World War I remembrance and a forgotten Macomb song
The McDonough County Voice
The establishment of a new World War I memorial park in Washington, D.C. has once again brought that controversial conflict to national attention. The Great War (as it has been called) was also discussed several years ago, in 2017, on the 100th anniversary of American involvement in that war, which left about 8.5 million soldiers dead, from various countries—including some 116,500 Americans. (Millions of European civilians died as well.)
Of course, any war that was touted as “the war to end all wars,” and the war “to make the world safe for democracy,” was bound to be criticized afterward for failing to accomplish those goals—despite the massive number of deaths. In a sense, no one then quite realized how many soldiers and others would be likely to die in that first modern war, featuring machine guns, airplanes, poison gas, and tanks.