Philip Powers and Armistice Day


At 11 am "French o'clock" on November 11th, 1918, the Armistice finally ended World War I.

That morning, my grandfather Powers conveyed the official order, to stop fighting, to the Commander in Chief of Allied forces.


Here is a piece of history: the original handwritten note, sent by radio from                           
Supreme Allied Commander Marshall Ferdinand Foch to the Allied Commander in Chief, to cease fighting:



6:45 am Nov 11th 1918                                                   
Marshall Foch, To The Commander in Chief                        
Hostilities will cease upon the whole front, from the eleventh November
eleven o'clock "French o'clock." The allied troops will not Cross             
until a further order, the line reached on that date and that hour.         
Marshall Foch                 


This note was handed down to me from my grandfather Philip Powers, who kept it as a souvenir after he hand-delivered it to the Commander in Chief.

Here is my grandfather's own note about this wireless message:



        This is the radio message that came in at one of                                
my stations telling the General to stop fighting. I was at the       
set at the time and took this over just as the operator wrote it   
down - not waiting to have it typed, or sending it by messenger.
Got the General to give it back to me after official copies           
had been made.       Philip —                                                  


         

26-year-old First Lieutenant Philip H. Powers (known as G-Pa to us grandkids)
was Commander of the Field Signal Battalion, on the Western Front.              




Philip had been following the wireless news of the ongoing armistice negotiations, so he was there when  
the official news came in at 6:45 am on November 11th.  As his note above mentions, wireless messages
were usually typed up and then delivered by a messenger, but this one was urgent.  Philip grabbed this    
as soon as it was handwritten, and ran it over to the General himself.  He knew this document would be   
an important souvenir, so he managed to get it back from the General, after official copies were made.    


His home town newspaper ran this article about this event.  It describes the "excitement
and joy—to say nothing of the emotion" when this message was received.