Saturday 2 November 1918.

Western Front. The Americans take Buzancy and link up with the French. The Canadians enter Valenciennes.

Mutiny of German troops brought in to the Western Front from occupation duties on the Eastern Front.

Battle of Vittorio Veneto. The Italians take Rovereto and Calliano in the Adige Valley.

German Revoution. Mutiny of naval crews at Kiel spreads and troops sent in to disperse them refuse to open fire.

In Vienna Hungarian soldiers on guard duty at the Schoenbrunn Palace desert and demand to go home, they are replaced by cadets from the military academy.

The Slovenes take over the administration of Carniola Province.  

East Africa. The only German army still on the offensive is von Lettow-Vorbeck's force in East Africa, they bombard Fife in northern Rhodesia before crossing into the British colony. 

Sunday 3 November 1918.

Austria-Hungary signs an armistice to take effect the following day. Signed on behalf of the Allies by the Italian Gen. Badoglio at Army HQ near Padua.The Italians begin a rapid occupation of Austrian territory including Trieste, Udine, Trento and over the next five weeks the Dalmation islands.

The Yugoslav National Council at Agram proclaims its intention to form a union with Montenegro.

Western Front. All German troops cleared from the Argonne Forest.

Polish Republic proclaimed at Warsaw. Thus the German puppet Kingdom of Poland is dissolved.

German Revolution. Naval mutineers march to the prison in Kiel aiming to release their comrades, but are forced back by officer cadets defending the site.

Monday 4 November 1918.

Armistice between the Allies and Austria-Hungary takes effect.

Western Front. Further significant gains by the Allies - the British cross the Sambre-Oise Canal, New Zealanders take Le Quesnoy, the Americans capture Stenay and Dun-sur-Meuse.

The British war poet Wilfred Owen killed in the Sambre Canal assault.

Battle of Vittorio Veneto. In the hours before the armistice takes effect The Italians and Americans made significant gains taking thousands of prisoners.

Macedonia. The Serbs liberate the Montenegrin capital of Cetiinje.

Italian warships enter the Austrian ports of Fiume and Zara.

German Revolution. All the Baltic naval bases are in the hands of revolutionary soldiers, sailors and workers, they envisage a revolution as seen in Russia a year previously. One of their main demands is the abdication of the Emperor. The government in Berlin is compelled to recognize that Germany can only be saved from a Russian-style revolution by ending the Hohenzollern Monarchy.  

And now Tommy we have Trump who is going out of his way to disrupt the world once more and trying to take us all back into the darkness for his own gain.

Tuesday 5 November 1918.

Western Front. Further major gains on all fronts, general retreat by the Germans to hastily prepared defensive lines.

Roumania. The Germans begin the evacuation of Roumania sending troops to the Western Front.

German Revolution. The Socialist uprising of sailors and workers spreads to a number of north German towns and cities. The government representative, the moderate socialist Gustav Noske, arrives in Kiel and is elected Chairman of the Soldiers' Council. In this capacity he is able to restore order in the cityl, but revolution has spread far beyond Kiel.

Wednesday 6 November 1918.

Western Front. The americans capture Sedan, the French retake Vervins and Rethel.

Roumania. With the imminent departure of German troops the pro-German Prime Minister Alexandru Marghiloman resigns and is replaced by Constantin Coanda.

German Revolution. More towns and cities in the north are taken over by anti-war anti-Monarchist Socialists.

Canadian memories of the First World War generally stick to Vimy Ridge. Vimy Ridge is the site of Canada’s official First World War memorial, and it’s the only battlefield that’s made its way onto our currency and passports.

But while Vimy may have represented a rare victory in the war’s darkest depths, historians, military commanders and First World War veterans themselves were more inclined to believe that Canada’s greatest triumph would come at the war’s end.

Below, a quick primer on the Last Hundred Days, the epic Canada-dominated finale to the Great War.

At one point, a quarter of the German Army was running from Canadians

The Last Hundred Days began on August 8, 1918 with an all-out attack on German positions in Amiens. By day’s end, Canadian soldiers had obliterated German defences and advanced an incredible 13 kilometres. It was the most jaw-dropping allied victory ever seen in the First World War up to that point. For context, it had taken months of fighting and 500,000 dead to gain only eight kilometres of ground at Passchendaele. Up until this point, many First World War battles had followed a predictable pattern: A lengthy artillery barrage followed by fixed-bayonet human wave attacks across no-man’s-land. At Amiens, Canada rolled out a strategy that prioritized speed and unpredictability above all else: Tanks, motorized machine guns, cavalry, storm troopers and intricately timed artillery barrages all thrown at the enemy in a dizzying tidal wave of force. Erich Ludendorff, who by this time had become the effective military dictator of Germany, referred to August 8 as the “black day” of the German army. As the Canadian breakout continued relentlessly into the autumn, Canadian Corps commander Arthur Currie would estimate that one quarter of all Germans on the Western Front were being shot at by Canadians. When German troops would sweep back into France in 1940, their new strategy of Blitzkrieg would be an eerily close carbon copy of the tactics that Canadians had used to evict them from France 21 years earlier.

