by O’Brien Brown

Early in the morning of July 1, 1916, a mist blanketed the lolling hills of the Somme region of northwestern France. Larks flittered and sang in the air as the haze burned off to reveal a brilliant summer’s day. On the British side of the front lines, crimson poppies and yellow grass swayed in a slight breeze. Across the wire, however, the earth heaved and shook as artillery shells slammed into the German trenches. The barrage rose to a shrieking fury as British troops, gathered in their jumping-off trenches, pressed into the chalky earth awaiting the shrill whistles of their officers telling them to go over the top.

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At 7:30, the devastating barrage lifted as British officers, eyes on their watches, blew their whistles and the men crawled up ladders, walking shoulder to shoulder into No Man’s Land. After a few yards, undamaged German machine guns opened up, catching the neat rows of slowly moving troops by surprise as they attempted to weave through the barbed wire emplacements, cutting them down in droves. “I am staring at a sunlit picture of Hell,” observed 2nd Lt. Siegfried Sassoon as he watched the attack unfold. Within a few hours 60,000 men had fallen, 20,000 never to rise again, in the worst single day of action in British military history. [To put this in some perspective, the Allies on D-Day 1944 attacked with 170,000 airborne and infantry, suffering 10,000 casualties, of which 4,000 were deaths; on America’s bloodiest battle day, the Battle of Antietam, 4,700 soldiers died.]

A Gruesome Beginning

This was the first day of the Battle of the Somme, a bloody, protracted struggle that was to become seared into the minds of succeeding British generations as the place where youth and innocence were slaughtered, a gaping wound that mars the national conscience to this day.

This appalling opening day was not due to a lack of planning. Indeed, few battles of the Great War were so well thought out and minutely organized as this. The plan of attack had originated at the Chantilly Conference in December 1915 where Allied commanders from France, Great Britain, Russia, Serbia, and Italy had met to coordinate strategy for the coming year, developing a grand scheme envisioning Russian and Italian offensives along their respective fronts. The decisive thrust, however, would occur in the west. Accordingly, French Commander-in-Chief General Joseph Joffre requested that the British Expeditionary Force, led by their new commander General Sir Douglas Haig, hit the enemy with 25 divisions on a 14-mile front with a simultaneous French assault consisting of 40 divisions along a front stretching 25 miles from the Somme to Lasigny. The battle was tentatively set for the summer, with Joffre thinking of July 1.

The choice of the Somme region as a center of operations was questionable—an observation made easy by hindsight. It is an area of ravines and rises, forests, muddy riverbanks, and soft rolling land—fine for farming and summer strolls, murderous for attacking infantry. The Germans occupied all of the high ground and had built deep, well-constructed dugouts sometimes extending more than 40 feet into the chalky ground. Beyond the German lines, there were no vital points or clear objectives to justify a major assault. But on the map this was where the British and French Armies touched, and for military minds this seemed like a logical place for a joint offensive. It was also “clean country,” uncluttered and unscarred by previous battles. Strategically, for the French a fight here would keep the focus of the war on the Western Front where, they believed, the war would be won or lost. And for Joffre personally, it was expedient to have the attacking forces under his command, on his front. A wise and wily old man, he wished to ensure that his Anglo-Saxon allies fully involved themselves in the fighting.

Although Haig had wanted his armies to strike at the Germans in Flanders, he demurred to General Joffre, the de facto generalissimo of the Allied forces, and threw himself into the planning for the attack with enthusiasm. To understand the character of the Somme battles, one must understand its driving force, Haig. An excellent military technician and planner, he was a man who unfortunately combined unbounded optimism and self-confidence with obstinacy. Throughout his career, his meticulously planned campaigns tended to be orthodox and, many have argued, unimaginative. An undistinguished student at Camberley Staff College, he did, however, possess a fine political nose; he married a lady-in-waiting of the royal family, thus establishing vital connections with King George V that assisted him greatly. Indeed, Haig, a cavalry officer, had risen rapidly through the ranks and had been appointed C-in-C of the BEF due in part to his secret channel to the king, which he ruthlessly used to undermine his predecessor, General Sir John French, removed from command in 1915. An odd man, reserved, urbane, and deeply religious, Haig displayed little concern for the suffering of his troops and great loyalty to his field commanders while gradually becoming convinced that God had singled him out for some divine role. Vilified by many, defended by few, he is today considered one of the most controversial commanders of a war in which the reputations of top commanders have been harshly judged by later generations.

1 Million Germans, 500,000 French Defenders

While the Allies made their offensive plans for the coming year, the Germans were not idly resting in their trenches. Believing Britain to be Germany’s main enemy, Chief of Staff General Erich von Falkenhayn conceived a macabre plan to “compel the French General Staff to throw in every man they have” into a battle of attrition at the militarily insignificant series of forts located at Verdun. Once the French had been destroyed, reasoned Falkenhayn, Germany could then concentrate her might on crushing Britain. Accordingly, on February 21, after a short, brutal artillery bombardment, one million German soldiers dashed against approximately 500,000 French defenders, beginning the longest, bloodiest battle in history. By May the French had lost 133,000 men and had 42 divisions engaged in fierce fighting at Verdun. Joffre now expected Haig to take on more responsibility for the upcoming Somme offensive.

The Somme became a British show. Haig’s spearhead would be the newly created Fourth Army, 20 divisions strong, commanded by Lt. Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson, an experienced and thoughtful infantryman, supported by the Third Army under General Edmund Allenby, which had taken over part of the old French line north of the River Somme in 1915.

Haig and Rawlinson’s fighting forces were relatively new material. The old, small, highly professional army of 1914 had been largely destroyed by 1916, wiped out trying to halt the German onslaught at the beginning of the war. The “New Army” or “Kitchener’s Army” was almost entirely made up of volunteers, men who had patriotically answered Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener’s call for more soldiers. British men had joined up in the millions, resulting in the creation of five new armies, consisting of six divisions each. Of the 13 divisions for the initial attack at the Somme, only four were regular army units. The rest were New Army men, untried, untested, unbloodied, soon to be thrown against the seasoned professionals of the Imperial German Army. These armies were socially stratified, with officers emanating largely from the south and west and the affluent large cities, while the lower ranks of former farmers, miners, ship builders, etc., came from villages and other rural regions of Britain. “Thus there came about,” writes John Keegan, “a meeting of strangers.” Indeed, regional accents were so strong as to almost make verbal communication mutually unintelligible. On top of this, the infrastructure of the New Armies had not been developed sufficiently to train the masses of fresh officers and men. Uniforms and equipment were lacking, and the men spent endless hours on the drill grounds instead of learning to handle their weapons. Many units were understaffed, their officers overworked, hastily trained and as young and inexperienced as the men they had to lead.

Jacob’s Ladder, Lulu Lane And Pottage Trench

The vast majority of these men, enthused with an almost religious feeling of patriotism and a naïve belief in their leaders, enlisted in “Pals” or “Chums” regiments. Arising from Victorian society’s penchant for clubs and associations—sports, church, craft guilds—entire company staffs or rugby club members, for instance, would join up with the promise that they could train and serve together. Although given official designations, the units of this truly unique citizen’s army were often simply known as “the Leeds Pals,” “Grimsby Chums,” “the Manchester Commercials,” and so forth.

These fresh troops, innocent to war, took up their positions on the Somme, a “quiet sector” of the Western Front where little fighting had taken place since 1914 and the troops had adopted a “live and let live” system. Because of this, the men had the “luxury” of being able to build proper trench systems. Defended by belts of barbed wire snarling all passages through No Man’s Land, the trench itself ideally consisted of a parapet (the side facing the enemy), often sand-bagged, a parados (the rear of the trench), and a fire-step which soldiers shot from. The men gave the trenches names, often humorous, such as Jacob’s Ladder, Lulu Lane, Pottage Trench. A “perisher”—soldier’s slang for a periscope—peeked over the lip of the trench, allowing a view of the enemy. Sometimes the trench sides were supported by wood paneling, wickerwork, or wire mesh, the floor laid with wooden duck boards—ladder-like constructions designed to keep soldiers’ feet out of the mud, a near impossibility given the wet climate. Enterprising men dug cubbyholes for sleeping and protection into the trench wall; the deep dugouts so beloved by the Germans were not constructed because the Allies never intended to stay in the front lines for very long. Two hundred yards or so behind the front line was the support line, with a reserve trench perhaps another 400 yards beyond this. All were connected by communication trenches and all were “traversed” or zigzagged to prevent a shell blast or attacking troops from causing destruction down the whole length of the line. Here the men received their rations—either tinned bully beef, tea and jam, or a hot greasy stew prepared in vast cookers behind the lines and brought up by men detailed for this duty, and a rum or wine ration. This whole network, however, was rapidly reduced to a gooey mess of mud, collapsed walls, smashed equipment, and rotting body parts by the effects of shelling and the weather. Refuse, rats, and black clouds of flies were rampant.

Although often only a few yards separated the opposing trench lines, soldiers normally got only a fleeting glimpse of the enemy. “Sometimes in the valley on the right,” wrote Guy Patterson, an officer with the 13th Battalion, Royal Welsh Fusiliers, “a grey shadow would stand for a few seconds, and then slide from sight, like a water-rat into his hole. At these we fired.” The only enemy soldiers the men really saw were either prisoners or dead.

Hand-to-Hand Fighting was Quick and Deadly

Trench life was usually one of dull routine. But some of the most vicious and terrifying fighting of the war took place during nighttime raids, carried out to capture enemy soldiers for intelligence purposes, to assess damage inflected by shelling, to keep the enemy tense, and to ensure that the troops kept their fighting edge. Brief, violent raids involving sometimes a handful, other times hundreds of men, were hated and dreaded. Although well armed with grenades, pistols, and light machine guns, many soldiers fashioned their own weapons for such operations: long jagged daggers, clubs, maces with nails driven into their heads, brass knuckles. Once a raiding party cut a path through the wire, the men pounced on the unaware enemy in his trenches where hand-to-hand fighting was quick and deadly; those overwhelmed rapidly surrendered, while the rest simply ran away behind the nearest traverse. Here the real trench fighting occurred—not the bayonet thrusts of fanciful imagination, but “bombing” each other with hand grenades. After rounding up the prisoners and anything that could be of use to the intelligence units, the raiding party then had to make its way back to the lines, only this time with the enemy fully alerted and waiting with flares, machine guns, and even artillery support, called in by telephone.

If no fighting was going on, units were rotated out of the line to the relatively peaceful back areas where they were entertained by prostitutes, enjoyed local foods such as fried eggs with French fries, and forgot the war for a while with a bottle of strong beer or wine. Many of the regular ranks—men from the lower classes—had never been so well fed and cared for in their lives.

With the multitudinous raw material of the New Armies, Haig and Rawlinson developed a battle plan that envisioned obliterating the Germans with a massive week-long artillery bombardment meant to pulverize their defenses, knocking out batteries and machine-gun nests, destroying trench systems, and ripping huge gaps in their barbed wire entanglements. Walking through the chopped up wire, British soldiers would take possession of the ruined, empty trenches. The main attack, occurring on an 18-mile front, would follow closely behind a carefully orchestrated “creeping barrage” that would screen their advance, stunning or killing their opponents in the first line of trenches before lifting on to the second line and beyond.

The objectives were to capture the ridges around the village of Pozières—the high ground from which the Germans could observe the important British base at Albert—eliminate enemy artillery and machine-gun positions concealed in Delville and High Woods at its crest, and establish British troops between the village of Serre and the River Ancre. Once the German lines had been breached, Haig planned to send the cavalry through in a giant wheel to the north to “roll up” the German forces, crushing them against the Belgian coast. Ultimately, the British were to break out into open country, and perhaps even end the war.

Rawlison and His Staff Prepared for “The Big Push”

Before that occurred, Haig wished to smash through to the village of Bapaume, several miles behind the German lines. Rawlinson, however, was more realistic, believing that his soldiers should advance in stages, tearing off chunks of the German line piece by piece and securing the high ground for future operations. He did not think a breakthrough was possible. Meanwhile, French Northern Army Group commander General Ferdinand Foch made plans with General Marie Fayolle’s Sixth Army to strike the German lines to the south of the River Somme along an eight-mile front. His force, though, had been pared down to a mere three divisions because of the drain on French manpower caused by the brutal fighting at Verdun.

Rawlinson and his staff worked out the finer details of “the Big Push,” as the approaching battle was called, aiming to hit the Germans near the village of Mametz, push on to Pozières at the top of the ridge, then cut eastward to enfilade the secondary German trenches. An attack at Beaumont Hamel to the north would hold up enemy forces while a feint at the village of Gommecourt by the Third Army was to confuse the enemy into thinking the main attack was there. The French would advance toward the town of Péronne. For much of the assault, Rawlinson’s men would have to attack a well-defended, dug-in enemy—uphill.

All of Haig’s organizational talents were evident in the buildup to the Big Push. In the weeks before the attack, army engineers and working crews were busy building roads and laying railway lines, digging jumping-off trenches and artillery emplacements and stockpiling nearly three million shells at massive dumps. Field hospitals were set up, graves dug, latrines laid out, water pumps built. The preliminary artillery barrage would consist of more than 1,500 guns of all sizes slinging over 1.7 million shells into the German lines. A special surprise feature was being dug by the Royal Engineers. Working by night, diggers scooped mines out of the chalky earth, deep under various German positions along their lines, filled with tons of explosives and wired to be set off on “Z” day, or zero hour. This was an eminently practical use of force because the British would essentially be attacking a fortress and the techniques of siege warfare were called for.

