2018: World War I

2018 marks the Centenary of the End of World War I. Since 2014, when the Centenary of the Beginning of the war was commemorated, I built up a collection of postcards, stamps and postmarks related to the war. Now for this important jubilee I will show it again in a new order based on the chronological course of the war. The primary series will consist of six posts, one for each year of the war and one for the background, which will be posted every month from now one. In 2019 I plan to post some more stories about Europe's changed political map after the Great War, but for now enjoy this post about the background and stay tuned for the next five posts. To bridge the time between the single posts you can visit my complete collection on my other blog, as not everything will be included in this post series.

Unfortunately this post series will be slightly centred on the Western Front. This is because the medium for it are stamps and postcards. As everyone who collects these might notice, it is much easier to get them for the countries involved in the Western Front than for the other fronts and as I noticed, the most stamps issued in the last five years were also centred on the events in this region. For the most cases I will just mention events of the war for which I have something, but sometimes I will also include others to have a "complete" view of the war. Connected with this, please also notice that the country labels I will add to the posts will be, like actually always on this blog, for the countries that the collectibles are from and not for the country a battle took place in or so. So for example if there is a Canadian stamp about a battle in France it would have the label "Canada" if there is no other French thing within the post.

Posts:
The Background of the Great War (June)
1914 (July)
1915 (August)
1916 (September)
1917 (October)
1918 (November)
A Changed Continent (2019) --> won't happen!

To commemorate the Centenary of the Armistice and the End of World War I these countries have issued special stamps:
Green = I got it!, Yellow = on its way/reserved, Red = missing
Australia
Belgium
Canada
France 
Hungary
Ireland
Italy
Luxembourg
New Zealand
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Serbia
Slovenia
United Kingdom
USA
and others I might not know about yet...