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

Joseph E. Persico

Dec 2007 · Sold by Random House

About this ebook

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.”

Ratings and reviews

Persico is mistaken when he claims that peace was at hand on 11 November. The war did not end on that date; only the fighting. Not until the Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919 did the war formally end. To the generals on the front, it was perfectly logical to continue the fight on 11 November. Who was to say that the ceasefire would hold? Who was to say that if parts of Belgium remained in German hands, that they wouldn't expect to keep that territory post-war? In hindsight, it is easy to say "the war was over", but there was no guarantee whatsoever that this was the case. In fact, after the draft treaty was presented to German officials in 1919, they inquired of their generals as to whether they could resume fighting before agreeing to sign - and only did so on being told that the German army was in no condition to continue the war. It is easy to condemn these generals as incopetent butchers, and there are certainly cases where this may be true. But here, they were exactly right. You may have a ceasefire looming, but you don't let up on the enemy when there's no guarantee that they might come back and attack you a day later.

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About the author

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.