THE HERITAGE OF THE GREAT WAR
THE HERITAGE OF THE GREAT WAR
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The people on this list were all extraordinary. Some of their roles may look small and insignificant, and some of them were rather unknown at that time - but in the years to come the world was going to hear from them. Even dead they had a message that came through. All these people were wounded, scratched, insulted, loved, disappointed, satisfied, challenged, brutalized, robbed from their ideals or otherwise shaped by the experiences they had during the Great War. And as they, for their part, shaped the remaining era of the 20th Century, one can hardly overestimate the influence of that war on our present-day world. So be ready for a suprise and read what Maurice Chevalier did in that war - and Humphrey Bogart, Albert Schweitzer, Charles de Gaulle, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Madame Curie, Mahatma Ghandi, Giacomo Puccini, the ´unsinkable´ Molly Brown, Hugh Lofting, Henry Moore, Monk Eastman, Ernest Hemingway and Adolf Hitler - and many others! |
Pictures above: Propaganda encouraged fathers to leave their family and to play a role in the Great War. |
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Name |
Nationality |
In 1914-1918... |
Known because... |
| Addams, Jane | American | 1915 chairman in The Hague of the International Congress of Women (considering ways to end the war); after that co-founder International League for Peace and Freedom | social reformer and pacifist; 1931 cowinner (with Nicholas Murray Butler) of the Nobel Prize for Peace; founder of Hull House in Chicago, first social settlements in North America |
| al-Askari, Jafar | Syrian, later Iraqi | served in the Ottoman Empire Army until captured by British forces moving into Palestine from Egypt; escaped and fled eastward, where he was converted to the cause of Arab nationalism and joined forces with Lawrence of Arabia; took part in the attack on Damascus | as reward for his loyalty became minister of defense in the first Iraqi government; served as prime minister twice, and was also minister of foreign affairs; † 1936 (killed by Chief of Staff Bakr Sidqi, in Iraq's first coup) |
| Alexander, Harold | English | brigadier 4th Guards Brigade; wounded twice | commander in WW 2 (Africa, Monte Cassino); governor general of Canada 1946-1952 |
| Allenby, Edmund | English | commander in France and Palestine | inventor of 'blitzkrieg' use of mechanized forces |
| Amann, Max | German | served as sergeant-quartermaster in the 16th Bayern Infantry Regiment, where he met corporal Adolf Hitler; wounded on the Flemish front, losing an arm as a result | after the war the third member to join Hitler's Nazi Party; 1922 became publisher of the party newspaper Volkische Beobachter; 1933 established Nazi control over the industry and closed down all newspapers that did not support Hitler; 1948 sentenced to ten years for war crimes; 1957 died in poverty |
| Amundsen, Roald | Norwegian | made a fortune with 'neutral' shipping | first man to reach South Pole |
| Annunzio, Gabriele D' | Italian | pilot, leader of the Serenissima air squadron | one of the first members of Mussolini's fascist movement; 1919 occupied the city of Fiume for 16 months with a fascist battle force; renowned for his poetry and novels (e.g. Notturno) |
| Antonescu, Ion | Romanian | officer; later chief of staff | fascist and anti-semite; 1940-1944 prime minister of Romania; in WW 2 pursuer of Jews; 1944 arrested; 1946 tried and executed as a war criminal |
| Attlee, Clement | English | Served in Gallipoli and Mesopotamia; badly wounded at El Hanna; 1918 served on the Western Front in France | leader of British Labour Party; in WW 2 deputy prime minister; prime minister 1945-1951 |
| Badoglio, Pietro | Italian | general, chief of staff; directed capture of Monte Sabotina 1916; defeated at Caporetto 1917 | governor of Libya 1929-1933; in WW 2 invaded Abyssinia; prime minister 1943-1944 after fall Mussolini; negotiated Italian armistice with the Allies, whom he joined in the war against Germany |
| Baden Powell, Sir Robert | English | 1914 claimed knowing German plans from his previous Intelligence investigations and ordered all bridges, railway culverts, telegraph and cable lines, waterworks, etc., guarded by posses of Scouts; had Sea Scouts taking over Coastguard tasks (taking position along the East and South coasts, and carrying out watch duties till long after the Armistice, when the Naval Ratings returned); 1915 published his book My adventures as a Spy | founder of the Scouts movement; army commander in South-Africa (Boer War) and in India; wrote many books about his life (e.g. Lessons from the Varsity of Life), his travels and the boy scouts (e.g. Rovering to Success) |
| Balbo, Italo | Italian | served in Alpine troops; received one bronze and two silver medals; reached rank of captain | joined Fascist movement, organized squadristi, squads of armed Fascist Blackshirts; 1922 leader of the March on Rome, which brought Mussolini to power; 1926 secretary of state for aviation; learned to fly and developed aviation in Italy; 1933 governor-general of Libya; † 1940 when his plane crashed at Tobruk, Libya (apparently shot down accidentally by Italian anti aircraft artillery) |
| Balfour, Arthur J. | English | Foreign Secretary | 1917 wrote Declaration of Palestine as a national home for Jews |
| Banting, Fred | Canadian | 1917 graduated medical school and joined army; battalion medical officer in field stations in France; hit by shrapnel from a shell, ignored orders to leave the area; when eventually evacuated his wound was bad and not healing; doctors suggested amputation but took over (saved his arm); awarded Military Cross for courage under fire | 1921 with Charles Best discovered Insulin (medicine against diabetes); 1923 Nobelprize medicine; in WW 2 rejoined the army; † 1941 (in an accident); the Sir Frederick Banting Foundation still funds start up research |
| Barbusse, Henri | French | soldier in France | novels (e.g. Under Fire) |
| Barlach, Ernst | German | soldier (Landsturmmann) | sculptures (e.g. War Monument, Der Rächer) |
| Beckman, Max | German | medical volunteer for a year; suffered breakdown and was discharged | paintings (e.g. The Night); considered 'degenerate artist' by Nazis; fled to Holland |
| Bell, Gertrude | English | worked with British Intelligence in the Middle East; 1915 appointed to the Arab Bureau in Cairo to gather information for mobilization of Arabs against Turkey; took part in the Mesopotamia Expeditionary Force in Basra and Baghdad | adventurer (equal to Lawrence of Arabia), archaeologist, and Arabist; nicknamed 'Daughter of the desert' and 'Uncrowned Queen of Iraq'; founder of archaeological museum in Baghdad; 1923 Iraq's Director of Antiquities |
| Ben-Gurion, David | Polish, later Israeli | expelled from Palestine for pro-Allied sympathies; raised Jewish Legion in USA and served in it in Palestine campaign against Turkey | Zionist leader; Prime Minister Israel 1948-1953 |
| Benoist, Robert | French | first served in infantry and in the end as a pilot in Armée de l'Air | before the war Grand Prix race car driver; in WW 2 Special Operations Executive; captured by Gestapo and executed in Buchenwald |
| Berg, Alban | Austrian | wanted to fight but got a army deskjob because of poor health; at same time composing opera (Wozzeck) | musician; composer (e.g. Violin Concerto, and opera Lulu); |
| Bishop, William A. (Billy) | Canadian | fighter pilot; 72 victories | served too in WW 2; organised Canadian airforce; movie star (Captain of the Clouds) |
| Blasko, Be'la Ferenc Dezso | Hungarian | infantry lieutenant; wounded three times; decorated before leaving the service in 1916 | movie star under pseudonym Bela Lugosi (e.g. Vampire Count in the original Broadway production of Dracula 1927) |
| Blériot, Louis | French | designer Spad fighter plane | pilot; airplane builder |
| Bliss, Arthur | English | wounded in the Battle of the Somme and gassed at Cambrai | musician; composer (e.g. Morning Heroes); 1941 director of music at the BBC; writer (articles collected in Bliss on Music) |
| Blixen, Karen | Danish | while living in Kenia accused (without cause) of being pro-German; leader of Allied despatch services and provision transports | writer (e.g. Out of Africa) |
| Bochkareva, Maria | Russian | 1914 joined Russian army; three medals for bravery; 1917 formed Women's Battalion with 2,000 female soldiers; wounded twice; | 1917 October Revolution attempted to defend Winter Palace against Bolshevik forces with few remaining members of her Battalion; fled to America after defeat of Kerensky's government; wrote memoirs (Yashka, My Life) |
| Bogart, Humphrey | American | seaman aboard troop transport ship USS Leviathan (mainly deployed in returning troops home from France after the armistice) | one of the leading movie stars of the 20th Century (e.g. in The African Queen); 1951 Oscar for best actor |
| Bolo, Paul | French | employed by Khedive of Egypt, travelled between America and Europe, raising money for establishing a pacifist movement; eventually gathered 300,000 pounds mainly from Germans; arrested in Paris and tried as traitor; executed in April 1918 | also known as Bolo Pasha, subject of some books |
| Bormann, Martin | German | cannoneer in a field artillery regiment at the end of the war | head of Nazi Party Chancellery; private secretary of Hitler |
| Borms, August | Belgian | pro-German Flemish activist; negotiated in Berlin for an independent Flemish state | 1918 sentenced to death because of collaboration; released in 1929; in WW 2 collaborated again with Germans; 1946 executed for high treason |
| Bothe, Walther | German | soldier on the Eastern Front; taken prisoner by the Russians and spent 5 years in captivity in Siberia | physicist who won a Nobel Prize in Physics for 1954 (along with Max Born) for his invention of the coincidence circuit; 1943 completed Germany's first cyclotron |
| Bowes-Lyon, Elizabeth | English | turned family castle Glamis in Scotland into a convalescence home for wounded soldiers, and helped it to run | queen of Great-Britain 1937-1952; queen-mother thereafter |
| Brecht, Berthold | German | medical student; medical orderly in a German military hospital; this experience reinforced his hatred of war | 1919 supported the failed Socialist revolution; poet; novelist (e.g. Dreigroschenroman); playwright (e.g. Baal. Die Dreigroschenoper and Fear and Misery of the Third Reich); theatrical reformer; fled Nazis first to Denmark, later to USA; 1948 left USA after being (falsely) accused of membership American Communist Party, went to East-Germany |
| Brittain, Vera | English | pacifist; feminist; nurse in France | women's movement; novels (e.g. Testament of Youth) |
| Brooke, Alan | British | chief artillery officer 1st British Army in France | in WW 2 leading role in evacuation British troops at Dunkirk; 1941 Chief of Imperial Staff |
| Brown, Margaret | American | establishing relief stations for soldiers in France | 'unsinkable Molly Brown' (surviver Titanic 1912) |
| Broz (Tito), Josip | Austro-Hungarian, later Yugoslavian | served with the Austro-Hungarian army; imprisoned for anti-war propaganda; later wounded and taken prisoner by Russians | communist leader; resistance leader in WW 2; Founder of Yugoslavia; President 1945-1980 |
| Bruce, Nigel | English, later American | served with British army; received 11 machinegun bullets into his bottom | movie actor, made more than 75 films (e.g. Escape, The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Trail of Lonesome Pine, portrayed Dr Watson in several Sherlock Holmes movies) |
| Bulkakov, Mikhael | Russian | doctor in Kiev; witnessed German occupation and then occupation by the Red Army; during these war years suffered from a morphine addiction | novels (e.g. Satan comes to Moscow and The Master and Margarita); short stories (e.g. Morphine); playwright |
| Butterworth, George | English | officer at the Somme; † 1916 | composer (e.g. A Shropshire Lad) |
| Cain, James M. | American | served in France with the 79th division; wrote The Taking of Montfaucon for newspapers | novelist (e.g. The Postman Always Rings Twice) |
