How did World War I end?
It ended with an armistice signed early on 11 November 1918 in Marshal Foch's railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne. Beaten in the field, abandoned by its allies and shaken by revolution, Germany accepted harsh Allied terms. The guns fell silent at 11 a.m., and the Treaty of Versailles followed on 28 June 1919.1
At 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918 the guns stopped firing along the Western Front. Some six hours earlier, in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne northeast of Paris, a German delegation had signed an armistice on terms set by Marshal Ferdinand Foch. It was not yet peace, and men died until the last minutes, but after more than four years the fighting in the west was over.2
Who won World War I and why?
The Allies won: France, the British Empire, Italy, the United States and their partners. By November 1918 Germany's spring offensives had failed, Allied armies reinforced by more than a million American soldiers were driving its forces back, its allies had surrendered and revolution was breaking out at home, so its own high command admitted the army could not go on.3
Key points
- Signed: early on 11 November 1918 in Foch's carriage at Compiègne; the text gives 5 a.m. French time.4
- Ceasefire: 11 a.m. the same day, six hours after the signing.5
- Terms: Germany had to leave occupied France and Belgium, evacuate the left bank of the Rhine and hand over guns, aircraft, railway stock, U-boats and much of its fleet.6
- Last deaths: a Canadian at about 10:58 a.m. and an American at 10:59 a.m., minutes before the ceasefire.7
- Poland: the same day the Regency Council in Warsaw handed command of the Polish army to Józef Piłsudski.8
1918: from German offensive to Allied advance
In the spring of 1918 Germany launched a series of great offensives in the west. They nearly broke the Allied line but failed, and the Imperial War Museums count the Second Battle of the Marne in July, fought on the river of the First Battle of the Marne of 1914, as the last of them. Under Foch, the Allied commander-in-chief, the initiative passed to the Allies.9
On 8 August the Allies attacked at Amiens, with the Australian and Canadian Corps in the lead, the IWM notes, opening what became the Hundred Days Offensive. Ludendorff called its first day the "black day of the German Army." American troops, over 1.4 million in France by the end of August by the IWM's count, made their main effort in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. On 29 September British, Australian and American troops broke through the Hindenburg Line at the St Quentin Canal. Ludendorff writes that at six in the afternoon of 28 September he had put to Hindenburg his views on a peace offer and a request for an armistice, and that Hindenburg thought the step necessary; on 29 September, LeMO notes, the Supreme Army Command demanded immediate armistice negotiations.10
Germany's allies fall away
Germany's partners gave up first, making its need for an armistice more urgent. By the Australian War Memorial's dates, Bulgaria signed an armistice on 29 September, the Ottoman Empire on 30 October and Austria-Hungary on 3 November; the Ottoman armistice was concluded at Mudros.11
The request to President Wilson
On 4 October the German government, led since 3 October by the new chancellor Prince Max of Baden according to the Anzac Portal, asked President Woodrow Wilson to broker a ceasefire on the basis of his Fourteen Points of January 1918. Wilson replied that Germany must end unrestricted U-boat warfare and remove its rulers. The German Historical Museum's online history LeMO notes that wartime propaganda had allowed no doubt about victory, so the request caught most Germans unprepared.12
Revolution in Germany
When the navy ordered one last attack on the British Grand Fleet at the end of October, the Anzac Portal notes, its sailors mutinied. Hunger and unrest spread. On 9 November the Kaiser's abdication was announced, a republic was proclaimed, as the IWM notes, and a government led by Social Democrats took over. Wilhelm II went into exile in the Netherlands; the Australian War Memorial dates his abdication to 10 November.13
The railway carriage at Compiègne
The German delegation was led by Matthias Erzberger, a secretary of state. According to the Australian War Memorial it crossed the front line by car on the evening of 7 November; it reached Compiègne on 8 November, where Foch presented the Allied terms. There was no real negotiation: the Allies refused an immediate ceasefire, and Foch made it plain that fighting would go on until the terms were accepted.14
What time was the armistice signed?
