Dardanelles Diary: The View from Offshore

From the Illustrated London News, 5 June 1915:

AFTER three days in the fine natural harbour of this island situated in the Aegean Sea, and where the Allies have made for themselves a naval base to attack the Dardanelles, we left suddenly at noon on Wednesday, 28 April, 1915, for the scene of action.

Naval Forces off Gallipoli

Now to tell you of one of the greatest days in my life — the day that I first came under the fire and was privileged to see one of the finest bombardments yet fought in history. About three o'clock, or three hours after leaving Lemnos, we sighted many vessels and land ahead. Then we saw flashes, and knew where we were. The cannonade became distinct, and gradually we came up with hundreds of craft of every description surrounding the entrance to the Straits and around the Peninsula of Gallipoli.

Transports supplying soldiers, stores, guns, and ammunition were there galore, and the men-o'-war, small and large, were darting to and fro. Some were lying broadside on, and great flashes of flame came from their guns. We were soon up on the boat-deck to take in the situation and gather information. On Sunday we had landed some Australian, French, and English troops at Helles Bay.

Our troops were landed with great opposition. Barbed-wire entanglements on land and under the sea caused great trouble. The men got caught in this wire and were slaughtered in hundreds. Eventually, barges made the shore, and the British Iroops landed at Helles Bay. The Australian Contingent were landed at the bay shown on the map, and the opposition was even greater here. A transport was eventually run aground, and the troops got on shore by using this as a jetty.

When we steamed up, we saw the landscape as shown on the sketches enclosed, and if these are joined, you will get the whole. I am told this gives a very accurate idea, so that you can perhaps glean some interest from my efforts. As we got into position, the guns of men-o'-war in the mouth of the Strait were doing damage, and already the village was burning. Then another of our cruisers started on our right, and finally the Queen Elizabeth and a cruiser took a position on our left and right, respectively, and let go for all they were worth. Need I say what a stirring sight all this was! We could see the land laid out like a panorama before us, and could see the flash of the enemy guns as they sought the batteries of our landing-party. Many of their shells dropped near the coast. So near was the Dublin to us that we could view the landing of the great guns and the tars skipping around as happy as sand-boys. Then came the great flash and yet another, and the following volumes of smoke. A while, and then the crash; broadsides were fired —  salvos delivered. Jove! it was terrible! Every nerve quivered with excitement as we watched the bursting of the shells and the shrapnel. Bang! and up would go a great column of smoke from the village. As night fell, we could see the lurid flash of the bursting shells and the great flames of the burning village. This was war indeed!

Then the cruiser let go every gun she had upon her, and some trenches to the right of the village must have been sky-high. So night fell, and the fires and lights of our landing- party, and the great glow of the flaming village on our port, with the many lights of the vessels standing "off" on our starboard, made a scene I shall never forget. For a quarter of an hour our guns spoke at eleven o'clock. At 5 a.m. they gave the enemy a gentle reminder for thirty minutes. This was Thursday, and all day we heard the booming of guns and occasionally saw the bursting of enemy shrapnel. Early in the afternoon, a great column of smoke arose from behind a ridge of hills, and continued to rise all day. At night there was a great glow there, and a small town must have been well alight. In the evening, bombardment took place all round, and it transpired that our troops had a terrible time — the Turks advancing with heavy guns and forming a most strong opposition; so much that our troops were forced to retire.

British Cruiser and Transport Off of Gallipoli Peninsula

Two men came off the shore to our vessel and stated the carnage to be awful. If you only realised in England how we are hanging on by our eyebrows here, some of the spruce young city men would come and lend a hand. Think of it, and try and realise what a task we have when it is known that the Turks are reinforcing in thousands, led by Germans who have brought some very heavy guns with them.

Thursday afternoon, a battleship on the extreme left, where the Australians had landed, did some good work, and at night there was exchange of artillery fire. It was very cold this night. Up at 5 a.m. next morning, I heard heavy firing from the enemy, and just about 8 a.m. the shrapnel was bursting over our trenches. The enemy's fire became general, and several shells fell along the cliff; three dropped in the sea around a transport which lay about 300 yards in front of us. She immediately moved to the rear with her load of prisoners. We could see the Turks with their red flag and khaki uniform. Their hands were shackled! Altogether, very exciting!

Then our dogs of war barked, and the Turkish-German guns were silenced. The village, to which the enemy had advanced, was given attention, and altogether the foe must have had a very warm time. Land fighting took place all day, but some good work was done from our vessels in the Narrows. From here a large forest and brushwood land was set on fire, and once more we had a bonfire. Dense columns of smoke arose, and as evening fell, the sky was painted red with the reflection of the flames. On this day we hear that the Australians put in some fine work, and especially at night under cover of the forest fire, when they did much damage to the enemy. During the morning, two of our aeroplanes carried out a reconnaissance, and a man-o'-war to our right was plumping shells right over the coveted hill. Oh, if we can only gain that prominence! Then, indeed, we should have an advantage, but one that would have been hardly earned. During the afternoon we were visited by a German 'plane. It had black crosses under the wings, and tried to drop a bomb on our observation-balloon. It was an unsuccessful attempt, however, and our anti-aircraft guns with their pop-pop-pop-pop-pop, sent her flying home.

After tea, we were treated to one of the finest sights of the many that have recently been offered to us. As twilight fell, the enemy made a terrific attack on our trenches. In the darkness, the bursting shrapnel, here and there and everywhere, was extraordinary. Away on the hill and ridge at the back we could see the flash of the enemy's guns. Then almost simultaneously would come the bang and the burst of the shell. Our artillery replied, and we could see the shell bursting on the Turkish positions. Then we had an exciting time, for the Germans sent over half-a-dozen star shells which lit up the land. These things are just like rockets, only that they fly lower —  more like a rifle-bullet. Behind the hill was the lurid glare of the fire, rifles and machine-guns cracked, the moon in all its fullness gradually rose in a beautifully clear sky, and we — well, we stood in breathless excitement as the players in this extraordinary drama carried on their part in the darkness of the land which lay before us. It gave me an unpleasant feeling of helplessness  —  a wholesome horror of war — but it was a wonderful sight. All night the guns boomed, and the next day (Saturday) too. In the morning we moved to the island of Tenedos, but speedily returned to the scene of the conflict. Once more we were "in the stalls," but expect to have to take our part at any moment.

V Beach, Cape Helles Viewed from River Clyde

We dropped some Engineers two days ago, and since then we hear that, upon landing, they were awaiting orders when a shell dropped right in their midst, and few of them were left. A cheerful prospect; but may God rest their souls — our late companions! More Engineers and some of the A.S.C. have left the ship, and the guns have been going all day long. Another fire occurred on Saturday afternoon, and the aeroplanes and observation-balloon were busy. Also guns boomed all day, but we seem to be getting used to these things.

Saturday evening we watched the battle, which quieted down. The sun sank behind the island of Imbros in all his glory, and as this island is very rocky and hilly it was a fine sight. The sea, too, was beautiful; and, as darkness fell, the many transports, with their flash-lamps, ships' lights, and signals, looked like a small town. Overhead, the stars shone out in the deep-blue sky in myriads. A lovely evening! Just after we retired (and I am now sleeping in the ladies' cabin on the top deck —  very comfortable, and plenty of sea air) the guns began to speak. It got so hot that our cabin was lit up by the flashes from our guns. We got up, put on our overcoats, and saw the fiercest of battles. To describe it in full would be useless to try. In the pitch dark the blue sky made a silhouette of the all-important hill. The enemy shrapnel burst continually all along the coast, and particularly over the Field Artillery and the two coves where our men are being landed. Great flashes came from our batteries, which did a lot of work, and the rifle-fire was quite audible and very rapid.

Just off the point of the Peninsula our man-o'-war let go every half-minute, and we could see her shells bursting on the hillside. Star shells floated over our encampments, and what with the continual lighting-up of the land by the bursting projectiles, the boom of the guns, the cracking of the rifles, and the rays of the searchlight with the signals flashing to and fro, an awful but memorable scene was presented to us.

