Frank Buckles: World War I Veteran Still Alive

(two articles on the same day claiming a man to be the last surving WWI vet. All we know for sure is that there can be very few of these heroes left alive._

ABC4 News: Frank Buckles - World War I Veteran Still Alive
by Joe Chevalier

I study quite a bit of history and I have always been fascinated with the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. A few years ago I read a story about Alberta Martin, the last Civil War widow to die. How is that possible? Well, she married a Civil War soldier that was in his 80s when she was 21. She died in 2004.

I sometimes look for such peculiar stories and I found one last year and have been following it since.

Frank Buckles is believed to be one of less than a handful, if not the only, surviving World War I veteran in the world. He joined the Army in 1917 by telling his recruiter he was 21 when he was only 16 years old. Here is a quote from him:

"I was just 16 and didn’t look a day older. I confess to you that I lied to more than one recruiter. I gave them my solemn word that I was 18, but I’d left my birth certificate back home in the family Bible. They’d take one look at me and laugh and tell me to go home before my mother noticed I was gone. Somehow I got the idea that telling an even bigger whopper was the way to go. So I told the next recruiter that I was 21 and darned if he didn’t sign me up on the spot! I enlisted in the Army on 14 August 1917"

Frank was still doing interviews as recently as last fall but there are rumors that he has quickly fallen into bad health. If he is still alive he will be 110 years old on February 1st, 2011. When he was asked about the secret to living so long he said, "When you start to die...don't"

Frank Buckles lives on a farm in Charles Town, West Virginia.

Last surviving World War I vet has ties to region

The Joplin Globe: Last surviving World War I vet has ties to region
WALKER, Mo. — The nation’s last surviving veteran of World War I — a man with ties to Southwest Missouri — will be remembered Tuesday on his 110th birthday.

Frank Buckles was born in Bethany, Mo., on Feb. 1, 1901, not far from the birthplace of Missouri’s own Black Jack Pershing. When he was still a boy, Buckles’ moved with his family to Walker in Vernon County, where he attended school.

He enlisted in the U.S. Army at age 16 and served until the end of the war.

But that was not the end of his adventures.

Buckles later traveled the world working for the shipping company White Star Line and was in Manila in the Philippines in 1941 when the Japanese invaded. He became a prisoner of war for more than three years, and was in the infamous Los Banos prison camp, where he was rescued in 1945.

The Long Way Home, by David Laskin

The Long Way Home: An American Journey From Ellis Island to the Great War, by David Laskin
HarperCollins, 2010
348 pages plus b&w photos scattered throughout book, acknowledgments, sources, index

Description
When the United States entered World WAr I in 1917, one-third of the nation's population had been born overseas or had a parent who was an immigrant. At the peak of US involvement in the war, nearly one in five American soldiers was foreign-born. Many of these immigrant soldiers-most of whom had been drafted-knew little of America outside of tight-knit ghettos and backbreaking labor. Yet World WAr I would change their lives and ultimately reshape the nation itself. Italians, Jews, Poles, Norwegians, Slovaks, Russians and Irishmen entered the army as aliens and returned as Americans, often as heroes.

In The Long Way Home, award-winning writer David Laskin traces the lives of a dozen men, eleven of whom left their childhood homes in Europe, journeyed through Ellis Island, and started over in a strange land. After detailing the daily realities of immigrant life in the factories, farms, mines and cities of a rapidly growing nation, Laskin tells the heartbreaking stories of how these men-both conscripts and volunteers-joined the army, were swept into the ordeal of boot camp, and endured the month of hell that that ended the war at the Argonne, where they truly became Americans. Those who survived were profoundly altered-and their experiences would shape the lives of their families as well.

Epic, inspiring and masterfully written, The Long WAy Home isan unforgettable true story of the Great War, the world it remade, and the men who fought for a country not of their birth, but which held the hope and opportunity of a better way of life.




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Blog updated every Tuesday and Thursday

Over There, by Byron Farwell

Over There: The United States in the Great War, 1917-1918, by Byron Farwell
WW Norton & Company, 1999
299 pages plus 16 pages of B&W photos, Appendices, bibliography, and index
Library: 940.4 FAR

Description
When the United States finally declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, the British and French armies were at a point of total exhaustion, and within two weeks the French troops had mutinied, leaving the Western Front practically undefended. In the same month, Lenin arrived in Moscow on the heels of the Russian Revolution, and vowed to make peace with Germany.

