The Presidential Election of 1916, Part I: Challenger Charles Evans Hughes

This Is How Close the Election Was

The U.S. presidential election of 1916 helped shape the world we live in because its winner, Woodrow Wilson, put his personal stamp on the final stages of the Great War and, more important, on how Americans and their subsequent leaders would look at their role in the world, afterward.  Yet, it was a remarkably close election.   Had  Wilson's  opponent, Charles Evans Hughes – an  undeniably brilliant and  multi-gifted man –  carried either Ohio or California, America would have had a new President just as it was being drawn into war. 

Charles Evans Hughes

To some, Charles Evans Hughes (1862–1948) appeared larger than life. Lawyer and Associate Justice Robert H.  Jackson once said of him, “[He] looks like God and talks  like God.” A brilliant lawyer with a  photographic memory, Hughes became politically prominent in 1905 when he was appointed counsel to New York State legislative committees investigating abusive business practices by utilities and life insurance companies.  

Drafted to run by New York Republicans, he defeated newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst in the 1906 gubernatorial election. As governor Hughes removed unfit officials of both parties and secured the authority to initiate investigations of executive agencies, earning the admiration of Progressives of all  stripes. Reelected governor in 1908, Hughes resigned in October 1910 after accepting President William H. Taft's appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he served as associate justice for six years. He wrote a number of decisions that broadened congressional power to regulate interstate commerce. In June 1916 he resigned at the behest of Republican party leaders to stand as their presidential candidate.  

Former president Theodore Roosevelt was also interested in unseating incumbent President Woodrow  Wilson in 1916.  Believing strongly in intervening on  the Allied side, he had denounced Woodrow Wilson's mediation efforts with Germany. He also mocked Hughes as "a bearded iceberg."  His political acumen had temporarily failed him, however.  Most Republicans still resented that he had split the party in 1912, resulting in a Wilson victory.  He did poorly in the early convention balloting and realized the futility of further effort.  Meeting concurrently, the Progressive party renominated him as their candidate, but he quickly declined and offered to support Hughes. 

Charles Evans Hughes had won the nomination on the third ballot and former vice president Charles W. Fairbanks of Indiana was picked for the second spot.  Most of the party's regulars felt they had fielded their best ticket, hopefully a winning one.  Candidate Hughes, however, would prove to be especially formal in manner, lacking political sparkle on the stump.  Roosevelt's "iceberg" analogy was mean, but on target. Being an inveterate "good government" proponent, Hughes was also skeptical of the party insiders.  Consequently, his dealings – in what turned out to be decisive states of Ohio and California – were uncharacteristically clumsy.  None of this, though, was foreseen by the happy delegates when they headed home from the convention.

Hughes Attacked the President's Record

His early campaigning focused on efficiency in government, the merit system in the civil service, credits for farmers and legal protections for workers.  In the latter stages he criticized Wilson's support of the eight-hour day for railroad men, and he backed a constitutional amendment to ensure the right to vote for women.  

Hughes's foreign policy called for a full preparedness program, but he declined to criticize Wilson's neutrali ty posture.  During the early electioneering the two  candidates' views on the war were almost indistinguishable.  That would shift, however, at the end of September, when the president allowed himself to be portrayed as the "peace" candidate. 

After the Election and the War

Charles Evans Hughes would re-emerge as a major figure in American life and  international affairs after the Great War. In 1921 he was selected by Warren Harding to be secretary of state and was successful in securing a separate peace with Germany, concluding arbitration treaties with a number of Latin American nations and, most notably, negotiating a series of treaties at the Washington Conference  on Naval Limitation of Armaments (1921–22).  Following Harding's death, Hughes continued at State during Calvin Coolidge's first term, but returned to private practice in 1925. After heading a commission to reform New York State government (1926), he served on both the Permanent Court of Arbitration (1926–30) and the Permanent Court of  International Justice (1928–30). In 1930, Hughes was nominated chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court by Herbert Hoover and served until 1941.

Next Friday:  Part II, Incumbent Woodrow Wilson

Sources: We adapted this series from several sources we should credit here.  The Miller Center of the University of Virginia,  The American Presidency Project of the University of California at Santa Barbara, 270 To Win,  OurCampaigns.com,  and Gallup.com.

