When Fake News Ended the Great War & Worsened a Pandemic: The False Armistice of November 7, 1918
When news of the signing of an armistice to end hostilities reaches American Army Intelligence in Paris, the Americans express doubt about the veracity of the French report and insist that, as far as they know, military operations are still very much active on the Western Front and that it is much too early on in the peace negotiations for any armistice agreement to have been reached.
French intelligence insists though, that their report states that an armistice has, in fact, been signed and that a ceasefire is set to go into effect at 2 pm that very day.
Head of the American Army Intelligence Service Lieutenant Colonel Cabot Wood forwards the report, “with reservations” to General John J. Pershing commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in France. Wood explicitly states that the report is “unconfirmed” and “rumored” but within minutes news is spreading all across France of an end to the First World War within hours.
Newspapers in Paris run with the story that morning, and oddly enough, the French papers report that their source for the story is the American Embassy in Paris, giving no mention to the initial report of an armistice which had leaked out via the French Intelligence Bureau.
By 11:59 a.m. the head of United Press in France, Roy Howard, sends a telegram to the offices of the New York World stating that the war will end by 2 pm that afternoon and Manhattan goes wild!
False Headlines Held Aloft November 7, 1918
All businesses in New York City shutdown that afternoon. The Mayor of New York, John Hylan, declares November 7 a public holiday.
Employees in banks, stores, offices, government buildings, literally everyone in and around New York City that day clocks out on their lunch break and doesn’t return to work.
Shredded newspaper, ticker-tape and confetti of all kinds rains down on city streets from buildings all across the city. “Gone to celebrate today. Back tomorrow,” read signs on storefronts and shops in midtown.
ARMISTICE SIGNED BETWEEN GERMANY AND ALLIES reads the Dow Jones ticker.
The moment this happens the news of an end to the war goes viral all across the United States via telephone and telegraph.
Famed opera singer Enrico Caruso waves an enormous American flag from a building in Times Square and sings “The Star Spangled” banner for all the crowds below to hear.
At this time a citywide restriction on the size of public gatherings is in effect in New York City, and in most cities across America as well, due to the Spanish Flu Pandemic that is at that moment causing untold death and suffering to spread across the United States.
But with news of the end of the war having just been announced no one, including the Mayor, gives a damn.
Hundreds of thousands of people gather in the streets, spontaneous victory parades erupt across Manhattan and hugging and kissing complete strangers seems to have replaced Spanish Flu as the most contagious disease of the moment.
The celebration is like midnight on New Year’s Eve in broad daylight! The Wall Street Journal reports that, “November 7 will go down as a day for rejoicing among all the nations of the world!”
In Philadelphia the mayor rings the Liberty Bell by hitting it with a small hammer and church bells ring as fireworks are launched all across the city of brotherly love.
Germany Surrenders!! War Ends!! The headlines in the New York World read as early editions are rushed into print, and the story is picked up by other newspapers, to commemorate this momentous occasion all across America.
The only problem is that the war isn’t over. World War One won’t end for another four days. The Great War will not end until the eleventh hour, on the eleventh day, of the eleventh month 1918.
What happened on that fateful day, November 7, 1918, is a glaring example of rumors run rampant and fake news being reported as fact. But, unfortunately, it will take the better part of an entire day for the truth to leak out and by the time that it does, the following day, the damage will already have been done.
All across America, needlessly as it turned out, crowds gathered by the tens of thousands in large cities and in small towns to celebrate an end to the war that never happened.
By November of 1918 the Spanish Flu pandemic was already surging across the United States for the second time that year. The pandemic had begun, on an army base in Kansas back in the early spring of 1918 as it turned out, and with the weather turning colder in the late fall of that year, the virus was back again with a vengeance.
In the springtime, seeking to censor information about the spreading flu pandemic due to fears that it would cause the war effort to suffer, the United States government forbade all newspapers and media outlets from reporting any news whatsoever regarding influenza. But, with the pandemic raging out of control and with the war being all but won by November, government censors relented and many municipal governments, most notably New York City’s, had enacted legislation which prohibited large public gatherings in an effort to stop the spread of the Spanish Flu.
When the fake armistice of November 7 was unexpectedly announced, all across the nation, directives that had gone into effect to help mitigate the spread of influenza were completely ignored because of a nationwide outburst of spontaneous joy at the end of the war.
When the actual armistice was signed four days later on November 11, 1918 celebrations were largely muted for two main reasons. Firstly, the false armistice of November 7 had dampened people’s enthusiasm once they awoke the following morning to discover that the war was, in fact, not over. Many simply felt cheated and no longer wished to celebrate.