Our last minute intervention in this European war woudl save the Allies in their hour of need and ch ange forever the way Americans saw their country and the world. In the course of a few months, the American army grew from 200,000 ill-equipped and untrained men to over a million, but it was longer still before the French and British commanders took General Pershing and his recruits seriously. This was a war fought under conditions unlike anything seen before, with dramatically improved weaponry--such as machine guns, artillery, flame throwers, poison gas, tanks and military aircraft-producing a nightmare of violence and death that young American soldiers entered innocently, almost lightheartedly.

Byron Farwell's vivid and informed narrative covers all phases of the American effort, from the home front, where the war introduced rapid technological and social changes that were difficult to absorb, to the desperate encounters in the front lines of Belleau Wood and the St. Mihiel salient, where American troops proved their valor and altered the course of the war.

With its fresh look at the GReat War, this book paints a memorable picture of the intense national experience whereby America came of age in the twentieth century.

Table of Contents
Prologue
Introduction
1. Edging toward war
2. The United States enters the war
3. The tools and engines of destruction
4. Finding the men and tools
5. Training in the United States
6. The War at Sea: the Anti-Submarine Campaign
7. The War at Sea: getting the Army over there
8. The AEF arrives over there
9. France: First Casualties
10. Trench WArfare
11. First Battles: Seicheprey and Cantigny
12. Home Front
13. Army Welfare
14. Venereal disease
15. Blacks and Indians in the American Army
16. Second battle of the Marne: on the Aisne river
17. Second battle of the Marne: final phase
18. The war in the air
19. The St. Mihiel Offensive: 12-16 September 1918
20. The Meuse-Argonne offensive: First phase Sept-Oct 1918
21. Meuse-Argonne: the Final Phase
22. Americans under European commanders
23. Armistice
24. The Army of Occupation and the wait for shipping space
25. Intervention in Northern Russia and Siberia
26. Return of the Legions
27. Epilogue: Medals and other Honors
Appendix A: Words and expressions from the GReat War
Appendix B: The Hello Girls, Alvin York, The "Lost Battalion"
Bibliography
Index


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Blog updated every Tuesday and Thursday with new books, on other days if news occurs

Jan 13, 2011: World War I exhibit open at Stuhr

The Independent: World War I exhibit open at Stuhr
By Amy Schweitzer

Hall Country, Nebraska -- It was the Great War -- the war to end all wars -- and Hall County men and women were at the front of the line to help fight it.

"Hall County was right up front when it came to volunteering," said Kari Stofer, curator of exhibits at Stuhr Museum. She said not only did Grand Island step up to the plate with its fighting men during World War I, but also in selling war bonds and setting up a canteen. "They went way above and beyond the quota. Hall County did a tremendous job."

World War I started in Europe in 1914, but the United States didn't enter the war until 1917 after President Woodrow Wilson tried to negotiate peace and was even re-elected based on his neutrality to the war. War was officially declared by the U.S. April 6, 1917.

An Italian carbine rifle, a medic's belt, a hand grenade and a stretcher are just part of a new exhibit at Stuhr Museum dedicated to World War I.

The museum will have photographs, uniforms and memorabilia from World War I on display starting today and running through Feb. 13.

Stofer said the museum had a similar display about five or six years ago, but it has added items to its collection since then, including a fabric water bucket and a couple of pieces of uniforms.

Each of the more than 160 items, including 40 photographs and 18 uniforms, have some connection to Hall County. Many were donated by soldiers or nurses who brought them home from the war to Hall County.

The exhibit includes helmets, American as well as German, which Stofer said were probably picked up as souvenirs by fighting men from Hall County.

A 48-star flag hangs on the wall of the main Stuhr building. It had been presented to a Hall County widow.

Also on display are several star mother flags that mothers who had a son serving hung in their window. If the woman's son died, the star was yellow.

Stofer said there were some items that they didn't even realize were related to the war until some research was done on the item.

"This looks like a nice vase, but it's really what we call trench art," she said, pointing to a large vase made from a large shell. "They would collect the shells, then go back to the trenches and make them into vases or other decorative objects."

