Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918 World War I and Its Violent Climax

Front Cover
Random House Publishing Group, Dec 18, 2007 - History - 496 pages
November 11, 1918. The final hours pulsate with tension as every man in the trenches hopes to escape the melancholy distinction of being the last to die in World War I. The Allied generals knew the fighting would end precisely at 11:00 A.M, yet in the final hours they flung men against an already beaten Germany. The result? Eleven thousand casualties suffered–more than during the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Why? Allied commanders wanted to punish the enemy to the very last moment and career officers saw a fast-fading chance for glory and promotion.

Joseph E. Persico puts the reader in the trenches with the forgotten and the famous–among the latter, Corporal Adolf Hitler, Captain Harry Truman, and Colonels Douglas MacArthur and George Patton. Mainly, he follows ordinary soldiers’ lives, illuminating their fate as the end approaches. Persico sets the last day of the war in historic context with a gripping reprise of all that led up to it, from the 1914 assassination of the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, which ignited the war, to the raw racism black doughboys endured except when ordered to advance and die in the war’s last hour. Persico recounts the war’s bloody climax in a cinematic style that evokes All Quiet on the Western Front, Grand Illusion, and Paths of Glory.

The pointless fighting on the last day of the war is the perfect metaphor for the four years that preceded it, years of senseless slaughter for hollow purposes. This book is sure to become the definitive history of the end of a conflict Winston Churchill called “the hardest, cruelest, and least-rewarded of all the wars that have been fought.”
 

Contents

The Desperate Hours
3
The Boy Who Blew Up the World
15
A Lovely War
25
Goya at His Most Macabre
34
Upon a Midnight Clear
43
The God Who Gave the Cannon Gave the Cross
53
The Three Musketeers
61
A Scar from Belgium to Switzerland
66
Baptism in Cantigny
231
Do You Want to Live Forever?
246
I Dont Expect to See Any of You Again
254
Do You Wish to Take Part in This Battle?
267
A Civilized End to Pointless Slaughter
278
A Plague in the Trenches
292
Victims Who Will Die in Vain
306
We Knew the End Could Not Be Far Off
320

Every Inch a Soldier
76
They Shall Not Pass
80
What Did You Do in the Great War Dad?
89
Tomorrow I Shall Take My Men over the Top
101
Hindenburg The Name Itself Is Massive
121
Keeping the World Safe for Democracy
133
Acts Prejudicial to Military Discipline
146
Doughboys
157
Sweet and Noble to Die for Ones Country
168
Over There
179
If This Is Our Country Then This Is Our War
201
Ludendorffs Grand Gamble
210
A German Bullet Is Cleaner Than a Whore
225
Pass the Word Cease Fire at Eleven
327
Little Short of Murder
337
The Fate of Private Gunther
348
This Fateful Morning Came an End to All Wars
362
Greater Losses Than on DDay
375
Only the Dead Have Seen the End of War
387
Marching Home
393
Acknowledgments
403
Casualty Statistics
407
Notes
409
Bibliography
429
Index
437
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

References to this book

About the author (2007)

JOSEPH E. PERSICO’s books include Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, which was made into a television docudrama; Piercing the Reich, on the penetration of Nazi Germany by American agents; My American Journey (as collaborator with Colin Powell); and Roosevelt’s Secret War. He lives in Guilderland, New York.

Bibliographic information