The Aviator. A Biography of James R. McConnell, Lafayette Escadrille Fighter Pilot

By Steven Tom 

Schiffer Military History, 2025

Reviewed by David F. Beer

Original Members of the Lafayette Escadrille: James McConnell,
Kiffin Rockwell, French Capt. Thenault, Norman Prince, Victor Chapman

James McConnell’s own bestselling book Flying for France appeared shortly before his death in World War One. He effectively described the war both on land and in the air but didn’t reveal much about himself either as a person or as a participant in the conflict. These details, however, are vibrantly revealed in Steven Tom’s The Aviator, and Schiffer Military History has done a magnificent job of presenting this work. The numerous black-and-white photos give us excellent views of each stage of McConnell’s too-short life, while the text is readable and enhanced by frequent excerpts from personal letters and memos.

If you’ve been on the campus of the University of Virginia you may have noticed a 12-foot-high bronze statue of a winged Icarus reaching into the sky. The inscription reads “Soaring like an eagle into new heavens of valor and devotion.” This statue honors James Rogers McConnell, a former student of the university who in his time there may have been better known for his campus social life and self-taught bagpipe playing. When war broke out in Europe, however, Jim, like many young men of his age and social class, sympathized with France and left home and country to fight. In January 1915 he sailed to France and joined the American Ambulance Field Service, which, other than enlisting in the French Foreign Legion, was at the time the only way an American could really be part of the war.

This is an extremely detailed biography. In the early chapters on Jim’s work as an ambulance driver we learn not only about his adventures (which at times are no less than heroic) but also about the evolution of the vehicles which became increasingly efficient in carrying the wounded and dying. American ambulance drivers were greatly appreciated:

The presence of the American ambulance…has an important influence upon the morale of the French troops. This factor is not to be disdained, for in the long, grueling campaign the morale is everything. The concrete expression of America’s sympathy for France’s sacrifice is to no small extent buoying up the French hopes...The ambulance section has been cited for the order of the day and decorated with the war cross…they are brave young men, seriously doing their work (57–58).

When Jim transfers to the Lafayette Escadrille and trains to become a pilot his progress—and the methods used by the French to train a pilot—are fascinating. With him we experience flying in various types of aircraft including the Penguin, Voisin, Caudron, and Blériot, and to describe Jim’s experiences as ‘hairy’ or precarious would be an understatement. He records much of his flying in his letters to friends and is especially moved by what he sees over Verdun, which he later describes as a “strip of murdered Nature”:

It looks as if shells fell by the thousands every second. There are spurts of smoke at nearly every foot of the brown areas, and a thick pall of mist covers it all. There are but holes where the trenches ran, and when one thinks of the poor devils crouching in their inadequate shelters under such a hurricane of flying metal, it increases one’s respect for the staying power of modern man. It’s terrible to watch, and I feel sad every time I look down (157).

The biography is greatly strengthened by significant portions of Jim’s letters to relatives and friends (including girlfriends) and by the citing of articles which Jim wrote and sent to popular American magazines. His style is always direct and unadorned.  He is quite forthright in his criticism of the United States for not immediately joining the French and British in the War. He describes the living conditions he experiences at each base he is sent to and like other flyers is frustrated and angry when weather conditions prevent any flying.

James R. McConnell, Sergeant-Pilot, Escadrille Américaine
KIA 19 March 1917
Order HERE

Just over two weeks before the United States entered the war, Jim was killed. He went missing on a morning patrol but due to bad weather was not found for a few days—during which all his companions desperately hoped he had merely crash-landed and been taken prison. But on 23 March, around 10:00 p.m.,

…the news everyone feared was confirmed. The squadron received a message that advancing French troops had found the wreckage of Nieuport #2055 near the Bois l’Abbe. The pilot…was found lying dead beside the plane. German soldiers had apparently taken all identifying papers from the body and had also taken his boots. A doctor estimated he had been dead for three days (p. 245).

Jim had outlived many other pilots and had made his mark in so many ways, including the literary one.  The Aviator gives us valuable insight into his life, his feelings, his friendships, and above all his courage. No wonder the memorial to him in Carthage, North Carolina, reads “He fought for humanity, liberty, and democracy.”

David F. Beer

The Boer War to World War: Tactics and Training in the British Army 1902–1914 (Video)

About That World War One British Warship Wreck Discovered off Scottish Coast

HMS Hawke

The wreck of HMS Hawke, an Edgar-class protected cruiser sunk by a German U-boat in 1914, has been discovered 360 feet down about 70 miles off Scotland’s Aberdeenshire coast, a search team announced in August. The Royal Navy confirmed the identity of the find in September 2024.

After 110 years of repose beneath the North Sea waves, the 387-foot Hawke, one of the early Royal Navy ship losses of World War I, remains in a notable state of preservation, with much of the teak decking still intact and a host of everyday artifacts such as crockery visible in the cabins. “It’s a really remarkable time capsule,” remarked wreck diver Steve Mortimer to the BBC.

The U-9 Was One of Only Two Vessels Awarded the Iron Cross in the War 
(Inset) Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddigen

Mortimer has been working on the project with Lost in Waters Deep, a Scottish group dedicated to researching and locating “the First World War naval losses off mainland Scotland, the Western Isles, Orkney, and Shetland.” Considerable preliminary legwork by the team, combing through contemporaneous data in British and German war records, set the stage for the discovery by shipwreck searchers off the diving support vessel Clasina.