| Canaris, Wilhelm | German | navy officer aboard 'Dresden'; interned in Chili; secret missions in Spain; U-boat commander | took part in the Kapp Putsch; in WW 2 leader of German navy intelligence; secret anti-Hitler views; arrested after attack on Hitler; 1945 hanged by SS |
| Casement, Roger David | Irish | 1914 first visted USA to get support for his Irish National Volunteers, then Germany; 1916 brought by German U-boat to Ireland (landed in County Kelly) where he tried to discourage national leaders to rebel at that moment; arrested by British for treason; to disgrace him his Black Diary was published revealing homosexual deeds with boys; August 1916 hanged in London | 1965 remains returned to Dublin and got state funeral; 2002 authenticity diary verified by independent scholars |
| Chamberlain, Houston Stewart | English, later German | living in Germany (he was married to a daughter of Wagner) wrote pro-German propaganda; accused England of treason of their common race; 1916 took German nationality and wrote 'Aryan' view on world politics; 1918 wrote Rasse und Nation (Race and Nation) | well-known racist figure in modern anti-Semitism; important for his role in linking ancient anti-Semitism with modern racist theories (in his book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, 1899); wrote that the Jews had poisoned the "Aryan doctrine" and saw in Hitler the man who would implement his ideas and rid mankind of the Jewish race; 1927 died in Bayreuth |
| Chandler, Raymond | American | Canadian Army 1917-1918; Royal Air Force 1918-1919 | crime & detective novels (e.g. Farewell, My Lovely) |
| Chevalier, Maurice | French | 1914 joined the French Army; 1916 wounded and captured; learned English from an English prisoner of war during his two years in a German POW camp | singer; movie star (e.g. in Gigi); show business legend; 1959 Oscar |
| Childers, Erskine | English, later Irish | believed in the cause of Irish Home Rule; July 1914 sailed to Ireland in his own yacht with 900 rifles and 14,000 rounds of ammunition, supplied by Germany for the Irish Volunteers; two months later signed up with the Royal Navy for the duration of the war; 1916 awarded DSO medal; also worked as intelligence officer | writer and poet; 1904 published fictional (?) account of the secret 'von Knorr-plan' for a German invasion (with flat-bottom boats) of England in the thriller The Riddle of the Sands, based on what he learned in 1897 when he sailed near the German Frisian Islands and in the Baltic; in the Irish Civil War supported the republican IRA; 1922 arrested by Irish Free State troops, imprisoned and later executed |
| Chlumberg, Hans von | Austrian | at the age of 17 at the outbreak the war went into action as a lieutenant of cavalry on the Italian front; took part in the Battle of the Isonzo; shocked by the scenes of carnage he witnessed and impressed by the madness and futility of it all | writer and playwright; his 1930 play The Miracle of Verdun made a profound impression in Europe but failed in the USA (in this play French and German soldiers arise from a mass grave but their return to the world makes such a great disturbance that they go back to their graves) |
| Churchill, Winston | English | First Lord of the Admiralty; 1915 blamed for the failure at the Dardanelles Campaign; officer in Belgium and France; 1917 Minister of Munitions | conservative politician; after rise of Hitler leading advocate of British rearmament; Prime minister in WW 2; writer (e.g. The World Crisis and The Second World War); 1953 Nobelprize Literature |
| Clark, Mark | American | 1918 seriously wounded by shrapnel while leading his company of the 11th Regiment 5th Division | in WW 2 US Army's youngest (46) ever three-star general; 1943 led amphibious landings on Italy |
| Cavell, Edith | English | director of nursing at Berkendael Medical Institute, in Brussels, Belgium; became part of an underground resistance network to help wounded Belgian soldiers to escape to Holland; also protected hospitalized men by keeping them longer than needed or sheltering them in the hospital's attic and cellar; she helped approximately 200 men escape the Germans; 1915 arrested and executed (still in her nurse's uniform), together with four Belgians, by the Germans | after the war her body was brought home to Norwich, England, where it was buried besides the cathedral; in Brussels the Edith Cavell-Marcel De Page Institute is named in her honor; in Londen a statue was erected near Trafalgar Square and in Canada a mountain in the High Sierra is named after her; there were books written and films made about her (e.g. Dawn, starring Sybil Thorndike); words she spoke to her last visitor, Stirling Gahan (English chaplain in Brussels), became famous: "I know now that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred and no bitterness towards anyone" |
| Cochin, Denys M. P. A. | French | chemist; developed French poison gas; 1915 minister of state; 1916 responsible for the blockade of Germany | scientist; writer (e.g. 1914-1922: La Guerre le blocus l'union sacrée) |
| Cocteau, Jean | French | ambulance driver on the Belgian front; 1917 published Parade (poetry for a ballet); 1918 published poem Aladdin's Lamp | novels (e.g. Thomas the Impostor and Les Enfants Terribles); 1930 hospitalized for opium poison, and depicted his addiction in book Opium; playwright and moviemaker (e.g. The Infernal Machine and Beauty and the Beast); painter (frescos in the town hall of Menton) |
| Coleman, Ronald | English, later American | served with the London Scottish Regiment; took part in first Battle of Ypres; 1915 invalided out after being wounded (shrapnel in his legs) during the battle of Messines Ridge; 1917 made his first movie: the two-reel comedy The Live Wire | film star in more than 20 movies, personification of the gentleman hero (e.g. in A Tale of Two Cities and Prisoner of Zenda) |
| Cooper, Meriam | American | fighter pilot and observer in France | film producer and director (e.g. King Kong); in WW 2 brigadier general and chief of staff |
| Crowley, Aleister | Scottish | 1915 to 1919 lived in the United States, where he published anti-British propaganda | occult figure, using blood and sex in rituals to obtain energy and achieve mystical insight; wrote many novels (e.g. 1918 The Saviour, 1922 The Diary of a Drug Friend) and books on occultism (e.g. 1913 The Book of Lies and 1929 Magick in Theory and Practice) |
| Curie, Marie | Polish, later French | as a medical doctor equipped and operated cars (known in the war zone as "little Curies") with her private x-ray (Röntgen) apparatus near front line; took 1,1 million films | better known as Madame Curie; science of radio-activity; two Nobel Prizes; books (e.g. La Radiologie et la guerre ) |
| Cushing, Harvey | American | medical doctor on the front | neurosurgery; writing (e.g. his memoirs and a biography of Osler) |
| Darlan, Jean-François | French | navy officer; commanded a battery of naval guns | strong anti-British feelings; in WW 2 joined French (pro-German) Vichy government as vice prime minister; 1942 commander in chief of the collaborating French armed forces; 1942 assassinated in Algiers |
| Delano, Jane A. | American | as chairman of the Red Cross committee on nursing service, saw to the mobilization of 20,000 nurses; 1918 director of the wartime Department of Nursing, which supplied nurses to the army, navy and Red Cross | insisted on the use of mosquito netting to prevent yellow fever at a time when the mosquito was not known to be a carrier of this disease; † 1919 after he fell ill of influenza on an European inspection tour |
| Dempsey, Jack | American | accused of dodging the draft | first boxer to win $ 1 million dollar in a fight (1921 against French war hero Georges Carpentier); champion World Heavyweight |
| Destouches, Louis-Ferdinand | French | cavalry conscript when the war broke out; fought in France and Belgium; seriously wounded; 1915 invalided out with everlasting headaches | novelist under pseudonym Louis-Ferdinand Céline (e.g. Voyage au bout de la nuit); became pacifist; 1939 tried to enlist again (turned down) |
| Disney, Walt | American | enlisted 16 years old (pretended to be 17) as ambulance driver; armistice came before he finished training in transit camp Sound Beach (Connecticut); went to France because there still was a need for drivers; in base Neufchateau earned a reputation by painting fake-medals on leather jackets and camouflage on German helmets, thus making them look like sharpshooter outfits, much sought after souvenirs | 1n 1919 back to the USA; became film pioneer: writer and animated movie maker; in WW 2 maker of anti-German propaganda movies |
| Dix, Otto | German | volunteered for the German Army, assigned to a field artillery regiment in Dresden; 1915 assigned as a non-commissioned officer of a machine-gun unit in the Battle of Somme; wounded several times; 1917 transferred to the Eastern front until the end of hostilities with Soviet Russia; transferred back to the western front, fought in the German Spring Offensive; earned Iron Cross and reached the rank of vice-sergeant-major | painter; his anti-war paintings (e.g. triptychon Der Krieg) aroused some ire; later Nazis declared him one of the "degenerate artists" |
| Dönitz, Karl | German | naval officer; 1916 he started U-boat career; 1918 first command (UC-25); lost his last boat UB-68 and 6 crew members on 4 October, 1918 after some problems during a dive with an unstabilized boat; next 9 months spent in British captivity | 1936 supervised construction and named commander of new U-boat fleet; in WW 2 conducted Battle of the Atlantic; 1943 commander of German navy; 1945 named by Hitler his successor as head of state; May 1945 executed surrender to Allies; 1946 tried as war criminal and imprisoned until 1956; wrote memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days |
| Doyle, Conan | Scottish | rejected for military service because of age (54); war journalist | historian (wrote e.g. The British Campaign in France and Flanders); short stories (e.g. Danger! Being the Log of Captain John Sirius); novels (e.g. Sherlock Holmes series and The Lost World) |
| Duchamp, Marcel | French, later American | painter; 1915 moved to New York where he became a leading figure in Dada, an art movement born out of despair (dadaists felt that reason and logic had led to the disaster of the war, and that the only way to salvation was through anarchy) | later became surrealist; experimented in film; spent much of life working in secret on various projects; largely avoided exhibiting works; rediscovered (c. 1960), after years of retirement, as prophet of post-modern art; most outrageous work was an urinal that he submitted as a sculpture to a 1917 New York exhibition (he turned it upside down, signed it "R.Mutt" and called it a fountain - the work was rejected); devoted chess player and writer about chess |
| Earhart, Amelia | American | nurse in a Red Cross Hospital, France | 1928 first woman to fly across the Atlantic: she was a passenger but was given the title Flight Commander (the plane was flown by William Stultz and Louis Gordon); in 1932 she flew solo across the Atlantic |
| Eastman, Monk | American | 1917 released from Sing Sing prison, 44 years old, and enlisted in 106th Infantry Regt, 27th Inf. Div. under the name of William Delaney; served as model soldier, bringing in wounded under fire on many occations and even refusing to stand down from the front lines when his unit was relieved; some stories tell of him wiping out German machinegun nests alone | well-known gang leader in the years around the turn of the century in New York City; discharged from the army in 1919 received as a hero in New York City; after that got back into the rackets; 1920 shot to death by a corrupt prohibition agent |
| Eden, Anthony | English | infantry officer in France; served at the Somme | British Prime Minister 1955-1957 |
| Einstein, Albert | Swiss | anti-war; chair University of Berlin; 1916 published his general theory of relativity | Nobel Prize in Physics 1921 |
