100th anniversary of the end of World War I

How the Great War could reign on Trump’s parade

The 100th anniversary of the end of World War I was in danger of sinking in obscurity. Then the president called for a huge military celebration.

By BRYAN BENDER

Many of President Donald Trump’s critics fear he will start World War III.

But he may bring good news for devotees of World War I.

This coming Veterans Day, the weekend selected for Trump’s $30 million military parade, is also the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War on Nov. 11, 1918. That’s the conflict that gave birth to the national veterans' holiday and planted seeds for many of the global convulsions that have erupted since.

Neither the president nor the Pentagon has remarked on the historical significance of the parade date. But it hasn't gone unnoticed by the federal commission that has sought for five years to heighten public awareness about the cataclysmic conflict that toppled empires, introduced chemical warfare, drew the borders of the modern Middle East and helped spawn Soviet Russia.

The parade “presents a wonderful opportunity for us,” said Edwin Fountain, vice chair of the congressionally created World War One Centennial Commission, which is also raising money to construct a national memorial in Washington to the Great War. “We have suggested to the secretary of Defense and the White House that the thematic focus of the parade can and ought to be the centennial of the armistice.”

So far, the Pentagon has said only that the parade to be held in Washington will honor veterans from all branches of the military who fought in all of America's wars. "We’re still very early in the planning stages and therefore do not have any specific details to provide yet regarding the parade," said Air Force. Col. Patrick Ryder, a spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is coordinating the planning.

Yet Fountain said he hopes that the timing of the parade will bestow special honor on the Americans who sacrificed in World War I, including nearly 117,000 who were killed and another 204,000 wounded. He also said the publicity surrounding the event could be used to highlight some of the enduring lessons of the war — including how easily regional disputes can still escalate into global ones.

"How can we learn the lesson of World War I? You look at Ukraine and you look at Syria and you wonder how those regional conflicts might escalate," Fountain said of two current wars where major rivals, including the United States and Russia, are on opposing sides.

"You can see how a conflict between forces we are each supporting could escalate and draw us in the same way as World War I," he added.

University of California, Berkeley professor Adam Hochschild agreed that the public attention surrounding the parade offers a unique chance to recount a war that was not seared into the American consciousness through films and books nearly as much as other conflicts.

"It is a rare opportunity to depart from the standard celebrate-the-heroes, thank-veterans-for-their-service kind of way we usually remember wars," said Hochschild, author of "To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918." "If there was ever a war that shouldn't have happened, World War I was it. It remade the world for the worse, in every conceivable way. It's impossible to imagine the Second World War without the first, without the huge legacy of bitterness and resentment."

The war between 1914 and 1918 pitted the Allies of Great Britain, France, Russia and ultimately the United States against the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire in Turkey, which had ruled much of the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Southeastern Europe from the 14th to the 20th centuries.

With a toll of some 19 million soldiers and civilians, it was one of the deadliest conflicts in human history, fueled by genocide and dramatic technological changes that included the advent of poison gas as a battlefield weapon.

"Soldiers rode in on horseback and flew out in airplanes," said Libby O'Connell, a cultural historian at the Smithsonian Institution and a member of the U.S. World War One Centennial Commission.

The conflict also set ablaze a series of political revolutions, including the Bolshevik Revolution that brought communists to power in Russia in 1917. And it left a legacy of rivalries, particularly in the Middle East, where the victors carved up the Ottoman Empire with little regard for religious or ethnic geography.

"Those borders are still a flash point," O'Connell said. "It hasn’t been resolved."

But World War I was subsequently glossed over in the United States, which participated in the final 18 months and helped the Allies turn the tide.

"It got book-ended by the Civil War and World War II," said Mitchell Yockelson, an investigative archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration. "It kind of laid dormant for a long time. And even the U.S. government didn't really mention World War I that much. We're the only belligerent in the war that doesn't have an official history."

One reason is that the veterans themselves wanted to forget it, he explained.

"For a lot of the soldiers when they came back in 1919 from service on the Western Front it was a horrific experience dealing with gas warfare, artillery shelling, hand-to-hand combat," he said. "A lot of Americans just didn't want to talk about it. They weren't writing about it, they weren't telling their families about it — certainly not in the same way as Union Civil War veterans were writing articles for The Century Magazine or Harper's."

But many believe the causes of the Great War have eerie parallels to today’s global power plays in regions ranging from Eastern Europe to North Korea to the South China Sea.

"There are similarities that we need to pay attention to," said former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Leon Panetta, who is a special adviser to the centennial commission. "The British, the French, the Germans were all trying to expand their empire. If you look at what is happening today, we've got a whole group of wannabe emperors around the world, who obviously are trying to assert the power of their country in ways that expand their influence.

"There was militarism at the time — a huge arms race that was going on between Britain and Germany, but others as well," Panetta continued. "Today, we have a whole new arms race going on with Russia. China is asserting authority over the South China Sea and Russia is trying to expand their influence over the old Soviet republics, starting with Ukraine. Iran is trying to expand its influence in the Middle East as well. So clearly there is growing militarism in this time as well."

O'Connell sees another alarming similarity between then and now. "We also have a breakdown in diplomacy," she said.

Panetta agreed that as in the run-up to World War I, when "there were not a lot of statesmen," international diplomacy is once again being dangerously discounted.

"The United States, of course, with 'America First,' is pulling back from its leadership role in the world," he said. "Others are all kind of looking out for themselves. There isn't that kind of broad world leadership looking at all these different crises we are confronting trying to figure out how do we work together to try to make sure these do not get out of control."

The Veterans Day parade, in Panetta's view, "is an opportunity to remind the American people of what World War I was all about and to hopefully learn the lessons that World War I teaches us about the present."

That's certainly the hope of the World War One Centennial Commission, which in early March finally secured $7 million from Congress to help finance its educational and other outreach efforts — marking its first government funding yet.

Until now, the commission has been "a federal agency without a federal appropriation," Fountain complained.

The organization is also hoping to gain more public support for its effort to construct a national World War I Memorial with private donations. Congress has decided it will be along the planned parade route — in Pershing Park, so named for Gen. John Pershing, the top commander in the war, at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

"The United States honors the American veterans of every major war of the 20th century with a national memorial in Washington, D.C., except the veterans of World War I," the commission declares on its website, adding that there is now an "opportunity to give long-overdue recognition to America’s 4.7 million sons and daughters who served in the Great War.

"Those women and men served with the same valor and courage as the veterans as those later wars," it adds, "and the nation’s sacrifice was great — 204,000 Americans returned home wounded and 116,516 did not come home at all."

"If you go back six weeks from the date the first shots were fired at the end of July 1914, Europe was at peace," Hochschild said. "Britain and Germany were each other's largest trading partners. No one really anticipated, with rare exceptions, how horrible it was going to be. The mistake everybody made in 1914 was that each country was so certain that this war would be over quickly and they would win it.

"I certainly see some of that same mood today," he added. "When you see Trump and Kim [Jong Un] in North Korea throwing insults at each other, you wonder if either of these guys know what a nuclear exchange would look like, what would it feel like."

His advice for marking the anniversary of the end of World War I: "Let's remember this event for the horror show it was. Yes, one has to honor the suffering that veterans went through. But it doesn't mean you have to honor the rationality of the war."