The citadel of Verdun had stood outside the city walls since the early 1600s – a relatively new addition in the Gallic city with a history reaching back to the 4th Century.  For nearly 300 years, Verdun had represented the strength of the French nation; it’s surrender to the Prussians in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War had symbolically (and somewhat practically) closed the chapter of French dominance over the continental affairs of Europe.

The French were determined to never let Verdun fall again.  A massive defensive redesign in the 1880s produced a bulwark without rival in Europe, or likely the world.  28 fortresses produced a double-ring of defense, each with 8-feet of steel-reinforced concrete, covered further in sand and earth.  1,000 pieces of artillery, with another 250 in reserve, were supported by a gigantic maze of trenches, bunkers and even an underground rail system.  Verdun had been deemed, before the war, “artillery-proof.”  If the famed citadel would ever fall again, it would be due to the weakness of the men inside, not the steel that protected them.

On the morning of February 21st, 1916, that theory would be put to the ultimate test.  808 German guns, firing for ten straight hours, lobbed over 1 million shells against the fortifications of Verdun.  The barrage could be heard 100 miles away.

For the next nearly 10 months, one of the worst battles in human history would slowly unfold, consuming lives on an industrial scale that exceeded anything the Great War had previously seen.  78% of the entire French army would eventually serve at Verdun.  The Germans would dub the battle the “blood-pump of the world.”  And anywhere from 973,000 to 1.25 million lives would be maimed or claimed before it was over.

—

French troops at Verdun.  Even today, the name “Verdun” conjures the worst images of the Great War

If there is a battle that encapsulates the entirety of the First World War, it might be Verdun.  The crushing weight of artillery; the human wave attacks; the obstinance of commanding generals – all were embraced at Verdun.  The scale of the battle can be seen even today.  Despite the Great War pounding the earth repeatedly at a number of locations, only in sections of Verdun does nothing grow 100 years later.   (more…)

Dawn hadn’t even fully broken over the small town of Taveta in British East Africa (now Kenya) when the artillery barrage began on February 12th, 1916.

By the standards of the Great War, the two-hour shelling of German Schutztruppe holding the small strategic lookout (Taveta was near Mount Kilimanjaro and had been seized by Germany early in the war) was little more than a pleasant morning wake-up call.  But by the standards of the war in Africa, it was part of a full-blown massive offensive by a combination of Boers, Brits, Rhodesians, Indians and Africans – well over 73,000 men – to wrestle away East Africa from the Kaiser’s grip.

The 6,000 men of a South African brigade, supported by Indian-based artillery, charged at Taveta up Salaita Hill, where British intelligence had suggested that the artillery had been pounding the front-line of a few hundred black African German troops.  In reality, the artillery had landed behind the front-line and instead of a few hundred defenders, 2,300 men awaited the Entente attack.  Knowing discretion to be the better part of valor, the South Africans quickly retreated with minimal casualties.

Salaita Hill would be another reversal for the Entente in an endless campaign against the forces of German Gen. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck – a campaign that would last beyond the end of the First World War.

—

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck: The “Lion of Africa” – the picture is from his years after the war, but he’s still dressed in his distinctive uniform and slouch hat

The voracious appetite of the Entente for German colonies defined the earliest months of the war in Africa.  German possessions in central and southwest Africa fell with relative ease as trained British regulars were able to beat German Schutztruppe (protection forces); often little more than ill-equipped black volunteers or aging white settlers.  Coupled with the introduction of forces from South African Boers and British Indians, the conquest of German Africa appeared to be proceeding as a neat and orderly little war.    (more…)

The debate in the House of Commons had raged for several weeks.  The failures of the coalition government of Prime Minister H.H. Asquith – Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, the failure of the British offensives of the fall of 1915, and a shortage of munitions in the spring of the same year – had been thrown at the PM’s feet.  The conservatives in Asquith’s coalition had begun calling for his head, as men he had dismissed from the War Cabinet, like Churchill and Lord Kitchener, attempted to speak directly to the public about what they deemed the PM’s lapses in judgement.

The measure before the House of Commons had been intended to blunt such criticisms.  It was a measure Asquith had fought against, both publicly and privately within the War Cabinet.  Asquith had tried for months to stall such a vote, commissioning studies in the vain hope of proving it unnecessary.  Instead, Asquith’s commissions had proven the opposite.  Placed between his principles and his ability to prosecute the war, Asquith chose the war.

The vote wasn’t even close.  By a margin of 383 to 36, the Military Service Act of 1916 passed on January 27th.  The proud tradition of the small, professional British Army had vanished.  Britain had joined the rest of Europe in embracing conscription.

—

The Promise of a “New Army.”  Millions of Britons flocked to the call in 1914 and 1915

Since the Battle of the Marne in the fall of 1914, most British authorities – both civilian and military – had understood that the British system of volunteerism had reached its logical limitations in a modern war.  The only question was the best way forward.    (more…)

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 the forts sat 40,000 Ottoman soldiers; a mix of veterans from the Caucasus campaigns of early 1915 and young recruits.  Behind them sat another nearly 90,000 Ottoman troops of the massive Third Army.  Nestled in the safety of one of the most complex defensive systems in the world, and surrounded by snow banks as high as four feet in some places, the last thing the Ottomans worried about on January 10th, 1916 was a Russian attack.