| Eisenhower, Dwight | American | 1915 graduated West Point; served with the Infantry September 1915 to February 1918 in USA; served with the Tank Corps from February 1918 to January 1922 in USA; fast career without going to the war: 1916 promoted First Lieutenant, 1917 Captain, 1918 Major (temporary) in June and Lieutenant Colonel (temporary) in October | 1919 Tank Corps observer in the First Transcontinental Motor Convoy; 1927-1929 assigned to American Battle Monuments Commission (directed by General John J. Pershing), writing a guidebook to WW 1 battlefields and in charge of guidebook revisions; in WW 2 Supreme Commander at the invasion in Normandy, France; President USA 1953-1961 |
| Eisner, Kurt | German | anti-war leftish politician | 1918 prime minister Socialist Republic of Bavaria; 1919 assassinated |
| Ernst, Max | German | 1914 conscripted to the army, where he served in the field artillery till the end of the war, never dropping his interest in art; 1916 took part in the "Sturm" exhibition in Berlin | after demobilization settled in Cologne, where he founded a group of Dadaists; their exhibition of 1920 at the Winter Brewery in Cologne was closed by the police on the grounds of obscenity (e.g. Fruit of a Long Experience); 1922 moved to Paris; 1940 arrested by the Gestapo, managed to escape and flee to America with the help of Peggy Guggenheim, a sponsor of the arts; 1953 returned to Europe and settled in France |
| Europe, James Reese | American | officer in France | black bandleader (e.g. 'Hell Fighters' Band); jazz & ragtime composer |
| Falkner (Faulkner), William | American | tried to join US Army Air Force, but turned down because of his height; then lied his way into RAF Canada; war ended before he finished training | bought an officer’s uniform and lied of his adventures in the RAF, including injuries that left him in constant pain and with a silver plate in his head; wrote novels (e.g. Soldier's Pay and The Sound and the Fury); poems (e.g. l’Apres-Midi d’un Faune); (screen)playwright (e.g. The Road to Glory) |
| Ferrari, Enzio | Italian | served with Italian Mountain Artillery corps in Trentino as a soldier shoeing mules; consigned to an hospital for incurable patients | after the war champion race driver; auto designer; adapted the Cavallino Rampante, the 'prancing horse' emblem from the famous Italian ace Francesco Baracca as a frieze for his Ferrari cars |
| Fleming, Alexander | Scottish | served in the Royal Army Medical Corps as medical doctor and researcher; worked in a Wound Research Centre to find a remedy to the real cause of most war fatalities (not the actual gunshot or shrapnel wound but its ensuing infection) | 1928 discovered Penicillin to kill bacteria (but could not do anything with it because he couldn't develop a strain of it that was reproducible; finally the Germans did it in WW 2); 1945 Nobelprize medicine |
| Fokker, Anthony | Dutch, later American | airplane builder; 1914 offered his services to both sides: England declined, Germany accepted whereafter he built more than 40 types of superior fighter planes for them; Germans also took him to a shot down plane that was flown by the Frenchman Roland Garros who had invented deflector blades to allow a machine gun to fire through the aircraft's propellers; Fokker then developed interrupter gear which gave German pilots a significant advantage over their Allied enemies | after the war took hundreds of unfinished German Fokker planes with him to Holland, where he established an large aircraft company; 1922 moved to America and founded Fokker Aircraft Corporation of America; developed and sold many commercial airplanes; company went bankrupt in the 1990s; wrote autobiography The Flying Dutchman |
| Ford, Henry | American | pacifist; 1916 sailed with the Ford Peace Ship to Europe; peace mission widely ridiculed and failed; 1918 bought newspaper The Dearborn Independent and published in it a series of scurrilous attacks on the 'International Jew', a mythical figure he blamed for financing the war | founder Ford Motor Company; 1913 introduces assembly line, i.c. first mass production; dictum that 'history is more or less bunk' was widely publicized; 1919 began million-dollar libel suit against the Chicago Tribune who had called him an 'ignorant idealist' because of his opposition to US involvement in the war (jury awarded Ford only six cents); 1927 formally retracted his attacks on Jews |
| Forester, Cecil Scott | English | 1915 tried to enlist in the army, but failed the physical | novelist, many historical novels (e.g. The African Queen and the Horatio Hornblower saga) |
| Forster, Edward M. | English | spent three years as Red Cross worker in Alexandria, Egypt | novels (e.g. A Passage to India) |
| Frank, Bruno | German | according to the Oxford Companion to German Literature he fought in the 1914-1918 war (no further information is given) | 1937 fled Nazi Germany to the USA; became prominent among the German exile community in Los Angeles; novelist (e.g. Cervantes and Der Reisepass); worked also in the film industry (made contributions to The Hunchback of the Notre Dame and Madam Curie) |
| Frank, Hans | German | 1917 joined German army; fought on the Western Front | 1921 joined Nazi party; 1933 minister of justice; 1939 governor-general in German-occupied Poland; ordered execution of hundreds of thousands of Poles and put most of Poland's Jews into ghettos; 1946 found guilty of war crimes and hanged; wrote memoirs (In the shadow of the gallows) |
| Frank, Leonhard | German | opposed war and fled to Switzerland; 1917 denounced war in Der Mensch ist gut | novelist, author of expressionist novels dealing with the destruction of the individual spirit by bourgeois society (e.g. Die Räuberbande ); 1933 again fled to Switzerland from Nazis; lived in Paris, escaped to USA; 1950 returned to Germany |
| Frank, Otto | German | August 1915 enlisted in the army as gunner; 1916 fought at the Somme; 1917 showed extraordinary courage during patrols, nominated for officer; transferred to front at Cambrai and later at Saint-Quentin; June 1918 promoted infantry officer | father of Anne Frank; 1933 fled from Nazis with his family to Amsterdam, in the Netherlands; publisher and defender of Anne Frank's Diary |
| Fraser, Helen | English | Red Cross nurse; commander of the Women's Royal Air Force | suffragette; scientist (botany); in WW 2 major-general of the Auxiliary Territorial Services (ATS) |
| Fried, Alfred | Austrian | pacifist; founder of German Peace Society | 1911 Nobel Peace Prize; publisher of pacifist periodicals |
| Friedrich, Ernst | German | refused military service, put in a mental institution; 1916 participated in illegal assemblies of anti-militarist and revolutionary youth; 1917 imprisoned for acts of sabotage | 1924 published Krieg dem Kriege (War against War) in many languages: book with pictures of the horrors of war juxtaposed with evocative and ironic captions; 1981 Friedrich's Anti-War Museum revived in Berlin |
| Fuller, Buckminster | American | 1915-17 apprentice at Armour & Company, New York City; 1917-19 Ensign, later Lieutenant in the United States Navy | inventor (e.g. the geodesic dome–the lightest, strongest, and most cost-effective structure ever devised); writer (e.g. 1928 4D Timelock, and 1938 Nine Chains to the Moon); professor at several universities; originated the term Spaceship Earth |
| Gamelin, Maurice-Gustave | French | staff officer; devised Marne counter offensive; brilliant tactician; 1916 youngest division commander (34) of France | 1931 chief of French general staff; 1938 chief of staff of national defense; relied on Maginot defence line which proved outdated in 1940; arrested by the pro-German Vichy government; imprisoned in Germany until 1945 |
| Garros, Roland | French | fighter pilot; invented a way of firing a machine-gun through the propeller; April 1915 shot down and crashed in German occupied France (after which Anthony Fokker inspected his deflector blades and developed superior interrupter gear for the Germans); February 1918 escaped from German POW-camp; † October 1918 when shot down above Vouziers | first Frenchman to cross the Mediterranean by air; famous French tennis-court is named after him |
| Gaulle, Charles de | French | 1913 as a young second lieutenant joined infantry regiment commanded by Pétain; fought in Verdun; three times wounded and three times mentioned in dispatches; 1916 captured by Germans; spent 2 years and 8 months as prisoner of war (made five unsuccessful attempts to escape) | 1934 wrote The Army of the Future; brigadier general in WW 2; President of France 1958-1969 |
| Geiger, Johannes Hans Wilhelm | German | left his research at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt to serve on the Western Front | physicist; 1928 developed first successful counter (known as Geiger counter) of individual alpha rays |
| Ghandi, Mohandas K. | Indian | toured Indian villages urging peasants to join the British army | Indian nationalist; peaceful resistance; his hope that Great Britain would consent in Indian independence after so many Indians gave their life in the Great War proved futile |
| Giraud, Henri | French | professional officer in the French army; 1914 captured in the battle of Guise in August, but escaped two months later | in WW 2 commander of the 7th Army; 1940 captured at Wassigny and imprisoned in Koenigstein Castle near Dresden, but escaped two years later, with the help of Allied secret services; co-president (with De Gaulle) of the French Committee of National Liberation (NCNL); published Mes Evasions and Algeria 1942-1944 |
| Goebbels, Joseph | German | rejected for military service because of a crippled foot (result of polio) | Nazi since 1922; master propagandist of the Nazi regime |
| Goering, Hermann | German | fighter pilot; 14 July 1918 commander of the Jagdgeschwader Nr I (the Richthofen squadron); after the Armistice, as to denying the planes to the Allies, flew them to Darmstadt and demobilised his men on the premises of a paper factory at Aschaffenburg; at the farewell party said: "Our time will come again!" | 1919 pilot in Sweden (civil); 1922 met Hitler in München and became Nazi; wounded at the November 1923 putsch ; 1928 Nazi partyleader in the parliament; 1933 prime-minister Prussia; in WW II Commander-in-Chief Luftwaffe (German airforce); 1946 put on trial for warcrimes, sentenced to death, committed suicide two hours before execution |
| Graves, Robert | English | 1914 infantry officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers (served alongside Siegfried Sassoon), fought in France; severely wounded on the Somme and listed by mistake as dead; 1916 published his first volume of poems Over the brazier | poetry; non-fiction (e.g. Lawrence and the Arabs and The Greek Myths); novels (e.g. his war- |
| Green, Julian | American, later French | volunteered 16 years old; served with Red Cross in Italy | writer (e.g. The Other Sleep and Adrienne Mesurat); first foreign member of the Academie Française |
| Groener, Wilhelm | German | general; economist; head of the Army Food Supply Office; commander I Corps | minister of Transport 1920-1923; Defense Minister (Reichswehrminister) 1928-1932; Interior Minister 1931-32; wrote memoirs (Lebens-Erinnerungen: Jugend, Generalstab, Weltkrieg) |
| Grosz, George | German | soldier; protested the German wartime propaganda campaign (with drawings e.g. Fit for Duty); tried to commit suicide, court-martialed for insubordination, sentenced to death, but then diagnosed as suffering from shell-shock and discharged from the Army | paintings (e.g. Explosion, The Blood is the Best Sauce); fled from Nazis to USA (returned to Germany in 1959, saying "My American dream turned out to be a soap bubble") |
| Guardia, Fiorello La | American | fighter pilot in Italy | Member of Congress; mayor of New York |
| Gurney, Ivor | English | 1914 volunteered for the Gloucester regiment but turned down because of defective eyesight; 1915 because of men-shortage allowed to join; fought at the Somme; 1917 near Passchendale shot in an arm, later endured gas-attack; probably shell shock; first poetry book (Severn and Somme) published while in hospital | several suicide attempts; 1922 declared insane and put away in a mental hospital in London; poet (e.g. War Embers); composer (for piano and songs) |
| Gustloff, Wilhelm | German | soldier; contracted tuberculosis and was sent to a German-owned sanitarium in Davos, Switzerland | early follower of Hitler; 1933 head of the German Nazi party in Switzerland; 1936 ambushed in his home and shot to death by David Frankfurter, a 17 years old Jewish student; the Nazi ship named after Gustloff was torpedoed in 1945 by a Soviet submarine - between 7,000 and 9,000 people drowned |
