In May 1918, an estimated 1.4 million deployed troops wrote letters to their mothers. They were put on the fastest ships and sent to New York. All had “Mother’s Letter” written in place of a stamp.

The deluge of Mother’s Day letters that arrived was especially out of the ordinary in 1918.

Championed by Anna Jarvis, a pathological mourner who wanted to memorialize her dead mother, Jarvis’ version of Mother’s Day was first observed in 1908. Recognized as a U.S. National Holiday in 1914, Mother’s Day still hadn’t gained much traction outside of Protestant pulpits and Sunday schools by the time the troops started writing.

May 3, 1918, The Stars and Stripes began to promote the fledgling holiday on its front pages, which brought American moms to the forefront of everybody’s mind.

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Wilson had without question resolutely avoided major preparations for war.

Some recent historians believe that, even as he delivered his thirty-two-minute war message to Congress beginning at 8:40 P.M. on April 2, 1917, he wistfully clung to the hope that America would not actually have to send troops to Europe.

Given the exhaustion on both sides, he may have seriously believed that the mere threat of U.S. entry would be sufficient to end hostilities. Nor was the president alone in this hope.

On April 6, after hearing testimony that appropriations were needed to actually deliver an army to France, Senator Thomas S. Martin of Virginia, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and a man who had just voted for the declaration of war, gasped: “Good Lord! You’re not going to send soldiers over there, are you?”

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Read and view:

* a photostat of the Zimmerman telegram;

* the February 24, 1917, telegram from U.S. Ambassador Walter Page to President Woodrow Wilson, conveying a translation of the intercepted Zimmermann telegram;

* the February 26, 1917, telegram from Acting Secretary of State Frank L. Polk to the American Embassy in Mexico City;

* and a partial decode of the Zimmermann Telegram made by Edward Bell of the American Embassy in London, sent to the State Department, March 2, 1917.

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American infantry soldiers went to war in 1941 and early 1942 with M1928 and M1928A1 Thompson submachine guns.

“One-Man Army” Wermuth brandished such a gun in Bataan, and all of the Thompsons shipped out of Bridgeport and Utica in the weeks after Pearl Harbor were M1928A1s.

Essentially, it was the same gun carried by the troops when the United States had “sent in the marines” back in the late 1920s.

Soon this would change.

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January 8, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson gave his now-famous "Fourteen Points for Peace" Address.

His battle to gain acceptance for, and support of, a "League of Nations" was an uphill battle, made more difficult following the compromises Wilson made in Paris, working toward finalizing the Treaty of Versailles.

January 10, 1920, the League of Nations came into effect—without ratification from the United States.

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The Great War had shown that the U.S. Navy couldn’t meet the demands for officers during a rapid expansion of the force; an experiment with a three-month cram course called the “Midshipman School” was not very effective.

The force needed a cadre of trained and experienced officers, larger than could be produced by the Naval Academy alone, ready to go but held in reserve.

Therefore, the Navy moved to emulate the successful college-level Army Reserve Officers Training Program (ROTC)—which provided classroom and some field military training roughly equivalent to, although not as intense as, that offered at West Point.

The Navy set up six Naval ROTC units, at Northwestern, Yale, Harvard, Georgia Tech, the University of Washington, and the University of California (UC) at Berkeley.

The program began in the fall semester of 1926, with Nimitz as the first professor of naval science at Berkeley.

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For nearly five months the war had been fought with mounting severity. Suddenly, as darkness fell on Christmas Eve, there was, in sections of the front line, a moment of peaceable behaviour.

'We got into conversation with the Germans who were anxious to arrange an Armistice during Xmas,' a 25-year-old lieutenant with the Scots Guards, Sir Edward Hulse, wrote in his battalion's war diary. 'A scout named F. Murker went out and met a German Patrol and was given a glass of whisky and some cigars, and a message was sent back saying that if we didn't fire at them they would not fire at us.' That night, on a front where five days earlier there had been savage fighting, the guns were silent.

On the following morning, German soldiers walked across towards the British wire and British soldiers went out to meet them.

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When Pearl Harbor was attacked on Sunday morning, December 7, it was already early Monday morning, December 8, in the Philippines.

At three o’clock on that dark Monday morning an urgent message reached Manila from Hawaii addressed to Rear Admiral Thomas C. Hart, commander of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet and ranking naval officer in the Philippines. The words were terse: AIR RAID AT PEARL HARBOR—THIS IS NO DRILL.

With this shock, military plans and efficiency unraveled in the Philippines with unbelievable speed and ineptness.

Admiral Hart and General MacArthur had always had a strained personal and professional relationship. Professionally, there was a lack of a clearly defined chain of command and “coordination of mission” between MacArthur and Hart. Much of this was due to the traditional vying between the army and the navy as to “who ruled the roost and who called the shots.” As a result, in the opening hours of World War II in the Philippines there was obvious discord between the responses of the navy and the army.

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