11.11.11

On the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month of 1918, the Armistice (cessation of the use of arms and ordinance) on the Western Front took effect. Men did die in action that day. An estimate of 11,000 casualties, that day, is given by the historian Joseph Persico. French military records recorded French deaths that day as happening on the tenth. Who wants to be told their son died on the last day of the war?

That day was also St. Martin's, the Roman soldier who declared before Worms, "I am a soldier of Christ. I cannot fight." Many of the French thought he intervened.

Erich Maria Remarque wrote the novel, Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front). The hero, Paul Bäumer, dies in October 1918. Many people are now introduced to that war, by that book. The book has been occasionally banned. There are no combat veterans of that war left alive.

this soldier of the Western Front did not see the Armistice

Signalman, Third Class, Frank Elgin Alexander of Elyria

The U.S.S. Grunion SS-216 was an American naval submarine with a crew of seventy men. She was in radio communication, off Kiska Island, Alaska, on 30 July 1942. She exchanged fire with a Japanese troop transport, Kano Maru. It seems an implosion caused by an exploding torpedo she was carrying destroyed her.

On 22 August of 2007 an expedition funded by the son of her commander found the Grunion on the bottom of the Bering Sea. On 11 October 2008 a memorial service was held at the U.S.S. Cod SS-224, permanently harbored in Cleveland.