City - Nowhere important State - NOWHERE INTERESTING Country - United States
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I have in my possession (just for one day) a binder… err, hmmm… folder, or book. Open the cover and inside are five plastic sleeves. Neatly set in the sleeves are 27 photographs from WW I. 1915 to be exact. The photos are of various things but mostly bodies: in some cases parts of bodies. These are not reprinted images… oh no. These are shots from a man whose daughter knows me. She came up to me today and told me about her father and showed me the book and asked if I wanted to make copies of the photos because she knew I liked history. Bless her heart. The photos are faded and hard to discern in most cases. A few are sharp. I scanned all of them tonight and have to give the binder back tomorrow. Here is what amazes me. People are so willing to share their history if they just know one is interested. Gabe sent me some letters and photos from a family member who was killed in The Great War. A fella I know walked up to me one day and handed me a 1944 German helmet. He told me it was left to him by his grandfather and he had no use for it. Pat (now dead) said he knew I liked odd things and gave me his two ticket stubs from the 2000 U.S. Open golf championship. Casey (who’s grandmother owned a department store in the 1940’s) sent me a hair curling iron that screwed into a light bulb socket. And on and on it went. I have trinkets and oddities from around the world. And tonight, I added to my collection 27 original photos from WW I. Crazy stuff.
Did I tell you the binder sleeves were stitched with the original dog tags of her father?
Churchill is not the end-all on the subject. While he was a staunch icon of WWII, he was still half Brit and half Yank. In WW I, was he speaking from Brit or Yank point? I can also offer Truman here. Harry was in WWI and found the dropping of the bomb in WW II necessary because he had witnessed first hand the futile loss of life in trench warfare. And if we take WWI back another “Great War”, we find US Civil War trench warfare (Petersburg, Richmond…etc…) setting the stage for the 19-teens….. I hold to my post. The Great War could not have been settled without the participation of Yanks. Well, not to the point we have now. It could have been settled (many here [US] thought we should just let it go… Europe for Europeans) and whatever worked out (German, French…Brit… who cares) would have been the song of the day. It could have been settled without the happy Yank… but to what end? What social pivot would the world have turned on? And in the end, whatever we think, whatever we argue… the Yanks were there to the end and the world today is as they left it…. WWI is the point where the world looked at the US and said, “They are not just smoke… there is force there.”
We canna argue the point of historical fact. We can only dissect and muse on what “may” have been or what “may” have evolved. The plain fact, the truth is… The Yanks hoved in… the war ended. We can quibble about the social/empirical issues till the cows come home. The “what if’s?” the “maybe’s”…..looking back….
The Yanks entered, the war pulsed, the tides of human frailty ebbed…
The war ended…..
Cheers (we really don’t use that word much here [yet given in the spirit of true friendship])
I actually don't agree with you. There's a good essay by Churchill on that same site why America should have stayed out of the Great War altogether. Agreed that it was a great bloody mess. If they had lined all the generals up in 1914 and shot every tenth one, they would have reduced the overall level of stupidity in the upper brass by about 10%...
Ya don't have to break it to me. I know we were not there for the start... but we were there to end it. Say what ya may... The Yanks were needed to end that bloody war.
Hate to break this to you, Jim, but the US didn't go "Over There" until 1917...
Try this: http://www.greatwar.nl/
Filled with Great War pictures and essays. Incredible, heart-breaking, awful. Rudyard Kipling's story "The Gardener", is reprinted as well (scroll down on the left) and is worth the time it takes to read it. The intro contains spoilers - skip over it.
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