The Junior Red Cross Activities Teachers Manual, published by the American Red Cross in October, 1918, includes suggestions ("not ... presented in detail ... but adaptable to the usual course of study") for a shawl to be knitted or crocheted by students for donation to refugees from France and Belgium, the countries hardest-hit by the fighting of the Great War, which had in fact not yet ended when the manual was published. There were estimated to have been some quarter-million civilian Belgian refugees to Britain alone, and the American Red Cross helped to provide humanitarian relief to refugees there and in other countries.
It is interesting that the directions for the shawl request that the circular version at least be worked with a permanent fold in the middle, an unusual feature. Dark colors were presumed to be preferred by the recipients, Andrea of Unsung Sewing Patterns suspects because of their limited resources for laundering.
Note also that a first-year high school student would be expected to be capable of making the shawl, more-or-less without a pattern!
Knitted items included in the Manual with (basic) patterns are babies' caps (page 326), wash cloths (page 328), and scrub cloths "or trench mops" out of muslin strips "for camp and hospital use" (page 376).
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