Jump to content

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Lester_in_reno

World War 1. 100 years ago right now

Recommended Posts

Jeezus Christo !

 

---------------

Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart[1]VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO (5 May 1880 – 5 June 1963) was a British Army officer born of Belgian and Irish parents. He was awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest military decoration awarded for valour "in the face of the enemy" in various Commonwealth countries.[2] He served in the Boer War, First World War, and Second World War. He was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear; survived two plane crashes; tunnelled out of a prisoner-of-war camp; and tore off his own fingers when a doctor refused to amputate them. Describing his experiences in the First World War, he wrote, "Frankly I had enjoyed the war."[3]:89

After returning home from service (including a period as a prisoner-of-war) in the Second World War, he was sent to China as Winston Churchill's personal representative. While en route he attended the Cairo Conference.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Carton_de_Wiart

 

cerified_Subarus.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

looking for those draft dodgers

 

Another mass roundup of suspected “slackers” inconveniences 20,000 young men in New York City, 12,000 in New Jersey, 27,000 in Chicago, etc. This will, as usual, be a colossal waste of time and manpower, yielding just a handful of actual draft evaders, while men who didn’t happen to have their documents on them (some because they’re too old to be eligible for the draft and thus have no documents) are held overnight while trying to get someone to bring documents.

cerified_Subarus.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

wait until the German people find out for how long they've been lied to by their Government !

Just wait!

 

----------------

 

Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg issues an address to the German people saying that Entente planes have been dropping pamphlets containing “most insane rumors,” such as that Germany is losing the war. “Why,” asks Mr. von H, “does the enemy incite colored people against the German soldiers? Because he wants to annihilate us.”

cerified_Subarus.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Merica!

 

 

41514557_1844100932350642_57250353737011

On this day 100 years ago, the Battle of St. Mihiel which took place. This was the first battle of the war both conducted and planned by an American army with its own commanders, and it would be supported by the French. St.Mihiel was a natural fortress and the Germans had spent years building five defense lines with enormous belts of barbed wire, machine gun nests, and concrete dugouts. It was a really important spot as well. From here, the Germans could hit the flanks of any Allied attacks toward Sedan. Just behind the whole salient was the region containing Metz and Thionville, with all of the iron ore and the steel mills the Germans had taken in 1914.

This battle was American Commander John Pershing’s baby. He thought the Americans had been wasted in defensive fighting for too long, and wanted a US army formed to hammer a real blow on the enemy. Well, back on August 10th the American First Army had been formed when American soldiers had finally arrived in enough numbers to form a full army, and Pershing got his wish.

Martin Gilbert writes that the Americans had tricked German High Command into thinking the attack would come at Mulhouse. A copy of part of the operational orders for a Mulhouse attack had been thrown into a wastebasket at Belfort and a German agent had found it, as intended, and passed it on as fact. However, German Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff had been evacuating the salient for a few days since he noticed the American build up near Verdun.

 

For this attack (Martin Gilbert) there would be 3,000 big guns and 40,000 tons of ammo. 15 miles of road were built using 100,000 tons of crushed stone, 45 miles of standard gauge and 250 miles of light gauge railways were built. 21,000 beds and 65 evacuation trains had even been made available for the wounded.

Over 200,000 Americans and 48,000 French attacked in the pouring rain on a 20km front.

The Americans fired off 100,000 shells of phosgene gas, incapacitating thousands and thousands of Germans, and in the skies flew over 1,400 planes. The attackers had (Stevenson) a 3-1 advantage in infantry, at least 5-1 in artillery, and over 7-1 in aircraft. Just a side note here, while both the Americans and French fought under Pershing’s command, the big guns and the 267 light tanks were all French made and a lot of them had French crews.

The encircling the Allies hoped for did not come about, and most of the German infantry managed to escape. The Allies took 7,000 casualties and the Germans 4,000... not counting the 13,000 prisoners they lost to the Allies. There are even some rather unusual stories about the surrendering of Germans. Gilbert writes of American Sergeant Harry J. Adams who saw a German run into a dugout, but Adams only had two bullets left in his pistol. He shot them into the dugout entrance and demanded that the German surrender. So the German did, and then another one came out and did, and another... until 300 of them had surrendered. Adams marched them back to the American lines, armed only with an empty pistol. Apparently, when the column was first seen, some people thought it was a German counterattack.

Overall, the Allies took over 500 square kilometers of land and cleared out the railway link. At noon on the 13th, the French entered St. Mihiel. When the Americans entered Essey later that day, they had a tough time getting the locals to come out of hiding - they did not know that United States soldiers were fighting in the war.

