The Importance of Verdun

Today is the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Battle of Verdun. Using my editor's utilities, I can see that to-date, after 1,027 postings on Roads to the Great War, this will be our 84th entry to touch on Verdun. I've been somewhat at loose ends trying to come of with something new and fresh on the battle of 1916.   But I've recently come to the realization that Verdun is the most important battlefield of the Great War, not because – at least, not solely because – of the 1916 fighting there. And Verdun was not only an important factor in every year of the war, it was a strong influence on the pre-1914 planning for war and, after 1918, a strong factor in the planning for the next war. I was a long time coming to this realization because I have longed believed that it is quite evident that 1914's Battle of the Marne is the most important single battle of the war, since it precluded a quick victory by either side, and condemned the participants to a long, grinding affair.  However, I now realize Verdun, including the city, the fortified zone, and its immediate flanks shaped the conduct of the fighting throughout the war, and the way the war is remembered today.

Consider This List:

Prewar:

The Schlieffen Plan, on close examination, used highly fortified Verdun as the dividing point for the holding armies of Germany, south of the city, and the swinging pendulum through France, to the north and west. Verdun was to be outflanked and eliminated as a threat to the German rear.

1905 Schlieffen Plan – Verdun (Circled) Was Always Central

1914:

A.  The failure of the Crown Prince's 5th Army to take Verdun in the opening of the the decisive battle and then advance in support of the armies to the west gave General Joffre opportunity to withdraw in good order and time to prepare a counterstrike.

B.   The resulting Battle of the Marne was won by France between Paris and a Verdun that was still held by the French Army.

C.  The French failure to protect the eastern flank of Verdun (later known as the St. Mihiel Salient), however, would leave the city under constant threat for much of the remaining war.

1915:

Overlooked in many histories is the intense and manpower draining fighting on the flanks of Verdun throughout 1915 in the Argonne Forest, Woëvre Plain, and Meuse Heights.

1916:

France's most memorable battle of the war, fighting off the German assault at Verdun, consumed almost the entire year.

Fort Douaumont in Early 1916.  Over 120,000 Shells Subsequently Hit the Fort

1917:

A.  After the exhaustion of the 1916 battle, during which two-thirds of France's divisions served at Verdun, the French Army experienced mutinies, following the failure of  their spring offensive.

B.  The man called back to re-establish order in the Army was the hero of Verdun, Philippe Pétain.

C.  Despite the mutinies, the French Army's principal offensive operations of 1917 were waged to regain territory lost in 1916 around Verdun.

1918:

The main American battlefields of the war were around Verdun in the final two months of the war. When they were fought, the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne Offensives were the two largest battles the U.S. had ever fought and contributed greatly to the German request for an Armistice. General Pershing understood that the Lorraine sector was the back door to the Rhine river and the heart of Germany.

Aftermath:

A.  The "Verdun Experience" was sacralized in France, a combination heroic epic and tragedy to be avoided in the future at all costs.

B.  The Verdun fortresses, the two most important of which were actually captured in 1916, inspired the defensive Maginot Line.

C.  German veterans of Verdun, such as Heinz Guderian, however, would learn a different lesson for the next war.

The Voie Sacrée: Part of Verdun's Mythic Heritage

Looking at the full picture of the Great War, from its run up through the Second World War, it is quite hard to dispute that Verdun was its most important battlefield, and possibly the most significant of the entire 20th century.   

Preparedness Fever: The Parades of 1916

American's Preparedness Movement spontaneously began in 1914 as it became apparent to many that the country was not prepared for the type of war sweeping across Europe. Its biggest boost came in May 1915 after the loss of 128 Americans on the RMS Lusitania. With Theodore Roosevelt and General Leonard Wood as spokesmen, the  Preparedness Movement pushed an agenda that included an expanded navy and army for defensive purposes, universal military service for a period of six months for all men turning 18, and an expanded standing reserve force in lieu of the National Guard.

It gained moment in 1916 with the president shifting his policies and deciding to personally advocate preparedness. The disturbances on the Mexican border in March, especially the raid on Columbus, NM,  further energized the advocates. Around the nation, there was a series of parades organized to draw attention to the need for preparedness. As one flyer put it, "The parade was held to demonstrate in a successful manner the overwhelming sentiment of the citizens of St. Louis in favor of Preparedness.” 

Below are some images of those parades held all over America in the spring and summer of 1916. Click on the images if you would like to see them in larger formats.

Washington, DC
President Wilson Leads the Parade

Spokane, WA

St. Louis, MO

San Francisco, CA
Ten Would Be Killed and Many Wounded by a Terrorist Bombing

Boston, MA

Chicago, IL

Los Angeles, CA

Providence, RI

Seattle, WA

Norfolk, VA

New York City

J.F.C. Fuller on Generalship

Just before he retired from the British Army Major General J.F.C. Fuller, brilliant historian and military theorist, fascist sympathizer, and all-around insufferable Odd Duck, published a reflection based in good part on his experiences and observations in the Great War.  It was titled:  Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure. Naturally it was not well received by the high command of that period. Some say it was suppressed.

