Intense Fighting on the American Front Continued Until the Last Minute
On the night of November 10-11, 1918, the American V Corps, commanded by major general Charles Summerall, secured crossings of the Meuse River, and continued to aggressively attack German positions along its front on the morning of the 11th. V Corps’ attacks continued even after senior American commanders learned that a final Armistice had been signed at 5AM that day, and that it was due to take effect a few hours later, and thus bring an end to the fighting, at 11AM.
Pershing informed his subordinate commanders, but said nothing about what they should do until 11AM. The more prudent amongst them decided against sending men to their deaths in order to seize ground they could occupy in safety in a few hours, while the ambitious careerists saw a fast-fading chance for glory and advancement. Unfortunately, there was no shortage of ambitious careerists among the ranks of American officers, and that translated into tragic results for their men.
While news of the impending armistice had reached senior American commanders early on the morning of the 11th, that information had not made its way down to the ranks of the soldiers assaulting the German trenches and strong points along the front. News of the armistice, however, had swiftly reached the Entente Powers’ home fronts, making its way to their capitals and main cities by 5:40AM. Thus, American civilians celebrated the end of the conflict in New York City and elsewhere, even as American Doughboys, unaware that the war was all but over, were still dying on the front lines, attacking enemy positions and suffering casualties by the hundreds.
The aggressiveness of Summerall and other American commanders would have been admirable at any other time, but its wisdom was questionable, to say the least, just hours before the end of hostilities. The only result was to produce thousands of needless casualties, both American and German, but mostly American since they were the ones attacking heavily fortified enemy positions. The US 89th Division, for example, was ordered to attack the German held town of Stenay on the morning of November 11th, and successfully took it – the last town forcibly captured on the Western Front. However, that achievement came at the cost of more than 300 American casualties. The American V Corps alone suffered over eleven hundred casualties in the war’s final hours, including over three hundred killed.
Those casualties neither advanced the Entente cause, nor otherwise had any appreciable impact on a war whose end had already been negotiated hours earlier. They only served to gratuitously add to the war’s already long ledger of death, suffering, and grief. All in all, because Pershing ordered or allowed his commanders to continue fighting even after the Armistice had been signed, over 3500 American casualties were suffered on the last day of the war. In November of 2018, in the run-up to the centenary of WWI’s end, Britain’s Imperial War Museum released a recording, documenting the final moments on the American front. Until the last minute, or literally the last second, the guns kept up a ferocious fire, then abruptly ceased at 11AM, their horrific din replaced by an eerie silence, broken only by the chirping of birds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTA10n1Ztqo
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
History – The Last Official Death of WWI Was a Man Who Sought Redemption
History Net – World War I: Wasted Lives on Armistice Day
Lad Bible – Eerie Recording Documents the Moment the First World War Ended
Marshall III, Jackson R., Tar Heel Junior Historian, Spring, 1993 – WWI: Last Days of the War