This week our Nation honors its veterans with a poignant holiday. Originally called “Armistice Day,” it marked the first anniversary of the armistice that effectively ended combat on the Western Front in World War I. At the eleventh hour, on the eleventh day, of the eleventh month the artillery fell silent, the biplanes ceased their bombing missions, and the trenches stopped being death traps for the soldiers that inhabited them.
We lost over 117,000 U.S. servicemen in that war. The total number of deaths (both military and civilian) for the Allies in that conflict was over 9 million. The central powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire which is now modern day Turkey) lost over seven million. While both France and Germany lost about four percent of their population in that conflict, some other nations lost a considerably greater proportion of their countrymen. Romania lost nine percent, the Ottoman Empire almost 14 percent, and Serbia an astounding 16 percent of their populations.
The idea that World War I would be the “war to end all wars” proved horribly illusory. We repeated the exercise in World War II and the carnage was worse. The US lost over 416,000 servicemen. The Soviet Union lost over 13 percent and Poland over 16 percent of their populations during that conflict. China, which had seen little action in World War I, lost anywhere from 10 to 20 million people.
Among our enemies of that war, the Japanese lost about four percent, while Nazi Germany lost around nine percent of their populations. All told, approximately 2.5 percent of the world’s population at the time, or 60 million people, perished.
For us today these figures are simply unimaginable. But still living among us are veterans who helped end that madness. We owe them a great deal, for they helped secure our freedoms when they were under attack and they helped make our current way of life possible.
Victories in the subsequent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan may not have been as clear cut than in either of the two world wars. Yet, the veterans of these wars have also helped secure our homeland, our freedoms, and our way of life.
Recently, I had an opportunity to speak to a group of veterans from World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. I told them that “not everyone gets medals for doing brave things although many of you should have. But, no matter how full or how empty the drawer, trunk or shadowbox where you keep your medals is, know that what you did, whether it was in the cold of the Ardennes Forest, the heat of Saipan, the bitter cold of the ‘Frozen Chosin’ or the broiling heat of a Vietnamese jungle, made the world a safer, more just, more humane place. For no matter what war you served in, and a few of you served in all three of these wars, you gave people that you had never met before hope. Yes, you brought bombs and bullets, but you also brought food and chocolate bars and an unequalled kindness to people whose militaries were anything but kind. You showed them that freedom was possible. And you created the conditions for freedom and democracy in places that had never practiced these concepts.”
So, on this eleventh day, of the eleventh month, of the eleventh year in our century we thank our veterans for keeping us free and providing hope to millions of people around the world. That is a military tradition all Americans can be proud of.
Cedric Leighton lives in Lorton and is the Founder and President of Cedric Leighton Associates, a Washington area strategic risk and management consultancy.