Another unusual item in the collection was a fragile crocheted vest or shawl that had been traded to a World War I soldier in exchange for food.

"We have some pretty neat things," Stofer said.

The Lacy Hall is dedicated to the nurses and other women volunteers during the war.

"Troop trains would stop off in Grand Island and (the town) would have a full force of people ready to meet them," Stofer said.

Each year Stuhr Museum chooses a theme for its displays. This year the theme is first responders in honor of the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 tragedies. World War I was chosen because when the call to arms came from Washington, D.C., Hall County was one of the first to answer with soldiers and volunteers.

"Soldiers and women basically dropped everything and put their full trust in the armed forces," Stofer said. "It's very inspiring."

About a month after war was declared, Congress passed the Selective Service Act that drafted 2.8 million men into the Army. By the summer of 1918, the U.S. was sending 10,000 fresh soldiers to France every day. The war ended on Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1918.

Stofer is inviting everyone out to the museum while the display is up.

If you go...

What: World War I display

Where: The Stuhr building's Main Gallery and Lacy Hall, Stuhr Museum, 3133 W. Highway 34

When: Jan. 15 to Feb. 13

Hours: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; noon to 5 p.m. on Sunday

More information: 385-5316 or www.stuhrmuseum.org

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Blog updated every Tuesday and Thursday with book info, and on other days if news occurs.

The Western Front, by Richard Holmes

The Western Front: Ordinary Soldiers and the Defining Battes of World War I, by Richard Holmes
TV Books, LLC, 1999, 2000
219 pages, further reading, index, b&w photos scattered throughout book
Library: 940.4 HOL

Description
The Western Front in World War I was the scene of devastating French warfare and astonishing human loss: nearly 750,000 soldiers perished in the battles fought in France and Belgium from 1914 to 1918. In The Western Front, renowned historian Richard Holmes traces the path those soldiers took, and presents the political, military, and human dilemmas of a bitter and bloody war.

In gripping detail, Holmes, the host of an accompanying History Channel documentary, takes us through the major and most costly battles of the Western Front, many of which garnered dubious gains at best, and all of which were won only with great human sacrifice.

The first Battles of Ypres was not only a scene of heavy Allied losses, but was dubbed by the GErmans the "Massacre of the Innocents", Verfun was a scene of astonishing casualties, where the professed goal of the German commander was to bleed the French forces to death; the fighting in the trenches of the Somme-a battle of attrition that lasted six months-proved a turning point for the morale of the British Army and the "muddy grave of the German field Army and of the confidence in the infallibility of German leadership"; while the long wearing slog toward Passchendaele was paved with inept leadership and mutinies in the French forces before dreadful conditions simply ground the battle to a halt.

Portraying the Western Front in stark and moving terms, Holmes draws not only from current scholarship, but also from letters written by the soldiers and the stories of the survivors themselves. His account makes vivid the human experience of war-how the men endured the indiscrimate slaughter and incomprehensible brutality that surrounded them.

Illustrated with photographs, artwork, and battlefield diagrams, The Western Front tells the story of our grandfathers and great grand-fathers. It is a perceptive and powerful account of our world history.

Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Making the Front
2. Feeding the Front
3. Holding the Front
4. Commanding the Front
5. Enduring the Front
6. Breaking the Front
The War in Outline
Further REading
Index


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Blog updated every Tuesday and Thursday

Hot Blood & Cold Steel, edited by Andy Simpson

Hot Blood & Cold Steel: Life and Death in the Trenches of the First World War, edited and compiled by Andy Simpson
Tom Donovan Publishing, 1993
203 pages, Glossary, Structure of the BEF, Bibliography, Index, 14 page of b&w photos
Library: 940.4 HOT

Description
Hot Blood and Cold Steel tells what it was like to live and fight in the trenches of the Western Front in the Great War. Death is present too, all pervadingly, for it was never far away and those who survived were the "lucky" ones - even if they suffered the torments of vermin, mussy and stinking trenches and shell-holes, almost constant danger, sometimes mutilating wounds and strained nerves.

This is the story of the men who held the front line in France and Flanders. It is a graphic account of a strange and seemingly unending style of life and death in all their facets. It is a unique approach, an anthology interwoven with a continuous commentary so that the reader is always kept aware of the context of the writing. The balanced and un-emotive approach cannot, however, fail to leave the reader unmoved.