Launched in 1891, the Hawke served in the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Squadron in the 1890s in addition to various other duties. An uncanny incident in September 1911 seems, in retrospect, to have been an ominous indication of the ship’s eventual fate: Her bow was smashed in a fluke collision off Southampton with the ocean liner RMS Olympic—sister ship of the Titanic, which sank the following year.

German Depiction of the Sinking

The Hawke was deployed with the 10th Cruiser Squadron, protecting a Canadian troop convoy from German warship attacks, on 15 October 1914 when she dropped out from the patrol to pick up mail from HMS Endymion. Hastening to rejoin her now out-of-sight squadron, the Hawke was struck by a torpedo from the German submarine U-9—which less than a month earlier had mortified the British public by sinking three ships of the 7th Cruiser Squadron in one shockingly decisive encounter.

Now, U-9’s latest victim quickly burst into flames from the fatal torpedo hit. An explosion rocked her, and in less than eight minutes, HMS Hawke had gone to her final resting place. Seventy men survived, while 524, including the captain, died with their ship.

Source: Naval History, December 2024

World War One Museum Collages

There's a pattern I've noticed in visiting World War One museums over the years.  Their curators seem to like to put together displays that have enormous concentrations of stuff–usually somewhat related, sometimes not—where the intention is clearly not to allow a full appreciate ever single item. Apparently, these are attempts to create a broad, emotional response from the visitor, something on the order of: This is what that war was about — fell it!".   I've decided to  use the term "collage" for these presentations. Collages were a product of the Dada Movement of the First World War period, in which the artists tried to make some original, radical statement by combining ordinary materials.  Anyway, here are a few examples of what I'm thinking about.  All the images can be enlarged by clicking on them. MH 

Somme 1916 Museum, Albert

Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra, Rovereto

In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres

Mémorial de Verdun

National WWI Museum, Kansas City

Historial de la Grande Guerra, Péronne

Guards Museum, London

Did Germany Forget Clausewitz During Their Prewar Planning?

Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz

All theories of Clausewitz have to be thrown overboard!

General Erich Ludendorff, 1916 

By Joseph Enge

Ludendorff did throw Clausewitz's theories overboard when ascending to command of the German General Staff with Hindenburg in 1916, but German military leadership had already consciously and in practice done so since General Alfred von Schlieffen took over as chief of staff in 1891.  Schlieffen decided as well to reject Helmuth von Moltke the Elder's balanced military views that allowed for various political considerations and solutions. By doing so he set in motion military preparations not only disconnected from the state's political objectives but also unnecessarily limited, forcing Germany into political directions against its best interests. Such a disconnect of policy and military considerations would have been unthinkable under Bismarck's leadership. 

The political system Bismarck designed was essentially flawed in that it was designed after German unification around himself and Kaiser Wilhelm I without any accountability other than to the emperor. Henry Kissinger pointed out the German Second Reich was an artifice without the traditions or philosophical frameworks of other nation states. The chancellors who followed Bismarck were not maestros, and Wilhelm II impulsively interfered with foreign and domestic political matters. The new military thought and theory from Schlieffen to Hindenburg, Weltpolitik and its fantasy visions of grandeur, a government without clear lines of authority and accountability, and an impetuous emperor in the middle of these elements led to the self-destructive decision making to enter World War I, the design and application of the Schlieffen Plan, and the decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare. Clausewitz's war as a method to achieve political objectives became political means to achieve military objectives. The price paid for upturning Clausewitz's central concept was high and consistently repeated by Germany throughout the Great War, leading to its ultimate defeat. 

Graf Alfred von Schlieffen

A common mindset developed after Bismarck's departure—from 1890 to the end of the war in 1918—that twisted Clausewitz's trinity of government policy, military methods, and popular passions into an imbalanced combination that inexorably alienated neighbor states, unnecessarily created a coalition of nations opposing Germany, limited Germany's choices and options to only risky military solutions. Those military solutions produced became more desperate and riskier with less likelihood of success as the war progressed. In the 16th century, Pope Julius III had asked,  “Do you know, my son, with what little understanding the world is ruled?” In the early 19th century, Carl von Clausewitz attempted to provide some understanding he found lacking of war, man's riskiest and costliest endeavor. Clausewitz's central concept of military  theory . was:  

The political object…must become an essential factor in the equation, and war is merely the continuation of policy by other means. The political object is the goal, war is a means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose. The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are Carl von Clausewitz, Theoretician of War embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive. 

Clausewitz's advice is both timeless and universal, yet was completely disregarded six decades later by fellow Prussian officer General Alfred Schlieffen while drawing up Germany's war plan that took his name and whose essentials were retained at the outbreak of World War I from August to September of 1914.

Schlieffen produced his military plan in complete isolation from political objectives and foreign policy concerns of the chancellor, assuming a singular scenario of Germany having to fight both France and Russia at the same time. Schlieffen directly contradicted Moltke the Elder's plan of Germany facing a two-front war by evenly dividing forces in defense that allowed an offense in either direction and for a political solution that made options available for Bismarck. The fundamental and fatal flaws of the Schlieffen Plan were its complete disconnect from any political objectives (as it was a singular plan that left the chancellor without other military options), the absence of a fallback plan should it fail, and its unilateral decision to violate neutral territory without regard for the political consequences. 

