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Books on the War in the Air

jbeigie — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 14:29:57 CST

Review of Diary of a Night Bomber Pilot by
Steve Suddaby

Book Reviews: Ian Castle’s London 1914-17: The Zeppelin Menace and Joseph Morris’ German Air Raids on Britain: 1914-1918

By Steve Suddaby

Ian Castle (Christa Hook, Illustrator), London 1914-17: The Zeppelin Menace, Osprey Publishing, 2008, www.ospreypublishing.com .

Joseph Morris, German Air Raids on Britain: 1914-1918, The Naval and Military Press, 1993, www.naval-military-press.com .

There have been two recent publications on the First Battle of Britain – one is a slick overview of the Zeppelin raids on London and the other is a reprinted classic of the German attacks on the British Isles with airships and airplanes. The world’s first strategic bombing campaign was launched with Zeppelins in the hope of forcing Britain to withdraw from the war. The raids were never more than a nuisance, however, and were doomed by September 1916 with the development of explosive and incendiary machine gun bullets. A greater threat to Britain was launched in the spring of 1917 with Gotha bomber attacks on London, followed by Giant bombers later that year. By summer 1918, they too succumbed to the defenses and to reverses on the Western Front.

Ian Castle’s London 1914-17: The Zeppelin Menace focuses on the airship attacks on the Empire’s capital. Although this Osprey publication tells a story that has been told many times before, the vivid illustrations by Christa Hook, the incredible maps, and the high proportion of rarely-seen photos make this a worthy addition to anyone’s Great War aviation library. The wide scale maps of German navy and army airship bases and of RFC Home Defence squadrons are very helpful, but the street maps that track the routes of the Zeppelins and where the bombs fell are exceptional. All together, the various graphics in this monograph truly enhance the reader’s understanding of this campaign – not to mention just making it fun to flip through the pages to look at the illustrations.

Naval & Military Press has done the WWI aviation community a real service by reprinting Joseph Morris’ 1925 classic, German Air Raids on Britain: 1914-1918, the first book to thoroughly cover the entire German bombing campaign. Despite outstanding new additions to the literature in the last 80 years, including Douglas Robinson’s The Zeppelin in Combat (1962) and Cole & Cheesman’s The Air Defence of Britain 1914-1918 (1984), the book still reads well. This reviewer found only two inaccuracies left over from 1925 – the belief that Gotha bombers “escorted” the Giants over England and ignorance of the size of the two largest German bombs dropped on London (1000 kg each). The NMP book reproduces all of the photographs and maps of the original. The photos are clear despite not being printed on glossy paper. The maps are reduced black and white versions of the original foldout, two-color maps, but are clearly printed and quite readable. Considering that the 1925 original would cost hundreds of dollars more at a rare book store, this is quite a bargain and belongs in every WWI aviation and strategic airpower library.

Book Review: “Wind in the Wires” by Captain Duncan Grinnell-Milne, Doubleday, 1968
“Wind in the Wires” is the memoirs of British Ace (6 kills) Duncan Grinnell-Milne. It is a fascinating and quick read. It covers the authors war time career in the air. What makes the book so incredibly fascinating is that Captain Milne started flying in 1915, was captured, escaped, and then resumed resumed his career in 1918. Even the author admits it was like fighting in two different wars. The book does not cover the period of his captivity, and eventual escape. That portion of his war time experience is covered in a different work.
The memoir starts with the authors arrival at pilot training in July of 1915. He was trained in Maurice Farman Shorthorn and Longhorn biplanes, as well as a Caudron, all of the pusher variety. Milne gives a particular amusing account of his first solo. It appears that in 1915 whenever an instructor felt that you were ready to solo, off you went. Milne solo'd in a Caudron after only 1 check out flight with an instructor. The whole method of training pilots appeared to have been very ad-hoc, and informal. Finally in September of 1915 Milne was posted to Number 16 Squadron in France. He had a total of 33 and one-half hours of flight time.
Number 16 Squadron flew an assortment of Farman Shorthorn and BE-2C aircraft during Milne's tenure. Milne started out in the Shorthorn and after everyone else in the Squadron was upgraded to a BE-2C, Milne was finally upgraded as well. His descriptions of Number 16 squadron are both amusing and bewildering. The squadron aerodrome was located next to a canal and all of the pilots lived in Riverboats. The squadron command structure was disagreeable almost to the point of being neurotic. Milne indicates that their was little to no camaraderie, most pilots remaining silent in the mess for fear of drawing the commander's ire.
Pure Fighter squadron's were not yet formed at this time in the RFC. The squadron's performing a mix of reconnaissance, pursuit and even some bombing raids. Milne was a bit of a fire eater, always trying to engage the enemy aircraft. Usually with no effect. It was just too difficult to shoot down an enemy aircraft using the observer's Lewis gun. Additionally the prevailing wind patterns over the Western Front tended to blow towards the German lines and away from Allied ones. The BE-2C had real difficulties flying back towards their own lines. Finally Milne did manage to catch a 2-seater Albatross by spotting the Albatross early, he was able to guide his airplane to attack from out of the sun, giving his observer an excellent shot. Milne had scored his first kill! His first kill almost became his last, he concentrated on watching his victim spiral to the ground, when he was attacked by 4 enemy aircraft. His BE “...banked, dodged, dived, and zoomed..” until they managed to elude the enemy.
Finally in December of 1915, while on Reconnaissance over German lines, his engine failed. Milne attempted to glide back across to Allied lines, but came up a few miles short. He was captured and imprisoned.
Milne resumes his memoir with a meeting with the King shortly after his escape. He expresses his desire to get back to France to fight the Germans. The King is sympathetic but non committal. It appears that RAF policy was to not send pilots that had escaped back to the Western Front, rather to send them to one of the peripheral fronts, Italy, Palestine, Salonika, or even as a Flight Instructor. Milne is offered any of those choices but is intent on going back to France. First he is retrained in single seat aircraft. He starts out on an Avro, then moves to a Sopwith Pup, a Spad, and finally in S.E.5s. After intercepting and destroying a letter to his training command indicating that he should NOT be sent to France, Milne manages to get sent to France.
At this point in the war, getting to France, and getting assigned to an active squadron are two different things. Pilots sit around waiting assignment in what is known as the “Pilots' Pool”. The average wait time being much longer than Milne is willing to wait for. After being in the pool for 3 day's, Milne stages an accident in which he manages to spill ink all over that day's assignment roster. He then helps the poor clerk reconstruct the roster, this time with his name at the very top of the list! Finally in August of 1918, Milne manages to get assigned to Number 56 squadron. He is back at the Front.
Number 56 Squadron is much different than his first squadron. It is the Squadron of Ball and McCudden. An aggressive squadron with high morale. Milne makes friends with a couple of American's that serve with 56 Squadron. His work at this time of the war is predominantly ground attack. Oddly enough, even though Milne shoots down 5 German aircraft during his 4 month stint with No 56 Squadron, he spends virtually no time in his memoirs describing the events. In fact this stretch of the war only takes up 40 or so pages in the memoir. He does describe the tactics employed by the S.E. 5 – Dive and Zoom! The Fokker D. VII that is their most feared adversary can out climb and out turn the S.E.5 but it can not out dive or out run the S.E.5.
Milne is constantly getting his plane shot up by “Archie” through his aggressive tactics at ground attack. At one point he gets his plane shot up so badly that he loses his landing gear, parts of his Rudder and ailerons. That he managed to make it back alive is a testament to his skill.
Milne finishes his wartime career as the Squadron commander. He oversees the demobilization of the Squadron and is one of the last sent home to England.
All in all, a very good read, and an excellent pairing with our own Jon Guttman's “The Origin of the Fighter Aircraft” which is how I read them.
– Jeff Beigie

Great War Books and Reviews

JeffreyLaMonica — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:28:47 CST

Books on the Eastern Front

Books on the CEF

Books on the ANZACS

Books on the AEF

Books on the BEF

My 75

Books on the War in the Air

Books on Medical Care

Robert Mueller's Fields of War

Handbook of Imperial Germany

John Milton Cooper's Woodrow Wilson: A Biography

Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, John Milton Cooper, Jr., Knopf, 2009, 702 pages, photos, index, notes, ISBN 978 0 307 26541 8, $35 cloth. The author’s earlier words include Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (Cambridge 2001) and Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900-1920 (Norton 1992).
The 28th President of the United States is best remembered for his foreign policy that sought to create a new world order based on collective security and national self-determination. It is Wilson who laid the basis for America’s 20th century foreign policies followed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his successors. Amidst the ongoing debates on the efficacy of US interventionism and harsh criticism of Wilson’s racism and wartime lack of respect for civil liberties, it is hard to remember his landmark legislative achievements. A Hamiltonian Federalist governing at the height of the Progressive Era, Wilson used his formidable skills as Democratic Party leader to create the Federal Reserve System, the income tax, the Federal Trade Commission, institute the popular election of senators, the first child labor law, the first federal aid to farmers, as well as create an eight-hour day for industrial workers. Though Wilson was the only American chief executive to hold a Ph.D., he was hardly an ivory tower intellectual. He was not admirer of the Social Gospel advocated by progressive prohibitionists and evangelical Christians. His was a conservative Presbyterian Protestantism not dependent on a mystical personal relationship with the Deity.
Cooper traces Wilson’s path from constitutional scholar and college professor, to President of Princeton University, to reforming Governor of New Jersey to President in 1913. He sees Wilson not as a muddled, moralist do-gooder, but rather as a hard-headed patriotic idealist and visionary. Though he dominated American foreign policy, dragging America into World War I, riding roughshod over congressional opposition and largely ignoring his Secretaries of State, Wilson was collegial in dealing with other cabinet members. He gladly delegating authority to them, with sometimes (as in the case of Attorney General Mitchell Palmer) baleful results. As a teacher, he embraced his role as President as an opportunity to educate the public. Though he could be stiff and unbending, he was charming and full of good humor in private and a forceful public speaker who wrote most of his own material.
This, then, is a sympathetic view of Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Cooper – who has become the premier Wilson scholar -- finds that Wilson, despite his signature failure to secure ratification of the Versailles Treaty and US membership in the League of Nations, left a legacy of great and lasting achievement.

Len Shurtleff

Holger Herwig's The Marne, 1914

The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle that Changed the World, Holger H. Herwig, Random House, 2009, 391 + xix pages, photos, maps, notes, index, ISBN 978 1 4000 6671 1, $28 cloth; a History Book Club selection. The author is Professor of History at the University of Calgary and Canada Research Chair at the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies. His book The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary (Edward Arnold, 1999) won the Western Front Association’s Tomlinson Book Prize for 2000.

Basing his judgment on 30 years of research, Professor Herwig has more than once asserted that the Marne was the most significant land battle of the 20th century. In this book he re-examines that thesis drawing on Saxon archives released from Russian captivity only following the end of the Cold War. He looks at the Marne as part of a series of engagements fought simultaneously and largely independently of central command along the frontiers in Belgium, in the Ardennes, and Lorraine, and along the rivers Ourcq, Grand Morin, Petit Morin, Saulz and Ornain flowing into the Marne. He also examines several myths about the “miracle of the Marne” including the role of Lt. Colonel Richard Hentch of the German General Staff, Generals von Kluck of the First Army, Von Bülow of the Second Army and Chief of Staff von Moltke. In all, he finds the Anglo-French victory to be the result of good tactics and strategy rather than a matter of luck. Nonetheless, it clearly was a very, very close call.

Along with an increasing number of scholars, Herwig sees that Austria-Hungary bears a large burden of guilt for starting the war, but he abjures assertions Germany intended world conquest from the outset. Instead, he sees expanded German territorial claims as coming only after the initial battles. Nonetheless, defeat at the Marne -- quickly covered up by Chancellor von Bethmann Holweg and the German high command -- saved Europe from German domination. Their obfuscation for decades obscured the truth behind the German retreat: a flawed command structure, inadequate logistics, antiquated communications and inept field commanders. German victory would have meant the subjugation of the Low Countries, German control of parts of northeastern France, and its Channel coast, economic domination of all of Europe from Scandinavia to Turkey and the reduction of Russia to its borders under Peter the Great.

As this is a work about the first two months of the conflict culminating in the fighting along the Ourcq and Marne rivers, it is fitting that Herwig also addresses the German campaign in Belgium, the destruction of the university city of Louvain and other atrocities. He draws incisive character sketches of the major French, German and British protagonists. And he gives us a glimpse of the domestic and international politics at play in July, August and September 1914 when all the lights went out.

Len Shurtleff

John Milton Cooper's Reconsidering Wilson

Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War and Peace, John Milton Cooper (ed.), John Hopkins, 2009, 359 + ix pages, index, notes, ISBN 978 0 8018 9074 1, $65 cloth. A series of essays examining Wilson’s political views, his domestic policies, programs and accomplishments, his international economic and diplomatic philosophy and his impact on America politics in years following 1920 up to today.

Despite sharply mixed judgments on the success of his presidency, Wilson ranks among the most activist and influential of all American chief executives. An educator and historian by training, Wilson is the only American President to have earned a Ph.D. He was a political scientist, prolific writer and political theorist, as well as a practical reformist politician. Taking office at the height of the Progressive Era, Wilson was a believer in the necessity and power of government to improve society. No populist, he favored pragmatic economic and social reform, working within the system to modify existing civil and economic institutions to better serve the needs of the majority.

Wilson was a legislative all-star creating the Federal Reserve System, a federal child labor law, the first federally-financed aid to farmers, the first graduated income tax and federal inheritance tax, a lower tariff, the Federal Trade Commission, new regulation of maritime shipping and an eight-hour day for railway workers among other accomplishments. His record on race relations was far less impressive. He permitted cabinet members to desegregate the federal government and to enforce without constraint the draconian war-time loyalty laws instituted in 1917 and 18.

It is, however, foreign affairs were Wilson’s actions are most remembered. Having almost single handedly led the United States into war in against Germany in 1917, he fought valiantly to create a New World Order based on self-determination, free trade and the collective security of the League of Nation to replace the failed European system of competing military alliances. Though often faulted for giving way too much to gain his League, Wilson bargained away nothing he held vitally importance in reaching agreement with French, British and Italians on a treaty ending World War I. Though America never joined Wilson’ League of Nations, the ideal of collective security it represented was resurrected after World War II and combined with a new alliance system (NATO) strong enough to keep the peace for half a century or more. Though Wilson did not apply his concept of self determination outside of Europe, it was after 1945 extended to Africa and Asia as his political thought, always flexible and pragmatic, evolved to meet new realities.

Len Shurtleff

Erez Manela's The Wilsonian Movement

The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, Erez Manela, Oxford, 2009, 331 + xiv pages, notes, bibliography, photos, map, ISBN978 0 19 537853 5, $19.95 paperback. The author is an Associate Professor of History at Harvard University.

This elegantly drafted work tackles a seldom-examined facet of the post-World War one world: The impact of Woodrow Wilson’s widely broadcast declamations on post war peace settlements with particular regard to the consent of the governed. Much of the material covered in the introduction and first two chapters is familiar to students Wilson and the First World War. His Fourteen Points, his Four Principals and his July 4, 1918 speech at Mount Vernon are all well known and much studied. The next four chapters, however, cover far less familiar ground.

Here the author traces the impact of Wilson’s call for “self-determination” on four emerging polities: China, Korea, Egypt and India. In each of these counties, only one of which (China) was even nominally self-governing, Wilson’s words were seized upon as an opportunity to assert full independence from foreign occupiers breaking the bonds of imperial rule. National movements were strengthened by Wilson’s words and their adherents encouraged to seek full political sovereignty. Unfortunately, Wilson had no intention that his call for national sovereignty would extend much beyond Europe. Moreover, the other members of the “Big Four” – Great Britain, France and Italy – were still intent upon expanding their colonial empires. Thus, the Versailles Treaty of June 1918 actually made the world save for empire rather than freeing subject peoples in Africa, Arabia and Asia under the aegis of a League of Nations. Though many scholars then and since view Wilson and Lenin as competing for the hearts and minds of emerging nations, this was not necessarily the case. In 1918, the Bolshevik revolution had yet to seize control of Russia. More importantly, leaders like Gandhi, Sun Yat-sen, and Syngman Rhee at the time looked not to Lenin, but to Wilson -- the leading statesman of the day -- for inspiration.

Though the fires of nationalism were not kindled by Wilson, his words did stoke and continued to fuel passions even after it was clear in spring 1919 that no support among the victors of The Great War for any movement toward self determination of non-European peoples. The major powers at meeting at Paris to negotiate a peace treaty were unwilling to offer non-European peoples a place in the New World Order as tantalizing described by Wilson. After 1919, nationalists in China, Korea, Egypt and most particularly India took control of local politics and led their people away from cooperation and collaboration toward confrontation with their colonial masters until they were finally triumphant in the years following 1945 and another global conflagration.

