Saluting the 11th day of the 11th month

The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month came on a Monday in 1918. News coverage reaching the public even the week before included information on battles and casualties even in the very final days of The Great War. The headline of the Nov. 7, 1918, edition of The Jamestown Alert proclaimed the German army was in a “full retreat from Belgium.” In a smaller headline much farther down the page, it noted the U.S. Army had reported 1,305 casualties in the daily report of Nov. 5. Of those, 124 were killed in action on the battlefield, 75 died of wounds sustained on the battlefield at field hospitals, and 108 died of disease. The rest, about 1,000 soldiers, were wounded or missing during the day's activities. The paper also had a brief note that included in that casualty list was a young man from Cayuga, North Dakota, who had died in Europe. But there were signs that America was looking beyond the war.

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