Here are some of Fuller's points that still seem to ring true.

1. In France, as in Gallipoli, and from all accounts in every theater of the World War, a blight fell upon generalship.

2.  Passchendaele [as an example. . .] though no one in his senses would have expected the general-in-chief, or his subordinate army commanders, to lead their men over those desolated shell-blasted swamps, very little was done outside formulating a plan to fight an offensive battle in a most difficult defensive area, with the result that soon after this battle was launched, on 31 July 1917, all contact between the half-drowned front and the wholly dry rear was lost. This hideous turmoil will go down in history as the most soulless battle fought in the annals of the British Army. 

3.  Sometime before the outbreak of the World War, the art of soldiership slipped into a groove and became materialized . . .the more management or command became methodized, the more dehumanized each grew.

4.  By 1914 [the generals] saw [the troops] no longer; now and again, perhaps, he heard of them far away, as managing directors sitting in dug-outs, in chateaux, and in offices.

5.  Where the German [General Staff] system went wrong was that it superimposed a committee of irresponsible non-fighting officers on the general. . .the object was not to liberate the general from non-fighting detail and so allow him to develop his personality and exercise it; but to restrain or stimulate his personality and so establish a uniformity of doctrine and action.

Depiction of the Passchendaele Battlefield
Fuller Considered This a "Soulless" Battle Where Generals Did Not Share the Danger

6.  In war it is almost impossible to exaggerate the evil effects of age upon generalship, and through generalship, on the spirit of an army. . .First, war is obviously a young man’s occupation; secondly, the older a man grows the more cautious he becomes, and thirdly, the more fixed his ideas. . .Youth, in every way, is not only more elastic than old age, but less cautious and far more energetic.

7.  In war, as in peace, individuality is far more important than uniformity; personality than congruity, and originality than conventionality. . .The old are often suspicious of the young and do not welcome criticism, yet without criticism both destructive and constructive, there can be no progress.

8.  I maintain that the proper place for a general is with his men, sharing their discomforts and dangers. . .

9.  If we wish to think clearly, we must cease imitating; if we wish to cease imitating, we must make use of our imagination.  We must train ourselves for the unexpected in place of training others for the cut and dried.  Audacity, and not caution, must be our watchword. Safety first may make a good midwife, but it will never make a good general

10.  These then are the three pillars of generalship: courage, creative intelligence, and physical fitness; the attributes of youth rather than of middle age.

Who Was Biggles?

First Biggles Collection, 1932

Captain James "Biggles" Bigglesworth is one of the great literary creations from the First World War. His air adventures are well known in the United Kingdom and other countries but much less known here in the States. Written by "Captain" W. E. (William Earl) Johns, the Biggles series consists of 96 books published between 1932 and 1970 with an additional six omnibus editions published within this period, plus two further books published in the late 1990s. 

Johns was born in 1893 and served in the war initially at Gallipoli and on the Macedonian Front.  After being commissioned and volunteering for the Royal Flying Corps, he served in France first as a machine gunner and from 1918 as a fighter pilot. Shot down over Mannheim, he was captured, escaped, caught again, and given a death sentence. Only the sudden end of the war saved his life. 

Johns remained with the Royal Air Force until 1927 as a flight instructor and later as a recruiting officer. His final rank was flying officer. When he became a successful author he promoted himself to captain. Biggles first appeared in the story "The White Fokker," published in the first issue of Popular Flying magazine, in 1932. The first collection of Biggles stories, The Camels Are Coming, was published that same year. Biggles has appeared in films over the years, the latest attempt being a science fiction flick, Biggles — Adventures in Time in 1986.

W.E. Johns, RAF Flight Instructor After the War

Graham Chapman as Biggles

Fans of Monty Python's Flying Circus will recall the parodies "Biggles Dictates a Letter" and "Cardinal Biggles," complete with flying helmet and goggles, assisting in the interrogations in the "Spanish Inquisition" sketch.

Sources:  Andrew Melomet's review of Biggles – Adventures in Time in the September 2009 St. Mihiel Trip-Wire and Wikipedia.

The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East reviewed by Courtland Jindra

The Fall of the Ottomans:
The Great War in the Middle East

by Eugene Rogan

Basic Books, 2015

One of my favorite movies is the David Lean classic Lawrence of Arabia. Obviously, like most movies based on an historical event or person, things have been altered to tell the story in a truncated and/or dramatic fashion. That said, I have always had an interest in the war in the Middle East, especially since it is so often obliquely referred to in news broadcasts about the region today. I tried to read a book on that theater of war about a year ago and found it impossibly dense. In fact I could not finish it. So, when another one was suggested to me, I was excited to give it a shot.

Turkish Machine Gunners at Gaza: They Fought on Many Fronts

In The Fall of the Ottomans, Eugene Rogan really succeeds in giving a readable overview of the conflict from both a Turkish and Allied perspective. The book begins with a chapter detailing the stormy decade leading up to the war for the Ottoman Empire. What most interested me about this section was the early pogroms against Armenians after the various Balkan wars, ominously foreshadowing the later genocide against the minority population. Rogan then delves into the reasons why the Young Turks decided to hitch their wagon to Germany and the book jumps into the war.

We get the various strategies of both the Entente and Central Powers as the narrative continues. One can tell the author has a ton of respect for this country that was depleted of money, material, and men by previous wars, widely disparaged by the British as easy pickings, but that nonetheless held on until the war's final days. The Turks had to deal with the Russians, the British Empire, and an insurrection from Arabs (not to mention various other countries that were involved on a lesser basis) ,and still were able to inflict devastating defeats on the Allies. Enver Pasha is treated even-handedly. I'd actually never seen much that was not extremely critical of his managing of the military, but even the disaster at Sarikamis is explained in terms where you can understand his reasoning. Gallipoli is obviously delved into at length as is the siege of Kut. Rogan also digs into the Armenian genocide. This was probably the highlight of the book as Rogan both sympathetically explains the Turks' fear of the Armenian Christians and sharply criticizes the wholesale slaughter (he also has little patience for those who downplay the genocide today).

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The British get a lot of commentary, especially about their various double dealing. Most of it is more explanatory and not accusatory, as Rogan seeks to understand what went on and not play judge, jury, and executioner. This passage provides the kind of context I am referring to:

The fact that the British and French were dividing amongst themselves lands that Sharif Husayn was claiming for the future Arab kingdom has led many historians to denounce the Sykes-Picot Agreement as an outrageous example of imperial perfidy...Yet for Britain and France, whose past imperial rivalries had nearly led them to war, the Sykes-Picot Agreement was an essential exercise...(p. 285)

The Zionist movement is discussed at length, as is the Arab abhorrence to the promise of a Jewish homeland. General Allenby's plans and his mostly efficient execution of them is admired. Expectedly, T.E. Lawrence and Prince Faysel's revolt get quite a bit of ink. In fact I would say Faysel and Mustafa Kemal probably are the most sympathetic characters in the book.

As The Fall of the Ottomans winds to a close and the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire is under way, one knows how many of today's issues in the Mid-East lead in some fashion back to this. It leaves one appropriately unsatisfied. My only real issue is the lack of (or insufficient) maps, which unfortunately is a problem with many books about the Great War. Though there are six included (some being more detailed than others), many towns discussed are not included, and I had to try and piece together where I was.

Nevertheless, if you have an interest in this theater of the Great War, you could definitely do worse than this volume. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Courtland Jindra

Forgotten General: Russia's Nikolai Yudenich

General Yudenich

While almost everyone, including historians, would rate Alexei Brusilov the best Russian commander of the war, a case can be made that their most successful general was the little remembered Nikolai Yudenich, commander on the Caucasian Front. A hero of the Russo-Japanese War, he utterly destroyed Enver Pasha's 1914 offensive, and later, when subordinated to Grand Duke Nicholas, he won repeated successes. 

The Caucasus Front received little attention or reinforcements in 1914, and things went back and forth, but in the following year Yudenich won victories at Erzerum, Trebizond, and Erzincan. However, after the first revolution, the Provisional Government found him insubordinate and relieved him of command. [See major article HERE.]

Later, in the Civil War, he would command badly outnumbered White forces on the critical Petrograd Front but would ultimately be forced to flee, first to Finland. General Yudenich would ultimately die in exile in France in 1933.

Bull Durham Targets the Troops

I was reading an online issue of Colliers Weekly which had an article by Winston Churchill on Verdun. Then I came across this two-page spread featuring the boys deployed down on the Mexican border in 1916. This advertisement was better than Churchill's piece, IMHO. It brought back memories of when my dad went on a "roll-your-own" kick and the smell became unbearable around the house.  The father of the current governor of California, who was governor in the 1960s, had just pushed through a  5 or 10 cent tax on a pack of cigarettes. Mom made him give up the pouch tobacco, but he never voted for Brown the Elder again.

Thanks to reader Steve Harris for sending in this addition:

Solzhenitsyn on God and the First World War

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008)

Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.

What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.

The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century. The first of these was World War I, and much of our present predicament can be traced back to it.

It was a war (the memory of which seems to be fading) when Europe, bursting with health and abundance, fell into a rage of self-mutilation which could not but sap its strength for a century or more, and perhaps forever.

The only possible explanation for this war is a mental eclipse among the leaders of Europe due to their lost awareness of a Supreme Power above them. Only a godless embitterment could have moved ostensibly Christian states to employ poison gas, a weapon so obviously beyond the limits of humanity.

Source: This is an excerpt from Solzhenitsyn's 1983 Speech,  "Men Have Forgotten God" in which he expands his theme to include the Second World War and the Mutual Assured Destruction Doctrine of the Cold War.

Just Where Did Those "Soccer Balls of the Somme" Get Kicked?