Germans may have explicitly avoided fighting Canadians until the very end

In the spring of 1918 Germany launched a last-ditch series of assaults designed to capture Paris and win the war before the United States army could show up in force. They devastated British lines to the Canadians’ north and French lines to the Canadians’ south, but the Canadians themselves eked out the offensive relatively untouched. This may have been intentional: Canadian soldiers were so fanatically committed to killing Germans that it often creeped out their fellow Allies. The British and French may have shared bread and chocolates with German troops during the famous Christmas Truce of 1914, but as soon as Canadian troops joined the war in 1915 they pursued Germany with “a vendetta which did not end until the war ended,” wrote the British war correspondent Philip Gibbs. Instead of winning the war, Germany’s “Spring Offensive” had cost them tens of thousands of their best troops and had the unintended consequence of leaving Canada as one of the strongest armies left standing on the Western Front.

The Canadian Corps at the end of the First World War is still the deadliest fighting force ever fielded by Canada

As historian Jack Granatstein said in a recent lecture about the Last Hundred Days, the Canadian Corps in World War One’s final months “played the greatest role that any Canadian army has ever accomplished in any war we have participated in.” For one, Canada showed up to the Last Hundred Days with more of everything: More tanks, more artillery, more machine guns and more men. Even as hundreds of Canadians were claimed daily by machine guns or shellfire, they were able to constantly keep the ranks filled with fresh conscripts. Canadians also brought way more poison gas. After the war, Arthur Currie estimated that at one point 90 per cent of all the poison gas deployed on the Western Front was being used by Canadians. By mid-1918, Canadians were also expertly seasoned by four years of war, something that gave them a notable advantage over the rookie U.S. army. In the war’s final months Canada would defeat 47 German divisions to the Americans’ 46, despite suffering less than half the casualties.

The cost in lives was way worse than anything yet seen

The standard image of the First World War is of men leaping out of a muddy trench to seize the muddy trenches of the enemy. And this was indeed the general gist of World War One for most of its duration. But the Last Hundred Days looked more like the Second World War: Troops moving over open French countryside to seize towns, bridges and canals. The stalemate was over, but open warfare was far deadlier than trench warfare. In the Last Hundred Days Canada suffered 45,835 killed, wounded or taken prisoner. It was equivalent to one fifth of Canada’s total casualties for the war, way more than the 10,602 casualties suffered to take Vimy Ridge. More Canadians would be killed in the Last Hundred Days than in Korea or in the Second World War Canadian army from D-Day to VE Day. On September 1, 1918 alone, nearly 1,000 Canadians were killed in action. And these were coming from a largely agrarian country of eight million: 1000 casualties could represent an entire prairie city’s worth of young men.

Controversially, Canadians kept dying right up until 11 a.m.

A poetic symmetry overlay the end of the First World War. For one, the war ended at the easily remembered 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. And for Canadian soldiers, that war would end by retaking Mons, the Belgian town at which British forces had first encountered German troops in 1914. But both symbols would come at a terrible cost: Even with Canadian commanders knowing that the armistice was signed, troops would continue to be thrown into battle right up into 11 a.m. And while the Canadians’ victory parade through Mons would provide stirring fodder for war artists, it did indeed kill men who would have otherwise returned home if the Canadian Corps had simply taken the morning off. The most notable was Saskatchewan conscript George Price, who was fatally hit by a German sniper at 10:58 a.m., becoming the last British Empire soldier to be killed in combat. “Hell of a note to think that that would happen right when the war’s over,” wrote his company commander. The death of Price and others would prompt postwar accusations that Arthur Currie had deliberately thrown away Canadian lives for the “glories of Mons” — accusations against which Currie would win a 1928 libel suit. “No order by me, verbal or otherwise, ordered an assault on Mons and Mons was never assaulted,” Currie said in 1919. But the acclaimed Nova Scotia memoirist Will Bird would have a different account, describing how in the war’s final hours he had been forced to kill three Germans with a rifle grenade, and witness two of his chums killed. “The war’s over tomorrow and everybody knows it,” was one of the last things Bird heard from fellow soldier Tom Mills before the 23-year-old died from having his stomach ripped open by shell fragments.

