Armistice of 11 November 1918

At 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918, the guns fell silent on the Western Front. Early that morning, in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne in northern France, German delegates had signed an armistice with the Allies, ending the fighting of the First World War against Germany, the last of the Central Powers still in the field. It was not formally a surrender, but its terms left Germany unable to resume the war. A final peace came only with the Treaty of Versailles.

From the Battle of Amiens in August 1918, the Allies pushed the German armies steadily back in what became known as the Hundred Days Offensive. Germany's allies gave way one after another: Bulgaria signed an armistice on 29 September, and the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary followed by early November. At home, the Allied blockade had caused severe food shortages, and the army was short of men, worn down by casualties and the influenza epidemic.

On 29 September the army high command told Kaiser Wilhelm II that the military situation was hopeless, and Erich Ludendorff demanded an immediate request for a ceasefire. A new chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, appealed to the American president Woodrow Wilson in early October for peace on the basis of Wilson's Fourteen Points. Wilson insisted that Germany leave the occupied territories, stop submarine warfare and in effect remove its autocratic rulers.

At the end of October sailors of the German fleet mutinied at Wilhelmshaven, and revolt spread across the country within days as workers' and soldiers' councils took over cities. On 9 November Prince Max announced the Kaiser's abdication and handed power to the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, and a republic was proclaimed in Berlin.

A German delegation led by the Centre Party politician Matthias Erzberger crossed the lines and arrived on 8 November at the train of the Allied supreme commander, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, in the forest. The Germans were given 72 hours to accept the Allied conditions. They won only minor changes, and on 10 November Ebert told Erzberger to sign. The armistice was agreed at about 5 a.m. on 11 November, to take effect six hours later, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

The 34 clauses required Germany to end hostilities, to leave France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Alsace-Lorraine within 15 days, and to withdraw from all land west of the Rhine, which Allied troops would occupy along with bridgeheads at Mainz, Koblenz and Cologne. Germany had to hand over 5,000 artillery pieces, 25,000 machine guns, 1,700 aircraft, its submarines and thousands of locomotives and wagons, and to intern its main surface fleet. It renounced the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest, and had to free Allied prisoners without any exchange, while the naval blockade continued. The armistice was renewed three times until the peace treaty came into force on 10 January 1920.

Fighting went on in many sectors right up to 11 a.m., as commanders kept pressing forward and gunners fired off their ammunition. On the last day of the war 2,738 men were killed. The American Henry Gunther, killed about a minute before the deadline, is generally considered the last soldier to die in action. When the moment came, reactions at the front were mostly subdued, while in Paris guns were fired, bells rang and crowds gathered to cheer the prime minister, Georges Clemenceau.

11 November became Armistice Day, Remembrance Day or Veterans Day in many countries, and is Poland's Independence Day. Because the German army had retreated in good order and the front still lay far from Berlin, nationalists including Hindenburg spread the false claim that the army had been "stabbed in the back" by civilians, socialists and Jews, a myth that poisoned the new republic. In June 1940 Adolf Hitler made defeated France sign its armistice in the same railway carriage.

Our 1914 map shows the German Empire at the start of the war, and our 1920 map shows Europe after the peace settlements that followed the armistice.