To the aviation minded, interest in World War I stops at the aerodrome because that’s where aeronautics’ voice changed as its technology matured. But interest in the conflict in which it fought—the War to End All Wars—never captured the interest of most Americans, whose attention and adulation focused on the Great War’s offspring, World War II. A visit to The National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City was an eye-opener that posed the headline’s question and others that wonder why?
If someone asked me to name all of the World War I memorials I knew of, it would be the Liberty Memorial and the mass-produced Spirit of the American Doughboy statue in Lord’s Park in Elgin, Illinois, not far from my boyhood home. I learned about the Liberty Memorial when I moved to Kansas City in 1989, but I never visited because the two halls that flanked the memorial tower were rarely open, and the whole thing closed in 1994.
It wasn’t until I visited it earlier this year that I learned that two weeks after the war ended on 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the civic leaders discussed the need for a lasting memorial to the men and women who served and died in the war. The city raised $2.5 million in 10 days in 1919. More than 100,000 people, including the five main allied commanders, attended the site dedication in 1921.
After three years of construction, President Calvin Coolidge delivered the dedication speech to a crowd of more than 150,000. On Veteran’s Day 1961, former presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower delivered rededication addresses to a crown of 60,000. The citizens voted to restore the memorial and expand the museum in 1998. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in October 2006. On the 2014 centennial of the war’s commencement, Congress finally recognized the Liberty Memorial as the national World War I memorial, renaming it.
America’s lack of appreciation for World War I is probably rooted in its short tenure of combat. The war started in 1914 but America didn’t get involved until April 1917, when unrestricted submarine warfare and the publication of Zimmerman’s telegram to Mexico promising the return of Texas and other states if it would attack America on behalf of the Axis.
Another factor is the scope of America’s participation. Slightly more than 4.7 million men and women served in the armed forces during the war. Of the force, only 2.8 million served overseas; 53,402 of them were killed in action. More than 63,000 died from diseases, mostly in the influenza pandemic, which claimed 50 million people worldwide, 675,000 of them in the United States. Unlike World War II, in which more than 16 million Americans (11 percent of the US population) served during the four-year conflict, during World War I more families were affected by the flu than the war.
Related to the number of affected families is generational depreciation, where interest wanes with the arrival of every new generation—unless the surviving hardware and history satisfies a niche curiosity. Aviation leads this list. And World War II is first on it because of its expansive generational proximity and because its hardware is still airborne. In the Great War, America didn’t really have substantial aerial forces let alone combat aircraft. Those that served fly fixed from museum ceilings. And the same is true for most aircraft that served the conflicts that followed World War II.
A lack of appreciation for the sacrifices of those who served in World War I is superseded only by the universal disregard for the socioeconomic and geopolitical causes of it and the resulting consequences that plague the world today. Another way to view all military memorials is, perhaps, as monuments to human hubris and disability to learn from the past. — Scott Spangler, Editor