A month later, Erzurum would be in Russian hands and 15,000 Turks had been left behind.

—

Russian troops with captured Turkish guns at Erzurum

At the beginning of 1916, the confidence of the Ottoman army was high and growing higher.  After starting the Great War with a failed offensive against the Suez Canal, and a debacle against the Russians in the Caucasus, the fortunes of the 600-year old empire had markedly improved.  They had won tremendous victories against the British in Gallipoli and Mesopotamia, and were in the process of capturing an entire British/Indian army at Kut.    (more…)

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 wrongly thought was a kilt), British Captain Geoffrey Spicer-Simson began hunting his intended prey – the German gunboat Kigani.

But the Kigani had been on its way to intercept them, and was surprised to see the small British “fleet” racing out to meet them.  In 11 quick minutes, the Kigani had been critically damaged; a shell having ripped through her deck, killing the gunboat’s captain and petty officers.  The Kigani withdrew her colors – a sign she intended to surrender.  Not content with his prey’s brief battle, Simson ordered the small wooden Mimi to ram the metal gunboat.  The Mimi‘s bow was significantly dented; Simson’s ego definitely was not.

Returning to shore, Simson, wearing a German officer’s ring he stole from one of the dead, proclaimed himself the “Horatio Nelson of Africa.”  The day after Christmas in 1915, the battle for Lake Tanganyika – the second largest freshwater lake in the world by volume – was almost over.  The battle for historic acclaim from one of the most eccentric (and incompetent) British officers in the Great War had begun.

—

Graf von Gotzen’s crew loads her 4-inch deck gun.  The weapon dwarfed anything the British or Belgians could wield in East Africa

Despite some of the first shots in the Great War being fired in Africa, the Entente had made little progress in removing the German threat to their colonial possessions.  In German East Africa, Lt. Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, who would soon become famous for his prolonged defense, had gone on the offensive, attacking and defeating the Indian Expeditionary Force sent to subdue him with an army eight times Lettow-Vorbeck’s size.   (more…)

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 via the river.  But the latest visitors to Kut had mostly arrived by land – well over 13,000 of them – and were starting to make themselves at home.  Trenches and bulwarks were being created overnight; tents flooded the village and surrounding river banks.

The newest guests to Kut were a collection of British and Indian troops who had last passed through the village attempting to claim Baghdad, and all of Mesopotamia, for the Crown.  Now in headlong retreat, the British and Indians had chosen to dig in and allow themselves to be surrounded by their Ottoman pursuers.  It had been the the brainchild of an arrogant British Indian Army General who preferred taking his orders from New Delhi than London, and was being executed by a British General whose claim to fame had been enduring a similar siege in Pakistan years earlier.

The strategy to conquer Mesopotamia had been ill-conceived and hastily implemented.  Now it was about to become, in the words of one British military historian, “the most abject capitulation in Britain’s military history.”

—

The Siege of Kut – many of the troops that held Kut for 147 days would never return home

Had the War Office in London gotten their way, Britain’s involvement in the so-called “Cradle of Civilization” would have ended in November of 1914.    (more…)

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 nomadic people, like the Bedouin, the Senussi hadn’t come to El Salloum to trade or rest.  The Senussi had come to meet their shipment of thousands of rounds of ammunition, machine guns and even light artillery from Germany and the Ottoman Empire.  The Senussi had come to wage a jihad against the West.

On November 23rd, 1915, in the deserts of Egypt, the Great War had become a Holy War.

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The Senussi on the march. Thousands of Senussi, aided by Bedouin allies, tried to force the British out of Egypt

Through the lens of the early 21st Century, the Senussi appear nearly pacifistic.  An off-shoot of the more mystical Sufi-Islamic faith, the Senussi had been founded in the mid-1800s in Mecca as a relative liberal interpretation of Islam.  The movement’s leader, Sayyid Muhammad ibn Ali as-Senussi (or Grand Senussi; a title that survived him), had rebelled against what he perceived as the more conservative orthodoxies of the Ottoman officials in Mecca.  Senussi preached that his followers live lives of voluntary poverty and resist fanaticism in the name of the faith.  Branded by a fatwa condemning his teachings, Senussi moved from Mecca, eventually finding acceptance in the Bedouin communities of the desert.   (more…)

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 revolutions of 1848, the issue had been deflected by French government after government.  For the African subjects of the Fourth Republic, broadly known then as the Senegalese originaires (even though few of them were actually in French Senegal), their rights and ability to elect representation floated in a Schrödinger’s cat state of unrest – they were both citizens and not-citizens, sometimes the beneficiaries of French law, and sometimes bereft of it.

But for a war bleeding France white, black soldiers became one potential solution to the manpower shortage.  A mass conscription of Senegalese oringinaires could provide thousands of men at arms.  But conscription also conferred citizenship.  France could have her thousands of black soldiers, if colonial Africa could have a seat at the table in French political affairs.  The demands of the trenches outweighed the colonial fears of the French ruling class.  Black Africans were no longer broadly defined as Senegalese subjects – they were now French citizens.  Over 200,000 would fight for France; 30,000 would never return home.

The debate over the status of colonial subjects was occurring in all the capitals of the Entente.  The Great War was only just over a year old, but was already remaking European society.

