The Battleships of the Great White Fleet Go to War

America's Battleships on Their World Cruise, 1907–1909

Less than a decade before America joined the hostilities in Europe, President Theodore Roosevelt had sent a fleet of 16 pre-dreadnought battleships on a world cruise. Their journey was a public relations extravaganza, a remarkable feat of seamanship, a risky exercise in "battleship diplomacy," and a message to other great powers that not only was the United States on the rise, she now had the capability to project her power anywhere in the world. It was a success in all these dimensions.

Yet, even before the ships had departed from Hampton Roads, Virginia, with the president looking on, they were obsolete. The nation's first dreadnought-class, all big-gun battleships were already under construction. When the out-of-date vessels returned, their gaudy white paint schemes were replaced by the conventional navy grey and they were gradually phased out of the nation's main line of battle. Most, during the prewar period, were upgraded to resemble the battleships that served America up to the 21st century. Nonetheless, despite looking the role, they were no longer capable of fighting more modern battle wagons head-to-head.

Refitted USS Ohio, 1918
(Your editor's grandfather Tom Stack worked at the Union Iron Works in San Francisco when the Ohio was built.)

However, once in the Great War, the United States needed all the warships it could assemble, and the veterans of the Great White Fleet were called to action. In comparison to their spectacular world cruise, though, the old battleships had a mostly humdrum war, performing a number of necessary, but routine, missions for the rapidly expanding U.S. Navy.

Immediately after war was declared, a few helped seize German ships that had been interned. Several, like the USS Nebraska (shown below) were assigned to escort convoys to Halifax or the mid-Atlantic. On anti-submarine patrols the battleships helped rescue survivors of sinkings, and the Minnesota suffered damage when it struck a mine laid by U-117. They also joined in the operations and deployments conducted around the Caribbean while the major fighting was going on in Europe.

USS Nebraska Adorned in Dazzle Camouflage in Port
Between Convoys

The predominant role the old battleships played in the war effort, though, was in training the tens of thousands of new sailors and reserve officers needed to support the growing fleet. Then with the Armistice, the veterans of America's greatest round-the-world expedition were called on to visit Europe one last time. The last significant mission of the battleships was to help transport the troops of the AEF home from Europe.

Shortly after the war, almost all old battleships were scrapped and their war service quickly forgotten. Their days of glory as the Great War Fleet would, however, will always remain a symbol of the brash, confident nation that was America at the beginning of the 20th century.

Sources: U.S. Navy Websites and Wikipedia

See our article on the Voyage of the Great White Fleet HERE.

Lonesome Memorial #17: The NINE BRAVE MEN on the Somme Battlefield

 

By James Patton

On Tuesday 22 July 2025, at a crossroads in the former Somme battlefield, a private memorial was rededicated, after a major restoration paid for by the Cheshire Roll of Honour, The Western Front Association (UK), and several private donors.

Most private memorials on the Western Front commemorate wealthy and/or high-born officers, who died in circumstances often described as heroic. But this one is for nine  Royal Engineer Other Ranks, just a bunch of ordinary blokes who were steadfast in doing their duty, fortifying a position that was soon rendered surplus to needs.

This minor incident was mentioned in a footnote to The Official History of the Great War (Vol 2 1916) page 162:

No 3 Section of the 82nd Field Company RE, working under the 57th Brigade (19th Division) was engaged under fire in building strong points in front of Bazentin-le-Petit village during the night of the 29th/30th July. The infantry assisting the section was withdrawn to prepare for an attack next day, but the sappers volunteered to go on with the work and did so, until nine were killed and nearly all the others wounded. In the village there now stands a brick memorial "To NINE BRAVE MEN".

The memorial inscription reads:

TO THE MEMORY 

OF NINE BRAVE MEN 

JULY 29, 1916 

82ND FIELD COY R.E.

No 43639 SPR. R.F. CHOAT  — No 59287 SPR. W.HAVILAND 

No 58897 SPR. J.JOINER  — No 95180 SPR. A.ROBOTHAM 

No 21182 SPR. C.W.VERNON  — No 43609 SPR. C.D.ELLISON

No 47753 SPR. J.HIGGINS  — No 61876 SPR. F.BLAKELEY 

No 86972 PNR. F.TREDIGO

More detail about the background to this company's work is found in an account written by the unit's commanding officer, Capt. (later Lieut. Col.) Reginald Francis Amhurst Butterworth  CMG DSO  (1876–1960) who wrote:

Nos 3 and 4 Sections. . . has to go up at dusk through the little village of Bazentin to wire in some tactical points gained during the day's fighting. They had two or three men hit on the way up and then for three or four hours they carried on their work under a hellish storm of H.E. and machine gun fire. The work was considered vitally necessary, accordingly Lt Howlett carried on steadfastly with No 4 Section and C.S.M. Deyermond with No 3 Section till the work was through. . . 6 killed and 19 wounded out of 40. I added the names of three others, who died with great heroism 'sticking it' in the same way on the previous night, thus making up the tale of the NINE BRAVE MEN. Choate was a first rate carpenter and a most loveable man. Ellison just a boy from a North Country workshop, Vernon a fitter and a fine stalwart fellow. . .

Lt. Col. Butterworth in 1929

Three days later 82 FC RE left the area. Capt. Butterworth wrote: "However I had written to each of the next of kin of the nine men. . . adding that I marked the spot. . . and would go back some day and put up a little stone to their memory. I had a block of granite engraved in the [16^th (Irish)] Divisional workshop. . . in November 1917. . . we collected bricks from the ruins near by and so constructed our small tribute of affection and respecting to the memory of our nine brave comrades."