Thursday 7 November 1918.

Western Front. The British take Avesnes, Bavai and Haumont; Much ground gained by the Franco-Americans.

The German armistice delegation is given permission to enter the Allied occupation zone.

German Revolution. Socialist unrest spreads to Bavaria where King Ludwig III is forced to flee to Austria, he is the first of the German Monarchs to be forced out.

Socialist members of the Imperial Reichstag demand the Emperor's abdication and the government's resignation within 24 hours.

The British appoint Admiral Sir Reginald Wemyss as their representative at the forthcoming armistice talks. 

For one, Canada showed up to the Last Hundred Days with more of everything: More tanks, more artillery, more machine guns and more men. Even as hundreds of Canadians were claimed daily by machine guns or shellfire, they were able to constantly keep the ranks filled with fresh conscripts. Canadians also brought way more poison gas. After the war, Arthur Currie estimated that at one point 90 per cent of all the poison gas deployed on the Western Front was being used by Canadians. 

So it sounds like the volunteers lines were all but gone and conscripts had to be used. I surprised that there wasn't more deaths. With a country with only a population of 8 million at the time and probably 3/4's of that population being women and children and of that 2 million total men in Canada take away another 30% for the ones too old to serve or not fit to serve so it's no wonder they had to fill the ranks with anyone left in the country. It meant that there was only roughly 1.4 million men in total that could serve in the first place.

I had never heard before that the Canadians were using 90% of the gas used on the western front in those last hundred days.

Valour Road is a street in the West End district of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Originally called Pine Street, it was renamed Valour Road in 1925 to recognize the courage of three young men who lived in the 700 block and served in the First World War.^[2]  Corporal Leo Clarke, Sergeant-Major Frederick William Hall, and Lieutenant Robert Shankland each received the Victoria Cross for acts of bravery during the war.  Shankland was the only one to survive the war; the other two men were awarded the medal posthumously.  All three medals are now on permanent display at the Canadian War Museum.

The three medals were loaned to the Manitoba Museum in 2014 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of the Great War.  This marked the first time that all three medals were in Winnipeg at the same time. A memorial statue of the three men is located at the corner of Valour Road and Sargent Avenue.

Friday 8 November 1918.

Western Front. The Germans retreat from the Hermann Line. The British capture Maubeuge and Conde.

The German armistice delegation meets the Allied C-in-C Foch at Compiegne and talks begin.

German Revolution. In Munich Kurt Eisner announces that King Ludwig III has been deposed and proclaims the People's State of Bavaria. The Duke of Brunswick abdicates. Eleven major cities are now under socialist control. Senior commanders inform the Chancellor that the army cannot be relied upon to suppress the uprising under current conditions.

Poland. The newly created State of Poland informs Vienna that it has assumed control of the Austrian province of Galicia.  

Saturday 9 November 1918.

Abdication of Wilhelm II as German Emperor and King of Prussia announced. Philipp Scheidemann, leader of the Social Democrats proclaims the German Republic. Chancellor Prince Max of Baden resigns, replaced by Friedrich Ebert, Scheidemann's deputy. (See Main Page).

Western Front. The British capture Tournai, the French retake Hirson.

German Revolution. The red flag is flown from the Old Palace in Berlin. A Republic is proclamed in Berlin. The Grand Duke of Hesse abdicates as the People's State of Hesse is proclaimed.

The battleship HMS Britannia sunk by a torpedo from the UB50 in the eastern Atlantic, 50 killed.   

Sunday 10 November 1918.

Western Front. The Belgians retake Ghent, the Canadians enter Mons, the French reach Mezieres,

Armistice terms agreed at Compiegne. But when the details are telegraphed to Berlin reservations are voiced delaying the final signing overnight.

Roumania. As the last German troops are leaving the country Roumania declares war on Germany for the second time (the first was in August 1916 and ended in Roumania's surrender in December 1917 and subsequent occupation by German troops).

The last warships of the conflict are sunk - the minesweepers HMS Ascot sunk by a torpedo from the UB67 in the North Sea, 53 killed and HMS Renarro sunk whilst clearing mines in the Dardanelles, 12 killed.

Armistice signed with Germany. The war is over. See Main Page.

In the hours before the ceasfire takes effect the Allied armies make further gains.