Len Shurtleff

Roger Possner's The Rise of Militarism in the Progressive Era, 1900-1914

The Rise of Militarism in the Progressive Era, 1900-1914, Roger Possner, McFarlane, 2009, 252 pages, illustrations, index, notes, ISBN 978 0 7864 4418 2, $39.95 paperback.
To order, contact McFarlane Publishers at www.madfarlanepub.com or phone (800) 253-2187.

This is book about the rise of militarism in America during the height of the progressive era. The author starts out from the premise that Progressives were more interested in changing people than they were in changing society. In other words, they sought to spread manly middle class values including patriotism. In America, the years immediately prior to World War I were dominated politically by the Republican Party and progressives like Theodore Roosevelt. These years witnessed a shift in American attitudes toward social structure and duty as politicians pushed for a larger army and navy and their more frequent use.

Public interest in and support for a stronger military gained support as a result of the expanded American assertiveness in foreign affairs including the Spanish-American War of 1989, the Philippine Insurrection, the Mexican Revolution and the creation of an American colonial empire in the Pacific and Caribbean. Real and perceived threats from an expansionist Japan in Asia and Germany in Latin America fed militarism as did the popular press, three-fold expansion of the Army, enhanced military recruiting, military sponsorship of shooting competitions among other factors. The War Department also sponsored military education in schools, held military tournaments in major cities and encouraged public attendance at military maneuvers. In an age when adult males participated by the thousands in civic and fraternal organizations, the National Guard reorganized under the Dick Act of 1903 and naval militia offered opportunities for both patriotic service and fellowship.

Though counter currents of mass immigration, pacifism, socialism and unionism hostile to military expansion are not ignored, the author sees these as being submerged in a wider progressive trend toward favorable to an expanded military role in American society and political affairs in the first 15 years of the 20th century.

Len Shurtleff

Trench Art, by Jane Kimball

Trench Art: An Illustrated History, Jane A. Kimball, Silverpenny Press, 2004, 401 + xi pages, index, bibliography, color and halftone photos, ISBN 097559 710 8, $65.00 from Barnes & Nobel.

This large, coffee table-size and profusely illustrated book traces the history of soldiers’ art from its origins among prisoners of war during the American Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars through its World War One “golden age” as a soldiers’ cottage industry to the early 21st century. Much of the book deals with art produced by French and British soldiers from recycled Western Front battlefield detritus and the post-war commercial manufacture of souvenirs for battlefield tourists, which continues today.

There are also chapters on decorated shell casings, other types of trench art including tankards, bowls, musical instruments, jewelry, and even clocks. Such art was also produced by WWI POWs seeking cash for comforts, as well as by refugees and exiles in the 19th and 20th centuries. The author also offers a useful primer on collecting, caring for and cataloging trench art, and how to spot fakes.

The high quality color photos make this book worth the purchase price.

Len Shurtleff

A Soldier of the Great War, by Mark Helprin

This too lengthy novel contains some of the richest writing you will ever encounter on any subject. Mark Helprin is a master of language and human interaction. This thrice-too long novel should have been the "All Quiet on the Italian Front" but misses by about 30%. However, I recommend you borrow this novel and read the sections on climbing the Italian/Austrian border mountains, small unit fighting during WW1 in these same mountains, Italian small unit fighting around the Isonzo River during WW1 and, most uniquely, chasing deserters in the mountains of Sicily. For the most part, this novel is a picaresque voyage of discovery of a middle class Italian academic forced reluctantly into various military formations during WW1 to become an accidental but bona fide hero. Two thirds of the novel cover our hero's far less interesting years outside WW1. Some of the battles and eccentric fellow soldiers and commanders encountered are uniquely described in luxurious detail you have never before read. If only Helprin had restricted this novel to 1/3 its length and concentrated only on the WW1 Italian battle, marching, prison camp and cantonement scenes, this novel would be a classic on the order of "All Quiet..." for the relatively unknown Italian front.

Jeff Milman,

Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance

Lords of finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, Liaquat Ahamed, Penguin, 2009, 564 pages, photos, tables, index, ISBN 978 1 59240 182 0, $32.95 cloth.

This is largely the story of four titans of international finance dealing with the impact of World war One, 1919 Versailles settlement, and most particularly the reparations imposed on Germany by the victorious European powers. The four are Montague Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, Benjamin Strong, Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank, and Amié Moreau, Governor of the Bank of France. These are the four leading protagonists in efforts to reestablish a world financial system shattered by The Great War and hobbled by conflict over German reparations and Allied war debts. It is also the story of the Dawes and Young Plan devised in 1924 and 1929-30 to deal with reparations and other war debt payments issues, as well as the economic upheavals of the 1920: the reimposition of the gold standard; the great German currency inflation; and, the American stock market bubble.

The author makes several sustainable and a couple of less certain findings.
First, he accuses the Weimar Republic of having followed deliberately inflationary policies in an effort to mitigate the impact of reparations, a finding not supported by many other economic historians. And, he asserts that Great Britain (along with Germany, France and Russia) abandoned the gold standard in 1914*. In fact, England did not formally abandon gold until 1919 and throughout the war made a monumental and largely successful effort to sustain sterling parity with the dollar and protect England position as the world’s banker.

More to the point are the author’s judgments on the roots of the Great Depression of 1929-1933. Foremost among the culprits are the politicians who presided over the Paris peace conference of 1919 who left the world with a gigantic overhang of international debt. Germany began the 1920 by owing some $12 billion in reparations to France and Britain, while Britain and France owed seven billion dollars in war debts to America. None of these bills were ever paid. The second group to blame were the leading central bankers of the era (Norman, Strong, Schacht and Moreau) responsible for decisions to take the world back to the unsustainable gold standard. As a result, most of the world’s gold flowed to the United States while Germany was able to accrue large foreign debts for largely unproductive pubic works improvements. When the German economy (the world’s third largest) collapsed in 1928, the stage was set for world-wide economic upheaval.

*The Currency and Bank Note Act of 1914 removed gold from general circulation and allowed the Bank of England to issue legal one pound and 10 schilling bank notes without regard to gold reserve rules.

Len Shurtleff
March 2009

Eileen Welsome's The General and the Jaguar

The General and the Jaguar: Pershing’s Hunt for Pancho Villa, Eileen Welsome, Bison Books (University of Nebraska Press), 2007, 403 pages, photos, maps, notes, appendix, bibliography, index, ISBN 978-0 8032 2224 3, $21.95 trade paperback First published by Little Brown in 2007.

Angered Venustiano Carranza’s use of American railways to transfer troops across Texas, Pancho Villa retaliated with a raid on the dusty border town of Columbus, New Mexico. Villa’s raid on March 9, 1916, resulted in 18 dead and 26 wounded, including soldiers of the 13tth Cavalry whose barracks were located at Columbia. In retaliation, President Wilson -- under pressure from congressmen -- sent Brigadier General John J. Pershing with a force of over 5,000 men and 4,000 horses and mules into Mexico in pursuit of “The Jaguar” Villa. This force eventually grew to some 10,000 men and penetrated 500 miles into Chihuahua State without ever catching up with the elusive Villa. Denied the use of Mexican railways Pershing for the first time employed motor trucks as well mule-drawn wagons to supply his force. He also engaged Signal Corps Jenny aircraft for reconnaissance.

At the time, Mexico was in the midst of a decade-long civil war. Having already intervened in Vera Cruz in 1914, Wilson reluctantly recognized the de facto regime of Venustiano Carranza. Germany, seeking to distract America from the war in Europe, backed ousted dictator Victoriano Huerta. At stake were large and important American and British investments in Mexican cattle, land and minerals, particularly oil. At the time, Mexico was the world’s second largest exporter of petroleum after the United States. The Royal Navy depended on Mexico for much of its fuel oil.

Before withdrawing in March 1917, Pershing clashed with Carranza’s federal troops as well as with Villa partisans and war nearly broke out between the two neighbors. Wilson and his cabinet believed that Mexicans would welcome Pershing’s soldiers. They were wrong. As a result, El Paso was put on a war footing and Wilson federalized thousands of National Guardsmen to patrol the border until they were reorganized for European service.*

Despite his lack of success, the punitive expedition catapulted Pershing into national prominence. He was promoted Major General and given command of American Expeditionary Forces when American declared war on Germany in April 1917.
Villa continued to raid and hide out in rural Chihuahua until he negotiated an amnesty in 1923. He was assassinated in 1928.

Len Shurtleff
January 2009

*This was not the final time that American forces intervened in Mexico. See Wings and Saddles: The Air and Cavalry Punitive Expedition of 1919, Stacy C. Hinkle, Southwestern Studies, Monograph No.19, The University of Texas at El Paso, Volume V, No.3, 1967.

M. Sukru Hanioglu's A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire

A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, M. Şűkrű Hanioğlu, Princeton, 2008, 241 + xii pages, photos, maps, index, bibliography, ISBN 978 0 69`1 13452 9, $29.95 cloth. The author is a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton.

Dr. Hanioğlu presents a long overdue analysis of the last century of the Ottoman Empire from 1787 through the advent of the Young Turks with greatest emphasis on the period from 1870 to 1918. Flying in the face of historical convention he asserts that Sublime Porte in the post-French Revolutionary period made sustained efforts to modernize and rationalize both its internal governance and its foreign policy striving to become a modern power and a member of the Concert of Europe. Both the 19th century Young Ottoman and the better-known 20th century army-cased Young Turk reform movements were dedicated first and foremost to preserving the Ottoman Empire and only secondarily to reforming political administration. In this they were faced with almost insurmountable odds. Periodic revolts and wars combined with rising nationalism among Ottoman minorities (Kurds, Albanians, Serbs Arabs, Greeks, Armenians), Russian and Austro-Hungarian designs on Ottoman satrapies in the Balkans, Italian and British incursions against Ottoman possessions in Africa and Arabia, economic domination by richer European powers, as well as weak political and administrative structures. Given these handicaps, it is a wonder that the Empire held together as long and as well as it did.

Of particular interest to historians of World War I will be Professor Hanioğlu’s analysis of Ottoman diplomacy. In the 19th century, the Ottoman’s sought and gained British protection against Russian ambitions to dominate the strategic straits leading from the Black to the Mediterranean Sea. By the end of the century, however, the Sublime Porte came into conflict with British determination control Ottoman Egypt and access to the Suez Canal. Austro-Hungarian incursions into the Balkans, Italian occupation of Libya, and the Balkan War of 1912 further weakened the Empire. After vainly seeking alliances with France and England as the European pot boiled over 1n 1914, the Young Turks finally seized the life preserver thrown by Germany opening herself to final dismemberment by the Entente victors in the post war settlements.

In all, this is a fine effort well worth reading for its valuable background WWI, to the politics of modern Turkey and of the other Ottoman successor states. Its maps are particularly useful, but the book could use a glossary of Ottoman terms unfamiliar to western readers. Having said that, I hasten to add that definition of these unfamiliar terms are available from online Turkish-English dictionaries.

Len Shurtleff

Terence Zuber's The Battle of the Frontiers

The Battle of the Frontiers, Ardennes 1914, Terence Zuber, Tempus, 2007, 314 pages, maps, photos, schematic sketches, orders of battle, end notes, glossary, ISBN 978 0 7524 4424 6, $34.96 cloth. Dr. Zuber is a retired US Major and the author of Inventing the Schlieffen Plan: German War Planning 1871-1914 (Oxford 2002) and German War Planning 1891-1914: Sources and Interpretations (Boydell & Brewer, 2004).

The is a first-class and long over-due study of the opening battles of World War I on the Western Front and the armies that fought them. It is also the first book in English on the Battle of the Frontiers fought in the Ardennes. Perhaps the most valuable part of this analysis is contained in the first two chapters in which Dr. Zuber examines the very different doctrine and training methods used by Germany and France. Not surprisingly, he finds Germany doctrine, tactical training and staff leadership vastly superior to the often slap-dash French system. Specifically, the Battle of the Frontiers proved the superiority of German battle tactics and front-line leadership, as well as superior understanding of the importance of reconnaissance despite the frequent breakdowns of command and control at the divisional and corps level. The Germans emphasized patrols at all tactical levels and in all arms. While the French focused on maneuver, the Germans sought battlefield superiority through movement and firepower, including the use of artillery. And, the Germans with their powerful, high angle-of-fire howitzer had artillery superiority. Unlike the rigid French Army system of detailed written orders, Germany stressed flexibility and initiative among company and platoon commanders, and even NCOs. These habits of command were reinforced by frequent peace-time field exercises at all levels of command. By comparison, French pre-war training regimes were uneven and irregular.

Moreover, the Battle of the Frontiers did not prove the efficacy of either the German or French battle plans. Since pre-war plans were not executed by either side, victory was the result of small unit successes based on superior German tactics and training. Also, the author contends, French defeat in the first battles of 1914 could not be laid at the feet of Grandmaison and his theories of offense á outrance which were adopted too late to influence French 1914 tactics.

This book is thankfully full of those clear, useful maps often missing from military histories. The author made great use of German primary sources, including war diaries, as well as more limited and often fragmentary French sources. By 1914, as the author asserts, the German Army had reached the pinnacle having learned to fight outnumbered and win even in the difficult terrain of the Ardennes. Therefore, it is fitting that this monograph concentrates on its operations.

Len Shurtleff

Lewis Gould's Four Hats in the Ring

Four Hats in the Ring: the 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics, Lewis L. Gould, Kansas, 2008, 235 + xvii pages, photos, drawings, index, bibliography, appendices, notes, ISBN 978 0 7006 1564 3, $29.95 cloth. A History Book Club selection.

The last American presidential election before The Great War was the first of our modern elections which set the pattern for two-party competition between Republicans and Democrats for the rest of the century. Four candidates, all well qualified, debated matters of real substance: social security, the tariff and free trade, and the regulation of big business and banking to name a few. It was also the first election to feature a year-long campaign complete with presidential primaries and with the protagonists crisscrossing the country seeking votes. The Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson won with a 42% plurality by holding the party base in the Midwest and South, while former President Theodore Roosevelt and incumbent Republican William Howard Taft split the majority Republican vote assuring a Wilson win. Roosevelt came in second in both the popular and electoral college votes, the only third party candidate to do so in American electoral history. Railroad unionist Eugene Debs, the Socialist standard bearer, polled nearly a million votes, a Socialist high water mark despite a lack-luster campaign.

While Wilson and Roosevelt were both progressives in their approach to governance and reform, Wilson was a traditional Democrat Jeffersonian who favored small business and small government, ironic in view of his leadership in creating a vastly expanded Washington bureaucracy to meet the demands of World War One. Roosevelt, on the other hand, believed in the power of big government to mandate social and economic reform. It is another irony that Wilson had adopted most of the planks of Roosevelt’s 1912 “Bull Moose” Progressive Party platform in legislation passed during his firm term.

Len Shurtleff

Marilene Henry and Peter Lang's A Zouave's Journey

A Zouave’s Journey: Recollections of a Footsoldier of the 37th African Division, Marilène Patten Henry, Peter Lang, 2007 142 + xii pages, maps, bibliography, index, ISBN 798 0 8204 9708 2, $61.95 hardback.

The poignant story of a fatherless orphan, Archille Lecreux, conscripted into the French army in May 1917 as a youth of 19 years who spent 30 months as an infantry men, was wounded, gassed, received the Croix de Guerre and rose to the rank of corporal. The story is drawn largely from his own writings. His diary – he was among the first generation to benefit from the universal primary education mandated by the Third Republic – offers much insight into the life of a front line soldier of The Great War: the comradeship, the poor food, mud, long marches; long periods of boredom interspersed with hours of terror and the death of friends.

In recounting this story, the author gives us much useful information about the life in the French Army, in particular about its elite Zouave regiments from North Africa which first won fame in the Crimea and Mexico. The Zouave are familiar to Americans as their unique uniforms comprising baggy red trousers, a wide blue sash, and close fitting vest topped off with a fez were popular among militia regiments of our own Civil War. Lecreux’s story is also illustrative of the careless fashion in which the French government treated war veterans and about the corrosive effect of the war on French society in general amid often severe postwar social and economic dislocation. His was not a happy, fulfilling life. Unable to work after the war, Lecreux received a pittance in disability pension from the government, but no useful treatment for the lingering affects his physical and psychological wounds. He died in 1988 at the age of 92 isolated from friends and family by his Great War memories.