—

French Senegalese troops – the term “Senegalese” was given to pretty much all central African French subjects, and the “oringinaires” only referred to the coastal population of those colonies

The bugle called and forth we went
To serve the crown our backs far bent,
And build what ere that must be done;
But ne’re to fire an angry gun
No heroes we no nay not one.

With deep lament we did our job
Despite the shame our manhood robbed.
We built and fixed and fixed again,
To prove our worth as proud black men
And hasten sure the Kaiser’s end…

Stripped to the waist and sweated chest
Midday’s reprieve brings much-needed rest

From trenches deep toward the sky.
Non-fighting troops and yet we die.

– The Black Soldier’s Lament, George A. Borden

To the extent the Entente gave their colonies any considerations at the start of the Great War, it was in pursuit of German colonial possessions.  The rapid expansion of Europe’s colonial empires in the 19th century had left Britain and France in control of vast sections of the globe, with only a thin paste of shifting political allegiances and minimalist military power holding it all together.  Concerns over how the empires could consolidate their gains were secondary to the opportunity to once again enlarge their territories at Germany’s expense.    (more…)

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” as both sides had exhausted themselves by August of 1915.  Italy’s second major offensive of the war at Isonzo had halted just months earlier for literally running out of ammunition.

Supplies would not be the hurdle for Italy on October 18. 1915.  1,200 artillery pieces and 19 divisions worth of men would hurl themselves against the rugged cliffs and the Dual Monarchy’s trenches in the third of twelve eventual attempts to break the Austrian line.  For the Italian soldiers who were lead forward with cries of “Avanti!“, Isonzo would become less a war than a battle of endurance – against the elements, and Italian generalship.

—

Italian light infantry of the 1st Alpini Regiment on Monte Nero, during the Isonzo campaigns

There may not have been a more difficult place on the planet to conduct a major offensive than the Isonzo river valley.    (more…)

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 I was in the process of being written.  That same day, the crushing weight of four armies – two Bulgarian, one German and one Austro-Hungarian – had broken the beleaguered lines of the Serbian defense.  The nation that had started the war had already seen tremendous hardship, enduring repeated assaults by the Dual Monarchy.  Now, the full weight of the Central Powers was being turned against them.  It would cost Serbia 27% of its entire population.

The evacuation of what remained of the Serbian nation would finally prompt the Entente to act, thus starting one of the longest, and strangest campaigns in the Great War – the Salonika Front.

—

A Front for the Whole Family – from left to right: a soldier from Indochina, a Frenchman, a Senegalese, an Englishman, a Russian, an Italian, a Serb, a Greek and an Indian.  717,000 troops from 6 of the Entente coalition nations fought in Salonika

Despite its primary role in the conflict, neither the Central Powers nor the Entente seemed to give Serbia much of a priority.    (more…)

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 Western Front.  The young men who were leading the charge had answered the call from Britain’s Secretary of State for War, Lord Horatio Kitchener, whose very image had surplanted the traditional “John Bull” (the British “Uncle Sam”) in rallying Britons to defend the Entente.  After a hard year of bloodletting from their French allies, “Kitchener’s Army”, or “Kitchener’s Mob” as his critics derided the volunteer recruitment effort, was to go into battle at the French town of Loos-en-Gohelle.

The Germans never saw the attack coming, and coupled with a surprise artillery burst and the first use of poison gas by the British, the Allied advance looked to be successful.

It ended in another wholesale slaughter.

—

The Battle of the Loos – the “mist” is 140 tons of chlorine gas

By the fall of 1915, Britain’s strategy to win the Great War had gone horribly adrift.   (more…)

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 new.

But the prices were.  The cost of eggs, butter and fat had been raised yet again.  Indignant, the women began to argue with the market’s sellers.  The arguing quickly turned to shoving, as women pushed past farmers to grab what food they could.

Cologne’s police were quick to arrive, which only seemed to anger the women further.  “We want to eat,” the women chanted.  “Our men are fighting for the country, and we are starving!”  With the market’s supplies being overrun, the police drew their sabers and charged into the crowd.  Dozens were wounded as the women fled, trampling five of their fellow protesters to death.  For the next two days, thousands of Cologne’s women rioted in response, smashing the windows of shop keepers they accused of hiking prices, and attacking police units around the city.

In the fall of 1915, Germany and her allies might have been winning on the battlefield, but were losing the war at home.

—

A German Food Line – the initial effects of the blockade weren’t really felt until 1915 as the 1914 crops had already been harvested when the war began

While the Central Powers were experimenting with new technologies to try and win the war, unleashing poison gas and zeppelin raids, the Entente’s most powerful weapon had been among the simplest – starvation.    (more…)

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 men in 1915 alone.  And the British were desperately throwing themselves against the Dardanelles while already contemplating a humiliating retreat.  Yet despite their victories, the Central Powers seemed no closer to ending the war than the Entente.  For both sides, their visions of victory – yet alone their rationales for fighting – were sinking into a murky morass of blood and mud.

But in the small village of Zimmerwald, Switzerland, a vision for the end of the war was beginning to form – a vision of revolution.

—

The Revolutionary in Obscurity – Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov in Switzerland in 1914

From September 5th to 8th, 1915 in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, the Great War was reduced to a war of words.  The combatants were not heads of state, military leaders, or even prominent civic leaders.  Rather, the attendees were there precisely because they lacked any real role among the warring governments.     (more…)

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 life was imitated by these dead men,” according to the patriotic serial The Times History of the War, published in 1916. “The illusion was so complete that often the living would speak to the dead before they realized the true state of affairs.”

