the Great War [III]

The German decision to embrace unrestricted submarine warfare on an epic scale would cost them the war. The sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915 and the Arabic in August the same year had prompted the United States to threaten war. The Germans backed off in September, issuing orders “on the policy to be followed for sinking liners or ships containing passengers. They would no longer attack them without warning, and they would make some provision, whenever they could, to see that passengers got off safely, as long as the ships stopped and did not try to escape or ram or otherwise fight back.” (217) As the British blockade strangled Germany from the sea, and as business with neutrals supplying Germany plummeted, German militarists and politicians became convinced that unrestricted submarine warfare would alleviate their woes. Early in 1916, the Kaiser agreed to unrestricted sub warfare in limited areas. On March 24, a U-boat sank a French cross-channel steamer the Sussex; several American passengers lost their lives. The United States swore that if Germany didn’t call off the submarine campaign, they would sever diplomatic relations, a first step towards war. The Germans backed off again, issuing the “Sussex Pledge,” agreeing to return to prewar rules for submarines. Thus the submarines were relegated to adjuncts to the German battle fleet or to prowling the Mediterranean and striking at Allied vessels.

The war continued in its stalemate, and Germany, despite massive victories against Russia and in France, couldn’t break the stalemate. Their attention again turned to submarines, and they asked why they were so afraid of the United States anyways? Militarily they ranked it alongside Denmark, Holland, and Chile. The United States had an army of 110,000 men, negligible numbers. Add to the mix that the United States was utterly deficient in wartime supplies; they had enough artillery and ammunition to support only about five divisions. They only had fifty-five airplanes, none of them modern by Western Front standards; the Army had never seen a tank; and the Navy, though somewhat more formidable, was offset by the fact that only a third of the vessels were war-ready, and the Navy only had ten percent of its required manpower. Furthermore, they didn’t have antisubmarine or escort forces necessary to combat the German submarines. The Germans failed to factor in America’s reserve strength, the adaptability of American industry, or the wide-ranging effects of American financial credit being unlocked. Thus they decided not to worry about the United States and politely informed the White House on January 31st 1917 that they’d begin unrestricted submarine warfare the next day.

The United States severed diplomatic relations on February 3, but President Wilson wanted more cause for war before throwing the United States directly into the conflict. The Zimmerman Note pressed Wilson to the brink. The British had intercepted a note from Germany’s Foreign Secretary to the German Ambassador in Mexico. “[If] Germany and the United States were to go to war, Germany would offer Mexico assistance in recovering Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, in return for her air against the Americans. The Germans were also going to offer Japan pieces of the American West if she switched her alliance.” (221) Wilson learned of the note on February 25, but it wasn’t until the middle of March that the last straw came: German submarines sank four unarmed and clearly marked American merchant ships. Thirty-six American lives were lost, and Wilson went to Congress. On April 6, the United States of America went to war with the German empire.

The American declaration of war intensified Germany’s submarine campaign. The Germans possessed 120 submarines, and two-thirds operated in the seas at any given time. The British responded to the submarine threat by initiating the Convoy System, so that “tempting vessels were no longer scattered unescorted all over the ocean. The submarine now had to come to the target, and when it did, it had to get by the escorts to make its attack.” (223) The British developed depth charges and hydrophones to detect the sounds of approaching submarines; the United States built wooden sub chasers and light destroyers. The British and French patrolled the Channel and created a mine barrage across it; the Allies strung a mine barrage from Scotland across the North Sea to Norwegian waters, restricting the North Sea theater. In the Mediterranean, the Allies bottled up the Germans at Austrian ports. Thus the German submarines were penned up where the Allies wanted them to be, and attacking merchants to stifle trade also meant jostling with newly-designed antisubmarine weapons and ships. If the Germans didn’t make headway on the Western Front, and fast, they would keep strangling worse than before.

On the Western Front, Germany tightened its lines. They retreated out of the westernmost bulge in their line, and twenty-five miles from the rear they created the heavily-fortified Siegfried Zone (or Hindenburg Line, as the Allies called it); in abandoned territory, they blew bridges and culverts, burned buildings, and poisoned wells. The Allies moved to attack. The Battle of Arras lasted from April 9th to May 16th 1917; Great Britain and Germany went head-to-head yet again, at a cost of around 300,000 casualties. The infamous Battle of Vimy Ridge, a subset of the Battle of Arras, itself cost 15,000 casualties. The French attacked the Germans in the Second Battle of the Aisne; from the 16th of April to the 9th of May, 240,00 casualties were suffered by either side. The bloodshed was so brutal, and the French army so demoralized, that it was on the verge of outright revolt. A Frenchman named Petain took over; being a “soldier’s soldier,” he was able to quell the revolting soldiers. The Germans never found out about the army’s rebellion, for the French soldiers continued to man the front lines, even if they refused to charge out of them. British attacks at Messines Ridge through the 7th and 14th of June made headlines: 60,000 casualties were suffered by either side; the Allies mined underneath the ridge and blew it to smithereens. The blast could be heard seventy miles away across the Channel in London. One of the final campaigns on the Western Front of 1917, the Third Battle of Ypres, would be known in folklore as Passchendaele, and 850,000 casualties would be suffered in this punching match between Great Britain and Germany. “Passchendaele was the end of an era in warfare… [The] nature of the war was changing, and within a few months of the slaughter in Flanders new techniques, new weapons, and new tactics would make Haig’s great battle nearly as obsolete as Waterloo or Balaclava… [The] next big battles of World War I were to be quite different from those that had gone before.” (243)

Passchendaele would be called a “love battle” by Scott Fitzgerald, since “the only people who could fight them were those who possessed a sublime faith in their countries, their institutions, and their own unquestioned value systems. Only that kind of security, that kind of unthinking confidence, armored men sufficiently to endure the hell of such battles.” But “Now those men were gone; either they lay rotting in the mud of France, or, if they still lived, they no longer possessed the faith of those pathetically empty times. The German Army consisted of old men who had already dreamed their dreams or young boys who had never had time to see visions. The French Army had already mutinied. In Britain they no longer allowed soldiers to take their rifles home on leave with them, for men returning to the front took pot shots at London houses as they rode by on the trains, in a futile but revealing expression of their frustrations. The whole sickening horror had simply gone on too long.” But the horrid affair would continue for another year. “The equilibrium of force still prevailed; the Clausewitzian extension of violence had proceeded farther than ever before, but had still not achieved a victory. Until one side or the other acknowledged defeat and bowed to the will of the stronger, the war must continue. Indeed, in that sense, it did not even end in 1918; it lasted until 1945.”