This battle raged throughout Saturday night, May I, but abated somewhat during Sunday, although the naval guns kept up a constant bombardment, especially one man- o'-war well up the Straits. We attended service in the morning. One of the hymns struck me as being somewhat appropriate:

Through the night of doubt and sorrow

Onward goes the pilgrim band, Singing songs of expectation,

Marching to the promised land.

In the afternoon, after a dinner, I confess I enjoyed a nap. By the way, you will like to know our bill-of-fare. There is plenty of water for drinking purposes, but for washing body and clothes the sea provides.

Breakfast consists of tea, porridge, jam, bread, and butter. Always the same, sometimes minus the porridge, which has reached quite a good standard. Dinner gives us stewed meat or bully beef, doubtful potatoes, and occasionally haricot beans — no fresh vegetables. Sometimes no pudding; but if any, rice and currants (unwashed) or a plum duff. Tea consists of bread, butter, jam, and the favourite beverage (I mean tea). On rare occasions we get a cheese ration, and very welcome it is. The way we deal with rations is thus: Two orderlies, our lorry-drivers — clear the cabin up (we are fortunate to have the ladies' room, 30 feet by 15 feet on the top deck —  hence, plenty of air) and draw the stores. Regular times are detailed for drawing boiling water, meat, and bread. These are called "Sittings." At a certain time groceries (sugar, tins of condensed milk, and butter) are issued. At the start of the voyage "dicksees" (i.e., metal cans), tin mugs and plates, knives, forks, and spoons were issued. The three corporals get the men seated and serve each man with the food. No man is allowed to take anything, and thus all get equal rations.

Now for Sunday evening's battle! An everyday occurrence, which we now treat just as we do the playing of a band or going to the theatre or pictures at home. Our men-o'-war right up the Straits had been pounding away at the Peninsula. These naval guns form our heavy artillery for the infantry's advance. Suddenly shrapnel began to burst all round. Flashes came from the hill and the ridges, and we knew the enemy had opened the ball. The sun sank once more in glory behind the island of Imbros. As night fell, an aeroplane reconnoitered over their position. On the seaward side of the Peninsula our friend the cruiser started her work in the darkness; we could actually see the shells' trail. The enemy on the Asia Minor side were dropping shrapnel — "bags" of it —  just off the point, and, thank heavens most of it was short and burst over the sea.

HMS Queen Elizabeth Opens Fire

Away in the distance, and further up the Peninsula where the Australians landed, our ships were dropping shell after shell on the heights. Altogether we had plenty to see. In front of us lay the French hospital-ship, with the little tugs running to and fro to her. From the Strait came a great man-o'-war to take a rest and load up ammunition after her day's work, and the heliographs and signalling-lamps were busy all around us. The only sign of peace here is the tranquil and beautiful sky with its gems twinkling ever.

And you think, as you lie back on the cushioned seats of the train or the "Tube" —  you think the taking of the Dardanelles is going along so nicely —  at least, so the daily papers inform you. Oh, it 's a picnic to come here! It 's a holiday from our offices, our homes, and our loved ones. We are lucky to see the world and enjoy the beautiful climate: but can you ever realise what it is costing England's sons to hang on by their eyelids on this terrible place? We know, because we've seen it, and it has been a great and terrible experience. We have seen Britain's wonderful organisation and greatness as you can never know it, although the great city of London and all its splendid workings are example enough; but, believe me, if the Allies ever gain the ascendancy over this terribly strong military position, it will only be by dint of some of the hardest fighting in this war. Our boys have had their powers of endurance tested through the terrible winter in France, but the heat which is beginning to make itself felt, and the extremes of temperature, will test any man's physical powers to their utmost.

Monday, May 3. Comparatively quiet in the battle-area. Our naval guns continue to tickle them up! Some of the men rowed officers ashore and came back full of the tales of battle. On 5th May we are going to make a big effort to get the hill and its adjacent ridge, for, on that day, the Australians hope to have gained a certain ground which will be conducive towards victory. May it be so! Hundreds of Greeks —  compelled by the Turks to fight, are coming in to surrender. Our poor fellows lay wounded for three days between the two fires before they could be brought in for treatment. The enemy have one or two big guns which are a nuisance, and they are fighting very doggedly. But actually how things are going we cannot, of course, tell.

Today an enemy aeroplane made a daring observation-flight. Our anti-aircraft guns made a useful attempt to pot him, but he escaped after quite an exciting flight. He looked like flying over our way, and we speculated as to a bomb; but no, he tried another course.

The despatch-ship brought letters for the ships' officers to-day. None for us, and great disappointment. Three and a-half weeks and not a word by mail or Press from home. It's rough on fellows homesick and unused to it. Lucky merchants, those in France!

Another big battle on Wednesday night. We havegained the village of Krithea, and fighting hard for the Hill [Achi] Baba. [Neither were ever captured in the campaign.] As usual, a terrific bombardment by our naval guns and the French 75-millimetre, which were landed early.

May 6, Thursday. Awoke to a glorious morning  —  full sun and cool breezes, sea perfect and dancing in the sunlight. What weather, and we get it every day! Beautiful nights and myriads of stars come to our gaze after viewing sunsets that beat any picture "all ends up."

View of Anzac Sector

Guns booming and banging, as usual. At 6.25 a German aeroplane flew overhead and dropped three bombs around a transport lying 300 yards from us. Great columns of water went up. The missiles were meant for our artillery just outside the camp, situated by the landing-place on the sea side of Helles Point. Later, a British and then a French aeroplane made observation-flights, and we had a most exciting time as the enemy's aircraft guns made merry, and fired well over a hundred shots. To see the shell burst and the resulting smoke hang in the air was very pretty, and it was finer still to see the way our 'planes fooled the gunners by their daring.

Heavy bombardment continues. I was on the boat-deck in charge of the party disinfecting up and cleaning machines. Some of our officers and ship's officers went ashore, but the ship hooted them back, and we guessed we were to move. At five o'clock they came back, and we started immediately for Alexandria —  so we are told. So we left the danger zone. So it was, for if one of those bombs had, perchance, hit us, we should have been blown sky-high — why?  —  well, perhaps, you can guess! After a rubber of whist and an excellent day's grub, I went forward to enjoy the night and have a talk with two of the boys about the constellations and their marvels. The phosphorescence danced gaily by us, and above us the gems of the sky sparkled gloriously. Low down the old "Flasher" threw colour upon colour before our eyes. We picked out the Pole Star, turned west, and thought  of home.

The men flushing down the decks woke me at 5 a.m. this morning, but what a morning! Air like wine, and through the cabin-doors the islands of the Archipelago — the Cyclades group  —  were studded all over the ocean. So we continued to pass them whilst eating brekker and performing physical drill. A panorama fit for the god!

Our officers who went ashore brought across relics of the great battles. Shell, cases, bullets. Tres interessant! I hear that the fight upon landing was one of the most terrible in this war. Ghastly beyond words!

So ends my first visit to the Dardanelles.

Sadly, I've never been able to identify this correspondent. Thanks to Tony Langley for discovering this gem and providing the photos. MH.

Dinant, Belgium—A Breathtaking Battlefield: A Roads Classic

Dinant Today: The Citadel, Church, and Tribute to Adolphe Sax on Charles de Gaulle Bridge

Dinant, Belgium, on the River Meuse is a strikingly beautiful town, most famous before the war for it's dramatic Notre Dame collegiate church and as the birthplace of saxophone inventor,  Adolphe Sax. The town is dominated by a huge, imposing hilltop citadel built in 1815 on the site of a 9th century fort of the  Holy Roman Empire.  In 1914, between 15 and 24 August, it became the place where French and German forces first fought each other on Belgium soil in the Great War. 