Len Shurtleff

Frederick Dickinson's War and National Renovation

War and National Renovation: Japan in the Great War, 1914-1919, Frederick R. Dickinson, Harvard, 1999, 363 + xviii pages, illustrations, index, bibliography, ISBN 0 674 00507 4.

This is a scholarly study of domestic politics and the diplomatic relations of Japan during the WWI period. Japan, it may be necessary to emphasize, had been allied to Great Britain since 1902 and was a member of the “Big Five” powers (America, Britain, France, Italy and Japan) at the 1919 Paris peace negotiations. Still, Japan’s involvement in the conflict was limited. It conquered and occupied the German Kiaochow leasehold and took over many German South Pacific island possessions in 1914. Her major war aims revolved around protecting and expanding her economic penetration of Manchuria and China, and retaining occupied German territories. Though Japan was basically untouched by The Great War, she was emboldened by this, her third in a series of victorious conflicts beginning in 1894-95 with China and continuing with Russia (1904-05).

At the same time, Japan was undergoing severe domestic political stress with the end of the Meiji Era, and the Tishaō political crisis of 1912. Domestic political forces included fledgling political parties, newly created labor federations, powerful conservative army and civilian bureaucrats. Many party leaders favored the extension of the franchise and evolution of a British-style parliamentary democracy; conservative supported sustaining the Meiji constitutional monarchy based on the German pattern. The conflict between these opposing forces was not resolved, but rather intensified during the conflict and disagreements over how to cope with the Chinese Revolution and ensuing endemic political instability there.

These domestic conflicts spilled over into the diplomatic arena. Conservatives wanted to expand Japanese influence in China beyond economic and financial matters to political and military domination. In many respects, conservative imperialists envisioned Japan as playing in Asia the same role that American played in the Western Hemisphere. And, they feared American efforts to maintain an “open door” in China, as well as Wilson’s powerful insistence on democratic governance and collective security as represented by the League of Nations. Seeing their ambitions in Asia, particularly in China and Manchuria, thwarted by Wilson, Japan began to look upon the United States, its ally Great Britain, as future enemies.

Len Shurtleff

William Silber's When Washington Shut Down Wall Street

When Washington Shut Down Wall Street: the Great Financial Crisis of 1914 and the Origins of America’s Monetary Supremacy, William L. Silber, Princeton, 2007217 + xi pages, photos, graphs, index, notes, references, ISBN 0 691 12747 6, $27.95 cloth.

The author is Nadler Professor of Finance and Economics at the Stern School of Business at NYU.

Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law and Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo is the hero of this neglected chapter of American history. McAdoo almost single handedly prevented a massive flow of gold overseas, kept America on the gold standard and prevented a disastrous run on banks by panicked depositors in the wake of the outbreak of war in Europe in the summer of 1914. McAdoo acted to preserve international confidence in the US monetary system which was badly eroded in the wake of the panic of 1907. He had none of the tools available to modern statesmen. The establishment of the newly- created Federal Reserve System, our central bank, was being delayed by political squabbling following its authorization in late 1913. While he worked to create the Federal Reserve of which he was the first Chairman, McAdoo took bold action to close the New York Stock Exchange preventing overseas investors from selling their shares and demanding payment in gold for export. He kept the Exchange closed for four months while he moved to preserve liquidity and prevent a run on the banks by issuing more paper currency. These decisive moves not only kept American on the gold standard, but also preserved domestic and international confidence in the American financial system, and set the stage for massive American sales to the embattled Entente, as well as for the emergence of Wall Street as the world financial capital eclipsing the City of London.

This book is a useful primer on the world of international finance in the early 20th century and on how World War I was financed. It is jargon-free and presented in lively prose.

Len Shurtleff

Robert Koenig's The Fourth Horseman

The Fourth Horseman: One Man’s Mission to Wage the Great War in America, Robert Koenig, PublicAffairs, 2006, 336 pages, photos, index, ISBN 1 58648 372 2, $26 cloth.

The story of the son of an American Civil War winner of the Medal of Honor who attempts to infect with ganders and anthrax horses and mules being shipped to the Entente from the US. Anton Dilger was born in Virginia, but returned to Germany, his father and mother’s homeland, at age ten, attended Heidelberg University and became a surgeon in 1911. He served as a volunteer surgeon in Bulgaria during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and in Germany at the outset of The Great War. In late 1915, he returned to America via Holland to embark on a career in germ warfare as an agent of German intelligence. His assignment was part of a wider German effort (also detailed by the author) to curtail American supply of munitions and other goods to the Entente by sabotaging munitions plants and merchant vessels, poisoning draught animals and fomenting labor undress among dock workers.

This book reminds us that World War I was a conflict of animal traction. Even Detroit could not meet the demand for motor trucks and both sides were chronically short of the millions of horses and mules vital to supplying their fighting forces. In all, some 750 thousand horses and mules were shipped from America to Europe during the course of the conflict.

We are also reminded that persons of German descent were the largest single ethnic group in America of the 1910s. Like the Irish (the second largest aggregation of hyphenated Americans), many German-Americans were opposed to American entry into the war on the side of Britain and France. Dilger worked from a laboratory in his basement in Chevy Chase, a Washington, D.C. suburb, not far from the British Army’s principal remount depot at Newport News, Virginia in collaboration with family members, Imperial German military attachés and diplomats, interned German seamen and German-born Americans. Later Dilger became involved in abortive German attempts to foment a border war between Mexico and the US. His cover blown, he, ironically, died in 1918 in Spain from the effects of influenza. .

Len Shurtleff

Liulevicius' War Land on the Eastern Front

Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius. War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. viii + 309 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-66157-7.

Reviewed by: Peter Fritzsche , Department of History, University of Illinois.
Published by: H-German (March, 2001)

Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius' new book on cultural and military politics on the eastern front in World War I makes plain how much has been lost in the historiographical fixation on the western front. The everyday brutalization in the trenches, the formation of a separate generational identity, the introduction of new and fierce technologies, and the fantastic military effort to achieve a breakthrough are crucial foundations for understanding the postwar period, the drama of defeat and humiliation, and the emergence of new, more populist politics in Germany as well as in France and Britain. Liulevicius has another story to tell, one equally important and, in this case, one told with great authority, catching detail, and clarifying insight. Although only one-third of German troop strength was arrayed against Russia, the experiences of the soldiers and the efforts of the military administration had lasting consequences, creating what Liulevicius' appropriately refers to as "the mindscape of the East." What had been encountered first as a "complicated weaving of 'lands and peoples'" (Land und Leute) was increasingly regarded as a vast, manipulable terrain of "'spaces and races' (Raum und Volk) to be orderd by German mastery and organization" (p. 8). While the harsh German occupiers of 1914-1918 differed fundamentally from the racial masters of 1939-1945, the experience of World War I furnished many of the tools, the lessons, and the perceptions on which the policies of World War II rested. One of the great strengths of Liulevicius' argument is that it draws out the implications of a superb case study of one area of German wartime occupation in Kurland and Lithuania (Ober-Ost) to encompass the Freikorps, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi period. Among Liulevicius' most effective vignettes are the train trips that soldiers, officers, and administrators take across the eastern battlelines. These fast-moving, impressionable journeys invited Germans to play the role of amateur ethnographer. They were fascinated by what they saw, commenting endlessly on allegedly more primitive agricultural practices, and making summary distinctions between primitive East and cultured West. These train journeys symbolized the detached but powerful and mobile roles that Germans had acquired as conquerers. And they helped create a powerful "Orientalizing" aesthetic of the East, which subsequently guided action and policy. Liulevicius is at his best in his discussions of this aesthetic or mindscape. Sweeping through the cities, the newcomers saw a "riot of architectural simultaneity," with "styles densely topping one another" (38). In the countryside, they noted how "field and meadow, tree and bush are left to themselves" without the "planned order" that prevalied in Germany (70). Cutting a trench through the sandy soil of the war zone, soldiers were shocked to find the bones and artifacts of prehistoric societies, a distant past that was shockingly close to the surface. "This unfamiliar mess of history" was a sign of the primitive, an invitation for Germans to cultivate. Ober Ost thus became the site of intensive German cultural colonization. German work and German culture was to transform the occupied territories into recognizable, civilized places. Germany's colonial mission therefore rested on the confusing presence of Land und Leute, whom the Germans would take in hand. Under Ludendorff, Ober Ost was intended to be a place of far-reaching agricultural extraction, and the territories were surveyed and administered in the most efficient ways imaginable. Nonetheless, an identifiable, if totally patronizing German cultural mission remained in place; there were even amicable relations between Eastern European Jews and German occupiers (something Liulevicius might have expanded on), and unlikely figures such as Victor Klemperer found a role in the administration to further these. The huge expectations that Ludendorff and his growing staff of experts and academics had for this miniature empire became clear in the administrative ambition of what Liulevicius calls "Verkehrspolitik," a kind of totalizing managerial politics. The land was closed off and then "divided up, creating a grid of control in which military authorities could direct every movement: of troops, requisitioned products, raw materials . . . manpower" (89). This effort at total exploitation totally failed, but both the effort and the failure led to a transformation of Land und Leute into Raum und Volk. It becomes clear in Liulevicius' argument that an ethnographic vision slowly gave way to a cultivating discourse, so that the complicated intertwining of ethnicity and religion disappeared into the exclusve terms of foreign native and German expert. The riot of the land was soon revisualized into vast, even oppressive spaces. And whereas supposedly culturally backward people still had a particular, even cherishable identity, manpower, lice-carriers, resources, and space did not. Any kind of effective occupation was further undermined by the mobilization of ethnic resistance to German rule. More and more train trips were made into a "fleeing vastness," a "wild nature" of "terrible ferocity" (pp. 152-53). This is exactly what the Freikorps saw; Bolshevism was, of course, the archetypical apparition on this landscape. In the end, writes Liulevicius, "the East appeared as an area of races and spaces, which could not be manipulated, but could only be cleared and cleaned." In reaching these well-argued conclusions, Liulevicius might have considered the general quandries of modern management, which recognizes the extreme malleability of social material and technological designs, and responds to this risk with more far-fetched intervention. To what extent did German practice and perception make Ober Ost a distinctly modern place, which authorized increasingly strenuous techniques of knowledge and practices of administration? A broader connection to the literature on German modernity would have been useful. The process that the war had begun, speeded up during the Weimar Republic. In the newly activated fields of Ostforschung and political geography, the East was "emptied of historical content;" "Raum was triumphantly ahistorical, biological, and 'scientific.'" Although administrators in Ober Ost, unlike Nazi conquerers, maintained a cultural politics and never quite gave up on the educative aims implicit in determinations of backwardness, Liulevicius underscores the lines of continuity between the two world wars: "the vicious outlook of the Nazis as they surveyed the East, seeing their own future in its conquest, was built upon a prior experience in the First World War and the lessons it seemed to yield" (p. 272). It is the experience and the encounter that Liulevicus emphasizes, and he thoroughly makes his argument that "War Land on the Eastern Front" needs to be understood as a critical place in Germany's twentieth-century history.

John E. MacNintch's The Brother Keepers

John E. MacNintch is a member of our site and author of The Brother Keepers: The Great War Odyssey of Sable MacInnes and his Brothers, a critically-acclaimed, creative non fiction Michener-type historical novel of snipers and bagpipers in the CEF. Historians convey what happened in the Great War; novelists who research history convey not only what happened, but also how the men must have felt and what they must have thought when they experienced those horrible wars of egregious human attrition under unspeakable conditions. The work represents ten years of research and writing about what the Canucks , and expatriated Americans ,experienced in World War I including accurate World War I historical aspects of battles fought and the mental anguish over breaking God's Commandment, Thou Shalt not Kill.

Review. This is a massive novel reminiscent of those produced by James Michener. The author, through the eyes of Sable MacInnes, one of five brothers, sons of an itinerant Baptist preacher, reveals in detail the course of Canadian participation in World War One. The first ten chapters of the book are devoted to the family life of the brothers as they grow up in rural Nova Scotia and to the culture of the Maritime Provinces. The remainder trace Canada's entry into The Great War and the campaigns of the Canadian Corps on the Western Front. MacNintch's fictional brothers are involved in one way or another in all of the major actions of the Canadian Corps: Ypres, the Somme, Passchendaele and the final push to Mons. One brother, who joins the navy, is present at Halifax when the French ammunition ship Mont Blanc explodes there in 1917, leveling half the city. All of this narrative is supported by excellent maps and historically accurate descriptions of the battles, as well as of Canadian politics of the times based on careful research extending from unit histories to family papers, and a thorough study of the literature and history of the conflict. There are excellent sketches of life in the trenches, relations between Canadians and their allies, as well as the weapons (including the Ross rifle) Canadians fought with. Appendices cover the Canadian Corps (CEF) order of battle in 1917 and contain a detailed glossary of contemporary military slang and terms used in the CEF. Authenticity is enhanced by quotations - set off in italics - from contemporary documents and historical studies. As most historians of World War One know, the Canadian Corps of five divisions (one of them stationed in England to train replacements) was as large as any of the five British armies on the Western Front and had a compliment of artillery larger than most armies. After mid-1917, it was totally under Canadian command with Lt. General (later Sir Arthur) Currie heading up an experienced, stable and expert staff, many of whom went on to lead the Canadian Army in WWII. The Canadian Corps has been described by several historians as the "shock troops" of the British Empire. Readers of this historical novel will discover why. The author's intent, clearly stated in his preface, is to place Canada's part in the Great War in proper context with that of the United States. In fact, however, Canada's role need not be compared with that of Woodrow Wilson's America. It stands on its own as a major contribution to Allied victory.
Len Shurtleff STAND TO! The Journal of the Western Front Association. Number 82: April/May 2008.

Autographed First Edition copies can be obtained from Aquadoc Publications LLC, 20 Pepperidge Trail, Old Saybrook CT 06475. (860-575-3829). ISBN 13: 978-9787505-0-3. Hard cover, 779 pages, 12 maps and 13 illustrations. $20.00 plus shipping and handling costs from CT address, by e-mail (j.macnintch@worldnet.att.net), or by PayPal from his book website www.thebrotherkeepers.com where excerpts, details, links and more reviews can be found. The book can also be ordered from Amazon.com.

Wayne Pettyjohn's Buck's Story

Bucks Story: A Marine in the Great War, Wayne A. Pettyjohn, illustrations Phyllis Pettyjohn, Dearing Printing & Trophy, Stillwater, OK, 200u8, 241 pages, maps, sketches, no ISBN, $20 paperback. Available from the author at (405) 372-1981 or e-mail wpettyj@aol.com.

This novel is based on stories the author heard from WWI veterans of the 4th Marine Brigade about their battles at Belleau Wood, the Second Battle of Soissons, at St. Mihiel, Blanc Mont and in the Meuse-Argonne. Descriptions of these battles are accompanied by useful maps.

This fast paced story traces the experiences of Michigan farm boy Buck Adams, who enlists in the Marines in May 1917 after graduating from high school. The reader follows Buck through boot camp at Paris Island, through infantry training at the newly-created Marine Base Quantico, and then overseas. Attached to the AEF’s Second Division, Buck’s unit – the 97th Company – was part of 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Brigade. Despite his youth, Buck is rapidly promoted to corporal, sergeant and then 2nd Lieutenant as he proves himself as a combat leader. His experiences in battle and behind the lines are crisply sketched and have the ring of verisimilitude without being maudlin or overdrawn. Characters are sketches are crisply but fully presented so that none come across as cardboard figures.

In all, a rollicking read based on real events.

Len Shurtleff

Robert Laplander's Finding the Lost Battalion

Finding the Lost Battalion: Beyond the Rumors, Myths and Legends of America’s Famous WWI Epic, Robert Laplander, Lulu.com, 2006, 616 pages, illustrations, maps,
ISBN 978 14116 76565, $35 paperback.

Amateur historian Robert Lapander has walked the ground where the Lost Battalion (actually parts of two battalions of the 77th Division) fought in the hills and ravines of the Argonne Forest in 1918. He asserts that he has corrected previous errors in positioning the location of the battle, which extended over several days. Mr. Laplander gave a powerful presentation of his findings at the April 2008 WFA East Coast Chapter seminar in Baltimore. His book in equally engaging and readable. It joins several other earlier histories of this event, which received wide publicity in the postwar era. One by established historians Thomas Johnson, Fletcher Pratt and Edward “Mac” Coffman is still in print. Another by Woodrow Wilson specialist Robert H. Ferrell is also still available.

