Peter Jackson’s new World War One Documentary, They Will Not Grow Old, will be released today in the U.K. to commemorate the centennial of the end of the Great War.
Stay Alert, Stay Armed and Stay Dangerous!
Tag Archives: The Great War
World War I History: Trench Warfare Notes, 1915
I have a really neat document to share today, generously sent to me by a reader named Chris in the United Kingdom. These are the notes from a 1915 course on trench warfare as recorded by his grandfather, one Harold Rayner. Harold was born in 1885 in Surrey, and survived the war to live until 1973 (although his brother died on the Western Front). Corporal Rayner (of the 2/5 Queen’s) attended a training class on trench warfare from January 10th to the 22nd of 1915, to help prepare him for combat, and he took about 60 pages of handwritten notes on a variety of topics including:
- Fuses
- Detonators
- Service Grenades
- Trench Engines
- Barricades
- Trench Fighting
- Explosives
- the Stokes Gun
- Open Warfare
The notebook included several mimeographed diagrams of grenades, mortars, and other pieces of equipment. Several of those have faded quite badly, and I did my best to bring up the images in the scanned copy below. Apparently Chris offered this notebook to several museums, and none were interested.
Well, I am happy to be able to scan it and make it public for anyone to see – thanks for thinking of me, Chris!
If you are interested in this aspect of World War One, take a look at the pdf document below – I think you will find lots of interesting details.
Read the Original Article and Download the pdf at Forgotten Weapons
World War I History: Six Facts About the Forgotten battle that Ended the Great War
“Conventional wisdom holds that World War One ended in the west with the collapse of the Hindenburg Line; in reality it was a comparatively small clash in one of the war’s forgotten fronts that precipitated the downfall of the Central Powers.”
WHEN GERMANY signed the Armistice on Nov. 11, 1918, the Central Powers were still in a strong position (at least on paper).
The Kaiser had already pushed Montenegro, Romania, and Russia out of the war; occupied Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, large parts of Poland and the Ukraine; and secured access to natural resources in the east. On the Western Front, French, British and American armies had yet to set foot on German soil. But despite all of this, Berlinstill sued for peace in the autumn of 1918. For many historians, this makes the end of the war on the Western Front somewhat hard to explain; it is difficult to find a decisive battle that served as the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’.
Yet, such an engagement did occur. It took place at Dobro Polje on the Salonika Front in today’s Macedonia. This little-known Allied victory, which was won by a small Franco-Serbian army, ended on Sept. 17, 1918. Although the clash generated fewer than 5,000 casualties, it broke the deadlock in the Balkans precipitating a ‘chain reaction’ of events that forced Berlin to seek terms within weeks.
The Allied victory at Dobro Polje broke the Bulgarian army, compelling Sofia to seek a separate peace on Sept. 29. Alone and isolated, the German 11th Army, which had been shoring up the southern flank since 1915, had no choice but to surrender too. This in turn weakened the Italian Front and opened the door for British troops to force Turkey to the peace table in October. The Central Powers’ ‘soft underbelly’ was suddenly exposed and utterly defenseles — Germany’s fate (and that of Austria-Hungary) was sealed.
Conventional wisdom holds that World War One ended with the Battle of Amiens, theHundred Days Offensive in the west and the collapse of the Hindenburg Line; in reality it was a comparatively small clash in one of the war’s forgotten fronts that precipitated the downfall of the Central Powers. Here are six things about Dobro Polje, the most decisive battle you’ve probably never heard of.
A Successful Multi-National Effort
The Entente forces at Salonika were comprised of just seven-and-a-half Serbian divisions, eight French, one Italian, 10 Greek, and three British divisions. The Anglo French forces consisted of significant numbers of colonial troops. All operated under the leadership of France’s General Franchet d’Esperey, commander of the Allied Armies of the East. The 62-year-old veteran of the Marne had been transferred to the region following his poor performance at the Third Battle of the Aisne in May 1918. He’d more than make up for his lackluster showing in the West by delivering the Allies a war-winning victory.
Serbian Esprit, French Reluctance
Serbia’s small 60,000-man army is often given most of the credit for the victory at Dobro Polje, as well as and the subsequent breakout that brought World War One to a speedy conclusion. Following Bulgaria’s decision to seek a separate peace with the Allies, Kaiser Wilhelm sent a telegram to the Bulgarian Tsar Ferdinand fuming about the outcome of the battle. “Disgraceful! 62,000 Serbs decided the war,” wrote Germany’s emperor. His assessment was remarkably astute. The Serbian army, which had been forced into exile following the Austro-Hungarian occupation of 1915, had been pressing for a major offensive on the Salonika Front for two years. Its leaders hoped to restore the army’s honour by finally liberating their homeland. France, however, had long opposed a major offensive in the south, viewing the Balkans as a sideshow, wishing to focus instead on what Paris viewed as the far more important Western Front. Serbia’s army-in-exile relied on France for all its supplies and equipment. As such, the Salonika Front remained largely stagnant from the end of 1916 until the Battle of Dobro Polje. During the lull, Serbian artillery was allowed to fall into disrepair. France also insisted that its own officers control the heavy guns, the Serbs would get only light artillery and trench mortars. It was only in 1918 when France decided in favor of an offensive in the Balkans that artillery was refurbished and reinforced.
Read the Remainder at Military History Now
WW1 History: 1916, A Most Terrible Year
This year I am going to start reading in earnest, a chronological history of The Great War: World War One.-SF
BOOKS that focus on what happened in a particular year have become a publishing phenomenon. So Keith Jeffery, a British academic historian whose last work was a fascinating, if slightly plodding, official history of Britain’s secret intelligence service, MI6, must have thought it a clever idea to go for 1916, the midpoint of the first world war. Mr Jeffery’s purpose is to show that not only was it a year of tremendous events, but one in which the effects of the war spread across most of the world, often with consequences that can still be felt a century later.
By 1916, the war that some had believed would be over by Christmas 1914 had become an attritional slog on both the largely static Western Front and on the rather more fluctuating front in the East. To break the deadlock, the general staffs of all the main belligerents continued to work on new tactics, such as the creeping artillery barrage, and to seek new technologies, including the tank, which first saw action in September 1916. Contrary to a widely held view, the second half of the war was a period of unprecedented military innovation.
The idea that sheer offensive élan could overcome well-entrenched defences equipped with modern weaponry, in the form of accurate artillery and the machine- gun, had died during the appalling bloodletting of late 1914. In the four months before the war of movement in the West ground to a halt, France and Germany had between them suffered over 1.5m casualties—a loss rate that was not exceeded until manoeuvre returned to the battlefield in the final months of fighting. By 1916 most of the soldiers on both sides had not only lost faith in imminent victory, but had become fatalistically resigned to the war as permanent crucible for their generation which civilians and politicians at home could not begin to comprehend.
Read the Remainder at Economist