Graf Helmuth von Moltke the Younger

Clausewitz's clear admonition was that the first and  most important decision is for the statesman and commander to meet to establish the kind of war they are fighting. It is not only amazing that Schlieffen constructed a plan that tied the political hands of the current chancellor, Leo von Caprivi, without providing options, but also tied the hands of future German chancellors for the next 20 years without its salient strategic shortcomings being raised or questioned. The July 1914 crisis found a German general staff locked into and unwilling to scrap their 20-year-old plan that did not allow for a potential war only with Russia.

Both Kaiser Wilhelm II and German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg did not fully appreciate how German war plans limited their choices to pursue Germany's best interests until it was too late. A great deal of focus and emphasis has been put on timetables and the need to mobilize quickly without falling behind opponents' mobilizations as forcing the start of World War I. More important was German linear rigidity to a singular plan that did not allow the chancellor or Kaiser the opportunity to seek not only political solutions but also alternative military solutions that were not in The Plan. Michael Geyer wrote, “Ideally means were subordinated to goals…Strategy (German)…proceeded to turn this calculus on its head.

The full extent of the upside-down relationship of military method dominating political objectives cannot be fully appreciated without realizing Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg did not have any concrete war aims until September of 1914, once the war was unleashed. If Moltke the Younger followed Clausewitz and was not fixed on one war plan without any alternatives, Bethmann-Hollweg would have been hard pressed, and the Kaiser too, to provide war aims other than the general and broad idea of breaking the Entente encirclement, which, ironically, Germany's actions had created.

Source:  Excerpted from "AFTER BISMARCK:  WHY THE SUBSEQUENT REJECTION OF CLAUSEWITZ AND MOLTKE THE ELDER LED TO WORLD WAR I AND GERMANY'S DEFEAT" By Joseph Enge, Over the Top, February 2014

Remembering a Veteran: Chaplain Dexter and the Silver Wattle of Gallipoli

Chaplain Dexter at Gallipoli

By James Patton

Senior Chaplain (hon. Lieut. Col.) Walter Ernest Dexter, DSO, MC, DCM, MiD (1873–1950) was born at Birkenhead, England. The  youngest son of a shipwright, he too seemed destined for the sea. He was indentured at 14 for five years at wages of "nothing plus twelve shillings for washing" on the barque Buckingham. After a year he jumped ship in New York and eked out an existence doing odd jobs, until  he was able to ship out aboard his eldest brother’s vessel in 1890.

All told, he made at least  37 voyages, under both sail and steam. He started as "boy," rose through the ranks, ending in March 1899, when he got his master's certificate. In 1900  he was the first mate of the Akbar, based at Mauritius.

When the Second Boer War was heating up in 1899, a former tea planter from Assam, the Scottish-born Dugald M. Lumsden CB (1851–1915), recruited a mounted unit in Bengal for Imperial Service. Well over 1,000 men volunteered, but Lumsden was choosy—he only wanted men between 25 and 40 years of age, and he preferred them to be unmarried. The unit was called Lumsden's Horse, with two companies and a machine gun section, filled with tea planters or men from the mercantile or maritime trades. Dexter was among the latter, assigned to 4 section of B Company. 

Lumsden's Horse deployed to South Africa in March 1900, and campaigned there for over a year. Two incidents involving Dexter stand out. First, Lumsden's Horse was in the vanguard of the advance on Elandsfontein, a Boer railway center. It was discovered that the Boers were using the telegraph to report British positions and perhaps direct artillery fire. Private Dexter rode forward under heavy fire, climbed a telegraph pole and cut the wires. Second, during the action at Karee, when a small party including Dexter were cut off, they had to fight their way out, suffering 50 percent casualties. Private Dexter was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) at the end of the unit's tour of duty. He also received the Queen’s South Africa Medal with three clasps.

Trooper Dexter During the Boer War

After his discharge he returned to the sea. He became master of the Afghan, carrying Moslem pilgrims to Mecca, then trading in the off-season. For manning a rescue boat from the Afghan at the wreck of the Taher off Mauritius in March 1901, he was commended by the Royal Humane Society. 

He later said that he began to feel "a driving force … certainly not myself." He studied the Biblical languages and entered Durham University in 1906, intending to prepare for the ministry. He graduated with an M.A. and received his  L.Th. in 1908, and was ordained in the Church of England. Given his non-traditional background, his first parish assignment was equally non-traditional, going to the new coal-mining camp at Wonthaggi in Victoria, Australia. For two years his vicarage was a tent, but he earned a reassignment to St. Barnabas in South Melbourne. 

Enlisting in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) on the outbreak of World War I, Dexter was one of twelve chaplains whose appointments dated from 8 September 1914. His parishioners  presented him with a silver traveling communion kit, (which today is in the  collections of the Australian War Museum, Canberra). He sailed on HMAT Orvieto in the first convoy to Egypt. At the beginning of the Dardanelles Campaign, he was assigned to hospital ship duty, but on 17 May 1915 he was landed at ANZAC on Gallipoli. Serving as acting senior chaplain of the 2nd Brigade, he shared the lives and dangers of the men, not only helping them spiritually but practically too,  as he was an effective ‘scrounger’, earning the nickname 'The Pinching Padre'. He also performed minor medical tasks and was known to have extracted teeth on at least one occasion. 'He was as good as a doctor', wrote a sergeant.