The smallest details were thought out. Captain R.J. Trousdell of the Royal Irish Fusiliers later recalled that the men carried, along with their newly issued steel helmets, rifle, gas masks, ammunition pouches, and bayonet, “two days rations, bomb, pick or shovel, Ayston fans (for clearing gas out of dugouts), flags for showing our position to Artillery, Verey lights, and on each man’s back was fitted a triangular piece of tin in order to show the position of our advanced line to aeroplanes” and other assorted equipment such as rolls of barbed wire and empty sandbags for consolidating newly won ground. The territory to be attacked was studied, and the troops carefully rehearsed the advance with some units even constructing clay scale models of the field in order to plan their movements down to the last detail. Aerial photographs were also of great assistance. In the days before the assault, special parties went out to the jumping-off positions, laying white tape down so that the troops could find their starting positions. Some officers, such as Siegfried Sassoon, crawled out into No Man’s Land on their own initiative and personally snipped gaps in the barbed wire. “I was cutting the wire by daylight,” he later wrote in his memoirs, “because common sense warned me that the lives of several hundred soldiers might depend on it being done properly.”

“The Men Must Learn to Obey by Instinct Without Thinking”

The French battle plan differed from that of their allies. Drawing on their experience gained through hard fighting since the beginning of the war and at Verdun, the French planned to use 900 heavy artillery pieces to smash up the German trenches, to be unleashed in a brief, violent preliminary barrage to gain surprise. More importantly, highly trained French troops were to advance in small groups, worming along the contours of the ground and moving up on the enemy in short rushes, thus presenting any surviving opponents difficult targets to aim at. They, too, would attack behind “creeping barrage” fire at which they were better because of experience gained in the field and intensive training. They pushed for 7:30 as zero hour to give the artillery maximum visibility, even while surrendering the basic principle of attacking at dawn.

Because the men and officers of the New Armies were for the most part inchoate, Haig and his generals believed they should attack with fixed bayonets in well-ordered waves, each succeeding wave of upright men pushing on the backs of those in front at one-minute intervals, their momentum sweeping the Germans in front of them. “The men must learn to obey by instinct without thinking,” ran the “Red Book,” the Fourth Army’s training manual. “The whole advance must be carried out as a drill.” Covering fire was not given great importance because it had been calculated that the German infantry and artillery would not survive the thunderous artillery barrage. Those who did survive would lose the “race” to their parapets, which the British infantry was expected to win. “You will find the Germans all dead,” the Newcastle Commercials were told by their officers.

Since the beginning of the fighting at Verdun, Falkenhayn had been telling his commanders along the line to expect an Allied relief attack. Because reserves were sparse, thanks to Verdun, he wanted the front lines well defended, which resulted in the troops expending great efforts to make their defensive works as strong as possible. Since aerial photography indicated the buildup of supply dumps and the construction of roads and railways in the Somme region, General Fritz von Below, commander of the 16-division strong Second Army, felt that an offensive was imminent, although Falkenhayn long thought it would occur farther to the north.

The German Army on the Somme proudly occupied ground captured in the early days of the war. Experienced “old sweats” from 1914, believing strongly in both their cause and their leaders, fully intended to keep and hopefully increase conquered territory. Their deep dugouts, complete with furniture and provisions and large enough to accommodate an entire company, provided a psychological sense of security. Conquered villages had been turned into mini-fortresses, armed with machine guns and mortars. In front of their trenches thick belts of well-laid wire gave added security. About a thousand machine-gun emplacements, many reinforced with concrete, bristled from concealed locations. The men had been trained to sit out an enemy bombardment in their dugouts and then to rush out the moment it stopped to man the parapets and repel an attack. They, too, would be in a race for their lives. They realized that their existence depended on reaching their positions before the enemy had time to cross No Man’s Land and cut his way through the wire. They would fight hard and determinedly.

One Week Before Z-Day

In the meantime, on June 4 the Russians attacked in Galicia. Known as the Brussilov Offensive, 600,000 Russian troops struck at a similar number of Austro-Hungarian forces, capturing and killing huge numbers of them. Falkenhayn was forced to dispatch five sorely needed divisions to counter this major threat to Germany’s ally. Because of an Austro-Hungarian attack in the Trentino, Italy’s planned offensive in the Isonzo sector did not get under way until August 6, when it enjoyed initial success but at a high cost in men.

On June 24, one week before Z-day, the British began their artillery bombardment to destroy German guns, wire entanglements, and front line troops, opening shots for what one historian has described as “the longest concentrated artillery bombardment in modern warfare.” What they surrendered in tactical surprise they felt they would gain through the brutal, crushing weight of 18-pounders, 4.5-inch howitzers, 60-pounders, and trench mortars. Heavy howitzers were used for counter-battery work, to knock out communication trenches and to disrupt the movement of reserves and materiel.

The Germans sat ensconced in their deep dugouts, listening with terror to the din of crashing shells above their heads. Many were entombed by direct hits and died of suffocation. Trench walls collapsed, the soldiers manning them blown to bloody hunks of flesh or traumatized with shell shock. Whenever the shelling ceased, the men rushed up from their dugouts to man the parapets, only to be caught once the guns began firing again, forcing them into their subterranean holds once more.

Yet despite the tremendous damage done, disturbing reports were coming in to many British battalion headquarters on the eve of the attack. Parties sent out to check for gaps in the wire found that huge sections had not been destroyed. The trouble was that the 18-pounder batteries, assigned the task of cutting the wire, fired shrapnel shells with a slow fuse that exploded high above or under the wire, tossing it into impenetrable knots or bursting harmlessly above, but not slicing through. An appalling number were duds, thanks to scandalously poor workmanship. Furthermore, in spite of the magnitude of the barrage, there were too few heavy guns firing, and these had been spread out too thinly. Many of the gun crews were badly trained, with accuracy not considered of vital importance. Thus, although the bombardment was a miserable thing to live through, the majority of German troops survived it with their wire, machine guns, and artillery in good condition even while the trench systems themselves had been devastated. For them, once the battle started the race was nearly won—they would merely have to run out of their dugouts, man their parapets, and fire into the oncoming enemy. In many ways, the attack as planned was already doomed to failure.

Z-Hour Approaches

But the vast majority of British troops had no inkling of this. Those in the attacking battalions had for the most part been billeted in villages or other areas behind the lines. Originally set for June 29, the attack was postponed until July 1 because of bad weather. As Z-hour approached, the men tramped along communication trenches, being issued ammunition, extra rations, grenades, and even pigeons in wicker cages for communication. As they took up positions at their jumping-off points, some prayed, others penned letters home, but most awaited the first battle in their young lives in thoughtful silence. Virtually all, though, were heartened by the tremendous pounding of their guns, believing that the coming assault would be a “walkover” to take possession of empty trenches. “There was a wonderful air of cheery expectancy over the troops,” recalled Major H.F. Bidder of the Royal Sussex Regiment. “They were in the highest spirits, and full of confidence. I have never known quite the same universal feeling of cheerful eagerness.”

July 1 dawned in an eerie white mist with a light rain falling, soon to vanish into a blazingly sunny day. For most a hot breakfast arrived from the rear and the men ate as their officers went through their orders, brushed off their uniforms, and grabbed hold of their walking sticks, a few even carrying swords: the British officer at this time was expected to lead, care for, and instruct his men, not kill. At around 6:30 in the morning the drumfire heightened to a roaring crescendo as nearly every gun and mortar opened up along the line, the shells raining down at a rate of 3,500 per minute onto the German positions. “Fifteen-inch howitzer and 9.2 shells were falling in Gommecourt Wood,” recalled a solider in the Queen Victoria’s Rifles, “whole trees were uprooted and flung into the air, and eventually the wood was in flames. The landscape seemed to be blotted out by drifting smoke.” As Royal Engineers placed their hands on their plungers to blow the mines, infantry officers nervously kept their eyes on their synchronized watches, awaiting zero hour. Now the troops were issued “liquid courage”—strong navy rum, to steel and calm nerves and give them a jolt of fire. But one soldier remembered passing by men in the front lines, “staring like persons in a trance across No Man’s Land, their powers of action apparently suspended.” Two hundred British battalions—100,000 men—would attack that day.

Mines Blew a Hole 90 ft. Deep and 300 ft. Wide in the German Lines

A few minutes minus zero, mammoth mines at Beaumont Hamel, La Boiselle, and other locations went off, sending tons of earth and men tumbling into the sky. One mine—the largest on the Western Front and now known as the Lochnager Crater—was made up of 60,000 pounds of guncotton and blew a hole 90 feet deep and 300 feet wide in the German lines. Then there was a moment of silence as all the guns ceased firing. At 7:30, the officers blew their whistles, scrambled up ladders and out into No Man’s Land, walking sticks probing the ground in front of them, their men following as rehearsed behind, forming up in lines, one wave behind the other. From the 8th East Surreys, a football kicked high in the air announced their advance. Major Bidder recalled how “the moment came, and they were all walking over the top, as steadily as on parade, the tin discs on their backs … glittering in the sun.” The commander of the 9th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers related how his men calmly went over the top: “Here and there a boy would wave his hand to me as I shouted good luck.… And all had a cheery face. Most were carrying loads. Fancy advancing against heavy fire with a big roll of barbed wire on your shoulder!” The artillery was now slamming into the enemy’s support trenches to avoid hitting their own men as they moved forward.

As soon as the bombardment lifted, the surviving German troops raced out from their holes in the earth, eyes blinking in the radiant sunlight, hearts pumping from the rush and terror of battle. Rapidly they lined the shattered remnants of their trenches, set up their machine guns, and looked in horrified wonder at the slow-moving lines of khaki approaching, their rifles sloped forward, bayonets catching the sunlight. The Germans sighted down the barrels of their Mauser rifles and Maxim machine guns, letting the British come into range. F.L. Cassell, a German soldier, remembered “the shout of the sentry, ‘They are coming,’ … Helmet, belt and rifle and up the steps … there they come, the khaki-yellows, they are not twenty metres in front of our trench. They advance slowly, fully equipped … machine-gun fire tears holes in their ranks.”

The British soldiers approached the wire which they were convinced would be cut to shreds. It was not. The guns, remembered Corporal W.H. Shaw of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, “hadn’t made any impact on those barbed-wire entanglements. The result was we never got anywhere near the Germans. Never got anywhere near them. Our lads was mown down. They were just simply slaughtered.” It was almost surreal, a midsummer’s stroll into death. At many places, the troops had to first pass through their own wire where they were wiped out by enemy machine-gunners.

“For some reason nothing seemed to happen at first,” remembered Private W. Slater of the 2nd Bradford Pals. “We strolled along as though walking in a park. Then, suddenly, we were in the midst of a storm of machine gun bullets and I saw men beginning to twirl around and fall in all kinds of curious ways as they were hit.” German artillery and machine guns were firing now, simply traversing along the slow-moving lines, and the British dropped in neat rows as they advanced. An officer who visited the field later reported “line after line of dead men laying where they had fallen.” In some places where gaps in the wire had been located, the troops were forced to line up to file through, and were easily chopped down. After having been bombarded for a week, the Germans eagerly blasted away at them, working the bolts of their rifles as fast as they could, some even rising up above the parapets to take pot shots at the clumped masses of enemy. “We had lain for seven days under the drum-fire,” recalled Unteroffizier Paul Scheytt, 109th Reserve Regiment, “… now we’d pay them back in their own kind.”

2 Years in the Making; 10 Minutes To Destroy

The slaughter was astounding: The 8th Division lost 5,274 men out of 8,500 and 218 officers from 300 in less than two hours; at Fricourt the 10th West Yorkshire and the 7th Green Howard Battalions were wiped out; the 810 men of the Newfoundland Regiment, attacking “Y” Ravine near Beaumont-Hamel, left 710 dead and wounded on the field in the space of a few minutes. A signaler from the Accrington Pals, still in the trenches, was “able to see our comrades move forward in an attempt to cross No-Man’s Land, only to be mown down like meadow grass.” The British forces had lost the race. “We were two years in the making,” recalled Private A. Pearson who served with the Leeds Pals, “and ten minutes in the destroying.”

Miraculously, troops on the Fourth Army’s right pressed on to their objectives and took the German front lines. The Leipzig Redoubt, a German strongpoint, fell and the village of Montauban was captured. The village of Mametz was overrun as well, but only after 159 Devonshire Regiment soldiers were killed by a lone German machine gun, situated a mere 400 yards away. Another successful attack occurred at the village of Serre, reached by the 6th Royal Warwicks who retreated to their starting lines after losing 520 killed, 316 wounded from their original attacking force of 836. By the end of this grim and awful day, 20,000 Britons lay dead and 25,000 had serious wounds. Some battalions no longer existed; a fifth of the entire attacking force was gone. The Germans had only lost about 6,000 men. The diversionary attack at Gommecourt had gone badly as well, with two divisions losing 7,000 men.

One bright spot on this day was the French effort, which achieved all of its objectives, except the taking of Péronne, with 7,000 casualties. Their tactics—learned on the shattered battlefields of Verdun—had proven superior. By concentrating heavy artillery on certain points on the German lines, and by opening their attack with a short, intense bombardment, the French had destroyed the wire and won tactical surprise. When their troops went over the top, they did not advance in parade lines, but in small groups, rushing forward from crater to crater, finally overrunning the German positions. They took 3,000 prisoners and 80 artillery pieces. As the attack on the Somme occurred during the 132nd day of the Battle of Verdun, this was both an admirable triumph for French tactics and training, and also belies the old myth that the French Army was near collapse.

Another positive feature was that the Allies enjoyed almost complete air superiority. French and British aircraft together put up 386 machines against Germany’s 129, a three-to-one ratio. The sleek and maneuverable French Nieuport fighter completely outclassed the German monoplane Fokker E-class aircraft. Although the Royal Flying Corps was hampered by inadequately trained crews and obsolete designs, such as the DH2 fighter and the BE2 observation craft, it aggressively bombed German supply dumps and railroad lines, and harried the infantry with strafing missions. During the first four days of the attack, RFC bombers dropped 13,000 bombs. But the price was so high—the corps lost 20 percent of its forces within a few days—that the RFC had great difficulties finding replacements, and the life span of air crews was measured in weeks.

A Public Stunned by the List of Soldiers Killed, Wounded, and Missing

Back on the ground, roll call became a perverse and sad ceremony for the Third and Fourth Armies on the evening of July 1. In the 14th Platoon of the 1st Rifle Brigade, for example, only one man was left out of the original 40. On the home front, however, the population was not told the truth, with newspaper headlines announcing “Kitchener’s Boys—New Armies Make Good,” or “Great Day on the Somme.” But these same newspapers also began publishing the lists of the killed, missing, and wounded. The public was stunned and horrified, especially those towns that had raised “Chums” or “Pals” battalions.

