[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of
interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the
articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ]
Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan
10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the
First World War
It is one of
the most well documented conflicts in history, but do we really know everything
about the First World War? Here, Seán Lang reveals 10 things you (probably)
weren’t aware of
Thursday 28th August 2014
Submitted by Emma McFarnon
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Lang, a senior
lecturer in history at Anglia Ruskin University, is the author of First World War for Dummies.
Produced in
conjunction with Imperial War Museums (IWM) as part of their First World War
centenary publishing programme, the book offers an introduction to ‘the war to
end all wars’.
1) The alliance system didn’t cause the war
Many people
assume that the war resulted directly from the alliance structure that bound
all the European great powers together before 1914. Germany was allied to
Austria-Hungary and Italy; Russia was allied to France, and both countries had
an entente (a diplomatic agreement) with Britain.
The alliances
certainly contributed to the prewar build-up of tension between the great
powers but, perhaps surprisingly, none of these alliances actually produced a
declaration of war.
In July 1914
Germany gave Austria-Hungary a sweeping guarantee of support known as the
‘Blank Cheque’, which went far beyond the terms of their formal alliance. The
French came in because Germany launched a pre-emptive strike against them;
Britain declared war not because of the entente agreements but because the
Germans invaded Belgium, and Italy first kept out of the war and then came in
against its own allies!
2) There were special battalions for short soldiers
The minimum
height requirement for the British Army was 5ft 3 ins, but many shorter men
were caught up in the recruiting enthusiasm of August 1914 and were keen to
enlist.
Rather
reluctantly the War Office established a number of ‘bantam battalions’,
attached to more conventional regiments. Many bantams were coal miners, and
their short height and technical expertise proved a great asset in the
tunnelling work that went on underneath the western front.
However,
bantams were not particularly effective in battle, and by the end of 1916 the
general fitness and condition of men volunteering as bantams was no longer up
to the standard required. It wasn’t easy to maintain recruitment: increasingly
the bantam battalions had to accept men of ‘normal’ height. And there’s not
much point in a bantam battalion that is largely made up of taller men, so
after conscription was introduced in 1916 the bantam battalions idea was quietly
dropped.
3) Munitions girls kept football going
The Football
League suspended its programme after the 1914–15 season (although the FA
continued to allow clubs to organise regional competitions), and amateur
tournaments were difficult to run with so many men in the army, so women
stepped into the breach.
Munitions
workers – ‘munitionettes’, as they were known – formed football teams and
played against rival factories. Munitionette football attracted a wide
following, and many matches were played at the grounds of professional clubs.
When peace came, however, the female players had to hang up their boots and go
back to the domestic lives they had been leading before the war. But the sport
continued to enjoy success until women were banned from playing in Football League
grounds in 1921.
4) Portuguese troops fought in the war
Like many
neutral countries, Portugal was angry at German U-boat attacks on its merchant
shipping. The Portuguese were also worried that the German military campaign in
Africa might move into their colonies in Mozambique and Angola.
In March 1916,
Germany declared war on Portugal. As well as patrolling the oceans and
strengthening their border controls in Africa, the Portuguese also sent a
military force to the western front. The Portuguese won the respect of their
more battle-hardened allies, and put up a particularly stubborn fight against
the great German offensive of spring, 1918.
5) The Russians first solved the problem of trench warfare
Launching a
successful attack against a heavily fortified enemy trench was one of the most
difficult problems facing military commanders on both sides: barbed wire and
machine guns gave a considerable advantage to the defender. Even if an attacker
did break through, the attacking force usually ran out of steam just as the
defenders brought up reinforcements.
The man who
solved the conundrum was the Russian general Alexei Brusilov, who in 1916
launched a massive offensive against the Austrians in co-ordination with the
British and French attack on the Somme. Brusilov realised that offensives on
the western front were too heavily concentrated on trying to ‘punch a hole’
through the enemy line at a particular point, so the enemy knew exactly where
to send his reinforcements.
By attacking
over a much larger area, Brusilov was able to hide the direction of his main
attack from the Austrians, so they never knew which points to reinforce and
which to abandon. Of course, Brusilov’s approach needed the sort of huge
numbers of men that were the Russian army’s speciality, and after its initial
success the attack petered out because the supply system for food and
ammunition couldn’t cope.
