Category: First Ringer

Blanketed in snow, the fortress at Erzurum looked almost peaceful.  In reality, with 235 pieces of field artillery, and 11 different forts and gun batteries, after Constantinople, Erzurum was the most heavily defended city in the Ottoman Empire.  Indeed, it was one of the most heavily defended cities in all of the Great War. Within…

Sunday morning services had already concluded by the time the small British torpedo boats the HMS Mimi and HMS Toutou had left their port on the massive freshwater Lake Tanganyika in the Belgian Congo.  Having changed out of his Naval dress uniform and back into his usual garb of short-sleeves and a skirt (which he…

The inhabitants of the sleepy Mesopotamian village of Kut al Amara (or Kut for short), might have felt like strangers in their own homes on December 7th, 1915.  Situated on the banks of the Tigris river 100 miles south of Baghdad, the 6,500 residents of Kut were certainly used to people passing through, albeit usually…

The ships had arrived silently in the night at the small Egyptian port city of El Salloum (or Sollum), their cargo carefully unloaded by the few Bedouin residents who had abandoned their nomadic ways and settled the city.  Overseeing the Bedouin workers were thousands of Senussi men, a Sufi-Muslim order of tribesmen from Libya.  A largely…

Amid the scores of concerns that clouded France’s Chamber of Deputies in the fall of 1915, the status of some of the empire’s colonial citizens would not have seemed a priority.  Despite decades of colonial demands to codify the citizenship status of France’s African subjects, in some cases stretching as far back as to the…

For over two months, the Isonzo river had been blissfully quiet along the border of Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Little fighting echoed through the peaks of Mount San Michele or valleys of the Banjšice Plateau.  Following Italy’s exuberant entry into the Great War the previous spring, there had been little progress in the realization of “Italia irredenta”…

By the tens of thousands, they marched through snow-capped mountains on the Serbian/Albanian border.  Most of them injured or riddled with disease, the survivors of Serbia’s resistance in the Great War, military or civilian, shuffled towards the faint hope of Entente salvation on October 7th, 1915. The last chapter from the first act of World War…

It was designed to change the Entente’s fortunes in the Great War. Across open fields clouded by chlorine gas, 6 divisions-worth of newly trained British soldiers threw themselves at the lightly defended (but heavily fortified) German line.  For the first time in 1915, the British were taking on a significant role in operations on the…

For hours, women had gathered in line at the farmer’s market in Cologne.  Before even daybreak, hundreds, and then thousands of German women had lined up to try and be among the first to buy badly needed supplies fresh from the nation’s farms.  The long lines, and limited food stuffs that awaited them, were nothing…

By the beginning of September in 1915, Europe had been at war for over a year – a year of bloodshed and loss for the Entente. The Western Powers of the Entente were locked in the static horror of the trenches.  The Russians were slowly losing their eastern European empire, en route to losing 2 million…

It was a little before 9am in the morning as Mamoru Shigemitsu, Japan’s foreign minister, and the rest of the Japanese delegation, boarded the massive American battleship the USS Missouri on September 2nd, 1945. The small Japanese contingent was dwarfed by the presence of the American military, and the number of representatives from other Allied forces.…

On August 14th, 1945, the Second World War had but hours to go. Since the atomic bombings and Soviet invasion of Manchuria just days earlier, Japan had begun secret communications through the neutral powers of Switzerland and Sweden to accept the Allies’ demands for unconditional surrender.  Unbeknownst to all but a few within the government…

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was eager to go home. For three months, the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries draftsman had resided in the port city of Hiroshima, doing his job designing Japanese oil tankers.  His job had become increasingly difficult as supplies for ship building became fewer and fewer.  American submarines,  warships and planes were sinking the tankers faster than…

It was barely 14 minutes past midnight when the twin explosions, coming almost one on top of the other, rocked the U.S.S. Indianapolis on July 30th, 1945. Coming from Guam by way of Tinian, few of the crew of the Indianapolis – and none of the crew of the Japanese submarine that had just given her…

“To the victor belong the spoils.” – Sen. William L. Marcy (1828) It had been perhaps the strangest coalition in human history – the foremost democratic, colonial, and communist powers in the world, rallying together to defeat a nation antithetical to all of them, despite their immense differences. Fear of defeat had united them; the…

The shelters were scattered across the cool New Mexican desert, one in each direction, 5 miles away from the target – a simple wooden 100-foot tower, looking much like an oil derrick.  Yet for most of the observers, the VIP shelter 20 miles away seemed the safer bet. The mood was tense.  The gathered collection…

In September of 1914, at the very outset of the Great War, a dreadful rumor arose. It was said that at the Battle of the Marne, east of Paris, soldiers on the front line had been discovered standing at their posts in all the dutiful military postures – but not alive. “Every normal attitude of…

For nearly a year, the Eastern Front had been something of a murderous pendulum.  The armies of the Central Powers and Russia had traded monstrous blows, racking up casualty figures in the hundreds of thousands battle after battle.  And despite the Front’s lack of the same sort of trench warfare that would define the Great…

It was 11:40pm on July 2nd, 1915 and the U.S. Senate chambers were practically empty.  The senators had left to return to their States (Congress was out of session), and most of the building’s staff had not only gone home for the night, but were likely going to stay home for the 4th of July…

With a world at war, and new nations joining the fight, the events of May 25th, 1915 would have seemed blessedly contradictory – two nations signing a peace treaty. There was little drama or media fanfare as representatives from Japan arrived in Peking to meet with the Republic of China’s first (semi-democratically) elected President, Yuan…

The enthusiasm was contagious in the Italian Chamber of Deputies.  As the 482 Deputies out of the Chamber’s 500 poured into their seats, the Deputies applauded were those who wore military uniforms.  Men hooted, waiving flags amid cries of “Viva Italia!”  For the dozens of diplomatic attendees, ranging from representatives of the Entente to neutral American observers,…

It was well after 2:00am on May 7th, 1945 when the first cars pulled up to a little red schoolhouse in Reims, France. Shuffling inside, and out of the cold morning air, were representatives of most of the major combatants in Europe.  Few were major commanders – the closest being Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, the…

The morning fog had lifted over the Atlantic, giving way to clear skies and calm seas.  120 miles southwest of Ireland, in open water, the RMS Lusitania was charting a fast, and direct, course for England on May 7th, 1915.  The ship had left New York just six days earlier, brimming with a passenger list that read…

The sun was setting in the tiny hamlet of Giulino di Messegra as the Fascist prisoners were off-loaded from a truck.  The handful of men, and one woman, had spent the previous night in a cold farm house, having just been captured off a German convoy by Italian communist partisans.  The partisan’s local leader, Walter Audisio,…

The sun was setting on the trenches of Ypres on the evening of April 22nd, 1915.  The Allied battlefield, a mixture of British regulars and French colonial troops, had been quiet for months following the First Battle of Ypres in November of the previous year.  The men of the French 45th and 87th divisions were acclimating…