On the Austrian front, the 10th and 11th Battles of Isonzo gave the Italians the advance they had been craving against the Austrians. Reinforced by German soldiers, Germany used newly-developed hutier tactics to overwhelm the Italians at the Battle of Caporetto, which exacted nearly half a million casualties between the armies involved. German hutier tactics paid handsome dividends, but the Allies had a card up their sleeve: the tank. “The Germans, with their fine military tradition, had answered the problem of the World War I battlefield with new tactics and new techniques; the Allies, with their inventive and industrial genius, answered it with new machines.” The Battle of Cambrai utilized a British tank force of 300-500 tanks to grab an Allied victory. Allied struggles on the Eastern Front were offset by victories in the Middle East: the British seized Baghdad, Beersheba, and Gaza. They pushed the Turks out of Jerusalem and seized the holy city as an early Christmas present, and as an omen to a better (more victorious) year ahead. The coming year would see the Americans in their first action in the European Theater.

At the beginning of 1918, the Bolshevik rulers in Russia were waiting for the capitalist powers to destroy themselves before beginning the World Revolution. As for Germany, “the country was living on next to nothing. The war had consumed Germany, taking off her older and older men and younger boys, as indeed it was doing to all the major long-term belligerents, and starving the nation for the most basic of consumer goods.” (259) In the French countryside, “Women, oldsters, and children were all that were left. They went to the factories or the field each morning, they came home to empty houses at night; some sort of half-life went on. But the industries kept producing the guns and the shells, and somewhere the men were found to use them.” (260) Britain faced its own woes: “Conscription had been introduced in 1916, against the bitter opposition of organized labor; the national debt had increased nearly ten times, but there was still little sign of flagging.” The war had a momentous effect on the national psyche; “Britain had lost three times as many men on the first day of the Somme as she had lost in combat during the entire twenty-two years with France and Napoleon.” The Americans were the only Allies who were giddy, optimistic, and eager for war. They didn’t know better yet.

Day after day Germany flushed veterans from the Eastern Front onto the Western’s front lines; at the same time, Americans poured into France. By March, their numbers would reach 325,000. The first half of the 1918 campaigns on the Western Front are marked by German aggression: Germany hoped to prey upon the weakened French and British before they gathered enough arms and morale. Germany knew a decisive battle was needed, and if it didn’t come in 1918, it might not come at all. A series of offensive maneuvers, lumped together as The Spring Offensives, launched against Allied troops and threw them into disarray. The Germans gained ground with each push, getting close enough to shell Paris for several months, killing or wounding close to a thousand Parisians. America had her own taste of warfare at Belleau Wood; the little hamlet looked like a miniature Verdun, and the month-long fighting throughout June cost 9000 casualties. The Allies blunted the German push and then pushed back with a series of counter-offensives taking place later in the year. First they sought about flattening out salients in their lines: The Second Battle of the Marne cost 270,000 casualties and lasted from July 15th to August 6th; this was France’s largest tank battle of the war. The Battle of Amiens launched on August 8th and involved coordination between air, ground, and tank forces. On the first day, 16,000 German troops surrendered. General Ludendorff, shocked at the news, later remarked that August 8th was “the black day” for the German armies. The third salient attack, that at the Battle of St. Mihiel, lasted from September 12th to the 15th; basically an all-American slugfest with the Germans, this victory cost 27,000 casualties on either side. By this point the Germans were retreating, falling back to more defensive positions, riddled with influenza, and struggling to remain united. The Allies pushed against them, striking into German-occupied territory. The Meuse-Argonne Offensive lasted from the 26th of September to the last day of the war, November 11th of that year; 400,000 casualties wound be suffered in this offensive. The Fifth Battle of Ypres lasted from the 28th of September to the 2nd of October, costing 10,000 casualties. The Second Battle of Cambrai, taking 20,000 casualties, lasted from the 8th to the 10th of October. By now the Germans were in complete disarray, and they came to the peace table looking to end the madness and preserve Germany from woes from within and woes from without.

The Central Powers began collapsing. Bulgaria surrendered to the Allies in September after being overrun by Allied troops. The Ottoman Empire (resembling not much of an empire, and whose fate would be dissolution, bringing an end to six centuries of Ottoman rule over much of Europe) surrendered on October 30th; its edges were snipped away, and the British had taken Baghdad, Mesopotamia, and Jerusalem. The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary simply dissolved: the Czechoslavs and Yugoslavs declared their independence, and Austria and Hungary went their own separate ways. The armistice they signed on November 3rd was an armistice with a nation that didn’t exist. The Germans, wounded and fractured and with no way out, signed an armistice with the Allied powers on November 11th of 1918, thus ending the war. “When [Marshal Foch of France] read the peace treaty, [he] burst out, ‘This isn’t peace! This is a truce for twenty years!’ The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919. Twenty years and sixty-seven days later, Great Britain and France declared war on Hitler’s Germany.” (323)

the Great War [II]