Of course, there were the burials to attend to. He often shared his feelings about them with his diary. This quote is taken from his entry on 10 August 1915, after the Battle of Lone Pine:

Australian Dead at Lone Pine

In the Lone Pine the moving of the dead goes steadily on. All hope of getting them out for burial is given up and they are being dragged into saps and recesses, which will be filled up. The bottom of the trench is fairly clear, you have not to stand on any as you walk along and the bottom of the trench is not springy, nor do gurgling sounds come from under your feet as you walk on something soft. The men are feeling worn out but are sticking it like Britons. The stench you get used to after a bit unless a body is moved. In all this the men eat, drink and try to sleep. Smoking is their salvation and a drop of rum works wonders … Had a funeral at 6 p.m. One is obsessed with dead men and burials and I am beginning to dream of them. I suppose it is because I am so tired.

He took a close interest in the burial sites on the Gallipoli battlefield. He organized work parties to build a low rock wall around part of the cemetery at Shrapnel Valley to protect it from floods. He also obtained paint and other materials to neaten the appearance of the graves. Later, he was put in charge of carefully surveying the cemeteries. Up to his departure on17 December 1915, he supervised the workers who drew up plans of the major cemeteries: Shrapnel Valley, Ari Burnu, the Beach, Brown's Dip, and Shell Green. Some of the smaller cemeteries were also surveyed, such as at Plugge's Plateau and Victoria Gully. Before their evacuation, his team had completed the job. He had kept the burial records up to date, and had also taken the bearings of many isolated graves, so that accurate and useful records would exist should the Australians ever return to Gallipoli. 

He also left behind a memento: "I went up the gullies and through the cemeteries, scattering Silver Wattle seed. If we have to leave here, I intend that a bit of Australia shall be here. I soaked the seed for about 20 hours, and they seem to be well and thriving."

Silver Wattle at Johnston's Jolly Cemetery, Gallipoli

Silver wattle, also called mimosa or Wednesday weed (Acacia dealbata), is a species of erect, bushy shrub or spreading tree. It is endemic in New South Wales and Victoria states. It produces bright yellow flowers throughout the antipodean summer, and the flower has been used as a symbol of Australia, even featured on the coat of arms, (along with a kangaroo and an emu). It grows well on sloping ground, like the sides of gullies or ravines, and Gallipoli has a lot of that terrain. It is now found in many locales with a Mediterranean clime, including California, where  it is classified as an invasive weed.

He was one of two chaplains at Gallipoli awarded the Distinguished Service Order, and was also Mentioned in Despatches. 

Chaplain Dexter (L) on the Western Front

After a stop in Egypt, he went to France in April 1916. From Pozières in July to the AIF's battles in August 1918, with only  a short break at AIF Headquarters in London, he tended to the troops' welfare as a senior chaplain, as well as a compassionate friend. One example of the latter is given by C.E.W. Bean, the official war historian: 

"Chaplain Dexter, with support from the Australian Comforts Fund, established at the corner of Bécourt Wood a coffee stall which henceforth became a cherished institution on the edge of every Australian battlefield."

In 1918 he was awarded the Military Cross for his work on the battlefield at Passchendaele, thus becoming the AIF’s most decorated chaplain.  

After the war, he served with the AIF demobilization staff in London, a difficult job as the repatriation process was slow due to a lack of ships. He returned to Melbourne in 1920, tried farming on a soldier’s grant, then returned to the church in 1924. Pastoral duties, civic affairs, further  education (he earned a Dip. Ed.), teaching, writing and war commemoration services then occupied his life. At some point he struck up a dialog with the British Poet Laureate (1930–67), John Masefield (1868–1967), who also went to sea as a boy, and who wrote a book about Gallipoli that was published in 1916. It is said that, on 11 November 1934, Masefield visited Dexter at his parish in Lara, near Melbourne, where Masefield read a minor work entitled  "For the dead at Gallipoli" for the first time. It is also said that, in 1938 Masefield helped Dexter get his autobiographical work covering his life at sea published, entitled Rope-Yarns, Marline-Spikes and Tar. If there were to be further works covering his military life, they were never forthcoming.  

He died on 31 August 1950, survived by his second wife, Dora, whom he had married in 1908, their five sons (all of whom served in World War II) and one daughter. "The press has told us of his amazing career, his distinctions, his activities and his varied ministry," wrote a wartime chaplain colleague who had risen to be the Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne; "he was a man of great gifts."

Sources:  The Anzac Portal; The Australian Boer War Memorial; Australian Dictionary of Biography

Between the World Wars: What was the United States' Involvement with the League of Nations?

The United States was the primary architect of the League of Nations but never  became a member.  In March 1920, the Treaty of Versailles, including the  Covenant for the League had been defeated by a 49–35 Senate vote. Wilson’s insistence that the Covenant be linked to the treaty was a blunder; over time, the treaty had been discredited as unenforceable, short-sighted, or too extreme in its provisions. Nine months later, Warren Harding was elected president on a platform opposing the League. 