Since, as engineers they had been recruited nation-wide, these nine repesented a Hollywood-like cross-section of Englishmen. Seven of them, including Choat, from Essex, Joiner from posh Maidstone in Kent, the Londoner Robotham, Vernon from gritty Wakefield in Yorkshire, Haviland from Birmingham in Warwickshire, Blakeley from the gloomy mills of Preston in Lancashire and Tredigo, a Cornishman but from Nottinghamshire, have no known graves and are remembered on the Thiepval Memorial, Pier and Face 8a and d.

The other two are Ellison, from Staffordshire, who is buried in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) Caterpillar Valley Cemetery (Special grave 21) and Higgins, from Tyneside, Northumberland, who lies in the CWGC Becourt Military Cemetery, Plot I Row P Grave 9.

Vernon's and Robothams's dates of death are given as 30 July, Higgins's as 31 July, and the others as 29 July in both the CWGC Register and His Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO) publication Soldiers Died in the Great War1914-19. In both sources, Ellison is spelled “Ellisson,” and in the CWGC Register Tredigo is spelled “Tregidgo.”

Bazentin Sector, July 1915

In the 1980s, the NINE BRAVE MEN memorial was refurbished and enclosed in a low wall by teenage boys from 82 Squadron,  Junior Leaders Regiment Royal Engineers, but after that program was discontinued, the memorial was once again neglected. Now, cleaned and touched up, the entire structure has also been moved a short distance to reduce the risk of damage from road traffic. The Bazentin Commune has accepted responsibility for its maintenance. 

Finding the Memorial: 

It now sits on a bend of the D73 highway, just down  the road from High Wood. The entrance to the CWGC  Bazentin- le- Petit Cemetery is just 500 ft. to the south.

Sources: The Western Front Association (UK); National Portrait Gallery

Best and Most Concise Summary I've Found of the Operational Challenges of the World War I Battlefields

This is an excerpt from the article "Dumb Donkeys or Cunning Foxes? Learning in the British and German Armies during the Great War" by Dr Robert T. Foley  of the Defence Studies Department, King’s College London.

Across the Western Front from early September, a rather strange thing began occurring. As the French and German armies shifted units from their southern wings to their northern in an attempt to outflank each other, improvised field positions began appearing wherever the two armies remained. While these were by no means the extensive trench systems of later in the war, they allowed positions to be held with fewer troops, freeing up others for use elsewhere. Although often seen as an innovation of the First World War, field positions had a long history, including in wars in the years immediately before 1914. Both the Balkan Wars of 1912/13 and the  Russo-Japanese War of 1904/05 had seen extensive use of entrenchments, and European armies were well versed in their use. By November 1914, the belligerents in Belgium and France faced each other from two increasingly sophisticated defensive  systems. These trenches proved successful at resisting most attempts to break through for the next four years. Several interrelated factors created this deadlock. 

First, the combination of cover and firepower created a tactical problem for attackers. Field fortifications provided cover for defending troops as they waited out enemy preparatory artillery bombardments and small-arms fire. Once this fire had lifted to allow attacking troops to close with the enemy, defenders would emerge and fire into the now-exposed attacking troops. Even if some defenders were killed or incapacitated by the preparatory fire, modern rifles could easily fire 20 rounds per minute, and the increasingly available machine guns could fire up to 600 rounds per minute. Added to the firepower of the infantry was that of the artillery. Again, as the war progressed, artillery firepower increased with ever-larger numbers and sizes of artillery pieces being added to the tables of organization of European armies. All of this firepower struck the attacker when he was at his most vulnerable. In order to attack the enemy, the attacker had to leave the protection of his own trenches, exposing him to the fire of the enemy. Thus, on the Western Front, relatively few defenders to stop cold almost any attack in its tracks. 

Added to this tactical problem was an operational problem. The defensive effectiveness of frontline trenches meant that they could be held by relatively few troops. Given the size of armies during the war, this left large numbers of units free to act as a reserve in case the enemy did succeed in breaking into a defensive position. (Although the calculations are by no means exact, the British official history noted that the two sides could each field 15,000 men per mile, or 10 men per yard, on the Western Front in 1914.) Moreover, it was clear to all that any attempt to break through the trenches would have to be carefully managed—attacking troops would have to be brought forward and artillery preparation carried out. Throughout most of the war, this buildup of men and material telegraphed an attacker’s intentions and allowed a defender to ready his reserves. Even if surprise could be achieved, the tactical break-in took so long that invariably defenders had time to bring up fresh reserves. 

As the war progressed, the two problems became more closely intertwined. From late 1915, the simple field fortifications gave way to complex defensive systems of considerable depth. Instead of a simple trench line, by late 1917, the Germans had developed sequential defensive systems, each of which comprised a number of trench lines and centres of resistance with a depth of up to 15 kilometres. The object of defensive ceased to be holding the forward line and became absorbing an enemy attack and inflicting high casualties before counter-attacking to regain lost ground. With systems being so deep, the problem of tactical mobility combined with that of operational mobility to prevent movement on the Western Front.