The attacks pressed on. Haig, obviously misinformed, stated that the German Army “has undoubtedly been severely shaken and he has few reserves in hand,” even as the Germans were bringing up reserves. One reason for this confusion is that generals and their staffs simply did not know what was going on at the front. Once attacking troops left their trenches, they advanced into the foggy unknown; only with the invention of the walkie-talkie would this black hole be removed. Runners or carrier pigeons brought back scattered, isolated reports of conditions at the front for overworked staffs to try to piece together, but command and control was virtually impossible.

There were other factors at play, too. One was Haig’s bulldog-like obstinacy and confounding optimism. This was his first great offensive as C-in-C and for political reasons he wanted battlefield success. The cost of these whims was high: During the battle’s first three days the average divisional casualties were 3,320 men; two weeks later the British Army was suffering 10,000 casualties a week with a daily average throughout the entire offensive of 2,500 men.

On the German side, Falkenhayn had been surprised at the magnitude of the British attack, which gradually pulled his attention away from his bleeding-white operation at Verdun. Despite the slaughter on the 1st, the German line had indeed been shaken in places and only hesitation and a lack of information and coordination on the part of British forces prevented a serious collapse and allowed time for the line to be reinforced. After sacking the Chief of Staff of the battered Second Army, Falkenhayn put in his own man, Colonel Friedrich Karl von Lossberg, who promptly reorganized the German forces. No longer did they heavily man their first line of trenches; now the ruined systems and shell holes were filled with thinner forces, letting the British infantry sweep forward and then knocking them back with counterattacks by reserves from the support lines. It was an effectively fluid tactic that blocked Haig’s desire for a decisive breakthrough. Falkenhayn also ordered that every inch of lost ground be retaken, and he started pulling divisions and guns from Verdun to shore up the line on the Somme.

“Well, They Were Mown Down, Just the Same as What We Were”

On July 2, British forces struck at La Boiselle and Ovillers, which they failed to take, although a German counterattack at Montauban was repulsed. Once again, it was the French who prevailed, breaking through the line south of the Somme and rounding up 4,000 prisoners by July 4. The battle was now becoming one of hellish fights over little villages and small woods, soon reduced to charred, jagged stumps. La Boiselle fell on the 6th and most of Trônes Wood was occupied on the 8th, until the British were driven out. Now it was the Germans who were charging across open fields, with predictable results. Corporal W. Shaw of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers related that when the Germans were attacking “well, they were mown down, just the same as what we were, and yet they were urged on by their officers just the same as our officers were urging us on.… Our machine-gunners had a what of a time with those Lewis machine-guns. You just couldn’t miss them.” After a week and a half of fighting, the Allies had forced the Germans back one to two miles. By the middle of July, Mametz had been secured by the British, and the tally of German prisoners stood at 7,000. Although Haig wanted to strike again on his right, he was now under pressure from Joffre and Foch to take Pozières ridge, with Joffre even ordering Haig to obey. Heatedly, Haig told him that he was ultimately responsible to the British government.

Meanwhile, Rawlinson had rediscovered a basic principle of warfare: the surprise attack. He planned to smash through the German line between Delville Wood and Bazentin-le-Petit, sweeping up the strategically important Trônes Wood along the way. Over Haig’s vigorous opposition, Rawlinson’s scheme involved moving the troops up under the cover of night and, following a short, massive bombardment, attacking at dawn. The British struck at 3:30 in the morning on July 14 after hurricane shelling, overrunning the German first and second lines and beyond to the outskirts of High Wood—one of the Somme’s dominant rises—and Delville Wood. In this tangled, burned-out forest, the South African Brigade became involved in some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. They called this spot Devil Wood.

This was the turning point of the Battle of the Somme, as the German line buckled. Two squadrons of cavalry from the 7th Division were even moved up—the first time soldiers on horseback had fought since the beginning of the war—and the flicker of a breakthrough appeared. As the British cleared High Wood, though, the impetus of their attacks waned, giving the Germans time to rush in reinforcements who counterattacked with vigor, forcing the British to withdraw the next day. It had been a close call, but now this position would not fall to British troops for another two months. The Somme, like Verdun, had transformed into a huge meat grinder, chewing up men for little gain. Haig’s grandiose vision of a breakthrough had degenerated into a war of attrition. By the end of July, the British and French had lost 200,000 men, the Germans 180,000, for gains of about three miles. Despite this evidence, Haig remained sanguine. “In another six weeks,” he claimed, “the enemy should be hard put to find men. The maintenance of a steady offensive pressure will result eventually in his complete overthrow.”

History’s First War Documentary

With the wounded filling London hospitals and the newspapers publishing unending casualty lists, Haig received a confidential letter from his friend, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir William Robertson, warning him that “the powers-that-be are beginning to get a little uneasy in regard to the situation. The casualties are mounting up and they were wondering whether we are likely to get a proper return for them.” Haig was feeling the heat from the dynamic and powerful Welsh populist politician Secretary of State for War David Lloyd George, who mistrusted and thought little of generals. Lloyd George expected results from such losses.

A month and a half after the start of the campaign, history’s first war documentary opened to packed London cinemas. The Battle of the Somme, filmed sometimes directly in the lines by J.B. McDowell and Geoffrey Malins, brought the war home for the first time to British civilians. Although designed more or less as a morale booster, its realistic scenes—some apparently staged by actors—enthralled and shocked moviegoers even as it stripped their naiveté away. During one showing a woman screamed out, “Oh God, they’re dead!” The government propaganda machine could not explain away these images. When the film ended its run in the fall, around 20 million people had seen it, forever exposed to the grime and death of modern warfare.

The fall rains were now approaching. Haig decided to throw in his trump card, a secret, potentially war-winning innovation: the tank. Although manned by novice crews and still plagued with mechanical troubles, 36 Mark I tanks—some armed with 6-pounder guns, others bristling with machine guns—were detailed to assault the German lines at the villages of Flers-Courcelette. Writing to Robertson on August 29, Haig confided, “I hope the Tanks prove successful. It is rather a desperate innovation.” Lumbering up to enemy positions at three miles per hour on September 15, 18 tanks (the rest had been ditched due to mechanical problems) terrified the Germans, hundreds of whom fled, surrendered, or were killed by fire from the tanks and their supporting infantry. It was one of the least costly victories of the war, even though Haig had tossed away a great tactical surprise for an insignificant gain. Again, it could not be exploited and there was no breakthrough.

At the end of August Falkenhayn, out of favor with the Kaiser because of lack of success at Verdun and the losses in men at the Somme, was replaced as chief of staff by Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, who brought along his deputy from the eastern campaigns, Erich von Ludendorff. Unbeknownst to the German High Command, Haig was also feeling a sense of urgency. Under constant pressure from Joffre to maintain the offensive, and with another important Allied strategic conference coming up at Chantilly, Haig wanted some kind of victory to strengthen his hand both for the negotiations with the French and his own political leaders. Indeed, in a meeting with Lloyd George, Haig was told that another Somme-like offensive in 1917 was unacceptable. The Secretary of State for War had his sights on other fronts, notably against the Ottoman Empire.

A Historical Battle of ‘Firsts’

As the rains were turning the cratered Somme battlefields into a turgid sucking muck, the British launched a final attack against Beaumont Hamel and other villages astride the River Ancre, locations they had been attempting to conquer since the beginning of the offensive. En route to Chantilly, a relieved Haig was informed that Beaumont Hamel had fallen. At last he could confront the French and the politicians with a victory of sorts. By now the first snowfall had dusted the Somme battlefields and once again a white mist obscured both the living and the dead. On November 18, Haig called off the offensive.

It had been a momentous battle—or series of battles—that stands out in history because of its many firsts: the tank, the war documentary, the first test of the New Armies. For the British, there was another bloody first—the enormous casualties. They had lost 419,654 killed and wounded, the French 204,253; the German figures varied between 450,00 and 600,000. In 130 days of fighting 31,000 Germans had been taken prisoner and 125 guns captured; this sounds impressive only if one does not compare it to more successful attacks. At the Battle of Arras, for instance, 13,000 Germans and 200 guns were taken on the first day alone. More depressingly, the maximum line of advance, after nearly four months of hard fighting, was at Les Boeufs, seven miles into German-held territory.

The blood spilled at the Somme stained Haig’s reputation. His callous indifference to the suffering of his men ensured that he would be despised by most of them and their families. Later, apologists for Haig would protest that he was forced into this battle to save the French at Verdun. However, not only did the French Army participate magnificently at the Somme, outperforming the British, but they continued battling at Verdun until December 18, long after Haig had called off his attacks. Just as spurious is Haig’s claim that he had never planned a breakthrough and only wanted to wear down the German reserves. But the battle’s repercussions went beyond him. By the end of the year, British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s coalition government, haunted by failures on the Somme and elsewhere, fell and Lloyd George came to power in Britain.

The Battle of the Somme has generated many myths and clichés, of “stupid” generals, inflated German casualty figures, the primacy of the machine gun over artillery. An enduring myth is that the British soldier with his 66-pound pack was so encumbered he could barely move, let alone fight. But with the modern American soldier in the recent Iraqi war lugging around 100 pounds of equipment, this would appear to be an overstatement.

A”: a Byword for a Bloody, Protracted, and Senseless Massacre

The Somme was a Great War battle par excellence. It quickly disintegrated into a series of small, vicious mini-actions for a few yards of shattered earth. It was presided over by generals sublimely convinced of their own abilities and battle plans, confident of victory and unconcerned by the agony of their men, arrogant in the racial superiority of their nations, closely watched over by equally strong-willed, self-confident politicians at home, unafraid of meddling and questioning their commanders’ decisions. And the whole messy thing was observed with cynicism by Fritz or Tommy or some poilu from the mire, stink, and death of the front lines. Later, a large number of these common soldiers—the product of fine 19th- century schooling—would write brilliant, poignant, brutally realistic books about their experiences, a unique literature that would forever alter how later generations view warfare.

Among the hundreds of thousands who fought at the Somme were some extraordinary men, and the horror of that battle would taint their minds and determine their future actions. British poets Graves, Blunden, Sassoon, and Rosenberg all went through it; Graves himself had been hit in the chest and left to die, but survived to write a masterful memoir of this time, Goodbye to All That. The American poet Alan Seeger, serving with the French Foreign Legion, was killed on the second day of the battle. His poem “Rendezvous” and its evocative opening line, “I have a rendezvous with Death,” is one of the most famous of World War I, or any war. Raymond Asquith, son of British Prime Minister Lord Asquith, was killed there. His death crushed his father, who thereafter lost the vigor to pursue the war. Harold Macmillan, British prime minister from 1957 to 1963, was severely wounded in the face by a grenade blast at the Somme. But perhaps the most famous soldier to fight in the battle was a skinny German corporal with a broad Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, Adolf Hitler. A brave and decorated dispatch runner, he was hit in the face by a piece of a shell that had slammed into his dugout, killing those around him while ironically sparing the future conqueror of Europe.

Verdun was ghoulish, Kaiserschlacht vast and breathtaking, but the Somme—or rather the first day of the battle—lingers in memory as an intensely sad affair, a monumental loss of innocence not only for the British Army, but for Britain itself, and the world. Those tragic, cheering ranks of “Pal” and “Chums” battalions hurled into eternity with the fluid sweep of the machine gun cannot be forgotten. Entire firms, neighborhoods, and villages had suddenly lost all their young men. At the time, the impact of this was profound, especially as loved ones compared the immensely long casualty lists with official pap. A whole generation had been extinguished, an immense loss that is still felt today, and lies like a black dream deep within the psyche of the British nation. This trauma was a factor in transforming the sociopolitical landscape of postwar Britain. On the grassy expanses of the Somme, notions of war as a chivalric adventure died. Concepts of obedience and an unquestioning belief in one’s leaders vanished. Indeed, “the Somme” has become a byword for a bloody, protracted, and senseless massacre. The antiwar, anti-authority revolts of youths from the summer of 1968 have their roots in the bitter experiences of the youths killed in the summer of 1916.

Today, the Somme’s undulating slopes and ravines have been reclaimed by farmers, but it remains a place of pilgrimage for the young and old of Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and Germany who pick their way across its expanses in hushed and awed reverence. The battle has left a haunting image, in the written word, in film, but most profoundly in the thousands of pale white gravestones dotting this scared patch of France.

by Robert Barr Smith

Some Tommies swore it had been St. George, the warrior saint of England. Others said it might have been St. Michael, since he carried a gleaming sword. A few said they couldn’t tell, but it had definitely been an angel, maybe more than one. Some men were sure they had seen three wonderful, tall figures towering above the smoke and dust of the battlefield. For others it had been a brilliant light, a golden aura against a brilliant sky, or a cloud in which indistinct but heroic figures had come and gone, aided by phantom archers from the olden days of the English warrior-kings. Whatever it was, the soldiers agreed, it had saved their lives. No amount of civilian scoffing would ever change that.

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The Battle of Waterloo

Skeptics back in England and America did scoff, but that was to be expected. Well-meaning clergymen and physicians made wise and condescending remarks about hysteria, battle fatigue, and fear. Others shook their heads knowingly and tut-tutted about superstition and overactive imaginations. Perhaps that was what had caused these “visions,” as the newspapers called them. But the naysayers and doubters hadn’t been there. They hadn’t fought against enormous odds, with comrades dying next to them, baked by a remorseless sun and drenched with rain. And they hadn’t walked the dreadful road west from Mons.

It was 1914, and Europe flamed and thundered with the red ruin of war. The roads of France and Belgium swarmed with endless columns of dusty infantry, miles of horse-drawn guns and wagons, and miserable hordes of Belgian civilians trying to move what remained of their lives in carts. Over the miles, from the Swiss frontier to the Belgian fortress of Liege, the armies clashed and the casualties mounted. In those terrible days of August heat, the powerful German right wing swung like a great fist west and southwest from the Belgian frontier and struck deep into France.