Last Saturday after morning chores and a shopping run to Trader Joe's, I decided to dedicate the afternoon to some detailed planning for my Somme battlefield tour this summer.  One of the activities I plan for our group is to visit the site where Capt. Billie Nevill's men of Company B of the 8th Battalion of the 2nd East Surrey Regiment kicked those four soccer balls across no-man's-land on 1 July 1916.

I hope our readers are familiar with the story—it's one of those glorious tragedies of the monumental, never-to-be-forgotten story of the First Day on the Somme. To reassure and, probably, to distract attention from the grim prospects of the coming battle—the unit was part of the 18th Division's assault on Montauban—Nevill purchased four soccer balls and promised rewards for the first man to kick one of them into a German trench. It began as intended, but like a lot of British units that morning, the East Surreys got hung up on the enemy's barbed wire. The good captain was killed along with 446 men of the East Surrey's. Two footballs were subsequently recovered, one held in Dover Castle (Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment & Queen's Regiment Museum).

Anyway, back to my recent quest, a job I thought was going to take me ten minutes consumed the entire afternoon.  I checked over a dozen Battle of the Somme maps, every Somme-related book on my shelves, and, of course, anything I could turn up online.  The problem was that no one source had a map with an arrow that said, "This is where it happened." My hours of research had generated a long list of clues, some of which were contradictory.  By triangulation and guesswork the sectional map and Google aerial view below show my results.  I open this to comment and correction from our readers, but absent any definitive correction, this is where I'm taking my group.

100 Years Ago: Wilson Loses Another Cabinet Member

By Keith Muchowski

Secretary of War Lindley M. Garrison resigned 100 years ago today. When he did, it was the second major resignation within the Wilson cabinet in less than a year; Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan had stepped down the previous June over differences with President Wilson over how to respond to the sinking of the Lusitania. Now Garrison was leaving the administration after Wilson withdrew his support for the secretary of war’s plan for expanding the military. What made Garrison’s resignation so dramatic—and public—was that the secretary and the president had once been of the same mind on the issue.

Lindley Garrison (1864–1932)

Garrison was an advocate of the Continental Army Plan, a proposal that would have expanded what was still a very small U.S. Army into a more ready force of nearly half-a-million men. Though Garrison and Wilson were never personally close—they were too much alike to get along—the president backed his war secretary on this issue in a number of public appearances. Wilson spoke to an enthusiastic dinner crowd at New York’s Biltmore Hotel on 4 November 1915 outlining Garrison's plan to expand the Army by 400,000 incrementally over the next three years. The Navy would expand too, the president duly noted. Less than a month later Wilson mentioned the plan again in his State of the Union Address, explaining to Congress that the nation must be made “ready to assert some part of its real power promptly and upon a larger scale, should occasion arise.” 

Many Congressmen were skeptical, so, facing opposition, Wilson did what he would do years later when confronted with resistance to the Treaty of Versailles—he went on the stump and appealed to the American people. In January 1916 he traveled throughout the heartland to pitch his administration’s vision for a Continental Army.

Mr. and Mrs. Garrison Take in a Horse Show

Opposition was indeed intense. It was an old-fashioned turf war in which the National Guard—and the Congressional and gubernatorial politicians who supported it—refused to give up state control over what they saw as their domain. By late January the plan was losing support from many sides. Major General Leonard Wood—former chief of staff, current commander of the Department of the East, and onetime Continental Army Plan backer—came out against it in a report to the Adjutant General. General Wood advocated conscription, not the voluntary reserve system Garrison's plan would have entailed. The House Military Affairs Committee, chaired by powerful Dixiecrat James Hay, was increasingly hostile. Many of the 48 governors were equally in opposition until finally Wilson succumbed to the inevitable and withdrew his support in early February. Garrison found this unacceptable and so had no choice but to tender his resignation. He stepped down on 10 February and left Washington immediately, taking a train to New York City without uttering a word. When a mob of reporters met him at Pennsylvania Station at 9:00 p.m. he still had nothing to say. That did not stop a scrum of photographers from snapping his picture. The political fallout was immediate. The New York Times declared Garrison’s departure “a distinct shock and a complete surprise.” Henry L. Stimson, a past and future secretary of war in his own right, called the resignation a “national calamity.”

Garrison with President Wilson in Happier Times

The Continental Army Plan never came to fruition, which may well have been for the best. Had it done so, the White House, Congress, and the Army itself would have had to overcome a number of logistical, financial, and other obstacles to put the plan into effect. What is more, Lindley Garrison, for all his positive qualities, was not the man to lead the U.S. military into war. He was an accomplished lawyer and capable administrator who would return to his lucrative private law practice after leaving politics. Despite his dedication and work ethic Garrison, was a bad fit for Washington’s political culture. He clashed frequently with senior military officers, Congress, and even President Wilson himself. Like Wilson, he did not always accept criticism well and often took it personally. Secretary Garrison's resignation 100 years ago today exposed strains within the Wilson Administration which would be even more apparent and tragic when the nation went to war 14 short months later.

Our contributor, Keith Muchowski, is outstanding blogster, who looks at American History from a New Yorker's viewpoint. Visit Keith's Blog, The Strawfoot,  for more interesting insights on the history of the First World War.

