Honoring Veterans

Today and every day

The shooting-war part of World War I ended on November 11, 1918, at 11:00 a.m. Spare a thought for Private Henry Gunther, U.S. Army, who is believed to be the last soldier to die in that conflict. He was killed at 10:59 a.m. as he charged a German machine gun post. The war did not conclude officially until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919. One year after the fighting stopped, on November 11, 1919, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson [sound effect] declared the first observance of Armistice Day.

Soldiers at the Battle of the Somme

The national Armistice Day holiday was established by the U.S. Congress on May 13, 1938. By this time, most of the states were already observing November 11 as a holiday recognizing the end of World War I. The observance was expanded following World War II and the Korean War: the 1938 Act was amended in 1954 to change the name to “Veterans Day”.

The first Veterans Day, in 1954, was commemorated by, among other events, the largest number of new citizens naturalized in the United States in a single day. Included among the 50,000 new Americans were three Japanese people who took their citizenship oaths on the deck of the USS Missouri, docked in Bremerton, Washington.

9,000 new American citizens are sworn in on Nov. 11, 1954, in New York’s Polo Grounds ( Photo by Lisa Larsen, LIFE Magazine)

In 1968, the Uniform Holiday Bill shifted several national holidays from their fixed dates to the nearest Monday in order to create more 3-day weekends. This worked for Memorial Day and Washington’s Birthday (now “Presidents Day” as if all presidents are equally worthy of a day off), but not for Veterans Day, which was restored to its November 11 observance in 1978 in accordance with state government and public preference.

World War I Veterans in 1978 (Image from Reddit)

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, there was a World War II veteran; one of the youngest, he had shipped out to Europe aged 18, arriving just as the war ended. He did educational presentations about World War I, because he believed early-2000s Americans had forgotten that war ever happened. Colonel Potter in the television program M*A*S*H was a World War I veteran. He was from northeast Missouri, like my late father, who was a Vietnam veteran.

My family’s observance of Veterans Day often includes steak, potatoes, and red wine, in honor of my father, and watching the Turner Network production The Lost Battalion, starring an intense Rick Schroder as Major Whittlesey.

The original film of The Lost Battalion was screened in 1919. I did not know this until just now, when YouTube’s algorithm noticed that I’d been doing searches related to World War I. (Spooky, but not as spooky as the time I got Google ads in Spanish for the model of car Beau the Son was, at that time, shopping for. He wasn’t even living with us then!)

To all the veterans among our CSLF friends, thank you for your service. Veterans among my living family members include my husband (Air Force), brother (Air Force), two cousins (Navy), Daughters A (Coast Guard) and B (Marine Corps) and daughter-in-law B (Marine Corps).