It was blamed on asphyxia, the result of such powerful new high-explosive shells fired at massive intervals – 432,000 shells had been fired in 5 days at the Marne.  That such an outlandish story could gain credence was not surprising: notwithstanding the massive cannon fire of previous ages, and even automatic weaponry unveiled in the American Civil War, nothing like this thunderous new artillery firepower had been seen before.  The rumor emanating from the Marne reflected the instinctive dread aroused by such monstrous innovation.

Only the “frozen” men at the Marne were not actually dead.  Rather, what the survivors of the first days of the Great War were experiencing and witnessing was an issue that would dominate every major army for the next four years – shell shock.

—

Duck & Cover – the scale of warfare experienced by the men in the trenches was unlike anything any army had encountered before.  No army was prepared for how a largely conscripted, civilian-based military would react

“Shell shock,” the term that would come to define the phenomenon, first appeared in the British medical journal The Lancet in February 1915, only six months after the commencement of the war. In a landmark article, Capt. Charles Myers of the Royal Army Medical Corps noted “the remarkably close similarity” of symptoms in soldiers who had been exposed to exploding shells.  The first cases Myers described exhibited a range of perceptual abnormalities, such as loss of or impaired hearing, sight and sensation, along with other common physical symptoms, such as tremor, loss of balance, headache and fatigue.    (more…)

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 War in the West, the battle-lines rarely shifted…and when they did, they often quickly shifted back.

The other constant was Russian blood.  Whether in victory (such as in the Carpathians) or in defeat (the Masurian Lakes), Russian soldiers died in biblical proportions.  At least 2 million rifles short, starving for food and being fed anti-Tsarist/anti-war Bolshevik propaganda, Russian troops were deserting in greater and greater numbers.  As a Russian Army report in the summer of 1915 suggested, “super-human efforts were [being] required to keep the men in the trenches.”

The Central Powers’ offensive that began on July 13th, 1915 held goals far more modest than being the decisive blow against the Russian Army.  Too many other battle plans had rested on such a notion in the previous 11 months and come up wanting.  The hope had been mostly to press on the gains made by driving the Russians out of Austrian Galicia that spring.  Instead, the Russian Army collapsed.

Tsarist Russia had been on the breaking point – she now appeared to be broken.

—

German troops enter Warsaw.  It would not be the last major city in the Russian Empire to fall

By any metric, Russia was not prepared for a prolonged, industrialized war.   (more…)

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 holiday.

Security was light – true to form for the era – and few (if anyone) took note of the thin gentleman who entered the Capitol and the U.S. Senate chamber’s reception room.  Even fewer probably noticed the man hurriedly exit the building.

The explosion that followed rocked more than the U.S. Senate chambers.  Despite America’s official neutrality in the war that was consuming Europe, the nation had just experienced a terrorist attack in the heart of their seat of government.

It was an informal beginning to Germany’s undeclared war of sabotage against the United States.

—

The remains of the U.S. Senate chamber’s reception room.  The bomber had hoped to set off the device in the Senate itself, although he appeared to time the explosion to ensure no one was around

The smoke was still clearing from the U.S. Senate chambers on July 3rd when a thin man approached the door of famed banker J.P. Morgan Jr. in Long Island, New York.  Forcing his way into Morgan’s home, the stranger shot Morgan – twice – before being subdued by the banker’s butler, who bashed the would-be assailant on the head with a piece of coal.  Such a bizarre assault was found to be stranger still – the assailant was the same man who had planted the bomb in Washington. (more…)

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 Shika. The course of nearly five-months of bitter negotiations, and the threat of expanded war in Asia, had led to this meeting. At issue were Japan’s “Twenty-One Demands” – a list of diplomatic concessions Japan wanted from China, including territories, industry, and most concerning for Japan’s fellow Western allies, de facto control of Chinese government ministers.

If accepted, China would become little more than a Japanese protectorate. If refused, the Great War would expand even further.

—

Japanese artillery at Tsingtao. A German-held Chinese port, Tsingtao was captured in 1914 by a joint British-Japanese invasion, setting the stage for further Japanese expansion in China

When we started this retrospective on World War I, we mentioned that it made sense after covering World War II since the conflicts “really were two different phases of the same war.”  And most assuredly, the seeds of Japan’s imperialist designs on China – and war against the United States and Britain – were firmly planted on May 25th, 1915.   (more…)

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, the atmosphere was more carnival than political.

A few minutes before the session began the Italian nationalist poet, Gabrielle D’Annunzio, appeared in the rear of the public tribune which was so crowded that it seemed impossible to squeeze in anybody else.  But the moment the people saw him they lifted him shoulder high and passed him over their heads to the first row.

The entire chamber, and all those occupying the other tribunes, rose and applauded for five minutes, crying “Viva D’Annunzio!”  Later thousands sent him their cards and in return received his autograph bearing the date of this eventful day.  Premier Antonio Salandra entered, followed by all the members of the Cabinet.  “Viva Salandra!” roared the Deputies, with the cheering lasting longer than anyone cared to count.  After the formalities of the opening of the Chamber, Premier Salandra, deeply moved by the demonstration, arose and said:

“Gentlemen, I have the honor to present to you a bill to meet the eventual expenditures of a national war.”

