Great WWI Trivia from Strategy Page

Wright Brothers Memorial Naval Aviation Fly-Over
Kill Devil Hills, NC (Strategy Page)

Strategy Page is a great site for hardcore military affairs enthusiasts.  Their articles range from in-depth reporting and analysis to a regular trivia feature. It also offers a neat selection of photos (See above).

1. Several novels, such as John Dos Passos’s 1921 Three Soldiers, have characters who are jailed or even executed for desertion from the army, but during World War I only 5,584 U.S. soldiers—out of nearly 3.5 million enrolled—were charged with desertion, of whom about half were convicted, few served much time, and none were executed.

2.  Fully 85 percent of Red Cross parcels sent to Allied POWs in German hands during World War I reached the intended soldier.

3.  The first wife of Austrian World War I submarine ace Captain Georg von Trapp was Agathe Whitehead, the granddaughter of Robert Whitehead, the inventor of the "automotive torpedo," with whom he had the children who became the “Trapp Family Singers."

4. Kreigsmarine Seals?  Perhaps the earliest example of a regularly organized naval special operations force was the German Marine-Sturmabteilung, composed of 300 surplus naval personnel, which was formed in the two-division Marinekorps Flandern in June of 1916 to conduct high-risk missions, including defending the submarines bases on the Belgian coast, defending trench lines along the Yser, and conducting maritime security and special operations.

5.“Agent 17”: August Schluga, Baron von Rastenfeld (1841–1917), who’d served as an officer candidate in the Austrian Army during the 1859 Italian War and afterward became a newspaper correspondent in Paris. Sometime during the 1860s he became a German spy, performing valuable services during the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars and over the years of peace that followed. In 1914 Schluga passed documents with details of French Plan XVII to the Germans, though the General Staff apparently did not fully appreciate their importance. Never apprehended, he continued to pass valuable information to the Germans from Paris until 1915, when he moved his base to Switzerland, where he died of natural causes. Schluga’s work was revealed postwar, but his sources were never determined.

6. Published in 1931, The Battle of Jutland by Cdr. Holloway H. Frost, USN (1889–1935), was so well regarded that the German navy adopted it as a text for officer cadets.

7.  About 40 percent of male New Zealanders between the ages of 19 and 45, totaling about 120,000 men, served overseas during the First World War, of whom 18,000 died and over 50,000 were injured.

8.  Despite its themes of peace, equality, and tolerance [and the passing of the old aristocracy], when Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1937, it became an immediate favorite with Benito Mussolini, who kept a copy in his private collection, though his partner in crime Adolf Hitler despised the picture.

9. At the time of his death, on 24 November 1916, at the height of the Great War, Hiram Maxim was deaf, having fired his invention, the first really practical machine gun, some 200,000 times while selling it to virtually every army in the world.

10.  Approximately one out of every three pilots who entered front line service in World War I died in combat or due to accidents.

11.  Soon after Italy entered the World War in the spring of 1915, about 310,000 Italians living in other countries (including nearly 90,000 from the United States and one from Siam) returned to their native soil to serve.