The German Offensive Kept the British and French Guessing

While the French threw away much of the flower of their army in head-on assaults against the German forces, the great right hook of the German offensive struck the Allied left, falling on a segment of the French army and the small but doughty British Expeditionary Force. The BEF comprised much of Britain’s tiny regular army, a minuscule force of four infantry divisions and five cavalry brigades when compared to the multitude of German army corps advancing on Paris. The BEF moved east toward the advancing Germans, marching across storied ground past Malplaquet, where Marlborough had whipped the French two centuries before. Up ahead was the field called Waterloo. Nobody was quite sure where the Germans’ main stroke would fall.

The first heavy fighting swirled around the Belgian city of Mons, a dreary industrial area studded with gray villages, dismal slag heaps, and shabby factory buildings. There, on Sunday, August 23, Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien’s II Corps took on the German juggernaut along the Conde Canal. The slimy, stinking 60-foot waterway was not much of an obstacle, but it would slow down the Germans and make them optimum targets.

Smith-Dorrien’s two divisions, stretched thin over 21 miles, found themselves attacked by two German corps, with another closely approaching and still another on the way. Although the British were badly outnumbered, their massed fire stopped the Germans cold.

In the morning, its right flank now uncovered by the French retreat, the BEF retreated, tramping down the long, hot road toward the west. Back they went in the heat and dust, occasionally turning to bloody the German corps pursuing them. Again and again the BEF’s murderous musketry reached through the shimmering heat of the French fields to drop graycoated German infantry in heaps hundreds of yards away. But there were simply too many enemy infantrymen and too much artillery. The BEF fell back from Mons step by grudging step, leaving behind them more graves, more old friends buried far from England.

The worst of the fighting was around Le Cateau, fought on the anniversary of Edward III’s great victory over the French at Crecy. It was not a place the II Corps commander would have chosen to fight, but Smith-Dorrien wisely elected to make a stand rather than try to disengage and withdraw in the face of overwhelming numbers. His men were tired, time was short, and the roads were clogged with transport columns and hordes of refugees.

The odds were 4-to-1 against the BEF in infantry, plus the usual German superiority in guns. All through the morning of August 26 and into the afternoon, Smith-Dorrien’s troops held up the German steamroller with their deadly riflefire. With the enemy lapping about his flanks, Smith-Dorrien passed the order for a fighting withdrawal.

“The Germans May be Able to Kill Them, but by God They Can’t Beat Them”

That night the BEF fell back in darkness and driving rain. Many of the men had reached the end of their endurance; some had not eaten in 24 hours. Still they slogged on. A British division commander, tears in his eyes, paid them the ultimate compliment: “The Germans may be able to kill them, but by God they can’t beat them.” But the Germans were coming on in such overwhelming numbers that rifles and courage could not hold them any longer. It was then, in a time of deadly crisis, that wonderful tales of heavenly help began to appear.

In one action during the long retreat, an understrength British battalion, about to be overrun by masses of German infantry, became aware of a shadowy army fighting beside them, an army of bowmen of the days of Agincourt, five centuries gone. These phantom men-at-arms cried aloud to St. George, and their swift arrows darkened the sky. A great voice was heard to thunder over the din of battle, “Array, Array!” German prisoners taken in the action said they were bewildered that their British opponents had reverted to wearing armor and shooting arrows.

In the night of the 26th, the third day of the retreat west through Belgium, weary British soldiers saw tall, unearthly figures materialize in the gloom above the German lines. They were winged like angels, and as they hovered in the gathering darkness, the Germans inexplicably halted and the British slipped away to safety. During the retreat, some soldiers swore that they had seen the face of the patron saint of England. A wounded Lancashire Fusilier asked a nurse for a picture or medal of Saint George because, he said, he had seen the saint leading the British troops at Vitry-le-Francois. A wounded gunner confirmed his story. He described the saint the same way the fusilier had—a tall, yellow-haired man on a white horse, wearing golden armor and wielding a sword. Other soldiers agreed that he looked just like his image on the gold sovereigns of the day.

A story appeared in the North American Review in August 1915 about a soldier who had memorized the motto inscribed on the plates in a London restaurant. Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius it read, “May St. George be a present help to England.” Later, in Belgium, the soldier prayed for the saint’s help against the waves of German attackers and was rewarded by a host of shining bowmen, who charged the Germans with shouts of “Harrow! Harrow! Monseigneur St. George, Knight of Heaven, Sweet Saint, succor us!” The arrows of the phantom archers cut down the enemy en masse, and the German General Staff, finding the bodies of hundreds of their men lying on the battlefield with no discernible wounds, came to the conclusion that the British had used poisonous gas.

Saved by a Miracle of God

Three soldiers were interviewed separately by the vicar of a church near Keswick, in the north of England. All agreed that a miracle had saved them from a massive German force about to overrun their unit. As the hard-pressed British troops prepared to fight to the end, the Germans suddenly recoiled. German prisoners explained that the attack was aborted because they saw strong British reinforcements coming up. In fact, the ground behind the British unit was empty. The men interviewed had no doubt who authored their salvation: “It was God did it,” they said.

One lance-corporal told his nurse of the appearance of angels during the Mons retreat. He could see, he said, “quite plainly in mid-air a strange light which seemed to be quite distinctly outlined and was not a reflection of the moon nor were there any clouds. The light became brighter and I could see quite distinctly three shapes, one in the center having what looked like outspread wings. The other two were not so large, but were quite plainly distinct from the center one. They were above the German line facing us. We stood watching them for about three-quarters of an hour. All the men with me saw them. I have a record of fifteen years’ good service, and I should be very sorry to make fool of myself by telling a story merely to please anyone.”

The soldier also told his story to another woman, a Red Cross hospital superintendent who interviewed the man and believed him implicitly. So did Harold Begbie, a writer on the supernatural, who related this tale in his 1916 book, On the Side of the Angels. Begbie was impressed with the soldier’s transparent honesty. Begbie also interviewed another soldier who spoke of a “bright light in the sky.” Still another told Begbie that he had heard men in France talking about the celestial apparitions. “He was,” Begbie wrote, “definitely conscious of a supernatural presence.” The soldier in question was a Grenadier Guards NCO, hardly a type given to hysteria and delusion.

Another tale was told of a Coldstream Guards unit lost in the gloom of early morning. One man saw a glow in the darkness, a glow that became the figure of a female angel, dressed in white, with a gold band around her hair. Gesturing to the tired guardsmen, she led them through the night to a sunken road, a way out of danger that Coldstream patrols had not been able to find—and afterwards could not find again on any map.

An Englishwoman nursing in France wrote of a wounded Lancashire Fusilier who asked her for a religious medal. Was he Catholic, she asked? No, he said, he was a Methodist, but he had seen St. George mounted on a white horse, leading the British into action against overwhelming odds. “The next minute,” he said, “comes this funny cloud of light, and when it clears off there’s a tall man with yellow hair, in golden armor on a white horse, holding his sword up, and his mouth open as if he was saying, ‘Come on, boys! I’ll put the kibosh on the devils.’ Then, before you could say ‘knife,’ the Germans had turned, and we were after them, fighting like ninety.”

Accounts of heavenly aid abounded in Britain. The magazine Light ran a story entitled “The Invisible Allies” in October 1914, and followed up another column the next April reporting that during the retreat from Mons several officers and men had seen a cloud appear between them and the Germans. The Catholic paper The Universe reported an account from a Catholic officer in which an isolated British party decided to charge the enemy head-on. Running into the open, somebody yelled, “St. George for England in the good old style,” and all around the British appeared a spectral company of archers. The British carried the German trench, and a German prisoner later asked the officer who the “officer on a great white horse” had been, for the German riflemen had not been able to hit him.

Saved by an Angelic Army or Mass Hysteria?

The parish magazine of All Saints, Clifton, reported that two officers had seen a troop of angels between their men and the enemy. The same magazine told the story of another soldier who had seen the same troop of angels standing between him and onrushing German cavalry. The Germans’ horses had panicked and run uncontrollably, allowing the British soldiers to reach safety. A soldier of the Cheshire Regiment saw the angels too, and watched the German cavalry horses panic and bolt before their terrifying presence.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1915 more stories surfaced. The “luminous cloud” between Germans and British appeared again, and the Bath Society Paper quoted an extract from an officer’s letter: “I myself saw the angels who saved our left wing from the Germans during the retreat from Mons. We heard the German cavalry tearing after us and ran for a place where we thought a stand could be made. We saw between us and the enemy a whole troop of Angels.”

A soldier of the West Riding Regiment told a group of Canadians that he had actually seen the angel, and a wounded soldier described to a young woman the same thing: an angel, wings spread, standing between his unit and the Germans. The woman, unconvinced, repeated the story later, and a British colonel told her simply: “Young lady, the thing happened. You need not be incredulous. I saw it myself.”

Captain Hayward, an intelligence officer with British I Corps, referred to “four or five wonderful beings,” robed in white, who faced the German lines in brilliant sunlight with hands upraised to halt the advancing enemy. He referred to another occasion on which “the sky opened with a bright shining light and figures of luminous beings appeared.”

A Weymouth clergyman read a letter from a soldier who had slogged through the Mons retreat. The man said he and his comrades had been trapped in a quarry by German cavalry, when suddenly angels lined the edge of the quarry and the Germans broke into panicked flight.

Those who scoffed at tales of St. George, angels, and phantom bowmen were quick to point out that it was difficult to obtain firsthand, authenticated evidence, which was certainly true.

So what inspired the stories of angels, spectral archers, the mighty figure of St. George? Was it hysteria, fatigue, fear, wishful thinking? Perhaps. But it is worth remembering that the men who told these stories, however exhausted, were tough, experienced soldiers used to such hardships. And a great many of them saw identical sights at different times and in different places. Maybe some of the stories were invented. Maybe all those who said they saw a miracle were simply hallucinating, as the scoffers said. Maybe it was, after all, merely mass hysteria.

But maybe it wasn’t.

by Peter Suicu

World War I, which had begun as a mobile and fluid conflict, at first seemed to be ideal for bicycles. Both sides used a large number of bikes to help troops get to the front lines quickly. But as the war bogged down into the hellish nightmare of trench warfare, the two-wheel machines were relegated to rear echelon duty. Cycles were used to some degree by sharpshooters in less static areas, as well as by scouts and dispatch riders.

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Following the war, the European interest in bikes expanded into leisure and sports. In the United States, too, cycling began to catch on, with venues such as New York City’s Madison Square Garden hosting daylong cycling races. With the advent of the radio, cycling faded as America’s premier sport, giving way to baseball, which was easier for announcers to call. Yet across the ocean cycling remained popular, and bicycles remained machines of war as much as machines of sport and peace.

A generation after the trench warfare of World War I, the renewed outbreak of war in Europe and Asia put bicycles back in the field. The German Army, even during its rapid-moving blitzkrieg campaign, still relied on horse-drawn carriages to transport men and equipment, and bicycles too played a part. There is a misconception that the Germans were fully mechanized and motorized during the war. In fact, Adolf Hitler invaded Russia with more horses than even Napoleon. For this reason, the bicycle was used in great numbers by the Germans for reconnaissance.

The Fuel Shortages of World War II

Wartime shortages throughout World War II also resulted in many nations utilizing the bicycle to save on fuel. This was especially true in isolated Great Britain during the Blitz, and followed even after the Yanks arrived in great numbers. The United States, which was also on wartime rationing, used bikes in great numbers, but unfortunately for collectors, few of American bikes survived the war.

“Given the rarity of these bikes today I would say it’s safe to assume that compared to other mass-produced military vehicles, bicycles were actually made in fairly small numbers,” says militaria collector Johan Willaert, who specializes in American Army items from World War II, including bicycles. “A lot of them must have been shipped over to the European and Pacific Theaters, but it seems a lot more were kept and used stateside.”

Willaert believes that there are actually more World War II-vintage bikes in European collections than in the United States, because most of these were bought in the States and shipped to Europe by collectors in recent years. “I know of only a handful of real ‘left-behind’ bikes in Europe while it seems they were not that uncommon in postwar surplus sales in the U.S.,” Willaert says. “I think they were used much more at U.S. camps and airfields than in Europe. The U.S. Army was much more mechanized and had no bicycle troops as such.”

Unlike other American gear from World War II, little information survives about the total numbers of bicycles produced. “It is not clear just exactly how many bikes were made for the U.S. Army on official wartime contracts,” says Willaert. “There seem to be no lists left or they haven’t surfaced to this day.”

Folding Bikes Specifically Designed for Warfare

While bikes were never utilized in great numbers by Americans, and in only a limited frontline role by the British military, a wartime enemy of the Allies used cycles in much larger numbers. “It was probably the Japanese who used the bicycle most during WWII,” says Robert van der Plas, coauthor of Bicycle Technology. “The invasion of Malaysia, with thousands of soldiers rolling into Singapore on bicycles, is one of the best-known instances. They used both folding bikes specifically designed for warfare, later rehashed for civilian use, and requisitioned bicycles from other occupied territories.”

The Japanese proved able to adapt and overcome obstacles with their bicycles. Since rubber was in short supply, Japanese soldiers learned to ride on the rims when the tires went flat and couldn’t be repaired.

After World War II, many of the wartime bikes passed to civilian hands as the world recovered from the horrors of war. This was especially true in Europe, where fuel was still hard to come by and where there had been an existing bike culture. “Bicycles have been a part of European history and culture for many, many years,” says Willaert. “For ages the bicycle has been a means of everyday transport for thousands of people, especially in Belgium and the Netherlands. The bicycle was a cheap and easy means of transport for people who couldn’t afford a car for decades.”

 Originally Published April 22, 2014

by Arnold Blumberg

While all the combatant nations engaged in World War I fielded machine guns during the conflict, the British Army’s Vickers was arguably the best medium machine gun of the war, while their Lewis gun—an American design but perfected by the English—was the most effective light machine gun.

