A group of some of hundreds of Calhoun men going off to World War I, taken in front of Calhoun courthouse in 1918, killed in combat from Calhoun, Homer Coen, Otis Douglas, Victor Hamilton and James F. Settles, but many more died from disease and injuries. A few that died from diseases while overseas, Charles E. Boggs, Addie Duffield, Charlie Mathess, Jesse Roach and Wellington Truman, and others died after returning home. - Photo Rennie West Holbert
Over one hundred years ago America entered World War I.
Calhoun's last World War Veteran, Karl Johnson died in 1996 at the age of 107.
CALHOUN'S LAST LIVING WV WW I VET - "Last Man Down" Was Karl Johnson, 107
USA'S OLDEST LIVING WWI VET WILL BE BURIED AT ARLINGTON - A WV Soldier
The First World War is distant history, with jumpy black and white films and the unfamiliar clothes and the horses pulling wagons, all something from a world long forgotten.
West Virginia mustered 58,000 soldiers for World War I, suffering about 5,000 casualties including dead and wounded.
Men enlisted, or were called up, in the millions, being sent to fight in places that many had never heard of before. It was a global struggle that changed their lives forever.
It ended on Nov. 17, 1918.
The power unleashed by the "modern war" resulted was previously unimagined.
Over 9 million soldiers died as a result of the fighting.
Food shortages, sometimes deliberately inflicted by blockades and sometimes resulting from failed harvests, weakened the people who remained on the home fronts.
Nearly 6 million civilians died from disease or starvation, with almost 1 million more killed as a direct result of military operations.
In all, the estimate of dead resulting from the war stands at over 16 million.
Ultimately, more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilized.
The war drew in all the world's economic great powers, which were assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies based
United Kingdom, France and the Russian Empire and the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary.
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