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A Fresh Looking Kilted Unit Somewhere on the Western Front |
Now all roads lead to France and heavy is the treadEdward Thomas, Roads
Of the living; but the dead returning lightly dance.
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A Fresh Looking Kilted Unit Somewhere on the Western Front |
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A German Magazine Supporting Jihad |
By Eugene Rogan
The Ottoman Empire, under pressure from its ally Germany, declared a jihad shortly after entering the First World War. The move was calculated to rouse Muslims in the British, French, and Russian empires to rebellion. Dismissed at the time and since as a "jihad made in Germany," the Ottoman attempt to turn the Great War into a holy war failed to provoke mass revolt in any part of the Muslim world. Yet, as German Orientalists [and Kaiser Wilhelm II] predicted, the mere threat of such a rebellion, particularly in British India, was enough to force Britain and its allies to divert scarce manpower and materiel away from the main theatre of operations in the Western Front to the Ottoman front. The deepening of Britain’s engagement in the Middle Eastern theatre of war across the four years of World War I can be attributed in large part to combating the threat of jihad. . .
Once the theological basis for a targeted jihad had been established, Sultan Mehmed V saw fit to make his own exhortation. It was not the Quran-thumping, sword-waving declaration of jihad that the Kaiser and his Orientalists had hoped for. The sultan’s declaration stressed national over theological concerns in rallying the Ottoman people behind the war. Yet he did work a brief reference to the jihad into his speech:
Russia, England, and France never for a moment ceased harbouring ill-will against our Caliphate, to which millions of Moslems, suffering under the tyranny of foreign dominations, are religiously and whole-heartedly devoted. . . Throw yourselves against the enemy as lions, bearing in mind that the very existence of our empire, and of 300 million Moslems whom I have summoned by sacred Fetva to a supreme struggle, depend on your victory.
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Sultan Mehmed V |
And with that, the sultan discharged his duty to raise Muslims in the Ottoman Empire and the world at large in holy war against the Entente Powers Most modern scholars are dismissive of Ottoman jihad efforts on the grounds that they failed to incite a single major uprising among colonial Muslims. Yet this analysis overlooks the many instances of localised rebellion and isolated mutiny that kept the Allies alert to the threat of jihad for the duration of the war. . . German hopes were realised in early 1915 when Indian Muslim soldiers rose in rebellion against the British in Singapore. The Singapore Mutiny involved some 500 sepoys and took a full week to suppress.
[Meanwhile] Ottoman defeats in the Caucasus and the canal zone emboldened Britain and its allies to launch an attack on the Dardanelles in a bid to force the straits and seize the Ottoman capital. The result was the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign. . . By the end of 1915, British war planners decided to evacuate their positions, dealing the Ottomans their first major victory of the war. One of the Allies’ overriding concerns was to prevent the Ottomans from capitalising on their victory at Gallipoli by reviving their call for jihad. In this way, the retreat from Gallipoli paradoxically drew the British ever deeper into the sideshow of the Ottoman front. For with each setback they experienced, the British redoubled their efforts to secure a decisive defeat over the Turks that would put to rest the threat of jihad once and for all.
Already before the evacuation of Gallipoli, the British had faced a number of crises on the Ottoman front, each heightening their jihad anxieties. In Yemen, when Ottoman troops allied with Imam Yahya, the ruler of Sana`a, laid siege to the British colony of Aden in July 1915, British officials feared the loss of prestige would encourage the proponents of jihad in the Arabian Peninsula. When Sayyid Ahmad, leader of the Sanussi mystical religious order in Eastern Libya, invaded the Western Desert of Egypt and drove British forces to retreat to Marsa Matruh in November and December 1915, the British feared the movement, led by Ottoman officers, might inspire Egyptians to rise in response to the jihad.
