Freedom Fighter Media - Memorial Day

An American soldier checks his watch. His rifle is a 30-06 Enfield. Bayonets are fixed. At 6 am they'll be going "over the top," meaning these soldiers will be leaving their deeply dug mud and lumber trenches to advance on an enemy protected by their own trenches not far away. The Americans, like their British and French allies will be attacking headlong into German Maschinengewehr and Maxim machine guns which will mow down most of the Americans before they go a few yards. The Germans, repeating the blunder, will stage similar attacks with the same deadly results. These are not isolated incidents, but daily events.

In the short time America fought in WWI (6 April 1917 - 18 November 1918), she lost 117,000 dead, 234,300, wounded, 4,526 missing.

World War I saw the bloody marriage of 19th Century tactics with 20th Century weapons. The machine gun and submarine, the airplane and the tank, all changed war forever, but it took military commanders far too long to face the realities of automatic weapons, modern artillery, and poison gas. At least 37,508,686 combatants were killed, wounded, or went missing, meaning that a fighting soldier or sailor in WWI had only a 43 percent chance of getting out of the war unscathed.

World War I was called "The War to End All Wars," the kind of foggy thinking that would make America and her allies unprepared for the next big conflict 20 years later.

As we remember those who served now and in the past, it's sobering to realize that only one American WWI veteran remains alive, Frank Woodruff Buckles, 109 as of this writing.

The artwork below is all from the magazine, Collier's (1888 - 1957). The artist is Herbert Paus (1860 - 1944). A few things to notice:

1) The two Civil War gentleman poring over a map; yes, thousands of veterans of the War Between the States were still alive during the First World War.

2) The depiction of both allies and enemies on the covers.

3) The farmer is shown for a reason as during the war, 38 percent of Americans made their livings working on farms. Today, that number is about 2 percent.

4) Jesus shown on a non-religious magazine cover. Considering that 76 percent of Americans today consider themselves Christian and that religion is such an important factor in life, the oddity is that Jesus is not shown on magazine covers today and that to do so would be considered "controversial." Today's press doesn't focus on the eternal or even on the important, but on "how to look good at the beach this summer" and which celebrity got tattooed in rehab.