America, however, next had to face the practical issues of dealing with the new international organization. Further, even while rejecting membership, the Republican Presidents of the period, and their foreign policy architects, agreed with many of the Leagues goals. 

To the extent that Congress allowed, the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations associated the United States with League efforts on several issues. Constant suspicion in Congress that steady U.S. cooperation with the League would lead to de facto membership prevented a close relationship between Washington and Geneva. Additionally, postwar disillusionment with the war and the Treaty of Versailles diminished public support for the League in the United States and the international community. 

Yet, the 50-plus countries operating collectively could not be ignored by America's statesmen. Consequently, an informal  level of  cooperation with the League through various unofficial channels evolved. American representatives often sat on League committees related to finance, and humanitarian issues, such as the League's Health Committee and the suppression of the opium trade. Large American organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation provided significant financial support for League projects in public health and economics.  

Most important was the off-and-on diplomatic cooperation between the United States and the League through war and peace-type emergencies. During the Manchurian Crisis (1931–1932), an American representative joined the commission of inquiry sent to Japan. The Japanese subsequently left the League in March 1933 following criticism of its invasion of Manchuria.  (Hitler soon after withdrew Germany from the League over re-armament issues, but America remained detached from that dispute.) Later, during the Ethiopian (Abyssinian) Crisis of 1935, the U.S. refused to cooperate with the League of Nations in placing formal sanctions on Italy. Instead, it invoked neutrality legislation that imposed an arms embargo on both belligerents. As Ethiopia was less industrialized, this restriction disproportionately hurt its defensive capability against Italy.  

Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie's 1936 Address to the League of Nations
Came to Symbolize the League's Failure at Peacekeeping

The League stopped intervening in subsequent international crises including the Spanish Civil War and Germany's occupation of Czechoslovakia. It effectively got out of the peacekeeping business, the main rationale for its creation. Meanwhile, by the end of the 1930s, the United States began to move away from strict isolationism, but, as a neutral, was not positioned with a broad coalition for holding off the rise of the Axis Powers.  

When war broke out in September 1939, the League simply ceased work; its headquarters in Geneva remained empty throughout the war.  In 1945—at the Conference in Yalta—America, Britain, and Russia formally agreed to convene a new international organization (the United Nations) when the war finished. On 12 April 1946, the League met in Geneva and formally abolished itself. 

Source: U.S. Department of State

How the Navy Won the War: The Real Instrument of Victory 1914-1918

 

By Jim Ring

Barnsley: Seaforth Publishing, 2018

Review by Dr. Joseph Moretz, PhD, U.S. Naval Academy

The British Expeditionary Force Landing in France

Originally Presented in the International Journal of Naval History, December 2021

Unsurprisingly, the centenary of the First World War witnessed an outpouring of commemoration to a conflict whose legacy shaped the contours of modern life with veneration reaching its apogee in 2018, as nations noted the stark sacrifices made by an earlier generation. Giving thanks to a peace at last secured, many could pray such a profound test not be faced again. A natural enough response by the heirs of the defeated, it is a stance even later generations of the victorious have embraced. Living with weapons even more ghastly than those found in the World War may offer one explanation for such revision while a sense the victory won came at an altogether too high a price must stand as another. That the quality of generalship proved unequal to the challenge of modern, industrial war has become received wisdom in contemporary Britain and doubtless, elsewhere, too. 

Jim Ring is aware of this context in How the Navy Won the War, but has his eyes set on two problems of a different sort. To wit, Britain followed a flawed military strategy in the war to the detriment of her greater interests, and the subsequent historiography of the war, centered on the actions of the Western Front, overlooks the font of the conflict’s decisiveness: the sea. This rebuttal is not aimed at academic historians of the war, though some academics might agree. Nor is it directed at those schooled in the conflict’s finer details. Rather, Ring seeks to reach a public knowing of the war but faintly and then badly at that. Fed on a continuous diet of works from two competing heresies, that public must conclude British soldiers were indeed “lions led by donkeys” or that Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig was not so bad after all—certainly, he remained the best type of officer the Army could produce under the circumstances. Accordingly, at no point has the public been allowed to appreciate the maritime dimension of the World War and how it ruled all else.

The argument is not without appeal to those born to a maritime tradition and cannot be dismissed out of hand given that it is the crux of those who posit a “British Way in Warfare,” such as the late author and defense critic, Sir Basil Liddell Hart. Unsurprisingly, How the Navy Won the War draws freely and favorably from that writer as well as Winston Churchill, Admiral Sir John Fisher and the noted Oxford historian Alan Taylor in making its case. Collectively, a body of no mean intellect, ironically, all bear a responsibility for the very received wisdom that Ring laments. That this so may be attributed to a reason that they feature so prominently in How the Navy Won the War—all wrote fluently with veer, passion and, at times, a degree of venom. Certainly, none stands accused of boring their readers in the turgid style of the official histories penned by Julian Corbett, Henry Newbolt, and Ernest which the author fails to cite.