American Brigade Commander Douglas MacArthur, going through the captured German lines at night, could see the city of Metz through his binoculars and thought it didn’t look all that well-defended, and he proposed a surprise attack on it to his superiors. Such an attack, if successful, would have been a serious prize, but Supreme Allied Commander Ferdinand Foch was busy making plans for a big new coordinated offensive at multiple points in two weeks and didn’t want any distractions.

 

cerified_Subarus.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Note: I recently found a Dutch website with some nasty-azz WW 1 death/ dead body  photos.

Most  of them are small in size.

It was a nasty-azz conflict. I am going to post some of them coming in the next few weeks, so fair warning.

 

Quote mark   You were between the devil and the deep blue sea. If you go forward, you`ll likely be shot, if you go back you`ll be court-martialled and shot, so what the hell do you do? What can you do? You just go forward because that`s the only bloke you can take your knife in, that`s the bloke you are facing. Quote mark

Private W. Hay

Quote mark   For a young man who had a long and worthwhile future awaiting him, it was not easy to expect death almost daily. However, after a while I got used to the idea of dying young. Strangely, it had a sort of soothing effect and prevented me from worrying too much. Because of this I gradually lost the terrible fear of being wounded or killed. Quote mark

German war-volunteer Reinhold Spengler

Quote mark   We passed dead men of both armies, but many more Boche than Americans. I was surprised at the indifference I felt toward dead Americans - they seemed a perfectly natural thing to come across, and I felt absolutely no shudder go down my back as I would have had I seen the same thing a year ago. Quote mark

Lieutenant Phelps Harding, American Expeditionary Force, in a letter, 1918

 

Quote mark   A soldier (who had just returned from the Western Front) was so disordered while he was going down the stairs into the London tube station, he became suddenly aware of the crowds of people coming up, he looked haggardly about, and evidently mistaking the hollow space below for the trenches and the ascending crowd for Germans, fixed his bayonet and charged. But for the women constable on duty at the turn of the staircase, who was quick enough to divine his trouble and hang on to him with all her strength to prevent his forward advance, he would have wounded many and caused danger and panic. Quote mark

British pioneer policewoman Mary Allen, in her autobiography

 

Quote mark   Before an attack, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can't complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here. Quote mark

Robert Graves, in "Good-bye to all that"

 

Quote mark   I look upon the People and the Nation as handed on to me as an responsibility conferred upon me by God, and I believe, as it is written in the Bible, that it is my duty to increase this heritage for which one day I shall be called upon to give an account. Whoever tries to interfere with my task I shall crush. Quote mark

German Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1913

 

 

cerified_Subarus.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote mark   I didn't get much peace, but I heard in Norway that Russia might well become a huge market for tractors soon. Quote mark

Henry Ford, when returning from his unofficial peace mission, December 24, 1915

Quote mark   The Second World War took place not so much because no one won the First, but because the Versailles Treaty did not acknowledge this truth. Quote mark

Historian Paul Johnson, 1972

Quote mark   All through the war the great armament firms were supplied from the enemy countries. The French and the British sold war materials to the Germans through Switzerland, Holland and the Baltic neutrals, and the Germans supplied optical sights for the British Admiralty. The armament industry, which had helped stimulate the war, made millions out of it. Quote mark

British historian C.J. Pennethorne Hughesz, 1935

Quote mark   I was called up in the war and sent to a hospital. I dressed wounds, applied iodine, gave enemas, did blood transfusions. If the doctor ordered: "Brecht, amputate a leg!", I would reply, "Certainly, Your Excellency!", and cut off the leg. If I was told, "Perform a trepanning!" I opened the man's skull and messed about with his brains. I saw how they patched fellows up, so as to cart them back to the Front as quickly as they could. Quote mark

Bertold Brecht, German playwright and poet, 1918

 

Quote mark   If the women in the factories stopped work for twenty minutes, the Allies would lose the war. Quote mark

French Field Marshal Joffre

Quote mark   In any case, the bayonet isn't as important as it used to be. It's more usual now to go into the attack with hand-grenades and your entrenching tool. The sharpened spade is a lighter and more versatile weapon - not only can you get a man under the chin, but more to the point, you can strike a blow with a lot more force behind it. That's especially true if you can bring it down diagonally between the neck and the shoulder, because then you can split down as far as the chest. When you put a bayonet in, it can stick, and you have to give the other man a hefty kick in the guts to get it out. Quote mark

Erich Maria Remarque, in 'All Quiet on the Western Front'

Quote mark   This war is really the greatest insanity in which white races have ever been engaged. Quote mark

 

German Admiral von Tirpitz, in a letter to his wife, October 1914

Quote mark   We were very surprised to seem them walking. We had never seen that before. The officers went in front. I noticed one of them walking calmly, carrying a walking stick. When we started firing we just had to load and reload. They went down in their hundreds. You didn't have to aim. We just fired into them. Quote mark