Austria-Hungary. Emperor Karl resigns the government of Austria, but does not abdicate. Heinrich Lammasch resigns as Imperial Chancellor, replaced by the Socialist Karl Renner who is styled Chancellor of German-Austria in a nation much reduced in size after independence has been seized by nationalists in the outer provinces.

Turkey. The pro-Allies Ahmed Tevfik appointed Grand Vizier.

Russian Civil War. Bolsheviks attack an Anglo-US-Canadian outpost at Tulgas,  

Four years three and a half months.

27 countries including colonies and Dominions.

70 million mobilized.

Around 10 million service personnel killed and 7.7 million civilians.

I will continue with this as important anniversaries arise, but it might not be on a daily basis. I've been at it daily (barring holidays and Aimoo breakdowns) for four and a half years!

Tuesday 12 November 1918.

Turkey. The Allied fleet of 60 ships passes through the Dardanelles and reaches Constantinople.

East Africa. The last action between the British and the Germans at Kasama.

I never knew Mark how much the Canadians and Australians managed to work together in Vimy and in the last 100 days. When Haig and the French were faced with the Germans taking all with the spring offensive they started looking for new ideas to try and stop it. Currie and the Australian General had a secret meeting among themselves and discussed how it could be done. They took there plan to Haig and he liked it so much that he informed the French and they liked and agreed to it.

I know Tommy won't want to here the next part but I'm in no way bad mouthing the American troops for what happened. The Australians and Americans lead by Perching were to advance in leap frog style with the Americans starting off. The Americans were pushed forward in such a hurry (almost advancing into their own artillery which was laying down fire in front of them) but not bothering to clear out the dug out that they had already pasted. When the Australians start moving up they start getting shot from behind from Germans that hadn't been clear out. The Australians complained about the situation to the rear and were told to advance at all costs so that the moment of the advance wouldn't be lost. Apparently the American took a shit kicking that day and a lot of it caused not my their unwillingness to fight but by their lack of proper training when compared to the other allied troops.

When the Canadian/Australian plan it called for a massive artillery Barrage to open up with but Haigs advisters complained that it was too much. Haig over rode them and let the plan continue. There was a new way of pin pointing the German guns by putting out sound devices at different distances and locations and then calculating between them where the German gun was located. It worked because when the advance happened 90% of the German guns had been eliminated by this method. This was the biggest artillery barrage that the western front had ever seen.

The Canadians to fool the Germans withdrew there forces to the rear in day light which was observed by German spotter planes and spys. That same night under the cover of darkness they march their troops back to the front. Currie had passed down orders to his troops that anyone to even dare light a match that he would have them court martialed. When Germans places were being over run by Canadians the Germans had a hard time excepting it. A German officer said that it was impossible because the Canadian troops had been moved to another location. So it shows to me that the Germans kept their eyes on Canadian movement. They also said the Canadians were a bit brutal in their advance and weren't taking many prisons even if a white flag had been raised.

Doesn't sound like those quiet polite Canadians does it Tommy.

Most of this info and much more came from a 2 hour special last night on the History Channel (The Last Hundred Days)

I screwed up Mark by saying the Aussies and Canadians worked together at Vimy when I should have said Passchendaele.

Watched a program tonight that showed the different Indian groups along with the Sikhs and Gurkhas on the western front. When you really think about it, it truely was a world war in every sense of the word.

It was shown over here in two parts two weeks ago. It was made by BBC Scotland and anyone watching it would think that no Englishmen were present in the final push.Otherwise an excellent programme. Monash and Currie are the forgotten Generals of the war. Serves you right for letting the Scots do the video. I'm surprised then everyone in it wasn't dressed in a kilt, including the Germans. I think the movie was meant to show more Canada's part in the last 100 days. It really only showed where the British and French were on the map related to the over all front.

Wednesday 13 November 1918.

Disturbances in The Netherlands as German troops retreat through Dutch territory.

The Commander of the German troops in East Africa, Gen. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, learns of the armistice and opens talks on the details of his own surrender.

Seen a short clip Mark on your They shall not grow old. Looks very good but is it not a move to be played at theaters? No mention of being on the tele here yet.

Thursday 14 November 1918.

Tomas Masaryk elected the first President of the Republic of Czechoslovakia.

The pro-German ruler of Ukraine Pavlo Skoropadski deposed in a coup.

It was a "World" War in the sense the British started it & then used troops in their occupied world territories to do the fighting for them, as always. They are to be admired for their ability to rule the less than humans.

Do you not use Mexicans and Puerto Ricans to do your fighting for you now and fill their heads with false promises?

Disturbances in The Netherlands as German troops retreat through Dutch territory.

Can you expand this a bit Mark.