Let's Not Forget Those Trenches — 11 Memorable Images

 

Display=580px,  Enlarged by Clicking on Them=800px

Presented without Further Comment

Sources: Imperial War Museum; Wiki Commons; Private Collection of Tony Langley

First Victory for the U.S. Air Service — A Roads Classic

Alan Winslow, Douglas Campbell, John Huffer,
94th Aero Sq.

The first U.S. Air Service aerial victories by fighter planes in the American sector in France were by Lts. Alan Winslow and Douglas Campbell, two pilots of the 94th Aero Squadron, which had just been transferred to the front. On Sunday morning, 14 April 1918, they were on "alert" at Gengoult Aerodrome near Toul, France. German planes were reported in the area and the two U.S. pilots, completely inexperienced in aerial combat, took off in their Nieuport 28s. Almost immediately they saw two German aircraft and attacked them directly over the flying field at less than 1,000 feet altitude, in full view of not only the Americans at Gengoult Aerodrome, but also the French citizens of Toul. Winslow and Campbell shot down two German airplanes and were back on the ground in a matter of minutes. This initial fighter combat by the U.S. Air Service, was  probably successful due as much to luck as skill. Fifteen years later, Winslow described the event in Liberty magazine:

Spring. The airdrome at Toul. A chill early-morning mist blankets the field. 

Douglas Campbell and I are on emergency service, which at the moment consists of waiting and a game of Russian bank. Somewhere over the lines Eddie Rickenbacker and Reed Chambers are on their first patrol. 

A telephone call from headquarters: Two German planes are reported over the near-by village of Boug. 

We run to our waiting planes. I take off first. I clear the trees bordering the field. 

There, directly before me, diving out of the mist, is a German Albatross. 

We fight no more than a few feet above the tree tops. 

The entire population of Toul comes out to watch. One of my bullets actually pierces the ear of a startled peasant. (Afterward he was extremely proud of that bullet. It was his own personal war relic.) 

The fight is over in less than four minutes; I land, climb out of my cockpit, and run toward the German pilot whose plane has just crashed to earth. He is surrounded by a chattering, excited crowd. I stand awkwardly on one foot and then on the other. I am only twenty-one and this is my first air victory. 

Alan Winslow (1896–1933) was a veteran of the Lafayette Flying Corps, who subsequently joined the American Air Service and was assigned to the 94th Aero Squadron. After the event described above he continued flying until he was shot down on 31 July 1918 and became a prisoner of war for the duration. He was wounded in the left arm, which was subsequently amputated by German doctors. In his later life he became an executive for Pan Am and wrote the 1933 series of articles on the air war for Liberty magazine quoted above  titled "No Parachutes." Later the same year he died due to a fall from his hotel room during a business trip to Ottawa. Various writers have speculated this may have been a suicide because of the loss of his wife or other reasons. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Lt. Winslow with His Downed German Fighter
and Admiring French

San Francisco-born Douglas Campbell (1896–1990) was assigned to the 94th Aero Squadron on 1 March 1918. He and Lt. Alan Winslow shared the squadron's first official victory over an enemy aircraft on 14 April 1918. Flying the Nieuport 28, Campbell was the first United States Air Service pilot trained in the United States to score five confirmed victories. Scoring his final victory on 5 June 1918, he and James Meissner shot down a Rumpler near Nancy, but Campbell was wounded in the back by an explosive bullet and sent home to recover. Promoted to captain, he returned to France on 8 November 1918 and served with the Army of Occupation in Germany. Returning to the United States on 1 January 1919, Campbell was discharged from the army on 24 February. After the war, he first worked in South America for W.R. Grace and then shifted over to the commercial aviation industry.  He eventually became general manager of Pan American.

Sources:  U.S. Air Force National Museum, 1st Fighter Association,  Find-a-Grave, and The Aerodrome Websites

Medal of Honor: Charles Whittlesey Graphic Novel

Charles Whittlesey commanded the famed Lost Battalion of World War I. On 2 October 1918, he led over 500 men in an advance against the German line during the Meuse-Argonne offensive. In the face of superior numbers, they were surrounded by the enemy and cut off from their division. Whittlesey overcame the lack of supplies and mounting casualties to hold out for five days before reinforcements finally arrived. 