These setbacks, combined with defeat in Gallipoli, placed ever more pressure on British forces in Mesopotamia to secure the victory over the Ottomans that had eluded the British in the first year of the war. In October 1915, General Townshend’s forces crowned a series of victories in southern Mesopotamia, achieved with relatively light casualties, with the conquest of Kut al-Amara. From Kut, British forces were within striking distance of Baghdad. The British Cabinet, fearing their failure in the Dardanelles had dealt their enemies a propaganda victory for their jihad politics, began to press for the occupation of Baghdad to compensate for the evacuation of Gallipoli. The Baghdad option had powerful advocates in Whitehall: the Foreign Secretary Lord Grey, Arthur Balfour, and Winston Churchill all called for the occupation of Baghdad. The politicians saw in Baghdad an opportunity "for a great success such as we had not yet achieved in any quarter and the political (and even military) advantages which would follow from it throughout the East could not easily be overrated," the British official historian of the Mesopotamia campaign noted.
The result was a catastrophic British failure. Townshend’s forces, depleted by months of campaigning and over-extended, faced recently reinforced and strongly entrenched Ottoman troops blocking the road to Baghdad. The retreat of Townshend’s army back to the secure position of Kut al-Amara marked but the start of Britain’s worst defeat on the Ottoman front. The Ottomans were quick to capitalise on the propaganda victory proffered by the British surrender at Kut. In August 1916, the local press in Iraq noted that the sultan had received a group of seventy Indian Muslim officers taken prisoner at Kut.
Claiming that the officers were unwilling warriors in "the campaign against the Empire of the Caliph," the sultan returned their swords as a mark of his personal respect. "This imperial favour so affected them," the newspaper reported, "that they all expressed their wish to serve the Empire." If this story was true, it meant that the Ottomans had succeeded in recruiting nearly all Indian Muslim officers taken prisoner at Kut for the Ottoman jihad effort.
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German Prison Camp for Muslims Only with a Mosque Paid for by the Kaiser |
It is against the background of the Ottoman threat of jihad, and the string of British defeats on the Ottoman front, that we should view the ultimate rival jihad: the British wartime alliance with Sharif Husayn of Mecca. While the Young Turks pressed Sharif Husayn to support the Ottoman jihad, the British were determined to "rob the call to Holy War of its principal thunderbolt" by striking an agreement with the Amir of Mecca. In November 1914, Oriental Secretary Ronald Storrs wrote to Sharif Abdullah in Kitchener’s name to secure a tacit alliance: If the Sharif and the Arab peoples would give their support to the British war effort, Kitchener pledged Britain’s guarantee of Arab independence and protection from external aggression.
Sharif Husayn instructed his son to respond that the Hashemites would adopt no policies hostile to Great Britain, but that he was constrained by his position not to break with the Ottomans for the moment.
In subsequent correspondence exchanged between 5 November 1915, and 10 March 1916, Sir Henry McMahon concluded a wartime alliance with Sharif Husayn of Mecca. The weeks that passed between their letters were punctuated by British defeats in both the Dardanelles and in Mesopotamia. . . Arguably, the alliance survived because the Hashemites and the British needed each other more in the summer of 1916 than ever. Sharif Husayn had strained relations with the Young Turks to the breaking point; he knew they would seize the first opportunity to dismiss—even murder—him and his sons. The British needed the sharif’s religious authority to undermine the Ottoman jihad, which officials in Cairo and Whitehall feared had been strengthened by recent Turkish victories.
The Arab Revolt did serve to neutralise jihad politics on the Ottoman front. In retrospect, the Hashemites seldom played on their religious credentials, preferring to cast their movement in national terms—an Arab revolt against Ottoman rule rather than an Islamic revolt against a discredited caliph. Yet the religious authority of the sharif of Mecca was indisputable, and he justified the Arab Revolt in terms that put into question the Ottoman sultan’s legitimacy as a spiritual leader of the global Muslim community. And, crucially, 1917 saw a major reversal of British fortunes in the Middle East. In March 1917, General Maude led a British campaign force to victory over the Ottomans in Iraq and occupied Baghdad. General Allenby took over the faltering Palestine campaign, where the Ottomans had twice defeated British forces at the gates of Gaza, to deliver on Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s request to occupy Jerusalem as a Christmas gift to the war-weary British public. And in October 1918, the occupation of Damascus heralded the fall of the Ottomans, by which point neither side made reference to a jihad rendered irrelevant in defeat.
