Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.

What is today? It’s Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 2025. A lot of us forget where Veterans Day came from. It’s different than Memorial Day. Memorial Day commemorates on the last Monday of May—the date alternates every year—all those who died in America’s wars. It’s from the Civil War idea of remembrance, and it was made an official holiday in the ‘50s.

And the date changes depending on which date is the last Monday in May. Sometimes we confuse that with Veterans Day. Veterans Day commemorates all those who served in the armed forces, both those who died and those who survived—the vast majority survived. It came from a word Armistice Day that commemorated the end of WWI. The allies who had defeated the German offensive dictated terms, and they needed an iconic time or date so that everybody would know when the war was officially over. Given it was November, they picked the 11th day of November. November was the 11th month of the year. So it was the 11th month of the 11th day, and the armistice took place at 11 o’clock in the morning.

And then the allies—obviously not the Germans who lost the war, or the Austrians who lost the war, and some of the Eastern European countries who lost the war—don’t commemorate it. But the allies in Western Europe and the United States then started to commemorate Armistice Day. And it was made an official holiday, I think in the 1950s, 1954, and the name was changed from Armistice Day to Veterans so that it wouldn’t be exclusively referring to WWI.

So now it’s all of our wars. We commemorate those who served, not necessarily those just who died, which will be commemorated next year in the last Monday of May.

There’s one kind of little wrinkle to all this. When I was in high school, the date fluctuated in October and it was changed in accordance with the pattern of Memorial Day to the fourth Monday in October. So you never knew what day Armistice Day was and you broke the complete connection between WWI and Armistice Day because it was no longer on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. And then that was corrected later. And so we went back now as we should have. We don’t use the word “Armistice” anymore.

We use Veterans Day, but it will always be on the 11th day and it commemorates what America has done in our wars. But by going back to that, as I said, all of the people who fought in all of our wars … But going back to that iconic date is important because it denotes the idea that America first went into a major world war. They did not want to go.

America did not want to go into that war. They had been firmly isolationists. They had no defenses other than a Navy to speak of. The war had broken out in July of 1914, so it had been going on for three years. The Americans said, “It doesn’t involve us.” They fought the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, 71.

They’re always fighting wars. That’s the nature of Europe. It’s very different than us over here. In addition, there were large minorities here of German immigrants, German Americans, and a large, of course, legacy of British—less so the French—but there was this feeling that we didn’t want to create tensions within America of some people rooting for the Kaiser and some for the British.

But we got into the war, on April 6 of 1917, even though Woodrow Wilson, the president had run both in 1912 and again in 1916, that we would not get into war.

What changed? Well, there’s a lot of things that changed. The Zimmermann telegram denoted the ambassador from Germany to Mexico had sent a telegram saying that they were going to work out an agreement that Mexico would attack the United States and deflect our attention from Europe and in exchange for that war that they would wage against us, they would be given back some of the territories they lost in the Mexican War: Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.

And then also in 1917, the Germans restarted unrestricted submarine warfare saying that “We (Germany) will sink any ship taking supplies to Britain or to France, regardless of the country.” And they sunk a number of American ships and then they had earlier sunk the Lusitania that had American civilians on it. So there was an outpouring of anger. And Wilson capitalized on that. And we had never been in a war overseas like this before. Never. We had the Barbary Pirates, but even the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, they had been on American soil. Spanish-American War, we had gone to the Philippines and Cuba, but that was brief. This was something new and we were going to fight the most formidable army in the history of Europe, the Imperial German Army. So there was a lot of apprehension.

We had to have a draft almost immediately. We drafted four million people and probably in achievement that’s even more impressive than what we did in WWII—we forget this—the U.S. government was able to draft two million people after April 1917, all the way to Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918, and send them all the way to France without losing a single soldier to enemy action.

And when those soldiers got there, it was absolutely critical that they get there in time because Germany had knocked out Russia and no longer had a two-front war at the end of 1917 and early 1918. So Germany was bringing vast amounts of fresh soldiers and veteran-experienced fighters to crush the tired British and French on the Western front.

So, the infusion of Americans—2 million of them, 10,000 a day—were arriving and they had little experience. They had little equipment compared to their European counterparts that had been in war for over three years. They plugged the gap, and we weren’t responsible entirely for the victory. That probably should be allotted to the British and French who suffered a lot more losses, respectively.

Probably a million Frenchmen died, another million were wounded and probably 900,000 British died. We lost about 116,000—60,000 of those were lost to disease, but we did bring in the manpower that stopped the German spring invasion of 1918, turn the tide allowed Britain and France to win the war, and allowed us to become a world power with this new army.

We had a new navy and at the Versailles Treaty the next year, Woodrow Wilson oversaw the peace negotiations and the settlement. They didn’t work too well. Wilson was an idealist and unfortunately—we can get into that sometime—the Versailles Treaty had innate flaws that, almost as general folk, the French superior commander said, “This is not a peace treaty. It’s a parenthesis for war within 20 years.” And that’s exactly what happened.

Nevertheless, today is Veterans Day. It commemorates the end of WWI, the Armistice on the 11th day of the 11th month at the 11th hour. And it’s something we should all commemorate those who have served from the founding of the country until our most recent engagements in the Middle East. The soldiers who sacrificed for us both by their service and by those who were wounded and killed, and it’s something we should keep in mind.

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