50 Fun Facts About 1918

Which neutral country's uncensored newspapers led the deadly flu pandemic of 1918 to be named after it?

Spain was not where the outbreak began: the earliest probable cases were recorded in Kansas. Warring nations censored the bad news, while Spanish papers reported it freely.

Which wartime measure did Americans first observe in March 1918, only for Congress to repeal it the following year?

Daylight saving time began on 31 March 1918 under the Standard Time Act, which also wrote the country's time zones into federal law. Congress scrapped it in 1919 over President Wilson's veto.

By what nickname was Manfred von Richthofen, the German ace shot down over France in April 1918, better known?

The Red Baron was credited with 80 victories, more than any other pilot of the war. The Australian airmen who recovered his body gave him a full military funeral.

Which baseball team won the 1918 World Series and then waited 86 years for its next championship?

The Boston Red Sox beat the Chicago Cubs four games to two. A wartime order cut the season short, making it the only World Series played entirely in September.

Which deposed monarch was shot with his wife and five children in a Yekaterinburg cellar in July 1918?

Nicholas II had given up the Russian throne more than a year earlier, ending three centuries of Romanov rule. The family was held in the Ipatiev House, which its captors called the House of Special Purpose.

Which future Nobel Peace Prize winner was born in the South African village of Mvezo in July 1918?

Nelson Mandela was given the forename Rolihlahla, a Xhosa word that loosely means troublemaker. He later became widely known by his clan name, Madiba.

Which printing error made a 24-cent American stamp issued in May 1918 famous among collectors?

An upside-down airplane appeared on a sheet of 100 stamps that collector William Robey bought over a post office counter. He sold the sheet to a dealer for $15,000 about a week later.

In what setting in the Forest of Compiègne did Allied and German delegates sign the armistice of November 1918?

A railway carriage from Marshal Foch's personal train hosted the signing. In 1940 Hitler had the same carriage hauled back to the exact spot for France's surrender.

The US Navy ship Cyclops, which vanished without a trace in March 1918, is a staple of which seafaring legend?

The Bermuda Triangle legend adopted the Cyclops, a coal carrier that left Barbados for Baltimore with 306 people and a load of manganese ore. No wreckage has ever been found.

Which liner, famous for rescuing Titanic survivors in 1912, was sunk by a German submarine off Ireland in July 1918?

RMS Carpathia took three torpedoes from U-55 two days after leaving Liverpool in a convoy. Five of the crew were killed.

Which prehistoric monument did Cecil Chubb give to the British nation in 1918, three years after buying it at auction?

Stonehenge had cost Chubb £6,600 at a 1915 sale, where he reportedly bid on a whim. His deed of gift said visitors should never be charged more than one shilling.

Which doll with red yarn hair was introduced to the public in a 1918 storybook by Johnny Gruelle?

Raggedy Ann got her name from two James Whitcomb Riley poems, The Raggedy Man and Little Orphant Annie. Gruelle had patented the doll three years before the stories appeared.

Which honorary rank is the stray dog Stubby said to have earned for catching a German spy in the Argonne in 1918?

Sergeant Stubby also learned to warn his regiment of mustard gas attacks after being injured by gas himself. After the war he became the mascot of the Georgetown Hoyas.

Which future Hollywood dog star was rescued as a newborn puppy from a shelled kennel on a French battlefield in 1918?

Rin Tin Tin was found by American serviceman Lee Duncan in a ruined German army kennel. His films earned Warner Bros. so much that studio insiders called him the mortgage lifter.

To which neutral country did Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II flee into exile by train in November 1918?

The Netherlands later refused to extradite him for trial, and he lived there until his death in 1941. He bought a country house at Doorn and spent much of his time chopping wood.

Which future novelist was wounded by mortar fire in July 1918 while serving with the Red Cross on the Italian Front?

Ernest Hemingway had just carried chocolate and cigarettes to front-line troops when the shell landed. While recovering he fell for a Red Cross nurse, and the war later fed his novel A Farewell to Arms.

Which long-running cartoon feature of oddities first ran in December 1918 under the title Champs and Chumps?