Source: International Affairs 90/2 (March 2014)

Also see Dr. Foley's article "Machine Gun Lessons from the Somme" HERE

The Attack on the Anthill from Paths of Glory — Video

 

Spain's Fake Neutrality

King Alfonso XIII, Who Survived Five Assassination
Attempts During His Reign, Supported Neutrality

Carolina Garcia Sanz, University of Seville

In southern and Mediterranean Europe during the First World War, Italy, Portugal, and Greece did not cling to neutral status, which made Spain an exception. Spain not only kept its neutrality but also strengthened its diplomatic connections with the Allies.  Starting in 1902, the Liberal Spanish government submitted its national ambitions in Morocco to a trilateral agreement with France and Great Britain. Moreover, the Spanish economy was heavily dependent on Great Britain and France.  Thus, on these grounds, despite the Royal Decree of Neutrality from 4 August 1914, the Conservative Eduardo Dato (1856–1921) cabinet unofficially informed the British that Spain would exhibit “benevolent neutrality” towards the Allied side.

All in all,  a non-belligerent fake-neutrality was the best option for Spain. In spite of the Spanish politicians’ ineffectuality, the country stayed out of the savage butchery. Furthermore, as the Italian case would  show, entering war—even on the winning side—was not always a guarantee of achieving any national aspirations.

Spain was the most self-sufficient European neutral in terms of minerals and foodstuffs. Moreover, its geographically strategic position between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean increased Spain’s importance for belligerent communications and transit trade. Spanish dynamism in commercial terms, and trade connections with the main ports of France, Italy, and North Africa, drew in combatants' involvement in Spanish affairs. Additionally, although Spain had not played a major part in Germany’s foreign policy prior to the First World War, the war intensified German activity against Anglo-French influence on Spain.

Don Quixote in the War
1915 Fantasy Novel

Despite ongoing pressures from the Allies, Spain could offer them little by entering the war, especially given the incalculable services it was already providing for their cause as a “neutral ally.” For instance, On 8 August 1914, the Spanish government had provided a guarantee to supply charcoal and foodstuffs to the population of Gibraltar, a British colony. When the Allies launched an offensive in the Dardanelles, they urgently needed to maintain their sea-based military and naval population in transit to or from the straits. The same was true while the Allied  convoy system was based at Gibraltar in the spring of 1917. Spain became one of the Entente’s biggest suppliers of foodstuffs and raw materials, while Spanish-German commercial relations were cut off. The Spanish government signed several bilateral trade agreements but only with the Allied countries.

U-boats, appearing in Spanish ports or anchoring in Spanish waters unannounced, proved to create serious practical and diplomatic problems. To complicate matters, during unrestricted submarine warfare, German u-boats sank over 80 Spanish-flagged vessels. German and Austrian submarine manoeuvres also put the convoy system at risk in the Mediterranean. On 10 May 1917, the first convoy had sailed from Gibraltar. The French and British foreign offices put harsh pressure on the Spanish government to prosecute German espionage on the Spanish coasts.

German U-35 on a 1917 Stopover in Cartagena

Spain, however,  without being at war, managed to have the war at Home.  The conflict provided Spain with an economic boom. Imports were decreasing dramatically while the volume and prices of raw materials and foodstuffs exports were rising. But the great prosperity was not evenly distributed across all  groups. Frequently, supplies of bread and other basic foodstuffs were limited, which particularly affected the rural and urban working class.  A civil “war of words” between Germanófilos (German supporters) and Aliadófilos (Allied supporters) flared up in Spain, showing the ideological gap between the ruling elite and the outsiders in the political system. Leftwing workers (the so-called “real Spain”) were ideologically closer to the Allies, whereas church and monarchist parties (identified with the “official Spain”) actively supported the German cause. With public opinion divided over World War I, King Alfonso XIII—who otherwise had a controversial reign—used his relations with other European royal families to help preserve a stance of neutrality, as espoused by his government.

Source:  Compiled from several articles by Dr. Sanz at 1914-1918 Online; Wikipedia

1914 and Innocence

The British Expeditionary Force Arriving,  August 1914

Shaun O'Connell

For Henry James, writing in August 1914, The Great War represented “the plunge of civilization into the abyss of blood and darkness . . . that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, . . . making it too tragic for words.”  But not, as it turned out, beyond the reach of language, for James’s eloquent epiphany anticipates the floodtide of words poured out to describe and account for modern warfare. For war, whatever else it may be, is a painful process of initiation and enlightenment, a motivation for reflection and an inspiration for journalism, memoirs, fiction, and poetry. Indeed, the tragic may only be contained, fully imagined, in language.

“Never such innocence,” wrote Philip Larkin of the British who went off to war in “MCMXIV”:

Never before or since,

As changed itself to past

Without a word—the men

Leaving the gardens tidy,

The thousands of marriages

Lasting a little while longer:

Never such innocence again.

But innocence among the young men who fight wars and the citizenry who applaud them as they march “over there,” while qualified by the record of previous wars, is, it seems, infinitely renewable, so the terrible facts and lessons of warfare require constant retelling. War, as H. G. Wells wrote, “is just the killing of things and the smashing of things,” but “when it is all over, then literature and civilization will have to begin again.”

The literature of warfare of the last century, particularly war memoirs, then, stands as an eloquent claim to civilization under siege and threatened by destruction; such literature is testimony to the transformation, for soldiers and civilians, affected by unimaginable experience, from innocence to awareness.

From: "Wars Remembered (2003)", New England Journal of Public Policy, 18 November 2015

Elusive Alliance: The German Occupation of Poland in World War I

German Cavalry Entering Warsaw, 5 August 1914

By Jesse Kauffman

Harvard University Press, 2015

Reviewed by Michael S. Neiberg

Originally presented in Michigan War Studies Review, 22 February 2016. 

