It is axiomatic for a military history scrivener such as myself to write about the end of World War I on Armistice/Remembrance/Veteran’s Day. And I shall…in a moment. First we should take a moment to consider that other things happened on that day in other years, both before and after.
In 1831, a Virginia slave, lay preacher and mystic named Nat Turner interpreted from the two solar eclipses of that year that the time was right for a slave rebellion. There had been eleven such risings in the United States since 1712, the latest before Turner’s was in South Carolina known as the Denmark Vesey revolt in 1822. On 21 August 1831, the revolt began. For two days the seventy slaves and free blacks that participated in the rising ravaged farms and homes in Southampton County, Virginia, eventually killing some sixty white men, women and children. As local militias rounded up and arrested the rebels, Turner hid out until 30 October. Tried for servile insurrection rather than murder, Turner was hanged on 11 November 1831. The Nat Turner Revolt, as it has been called since, sent a chill through the slave-holding South second only to the the more successful slave revolt in Haiti in 1804 that resulted in hundreds of slave owners being brutally murdered. New and repressive laws were passed restricting slave social activities and what few liberties they had.
In 1839, the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) was founded in Lexington. Originally one of several Virginia arsenals set up after the War of 1812, the first President was Claudius Crozet, a French-born graduate of the exclusive Ecole Polytechnique engineering school who had taught at West Point. VMI has produced some of America’s best soldiers, including George C. Marshall, Lemuel Shepard, Leonard Gerow, and John Jumper.
On this day in 1885, in San Gabriel, California, George Smith Patton Junior was born. Georgie, as he was called by his family, always had a marital career in mind. He attended VMI as an undergraduate before being accepted at West Point. Graduating 46th in a class of 103 in 1909, he was branched to the cavalry. Patton always had a mind of his own, and a private fortune to back it up, so his career was only limited by his ability to get higher postings. While he was a superb organizer and tactician he had little patience for those who disagreed with his plans, including his superiors. Patton did not understand that the larger the units the bigger the politics and public exposure, and refused in some cases to be anything other than his own vision of marital glory. Even as he rose in the ranks the consensus was that he was useful, but not indispensable. As a tactical commander he was useful: as a senior officer, less so. His death in a traffic accident in 1945 put a counterpoint on a style of soldier who had outlived its usefulness.
And on 11 November, 1918, when the guns finally fell silent on the Western Front, the killing did not yet stop, not for several days. Parts of the Meuse-Argonne sector, where the Americans had been attacking since September, were out of communications, and the German forces in Africa wouldn’t get the word of the surrender at Compiegne. Aside from that, Russia was in civil war, Germany was in revolution, and Austria and Hungary were in chaos, Worse, the 1918 Influenza was still killing people at a rate that made the Western Front seem…amateurish…and was not a respecter of non-combatants or borders. While the war caused some ten million dead directly, the influenza probably killed one hundred million, affecting one in four people on the face of the earth before it died out in 1921.
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