Believe It or Not began as Robert Ripley's roundup of odd sporting feats. He took the famous title in October 1919, once he had started adding curiosities that had nothing to do with sport.

What eerie coincidence linked the tornadoes that struck Codell, Kansas, in 1916, 1917 and 1918?

The same calendar date, May 20, brought a tornado to Codell three years running. The third, in 1918, was a direct hit just after dark from which the town never fully recovered.

Incas, who died at the Cincinnati Zoo in February 1918, was the last known member of which American bird species?

The Carolina parakeet saw its last captive bird die in the same cage where Martha, the last passenger pigeon, had died in 1914. The species was declared extinct in 1939.

Which trapped American unit is the pigeon Cher Ami credited with helping to save in the Argonne in October 1918?

The Lost Battalion was being shelled by its own artillery until, as the story goes, the wounded bird got through with a plea to stop. Of more than 500 men who went in, only 194 walked out unhurt.

What name is given to the peace program President Woodrow Wilson laid before Congress in January 1918?

The Fourteen Points called for free trade, self-determination for national minorities and a League of Nations. The leaders of Britain, France and Italy were skeptical of such idealism.

Which treaty, signed in March 1918, took Bolshevik Russia out of the First World War at a huge cost in territory?

Brest-Litovsk cost Russia land holding about nine tenths of its coal mines. It was annulled eight months later, when Germany itself gave up the fight.

Which British service was born on 1 April 1918 when the flying arms of the army and the navy were merged?

The Royal Air Force was made from the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service. The war it was built to fight had only seven months left to run.

Which new weapon of the First World War fought its own kind for the first time near Villers-Bretonneux in April 1918?

The tank met its own kind when three German A7Vs chanced upon three British Mark IVs during an infantry attack. The only surviving A7V, Mephisto, was abandoned in the same battle.

Which city did a German super-gun begin shelling from more than 70 miles away in March 1918?

Paris was hit by shells that climbed about 26 miles high on the way, the greatest height any human-made object reached until the V-2 rocket. The first blast, at 7:18 one morning, was heard across the city.

Which branch of the American armed forces won lasting fame at the Battle of Belleau Wood in France in June 1918?

The Marine Corps traces its Devil Dogs nickname to the battle. Afterwards the French renamed the wood in the Marines' honor.

Which Tennessee-born soldier won the Medal of Honor for leading an attack on a German machine-gun nest in October 1918?

Alvin York had first sought exemption as a conscientious objector because his church forbade violence. He was credited with taking 132 prisoners that day.

Which British war poet was killed crossing a French canal exactly one week before the armistice of November 1918?

Wilfred Owen's mother received the telegram announcing his death on Armistice Day, as Shrewsbury's church bells rang in celebration. He was 25.

Which Bolshevik leader was badly wounded when Fanny Kaplan shot him outside a Moscow factory in August 1918?

Vladimir Lenin was hit by two of her three bullets after giving a speech at an arms works. Within a week his government had formally decreed the Red Terror.

Which North Atlantic island became a sovereign kingdom in December 1918 while still sharing a monarch with Denmark?

Iceland let the Danes go on handling its foreign affairs and defense under the Act of Union. It cut the last tie in 1944, when a referendum made it a republic.

Which silent film star played a doughboy in the trenches of France in the 1918 comedy Shoulder Arms?

Charlie Chaplin never appears in his Little Tramp outfit in the film, the first of three he made about war. His elder brother Sydney co-starred.

Which fictional hero made his first screen appearance in a 1918 silent film starring strongman actor Elmo Lincoln?

Tarzan reached the screen six years after the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. Lincoln got the part only because the actor first cast had enlisted to fight in the war.

Which future composer of West Side Story was born in the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, in August 1918?

Leonard Bernstein became famous overnight at 25, when he conducted a nationally broadcast Carnegie Hall concert at short notice and without rehearsal after the guest conductor fell ill.

Which evangelist, born on a family dairy farm in November 1918, later preached in over 185 countries and territories?

