In my view, WW1 was fought to a stalemate since the German homeland was not decisively occupied/defeated. The Kaiser had to accept terms of surrender where those were the larger defeat rather than was the battlefield defeat. This was where the seeds for WW2 were sown. At least the Allies learned from that and went for the full victory in WW2.
There are a thousand facts which historians have avoided, and the public tended to just skip....in a review of WWI.
We can bring up the murders of a couple members of the Hapsburg royal family (the Austrian-Hugarian Empire).
We can bring up the actual text of the Hapsburgs direct message to Serbia after the crown-prince was murdered on the streets. It really wasn’t anything different than what most countries would have expected. Serbia didn’t even pause to think over a couple of simple actions....they just went direct to Russia and enacted their secret defense treaty.
The French fell into this whole because they finally thought....with the Russians and English....they could win an actual war against Germany (three miserable defeats throughout the 1800s weren’t enough for them).
The Germans knew every single weakness of the Russians and exploited it. Communism only arrived....because the Germans allowed to be a apart of their entire strategy in defeating Russia.
Lousy military leadership and strategy from the British and French...accomplished almost nothing for the war.
And Wilson arriving for peace talks? He was marginally in any health to travel, and even less to focus on the issues. In the end....Wilson being there, merely triggered the causes for WW II to occur.
I’m kinda hoping for this anniversary next year to drag out all these topics and refocus history professors on the subject.
Oh, and I should add....after the war, and the US legislature all hyped up to look good....sat up the GI-bonus deal....roughly a $1 a day for each day of service, but payable around 1945 (two decades away). This single act....triggered the Anacosta Flats riots in DC, and condemned the Hoover campaign to loose in 1932. This event is almost completely lost in US history, but reshapes the nation with FDR and his failed economic policy.
“UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER”, something we have stopped doing.