Undertones of War reviewed by Jane Mattisson Ekstam

Undertones of War

by Edmund Blunden

Folio Society, 1989

Edmund Blunden

Edmund Blunden was training as a volunteer with the Royal Sussex Regiment at the outbreak of war. As a temporary second-lieutenant, he crossed to France in 1916. Undertones of War is a very personal story of war. It was also a very popular one — first published in 1928, by February 1929 it ran into five impressions. Blunden addresses the tragedy of war, the profound grief over the death of brothers in the same battalion, the colors of German trench mortars, the clang of shrapnel, and the powdery glare of signal lights. Above all, however, Undertones of War is about the outrage at the violence done to man and nature. Blunden viewed the battlefield with a true countryman's eye: skulls are as plentiful as mushrooms, shrapnel is compared to crimson cloudlets, and the mist of evening is described as fit for a nightingale.

For Blunden, nature had a consoling beauty; human nature is part of nature. As a result, Blunden's memoir is less grimly realistic than Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That. Paul Fussell has noted in The Great War and Modern Memory that Blunden's writing is characterized by archaism, both in language and landscape. Blunden's focus is on pre-industrial England. This is also true of his poetry. "Festubert: The Old German Line," where he describes the violence endured by man and nature, is a case in point: "Sparse mists of moonlight hurt our eyes/With gouged and scourged uncertainties/Of soul and soil in agonies." A selection of Blunden's poetry is to be found at the end of the Folio Society and University of Chicago editions of Undertones of War.

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Divided into 27 chapters, Blunden's memoir is introduced by a short "preliminary" beginning with the short and the deceptively simple question, "Why should I not write it?" Only a few will understand his memoir, writes Blunden, but that is not, he emphasizes, his fault. The implication is that only those who witnessed at first hand the events described can really understand. In the preliminary Blunden also addresses the vagaries of memory:

I know that memory has her little ways, and by now she has concealed precisely that look, that word, that coincidence of nature without and nature within which I long to remember. . . I must go over the ground again. A voice, perhaps not my own, answers within me. You will be going over the ground again, it says, until that hour when agony's clawed face softens the smilingness of a young spring day.

Blunden soon realized that war was endless: "no one here appeared to conceive any end to it," he writes. He expresses relief that he is an officer and can thus "plough [his] way back to the black hole under the Brickstack, and there imitate sleep with no greater defect than that of rats running over me." For private soldiers, however, long hours of huddling on the fire-step in the pouring rain awaited and there was "nothing but hope and a mackintosh sheet between them and the descent of minenwerfer shells."

Typically, however, Blunden also notes that "not all hours were poisonous. The summer afternoon sometimes stole past unmolested." His descriptions in Chapter Eight, "The Calm," of Lacouture and Cuinchy are almost idyllic and include such evocative phrases as "drowsy summer's yellow haze." Chapter Fifteen, "Theatre of War," however, tells the other and more obvious side of the story. The front line, for example, is described as "crude and inhuman," the cold is "foul" and the threat of ambush ever present.

Column of German Prisoners, Including Wounded, at the Somme, 1916

By 1917 Blunden had lost many old friends and he was tired of war. Not even the "huge old trees, the grass and herbs" could raise his spirits. Undertones of War shows how he longed for what he calls "the fragrance of ancient peace," as evidenced in the following lines:

Now to attune my soul if I can
To the contentment of this countryside,
Where man is not for ever killing man
But quiet days and quiet waters glide.

As time passes, Blunden increasingly sought the friendship of kindred spirits who, through art, could transcend the horror of war. In Chapter Twenty-five, for example, he describes Worley, a sketcher. It is with clear affection that Blunden writes, "He showed these drawings to very few persons, to me most, for he believed I knew about such matters. I loved him for this new expression of a simple but profound trust." The famous final sentence of Undertones of War reads:

No conjecture that, in a few weeks, Buir-sur-Ancre would appear much the same as the cataclysmal railway cutting by Hill 60, came from that innocent greenwood. No destined anguish lifted its snaky head to poison a harmless young shepherd in a soldier's coat.

Throughout the horrors, Blunden remained a poetic "shepherd." He was never a soldier at heart. He survived the war, left the army in 1919, and took up the scholarship to Oxford that he had won while still at school. A writer and countryman at heart, Blunden loathed war; at the same time, it was also the source of some of his most important works, including Undertones of War. The Folio Society edition contains not only the earlier mentioned poems but also the memoir that is the foundation of Undertones of War, namely De Bello Germanico, written directly after the war but never finished. Undertones of War is the story of a survivor who, remarkably, managed to retain the qualities of a shepherd amidst the unprecedented horrors of modern warfare. Blunden died in 1974.

Jane Mattisson Ekstam

How Greece Views the Great War

In 1918, even though the Macedonian Front occupied more than 1,000,000 men on its battlefields, its memory in Greece and Bulgaria today is in no way similar to the one of the Western or the Eastern Front held by the nations that also fought there.

