Why Veterans Day Is on November 11

Near the village of Chaumont-devant-Damvillers in northeastern France, on the morning of November 11, 1918, Private Henry N. Gunther of the 313th Infantry charged a German roadblock and was shot. The U.S. Army puts the time at 10:59 a.m. The National Archives, in one account, says 10:58.

Either way, Gunther died within two minutes of the moment the guns were supposed to stop. At 11 a.m. Paris time, they did.

That hour is the reason Veterans Day falls on November 11, whatever day of the week it lands on. The holiday has changed names, changed purpose, and once even changed months. The date always came back to the morning the fighting ended.

Why November 11?

World War I did not end with a peace treaty that day. It ended with an armistice, an agreement to stop fighting. Allied and German officials signed it at 5 a.m. on November 11, 1918, in a railway carriage on a siding in the Forest of Compiègne, northeast of Paris. The Library of Congress identifies the car as the one used by Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Allied commander.

The cease-fire was set for six hours later: 11 a.m. in Paris, 6 a.m. on the East Coast of the United States. That gave the world the phrase still used today, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

The actual peace treaty, signed at Versailles, did not come until June 28, 1919. But it was November 11 that people remembered as the day the war stopped.

The first Armistice Day

A year later, President Woodrow Wilson marked the anniversary with a message to the country. "To us in America," he wrote, "the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country's service and with gratitude for the victory."

The plan was simple: parades, public meetings, and a short pause in business at 11 a.m. The Library of Congress says the pause was two minutes.

On November 11, 1921, the third anniversary, the country buried an unidentified American soldier from the war at Arlington National Cemetery. President Warren G. Harding spoke at the Memorial Amphitheater. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier became the center of the day, and it still is.

Congress took longer. On June 4, 1926, it passed a resolution calling November 11, 1918, the end of "the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals," and asked the President to proclaim ceremonies each year. Not until May 13, 1938, did a law make it a legal holiday. That law called November 11 "a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace."

Armistice Day, in other words, began as a day about one war and about peace.

The man from Birmingham

Then came a second world war, and Korea. A new generation had served, and Armistice Day still honored the veterans of one war.

Raymond Weeks, a World War II veteran in Birmingham, Alabama, set out to change that. On November 11, 1947, he organized a celebration in Birmingham for veterans of every American war, the men of 1918 among them. According to records at the National Archives and the Reagan Presidential Library, Weeks pressed the idea nationally and took a delegation to meet with General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then the Army's chief of staff.

The idea reached Congress through Representative Edward H. Rees of Kansas, who introduced a bill to rename the holiday. It became law on June 1, 1954. The change was small on paper. The law struck the word "Armistice" from the 1938 act and put in "Veterans." The date stayed the same.

That fall, Eisenhower, now President, issued the first Veterans Day proclamation. "On that day," he wrote, "let us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom."

On November 11, 1982, President Ronald Reagan gave Weeks the Presidential Citizens Medal. "And, again," Reagan said at the ceremony, "we thank the man who has made Armistice Day into this Veterans Day -- Raymond Weeks."

The years it moved to October

In 1968 Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, signed June 28, to give federal workers more three-day weekends. Veterans Day was one of the holidays moved. Starting in 1971 it fell on the fourth Monday in October. The first one under the new rule was October 25, 1971.

It did not go well. States set their own holidays, and according to the VA, many of them kept November 11 anyway. For a few years the country observed Veterans Day on different dates in different places.

Congress reversed itself. A law approved September 18, 1975, returned the federal holiday to November 11, starting in 1978. It has stayed there since.

Veterans Day, not Memorial Day

The two holidays are easy to mix up, and the VA draws the line clearly. Memorial Day honors those who died in military service. Veterans Day honors everyone who served honorably, in war or in peace, and it is meant largely for the living.

The VA also settles a spelling question: it's Veterans Day, with no apostrophe.