Distinguished historian Bernard Bailyn has recently written a masterful study of the differences between teleological and contextual history.  The former presumes an inevitable or likely end state. On this view, the American Revolution, for example, becomes merely one stage in the United States’ rise to global power or its realization of full political equality. Contextual history, by contrast, posits no such end state and accommodates a wide variety of possible outcomes. It recognizes that actors at any given time do not have a later historian’s awareness of the longer-term course of events. The teleological theory is so tempting because we cannot erase from our consciousness the events that subsequently flowed from past actions. The challenge is to avoid letting those events determine too exclusively how we write about the past.

In this regard, the First World War presents a particularly acute problem. Those who see it as merely a prelude to the Second World War often ignore that the generations alive in 1914–18 did not know what we now know. By positioning the First World War as the start of the time stream leading to the Second, we neglect, in Bailyn’s terms, the contextual significance of events in their own time. Too often teleological writers over-interpret evidence from one era because they can only see it through the lens of another.

Thanks to some marvelous scholarly work, the German war on the Eastern Front in 1914–18 is no  longer, as Winston Churchill called it, an “unknown war.” But we still struggle to give it meaning on its own terms. Our knowledge of Nazi genocide, the Cold War, and the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe makes it hard not to see the events of the First World War in a larger context of the twentieth century as a whole. Scholars have sometimes cast the war as a manifestation of the German notion of Sonderweg (special way) that makes the genocide of 1939–45 a bit more explicable. A purely teleological explanation draws a direct line from German war crimes in the Great War to the death camps of the Third Reich and perhaps beyond to the years of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe.

In Elusive Alliance, Jesse Kauffman (Eastern Michigan Univ.) rejects any such reductive analysis.  Adopting Bailyn’s contextual method, he sees a variety of possible outcomes in the German occupation of Poland from 1914 to 1918. Rather than portraying it as a dress rehearsal for the Second World War, he elucidates German occupation policy in Poland as a function of the exigencies of total war in the East, domestic politics inside Germany, and, crucially, the actions of the Poles themselves. While these overlapping contexts may share critical elements with those of 1939–45, they were nevertheless distinctive. In other words, the Kaiser’s Second Reich fought a kind of war in a not yet independent Poland that necessarily differed from the one Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich waged against both the Soviet Union and an independent Poland. The key to comprehending the first, therefore, is to forget the second ever happened, or, perhaps better put, to remember that no one in 1914–18 knew what was to come a generation on. For Kauffman, the German occupiers of Poland in the First World War were not harbingers of their counterparts in the Second; they instead represent a fading 19-century view of Europe, in which Poland played a key role in stabilizing or destabilizing central and eastern Europe.

Polish Lancers on Parade During German Occupation

Kauffman argues most convincingly that the Germans’ confused quest for a viable policy for Poland in the First World War lacked clear goals and so ended in failure. Rather than murdering the Poles and destroying their institutions, as they tried to do in the Second World War, the Germans had hoped to create an independent nation (its borders shifted eastward at the expense of Russia) with close cultural, economic, and military ties to Germany. In doing so, they could cast themselves as modernizers and liberalizers in contrast to the autocratic and brutal Russians they were replacing. To achieve this, Kauffman maintains, they had to find a balance between coercing the Poles and gaining their consent for German designs. They never succeeded, mostly because the Poles recognized that Germany, not Poland, would benefit from German reforms.

Like Isabel Hull,  Kauffman does not see Germany in the First World War era as an outlier among European states. Instead, he contends that its plans for Poland differed little from Britain’s plans for Ireland, France’s for Corsica and North Africa, or even the Americans’ for Mexico. Similarly, the Allies’ wartime policy in the liberated portions of the Ottoman Empire reflected a desire to ensure both political stability and easy access to raw materials, while at the same time respecting local customs. In so doing, they wished to project enough political legitimacy to dampen overt resistance and even allow them to recruit soldiers from occupied regions. At least until 1918, Kauffman demonstrates, the Germans behaved essentially like other occupying states. Only later, when memories of the occupation of Poland and the Treaty of Versailles’s creation of a new Polish state embittered Germans in the postwar years, did a far more horrifying and brutal—but not inevitable—model present itself. 

The most critical context of the occupation was, of course, the total war Germany was fighting on multiple fronts during the First World War. Like all warring states, Germany sought to win first and remake the areas it occupied later. Effective occupation policy was vital to achieving victory. This put the occupiers in a difficult position, given the diverse religions, cultures, and languages within Poland. Policies that helped to win the war (like the confiscation of food to minimize the effects of the British blockade at home) undermined Germany’s goal of establishing good relations with a reborn Poland and tsarist Russia after the war. This dilemma proved insoluble—a lesson for all occupying powers, including recently the United States. 

Kauffman astutely returns the Poles themselves to the center of their own story. Like the Balkans, Poland, too, has more history than it can consume. In 1914, it was home to competing polities and a diverse population. It was more an idea than a nation with distinct borders or a common history. Various groups strove to control both the country’s historical narrative and the future direction of any Polish state. This struggle allowed the Poles to play the Germans off against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at least until its collapse.

Order HERE

The author organizes his narrative around the figure of Gen. Hans Hartwig von Beseler, who came to Poland after making his name as the victor of Antwerp (Oct. 1914). The general became the principal German policymaker in Poland following the great Russian retreat after the Gorlice-Tarnów offensive in spring 1915. Finding himself immersed in both German and Polish domestic politics, he envisioned a reliably pro-German postwar Polish state that Poles themselves could regard as legitimate. As Kauffman observes, Beseler’s plans differed sharply from the genocidal tactics of Hitler’s Reich a generation later. Beseler wanted to work with all but the most anti-German Poles, including the Jews, most of whom initially saw the Germans as liberators from the pogroms and repressions of tsarist Russia. Kauffman notes that many of the professors whom Beseler helped to develop the new pro-German Warsaw University later died in Nazi death camps, a poignant index of the differences between the two occupations.