For Bulgarians the First World War was a national disaster, and so was the definitive loss of Macedonia. In the case of Greece, the situation was different. The loss of Asia Minor (Turkish War) is for the Greeks what the loss of Macedonia is for the Bulgarians. The First World War was not the most important war. For most Greeks it was rather a break, an interlude between national wars (1912–1913 and 1919–1922). That is why it was recorded in the literature and in the collective memory not as the Great War but as the period of the National Discord, which has caused several problems to the political life in Greece for decades and is considered by many researchers the main cause of the in Asia Minor Disaster (1922).

Venizelos, Greek Prime Minister

For the Greeks the First World War is the least known war of the 20th century. It is the National Discord war caused by Prime Minister Venizelos’ insistence that Greece enter the war pairing with the Entente, as well as by King Constantine’s insistence that Greece remain neutral and thus favored by Germany. Eventually, Greece itself was divided in two states with two capitals, Thessaloniki and Athens. In fact, the Greek army, which had won in the Balkan Wars, pledged allegiance to Constantine, but when Venizelos prevailed with the Ententes’ help in 1917 most of the officers and the soldiers were discharged. Another army took its place with soldiers who came mostly from the New Greece (Epirus, Macedonia, Crete, Aegean Islands, and Thrace). The generals who were supporters of the king were persecuted. When Constantine was restored to the Greek throne, the supporters of Venizelos were persecuted, while the supporters of the king were restored to the army with all glory and honor.

Consequently, when monarchy was re-stabilized (1935) in Greece, the Balkan Wars period, during which Constantine was praised as commander-in-chief of the Army, came to the fore, while the First World War period was hushed up because it was associated with his failed political practices. Until 1974 the First World War and the Macedonian Front remained in the dark, as part of a political suppression of the responsibilities of monarchy itself.

A Greek Column Advancing on the Macedonian Front

The fighting involving Greece that Westerners associate with the First World War — The Macedonian Front — is honored only by the Entente’s veteran association on the last weekend of September with festivities in the Allied cemeteries in Stavroupolis, Thessaloniki, in the Axioupolis monument and in Doiran Commonwealth and Greek cemeteries, and on 11 November, the day of the Armistice, at the central Entente cemetery in Stavroupolis, Thessaloniki, and in the presence of very few dignitaries and common people.

From: The Great War and the Balkans: the Use of Memory in Bulgaria and Greece by Vlasis Vlasidis, University of Macedonia.

Maria Dolens: Bell of Peace of Rovereto

The picturesque hill town of Rovereto - City of the Ancient Oak -- lies in the Trentino region of Italy about halfway between Milan and Venice, and almost due north of Verona. It is located in the valley of the Adige River, on the route leading north to the Brenner Pass through the Alps. Now part of Italy, in 1915 it lay within Austria approximately 10 miles from the border and was fought over by both sides in attack and counter-attack. It is the site of Italy's War Museum and the most famous remembrance tradition of the Italian Front of the Great War. 

“Maria Dolens” ("Mary Grieving"), Rovereto’s monumental bell, tolls 100 times every evening at nightfall in remembrance of the fallen of all the wars, of all the nations of the world. It is the largest bell in the world to be rung regularly.

With My 2011 Italian Front Tour Group at Maria Dolens

"Maria Dolens" was the brainchild of the Roveretan Fr. Antonio Rossaro, to honor the fallen of all wars and to invoke peace and brotherhood among all the peoples of the world. It was cast in Trento on the 30 October 1924 with bronze from cannons donated by the nations involved in the First World War. It was inaugurated on 24 May 1925 with the name “Maria Dolens." Recast twice, the current bell  was blessed in Rome in St. Peter’s Square by His Holiness Pope Paul VI on 31 October 1965, then returned to Rovereto and placed on Miravalle Hill overlooking the town.

The bell’s dimension:

    * Height 3.36 m
    * Diameter 3.21 m
    * Weight 22.639 tonnes
    * Clapper weight 600 kilos
    * Weight of supporting beam 10.3 tonnes

False Legend: The 66-lb. Pack at the Somme

All great events generate legends that magnify or distort the actual proceedings, and that is certainly true of the Battle of the Somme.  One of these involves the shoulder pack the British infantryman had to carry into battle as he went over the top and across no-man's-land.

Many sources, including the British Official History, suggest that soldiers who attacked on 1 July 1916 carried a pack weighing over 66 lbs (30kg).  Contemporary records, film, and photographs show that this was not the case.

Above, British infantrymen give a helping hand to wounded German prisoners near la Boisselle on 3 July 1916.  They are both wearing their equipment in "fighting order."  One has an additional bandoleer of ammunition, and each has an anti-gas PH (phenate hexamine) helmet in a small bag hung at the front.

If the weight carried by the soldiers affected their progress across no man’s land the men of 36th Ulster Division would not have been able to rush the Schwaben Redoubt, and General Congreve’s XIII Corps, which achieved considerable success in the southern part of the line, would surely have been hampered as much as the soldiers in the unsuccessful attacks further north.