The bloodletting of 1915 paled in comparison to that of 1916. On the Western Front, the Germans set their sights on the French fortress of Verdun straddling a hollow on the Meuse River. "In 1916 Verdun was largely useless, a salient in the general trench line, but one that had been consistently downgraded since the heavy fighting around it in 1914. Before the war it had been a great ring of concentric forts, but the rapid fall of such places as Liege and Maubeuge had led the French to dismantle most of the works, on the idea that they were not worth keeping up. Verdun had become a backwater of the Western front." (141) Germany hoped that by taking Verdun, beloved in the eyes of the French, they would break French morale. The Allies' goal was simpler: they wanted to kill as many Germans as possible, and they planned to do this at a dinky stream known as the Somme. The Germans launched their attack on Verdun first; the Battle of Verdun lasted from February 21st of 1916 to the 20th of December the same year, and exacted about a million casualties. Here the Germans used phosgene gas for the first time. The Allies didn't launch their Somme offensive until the first of July, and the Battle of the Somme lasted until the 18th of November, taking another million casualties. Whereas the Germans experimented with poison gas at Verdun, the Allies experimented with "landships" at the Somme; since the phrase "landship" or "armored fighting vehicle" gave the secret away, the Allies gave these lumbering machines a code-name: the tank. "The tanks were slow, seriously underpowered, and mechanically unreliable. Of forty-seven, only about a dozen survived the approach march and actually got into battle." (156) The tanks surprised the Germans, but none of them survived the battle. 

As the Allies and Central Powers slugged it out at Verdun and the Somme, the Italians threw themselves against the Austrians at Isonzo again and again, hoping to accomplish in 1916 what they failed to accomplish the previous year. The 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th battles of Isonzo raged throughout the year at a cost of around 250,000 casualties; the Austrians broke the pattern with the Battle of Asiago between the 15th of May and the 10th of June; both sides suffered a total of around 240,000 casualties. As the Italians bled and struggled at Isonzo, the Russians launched a campaign against the Austrians; named "Brusilov's Offensive," the battle raged from June 4th to September 20th at a cost of two million casualties. Rumania entered the war and was occupied by the Central Powers by January 17th of 1917; the fall of Rumania cost 500,000 casualties. "[Brusilov's Offensive] was the last great attempt of Tsarist Russia to master its fate, and it was a failure. With more than a million men gone, the Russian armies were reeling. Morale was down, desertions up. Discontent was epidemic, treason openly muttered in the ranks, despair the order of the day at home. The Tsar did not know what to do, Alexandra, ever more firmly under the spell of Rasputin, counseled only the wrong things. As the cold winter settled over the Eastern Front, the cold of death infected the limbs of the Romanov dynasty. By late 1916, the shadows were palpably gathering." (167)

On the High Seas, the German fleet remained at anchor, refusing to come out and face the British. The Kaiser didn’t want to risk his priceless ships, and he knew that if he sallied forth, he’d be pinched between two British fleets in the North Sea. The Germans had relied on their U-Boats to prowl the North Atlantic hunting British warships, but in 1916, in lieu of blockade at sea and stalemate on land, the Kaiser loosened his restrictions on naval operations. Because of the “Sussex Pledge,” where the Kaiser agreed to stop its U-boat merchant warfare, the U-boats became part of the German battle fleet. The fleet sailed out and met the British on the North Sea. The following Battle of Jutland has been called the greatest battleship encounter in world history. It took 8500 lives and wounded another thousand; the British lost three battle cruisers, three armored cruisers, and eight destroyers. The Germans lost one predreadnought, one battle cruiser, four light cruisers, and five destroyers. The naval battle that ran from May 31st to June 1st of 1916 “was the end of an era. Lepanto in 1571 had finished galley warfare; Trafalgar in 1805 was the last great fleet action under sail. Jutland was the last and greatest naval action fought on the open sea between surface vessels alone; none of the available submarines, airships, or seaplanes had intervened in the battle. By the next time battle fleets met at sea, war would have become three-dimensional.” (179)

As war ravaged the continents, the various countries involved were hungry to gobble up spoils. The French were tied up on the Western Front, but the British could afford to seek out imperial ambitions. Britain’s aims were two-fold: to seize Germany’s overseas empire and to dissolve the Ottoman Empire. The German-occupied port of Tsingtao in China was hit first in a joint operation by the British and Japanese. Here the Japanese showed marvelous ingenuity, bombing the fortress from the air. The subsequent German surrender paved the way for Japan to gobble up Germany’s Pacific outposts in the North Pacific, the Marshalls, the Marianas, and Carolines. Now occupied by the Japanese, these places would become legendary in the next Great War. In Africa, the Germans occupied four areas: Togoland, the Cameroons, German Southwest Africa, and German East Africa. The British wrestled these from the British one-by-one, though the African campaign would last until the end of the war. As the British fought the Germans in Africa, Turkey and Russia slugged it out: in this awful war of attrition, the opposing armies, great in number but weak in supplies and armament, acted like armies straight out of the 19th century. By 1916, the Ottomon Empire reeled under Russia’s fist; but Russia began to corrode, the disintegration weakening the Russian forces facing the Turks, and the Turks couldn’t help but cheer. The Russians may be dropping out, but the British still stood against Turkey. The British eyed the Persian Gulf, coveting the oil, and launched on a Mesopotamian Campaign that neared the gates of Baghdad; the Turks repulsed the over-extended British, laying siege to them at Kut. On April 29th, 1916, the British surrendered to the Turks. “It was up to that time the largest surrender of British troops on the field of battle; by contrast, Cornwallis at Yorktown had surrendered about 8000 men, and [the British prisoners, numbering around 10,000] were exceeded in numbers only by the surrender of the British at Singapore in 1942.” (190) The Turks may have secured a wild victory at Kut, but they were facing revolts from the desert tribes; these tribes were assisted by T.E. Lawrence, a.k.a. “Lawrence of Arabia,” who was deemed a madman by most of his fellow Englishmen. Meanwhile, the British fought in Egypt, their eyes on the imperial lifeline known as the Suez Canal; they pushed their forces up into Palestine and got as far as Gaza before being unable to take the city.