Aerial View of the Citadel
(If You Visit, Take the Cable Car to the Top, the Views Are Wonderful)

Riverside De Gaulle Monument

French scouts approaching from the south earlier had entered Dinant and discovered to their surprise that the town and fortress had been abandoned by the Belgian Army. Meanwhile, the German Army was sweeping down from the northeast. One of the first French units to arrive was the 33rd Regiment of Infantry, once commanded by future marshal Philippe Pétain, and that day the unit of future president of France, Lt. Charles de Gaulle.

On 15 August, the same day that Fort Loncin was destroyed at Liège, a contingent of French soldiers was sent up to the citadel to prepare to defend the city and Meuse Valley below, down which they expected the enemy to be advancing.  Supporting these forces was Lt. de Gaulle, who was quickly shot in the leg crossing the bridge across the Meuse.

Bridge Plaque at the Location of de Gaulle's Wounding

Afterward the detail assigned to the citadel received an unpleasant and fatal surprise.  A battalion of German troops approached along the adjacent cliffs and, undetected, entered the fortifications from the undefended rear. Badly outnumbered, the French soldiers chose to retreat and, unfortunately for them, fled down a dead end gallery. All 80 of those  men  were killed, along with 12 Germans. A monument marks where those first soldiers were cremated.

The Town After the 1914 Fighting

After an artillery duel followed,  the 8th Regiment of Infantry was ordered to take the town and citadel. The attack succeeded, and the French regained control of the town and citadel. This was merely temporary, however, since the French Army was soon to engage in a broad retreat out of Belgium and northern France.

L'Assaut by Alexandre Daoust,
Memorial to 1,200 French Who Fell Fighting Around Dinant

Dinant  also became part of the heritage of German atrocities later in the month when 674 civilians were killed in the fighting, including 112 executed for resisting or firing on the German forces.

Memorial to  the Fallen Civilians of Dinant, 116 Belgians Executed at This Location, 
23 August 1914 (Top Photo)

George Creel: Selling The War

George Creel

A two-part interview conducted on 5 and 12 April 2019 by Theo Mayer of the World War One Centennial Commission with author Alan Axelrod

Theo Mayer: With us today is Alan Axelrod, the author of more than 150 books on leadership, history, military history, and business, among others. And one of those  books that Alan wrote is called  Selling the Great War. The Making of American Propaganda. It's the bio of George Creel. We got together to talk about George, and it  turned into such an interesting conversation, we're going to have to break this out into  two parts. Here's part one of George Creel, the man who sold America on World  War I. Alan, welcome. 

Alan Axelrod: Great to be with you. 

Theo Mayer: Alan, you and I have talked about George Creel quite a bit, but let's maybe  introduce him in a broad context first. 

Alan Axelrod: Well, he was a young man from rural Missouri, who was the son of a  doting mother and an alcoholic father and not very well educated. But he had a  quick mind, and he was intensely curious, and he became a journalist, sort of through  the back door. He worked for some small-town papers and then moved to New  York, and found work as a joke writer. He eked out a living writing jokes that were just stuck in newspapers to fill space. But eventually he linked up with  a few influential people and he became a muckraker; he became a very socially high minded journalist. And in this job, he became acquainted with Woodrow Wilson during his first  run at the presidency, and he just fell in love with the man, he fell  in love with progressivism. And by the time Wilson stood for re-election in 1916, Creel  had ingratiated himself with Wilson and became the writer of Wilson's campaign biography and became  a leading exponent of Wilson, particularly Wilson's opposition to any American involvement in World War  I. And, of course, Wilson won by a very narrow margin, re-election largely on the  campaign slogan "He kept us out of war." Then, of course, he takes the oath  of office, back in those days, in March of 1917. And on 6 April of  that year he asked Congress for a declaration of war so that the United States could join the war that he had kept the country out of during this first  administration. And this put Creel in the position of having to turn the American public around, 180 degrees, from this orientation of pacifism, of absolute neutrality, to total commitment to  a war in Europe. 

Theo Mayer: Now, having an administration and a president who gets elected, who brings in a leading  and, perhaps, even controversial journalists into his inner circle, that sounds pretty familiar. 

Alan Axelrod: Absolutely. Creel had the advantage of. . . He was considered a kind of gadfly at  this point; his real power came once he started the Committee on Public Information. He  was an outsider, he was always an outsider and part of him relished being an  outsider, and part of him wanted desperately to get into the center of activity and  the center of power. He didn't really want to be the man in front of  the curtain, he wanted to be the man behind the curtain, he wanted to be  the power behind the power; and that's what he achieved with the Committee on Public  Information. 

Theo Mayer: Well, the Committee on Public Information really became an incredibly powerful aspect of American public  opinion, at large. 

Alan Axelrod: It was, and what is interesting about it is that Woodrow Wilson, who is a  man of infinite contradiction, who was proposing to fight a war as he famously told  Congress in his war message, [on] 2 April, he was taking America into a war to  make the world safe for democracy. But his first steps were ushering through passage of  draconian espionage legislation, and what he wanted to do was clamp down [with] very rigorous censorship.  He was very much afraid of espionage, and what we would call today fake news. What Creel did is took him aside and told him this would be very destructive not just to democracy, which he really didn't pursue that point very far, but it  would be destructive to the war effort because any effort at over-censorship would make  the American people feel, quite rightly, that the government was simply hiding something, and that  their motives were not on the up-and-up. So as an alternative, what Creel  proposed is that he would create a central bureau through which all information about the war would pass. That it would become the clearinghouse and the source for every bit  of information about the Great War that would be published in this country. There would  be no censorship, but there would only be one source of information, and it would  be produced in such a stream and such a flow that newspapers would welcome it.  Their work would be done for them, and they would be supplied with an endless  stream of war information that would be supplied in great detail and with all apparent  openness; and that is what happened. 

Theo Mayer: Yeah, and let's talk about that for a moment. I mean, obviously, in today's parlance,  it would be "control the message," but they actually started publishing a newspaper, the Official  Bulletin, which started the month after war was declared. Creel was the publisher, Wilson requested  it, they charged a lot of money for the Official Bulletin so that the newspapers  didn't think that he was trying to compete with them, and they started publishing, daily except Sunday. 

Alan Axelrod: And, in fact, it was the only time in American history that there was, in  effect, a national state newspaper. They did the bulletin, they also prepared news stories which were distributed from a central point in Washington DC and were available to all journalists. And they launched into many other publishing ventures, educational ventures, of course, the great poster  campaigns, what Creel called "The war of the fences," where he wanted recruiting posters and  posters to support the sale of war bonds and liberty bonds, and posters to dramatize  the atrocities that the Germans were committing and so forth; he wanted these to be  plastered on every available space in the public environment. So it was a combination of very overt propaganda but also just information; constant flow of information in every conceivable medium. The most characteristic, of course, was the Four-Minute Men, who were a cadre of  about 75,000 of them, all volunteers, usually young men reasonably prominent in their community, who  were asked to deliver a speech relating, in some way, to the war. They weren't  told what to say, but they were given sort of templates and suggestions, and they  were to deliver this speech, for the most part, in movie theaters, never to interrupt  the movie. But it was done during the four minutes it took a professional projectionist  to change reels on a feature length film in those days of silent cinema. And  that was four minutes, and they became known as the Four-Minute Men. And it was a live presentation, sort of at the intermission of a show, and it was  never delivered from a script, it always had the appearance of being quite spontaneous. It was delivered by men who [were] known to the community, and it was meant to  create a grassroots support for everything related to the war. 

Theo Mayer: Now he was the marketing behind the Liberty bond endeavor, which, it struck me, it  was something like 16, almost $17 billion. 

