Darrell Castle talks about the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, and how that war still effects us today.

Transcription/Notes

DOUGHBOYS

Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report.  Today is Friday, November 9, 2018, and on this Report I will spend the time I have with you reminding you that tomorrow November 10 is the Marine Corps birthday but more importantly for this week, Sunday, November 11, 2018, is the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One, or what used to be known as "Armistice Day".

I talk about the 100th anniversary in order to honor those who served, and especially those who died in that European struggle.  It was a European struggle for the most part, pitting England, France, Italy, Romania, and Russia against Germany and what was then known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  The end of the War brought an end to the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as the Ottoman Empire. New countries were born and old countries died.  Modern day Turkey, Iraq, Iran (not Persia but Iran), and Saudi Arabia were all created along with the right of Jews to immigrate to Palestine, resulting ultimately in the state of Israel after World War Two.  Communism and Fascism had their start along with Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler.

What caused all this slaughter that was to come from 1914 to 1918?  There are many answers and probably none of them completely or totally accurate, but for one thing, Europe’s old leaders--its nobility, its royalty were all related.  England, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Russia, all had royal families that were intermarried and interrelated.  It was a family squabble with a lot of old scores and old grudges to settle.  None of them could imagine the slaughter to which their people were about to be subject, or the fact that the war would destroy their families and the Royal system itself.

The world was altered in virtually every way by that war, even geographically, as the geography of the continent was changed in several ways.  Six thousand square miles of France was converted into an uninhabitable wilderness and vegetation has still not completely recovered.  Some hills across the continent were lowered by 50 to 100 feet by the shelling.  Not a single living tree stood in Belgium because of the many years of fighting there.  The warring armies both used the tactic of tunneling deep under the trenches of the enemy to plant massive explosive charges and collapse the enemy trenches but the explosions also collapsed the surrounding landscape creating vast lakes that still exist today.

The social order of Europe was changed by the massive number of men under arms and gone for so long.  Women were pressed into service in many occupations previously reserved for men.  The social class structure, which was so rigid before the war with the master-servant class system unshakable, was shaken to the core and destroyed by the war.  The sons of the nobility were expected to lead the movement to fill the ranks and to provide leadership in the officer corps.  So many of the nobility and other upper classes were slaughtered in the trenches there was not enough of them left to maintain the system.  Women refused to go back into servitude and demanded their place in society.  Women were elected to parliament for the first time.  Women in parliament would have been unthinkable before the war, but people suffered so much everything was different.

I said that I wanted to remind you of this anniversary as a way of honoring those who served and especially those who died.  Well, there were certainly a lot of people to honor, and that’s for sure. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 million combatants were slaughtered in the trenches of Europe and around 40 million wounded, many horribly.  Plastic surgery was begun as a way to repair some of the horrible wounds that kept men from being able to lead normal lives.

Vast pandemics of disease spread across the world killing millions.