6) The war produced Britain’s worst rail disaster
On 22 May 1915
a troop train carrying men of the Royal Scots Guards and the Leith Territorial
battalion south to embark for the Gallipoli campaign crashed into a stationary
local train sitting outside a signal box near Gretna Green. Moments later the
Glasgow express crashed into the wreckage of the two trains, and the whole
scene was engulfed by fire.
Some 226
people were killed, 214 of them soldiers, and 246 were seriously injured. It
remains to this day the biggest loss of life in a railway accident in Britain.
The crash
happened through the carelessness of the two signalmen, who were found guilty
of criminal negligence and sent to prison. They had shunted the local train
onto the main line instead of a siding and had been too busy chatting about the
war to change the signals to warn the approaching troop train.
Wartime demand
for rolling stock was so high that trains were using old wooden-framed
carriages, which caught fire with terrifying speed. The crash was another
unwanted by-product of the First World War.
7) Japan came to the rescue of the British in the Mediterranean
Britain’s only
formal alliance before 1914 was with Japan, and it was designed to relieve the
Royal Navy of some of the burden of defending Britain’s Asian colonies, and to
enable Britain and Japan to help one another safeguard their respective
interests in China and Korea.
When war broke
out, the Japanese attacked German possessions in the Pacific and China, but in
1917 Britain requested Japanese assistance with escort duties in the
Mediterranean. The region was vital for supplying Allied armies in Italy and
Greece, and for maintaining communications with Africa, but the Allied navies
faced threats from German and Austrian submarines.
The Japanese,
operating from Malta, provided escorts for Allied merchant and troop convoys,
and a search-and-rescue service for the crews of torpedoed vessels. Japan’s
important role in the war strengthened its claim to be accepted by the
Americans and Europeans as a fully fledged great power.
8) The Chinese worked on the western front
Who actually
filled all those sandbags we see in photographs of the trenches? Who loaded the
guns, ammunitions and food onto lorries or trains? Who cleared up after a
train was derailed or a headquarters building shelled?
The answer was
the Chinese Labour Corps. They were volunteers from the Chinese countryside who
were sent to Europe to fulfil a vital, but almost completely overlooked role in
making an Allied victory possible. They were paid a pittance, and were
generally regarded by both the British and French as expendable ‘coolies’.
They mostly
served behind the lines, which limited their casualties from enemy action,
although they suffered very badly from the ‘Spanish’ flu epidemic of 1918.
9) The war dragged on two weeks longer than you think
Although we
mark the Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, as the end of the First World War, it
actually lasted two further weeks in Africa.
The German
commander, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, had become a national hero in Germany
through his ruthless guerrilla campaign against Britain’s imperial forces in
East Africa, forcing Africans to act as his porters and devastating the economy
of the local villages as he did so. Vorbeck had been forced into Portuguese
Mozambique by November 1918, but he still had some 3,000 troops under his
command and he was still launching raids into Southern Rhodesia when news
reached him of the armistice in Europe.
Unlike the
German army in Europe, Vorbeck could regard his own force as undefeated, and he
decided to end the African war at a time of his own choosing. He formally
surrendered to the British in Northern Rhodesia (modern Zambia) on 25 November,
two weeks after the Armistice in Europe.
10) Kipling’s words were tragic
The words that
appear on the gravestones of unidentified soldiers of the First World War, “A
soldier of the Great War known unto God”, were written by the celebrated writer
and Nobel Prizewinner, Rudyard Kipling.
Commissioning
leading figures like Kipling was a way of showing that Britain honoured its war
dead. The words on the Cenotaph in Whitehall, built by the architect Sir Edwin
Lutyens, even calls them “The Glorious Dead”. The words were chosen by
Kipling, but there was a cruel irony in this commission.
Kipling’s own
son John had been taken into the army despite his appallingly weak eyesight,
and was killed by a German shell in 1915 at the battle of Loos. His body was
never found, so he too became, in his father’s words, “a soldier of the Great
War known unto God”.
First World
War for Dummies, published by Wiley, is now on sale. To find out more, click
here.
[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of
interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the
articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ]
Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan
