Its absolutely justified to bump a thread as wonderful and informative as this!
One of the best threads. Thanks Trig for writing this amazing series and to those who bumped it.
A New View of the Battle of Gallipoli, One of the Bloodiest Conflicts of World War I
Smithsonian article about the battle, as well as recent archaeological efforts.
Thirty-two cutters filled with British troops advanced steadily across the sea under a brightening sky. The men clutched their rifles and peered at a crescent of sand a few hundred yards away, fortified by barbed wire strung across wooden posts. Just beyond the beach rose rugged limestone cliffs covered in heavy brush. It was a few minutes after dawn on April 25, 1915, and the 1st Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers was preparing to land on W Beach on the southern end of the Gallipoli Peninsula. “It might have been a deserted land we were nearing in our little boats,” remembered Capt. Richard Willis, commander of C Company. “Then, crack!
The stroke oar of my boat fell forward to the angry astonishment of his mates.” Chaos broke out as soldiers tried desperately to escape a hail of bullets raking across the beach and the boats. “Men leapt out of the boats into deep water, encumbered with their rifles and their 70 pounds of kit,” recalled Willis, “and some of them died right there, while others reached the land only to be cut down on the barbed wire.”
A few yards away, the commander of B Company waded through three feet of water onto the beach. “The sea behind was absolutely crimson, and you could hear the groans through the rattle of musketry…I shouted to the soldier behind me to signal, but he shouted back, ‘I am shot through the chest.’ I then perceived they were all hit.” The survivors of the Lancashire battalion pushed on, eventually forcing the three platoons of Turkish defenders, about 200 men, to flee. By 7:15 that morning they had secured the landing place, but at a terrible cost. Out of 1,029 men who landed on W Beach, only 410 survived.
One hundredth Anniversary of the battle of Ypres. Thanks again Triggercut, my knowledge of WW1 has greatly expanded thanks to your efforts and I read the book you recommended, A World Undone.
Ypres was where Canada entered the War. Canadians should never think our history is weak; 60,000 Canadians died in World War 1. To me that is an almost incomprehensible number with or without considering that Canada’s population was under 8 million at the time.
The Canadian 1st Division was inserted at the Salient line, which was a successful push into German forces but left them surrounded on three sides. They lasted through a couple days of trenches, mud, artillery, friends dying, and minor offensives involving climbing out of the trench to get killed by German machine guns. Over the top.
Then a quiet moment. Germans had noted the direction of the breeze and opened 6,000 cans of Chlorine gas. This was the first use of gas on the Western Front and the Germans weren’t expecting much to happen. Gas had been tried once before on the Eastern Front but was ineffective; the gas was made mostly inert by below-freezing temperatures. This time it worked. The gas moved through the Algerian and Moroccan divisions, killing the uh, fortunate within 10 minutes. The less fortunate were blinded, bleeding internally, and forced out of the trenches by the gas (which sinks in air) and were therefore ripe targets for machine guns. A 4-mile wide gap in the line was cleared, but Germany couldn’t take advantage, they weren’t ready with an offensive force. The gap was closing.
Canadians were mostly spared the gas, and caught on quickly that you could urinate into a cloth and hold it over your mouth to neutralize the poison. But they were now badly exposed to artillery and the offense that Germany tried to put together. In total, within a few days Canadians had suffered around 6,000 casualties including 2,000 dead when they were rotated out.
A professor once told me that World War II might have had the higher casualty count, but only because they cheated by killing civilians. World War I is a testament to how effective the nations of the world had gotten at killing and keeping on fighting.
It was interesting to read about the centennial of the Gallipoli battle this past weekend – The Aussies, the Kiwis and the Turks all point to that battle as being pivotal to their emergence as modern, respected nations.
It was. I didn’t realize how central it is to the identity of Australia and New Zealand as well as Turkey. It’s also a bit strange to me to feel that degree of pride for participating in one of the more pointless campaigns of an already pointless war. But I guess that’s what people do with history.