On May 23rd, 1915, Italy willingly chose to enter the horrors of the Great War.

—

The Triple Alliance – Italy was allied with the Central Powers before 1914, but felt very much the junior partner. The animosity was mutual – Austria was contemplating a surprise attack against Italy as late as 1911

For most of the combatants in the Great War, their entry into the conflict was, in some way or another, strategic.  Austria had to punish a nation which had assassinated a royal heir.  Germany couldn’t afford to be trapped in a two-front war against Russia and France, and thus felt it had to strike first.  Even Britain, ostensibly fighting for Belgian independence, joined the battle to keep Germany from dominating continental geopolitics.  But for Italy, the Great War was far more ideological. (more…)

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 as a “who’s who” of political, theatrical and financial dignitaries from Britain and America.  Many passengers were enjoying the warm, sun-swept decks as they awaited their arrival in Liverpool.

Also enjoying the sites was 18 year-old Leslie Morton, a lookout among the Lusitania‘s crew.  A commotion in the calm waters easily caught his eye; a foaming residue trail in the ocean.  Morton could barely shout out his warning, “torpedoes coming on the starboard side!” before the Lusitania was hit, just underneath her bridge.  Steel and water rocketed skyward.  Almost instantly, a second explosion, “a million ton hammer” struck the vessel.  Within four minutes, the boat had lost her engines, steering and all electric power.  All aboard understood what happened – the Lusitania was destined for the bottom of the ocean.

Nearly 1,200 lives would join her.

—

The scale of the loss of life wouldn’t be apparent right away, but 1,198 civilians drowned on the Lusitania

Of all the tactics the Germans had unleashed to try and turn the Great War to their advantage, unrestricted submarine warfare had been the most effective. (more…)

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 to the routine of the trenches – a far cry from their prior lives in Morocco and Algeria.

On the darkening horizon a cloud began to form from the German line.  It moved slowly, practically crawling on the ground towards the French colonial troops.  Eyes began to itch and water; mouths filled with a distinct metallic taste.  And as the cloud enveloped the trenches, lungs seized and eyes felt like they were melting…because they were.  It was 168 tons of chlorine gas.

Science had brought another new horror to the Great War.

—

Clouds of Death – the use of chemical weapons at the Second Battle of Ypres contributed to nearly 70,000 Allied casualties over the course of one month

The use of new technology as new tools of terror had already been well-established in the Great War. (more…)

The retreat was slow, deliberate, and disciplined over the mountains leading from the Azerbaijani village of Dilman on April 15th, 1915.  For a conflict that already had claimed or maimed millions of combatants, the men of the Turkish 1st Expeditionary Force were relatively unscathed.  Few of the Ottoman regulars had lost their lives.  But their conscripted Kurdish cavalrymen were less fortunate – their entire force of nearly 12,000 men had either been killed or deserted.

The objective had been an indirect strike at Russian and British colonial influence through an invasion of Persia.  The Great War was further becoming a world war.

—

The Great Game, summarized in a 1911 cartoon: “If we hadn’t a thorough understanding, I (British lion) might almost be tempted to ask what you (Russian bear) are doing there with our little playfellow (Persian cat)”

By the spring of 1915, it was already clear that this was no longer just “Europe’s war.” (more…)

The morning was cold and grey as journalist J.M. Beaufort, an American observer with the German army, left with a detachment of German soldiers stationed in the Polish (then Russian) town of Augustów.  Just days earlier, on February 23rd, 1915, the town had been part of the gigantic battlefield known as the Masurian Lakes, and the German troops were looking for stranglers from both the German and Russian armies.

Deep within the woods, Beaufort and his German escort came across a disturbing scene.  Seated in the snow a “giant Russian” cradled the decapitated head of a dead German soldier, whose body lay covered by the Russian’s army jacket.  An empty flask sat between them, with the Russian dead-eyed and soaked in blood.  As they approached, the realized most of the blood was the Russian’s own – his left elbow was all but gone.  Momentarily brought out of his daze, the Russian looked at Beaufort and said only one word: “Nitchewo” (“It is nothing”).

He had been part of the 220,000 men Russia had brought to the Masurian Lakes.  Only 20,000 walked away.

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The German line at the Masurian Lakes. Germany hoped to launch an offensive before Russia could launch her own

The war between Tsarist Russia and Imperial Germany was in some ways the inverse of the conflict both nations would fight a generation later. (more…)

The weather in the Dardanelles – the strait that ran through Constantinople, connecting the Mediterranean and the Black Sea – was rough.  Cloudy skies and choppy seas lashed against the Ottoman forts that dotted the coastline.  Emerging from the gray horizon, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, one of the most modern battleship of the era, let loose a volley from her deck guns, beginning a long-distance bombardment.  Behind her sat a large joint Anglo-French fleet of mostly older battleships.  This was no pin-prick attack.  The fight to clear the Dardanelles and force the Ottoman Empire out of the war had begun.

It would end less than a year later, and in humiliating defeat for the Entente.