Also available from Mr. Laplander’s American Expeditionary Foundation is The Lost Battalion: Return to the Charlevaux, 2007, 160 pages, ISBN 978 816151 39203, $27.50 paperback. This is a recounting of one of Mr. Laplander’s visits to the Lost Battalion site above Charlevaux Mill.

Len Shurtleff

Isabel Hull's Absolute Destruction

Gilli Vardi
Review of Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction. Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany
University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History, 10, (2006)

Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction. Military Culture and the Practices of War in
Imperial Germany, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 408 pages, ISBN
0801442583.

Hull’s book makes essential reading for scholars interested in two interlocking themes:
German military history of the early 20th century, and the question of continuity in
German modern history. Hull presents us with convincing and eloquent arguments, using
cultural theories as an analytical tool to explain the German conduct of war from 1870
through 1918. This is characterised with what Hull calls ‘institutional extremism’, the
doctrine and warfare of annihilation (Vernichtungskrieg) exercised in its extreme by the
Imperial Army in its African campaign of 1904 against the Herero insurrection, and
increasingly during the First World War. The German army, as Hull establishes, came to
develop a uniquely violent and genocidal military culture, unrestrained by the civil
authorities who were themselves taken by ‘double militarism’. This culture eventually
became unrealistic, dysfunctional and self destructive. Unfolding the story and role of
this military culture, the decisions taken by the German leadership, both military and
civil, the differences dissolving as the Great War continued, Hull makes a powerful
argument for German Sonderweg and raises an important contribution to Fritz Fischer’s
claim on the many links connecting the Kaiserreich with the Third Reich.
The book is divided into three parts. The first portrays the campaign in Southwest
Africa (now Namibia) between 1904 and 1907. In this campaign the army embarked on a
policy of exterminating the rebellious Herero. Ever since the wars of unification, the
German army came to define victory exclusively as the annihilation of the enemy’s
forces; this would be best achieved in a single, decisive battle of annihilation. In
accordance with this rationale, the extermination of the Herero people, not just the
warriors, became a ‘military necessity’, allowing the soldiers to expand the killing to
captives, women and children, and eventually to drive the Herero to the desert. Hull
estimates that 50-70 percent of them died as a result of the German campaign.
The second part of the book is the most interesting, original and thoughtprovoking.
Hull employs theories of culture and organisational culture to explain what
drove the German army, narrowed its frame of thought, determined how it conceptualised
warfare, and made some military solutions more desirable (and later the sole acceptable
answer) than others. In her cultural account, Hull’s analysis encompasses the civil
authorities and governments, the Reich’s constitution, laws and politics as well as the
army, since these were inseparable and affected each other’s development. In an
escalating process, Germany’s leaders subdued political guidance and primacy in setting
the goals of war to the military ones. The army itself inclined ever more toward extreme
warfare, and while other European armies with much the same inclinations were halted
by their governments, the German army was left (and even encouraged) to devote itself
completely to its cultural characteristics: risk taking, the endless pursuit of annihilation
battles, the reduction of strategy to meticulous operational and tactical planning, the trust
in fighting spirit and ‘qualitative superiority’, ruthlessness and an exaggerated drive for
action.

All these would prove fatal in the First World War, as Hull elaborates in the third
part of the book. In a gradual process the army alone came to define what ‘victory’ and
the ultimate goal of war is. This goal was reduced to a tactical formula (annihilation)
which turned means to ends, as the Schlieffen plan so clearly demonstrates. A realistic
assessment of Germany’s situation, resources, capabilities and needs, was not to be
found; nor was it demanded or appreciated, since the military leadership was
overwhelmingly confident that victory would be achieved should the army be granted
the freedom to conduct the war according to its demands and best decisions. This
freedom was granted, and the path was thus opened for the catastrophes that followed.
Once the Schlieffen plan failed to realize a decisive battle and the war turned into a slow,
total, all-consuming struggle, the military leaders stressed the exigencies of ‘military
necessity’, facilitating once again a ruthless and destructive occupation, this time in
Europe, while futilely trying again and again to wage that final decisive battle or create
the conditions that would lead to it. Eventually, driven to self-destructive extremity, they
were willing to accept Germany’s own destruction in a final last battle (Endkampf), and
preferred it over ‘humiliating’ surrender.

Hull’s argument, however powerful, is not without flaws. She ignores the
ideological component of warfare at the expense of the cultural one: Germany’s policy
was not devoid of ideological convictions as to Germany’s place under the sun, which
encouraged and propelled both its African campaign and its decisions during the July
1914 crisis. Ideology is a powerful motivator, indeed sometimes more powerful than
previous cultural constructs, and it can thus challenge the cultural explanations and
motivations presented so convincingly in the book. Hull addresses this issue only briefly
in her conclusions.A further discussion on public opinion and parliamentary objection to
the army’s demands prior to the First World War (mainly the SPD and its voters) could
have enriched the explanations of ‘double militarism’ and avoided a one-dimensional
analysis of the phenomenon.

However these questions do not undermine Hull’s achievement - shedding new
light and offering a comprehensive explanation to this complicated chapter in German
history. Hull presents us with a well-established explanation as to why and how Germany
was swept into the disasters of the Great War, and suggests interesting links between the
unification and colonial wars, and the World War that followed. It is a highly
recommended book and a valuable contribution to the research of German history.

Gilli Vardi
Department of International History
London School of Economics

Edward Lengel's To Conquer Hell

Edward G. Lengel, associate editor, the Papers of George Washington, "To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918." Henry Holt and Co.

March 14, 2008 — Ed Lengel's book, "To Conquer Hell" covers the dramatic story of the bloodiest battle in American history: the epic fight for the Meuse-Argonne in World War I.

On Sept. 26, 1918, more than 1 million American soldiers prepared to assault the German-held Meuse-Argonne region of France. Their commander, U.S. Army Gen. John J. Pershing, believed in the superiority of American "guts" over barbed wire, machine guns, massed artillery and poison gas. In 36 hours, he said, the Doughboys would crack the German defenses and open the road to Berlin.

Six weeks later, after savage fighting across swamps, forests, towns and rugged hills, the battle finally ended with the signing of the armistice that concluded the First World War. The Meuse-Argonne had fallen, at the cost of more than 120,000 American casualties, including 26,000 dead. In the bloodiest battle the country had ever seen, an entire generation of young Americans had been transformed forever.

"To Conquer Hell" also is studded with portraits of remarkable soldiers like Pershing, Harry Truman, George Patton and Alvin York, and authoritative in presenting the big picture. It is military history of the first rank and, incredibly, the first in-depth account of this fascinating and important battle.

"The Meuse-Argonne was the most important American battle of the First World War, and the bloodiest battle in American military history," said Lengel. "My book is the first comprehensive history of the battle from the soldiers’ eye view."

As an editor with the Washington Papers, Lengel has spent most of the last 12 years immersed in the Revolutionary War. But family history (he is a cousin of Sgt. Alvin C. York, famously portrayed by Gary Cooper in the 1941 film "Sergeant York") and a lifelong interest in soldiers' literature inspired his fascination with the First World War.

"This war was the single most important event of modern times," Lengel said. "It influenced every imaginable aspect of politics and culture across the globe."

Martin Gilbert, author of "The First World War" and "The Somme," praised the book as "one of the most powerful war books that I have read." He wrote, "Those who fought on the Meuse-Argonne in 1918, and all Americans interested in their national heritage, are fortunate that Edward G. Lengel has written this deeply researched book — bringing the strategy, the commanders, the officers and men, the tactics, the horror and the heroism together in a moving, dramatic and intensely human account."

Lengel is the author of "This Glorious Struggle: George Washington's Revolutionary War Letters," also released this year, and "General George Washington: A Military Life."

To Conquer Hell: The Meuse Argonne, 1918, Edward G. Lengel, Henry Holt, 2008, 491 + xiv pages, photos, maps, index, notes, bibliography, ISBN 0 8050 7931 9, $32.95 cloth.
The author teaches at the University of Virginia and is scheduled to speak at the September 2008 Western Front Association annual national seminar at Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

This is a detailed and long-overdue examination of this most bloody battle, actually a six-week-long major campaign of World War One. There have been only two book-length studies of the Meuse-Argonne since 1985: Paul Braim’s The Test of Battle (Delaware 1987); and, Robert Ferrell’s America’s Deadliest Battle Braim’s work was long on detail and short on cogent analysis; Ferrell was long on analysis but short on tactical detail. Lengel’s work is full of both, based as it is on a thorough study of primary and secondary sources including first-person accounts and unit histories. (Kansas 2007).

Attacking across broken, hilly ground held by deeply entrenched German forces since 1914, the American First and Second Armies took over 120,000 casualties including 26,000 dead. Yet, this was a combined arms battle involving both tanks and aircraft in both the scouting and attack modes. It was also a hard learning experience on a steep curve for inexperienced American infantry leaders and artillerists, who learned their trade in a series of costly frontal attacks. Logistics, despite the careful planning George Marshall and other skilled operations officers, was also an issue. Massive traffic jams hampered the attack for days and led to French calls AEF commander Pershing’s removal. Indeed, problems of food and ammunition supply and evacuation of the wounded were not resolved until after a mid-campaign pause for rest and reorganization.

In all, you will find here many accounts of the participation of future American military leaders (MacArthur, Marshall, Patton), as well as details of the individual actions, units engaged and analysis of results. These accounts will be familiar to specialists, but new to general readers not familiar with the details of American participation in The Great War. And, here lies the value of this book: educating a new generation of readers.

Len Shurtleff

John Mosier's The Myth of the Great War

John Mosier's new book re-examines history with new evidence By Margaret M. Wenzel, A'01 Intern in the Offices of Public Affairs and Publications John Mosier, professor of English literature at Loyola, began writing his fifth and most recent book, The Myth of the Great War, as a guide to visitors to Europe who wanted to know about modern history. Ten years later, Mosier has now written one of the most controversial books about World War I, arguing that America's involvement on the Allied Side has been far more influential than previously thought before. The primary mystery of the conflict, Mosier contends, is that the Allies continued fighting in French trenches under the delusion that German casualties far outweighed those of the French and Belgian. Although the Germans suffered tremendous losses, they did not compare to the unsupportable levels on the French and British sides. The Kirkus Review, the newswire service that reviews books that have reached the potential to become bestsellers, has praised Mosier's book as "a compelling and novel reassessment of WWI military history." The review hails The Myth of the Great War as "a necessary addition to any serious collection of military or WWI history." How did Mosier, an English professor, come to the field of military history? Well, his experiences as an author are as exciting as theories his new book proposes. Adventurous and humble, Mosier will tell you, "I do not think of myself as a historian." Standing in a French graveyard over a decade ago, Mosier recalled how his search for the truth began: "I was standing in this place and I noticed hundreds of graves of soldiers who had died in Verdun in 1917. I had always understood that the battle was fought between February and December of 1916. There was clearly something wrong with the way history was being told. 'What was going on here?' I thought." Mosier got more interested, and as he began to uncover the truth, "it never became any easier." "It was dangerous out there," Mosier relates. "People don't realize that most allied shells did not explode. They penetrated into the ground and the percussion fuses, TNT, never were impacted hard enough to go off," the author explains of his field research while in Verdun. The largest battlefield in the world, the site of incalculable horrors, was the place Mosier began his investigation. "As I have always understood military history, it was as if there were more German casualties than anything elseand why not?," he continues. "No one is really sure how many Belgians were lost in the war. Thousands of unmarked graves will muddle the facts up pretty well if you're not careful." The greatest living British historian, Niall Ferguson, has praised The Myth of the Great War as a fresh new perspective on the subject. "He [Mosier] rightly argues that the crucial factor was their [Germans] superior understanding of the new artillery technology of the period, as well as their better infantry tactics. . . His really deep knowledge of the French military history of 1914-16, backed up by an impressive knowledge of the terrain, results in some truly convincing revisionism." Though Ferguson has stated that he fundamentally disagrees with Mosier's assessment of the American contribution to the war, "there is much else in the book I really admire." Both Mosier and Ferguson used many of the same sources, but Myth improves on, in many respects, the Brit's respected figures. Ferguson has said, "Perhaps the thing I like best is the way he shows how allied propaganda tended to snatch victories from the jaws of defeat, by reporting short-term gains of territory, but not reporting subsequent and often successful German counterattacks. Mosier's point is that the historical narrative of the war has continued to be dominated by the narratives constructed at the same time as the Entente Powers. . . he sets about trying to deconstruct some of these 'victories.'" Mosier's final claim in Myth is the most controversial: he contends that the final allied victory was due to America's participation in the final stages. As the Kirkus Review stated, Mosier's theory is so well supported that, "Historians. . .will be compelled at the very least to come to terms with his argument." What's next for Mosier? "A book about World War II." Using the same methods as in The Myth of the Great War, Mosier's next work should be completed around December of this year. HarperCollins has published the book here in the U.S., and the rights have to been sold to British publishers, Pilot Press.

Mitchell Yockelson's Borrowed Soldiers

The Campaigns and Commanders Series for University of Oklahoma Press has just published Borrowed Soldiers: Americans under British Command, 1918, by Mitchell A. Yockelson. Focusing on the U.S. 27th and 30th Divisions, this book provides a comprehensive study of the first time American and British soldiers fought together as a coalition force – more than twenty years before that happened in World War II. This book tells how these Yanks contributed substantially to British and Australian efforts to piece the Hindenburg Line. Borrowed Soldiers

Borrowed Soldiers: American under British Command, 1918, Michell A Yockelson, Oklahoma, 2008, 308 + xx pages, photos, maps, appendices, ISBN 978 0 8061 3919 7, $29.95 cloth. The author is an archivist at the National Archives, history teaches at Annapolis, and a frequent speaker at WFA seminars.

This is a superbly crafted analysis of the campaigns of the United States II Corps, The 27th and 30th Divisions, in Flanders at Mount Kimmel then along the Somme. It was these divisions that, despite suffering heavy casualties, broke through the Hindenburg Line along the St Quentin Canal between Vandhuille and Bellicourt in late September 1918. Fighting under command of the Lt. General Sir John Monash’s Australian and New Zealand (ANZAC) Corps, the two divisions continued to advance in attacks along the Selle River extending into October 1918.

Originally created to control several division assigned to the British for training, II Corps was in mid-1918 reduced to an administrative headquarters overseeing only two AEF divisions, the 27th and 30th. Its commanding officer, Major General George W. Read, sensibly ceded tactical command to the British. He had neither the personal expertise nor the staff to exercise tactical control. Despite some misunderstandings, this arrangement and II Corps troops were better led, better armed and better fed than the run- of-the-mill AEF formation. Their troops were armed with British SMLE rifles and Lewis guns, supported entirely by BEF artillery, fed by the British commissary and often tended by the Royal Medical Corps. Some soldiers even wore British uniforms when their American ones wore out.

Several other things are unique about these two divisions. Both were National Guard units topped off with draftees before deployment overseas beginning in February 1918 . The 27th Division was made up of New York state guardsmen; the 30th (Old Hickory Division) of guardsmen from Tennessee, North and South Carolina. Once deployed to Europe, they were neither reinforced with artillery, nor their losses replaced with fresh troops. Thus, unlike other National Guard divisions they never lost their regional character. Also, as alluded to above, these were the only divisions entirely trained, armed and supplied by the British. Finally, the 27th Division was the only AEF division to be commanded from start to finish by a career National Guard officer, Major General John F. O’Ryan, a New York lawyer and long-service graduate of the Command and General Staff College well respected by his professional army peers. While Yockelson does not minimize the frictions inevitable between Americans and British soldiers, he does emphasize the largely positive aspects of the amalgamation.

As you might expect, II Corps performance in battle was sometimes spotty, though their discipline was strong. Plagued with a steep learning curve and a shortage of trained officers and NCOs, poor battlefield communications and confusion over conflicting tactical doctrines pressed on them by British trainers and American staff officers, they sometimes failed. Nonetheless, the author rates their performance as equal that of the best AEF divisions, The First, Second and 26th, particularly in action against a stubborn and expert defense mounted by the Germans at the Hindenburg Line along the St. Quentin Canal in the final 100 days battles of 1918.

Those who travel to the Western Front will recall seeing monuments to the II Corps near Vierstraat Belgium and at Bellicourt, France. Many of the two divisions’ dead are buried at the Somme American Cemetery at Bony. Others, whose bodies were never identified, are memorialized on the Menin Gate in Ypres. In one respect, these are monuments to coalition warfare marking successful cooperation and collaboration that cemented the Anglo-American alliance through two world wars and beyond.