Billy Graham once turned down a five-year, $1 million NBC television contract to keep touring his live revivals. His own ministry counts his live audiences at 210 million people.

Which world record belongs to Robert Wadlow, who was born at an ordinary weight in Alton, Illinois, in February 1918?

Tallest person ever reliably measured, Wadlow reached 8 feet 11 inches because an overactive pituitary gland kept him growing as an adult. He died at 22.

Which song did a military band play during the seventh-inning stretch of Game 1 of the 1918 World Series in Chicago?

The Star-Spangled Banner had players turning to the flag and the standing crowd singing along, and the custom soon spread to other sports. It did not become the official national anthem until 1931.

Which French aviator, later the namesake of the French Open's stadium, was shot down and killed in October 1918?

Roland Garros had made the first non-stop flight across the Mediterranean in 1913 and escaped from a German prison camp early in 1918. He died one day before his 30th birthday.

Which country celebrates 11 November 1918 as the day it regained independence after 123 years of partition?

Poland had been carved up in the late 1700s by its neighbors. The collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires in a single war let the country re-emerge.

Which physicist, born in Queens in May 1918, later shared a Nobel Prize and helped investigate the Challenger disaster?

Richard Feynman worked on the atomic bomb in his twenties and won his 1965 prize for quantum electrodynamics. The space shuttle inquiry made him a household name in the 1980s.

Which car brand, co-founded by a Swiss-born racing driver, became part of General Motors in May 1918?

Chevrolet was the vehicle William Durant used to win back the presidency of General Motors, the company he had founded in 1908. Louis Chevrolet had already sold Durant his share after the two fell out over car design.

Which German physicist was awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of energy quanta?

Max Planck called quanta the pennies of the atomic world. The prize for 1918 was actually handed over a year late, in 1919.

Which woman became the first elected to the British House of Commons, in December 1918, yet never took her seat?

Constance Markievicz won her seat for Sinn Féin while locked up in Holloway Prison. Her party's policy was to stay away from Westminster, so she sat in the breakaway Irish assembly instead.

Which Socialist leader was sentenced to ten years in prison in 1918 for an anti-draft speech in Canton, Ohio?

Eugene V. Debs ran for president from his cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in 1920 and still won 3.4 percent of the vote. It was his fifth campaign for the White House.

Soviet Russia jumped straight from 31 January to 14 February 1918 on adopting which system of counting the days?

Gregorian dating, which the decree called the Western European style, came in by simply dropping 1 to 13 February. Those thirteen days never existed in Russia.

What blunder did pilot George Boyle make on the first scheduled airmail flight out of Washington in May 1918?

Flying in the wrong direction came easily: Boyle followed the wrong railroad tracks and headed south instead of north. He landed, disoriented, 18 minutes later, after President Wilson had seen him off.

Which ally of Germany left the war by signing the Armistice of Salonica in late September 1918?

Bulgaria had entered the war in 1915 by invading Serbia. The deal was signed at 10:50 p.m. at Allied headquarters in Thessaloniki and took effect at noon the next day.

Which 30-to-1 outsider, bought as a workout partner for a better-fancied colt, won the Kentucky Derby in May 1918?

Exterminator ran only because his stablemate Sun Briar developed a leg ailment before the race. He was still good enough four years later to be named Horse of the Year.

By what nickname is the 369th Infantry, the regiment of May 1918 hero Henry Johnson, commonly known?

Harlem Hellfighters may be a name coined by the American press rather than by German soldiers, as legend has it. Johnson took 21 wounds fighting off a raid, and France gave him the Croix de Guerre.

Which part of the Massachusetts coast was hit by shells from a German submarine attacking barges in July 1918?

Cape Cod became the only place in the United States to take enemy fire in the war when stray shells fell on a marsh and a beach at Orleans. Nothing suggests the shore was the target.

Which battle's opening day, 8 August 1918, did General Erich Ludendorff call the black day of the German Army?

Amiens earned the name not for the ground given up but because German morale had sunk so low that troops surrendered in large numbers. It opened the Hundred Days Offensive that ended the war.