The armistice was signed in the early hours of 11 November 1918. Its text records 5 a.m. French time, as do the IWM and the Anzac Portal, but other accounts put the last signatures a few minutes later: the Australian War Memorial gives 5:10 a.m. and the French government 5:15 a.m. The ceasefire followed six hours later, at 11 a.m.15
The terms
Foch made sure the armistice, in name only a ceasefire, left Germany unable to fight again. Within 15 days German troops had to leave Belgium, France, Luxembourg and Alsace-Lorraine, and the Allies would occupy the left bank of the Rhine with bridgeheads at Mainz, Coblenz and Cologne. The text lists 5,000 guns, 25,000 machine guns, 3,000 trench mortars and 1,700 aircraft to be handed over, with 5,000 locomotives, 150,000 wagons and 5,000 trucks. Germany had to surrender all its submarines and intern 6 battle cruisers, 10 battleships, 8 light cruisers and 50 destroyers. The armistice annulled the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Russia and kept the Allied blockade in force. It ran for 36 days with an option to extend, and fighting in the west never resumed.16
Why the fighting went on until 11 o'clock
The ceasefire was set six hours after the signing, the BBC explained, so that the news could reach every unit at the front. Many commanders kept attacking until the last minutes. The American author Joseph E. Persico calculated nearly 11,000 casualties on the last day, more than on D-Day, as the BBC reports; the Guardian gives the same comparison.17
The pressure came from the top. At 9 p.m. on 9 November, while the German delegates were still weighing his terms, Foch telegraphed every Allied commander-in-chief that the enemy, "disorganized by our repeated attacks," was retreating along the whole front, and appealed to their energy to make the results decisive. The American First Army attacked on 10 and 11 November and forced a crossing of the Meuse; Pershing's report records that word of the signing reached his headquarters from Foch at 6 a.m. Along the front, the Australian War Memorial notes, scheduled attacks that should have been canceled went ahead, and some artillery units competed to be the last to fire.18
The last men to fall
Private George Edwin Ellison of the 5th Royal Irish Lancers, aged 40, was killed at about 9:30 a.m. near Mons, where the British army had first fought in 1914; he is regarded as the last British soldier killed in action and had served at the front since 1914. The Guardian notes that he lies at St Symphorien cemetery facing John Parr, the first British soldier to die.19
At 10:45 a.m. by the BBC's account, or 10:50 a.m. according to the French government, the French soldier Augustin Trébuchon was killed at Vrigne-Meuse in the Ardennes while carrying a message. The BBC adds that the message announced soup after the ceasefire, and that his grave, like those of other French soldiers killed that day, bears the date 10 November. The Canadian Private George Lawrence Price, 25, was shot near Mons just before 11: at 10:57 a.m. according to the Guardian, while the BBC gives his death at 10:58. At 10:59 a.m. the American Henry Gunther was killed on the Meuse front charging a German machine-gun post; the Guardian writes that the Germans first fired over his head to warn him off. The BBC names him the last soldier killed in action in the war, the Guardian the last Allied soldier to die.20
How many people died in World War I?
The armistice ended a war that had killed on a scale never seen before. The Australian War Memorial puts the military dead at about 10 million, and the French historian Antoine Prost, comparing the main statistical estimates, finds between about 9.2 and 10.1 million. Both count around 20 million wounded who survived: the Memorial speaks of 20 million severely wounded, and the estimates Prost compares run from 20.4 to 21.2 million.21
The United States entered the war in April 1917. The Department of Veterans Affairs counts 53,402 American battle deaths and 63,114 other deaths in service, about 116,500 in all, close to the 114,000 to 117,000 in the estimates Prost compares. The Meuse-Argonne offensive alone cost the American First Army about 117,000 killed and wounded, by the count of both Pershing's final report and the American Battle Monuments Commission.22
The German side
LeMO notes that the army high command had itself recognized in the autumn of 1918 that its exhausted forces could not go on, which is why it had the government seek an armistice. Yet the Social Democrat leader Friedrich Ebert greeted troops returning to Berlin on 10 December 1918 with the words "Kein Feind hat euch überwunden," no enemy has overcome you. From such words grew the "stab-in-the-back" myth: the false claim, spread above all by Hindenburg and Ludendorff, that an undefeated army had been betrayed at home. The IWM observes that the German generals let the new republic carry the humiliation of a defeat that was their own responsibility.23
Celebration and grief
The news set off celebrations in London and other Allied cities. In Britain, the IWM records, sirens, factory hooters and church bells sounded from 11 a.m. At the front, reactions ranged from euphoria to numb exhaustion, and for many families the joy was tempered by grief for the dead.24
From armistice to peace
Six days after the ceasefire, on 17 November, the Allied armies began to advance toward the Rhine along the whole Western Front, in the wake of the retreating Germans. They halted at the German frontier until 1 December, then marched into the Rhineland, and the American Third Army set up its headquarters at Coblenz, in the bridgehead the armistice terms had assigned to the Allies.25
The peace, the IWM notes, was drawn up by the victors at a conference in Paris that opened in January 1919, and the treaty with Germany was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 28 June 1919.26
Since 1919 the anniversary has been marked with a silence at 11 a.m. In the United States, the Department of Veterans Affairs notes, Congress replaced the word "Armistice" with "Veterans" in 1954, and the day became Veterans Day.27
A war that did not end everywhere
For Poland, 11 November is Independence Day. Józef Piłsudski, freed from German imprisonment, reached Warsaw on 10 November, and on 11 November the Regency Council handed him command of the Polish army. Away from the Western Front, the IWM stresses, the armistice did not necessarily mean the end of fighting. In the east new states fought for their borders, as Poles were already doing in the defense of Lwów. Read more on Józef Piłsudski and the greatest battles of World War I.28