The Great War in the Middle East had been fought under the shadow of jihad. Though it had failed to produce the global Islamic uprising that some of the German advocates of Islampolitik might have hoped for, the Ottoman jihad had succeeded in diverting over one and a half million soldiers from the Western Front to sustain the campaigns in the Middle East: 500,000 Allied troops in the Gallipoli campaign alone, nearly 800,000 Indian soldiers on all Middle Eastern fronts, and thousands more in the Palestine and Syrian campaigns. Had the weight of these forces been deployed in France instead, it would have altered the balance of power on the Western Front.
Furthermore, jihad politics played a major role in prolonging the First World War. Indeed, one of the great surprises of the Great War was the tenacity of the Ottoman Empire. While Russia—the power most responsible for drawing the Ottomans into the war in the first place—concluded an armistice as early as December 1917, the Ottomans forced the Allies to fight until 30 October 1918—just days before Germany concluded its own armistice with the Entente on 11 November. We cannot rule out the influence of jihad propaganda in motivating Ottoman Muslims to fight so tenaciously for four long years. It is certainly the case that Islampolitik drew the Allies ever deeper into the war in the Middle East and in this way played a key role in lengthening the Great War. Indeed, it is one of the great ironies of the Great War in the Middle East that the British proved more responsive to the Ottoman call to jihad than the global Muslim community.
Excerpted from: "Rival Jihads: Islam and the Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1918," Journal of the British Academy, 2016 #4
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Woodrow Wilson and His War Cabinet |
On 15 August 1918, American Doughboys landed in Siberia to begin one of the more contentious episodes in U.S.-Soviet relations. The 8,000 troops of the American Expeditionary Force were to remain for more than 18 months, playing a rather forgotten role in the Russian Civil War. Historians have since tried to understand the motives behind President Woodrow Wilson's decision to dispatch U.S. troops to the region. Wilson, as usual, never plainly stated his intentions but cloaked them instead in the eloquent rhetoric that became his hallmark.
Several explanations of Wilson's actions have since emerged. Two interpretations see intervention as part of the Allied war effort, with the president portrayed as believing claims that the Bolsheviks were actually German agents, or as acting in a way to steer his allies into supporting Russian "liberal nationalism" against the threats of both Russian Bolshevism and German militarism. A third interpretation, offered by the former diplomat George Kennan, explains the dispatch of troops ultimately as an effort to rescue the beleaguered "Czech Legion," which had just captured the port of Vladivostok (the future base of operations for Allied intervention) and who were at the time of the U.S. landing eagerly pursuing the Red Guard into the Siberian wilderness.
Perhaps the most pervasive interpretation, however, places the onus for U.S. troops in Siberia onto the emerging empire of Japan. By sending troops to Siberia at a time when Allied intervention appeared inevitable, the president had hoped to restrain Japanese expansion and thereby preserve the "Open Door" in the Far East. The Japanese responded to Wilson's action by sending ten times the number of troops called for by the U.S. president, and proceeded to establish themselves at strategic locations along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The historian John White saw the U.S. military expedition as "a forceful reminder of the American desire" to prevent further Japanese expansion. An expeditionary force that was outnumbered ten to one, vastly out-gunned in artillery, and suffering an 8,000-mile supply line stretching across the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco may have appeared more as a reminder of Wilson's difficult position. The fact that American troops worked with the Japanese (despite the mutual and often violent dislike) in achieving a common objective has never been addressed adequately by White or any other historian researching the 6 July 1918 decision to intervene.