| Gutenberg, Beno | German, later American | infantry; wounded in the head; as meteorologist attached to the chemical (gas) warfare units | seismologist; studied earthquakes as head Seismological Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology |
| Haber, Fritz | German | inventor of chlorine- and mustard gas; developed processes for large scale production of nitrogen for munitions | 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; 1933 being a Jew fled Germany to England, later to Switzerland |
| Hahn, Albert | Dutch | cartoonist; made ± 4,000 political cartoons, most of them for the Dutch socialist weekly De Notenkraker; strongly anti-war and anti-German; † August 1918 of tuberculosis | after the war many collections of his work appeared; together with Louis Raemakers the most renowned Dutch anti-war cartoonists ever, their drawings went all over the world |
| Hahn, Otto | German | as special chemical-warfare officer organized the use of chlorine gas and mustard gas against British and French troops | nuclear researcher; in WW 2 made no attempt to turn his knowledge nuclear physics into a military weapon due to his dislike of Hitler and fascism; 1945 president of the German Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science |
| Hamilton, Alice | American | pacifist; anti-war; founder of Women's Peace Party | feminism; 1919 first female professor at Harvard Medical School |
| Hammett, Daniel | American | served a sergeant in an ambulance corps; contracted the Spanish influenza and tuberculosis; spent the rest of the war in hospital (and for much of his life suffered from ill health) | before and shortly after the war worked with Pinkerton Detective Agency; after the war became writer (mostly detective books e.g. The Maltese Falcon) and playwright (e.g. Watch on Rhine); 1930 he became politically active, fierce opponent of Nazism and joined Communist Party; in WW 2 served three years in the US Army, editing an army newspaper in the Aleutian Islands; 1948 chairman of the Civil Rights Congress, attacked during McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade; 1951 went to prison for five months rather than testify at the trial of four communists accused of conspiracy |
| Hauptmann, Bruno Richard | German, later American | served as machinegunner in the German army | convicted in the kidnap and murder case of the baby son of aviator Charles Lindbergh; he denied any involvement even when offered a reprieve from the death penalty for a guilty plea |
| Hedin, Sven | Swedish | pro-German; 1915 published With the German Armies in the West, a reportage from the Western Front, with rebuttal of Allied claims of German atrocities and maltreatment of prisoners; 1915 published Nach Osten! reportage from the Eastern Front | explorer and publicist; travelled Asia; in WW 2 again pro-German, befriended to high-ranking nazi's, Hitler, Goering, Hess and others; in his publicaties indicted Roosevelt as the one responsible for the War; wrote memoirs My Life as an Explorer |
| Heinkel, Ernst | German | designed Albatros B II airplane for reconnaissance; also developed sea airplanes | 1922 established Heinkel-Flugzeugwerke company at Warnemunde (his airplanes formed a vital part of the Luffwaffe in WW 2); critic of Hitler's regime; 1942 German government took control of his factories |
| Hemingway, Ernest | American | 1918 ambulance driver in Italy; wounded in both legs at the Piave River (on the Austro-Italian front); while hospitalized in Milan fell in love with an (Austrian) Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who turned down his proposal for marriage; awarded Italian Silver Medal for Valour; 1919 invalided back to USA | novels (e.g. A Farewell to Arms); short stories (e.g. A Natural History of the Dead); 1954 Nobel Prize Literature |
| Hasek, Jaroslav | Czech | volunteer Austrian army; surrendered to Russians; joined Czech Legion; 1918 joined Bolsheviks, who made him political commissar in 5th Army | humorist; journalist; satirical novelist (e.g. The Good Soldier Schweik) |
| Hess, Rudolf | German | army shock troop leader; wounded at Verdun and later three times in Romania and Hungary; after long convalescence became lieutenant Luftwaffe (air force); October 1918 completed flying school training, then flew in aerial combat without either hitting or being hit by the enemy, 1 November posted to Jagdstaffel (Fighter Squadron) 35 on the Valenciennes sector of the front and took part in the last air battles of the war | 1920 joined Hitler's Nazi-party; deputy leader of Germany 1933-1941; May 1941 made solo airplane flight to Scotland claiming to be on a peace mission (on landing immediately taken as a prisoner of war by the British); 1946 convicted as a major war criminal and sentenced to life imprisonment at Spandau Prison, West Berlin |
| Himmler, Heinrich | German | joined army at the age of 17; officier cadet of 11th Bavarian Infantry | Nazi; Reichsführer-SS; head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS; Minister of the Interior 1943-1945 |
| Hindenburg, Paul von | German | commander-in-chief | German president 1925-1934; 1933 appointed Adolf Hitler as German Chancellor |
| Hirst, Francis W. | English | editor of The Economist, forced to resign in 1916. In his last article he wrote: "Since the war began, the function of an editor who believes that truth and patriotism ought to be reconciled has been difficult and even hazardous" | apostle of civil liberty and personal freedom; writer (e.g. The Political Economy of War and The Consequences of the War to Great Britain) |
| Hitler, Adolf | Austrian | message orderly, corporal; wounded at the Somme; gassed near Ypres; heavily decorated (two Iron Crosses) for bravery | founded fascist Nazi party; wrote Mein Kampf; German dictator 1933-1945; committed suicide 1945 |
| Holst, Gustav | English | medical unfit for military duty; musical organizer with troops in Near East | musician; composer (e.g. The Planets) |
| Hoover, Herbert | American | food administrator: feeded the Doughboys and America; 1914-1917 head of the Commission for Relief in Belgium | humanitarian; invented 'wheatless' and 'meatless' days; feeded Europe after the war; wrote The Tragedy of Woodrow Wilson; President USA 1929-1933 |
| Horton, Max | English | commander British submarine E.9 of 800 tons, one of the first ocean going submarines; destroyed several German submarines and surface vessels | in WW 2 admiral and highly succesful commander-in-chief of British anti U-boot operations, working from secret naval headquarters in Liverpool |
| Howard Steiner, Leslie | English | March 1915 enlisted in the cavalry; 1916 married Ruth Evelyn Martin before departing for France. Fought at the Somme. 1917 sent home with shellshock; 1918 mustered out of the army for medical reasons | stage- and movie actor (e.g. in Petrified Forest and in the anti-nazi film Spitfire); 1938 Oscar for his portrayal of Henry Higgins in Pygmalion; 1943 the plane he was traveling in was shot down by a German plane (the Nazis mistook the aircraft for Winston Churchill's plane) |
| Hubble, Edwin | American | infantry and artillery commander in France | astronomer (proved expanding universe theory); the Hubble Space Telescope is named after him |
| Hussein, Abdullah ibn | Palestinian | Arabic leader | 1946 first king of Jordan; 1951 assassinated |
| Ibert, Jacques | French | nurse and stretcher bearer at the front; later naval officer | musical composer (e.g. Les Six, and Escales); 1919 Prix de Rome |
| Jacobs, Aletta | Dutch | physician; suffragist; 1915 organised International Peace Congress of Women | founder of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom; wrote autobiography My Life as an International leader in Health, Suffrage and Peace |
| Jakobs, Josef | Luxembourger, German | served in the 4th Foot Guards from August 1914 to December 1914, when he was discharged for medical reasons; then served from October 1916 until the end of the war as a Lieutenant in the 4th Foot Guards | in WW II officer in the Intelligence Section of the German General Staff; on 31 January 1941 parachuted at Ramsay in Huntingdonshire and broke his right ankle; arrested as spy but stated he was a friend of England, and that he had come to help in the fight against Germany; sentenced to death and, as the last person to be executed in the Tower of London, shot there by a firing squad composed of soldiers from the Scots Guards on 15 August 1941 |
| Jane, Fred T. | English | Naval expert; 1915 predicted in The War Illustrated, "that this war must go on for years and years. At any time there may be a temporary truce, but any real abiding peace seems absolutely impossible until German military domination is completely victorious or completely destroyed. There is no middle course"; † 1916 | publicist; 1898 published Jane's All the World's Fighting Ships (later shortened to Jane's Fighting Ships); many of his works fell in the realm of science fiction, foreshadowing aircraft, television and laser holograms, his The Violet Flame featured a nuclear weapon |
| Jaurés, Jean | French | as socialist leader argued for peaceful negotiations; on 31st July 1914 assassinated by a young French nationalist who wanted to go to war with Germany | historian and writer (e.g. The Franco-German War and The New Army); at the Second International he opposed armed insurrection, advocated policy of "peace through arbitration" |
| Jung, Carl G. | Swiss | suffered from 'creative sickness'; 1918 commander Châteus-d'Oexis internment camp | founder of analytic psychology |
| Jung, Carl G. | Swiss | suffered from 'creative sickness'; 1918 commander Châteus-d'Oexis internment camp | founder of analytic psychology |
| Johns, William Earl | British | served in France first as a machine-gunner and from 1918 as a fighter pilot with the Royal Flying Corps; shot down over Mannheim, he was captured, escaped, caught again and given a death sentence; only the sudden end of the war saved his life | remained with the Royal Air Force until 1931 as a flight instructor and later as a recruiting officer; his final rank was Flying Officer; when he became a successful author he promoted himself to Captain; wrote a very succesfull series of 98 books with air adventures of the imaginary Captain James "Biggles" Bigglesworth |
| Junkers, Hugo | German | 1915 designed the world's first all-metal fighter plane, the Junkers D-I; | 1919 established his own company: Lufthansa; later his aircraft factories produced civil and military planes, also used in WW 2 |
| Keaton, Buster | American | corporal in France (40th Division); unit was held in reserve, he never actually saw any action, but caught an ear infection that almost cost him his life; performed 'snake dances' with the regimental band | movie star (comical) for 50 years (e.g. in The General, directed and starred by himself); |
| Keitel, Wilhelm | German | officer and commander in Flanders; wounded | Nazi; field marshall; advisor of Hitler; ordered mass murders in Poland; 1945 convicted as war criminal and hanged |
| Kekkonen, Urho | Finnish | war correspondent; took part in fighting in Eastern Finland; commander of an execution patrol squad | president Finland 1956-1981 |
| Kemal, Mustafa | Turkish | commander Turkish army; became national hero during the defense of the Dardanelles: stopped allied landing, then with a series of smart programmed offensives succeeded in rejecting the allies definitely; prevented rout of Turkish army on retreat from Syria | was born in 1881 in Salonicco (currently in Greece, but at that time belonged to the Ottoman Empire); after the war became Atatürk (father of all Turks); first president of Turkey; abandoned the Moslem habit to have more wives (but was not faithful to his own); after his death in 1938 became object of a cult of the personality |
| Kertész, André | Hungarian | soldier; took his camera with him and photographed his fellow soldiers, the countryside and people | 1925 left Stock Exchange and left for Paris; became a well-known photographer, finding work for the new illustrated magazines; among photographers who were aided or influenced by him at this time were fellow Hungarian Brassai and the young Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson |
| Kesselring, Albert | German | balloon observer at the front; close friendship with pilot Hermann Goering | in WW 2 commander German 1st Air Fleet; ordered mass bombings on cities; 1947 convicted as war criminal; 1952 released for health reasons; 1953 published his autobiography A Soldier to the Last Day |
| Kerensky, Alexander F. | Russian | revolutionary socialist; minister of Justice | 1917 Russian Prime Minister; 1917 in turmoil fled Russia |
| Keynes, John M. | English | pacifist; took part in the Versailles negotiations | economics; books (e.g. A General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money) |
| Kipling, Rudyard | English | succesful writer and poet; first pro-, later (after his son went missing in action in France) firm anti-war | epitaphs, short stories (e.g. The Gardener); novels (e.g. The Junglebook); 1907 Nobel Prize Literature |
| Kirchner, Ernst L. | German | war-volunteer; nervous brakedown; recovered in Switzerland | paintings (e.g. Self Portrait as a Soldier); 1938 suicide after rise Nazis |
| Klee, Paul | German | soldier (not at the front) | paintings (Nazis found him a 'degenerated painter'); books (e.g. Diaries: 1898-1918) |
| Kokoschka, Oskar | Austrian | served in German cavalry; wounded | expressionist paintings |
| Kollontay, Aleksandra M. | Russian | daughter of general but became revolutionary; 1916 campaigned in USA against possible American participation in the war; 1917 commissar for public welfare in the Bolshevik government | advocate of free love; first woman to serve as accredited minister to foreign countries (Norway, Mexico, Sweden); ambassador; wrote Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai |
| Korzybski, Alfred | Polish, then Russian, then American | intelligence officer in the Russian army | after the October Revolution moved to USA; founder of general semantics |
| Kostrowitzky, Wilhelm de | Polish, later French | avant-garde poet, better known as Guillaume Apollinaire; soldier in the French army; 1916 wounded in the head by a piece of shrapnel near the Chemin des Dames; † of influenza on November 9, 1918, in Paris | Calligrammes, a collection of war poetry, was published a few months after his death; another book he was working on, Les oiseaux chantent avec les doigts, to be illustrated by Pabo Picasso, was not finished and never published |
| Kreisler, Fritz | German | officer in the German army; 1914 wounded | composer and violonist; wrote memoir Four weeks in the trenches |
| Krupp, Bertha | German | owner of world's largest manufacturer of munitions (since 1902 when her father committed suicide after charges of homo- |
1906 married Prussian diplomat Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach, who changed his name to Krupp and took over the family firm; later both supported Adolf Hitler and financed the Nazis |
| Kun, Béla | Hungarian | war volunteer; 1916 captured by Russians; 1917 joined, together with other socialist officer-POW's, Russian Communist Party | 1918 leader Hungarian communists; organizer revolution; leader of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic; 1920 fled to Russia, member Komintern; 1937 liquidated (probably on Stalin's orders); 1956 posthume rehabilitation in Soviet-Union |
| Lafontaine, Henri-Marie | Belgian | international lawyer; president of the International Peace Bureau; 1914 with his wife fled to London and then to the USA, where he was able to put all his internationalist ideas into one large work: The Great Solution. Magnissima Charta. Essay on Evolutionary and Constructive Pacifism (1915) | 1913 Nobel Peace Prize; founder of the Centre Intellectuel Mondial (later merged into the League of Nations Institute for Intellectual Co-operation); member of the Belgian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and in 1920 to the League of Nations Assembly; proposed a world school and university, a world parliament and an international court of justice |
| Lang, Fritz | Austrian, later American | 1915 enlisted and served as artillery officer; wounded at least three times | 1919 working in Berlin as a film director, made Metropolis; 1933 fled from Nazis to Hollywood and made more movies (e.g. Fury, Ministry of Fear, Rancho Notorious and The Big Heat) |
| Lartigue, Jacques-Henri | French | soldier; lost his youthful passion for photography and devoted himself to painting | painter and photographer; published photobook Diary of a Century |
| Laughton, Charles | English | joined the army in 1917 at age 18; in March 1918 went to the front in France with the 7th Bn. Northamptonshire Regiment (later he wrote: "One experience, which I would rather not talk about, took away my sleep intermittently for two years afterwards, though looking back I admit the War probably had a toughening effect on me"); was gassed shortly before the armistice | left the army in February 1919; became an actor, the characteristic husky voice for which he was known on stage was a direct result of his being gassed; ten years after his demobilization wore the uniform again playing Harry Heegan in Sean O'Casey's world premiere of his war play The Silver Tassie; became famous for his roles in e.g. The Private Life of Henry VIII, Mutiny on the Bounty and Witness for the prosecution |
| Laurie, John | Scottish | soldier in France; wounded, invalided out | actor, tv star (Private Frazer in Dad's Army) |
| Lawrence, D.E. | English | strongly opposed to the war; 1914 married Frieda von Richthofen, cousin of the German ace Manfred von Richthof (the Red Baron); while living in rural Cornwall attracted hostility and suspected of signalling to German submarines; both were expelled from Cornwall in 1917 and spend the rest of the war in London and Derbyshire | went to Italy in 1919 and never again lived in England; became celebrated novelist (e.g. Lady Chatterley's Lover and Sons and Lovers); while in Australia wrote Kangeroo about their experiences in Cornwall, which was later made into a movie |
| Lawrence, Thomas E. | English | intelligence officer in the Near-East; devoted to Arabic nationalism; encouraged Hashemite revolt against the Ottoman Empire | Arabist (nicknamed Lawrence of Arabia); books (e.g. Seven Pillars of Wisdom) |
| Leger, Ferdnand | French | artist | designer; paintings (e.g. Sur la route de Fleury, deux morts, 24 octobre 1916); movie maker (e.g. Ballet Mecanique 1924) |
| Lemaître, George | Belgian | artillery officer; received Croix de Guerre | after the war became priest and astronomer who first articulated the Big Bang theory of cosmology |
| Lenin, Vladimir I. | Russian | in exile in Switzerland; 1917 permitted by Germany (hoped that he would foment further instability in Russia) to travel in a sealed car to Russia; 1917 leads October Revolution | Bolsjevik leader of Russia 1917-1922 |
| Lettow-Vorbeck, Paul von | German | colonel in German East Africa (present day Tanzania), commanding 14,000 men, mostly well-trained Askari; kept on defeating British troops until the end of the war | 1922 took part in the failed German Kapp-Putsch to establish a military dictatorship; conservative deputy in parliament; opposed Hitler; wrote My Reminiscences of East Africa |
| Lewis, C.S. | English | officer in France; wounded in Battle of Arras | poetry; short stories (e.g. Death in Battle); novels (e.g. Space Trilogy), and youth novels (e.g Chronicles of Narnia); befriended to J.R.R. Tolkien |
| Lewis, Percy Wyndham | English | Official War Artist, posted on the Western Front, where he made his best known painting: A Battery Shelled | as painter founder of vorticism: a combination of cubism and futurism; member of the British Fascist Party; writer (1931: Hitler, and 1939: The Hitler Cult); spent WW 2 in USA and Canada |
| Ley, Robert | German | war volonteer, fighter pilot on the Westfront; 1917 shot down over France, spent over two years as a prisoner of war | after the war chemist but sacked because of his drink problem; 1925 joined nazi party; 1933 head of Labor Front, ruthlessly enforced obedience in labor ranks; 1945 committed suicide awaiting trial as war criminal |
| Liebknecht, Karl | German | socialist; member Reichstag; anti-war; imprisoned | founder of political leftish Spartacus League; 1919 arrested and executed without trial |
| Lindemann, Frederick | German, later English | director Experimental Physics Station of Royal Air Force at Farnborough; developed mathematical theory of aircraft spin and brought this into practice in air combat | leading scientific adviser for British government in WW 2; advocated the policy of area bombing of civilian populations; nuclear researcher |
| Llewellyn, Karl N. | American | studied law in USA, Germany (3 years) and France; in 1914 entered Sorbonne university in Paris; when the war broke out joined German army and fought with a Prussian unit on the western front, earning an Iron Cross; wounded in battle in November 1914, spent 3 months in a military hospital; 1915 returned to the USA and studied at Yale; in 1917, when USA entered the war, applied to enter US Army but was rejected as "morally unfit" | became prominent American jurisprudential scholar associated with the school of legal realism (putting more emphasis on the facts of a specific case than on general legal rules); also wrote a book on anthropology: The Cheyenne Way (1941); was active in the Legal Aid Society, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People |
| Lofting, Hugh | English | 1915 worked in New York for the British Ministry of Information; 1916 Lieutenant in the Irish Guards; 1918 invalided out after being hit in France by a German handgrenade | writer (e.g. The Story of Doctor Dolittle: Being the History of His Peculiar Life at Home and Astonishing Adventures in Foreign Parts. Never Before Published, and many other Doctor Dolittle books) |
| Loraine, Robert | English | served all four years of the war as fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force; wounded several times: 1915 lost one lung, 1918 lost kneecap; active in a dramatic group of his squadron | 1910 pilot on the first aeroplane to be fitted with Marconi wireless transmitting apparatus (during this flight he sent a message using the Morse key sending the code-signal meaning 'Enemy in sight'); actor in many Shakespeare plays and in aviation movies |
| Ludendorff, Erich | German | Chief-of-Staff | became fascist; 1923 took part in Hitler's putsch |
| Lukas, Paul | Hungarian, later American | observer in the Austro Hungarian Air Force | movie star (e.g. in Watch on the Rhine and in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) |
| Luxemburg, Rosa | Polish | imprisoned; socialist politician; writer (e.g. 1916 The War and the Worker) | founder of Spartacus League; 1919 murdered |
| MacArthur, Douglas | American | brigade commander and division commander (84th Brigade, 42nd division) | general in World War 2 |
| Macmillan, Harold | English | 1914 left university and joined the Grenadier Guards; officer, served on the Western Front in France and Belgium; wounded three times (at the Battle of Loos he was hit in a leg and in a hand; of the other occasions no details are known) | 1924 Conservative MP; in WW 2 parliamentary secretary to the ministry of supply; 1942 sent to North Africa where he became minister at Allied Headquarters; 1958-1963 British Prime Minister; after retirement wrote Winds of Change (1966), The Blast of War (1967), Tides of Fortune (1969), Riding the Storm (1971) and At the End of the Day (1972) |
| Malevich, Kazimir | Russian | although being anti-war painting official war propaganda | paintings (e.g. Private of the First Division, and What a Boom! What a Blast) |
| Mann, Thomas | German | strong supporter Kaiser; attacker liberalism | novels, books (e.g. Von Deutscher Republik); 1929 Nobel Prize Literature |
| Mannerheim, Carl G. | Finnish (Swedish-speaker) | cavalry commander in Russian Imperial army; served on Romanian front as commander of VI cavalry; December 1917 left Russia for Finland, three days before the declaration of independence | military and political leader of Finland |