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However, both weapons had their problems. The Vickers Machine Gun was a heavy Maxim-type weapon. Water-cooled and belt-fed, it was very reliable. But it was also a very complex war tool requiring a specially-trained crew, and the weight of the gun and the prodigious amount of water and ammunition it required meant the Vickers was restricted to a purely static defensive role.

The Lewis gun had been adopted during the Great War to provide close support for advancing troops. It had an air-cooled barrel and fired .303 caliber bullets from a 47-round pan magazine mounted on the top of the piece. Unfortunately, the Lewis gun was still relatively bulky, complicated, suffered from a high rate of stoppages, and could not maintain sustained rates of fire due to its barrel overheating, causing the gun to simply stop working.

Replacing the Vickers & Lewis

Faced with the shortcomings of their standard medium and light machine guns, the British Army sought to replace both in the 1930s. That year, a contender to replace the Lewis gun appeared in the form of the Zb 26: a light, air-cooled, magazine-fed weapon produced by the Brno Firm of Czechoslovakia. Modified to shoot the standard British Army infantry and machine gun .303 caliber ammunition (or 7.7x56mm), the gun—now designated the Zb 30, with a 30 round curved magazine—caught the attention of the Small Arms Committee. After a few minor alterations, the Czech fire arm-called the ZBG 34, was adopted by the Army. Referred to as the BREN, from “Brno” and “Enfield”, assembly lines were set at the Royal Small Arms Factory in 1935, with the first finished product appearing in September 1937.

Introducing the Bren Gun

The original Bren gun was designated the Mark 1. It was capable of semi or fully automatic fire from a distinctive curved top-mounted 30-round magazine. It was 45.5 inches in overall length, and employed a quick-change 25-inch barrel, which could be replaced in seconds, allowing it to keep up a sustained rate of fire. The Bren gun used a magazine rather than the better belt-fed system due to the theory (proved incorrect by the Germans with their MG 34 and MG 42s) that the former made the weapon more portable. The piece weighed 22 pounds and 3 ounces, and fired 500 rounds per minute.

Throughout the Second World War, the Mark 1 Bren was modified three times to include the models Mark II, Mark III, and Mark IV. The same .303 caliber ammunition as the Mark 1 was used, so the differences between these patterns were a few pounds of weight and inches shaved off the later model’s overall length and barrels. In mid-1944, the Bren was standardized as the Mark III with a full length of 42.9 inches, barrel length 22.25 inches, and weighing 19 pounds and 5 ounces. Its effective range was 600 yards. It was essentially a lightened Mark 1, but fitted with a simpler ladder back sight of the Mark II, a shorter and lighter barrel (which reduced accuracy) and simpler butt. Over 57,600 Mark IIIs were produced during the war.

Backbone of the British Infantry

During World War II, the Bren gun became the backbone of the British infantry. Every infantry section of ten men (equivalent to an American rifle squad) and its combat tactics were built around the Bren light machine gun, with the section’s riflemen tasked with augmenting the firepower of the Bren. Each infantry section contained a seven-man Rifle Group, and a three man Bren gun Group. In addition to carrying extra Bren gun ammunition, the Rifle Group would provide security and replacements for the Bren gun crews, while the Bren gunners provided the main killing power of the infantry section.

In addition to the Bren in each infantry section, every infantry battalion included a carrier platoon made up of 13 Universal Carriers (unofficially called “Bren Gun Carriers”) in four sections of three vehicles each. Each conveyance carried a Bren gun and a three-man crew. Further, support units (ie,. supply, artillery) carried on their rosters Brens for close defense and anti-aircraft protection.

Bren guns were integral in anti-tank warfare. Although not able to knock a tank out with their small arms ammunition, their fire would cause the enemy tank crews to “button up,” limiting their fields of vision, and dispersing opposing infantry supporting the tanks. Anti-tank weapons could then be brought to bear on the steel monsters with less risk to the attackers.

Useful in the Far East and Western Front

When war broke out on September 1, 1939, the Bren had only been recently adopted by the British Army and was in short supply. After the British evacuation of France in June 1940, only 2,300 Bren guns were available for service. A chronic shortage of the weapon persisted until late 1942, when production of the gun by the UK, Canada, and Australia made up the shortfall. By war’s end Bren guns were in plentiful numbers with all British combat divisions: 1,262, 1,376, and 966 in infantry, armored, and airborne, respectively.

In the Far East, Commonwealth soldiers appreciated the Bren’s portability, as much of the fighting took place in swamps and the jungle and where the armament’s heavy caliber rounds could easily penetrate the thick vegetation. The Australians took to the Bren very quickly, using it as a heavy automatic rifle rather than a machine gun.

When the Allies landed in Italy in 1943, and then in France the next year, the Bren was not affected by the bitter winters found in those theaters of the war. More importantly, it allowed the British infantry, still equipped with bolt-action Enfield Rifles, to maintain a respectful rate of fire compared to the Americans’ use of the semi-automatic Garand Rifle, and the Wehrmacht’s employment of the excellent MG-42 Light Machine Gun.

The Bren gun, in its last incarnation—the post-World War II L4A4—was effectively removed from active service in the mid-1980s being replaced by the L86 Light Support Weapon. While never completely replacing the Vickers, the Bren did serve as the primary support arm for British and Commonwealth troops through World War II and Korea, and set the British small-unit infantry tactics on a path they would follow until the 1980s.

Originally Published January 20, 2015

by Pat McTaggart

“Where is Steiner?” Adolf Hitler demanded as his Thousand Year Reich crumbled around him in April 1945. “Is he attacking yet?” The Steiner in question was SS Obergruppenführerund General der Waffen SS Felix Steiner, a man who had served in Hitler’s Black Guard since 1935.

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Steiner was born in Ebenrode, East Prussia, on May 23, 1896. His family had been Austrian in origin, but had emigrated from Salzburg to Prussia in 1731. The son of a middle-class grammar-school teacher, Felix would have many options to make a decent living in the Kaiser’s Reich when he grew to manhood. At age 17, he decided that he wanted a career in the Army, and in March 1914 he enlisted as a cadet officer in the 5th (East Prussian) Infantry Regiment von Bozen.

Early Exposure to the Pain of War

He found that he was well suited to army life, throwing himself into the training and lectures that would eventually make him an officer. That training was short lived, however, as the war clouds that had been gathering over Europe burst that August.

With the outbreak of war, Steiner’s regiment was sent to the Russian border to deal with an expected Russian invasion. In the cold, damp months that followed, he saw the face of war on a very personal level as his regiment fought in the Masurian Lakes area. He was severely wounded in November, earning him a stay in the hospital as well as the Iron Cross, Second Class. On January 27, 1915, he received a promotion to second lieutenant while still on convalescent leave.

After months of recovery, the young officer was posted to Fortress Machine Gun Detachment 1. In 1916, he was transferred to the Kurland (Lithuanian) Front as a company commander in Machine Gun Sharpshooter Detachment Ober-Ost 46. Throughout 1916 and 1917, he led his men in battles around the Düna River and Riga, where he earned the Iron Cross, First Class.

Carnage on the Western Front

In the spring of 1918, Steiner’s unit was sent to the slaughterhouse in the west. The carnage that he saw in Flanders and France left a deep impression on him. Both the Germans and the Allies had wasted the cream of their armies in four years of trench warfare, and the recruits that now bore the brunt of the fighting were little more than cannon fodder, sullenly waiting for another charge that would more than likely end their young lives.

The German Army’s offensive in the fall of 1918 was its last gasp. Although successful at first, the armies of the Kaiser soon ran into an Allied defense that slowed and then stopped any hope for victory. In those final battles, Steiner noticed that the Sturmtruppen (assault troops), which were special groups used to breach the Allied lines, enjoyed both success and a camaraderie that was not found in the Regular Army units. Impressed by their boldness and high level of training, Steiner would carry the memory of their final battles into the postwar period.

A Lack of Direction at War’s End

On October 10, 1918, the battle-hardened Steiner was promoted to first lieutenant. Two months later the war was over and he was demobilized. Like many of his comrades, the 21-year-old former officer felt lost and betrayed in the new democratic Germany. In January 1919, he joined a volunteer corps to fight against Communist elements on the eastern border. His experience during the war made him a natural leader, and he was soon in command of a unit fighting in the area around Memel, on the Lithuanian frontier.

Returning to Germany, Steiner found a place in the 100,000-man Reichswehr, the postwar German Army. He joined the 1st Infantry Regiment in 1921. For the next few years, he served in several positions, including duty with the General Staff. Promoted to captain on December 1, 1927, he became adjutant to the 1st Ostpreussischen Infanterie Regiment headquartered in Königsberg. In 1932, he was leading a company of the regiment, using the skills that he had learned during the war to train a new generation of German soldiers.

Steiner left the regiment in 1933 and was used for special assignments by the training department of the newly formed Wehrmacht. In December 1933, he retired from the army with the rank of major, and the following year he became a training adviser.

Steiner Joins Precursor To Waffen SS

It was a time of expansion for the German Army, and Steiner immersed himself in his new job wholeheartedly. As time wore on, however, he found himself longing for a greater challenge. On March 16, 1935, he joined the SS Verfügungstruppe(V-Truppe), which would eventually become the Waffen (armed) SS.

Steiner was appointed commander of the 3rd Batallion/SS Standarte “Deutschland” with the rank of OberSturmbannführer (Lt. Col.). At the time, the V-Truppe was little more than a ceremonial guard with little or no military training. Steiner saw the V-Truppe as fertile ground for building a new military force within Germany, outside of the general armed forces. To accomplish this, he and other like-minded ex-army officers such as Paul Hausser set about the ambitious project of turning their men into an elite fighting unit.

“I must admit that we were a little aggressive in our desire to prove our theories in the military field and further our own ambitions,” he later wrote. “By the mid-1930s we had managed to install ourselves as commanders of these cadres, the embryo SS combat units who were at that time little more than novices, very keen but without any military training at all.”

New and Radical Methods To Mold Elite Troops

Steiner was determined to turn his men into the finest soldiers in Europe, if not the world. To do this, he abandoned many time-honored traditions of the German Army, first as battalion commander and later as commander of the Deutschland, which he took over in 1936.

Drawing on his front-line experiences of World War I, he worked with his 3rd Battalion, using methods that shocked many of the older, more traditional officers. One of the first things he did was to relegate the barracks square drill to a position of secondary importance. His primary concern was to create a hardened fighting force, so he stressed athletics and sports as a way to build up the body for the rigors of warfare.

Recalling the tactics of the Sturmtruppen during the final battles of the Great War, Steiner equipped his men with lighter weapons (sub-machine guns, hand grenades, pistols, and explosive charges) instead of the trusted Mauser rifle. He also introduced a camouflaged battledress to replace the basic field gray uniform and used live ammunition in his training exercises.

Class Barriers Torn Down To Build Trust

Another Steiner innovation was the abolishment of the class system between officers and enlisted men. He knew full well that the hardships on the battlefield demanded an unquestioned trust between the two groups. Therefore, he broke down the traditional barriers that separated the men from their superiors by having them compete in sporting events as equals. The officers and enlisted men also shared the same mess area, and anyone aspiring to become an officer had to serve at least two years in the ranks before being accepted for officer training.

Steiner slowly transformed the Deutschland into a unit that impressed even senior army officers. His innovations soon found their way into other SS Standarte, including the LeibStandarte Adolf Hitler, the Führer’s bodyguard unit commanded by Hitler’s old friend Josef “Sepp” Dietrich.

After the war, Steiner wrote, “I believe we succeeded in producing a very fine type of young leader who was above all inculcated with the team spirit never taught in the German Army. Everyone in the SS units joined in activities together—the greater emphasis was always on team spirit and comradeship.… We intended to instill an unparalleled esprit de corps in our force that would mark it out as one of the finest ever assembled. In the main, I believe we achieved this objective, despite what some said about us and at times not without reason.”

Hitler Puts V-Truppe on Equal Status With Rest of Wehrmacht

On August 17, 1938, Adolf Hitler signed a decree recognizing the V-Truppe as a permanent force. The three Wehrmacht services (Army, Navy, and Air Force) had continued to look upon these “Asphalt Soldiers” as bastard children, but with the stroke of a pen, Hitler had elevated the V-Truppe to a more or less equal footing in the armed forces.

Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler saw the V-Truppe as an internal stabilizing force for the Nazi regime—one that would quell any popular uprising that might take place. Steiner, who had nothing but disdain for Himmler, continued to regard his men as the nucleus of a new army. The two men would have more than likely crossed swords had it not been for the outbreak of war. In August 1939, a few days before the invasion of Poland, Hitler issued an order placing units of the V-Truppe under the command of the army, securing for them a position as military fighting formations.

Steiner’s Deutschland went to Poland as part of Division Kempf, a semi-armored unit named for its commander. Before the Polish defenses at Mlawa, the regiment received its baptism of fire. The young SS officers and men ran into heavy resistance as they sought to drive the Poles from their trenches and bunkers. Army reinforcements were called in and, after three days of intense fighting, the Poles were finally forced to abandon their positions.

Steiner and SS Prove Their Mettle in Poland

Pushing forward toward Modlin and the Narew River, Steiner tried to seize the river crossing at Rozan ahead of the retreating Poles. As the Deutschland neared the crossing, it ran into a hornet’s nest of machine-gun and artillery fire. Supported by elements of the 7th Panzer Regiment, Steiner ordered an assault on the old Imperial Russian forts that guarded the town. After another fierce engagement, the river crossing was captured, unhinging the Narew defense line and opening the way to Warsaw from the north.

The rest of the short-lived Polish campaign saw Steiner and his men engaged in several other actions, culminating with the siege of the Modlin fortress, which capitulated on September 28. Several members of the Deutschland had distinguished themselves during the fighting, including Herbert Gille, Matthias Kleinheisterkamp, and Fritz Witt—all of whom would go on to lead divisions of the Waffen SS.