Beseler’s travails will sound familiar to observers of present-day occupations. Unversed in the history and culture of the people he would soon rule, Beseler struggled to understand the Poles and the fissures in Polish society. Rejecting the biological racism of many Europeans, he tended to see the Poles as children, unsophisticated and incapable of self-government, yet (he presumed) eager to learn from and emulate the more advanced political system of their occupiers. He also had to deal with representatives of the German civil government, who often had their own goals for Poland. Moreover, other great powers, friend and foe alike, tried to influence the nature of the German occupation. In the end, as Kauffman clearly shows, it was all too much to hold together.

The contexts and results of the Second World War were far different. By 1939, German leaders had conceived a white-hot hatred of Poland, a state created in 1919 by the victorious Allies partly from German territory. The leaders of the deeply racist Third Reich meant to empty Poland in order to maintain the standard of living, and thereby the morale, of the German home front, an intention consistent with their explanation of Germany’s defeat in 1918. Poland was then to be resettled by Germans in accordance with the Nazi quest for Lebensraum. These differences in historical context, not some deeper Drang noch Osten (drive toward the east) or unusually virulent racism, best explain the dissimilarities of the two occupations.

Students of twentieth-century European history or occupations generally should read Elusive Alliance and carefully consider its core arguments. Jesse Kauffman has made a most compelling case that Nazi occupation policies were not continuing but reacting against those of the Kaiserreich. Policymakers, too, should reflect on the relevance of the German occupation of Poland to a general theory of occupation. However good their intentions and their resources, occupying powers will always face daunting challenges. As Robespierre is said to have remarked, no one loves armed missionaries.

Michael S. Neiberg

A Maxim Machine Gunner's View from the Trenches

Private Gilbert Williams

Private Gilbert Williams worked at the Great Western Railway audit office at Paddington and enlisted in the Seaforth Highlanders when war broke out.  The British National Archives holds two of his letters to a Mr. Hunt at Great Western in which Williams vividly describes life in the trenches and his pride (thrill?) at being a Maxim machine gunner. 

16 November 1915

Dear Mr Hunt,

Please accept yourself and convey to the other gentlemen my best thanks for the State Express cigarettes. They are fine. Oh what a picnic it is in the trenches just now. We have been in the trenches 10 days up to now, and except for the last two days it has been raining almost steadily. The result is mud, mud and yet more mud, knee deep in places. But luckily we have long top boots from trench wear, so that the mud does not worry as much, except that is making our feet as cold as ice… We have been issued with fur jackets so we can keep our bodies warm.

Just now the whole countryside is covered with snow and moving objects are distinguishable a long distance off. For instance this morning when I was on duty with the gun I could see the Germans walking down a road away behind their lines. I had several bursts at them with the gun but they were out of range. Made me damned mad I can tell you seeing the blighters and then not being able to lay them out.

You can’t realise the power one seems to possess when handling a Maxim. Personally I feel as if I could lay out the whole German army. We fire about a couple of thousand rounds every night into Fritz’s trenches just to keep them quiet. They (the Germans) have been trying to find the gun, both with their Maxims and with shells, but up to now, they’ve not succeed. Kind regards to everybody. Yours very sincerely,

Gilbert Williams

A Maxim Machine Gun Squad in Training

6 April 1916

Dear Mr Hunt,

Thanks very much for your letter which I received a week or two ago, also for the magazine.

We are in the trenches just now. In fact we seem to spend about three times as much time in as we do out. Also we are in a pretty warm spot, it was about here, towards the end of last summer that the French and German had some of the fiercest fighting of the war. The country around about is a veritable maze of trenches. The fighting at one time was so fierce that there was only time just to bury the dead in the sides of the trenches, and now that the trenches have crumpled one is constantly seeing the bones of men’s legs or their boots, or skulls sticking out from the sides of the trenches, pleasant, eh? There will be a pleasant smell here in the summer. I only hope we are not here then. In places we are only about twenty yards away from Fritz and company. Consequently alltimes the air is pretty thick with bombs, grenades and trench mortars.

These last are pretty hellish sort of toys. They have an explosion like about ten earthquakes rolled into one. But even these are not the worst we have to put up with. The trenches being so close together there is of course any amount of mining going on. So one never knows when the particular lump of earth one is standing on is going to take a trip through the solar regions. When a mine does go up, there is some excitement knocking about I can tell you. Suppose for instance we were going to explode one, all the artillery in the neighbourhood is ranged on the spot and directly the mine is exploded, there is hell let loose on the crater. Of course as soon as he gets the range the enemy replies, so that the air is fairly full of everything that kills quickly. One can on these occasions always rely on a good many casualties. Since we have been in this spasm there have been five exploded in this neighbourhood, while others are expected to go up at any time. So much for conditions here.

How is everything in town? Pretty quiet I suppose. I see you’ve had the zepps (Zeppelins) over again? Is it a fact that one dropped in the Thames? (Lines censored.) That is about all the news, so will close, kindest regards to everybody. 

Yours very sincerely,

Gilbert Williams.

Pvt. Williams survived the Western Front and returned to serve in the Second World War. He died in 1967.

Crisis at the War Department: How Do You Manage a Global War on the Fly?

On 19 January 1918,  Chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee Senator George E. Chamberlain dramatically announced: 

The military establishment of America has fallen down!