And secondly, the signing of the actual armistice between Germany and the allies on November 11, 1918 was a planned and orchestrated affair. It was designed to give allied military leaders the most time to advance their careers with vicious fighting and offensives being permitted to go on until the very last moment even after the armistice itself had already been signed. Also, news of the real armistice was announced through military channels only at first, and not through the French or American press, to both try and slow the gathering of large crowds due to the Spanish Flu pandemic and simultaneously to try and prevent a socialist revolution or a military uprising from erupting in defeated Germany.
Of course, when the warring powers of Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States signed an armistice they neither mitigated the spread of Spanish Flu, nor in any way helped to improve stability in war ravaged Germany, but the false armistice celebrations of November 7 definitely didn’t help the situation, and without the spontaneous reporting of “fake news” perhaps fewer lives both as a result of combat in the trenches, and the Spanish Flu at home, could have been lost.
So what went wrong? And how could fewer lives have been lost without such a mistake?
For one thing, by the time peace negotiations between Germany and the Entente powers of France, Britain and the United States got underway in November of 1918, the signing of an armistice that would result in a German surrender was, pretty much, a foregone conclusion.
The Kaiser had already abdicated and was in exile; the German Navy had already mutinied in Kiel in the northern part of the country and despite being able to still theoretically field hundreds of supposedly combat ready divisions, German soldiers had been surrendering in droves for months, starvation was becoming rampant on the German homefront and thousands of German soldiers and civilians alike were falling sick and dying from the Spanish Flu each day.
While the allies, despite having their own armies and homefronts ravaged by influenza, were daily pouring tens of thousands of fresh American troops into the fight in France and out producing Germany exponentially in terms of material and natural resources while at the very same time maintaining stable, unified and determined governments that were capable of influencing and controlling their civilian populations.
On November 7, 1918 a German peace delegation with the intention of signing an armistice agreement had approached French lines under a flag of truce near the town of Spa in Belgium.
To allow the peace delegation to pass through allied lines French forces in the area had announced a temporary ceasefire. It was this temporary ceasefire by French forces around Spa that was erroneously reported to French intelligence as a complete German surrender. A report was filed with French intelligence that stated that a German delegation had crossed allied lines and had actually signed an armistice rather than reporting the truth, which was that a German delegation had crossed allied lines with the intention to sign an armistice.
When UP got hold of the story, though, wishing to get the scoop of the century on their number one competitor the Associated Press, Roy Howard not wanting to miss the money making opportunity of a lifetime, telegraphed to the newspaper offices of the New York World that the war was over although there was definitely substantial evidence to the contrary at the time, including the report of American Army Intelligence which stated that news of a German surrender was nothing more than a rumor and completely unfounded. But once that telegraph reached Manhattan, and the words GERMANY SURRENDERS flashed across the Dow Jones ticker well, the rest as they say, was history.
The German peace delegation wished to agree to President Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen point plan to end the war, but Lloyd George in Great Britain and Georges Clemenceau in France, wished for Germany to admit to some sort of war guilt for starting the war and they wanted Germany to more frankly acknowledge their defeat at the hands of the allies before signing an armistice at Compiegne in France on November 11, 1918. Negotiations dragged on for four days due largely to issues of language and planning but not military necessity.
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| Armistice is Signed November 11, 1918 |
On November 8, 1918, as it slowly dawned on Americans that news of the armistice from the day before had been fake, Roy Howard of UP went from hero to public enemy number one literally overnight.
The Associated Press accused Howard of having committed the, “most flagrant and culpable act of public deception in the whole history of news gathering”.
It cost the city of New York $85,000 to clean the streets of Manhattan after the false armistice report of November 7 and many New Yorkers at the time believed that Howard himself should be solely responsible for paying the bill.
On November 7 at 2:15 pm the State Department of the United States had issued an official denial of United Press’s claim that Germany had surrendered, but being so sure of themselves and not wishing to lose out on the exclusivity of their reporting, United Press had later claimed that it was the State Department that was issuing fake reports and wished to keep the American people in the dark as to what was really going on in Europe.
Slowly, though, the truth would emerge and, thankfully, many other news organizations such as the Associated Press and Reuters in London were much more cautious when it came to reporting the war’s end and waited for official word from Washington, London and Paris to come on November 11th before they ran any sensational headlines about Germany’s imminent demise.
When it happened many American’s, rightly or wrongly, felt a great deal of anger about the fake armistice of November 7, 1918. Many felt that they had been hoodwinked by the press and called for representatives of the United Press to be criminally prosecuted and jailed.
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| Roy Howard of the United Press |
Lucky for Roy Howard and the reporters of United Press that the war ended as quickly as it did after the 7th of November 1918, or the public outcry over what happened would have been much worse and the consequences could have been much more dire.
As it was, with the end of the First World War which claimed over 100,000 American lives and the onset of the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918 which cost nearly 1,000,000 lives across the United States, the American people simply had more important things than fake news to worry about at the end of 1918.
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