Published as part of their Medal of Honor Series, the Association of the United States Army is proud to offer this volume as a free pdf download HERE.

Medal of Honor: Charles Whittlesey was created by a team of professional comic book veterans:

• Script: Chuck Dixon (Batman, The Punisher, The ’Nam) 
• Pencils, Inks, and Cover: Karl Moline (Supergirl, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Rogue)
• Inks and Cover: Geof Isherwood (The ’Nam, G.I. Joe, Conan the Barbarian)
• Colors: Peter Pantazis (Justice League, Superman, Black Panther)
• Lettering: Troy Peteri (Spider-Man, Iron Man, X-Men)

For free downloads of the earlier volumes of the Medal of Honor Series that included World War One recipients "Wild Bill" Donovan, Henry Johnson, Sam Woodfill, and Alvin York,  see our earlier article HERE.

Neutral Switzerland and the Great War

Prewar, This Was the Point Where Switzerland,
Germany, and France Had Their Borders Touch. During Hostilies, the German/French Border Would Move East

As a neutral country, Switzerland was not involved in the devastating military conflicts of 1914–18. Nevertheless, concerning the economy, communications, diplomacy, secret services and war propaganda, it was intensely entangled with the “Great War.” From August 1914 onward, the Swiss authorities governed with extra-constitutional emergency law, which was called a “plenipotentiary regime.” The government, in line with export-oriented companies, was guided by the goal of benefiting from the advantages of a continent at war.

Mobilization

In 1914, Switzerland had a militia army based on the principle of compulsory military service. Members of the liberal middle class and conservative families from central Switzerland dominated the officer corps. At the outbreak of war, some 220,000 men (approximately one eighth of the working population) were conscripted for active service; some 45,000 horses (about a third of the population) were also enlisted. The mobilized men served an average of 500 to 600 days in the army. Receiving little pay, and with no system to compensate for loss of earnings until the start of World War II, it spelled financial crisis for many lower-class families. The labor market struggled with the loss of some 100,000 migrant workers, called up by their national armies when the war broke out. By 1920 migration out of Switzerland had risen to at least 228,000, while the net immigration was 72,000—including 42,000 demobilized soldiers. When the war ended, Switzerland closed its borders to prevent an influx of demobilized soldiers from the Central Powers and to protect the “national workforce.” Swiss men returned straight to their workplaces. In parallel, the women who had been employed during the war to counteract the labor shortage in the war industries were swiftly “phased out,” returning the proportion of women in industry to prewar level by 1920.

Guarding the Borders

A Swiss Outpost Guarding a Pass to Italy

Since Switzerland was a neutral country, its frontiers had to be guarded to prevent the warring armies crossing them, deliberately or accidentally. However there were occasions when the border was crossed. The start of the war was one of the points at which there was the greatest fear amongst the Swiss of invasion, in case the French or Germans tried to gain an advantage by outflanking their enemy through Switzerland. The frontiers were guarded by the Swiss army. Above: the frontier at Basel, blocked at the start of the war.

In places the frontier had considerable defenses, including bunkers and barbed wire, similar to those used by the opposing sides in combat. However as this image shows, in places away from the fighting little separated the Swiss and their neighbors. Although Switzerland is a small country, the frontier was 1,400 km (870 miles) in length and could not be guarded in great strength everywhere! There are said to have been some 1,000 violations of the frontier during the war.

A Swiss Guard and German Soldier Chat at the Border

The Swiss strictly enforced their frontier. Under international law, troops from the belligerents who crossed the Swiss border (for whatever reason) had to be interned. While such internments were perceived as a humanitarian gesture by a strategically important neutral nation, they also helped save the Swiss tourism industry.  Between January 1916 and August 1919, nearly 68,000 wounded or sick officers and men were interned in Switzerland; 37,515 French, 4,326 Belgians, 21,000 Germans and 4,081 British, enlivened otherwise deserted resorts. Germans were interned in German-speaking regions, particularly around Davos. French and Belgians were scattered mainly throughout the francophone areas. When the British soldiers arrived, at the end of May 1916, they were concentrated in areas popular with English speaking tourists before the war, the main centers being Chateau d’Oex and Mürren but with smaller groups in other communities according to employment, education and medical needs.