Domestic life in the line: accommodation, food and drink, wiring and carrying, the whole day and night routine are investigated, as are the operational aspects of trench life - raiding and patrolling in no-man's land and the German lines.

Actual battle experience is also featured, but one of the most interesting parts of the book is devoted to the attitudes of the front line soldiers, officers and their men, to each other; to the staff; to their Allies; to wounds; to fear; to God; to the sheer horror of it all.

There is also a strong sense of humor about some of the material included - often a necessary antidote to the appalling conditions, but it should not be thought that everyone involved hated it. Some young soldiers found in it experience and responsibility beyond their years, while the professionals went to war with cool enthusiasm.

The technological war and the changing battlefield are also discussed, incorporating some current thinking on Great War tactics and strategy.

The aim of this all-encompassing portrayal of front line life is to grip the reader such that they cannot put it down, and that by the time it is finished they will have a genuine understanding of what it was like to fight in the trenches of the Western Front.

Table of Contents
1. The Trenches
2. Domestic Life in the Line
3. Vermin
4. Weapons and Technology
5. Trench Life - Operations
6. Under Fire
7. Fear and Shellshock
8. Wounds, Death and Burial
9. Religion and Superstition
10. Officers, Men and the Regiment
11. The Front Line Soldier and the Staff
12. Allies
13. The Germans
14. Offensive Operations - the Somme
15. The Armistice
Appendix 1 - Glossary
Appendix 2 - The Structure of the BEF
Bibliography

Maps
General map of the Somme
Trones Wood

Photos
--Capt H. Dundas, Scots Guards
--Rifleman G. Brown, Rifle Brigade
--Battle of the Marne (unidentified soldiers reacting to shelling)
--Unidentified soldiers in 'high command' trench, probably Ypres Salient, 1915
--Several views of the ruination of the ruins of St. Eloi
--Battle of Messines - ruined trees
--Unidentified soldiers in trench, Yorks and Lancs, Arras Front, 12 Jan 1918
--Unidentified officers of the 12th Royal Irish Rifles 7 Feb 1918
--Unidentified Australian Lewis gun crew, Garter Point near Ypres, 27 Sep 1917
--Unidentified soldiers gathered around a MK 1 tank at Flers, 17 Sep 1916
--Mk IV tank
--Three unidentified soldiers, part of a 'bombing squad' c' 1915
--Two unidentified guardsmen manning a post, Ypres Salient, April 1916
--Unidentified Canadian Scottish moving up to the attack on Cambrai. Wirecutters on rifles.
--11 unidentified soldiers for a posed photo, Queen's Regiment with Lee Enfield rifles
--Several unidentified soldiers in posed photo, 23rd light trench mortar battery, 23rd Brigade, 8th division
--3 recognizable but unidentified men (among 8) , a British 9.45 mortar crew in Pigeon Wood, Gommecourt, March 1917
--3 recognizable but unidentified soldiers among 8, 12-inch howitzer in action, Aveluy Wood, September 1916






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Blog updated every Tuesday and Thursday

The Marne, 1914, by Holger H. Herwig

The Marne, 1914: The Opening of WWI and the Battle that Changed the World, by Holger H. Herwig
Random House, 2009
319 pages plus 16 pages of b&w photos, acknowledgements, notes on sources, notes, index
Library: 940.421 HER

Description:
It is one of the essential events of military history, a cataclysmic encounter that prevented a quick GErman victory in World War I and changed the course of two wars and the world. Now, for the first time in a generation, here is a bold new account of the Battle of the Marne. A landmark work by a distinguished scholar, The Marne, 1914 gives for the first time, all sides of the story. In remarkable detail, and with exclusive information based on newly unearthed documents, Holger M. Herwig superbly re-creates the dramatic battle, revealing how the German forces were foiled and years of brutal trench warfare were made inevitable.

Herwig brilliantly reinterprets GErmany's aggressive "Schlieffen Plan"-commonly considered militarism run amok-as a carefully crafted, years-in-the-making design to avoid a protracted war against superior coalitions. He also paints a new portrait of the run-up to the Marne: the Battle of the Frontiers, long thought a coherent assault but really a series of haphazard engagements that left "heaps of corpses", France demoralized, Belgium in ruins, and GErmany emboldened to take Paris.