Central, though, to the author’s argument is the mistake Britain made by sending its army to the continent in August 1914 to act as an appendage of the French Army. From that decision flowed the destruction of the original British Expeditionary Force on the Marne and the subsequent disasters of the Somme and Third Ypres which decimated the “New Armies” which had replaced the “Old Contemptibles.”  Instead, better would it have been for Britain to limits its role to the traditional maritime strategy which had served it so well previously. Here, the influence of General Sir Henry Wilson, late Director of Military Operations, and Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, is castigated. The former by tying British military strategy so closely to France, while the latter, in raising an army of continental proportions, fed the beast that Wilson had ordained.

That proposition fails to persuade not least because Henry Wilson did not operate as a loose cannon. Francophile that he assuredly was, that officer remained subject to the guidance and oversight of the War Office and Richard Haldane, its Secretary of State during the key period before the war. It fails because sending the BEF to the continent in 1914 did not irretrievably commit Britain to a war of mass attrition. After all, Britain simultaneously initiated a series of peripheral operations against German colonies and would soon initiate another in Mesopotamia when the Ottoman Empire opted for belligerency in association with Germany and Austria-Hungary. More than anything else what committed Britain to a continental war was the fresh facts that Germany had created on the ground. With large portions of France and Belgium occupied and Russia suffering a heavy defeat at Tannenberg, the limits of naval power were all to painfully exposed when the German High Sea Fleet elected not to sally forth. In short, Britain could not leave France in the lurch unless it was willing to accept a very less than splendid isolation in a Europe now transformed to its detriment.  

Order HERE

This does not mean that what followed passes without criticism, but coalition warfare for a coalition lacking a unifying strategy, possessing diverse political aims, and retaining fragmented operational control of its military forces posits mistakes—many mistakes—will be likely until success or failure beckons. The tale of the succeeding four years is of a coalition struggling to master such shortfalls. The sea made the war a World War, but it did not make it any easier to wage. Britain and the Allies, however, were fortunate that they faced a Germany having an uncanny ability to make its own share of grievous errors, especially at the nexus of strategy and policy, while never grasping the essence of maritime war.

In the end, what transformed matters were the defeat of Russia and the entry of the United States into the war. The first sowed the seeds of discord which eventually rebounded on a Germany which had abetted the return of Lenin to Russia. The second allowed economic warfare to be prosecuted in a rigor heretofore not possible owing to earlier American neutrality. The Royal Navy played its part in that prosecution but so too the Allied armies fighting at the front which forced the enemy to consume that which could not be replaced—be it food, be it armaments, or be it manpower. How the Navy Won the War attempts too much, but it does remind us that the war was more than the Western Front and the clash of armies. It was a clash of economies too and not by accident did the side mastering sea power ultimately prevail. The specialist attuned to the First World War may safely forego the work. Others, less steeped in the war, are invited to consider the corrective presented. 

Joseph Moretz, PhD

Gatchina Palace: Once the Beating Heart of Russian Military Aviation

Gatchina Palace from an Aircraft

Located 30 miles southwest of St. Petersburg, in the city of the same name, Gatchina Palace dates back to the time of Empress Catherine II. In 1765, the tsaritsa gave her favorite, Count Grigory Orlov, a lavish gift—the Gatchina estate. Tsar Nicholas II spent his childhood and youth living at Gatchina Palace, which served as the primary residence for his father, Alexander III, following the 1881 assassination of Alexander II. Nicholas II grew up in the "Citadel of Autocracy," often occupying simple rooms, but later preferred living in the Alexander Palace after his own accession to the throne in 1894.

Record Setting Lt. Rudnev in His Farmam III Biplane

Gatchina Palace and its surrounding Military Field played a pivotal role in early Russian aviation.  In 1910, the Voyennoye Polye (Military Field) near the palace became Russia's first air strip, where aviators, including the famous Aleksandr Kazakov, trained before serving in World War I, becoming Russia's leading ace.  Gatchina is remembered a century later as the "Birthplace of Russian Military Aviation." The military pilot Evgeniy Vladimirovich Rudnev, who had learnt to fly at the Gatchina aerodrome, made the first flight between two cities in the history of Russian aviation,  Gatchina and St. Petersburg, on 22 October 1910 with a Farman III aircraft. 

Officers and Students of the Aviation School

The Imperial Russian Air Service (IRAS), founded in 1912, performed notably at times on the Eastern Front.  Despite limited domestic industrial capacity, it produced some of the war's most innovative aircraft, such as the Ilya Muromets four-engine bomber and was the first to implement strategic bombing tactics. International aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky began his early aviation career at Gatchina, specifically during the 1910s, when he tested and showcased his pioneering aircraft.

Memorial with a Farman Aircraft Honoring the Contributions of the Gatchina Airmen on the Grounds of the Museum

During WWI, Gatchina trained pilots, while the nearby town later supported aircraft engine repairs, strengthening its connection to aerial warfare. Throughout the conflict, the area was vital for aircraft logistics, with the Museum of the History of Aviation Engine Construction now located in the former barracks of the Life Guards of the Uhlan regiment opposite the palace. Following the 1917 revolution, the palace was transformed into a museum, though it witnessed fighting between Red forces and the White Army in the subsequent Civil War period. 

