The war to end all wars that didn’t end when it ended
So when exactly did World War One end?
It all started when I spent a summer in Leicester teaching at the university.
I was strolling through Victoria Park on my way to campus when an inscription on the Arch of Remembrance caught my eye.
“World War 1, 1914–1919”.
My first thought:
A typo on a war memorial? How careless.
Two ‘O’ level years spent studying the war poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and four years of modern history had left me in no doubt that “The War to End All Wars” had ended in 1918.
So what was going on?
I contacted a history lecturer at the university and he explained that the date when the war ended was not quite black and white.
The Armistice declared at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month was just a cessation of fighting. The war didn’t officially end until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28th, 1919.
Added to that was the fact that there was no national oversight of war memorials so the local committees in charge of their construction could decide whether it was a four-year or five-year war.
Mystery solved … until this week.
With Remembrance Sunday coming up, I was discussing the Arch of Remembrance with a friend in Leicester and he told me he had also wondered at the discrepancy in dates.
I went online just to doublecheck the facts and I discovered something even more interesting. The USA and Germany didn’t sign a peace treaty until the 25th of August, 1921 (effective the 11th November, 1921).
Now it was a seven-year war.
Except …
My friend countered my discovery with one of his own. Costa Rica was officially at war with Germany until 1945 (the Potsdam Agreement ending two wars for the price of one).
Apparently, historians don’t really take Costa Rica’s involvement in World War One very seriously — they were just jumping on the Allied bandwagon — but it is an interesting quirk of history.
At least the history books were right about the dates of World War II.
1939–1991.
Yep. There’s a story behind that one as well ;-)
