When did the 1914-18 War become "World War I"?

Sun Oct 7 16:46:48 UTC 2001

The Piper-L list (devoted to the late science fiction writer H. Beam Piper)
recently produced a surprisingly well-researched thread on the above topic.
Extracting from that thread:

At 03:50 PM 10/2/01 -0400, Michael Walsh wrote:
>Out of curiousity . . .when did "The Great War", "The War to end all Wars"
become WWI.
>Anybody here have solid references?

This has been discussed on both of the WWI Lists and the WWII Lists.  The
term "World War II" appeared in the British press in September, 1939, and,
by default, 'the Great War' and 'the World War' were converted into "World
War I".
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The British press? That early? Well, I guess I wouldn't be too surprised. So
much for an alternate theory I had, though... Even as a kid, diving into
books quite a bit older than I was, I noticed references to "the World War,"
meaning what I knew as World War I. It finally dawned on me that before there
was a World War II, people wouldn't have known the Great War of 1914-1918 was
going to be just the first of at least two, and wouldn't have called it World
War I. (There's a funny bit in a Jack Finney time travel novel, Time and Time
Again -- I think that's the right author and title -- where a young woman
transferred from the 19th Century to the relative present asks the hero what
that book on his shelf with a title of "World War Eye" is about.) It only
much later and more slowly struck me how ODD terms like "World War I" and
"World War II" are, even though it makes some sort of sense when you consider
the evolution from "the World War" and much the same sets of opponents
fighting much the same ground not ve
ry many years apart.

The very earliest use of the term "World War II" I've found was when I was at
the library checking out a reference to Superman in an issue of Time Magazine
in the September/October '39 period. The Time article was a tongue-in-cheek
piece discussing Superman's dilemma. That is, how could this all-powerful
comic-strip character survive (as in maintain credibility or at least
suspension of disbelief) in a world where if he really did exist he would
have noticeable effects on current events, like the war that had just broken
out in Europe? And the article did use the term "World War II."

My thought was that it was a "Time-ism" (Time in that period was written in
its own slightly peculiar jargon, clipped and "telegraphic" with odd turns of
phrase, no doubt thought to be up-to-date and modern). A term like "World War
II" is so familiar to us now that we forget how it must have seemed when it
was new to readers, but in trying to think like it's 1939 and "the World War"
is the familiar term, "World War II" seems like the sort of novel,
telegraphic, slangy neologism a Time writer would have come up with. And I
was rather tickled by the thought that the first documented use of such a now
common and familiar term as World War II might have been in an article about
Superman...

Wish I still had the date on that article, though I could look it up again if
I get back to a large library with magazine microfiche files. But you say the
British press was using the term World War II as early as September, '39...?
So much for that theory...
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I have seen a couple of references in the mid-thirties to a "Second World
War" but usually as "second World War" as in the context (paraphrasing) "if
things continue to go badly in central Europe we may face a second World War"
(I can only remember this specifically from a 1936 or 1937 issue of Current
History, but I'm pretty sure there were others).  That, of course, wouldn't
qualify as a first listing of the events started either in China or Poland as
"World War Two," but would be more along the lines of Cold War fears of a
"World War Three."
----------------------------------

One of the little quirks of our ISP is that whichever of us (my husband, a
historian, and myself) logs on first to pick up our e-mails gets them ALL.
As a result, this evening he spotted the new thread, and referred me to a
book written in 1933, "The First World War," edited by Laurence Stallings.
He believes that this is the earliest reference he has seen with that
particular usage.  (Stallings, who was obviously a stiudent of history,
closed the book with a series of photo montages of: Hitler, Uncle Joe,
Mussolini and Ataturk).
-----------------------------------------
Glad you responded. Gives me a chance to make a correction. The book I
referred to with the "World War Eye" reference is Jack Finney's "Time and
Again" (1970). The 19th Century girl transported to the modern era is
appalled by a book whose title she reads off as "A Pictorial History of World
War Eye." She asks, "And what does World War EYE mean?"
    The hero tells her "That isn't a letter of the alphabet. It's a number,
Julia, a roman number."
    Julia catches on quick. "World War...ONE? There've been MORE?"

    It reminds me of somebody's remark (Einstein's?) that he didn't know what
weapons World War III would be fought with, but he knew World War IV would be
fought with rocks and clubs. It seems as though Piper is the one of the few
writers who could imagine a fourth world war without assuming the third would
put a definite end to the series for a few millenia.

    Anyway, to clarify...I mentioned the 1939 Time Magazine article about
Superman as possibly the first use of World War II (that is, with the Roman
numeral). Not use of "the Second World War," which seems like an obvious
construction if "the World War" is already in common use. It sounded to me
like a Time-ism to number the world wars with Roman numerals (we're so used
to it because it went into popular usage that we don't realize how odd a
formulation it must have been at first).
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If you wish to consult the originals of the above quotes, go to URL
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/piper-l.html#ARCHIVES
select "October 2001" and start with the fifth item under the heading "Beam's
fascination with the South?".

         - Jim Landau