Switzerland Was the  Place to Be Interned

French, German, Italian, British or American aircraft also sometimes accidentally crossed onto Swiss soil. In certain cases the plane landed because the airmen did not realize they had crossed the frontier, while other times injuries to the crew meant they had to land immediately. Very occasionally, Swiss territory was actually attacked, most frequently through being bombed by aircraft. The town of Porrentruy was bombed several times. It was located in a small section of Swiss territory that projected out into France, and was only about 12 km or 7 miles away from the point where the Western Front (the French and German front lines) met the Swiss frontier. This seems to have meant that there was potential for either side to make a navigational error and drop bombs on Swiss land.    

On 7 October 1918, Swiss neutrality was infringed in an attack that caused great public controversy in Switzerland. An observation balloon tethered between Miécourt and Cornol (near Porrentruy, around 2-3km (1.5 miles) over the border into Switzerland) was shot down by a German aircraft. The burning balloon fell to earth and the Swiss soldier acting as observer, Lieutenant Walter Flury, was killed. Some Swiss newspapers questioned whether the attack was really an error or had been planned, since the balloon was clearly marked as Swiss. Below is a balloon similar ​to the one that was shot down. Such apparently direct attacks were very rare, however.

The Wartime Economy

Switzerland's 1913 GDP per capita was the highest in the world. Its  economy would be strongly affected by the First World War, negatively as well as positively. On the one hand, the import of foodstuff and raw materials deteriorated towards the end of the war and inflation reduced the purchasing power of a large part of the population. Predictably, the important  tourism sector suffered from enormous losses. On the other hand, many exporting industrial firms enjoyed a strong demand for their products during the first half of the war, those selling strategic war material registered profits even until the end of the war. According to one estimate, both real GDP and GDP per capita declined by 11 percent between 1913 and 1918. Real wages deteriorated during the war but caught up in the postwar period.

Being neutral and contiguous to both Germany and France and their allies, the Swiss managed to trade with both countries throughout the war, although the balance was much in favor of the Allies. Here's one interesting example. Due to their long experience in precision instrumentation, the Swiss made the world's best artillery fuses. Also, Swiss businessmen were "world class" at evading government attempts to keep the German trade and Allied trade  compartmentalized.  This led to the incongruous situation where German coal and steel helped produce 25 million artillery shell fuses for the British, as well as over 121 million components used in assembling other fuses all used in artillery shells fired at the Germans.  

World War I did cause a general strike in Switzerland, however. See our article HERE.

A Swiss Observation Balloon

Host to a Noted Troublemaker and Some Very Eccentric Artists

Lenin spent the early part of the war in Zurich.  He left Austria for neutral Switzerland in 1914 following the outbreak of the war and remained active in Switzerland until 1917. Following the 1917 February Revolution in Russia and the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, he left Switzerland on a sealed train to Petrograd, where he would shortly lead the 1917 October (Boklshevik) Revolution in Russia. 

Meanwhile, in the same neighborhood, a group of politicized artists was founding another radical movement. While the Dada art movement was also an anti-war organization, Dadaists used art to oppose all wars. The founders of the movement had left Germany and Romania to escape the destruction of the war. At the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich they put on performances expressing their disgust with the war and with the interests that inspired it. By some accounts Dada coalesced on 6 October 1916 at the cabaret. When World War I ended in 1918, most of the Zürich Dadaists returned to their home countries, and some began Dada activities in other cities. See our article on DADA HERE.

Sources: The most comprehensive site on Switzerland in the war is Switzerland1914-1918.net (If you are interested in more information on the subject click HERE; 1914-1918 Online; Wikipedia; Global-Geneva

Champion of Unrestricted U-boat Warfare and Early Booster of the Nazis: Konteradmiral (Rear Admiral) Magnus von Levetzow

Champion of Unrestricted U-boat Warfare and
Early Booster of the Nazis:  Kapitän, later
Konteradmiral (Rear Admiral) Magnus von Levetzow

Magnus von Levetzow was born on 8 January1871 in Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany to a noble clan that had settled in Mecklenburg around 1300. Levetzow entered the navy in 1889 and attended the War Academy in 1900–1902.