Len Shurtleff

John Terraine's "To Win a War. 1918, The Year of Victory"

At a recent WFA-USA East Coast Chapter event, I received John Terraine’s “To Win a War: 1918, The Year of Victory” as a door prize. It has finally worked its way up the stack of books I have to read, and I just finished it last night. I am glad that I read the book. It is a relatively easy read. Only 235 pages long (excluding index, appendices, etc) the book can be read on your lunch hour in a little over a week. If you are like me, I do much of my reading during my lunch hour, so books in the 250-500 page range are ideal.

“To Win a War” was published in 1978, and for its time I imagine it was considered a bit of a revisionist book, but by the standards of recent works on the Great War it has become conventional. To whit, the Germans lost the war and the Allies actually won it by beating them on the battlefield. It also portrays the Generals and especially Haig as competent professionals and not as uncaring butchers. The book has a decidedly British centric viewpoint of the final year of the war. The revisionist aspects of the book are basically covered in the first couple of chapters in which the author takes David Lloyd George’s view of the war to task.

The book is nine chapters long and the first three chapters deal with the situation both political and militarily of the opposing sides leading up to the eve of the German Spring Offensives. It is here that Terraine details the conflict between Lloyd George and Douglas Haig. 1918 starts with the Government in London dismayed over the cost of the 1917 Offensives and the lack of results. Lloyd George is determined to not repeat 1917, and takes moves to rein in Haig. Some of the actions that he takes is to push the “Superior Direction” of the war onto the Supreme War Council in Versailles. This move caused the ouster of Sir William Robertson as the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and his replacement by Sir Henry Wilson. Robertson had been Haig’s chief supporter on the Imperial General Staff. Wilson would not be a Haig proponent but a more political general. Additionally, Lloyd George kept the number of replacements provided to the BEF to a minimum. The BEF was forced to reducing the size of a divisions, and break several divisions up in order to bring the rest up to strength. The result of all these actions were that just prior to the impending German attack the BEF was weaker, with a Commander that had to fight London as well as the Germans. Along with discussing the British situation, Terraine also talks about the American and French situation.

By March 1918, the United States had been in the war for almost a year, but still had not managed to field an Army, build any new dreadnoughts, manufacture artillery for the troops it did have in France. The US was coming on much slower than anyone had hoped, and this presented an opportunity for the Germans. One bright spot for the allies were that the French were in much better condition than they had been six months earlier. The government was now headed by Georges Clemenceau, known as the “Tiger”. Gone were the pacifist ministers and those with defeatist attitudes. “Only War, Nothing but War” was the attitude in government. The army was in better shape as well. It had recovered from the mutinies of 1917. Ferdinand Foch was now the Generalissimo in charge of the Supreme War Council and he brought an aggressive spirit to the Front.

Terraine then goes on to describe the German Spring Offensives. He presents a large number of statistics to show that the War in 1918 were consuming men and material not seen since 1914. Contrary to popular myth, the war in the trenches killed less men than a war of Maneuver. While Terraine does detail the German successes, he barely mentions any sense of panic in the allied command at the height of the attacks. From reading this book one would never think that Haig was anything but cool and collected. If anyone became unsettled, it was only the French.

As the German attacks petered out, unable to gain any strategic gains. The allies began to counterattack. The Americans attacking for the first time at Cantigny. Of the early counterattacks Terraine singles out the attack on the village of Le Hamel by the Australian Corp, commanded by Lt. Gen. Monash. This was a set piece attack that featured a combined arms approach - tanks, artillery, and infantry. Monash’s approach was that the infantry was to occupy and hold ground, not take ground. That was the job of the artillery. At Le Hamel, everything went right. It was a textbook victory. The battle even featured several companies of Americans. For me this is one of the more interesting features of the book. Terraine details the role the Americans played in the English sector. Two American divisions fought under British control, and did very well. In some respects, better than those under American command. The Australians, Americans, along with the Canadians would form the shock troops that would spearhead much of the British attacks in 1918.

After Le Hamel, the British wished to repeat that performance on a wider scale. During the Battle of Amiens, they would do just that. 1900 aircraft, 414 tanks, the Australians, Canadians, the Cavalry Corp, along with the rest of the British Fourth Army were committed to battle. Terraine devotes much of an entire chapter to describe this battle, the opening of which, Ludendorff would call the “Black Day” of the German Army. Terraine points out how the war in 1918, and the allied attacks would foreshadow much of what would be seen in World War 2.

After Amiens, the Germans realized that they could not win the war. Terraine spends the rest of the book detailing how each Allied, and especially British attack would cause the German command to become ever more desperate to end the war. Terraine does a good job of showing how the desperation of the German command caused a change in Government in Germany. He also describes how the loss of confidence at the Front caused near revolutionary changes in Germany to point where the situation in Germany began to effect the front. Terraine also describes the hardening of Allied attitudes. The armistice conditions being insisted upon by the French and Pershing basically amounted to a demand for Unconditional Surrender. Unfortunately for Germany, the continuing Allied and especially British success was driving Germany to the point to where she could do nothing but accept the terms.

Terraine details how Haig being aware of the declining manpower situation of his army was pushing for a decision in 1918. Haig was worried that if the war did not end before the winter, the Germans would recover, and be able to fight on possibly into 1920. By the end of 1918 the French were not fighting hard. American losses in the Argonne were causing several formations to be broke up to provide replacements to other divisions. Terraine describes a situation where only the British Army was driving the Germans, and they were reaching the end of their ability to continue to do so. Along with being concerned that demanding terms that might cause the Germans to fight on, Haig was also worried that too harsh of terms would lead not to peace but to another war at a later date.

While “To Win a War” is an interesting book, detailing British accomplishments and attitudes to a degree that I had not read much of previously. It is not without its faults. The Maps in the book are pretty useless. They rarely have the locations marked for the battles being described in the text around the maps. If you are going to pick up a copy of the book, I suggest keeping a WW-I atlas at hand to keep everything in proper perspective.

While being a 30 year old book. Copies of it are available on Abe Books for as little as $1. If you are a student of the Great War I would suggest that would be a dollar well spent.

- Jeffrey Beigie

Eyewitness of Air Warfare, 1914

kjm329 — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:33:35 CST

by Kevin McCoach

This is a primary source by Lt. W.R Read who was a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps. In early August 1914 the Corps was ordered to transport it force of 63 planes to France and provide reconnaissance of enemy troop movements. Read kept a diary of his experience with his observer Jackson, as they flew over Mons, Belgium. Lt. Read refers to his plane as “Henri". One day after their reconnaissance over Mons and Charleroi, Jackson spotted a German Taube. Read wanted to continue back to base to give the report. Jackson, who was always bloodthirsty, wanted to go for the German Taube. They Proceeded to go after him and at first pass Jackson got in two shots with the rifle. They passed each other a few more times and soon Jackson was out of ammo. He asked Read for his revolver which was also out of ammo. Jackson ordered Read to pass the German Taube once more but this time as close as possible. As they beside the Taube, Jackson proceeded to try and throw the revolver at the Germans propeller and obviousl missed so they went back to base.

August 22 they headed out again. The French distinguished themselves by taking down one of their own airships. They fired at the fleet a few times and a few plains came back with bullet holes in them. One of the observers in the plains that were fired at got shot in the stomach. Read and Jackson do more flying than most other flights because Henri is the most reliable machine and is always ready for flight. On their last reconnaissance of Le Cateau which was in flames and they were being shelled by anti-aircraft guns. They were forced to land but there was no suitable place to land at headquarters in Bertry. They were forced to land somewhere unsteady. As they landed they began to skid and as soon as they touched ground the chassis gave way and Henri did a nose dive. there was no time for repair for shells were already falling over the town. Read and Jackson were forced to leave Henri there at it's last resting place. Henri

The topic of the week was air warfare. I researched and found and eyewitness report of a battle in the air that would go along with the topic of air war we were discussing in class.

German taube

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/648646/World-War-I/53158/Air-warfare

http://www.fidnet.com/~weid/ww1.html

http://www.worldwar1gallery.com/airwar/

History of World War I at DCCC

JeffreyLaMonica — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 06:54:52 CST

History of WWI at DCCC Online Assignment

One group of students is assigned to present a short primary source reading to the class each week. Groups choose their primary source from a link posted on the course internet site. The primary source must pertain to that week’s topic. The goals of the presentation are to summarize the reading and link it to that week’s topic. Each group member must contribute to the presentation. After the presentation, the group creates a page on the course internet site based upon their presentation. The page should include a thorough description of the primary source reading and its connections to class. Cutting and pasting information from other websites is not sufficient. Each page should include images, videos, and links to other websites. No two pages may include the same material. Pages will be graded on content and creativity. The online assignment is due at the end of the semester. An in-class tutorial will explain how to create a page on the internet site. It is each student’s responsibility to volunteer to participate in at least one group presentation during the semester.

Click "Add a New Page" in the left column to start your page. Click "Easy Edit" to begin working on your page. You can type text and paste information right in your page. The interface works like a word processing program with the abilities to add images, video, and links to other websites. Choose fonts, colors, and check your spelling just as you would with a word processing program. The are icons to click that allow you to add "Photo" and "Link". The "Video" icon enables you to add video from the internet. Click "Save" when you are done working. You can return and update your page anytime.

World War I Primary Document Archive

Anglo-Russian Entente

The War at Sea

The War in the Air

First Battle of the Marne

Russian Revolution

Lusitania

Zimmerman Telegram

Battle of Verdun

US Marines at Belleau Wood

Gallipoli Campaign

Second Battle of the Marne

The Gallipoli Campaign

VictorDiLella — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 02:42:50 CST

On February 19th 1915, the French and British coordinated a naval attack through the Dardanelles followed by the landing of troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula. It was meant to break through Dardanelles, capture Istanbul, and establish a link with the Russian Navy. This attack would be stopped by a combined force of Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and German troops, resulting in an Allied retreat by January of 1916. The Allies suffered roughly 220,000 casualties, while the Central Powers suffered roughly 253,000 casualties. The campaign is notable for being the first major operation which used the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, or ANZAC. Australia and New Zealand's equivalent of veteran's day, Anzac Day, was created to commemorate the loss. It is celebrated on April 25th.

The attack began on February 19th with an attempt to storm battleships from the British and French Navies straight through the Dardanelles. This proved to be a fatal decision for three reasons: the Ottomans had loaded the Dardnelles with mines, the Ottomans had artillery positioned on the high ground on either side of the straight, and the guns of the British and French ships could not aim high enough to hit the Ottoman defensive positions. After heavy damage was sustained on their enormously expensive battleships, the Allied navies decided to pull out and let the infantry try their luck.

The infantry attack was headed by General Ian Hamilton on April 25th. The allies used boats to land troops at various locations on the Gallipoli Peninsula. They arrived to find themselves fighting uphill against Turkish machine gun positions, and quickly dug in and made makeshift trenches at the base of the hills. Minor battles were fought through late April and into May. The month of May saw two British battleships go down at the hands of a German U-boat, U-21.

The Allies launched a series of attacks in August known as the August Offensive. Although they did eventually control the high ground in some of these attacks, they did not capture enough for a continued presence to be worthwhile. Evacuation began in late November and continued until January of 1916.

The failure of the Gallipoli Campaign would not be the last humiliating defeat that the British would suffer at the hands of the poorly equipped, poorly trained Turks. It is generally seen as a disaster for the Allies, and was one of the rare times in the war during which the navy saw any action.

Field Reports from Lord Herbert Kitchener and General Sir Ian Hamilton

These reports are very optimistic considering the losses that the British suffered during their stay at Gallipoli.

Here is footage of the Turks preparing for the battles at Gallipoli:

Further Reading: Australian War Memorial history of the Anzacs at Gallipoli, Royal Dublin Fusiliers Association description of Irish troops at Gallipoli, IWM Gallipoli Interactive Site

The United States Marines at Belleau Wood

Paul.Roth — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:47:36 CST

The battle at Belleau Wood was the defining moment for the United States Marine Corps up until the raising of the US flag on the top of Mount Suribachi.

The Second Battle of the Marne

LyandKeith — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 23:07:53 CST

[15th JULY - 5th AUGUST 1918]

The Second Battle of the Marne marked the turning of the tide in World War I. It began with the last German offensive of the conflict which was quickly followed by the first Allied offensive victory of 1918. The American Expeditionary Force with over 250,000 men fighting under. Overall French command played key roles, both in the initial defense and then in later advances.

In the Second Battle of Marne with 30,000 killed and wounded, the United States started suffering casualties on the enormous scale usually associated with the battles of the Great War. The battle took place over the course of 15 July-5 August 1918, in the final year of the war. Erich Ludendorff, effectively the German Chief-of-Staff was convinced that the war could best be won by an attack in Flanders.

[Map of the Marne]
General = 1914 - 1918

[ Associating the War with notes: ]

The Second battle of the Marne took place between the 15th of July and the 5th of august of 1918. Basically, It was an allied victory and the last big German offensive. The Germans not only lost the battle but grounds as well. Even German commanders felt that the war was lost. Lundendorff wanted an attack on Flanders. German forces was to launch an offensive on French forces on the east and west Reims.

Within the French forces however there were 85,000 US forces plus troops from the BEF. First day, the Germans failed and were halted on the east. On the west however, they were able to break through and cross the Marne.Naturally, a counter offense was authorized on the 18 of July with 24 French divisions, 8 US divisions, and 350 tanks. They successfully eliminated German salient among the French lines. Germans retreated on the 20th of July but came back to where they started their great spring 1918 offensive on the 3rd of august. The allied counter offensive was halted on the 6th of August by entrenched Germans.Essentially, Ludendorff's plan was canceled entirely and no large scale attempt for a war win on the German behalf was planned afterwards. Therefore it was essentially the marked end of German victories and the beginning of Allied wins.

[The End to World War I]

Following the Second Battle of the Marne, the end to World War I also known as, The Great War, came about on the 11th of November 1918.

To the left, a look back, a tribute, to WWI.

[ Page by: ] Ly Wang && Keith OReilly

Anglo-Russian Entente

AngloRussianEntente — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:45:32 CST

Summary:

The document outlined the agreement between Great Britain and Russia regarding the land of Persia. The British and the Russians realized the competitions they could face between one another while trying to gain control of this key area of the continent. They hoped that by outlining this peace, disagreements between the two powers could be avoided.

The terms included the following conditions:

I. The British would not attempt to expand passed a predetermined line. This line forced the British to stay away from the Russian and Afghan borders and frontiers. This includes even supporting entities that attempt to cross the line into the Russian influence.

II. The Russians agreed to not pass a predetermined line as well. This includes refusing to support entities which attempted to cross into British influence.

III. Russia agrees to not oppose, without discussion with Great Britain, concessions to British subjects between the given lands. Great Britain has a similar agreement with Russia.

Essentially, the Anglo-Russian Entente divided Persia into three sections: a British section, a Russian section and a neutral buffer zone. They tried to sugarcoat the attempt to partition the Persian empire between the two great powers by using very specific language which avoided the term “influence”; even though that was exactly what was going on.

Relevance to Class:

The Anglo-Russian Entente divided Persia into these 3 parts. Controversy over the superpowers dividing Persia without their permission was a huge piece of the Great War puzzle. Essentially, this began to tear apart an already fragile Ottoman Empire. This also set into motion many of the events that took place over the next few years. This Entente ensured that Great Britain would enter the war on the side of the Russians to protect its Entente partner and its territory in Persia. Conversely, it also ensured that the Ottoman Empire would join the war on the Alliance side. It also dictated that Persia would become an intense battleground for control of the northeastern portion of the Ottoman Empire because of the neutral buffer zone that was created. This buffer zone would eventually create an easy invasion point of both Russian and British Persia by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. Also the Anglo-Russian Entente agreement would soon combine with the French alliance agreements to become as a whole the Triple Entente.

