Transcript for the Piece Audio version of World War One and Armistice Day

WW-1 (2004)

For many Americans, World War One is a forgotten war. It's been nearly a century since the beginning of the Great War in Europe and there are very few people are alive today who can remember it. But the reason we mark Veterans Day on November 11th is because it is the date Wold War One ended. Lester Graham takes a look at the war and its Armistice Day.

Europe had been at war for more than three years by 1917 When President Wilson and the Congress decided to send American troops. The propaganda machine started grinding. There was no radio yet? but luminaries such as General ?Black Jack? Pershing who led the American Expedition made recordings that were played on phonographs in fraternal clubs and town halls back home?
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PERSHING "Three thousand miles from home an American army is fighting for you. Everything you hold worth-while is at stake."
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THORWARTH-1 "Well, they told us we were fighting for democracy in a war to end wars. That was what they tried to brainwash the people with, you know."
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George Thorwarth was among the first American soldiers to ship out for the war. In this interview, recorded in 1990, he explained that like thousands of others, he had volunteered alongside his friends and neighbors.
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THORWARTH-2 "America, they wanted to end that war. They didn't want to be over there forever. We just enlisted for the duration, you know."
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Over There
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It was supposed to be a grand adventure. But after landing in France, the doughboys quickly found their dreams of glory mired in the brutality of trench warfare. Technology helped make an incomprehensible level of carnage possible. Improved artillery turned forests and pastures into cratered fields of mud and twisted barbed wire. All kinds of new contraptions killed men in gruesome ways? and one of the worst new weapons was poison gas attacks?
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THORWARTH-3 "I think the most vivid one I can remember was the time I had the patrol out. We had 260 men in the company and there were only two squads left after the gas attack lasted 48 hours. And our gas masks were only good for 24. You go out on patrol at night and you stick your arm into the dead bodies and stuff. It was terrible up there at that time."
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The troops were always short on supplies. Sometimes in the trenches for months at a time, their clothes rotted away. Thorwarth says his leggings, socks and underwear fell apart? leaving him with nothing but a shirt and pants he had to pin together. Food was short. They ate whatever was available?
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THORWARTH-4 "All our artillery was drawn by horses at that time. When a horse get killed, we?d have something to eat."
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World War One was to end on November 11th, 1918. Armistice Day. Veterans of the war crawled from their holes and trenches, found a bottle of wine or cognac anywhere they could and celebrated surviving. Eight-and-a-half million soldiers and sailors had died. 117-thousand of them Americans.
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MY DREAM OF THE BIG PARADE
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In his book 'The First World War,' Keith Robbins writes "Huge numbers of crosses peopled the silent landscape. From all over the world in years to come relatives and friends trooped through these uncommunicative cities of the dead. The cemeteries of Europe housed them for in the end there was little to be said for trying to bring the fallen home. 'It is just as near from France to heaven as from Indiana,' concluded one mother."

This is Lester Graham
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