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Waiting in Siberia: White Forces |
The actual military record of the American Expeditionary Force is extremely useful in understanding Wilson's decision and can be seen as supporting yet another interpretation. To William Appleman Williams, the president was decidedly anti-Bolshevik and the primary purpose for intervention was to counter the revolution. "Intervention as a consciously anti-Bolshevik operation was decided upon by American leaders within five weeks of the day Lenin and Trotsky took power." There were no illusions about the threat posed by the Bolsheviks. They were social revolutionaries, as U.S. leaders acknowledged, albeit in private. Their view of socialism and Bolshevism was accordingly accompanied by antagonistic policies, firstly through recognition of counterrevolutionary leaders.
Other measures included funding of British and French sponsored campaigns against the Bolsheviks, channeling aid to the White armies forming in Siberia and South Russia, unofficial participation in blockades designed to starve out Communist held regions (and manipulating relief programs to the same end) and clandestinely using the Russian Embassy in Washington's resources to further support counter revolutionary efforts. In the reality of war in Siberia and within the limitations of domestic politics, the AEF was used as another measure in the campaign to topple the government in Moscow. Rather than the culmination of American policy in Russia, the dispatch of the American Expeditionary Force was a natural extension.
Wilson's pragmatic wait-and-see policy allowed him (and his expeditionary force) to exit Siberia when all hope of successful counterrevolution had vanished. Rather than idealistic or misguided, Wilson's Siberian policy allowed the president to cautiously play the situation with a minimum political and military cost.
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The Port of Vladivostok Would Make an Intervention Feasible |
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GEORGE RINHART/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES |
By the end of the 1920s, more than 40,000 different candy bars were being made in the U.S.
By: Jessica Pearce Rotondi
Published: 13 January 2021 by the History Channel
Candy bars may seem quintessentially American, but they have origins in the World War I chocolate rations given to European soldiers. The American military followed suit, helping its Doughboys develop a sweet tooth they would bring home after the war. Throughout the 1920s, thousands of small, regional confectioners emerged to meet the demand, creating a candy boom brimming with catchily named bars based on popular expressions, pop culture icons, and even dance crazes. (Hello, Charleston Chew.) The goal of the most ambitious new sweets makers? To take a bite out of a candy business dominated by Hershey’s, the planet’s biggest chocolate maker.
While the history of chocolate consumption stretches back 4,000 years to ancient cultures in what is today Mexico and Central America, the U.S. story of chocolate has strong military associations.
In the earliest decades of the United States, candy was quickly recognized not just as a sweet treat but also as a valuable way to fuel troops. During the Revolutionary War, chocolate, a favorite treat of George Washington, became part of his soldier’s rations. It was prized for its combined kick of caffeine and sugar; it even served as occasional payment to American troops in lieu of money. Candy also played a role in the Civil War, used as “a provision with quick energy and lots of sugar,” says Steve Almond, author of Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America.
While the first chocolate bar was created by Joseph Fry in Great Britain in 1847, and Cadbury began selling individual boxes of chocolate candies there as early as 1868, it would take the outbreak of war on a global scale for the chocolate candy bar to really take off.
In World War I, the British military gave soldiers chocolate to boost morale and energy. The mayor of York sent a tin of hometown confectioner Rowntree’s chocolates to residents in uniform, and in 1915, every UK, soldier abroad received a “King George Chocolate Tin.”
Not to be outdone, the American Army Quartermaster Corps solicited donations of 20-pound blocks of chocolate from confectioners back home, which they then cut down and wrapped by hand. When U.S. servicemen returned from the war with an insatiable appetite for chocolate, they arrived back just before the onset of Prohibition—when Americans actively sought alternatives to alcohol to boost their energy and mood, from soda to ice cream to candy. By the end of the 1920s, more than 40,000 different candy bars were being made in the U.S., says Susan Benjamin, candy historian and author of Sweet as Sin: The Unwrapped Story of How Candy Became America’s Favorite Pleasure.
