To celebrate the 100 year anniversary of Armistice, which occurred today, here’s an article we did to help educate our fellow prisoners about Armistice. Click below to see the article as it appeared in the magazine. Scroll down for a text only version.
Nov. 11th Armistice : Text only version
At 10.20 AM GMT on November 11th 1918, the British Prime Minister announced “The Armistice was signed at Five o’clock this morning, and hostilities are to cease on all fronts at 11 a.m. today.” Field-Marshall Foch had received a German delegation in a railway carriage in the French forest of Compiègne. The following day saw Kaiser Wilhelm abdicate and flee for neutral Holland. The terms of the armistice announced in London were that Germany could no longer fight; that she would have to surrender her arms of land, air and sea and that she must repair and repay.
The entire world looked forward to peace and harmony – and many held the opinion that mankind would never make the same mistakes again – that war on a global scale would never again occur. There were re-unions as heroes made their way home to rapturous welcomes and released POW’s were repatriated to re-join their families and return to their old lives. The subsequent negotiations at The Treaty of Versailles and other conferences saw the earliest buddings of the “Special Relationship” between Britain and the USA as a friendship developed between President Woodrow Wilson and King George V.
In 1927, Carriage number #2419 of the Orient Express, which had been used for the signing of the armistice was taken out of use and installed at the forest of Compiegne as part of a permanent memorial named the “Glade of the Armistice”. There it remained, a monument to the defeat of Imperial Germany and the triumph of France until it was called into use for another surrender.
22nd June 1940 and a fleet of Swastika bedecked staff cars carrying Adolf Hitler accompanied by Hermann Göring, Wilhelm Keitel and Joachim von Ribbentrop among others, sweep into the Glade of the Armistice. William Shirer described Hitler’s reaction to the monument. The inscription on the granite block in the clearing read “Here on the eleventh of November 1918 succumbed the criminal pride of the German empire…vanquished by the free peoples it tried to enslave.” Hitler is said to have spun on his heels, thrown his hands onto his hips and strode defiantly to the famous train carriage where he would exact his revenge. This time the French would be surrendering and the German people would be victorious. Hitler then ordered that the glade be destroyed and the train carriage be removed. It was initially moved to Berlin were it was put on display in the Lustgarten.
After the Allies started to make significant gains in 1945, the carriage was removed by the Germans for safe keeping to the town of Crawinkel, but as an American armoured column entered the town, the detachment of the SS guarding the carriage set it ablaze rather than see it fall back into enemy hands. Hitler could never have envisaged a more humiliating outcome than to have to surrender to the French in the same carriage – again! Some sections were salvaged by a private person and are exhibited at Compiègne.
After the war, the Glade of the Armistice was restored by German POW labour, but it wasn’t until Armistice Day 1950 that a replacement carriage was renumbered from #2439 to #2419D. This replacement carriage was correct in every detail; it was made during the same run and was present in the train on the fateful first Armistice in 1918.
