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While debating the 1922 issue of benefits to be paid to the American W.W. I veterans, this record of salary and the post-war benefits paid by the other combatant nations was distributed to members of Congress.
The intended readers for the attached article were the newly initiated members of the American Legion (ie. recently demobilized U.S. veterans), who might have had a tough time picturing a Paris that was largely free of swaggering, gum-chewing Doughboys gallivanting down those broad-belted boulevards, but that is what this journalist, Marquis James (1891 – 1955) intended. At the time of this printing, the A.E.F. (American Expeditionary Force) had been shaved down from 4,000,000 to half that number and re-christened the A.F.F. (American Forces in France) and the A.F.G. (American Forces in Germany). With a good bit of humor, the article concentrates on the antics of the American Third Army in Germany as they performed their Bolshevist busting duties in the Coblenz region.
Perhaps in his haste to be the reliable cynic, H.L. Mencken (1880 – 1956) decided to ignore the haphazard nature of industrial warfare and indulged in some Darwinian thinking. There is no doubt that this column must have infuriated the Gold Star Mothers of W.W. I, who were still very much a presence at the time this opinion piece appeared, and it can also be assumed that the veterans of The American Legion were also shocked to read Mencken’s words declaring that:
The American Army came home substantially as it went abroad. Some of the weaklings were left behind, true enough, but surely not all of them. But the French and German Armies probably left them all behind. The Frenchman who got through those bitter four years was certainly a Frenchman far above the average in vigor and intelligence…
I predict increasing ferment and unrest throughout all Islam; a continued awakening to self-consciousness; an increasing dislike for Western domination.
So wrote Lothrop Stoddard (1883 – 1950), an author who was very much a man of his time and tended to gaze outside the borders of Western Civilization with much the same vision as his contemporary Rudyard Kipling, seeing the majority of the world’s inhabitants as the white man’s burden. Yet, for all his concern on the matter of Anglo-Saxon hegemony, he seemed to recognize the growing discontent in Islam, even if he was some sixty years early.
Not pacifists, but soldiers, have signed what several editors term one of the most striking and remarkable appeals for peace that have come to their tables.
Veterans of the 1914-1918 slaughter called for their respective governments to oppose territorial aggrandizement and demanded that an international court be established to outlaw war; following the establishment of said court, the immediate effort to disarm and disband sea and air forces and destroy the implements of warfare should begin. The American Legion Commander-in-Chief, Alvin Owsley (1888 – 1967), was among the signators.
Click here to read an article about the German veterans of W.W. I.
One of the most sinister results of the war has been a new wave of anti-Semitism in Europe. Recent dispatches from Berlin describe street demonstrations against Jews and speak of a veritable pogrom atmosphere in Munich and Budapest. In Poland, Jewish blood has flown freely, amid scenes of horror described by Herman Bernstein and other writers in American newspapers. In Ukraine the number of Jews massacred during the early part of the present year is estimated anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000.
In the attached magazine interview, Kaiser Wilhelm’s son and fellow exile, Crown Prince Wilhelm III (1882 – 1951, a.k.a. The Butcher of Verdun), catalogs his many discomforts as a refugee in Holland. At this point in his life, the former heir apparent was dictating his memoir (click here to read the book review) and following closely the goings-on at Versailles.
Click here to read an article about the German veterans of W.W. I.
A brief article published some six months after the Armistice in which the editors collected various opinion pieces from assorted German newspapers that clearly stated the deep hatred many Germans felt for their former king. Also mentioned was the possibility that the dethroned Kaiser could possibly stand trial before the court of Nations.
The rotten branch on the Hohenzollern tree must be broken off, so that the tree may once more bloom and flourish. William II is superficial, frivolous, vain, and and autocratic; a lover of pomp; proud of his money, void of seriousness; a petty worshiper of his own petty self; without one trait of greatness, a poseur, an actor, and worst of all for a ruler: a coward.
Click here to read what the Kaiser thought of Adolf Hitler.
The attached magazine article is for any sentimental sap who has never crossed the water to walk wander pensively upon that ground where the blood once flowed between the years 1914 and 1918. It concerns the July 14, 1936 reunion at Verdun where many of the old combatants of the Great War were:
Called together at historic Fort Douaumont, captured and retaken a score of times during those dark days of 1916, to swear a solemn oath to work for peace, the disillusioned survivors of their father’s folly found Verdun changed, yet unchanged and changeless.
Click here to read another article concerning peace-loving veterans of World War One.
A few cartoons by the illustrator George Wright (1872 – 1951) depicting the American Third Army during it’s 1919 occupation of Germany.
Ten years ago the American people reversed its national tradition against entangling alliances and participation in the political struggles of Europe in order, as it is fondly believed, to make the world safe for democracy, safeguard the rights of small nations and the principle of self-determination… If the causes and justifications for our intervention were based on facts, some evidence of their truth ought now, after ten years, to be apparent.
It was discovered in 1922 that when the German school system made mention of the recently ended war (if they addressed the topic at all), the subject was often white-washed or inaccurately characterized. When approached by a foreign reporter concerning the matter, teachers claimed that new books were too expensive and that the prevailing political forces could never agree on an accurate history of the war:
When do you think you will be able to begin studying the history of the war in your schools? I asked.
Not until this generation dies…
Georges Clemenceau (1841 – 1929) served as one of France’s wartime Premieres (1917-1920). The following is an excerpt from his letter to the American people imploring them to share in his outrage concerning Germany’s open defiance to the Versailles Treaty. Clemenceau would die seven years later, fully convinced that another devastating war with Germany was just around the corner.
Click here to read more articles about the German violations of the Versailles Treaty.
The British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950) used to get mighty hot under the collar when the topic of American society came up and this column is just one example. During his 1922 American speaking tour Russell rambled-on about how prone Americans were to confuse the truth with commercial messages; believing that altruism was seldom a motivating factor behind a single American undertaking. He will have none of the thinking that America’s main concern for jumping into the meat grinder of 1914-1918 was entirely inspired by wounded France and poor little Belgium but was rather an exercise in American self-interest.
Read the thoughts of one W.W. I veteran who regrets having gone to war…
One year after the First World War reached it’s bloody conclusion, Admiral German Grand Admiral Alfred Von Tirpitz (1849 – 1930) was in a frenzy writing his wartime memoir in order that it arrive at the printing presses before his critics could do the same. One of his most devoted detractor was a naval advocate named Captain Persius who had been riding Tirpitz as early as 1914 for failing to fully grasp the benefits of the U-boat. In 1919 Captain Persius took it upon himself to widely distribute a pamphlet titled, How Tirpitz Ruined the German Fleet, which was reviewed in this article.
Tirpitz never realized the power of the submarine… Tirpitz was building Dreadnoughts when he should have been concentrating on submarines, and what is worse was building them with less displacement than the British, less strongly armed and of lower speed.
In 1920 the representatives from the victorious nations who convened at Versailles demanded that Kaiser Wilhelm, Admiral Tirpitz and an assortment of other big shots be handed over for trial – click here to read about it.