Alan Axelrod: Yeah, this was in 1917 and 1918 dollars. And each of the liberty loan campaigns  was vastly oversubscribed; it was an extraordinary success. It also was engineered such that those  who couldn't afford to buy bonds would by stamps; you could spend pennies or you could spend really a great deal of money supporting the war. And he handled what  I would call the soft sell end of it, the persuasive end of it. But  that complemented the other aspect of shaping thought during the war which was real social  pressure, the whole idea that "If you're not with us you're against us," and nobody  wanted to be a slacker. If you weren't out there actually fighting the war, you  had to be doing something else, and the very least you could do was contribute  money to the Liberty loans. And your neighbors would see to it that you did; lists of contributors were published. People were really strong armed into doing this. But on  Creel's side, he made it appealing. 

Theo Mayer: Well, I remember a story, Alan, where on the first Liberty loan drive, he actually  got all of the bells in all of the churches to do a ring countdown of how many days were left before the bond drive was over. So he, somehow,  convinced schools and churches and civic halls to all toll their bells, every day on  a countdown. That's pretty amazing. 

Alan Axelrod: Well, this really was the birth of public relations. Creel's own account of the Committee  on Public Information was called "How We Advertise America." But it really wasn't advertising, that  was the wrong word, it was public relations, and that word really didn't exist in  1917, 1918. But the men who became the creators of American public relations were working  for Creel, the most famous of them was Edward Bernays, who had an incredibly long  career. The man died just a few years ago. He was, I think, 101. 

Theo Mayer: Well noted as the father of public relations. 

Alan Axelrod: And that is what he was. And he was actually born in Vienna. He was  the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He grew up in the United States, he came to  the U.S. when he was less than a year old; he was an American kid.  He took to the Committee of Public Information what he was already creating in the  way of shaping the American mind, which is what he talked about, shaping the popular mind. But he honed, as a result of working on the Committee on Public Information,  he honed what he called the "science propaganda." This led to the creation of PR  as an industry. And the idea, the difference between public relations, as he conceived of it, and advertising was that advertising broadcast a message, public relations created a mindset. It  appealed to influencers, it was an attempt really to shape perception and to plant ideas  in the public mind as if those ideas came from the public themselves; it really was a campaign to shape reality, from the ground up. 

Theo Mayer: It's a rebranding of propaganda, fundamentally. 

Alan Axelrod: He called it propaganda from the beginning. And Creel also embraced the term propaganda, but  he said that it was in the sense that the Catholic Church used it, which  was as the propagation of the faith, and the faith that he was propagating, that  Creel was propagating, was the faith of Woodrow Wilson, which was democracy, as Creel saw  it, and fighting for democracy, and that was good propaganda, but it was propaganda. 

Part II

Theo Mayer: Just days after Congress votes to enter World War  I, President Wilson appoints a chairman of what was to be called the Committee on Public Information, the CPI. The man was George Edward Creel, one of the most interesting,  obscure, and, I think, influential characters of this era. So, with us to explore this  character is Alan Axelrod, the author of Selling the Great War: The Making of American  Propaganda. It's the bio of George Creel, and this is Part II of our conversation.  

Alan, to kick of Part II let's talk  about post-Armistice. You know, we've republished every issue of the official bulletin on the  website at the Commission. And one day, at the end of May, it just stops.  So, on 1 April, suddenly there's nothing in the last issue that says we're stopping. It's just all of a sudden it goes away. Did the whole committee just evaporate all of a sudden? 

Alan Axelrod: It evaporated all of a sudden. Congress cut it off and Congress went after it  with almost literally a hatchet. They threw everything away that they could get their hands on; they destroyed all the records they could get their hands on. The only things that were saved was what Creel himself managed to salvage. He rented trucks and men  to load them and took stuff away and stored it at his own expense. And any of this vast amount of material that he didn't save was destroyed. There was  a real revulsion in Congress against everything he had done. It was very strange. 

Theo Mayer: Well, revulsion of just him, or him and Wilson both? 

Alan Axelrod: After the Armistice and ultimately after the defeat of the League of Nations in the  U.S. and the Treaty of Versailles, there was a real collective political effort at group  national amnesia. There was almost an effort to erase most of what the war had  been about, and Creel's effort was part of it. I actually think that part of  the animus against Creel was that he had done his job too well, that the  propaganda and the mindset it created were considered dangerous, and that the incoming Republican wave that swept in after Wilson, first with the midterm elections that transformed the balance  of Congress, wanted to disengage the nation from the global orientation that it was getting  under Wilson. It was the closest thing we ever had to a book burning. 

Theo Mayer: So, we get to the end of the war and suddenly all of this just sort of disappears, evaporates, goes away. And over the next number of years, this stuff  starts to re-emerge as Germany re-emerges in power. We've talked about that in the past. Why don't you talk about that a little bit. 

Alan Axelrod: Creel himself preserved much of this and later told the story, but between the wars  with the rise of the Nazi party and the rise of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels discovered not Creel first but actually the writings of the nephew of Sigmund Freud, this Jew named Edward Bernays, and his book Propaganda, which came out in the 1920s, and  then there was another book after that. Goebbels was very excited about this, and through it he discovered the work of the Committee on Public Information. He put all of  this together and saw this as the template for what the Nazis needed to do to not just help further the demonization of the Jews but for creating an orientation  to war. The Germans had lost World War I, but they came out of World  War I intact. Their cities weren't destroyed, their farms weren't destroyed, they weren't pocked with shell holes, they weren't crisscrossed with trenches, but they had lost. That became a  narrative of betrayal, betrayal by democracy, and betrayal by the Jews. That became the central  message of Nazi propaganda. And the answer to that was to fight to re-litigate that  war with a new war. And the basis for doing that had all been laid  out by the methods of Creel and Bernays and others who worked for the CPI. It had to do not with withholding information, but by controlling information and putting it  out there in profusion and with apparent full transparency. And Bernays, when he learned of  this, was appalled that Goebbels had his books in his library and was a big  fan. 

Theo Mayer: Well, it is incredibly ironic. Alan, let's wrap this up with what happened to Creel  after World War I as a person. 

Alan Axelrod: Creel became a writer. I mean, he went on writing. He became a journalist. He  made a very good living as a feature writer for popular magazines, such as Colliers  and so forth. And then he became a labor activist during the Depression and once  again found somebody to champion and to support in Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. And he tried to enter politics. He ran for governor of California in 1934 in  the Democratic primary, and his leading opponent was Upton Sinclair. Neither of them prevailed, of course. But he didn't disappear; he just never became particularly influential. 

Theo Mayer: Obviously he was incredibly influential in this period from turn of the century, 1915 on  through 1920 something. Why don't we know his name? 

Alan Axelrod: Well, I would say first of all the major reason is that there was an  active movement at the end of the war to bury him. He was excluded from  history that essentially he himself wrote, and he never again attained prominence in politics. Until  the emergence of FDR, the White House was dominated by Republicans, politics was dominated by Republicans. He was an [inaudible] Republican, so he wasn't going to get any love there.  And he turned to writing a series of popular, but quite undistinguished books. I mean,  if you read his writing it's fascinating historically, but he wasn't a very good writer. He's rather dull, he is burdened by cliches. He's the kind of labor-oriented popular  writers of the '30s but without any real voice. So he never really got a  foothold in the popular mind. He became a kind of shadowy figure. He was discredited. He was the victim of very deliberate campaigns to discredit him, and they stuck. He  wasn't ruined as a human being. He made money, he lived. He certainly wasn't in  despair. He wrote toward the very end of his life an autobiography that is at  least readable, called Rebel at Large, but nobody much cared. 

The Fovant Badges

By James Patton

Click on Images to Enlarge

On the Wiltshire Downs, southwest of London, there are a group of chalk carvings that make up an unusual, perhaps unique, World War One memorial. These are depictions of unit insignia, some of which were created by the soldiers while they were stationed in camps on the plain below. The Fovant Badges, as they are collectively known due to the proximity of the village of Fovant, consist of a group of seven that date from the war plus one that was added in 1950, one in 1970, and a poppy carving between the Post Office Rifles and the Devonshires that was created for the centennial in 2016. 

It is believed that the first cut was by the 6th (City of London) Battalion (City of London Rifles), a Territorial Force unit, and there were four other badges of London Territorials in the groupings.

