Thursday marks the 100th anniversary of World War I, one of the most pivotal events in American and world history.
The American role in the war simply lacked the drama or the sweeping victories of the Civil War or World War II. To some, American involvement in World War I remains a mistake and an argument can be made that the rise of Soviet Russia and of Nazi Germany would have been far different -- and perhaps would never have taken place -- had America not entered the war in early 1917. The fact that hundreds of thousands of men fought for four years on the Western Front in massive lines of trenches, battling over inches and yards, remains almost incomprehensible a century later.
While Florida housed some naval bases in the war, the Great War, as it was called, did not impact the Sunshine State the way that other conflicts -- namely World War II -- did. But reading information on the fallen and going through the 39 rolls of information at the National Archives on the men drafted from Florida holds more than its share of human interest.
Almost 200 Floridians who lost their lives during World War I are buried in seven American military cemeteries in France. A stunningly high percentage of the young men from Florida who lost their lives were killed in the final weeks of the war in late October and early November 1918. Some of the “doughboys” from the Sunshine State, buried in France, died in 1919 -- victims of their wounds and the influenza epidemic that swept the world after the war.
Even the ones who survived the war were not always lucky. During the Great Depression, hundreds of former doughboys would head to veteran camps throughout the state, looking for work. In the hurricane that swept through Key West in 1935, an estimated 250 veterans of the war lost their lives.
Like the war they fought in, American veterans of World War I have often been overlooked and the last one passed away in February 2011. While it may be easy to forget the war, Florida and the rest of the nation should never forget the Americans whose lives were forever impacted -- and far too many ended -- by World War I and its aftermath.
Simply put, it’s hard to imagine how the 20th century would have gone without American involvement in World War I. America’s entry into the war helped France’s and Great Britain’s efforts on the Western Front, leading to their victory over the Germans in 1918 and harsh indemnities in the war’s aftermath that crippled Weimar Germany and helped usher Hitler and the Nazis into power. Having overthrown Tsar Nicholas II, thanks to the influx of American troops in France, the new Provisional Government in Russia remained in the war despite the staggering casualties, setting the stage for the Bolsheviks taking control later in 1917. In the aftermath of the war, as troops came home, influenza claimed the lives of more than 50 million people across the globe, including 650,000 Americans.
So much of the 20th century--the Great Depression, the Communist regime in the Soviet Union, the rise of the Nazis, the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the creation of a Jewish state in Israel, the decline and breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the Cold War--was a direct result of World War I. America’s entry into the war changed the nation and, for better of worse, the course of world events.
Almost 3 million Americans served in the armed forces during the war and that experience shaped their lives in countless ways: Prohibition, the prosperity and cultural changes of the Roaring 20s, disillusionment and economic downturn, isolationism in the late 1930s and even after the start of World War II, a fierce determination to win that war after America entered it. Above all, the veterans who served in World War I added to the nation’s proud military legacy.
“Time will not dim the glory of their deeds,” noted Gen. John J. Pershing of the Americans lost in World War I. It hasn't.
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