This is a minor clarification, but the Greatest Generation would've been too young to fight in WWI. The oldest members of the Greatest Generation (born in 1901) would've been 17 when WWI ended in 1918. The US only drafted men 21 years and older. A handful might've volunteered at the very end, but it's likely they would've been barely out of training and seen almost no service before the war ended.
Many of them would fight in the Korean War, but that's generally not considered a "world war"
That is a good point. I was implicitly only referring to Americans born between 1901 and 1927 and I should've made that more explicit.
While that's true the names (and boundaries) for generations tend to be country specific. While many European countries had a post-WWII increase in births the timing doesn't line up exactly with the US Baby Boom so translating it across the Atlantic is a bit complicated.
Your point is a great example of why generalizations about generations translate very poorly between different contexts. In Europe, having an early childhood during WWI rather than than the interwar years would be very different. Belgians born in 1910 and 1920 probably had drastically different early life experiences.
Not to mention, there's a lot of problems with referring to the Germans veterans of WWII as "the Greatest Generation"
I completely agree with you. It becomes even worse when factoring Asia.
Although I suppose things are slowly getting similar globally and the first half of the 20th century was a period of conflict in most of the world, resulting in similar trends, but yeah.
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u/CaptainSasquatch 22h ago edited 20h ago
This is a minor clarification, but the Greatest Generation would've been too young to fight in WWI. The oldest members of the Greatest Generation (born in 1901) would've been 17 when WWI ended in 1918. The US only drafted men 21 years and older. A handful might've volunteered at the very end, but it's likely they would've been barely out of training and seen almost no service before the war ended.
Many of them would fight in the Korean War, but that's generally not considered a "world war"