8 Interesting Things About WWI

I am trying to keep moving forward with my writing, in spite of the pandemic occupying our minds lately.  To that end, I spent some time this week researching WWI.  The  hero in the historical romance I am currently working on fought in the war, so I wanted to have a better idea of what he might have experienced.
 
In the course of my research, I learned several interesting things, some related to the fighting and some to the home front. 







For example:

• In a precursor to what we know from WWII, many women also entered the workforce during the Great War to replace men who had gone to fight.  Women took jobs like directing traffic, delivering mail and driving city trams as well as working in factories.
  
• Other women from the cities became part of the “Women’s Land Army of America” (also called “farmerettes.”)  They were taught basic farming practices and fanned out to provide needed labor on farms across the country.
• Red Cross volunteers knit about 22 million items for hospitals and about 15 million items for the Army.
• Sentiment against German-Americans was extremely virulent, in part because they formed such a large portion of the population.  German-Americans had to register with the government and had their firearms confiscated.  Their many social groups were shut down, and speaking the language was essentially forbidden.
• The first case of the Spanish Flu in the U.S. was in a military hospital at Camp Funston in Kansas in March of 1918.  It killed 675,000 U.S. citizens before it was over, many of them younger adults and many who died within 2-3 days of their first symptoms.
• One of the reason for the invention and use of tanks was because of the trench warfare which comprised the first several years of WWI.  The tanks were needed to overcome the miles of trenches dug, and to overcome the rolls of barbed wire and machine guns (another new invention) protecting the trenches.
• Because the U.S. Army thought the war would last one or two years longer than it actually did, they were still training and recruiting more soldiers when the war ended.  They had about 1.5 million new troops training at locations in the U.S. and had just drafted another 250,000 men.
• The Army was also totally unprepared to disperse soldiers after the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918.  It took about 3 months just to get the men still in the U.S. returned home.  It took many more months for the Army to find enough ships to bring 2 million soldiers home from Europe.
  

 
There you go.  I hope you found these snippets of history as interesting as I did.  Some of what I learned gave me ideas for future stories – something I am sure many writers can relate to.  Until next week, stay safe and keep reading.

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