In 1900, he served as Admiralty staff officer during the German blockade of Venezuela, and from 1906 to 1918 he was attached to the High Sea Fleet in various capacities. From 1909 to 1912, Levetzow was first Admiralty officer in the fleet command; in 1912, he commanded the light cruiser Stralsund and the following year in the grade of captain the battle cruiser Moltke.

Captain von Levetzow led the Moltke to the coast of England on December 16, 1914, and bombarded Hartlepool. On 24 January 1915, he stood off the Dogger Bank as the British demolished the armored cruiser Blücher. One year later, Levetzow joined the High Sea Fleet as chief of the Operations Division immediately under Captain Adolf von Trotha; Vice Admiral Reinhard Scheer served as fleet commander. This triumvirate directed the fleet at Jutland on 31 May 31/1 June 1916 and inflicted serious material losses upon the British Grand Fleet, while twice facing annihilation by Sir John Jellicoe's dreadnoughts as the latter crossed Scheer's T.

In September 1917, Levetzow was temporarily appointed chief of staff to Vice Admiral Ehrhardt Schmidt's squadron for the conquest of the Baltic islands of Osel, Moon, and Dagö in the Gulf of Riga, which also netted the Russian battleship Slava. Levetzow received the order Pour le mérite in October 1917.

In November 1917, Levetzow returned to the High Sea Fleet, and by January 1918, was promoted commodore and given command of the Second Division, Scouting Forces, under Admiral Franz von Hipper. In August 1918, the restless Levetzow became chief of staff of the new Supreme Command of the navy under Admiral Scheer. In this capacity, he actively planned the fatal Operations Plan No. 19, which called for a suicide sortie against the British Grand Fleet on 30 October 1918. The sailors of the fleet instead rebelled.

Levetzow was a highly political creature. A fanatical follower of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, Levetzow had spared no effort to propagate the state secretary's views in the navy and beyond. Levetzow recruited members of the court and of other ruling houses to uphold the Tirpitz line, and he used the same channels to drum up support for a fleet engagement as well as for unrestricted submarine warfare. 

Holger Herwig gives dual credit to the godfather of Germany's modern navy, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, and an influential officer, Captain Magnus von Levetzow, for inspiring the great unrestricted U-boat warfare debate as early as 1914. 

Tirpitz responded to a reporter's question about whether he intended to blockade Britain with its U-boats, "If pressed to the utmost, why not? – England wants to starve us into submission; we can play the same game, blockade England and destroy each and every ship that tries to run the blockade." Captain von Levetzow, apparently a man with a literary bent, sent a 1913 Conan Doyle story, "Danger! A Story of England's Peril," to his commander, Fleet Admiral Reinhard Scheer, and Kaiser Wilhelm. The story told was of an England starved out  in six weeks by a flotilla of U-boats. It must have been  irresistibly seductive to any patriotic German in 1914.  Thanks to these two officers, the idea was planted in  the collective brain of Germany's leadership early in  the war. The German public, the people who would increasingly feel the impact of the Royal Navy's  blockade on the Central Powers, independently came to look to the U-boat as the logical counter response.  Also, some of the early successes, like the achievement  of U-9 in sinking three British cruisers in a single day,  convinced many that Germany had a wonder-weapon that  it should employ to its fullest capability.

With the wily Trotha, Levetzow worked diligently to undermine the positions of Georg A. von Müller of the Navy Cabinet, Henning von Holtzendorff of the Admiralty Staff, and Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg with the kaiser, the politicians, and the nation. 

Levetzow favored sweeping territorial annexations by Germany in Europe, Asia Minor, and Africa as late as September 1918, and he encouraged fellow naval officers to pursue these aims through Tirpitz's right-wing Fatherland party.

Von Levetzow with Fellow Admirals Raeder and
von Trotha at a Commemoration of the
Battle of Skagerraktag (Jutland)

Levetzow survived the reduction of the German navy to 10,000 officers and men under the Versailles Treaty and in January 1920 was promoted rear admiral and given command of the Baltic Sea naval station at Kiel. In this capacity he supported the Kapp Putsch in March 1920 and was forced to resign from the service. For a time, Levetzow hoped to establish close contacts between the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II in Doorn, as well as Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler of the NSDAP; however, by 1932 Levetzow accepted the kaiser's refusal to become embroiled with the Nazis and was elected an NSDAP member of parliament. 