Source:  Imperial War Museum

French Cartoon: Return of the Warrior

Legendary Polygon Wood: The First Fight

By James Patton

Polygon Wood is a small forest in Belgium a few miles east of Ypres. In 1914 there was a racecourse and a Belgian Army rifle range located there. It was the site of three actions during the Great War. The first, which happened during First Ypres, was a battalion-sized fight in October 1914, and is the subject of this entry. The second, during Second Ypres, was in May 1915, when the British were driven out of the wood, and the last, the biggest and the most well known, occurred during Third Ypres at the end of September 1917.

All battles are important, certainly to those who fought them. Moreover, the first battle in Polygon Wood was noteworthy for two reasons. First, there occurred another of those fleeting opportunities for the Germans to push through a weak spot in the Allied forces, which they failed to exploit. Second, it was the first occasion where British Territorials were engaged in battle. 

Location of Polygon Wood East of Ypres

Polygon Wood was on the northern side of a small salient held by the British. On the morning of October 24th, the German XXVII Reserve Corps launched an attack to reduce the salient using four regiments of their 54th Reserve Division, supported by artillery, attacking the British 21st Brigade. The line south of Zonnebeke had been thinned due to movement of units of the 2nd Division to support a French counterattack to the west. This left just the 21st Brigade to defend Polygon Wood, just over two miles due east of Ypres and a few hundred yards south of Zonnebeke, and the only geographical barrier to a German assault on Ypres itself.

On the Reutel Spur, which runs parallel to the eastern face of Polygon Wood, the 2nd Wiltshire Regiment (recently arrived from garrison duty in Gibraltar), was holding the 21st Brigade line, at its junction with the 22nd Brigade — a point which had been heavily shelled on the previous day. Early that morning a company of the 2nd Royal Scots Fusiliers, some 200 yards away on the right of the Wiltshires, was forced to give ground, and two companies of the 2nd Scots Guards (of 20th Brigade), who filled the gap on the other flank, were also driven back, but no word of this had reached either brigade headquarters or the Wiltshires. 

Depiction of 1914 Fighting at Polygon Wood

The two platoons forming the right of the Wiltshires defending the southern edge of Reutel were overwhelmed by attacks in their front, flank, and rear at about 8 a.m. Germans in the village of Reutel, on the right flank and even behind the Wiltshires, attacked in force, while the rest of the Wiltshires were fully engaged at the front, and shot their way down the trenches from right to left, capturing what remained of the companies, the casualties exceeding 450 men. Only the quartermaster, the sergeant-major, and 172 other ranks answered the roll call next morning, and over half of these men had not been in the line on the 24th. Before this disaster occurred,  however, Brig. Gen. Watts, commanding the 21st Brigade, had reported to the 7th Division headquarters the desperate straits of the Wiltshires and the 2nd Royal Scots Fusiliers (who had already fallen back). 

Shortly after he added to his message that the enemy had succeeded in breaking through the line and had entered Polygon Wood, though as on other occasions when Germans got into woods behind the lines, this did not preclude all hope that the troops in front were still holding out. Gen. Capper immediately took from his cavalry reserve at Hooge the only unit available, the 1/1st Northumberland Hussars (known familiarly in the Army as "The Noodles") to check further enemy progress through Polygon Wood. 

Northumberland Hussars Cap Badge

The Norman keep is the "New Castle"

The honor is for South Africa 1900–02

Thus by accident or by twist of fate this yeomanry unit [see below] dating from 1797 became the first non-regulars to fight with the British Army in the Great War.  Advancing dismounted, they stopped the Germans long enough for the 2nd Warwicks, detached from the 22nd Brigade, to join them and this ad hoc force then drove the Germans back, suffering nearly 300 casualties, including the senior officer Lt. Col. WL Loring of the Warwicks. 

The regiment carried out the task assigned to it in a thoroughly effective manner, though this was its first serious action – indeed the first serious engagement of any Territorial unit. In combination with the 2nd Warwickshire, which was in reserve behind the 22nd Brigade north of the wood, the hussars definitely checked the German advance, and, after considerable fighting cleared the part of Polygon Wood which lay south of the racecourse. 

(Military Operations. France and Belgium, 1914, Volume II)

The Official Report added: "The Germans. . . were content to rest after achieving the objective that they had been given, or they did not know what to do next."

Thus the inexperienced German reservists had been unaware that they had opened a critical hole in Capper's 7th Division defenses, and an opportunity was lost. The next day, with the Germans still holding the northern half of the wood, the 1st Irish Guards and the 2nd Grenadier Guards, from 4th Brigade, 2nd Division, were ordered to clear them out. The scene was later described as "a slaughter-house." During the early hours of the 26th, these two battalions were reinforced by the 3rd Coldstream Guards, and all attacked again. However, the Germans held their ground and the action was over.

What Were the Yeomanry?

