“HUNS STOP FIGHTING, GIVE UP NAVY AND RHINE TO THE ALLIES”
Bannered in capital letters across the top of the front page of The News Tribune on Nov. 11, 1918, was the news Tacoma and a war-weary nation had long been waiting for. The Great War was over.
“U.S. AND EUROPE CELEBRATE; JOYOUS HOLIDAY IN TACOMA,” the headline lower down on Page One read.
“Mad with joy that peace at last has spread its wings over a war-torn world, Tacoma began its celebration when the whistles at midnight wafted the news that the long, bitter struggle for world liberty had been won,” News Tribune reporter Zilfa Phillips wrote.
And the reporter was only warming up the typewriter to capture the ecstatic mood of that unforgettable day.
“Horns blowing, bells ringing, voices raised in hilarious shouts, flags waving. In this way was the day begun by Tacoma workers, who even before Mayor Riddell proclaimed the day a holiday, left their toil behind them and surged through the streets, singing and shouting their joy that the days of darkness and bloodshed were over.
“Across the long Lincoln Bridge from the tideflats the shipworkers, led by their bands, marched in great masses of glad humanity. Through the streets they paraded, stopping here and there to salute flags that seemingly from nowhere suddenly appeared in red, white and blue blotches in windows and over big buildings.”
All pretense of journalistic objectivity went out the window on that day as The News Tribune celebrated along with the people. Phillips’ prose was purple, but it certainly reflected the atmosphere of the times.
The armistice between the Allies and Germany was signed in a railway car in the Compigne Forest in France that morning, and for symbolic effect went into effect at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
The killing went on right up until the deadline, and estimates put the number of soldiers on all sides who died that day at 11,000 men.
At 11 a.m. in Tacoma, “the raising of the magnificent flag at the News Tribune office attracted the immense crowd that packed the square at 11th and A streets,” the reporter wrote. The flag stretched from the building’s sixth floor down to the sidewalk.
“As it was swung into place by the heads of the News Tribune business department a great cheer rose from the throats of the crowd, and the band struck up ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning.’
“In mellow autumnal glory, the sun came out from behind the dark clouds that had obscured it in the early morning, and beamed in mellow glory upon the exultant throngs.”
The celebration got pretty wild.
“A half-dozen lodgers from one Pacific Avenue hotel, clad in bathrobes and slippers, joined the matinal merrymakers, and when a parade was forming they marched at its head, flaunting their robes with reckless abandon.
“Others, armed with pillows, found relief for their pent-up feelings in swatting others on the head.”
And then there was this: “An unwieldy celebrator – net weight 225 pounds – clad in a white nightie that gave him the appearance of an observation balloon ready to shoot heavenward, broke into the crowd with a mouth organ and was immediately hailed as a ‘chief’ and placed in charge of the midnight ‘follies’ musical program. He played ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ and gave vent to accompanying wheezes between notes until a thoughtful policeman came along and threatened him with the ‘hoos-gow.’ He made his exit for more clothes.”
On a more sober note, The News Tribune editorialized that the terms of the armistice agreement “render it impossible for the German to again wage war even if he should be so inclined in the future.”
And the following day, an editorial published next to a cartoon showing Uncle Sam booting Germany out of a building tagged “The Family of Nations” contained an ominous prophecy, although the writer could not have known it.
The editorial writer was unsympathetic to an appeal to President Woodrow Wilson by Germany’s Foreign Minister Wilhelm Heinrich Solf, in which the diplomat begged for relief from what he termed “the intolerable burdens and fearful conditions imposed upon the German people.”
“In view of the fact that the terms are absolutely necessary to safeguard the peace and are mild compared with the conditions which the Germans imposed on Belgium, Rumania and Russia, this appeal merely cast doubt on any reported change in the German viewpoint,” the editorial stated.
It concluded that until “the German people themselves repent of their sins in sackcloth and ashes, the world will rightly look upon them with suspicion and horror.”
That unyielding triumphalism had its consequences.
The terms of the armistice fueled German resentment and ensured that 22 years later the same railway car where the document was signed was taken out of mothballs and brought to the signing site in the Compigne Forest.
And there Adolf Hitler, whose exploitation of those resentments propelled him to power, forced the defeated French to sign their surrender. It was then that the conflict that had been called the Great War and The War To End All Wars earned a new designation: World War I.
The past was prologue, and that joyful day in 1918 seemed a very, very long time ago.
Soren Andersen: 253-597-8660
This is one of a series of stories appearing during The News Tribune’s 125th year. Every Sunday we take a look at what happened during the same week sometime in the past 125 years.