Steiner had trained his men well, and his new methods had held Deutschland’s casualties down to 15 dead and 35 wounded, compared to much higher losses in the other units of the V-Truppe operating in Poland. In the eyes of Hitler and high-ranking members of the SS, the V-Truppe had proven itself in the field. Despite army resistance, an SS police division was formed in late September. On October 10, SS Gruppenführer (Lt. Gen.) Hausser began forming the motorized Verfügungstruppe Division(V Division), which would later be renamed Das Reich. Three regiments—Germania, Der Führer, and Steiner’s Deutschland—made up the division.

Himmler’s Praise Doesn’t Impress Steiner

The success of Deutschland in Poland caused Steiner’s star to rise in the eyes of Himmler. The Reichsführer had finally realized that having a militarized SS could further his own ambitions and that Steiner had been the key to that successful military transition. After the Polish campaign, Himmler heaped praise upon Steiner, but the East Prussian was not the least bit impressed. He still regarded his chief as an incompetent bumbler whose constant interference would hinder, rather than help, the growth of the Waffen SS.

Steiner was proud of his regiment’s success, but he knew that the next battle would not be long in coming. During the winter of 1939 to 1940, Deutschland was stationed near Würzburg, and later near Münster, but the troops had little time to savor the hospitality of those cities as they were constantly in the field, training and honing their skills. Steiner’s motto, “Sweat saves blood,” had served his men well in Poland, and he was not about to let them lose their fighting edge.

During the first week of May 1940, the regiment was transported to the western frontier with Holland. On May 10, Steiner led his men across the border as part of General der Artillerie Albert Wodrig’s XXVI Armeekorps. The unit breached Dutch defenses along the Wilhelmina Canal and began a march through the country that ended with the capture of Walcheren Island, south of Rotterdam, on May 17.

Pushing Into France

Deutschland and the rest of the V Division then turned south and fought their way through Belgium and into France. Advancing toward Dunkirk, the division ran into heavy British resistance in the Nieppe Forest. While the two other regiments of Hausser’s division were locked in the forest battle, Steiner’s regiment was sent on a flanking attack with the 3rd Panzer Division. Breaching the enemy line, elements of the panzer division were stopped by a strong British defense at Merville. Steiner turned his regiment to bypass the enemy strongpoints and managed to reach the Lys Canal, which was also heavily defended by the British. Nevertheless, he ordered an assault across the canal and established a bridgehead on the other side, making Deutschland the lead unit in that sector of the front.

The British, determined to dislodge the Germans, sent an armored group to force Deutschland back. In the action that followed, several tanks were destroyed by the young and sometimes foolhardy SS troopers. Men were crushed in their foxholes as they flung hand grenades, trying to disable the tank’s track mechanisms, while others were shot down trying to jump onto the vehicles to pry open the hatches and disable the crews with bullets or explosives. Salvation for the bridgehead came in the form of a tank-destroyer unit from the SS Totenkopf Division, which forced the surviving British to withdraw.

Reinforced V Division Readies For Final Battles

With the evacuation of Allied forces at Dunkirk, the V Division made ready for the final battles for France. Replacements had been sent from Germany to make good the losses suffered by Deutschland and her sister regiments, and on June 5 the division entered the fray.

In the series of battles that followed, Steiner led his men through the defenses of the Weygand Line and across the Aisne River, taking position after position in sharp assaults. After crossing the Marne, the unit swept on east of Paris, crossing the Seine northwest of Troyes. Although Paris had capitulated on June 14, the French continued to resist, and from June 16-18 Deutschland took part in a fierce battle near Chatillion in which it took an estimated 5,000 prisoners.

The fall of France found Steiner’s regiment on the demarcation line with the newly formed Vichy territory. For his part in the battle for the West, Steiner became one of the first three Waffen SS recipients of the Ritterkruez (Knight’s Cross) on August 15. The 32-year-old commander of his 1st Battalion, Fritz Witt, received the award on September 4.

Reward, Promotion and Rebuke For Brash Young SS Officer

With the end of the campaign, the V Division was sent to Holland to rest and refit. Himmler, anxious to reward his SS heroes, promoted Steiner to the rank of SS Brigadeführer und Generalmajor der Waffen SS on November 9. In spite of his promotion and his well-earned decorations, Steiner made no bones about his contempt for his boss. When Himmler heard that Steiner had referred to him as a “sleazy romantic,” Himmler rebuked him by saying, “You are my most insubordinate general.” The Reichsführer was also forced to send an aide to tell Steiner to keep his mouth shut after word reached him that the East Prussian had been vocally criticizing Hitler’s strategy during the campaign in the west.

Many men would have landed in a concentration camp for Steiner’s utterances, but circumstances demanded that Himmler keep his outspoken and insubordinate general. The Waffen SS was growing, and commanders such as Steiner were needed to turn the raw recruits into fighting men.

Steiner Receives Expanded Division and Commences Training

In an order dated December 1, 1940, the SS regiments Nordland (which had contingents of Norwegians and Danes), Westland (Flemish and Dutch), and Germania were brought together to form a new division with Steiner as its commander. On January 1, 1941, the unit was officially designated the SS Division Wiking.

Steiner wasted little time in beginning the training of his new division. His three regimental commanders, Hilmar Wäckerle (Westland), Reichsritter von Oberkamp (Germania), and Fritz von Scholz (Nordland), knew what Steiner expected of them, and the division soon began to take shape as a multinational fighting force. His artillery commander, Herbert-Otto Gille, was a trusted friend from the old V Division. He, too, was an ex-army officer who shared many of his commander’s opinions, including his disdain of Himmler.

Steiner was faced with turning this multi-national division into a battle-ready unit within a matter of months. He also had to contend with the language and cultural differences that the young volunteers brought with them. After some initial difficulties with some of the more arrogant German training officers and NCOs (Steiner soon weeded them out), the men were soon doing as well or better than their German counterparts in the division.

Wiking Division Begins Fateful Campaign on Eastern Front

At the beginning of June, Steiner was ordered to transport the division to Silesia. It then marched into Poland and settled into camouflaged positions near Lublin. On June 22, as part of Generaloberst Ewald von Kleist’s Panzergruppe 1, Wiking crossed the Russian border and began what was to be a four-year struggle to the death against the Red Army.

By early July, the division had fought its way to Tarnopol, earning the respect of both friend and foe. Von Kleist praised the formation and its commander for its fighting ability and esprit de corps. A captured Soviet commander, Maj. Gen. Artemenko, told his captors that Wiking has shown greater fortitude than any unit on either side and that the Soviets “breathed a sigh of relief” when Steiner’s men were relieved in a sector by Regular Army units.

Steiner kept the division moving, crossing the Dnieper River and heading toward Dnepropetrovsk. Losses began to mount as the Soviets hit back, trying to stop the Germans, but by early October the division was still on the move across the desolate steppes east of the Dnieper. In October, however, the rains started to fall in southern Russia, turning the rich soil into a quagmire that made movement all but impossible. In November, the division repulsed several Soviet attacks that were a prelude to Stalin’s planned winter offensive.

Soviets Launch Winter Offensive; Steiner’s Division Holds

The men were exhausted, and replacements were needed by all regiments of the division. Westland, for example, had suffered a casualty rate of 50 percent killed, wounded, or missing from July 1 to November 30. Steiner saw little choice but to go on the defensive for the winter. During the next few months, Steiner’s men held positions on the Mius River against several major Soviet attacks, bleeding the Russians white as they tried to force their way through Wiking defenses.

Finally, the Soviet offensive ground to a halt. Replacements arrived to flesh out the division, and Steiner seemed to be everywhere at once, watching his regiments train and giving advice on how to improve their assault tactics. A panzer detachment, commanded by Sturmbannführer (Major) Johannes Mühlenkamp, was assigned to the division, giving it the armored muscle it would need for the coming summer offensive.

In July, Wiking took part in the storming of Rostov and then set off across the steppes toward the Caucasus. By the end of September the division had reached the southern European land bridge with Asia. Crossing the Terek River, Steiner and his men became embroiled in fighting for control of the rugged, mountainous terrain near Mosdok and Alagir. The fighting continued until late December, when the division was ordered out of the line for rest and to receive replacements.

A Promotion and New Assignment Received at Wolf’s Lair

On December 23, 1942, Steiner was awarded the oak leaves to the Ritterkreuz for his successes with the Wiking Division. The formal presentation took place on February 5, 1943, at Hitler’s Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) headquarters near Rastenberg, East Prussia. Sometime before the presentation, he learned that his days with Wiking were numbered and that he had been selected to form a new SS panzer corps.

Steiner must have been both puzzled and amused upon learning of his elevation to corps commander. His time with Wiking had done little to endear him to Himmler, who had reprimanded him on several occasions for signing his orders “Generalleutnant Steiner” instead of using his SS rank. He had also been admonished for criticizing the Reich’s policy of treating the Russians as subhumans and for greeting his men with a half-hearted “Heil” instead of the standard “Heil Hitler.”

Despite his growing reputation as a general who traveled his own course, Steiner took command of the new III(Germanisches) SS Panzerkorps, which was supposed to be built around the Wiking and Nordland SS divisions. In reality, the corps was given whatever troops were on hand, including army and Luftwaffe units.

Cracks Begin To Show

Throughout the summer and fall, Steiner worked to turn his corps into a cohesive fighting unit. His SS units’ morale was still high, but the army units that passed through his command were beginning to show the strain of the horrors of the Eastern Front. In June, an old friend, Friedrich Graf von der Schulenburg, visited with Steiner, who was due to be promoted to Obergruppenführer(Lt. Gen.) on July 1.

Schulenburg, a rabid anti-Nazi, and Steiner talked about the days when they had served together in the 1st Infantry Regiment and then switched to the current situation on the Eastern Front. As Schulenburg left, he told Steiner, “We shall have to kill Hitler before he ruins Germany.” The SS general remained silent, troubled by his friend’s parting words.

Combat for Steiner’s corps in the summer and fall consisted of actions against the partisan forces in Yugoslavia. In late November, the corps was ordered to the Front and began a long trip north to the Orianenbaum Front of Heeresgruppe (Army Group) Nord. It was a corps in name only, consisting of the Nordland Division and SS Polezei (Police) Regiment 14. Arriving at the front, the poorly trained and inadequately equipped 9th and 10th Luftwaffe field divisions were added to the corps, as was the 4th SS BrigadeNederland. Steiner hoped that he would have time to train his lackluster Luftwaffe units, but the Soviets had other ideas.

Soviets Rain Hell Fire Upon German Forces

On the night of January 13, the Soviets inside the Orianenbaum Pocket unleashed an artillery barrage of devastating proportions. More than 100,000 shells fell on the corps’ positions. The barrage was followed by an attack from the pocket by the Soviet 2nd Shock Army. Meanwhile, around Leningrad the Russians attacked German forces laying siege to the city with 42 Red Army infantry divisions and nine tank corps.

In Steiner’s sector, the 10th Luftwaffe Field Division disintegrated under the initial onslaught. The 9th soon followed, and Soviet tanks and infantry were soon in open country, hoping to encircle Steiner’s corps and the rest of the German 18th Army. The battle was not all one-sided. The commander of Nordland’s Engineer Battalion, Fritz Bunse, and Hanns-Heinrich Lohmann, commander of the Norge Regiment, were awarded the Ritterkreuz for delaying the Russian advance. The 5th Kompanie of Nordland’s reconnaissance unit, commanded by Georg Langendorf, destroyed 48 of 54 Soviet tanks in a single engagement, stopping a Russian breakthrough and allowing other units of the division time to escape.

Germans Win Race To River and Establish Bridgehead

Although these actions slowed the Russian advance, Steiner knew that the entire Leningrad Front had been shattered and that the only hope of rescue for his corps lay behind the Narva River, some 150 miles to the west. It was a close thing, but Steiner’s men won the race to the river. The SS general immediately established a bridgehead on the eastern bank and placed his artillery and support units on the western bank in the city of Narva itself.

In the months that followed, the defenders inside the Narva bridgehead held out against overwhelming odds. Augmented by remnants of some army divisions and by the newly formed 20thEstonian SS Division, Steiner moved his units like a chessmaster, containing Soviet attacks on his flanks and on the bridgehead itself. He was finally forced to withdraw from the position in late July after the Soviet summer offensive against Heeresgruppe Mitte had unhinged the entire northern front.

During the retreat through the Baltic States, the 5th SS Wallonien and 6th SS Langemarck Brigades joined the corps, making it a true European entity comprising German, Flemish, Walloon,Estonian, Norwegian, Danish, and Dutch soldiers along with a few Swiss, Swedes, and Finns.

Another Trip To Wolf’s Lair Before Mounting Retreat

On August 10, Steiner was summoned once again to the Wolfsschanze, this time to receive the coveted swords to the Ritterkreuz. He became the 86th soldier of the German armed forces to receive the award. Returning to his corps, he continued to conduct a fighting withdrawal. He remained with the corps until October 30, when he turned over command to ObergruppenführerGeorg Keppler and returned to Germany for a well-deserved rest.

At the end of January 1945, Steiner was given the task of defending Pomerania. His new command, the 11th Army, was a conglomeration of depleted army and SS divisions that stood little chance of halting the Russian advance into Germany.

“Accept My Plan Or Relieve Me!”

In mid-February, he was ordered to attack Marshal Georgi Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front and continue an advance to a point near Küstrin, where the Warthe and Oder Rivers converged. Steiner received the order with a mixture of rage and incredulity. Bypassing the chain of command, he telephoned Generaloberst (Col. Gen.) Heinz Guderian, the army chief of staff, and argued against the attack. Steiner told Guderian that with only 50,000 men and 300 tanks the operation would be a suicide mission with no expected success. He said that a more limited attack, which would leave the 11th Army less vulnerable to a certain Soviet counterattack, would put him in a better position to fulfill his mission of defending Pomerania.

As the discussion grew more heated, Steiner shouted into the telephone, “Accept my plan or relieve me!” Guderian shouted back, “Have it your own way!” and then hung up.

The attack started on February 16 and pushed the Soviet 68th Army back about eight miles on the first day. The next day saw another push by Steiner’s army that left scores of Soviet tanks burning in its wake. Steiner’s attack forced Zhukov to divert two tank armies, which were headed toward Berlin, to meet the attack. These new enemy units stopped the 11th Army, forcing it back to its original positions.