Production line for 3-inch shells, Bethlehem Steel, PA

The one area where the War Department was supremely lacking was in its own ability to manage the war. In the spring of 1917 the Army’s General Staff was a small war-planning agency rather than a coordinating staff for the War Department and its bureaus. The National Defense Act of 1916 had limited the number of General Staff officers that could be stationed in Washington to fewer than twenty, less than a tenth of England’s staff in August 1914. Once the United States joined the conflict many talented officers left Washington for overseas or commands, even as the staff needed to undergo a massive expansion. Without a strong coordination agency to provide oversight, the staff bureaus ran amok. By July more than 150 War Department purchasing committees competed against each other, often cornering the market for scarce items and making them unavailable for the Army at large. While the General Staff at least established troop movement and training schedules, no one set up industrial and transportation priorities. 

To a large degree the problem was that Baker did not have a strong chief of staff to control the General Staff and manage the bureaus. Both General Scott and his successor, General Bliss, were near retirement and distracted by special assignments. Baker did little to alleviate these problems until late 1917. By then the situation had become a crisis. 

Major General George Goethals at the Panama Canal

Responding to pressure from Congress and recommendations from the General Staff, Baker took action to centralize and streamline the supply activities. First, in November, he appointed industrialist Benedict Crowell, a firm believer in centralized control, as the assistant secretary of war; later Crowell would also assume duties as director of munitions. On the military side, Baker called back from retirement Maj. Gen. George W. Goethals, who had coordinated the construction of the Panama Canal. First appointed acting quartermaster general in December, Goethals quickly assumed the mantle of the Army’s chief supply officer. Eliminating red tape and consolidating supply functions, especially the purchasing agencies, he also brought in talented administrators from both the military and the civilian sector to run the supply system. 

In the meantime, the secretary of war was beginning to reorganize the General Staff. Congress had increased the size of the staff, but it wasn’t until Maj. Gen. Peyton C. March became the chief of staff in March of 1918 that the General Staff gained a firm, guiding hand. Over his thirty years of service, the 53-year-old March had gained an experience well balanced between line and staff. He had been cited for gallantry as a junior officer in the War with Spain and in the Philippine Insurrection. He also served tours of duty with the Office of the Adjutant General and  most recently had been Pershing’s artillery chief in France. Forceful and brilliant, March was unafraid of making decisions.

March’s overarching goal was to get as many men as possible to the AEF in Europe to win the war. To achieve this, he set about making the General Staff and the War Department more effective and efficient, quickly clearing bureaucratic logjams, streamlining operations, and ousting ineffective officers. In May 1918 he was aided immeasurably by the Overman Act, which granted the president authority to reorganize executive agencies during the war. Moreover, he received the additional authority of the rank of four-star general. March quickly decreed that the powerful bureau chiefs were subordinate to the General Staff and were to report to the secretary of war only through the chief of staff.

A Revealing Photo of General Peyton C. March

In August 1918 March drastically reorganized the General Staff, creating four main divisions: Operations; Military Intelligence; Purchase, Storage, and Traffic; and War Plans. The divisions’ titles fairly well explained their functions. Notably, with the creation of the Purchase, Storage, and Traffic Division, for the first time the Army had centralized control over logistics. Under this reorganization, the total military and civilian  strength of the General Staff increased to just over 1,000 and took on a much more active role. [Secretary Baker summed up March's role: "The war was won by days. Your energy and drive supplied the days necessary for our side to win."]

By the end of the summer of 1918, Generals March and Goethals and their talented military and civilian subordinates had engineered a managerial revolution in the War Department.  Inefficiency, pigeonholes, and snarled actions were replaced by centralized control and decentralized operations.

Source: The U.S. Army in the World War I Era,  Center of Military History, United States Army

Remembering French Wartime Fashion

I want to commend the staff of the National World War I Museum for their imaginative efforts in 2021 to keep the public interested in the historical importance of the war by presenting imaginative and fresh programs that look at its surprising aspects. I've been meaning to write this article for some time, but the museum's latest special exhibition, Silk and Steel: French Fashion, Women and WWI, which  showed through 11 April 2021, is a perfect example of what I like to see. Obviously intended to attract an audience other than hard-core military history types, Silk and Steel will allow visitors, who may otherwise have never traveled to the museum to learn how deeply connected the war is to our 21st-century culture.

Everything's Up to Date in Kansas City
Part of the WWI Museum's Display

Silk and Steel features original dresses, coats, capes, hats, shoes, and accessories. Topics presented are the evolution of the wartime silhouette, Parisian designers during the war, military uniforms’ influence, women’s uniforms in France and America, war work, economics of fashion, and postwar emancipation. Original clothing and accessories were on loan from many other museums. Here are a few examples:

"Madame Dress" by Jeanne Lanvin

Blouse by Coco Chanel

Smith College Relief Unit Uniform,
Abercrombie and Fitch

French Fashion, Women, and the First World War was organized by Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York. An initial iteration of this exhibition called Mode & Femmes 14–18 was presented at the Bibliothèque Forney in Paris by Bibliocité.

Ten Things I Missed on My Numerous Trips to the Ypres Salient but Discovered on Google Street View

1. Lock on Ypres-Yser Canal
A key location in the 1915 Second Ypres battle in which it was destroyed, the site became the front line for two years until the opening of the Battle of Passchendaele. Located about 3 miles north of the Menin Gate.

2.  Monument to the 20th Light Division of the British Army
This Kitchener division was rotated several times into the Ypres Salient, seeing its heaviest action in the Battle of Passchendaele.  Its monument is located on the Boezinge-Langemark Road on the southern edge of Langemark.

