Veterans Day is on 11 November because the First World War Armistice took effect at 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918. Armistice Day (1919, Congress 1926, legal holiday 1938) became Veterans Day in 1954. The 1968 Uniform Holiday Bill moved it to October; it returned to 11 November in 1978. Memorial Day honours the fallen, Veterans Day all who served.
Every year on 11 November Americans stop to thank the men and women who have worn the uniform. Fewer know why it is this date, why it once had another name, or why in the 1970s it briefly moved.
The answer begins on a single morning in France, in a railway carriage in a forest, and ends with an act of Congress. Here is the story of the day, told from the records.
The last morning of the Great War
By November 1918 the American Expeditionary Forces under John J. Pershing were deep in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, the largest battle the US Army had ever fought. The Marines had already made their name at Belleau Wood in June, and in the Argonne on 8 October Corporal Alvin York had performed the action that won him the Medal of Honor.
In the early hours of 11 November, German delegates signed the Armistice in Marshal Foch's railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne. The agreement was signed at about 5 a.m.1, but the fighting was to stop only at 11 a.m. In those six hours many commanders kept attacking. The historian Joseph Persico put the total casualties on all sides that last day at nearly 11,0001.
One of them was Private Henry N. Gunther of Baltimore, of the 313th Infantry Regiment, 79th Division. He had been a sergeant until he was demoted over a letter urging a friend to avoid the draft2. Moments before 11 a.m., near the village of Chaumont-devant-Damvillers, he charged a German roadblock and was shot dead2. Accounts give the time as 10:58 or 10:59. He is generally remembered as the last American soldier killed in the war.
From Armistice Day to Veterans Day
A year later, in November 1919, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first Armistice Day. He wrote that Americans would remember it with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died3 in the country's service. The plan was simple: parades, public meetings and a brief suspension of business beginning at 11 a.m.
On 4 June 1926 Congress passed a concurrent resolution asking the President to call for the flag to be flown on 11 November; by then 27 states had already made it a legal holiday3. An Act approved on 13 May 1938 made 11 November3 a national legal holiday, a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and known as Armistice Day. Between the wars it was above all a day for the veterans4 of 1917 and 1918.
The Second World War and Korea changed that. In Birmingham, Alabama, a Navy veteran named Raymond Weeks organised a celebration in 19475 to honour all veterans, not just those of the First World War, and lobbied Congress to follow. Representative Edward Rees of Kansas introduced the bill. On 1 June 1954 the law striking out the word Armistice and inserting Veterans was approved, and on 8 October President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued the first Veterans Day Proclamation3.
Then came a detour. The Uniform Holiday Bill, signed on 28 June 1968, moved Veterans Day to a Monday to create three-day weekends. The first Monday Veterans Day, on 25 October 1971, was observed with much confusion, and many states kept the old date. On 20 September 1975 President Gerald Ford signed a law returning the observance to 11 November, beginning in 1978.
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
The most solemn ritual of the day began in 1921. On 24 October, at Châlons-sur-Marne in France, Sergeant Edward F. Younger of the 50th Infantry chose one unidentified American from among the caskets by placing a spray of white roses on it6.
On 11 November 1921 the Unknown was carried on a horse-drawn caisson through Washington to Arlington National Cemetery. President Warren G. Harding presided and placed the Medal of Honor on the casket6. Unknowns from the Second World War and Korea were interred beside him in 1958. A Vietnam War Unknown was added in 1984, but was identified and removed in 1998. The national Veterans Day ceremony is still held at Arlington each year.
Veterans Day or Memorial Day?
The two are often confused. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, Memorial Day, in May, is for remembering those who died in the service of their country. Veterans Day is the day to thank all who served honorably7, in war or in peace, and above all the living.
The spelling carries the idea: Veterans Day, with no apostrophe, because the day does not belong to veterans; it is a day for honouring them.
The same date elsewhere
Britain and the Commonwealth keep 11 November too. The first two-minute silence was held on Armistice Day 1919, at the request of King George V8, and the Unknown Warrior was buried in Westminster Abbey in 1920. Canada and Australia observe Remembrance Day on 11 November, while Britain holds its main ceremonies on Remembrance Sunday, the Sunday nearest the date.
For Poland, the same morning meant something else: rebirth. On 11 November 1918 the Regency Council handed military command to Józef Piłsudski, who had reached Warsaw the day before after his release from German captivity in Magdeburg. The date became Poland's National Independence Day. Abolished by the communist authorities in 1945, it was restored in 1989.
The battles behind the day
Veterans Day honours more than one war. It honours the doughboys of 1918, but also the men who came ashore in Normandy on 6 June 1944, the Marines who fought for Iwo Jima in February and March 1945, and the soldiers and Marines who fought their way out of the Chosin Reservoir in the winter of 1950.
That widening was exactly what Raymond Weeks had in mind: one day for everyone who served, whatever the war and whether or not they ever saw combat.
Why the date still matters
When Congress moved the holiday to a Monday, it was solving a calendar problem. The country answered that the date itself was the point. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day was the moment a world war stopped, and keeping it on 11 November keeps that moment in view: the relief, the cost of the last morning, and the millions who came home and had to live with what they had seen.