Links to Consider

Anglo-Russian Entente Document

NY Times Article dealing with Entente

Battle of Verdun

AmandaandNick — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 13:40:43 CST

The Battle of Verdun was the longest battle of World War One and lasted from February 21, 1916 to December 16, 1916. The attack on Verdun came about because Von Falkenhayn wanted to "bleed France white" by launching a massive German attack on a narrow stretch of land that had historic sentiment for the French- Verdun. The area around Verdun contained 20 major forts and 40 smaller ones. This historically protected the Eastern border of France. Falkenhayn believed that the French couldn't possibly allow these forts to fall because of the national humiliation it would cause them. Because of this, he figured the French would fight until their last man and this battle would change the course of the war.
There was a big flaw in this plan and that was the French would be a weak opponent and would take massive numbers of casualties. Unfortunately for the Germans, this was not the case. One thing that hampered the French was that they had recently removed ammunition from the forts to other areas on the Western Front. Also, the trenches they had previously dug for defensive purposes had not yet been finished. At the start of the attack 140,000 German troops marched forward supported by 1,200 artillery guns which targeted 2,500,000 shells at the Verdun region. Germans also had air supremacy with 168 planes. This was the largest number in history up to this point. The French only had 30,000 troops to oppose the Germans. In the first day 100 German artillery guns fired on a 6 mile line along the French front.
Flame throwers were used in large numbers for the very first time to help Germans advance 8 miles. This battle was to last an excess of 300 days. By February 25th the Germans captured 10,000 French soldiers. To make matters worse, the largest fort Douaumont, which was said to be the most powerful fort, was manned by only 56 men. Even worse than this, they were elderly part-time gunners who ended up giving the Germans no resistance. The French put Philippe Petain in charge of defense for Verdun. He brought 25,000 tons of supplies, 90,000 soldiers and 6,000 vehicles. Now, 66% of the French army was to pass up one road to Verdun called the "Sacred Way" to save the French from defeat.
By summer, the French achieved some form of air supremacy. June first Germany launched a massive attack at Verdun and by June 23 they got within 2.5 miles from Verd un. The attack failed because Germany's army had given all that it had. By the end of October the French recaptured Vaux, Douaumont and all surrounding land. The battle still continued until December. The French lost over 360,000 men and Germans lost nearly 340,000 men.

First Battle of the Marne

SarahandJohn — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:48:30 CST

After invading Belgium and Northern France, Germany was within 30 miles of Paris. This came into accordance of the Schlieffen Plan, with a swift defeat of France followed with a massive invasion of Russia. Germany forced the Allies to retreat for close to two weeks, pushing them to the south of the Marne river. After having Paris completely surrounded in the East, German victory seemed clear. However, French troops, under Joseph Joffre, launched a counter offensive in an attempt to break the German;s First Army line. Under the command of General Maunory, the French Sixth Army, along with BEF forces, poured into the German line.Despite this, Germany was close to achieving its objective of taking Paris, but French forces driven by taxi cabs came in to help the beliguered Allies. On September 8th, French commander Franchet d'Esperey launched a surprise attack on Germany's second Army, widening the gap between the 1st and 2nd army. German forces retreated the next day under General Helmuth von Moltke, with the Allies pursuing the remains of the German forces. On September 10th, Germany dug in 40 miles from Marne, creating the Western Front which will last close to four years. There were 250,000 French casualties and nearly the same for the Germans, while the British suffered 12,733 casualties.

Zimmermann Telegraph

JC00 — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 04:57:11 CST

The Zimmermann Telegraph

The Telegram was transmitted by radio and also across two telegraph routes under the cover of diplomatic messages by two neutral governments, Sweden and the United States. Germany lacked direct telegraphic access to the Western hemisphere because the British had cut the German cables in the Atlantic and shut down German stations in neutral countries. This forced Germany to use British and American cables instead despite the risk of interception. The Zimmermann messages passed over cables that touched on British soil, and as a result were intercepted there by British intelligence. President Woodrow Wilson had granted the German diplomats the privilege of sending their messages under the cover of U.S. diplomatic traffic in hopes that this would enable Germany to remain in touch with the United States and further Wilson's aims of ending the war. The message passing through this way was sent from Berlin to the German ambassador in Washington, Johann von Bernstorff, for re-transmission to von Eckardt in Mexico. What was a privilege provided to further peace actually brought war. The Telegram was intercepted as soon as it was sent. The code breakers in Room 40 at the Admiralty received a copy and decrypted enough to get the gist of it. The German Foreign Office encrypted the Telegram with cipher 0075, which Room 40 had partly broken. The British government wanted to use the incriminating Telegram. It provided a splendid opportunity to draw the United States into World War I on the Allied side. Anti-German feeling in the United States was particularly strong at that moment, due to the German policy of "unrestricted" submarine warfare.

Zimmerman Telegraph

The Sinking of the Lusitania

JeffreyLaMonica — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:14:16 CST

Our primary source was written from William Jennings Bryan, the secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson to the US ambassador to Germany. He starts out by talking about recent attacks that the Germans made, and the deaths of the American citizens who were involved. The first attack was the sinking of the British passenger steamer Falaba. Although only one American citizen was killed it was enough to send the American people into a panic. Next was the sinking of the gulflight, which killed two American citizens. Then the worst sinking of them all, the sinking of the Lusitania which killed over 100 American citizens.
Why would the US allow ships to travel through a high risk areas with American passengers aboard? If theGermans put out the warnings why would the American citizens take the risk of traveling a British ship? At the end of this article he states even though previously we had ties with Germany they would all be broken due to American civilian casualties. This really angered America and lead to our involvement into world war one. We once had a treaty with the Kingdom of Prussia in 1828 which would now be broken after the 124 American civilian deaths. This really gave us a reason once we received the Zimmerman telegram to get involved and there was no choice but to wage war. Overall all the attacks of the ships were uncivilized and barbaric and the United States had every right to join the war and fight for the American citizens who lost their lives to these attacks.

Woodrow Wilson

The Lusitania As It Is Today

The British Passenger Ship Sunk Before Lusitania, "Falaba"

Broadside view of Lusitania

The Gulflight

The War at Sea During World War I

JeffreyLaMonica — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:50:09 CST

Only a few topics arise when talking about the war at sea during World War I. In fact most of the time most of the navies tried to avoid each other. Most of these massive ships were extremely expensive and many admirals did not want to lose any. However there was one major battle that did take place. On May 31, 1916 two major fleet's of the British and German navies would face of in The Battle of Jutland. The German Admiral Reinhardt Scheer went up against two British Admirals John Jellicoe and David Beatty. It was night time and both fleet's mistakenly ran into each other. The British navy of 52 ships outnumbered the German navy of 40 ships. At the end the German navy claimed victory after sinking 14 ships and killing around 6,100 British soldiers. The German navy lost 11 ships and lost about 2,550 soldiers. Neither navy wanted to see a battle like this again and did their best to stay away from each other.

Russian Revolution (his ww1 fall 09)

nkrinsky — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 12:01:07 CST

There is no abstract available for this page revision.

War Memorials

JeffreyLaMonica — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 16:56:10 CST

National World War I Memorial Foundation

National WWI Memorial Debate

Congress and the National WWI Memorial

The Cost of the National WWI Memorial

Last Vet Advocates for Memorial

More of the Last Vet and the Memorial

112 American Soldiers Buried in Manchester, UK

American War Memorials Overseas, Inc.

Soldiers Memorial in St. Louis, MO

Gold Star Mothers Monument

Belleau Wood Monument in Cook County, Illinois

Polar Bears Memorial in Troy, MI

British Roll of Honor

Canadian Monuments

Above: Memorial to the dead of two wars, Gosport, Hampshire, England (photograph by Christopher T. George). Below: Memorial to the dead of World War I, Sandwich, Kent, England (photograph courtesy of Joe Neary).

AEF Monument in Herrin, Illinois

Great War Relatives and Ancestors

JeffreyLaMonica — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 16:48:14 CST

Have a Great War Relative?

Please share information about your ancestors that served in the Great War on this page.

Can anyone help with this?

There is a British soldier buried in OCRACOKE ISLAND (BRITISH) CEMETERY in North Carolina. He was on loan to the US Navy. Could someone please make some inquiries or get a photo ofthis grave?

AEF Veteran in St. Louis Newspaper

James Louis Dickerson

Regiment: 276th Aero Squadron
Rank: Private 1st Class Age:29 Hair: Dark Eyes: Gray Height: Tall Build: Slender Occupation: Yard foreman
Nativity: Bee Fork, St. Francois County, Missouri Residence: 704 Illinois – Collinsville, Illinois
Engagements: Unit was not deployed overseas. The squadron was stationed at Emerson Field, Fort Jackson, South Carolina and later Fort Bragg. They were a non-combat training unit under the command of Lt. Harley Halbert Pope. The landing field at Bragg was later named after Lt. Pope.
Birth: January 9, 1889 Death: November 10, 1979 Where: Collinsville, Illinois Buried: St. John Cemetery, Collinsville, Illinois Marker: Private & Military Headstones

Belleville News-Democrat
November 11, 1979
James Dickerson

James L. Dickerson, 90, of Collinsville, died Saturday, November 10, at Maryville Colonial Nursing Home in Maryville.
He was a retired foreman for the National Lead Co. in Granite City and a World War I Veteran. He was a member of Veterans of World War I of the United States – Collinsville chapter, and the First Assembly of God Church in Collinsville.
He was preceded in death by his wife, the former Talitha Meadows.
He is survived by two daughters. Mrs. Thelda Taveggia of Collinsville and Mrs. Faye Fiddelke of Collinsville; three sons, Lawrence Dickerson of Collinsville, Leonard Dickerson of Collinsville and Donald Dickerson of St. Jacob; two sisters. Mrs. Everett (Lola) Smith of Piedmont, Mo., and Mrs. Lee (Mae) Rose of Piedmont, Mo., one brother, Raymond Dickerson of St. Louis; 11 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.
Funeral services will be at 1 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 13, at the Herbert A. Kassly Funeral Home in Collinsville. Burial will be in St. John Cemetery in Collinsville.
Friends may call after 3:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 12.
Memorials may be made to the First Assembly of God Church in Collinsville.
Funeral arrangements are being made by the Herbert A. Kassly Funeral Home in Collinsville.

Joseph Gauglio

Regiment: 16th Company, 159th Depot Brigade
Rank: Private 1st Class
Age: 28 Hair: Light Brown Eyes: Brown Height: Medium Build: Medium
Occupation: Miner Nativity: Trecate,. Italy Residence: Orient, Franklin County, Illinois
Engagements: Unit was not deployed overseas. The regiment was stationed at Camp Zachary Taylor, Louisville, Kentucky during the war.
Birth: September 29, 1890 Died: September 6, 1968 Where: Collinsville, Madison County, Illinois Buried: SS Peter & Paul Catholic Cemetery Marker: Private & Military Headstone

Collinsville Herald
September 10, 1968
Local Man dies Friday at his home

Joseph Guaglio, age 77, of 652 Burroughs Ave., passed away at his residence on Friday, Sept. 6, 1968 at 8:50 a.m. He had been ill for seven months.
He was born in Trecate, Italy, on Sept. 29, 1890, and was a resident of Collinsville for 52 years. He retired as a coalminer about 14 years ago and was last employed at the Troy Coal Company.
He was a member of the Progressive Mine Workers of America, Local No. 3. He was a World War I Veteran. He was the son of the late Carlo and Mary Vittoro Guaglio.
Funeral was from the Herbert A. Kassly Funeral Home today at 9 a.m. Interment was in the Catholic Cemetery. Recitation of the Rosary was Sunday at 8 p.m.
Pallbearers were William Van Dorn, Albert J. Meyer, James Lyerla, Sylvester (Buzz) Bugger, Robert Wilshire and Robert Dankenbring.
Mr. Guaglio is survived by his wife, Teresa Guaglio; one daughter, Mrs. William H. Childress; one sister, Mrs. Lena Boccini of Italy; four grandchildren, Mrs. Daniel (Mary Sharon) McAlvey of Iraklion Crete, Greece, Joseph, Gary, and Mark Childress all of Collinsville; and one great grandson, Daniel McAlvey.

H. Grady Vien

Henry Grady Vein was born October 3,1897 at East St. Louis,Il.and died on March 5th 1943 at East St. Louisof a massive heart attack.He is buried at the Mt. Carmel Catholic Cemetery in Belleville, Illinois.He served as a private in the Student's Army Training Corps,St. LouisUniversity.WFA ANCESTORS: The S.A.T.C.was the forerunner of the ROTC.

The student newspaper THE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY RECORD described the S.A.T.C. as follows, “ Coached by educators who were anxious to prove that colleges and universities were military assets, the War Department in the spring and summer of 1918 laid plans for the organization of the Student’s Army Training Corps, Able-bodied men from the ages 18-21 with a high school education could seek admission to any college or university on the War Department’s approved list, and, if successful, remain for up to a year of training in many areas, including woodworking, airplane repair, blacksmithing, metalworking and auto repair. They underwent military instruction and discipline, received the pay of a private and were clothed, housed, fed and educated at the government’s expense. At the peak of the program, nearly 1,200 student-soldiers were on campus, nearly, the total enrollment of the degree –granting divisions at the University before the war.’

Thomas Paul Peyla

Regiment: Battery F, 51ST Artillery, 3rd Battalion, 26th Division
Rank: Private 1st Class
Occupation: Machinist
Nativity: Glenburn, Vermilion County, Illinois
Residence: 802 Vandalia, Collinsville, Illinois
Engagements: Toul Sector, France – Verdun Sector, France - St. Mihiel Offensive, Thiaucourt Sector, France, - Meuse-Argonne Offensive
Birth: September 7, 1898
Death: October 24, 1943
Where: Collinsville, Illinois
Buried: St. John Cemetery, Collinsville, Illinois Marker: Private Headstone

Collinsville Herald

October 28, 1943

Thomas Paul Peyla
Dies at His Home
At Age of 45 Years

Thomas Paul Peyla, 45 years old, died at 2 a.m. Sunday, October 24, at his home at 802 Vandalia street. He is the son of Mrs. Mary Peyla, who now resides in Mt. Vernon, Illinois.
Mr. Peyla was born in Glenburn, Illinois, September 7, 1898, and lived in Collinsville most of his life. He was employed as a machinist at the Excelsior Tool Works in East. St. Louis.
His remains were at the Schroeppel Undertaking Company Funeral Home until 11 a.m. Wednesday, then removed to the Holy Cross Lutheran Church where funeral services were conducted at 2:30 p.m. by Rev. Theo. H. Roschke. Internment was made in the St. John’s Cemetery.
He is survived by his wife Aleta (nee Lochmann ), two daughters, June Peyla and Mrs. Mildred Calza, and his mother, Mrs. Mary Peyla, one brother, Pete Peyla, two sisters, Mrs. Robert Peretti of St. Louis, and Mrs. Bernard Staten of Mt. Vernon, Illinois.
He was a member of the Holy Cross Lutheran Church and Leighton Evatt Post 365, American Legion.
The pallbearers were Lewis Cognasso, Phil Dematteir, S2/c Bob Peyla, Clifton Lochmann, Rene Lochmann and James Banks.

Peter John Peyla

Regiment: United States Navy
Rank: Blacksmith 1ST Class
Occupation: foreman Lumaghi Mine
Nativity: Braidwood, Will County, Illinois
Residence: 420 Spring St., Collinsville, Illinois
Engagements: None
Birth: November 29,1893
Death: June 23,1967
Where: St. Mary’s Hospital, East. St. Louis, Illinois
Buried: St. John Cemetery, Collinsville, Illinois Marker: Private & Military Headstone

Collinsville Herald

June 26, 1967

Funeral Services For Peter Peyla

Funeral services will be held at 2 p.m. Tuesday for Peter J.Peyla, 73, 420 Spring St., who died Friday at his home. He had been ill for the past three months.
Peyla, retired foreman for the Lumaghi Mines, was a member of the Alpins Dogall Lodge, the American Legion Post 365 and the Eagles Lodge.
Services will be held from the Herr Funeral Home, Collinsville, to St. John’s Cemetery, with Rev. Alvin Kollmann officiating.
Peyla is survived by his wife, Lenora Loehmann Peyla, and two sons, Ralph L. and Robert P., Both of Collinsville. One brother Thomas, and a sister, Minnie Peretti, preceded him in death.