During the war era there were 11 more cuts in the hillside; these are no longer viewable.  Additionally, there are another five that date from the war situated on hills nearby, including the well-known "Map of Australia;" three others of this group are un-restored. 

These cuttings were made by digging small trenches according to a grid scheme which were then filled with small pieces of chalk, the local bedrock. In order to be visible from the camps they had to be large. For example, the Australian "Rising Sun" below is about 66 yards wide and 46 yards tall. 

The sites require frequent maintenance to prevent deterioration. This work has been performed by the Fovant Badges Society, the Sutton Mandeville Heritage Trust, the Map of Australia Trust, the Australian War Museum, and local Territorial Army formations. 

Since 1950 there has been an annual "drumhead" service conducted by the Fovant Badges Society and held in the village. There have also been ceremonies held at the sites, even though the steep incline makes this challenging. In November of last year a group of Australian Army officers, headed up by Major General Anthony Rawlins, viewed the Map of Australia and the Fovant Badges and met with volunteers and local officials. 

These carvings and sites are all protected as Scheduled Monuments under U.K. law and carried on the lists of the Imperial War Museum as war memorials. They are also near the site of an Iron Age settlement.

There are other carvings in the same chalk formations. The most famous are the Westbury White Horse and the Uffington White Horse, both of which are much older—the latter is recognized as prehistoric.

Most of the Fovant carvings, as well as the Westbury White Horse, can be seen from the A30 highway, which has lay-bys for convenient viewing.

Read more about the Fovant Badges Society:
http://www.hows.org.uk/personal/hillfigs/fovant/fbs.htm

Links to stories about Australian involvement:
https://www.salisburyjournal.co.uk/news/18042186.australian-army-deputy-chief-visits-historic-chalk-badges-south-wiltshire/

https://map-of-australia.com/2019/04/26/anzac-day-2019/anzac-day-service-held-in-wiltshire-22/

U-117's Successful Attack on America

U-117 and Crew

German mine-laying submarine U-117 arrived off the east coast of U.S. on 10 August 1918 and laid mines, which played a part in sinking of 13 Allied ships and vessels.  U-117, launched on 10 December 1917 with Kapitänleutnant Otto Droscher in command, was a UE-II series long-range minelaying U-boat. It was 267.5 feet long with a cruising speed of 14.7 knots on the surface and seven knots submerged. Its armament consisted of one deck gun, two mine tubes with a capacity to carry 42 mines, and four torpedo tubes. After departing Kiel, it set a course for North America to lay mines off the coast of the United States and to conduct undersea cruiser warfare. During the voyage across the Atlantic, heavy weather foiled its attempts to attack two lone steamers, two convoys, and a small cruiser.

 U-117 reached the American coast on 8 August 1918 and soon thereafter encountered a fishing fleet off the coast of Massachusetts. On 10 August, U-117 attacked and sunk nine fishing vessels with explosives and gunfire. On 12 August, it sighted the Norwegian steamer Sommerstadt and, after observing that the ship was armed, made a submerged attack that sank the steamer with a single torpedo. The following day, the U-boat made another submerged torpedo attack and hit the 7,127-ton American tanker Frederick R. Kellogg, bound from Tampico, Mexico, to Boston, Massachusetts, with 7,500 barrels of crude oil. The action occurred only 12 miles north of Barnegat Light, New Jersey, in shallow water, which ultimately enabled the ship to be salvaged.

Inspection by American Naval Officers After Surrender

Later that same day, U-117 began the minelaying phase of its operations by laying mines near Barnegat Light, New Jersey. Months later, that mine field claimed a victim when the Mallory Line steamship San Saba struck a mine and sank on 4 October 1918. On 14 August, U-117 took a break from minelaying operations to resume undersea cruiser warfare when it encountered the American schooner Dorothy B. Barrett. The U-boat brought its deck guns to bear and quickly sunk the sailing vessel. Shortly thereafter, however, the hunter became the hunted when an American seaplane and submarine chaser SC-71 forced the U-boat to seek refuge beneath the surface. The aircraft subjected U-117 to a brief barrage of bombs, and SC-71 attacked the U-boat with depth charges before losing track of the submarine.

The next day, 15 August 1918, U-117 resumed its minelaying operations, now off Delaware near the Fenwick Island Lightship. Later that year in September, mines laid claimed two victims, one damaged and the other sunk. The first victim was the battleship, USS Minnesota, which struck one of the mines on 29 September and suffered extensive damage.  Receiving minor damage to her starboard side, she returned to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and later returned to duty in March 1919.  The cargo ship Saetia later entered the same field on 9 November, struck a mine, and sank.

U-117 continued to move south on 15 August 1918. After laying a third minefield near Winter Quarters Shoal Lightship off Virginia, U-117 halted an American sailing vessel, the 1,613-ton Madrugada, and sank it with gunfire. Later that day, a patrolling American seaplane foiled a subsequent attempt by U-117 to stop another sailing ship, which escaped unharmed.

As a Prize of War, Washington Naval Yard

On 16 August 1918, U-117 resumed minelaying further south off of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, but the approach of the 6,978-ton British steamer Mirlo interrupted its operation. Approaching the target submerged, U-117 fired a single torpedo that fatally damaged the steamer off Wimble Shoals. The ship's flammable cargo caught fire and nine of the 52 aboard lost their lives. A heroic rescue effort by U.S. Coast Guard personnel from the Chicamacomico Lifeboat Station under the command of Warrant Officer John Allen Midgett, Jr., brought the others safely ashore. Following the attack, U-117 again began laying mines, sowing its fourth and final field. At that point, a shortage of fuel forced the U-boat to begin making plans to return to Germany. U-117's next and final attack off Cape Hatteras was against the Norwegian bark Nordhav, which U-117 sank two days later farther offshore. U-117 then began its voyage back across the Atlantic to Germany.

After an unsuccessful attempt at a torpedo attack on a lone British steamer, War Ranee, on 5 September 1918, U-117 concentrated on making the final run toward Germany and safety. Three days later, U-117 was contacted over the wireless by the homeward-bound U-140 requesting a fuel replenishment rendezvous due to its critical fuel shortage. The two U-boats met on 12 and 13 September near the Faroe Islands, and U-140 took on about 5,000 gallons of diesel before continuing on toward Kiel. U-117 pulled into Kiel rather ignominiously on 22 September, having had to call upon a patrolling torpedo boat to tow it the last leg of its journey, having run out of fuel before making it back to port.

The Imperial German Navy recognized the success U-boats were having in United States waters, and planning for additional U-boat operations continued. Germany was in the process of sending three additional U-boats (U-155, U-152, and U-139) into U.S. waters when the war ended in November 1918. These U-boats were ordered to cancel their missions and surrender.

The armistice of 11 November 1918 ended hostilities and required Germany to turn over its U-boats to the Allies. U-117 surrendered ten days later in Harwich, England. Over the next few months, the U.S. Navy expressed an interest in acquiring several former German U-boats to serve as exhibits during a Victory Bond campaign.  U-117 became one of the six U-boats set aside for that purpose. In March 1919, American crews took over the U-boats and prepared for the trans-Atlantic crossing under their new task group name, the Ex-German Submarine Expeditionary Force.

After the war, U-117 was sunk during the Mitchell Bombing Tests in 1921 by the new lightweight bombs dropped by U.S. Navy F-5L aircraft. 

Adapted from: The Enemy in Home Waters, Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, NOAA

Map Series #15: The Ethnic Divisions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

Click on Map to Enlarge

Public domain map by Andrein, Presented at Vox

Environmental Histories of the First World War

Edited by R. Tucker, T. Keller, R. McNeil, & M. Schmid

Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018

Jim Gallen, Reviewer

The Great War had many effects on the world. Environmental Histories of the First World War consists of 14 essays highlighting various ways that the war shaped the environment. I was expecting to read about lead runoff polluting streams and the devastation of isolated species of fauna and flora, but the authors have examined events that set into motion more indirect influences.