3.  Monument to Harry Patch
 The last surviving British combat soldier of the War, Harry Patch fought in the Salient with the 20th Light Division in 1917  and was severely wounded. The monument is located near where he was wounded on the west side of Langemarck during the effort to capture the town.

Click on Image to Read Text

4. Panel for Frederick Dancox, VC
Pvt. Dancox captured a Bunker and 40 German Prisoners at this Site in October 1917. He was awarded the Victoria Cross but was killed in action before he could receive the award. The panel is located on a bicycle path crossing the Langemarck-Staden Road.

5. Memorial Park for Lt. Juul De Winde, Belgian Army
Lt. De Winde was KIA 28 September 1918 in King Albert's sole offensive of the war. During the war he was a soldier-poet in a trench newspaper and, after his death, became a symbol for the Flemish (Dutch) Movement. The site is accessed by a quarter-mile long path off of N313 about a mile from the center of Westrozebeke.

6. Beecham Dugout
Site of massive German bunker on Passchendaele Ridge that has been relocated to a museum in Dixmude and partially reassembled for viewing.

7. French National Cemetery at St. Charles de Petyze 
With 3,500 burials, this is the principal French Cemetery in Belgium. The sculptor of the dramatic crucifiction monument, Jean Fréour, was a member of the Breton art movement.   Many of the men buried here were from the 87th Division, recruited in Brittany. It  is located between Potijze and Zonnebeke on the east side of the road.

8. Messines Miner Tribute
Honoring the men who dug the mines detonated in June 1917. Located at the Wijtschaete village church.

9. Observation Ridge Marker
Commemorates 1916 fighting by Canadian Forces Between Hill 62 and Mont Sorrel. Located about .2 miles south of Maple Copse Cemetery.

10. Kasteel de Lovie
Wartime Headquarters of the British 5th Division. Located 1.8 miles NW of Poperinge on N308. (Possibly contributing to the term "Chateau Generals" ?)

See my similar article on the Meuse-Argonne Sector HERE.

Eyewitness: The Day of Glory (Armistice Day in Paris)

[Background: Dorothy Canfield (1879–1958)  was an education reformer, social activist, and best-selling American author in the early 20th century. With her husband, she spent the war in Paris and became deeply involved in war work, including establishing a Braille press for blinded veterans and aiding refugere.  The Day of Glory, a collection of her wartime articles, was published in 1919. It concludes with this vivid description of Armistice Day.] 

Paris, 11 November 1918

By Dorothy Canfield 

... if the armistice is signed, a salvo of cannon from the Invalides at eleven o’clock will announce the end of the war.

The clock hands crept slowly past ten and lagged intolerably thereafter. The rapid beating of your heart, telling off the minutes, brought eleven finally very near. Then the clock, your heart, all the world, seemed to stand still. The great moment was there. Would the announcing cannon speak? Such a terrible silence as the world kept during that supreme moment of suspense! It was the quintessence of all the moral torture of four nightmare years.

And then ... like a shock within your own body it came, the first solemn proclamation of the cannon, shaking the windows, the houses, the very sky, with its news. The war was over. The accursed guns had ceased tearing to pieces our husbands and our sons and our fathers.

Of all the hundreds of thousands of women who heard those guns, I think there was not one who did not feel instantly, scalding on her cheeks, the blessed tears—tears of joy! She had forgotten that there could be tears of joy. The horrible weight on the soul that had grown to be a part of life dissolved away in that assuaging flood; the horrible constriction around the heart loosened. We wept with all our might; we poured out once for all the old bitterness, the old horror. We felt sanity coming back, and faith and even hope, that forgotten possession of the old days.

When the first tears of deliverance had passed, and your knees had stopped shaking, and your heart no longer beat suffocatingly in your throat, why, then every one felt one common imperious desire, to leave the little cramping prison of his own walls, to escape out of the selfish circle of his own joy, and to mingle his thanksgiving with that of all his fellows, to make himself physically, as he felt spiritually, at one with rejoicing humanity.

And we all rushed out into the streets.

I think there never can have been such a day before, such a day of pure thanksgiving and joy for every one. For the emotion was so intense that, during the priceless hours of that first day, it admitted no other. Human hearts could hold no more than that great gladness. The dreadful past, the terrible problems of the future, were not. We lived and drew our breath only in the knowledge that “firing had ceased at eleven o’clock that morning,” and that those who had fought as best they could for the Right had conquered. You saw everywhere supreme testimony to the nobility of the moment, women in black, with bits of bright-colored tricolor pinned on their long black veils, with at last a smile, the most wonderful of all smiles, in their dimmed eyes. They were marching with the others in the streets; every one was marching with every one else, arm in arm, singing:

Allons, enfants de la patrie,

Le Jour de Gloire est arrivé!

The houses echoed to those words, repeated and repeated by every band of jubilant men and
 women and children who swept by, waving flags and shouting:

Come, children of our country,

The Day of Glory is here!

Every group had at its head a permissionnaire or two in field uniform who had been pounced upon as the visible emblem of victory, kissed, embraced, covered with flowers, and set in the front rank to carry the largest flag. Sometimes there walked beside these soldiers working women with sleeping babies in their arms, sometimes old men in frock coats with ribbons in their buttonholes, sometimes light-hearted, laughing little munition workers still in their black aprons, but with tricolored ribbons twisted in their hair, sometimes elegantly dressed ladies, sometimes women in long mourning veils, sometimes ragged old beggars, sometimes a cab filled with crippled soldiers waving their crutches—but all with the same face of steadfast, glowing jubilee. During those few blessed hours there was no bitterness, no evil arrogance, no revengeful
 fury. Any one who saw all that afternoon those thousands and thousands of human faces all shining with the same exaltation can never entirely despair of his fellows again, knowing them to be capable of that pure joy.