She colorizes old photos and today she has one of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. If only his driver didn’t make that wrong turn.
Kinda get the feeling that the war was going to be inevitable one way or another though. If not the assassination, then something else.
Probably, but if that French minister whatshisname the pacifist wasn’t killed, conceivably not. But he was, and so was the archduke.
In allocating blame for leading up to the war it’s hard for me to say who is more responsible. The Russians for deliberately provoking it despite their pathetic economy and military and their fragile politics, the Austrians for being so weak and stupid as to be provoked, the Germans for being so eager to join in, or the French for being so hot to avenge their last loss to the Germans. The British may get a tiny bit of slack pre-1914 for not really provoking the war so much as exacerbating it with their idiot treaties. But then once the war started, the British, French, and Italians share a joint prize for atrocious and horribly self-destructive conduct of the damn thing.
Wow, what an amazing thread. Thanks for resurrecting it. I’ve got a lot of reading to do. I just recently heard the lecture about the assassination on the Great Lecture series “36 events that changed the world” and this was one of them.
100 Year anniversary of the U.S. joining WW1 is coming up tomorrow. Hopefully there will be some good stories around the anniversary about what led to that, or stories about what happened as the U.S. joined the war.
I’m going to mark the occasion by listening to some Franz Ferdinand.
This is a bit of a stretch, but maybe with no US involvement there would have been no Kaiserschlacht, and maybe a fair armistice instead of the forced capitulation followed by shameful reparations that laid the groundwork for WWII.
Hi it is possible to get a copy of your Word Document emailed to me?
Thanks :)
Oh hey, me too kthxplz. For me, I don’t really feel like a forum exchange has really happened until it’s been immortalized in Word.
Someone has a school paper due!
Although an armistice had been signed at 5:10 am local time on November 11th, 2018, it was not slated to take effect until 11:00 am, when officers and leaders troops on both sides of the lines could be notified by telegraph to stand down.
Actual notifications were probably all received by 9 that morning. Nonetheless, shelling and shooting would continue through 11:00 am, as prescribed in the armistice ceasefire.
The morning of November 11th, in the six hours between signing of the ceasefire and it going into place, an estimated 11,000 casualties were incurred. That includes another 2,700 deaths, with one recorded just a minute before 11:00 am.
It wasn’t a very good year for Henry Gunther. He was an efficient and clever accountant at a bank in Baltimore, a first-generation American of German ancestry who’d watched the coming war in Europe with growing horror. Gunther had family he corresponded with in Germany. He’d hoped to go visit them soon, and hoped they might also one day visit him. And then the war. He and his friends were insulted often, called “huns” behind their backs. As the war wore on, the inults about Gunther’s heritage only got worse, and he heard them all.
Gunther didn’t enlist by any means; he was a proud American to be certain, and deeply troubled at the actions of Germany, by all accounts…but struggled with the idea of shooting those from his ancestral homeland.Eventually he was drafted in 1918, and was so obviously bright that he was quickly promoted to a supply sergeant in charge of keeping his regiment equipped in uniforms and incidental clothing.
Shortly after arriving with his unit, the 313th Regiment – known as “Baltimore’s Own” – in September of 1918, Gunther was appalled at the conditions with which soldiers along the front, especially American soldiers, were forced to endure. A sharply critical letter about supplies not received and insufficient training that he’d sent back home was intercepted by a censor…and Henry found himself busted back to private.
That didn’t sit well with him, though not because he’d been busted. It was more a consideration for Henry Gunther that he’d felt he’d let his friends in the unit (Gunther was quite popular) down. In fact, Gunther also worried that his voice betrayed a trace of a German accent from growing up in a neighborhood in Baltimore where German was as likely to be spoken in shops and in churches as English. He feared that his comrades in arms were also aware that Gunther had family in Germany, and perhaps even in the German army. Would they suspect him of being a traitor, he wondered?