Sources: Aviation of Russia; picryl; RussianPhotos.ru; Russia Beyond

A "Gift" from the Great War—The Universal Passport System

Wartime Passport Control on  the Nemunas River between Tilsit and Kaunas

A 1922 International Labor Organization's report succinctly summarized the impact of the war on international travel. It pointed out that for much of the 19th century, migration was, generally speaking, unhindered and each emigrant could decide on the time of departure, arrival or return, to suit his own convenience. In periods of peace, passports were a rare requirement, although there were notable special cases, such as the border between the Ottoman and Russian empires and pre-unification.  But World War I's outbreak brought harsh restrictions on freedom of movement. In 1914, warring states of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy were the first to make passports mandatory, a measure rapidly followed by others, including the neutral states of Spain, Denmark, and Switzerland. The British were the first to issue modern-style, photo-ID booklets. 

At the end of the war, the regime of obligatory passports was widespread. In reaction, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which established the League of Nations, stipulated that member states commit to “secure and maintain freedom of communications and of transit.” To facilitate freedom of movement, participants agreed instead to establish a uniform, international passport, issued for a single journey or for a period two years. This is how we ended up with the format of the passports we use today. Participants also decided to abolish exit visas and decrease the cost of entry visas.

1916 Issue Passport for Austrian Scientist Georg Grasser

The first passport implementation conference was held in Paris in 1920, under the auspices of the League of Nations (the predecessor of the United Nations). Part of its Committee on Communication and Transit’s aim was to restore the prewar regime of freedom of movement.

Fences, however proved easier to build than to dismantle. The conference initially  recognized that restrictions on freedom of movement affect “personal relations between the peoples of various countries” and “constitute a serious obstacle to the resumption of normal intercourse and to the economic recovery of the world.”

Special Wartime Passport for a U.S. Postal Worker

But its delegates also concluded that security concerns prevented, for the time being, the total abolition of restrictions and the complete return to prewar conditions which the Conference hopes, nevertheless, to see gradually re-established in the near future. To facilitate freedom of movement, participants agreed instead to establish a uniform, international passport, issued for a single journey or for a period two years. This is how we ended up with the format of the passports we use today.

In 1947, the first problem considered at an expert meeting preparing for the UN World Conference on Passports and Frontier Formalities was “the possibility of a return to the regime which existed before 1914 involving as a general rule the abolition of any requirement that travelers should carry passports.” But delegates ultimately decided that a return to a passport-free world could only happen alongside a return to the global conditions that prevailed before the start of the first world war. By 1947, that was a distant dream. 

Sources:  80 Years of Fee; The Treasure Bunker; The Postal Museum

Lonesome Memorials #24 The Remember Flanders Memorials, Ottawa and Guelph, Canada

 

The Remember Flanders memorials in Ottawa and Guelph, Canada, were designed by Canadian sculptor Ruth Abernethy. The bronze features John McCrae, author of the immortal poem "In Flanders Fields." The memorial commemorates the centennials of the Second Battle of Ypres, the Saint Julien Gas Attacks, and the writing of "In Flanders Fields." These statues were erected by the Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery in collaboration with the Royal Canadian Medical Service and with support from the government of Flanders. There are two identical versions of the memorial, one in Ottawa and a second in McCrae's hometown of Guelph, Ontario. The first was unveiled on 3 May 2015 and the second on 25 June 2015. 

Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae was the Canadian soldier, a doctor and teacher, who wrote "In Flanders Fields" during the First World War. Born in Guelph, Ontario, in 1872, he served with an artillery battery in the South African War and had a successful civilian medical career. When the First World War broke out in 1914, the patriotic 41-year-old enlisted again and would be appointed as a medical officer with the First Brigade of the Canadian Field Artillery. Sadly, Lieutenant-Colonel McCrae would not survive the conflict, dying of illness in January 1918. He is buried in the CWGC Wimereux Communal Cemetery in Pas de Calais, France

Locations

Ontario

92 Sussex Drive

Guelph

52 Norfolk Street

Remembering a Veteran: Jimmy Doolittle's World War I

General James Harold “Jimmy” Doolittle (1896–1993) was a pioneering pilot, aeronautical engineer, combat leader and military strategist whose career stretched from World War I to the height of the Cold War. He is most famous for leading a daring bombing raid over Tokyo in 1942, the first American attack on the Japanese mainland.

Doolittle Around the Time of World War One

Born in Alameda, California, he spent much of his childhood in western Alaska. His father, Frank, was a gold prospector and carpenter in Nome, where young Jimmy learned to fight bullies and pilot a dogsled. Eventually Rosa and Jimmy Doolittle returned to California, leaving Frank behind.

Jimmy attended high school in Los Angeles, where he distinguished himself as a gymnast and boxer. He then began courses at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Mines, but the war drew him to military service. He originally left his junior year at Berkeley in October 1917 to enlist as a flying cadet in the Signal Corps Reserve. A natural, he was soon soloing and earned his commission in March 1918. Initially he served as a flight gunnery instructor. He later requested a transfer to the European theater, but the Armistice dashed his dreams of combat.