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A Beach Too Far – 568,000 Allied troops crammed into the narrow beachheads along the Bosphorus

No one expected the Ottomans to put up a fight. (more…)

A British Army recruiting poster from 1915. Not exactly a winning argument – die in the trenches to avoid dying at home. Around 1,400 people were killed in almost 90 air raids in Britain during World War I

The process had been replayed many times already – initial hopes that the War would not escalate; would not consume some new front or turn some new technology into a means to kill or destroy, were constantly dashed, only to see the War expand further still.  Why should the air be any different?

The attack on Great Yarmouth was hardly the first aerial assault in the Great War.  From the war’s very beginning, Germany had assembled the “Ostend Carrier Pigeon Detachment” – a code-named unit for conducting Zeppelin raids on Entente targets.  A few bombings had occurred at the start of the Belgian campaign.   Liège and Antwerp were both hit in August and early September, causing very little damage and few civilian casualties.  A more consistent bombing campaign by German byplanes had hit Paris in the opening weeks of the war, but the destruction was minimal and the German demands (dropped in leaflet form by the planes) of immediate surrender struck Parisians as more comical than threatening.  An accidental bombing near the Notre Dame Cathedral, and the start of trench warfare, combined to seemingly end the German fascination with aerial bombardment before it even really began.

The remains of a British home in Suffolk of April 1915

If air bombardment was seeking an advocate in the German leadership, it wasn’t Kaiser Wilhelm II.  While German Naval Commander Alfred von Tirpitz lobbied vigorously for attacking Britain through the air (perhaps in part because his fleet was being kept out of combat and any air campaign would be under the Naval office), Wilhelm was concerned that attacking Britain would mean attacking his English relatives – most of the houses of Europe were literally related.  But as the hopes of a quick resolution to the war were dashed and 1914 became 1915, Wilhelm relented to his Admiral’s advice: “The measure of the success will lie not only in the injury which will be caused to the enemy, but also in the significant effect it will have in diminishing the enemy’s determination to prosecute the war,” Tirpitz claimed.

Britain would now experience it’s first “blitz.”  “Nowadays there is no such animal as a non-combatant,” justified German Zeppelin corps commander Peter Strasser, “modern warfare is total warfare.”

Peter Strasser – head of Germany’s Zeppelin Corps. Strasser advocated the Zeppelin as a tool of “total war” against civilian populations

Know Thy Enemy – and thy Friend, apparently.

A Zeppelin bomb crater in Paris

The German Gotha G.IV. – the first “heavy bomber” of the Great War. Only around 230 were built (as were several hundred of similar Gotha models). Initially, the Gothas were the Great War’s equivalent of a B-29 Superfortress – capable of carrying both a massive payload and multiple machine guns

The Gothas attacked during the day, a far cry from the usual nighttime Zeppelin raids.  A June 13, 1917 daytime raid on London killed 162 and wounded another 432 without the loss of a single Gotha.  As frightening as the initial Zeppelin raids had been, they were nothing compared to the German Gothas.  The Royal Flying Corps commander Lionel Charlton understood the long-term consequences of the raid, calling it “the beginning of a new epoch in the history of warfare.”

The British defense against the Gothas was even worse than their efforts against the Zeppelins.  A July 1917 Gotha raid against London killed another 57 civilians and wounded 193.  Over 100 sorties were launched against the Gotha formation, succeeding in shooting down one to the loss of two RFC planes.  It wasn’t until August of 1917 that British air defenses could coordinate their counterattacks.  The loss of three Gothas during an August raid convinced the Germans they had to switch to nighttime attacks as only 30 Gothas had originally been produced.

The Royal Flying Corps – the RFC would eventually become the RAF in 1918, but not before surviving horrendous casualty rates, including over 700 killed in 1917 alone (a large percentage of the RFC’s active pilots). Most of these pilots served in France, not in Britain

Worse for the Germans, the Royal Flying Corps finally decided to be proactive and target the Gothas on the ground.  Sorties at St. Denis-Westrem and Gontrode in Belgium, the home of the Gotha airfields, forced the Germans to further push back their bases of operation.  With even greater distances to travel, many Gotha formations missed their targets, dropping bombs on rural locations or even in the ocean.

By 1918, the Germans were desperate enough to press the Zeppelin and Gotha attacks regardless of the losses.  Gothas were dropping like flies – a May 1918 squadron of over 40 planes lost 7 in an attack against London.  The high rate of losses prompted Peter Strasser to personally direct an assault against London aboard one of his beloved Zeppelins.  Leading a raiding party of four Zeppelins in early August 1918, British air defenses managed to shoot down Strasser’s Zeppelin, killing him and his entire crew.  The remaining Zeppelins, leaderless, crashed either in England or at sea.  It was the last Zeppelin raid of the Great War.

The remains of a Zeppelin. By the end of the war, the Zeppelin were little more than ineffective death traps for their German crews

By any definition, the German aerial campaign against Britain was a failure.  Despite killing nearly 1,400 civilians and wounding another 3,300, the material damage to the British cause was only around 3 million pounds (47 million in 2014 pounds).  The prime objective – knocking Britain out of the war – never came close to materializing.  Throughout the Great War, Germany would adopt tactics that successfully struck at Britain’s ability to continue the fight.  The unrestricted submarine warfare nearly starved Britain and the “Spring Offensive” of 1918, targeting the British Fifth Army, were both terrible blows to British morale.  But Germany rarely committed to these campaigns except in fits and starts, and Germany never attempted to try them all at once.  One can only imagine a Britain pressed by U-boats, bombed heavily by Zeppelins or byplanes and suffering major losses in France all at the same time.  The German strategy of separating Britain from its French ally might have succeeded.

