World War I

I’ve never been in the military, or any war, but I’m fascinated by them anyway, particularly the US Civil War, World War I, and World War II.  I’m not aware that I have any relatives who fought in the Civil War, as ¾ of my family came from Poland around the turn of the century, and my uncle tells me that our ancestor in Brooklyn was in the fire dept (FDNY – protecting the city from the scourge of Confederate terrorists!) and exempt from service.  I’m also not aware of any relatives who fought in Vietnam.  I have several uncles who fought in WWII (my father was too young) and Korea.  And my mom’s dad did fight in World War I, in the US Army.  We have a picture of him in the “campaign hat” which was replaced in the trenches by the flat helmet we shared with the British.

 This is one of the strangest wars – far stranger than WWII.  Artillery blowing men into bits.  Puttees.  Biplanes, poison gas, and bizarre shaped, primitive tanks.  Of course any original footage of the war is in grainy black & white (while there is plenty of color footage of WWII) and the herky-jerky timing with everyone walking way too fast.  There had been wars between the Civil War and WWI: the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), the Spanish-American War (1898), the Boer War (1900-03), the Russo-Japanese War (1905), two Balkans Wars (1912-13).  But this was a twisted mix of primitive and modern war.  The major weapons which were perfected in WWII – planes & tanks – were invented and introduced, in crude form, in this war.

 Background.  In 1914, Europe was spoiling for a fight.  France wanted Alsace-Lorraine back from the Germans, and had their Plan XVII (what happened to Plans I-XVI?) to retake that territory lost during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), complete with lots of maps of Germany and no maps of France.  Germany wanted to take out France with a large swing around west of Paris, and come back and smash the French in Alsace-Lorraine, then dash off to the east to fend off the Russians – the so-called “Schlieffen Plan”, which assumed that the Belgians, whose country was inconveniently in between Germany and France, would simply step aside and let the Germans pass through (“you don’t mind, do you?” “No, of course, go right ahead.”). 

            As we well know, the whole thing was triggered, so to speak, when a Serbian, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand (no relation to the band) in Sarajevo in June 1914.  After this, a chain reaction of ultimatums and mobilizations pulled Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, and France into war together, with England sitting it out initially until Belgium’s neutrality was violated.  Italy also declined to get involved with her allies Germany and Austria-Hungary, instead entering the war on the Allied side in 1915.  Remarkably, Princip was not executed for his crime, as he was under 18 when it occurred and Austria-Hungary had a law against executing minors, and they didn’t make an exception for his case.  Amazing: he killed the heir to the throne, and he’s simply locked up in jail.  He lived to see the war escalate, and died in jail of tuberculosis in 1918. 

            Of course, nothing ever goes according to plan.  First the Belgians decided to resist after all (as hopeless as it may have been – “resistance is futile!”).  Then the Russians mobilized a little too fast, forcing the Germans to switch forces east, leaving them not enough to go west of Paris, so von Moltke, the German commander, adlibbed Schlieffen’s plan (he had died in 1905) and passed by to the east of Paris.  For their part, the French couldn’t seem to break through the German lines defending Alsace-Lorraine, but a few of their more “think outside the Plan XVII” officers were noting large German formations going westwards through Belgium and wondering if maybe someone should start paying attention there – and were told to SHUT UP because…it wasn’t part of the Plan!  Ultimately, though, Gallieni mobilized the taxi cabs of Paris to ferry forces to the front, smashing into the German flank at the Marne, and they fell back to the Aisne.  Then both sides raced to the sea, setting up trenches from Switzerland to the English Channel.  And the slaughter really began.

 Trenches.  These were mainly on the Western Front, which was the major theater of the war.  Common ingredients: firebays, traverses, zigzags, communication trenches, dugouts, latrines, firesteps, lice, rats, trench raids, half-buried rotting corpses, lots of mud, etc.  French trenches were often designed a little shabbier than British, while the Germans tended to overengineer theirs (the BMW Trench! New 1916 Model!).  The cratered, barbed-wire infested, corpse ridden killing zone in between the two lines, where machine guns consistently mowed down both side’s armies in droves, was No Man’s Land.

 Puttees.  For some reason, these were prevalent in this war, and almost nonexistent before and after.  Hardly anything else epitomizes the typical WWI uniform than puttees.  These are the spiral leggings from the ankle up to below the knee.  Not only British and French, but also American forces traded their canvas leggings in for these.  Even the Germans, known for their jackboots, used them.  I never figured out what the deal was with these.