Due to his high performance, three officers recommended he be retained in the Air Service after demobilization; he subsequently received a Regular Army commission in 1920. Doolittle worked at the Army’s Kelly Field in San Antonio, Texas, before returning to Berkeley to complete his degree. In 1922 he became the first pilot to fly coast to coast in under 24 hours, making the journey from Pablo Beach (now Jacksonville Beach) Florida to Rockwell Field, Coronado, California, with just one stop in Texas to refuel. The Army next sent him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned master’s and doctoral degrees in aeronautical engineering.

On 24 September 1929 Lieutenant Doolittle Made History's First Completely
Blind (Instrument Only) Takeoff and Landing in History on this Aircraft 

He spent the rest of the decade working as a test pilot for military and civilian planes, setting air race records and helping to develop instruments that allowed pilots to fly in whiteout conditions. In 1930 he left the army for higher-paying work at the Shell Oil Company, where he pressed for the adoption of advanced aviation fuel. Returning to the army full-time in 1940, Doolittle continued his test pilot work until January of 1942, when he was summoned by General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold to lead a raid on the Japanese mainland.  The rest is history.

A Tale from "My Old Man" Collection of Stories.

My father, George Hanlon (1905–1991), has made previous appearances on Roads to the Great War (See Preparedness Day Bombing, Jack London, and Influenza) and is now ready for a return visit. Here's another story he shared with me when I was growing up.

In the 1930s, the family trucking business in San Francisco was located adjacent to an aviation shop run by a German WWI veteran.  The mechanics there were apparently cutting edge and had recently provided support for the filming of Howard Hughes's Hell's Angels. They also attracted the interest of Jimmy Doolittle, who was checking up on  aviation developments during his civilian period between the wars. The Old Man drove trucks for my grandfather between his construction jobs and met Doolittle next-door several times while on coffee break visits. Apparently, Dad and the future general got on a friendly, first-name basis for a brief period, but they soon went their separate ways for a decade or so.

In 1942, the Old Man was a  civilian leaderman rigger at the Alameda Naval Air Station at the same dock where the second USS Hornet is now moored as a museum ship. One day, the original USS Hornet arrived unexpectedly. An announcement soon went out that all non-military employees were to leave the base for the next  72 hours. Being a supervisor, Dad was one of the last to leave the ship. Walking off the pier, he spied the Navy captain commanding the docks with an Army officer at the end of the pier. As he drew closer he recognized his old acquaintance, and called out, "Hi, Jimmy," who responded, "Hi, Skinny" (OM's nickname) and they shook hands. According to Dad,  the naval officer looked shocked, as if a major security breach had occurred, but said nothing. A day  or so later, Dad was riding to San Francisco on the Key System train that used to run on the lower level of the Bay Bridge, when the Hornet sailed underneath with a full load of Army bombers on its deck. He told me he knew immediately something interesting was up but kept it to himself for a long time, even after President Roosevelt announced the mission had been launched from Shangri-La.

Three Poetic Images of Hell from Frederic Manning

L'Enfer
Georges Leroux, 1921

Grotesque (Poem)

These are the damned circles Dante trod,

Terrible in hopelessness,

But even skulls have their humour,

An eyeless and sardonic mockery:

And we,

Sitting with streaming eyes in the acrid smoke,

That murks our foul, damp billet,

Chant bitterly, with raucous voices

As a choir of frogs

In hideous irony, our patriotic songs.

Born in Sydney, Australia, Frederic Manning (1882–1935) came to Britain in 1903 with his family. He originally signed up as a private in the King’s Shropshire Regiment, then started officer training in Oxford in April 1916. From August 1916 he served with the 7th battalion at the Somme and Ancre, and returned to the UK in December 1916 to undertake further officer training at Whittington Barracks before joining the Royal Irish Regiment in Dublin in May 1917. Greatly affected by his service on the Western Front, he began drinking heavily and was force to resign his commission in February 1918.

In 1917 he published a collection of poems under the title Ediola. This was a mixture of verse in his early style alongside war poems. In 1929 he composed a novel, The Middle Parts of Fortune, obviously autobiographical, about three soldiers’ experience of the trench nightmare, which is considered one of the greatest literary works to emerge from the war. A watered-down version was later published with the title  Her Privates We.

The Middle Parts of Fortune  (Novel Excerpt)

But war is a jealous god, destroying ruthlessly his rivals. . . In the last couple of days their whole psychological condition had changed: they had behind them no longer the moral impetus which thrust them into action, which carried them forward on a wave of emotional excitement, transfiguring all the circumstances of their life so that these could only be expressed in the terms of heroic tragedy, of some superhuman or even divine conflict with the powers of evil; all that tempest of excitement was spent, and they were now mere derelicts in a wrecked and dilapidated world, with sore and angry nerves sharpening their tempers, or shutting them up in a morose and sullen humour from which it was difficult to move them.

Fricourt (Somme Battlefield)
Borlase Smart

The Face  (Poem)

Out of the smoke of men’s wrath,

The red mist of anger,

Suddenly,

As a wraith of sleep,

A boy’s face, white and tense,

Convulsed with terror and hate,

The lips trembling…

Then a red smear, falling…

I thrust aside the cloud, as it were tangible,

Blinded with a mist of blood.

The face cometh again

As a wraith of sleep:

A boy’s face delicate and blonde,

The very mask of God,

Broken.

Note:  In an earlier posting, we presented Manning's reflections on death. It can found HERE.