Von Levetzow, President of the Berlin Police with 
Hermann Göring, Founder of the Gestapo, 1933

Hitler rewarded the admiral, who had helped to bring naval support to the Nazis, by appointing him police president of Berlin on 15 February 1933. For the next two years Levetzow energetically purged the Ministry of the Interior of republicans. Levetzow was an opponent of lawless violence and antisemitism and often came into conflict with the more radical Berlin Sturmabteilung (SA) leadership, as well as with Berlin Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels, who had been trying to have him replaced since from at least November 1934.  He was forced to withdraw from politics in July 1935 and died in Berlin on 13 March 1939.  He did not live to see the impact of unrestricted U-boat warfare on the course of the Second World War. 

Source: The World Biographical Encyclopedia; Over the Top, November 2016;  "Total Rhetoric, Limited War: Germany's U-Boat Campaign 1917 -1918," Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, May 1998, by Holger Herwig; Bundesarchiv 

Recommended: A "Gentleman’s Rifle" in the Trenches of WWI

 

A single Holland & Holland weaves together a story of the Great War’s trenches, one of the world’s best gun makers, Britain’s greatest 20th-century soldier, and the author of Gunga Din.

Originally Presented in American Rifleman, 10 April 2022

By Terry Wieland

It was London, it was September, it was raining.

Outside the Brigade of Guards Museum, near Buckingham Palace, the statue of Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis stands 15 ft high—a tribute to Britain’s greatest field commander of the 20th century. His trademark sheepskin is faithfully reproduced in a half-ton of bronze, and even here he manages to wear it like a dinner jacket. England’s greatest combat soldier was also known as the best-dressed man in the regiment.

As the rain pelted harder, plastering the brown beech leaves to the paving stones and forming tiny waterfalls in the creases of the jacket, Alexander—or “Alex,” as he was known to all—took no notice. He kept his eye fixed firmly on the entrance to the museum, and suddenly that seemed like a heck of a good idea as the sky opened up and the cold rain came down in sheets.

The Guards regiments are among Britain’s most famous icons. They are the soldiers in red tunics and black bearskins who mount the guard on Buckingham Palace, among other places. What is less well known is that they are also elite soldiers who have fought the king’s wars around the world for centuries. The oldest regiment is the Scots Guards, followed by the Grenadiers and the Coldstreams. The Irish Guards—Alexander’s regiment—and the Welsh are the youngest.

Guardsman with an H&H Rifle

Inside the museum, one tableau after another depicts their exploits at Waterloo, Dunkirk, South Africa, Flanders. The displays, colorful at first, turn slowly sodden and muddy as all the gentility was wrung out of warfare, and red tunics were replaced by khaki (in South Africa) and brown service dress in the mud of Flanders. The display from the First World War includes bits of webbing, barbed wire, grenades, a bayonet. The stuff looks muddy even when it isn’t.

There is also a rifle. Not a Lee-Enfield, No. 1 Mk III, as might be expected, but a classic single-shot, break-action rifle of the type favored, before the war, for stalking stag in Scotland. It is of obviously fine pedigree but has seen much hard use. The bluing is worn to a silver sheen and the stock is scratched and battered.

If you crouch down and peer closely, with the light exactly right, you can still read on the receiver “Holland & Holland.” It is an aristocrat among firearms, a “gentleman’s rifle”—a Royal Grade single-shot stocked in English walnut and finely checkered. At one time, the receiver displayed graceful engraving, although it is now worn almost completely away. Four years of trench warfare will do that.

The story of how H&H rifle No. 26069 journeyed from the Bruton Street showroom to the Guards Museum is really one of convergence of the great names in prewar England, in the military, in literature, and in gun making. It involves Harold Alexander, Britain’s greatest soldier of the 20th century, and Field Marshal Lord Roberts, one of its greatest of the 19th; it involves Rudyard Kipling, Poet Laureate of the Empire and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature; and of course Holland & Holland, England’s greatest rifle maker.

The story begins with Lord Roberts in South Africa, fighting the Afrikaaners in Britain’s first, and one of its bloodiest, military campaigns of the 20th century. There, Roberts renewed his acquaintance with Rudyard Kipling, an old friend from India.

