THE GREAT WAR

Those Who Answered the Call

To the men and women who served, sacrificed, and carried the burdens of a war that reshaped the world.

A World Transformed by War

Before the United States entered the First World War, Europe had already descended into a conflict of unprecedented scale. Old rivalries, military alliances, nationalism, and imperial competition had created a continent poised for catastrophe. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 became the spark that ignited it.

Industrial technology changed the nature of battle. Machine guns, heavy artillery, poison gas, aircraft, submarines, and tanks brought destruction with a speed and reach earlier generations could scarcely have imagined. Across the Western Front, armies dug into the earth and fought for years over shattered miles of mud, wire, and ruined villages.

When America entered the war in April 1917, it began one of the fastest military mobilizations in its history. The soldiers who crossed the Atlantic were known simply as “Doughboys.” Their arrival brought new strength to exhausted Allied armies and helped turn the tide during the war’s final year.

The Road to War

The crisis began on June 28, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia one month later. A chain of alliances then pulled Europe’s major powers into the conflict.

Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria formed the Central Powers. Opposing them were the Allied Powers, led by France, Britain, Russia, and later Italy and the United States. What many expected to be a short war became a four-year struggle fought across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the oceans, and the skies.

America Answers the Call

President Woodrow Wilson initially sought to keep the United States neutral. Yet repeated German submarine attacks, the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, and the revelation of the Zimmermann Telegram steadily changed public opinion.

On April 2, 1917, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany. Congress approved it four days later. The nation then faced a massive challenge: building, training, equipping, transporting, and supplying an army capable of fighting overseas.

The American Expeditionary Forces

General John J. Pershing commanded the American Expeditionary Forces, or AEF. Pershing insisted that American soldiers should fight as a distinct national army rather than merely serve as replacements within British and French units.

More than two million American service members eventually deployed overseas. They arrived in France through ports crowded with troops, horses, trucks, ammunition, food, medical supplies, and machinery. Behind the front, American engineers built roads, railways, warehouses, hospitals, and communications networks on an enormous scale.

The first American troops landed in France in June 1917. By the spring and summer of 1918, rapidly growing American forces were entering major combat at Cantigny, Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, Saint-Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne.

Life in the Trenches

The trenches were more than firing positions. They were temporary homes, supply routes, aid stations, observation posts, and places of constant danger. Soldiers endured mud, rats, lice, disease, bitter cold, summer heat, flooding, exhaustion, and the unending thunder of artillery.

Between opposing trench systems lay “No Man’s Land,” an exposed landscape of shell craters, broken trees, wire entanglements, and abandoned equipment. Attacks across this ground could be devastating. Even during quieter periods, snipers, shellfire, gas alarms, and raids prevented any true sense of safety.

Weapons That Changed Warfare

A Nation at War

Victory depended upon far more than the infantryman in the trench. Nurses and physicians treated terrible wounds in hospitals near the front. Engineers built the infrastructure that kept armies moving. Sailors protected troopships and supply lines. Signal Corps personnel maintained communications. Drivers, mechanics, railroad crews, cooks, clerks, and labor units performed work essential to every operation.

At home, factories expanded production, families planted victory gardens, citizens purchased Liberty Bonds, and women entered occupations previously closed to them. African American troops served in a segregated military, often under discriminatory conditions, yet units such as the 369th Infantry Regiment—the Harlem Hellfighters—earned distinction in combat.

From Sarajevo to the Armistice

The War in Perspective

A Tribute Cast in Metal

The Wilson Heritage Works World War I commemorative was created as a tangible connection to the history preserved in this exhibit. Its imagery honors the American service members who entered a distant conflict and helped bring the Great War to its conclusion.

Each piece is intended not merely as a collectible, but as a small memorial—an object that invites its owner to remember the courage, hardship, and sacrifice behind the dates engraved upon it.