| Mansfield, Michael J. (Mike) | American | 1917, fourteen years old, quit school and tried to enlist in the armed forces, but was turned down; then went to the church where he had been baptized, obtained a copy of his birth certificate, and forged it to show that he was born a few years earlier; with these papers accepted in the Navy and crossed the Atlantic seven times aboard the cruiser USS Minneapolis before officers discovered he was underage and discharged him | After the war worked in copper mines, then took high school, then university, became a professor in Far Eastern history and went into politics; served 34 years in Congress, 24 of those in the Senate (Democrats); presided over the Senate from 1961 to 1976; later appointed US ambassador to Japan; died in 2001, 98 years old |
| Marconi, Guglielmo | Italian | navy commander; delegate Paris Peace Conference | inventor wireless telegraphy; 1909 Nobel Prize for Physics; strong supporter of Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini |
| Marinetti, Filippo | Italian | stated 'War is the world’s only hygiene', welcomed the war as a cleansing expression of pure energy that would sweep away the old world and replace it with a new Futurist society that is growing and improving through destruction | 'father' of futurism; in his Manifesto of Futurism (1909) called for the destruction of all tradition, universities, museums, libraries etc; 1919 belonged to the first Fascio di Combattimento, bunches that were at the base of Mussolini's Fascist Party, all wearing the black shirt of the Arditi (stormtroopers); volunteered for active service in the Worldwar II |
| Marshall, George C. | American | Chief of Operations AEF | in WW 2 US army chief of staff; inventor of a plan to rebuild Europe; 1953 Nobel Peace Prize |
| Marshall, Herbert B. F. | English, later American | 1916 enlisted in 14th London's Scottish Regiment; shot through the knee by a German sniper; right leg amputated nearly up to his hip; spent many years trying to adjust to an artificial limb | stage- and movie actor, barely visible limping, in more than sixty films, (e.g. in The Little Foxes and in some early Hitchcock movies like The Man who Knew Too Much) |
| Masefield, John Edward | English | volunteered in the beginning of the war in spite of his old age; served as a medical orderly on the western front | poet and children's writer; published an account of his war experiences |
| Masereel, Frans | Belgian | 1914 fled to Geneva in neutral Switzerland; met with many left artists and writers, such as Romain Rolland and Stefan Zweig; started illustrating pacifist magazines Les Tablettes and La Feuille, this established his international reputation | German book publisher Kurt Wolff published inexpensive editions of Masereel's woodcut stories — including Geschichte Ohne Worte and Die Stadt — as well as his illustrations for novels, pamphlets and posters, this made him an extremely popular artist; his work was also published in France and later in the United States, to great acclaim; in WW II resistance fighter |
| Massey, Raymond | Canadian | officer in France | actor; director; tv star (Dr. Kildare) |
| McNutt, Paul Vories | American | assistant professor of law at Indiana University; 1917 enlisted and became inspector of training schools for officers; never saw action but reached the rank of lieutenant- |
after the war appointed professor of law and later dean at Indiana University; became National Commander of the American Legion; elected governor of Indiana (Democratic Party); first American Ambassador to the Philippine Republic |
| Metaxas, Ionnis | Greek | chief of staff Greek army; pro-German; 1917 exiled to Italy when Greece joined the Allies | prime minister 1936; sent parliament home; fascist dicator; in WW 2 fought against Italy; 1941 mysterious death |
| Milne, Alan A. | English | 1914 left his position as assistent editor at Punch to join the army; commissioned with the 4th Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment; continued to write during articles, plays, and stories | took his son to the London Zoo where they met Winnie, a mascot black bear of the Canadian Expeditionary Force; 1926 published Winnie-the-Pooh, now a worldfamous childrens book on a bear |
| Moens, Wies | Belgian | pro-German Flemish activist; poet | 1918-1921 imprisoned because of collaboration; in WW 2 director Flemish-German radiostation Brussels; 1947 sentenced to death because of collaboration, escaped to Holland; novelist; poet (e.g. De Tocht); playwright |
| Montgomery, Bernard | English | officer in France; 1914 shot in the chest, hospitalized in England; 1916 returned to Western Front; 1918 chief of staff 47th London Division | general in WW 2; army commander; 1943 led invasion Italy; quarrelled with Eisenhower about tactics; wrote The Memoirs of Field Marshal Montgomery |
| Morel, Edward D. | English | journalist, socialist politician opposed to war; co-founder of the Uniton of Democratic Control (UDC); 1916 wrote The Truth and the War; 1917 sentenced 6 months in prison because of sending a political pamphlet to a friend in Switzerland; criticizer of the Versailles Treaty, warning it would lead to another war | anti-slavery campaigner, wrote The Congo Scandal; 1912 wrote Morocco in Diplomacy in which in blamed British and French governments for the Moroccan crises; 1922 as Labour candidate in Dundee defeated Liberal Party candidate Winston Churchill; 1924 as foreign policy advisor for the MacDonald government persuaded the PM to recognize the communist government in the Soviet Union |
| Moore, Henry Spencer | English | enlisted, 18 years old, in the Civil Service Rifles, 15th London Regiment; sent to France where he took part in the battle of Cambrai; suffered a gas attack and was sent back to spend two months in hospital; after recovering became an Army Physical Training Instructor | one of the most important sculptors to work with abstract art; known for his monumental bronze sculptures that suggest natural contours without being figurative; his best works are either mother-and-child figures or reclining figures; in WW 2 appointed official war artist and commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee to execute drawings of life in underground bomb shelters |
| Moseley, Henry | English | 1914 commissioned as signals officer Royal Engineers; † 1915 (killed in action at Gallipoli, 28 years old) | experimental physicist; discoverer of the Atomic Number |
| Murdoch, Keith | Austrian | journalist; 1914 applied to become Australia's official war historian, but turned down; as editor of the London office of the Sun and the Melbourne Herald visited Gallipoli and wrote letters to the Australian prime minister about mismanagement of the campaign | after the war became one of Australia's powerful newspaper magnates; his son Rupert founded in his own turn a worldwide media empire |
| Musil, Robert | Austrian | officer on the Italian front | novels (e.g. The Man Without Qualities) |
| Mussolini, Benito | Italian | 1914 founded independent newspaper Popolo d'Italia, founded political party 'Autonomous Fascists'; 1915 drafted, served in the 11th Bersaglieri in the trenches of the Upper-Isonzo battlefield; 1916 transferred to the Carnia front and later to the Carso mountains; promoted to corporal; hospitalized with typhus; 1917 wounded when a bomb exploded during excercises; managed to return to active politics that same year, founded Revolutionary Fascists party | 1919 founded Fighting Fascists movement that stood for an entirely new political system (trenchocracy) for the new Italy, to be ruled directly by war veterans (combattenti); his Fascio dit Combattimento (battlegroups) wore the black shirt of the Italian Arditi (stormtroopers); 1921 elections won entry into Parliament; 1922 successfully "marched" on Rome; fascist dictator of Italy 1922-1943 |
| Niemöller, Martin | German | naval lieutenant and U-boat commander, highly decorated; befriended with Admiral Karl Dönitz (Chief of the German Submarine Fleet); came out of the war a crushed and uprooted man | 1924 ordained as Lutheran pastor; founder of the Confessing Church; supported Hitler prior to his taking power; 1933 broke with Nazis because the church was made subordinate to state authority; 1937 arrested by Nazis for treason, spent most of WW 2 in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps; after that war adamant pacifist and advocate of reconciliation; wrote autobiography Vom U-Boot zur Kanzel and poems (e.g. the famous First They Came for the Communists) |
| Nimitz, Chester William | American | chief of staff to the commander of the submarine force of the Atlantic Fleet | in WW 2 commander of the Pacific Fleet; fleet admiral (5-star admiral); chief of naval operations |
| Dos Passos, John | American | ambulance driver in France and Italy | journalist, writer en playwright; active in the campaign against the growth of fascism in Europe; wrote many books (e.g. One Man's Initiation, Three Soldiers and his autobiography The Best of Times: An Informal Memoir) |
| Patton, George | American | tank commander in France; wounded in the Argonne | tank general in WW 2 |
| Pershing, John | American | 1915 wife and 3 daughters perished in a fire; 1917 commander American Expeditionary Forces (nick-named Black Jack); October 1918 caught Spanish flu | stayed out of politics; 1921 chief of staff US army; 1924 retired at the age of 64 |
| Petain, Henri-Philippe | French | commander French army, much adored by common soldier; 1915 commander at Verdun; 1917 commander-in-chief replacing Nivelle after the great mutiny (had 27 mutineers executed); 1918 directed the French armies in the offensives that ended the war | 1934 War Minister; in WW 2 head (pro-German) Vichy government; 1945 arrested and charged with treason: found guilty of and sentenced to death for aiding the German enemy; † 1951 in prison |
| Petit, Gabrielle | Belgian | 1914 joined Belgian Red Cross; worked for British Secret Service; distributed clandestine newspaper La libre Belgique and underground mail service Mot du Soldat; helped young men crossing the Belgian-Dutch border and crossed the electric fence herself 40 times; 1916 arrested by Germans and executed | after the war, when her story became known, national Belgian heroine; 1919 national funeral in the presence of queen Elisabeth, cardinal Mercier and Belgian prime minister Delacroix |
| Pickering, Jeanette | American | as one of the few American suffragettes outspoken isolationist; first woman elected to Congress; voted (with 48 others) against going to war with Germany; better known under her husbands name Rankin | leader of the woman suffrage movement; stimulator of social work and child welfare campaigns; co-founder and later vice-chairwoman of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom; supporter of the 'devil theory of war': the view that the USA had been dragged into WW I by 'merchants of death' - bankers and munitions makers |
| Pirenne, Henri | Belgian | historian; arrested in 1916 by German army for refusing entry to (German founded) University of Ghent; taken to camps in Germany where he wrote his History of Europe | historian and writer (e.g. History of Belgium, and Mohammed and Charlemagne) |
| Plumpe, Friedrich W. | German | served in the German air force; interned in Switzerland for most of the war | better known under his artists name Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau: one of the great German film directors of the 1920's; made many movies (e.g. the first Dracula movie Nosferatu and The Burning Earth); won Oscar for Sunrise |
| Porsche, Ferdinand | Czechoslovakian, later German | designed aircraft engines at Austro-Daimler; also created heavy artillery vehicles, known as Motor-Mörser, used by the German army to invade Belgium and France; 1916 managing director Austro-Daimler | 1934 stimulated by Hitler to found the Volkswagen factory complex "KdF-City" (Kraft durch Freude, or Strength through Joy) near town of Wolfsburg; in WW 2 head of the German Tank Commission for which he designed massive artillery vehicles; received numerous Nazi honors |
| Priestley, John B. | English | soldier; wounded at Loos | journalism; playwright; novels (e.g. The Good Companions) |
| Pound, Ezra | American | 1914 founder and editor of the revolutionary literary magazine Blast; 1918 began investigating the causes of the war | lifelong obsession with economic and political theory to explain the failures of modern democratic society; writer (e.g. Cantos); in WW 2 broadcasted fascist propaganda from Rome attacking American war efforts; 1945 returned to USA under indictment for treason but never stood trial (his lawyer successfully entered a plea of insanity) |
