![]() ![]() ![]() Put another way, the British had more men killed on one day of World War I (July 1, 1916, still the bloodiest single day in the history of the British Army) than it suffered in the first month of operations on and subsequent to D-Day. The British Empire suffered an estimated 908,000 deaths in World War I, or more than twice the number of World War II. While one compares humanitarian catastrophes at one’s own peril, a few numbers may make the case. For France and Great Britain especially, World War I (known as the Great War or La Grande Guerre for a good reason) remains the war both in the popular imagination and among scholars. Whereas for the United States, World War I is a little-known and arcane period in history, for Europeans it is absolutely formative. That contrast is the first point I always make to my students. American students might thus be forgiven for not responding to Belleau Wood or the Meuse-Argonne in the same ways they might react to Gettysburg or Pearl Harbor. The war, moreover, falls in between two much larger and more emotive events in American history, the Civil War and World War II. The United States was never attacked and there is no single moment associated with the war in American memory as the Somme is in British memory. The war for Americans was a brief event, and a relatively small proportion of Americans saw any sustained military action. This continued sense of relevance for Europeans is, of course, entirely natural given the great destruction the war brought and the impact the war had on European history.Īmerican students, by contrast, are unlikely to have such close associations to World War I. These responses might well be slightly inaccurate or even wildly so, but the war remains enough of a part of the living memory for Europeans to elicit certain emotional and historical triggers. It might even be the now fashionable response of dismissing the war as a fratricidal relic of Europe’s “old” age of nationalism and rivalry. It may be a response about an ancestor who fought in one of the war’s titanic battles or it might be a response influenced by a work of fiction like Blackadder, Oh! What a Lovely War, or All Quiet on the Western Front. ![]() Ask any British student about the Somme or any French or German student about Verdun and you are likely to get a quick response. ![]()
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