"We Are Making a New World,"  Paul Nash, 1918 (IWM)

The editors have divided the book into four parts: "Europe and North America: Battle Zones and Support Systems;" "War's Global Reach: Extracting Natural Resources;" "The Middle East and Africa: Ecosystems, Refugees, and Famine;" and "The Long Aftermath: Environmentalism and Memory." As I find food and famine to run through essays in multiple parts, I will associate the essays by their primary focus rather than in the sequence presented by the editors.

The first essay is a survey of the issues discussed in more detail in subsequent essays. The fourth essay, "The Chemist's War," examines both how gas attacks contaminated the ground and how munitions plants affected the environments around them by using the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland as a case study. The fifth essay, "'The Mineral Sanction: The Great War and the Strategic Role of Natural Resources," highlights the importance of obtaining access and denying access to enemies of raw materials from coal to rare earth minerals. Blockade, purchasing, and threats against supplier nations were all methods employed to achieve victory.

The seventh essay, "The First World War and the Beginning of Over-Fishing in the North Sea," presents an example of unintended consequences of the war. While limitations on fishing gave stocks a chance to recover, the naval trawlers and their crews that were dedicated to sweeping for mines and other defensive measures were easily converted to fishing trawlers with the advent of peace, thereby increasing pressures on fish stocks. Demand was further increased as shortages in other foodstuffs forced German acceptance of fish into the diet. Essay number eight, "Environments, Systems Building and the Japanese Empire" deals with the expansion of Japanese control in East Asia and the Pacific made possible by the war, and the resulting environmental changes in the area affected.

I was impressed by two major themes presented in the essays. The sixth essay, "Something New Under the Fog of War: The First World War and the Debut of Oil on the Global Stage" is a narrative of how the war accelerated the transition from coal to oil power in marine vessels and changed the nature of energy usage. This forced the adoption by the West of strategies to ensure a steady supply of oil to its war machines while restricting the flow to adversaries. These are policies that would become crucial during World War II, both in Europe and in the Pacific, and continue to influence national policies to the present.

The most persistent theme in this tome is the role of food as a weapon of war. "Beans are bullets, potatoes are powder." A reasonable understanding of both the Great War and World War II includes the German effort to starve Britain into submission, and a little deeper analysis includes the Allied attempts and successes in employing hunger to bring the Central Powers to their knees. Industrialized countries, including Britain and Germany, relied on imports to supply their food needs, a vulnerability during wartime. Food supplies were jeopardized by disruption of trade patterns as well as naval blockade. Mars's claims on agricultural production competed with the need for food. Farmers became soldiers. Nitrogen that could be used for fertilizer and fats that fed people were also necessary for explosives. As hogs were slaughtered the supply of manure decreased with predictable impact on crop yields.

The second essay posits that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was brought down by the failure of its internal food production and distribution arrangements, exacerbated by dissention between the Austrian and Hungarian portions of the empire. Essays deal with the utilization of food and famine to destabilize the southern portions of the Ottoman Empire, particularly Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. An infestation of locusts in the Levant worsened starvation, encouraged Lebanese emigration to the United States and gave Lebanon the distinction of having the highest per capita losses during the war of any nation. The eleventh essay is a study of the economic consequences of the interruption of Moslem pilgrims to Mecca and other factors that caused starvation in Ethiopia and neighboring regions.

The authors and editors have supplemented the text with charts, maps, and photos that aid in the understanding of the issues involved. The necessity of food aid, such as the virtual American feeding of Belgium and continued postwar aid is a sometimes overlooked story. The role of Herbert Hoover in organizing American aid for the Belgians and others encourages me to read more about him. Only a serious student of the economic and environmental factors and consequences of the Great War will derive maximum benefit from this book. Although only 312 pages including the index, a more general reader such as myself must process much verbiage for the grains of interesting facts. That being recognized I did gain a greater cognizance of the multi-faceted nature of the Great War as total war and the changes it left in its wake. At times while reading I questioned whether it was worth the effort, but as I reflected after completion, I concluded that it was.

Jim Gallen

G.K. Chesterton in the Great War

G.K. Chesterton

When war was declared, G.K. Chesterton’s brother Cecil, editor of The New Witness, wrote in his editorial that “the news comes as an immense relief after the long strain of waiting. Stern as is the struggle ahead of us, dreadful as are the possibilities which defeat would involve, it is something to have done with the scheming fear that hung over us all last week — the fear that we were going to see England lose her honour” (quoted in Finch, p. 228).

GKC saw the war as a crusade and was as certain that England was right as he had been sure that the Boer War was wrong. In his obituary of Pope Pius X (which was published toward end of August), GKC wrote, “If the Germans prevail, of course there will never be any history any more. There will only be an enormous fable eating up all the facts.”

In November 1914, he published The Barbarism of Berlin, a short book based on his Daily Mail articles, which was an attack on the immorality of the Germans. On 25 November, he was addressing a large crowd of undergraduates at Oxford and had to leave the platform through dizziness. He managed to get home, and collapsed into bed so heavily that he broke the bed. His illness turned out to be a heart problem, perhaps exacerbated by excessive alcohol. On 24 December, he fell into a coma. There was no improvement until January 1915, and he was not really lucid until April.

While he was ill, his weekly column in the Illustrated London News was written by his friend Hilaire Belloc. Chesterton took it up again in May and thereafter slowly got back into his busy schedule of writing and speaking.

The last issue of The New Witness to be edited by Cecil Chesterton was that of 12 October 1916.
He decided to join up, and his brother GKC had agreed to become editor until Cecil’s return from the war. “I am the worst editor in the world” he confessed. Much of his energy in early 1917 taken up with denouncing pacifism—above all the conscientious objection of the Cambridge philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Cecil Chesterton

On 26 July 1917, GKC commented on the Russian Revolution, which was, he said, run by a clique of Jews, not rascals, but idealists, which “may be more of a problem.” (Bernard Levin, a leading British columnist who frequently quoted Chesterton, in The Case for Chesterton  brought up some of his light verse and said “The best one can say of Chesterton’s anti-semitism is that it was less vile than Belloc’s; let us leave it at that”: quoted in Wikipedia).

Cecil was wounded in France. He was brought back to recuperate and went off to France again. He collapsed after a 12-mile march in the rain from Ypres in the final stages of the war and died.

GKC had been very close to his brother and this news devastated him. He decided to continue with the editing of The New Witness, which he had only taken on to please his brother, in honour of his brother’s memory, and he did that for the rest of his life, initially with the help of Cecil’s widow. After 1925 it was known as G.K.’s Weekly.

The above information comes from Michael Ffinch, G.K. Chesterton (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986) as presented in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers in the Great War.

A U.S. Navy Ship Suffers the Spanish Flu

USS Pittsburgh (Formerly USS Pennsylvania) in Rio de Janeiro

Personal account by Rear Admiral William B. Caperton of the 1918 Influenza on Armored Cruiser No. 4, USS Pittsburgh, at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

And then there came upon us the most terrifying of experiences. On the fourth of October we had noted that the so called Spanish influenza, which had passed thru Europe had made its appearance in Brazil. Bahia and Pernambuco were then suffering lightly. On the arrival in Rio of the SS Dannemara from Lisbon and Dakar, Africa, the ship reported four deaths from the disease during the trip, and the existence of several new cases when she came into port. The local health authorities, notwithstanding these, made no effort to quarantine the vessel or her passengers. The result was not unexpected to us. 

When the HMS New Castle arrived in Rio from Bahia on the 6th, she had sixty cases on board, all of a benign type. By the seventh the Pittsburgh reported a few cases and the disease was incapacitating hundreds daily in Rio de Janeiro, while the Lage Brothers shipyard was almost shut down. The following day 33 cases in the flagship, with the numbers ashore increasing alarmingly. By the 9th, 92 cases had made their appearance on board and hundreds ashore were dying without medical attendance. Hospitals were crowded and coffins almost ceased to exist. 