The 313th was part of the 157th Infantry Brigade, led by Brigadier General William Jones Nicholson. Nicholson was a crusy old bird and longtime veteran. He’d begun his military career in the 7th Cavalry – yep, THAT 7th Cavalry. He had no formal military training, but fought in the Little Big Horn campaign (though obviously not at that battle) and had distinguished himself enough in some of the more bloody slaughters of Native American resistance in the west that he was promoted to Lieutenant. He was at Wounded Knee, and commanded a battalion that fired upon the camp there. He’d later testify he’d only done so after a group of “Indian Bucks” had charged at the position he and his men held.
Nicholson kept getting field promotions. He served in the ginned-up Spanish-American war and been decorated for his service. At the start of World War I, the plan was to put the old guy in charge of training officers, but Nicholson’s superiors liked the guy so much, they put him in charge of the 157th, a brigade in the American 79th division. General Nicholson was not one for technicalities or frippery.
And so early that morning on November 11th, Nicholson got the order of the impending ceasefire to take effect at 11:00 am on the dot. Nicholson had heard rumors of ceasefires before, in other conflicts he’d fought in. He called in his senior officers and staff, and informed them that until 11:00 am that morning, he expected them to continue to fight, and fight doggedly and with all vigor. They were to proceed as if the ceasefire would collapse and that they would need to push the Germans back out of France and take the fight to them throughout the winter and into spring.
That order came down the line that morning. The 313th Regiment continued to advance, grumbling the entire way. Everyone was aware of the oncoming ceasefire. No one wanted to get shot just before this awful war ended. Orders, however, were orders, and the 313th eventually came up on the village of Ville-devant-Chaumont. It was fortified by remnants of a German regiment who’d dug in to the rubble of the town. A German machine gun nest managed to pin Henry Gunther’s squad.
Gunther was no doubt happy the war was perhaps finally going to end, but also agitated about what his pals in the troop thought about him. When news of the upcoming ceasefire rippled through camp, were they looking at him? Giving him the eye? Gunther considered himself proud. And brave. What did those fellows mean by all that?
It was 10:45 that morning. It was foggy, both with caused by a weather front and the acrid smoke of shells and gunpowder. Shots were being traded, but the Germans in the village and the Americans drawn up outside it seemed to be just fine with riding out the last 15 minutes. No word had reached either group to countermand the order that at 11:00 am, all shooting was to stop.
For Private Henry Gunther though, 11:00 am might mean an end to being able to prove to his buddies that he was every bit the loyal American soldier they all were. He told his best friend – and now sergeant – Ernest Powell that they had orders to move up. Powell told Gunther that this was folly. In 10 minutes, the war was likely to be over. Gunther told Powell that the Germans were falling back under even token resistance, that the fight had gone out of them. All a fellow might need to do would be to throw some more aggressive gunfire at that town, and the Germans would fall back. Henry Gunther and the rest of the 313th would end the war by liberating a German-held town.
Powell didn’t see it that way. They’d advanced, they were currently trading fire, and he was acting to the letter of his orders. He told Gunther that he thought it was a crazy idea. Just stand down, fire your rifle. But he didn’t give an explicit order. Henry Gunther was his friend. And so Gunther thought he saw a position of cover ahead. It was about 10:56 am.
Gunther moved up, and then advanced into open territory. His own fellows shouted at him to get down. He came into view of the Germans holed up in the Ville-devant-Chaumont. They waved him back frantically – they knew the ceasefire was literally seconds away. But Gunther moved up again, and as he ran, the Germans fired a volley of machine gun fire over his head. They again frantically waved him back. Its likely that they shouted at him, and that Gunther heard them and understood.
But Henry Gunther – who’d heard all the insults directed at German Americans back home in Baltimore, especially since the outbreak of the war – kept on coming. He leveled his gun and fired off a couple of shots. With little choice, a quick burst of machine gun fire dropped Henry Gunther to the ground. It was 10:59 am on November 11th, 1918. Private Gunther was to be the final combat death in World War I before the Armistice took place.