Roberts was an Ulsterman, a gentleman of Anglo-Irish descent. For reasons no one has adequately explained, Ulster (Northern Ireland) has produced a disproportionate number of great British generals. The Duke of Wellington was an Ulsterman, as was Montgomery, among many others. In the South African campaign, the army’s Irish regiments performed spectacularly. To recognize their contribution, Queen Victoria ordered—on Roberts’s advice—the formation of a regiment of Irish Guards to join the Scots, Grenadiers, and Coldstreams.

When he heard the news, Harold Alexander (also from Ulster) was nine years old. He immediately decided that his future would lie with the Irish Guards. The son of the Earl of Caledon, he attended school at Harrow, went on to the military academy at Sandhurst, and joined his new regiment in London in 1911. He was a 22-year-old first lieutenant when the war broke out in 1914.

One of his fellow officers was the Earl of Kingston, and they shipped off to France together. In the Earl’s kit was the H&H rifle. It came to be there in a rather convoluted way.

Continue this article:

HERE

How Did the Schlieffen Plan Work on the Eastern Front?

Cosssacks Arriving in East Prussia

The Plans for East Prussian and Galicia

Under the Eastern dimension of Germany's Schlieffen Plan a single army (the Eighth), made up primarily of territorial forces, was to be deployed  against the slow-moving Russian goliath and defend the homeland. Later, after France had been disposed of, the  entire German Army would be shifted to the east to  confront the tsar's forces. 

The opposing Russian War Plan XIX featured an ambitious double offensive. In the north, anticipating that France would be the initial focus of attention for the German Army, a two-army converging drive into East Prussia to threaten the Germans and relieve pressure on  the French was to be executed. Not to be neglected,  because its posture toward the Slavs of Serbia had  brought Russia into the war, was the old enemy Austria Hungary. Four armies would mount a second invasion  into Galicia, the empire's northernmost province with  the goal of destroying the Austro-Hungarian Army.  

Early Deployments in the East

What Happened

In the north, Russia—responding to  French appeals for alacrity—moved more quickly than  anyone thought possible and crossed into German  territory on August 17th. After being bloodied in the  small-scale Battle of Gumbinnen the commander of the  German Eighth Army Maximilian von Prittwitz  proposed, then withdrew, a panicky request to abandon East Prussia. The decision to replace him had already been made, however. A new team, Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff, had been dispatched to restore control. 

Meanwhile, the Russian advance in East Prussia was developing its own problems. Initiated prematurely, the two armies found they were short of both  manpower and ordnance. The greatest deficiency for the  Russian forces, though, was in what is now called  "command and control." The two Russian armies operated as though they were oblivious to one another's  movements. Battlefield radio communication was also  in the clear and unciphered, allowing German  intelligence to deduce the southernmost Russian army  (the Second) could be isolated and destroyed before the  northernmost (the First) could come to its assistance. 

The Battle of Tannenberg and the envelopment and  destruction of the Second Army followed. Another setback, albeit less catastrophic, came for the First Army  at the Masurian Lakes in September. Russia was driven  out of East Prussia and would never regain the initiative  in the war. The key element of Plan XIX had failed. 

The 1914 campaign to the south in Galicia is one of the lesser-told tales of the Great War. After much pushing and shoving, though, the Russian steamroller proved too much for the Austro-Hungarian Army. By the end of the year, they had repelled an Austrian incursion into Poland, occupied the province of Galicia, and were threatening the passes across the Carpathian Mountains, gateway to Hungary. The first year of the war was an utter disaster for the empire that had wanted it most. 

The Eastern Front never was quite as deadlocked as the West, but the sheer size of Russia and the sub-par leadership of the Austro-Hungarian command doomed it to be just as costly in human suffering.

Source:  Over the Top, March 2009

The Unforgettable Monument at Mort Homme—A Roads Classic

Depiction of the Fighting
at Mort Homme

The famous Mort Homme Skeleton Memorial commemorates those of the French 69th Division, who bore the brunt of much of the fighting during the critical period. The monument, by Froment-Meurice, was unveiled in 1922. It bears the famous words Ils N'ont Pas Passe ("They Did Not Pass") in response to the rallying cry Ils Ne Passeront Pas! ("They Shall Not Pass!) of General Robert Nivelle's Order of the Day for 23 June 1916.

Atop Mort Homme is also a memorial to the men of the French 40th Division, in the form of a tall obelisk with a sword engraved on the front and the words Mort Homme inscribed on the top. There is no commemorative for the thousands of Germans who also fell on the hill.

After three months of ferocious fighting, Mort Homme was secured by German forces on 29 May 1916. The hill was the site of further back and forth action after the official end of the Battle of Verdun.  French forces finally secured the hill on 20 August 1917. A year later it would be immediately behind the jump-off line for the American Meuse-Argonne Offensive. During the 1916 fighting, American Field Service ambulances had helped evacuate wounded from the Mort Homme and Cote 304 sector on the left bank.

Remembering a Veteran: War Artist Maurice Busset, French Aéronautique Militaire

Self Portrait

Maurice Busset (1879–1936) was a French painter and woodcut engraver. During World War I he was an airman and an official war artist, and a significant number of his works relate to aviation during the war. He later became an art teacher back in Clermont-Ferrand and was at the forefront of Auvergne regional art. During WWI he was a painter in the archives of military aviation. From 1929, he moved full time to a large studio in Clermont-Ferrand and became assistant curator at the City Museum. He also had a passion for archaeology and claimed to have discovered the true site of the Battle of Gergovie on the coast of Clermont-Ferrand, a theory still debated today.

Click on Images to Enlarge

(Display=580px,  Large=800px)

The Siren of  Notre-Dame and Skylights of Paris, 1918

Roland Garros Book Poster

Air Combat

Paris Bombarded

An Accident

Guynemer Attacking a Fokker, Detail

The Major Aces:
Fonck, Guynemer, Madon, Nungesser, Heurtaux

Bombardment of Ludwishafen

Air Combat

What They Are Saying About: Laugh or Cry: The British Soldier on the Western Front, 1914–1918

Click HERE to Order This Book

By Peter Hart and Gary Bain 

Pen and Sword Military, 2022

Publisher's Synopsis:

Humour helped the British soldier survive the terrible experiences they faced in the trenches of the Western Front during the Great War. Human beings are complicated, and there is no set pattern as to how they react to the outrageous stresses of war. But humour, often dark and representative of the horrors around them could and often did help. They may have been up to their knees in mud and blood, soaking wet and shot at from all sides, but many were still determined to see the ‘funny side’, rather than surrender to utter misery. . . You have to laugh or cry.

From Readers and Reviewers:

If you’ve ever read a “Forgotten Voices of…” book, the format will be familiar; short passages of explanatory prose make points or assertions which are interspersed by illustrative quotes from a veteran or other contemporaneous source. The difference is that the subject matter here revolves around the morale and the antics of soldiers and officers in the British and Commonwealth Armies. Hart’s previous job plays strongly into this, for many years he gathered oral testimony from veterans of the First World War for the IWM archives. There are also copious excerpts from personal memoirs, letters home, Regimental diaries and the like. Themes are varied in chapters, covering the human farces, tragedies and pranks experienced in training, trench life, fighting, officers and NCOs, interactions with the enemy, life behind the line and so on. Two chapters stand out for me: the first, “Gunners”, highlights the life, horrors, frustrations and small joys of those manning the guns (often overlooked in favour of the infantry’s lot in the trenches). The second, “Advance to Victory, 1918” relates the change in warfare in the last hundred days, relating the strains and freedoms this placed on the advancing troops. 

ARMY RUMOUR SERVICE

Humor helped the British soldier survive the terrible experiences they faced in the trenches of the Western Front during the Great War. Human beings are complicated, and there is no set pattern as to how they react to the outrageous stresses of war.

"Awakened by great shouted oaths below. Peeped over the side of the manger and saw a Belgian lass milking and addressing a cow with a comprehensive luridness that left no doubt in my mind that British soldiers had been billeted here before." — Private Norman Ellison, 1/6th King’s Liverpool Regiment 

GOODREADS

Lively and supremely well informed, Peter Hart is a military historian specialising in the Great War. He was the Oral Historian at the Imperial War Museum from 1981 until his retirement and is the author of many Great War books. Here he is teamed up with his irrepressible collaborator, Gary Bain.

 WESTERN FRONT ASSOCIATION