Hitler Pins Last Hopes On Steiner

Steiner’s limited victory gave Adolf Hitler hope. With his armies crumbling around him, here was a general who could still fight. In the upcoming weeks, the Führer would once again call on Steiner when all hope seemed lost.

Steiner kept command of the 11th Army until early March, when he turned it over to Army General Walter Lucht. As the Russians continued to batter their way to Berlin, Generaloberst Gotthard Heinrici, commander of Heeresgruppe Weichsel (Army Group Vistula), charged with defending the capital’s approaches, gathered a meager armored reserve and put Steiner in charge of the unit.

On April 21, Hitler was listening to a situation report describing the worsening conditions around Berlin. Soviet artillery was within range of the city, and General der PanzertruppeHasso von Manteuffel’s 3rd Panzerarmee, the only effective blocking force left in front of Berlin, was in danger of being encircled. As Hitler listened, Steiner’s armored unit was mentioned in passing. The name triggered an immediate response in Hitler, who was soon planning another fanciful mission for the SS general. This time, Steiner was ordered to attack and shatter Zhukov’s spearhead, which would prevent von Manteuffel from being encircled and would save Berlin at the same time. His command, now designated Armeegruppe Steiner, consisted of about 10,000 exhausted troops and a mere handful of tanks.

Plan To Eliminate Hitler Foiled By Bunker Retreat

For Steiner, the order seemed nothing short of lunacy. He had become more and more disillusioned with Hitler and his Reich since his conversation with von Schulenburg in the summer of 1943. Some weeks after that conversation, Steiner and Oberführer (no U.S. equivalent rank) Joachim Ziegler (his chief of staff) met with anti-Nazi elements and discussed arresting Hitler—a plan that never developed. Only a few days before receiving Hitler’s latest order, another plot was hatched by Steiner and Obergruppenführers Richard Hildebrandt and Curt von Gottberg. They planned to murder Hitler and end the war before Germany was totally destroyed, but by that time the Führer had already retreated to the relative safety of his Berlin bunker.

Hitler now waited for the attack, and Steiner did nothing. Time after time, Hitler asked his staff how the offensive was proceeding. When he found out the truth, he flew into a blind rage, sending Heinrici and Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel to Steiner’s headquarters to force him to attack.

Steiner remained firm. “I won’t do it,” he said. “This attack is nonsense—murder. Do what you want to me.”

Steiner Remains In Command and Saves Troops From Soviets

It was not until April 27 that Hitler finally gave up on Steiner. He ordered him to be relieved, but the SS general persuaded his replacement to leave him in command. It was Steiner’s final snub to the leader that he had once so gladly served. A few days later, Hitler was dead. During the final week of the war, Steiner led his unit to the west, surrendering to the Americans and saving his men from Soviet labor camps. He remained in captivity until April 27, 1948.

In the postwar years, Steiner wrote two books, The Army of Outlaws and The Volunteers, in which he described his wartime experiences. He also wrote From Clausewitz to Bulganin, a study in military history. He was active within the Waffen SS Veteran’s Association (HIAG) and kept in touch with many of his wartime comrades, attending several divisional reunions.

Trying to Set The Record Straight

Writing after the war, Steiner sought to defend his men and the Waffen SS organization. “A great deal of misunderstanding and misconception came about as to the role of SS troops, and I refer not only to other countries, but at home … let it be said that many thousands of young Germans fought and died for their country, not because of some fanatical blind faith in their Führer, but simply through patriotism. It would be naïve of me to suggest that they did not in many cases have faith in Hitler, they did, but then they did not know the ‘nature of the beast.’ By the time they learnt, it was too late.”

Steiner’s last years were spent in Munich, where he enjoyed meeting with a small company of close friends and wartime associates. On May 16, 1966, the former SS general died of heart failure. His funeral was attended by hundreds of his men who came from all over Europe to pay their last respects.

Originally Published July 21, 2015

by Arnold Blumberg

At the outbreak of World War II, the British War Office assumed that conditions on the Western Front in France would be the same as those experienced in the Great War of 1914-1918. It therefore wanted a very heavy infantry tank that would be invulnerable to known anti-tank guns of the time. Further, it wanted a tank with a wide trench crossing capacity, and able to negotiate ground churned up by shell fire. The design arrived at was the A20, essentially a refinement of the “lozenge” shape tanks built by the British in 1916-1918. Fitted with a 2-pounder main gun, trials for the new machine began in June 1940.

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With the need to add major modifications to the design due to mechanical faults, the now renamed A22, Infantry Mark IV tank, went into production in 1942. Referred to as the Churchill, it weighed almost 42 tons, had 102mm of armor, sported a 57mm main gun, and attained a maximum speed of 15mph. But as the Churchill was finally rolling off the assembly lines, the War Office-reviewing the combat experiences in North Africa, decided in early 1941 that speed and reliability were more important than heavy armor. As a result, the British looked to create a new tank with those characteristics.

Developing the Cromwell Tank

What they came up with was a new specification incorporating improved mechanical and maintenance reliability, a studier 75mm armored turret able to mount a 57mm cannon, and 65mm armor hull protection. The new tank had to be no more than 24 tons in weight and have a maximum speed of 24mph. A production order for 500, of what was designated the A24, was placed with the Nuffield Mechanization and Aero Firm in June 1941. The design then went through a series of changes first morphing into the Cavalier, which proved a poor design, and then the Centaur, also deemed not suitable as a battle tank. (Both vehicles were later modified as specialized armored fighting machines such as howitzer armed, anti-aircraft, engineer, observation, and bulldozer tanks). Fortunately, in tandem with the Cavalier and Centaur, another tank design had been developed: the Cromwell tank.

Similar in appearance to the Cavalier and Centaur, the Cromwell, initially known as the Cromwell X, was the Meteor engine version of the A27 series-thus the designation A27M (M for Meteor engine). It was a re-engined Centaur I with a powerful 600 hp Meteor engine which proved an excellent choice for a tank power plant since it could accommodate any foreseen future upgrades to the Cromwell series.

The first trials for the Cromwell tank were conducted in March 1942, actually ahead of those for the Centaur tank. Teething problems were minor—mainly concerned with clutch, gears and cooling systems associated with the engine and transmission. Production started in January 1943. By that point the War Office policy regarding tank armament had changed considerably since the heavy cruiser requirement resulting in the A24/A27 series had been formulated. The combat in the Western Desert, coupled with the appearance of the American built M3 Grant and M4 Medium tanks in that theater, led to a requirement that British main battle tanks have a duel-purpose main gun capable of shooting High Explosive (HE) and Armor Piercing (AP) rounds. Work on a British design version of the 75mm gun – a bored-out model of the British 6-pounder able to fire American 75mm ammunition, was begun in December 1942. As result, Cromwell’s from the Model IV onward were fitted with this weapon in place of the originally considered 6-pounder. The first vehicles so equipped were delivered in November 1943, but there were many defects in the gun, including unsatisfactory semi-automatic cams in the breech, which were not entirely eliminated until May 1944.

The most Important British-Built Cruiser of WW2

The Cromwell Mark IV-the most numerous of the Cromwell tank series- held a crew of 5 (commander, gunner, driver, co-driver, and loader who also acted as the radio operator) protected by 76 mm of frontal armor and 20mm on its sides and rear, it weighed 28 tons, and was 20 feet ten inches long, 8 feet 2 inches high, with a width of 9 feet 6 inches. It travelled on manganese tracks 14 inches wide with center guides and could go a maximum speed of 32 mph, with a cross country rate of 18mph, and had a range of 173 miles. Its all- welded construction was carried on a improved Christie suspension system of five large independently sprung road wheels on each side. It held 64 rounds of 75mm ammunition for its main armament, in addition to 5,000 rounds for its two Besa 7.92 Caliber Machineguns.

The Cromwell was numerically the most important British- built cruiser tank during World War Two, contributing, along with the American Sherman, the main equipment of the United Kingdom’s armored force. They comprised all the tanks of the Reconnaissance Regiments of the Guards, and 11th Armored Divisions. (M4s composed the tanks of those outfit’s armored regiments). However, Cromwells formed the entire tank strength of the British 7th (Desert Rats) Armored Division, as well as the 1st Polish Armored Division’s 10th Mounted Rifle Regiment, and much of the 1st Czechoslovakian Armored Brigade which fought with the Allies in Northwest Europe in 1944—45.

However, even with its 75mm gun the Cromwell tank was still, by 1944 standards, inferior to contemporary German tanks like the Panther and Tiger, and even late model Mark IVs. With its Meteor engine it was the fastest and most powerful British tank design of the war, but physical limitations (mainly the narrowness of the hull) prevented it being up-gunned to carry the very effective 17-pounder (76.2mm) Quick Firing Cannon. To stay alive on the modern battlefield, Cromwell tank commanders had to use his vehicle’s speed, maneuverability, and fast traversing gun turret to counter the more powerful armor an armament possessed by his Wehrmacht tank opponent. Using these advantages, a Cromwell could get on the enemy’s rear or flank and get off killer shots on these more vulnerable vehicle surfaces. The Cromwell’s speed and maneuverability could also be used to escape to safety from the unwanted attention of its more powerful adversary.

Mechanical Reliability Provided a Substantial Edge

Of equal importance to the success of the Cromwell in combat, was its mechanical reliability. Although not quite up to that of the Sherman, the Cromwell tank was easy to maintain which meant it could remain in operation for long periods of time before having to be pulled out of the line for routine maintenance and repairs. This allowed it to exploit breakthroughs even better than the Sherman. For example, the 7th Armored Division advanced an average of 70 miles a day after the breakout from Normandy. Further, its speed, reliability and range made it an especially good tank for conducting long distance reconnaissance missions.

About 3,066 Cromwells of all models were produced during the war. In 1945 it was retired from active service and replaced by the Centurion tank which was introduced in that year. However, the Cromwell soldiered on and, in limited numbers, saw service in the armies of Greece and Portugal, and action in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, as well as with the British in the Korean War two years later.

Originally Published January 8, 2015

by Don Duffy

By spring 1917, Russia had borne the heaviest burden of World War I. Russian reports counted more than six million men killed, wounded, or interned as prisoners of war. This enormous toll had bled the reserve pool of young Russian peasants nearly dry. The Russian Imperial Treasury was effectively bankrupt. Tsar Nicholas was forced to abdicate in March, but the new Russian Revolutionary Provisional Government continued the war against Germany. Its ability to raise morale, however, was scant. Bolshevik antiwar leaflets circulating among the Russian troops already had become one of the German High Command’s most effective weapons on its Eastern Front. Once blindly obedient to their hard-line elitist officer corps under penalty of flogging or death, hundreds of thousands of rebellious Russian soldiers lay down their arms and deserted or surrendered to the enemy they outnumbered.

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Desperation loomed. The major burden for regenerating the demoralized army fell on Minister of War Alexander Kerensky, a Socialist Revolutionary and silver-tongued orator whose chronic kidney disease exempted him from military duty.

“I Summon You Not to a Feast But to Death!”

In early summer 1917, Citizen Kerensky donned an unadorned khaki tunic, field cap, riding breeches, and army boots and set out for the front. Standing atop the hood of his open touring car to rally the troops while his general staff planned a renewed offensive, Kerensky earned himself the sardonic nickname of “The Great Persuader-in-Chief.”

“I am sent by the Revolution!” Kerensky would proclaim in his greeting to assemblies of skeptical soldiers. “Forward to the battle of freedom! I summon you not to a feast but to death!”

“For the sake of the nation’s life,” Kerensky recalled in his memoirs, “it was necessary to restore the army’s will to die.” One of his earlier official acts, however, had been his “Declaration of the Rights of the Soldier,” which banned punishment for disobedience and created committees of enlisted men to negotiate with ex-Tsarist officers who once commanded with whips and iron fists.

Uncounted numbers of Russian women already stood among the troops gathering to hear Kerensky’s orations, but at the time, the possible roles of women in World War I were often overlooked. Overworked and hard pressed to declare every draftee and volunteer fit for duty, Russian physicians had turned blind eyes to cross-dressing, shaven-headed women masquerading as men at their pre-induction physicals. Among these so-called Amazons crossing the gender line was Maria “Yasha” Botchkareva. A Siberian peasant, she’d fled from her drunken and abusive husband, enlisted in the Russian Imperial Infantry, suffered two wounds in combat, and won three decorations for bravery under enemy fire.

Organizing the Women’s Battalion

In May 1917, Duma (the Russian parliament) President Mikhail V. Rodzianko summoned Botchkareva to St. Petersburg to hear her plea for permission to organize a women’s battalion for the coming summer offensive. “You heard of what I have gone through and what I have done as a soldier,” Botchkareva stated to Rodzianko’s assembly of soldiers’ delegates to the Duma. “Now, how would it do to organize three hundred women like me to serve as an example to the army and lead the men into battle?”

Botchkareva attached one condition to her proposal. Unlike the new Revolutionary Army democratized by Kerensky’s decree, her battalion would respect the traditional discipline of the old Imperial Army. She would “exercise absolute authority and demand absolute obedience” from her volunteers.

Rodzianko sent Botchkareva to pitch her proposal to the new Commander-in-Chief (replacing the Tsar), General Aleksei A. Brusilov. The Duma president reasoned it would be easier for Botchkareva to sell her plan to Kerensky with Brusilov’s endorsement.

On May 15, 1917, accompanied by General Brusilov, Botchkareva pleaded her case to Kerensky at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. The Minister of War and future Prime Minister quickly grasped the potential of her proposal as a propaganda tool.

The First Russian Women’s Battalion of Death

“I was granted authority then and there,” Botchkareva later recalled, “to form a unit under the name of the First Russian Women’s Battalion of Death.”

“Men and women citizens,” Botchkareva addressed the throng of war supporters gathered at St. Petersburg’s Mariynski Theater the following evening, “our mother is perishing! Our mother is Russia. I want to save her. I want women whose hearts are crystal, whose souls are pure, whose impulses are lofty. With such women setting an example of self-sacrifice, you men will realize your duty in this grave hour!”

