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| Cavendish resident and WWI veteran, Clyde Bailey |
Armistice Day is commemorated every year on November 11th
to mark the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at
Compiègne, France. It took effect at eleven o'clock in the morning—the
"eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. This
year marks the 80th anniversary of the Armistice.
Cavendish had 57 men and one woman serve in the war. A few
families had two members of their family serving but the Pollards had four sons
and one daughter, Mary, who was a dietician in an Army Hospital on Ellis
Island.
Of those serving, four died: George Dixon, Winthrop Hoyle, Truman
McNulty and Francis Wallace. Hoyle was only 16 and died of nephritis in Rhode Island,
while the other three died from what was known as the “Spanish Flu.”
Killing between 50-100 million people around the world, this
flu was more deadly than WWI where nine million men were killed in combat and
another twenty one million wounded, many of whom were left without arms, legs, noses, and
even genitals, while others suffered the remainder of their lives from mustard
gas.
As history was to show, the seeds for WWII were laid in the
Armistice, which in effect was a surrender. German civilians, due to
what we would call today “fake news,”
were not aware that their military had been defeated and were outraged
to learn of the Armistice terms and to see British, French and American
occupation troops in their homeland. It isn’t surprising that Hitler could
pedal his message that the Army was robbed of its victory by socialists,
pacifists and Jews.
While much is made of the 11th hour, the 11th
day of the 11th month, the final six hours after the signing of the
Armistice, which occurred at 5 am, was a blood
bath. On that date, twenty-seven
hundred and thirty-eight men from both sides were killed, and eighty-two
hundred and six were left wounded or missing, with the vast majority of these
casualties happening after the Armistice had been signed, where there was no
political or military gain. The day’s toll was greater than both sides suffered on D Day in 1944.
Among the many victims were
troops of the American 92nd Division, part of Bullard’s Second Army. The U.S.
military was rigidly segregated, and the men of the 92nd were black. All their
higher-ranking officers, however, were white, often Southerners resentful of
being given such commands. “Poor Negroes!” Bullard, an Alabaman, wrote. “They are
hopelessly inferior.” After already enduring discrimination and fear at
home—sixty black Americans were lynched in 1918 alone—and being treated as
second-class citizens in the Army, these troops found themselves, after the
Armistice had been signed, advancing into German machine-gun fire and mustard
gas. They were ordered to make their last attack at 10:30 A.M. The
92nd Division officially recorded seventeen deaths and three hundred and two
wounded or missing on November 11th; one general declared that the real toll
was even higher. A Hundred Years After the Armistice
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