Turmoil in the colonies echoed turmoil at home. Severe food shortages dubbed the winter of 1916-1917 “the turnip winter”, since people were reduced to eating turnips to survive. Russia was undergoing what would be her last dying throes. “There was talk of regicide, not only among the radical and extremist underground but also among members of the aristocracy itself. The army was in disarray, desertions were mounting, shortages were felt everywhere, the communications network was near collapse, the cities torn by strikes and riots. Successive call-ups of soldiers had left essential industries and services undermanned, and there was a general sense of the country collapsing under the strain.” (199) Seething discontent focused on Rasputin, who had become one of the Tsar’s most trusted advisor, and whose policies and suggestions had been disastrous for Russia. On the cusp of the new year, “the drunkard” was assassinated. “The conspirators [poisoned Rasputin] with cakes and wine, and watched in horror as he happily stuffed himself and asked for more. Finally, in near terror, they pulled out revolvers and shot him repeatedly. Still refusing to die, he began to crawl out of the palace, while they beat him with revolver butts and hacked at him with their sabers. At last they stuffed him under the ice of the Neva River. Later when the Tsarina had his corpse recovered, the doctors found he had died of drowning.” (200) Tsarina was haunted by one of Rasputin’s prophecies: “If I die or you desert me, your son and your throne will not last six months.” Germany, though pleased at Russia’s internal instability, faced an instability of its own: the Reichstag, or German Parliament, disagreed with the ongoing bloodshed and wanted peace; after all, Germany had already secured what was tantamount to victory: they held large portions of France of Russia, and virtually all of Belgium, Rumania, and Serbia. The Germans sued for peace talks, but the Allies ignored them; with the Reichstag in chaos, Germany played the card it’d been keeping up its sleeve: the submarine. The time had come to recommence unrestricted submarine warfare, and with a vengeance; many feared (rightly) that this would prompt the United States to enter the war. The Admiralty promised that they could sink 600,000 tons of Allied shipping a month and knock Britain out of the war within six; the United States’ greatest ally was Britain, and if Britain were no longer a factor, the United States would probably stay out.

Russia didn’t have any cards to play: the national instability could only steamroll. Russia’s archaic state organization couldn’t keep up with the demands of this western-styled modern war; the Russian Tsars had had difficulties in the wake of the Crimean War, a revolutionary near-miss in the Russo-Japanese War, and in 1917 the tide was just too great. It all began on March 8th of that year: a food riot in Petrograd (a.k.a. St. Petersburg) blossomed out-of-control, strengthened by a demonstration to celebrate International Women’s Day. Petrograd (and Russia) were the economic heartbeats of the Russian machine, and thus it was in these places that Russians felt the most discontent: slum housing, poor and unequal distribution of food and services, and long hours took their toll and riots ensued. On March 10, the military garrison of Petrograd, instead of squashing the rights, joined them; even the Cossacks, a brutal government instrument of crowd control, turned their guns on the police and shooting erupted in the streets. By March 12, the armed forces were falling apart as regiment after regiment in Petrograd went over to the mob. The garrisons turned on their own officers, deserted, or set up new leaders; these social counsels were also known as “soviets.” The Duma, a governmental institution of council assemblies formed during the reign of Tsar Nicholas II, moved to establish a Provisional Government; another political movement, the Council of Workers and Soldiers Representative (or the Petrograd Soviet) moved to form their own type of government. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated on the 15th of March, handing power to his brother, the Grand Duke Michael. Michael abdicated on the 16th, giving authority to the Provisional Government.

The Provisional Government styled itself as a western democracy, proclaiming a variety of civil liberties and the abolishment of social, racial, and religious discrimination. They gave Finland independence within the Russian federation, and they gave total independence to Poland; but Finland was breaking away on its own anyways, and Poland was occupied by Germany, so this didn’t mean much. The fatal flaw in the Provisional Government’s policies was their refusal to stop the war against Germany: they would continue with their obligations and loyalty to the Allies. The activity of the political group called the Soviets thwarted the Provisional Government’s plans by destroying the armies: the Soviets “democratized” the army, destroying the rank hierarchy and eliminating officers’ authority and privileges. Desertions run rampant, units marched where they wanted, and officers either deserted, went along with their men, or were killed. The army dissolved even as Russia launched its last campaign (manned mostly by Finns and Poles) against the Russians; this July Offensive made good progress but was checked and repulsed by the Germans. The bloody defeat gave room for the Bolsheviks to seize power.

Vladimir Lenin stepped onto the world stage. He’d been a student of Karl Marx and a committed revolutionary for a long while; after being imprisoned for three years in Siberia, he left Russia and settled in Switzerland. By 1900, he was the leader of the minority wing of the Russian Communist party, known as “Bolsheviks.” The Bolsheviks argued that the installment of a true Marxist state could only come by violence; that is all that could really destroy the class system. The Mensheviks disagreed, believing that a Marxist state could come about gradually, without undue violence, by infecting parliamentary government. At the outbreak of war, Lenin and his small band of followers managed a fragile existence writing tracts, smuggling funds in and out of Russia, and toiling away as they waited for the right time. In April of 1917, the Germans decided to use Lenin as a pawn: they would support him so that he could overthrow the Russian regime and knock Russia out of the war. They shipped him to Petrograd where he led a coup that fizzled out in two days; he went into temporary exile in Finland. Russia was falling apart at the seams: the Finns announced their complete independence, the Ukraine was on the brink of rebellion, and the Cossacks were establishing their own regime. General Kornilov, a displaced Russian general, led a rebellion of turncoat armed forces against Petrograd; but his army dissolved. The whole affair opened the jail house doors for Leon Trotsky, who toiled with the Bolsheviks to overthrow the Russian regime. In October the Bolsheviks became the majority party in the Petrograd Soviet, and Trotsky was elected chairman. On November 6, the Bolsheviks seized power; this would be known as the October Revolution, since November 6th in the Russian calendar was October 24.