Finally, Herwig puts in dazzling relief the Battle of the Marne itself: the French resolve to win, which included the exodus of 100,000 people from Paris (where even pigeons were placed under state control in case radio communication broke down), the crucial lack of coordination between Germany's First and Second Armies, and the fateful "Day of Rest" taken by the Third Army. He provides relevatory new facts about the all-important order of retreat by GErmany's Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hentsch, previously an event hardly documented and here freshly reconstructed from diary excerpts.

Herwig also provides stunning cameos of all the important players: Germany's Chief of GEneral Staff Helmuth von Moltke, progressively daring and self-pitying as his plans go awry, his rival, France's Joseph Joffre, seeming weak but secretly unflappable and steely, and Commander of the British Expeditionary Force John French, arrogant, combative and mercurial.

The Marne, 1914 puts into context the Battle's rich historical significance: how it turned the war into a 4-year-long fiasco that taught Europe to accept a new form of barbarism and stoked the furnace for the fires of World WAr II. Revalatory and riveting, this will be the new source on this seminal event.

Table of Contents
List of Maps
Prolgue: A drama never surpassed
1. War: Now or Never
2. "Let slip the dogs of war"
3. Death in the Vosges
4. The Bloody Road West: Liege to Louvain
5. Deadly Deadlock: The Ardennes
6. Squandered Climatics
7. To the Marne
8. Climax: the Ourcq
9. Decision: the Marne
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
A Note on Sources
Notes
Glossary
Index

Photos
Kaiser Wilhelm II
Helmuth vom Moltke, German chief of general staff
General Alexander von Kluck, chief of staff, GErman 1st army, General Kuhl, and 9 other unidentified officers
Erich Ludendorff, deputy chief of staff, German 2nd army
General Karl von Bulow, German 2nd army
Raymond Poincare, president of France
General Ferdinand Foch, French 9th army
General Edouard de Castelnau, French 2nd army
General Joseph P Joffre, French chief of general staff
General Fernand de Langle de Cary, French 4th army, Joffre, and unidentified officer
General Charles Lanrezac, commander French 5th army
General Auguste Yvon Edmond Dubail, French 1st army
Joseph Gallieni, governor of Fortress Paris
General Michael-Joseph Maunory
General Maurice Sarrail, French 3rd army
HH Asquith, prime minister of the UK
Horatio Herbert, Lord Kitchener, secretary of state for war and 2 unidentified men
Field Marshal John French, commander in chief British Expeditionary Force, and unidentified soldier and civilians
Field Marshal Douglas Haig
Field Marshal Sir HEnry Wilson, British deputy chief of staff
General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, British II corps
Fort Loncin, Liege, Belgium, 3 views
The library at Louvain (exterior, destruction)




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Blog updated every Tuesday and Thursday

Nurses at the Front, edited by Margaret R. Higonnet

Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War
, edited by Margaret R. Higonnet
Northeastern University Press, 2001
161 pages, no index, no photos
Library: 940.47573 NUR

Description
Ellen N. La Motte (1873-1961) and Mary Borden (1886-1968) are two of the best known American nurses who wrote about their experiences working in the same field hospital on the Western Front during World War I. La Motte's The Backwash of War (1916) and Borden's The Forbidden Zone (1929) present in powerful, vivid, and often haunting prose each woman's acute observations of the stark realities of battle and the severe conditions under which military medicine is practiced.

Now representative selections from these classic texts are published for the first time in one volume. Linked by parallel themes and narrative approaches, the episodes recounted by La Motte and Borden expose the intense, horrific world of the surgical wards and operating rooms. Revealing the moral dilemmas faced by those who make decisions about the lives and deaths of soldiers, they describe the ethical contradictions of saving men who will return to the trenches to kill or be killed. Written from the perspective of both observer and actor, these compelling sketches often shift from shocking realism to irony, as they invite the reader to enter the nurses' harsh world and to understand their professional and personal struggles. In addition, the depictions of men's suffering challenge institutional indifference to the human costs of war.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Glossary of French Terms

From The Backwash of War, by Ellen N. La Motte
Introduction (1916)
Heroes
Alone
A Belgian Civilian
The Interval
Women and Wives
Pour la Patrie
A Surgical Triumph
At the Telephone
A Citation