In the early hours of the 10th, in accordance with the previous arrangements, and in view of the probability of the Pittsburgh going out upon the high sea patrol for an extended time, she entered the floating dry dock. With my staff that morning I attended memorial services ashore in the Candelaria church for the repose of the souls of over more than a hundred Brazilian sailors who had died of influenza in their squadron abroad.

During the day, while the crew was working feverishly upon the sides of the flagship in the dock, the Department advised me that the Brazilian Ambassador to the United States, Da Gama, was to be returned to his native land by battleship and that I was to have the Pittsburgh proceed to the West Indies and transfer the ambassador to her.

By the next day, the 11th, there were 418 cases of influenza in the flagship, so that her activities for any duty were becoming handicapped. The seriousness of the situation was cabled to the Department with the suggestion that the ship bringing the Ambassador continue on its way and remain for the 15th of November, for which Brazilian National Day ships from Uruguay, Argentina and Chile would be there. That would make it incumbent that our representation be adequate for the occasion. On the 14th of October 644 cases had been admitted to the sick list, with about 350 more light ones not listed. One man died the day before. On the 15th three had died, the Commanding Officer, his heads of department and two members of my staff were sick, while the disease raged unabated in Rio where conditions defied description. 

The [Navy} Department, unaware of the seriousness and the rapidity with which the epidemic was spreading, directed me to have the Pittsburgh proceed to Bahia, as previously directed and there report her condition. Then, if unable to carry out the Department's order, the Pueblo [Armored Cruiser No.7] would be ordered to Rio with Da Gama. But the proscribed cruise for the Pittsburgh was an impossibility. Of that I informed the Department, adding that I was holding her at Rio. 

Conditions in the ship were rapidly becoming worse. More than half of the hospital corps were ill, and help was commandeered from all ratings and from the junior officers of the line. And the drizzle and the rain which had set in during the early days of the epidemic continued fitfully, rendering it difficult to find room for the cots of the sick who had been kept on deck in the open, during the good weather. Ashore people died like flies, and many lay in the streets for two or three days waiting interment, even a hole in the corner of a trench. By the 18th, twelve of the 48 pneumonia cases had died in the Pittsburgh. Further caskets could not be obtained ashore, at any price, and the burial of our men became an urgent necessity.

Six more men died on the 20th, when the Brazilian Minister of Marine offered us fifty cots in one of their Army hospitals. Accompanied by the Fleet Surgeon and Flag Secretary, my only able bodied aids, we visited the hospital, decided to accept the courteous offer, and rushed down to the house of the Minister of Marine to advise him of our acceptance. He came down to the door of his house, still clad in his pajamas. This good natured and kindhearted Admiral Alexandrino de Alencar, with a flourish of his hands and a few vivid words in French, announced his pleasure at our decision. On the 21st of October 16 bodies were taken from the Pittsburgh and landed for burial in the Sao Francisco Xavier Cemetery. Notwithstanding the previous arrangement with cemetery authorities for the opening of 20 graves, the funeral cortege arrived at the cemetery and found no graves prepared.

Those destined for us had been used by others. Much haggling with the cemetery authorities resulted, until finally the army officer in charge of the prisoners detailed eight to dig the graves required by us. These men were of practically no assistance to us and we were finally compelled to dig the graves for our own dead shipmates. Conditions in the cemetery beggared description. Eight hundred bodies in all states of decomposition, and lying about in the cemetery, were awaiting burial. Thousands of buzzards swarmed overhead. In the city itself there were no longer medicines, or wood for coffins and very little food. Rich and poor alike were stricken. In the big public hospital which had the contract for burying the city's dead, hundreds of naked bodies lay thrown upon each other like cord wood and at least one instance was known of a live man being dragged out from the piles. The following day, thanks to the generosity of Mr. F.A. Huntress, the American manager of Rio Light and Power Company, arrangements were made for the proper transportation of those whom it was necessary to inter ashore.

My old Chinese cook, scenting the approach of death, went to the flag office and made out a will, leaving all his money and possessions to Uncle Sam, for as he said, the government had been good to him, and he had no relatives. Fortunately for us he survived.

Five more sailors were buried on the 23rd. During the afternoon forty patients were transferred to the Army Central Hospital by means of large streetcars, and the Fleet surgeon, Medical Inspector Karl Ohnesorg, tho ill himself, assumed charge there. The ship had been unable to secure milk or fresh eggs and no chickens could be obtained in the market at any price; while the contractors were hard put up to keep their contracts for the deliveries of fresh vegetables. The American women of Rio de Janeiro immediately offered their assistance and soon an adequate supply of fresh milk, eggs and chickens was available for the sick at the hospital, while sweaters and pajamas were sent off to the ship for the hundreds still in the throes of the disease. By the 24th, 654 men were on the list with influenza and 46 of the 102 pneumonia cases had died. Two members of my staff, seriously ill, were transferred to the Stranger's (British) Hospital in the city. The army authorized and then gave us one hundred beds in the hospital and the Pittsburgh transferred cooks and sufficient hospital corpsmen to care for the contingent ashore. The Rio Light and Power Company generously loaned us all manner of kitchen ware, glassware, ranges, mosquito netting, bed screens and other necessities for use in the hospital. 

Funeral in Rio de Janeiro for the Pittsburgh's Sailors

The last days of the month found considerable improvement in the flagship. By the 31st of October there had been 58 fatal cases, but great improvement was shown throughout the ship and many men were returned to duty. Ashore, more than one thousand people died daily. Many of those whom we had known well and been fond of were carried off and the streets of Rio de Janeiro, generally gay and vivid with movement and color, were deserted and motionless. Here and there an occasional automobile was the only sign of life, while now and then some poor native with a miniature coffin on his head and followed by a sorrowful family trudged drearily to the nearest cemetery with his loved load. No description of the sorrows and troubles which attended us would be complete without suitable reference to the Brazilian officials, from the President of the Republic, his Secretary, the Ministers of War, Marine and of the Interior down to the lowliest of sailors, who did so much and spent so much of their time that every solace be offered our men and all possible assistance rendered to them. More nearly did they take to heart our sorrow than they did their own. And there was hardly a family ashore where the hand of death had not left its trace.

On the 5th of November the SS Corvello came in with fifty-one enlisted men for the Pittsburgh. These were immediately quartered on the Ilha des Cobras again with the insistence and courtesy of the Brazilians. Thus came and went that most terrible of experiences. The self sacrificing spirit of our doctors and our men and the persistent kindnesses and consideration for our welfare shown to us by Brazilians in Rio have left with me and many an ineradicable memory. Suitable letters of appreciation and profound gratitude I later dispatched to the various civil and unofficial sources from which so much of our help had come, asking the Department at the same time to express to these people the Navy's thanks for their self-sacrificing interest in us.

Source: U.S. Navy History and Heritage Command

Thanks to reader Paul Albright for this article.

My Favorite Quote from Goodbye to All That

Having now been in the trenches for five months, I had passed my prime. For the first three weeks, an officer was of little use in the front line... Between three weeks and four weeks he was at his best, unless he happened to have any particular bad shock or sequence of shocks. Then his usefulness gradually declined as neurasthenia developed. At six months he was still more or less all right; but by nine or ten months, unless he had been given a few weeks' rest on a technical course, or in hospital, he usually became a drag on the other company officers. After a year or fifteen months he was often worse than useless.

Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That

The Birth of the Air War

Artist's Concept of a Dogfight

By Jon Guttman
From Relevance, Summer 2009

When Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914, it began a chain reaction that escalated, country by country, alliance by alliance, into a global conflagration. In the course of that conflict, the evolution of aerial warfare might also be said to have escalated.