Lenin’s overthrow of the government took place in tandem with a German thrust into Russia, overrunning Latvia and the Baltic islands. The Germans were dangerously close to Petrograd, and Lenin offered them an armistice, hoping to keep them at bay: the Germans had no reason not to try and bite off large chunks of Russian territory, and Lenin wanted Russia for himself. On December 3, representatives of the Central Powers and of the Bolsheviks met at Brest-Litovsk in Poland to talk peace. Neither side agreed to each other’s conditions, and an exasperated Trotsky declared on February 10 that the war was simply over for the Russians. The Germans showed him that it wasn’t, furthering their advance into Russia. The Russians flocked back to the drawing table; desperate to salvage something, they agreed to anything. The Germans demanded Russian locomotives and rolling stock, machine guns, rifles, and ammunition, artillery pieces, wheat and oil, economic concessions, and territorial bits. On March 3, 1918, five days from the one-year anniversary of the food riots that started it all, Germany and Russia were at peace.

Russia was out of the war.
Germany could now focus on the western theater.
 They had ambitious aims for the Western Theater.
(but their unrestricted submarine use would come to haunt them)

the Great War [I]

~ notes from Stokesbury's History of World War One ~

being a three-part series

The turn of the 20th century saw the modern powers in various states of being. Germany, united under Otto von Bismarck, had become an industrial giant. The Third Republic of France, brutalized by a war with Germany in the late 19th century, began embracing pacifist ideals. Britain found itself in the clutch of labor riots and poverty, and Russia fared no better: the peasant class suffered under the Russian high-rollers, and the Russian leaders spent their time in lavish luxury while the lower classes struggled to survive. These great powers would find themselves at each other's throats; indeed, many politicians and historians speculated that a massive war lie on the horizon. This massive war enjoyed several accelerators in the early 1900s. France and Germany set their teeth against each other with the Moroccan Crises; France desired to colonize Morocco and add it to its imperial reach, but Germany resisted in volatile fashion. Tensions escalated when the Dual Monarchy (Austria-Hungary) annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, claiming them as part of their empire (they'd kept a military presence in these areas since the tail-end of the 19th century). The nation of Serbia saw Bosnia as its own heritage, and Russia wanted Bosnia, too. The explosion came with the assassination of Austria's Archduke Ferdinand at the hands of a Serbian assassin. The Dual Powers declared war on Serbia and invaded on August 12th of 1914. A string of alliances brought the larger powers into the conflict: Russia, France, and England set their teeth against Germany and Austria; Austria sought to spar with the Russians to the north and to invade both Serbia and Bosnia; Germany set its sights on France to the west and Russia to the east, hoping to quickly overrun France as Russia mobilized before taking the offensive to the east (this was part of the Schlieffen Plan). 

The opening battles in the west can be divided into three "campaigns": (1) the Germans forcing their passage through Belgium, (2) "the battle of the frontiers" in Lorraine, the Ardennes, and the battle of Mons, and (3) the Allied retreat. As the Germans pushed into Belgium, they had to destroy the Fortress at Liege; this battle lasted from August 5th to the 14th, and resulted in around 20,000 dead and wounded. As the Battle of Liege turned into a Germany victory, German and French troops sparred in Lorraine (between Germany and France) from the 14th to the 22nd with 60,000 casualties. The Germans then thrust into the Ardennes, and a two-day battle racked up 50,000 casualties. The British Expeditionary Force held out agianst the Germans at Mons on the 23rd, both sides suffering around 4000 total dead and wounded. The Germans were too strong, and the Allies too confused and disoriented, and the Allies began to retreat. The B.E.F. took up defensive positions around Le Cateau; abandoned by their allies, the British slugged it out with the Germans on the 26th of August before escaping at the cost of 12,000 casualties. Le Cateau had been the biggest British battle since Waterloo, but the next battle would be even worse: the Battle of St. Quentin on the 29th saw British and French facing off against the Germans at the cost of 19,000 dead and wounded. 

The Allies kept up the retreat, building their forces around the River Marne, and between September 5th and 10th, they held the German advance at bay; the Battle of the Marne was the biggest battle of the war so far, costing 500,000 casualties to the powers involved. Having broken the German thrust, the next series of battles, misnamed "the race to the sea," involved the various powers shuffling around one another, trying to gain the advantage. Stokesbury muses on the exhaustion of the German advance and the crumbling of the Schlieffen Plan, "[It] is perhaps legitimate to ask if Europe would not have been better off had the Schlieffen Plan worked. During the war the Germans came to be seen by the Allies as fiends incarnate, the Hun who raped nuns and bayoneted babies, but that view of them was a creation of the war itself. It is true that even their early demands for peace terms were exaggerated, but would a German hegemony of Europe have been any worse than the subsequent course of the war, with its millions of deaths, its influenza epidemic, its Bolshevik Revolution? Is it too imaginative to say that if the Schlieffen Plan had worked, Adolf Hitler might have remained a private in the List Regiment and Joseph Stalin a Georgian peasant? The Battle of the Marne was the end of the Schlieffen Plan, the end of the era of short wars, and the end of the old Europe as well." (57)

The so-called "race to the sea" started at the Marne and ended at the seacoast with the coming of winter in mid-November. The 1st Battle of the Aisne ran from September 12th to the 15th and cost 20,000 casualties; here was the beginning of trench warfare. The First Battle of Artois bloodied sands that would be seen two more times throughout the war. The Battle of the Yser in Belgium, from the 16th of October to that Halloween, cost 130,000 casualties. The 1st Battle of the Ypres ran from mid-October (the 19th) to the tail-end of November (the 11th) and cost 200,000 casualties. Slowly a line running from the North Sea to the Swiss border developed; here the battered, bloodied, and exhausted armies began digging trenches in anticipation of the coming spring offensive. 

