Hear General Pershing's 1918 message from the battlefields of France, restored

In March 1918, General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, spoke 33 seconds into a recording horn in France. The Library of Congress catalog records the place as the American field headquarters on the Picardy battlefield. The Nation's Forum, a project that recorded American leaders during the First World War, issued the speech on a disc pressed by Columbia, with Ambassador James W. Gerard on the other side. The Library of Congress notes that this was the one Nation's Forum record sold commercially.

The Library of Congress holds a copy pressed from the original master and has digitized it for its collection "American Leaders Speak: Recordings from World War I." It is an acoustic recording, made without a microphone, and the noise of the disc sits on top of Pershing's voice. For Veterans Day, 108 years after the armistice of November 11, 1918, we ran it through Diffio AI, our speech restoration tool. This page puts the original and the restoration side by side.

Listen: the 1918 recording as it survives

Listen: the same recording, restored with Diffio

Both files are the whole disc, matched for loudness, so what changes is the noise and the voice, not the volume. What Pershing says:

"Three thousand miles from home, an American army is fighting for you. Everything you hold worthwhile is at stake. Only the hardest blows can win against the enemy we are fighting. Invoking the spirit of our forefathers, the army asks your unshrinking support, to the end that the high ideals for which America stands may endure upon the earth."

The Library of Congress catalog quotes the phrase as "unshrinking support." On both the original and the restoration, a speech recognition model hears "unflinching," which shows how hard the word is to make out on the disc. We have kept the catalog's wording.

Watch: before and after

What changed

Diffio restores recorded speech. It separates the voice from everything else in the recording and rebuilds it so it sounds closer to a clean microphone. On this disc the surface noise drops away and Pershing's voice comes forward.

We checked the result the same way we check our own work: we ran a speech recognition model (Whisper) on the original and on the restoration. On the original it heard the last line as "they endure upon the earth"; on the restoration it heard "may endure upon the earth," which is what Pershing said. Everything else matched.

One honest note from the process. On our first pass the restoration lost the opening words, "thousand miles from home," because the speech starts in the very first second of the file. Adding two seconds of silence before the recording fixed it, and the version on this page is that second pass. If you restore a recording that starts mid-word, give it a moment of lead-in.

The models are generative, which is why the result can be so much clearer than a noise filter manages on audio this old. It is also why we publish the original next to the restoration. Treat the restored file as a listening copy: the original stays exactly as the Library of Congress digitized it, and anyone quoting Pershing should check the words against it.

More voices from the same years

Earlier this fall we restored Warren G. Harding's 1921 Hoboken address for the American war dead, which he recorded for Victor in 1922, and a set of early presidential voices from 1908 to 1922. The same kind of restoration works on recordings much closer to home: a grandfather's cassette about his service, a reel-to-reel of a Veterans Day service, an oral history taped in a noisy hall. You can try Diffio on three uploads without a card.

For journalists, educators and museums

The Library of Congress records that this disc was sold commercially in 1918, and U.S. sound recordings published before 1923 entered the public domain in 2022. The restored audio and the video on this page are free to use for press, classroom and museum work. Write to me at nathan.harmon@trydiffio.com if you'd like WAV files. Please credit "Audio: Gen. John J. Pershing, 'From the Battlefields of France,' Nation's Forum (1918), Library of Congress; restored with Diffio AI (diffio.ai)". The original is at the Library of Congress.

Nathan Harmon is the founder of Diffio AI, based in Colorado Springs.