Nevertheless, the campaign had forever changed the nature of war.  As Wells had predicted, the concept of a “front” at which all the fighting was done was now a 19th Century concept.  Civilians were as much a target as soldiers in the field, if not more so as those civilians provided the material and political support necessary to maintain the war effort.  Strasser was sadly correct – modern warfare was now total warfare.  Strasser prided himself on his air ships being called “baby-killers.”  In his mind, it only proved how effective his tactics had become.

British propaganda on the Zeppelin raids – dubbed “baby-killers,” the raids only deepened the British commitment to fight

British Prime Minister David Lloyd George promised to repay Germany for its air raids “with compound interest,” leading to the development of the four-engined Handley Page V/1500 bomber, designed to drop 7,500 lbs on Berlin.  The Handley never saw action, and relatively few British bombs hit German territory.  The few that did prompted German retribution – against French cities.  Thus the French demanded that their British allies stop.

Berlin saw only one air raid during the War.  In 1916 a French plane flew over Berlin and dropped not bombs but leaflets.  For in the words of the translated leaflet, “Paris did not make war on women and children.”

In tattered clothes, on frostbit feet, what remained of the Ottoman 3rd Army lumbered down from the mountains around Sarikamish in the Russian Caucuses.  150,000 men had launched the Ottoman Empire’s first offensive of the Great War.  An estimated 42,000 had returned, defeated by a combination of Russians, Armenains, frigid temperatures, disease, and overwhelming hubris by their commander.  The final death throes of the 3rd Amry on January 17, 1915 would linger for months – even the commanding General of the Ottoman forces in the Caucuses would die, having contracted typhus while touring the battle’s front line.

The “sick man of Europe,” as Tsar Nicholas I had referred to the Ottoman Empire 62 years earlier, had coughed.

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The Central Powers – Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany; Kaiser and King Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary; Sultan Mehmed V of the Ottoman Empire; Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria.

Sultan Mehmed V hadn’t wanted to join the Central Powers.  In fact, he didn’t want to the join Europe’s war at all.

But the supposed supreme leader of the Ottoman Empire had little say in the matter.  The Sultan’s role had significantly shrunk as near centuries of malaise prompted the “Young Turk” revolution of 1908, restoring the Turkish Constitution and Parliament.  And the Empire’s repeated defeats in the Balkan Wars just years prior to the Great War, which cost the Ottomans most of their remaining European territory, had prompted yet another coup in 1913 which brought to power a triumvirate of civilian leaders known as “the three Pashas.”  Mehmed V was now an afterthought, and after 30 years of semi-solitary confinement in Topkapı Palace, Mehmed hadn’t exactly been groomed to be a political leader.  He preferred writing poetry to drafting legislation.

An Ottoman machine-gun unit in the Allahüekber Mountains

Enver Pasha was more than happy to fill the void.  One-third of the “three Pashas,” Enver saw the burgeoning conflict in Europe as a chance to regain lost territories and glories for the Ottoman Empire.  Like Germany’s Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, Enver hid behind the thin pretext of only being the Empire’s Minister of War while orchestrating an Ottoman entry on the side of the Central Powers.  Diplomats elsewhere knew better, half-jokingly referring to the Empire as “Enverland.”

There had been little doubt which side the Ottomans would chose if a war broke out.  An Ottoman alliance with the Entente was all but impossible.  Russia had been the Ottoman’s implacable enemy for over 340 years – the two empires had already fought 11 wars, one as recently as 1878.  Britain had eyed the Ottoman possessions in the Middle East greedily, hoping to expand upon their Egyptian protectorate or at least counter Russian ambitions in Persia.  Meanwhile Germany had provided economic and military support to the Ottomans and assisted with the expansion of the famed Orient Express, which connected southern Germany to markets in the Middle East and India.

A victorious Entente would, by Ottoman calculations, eventually divide up the Empire whether Turkey fought with or against them.  A victorious Germany, however, might help preserve the Empire from foreign pressures long often for needed reforms to be enacted.  The Ottomans signed a secret treaty with Germany (without the Sultan’s signature, prompting some speculation that the treaty was invalid) to declare war on Russia in early August.  By October of 1914, the Ottoman navy was shelling Russian ports.

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Enver Pasha – the Minister of War, and de facto Commander-in-Chief of the Empire.  Enver was part of a triumvirate that came to be called “the three Pashas”

The problem for the Sarikamish Offensive was not the target itself. The province, centered on the chief city and capital of the same name, had been part of the Ottoman Empire for 344 years before Russia annexed it in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877.  The problems were more fundamental – starting with Enver’s expectations for what an offensive would unlease.  Enver envisioned leading a rebellion of Turkic peoples against the Russians.  It wasn’t the first time Enver thought in such grandiose terms; he had the Sultan issue a jihad against the Entente at the start of the war, which was largely ignored.

But the Turks faced even more formidable obstacles, beginning with the terrain itself.  The Ottoman 3rd Army would have to attack the Russian Caucasus Army across the Allahüekber Mountains, towering over 9,000 feet, which meant traversing high-altitude valleys cut by steep gorges over primitive roads in winter conditions. To make matters worse, Enver was planning a complex battle of encirclement, with three Turkish army corps approaching the Russians simultaneously from different directions, calling for carefully coordinated movements despite almost nonexistent communications.