Benjamin “Benny” J. Loyet

Regiment: Company A 26TH U.S. Infantry – 1st Division “Big Red One”
Rank: Private 1st Class
Age: 22 Hair: Dark Eyes: Gray Complexion: Ruddy Height: 5’6” Build: Slender
Nativity: Black Jack, Madison County, Illinois Residence: Troy, Illinois
Date of Enlistment: February 23, 1918
Place of Entry: Edwardsville, Madison County, Illinois
Decorations: World War I Victory Medal
Engagements: Catigny, Soissons, St. Mihiel, Argonne and Rhine
Discharge: September 26, 1919 Where: Camp Grant, Illinois
Notable Division Commander: Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Birth: April 14, 1895
Death: May 18, 1985
Where: Oliver C. Anderson Hospital, Maryville, Madison County, Illinois
Buried: SS Peter and Paul Catholic Cemetery, Collinsville, Illinois
Marker: Private & Military Headstones

Belleville News-Democrat
May 20, 1985

Benny ‘Ben’ Loyet

Benny J. ‘Ben’ Loyet, 90, of Collinsville, died Saturday, May 18, 1985 at Oliver C. Anderson Hospital in Maryville.
He was a member of SS Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Collinsville, Collinsville American Legion, a Third Degree Knight of the Collinsville Knights of Columbus Council No. 1712, National Association of Postal Carriers, a World War I Veteran and member of World War I Barracks.
Preceding him in death were two brothers and a sister.
Surviving are his wife, the former Ella Scully; two sons, James and Robert Loyet both of Collinsville; five daughters, Mrs. Vernon(Nancy) Deason, Mrs. Robert (Marilyn) Catalpa, Miss Gildo Genieva Varda, Mrs. William (Helen) Graham and Mrs. William (Virginia) Stephens all of Collinsville; a brother, Earl Loyet of Lebanon; three sisters, Clara Obernueffmann of Belleville, Mayme Siegel and Edna Fohne both of Lebanon; 22 grandchildren; three great grandchildren.
Funeral procession to leave at 10a.m. Tuesday, from the Herbert A. Kassly Funeral Home in Collinsville to SS Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Collinsville for a 10:30 a.m. mass with Rev. Robert Morris officiating. Burial will be in SS Peter and Paul Catholic Cemetery in Collinsville.
Friends may call from4 to 9 p.m. Monday, at the funeral home.
A recitation of the rosary will be held at 6:30 p.m. Monday, at the Herbert A. Kassly Funeral Home in Collinsville.
Memorials may be made to the St. Vincent DePaul Society or masses may be offered.

Edmund Henry Sudbring

Regiment: Company M 132nd U.S. Infantry 33rd Division - “Prairie Division”
Rank: Private 1ST Class
Age: 22
Hair: Dark
Eyes: Gray
Complexion: Ruddy
Height: 5’4”
Build: Slender
Occupation: Farmer
Nativity: Collinsville, Madison County, Illinois
Residence: 1004 Union St., Collinsville, Illinois
Date of Enlistment: September 18, 1917
Place of Entry: Camp Zachary Taylor, Louisville, Kentucky
Engagements: Landed at Brest, France on May 26, 1918 and sent directly to the front. Made advance with Australians on the German lines in the Hamel Woods on July 14, 1918.Other engagements included Argonne Forrest, Meuse, Bois de Forges, Bois de Fays and Bois de Forest.
Discharge: May 31, 1919
Where: Camp Grant, Illinois
Birth: April 16, 1895
Death: March 2, 1984 Where: Oliver C. Anderson Hospital, Maryville, Madison County, Illinois
Buried: Holy Cross Lutheran Cemetery, Collinsville, Illinois Marker: Private Headstone - Mausoleum

Collinsville Herald
March 5, 1984

Edmund H. Sudbring, a resident of the 1000 block of Union, Collinsville, died at Oliver C. Anderson Hospital, Maryville.
Age 88, he was born in Collinsville April 16, 1895, son of the late John and Emma Ambrosius Sudbring.
Three brothers and one sister also preceded him in death.
He was a veteran of World War I, was a member of Holy Cross Lutheran Church, and was retired from G.S. Suppiger, Collinsville.
Services were held at 1:30 p.m. today at Holy Cross Lutheran Church. The Rev. Dale Meyer officiated, with burial in the mausoleum at Holy Cross Lutheran Cemetery.
Herr Funeral Home was in charge of the arrangements.
Survivors include his wife, Alma Flath Sudbring, one son, Robert E. Sudbring of Collinsville; one daughter, Mrs. Albert (Verna) Jedda ofCollinsville; one sister, Amelia Neier of Troy; one brother, Jim Sudbring of Collinsville; three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren

William Joseph Fritz

Regiment: Company H 10th U.S. Infantry – 14th Division “Wolverine Division”
Rank: Private 1st Class
Age: 22
Hair: Dark
Eyes: Brown
Height: Tall
Build: Medium
Occupation: Carpenter
Nativity: St. Louis, Missouri
Residence: 423 S. Combs – Collinsville, Illinois
Engagements: Unit was not deployed overseas. The regiment was stationed at Camp Custer, Michigan.
Birth: April 10, 1894 Death: June 17, 1960 Where: Collinsville, Illinois
Buried: St. John Cemetery, Collinsville, Illinois Marker: Private & Military Headstones

Metro-East Journal

June 17, 1960

William Fritz
Dead at 66

William J. Fritz, 66, 419 S. Combs Ave., Collinsville, died at 7 a.m. today at his home, after being ill eight years.
He was born in St. Louis and had lived in Collinsville for the past 56 years. He was a carpenter and had been a member of Local 295 in Collinsville 47 years.
Mr. Fritz was a charter member of American Legion Post No. 365, a veteran of World War I and St. John’s Evangelical Church.
He is survived by his wife Mrs. Marcella Fritz; two daughters Mrs. Ward (Marceline) Booth and Mrs. Rodgers (Wilela) Buckles, both of Collinsville, and one sister Mrs. Charles (Ann) Talbot of Collinsville.
Funeral services will be at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Herr Funeral Home, Collinsville. The Rev. C.H. Kuhlman will officiate. Burial will be in St. John’s Cemetery.

Using DNA to Identify Unknown Fallen at Fromelles

Soldiers Letters

List of Surviving WWI Vets

One of Britain's Last Vets Passes On

soldier on left unknown
in middle Julian Hamilton, Beaufort, NC Sept. 20, 1917 to June 25, 1919
Co, G 322 INF 81st DIV (Wildcat)
man on right William J. Moore, Morehead City, NC Sept. 20, 1917 to Nov. 30,1918
Co. K 322 INF 81st DIV

Henry Clayton Willis, Davis, NC Aug. 4, 1918 to June 10,1919
overseas Sept. 4, 1918 to Jun2, 1918 discharged 9/10/19

Co. G 57th Pioneers first, then Co. E 56th Pioneers private

Benjamin Tucker Willis, Williston, NC Sept. 20, 1917 to Sept, 29, 1918

pvt. Co. E 322 INF 81st DIV to Oct. 18, 1917 then Co. H 120 INF

30th DIV (Old Hickory) to Sept. 1918 overseas from May 12, 1918

KIA in attack on Hindenburg Line

Below are three photos of one of our member's grandfathers and uncle

Hi, Does anyone know anything about American soldiers who might have been sent over in an early wave as part of a medic corps? I am trying to find out information about my grandfather who was in the war -- he died in a VA Hospital in Philadelphia 10 years later. My grandmother told he that he had been in a medical unit or something and then was gassed and shellshocked. I don't have many details. His name was Forrest M. Hann -- the first name may have a single R. This site is very educational and I appreciate the contributions that everyone makes.

Captain John N. Douglas is my grandfather. He was an officer serving in the 92d (Buffalo) Division as commander of the 317th Motor Supply Train. At full strength, the 317th Supply Train consisted of roughly 500 officers and men with 200 motor trucks. The 92d Division was the AEF's only complete combat division composed of black troops. All of its officers were white, except for the Doctor, the Chaplain and the Dentist. His unit trained at Camp Funston, Kansas and sailed for France at end of June, 1918. They returned to the USA in February, 1919. I am working on a book about his experiences based upon his diary, his 60+ letters home, and substantial research at the National Archives and various military archive sources.

The war at sea

gallagher3 — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 17:17:25 CST

During World War One, there were not a lot of large naval battles. A lot of the use of the navy would be for scouting other ships. For Example The British had a blockade, they had German ships surrounded. They would often try to scout each other down, so that if they wanted to attack, they could..They Germans would also constantly be looking for a flaw in the blockade so that they could possibly get through it. The big naval battles in the early stages of the war, The battle of Jutland, happened because both sides were scouting out each other and their ships and had met.

other useful links other than video:
http://www.gwpda.org/1916/jutland.html- The Battle of Jutland described by Rudyard Kipling. First hand account, spoken about in class.Talks about the exact events that happened in the battle of Jutland. Every detail including how the Germans were able to get their ships into port!

One Of the reasons alot of Naval battles were not common was because of the expensive nature of the ships used. The picture of the ship shown below is called a dreadnought. It is a huge naval vessel used for fighting. Navies would often use their cruiser ships rather than dreadnought for fear that the ship would be sunk.

Books on medical care

LeoVanBergen — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:15:35 CST

Before My Helpless Sight by Leo Van Bergen

Before My Helpless Sight: Suffering, Dying, and Military Medicine on the Western Front. 1914-1918 ,by Leo van Bergen, medical historian at the VU-University Medical Center in Amsterdam,has writtenthe definitive book on the subjects in the title. The depths of his insites in all aspects of what it was like is amazingcertainly given that he is neither a doctor or a veteran There is deftness of touch here of source materials and a vast breath of reading and understanding. Much of the narrative is moving, poignant, and horrific and to my sense right. It has a smooth flow and easy reading style accessible to student and scholar. I say this as a veteran of the Vietnam war who spent his early years 1966-68as a Navy HospitalCorpsman on the psychiatric wards of Bethesda Naval hospital and as a platoon corpsman with the 2nd Bn, 1st Marines, 1st Marine Division in Vietnam in 1968-69. This followedby a 35 year career as a physicians assistant in general surgery and forensic medicine. I highly recommend this book to allwho are students of that war and the wars of today because, the real horrors of warare not on the battlefield but in the aide stations and hospitals then as now.

Jack V Sturiano

For more reviews on Before my Helpless Sight see:

http://www.wereldoorlog1418.nl/helpless-sight/index.html or

http://www.westernfrontassociation.com/book-reviews/91-general-interest/966-before-my-helpless-sight.html

For an extended content see:

http://www.wereldoorlog1418.nl/medical-aspects/index.html

Western Front Association East Coast Chapter

JeffreyLaMonica — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:02:16 CST

The East Coast Chapter of the Western Front Association

welcomes enthusiasts as well as amateur and professional historians

interested in the study and commemoration of the Great War, 1914-1918.

This site exists as a forum for the WFA's East Coast Chapter. Announcements pertaining to upcoming and past events are posted here. More importantly, this site acts as a network for exchanging any information, ideas, and opinions concerning the Great War. Making this site a vibrant intellectual community relies upon contributions from YOU. All visitors are welcome to join and contribute to this site. Once you join, you will find the interface easy to use. Feel free to add material, post comments and questions, and create adjoining pages of your own. We envision an internet site that is enriched by member-contributed pages on all aspects of the Great War. A list of suggested topics for discussion are provided in the column to the far left to initiate dialogue. Click on one to get involved!

Adding a Page of Your Own

Click "Add a New Page" in the left column to start your page. Click "Easy Edit" to begin working on your page. You can type text and paste information right in your page. The interface works like a word processing program with the abilities to add images, video, and links to other websites. Choose fonts, colors, and check your spelling just as you would with a word processing program. The are icons to click that allow you to add "Photo" and "Link". The "Video" icon enables you to add video from the internet. Click "Save" when you are done working. You can return and update your page anytime.

History of World War I at DCCC Online Assignment

WFA Membership Form

The Western Front Association
Florida & Gulf Coast Chapter
Annual Seminar – February 26-27, 2010
The Hilton Garden Inn – Tampa North
13305 Temple Terrace Boulevard
Temple Terrace, Florida
I-75 exit 266
(813) 342-5000

Friday, February 26
9:00 am George Thompson, 1914 – Swan Song of the Austro-Hungarian Army
10:00 am Peter Pastor, The Hungarian Home Front during World War I
11:00 am János Angi, The Wartime Role of István Tisza and Mihály Károlyi in Hungarian Memory
Noon Buffet Lunch at the Hotel
1:30 pm Richard Hall, World War I in Bulgaria
2:30 pm Michael Barrett, The Romanian Campaign of 1916
3:30 pm Lt. Col. Winfield Scott, The First Fall of Baghdad: British Tragedy to Triumph on the Tigris, 1916-1917
6:30 pm No Host Dinner at Dunderbocks Restaurant

Saturday, February 27th
9:00 am Dennis Laffer, The Armenian Holocaust
10:00 am Steven Béla Várdy, The Impact of the Treaty of Trianon on Hungary
11:00 am William Dean, Fighting a Two-Front War: France & Morocco at the Outbreak of WWI
Noon Buffet Luncheon at the Hotel
1:30 pm Kees Botherbloem, Early Russian Analyses of the First World War
2:30 pm Carolyn Lowry, At What Cost: Spanish Neutrality in WWI
3:30 pm Grayson “Jack” Tunstall, Contrasts: The Eastern and Western Fronts

To register, mail a check for $95 made out to Leonard G. Shurtleff, 6915 NW 49th Street, Gainesville, Florida 23653-1152. If you need more information, contact Len Shurtleff at lshurtleff @aol.com or telephone (352) 379-3299.
For hotel reservations, call the Hilton Garden Tampa-North directly at (813) 342-5000 and ask for the WFA rate of $99 per night.

The WFA East
Coast Chapter
The Fall 2009 WWI History Seminar !
Saturday November 7 – Maryland War Memorial, Baltimore

Mike O'Neal-“Dunkirk to Vittorio Veneto: New Jersey's Aviators in the Twilight of the Great War”

Marc Romanych-“Germany’s Wonder Weapon – the 42cm ‘Big Bertha’ Howitzer”

Robert-Lembke-"Flamethrowers in the Great War: Exploding The Myths"

Clayton Donnell-“Fortress Antwerp”

Jon Guttman-“Pusher Aces of World War I”

Valor Tours, Ltd. 2010 Western Front Tour.
When: May 4-11, 2010
Cost: $2,950 per person, land costs only, twin share, sgle suppl.
available
Major Stops & Site:
1st and 2nd Battles of the Marne,
Belleau Wood, Chateau-Thierry
Reims, Champagne, Blanc Mont
Verdun, St. Mihiel, Meuse-Argonne

mike.greatwar@gmail.com

Valor Tours, Ltd. 2010 Gallipoli Tour

When: September 12-20, 2010
Cost: $3,850 (estimated) dbl. occupancy, all land costs and meals included, single supplement available.
Itinerary: Istanbul, Troy, Canakkkale, Cape Helles, Krithia, Anzac, Lone Pine, Chanuk Bair, the Nek, Suvla Bay, Naval Sites and Forts

mike.greatwar@gmail.com

Propaganda Posters

More Posters

WFA/GWS National Seminar
at
The National World War I Museum
Kansas City, MO
11-13 September 2009

The Three Ts of Pursuit Air Superiority: Technology, Tactics, and Techniques
Bob Denison

Poetry Reading
Mary Swanson

Technology and the Treaty
Dana Lombardy, Great War Society President

Air Bombing Technology
Steve Suddaby, WFA Vice President

American Innovation during the War Using Archival Documents as Case Studies
Mitchell Yockelson, National Archives

They Were Fighting Men
Pellom McDaniels, University of Missouri

Beyond Incompetence: Why the AEF Lacked Fleets of Tanks in 1918
Patrick Osborn, National Archives and Karl Klusewitz

DADA: A World Turned Upside Down
Jan Schall, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Grenades: An Explosive Topic!
Doran Cart, WFA President

WWI Communications Technology: From Feathers to Frequencies
David Beer, University of Texas

Bloody Christmas 1918: The Battle of the Kaiser's Army
Scott Stephenson, Command and General Staff College

Technology and Tactics: Battle of Caporetto and its Effect on WWII Tactics

Gaetano Cavallaro

Wilson and Lenin-Whose Influence is Greater
Croby Kemper III, Kansas City Public Library

Past Seminars

For announcements and information pertaining to the national branch of the WFA click the link below.

Western Front Association United States Branch Website

Visit the WFA East Coast Chapter's website at the link below.

WFA East Coast Chapter Website

WFA-UK Website

Links to World War One Battlefield Tours

Spring 2009 Battlefield Tour

Valor Tours

Bartlett's Battlefield Journeys

US Marines in the Great War

US Marines in Belleau Wood

"Detroit's Own" Polar Bear Memorial Association

American Troops in Northern Russia, 1919

Dreadnoughts

Austro-Hungarian Dreadnoughts, 1915

First Division AEF

First Division Museum

Scholars and historians are in debate over the location of Alvin C. York's Great War heroics. The Sergeant Alvin C. York Project and The Sergeant York Discovery Expedition represent some points of view. Visit their sites for details about their theses.

The Sergeant Alvin C. York Project

The Sergeant York Discovery Expedition

Interested in Trench Art?

Visit these sites.

