November 11th is now known as Veterans’ Day, but originally it was called Armistice Day, marking the anniversary of the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” in 1918 when the guns
November 11th is now known as Veterans’ Day, but originally it was called Armistice Day, marking the anniversary of the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” in 1918 when the guns on all fronts of “The Great War” fell silent, ending four years of unprecedented carnage that took the lives of over 8 million soldiers, sailors and airmen. Although the United States entered the fighting just 18 months before the war’s end, 118,000 American lives were sacrificed in a conflict that so shocked the world that what we now call World War I was mistakenly thought to be “the war to end all wars.”
One of those American doughboys who fought and survived to return to Oak Park was a Finnish-born immigrant, Johannes Siegfried Anderson, who after the war made his home at 1182 S. Scoville Avenue, where he lived until his death in 1950. During those postwar years his most prized possession was his Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest decoration awarded to members of the U.S. military.
Since its creation in 1862 only some 3400 Medals of Honor have been awarded. In all of World War I there 