Enver claimed his plan was drawn from the best inspirations of Napoleonic and German military thinking.  That Germany’s chief military adviser Otto Liman von Sanders insisted the operation was fruitless didn’t matter.  Even the Ottoman commander in charge of the Caucuses, Hasan İzzet, opposed the plan, knowing the difficultly of getting through mountainous passes in winter with troops ill-equipped for such conditions.  For his frankness, Izzet was removed just a week before the offensive would commence.  Enver would be leading the operation at Sarikamish.

Russian troops in their trenches at Sarikamish

Despite the hurdles, the Ottoman attack made good initial progress. On December 22, 1914 the Ottoman 3rd Army’s 150,000 men hit the Russian Caucasian Army’s 65,000 troops, still bloodied from their November fiasco.  The Ottoman XI Corps pinned down the Russian front line as the IX Corps and the X Corps made their way around the Russian Army’s flanks.  Within the first three days of the Sarikamish Offensive, the Turks had progressed 50 miles into Russian territory – remarkable considering how few Ottoman troops were dressed for the conditions – and were now turning the Russian flanks.  The Russian Caucasian Army looked to soon be surrounded.

Enver’s wildly ambitious plan had met early success – a tremendous credit to his troops.  But the cost of marching in the frigid mountains sapped his men’s strength quickly.  Recognizing the limits of the XI Corps’ endurance, Ottoman commanders halted the offensive to give their men time to rest.  No longer pressed on the front lines, the Russians immediately retreated to Sarikamish itself, joined by reinforcements who had just arrived by rail.  The encirclement had failed and now the Russians were at near parity with the Ottomans in terms of the number of troops engaged.

Kurdish Cavalry recruited by the Ottomans

By the start of 1915, the Russians struck at the individual Ottoman wings as the XI Corps, at the center of the front line, struggled to keep up, leaving the IX and X Corps exposed.  Harassed by local Armenian guerrillas recruited by the Russians, Ottoman troops found themselves unable to get reinforcements or even communicate between the three Corps of the 3rd Army.  Col. Hafiz Hakki, Enver’s brother-in-law and one of the Corps commanders, knew by January 2nd that the offensive had failed and that the entire 3rd Army was now in danger.  But Enver refused to acknowledge his error, wiring Hakki that “the offensive is to go on at full strength.”

By January 6th, the 3rd Army’s headquarters was under attack.  Three entire Ottoman divisions had surrendered.  The reinforcements that the 3rd Army had been counting on did arrive from Constantinople on the Black Sea, but the troop transports were promptly sunk by Russian warships.  Hakki, finding himself one of the few high level officers still alive or not captured, ordered a general retreat.  In reality, the retreat had already occurred, with the surviving troops crossing the border to find Enver and his German advisers awaiting them.  If Enver was upset by these losses, he concealed it well; Lewis Einstein, an American diplomat in Constantinople, later recalled, “Even when he returned from the Caucasus, where an entire army had been lost by his fault, he seemed perfectly happy, and went the same evening to a concert.”

Russian Armenian volunteers

The scale of the defeat horrified the rest of the Central Powers.  Ottoman casualties were difficult to pin down, with estimates as high as 90,000 killed and 50,000 taken prisoner – many of the survivors were 3rd Army reinforcements and not part of the original invasion force.  Col. Hafiz Hakki was promoted to General and given the command of the entire Ottoman Caucuses – and died just weeks later from typhus, which had already claimed the lives of thousands of Ottoman soldiers.

The Russians, reeling just weeks earlier, lost perhaps as few as 16,000 men (one estimate had the number as high as 30,000).  Nevertheless, as one German officer attached to the army wrote later, the Ottoman 3rd Army had “suffered a disaster which for rapidity and completeness is without parallel in military history.”

Still, if defeat concerned the Central Powers, victory hadn’t allayed the fears of the Entente.  The Allies had assumed the Ottomans weren’t capable of offensive action.  Coupled with a failed Ottoman attack against the Suez Canal just weeks after Sarikamish, the Entente now believed the Ottomans needed to be driven out of the war.  Defeating the Turks would lessen the pressure on the Russians, open up the Straits and allow the Tsar’s troops to be easily supplied, plus possibly bring in Bulgaria and Greece on the side of the Entente (both were former Ottoman territories) and open up a southern front against Germany and Austria.  The ashes of Sarikamish proved fertile soil for the seeds of Gallipoli.

The forgotten genocide: the exact scale of the Armenian genocide is unknown, with estimates from 1-1.5 million. Pasha blamed Russian success in recruiting Armenians to fight for the Tsar for the defeat at Sarikamish, resulting in part of the Ottoman policy that led to so many deaths

Sarikamish would have another lasting impact on the Great War.  Enver blamed the defeat on the Armenian volunteer troops that fought for the Russians; increasing Ottoman fears that the Empire’s own Armenian population might rise up in revolt.  The Armenians had been simmering for decades following several massacres during the 1890s, and a proposed peace summit in July of 1914 had only served to push the Armenians towards a policy of alliance with Russia in hopes of annexation.  Defeat at Sarikamish provoked an immediate Ottoman crackdown.

Within months, the Armenian genocide would begin.