The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Program to detail local lives touched by World War I
CROMWELL >> With the centennial of America’s entry into World War I just months away, the Cromwell Historical Society is presenting a program about life on the home front in the Cromwell of 1917.
The program “Life in Cromwell During the Great War” is part of the society’s “Legacy of the Great War: World War One, A Century Removed.” It will be held Monday at 7 p.m. in the library/ media center at Cromwell High School at 1 Donald Harris Drive.
The program is being presented in cooperation with high school’s history club.
The war, which pitted the armies of Britain, France and Russia against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire, took place between 1914 and 1918.
It was called The Great War “not just for its epic scale but also for the sense that it was a more important and meaningful conflict than earlier European wars. The carnage created by the war was unprecedented and it resulted in significant changes throughout the world,” according to an entry on the website Reference.com.
America, which had officially remained neutral (although it sold plentiful materials and weaponry to the British), entered the war in April 1917.
The war affected not just the 114 men from Cromwell who were shipped overseas to fight in France, but the families they left behind, Historical Society President Richard F. Donohue explained in announcing the program.
“The vast majority of Cromwell’s citizens experienced the war from the confines of their town,” Donohue said.
On Monday, members of the history club and their adviser Erik Anderson “will discuss World War I and what it was like for the people of Cromwell who experienced rationing, participation in Liberty Bond drives and various displays of patriotism through the duration of the war,” Donohue said.
“While Cromwell had an involvement in the war effort that was very typical for small towns across the nation, the stories are unique,” Donohue said. Although it has generally receded in America’s national memory, “the defining conflict of the modern era,” as it was called in a 2014 article in the Wall Street Journal by Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan, made a mark on the town.
Macmillan, who wrote the prize-winning “Paris 1919,” a history of the postwar Paris Peace conference, is the great-granddaughter of Britain’s WWI wartime prime minister David Lloyd George.
America ultimately joined the war after Germany renewed its policy of unrestricted submarines — and after the revelation of the Zimmerman Telegram. The telegram, which was sent by Germany’s foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann, sought to persuade Mexico to attack America, thereby diverting the United States from joining the allied cause in Europe.
America’s role in the war proved crucial because following the Russian Revolution in 1917, Germany negotiated a separate peace treaty with Russia.
Doing so freed up hundreds of thousands of German troops who were shifted to the so-called Western Front, where they helped mount a massive offensive in the spring of 1918 that initially forced the Allies back before it petered out.
The infusion of U.S. troops helped fuel the Allied counterattack, which ultimately led to the end of the war on Nov. 11, 1918.
In less than a year’s fighting, America suffered casualties — killed, wounded and missing — totaling approximately 260,000, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Of that number, 53,402 were killed or died of their combat wounds (and another 63,114 noncombatant deaths, many of whom died from influenza) and 204,002 were wounded.