"Veterans, Write Your Story"
By Dr. Matthew Naylor
via the Veterans Voices web site
“It’s taken a long time, four years and half of the sort of thing that France has been through is tremendous... I was talking last night with a [French] mother who gave her two boys and her husband and now is all alone who told me “Why should not I be glad? My two boys and my good man are gone it is true, but there are so many others. The war, it is finished, thanks to the good God.”
– November 11, 1918, Ned Henschel
As we approach the centennial of the armistice that helped end World War I, the writings of those men and women who lived and died during “the war to end all wars” continue to resonate among Americans. It is their written words and oral histories that not only inform the scholarship surrounding this important event, but also act as integral parts of the National WWI Museum and Memorial, which tells that global story.
As historians, we consider these accounts vital to our understanding of the past. Whether fiction, like Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms or Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, or nonfiction, like Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel or Hervey Allen’s Toward the Flame, they provide their audience with a testament of the war experience. Such accounts are invaluable, as there are no longer any similar living connections to the Great War.
Although World War I has been cast as a “forgotten war,” recent scholarship attests to the fact that World War I veterans originally shared their stories on levels like that of other wars throughout the 20th century. The growing ambiguity regarding American involvement in the war, however, combined with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 and American entry into World War II in 1941, largely relegated the numerous volumes of poetry, prose, fiction, and nonfiction, to the sidelines of history. With the 50th anniversary of the country’s entry into the war coinciding with the height of the Vietnam War, the potential resurgence of war writings was greatly minimized.
Research also shows that sharing the veteran experience empowers the serviceperson and benefits their community. It informs our present understanding of both the military and the veteran experience, fostering a connection between the two while also deepening the connection between society and the military. This is important, given the visible presence of veterans in communities across the country and the continued U.S. military presence overseas. The need for and reliance on veteran writings will be no less important to future generations than those of the First World War are to us now.
Read the entire article on the Veterans Voices web site.
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Commissioner Naylor is member of the U.S. World War One Centennial Commission, and President and CEO of the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, MO..