Armistice Day

Armistice Day, observed on November 11, is presented as a point of reflection for Harry S. Truman rather than as a public ceremony. In 1939, with war spreading in Europe, the date brought his own experience of the First World War into uneasy conversation with the new crisis: the end of one war had not guaranteed the safety of civilization from another.

November 11, 1939

On Armistice Day, Truman wrote to Bess Truman about the uncertainty facing those who had taken part in the First World War. He told her, “You know it makes some of us who went on that first Crusade…wonder sometimes just what fate really holds for civilization.” The phrase “first Crusade” invokes the idealism attached to that earlier service, while the question of civilization’s fate registers doubt that its sacrifices had settled the dangers of war.

The letter came amid Truman’s growing alarm at events in Europe. He had followed the fighting on maps of France pinned to his office wall and opposed senators who argued for continued isolation. He called for military preparedness, a special session of Congress to revise the Neutrality Act of 1936, the lifting of the arms embargo, and larger defense appropriations. The date’s reflection was therefore set against immediate political argument: remembrance of the previous war coincided with his call to prepare for the next.

Memory and the coming war

Truman’s concern was not simply that war had returned to Europe, but that the democracies’ failure to resist aggression could encourage further advances. In 1939 he described the dictators’ conduct as a reversion to “cave-man savagery” and argued that refusing to sell arms to friendly nations would help the aggressors. Armistice Day consequently frames a tension between the hope associated with the end of the First World War and his conviction that peace required active preparation.

That tension gained a different, more immediate form during the Second World War. When Truman later weighed whether to invade Japan or rely on bombing and blockade, he called it his hardest decision to date and focused on the expected loss of American lives. The account records the decision in terms of alternatives and consequences, not as a later observance of Armistice Day; its relevance here is the contrast between the 1939 question about civilization’s future and the burdens of making wartime choices.

War’s moral cost

The later debate over the atomic bomb also shows how concerns about the conduct and consequences of war remained difficult to separate from the search for surrender. Truman’s advisers discussed whether a demonstration or a direct military use might end the conflict; a demonstration was rejected as unlikely to produce the necessary shock. Truman later recalled that military leaders believed an invasion could cost at least a quarter of a million American casualties, while stating that he disliked the weapon.

At the same time, Truman resisted treating civilian populations as legitimate objects of vengeance. In a letter written on August 9, 1945, he said he regretted the necessity of wiping out whole populations and had a human feeling for Japanese women and children. This later record does not establish that the 1939 letter determined his subsequent decisions. It does, however, give the Armistice Day reflection a wider context: the hope that war might safeguard civilization existed alongside the painful question of what that purpose allowed a government to do.

Significance in the account

Armistice Day marks a brief but revealing moment in Truman’s wartime outlook. The date connects the memory of his earlier military service with his 1939 opposition to passivity as Europe moved toward war. Its significance lies in that juxtaposition, not in evidence of a recurring ritual or a settled resolution: the remembrance of one war’s ending accompanies uncertainty about whether civilization can avoid another and, later, the moral costs of bringing war to a close.