Though the 300-mile western front has garnered most attention in the western world, battles were no less important (nor less bloody) on the eastern front, which ran four times the length of the western front, from east Prussia to neutral Romania. Russia attacked Germany on the 17th of August, and the subsequent Battle of Gumbinnen on the 20th saw 30,000 dead and wounded. The Battle of Tannenberg, lasting from the 26th to the 30th, cost 185,000 soldiers. Russia's drive lost steam at the Battle of the Masurian Lakes, fought from the 7th to the 14th of September, with 135,000 soldiers dead and dying in the field. The Germans attacked the Russians relentlessly: the Battle of the Vistula River (September 29th to October 31st) cost 200,000 casualties; the Battle of Lodz (November 11th to December 6th) saw another 120,000 men stripped from their units. The Winter Battle of the Masurian Lakes pushed the Russians back; from February 7th to the 22nd of 1915, the Russians lost ground and both armies lost soldiers (around 215,000). As Russia waged war against Germany, it also faced off against Austria. The Battle of Galicia, lasting from the 23rd of August to the 11th of September, cost 550,000 casualties. As Austria waged war with Russia, it also fought Serbia in a series of invasions and brutal battles that lasted from August through December; the skirmishes, battles, and invasions amounted to 425,000 casualties. Austria was burning itself out but thankful that the Carpathian Mountains created a natural hindrance to the Russians. 

The bloodiness on land was offset by the lack of blood spilled on the high seas. Germany had all but bled itself dry creating a vast battle fleet to counter the British in the North Sea; but because their fleet was so expensive and symbolic, they didn't want to risk using them to do what they were designed to do (i.e., wage war). The British had grown complacent in their Navy with the result that though they had lots of ships, their sailors weren't exactly up to par. The Battle of Heligoland Bight on August 28th cost Germany men and ships, and the kaiser freaked out, curtailing naval engagements. On January 24th of 1915, the British and Germans sparred again on the Dogger Bank. Submarines prowled the waters, but they weren't used against commerce (yet). Using submarines against merchantmen violated international rules of submarine warfare; but as Britain set about blockading Germany, Germany looked for a way to hurt Britain, too. It would only be a matter of time before Germany said "to hell!" with international rules and began targeting merchant ships, sinking their cargoes and crews.

The advent of spring in 1915 saw movement on the western front. Germany went into a defensive posture in the west, forced to focus offensively on the Russians. The British and French, however, weren't keen on sitting still. The battles along the western front were marked by sparring in the salients (or bulges) in the lines. The 1st Battle of Champagne raged from December 20th of 1914 to March 17th of 1915, and it cost about 140,000 men. The Battle of Neuve Chapelle cost another 20,000, and it took place between the 10th and 13th of March. The 2nd Battle of Ypres lasted just over a month, from April 22nd to May 25th, and it cost 100,000 casualties. Here the Germans used poison gas for the first time, though they didn't see how useful it could be. The 2nd Battle of Artois ran from the 9th of May to the 18th of June, and 200,000 casualties were exacted between the armies as they wrestled to control Vimy Ridge. The 2nd Battle of Champagne, fought between the 25th of September and the 6th of November, cost 235,000 men. The 3rd Battle of Artois, beginning at the same time as the 2nd Battle of Champagne but coming to a close two days earlier, saw 160,000 casualties. The legendary Battle of Loos (also known as the corpsefield of Loos) exacted 85,000 casualties, the majority of them British. The battles of 1915 foreshadowed the nature of the western front: vicious attacks seeking to budge the enemy from salients and, more often than not, failing. Many locations saw seesaw fighting (such as Vimy Ridge in the series of Artois battles) as the opposing sides slugged it out in a fistfight going nowhere. Meters of ground were lost and gained and hundreds of thousands lost their lives in the process.

Turkey came into the war relatively late; fractured and picked apart over the years by the Russians, British, and French, Turkey found an ally in Germany. The Turks shelled Russian ports in the Black Sea and began a campaign against the Russians and Armenians (whom they loathed) in the Caucasus Mountains. Italy, though allied to Germany as part of the Triple Alliance, suffered its own internal combustion and couldn't decide where it stood. Both Germany and the Allies entreated Italy to their cause, and the Americans went so far as to subsidize an Italian Socialist paper, Avanti, edited by none other than a fellow named Benito Mussolini. On the 23rd of May 1915, Italy joined up with the Allies. The Italians promptly went to war against the Austrians in the jagged mountain foothills. They made headway but got pushed back, and the Austrians dug into the 600-meter-high foothills and let the Italians come. Come they did, four times, and these battles of Isonzo racked up 410,000 casualties, the Italians unable to dislodge the entrenched Austrians. The only other major power not committed in some capacity to the war effort was the United States. President Woodrow Wilson declared American neutrality, and most Americans agreed with his isolationist position; "Why get tangled up in a European squabble? Let them sort it out!" Most Americans were sympathetic towards the Allies, but those of German heritage, especially in the Midwest, favored Germany; but as English papers printed reports of actual German barbarity (and some rumors of barbarity that simply weren't true), Americans began to see "the Hun" as an evil monster that had to be dealt with. Nevertheless, Wilson continued clinging to neutrality, and he opened trade to any belligerent nation. This was good news for American businessmen, but the British loathed America for this: we were, after all, selling war necessities to Germany.

