A reader sent me a link to a pretty cool image gallery showing the basic clothing and equipment of five different major combatant powers from mid-WWI. I have re-uploaded the individual photos in case the original links go dead (click to enlarge each photo).
Read the Original Article and Photo’s at Forgotten Weapons
The Limits of Foresight On the Road To The Great War
One hundred years ago today, long lines of British infantry climbed out of their trenches in the Somme region of France and hurled themselves at the entrenched Germans. The next 24 hours would turn out to be the bloodiest day in British military history, with 60,000 casualties. Battalions lost 90 percent of their personnel in an hour. One division, the 36th, took 5,000 casualties in 2 days (56 percent) and had to be pulled out — after one year of training, it had lasted 48 hours in combat. The offensive petered out after three months, having advanced only five miles at the cost of 350,000 British and 70,000 Dominion casualties. For the high casualties and lack of success, historians and memoirists have harshly criticized British generals — “donkeys,” in Alan Clark’s estimation, and “arrogant incompetents” in Robert Graves’ semi-autobiography Good-Bye to All That. More broadly, historians have criticized all World War I generals for failing to anticipate the supremacy of the defensive and the trench system that resulted. But is this criticism for lack of foresight fair? As C.V. Wedgewood said:
History is lived forwards, but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning, and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.
Looking back on World War I, historians can assemble bits of pre-war history to build a narrative predicting the superiority of the defensive and the resulting trench system. However, considered broadly, lessons of battlefield experience before the war were actually ambiguous and indicated a continuation of traditional maneuver warfare, punctuated by periodic sieges of cities and fortresses, as had been the experience in warfare for thousands of years. Here is the pre-World War I history that the generals had available to learn from.
The siege of Richmond and Petersburg at the end of the Civil War (July 1864 to April 1865) is often cited as an example of what the generals of World War I should have expected. The siege positions, extending 35 miles, comprised a continuous line of trenches and fortifications. Union infantry assaults failed, even when supported by surprise or extensive preparation (for example, the Battle of the Crater, July 30, 1864). With its extensive fortifications, powerful artillery, intense infantry fire, and rapid reinforcement of threatened sectors, the siege did indeed look a lot like the western front in World War I. However, this was an exceptional experience during the Civil War. In the west, the war was one of continuous maneuver, punctuated by periodic city sieges (for example, Chattanooga, Vicksburg, Atlanta). In April 1865, when Grant finally outflanked Lee’s entrenched army, the war in the east broke into open maneuver once again.
The Austro-Prussian war of 1866 never devolved into trenches or sieges at all, but instead saw continuous rapid maneuver aided by railroads and telegraph communications, as had been seen in the American Civil War. The decisive battle, Koniggratz, was positively Napoleonic in its movement of corps over large spaces and in the decisive strike to an exposed flank. The war between two great powers was over in seven weeks.
Read the Remainder at War on the Rocks
One hundred years ago Friday, as the last shells of a week-long bombardment crept off into the fields of northern France, British Army Capt. William P. Nevill kicked a football into no-man’s land.
It was a few minutes after 7:30 am on July 1, 1916, and one of the bloodiest engagements in the history of civilization — the Battle of the Somme — had just begun.
About 110,000 men spread across a 13-mile stretch of front attacked that day. By July 2, 60,000 would be dead or wounded — stretched lifeless over fields of barbed wire or calling out from the depths of shell craters.
Nevill was one of those men. A company commander with the 8th East Surrey Regiment, his story and the story of his company’s four footballs are chronicled in historian Paul Fussell’s seminal work, “The Great War and Modern Memory,” and a website dedicated to Surrey county’s past. A small corner of history, it is a painful reminder of the Great War’s cost and the generation it nearly eradicated.
Prior to the Somme, Nevill had been home in London on leave and bought four footballs — one for each platoon in his company. He offered a prize for the first group that got a ball to the German front line. Fussell writes that kicking a football toward the enemy was a way of showing “sporting spirit” and was first done at the Battle of Loos in 1915.
Read the Remainder at Washington Post
The British Army entered World War I with just two machine guns per battalion. In contrast, the Imperial German Army had long embraced the new weapon — and had already fully integrated it into its infantry regiments.
As the stalemate of trench warfare took hold, the British quickly learned how to best use the machine gun. In October 1915, the British Army stood up the new Machine Gun Corps to handle the powerful new weapon.
The Machine Gun Corps grouped the infantry’s Vickers Guns into companies of 10 guns apiece and attached a company to each brigade. Meanwhile, the infantry got their own Lewis light machine guns that fell outside the Corps’ purview.
The army wrote new tactics for the massed use of machine guns and published them in the official manual The Employment of Machine Guns. Shortly thereafer in 1916, the British Army’s new machine-gun concept underwent a trial by fire.
Literally.
One of the new tactics was “barrage fire,” whereby groups of gunners fired indirectly — that is, without necessarily seeing their targets — in order to prevent enemy troop movements, to give covering fire or to generally harass and suppress the enemy.
The gunners angled their weapons high so the rounds would arc over the battlefield, much like artillery does.
The 100th Machine Gun Company was among the first to put into practice this long-range barrage technique — at High Wood during the bloody Battle of the Somme between July and November 1916. The company fired a staggering 100,000 rounds in just 12 hours.
That’s one round every three seconds for each of the company’s seven operational guns.
The Machine Gun Corps fought in every major theater of World War I. Its men won seven Victoria Crosses. The Corps finally disbanded in 1922, but the venerable Vickers remained in service into the 1960s.
Amid the chaos and carnage of the Battle of the Somme, a small forest became a focal point of the battle. High Wood had originally been part of the Germans’ secondary trench line, but when British troops advanced, the wood became the center of German defenses.
Read the Remainder at War is Boring
Another sad example of how Anti-Semitism is creeping back into Europe and being virtually ignored in America.-SF
Amid a divisive debate in Ukraine on state honors for nationalists viewed as responsible for anti-Semitic pogroms, the country for the first time observed a minute of silence in memory of Symon Petliura, a 1920s statesman blamed for the murder of 50,000 Jewish compatriots.
The minute was observed on May 25, the 90th anniversary of Petliura’s assassination in Paris. National television channels interrupted their programs and broadcast the image of a burning candle for 60 seconds, Ukraine’s Federal News Agency reported.
A French court acquitted Sholom Schwartzbard, a Russia-born Jew, of the murder even though he admitted to it after the court found that Petliura had been involved in or knew of pogroms by members of his militia fighting for Ukrainian independence from Russia in the years 1917-1921. Fifteen of Schwartzbard’s relatives perished in the pogroms.
Separately, the director of Ukraine’s Institute of National Remembrance, Vladimir Vyatrovich, said in a statement on Monday that Kiev will soon name a street for two other Ukrainian nationalists — Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych — who are widely believed to be responsible for lethal violence against Jews. Another street is to be named for Janusz Korczak, the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit, a Polish Jewish teacher who was murdered in Auschwitz.
Bandera and Shukhevych collaborated with Nazi forces that occupied what is now Ukraine and are believed to have commanded troops that killed thousands of Jews. Once regarded by Ukrainian authorities as illegitimate to serve as national role models because of their war crimes against Jews and Poles, Petliura, Bandera and Shukhevych are now openly honored in Ukraine following a revolution spearheaded by nationalists in 2014.
Read the Remainder at Times of Israel