| Price, G. Ward | English | official correspondent with the allied forces in the Balkan (wrote The Story of the Salonika Army, 1918); also reported for Daily Mail about Gallipoli | after the war advocate of fascism, Nazism and dictatorship; 1936 wrote I Know These Dictators about the virtues of Hitler and Mussolini whom he both knew personally; in WW II again war reporter for the Daily Mail |
| Princip, Gravilo | Serbian | 1914 shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo | started Great War; † 1918 in prison of tuberculosis |
| Puccini, Giacomo | Italian | anti-war, which caused animosity with his fiercely patriotic friend, conductor Arturo Toscanini | composer, mainly opera (e.g. Gianni Schichi and Tosca) |
| Raemakers, Louis | Dutch | cartoonist for the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf; on trial for endangering Dutch neutrality; German government put 12,000 Dutch guilders on his head; fled to England; worked for English and American media (reaching a newspaper circulation of 300 million in the USA alone) | 1919 published the Raemaekers Cartoon History of the War |
| Raines, Claude | English | served in France with the 14th London's Scottish Regiment | movie actor (e.g. leading part in The Invisible Man, and in Lawrence of Arabia and Casablanca) |
| Rathbone, Basil | South-African, later English | 1916 second lieutenant, intelligence officer, with the Liverpool Scottish; received Military Cross for bravery; his brother John died in France | stage- (e.g. Shakespeare-plays) and movie actor (e.g. leading part in Sherlock Holmes-films); master swordsman which would land him many classic roles on stage and film; writer (In and Out of Character: An Autobiography) |
| Rathenau, Walter | German | directed the distribution of raw materials and organised German war industries | industrialist; social theorist; founder of public utilities company Allgemeine Elektrizitätsgesellschaft AEG; 1921 minister of reconstruction; 1922 foreign minister; 1922 being a Jew assassinated by nationalist and anti-Semitic fanatics, who opposed his attempts to fulfill reparations obligations; wrote In Days to Come and The New Society |
| Ravel, Maurice | French | ambulance and truck driver for a short period; then declared unfit (underweight) for military service | composer (e.g. A Concerto in D Major for the Left Hand, which he wrote for his friend Paul Wittgenstein, a pianist, who had lost in right arm in the war; other works: Bolero, Carmen, The Pearlfishers) |
| Reed, John | American | reporter in Mexico, Germany, Serbia, Russia (observed the Russian Revolution firsthand) | co-founder American Communist Party; books (e.g. Ten Days That Shook the World) |
| Remark, Erich Paul | German | conscripted infantry soldier; 1917 near Passendale hit by an British shell: one of the splinters penetrated his right forearm - the end of his dreamed career in music; nursed in German hospital until October 1918 | anti-war novels under pseudonym Erich Maria Remarque (e.g. Im Westen Nichts Neues and Drei Kameraden); 1933 Nazis burn his books publicly in the bonfire of books; fled to America where he became a celebrity and wrote many more books |
| Renoir, Jean | French | wounded while serving as a soldier in French mountain corps; after recovery joined airforce and served in bombers and reconnaissance aircraft | film director (e.g. La Grande Illusion) |
| Ribbentrop, Joachim von | German | war volunteer; officer at the Eastern front; wounded; attached to German military mission in Turkey | Nazi foreign minister; 1945 convicted as war criminal and hanged |
| Richthofen, Manfred A. von | German | fighter pilot (Red Baron) | 80 confirmed air-victories; † 1918 |
| Rickenbacker, Eddie | American | fighter pilot with 26 confirmed air-victories; nicknamed Captain Eddie | Owner of Indiananapolis Speedway; President of Eastern Airlines |
| Ridley, Arnold | English | soldier; invalided out | playwright; actor; tv star (private Godfrey in Dad's Army) |
| Riter, Mary | Canadian | painter (better known under her husbands name Hamilton); donated paintings to aid in fundraising activities | 1919-1922 painted French battlefields (lived in France alone in a tin hut, amid Chinese workers clearing the Western Front of war debris) |
| Röhm, Ernst | German | adjudant of a battalion at Western front; 1917 Ordonnanzoffizier; 1918 Generalstabsoffizier; major; three times wounded | Nazi; commander of SA (Sturm Abteilung); 1934 arrested by Hitler; shot by two SS men in the 'Night of the Long Knives' |
| Rommel, Erwin | German | infantry officer in the Würtemburg Mountain Battalion; served on five fronts; at Caporetto earned Pour le Mérite medal | in WW 2 field marshal; commander Afrika Corps and army group in Northern France; after attack on Hitler forced to commit suicide |
| Roncalli, Angelo | Italian | sergeant medical corps in the Italian army; served as corpseman at Monte Pasubio; later chaplain in the Bergamo Hospital | 1958 became pope John XXIII, then 77 years old; in his Encyclical Paccem en Terris declared that "humanity is a family, that all men and women are brothers and sisters, that all wars are civil wars, and that all killing is fratricidal"; convened Vatican II Council |
| Roosevelt, Eleanor | American | 1918 works with the D.C. Red Cross, the Navy Department, and Navy League to help WWI servicemen; visits wounded soldiers in hospitals; attends Paris Peace Conference | symbol of 20th century American independent politically active woman; as First Lady (married to Franklin D. Roosevelt) she wrote My Day newspaper columns 1936-1962 |
| Rosenblum, Sigmund Georgievich | Polish, later English | better known under his spy name Sidney Reilly; in the start of the war a shady businessman dealing with arms shipments in USA; volunteered for Canadian chapter of Royal Flying Corps during the war, probably to escape creditors; 1918 volunteered for MI6 secret service in 1918 (although he later claimed he had been working for them since 1890's); 1921 fired | alleged British "super-spy", became famous after the war because of his stories and (unproven) claims to have spied in Russia and Germany prior to the war and how he infiltrated German High Command meeting (with Kaiser included) wearing a German officer's uniform during the war |
| Rubinstein, Helena | Polish, later American | when the war broke out she took her Paris beauty salon business to New York | invented face cream; philanthropy |
| Russell, Bertrand | English | outspoken pacifist and socialist; chairman Non-Conscription Fellowship; 1918 served six months in prison, convicted of libelling an ally - the American army - in a Tribune article; while in Brixton Gaol worked on Introduction to mathematical philosophy; the war darkened his view of human nature: "I learned an understanding of instinctive processes which I had not possessed before" | philosopher; visited Russia in 1920 and met Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, but returned deeply disillusioned and published his sharp critic: The practice and theory of bolshevism; visiting professor at the University of California and City College, New York, where he was debarred from teaching because of libertarian opinions about sexual morals, education, and war; wrote many books (e.g. History of Western Philosopy and Political Ideals: Roads to Freedom); 1950 Nobel Prize Literature; 1962 negotiator Cuba crisis |
| Rutherford, | New-Zealandish | 1914 knighted; ceased his atomic research to help the British Admiralty with problems of submarine detection; had a large water tank installed on the ground floor his laboratorium in Manchester to carry out research on defense against submarine attack, but soon returned to nuclear physics | physicist; 1908 Nobel Prize in chemistry; ; 1918 first human to create a "nuclear reaction" though a weak one; fiercely anti-Nazi; 1933 president of the Academic Assistance Council, established to help German refugees. He would not personally help chemist Fritz Haber, however, who had been instrumental in creating chemical weapons in WW I |
| Sacco, Nicola | Italian / American | leftwing radical; fled USA to Mexico to avoid conscription | 1927 executed on false evidence of being a murderous bankrobber (with Vanzetti) |
| Santayana, George | Spanish and American | stayed in Oxford; famous counter to Wilson's war to end all wars: "Only the dead have seen the end of war" | philosopher; more famous expressions: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", and "History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there"; wrote one novel (The Last Puritan) |
| Sassoon, Siegfried L. | English | officer in France; poet; turned anti-war | poetry; novels (e.g. Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man) |
| Schiele, Egon | Austrian | soldier-clerk in a prison camp for Russian officers; painter | paintings (e.g. Death and the Maiden); † 1918 in flu pandemic |
| Schönberg, Arnold | Austrian | reserve-officer; conductor | conductor; composer (e.g. Die eiserne Brigade) |
| Seeger, Alan | American | 1914 joined the French Foreign legion; † at the Somme (on the 4th of July 1916) | poetry (e.g. I have a rendezvous with death) |
| Seyss-Inquart, Arthur | Austrian | soldier 1915-1918 | Nazi; in WW 2 SS-Obergruppenführer; civil commander in occupied Holland; 1946 convicted as war criminal and hanged |
| Shakhovskaya, Eugenie | Russian | fighter pilot; flies reconnaissance missions | princess; first female military pilot |
| Shaw, Bernard | Irish | anti-war; socialist; writer | playwright; novels; 1925 Nobel Prize Literature |
| Sikorsky, Igor | Russian, later American | designer Russian fighter aeroplane Ilia Mourometz | left Russia after Revolution to USA; built civilian planes out of WW I vintage; 1933 built first helicopter |
| Silvester, Victor | English | 1914 ran away (14 years old) from Ardingly College and was fighting on the Western Front at fifteen; took part in the Battle of Arras; 1917 member of execution squads killing deserters; his parents suspected he had joined the army and informed the authorities in 1914 but it was not until he was wounded in 1917 that he was discovered and brought home to England | leader of a famous ballroom dance school; leader of a famous dance orchestra; made 6,500 music broadcasts on the BBC; sold over 65 million records; wrote autobiography Dancing is my life |
| Sinclair, Upton | American | journalist; socialist | novels (e.g. King Coal); 1942 Pulitzer Prize |
| Schmidt, Käthe | German | expressionist graphic artist on poverty, war and death; mother (lost her only son in the early days of the war); socialist and pacifist | better known as Käthe Kollwitz, her husbands family name; lived and worked in Berlin slums; first woman elected to the Prussian Academy but Nazi-board expelled her in 1933 from the academy because of her beliefs, and because of her art (anti-war drawings and sculptures); in WW 2 lost her only grandson |
| Schweitzer, Albert | German | 1914 lived with his wife Hélène Bresslau in French Equatorial Africa (now Gabon) at a mission station in Lambaréne; in an abandoned chicken coop they cared for nearly 2,000 patients; with the outbreak of World War 1 they found themselves German citizens in a French colony; detained as enemy aliens; 1915 came upon the insight Reverence for Life as the elementary and universal principle of ethics; transported as prisoners of war to southern France, at first to a camp in the Pyrenees, later to a camp in St. Remy | 1924 returned to Africa; insightful author in philosophy, ethics, music and theology; 1952 Nobel Prize for his humanitarian work; appealed to stop atomic bomb development (1957 Declaration of Conscience); corresponded with anti-war scientists and friends such as Bertrand Russell and Pablo Casals; continued to oversee the Lambaréné hospital until his death at the age of 90 |
| Somerset Maugham, William | English | reporter; British spy in Russia | playwright; short stories and novels (e.g. Of Human Bondage) |
| Smith, Walter Bedell | American | reserve officer; wounded by shrapnel in the Aisne-Marne offensive | in WW 2 Chief of Staff; first director of the CIA |