Trench Art Collector

Trench Art Website

Trench Art Article

Fun Great War Quizzes

Article on British Interest in The Great War Today

WHAT STUDENTS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WORLD WAR I

by Michael Neiberg

Ask any British student about the Somme or any French or
German student about Verdun and you are likely to get a
quick response. It may be a response about an ancestor who
fought in one of the war's titanic battles or it might be a
response influenced by a work of fiction like Blackadder,
Oh! What a Lovely War, or All Quiet on the Western Front. It
might even be the now fashionable response of dismissing the
war as a fratricidal relic of Europe's "old" age of
nationalism and rivalry. These responses might well be
slightly inaccurate or even wildly so, but the war remains
enough of a part of the living memory for Europeans to
elicit certain emotional and historical triggers. This
continued sense of relevance for Europeans is, of course,
entirely natural given the great destruction the war brought
and the impact the war had on European history.

American students, by contrast, are unlikely to have such
close associations to World War I. The war for Americans was
a brief event, and a relatively small proportion of
Americans saw any sustained military action. The United
States was never attacked and there is no single moment
associated with the war in American memory as the Somme is
in British memory. The war, moreover, falls in between two
much larger and more emotive events in American history, the
Civil War and World War II. American students might thus be
forgiven for not responding to Belleau Wood or the Meuse-
Argonne in the same ways they might react to Gettysburg or
Pearl Harbor.

That contrast is the first point I always make to my
students. Whereas for the United States, World War I is a
little-known and arcane period in history, for Europeans it
is absolutely formative. For France and Great Britain
especially, World War I (known as the Great War or La Grande
Guerre for a good reason) remains the war both in the
popular imagination and among scholars. While one compares
humanitarian catastrophes at one's own peril, a few numbers
may make the case. The British Empire suffered an estimated
908,000 deaths in World War I, or more than twice the number
of World War II. Put another way, the British had more men
killed on one day of World War I (July 1, 1916, still the
bloodiest single day in the history of the British Army)
than it suffered in the first month of operations on and
subsequent to D-Day. For France, of course, the contrast is
even more stark: an estimated 1,300,000 Frenchmen died in
World War I compared to 567,000 in World War II.

A simple car ride along any of World War I's many
battlefields will prove the point to those less
statistically inclined. On many battlefields, such as
Verdun, Champagne, and the Somme, the war still speaks
through the massive shell holes and mine craters that
continue to scar the landscape 90 years later. An observant
tourist can also see signs reading village detruit
(destroyed village), marking a place that was quite
literally pulverized during the war and never rebuilt. The
French burial custom has been to build massive cemeteries
such as the ones at Verdun, Les Islettes, or Notre Dame de
Lorette that impress by their sheer size. Ossuaries
containing the remains of thousands of inconnus (unknown
soldiers) stand as silent witnesses to the awesome power of
modern weapons, most importantly artillery, to kill men
without leaving sufficient remains to allow for
identification or burial. The British have preferred to
build smaller, more numerous cemeteries with the unique
touch of including a personal statement from the family on
the headstones. The Germans, too, built cemeteries with
black, solemn crosses that stand in stark contrast to the
gleaming white marble to be found in the American ones.

Driving away from the battlefield, a traveler might stop at
any of a number of appealing French or Belgian towns to have
a coffee or meal and try to get the horrors of what they
have just seen out of their minds. But it will not take much
imagination to see the impacts of the war in any town near
the western front. Some, like Arras or Ypres, will have post
cards for sale showing the astonishing destruction and
devastation that left them mere piles of rubble. Others will
have place names like Place Foch or Avenue Joffre named to
honor the heroes of the war. One might even see an Avenue
Haig or a Rue Pershing thrown in. Every French town, no
matter how small or how far from the western front, will
have a statue near the town hall commemorating the young men
who died pour la patrie from 1914-1918. If one looks very
closely, one will see a tragic recurrence of family names on
such statues and, often on the back, the addition of a
smaller number of names from the war of 1939-1945, seemingly
added as an afterthought.

For Europeans, the war is the epochal event of the century.
Without it, there would have been no great depression, no
fascism, no Second World War, and no concentration camps. We
will never know, of course, what the estimated 8 million
Europeans who died in the course of the war might otherwise
have contributed to politics, to medicine, or to art. What
we do know is that Europe is still suffering from that huge
loss of its best men and is still struggling to figure out
how to even cope with their memory.

The American experience of World War I must therefore be
kept in its proper perspective. Americans who do not
understand what the war did to Europe will never really
understand the Europe that emerged. Europe's ambivalent
attitude toward the United States, its drive toward
unification, and the relatively recent coming together of
the French and German governments will all come into sharper
focus if they are set against the backdrop of the killing of
1914-1918. Americans, a European might say over coffee in
Arras, do not really understand war because it has not
touched us as it has them.

For that, of course, we can all be very grateful. Although
the war did not result in destruction for Americans on the
European scale, it nevertheless had deep and often forgotten
impacts on America. Perhaps most importantly, it led to
fundamental, long-term changes in the way America (and
Americans) relate to the outside world. It is hard to
imagine today, but when Woodrow Wilson went to Paris for the
postwar peace conference in early 1919, it marked the first
time ever that a sitting American president had visited
Europe. This was due to much more than the limits of
transportation technology. It reflected instead an American
mindset that clearly relegated European affairs to the back
burner.

Woodrow Wilson forever changed that attitude, and with it he
changed much more. Wilson committed America to international
sponsorship of an idea of foreign policy based around the
high-minded quest for democracy, capitalism, and freedom.
While not all Americans have seen the problem in the way
Wilson did and while even Wilson did not fully believe in
all of the consequences of his own idealism, his way of
viewing the world has bequeathed a legacy to every American
leader since. Echoes of his belief in the use of American
power to pave the way for ideals that would in turn secure
the freedom and peace of peoples everywhere has influenced
American foreign policy ever since. Presidents of both
parties, down to the present day, have used Wilson's ideals
and his language as the basis for their global involvement.

To many Europeans, these ideals have come, as Wilson hoped
they would, as a breath of fresh air to a continent
hopelessly mired in ancient hatreds. To others, they have
come as a lofty intrusion from a society that they see as
having more power than wisdom. Georges Clemenceau, France's
hard-bitten premier, famously dismissed Wilson's idealistic
Fourteen Points with the witty, "God Himself only gave us
ten." In some versions of the anecdote, the anti-clerical
Clemenceau followed that quip with "and we soon enough
learned to break those." His principled distaste for
Wilson's idealism notwithstanding (Clemenceau derisively
called him "the professor"), Clemenceau had a deep
admiration for America. As a young journalist, he had
covered the end of the American Civil War, spoke English
with American idioms, and had an American wife, at least
until he had her deported on trumped up charges. His
experiences with America are a symbolic microcosm of those
of his French countrymen, and, more generally, Europeans
across at least the western part of the continent.

Clemenceau and Wilson did agree on their shared dislike of
communism. Although it is now hardly more than a footnote,
even in American histories of the war, the United States
sent an expedition to northern Russia from 1918 to 1920 to
assist the noncommunist Whites in the Russian Civil War.
Although ultimately unsuccessful in stopping the spread of
Bolshevism, the incident showed Wilson's faith in the
ability of even small numbers of American soldiers to
influence world events. It can also be seen as the first
real American shot in the Cold War, and one that Josef
Stalin never fully forgave or forgot.

Historians short on space and teachers short on time like to
contrast the interventionist Wilson to the supposedly
isolationist years that followed. But the contrast is not
entirely accurate. The United States rejected the Treaty of
Versailles and refused to join the League of Nations, but
those events are only part of the story. The United States
did participate in a number of international conferences and
programs designed to reduce world tensions; in many cases
the United States provided the key leadership. These
conferences included the Washington Conferences on Naval
Disarmament, the Kellogg-Briand Pact that aimed to eliminate
war as an act of statecraft, the Dawes and Young Plans to
refinance German war debt, and the promotion of
international trade in the hopes that nations that trade
together would not go to war against one another. American
isolationism, to the extent that it even existed, is
therefore best seen as a desire not to go to war; it was not
a desire to bury the nation's collective heads in the sand.
The distinction is critical. A rough analogy might be found
today in the environmental movement, where the United States
is a recognized player and sometime leader, but only on
American terms, as the continued American refusal to sign
the Kyoto Accords demonstrates.

The war had equally dramatic impacts on the American home
front. The idea of intervening in a bloody and inconclusive
European war for unclear gains generated tremendous
controversy. Conservatives and many east coast elites
supported American entry into the war in large part because
they believed that the nation's honor had been impinged by
repeated German insults such as submarine warfare and the
notorious Zimmerman telegram promising Mexico parts of
American territory in exchange for military intervention.
Even before America entered the war, hundreds of young men
from "good families" and Ivy League universities had
volunteered their services for the French cause in the
French Foreign Legion and an all-American fighter squadron
called the Lafayette Escadrille. Among the Escadrille's most
vocal supporters was the former president and Wilson nemesis
Theodore Roosevelt, who praised the courage of young
Americans willing to risk their lives and their American
citizenship to fight for a cause that they believed to be
just.

But not all Americans responded as Roosevelt did. In the
Midwest and South there was widespread suspicion of entering
the war and lukewarm feelings about America's potential
British and French allies. Although few Americans supported
the Central Powers after the callous German sinking of the
Lusitania in May 1915, there was a deep chasm between anti-
German sentiment and a desire to send American troops "Over
There". The problems of Europe were a long way from the
minds of most Americans and, censorship notwithstanding,
Americans could read the newspapers and understand how
murderous the battlefields of the western front were.
Moreover, Americans were making money from their definition
of neutrality, which permitted trade with both sides. Why
put American safety and security at risk? Why kill the goose
that laid the golden eggs?

Germany's decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare
in April 1917 may have convinced Wilson and his advisers of
the need for war, but millions of Americans remained
unconvinced. The administration was worried about active
opposition to the war from radical labor groups like the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), anti-British Irish-
Americans, and ethnic Germans living in the Midwest and in
most major cities. Aware of the need to build consensus and
ensure support for the war, the government engaged in a
massive public relations and propaganda campaign, the like
of which the country had never seen. Newspapers and books
combined with new media like movies to saturate the American
people with images and ideas to promote the war. As with all
propaganda, it is hard to know exactly how average Americans
responded to these images. But Americans did rally around
the flag and even opponents of the war generally gave the
government its support once the country was officially at
war.

The American experience of war may have been brief, but its
impacts on the home front were dramatic. Among the groups
most deeply affected were African-Americans, thousands of
whom moved north to take jobs in the now booming northern
factories. This "great migration" was a transformative event
in African-American history as individuals and entire
families left the sharecropping south and came north. While
the jobs paid well and offered an escape from the Jim Crow
racism of the south, problems and violence emerged when
white workers came back and demanded their jobs. Many also
demanded that African-Americans return to the South as well.
Nineteen-nineteen was a year of terrible racial violence
characterized by widespread lynching. African-American
deaths due to racial violence in the turbulent period 1917-
1923 appear to have at least equaled, and may have exceeded,
the number of African-American battle deaths. This figure is
a function both of the general exclusion of African-
Americans from the battlefield and the intensity of racial
tension in the immediate postwar years.

The extent to which the war made the United States a
"nation" remains a point of considerable debate among
scholars. Some argue that the mass movement of people across
the nation, the shared military service of Americans (in
segregated units) raised across the nation, and increased
government standardization of the economy all point to the
emergence of a national mindset. World War I was the first
large-scale crisis that required a shared response from
Northerners and Southerners, Easterners and Westerners, city
dwellers and farmers, men and women. The country had
national heroes like John Pershing (born in Missouri), Alvin
York (born in Tennessee), and Eddie Rickenbacker (born in
Ohio). Having worked together to meet a common challenge,
America, these scholars argue, was ready to face the 1920s
era of mass media as people who identified themselves as
Americans first and foremost.

This narrative is compelling, but it is not the full story.
America remained deeply divided along numerous fault lines,
especially that of race; the United States Army raised two
African-American divisions for military service, but it
treated one so brutally that it performed badly in combat
and it gladly dispatched the other to the French Army, under
whose guidance it won numerous citations. Most of the
divisions in the United States Army, moreover, were National
Guard units connected to a state. Many of the largest and
most important monuments to the Americans on the Western
Front are dedicated not to the United States Army, but to
state units like the 28th Division from Pennsylvania,
memorialized at Varennes in one of France's largest World
War I monuments.

Perhaps what makes this complex war ultimately so difficult
to teach is the absence of an easy and straightforward
narrative. Although we recognize the limits of grand
narrative, there is a simplicity in teaching the Civil War
as the end of slavery and World War II as the destruction of
Nazism and Japanese totalitarianism. World War I's narrative
is much more complex and ultimately less satisfying to most
students. Nevertheless, it is a critical part of American
history and deserves a greater place in the curriculum than
the parenthesis to which it all too often gets relegated.

Links to Other Great War Websites

National World War One Museum

League of World War I Aviation Historians

Over There

US Army Heritage and Education Center

World War I Document Archive

The Long, Long Trail

BBC World War I

World War I TeacherNet

American Battle Monuments Commission

The Great War Society

Trenches on the Web

WWI Color Photos

AEF Blog

The Aerodrome

FirstWorldWar.com

The New York Military Affairs Symposium

MilitaryGenealogy.com

The Great War Forum

WWI: Experiences of an English Soldier

America's World War One Monuments

Great War Association

Letters Home

Past Seminars

JeffreyLaMonica — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:55:40 CST

WFA East Coast Chapter Spring Seminar
At
Fort Mifflin, Philadelphia, PA
9 May 2009

Fort Mifflin

Christopher George talks about his grandfather's service as A British 'Grunt' in the Great War: The Service of
Private George T. Matchett

Tim Mulligan speaks on World War I German Naval Records at the National
Archives: Access and Research Possibilities

Our Tour Guide

Weapons Demonstration

WFA 2008 National Seminar

OVER HERE AND OVER THERE: AMERICA’S GREAT WAR AND AMERICA’S GREAT WARRIORS

Western Front Association-U.S. Branch Annual National Seminar

U.S. Army Heritage & Education Center

12-14 September 2008

COL Robert J. Dalessandro [AHEC Director] & Mr. Michael G. Knapp [AHEC Collection Manager]
"Forging the Force: Organizing and Preparing the AEF for Overseas Duty"
Organization and Insignia of the American Expeditionary Force, 1917-1923

Dr. Nancy Gentile Ford [Professor, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania] "Americans All! Foreign-Born Soldiers in WWI"
Americans All

Mr. Stephen L. Harris [Author/Historian] "Irish by Association, Irish by Adoption, Irish by Conviction: The Fighting 69th Changes Its Color From Green to Rainbow."
Stephen Harris Website

Dr. Marion Pinsdorff [Professor Emeritus, Fordham University] “War Morphed Hawaii’s Business: Hackfeld’s Into American Factors; Ehlers Into Liberty House”

Mr. Jay Graybeal [Army Heritage Museum Chief Curator] “’Us Sailors Never Reach France Cause!’: The U. S. Naval Reserve Flying Corps in France”

Mr. Christopher Semancik [AHEC Arms Curator] “Trenches, Tranches, Schützengraben”

Dr. Douglas V. Johnson [Professor, US Army War College] "Americans at the Battle of Soissons"
Doug Johnson Website
Soissons, 1918

Dr. Mitch Yockelson [National Archives and Records Administration] "Borrowed Soldiers: The Anglo-American Relationship in World War I”
See the Review for Mitch Yockelson's Book on Our "Great War Books and Reviews" Page

Dr. Ed Lengel [Professor, University of Virginia] "America's Experience in the Meuse-Argonne"
See the Review for Ed Lengel's book on our "Great War Books and Reviews" Page

Dr. Lengel Accepts the Tomlinson Book Prize For To Conquer Hell

Dane Coffman as General Pershing
A Ring,a Razor, and a Pipe

New WFA President, Doran Cart
National World War One Museum

Program Coordinator, Louise Arnold-Friend

Highlights from our spring 2008 seminar in Baltimore, Maryland
5 April 2008

"Pantheon de la Guerre: Reconfiguring a Panorama of the Great War"

by Mark Levitch

Pantheon de la Guerre

Link for Dr. Levitch's Book

"Forts of the Meuse"

by Clayton Donnell

Fort Loncin

Link for Clayton Donnell's Book

Great War Fortifications

"Reactions to Catastrophe: French Intellectuals and the Great War"

by Paul Gery

Georges Sorel

Link to French Intellectuals and the Great War

"Enemy in All Directions: The True Story of the Lost Battalion"

by Robert Laplander

Major Charles Whittlesey and Major Charles McKinney

Link for Robert Laplander's Book

Reviews of and reactions to Mr. Laplander's book are welcome. See the discussion thread for Lost Battalion books below.

Click for Review

"The Original 'Flying Tigers': The Princeton Flying Corps in World War I"

by Mike O'Neal

Link to Mike O'Neal's Website