Aerial reconnaissance had existed since the French use of balloons in 1794, and the first use of airplanes for that purpose was by the Italians over Tripoli in 1911. The first tentative thoughts of monopolizing the air predate that to 23 July 1910, when German pioneer airman August Euler applied for a patent for a fixed, forward-firing  machine gun mounting for an airplane, using a "blowback shock absorber" and a special gun sight. 

Later that year French airplane maker Gabriel Voisin displayed a sketchy mount for a 37mm naval cannon on one of his pusher biplanes. In Britain, Captain Bertram Dickson wrote a memorandum to the standing subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence, advising that the use of aircraft in time of war to gather intelligence "would lead to the inevitable result of a war in the air, for supremacy of the air, by armed aeroplanes against each other." 

Unarmed French Reconnaissance Aircraft During the Battle of the Marne

Further experiments with airborne gunnery followed in the United States and Britain, and as early as 22 August 1914, Lieutenants Louis Aubon Strange and L. Penn-Gaskell of No. 5 Squadron, flying a Farman F.20, claimed to have fired the war's first shots at a German airplane. Occasional exchanges of pistol and carbine fire followed, as well as a drastic resort to ramming on 8 September, which resulted in the deaths of Austro-Hungarian crewmen Franz Malina and Friedrich Freiherr Rosenthal, as well as the Russian who attacked them, Piotr Nikolayevich Nesterov. The first official shootdown using firearms occurred on 5 October when French Voisin 3LA crew Sergent Joseph Frantz and Sapeur Louis Quénault of Escadrille V.24 used up their Hotchkiss machine gun ammunition attacking an Aviatik B.I, after which Quénault used a rifle to hit the pilot and bring down his quarry, killing Feldwebel Wilhelm Schlichting and Oberleutnant Fritz von Zangen of Feldflieger Abteilung 18. 

In 1915 both sides set their sights on developing an effective fighter airplane. The best platform ultimately proved to be a tractor engine single-seat scout with the pilot using his machine gun by aiming his plane at the enemy. That arrangement, however, presented the challenge of firing one's weapon gun without shooting the propeller off. Early French methods involved mounting the gun above the upper wing or attaching steel wedges on the propeller blades to deflect any rounds that struck it. Using the latter on a Morane-Saulnier L parasol monoplane in April 1915, Sergent Roland Garros downed three German planes in quick succession before being brought down on the 18th—either due to engine trouble or an infantryman's rifle bullet through his fuel line, depending on whose story one believed. German notions of copying his deflectors proved unworkable—they might have been able to deflect copper-jacketed French bullets, but steel-jacketed German rounds would shatter them. In any case Anthony Fokker, a Dutch designer working for the Germans, had a better idea.

Since 15 July 1913, Franz Schneider of the Luft Verkehrs Gesellschaft (LVG) had held a patent for using a series of cams and rods attached to the trigger bar, to interrupt the machine gun's fire whenever the propeller was in its way. Ultimately adapting this Gestängesteuerung, or pushrod control as he called it, to the Spandau-produced Maxim LMG 08/15 machine gun, Fokker produced a series of monoplane (Eindecker) fighters, the E.I, E.II, E.III, and E.IV that came to dominate the sky from July 1915 through to nearly a year later. In the hands of aggressive pilots like Leutnant Kurt Wintgens, Otto Parschau, Max Immelmann, and Oswald Boelcke, the "Fokker Scourge," as the Allies called it, launched an aerial arms race that accelerated both the development of the fighter plane and of tactics for its use. 

Actual Dogfight Somewhere on the Western Front

After almost being shot down while rashly hunting alone in Allied territory, Leutnant Oswald Boelcke decided that teamwork, rather than lone exploits, would be necessary if fighters were to gain a meaningful control of the sky. As a minimum, he decided that a fighter pilot should have a wingman flying slightly above and to his side, guarding his tail. 

Lloyd George vs. Asquith

Prime Minister Herbert Asquith & Minister for War David Lloyd George

by George Cassar

Lloyd George's unhappiness at the War Office deepened in the autumn of 1916. The war was going badly for the Allies and his efforts to circumvent the obstructionism of the CIGS and the generals had failed. He could see no ray of light ahead. Pondering on how to achieve greater civilian control of the generals, he could think of no other way than to remove the higher conduct of the war from Asquith's hands. As David Woodward, a leading authority on the period has observed, “It was Robertson and the military policy he represented – not Asquith – whom Lloyd George hoped to overthrow.”

Lloyd George admired Asquith's intellectual qualities, his skills as a parliamentarian, and the resourcefulness that he had shown as prime minister in times of peace. Indeed, during the prewar era Lloyd George had acted as a creative spark for the Liberal social program and someone on whom Asquith could depend, and the two, however different temperamentally, had formed a very effective team, but tensions in their relationship began to appear in the summer of 1915 owing to their differences over conscription. In the months that followed, the gap between the two became more acute as Lloyd George grew increasingly disillusioned with, and critical of, Asquith's inefficient and leisurely management of the war. Not only did Asquith defer to his generals, he also insisted on preserving the cabinet's executive authority. This meant that all major rulings in the War Council and its successors the Dardanelles Committee and the War Committee, were referred to the full cabinet, where too often issues which provoked disagreement were shelved rather than decided on one way or another.

As Lloyd George put more and more distance between himself and Asquith, he forged new links with a number of prominent Unionists. As a group, the Conservatives also wanted greater efficiency and speed in decision-making. They distrusted Lloyd George, however, regarding him as a Welsh radical who in previous years had been a fierce critic of the Boer War. Still they were impressed by his driving force and by his determined approach to waging war, regardless of infringements on individual liberty. In the final analysis they saw Lloyd George as a lesser evil than Asquith. 

The press joined restive Conservatives to clamor for reform of the executive. The Morning Post summed up the frustration felt by many with Asquith's ministry when it wrote on 1 December 1916: “Nothing is foreseen, every decision is postponed. The war is not really directed – it directs itself.” There were demands that Asquith be replaced as prime minister by Lloyd George, who seemed better fitted to play the part of a war leader. In short, the country as a whole wanted a change, a livelier organizer of victory, a new Pitt. On 1 December 1916 Lloyd George, with Bonar Law's backing, presented Asquith with a plan that would reconstruct the system for prosecuting the war. This involved delegating executive authority to a small committee consisting of three or four ministers free of departmental responsibilities and under the chairmanship of Lloyd George. Asquith would be excluded from the new body but would remain prime minister. After some modification, Asquith accepted the arrangement. On 4 December, however, a leading article in the Times attacked Asquith personally and implied that he had been reduced to a subordinate position in his own cabinet. The piece was clearly written by someone with good inside information. It appears that Carson was the informant but Asquith suspected Lloyd George, who was known to have friendly relations with Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Times. His pride injured, Asquith repudiated his earlier agreement with Lloyd George, determined to fight. Lloyd George's response was to resign. Asquith could have weathered Lloyd George's defection, but confronted by the loss of all, or nearly all, of the Conservatives in the cabinet, he had no option but to resign.

Punch, 20 December 1916

The king immediately sent for Bonar Law, the most obvious choice to succeed Asquith. Bonar Law declined the offer when Asquith made it clear that he would not serve under him. Thereupon the king turned to Lloyd George and invited him to form a government. Lloyd George accepted and from 7–9 December garnered enough support from Conservatives, Labour, and Liberal sympathizers to form a government. His longstanding ambition to succeed Asquith had been achieved, not so much by intrigue as by accident. Lloyd George was 54 years old when he moved to 10 Downing Street in December 1916. His accession to power reflected the nation's repudiation of Asquith's “wait and see policy” and a desire for a more ruthless and forceful prosecution of the war. The country as a whole counted on him to break through the inertia of the previous administration and turn the tide in 1917. Although he could expect a short period of grace, he realized that he would have to produce tangible victories, not only for his own political survival but also to boost the morale of the war weary British public. He feared that continued massive casualties in futile offensives, such as had occurred at the Somme, would only increase public support for a negotiated peace. 

From:  Lloyd George at War, 1916-1918 by George Cassar