Authored by Connor O'Keeffe via The Mises Institute,
Today is Veterans Day. It's a day when politicians like to give speeches praising the extraordinary courage and selflessness of America's veterans and active-duty military personnel.
It's also a day when American military history is often treated like a vague, homogeneous blob of sacrifice. But it's worth getting a bit more specific.
We celebrate on November 11 because that's the day, back in 1918, when World War I ended. It was famously the day when the guns fell silent at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
Less famous is the fact that the agreement to stop fighting had been reached around 5 am that day. But the Allied high command rejected their German counterparts' request that everyone stop firing as quickly as orders could be circulated, opting instead to wait until the more poetic time of 11 am. And, in those last few hours, 2,738 soldiers would lose their lives - including an American private who was shot and killed at 10:59 am, seconds before both sides were officially ordered to cease firing.
However, the tragedy of those last few hours of unnecessary fighting was immediately overtaken by an overwhelming sense of relief. The world had never seen death and destruction at a scale even close to what had just consumed Europe. The military and civilian deaths are estimated to fall somewhere in the range of 15 to 22 million.
As we know now, the war was, unfortunately, only the o
