth fighting for. There is dignity in sacrificing one’s life for others.

We should also remember that the world’s leaders had proven unequal to the task of preventing war. So, millions of men like Gidney and Chipman heeded their nations’ calls to duty and died as a result. Their promising lives were cut short. Their families paid the ultimate price. We should always be wary of leaders who advocate war yet dismiss the reality of death and its manifold consequences.

In closing, in April 1919, some six months after George Gidney had died, his mother received a letter from the American Red Cross. It included details of George’s death as recorded by his commanding officer. And it closed with this note: “we with all American people will ever honor the memory of your son, who willingly made the supreme sacrifice that the world might be made a fit place in which to live.” May we do the same today and forevermore—honor the memories of fine Americans like George Gidney and Wesley Chipman by striving to make the world “a fit place in which to live.” 3

Thank you.Notes

1. Gidney died October 3, 1918. Chipman died October 8, 1918.

2. George Gidney to his mother, Mrs. George [Emma] Gidney, September 24, 1918, private collection of Rand Briem, Ogden, Utah; James Wesley Chipman to John Chipman and Jane Drew Clarke Chipman, July 12, 1918, private collection of Richard Sadler and Claudia Sadler, Ogden, Utah. “The darling of our family” quotation comes from Claudia Sadler, interview with author, November 6, 2018, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah.

3. William R. Castle, Jr., to Mrs. George [Emma] Gidney, April 1, 1919, Briem collection.