The 11th Month on the 11th Day at the 11th Hour

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.

What is today? It’s Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 2025. A lot of us forget where Veterans Day came from. It’s different than Memorial Day. Memorial Day commemorates on the last Monday of May—the date alternates every year—all those who died in America’s wars. It’s from the Civil War idea of remembrance, and it was made an official holiday in the ‘50s.

And the date changes depending on which date is the last Monday in May. Sometimes we confuse that with Veterans Day. Veterans Day commemorates all those who served in the armed forces, both those who died and those who survived—the vast majority survived. It came from a word Armistice Day that commemorated the end of WWI. The allies who had defeated the German offensive dictated terms, and they needed an iconic time or date so that everybody would know when the war was officially over. Given it was November, they picked the 11th day of November. November was the 11th month of the year. So it was the 11th month of the 11th day, and the armistice took place at 11 o’clock in the morning.

And then the allies—obviously not the Germans who lost the war, or the Austrians who lost the war, and some of the Eastern European countries who lost the war—don’t commemorate it. But the allies in Western Europe and the United States then started to commemorate Armistice Day. And it was made an official holiday, I think in the 1950s, 1954, and the name was changed from Armistice Day to Veterans so that it wouldn’t be exclusively referring to WWI.