During the candy bar boom, nearly every major city had a set of confectioners cranking out as many types of candy bars as they could, filling them with everything from nougat, marshmallow, and nuts to fruits and dehydrated vegetables. (Yes, really.) Because a lack of widespread refrigeration and transportation issues remained a barrier to national distribution, regional brands dominated each market, creating bars with names that appealed to local pride. The Charleston Chew took its name from a local dance craze. The 18th Amendment Bar was born in Chicago during Prohibition. “It was the birth of modern marketing. Since most bars used the same six or seven ingredients, people were furiously trying to figure out how to differentiate their brand,” says Almond.
Candy companies often named their popular bars after pop culture icons: “Charles Lindbergh begat both the Lindy and the Winning Lindy. Clara Bow begat the It bar. Dick Tracy had his own bar. So did Amos ’n’ Andy and Little Orphan Annie and Betsy Ross,” Almond says.
Continue reading this story at:
By James Patton
The following is an extract from the History of the 353rd Infantry Regiment 89th Division, National Army September 1917–June 1919 by Capt. Charles F. Dienst and associates, published by the 353rd Infantry Society in 1921. It has been extensively edited for length, style, and clarity.
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A Tank Moves Up through the Rear before the Attack |
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The 353rd Formed the Right Flank of the 89th Division's Advance. They Would Be in Communication with Marines of the 2nd Division throughout the Battle |
"In a battle there is no time to inquire into the identity or motives of persons who create panic, disorganization or surrender. It is the duty of every officer and soldier to kill on the spot any person who in a fight urges or advises anyone to surrender or to stop fighting. It makes no difference whether the person is a stranger or a friend, or whether he is an officer or a private."(G. O. No.5, Headquarters IV Army Corps, A. E. F., September 6th, 1918.)
{Editor Dienst’s Note: This order is shockingly draconian, more like the German army than the American. I don’t know of an instance where anyone was killed under this authority.}
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The Regiment's Jump-Off Trenches Here Were Perpendicular to This Road to the Left. Remnants of Bois Mort Mare Are Still Visible |
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Lt. Wickersham and His Grave at the St. Mihiel Cemetery |
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Captured German Position near Euvezin and Beau Vallon Wood |
On September 11th the company commanders were called to Battalion Headquarters. At about five o'clock in the afternoon Capt. Crump, the Battalion Commander, returned from Regimental Headquarters with our orders for the assault on the following morning. At eight o'clock, the four platoon commanders, Lieutenant Hunter and I assembled to go over the plans. Our mission was to reach the second objective, then turn to the left and mop up Mort Mare Woods.
I gave the platoon commanders their final orders and then prepared to move up with my headquarters and reserve platoon. Just as we were leaving we learned that Sergeant Hammond, commanding the first platoon, had accidentally injured himself. Time was short, so one platoon must go into action commanded by an un-briefed sergeant.
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Burial of First Men Killed in the Opening Attack |
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Captured German Pillbox Turned into a Field HQ |
"The Commander-in-Chief has called the attention of the Division Commander to reports being circulated in Germany that Americans kill those who attempt to surrender and has directed an investigation to see if there is any foundation for such reports. He has further directed that all officers and soldiers be informed that an enemy who has not been guilty of treacherous conduct and who offers to surrender shall be treated in accordance with the laws and customs of war on land."The object of the German propaganda is undoubtedly to make soldiers fight more bitterly and kill more Americans before they are finally killed themselves, rather than surrender when the situation is hopeless."Officers and men should use discretion in accepting surrender, and in judging as to treacherous conduct. Firing into the rear of our troops after they have passed a point may be considered as an example of treacherous conduct."
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German Prisoners Captured in the Fighting |
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Wounded Men from the Division Were Taken to This Assembly Point |
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Sgt. Adams and the Dugout Where He Took His Prisoners |
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Exhausted Men Resting after the Continual Battle |
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It was along the Beney-Thiacourt road that the 353rd would capture the ground destined to become the American St. Mihiel Cemetery. |
Next Friday: The All-Kansas regiment fights in the Meuese-Argonne Offensive
James Patton