Meanwhile, as the British blockade threatened to strangle Germany, German submarines began attacking British merchant ships. The British responded by arming their merchant ships. International law stated that a submarine could sink a merchant ship, but first it had to board the ship and check the manifests; if war material were found on-board, they could sink the boat, but only once they guaranteed safe passage to the crew. Because submarines risked life and limb announcing their presence, they simply stopped and just fired their torpedoes. The British were enraged but could do nothing but keep an eye out. On the 7th of May 1915, a U-boat off the coast of Ireland sank the Lusitania, killing 1,198 people (including 128 Americans). Woodrow Wilson threatened war if Germany didn't get their submarine forces in line, and the kaiser backed off. The media played up the Lusitania as a cruise liner; what most people didn't know was that, though it was a cruise ship, it had been transporting war materials and soldiers. This fact was kept out of the public eye; both Wilson and Churchill hoped this piece of propaganda would further alienate Germany in public opinion and provoke her to watch her submarines on the high seas.

Austria's campaigns against Russia perturbed the Tsar; he didn't know if he could handle another front with Turkey massing for war. He petitioned the Allies for help, and Winston Churchill devised a plan: "Let's attack the Dardanelles and push Turkey out of the war." The Dardanelles, previously called the Hellespont, was a narrow strait in northeast Turkey connecting the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara. The Allies blasted up the strait and landed on the Gallipoli peninsula. The landings were nothing short of a bloodletting as Allied troops used rowboats to disembark on the beaches under heavy machine-gun fire. The forthcoming Battle of Gallipoli, lasting from the 25th of April 1915 to the ninth of January 1916, claimed half a million lives. The battle turned into a microcosm of the western front, with locations such as Cape Helles, Anzac Cove, and Suvla Bay becoming cemented as legend. Churchill's plan failed, and the quagmire on the peninsula would have far-reaching consequences.

In Russia, the Tsar's only male heir suffered from hemophilia, and a mystic holy man known as Rasputin (meaning "the drunkard") was brought into the palace to soothe the boy. Rasputin would gain credibility with the royal family, influencing the unfolding of the war. Instability in Russia gave the Germans the upper hand, and on May 5th the Germans launched their Gorlice-Tarnow offensive; it lasted nearly two months, cost 650,000 casualties, and broke Russian rule of Poland, which they'd enjoyed since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Russia wouldn't claim authority in Poland until 1944. In September, Bulgaria allied with Germany and Austria, encouraged both by German success in Poland and the Allied disaster on the Gallipoli peninsula. Bulgaria's first action was an invasion and conquering of Serbia between October and November 1915, knocking Serbia out of the war. "Thus 1915, as 1914 before it, came to an indecisive end. There was little to celebrate in the final days of the year and less for the Allies than for the Central Powers. Italy had come in, but Serbia had gone out; Salonika [in Greece] had been opened up, but the Dardanelles was closing down. The submarine remained a question mark, and as long as it did, Britain's command of the sea was tenuous. Russia was barely surviving. On the Western Front, France and Britain dashed their young men in vain against the prepared German positions, and hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded had gained them a few useless yards. The constant upgrading of artillery and the introduction of gas were plumping new depths of frightfulness, but all to little effect." (138) Stokesbury continues, "What was to be done? From London all the way east to St. Petersburg the nations were trapped in the war. Like men who had blundered into a swamp, knowing how much it had cost them to come this far, they could not bring themselves to turn about and go back the way they had come. Surely a bit more effort would see them safely through to the other side. With little thought of faltering yet, they girded themselves for an even more stupendous trial of arms. The sacrifice of those who had gone before must not be in vain. They must win through to victory." (139)

[books i've been reading]

The First World War, John Keegan. "The First World War created the modern world. A conflict of unprecedented ferocity, it abruptly ended the relative peace and prosperity of the Victorian era, unleashing such demons of the twentieth century as mechanized warfare and mass death. It also helped to usher in the ideas that have shaped our times--modernism in the arts, new approaches to psychology and medicine, radical thoughts about economics and society--and in so doing shattered the faith in rationalism and liberalism that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment. With The First World War, John Keegan, one of our most eminent military historians, fulfills a lifelong ambition to write the definitive account of the Great War for our generation. Probing the mystery of how a civilization at the height of its achievement could have propelled itself into such a ruinous conflict, Keegan takes us behind the scenes of the negotiations among Europe's crowned heads (all of them related to one another by blood) and ministers, and their doomed efforts to defuse the crisis. He reveals how, by an astonishing failure of diplomacy and communication, a bilateral dispute grew to engulf an entire continent. But the heart of Keegan's superb narrative is, of course, his analysis of the military conflict. With unequalled authority and insight, he recreates the nightmarish engagements whose names have become legend--Verdun, the Somme and Gallipoli among them--and sheds new light on the strategies and tactics employed, particularly the contributions of geography and technology. No less central to Keegan's account is the human aspect. He acquaints us with the thoughts of the intriguing personalities who oversaw the tragically unnecessary catastrophe--from heads of state like Russia's hapless tsar, Nicholas II, to renowned warmakers such as Haig, Hindenburg and Joffre. But Keegan reserves his most affecting personal sympathy for those whose individual efforts history has not recorded--"the anonymous millions, indistinguishably drab, undifferentially deprived of any scrap of the glories that by tradition made the life of the man-at-arms tolerable." By the end of the war, three great empires--the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman--had collapsed. But as Keegan shows, the devastation ex-tended over the entirety of Europe, and still profoundly informs the politics and culture of the continent today. His brilliant, panoramic account of this vast and terrible conflict is destined to take its place among the classics of world history." (from Amazon.com)

A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, G.J. Meyer. Here's the best history of the Great War that I have read. Meyer writes as a narrative historian, bringing life to the story and interspersing the narrative with crucial background information that many histories gloss over. If you have a baseline knowledge of World War One and want to explore it more in-depth, this is the book to turn to. "The First World War is one of history’s greatest tragedies. In this remarkable and intimate account, author G. J. Meyer draws on exhaustive research to bring to life the story of how the Great War reduced Europe’s mightiest empires to rubble, killed twenty million people, and cracked the foundations of the world we live in today. The First World War is one of history’s greatest tragedies. In this remarkable and intimate account, author G. J. Meyer draws on exhaustive research to bring to life the story of how the Great War reduced Europe’s mightiest empires to rubble, killed twenty million people, and cracked the foundations of the world we live in today." (from Amazon.com)

a cosmic post

#starwarsinthecity

those AT-ATs are bigger than the movies portray them

snowed in? take a tauntaun to work!

this star destroyer looks a wee bit ominous

Boba Fett taking a selfie

jar-jar binks has O.D.'d in the alley.
No one's mad about it (except Anakin)
Fuck Anakin.