Quote mark   The home front is always underrated by Generals in the field. And yet that is where the Great War was won and lost. The Russian, Bulgarian, Austrian and German home fronts fell to pieces before their armies collapsed. Quote mark

 

British Prime Minister Lloyd George, in his 'War Memoirs'

 

Quote mark   I had them placed in special rooms, nude, but with their full army kit on the floor for them to put on as soon as they were so minded. There were no blankets or substitutes for clothing left in the rooms, which were quite bare. Several of the men held out naked for several hours but they gradually accepted the inevitable. Forty of the conscientious objectors who passed through my hands are now quite willing soldiers. Quote mark

 

Lieutenant Colonel Reginald Brook, commander of Military Detention Barracks, Wandsworth, in 'The Daily Express' 4 July 1916

 

Quote mark   EVERYTHING HAS GONE WELL - Our troops have successfully carried out their missions, all counter-atacks have been repulsed and large numbers of prisoners taken. Quote mark

 

British newspaper 'The Times, reporting on 3 July 1916 on the disastrous Battle of the Somme

 

Quote mark   At 8 o'clock in the morning a dense throng of workers - almost 10,000 - assembled in the square, which the police had already occupied well ahead of time. Karl Liebknecht's voice then rang out: 'Down with the War! Down with the Government!' The police immediately rushed at him. For the first time since the beginning of the war open resistance to it had appeared on the streets of the capital. The ice was broken. Quote mark

 

Paul Frolich, Berlin, May 1916

 

cerified_Subarus.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

yeah this is very gory!

"

Yes, we know this is an unpleasant sight. But this whole war was very unpleasant - especially for the men who had to fight it. So don't complain if we confront you with their reality.

This is a French medical picture, made on March 31, 1918. The dead man is a French soldier of the 99th Infantry Regt., who was killed by German mustard gas. The gas not only burned his lungs and intoxicated him, but also tore his skin apart.

The photograph is an autochrome color picture. This photocolor process was invented in the beginning of the 20th century by the Lumière brothers. We have 250 color pictures from the Great War: many of these original autochromes and others artificially tinted.

"

 

 

 

voorpagina97.jpg

cerified_Subarus.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

When the Great War broke out, in 1914, French poilu's (common soldiers) still wore their Napoleontic uniforms with red trousers. They made perfect targets.

Real color picture (autochrome) made in 1914 by Jean-Baptiste Tournassoud, Commander of the Photography and Cinematography Section of the French Army.

voorpagina55.jpg

 

cerified_Subarus.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Senegalese soldiers have found billets in a shack near the frontline.

On the right a picture of a Senegalese army cook.

True color pictures made in June 1917 in Saint-Ulrich, Northern France.

Senegal was a French colony. In total the French colonies donated 587,000 soldiers to the warfare. Almost 520,000 of them fought on European soil. The Germans feared their fierceness.

 

voorpagina60.jpgsenegalesecook.jpg

cerified_Subarus.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

British soldier giving water to a wounded German prisoner-of-war.

Although the picture is probably staged, friendly gestures like this actually happened. In World War One most soldiers did not really hate their enemies. They saw each other as victims of the same uncomprehensible world-politics. Of course those views changed when friends got killed. And captured snipers and flamethrower-operators did not get much compassion either.

 

 

voorpagina62.jpg

 

 

cerified_Subarus.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

American Army chaplain offers a cigar to a young German prisoner-of-war.

As Germany in 1918 ran out of cannon fodder, the Kaiser and his generals committed very young soldiers to battle.

Boy Soldiers were omnipresent in allied armies as well. See They Die Young: Kid Soldiers of the Great War (with lots of pictures).

 

voorpagina65.jpg

cerified_Subarus.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Mata Hari is known as one the most beautiful spies in history. The name is derived from the Malayan mata (eye) and hari (dawn); she is thus the Eye of the Dawn.

Her real name was Greta Zelle. She was Dutch, born in 1876 in the city of Leeuwarden in the Netherlands (Holland). Her father sold hats and caps. She became a famous erotic dancer and often danced half or completely nude.

Ms. Zelle slipped into countless French and German beds, and became a pawn in international intrigue. In 1917 she was arrested in France. She was convicted as a spy and executed on October 15th.

Mystery. In spite of the enormous research that has been done, historians have never clarified the exact nature of Mata Hari's spying activities. We have to wait until 2017, when French secret archives on her will open.

 

voorpagina72.jpgmatahari.jpg

 

cerified_Subarus.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites



  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.



×
×
  • Create New...