| Smuts, Jan Christiaan | South-African | defence minister: led South Africa's army in successful campaign in German East-Africa; 1917 joined Imperial War Cabinet in London; played leading role in establishing the Royal Air Force | at Paris Peace Conference worked hard for a League of Nations; prime minister South Africa 1919-1924 and 1939-1948; only man to sign the peace treaties at the end of WW 1 and WW 2; because of his efforts towards independence of South Africa, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand at the Imperial War Conference 1917 some consider him to be Father of the British Commonwealth |
| Steichen, Edward | American | chief of the Air Service's photographic section | photography (e.g. The Family of Man) |
| Stein, Gertrude | American | 1914 left her Paris home in fear of Zeppelin- and Taube raids; 1916 returned and joined 'American Fund for French Wounded'; delivered supplies to hospitals with a Ford automobile | avant-garde writer (e.g. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas); eccentric and self-styled genius, whose Paris home became a salon for leading artists and writers between World Wars 1 and 2 |
| Strasser, Gregor | German | sodier (war volunteer), later promoted on the battlefield to lieutenant; Iron Crosses 2nd and 1st Class for bravery | 1920 joined Nazi party; 1923 participated in Munich Putsch; 1932 head of Nazi political organization and second only to Hitler in power and authority; 1934 in the 'Night of the Long Knives' murdered on Hitler’s orders |
| Strauss, Richard | German | lost his fortune invested in London (confiscated) | musical composer (e.g. Ein Heldenleben, and opera's) |
| Streicher, Julius | German | infantry soldier in France; first man in his company to win the Iron Cross; selected as a member of the elite Mountain Machine Gun Detachment, later accepted as an officer candidate; as first ieutenant fought on the Romanian and Italian fronts and in France | notorious for his anti-Semitic campaign; joined Nazi movement; 1923 took part with Hitler in Munich Putsch; 1924 arrested and imprisoned; managing editor nazi newspaper Der Stürmer; 1945 hanged as war criminal |
| Sudek, Joseph | Czech | drafted in 1915, keen amateur photographer, producing several albums of pictures including landscapes showing splintered trees and other war damage; war service ended when he was wounded by artillery fire from his own side during an attack, resulting in the loss of his right arm | while staying in a veteran's hostel met another photographer of the same age, Jaromir Funke, with whom he in 1924 founded Czech Photographic Society; became leading figure in the Czech cultural scene, also because of his poetry (his nickname was Poet of Prague) |
| Swinton, Ernest | English | professional soldier: Lieutenant Colonel; British Army's official journalist on the Western Front (using the pseudonym Eyewitness) | considered to be the real 'inventor' of the tank (idea adapted by Churchill); after the war professor of Military History at Oxford University; writer (e.g. Eyewitness) |
| Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre | French | priest, medical orderly in France and Belgium | philosophy of 'neo-humanism' |
| Thomas, Albert | French | socialist; minister of Munitions; improved French industrialisation | Director of the International Labour Bureau |
| Thomas, Margaret H. (Lady Rhondda) | English | in America arranged supply of munitions for British armed forces; torpedoed on board Lusitania; 1917 Minister of Food | 1920 founded political magazine Time and Tide; wrote autobiography This Was My World |
| Tolkien, J.R.R. | English | signals officer at Somme front; 1916 caught trench fever; hospitalized in England | novels (e.g. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) |
| Tolstoy, Aleksei | Russian | war correspondent for the newspaper Russkie Vedomosti; made several visits to the Front line, travelled in France and England; sided with the Whites; 1917 worked for General Denikin's propaganda section | 1918 emigrated to Paris; later moved to Berlin where he became the editor of the Bolshevik newspaper Nakanune; broke with the emigre circles and returned to the Soviet Union; writer (e.g. trilogy Road to Calvary and Peter the First) |
| Tonks, Henry | English | medical doctor at the front in France; 1918 official war artist | paintings (e.g. An Advanced Dressing Station in France and An Underground Casualty Clearing Station); professor Slade Art School |
| Toscanini, Arturo | Italian | conducted music (even German) on the Italian-Austrian front | conductor |
| Toynbee, Arnold | English | member British Intelligence Service; investigated Armenian massacre in Turkey | historian and writer (e.g. The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and A Study of History) |
| Tracy, Spencer | American | 1917 left school to join US Navy; did not see any action | actor; movie star (e.g. in Captain Courageous and Boys Town) |
| Truman, Harry S. | American | artillery commander; fought in the Argonne Forest | President USA 1945; responsible for throwing Atomic Bombs on Japan |
| Vaughan Williams, Ralph | English | Field Ambulance Service in Flanders | conductor; composer (e.g. Nine symphonies) |
| Valentino, Rodolfo Guglielmi | Italian | in his youth attends military school in Italy; 1913 leaves Europe for America; becomes lounge lizard, ballroom dancer and gigolo; arrested in brothel, charged with "misdemeanor, white slave investigation" and jailed; tries his luck as movie star | 1921 first great success in movie The Four Horsemen of the Apocalyps in which he dies on a Great War battlefield in Europe; later star in many other films (e.g. The Sheik of Araby and Beyond the Rocks); becomes male sex symbol |
| Valera, Eamon De | American, later Irish | Irish nationalist; member Sinn Fein; leader opposition against British conscription in Ireland; 1918 arrested and deported for internment to England | 1926 founder political party Fianna Fail; 1945 as Prime Minister called personally on the German ambassador to Ireland to offer his condolences on the death of Hitler; president of Ireland 1959-1973 |
| Vanzetti, Bartholomeo | Italian / American | anarchist; fled USA to Mexico to avoid conscription | 1927 executed on false evidence of being a murderous bankrobber (with Sacco) |
| Vassos, John | Greek / American | born in Greece, spent his youth in Constantinople where he became editorial cartoonist for a liberal newspaper; when one of these cartoons featured a less-than-flattering view of the Turkish senate, he was forced to flee (supposedly for his life) on a British ship, 16 years old; saw action in the North Sea, at Gallipoli and on a mine sweeper | ended up in 1919 in America; attended Fenway Art School, openend his own studio in New York in 1924; made Art Deco designs for theatres (for plays and musicals); wrote and illustrated books; worked 40 years for RCA: designed many of RCA's tv-sets and other appliances |
| Vieth von Golsseneau, Arnold F. | German | battalion commander | Marxist; professor of anthropology; novels under pseudonym Ludwig Renn (e.g. Krieg) |
| Wallace, DeWitt | American | served in France; wounded (while recuperating developed skills in abridging magazine articles) | 1922 founder of of the Readers Digest magazine |
| Wegner, Armin T. | German | 1914 volunteer nurse with the German army in Poland; Iron Cross for assisting wounded under fire; 1915 as second lieutenant stationed in Turkey witnessed Armenian genocide and took many pictures, which he illegaly sent to Germany and USA; 1916 arrested at the request of Turkish command and transferred to cholera wards in Constantinople (Istanbul) | 1918 active member of pacifist and anti-military movements in Germany; 1919 wrote open letter to American president Wilson appealing for the creation of an independent Armenian state; one of the earliest to protest against Hitler's treatment of Jews; dedicated great part of his life to the fight for Armenian and Jewish human rights |
| Wells, Herbert G. | English | active socialist; researcher for League of Nations | science fiction (e.g. The War of the Worlds) |
| Wharton, Edith | American | in France led aid committee for refugees; travelled to the front to observe fighting; urged USA to join war effort | novels (e.g. The House of Mirth) and non-fiction (e.g. The Age of Innocence); 1921 Pulitzer Prize |
| Wiedemann, Fritz | German | compagny commander of the 16th Bayern Infantry Regiment, in which corporal Adolf Hitler served; reported that Hitler was 'a fine orderly', but also that the man missed 'leadership qualities' | from the twenties and during WW II early confident and personal adjutant of Hitler; paymaster for Nazi underground in U.S. (paid out more than $5 million) |
| Wittgenstein, Ludwig | Austrian | officer; while serving wrote his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus | philosopher; poet; brother of pianist Paul Wittgenstein |
| Wittgenstein, Paul | Austrian | officer; lost right hand at the front | pianist (Strauss, Prokofiev and Ravel composed left-handed music for him); brother of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein |
| Wodehouse, P.G. | English, later American | tried to join army in England and in America, but rejected in both countries due to his weak eye sight | in WW 2 interned in Germany; accused (falsely) of treason by broadcasting dangerous propaganda from Germany; novels (e.g. My Man Jeeves) |
| Wright, Almroth Edward | English | developed a typhoid immunization that used killed typhoid bacilli; it made Britain the only country with troops immunized against typhoid at the start of WW I, the first war in which fewer British soldiers died of infection than from trauma | bacteriologist and immunologist; also developed vaccines against enteric tuberculosis and pneumonia; well known for advancing autogenous vaccines (vaccines prepared from a patient's own bacteria) |
| Zanuck, Darryl Francis | American | abandoned by both of his parents by the time he was 13; in 1917, on the day before his 15th birthday he removed his braces, lied about his age and joined the Nebraska National Guard, went to France and Belgium but never saw battle; also did some boxing while in uniform, as a bantamweight | after returning to civilian life at age 18, decided to try for career as a writer; his stories about fighting Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution and serving in France were printed in Stars and Stripes; though he never directed a movie, as a producer contributed directly to the creative content of hundreds of films, many of them important (e.g. The Longest Day) |
| Zelle, Greta | Dutch | spy (Mata Hari), who slipped into countless French and German beds, and became a pawn in international intrigue | 1917 in France convicted as a spy and executed; because of her alledged beauty and profession subject of many books and some movies (e.g. Mata Hari, starring Greta Garbo) |
| Zeppelin, Ferdinand | German | as retired Brigadier General and aeronautical inventor owned airship company; improved his airships for combat action, such as bombing, reconnaissance and ground bombardment coordination | developed airships for luxury passenger transport; his Graf Zeppelin, which flew round the world in 20 days had separate passenger cabins, lounges and dining-rooms |
| Zhukov, Georgy K. | Russian | officer with the dragoons; twice holder of St. George Cross (highest decoration in the Russian Imperial Army); 1918 joined the Red Army, served as a cavalry commander during the Russian Civil War | after the war studied military science both in Russia and in Germany; became marshal of the Soviet Union; during WW 2 the most important Soviet military commander; 1945 commanded the final assault on Berlin; 1955 deputy minister of defense |
| Zuckmayer, Carl | German | officer | playwright (e.g. Der Hauptmann von Köpenick); 1938 fled from Nazis to USA |
| Zweig, Arnold | German | officer in Verdun and on the Eastern Front | exiled anti-Nazi; novels (e.g. Sergeant Grisha, the Schachnovelle, and Die Welt von gestern) |
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Below you will find a list of more than 300 persons who played a role in the First World War. We left most of the generals and politicians out.
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