1908  

GOING BACK IN TIME

LOOKING BACK: 1918

In 1918, most Americans lived on farms or in small towns or villages. If you lived in a small town like Currituck, the outside world would have seemed very far away. News and letters traveled slowly. The radio, or “wireless,” was so new that few families had one. Telephone service was not available in most rural areas. People didn’t travel much. They grew up, married, raised families, and died within a few miles of where they were born. In your town everyone would have known everyone else. The arrival of a stranger like Mr. Arminger really would have been big news.

But when America entered World War I on April 6, 1917, the outside world began to touch all Americans’ lives, as fathers, husbands, and brothers—like Pam’s papa—left home to fight in Europe. There the war had already been raging for three years. It began with the murder of a prince in Austria-Hungary. Europe at that time was divided into two military partnerships: the Allies (Great Britain, France, and Russia) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy). If one of the countries was attacked, its partners would fight, too. Within weeks of the prince’s murder, all the major countries in Europe were at war. Eventually more than 25 nations around the world joined in.

At first the United States vowed to stay out of the war. But Americans became outraged at Germany’s attacks on civilians, especially the sinking of the British passenger ship Lusitania. Finally, Congress declared war. Every American man of fighting age had to register for military service. If he didn’t, he could be sent to jail. Wealthy businessmen signed up as soldiers, and so did illiterate tenant farmers like Ralph Suggs. Once in the army, men who had never traveled 50 miles from home were sailing thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean to fight.

Our doughboys (the nickname for American foot soldiers) joined Allied forces already dug into trenches, complex systems of ditches made to protect soldiers from enemy gunfire. Soldiers spent months living in these ditches, waiting for the call to go “over the top”—to pour out of the trenches and fight. The area between battling trenches was known as no-man’s-land. Soldiers who entered this scarred wasteland faced enemy cannon, machine-gun fire, barbed wire, and poison gas attacks that left men blind, paralyzed, or dead.

Troops in the trenches needed some way to communicate with their commanders, who were often stationed 50 miles or more from the battlefront. The outcome of a battle might depend on a single message reaching command posts quickly. Often soldiers relied on homing pigeons to carry these vital messages.

The birds wore aluminum tubes on their legs to hold coded messages, sketches, or maps. Both the Allies and the Central Powers used pigeons with great success—the birds delivered 95 percent of their messages safely. Pigeons were tossed from trenches, tanks, planes, balloons, and ships. Even spies used them.

Many birds were wounded by enemy gunfire. The loss of an eye or leg was common, but injuries rarely stopped these brave little messengers from completing a mission. An example is Cher Ami, a black checker cock with the American army at the Battle of Argonne in France. German troops had completely surrounded Cher Ami’s battalion. Cher Ami, the Americans’ last pigeon, was their only hope for rescue. His leg was shot off by the enemy, but he still flew on to deliver his message—with his message holder hanging by a tendon. Thanks to his brave flight, the American soldiers were saved.

Pigeons had only one drawback as wartime messengers—they would not fly at night. So the U.S. Army began secret experiments to develop night-flying pigeons. Agents like Mr. Arminger chose 1,200 privately owned pigeons to be trained in government lofts. Four hundred birds eventually learned to home at night, and they were bred to produce night flyers for the war.

While American soldiers, along with their pigeons, fought in Europe, at home the United States government waged another kind of war—a propaganda war. Propaganda is information intended to make people support a cause or point of view. During World War I, a government agency called the Committee on Public Infor-mation, or the CPI, used propaganda to rally Americans to support the war. The CPI whipped patriotism to a fever pitch by planting frightening images of German soldiers in Americans’ minds. The agency distributed millions of pamphlets and posters—many, like the one Pam saw, showing German soldiers as cruel or evil. Other posters warned that German agents lurked everywhere, trying to gain information to use against American troops. Citizens were told to report possible spies to the CPI, just as Miz Gracie wanted to report Mr. Arminger.

Prejudice against Germans and other foreigners erupted throughout the United States, especially in areas where many immigrants lived. Leaders of German-American communities were threatened or run out of town. People of German heritage lost their jobs and property. Some were even killed. Anything German was banned, even the performance of music by German composers who had died centuries before! Most German-Americans were loyal citizens, but the prejudice against them lasted long after the war ended with Germany’s defeat on November 11, 1918.

No battles were fought on American soil, yet the Great War changed the face of our nation. Cities grew as people left farms and villages. Many women who held wartime jobs found new independence. Along with thousands of returning soldiers, they moved to cities to attend college or take jobs in offices and factories. For the first time in America, girls like Pam could dream of a future beyond their small town.