#bigbonelick

I know what you're thinking, Blake.

And I don't want you to stop thinking it.

[books i've been reading]

The Great War: An Illustrated History, Phil Carradice. Here's a fantastic, easy-to-read trainer on the Great War. "The Great War: an illustrated history is a history of World War One told through nearly 150 illustrations relating to the war, each accompanied by an in depth caption. Topics to be covered include the causes of the war, and the early months, particularly recruitment and training. It also covers the early trenches, and the Belgian and French involvement. Specific attention is given to the German view and the stalemate as the war bogged down, including trench life, and the major battles, including Ypres and the Somme. The book also covers the war on other fronts, especially Gallipoli, the Home Front including the role of women and the war at sea particularly the Battle of Jutland and the role of convoys. Finally, it covers the war in the air, messages from the Front, postcards sent by serving soldiers and the art and poetry from the war years leading up to the final months including victory celebrations and the Peace Treaty." (from Amazon.com)

Weapons of World War I, Chris Bishop. I've found this book to be a kick-ass sidekick to histories of the Great War, bringing to visual life the weapons, tactics, and backgrounds of the machinery of war operative in World War One. "From the first tanks to early submarines to the repeating rifle to the biplane, Encyclopedia of Weapons of World War I examines key weapons from the Great War. It includes more than 300 pieces of equipment from handguns to zeppelins. Each weapon system is illustrated with a detailed profile artwork and a photograph showing the weapons system in service. Accompanying the illustrative material is detailed text that lists each weapon’s service history, the numbers built, and its variants, as well as full specifications." (from Amazon.com)

*comparisons*

South America's pretty damned big.

this is why you don't get involved in a land war in Russia

Australia is damned big, too.

Texas is Alaska's little sister

Pluto and Charon are smaller than I thought they were...

oh, just the Middle East.

on writing (III)

that's one too many dots for an elipses...

The writing process isn't anything to snuff about. Every writer has a different way of going about it, a certain pattern or scheme that works for them. The past couple years have seen a honing in and cementing of a particular pattern of my own. Contrary to popular belief, one doesn't just get a story idea, sit down, and hammer it out. There are exceptions, of course, like some of the modern masters who can churn out a book every 6-8 weeks. I'm no "modern master" and I don't pretend to be. Writing a story, at least for me, is one hell of a difficult thing to do. I had to find a way through the morass, and the process below sees me from one shore to the other.

(A) Scripting. I owe a lot to the person who came up with the "Snowflake Method." The Snowflake Method (as I perceive it) boils down to sketching out your story in such a way that you break it down into smaller and smaller components; the writing process becomes a sort of "fleshing-out" the components into a coherent narrative. This particular method is based on a process of architectural planning but translated into writing works of fiction. A good deal of the time I spend "writing" is actually spent, technically-speaking, "scripting": engaging my creative faculties to sketch out a story. The writing process is putting meat on the bare-bones script. The Snowflake Method, then, has both macro and micro developments; and this is also where I create my characters. Following scripting, my writing process focuses on the story scene-by-scene.

(B) Write the Scene. Here I focus on the flow of the scene: its setting, the movement of the characters, and the rough draft of the dialogue. I write by three major rules: (1) Cut, cut, CUT!, (2) Don't be afraid to MOVE! (as I have a tendency to become caught up details and description; a good struggle to have, but one that can threaten to lead the writing into a black hole), and (3) A plague on the house of adverbs (and on passive voice, too)!

(c) Rewrite the Scene. Once I have the first draft of the scene written, I rewrite it. All of it. Here I focus on description and detail: where should detail be cut, and where should it be added? I like the Rule of Three: as the Greeks taught, there is a mysterious perfection to the grouping of three, and when it comes to detail in a story, the Rule of Three is a good guide to how much is too much. When rewriting the scene, I also tweak the dialogue.

(d) Revise the Scene. On my third tramp through the scene, I focus on sentence structure, hunting down adverbs and unnecessary adjectives. Passive voice also becomes prey; active voice reads better, and passive voice should be used minimally. The third draft of the scene focuses, too, on the dialogue: here I flesh out the dialogue some more, showing rather than telling how characters feel, think, and gesture.

That's my writing process when it comes to scenes, and scenes build to create a story. The culmination of all the scenes results in the Rough Draft. Once I have the Rough Draft completed, I let it sit for a few weeks and return to it, keeping my eye out for four things: (1) Continuity, especially paying attention to little details, for readers are keen on pointing out discontinuity; (2) hunting for adverbs, unnecessary adjectives, and passive voice that I may have missed in the original writing; (3) cutting unnecessary scenes or dialogue; and (4) looking to enhance any themes, motifs, or symbols that rose out of the writing.

So that's how I do it.
It tends to work out pretty well for me.

monsters, et. al.

because I dig Pacific Rim and Godzilla

oh, just hanging with some Pleistocene pals

pleasant seas do not ancient oceans make

I always appreciate a shout-out to Ghostbusters.

#amargeddon [sic]

Armageddon.

It's better than sex.

#warintheskies

Birds of Steel needs a World War One Mod.