 Helmets.  In 1914, every nation went to war with some form of cloth hat for head protection.  The Germans had their unique pickelhaubes (spiked helmets – but of leather, not steel)(bottom right), the French had kepis, and the Brits, Japanese, and Russians had peaked caps (see “Legends of the Fall” for the early British uniform).  Someone figured out that these things weren’t the best to keep shell fragments and bullets from shredding the human head, so by 1916 most of the nations had introduced steel helmets.  The Germans had a larger, goofier version of the helmet they used in WWII, with two large lugs like Frankenstein (bottom left); the British and Americans used a flat helmet (see “Braveheart”)(top and middle rows, second from right) of medieval origin, and the French came out with the “Adrian” helmet, which I can’t stand.  Also, the French went from navy blue greatcoats with bright red pants (which dates back to 1867) (middle row, far left), to “horizon blue” uniforms which were much more practical – though aesthetically, I prefer the 1914 uniform.

 Machine Guns.  Whether it be the German Spandaus, the British Vickers and Lewis guns (which the Germans liked so much, they converted captured models to fire the 8mm Mauser round), or the French Hotchkiss models, these proved to be more than capable of reducing human waves of attacking forces into little more than another class of corpses.  See also, Artillery.

 Artillery.  Excellent for turning the countryside into a desolate moonscape, and blowing men of any nationality into oblivion.  The barrages would drive men crazy with despair, those it didn’t obliterate.  But ironically, despite week long artillery attacks, after which it was assumed no one from the other side would be left alive, somehow enough forces had either pulled back, or successfully sought shelter in dugouts (often reinforced with concrete and immune to even direct hits) that more than enough survivors could come out of the ground, man the machine guns, and turn the oncoming attack into yet another wave of dead bodies.  By the end of the war, armies were experimenting with “creeping barrages” which screened in front of the attacking forces, forcing the defenders – in theory – to keep their heads down.  But even these didn’t work too well.

 Poison Gas.  Chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas were the main ones used, not only by the Germans, who started this mess, but also the Allies.  Of course, the reaction to gas – the gas masks – were equally bizarre.  The German masks look like what we think of as gas masks, with eye pieces and a canister (e.g. the animated denizens from “Pink Floyd the Wall”), whereas the French M2 mask, surprisingly effective, was simply a bag with two eye pieces and a small mouthpiece, again evoking piglike children from “Pink Floyd The Wall”; (see middle row, second from right, being used by US troops).  Although gas has been used since WWI, no war is as closely associated with it as this one.

 Tanks.  The Brits started with their own, bizarre rhomboid tanks with the treads going all the way around (Marks I-V), introduced at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 (see above, far right corner).  The French Renault model was smaller and had a turret (the US used these), whereas Germany’s only tank, the A7V, was a monster box monstrosity (middle row, far right – with the skull & crossbones, it looks like the Delta Tau Chi float from “Animal House”).  The Germans also captured substantial numbers of British tanks, trained on them, and turned them around to make up the majority of their own tank force, such as it was.  All the tanks were slow and lumbering, frequently breaking down.  Only by the end did the Allies have enough to make a difference, but even there, tank tactics left much to be desired – as Liddell-Hart and Guderian soon decided.

 Biplanes.  It’s not WWI without the knights of the air, including Germany’s Red Baron and their colorful Flying Circus (from which Monty Python got their name).  Black? Red? Green? Purple?  Great colors for planes.  And I love the Maltese crosses on the planes.  The Brits had their Sopwith Camel (w/o Snoopy), the French had Spads & Nieuports, but I love the German Albatros the most.

 Major Battles.  Tannenberg was the major German victory on the Eastern Front, with Brusilov’s offensive the only victory for the Russians there.  On the Western Front, the battles of Verdun and the Somme, both in 1916, were the most important. 

            Verdun was a fortress town in Eastern France, the pride of France, site of forts Douamont and Vaux.  Douamont, the largest, was captured by a German sergeant who found it mostly empty, as the garrison had been severely depleted to go fighting outside.  Vaux was captured after its garrison was reduced to drinking its own urine out of severe thirst.  But the German plan to bleed France white defending the area backfired, as the Germans ended up losing almost as many troops themselves in the process.

            The Somme battle was England’s attempt to take the heat off the French at Verdun by distracting the Germans, and their chance to debut their new tanks, wasted away piecemeal fashion.  Moreover, the weeklong artillery barrage not only didn’t wipe out the Germans, sufficient Germans survived to mow down 60,000 British soldiers, and 20,000 on the first day alone – the bloodiest day in British military history.  Both battles simply killed thousands of soldiers yet provided no strategic benefit to anyone. 

 In The Navy.  Despite competing with the Royal Navy in the years leading up the war, the German surface fleet really didn’t do much, fighting one inconclusive sea battle at Jutland in 1916, then retreating into its own ports for the remainder of the war.  The German U-Boat fleet, however, began making its historic record, in an almost (emphasis on “almost”) successful attempt to starve out Britain from much-needed supplies. Yet sinking the Lusitania in 1915 backfired, pushing much public opinion in otherwise neutral America against the Germans.  For its part, the Royal Navy’s blockade of Germany was far more effective.