From The Forbidden Zone by Mary Borden
Preface (1929)
Belgium
The Square
Moonlight
Enfant de Malheur
Rose
Conspiracy
Paraphenalia
In the Operating Room
Blind


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Blog updated every Tuesday and Thursday

The Pity of War, by Niall Ferguson

The Pity of War: Explaining World War I, by Niall Ferguson
Basic Books, 1999
462 pages, plus Notes, Bibliography, Index, and 32 pages of b&w photos
Library: 940.3 FER

Description
The Pity of War makes a simple and provocative argument: the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England's fault. According to Niall Ferguson, England entered into war based on naive assumptions of German aims, thereby transforming a Continental conflict into a world war, which it then badly mishandled, necessitating American involvement. The war was not inevitable, Ferguson argues, but rather was the result of the mistaken decisions of individuals who would later claim to have been in the group of huge impersonal forces.

That the war was wicked, horrific and inhuman is memorialized in part by the poetry of men like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, but also by cold statistics. Indeed, more British soldiers were killed in the first day of the Battle of the Somme than Americans in the Vietnam War. The total British fatalities in that single battle -some 420,000- exceeds the entire American fatalities for both World Wars. And yet, as Ferguson writes, while the war itself was a disastrous folly, the great majority of men who fought it did so with little reluctance ad some enthusiasm. For anyone wanting to understand why wars are fought, why men are willing to fight them and why the world is as it is today, there is no sharper or more stimulating guide than Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War.

Table of Contents
Figures
Tables
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Notes on the illustrations
Introduction
1. The Myth of Militarism
2. Empires, Ententes, and Edwardian Appeasement
3. Britain's War of Illusion
4. Arms and Men
5. Public Finance and National Security
6. The Last Days of Mankind: 28 June - 4 August 1914
7. The August Days: The Myth of War Enthusiasm
8. The Press Gang
9. Economic Capability; The Advantage Squandered
10. Strategy, Tactics and the Net Body Count
11. 'Maximum Slaughter at Minimum Expense': War Finance
12. The Death Instinct: Why Men Fought
13. The Captor's Dilemma
14. Hoe (not) to Pay for the War
Conclusion: Alternatives to Armageddon
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Photos
-John Gilmour Ferguson
-George V and the King of Belgium with three unidentified men in uniform
-4 unidentified British soldiers walking on log in no man's land
-British officer and enlisted man in water filled trench
-unidentified German soldiers and peasants, Eastern front
-3 unidentified, nude German soldiers on horseback
-boxes of food stacked high
-unidentified British women making striking chambers
-British corporal checking shells
-6 unidentified British soldiers displaying shells on which they've written mottoes
-unidentified German boy in uniform, standing by shells
-unidentified dead German soldier on barbed wire
-unidentified dead British soldiers, the Leicesters
-dead German soldier in water-filled shell crater
-Dead Scot at Fosse 8
-various photos of dead British soldiers in trenches, all face down and unrecognizable
-18 unidentified British soldiers marching off to war
-5 Seaforths, Highland regiment, "devils in skirts" in trench
-Unidentified British soldier carrying wounded comrade
-unidentified British soldier, sleeping in trench
-6 members, unidentified, of German 16 Korpscommando, in recaptured Gorz
-2 British soldiers escorting 2 German POWs
-German POW behind barbed wire
-3 unidentified German POWs, battle of Menin Road
-4 German soldiers carrying in a wounded British soldier
-About 20 British soldiers in mufti, putting on a wartime concert party
-About 20 British soldiers in mufti, ditto
-2 British soldiers digging out wreckage of chateau Calincourt from the Somme



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St. Mihiel Tripwire

The St. Mihiel Tripwire is the online newsletter of The Great War Society.

http://www.worldwar1.com/tripwire/smtw.htm

The Great War Society: http://www.the-great-war-society.org/

Since 1986, the purposes of The Great War Society have been to study all aspects of World War I and to promote a greater understanding of this catastrophic conflict and its profound and lasting effects on subsequent generations. To achieve these goals, the organization focuses on activities that involve the work of volunteers, charitable contributions, and sponsorships in the areas of Education, Preservation, Translation & Transcription.