The Day of Glory has come.

The crowd seemed to be merely washing back and forth in surging waves of thanksgiving, up and down the streets aimlessly, carrying flowers to no purpose but to celebrate their happiness. But once you were in it, singing and marching with the others, you felt an invisible current bearing you steadily, irresistibly, in one direction; and soon, as you marched, and grew nearer the unknown goal, you heard another shorter, more peremptory, rhythm mingling with the longer shout, repeated over and over:

Allons, enfants de la patrie,

Le Jour de Gloire est arrivé!

Now people were beginning to shout: “To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg!” Then you knew that you
 were being swept along to the Place de la Concorde, to salute the statue of Strasbourg, freed from her forty years of mourning and slavery.

The crowd grew denser and denser as it approached that heart of Paris; and the denser it grew the higher flamed the great fire of rejoicing, mounting up almost visibly to the quiet gray skies:

Come, children of our country,

The Day of Glory is here!

“To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg! To Strasbourg!”

No evil epithets hurled at the defeated enemy, not one, not one in all those long hours of shouting out what was in the heart; no ugly effigies, no taunting cries, no mention even of the enemy—instead a fresh outburst of rejoicing at the encounter with a long procession of Belgians, marching arm in arm, carrying Belgian flags and pealing out like trumpets the noble Brabançonne! We made way for them with respectful admiration, we stopped our song to listen to
 theirs, we let them pass, waving our hats, our handkerchiefs, cheering them, pressing flowers upon them, snatching at their hands for a clasp as they went by, blessing them for their constancy and courage, sharing their relief till our hearts were like to burst!

We fell in behind them and at once had to separate again to allow the passage of a huge camion, bristling with American soldiers, heaped up in a great pyramid of brown. How every one cheered them, a different shout, with none of the poignant undercurrent of sympathy for pain that had greeted the Belgian exiles. These brave, lovable, boyish crusaders come from across the sea for a great ideal, who had been ready to give all, but who had been blessedly spared the last sacrifice—it was a rollicking shout which greeted them! They represented the youth, the sunshine; they were loved and laughed at and acclaimed by the crowd as they passed, waving their caps, leaning over the side to shake the myriad hands stretched up to them, catching at the flowers flung at them, shouting out some song, perhaps a college cheer, judging
 by the professionally frantic gestures of a cheer leader, grinding his teeth and waving his arms wildly to exhort them to more volume of sound. Whatever it was, it was quite inaudible in the general uproar, the only coherent accent of which was the swelling cry repeated till it was like an elemental sound of nature.

The Day of Glory has arrived.

Now a group of English soldiers overtook us, carrying a great, red, glorious English flag, adding some hearty, inaudible marching song to the tumult. As they passed, a poilu in our band sprang forward, seized one of the Anglo-Saxons in his arms, and kissed him resoundingly on both cheeks. Then there was laughter, and shouts and handshakings and more embracing, and they too vanished away in the waves of the great river of humanity flowing steadily, rapidly toward the statue of the lost city whose loss had meant the triumph of unscrupulous force, whose restitution meant the righting of an old wrong in the name of justice. We were almost there
 now; the huge open Place opened out before us.

Now we had come into it, and our songs for an instant were cut short by one great cry of astonishment. As far as the eye could reach, the vast public square was black with the crowd, and brilliant with waving flags. A band up on the terrace of the Tuileries, stationed between the captured German airplanes, flashed in the air the yellow sheen of their innumerable brass instruments, evidently playing with all their souls, but not a sound of their music reached our ears, so deafening was the burst of shouting and singing as the crowd saw its goal, the high statue of the lost city, buried in heaped-up flowers and palms, a triumphant wreath of gold shadowing the eyes which so long had looked back to France from exile.

Ah, what an ovation we gave her! Then we shouted as we had not done before, the great primitive, inarticulate cry of rejoicing that bursts from the heart too full. We shook out our flags high over our heads, as we passed, we cast our flowers up on the pedestal, we were
 swept along by the current—we were the current ourselves!

The Author at Work

At the base of the statue a group of white-haired Alsatians stood, men and women, with quivering lips and trembling hands. Theirs was the honor to arrange the flowers which, tossed too hastily by the eager bearers, fell to the ground.

As they stooped for them, and reached high to find yet one more corner not covered with blooms, a splendid, fair-haired lad, sturdy and tall, with the field outfit of the French soldier heavy on his back, pushed his way through the crowd.

He had in his hand a little bouquet—white and red roses, and forget-me-nots. His eyes were fixed on the statue. He did not see the old men and women there to receive the flowers. He pressed past them and with his own young hands laid his humble offering at the feet of the recovered city. He looked up at the statue and his lips moved. He could not have been more unconscious if he had been entirely alone in an Alsatian forest. The expression of his beautiful
 young face was such that a hush of awe fell on those who saw him.

An old woman in black took his hand in hers and said: “You are from Alsace?”

“I escaped from Strasbourg to join the French army,” he said, “and all my family are there.” His eyes brimmed, his chin quivered.

The old woman had a noble gesture of self-forgetting humanity. She took him in her arms and kissed him on both cheeks. “You are my son,” she said.

They all crowded around him, taking his hand. “And my brother!” “And mine!” “And mine!”

The tears ran down their cheeks.

Source:  The Day of Glory, Henry Holt & Company, 1919