 Eastern Front.  This was much more fluid due to the more open spaces in Poland and Ukraine.  The Austrians didn’t do much except compete with the Russians for incompetence.  The Germans were led by the killer twin team of Ludendorff & Hindenburg, whereas the Russians only had Brusilov of any value – Rennenkampf and Samsonov hated each other, and their dispute allowed L&H to defeat them at Tannenberg.  When Brusilov actually spanked the Germans in 1916 – the only victory of the Russians – the Romanians hopped in the war on the Allied side, only to be thoroughly spanked in turn by the Germans, who then walked into Bucharest.  In February 1917, Kerenksy took over in Russia, but continued the war [note: Kerensky survived not only the later revolution, but outlived Trostky, Lenin, and Stalin, and died in 1970!].  The Germans helpfully smuggled Lenin into St Petersburg, where he bumped Russia into its second – Bolshevik – revolution in late 1917.  Lenin signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and Germany actually WON the Eastern Front war in World War I.  This allowed them to move forces west in 1918 for a spring offensive…just in time to meet the Americans.

 Middle East.  I covered this in the “Al Aurens” blog entry about T.E. Lawrence, aka “Lawrence of Arabia”. 

 Africa.  The Germans had Cameroon, south-west Africa (now known as Namibia), and Tanzania.  The first two were easily captured by Allied forces, but in the latter, a brilliant German general, Von Lettow-Vorbeck (above in slouch hat), waged a guerilla war against the Brits and remained undefeated until the Armistice.  In “The Young Indiana Jones”, the young Indiana Jones bumps up against him several times.  (Yes, it’s just a TV show.)

 Asia.  Oddly, in WWI the Japanese were on the Allied side, and fought against Germany.  Basically this consisted of the Japanese divesting the Germans of their colonies in China (e.g. Tsingtao, as in the beer – the artillery attack is shown above in the bottom row, second from left) and the Bismarck Islands.  The Germans had their hands full in Europe and weren’t really in a position to defend these farflung possessions.

 US.  The US entered in 1917, but troops didn’t end up fighting until 1918.  Unlike WWII, where the Americans came fully equipped and ended up supplying practically everyone else on the Allied side – including the Russians – with weapons and equipment, and completely equipping the Free French Army, in WWI the Americans were “hey, can I bum this off you?” with helmets from the British, machine guns, tanks, and artillery from the French, and pretty much simply provided warm bodies and aggressive soldiers who weren’t worn out by years of fighting and were eager to tear the Huns a new asshole.  In the movie “The Lost Battalion”, a German junior officer complains to his captain, “these Americans don’t retreat when they’re supposed to!”, to which the jaded German captain simply replies, “how inconsiderate of them.”  The Springfield rifle, with its action copied from Mauser, was less common than the Enfield.  The Chauchat machine gun, borrowed from the French, turned out to be incorrectly adapted to the .30-06 cartridge, and was more reliable in its original 8mm Lebel caliber.  The Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) made its debut late in the war.  US troops traded their campaign hats for British style helmets, and their canvas leggings for puttees.  US soldiers stationed next to British troops used Lee-Enfield rifles.  Black US soldiers were often issued Adrian helmets and French rifles and equipment, and fought under white officers.  US forces also fought in Italy.  The North Russian Expeditionary Force, sent to make sure Allied material didn’t fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks, used Mosin-Nagant rifles and Vickers machine guns. 

 Books.  My favorite, of course, is All Quiet on the Western Front, though translated into English from Am Westen Nichts Neues.  The war also inspired tons of poetry -  and Lord of the Rings, by Tolkien, who served as an infantry officer in the British Army during the war.  The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman, is an excellent review of the opening chapter of the war, before the Race to the Sea and trench warfare began.

 Movies.  By far the best WWI movie is “All Quiet on the Western Front”, the 1931 B&W version.   For some reason, color movies of WWI, e.g. “The Lost Battalion” or the 1970s version of AQotWF, don’t seem to really fit the war that well.  Although it’s in black & white, I can’t recommend the Sgt. York movie with Gary Cooper in the lead role, as 80% of the movie is his background in the US and only the last tail end of the movie actually takes place in the military, or even over in France.  “The Fighting 69^th” has James Cagney.  “Wings” was probably the best WWI biplane film, though I did like “Flyboys.”  I already reviewed “Joyeux Noel”, the movie which covered the Christmas Truce of WWI.

 Perhaps the idea sum up here is to pull back into a reference from the Python blog two weeks ago: “12 Monkeys”.  There was a brief scene in the movie where Bruce Willis’ character, who is traveling through time in an effort to save humanity from a virus which wiped out the majority of the population, accidentally winds up in a French trench during the middle of a battle during WWI.  The French are wearing gas masks and all hell is breaking loose, and WHOOSH, Bruce Willis comes from out of nowhere, freaked out and disoriented, and for his part freaking out the French as well (“who is this guy?? Where did he come from?  Is he German??”) and finally he’s whisked out, only to find out later he has a German Mauser bullet lodged in him somewhere.  WHOA….