In the years after the Jacobite rising of 1745,  the attempt by Prince Charles Edward Stuart to regain the British throne for the exiled House of Stuart, many counties formed irregular military units for local defense. Some, consisting of young "Toffs" with their own horses, became known as "the Yeomanry." They dealt with civil unrest and, once, a French incursion. The Territorial and Reserve Forces Act of 1907 incorporated all irregular units into the new Territorial Army, under the control of the War Office.

Remembering a Veteran: David Sinton Ingalls, the U.S. Navy's First Ace

Lieutenant (JG), David S. Ingalls on 24 September 1918 scored his fifth victory in six weeks flying a Sopwith Camel with 213 Squadron of the British Royal Air Force. In so doing he became the U.S. Navy's first fighter ace.  He had learned to fly as a member of the "First Yale Unit."

Lt Ingalls During the War

His postwar accomplishments were even more impressive than his combat accomplishments during the Great War:

Between 1926 and 1928 he was a representative in the Ohio Legislature and co-sponsored the Ohio Aviation Code.

In 1929, while serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he guided the Naval Aviation Test and Development program.

He helped develop the Naval Air Transportation Service in 1942, supplying naval ships in the Pacific.

He was the Air Center Commander at Guadalcanal.

As a rear admiral he served as plans officer of the South Pacific and then commander of the Pearl Harbor Naval Air Station.

After World War II he served as vice president of Pan American World Airways and was a newspaper publisher and broadcasting executive,  actively promoting military, commercial, and private aviation as well as air safety.

Sources: National Naval Air Museum and the National Aviation Hall of Fame

The German High Command at War reviewed by Ron Drees

The German High Command at War:
Hindenburg and Ludendorff Conduct World War I

by Robert Asprey

William Morrow, 1991

German Command on the Eastern Front: Hoffmann, Ludendorff, and Hindenburg

After gaining a basic understanding of the ebb and flow of the war, one should read this book to learn about the personalities, clashes, successes, and failures from the German side as Robert Asprey describes them mercilessly. While many battles are discussed briefly, with hard-to-comprehend maps, this book is above all about German leaders of WWI and how they interacted — usually badly. Apparently the Duo, as the author calls them, of Hindenburg and Ludendorff were not concerned with national welfare but with obtaining unbridled power to conduct the war on their terms, regardless of how the nation suffered.

Asprey argues that Ludendorff was the worst of the Duo — egotistical, ruthless, irresponsible, intolerant, and at the end, a poor strategist who wasted the Army in a last ditch effort to win the war. Hindenburg was vainglorious, spending countless hours sitting for portraits larger than life size and worrying about the correct number of buttons on his coat. Each lied to the Kaiser, the chancellors, the Reichstag, and most of all to the German public who never knew — but who became ever more suspicious about how badly the war was going until the collapse at the end.

The Duo, Kaiser Wilhelm, the various chancellors, and staff members all ate the equivalent of a banquet every night while half-a-million Germans died of starvation. The Duo were politicians who forced out civilian members of the government who either opposed them or were standing in positions they wanted. The Kaiser had mood swings like a teeter-totter, was too weak to demand the truth but allowed himself to be steamrollered. The various chancellors were weak, enabling the Duo to run roughshod over the government.

Order Now

The Duo and others had to resign before the end of the war but continued to absolve themselves of the responsibility for losing the war. Hindenburg accused the German public of stabbing the Army in the back. Yet it was the public who allowed their sons to be sacrificed for nothing and tolerated the hardships of very short rations, no coal or oil for heating, no medical supplies for themselves or the Army, no clothing or shoes, and swallowed lies upon lies about the progress of the war. The Duo backstabbed the public by their conduct of the war and a second time by contributing to the rise of Corporal Hitler. Hindenburg, when reelected as president of Germany in 1932, appointed Hitler as chancellor. The corporal led Germany down the same path but to an even more horrendous ending. The world is still recovering from both catastrophes.

Although somewhat dated now, this double biography of Hindenburg and Ludendorff is well worth reading, particularly if you want to get an insight into one more aspect of the "German side" of the Great War.

An Unforgettable Russian Propaganda Poster

In World War One, whole nations and not merely professional armies were in mortal combat. Propaganda was global, with a clear message. Hate the enemy; our cause is just; support our soldiers; unite with our allies. In this pre-radio and television age, posters were one of the most important means of spreading propaganda. Governments invested heavily in posters that grabbed attention, and some of them became symbols of national resolve. 

Click on Image for Full Size

Vrag roda chelovecheskago
[The Enemy of Humankind]

A vital function of the poster was to make the enemy appear savage, barbaric, and inhumane. All the belligerents in World War One employed such atrocity propaganda, using stereotypes largely developed in the period leading up to the outbreak of war. The enemy provides a target for attack to unite the people and offers a scapegoat to diverting attention from problems at home. 

This Russian poster is an example. The enemy of the people is personified by Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941), the last German emperor and king of Prussia, whose policies had contributed to the outbreak of the war. He is caricatured as a cloven-footed, tailed devil, his spiked helmet barely able to conceal his pointed ears, and holding human skulls: an icon of greed, evil, and brutality. 

Found at the British Museum Website