What happened on the Armistice of 1918?
On 11th November 1918, an armistice paused hostilities on the Western Front. We explore how this agreement came to be and what it meant.
Image: Painting depicting the signature of the Armistice in the railway carriage | Public Domain
On 11th November 1918, the fighting on World War I’s Western Front ceased after the signing of an armistice between the Allies and Germany. We now commemorate this date each year as Remembrance Day.
Of course, the war was not truly over until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles the following year. But the armistice was what silenced the famous guns over the trenches in France, and that is why we remember it as the end of World War I.
Why did the war end then?
In April 1918, it had seemed that Germany might win the war as it pushed forward hard on the Western Front. But its intense offensives also cost the nation greatly in terms of men and armaments. The fact that the USA had joined the war in 1917 also meant there were large numbers of fresh troops on the Allied side, whereas the German ones were exhausted.
The Allies retorted with the 'Hundred Days Offensive', which focused on striking strategic points. This highly effective offensive began with the Battle of Amiens and by autumn broke Germany’s Hindenberg line, its second-to-last line of defence.
In the two months before the armistice with Germany was signed, the other Central Powers – Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary – signed their own armistices. In Germany, there were uprisings and protests because of the deprivations civilians were suffering – especially hunger.
It became clear to Germany that it had no choice but to ask for an armistice. In October 1918, it requested one based on the 'Fourteen Points' that US President Woodrow Wilson had put forward in a speech.
But the Fourteen Points aimed to demilitarise all the nations involved, and the Allies were not eager to give up their own war machinery. Rather, they wanted to absolutely eliminate all possibility of Germany resuming hostilities. With this goal in mind, they drafted their own terms, giving Germany little scope to negotiate.
The terms of the agreement
Some main elements of the armistice were these:
- Fighting on the Western Front would pause.
- Germany had to make massive and speedy withdrawals from territory it had gained and occupied during the war, including France and Belgium. It was not allowed to destroy infrastructure or harm people as it withdrew.
- Germany had to give its war vehicles, ammunition and weapons to the Allies, so that it could not attack again before a permanent peace was put in place. The aim was for Germany to be completely demilitarised.
- Prisoners of war were to be released.
The removal of Kaiser Wilhelm, the German king, was not technically part of the agreement, but Germany understood it was required. On 9th November, Wilhelm was forced to abdicate, and Germany became a republic.
Who signed and where
The armistice was signed at 5:45 in the morning in Compiègne, northern France. The setting of this momentous event was a train car that is now called the Compiègne Wagon. Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Supreme Allied Commander and drafter of the armistice, had been using this dining car as his headquarters.
The other Allied signatory, in addition to Foch, was a British admiral, Rosslyn Wemyss.
The German delegation was led by Matthias Erzberger of the German Reichstag. He signed the armistice together with three other Germans – Major General Detlof von Winterfeldt of the army and Captain Ernst Vanselow of the navy, plus the diplomat Alfred von Oberndorff.
Because the agreement did not go into effect until 11am – the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month – fighting continued until then. Tragically, 2,738 men died in action on 11th November. The very last of them was the American Henry Gunther, who was shot at 10:59am.
The public response
The news of the armistice prompted huge celebrations in many places in Allied nations, including Britain. There was sadness, too, though, at the horrific loss of life that had occurred over the previous four years.
Unrest in Germany continued into 1919, becoming a revolution that went on until that summer. The harshness of the armistice’s terms – and those of the Treaty of Versailles – produced a backlash that was stoked by some German political leaders. A conspiracy theory emerged, stating that Germany could have won if traitors had not capitulated and 'stabbed their country in the back'. This resentment fed into the development of the Nazi regime and into World War II.
In fact, Matthias Erzberger, leader of the German delegation to sign the armistice, was assassinated in 1921 in retribution for what was seen as his role in Germany’s defeat.
What happened after?
The original armistice agreement only promised 36 days of ceasefire. It was extended three times before the Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28th June 1919.
After the armistice, fighting also continued in East Africa and other regions until the combatants received the news that a ceasefire had been agreed. Allied soldiers were slowly demobbed in stages – which provoked protests from men desperate to go home.
The train carriage in which the armistice was signed was moved to a museum – until 1940, when Hitler had it brought back to its former location. France signed its armistice with the Nazis in exactly the same place where Germany had lost World War I decades before.
