Here is a minimally colorized Veterans Day photo of Santa Barbara in 1918.
The photo shows people awaiting a train of soldiers returning to Santa Barbara’s Train Station after the war ended on November 11, 1918.
The source of the original was the USC Digital Library.
The end of WWI was on November 11, 1918 @ 11am. American troops did not go into their first battle at Cantigny on May 28, 1918. Though most Americans do not know it, Americans fought in WWI for only 5-1/2 months. About 117,000 US troops, including Marines, died during combat. Germany and Austria started the war, but there was no combat in either country! The US started shipping 100,000 troops a month to the war and Germany and Austria threw in the towel. They would have been overrun. My father was a heavy machine gunner in the German Army in Riga and Alsace. He died during mid-life @ 51 from the results of poison gas.
Quite a crowd to welcome home their friends and family members. But it couldn’t have been Nov 11th, 1917 because that is the day the war was halted. And Armistice Day wasn’t formally decreed until 1919. BTW Armistice Day became Veterans’ Day in 1954.