Armistice Day
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Armistice Day is the anniversary of the official end of World War I, November 11, 1918. It commemorates the armistice signed between the Allies and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front, which took effect at eleven o'clock in the morning — the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month." While this official date to mark the end of the war reflects the ceasefire on the Western Front, hostilities continued in other regions, especially across the former Russian Empire and in parts of the old Ottoman Empire.
The date was a national holiday in many of the former allied nations to allow people to commemorate those members of the armed forces who were killed during war. After World War II, it was changed to Veterans Day in the United States and to Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth of Nations. Armistice Day is an official holiday in France. It is also an official holiday in Belgium, known also as the day of peace in the Flanders Fields.
In many parts of the world, people take two minutes of silence at 1100h as a sign of respect for the roughly eight million who died in the war, as suggested by Edward George Honey in a letter to a British newspaper though Wellesley Tudor Pole established two ceremonial periods of remembrance based on events in 1917. [1] [2] Beginning in 1939, the two-minute silence was moved to the Sunday nearest the 11th, in order not to interfere with wartime production should the 11th fall on a weekday.
In Belgium, this tradition lasted until 2003, when a group in successfully lobbied the international community to move the official moment of remembrance back to the 11th.