Botchkareva claimed that 1,500 women in the audience applied for enlistment. That number swelled to more than 2,000 the following day after her speech at the Kolomensk Women’s Institute.

“There will be strict discipline and guilt will be severely punished,” Botchkareva laid down to the recruits, aged 18 to 35. “It is the purpose of this Battalion to restore discipline in the army.” She even demanded they sign a statement forfeiting their rights under Kerensky’s Declaration.

A Rigid System of Discipline & Training

British suffragette Emmaline Pankhurst witnessed and reported on the recruits’ basic training. Once a militant feminist at war with her government, Pankhurst had declared a truce on gender issues to concentrate on rallying women to the war effort.

“We apply the rigid system of discipline of the pre-revolutionary army, rejecting the new principle of soldier self-government,” the tough-minded Botchkareva told an Associated Press reporter who visited the battalion’s barracks on Torgvaya Street. “We impose a Spartan regime from the first. They sleep on boards without bed clothes, thus immediately eliminating the weak. The smallest breach of discipline is punished by expulsion in disgrace.”

The AP correspondent observed the women recruits marching “to an exaggerated goose- step,” carrying cavalry rifles five pounds lighter than the standard Russian infantry weapon. He encountered the wispy young daughter of the Tsarist-era Naval Minister standing sentry duty and the former editor of a feminist magazine serving as Botchkareva’s regimental clerk.

On July 7, 1917, their basic training completed and all their personal possessions confiscated except their brassieres, Botchkareva paraded her recruits into the square of Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg. There they knelt and received the blessings of an archbishop and patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.

One More Hurdle Before Leading Her Recurits

Botchkareva carried a gold-handled saber presented to her by General Lar Komilov, soon to succeed Brusilov as Kerensky’s commander-in-chief. Her shoulders bore lieutenant’s epaulets pinned there by Kerensky himself. Like all her recruits, her head was shaved to its shiny skin.

Pankhurst, representing the international League for Equal Rights for Women; American Ambassador David Francis; British Ambassador Sir George Buchanan; and correspondents from the Associated Press and The New York Times were among the foreigners witnessing this patriotic event. Thousands of cheering spectators lined the battalion’s parade route to the station where they entrained for the front.

Lieutenant Botchkareva had one more hurdle to clear before leading her recruits in the first modern all-women’s assault on enemy troops. Kerensky ordered her to conform to his Declaration of the Rights of a Soldier.

“With two violent jerks,” Botchkareva later recalled, “I tore off my epaulets and threw them into the face of the War Minister.” She also claimed shouting: “I don’t want to serve under you!”

“Shoot her!” Botchkareva claimed the angry Kerensky shouted to the 9th Corps Commander. “Capital punishment has been abolished,” she quoted after her commanding officer’s retort. While some historians challenge Botchkareva’s account of that meeting at 9th Corps headquarters, several primary sources verify she prevailed in refusing to obey Kerensky’s demand.

Taking Position in the Trenches

Botchkareva’s unit took its position in the trenches of the 525th Kuraig-Daryuinski Regiment near the present Minsk-Vilnius highway. Artillery bombarded the German positions for two days in preparation for the Russian assault in the Battle of Smorgon. But when Zero Hour arrived, the enlisted men cowered in their trenches, debating whether to obey their officers’ command to go over the top.

According to Botchkareva’s account, 75 male officers and 300 of “the most intelligent and gallant” enlisted men pledged to follow her battalion in an infantry assault. “They’re faking!” she recalled a number of shirkers shouting until 300 women and 375 male followers climbed from the trenches to begin their trek across no-man’s-land.

“We moved forward against a withering fire of machine guns and artillery, my brave girls, encouraged by the presence of men on their sides, marching steadily against a hail of bullets,” the assault leader recalled. Their example stirred more malingering males into action. “First our regiment poured out and then, on both sides, the contagion spread and unit after unit joined in the advance.”

Smashing the German Lines

Botchkareva’s assault smashed the first and then the second German line. “But there was poison awaiting us in that second line of trenches,” she decried in her memoirs. The “poison” wasn’t mustard gas but caches of vodka and beer.

Hundreds of male attackers threw down their rifles, smashed open bottles, and began toasting their survival. Botchkareva ran along the trenches, ordering her women to destroy the stores of liquor and urging the men to follow her in an assault on the third German line.

Botchkareva and her surviving soldiers led the next assault. The enemy broke in retreat. The attackers took cover in a forest, retrieved their dead and wounded, summoned stretcher bearers, and sent out scouts to assess the situation while waiting for promised reinforcements from the 9th Corps reserves.

Those male reinforcements never arrived. A telegraph line sent word that the 9th Corps reserves remained huddled in the first line of Russian trenches, debating whether to obey their officers’ requests to advance.

The End of the Summer Offensive

Enemy artillery barrages signaled that a German counterattack was mounting. The telegraph line clattered a shocking decision. The men of the 9th Corps agreed to stand and defend their position against any counterattack but refused to advance from their trenches. The First Russian Women’s Battalion of Death had no choice but to retreat.

The collapse of the 1917 summer offensive spread across the entire front. On the Southwestern Front, General Anton Denikin gathered reports of regiments throwing down their weapons and fleeing in the face of savage enemy counterattacks. “I would say we no longer have an army!” he wrote in his report to Brusilov.

Botchkareva claimed that a concussion from a German artillery shell knocked her unconscious during the retreat. She recalled awakening in a field hospital and receiving reports of at least 50 of her “girls” among the dead and wounded in the Battle of Smorgon.

Eyewitness accounts of this first modern case of women in combat give Botchkareva’s “girls” mixed reviews for their performance and effect on male morale, depending on the observer’s gender bias.

Undying Fame & Highest Morale

British suffragette Pankhurst sent a proud but terse telegram to the editor of Brittania, reporting, “First Women’s Battalion number 250 took place of retreating troops. In counter-attack made one hundred prisoners including two officers. Only five weeks training. Their leader wounded. Have earned undying fame, morale effect great. More women soldiers training, also marines.”

British Red Cross nurse Florence Farmborough reported finding three of Botchkareva’s wounded “girls” in a field hospital. “At dinner,” she recalled, “we heard more of the Women’s Battalion of Death … they did go into the attack, they did ‘go over the top.’”

Belorussian observer B. Kamenshchykau confirmed that the Women’s Battalion led the charge but dismissed their impact on male morale. “The soldiers demanded that Botchkareva’s battalion should go over the top first. How great was the pleasure of the soldiers when, after the first artillery rounds from the Germans, the famed battalion broke off their attack.

With cries and screams, the ‘gallant’ women soldiers scattered among the bushes, and the soldiers had to search them out of the woods.… After that the soldiers declared that they would not go on the offensive, for if the screams of Botchkareva’s ‘gallant’ battalion could not break the German defenses, then it was obviously beyond the strength of simple soldiers like ourselves.”

The First Casualties

The official Russian military report confirms the Battalion’s participation in the assault on the German trenches: “The party of wounded in the battles in the direction of Vilno report the extreme ferocity of the Germans, who preferred death to capture. . . . The field of battle was littered with German corpses. The women’s battalion, which received its baptism of fire, also suffered. The wounded women soldiers have been conveyed to Minsk.”

Other eyewitness accounts reported incredulous German prisoners cursing in shame and embarrassment after discovering they’d surrendered to women.

Botchkareva claimed her hospital visitors included the new Commander-in-Chief General Komilov, Kerensky, and a male delegate from the 9th Corps Committee bearing a testimonial to her bravery signed by all its members. After returning to the front, she found that “fraternization was general. There was a virtual, if not formal, truce. The men met every day, indulged in long arguments, and drank beer brought by the Germans.”

She claimed her exhortations to renew the offensive provoked many males into threatening her life. Promoted to the rank of captain, Botchkareva finally negotiated an agreement with her male harassers: “We will leave you alone, and you leave us alone.”

Civil Unrest in Russia

The commanding officer of the First Russian Women’s Battalion of Death was leading her “girls” in another assault when joyous news reached the men lingering in the trenches. The Bolsheviks had seized power in St. Petersburg. Kerensky, last Prime Minister of the Provisional Government, had fled for his life. A drunken mob of male troopers celebrated by seizing 20 of Botchkareva’s “girls” remaining in reserve and lynching them.

Botchkareva led her survivors from one demoralized command post to another, dodging male Bolshevik deserters threatening to execute her as a traitor to the cause for peace. Finally she agreed to disband her battalion for their own safety and headed for her home village near Tomsk, across a land Russian poetess Zinaida Gippius described as now bloodied by “Civil War without mercy.”

Botchkareva claimed she spied for General Kornilov’s White Guards along her journey, fell prisoner to a band of Red Guards, and barely escaped execution. An Associated Press dispatch from Archangel puts her in that northern Russian outpost in late December for a meeting with General Marushewski, Commander-in-Chief of the Northern White Guard.

This AP report states Botchkareva called on the general in full dress uniform, ready for combat in the anti-Bolshevik cause, only to be ordered to demobilize.

Heading to America

“I do not take the responsibility of estimating the merits of Mme. Botchkareva’s organization in the Russian Army,” the general’s official statement declared, “and I surmise that the efforts made and blood shed in the name of the Fatherland will be duly considered by the Central Government and by history.… I believe that the performance by women of military duties, which are improper for the sex, is a shameful mark stamped on the entire population of the region.”

This rejection by a male anti-Bolshevik leader persuaded Botchkareva to join the White Russian self-exiles directly pleading their case for foreign intervention. She entered the hordes of refugees heading for Vladivostok, the Russian Far Eastern port where Allied troops kept the peace while their ships awaited streams of evacuees.

On April 18, 1918, Botchkareva boarded the Sheridan, an American passenger liner. Her presence aboard ship is verified by Florence Farmborough, a fellow evacuee who wrote in her diary, “By a strange working of fate, one of the first persons I have seen on board is Yasha Botchkareva, erstwhile leader of the Women’s Death Battalion. She has eluded the spy-net of the Red guards and is making good her escape to the United States.”

If Botchkareva’s notoriety didn’t precede her to her adoptive country, her memoirs published in early 1919 soon vaulted her into temporary celebrity status. A New York Times dispatch reported President Woodrow Wilson receiving her at the White House on July 10 during his deliberations over the question of further American intervention in the Russian Civil War.

Originally Published September 15, 2014

by Arnold Blumberg

By 1901, the Small Arms Committee—the body within the War Office tasked with arming the British Army with weapons—sought to replace their then-standard issue rifle: the Magazine Lee-Metford Rifle Mark II. The Lee-Metford, which had come in to general service in 1893, had had its issues from the start. There were significant cost concerns because two different models—carbines and rifles—had to be manufactured. The gun also had problems with barrel wear that resulted in poor accuracy, and ammunition was difficult to load due to awkward magazine access. Finally, its length, weight and bayonet fitting caused trouble handling the piece.

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Between 1902 and 1906, after numerous modifications and experimental trials, a new bolt action rifle—the Short, Magazine Lee-Enfield Rifle Number 1 Mark III (SMLE No. 1 MK III)—was adopted by the British armed forces in 1907. The new rifle incorporated a host of modifications not found on the Lee-Metford. These included a fully enclosed top hand-guard along the barrel, and a rear sight that graduated from 200 to 2,000 yards. (In later models this was increased to 2,800 yards). Most significantly, the weapon’s barrel length and total weight—25.2 inches and 8.8 pounds, respectively—were five inches shorter and 1.4 pounds lighter than the Lee-Metford.

Shorter Barrels Became Standard Issue

Charger loading guides to allow faster loading of its five round clips were also added to the new rifle. The 17-inch long Pattern 1907 Sword Bayonet was fitted to the rifle, and in that year the SMLE became the standard small arms for all services in the British Empire’s armed forces. (Note: the nomenclature “Short” in SMLE refers to the rifle’s shortened barrel, not its shortened magazine. This short barrel trait would be deemed so important that by the start of World War II, all major military powers came to make short barrel rifles the standard shoulder arm in their arsenals).

In 1911, a new cartridge was introduced which became the standard ammunition for the Lee-Enfield Rifle for the rest of its service life. This was the “Cartridge, S.A., Ball, Mk VII, C” a cordite load which had a pointed, or, spritzer, bullet. This .303 round, weighing 174 grains, delivered great range ( accurate at 2,000 yards) and possessed tremendous penetration power since its velocity was 2,750 feet per second allowing it to punch through at 200 yards 38 inches of hardwood, 58 inches of softwood, 14 inches of lime-mortared brickwork,18 inches of packed sandbags, or 60 inches of clay-packed sandbags. This ammunition fitted in to a ten round magazine using five round charger clips.

A Host of Modifications

The iconic British Army rifle of World War I, over 3,850, 000 SMLEs were produced during the four years of that conflict. Some were converted to meet the unexpected challenges of trench warfare. Almost 10,000 were modified as sniper rifles, and like the other models used, without outstanding results. Lee-Enfield rifles were refashioned to serve as barb-wire cutters, first latching on to the offending wire and then severing it with a fired bullet. Other SMLEs were modified to shoot the Number 36 MK I Mills Grenade fitted to the rifle with a cup discharger. This explosive could be fired up to 200 yards and proved so efficient that the partnership of the SMLE and Mills grenade continued to be employed throughout World War II.

Pleased with its performance during the Great War, the SMLE—with minor improvements such as an aperture rear sight, a thickened gun barrel, and a new bolt-release catch—was approved for service in November 1939. Designated as Rifle Number 4 Mark I, 4, 244,700 were produced during the Second World War by British, Canadian and United States factories. With demand high, the Number 4 did not reach the armed forces until the second half of 1942. The basic design was so good that only minor modifications implemented in mid-1941—adopting a two-groove barrel instead of the normal five or six groove barrel—were ever made. The revised Number 4 Mark 1* remained England’s frontline service rifle in conjunction with large numbers of Number 1 Mark IIIs, the latter of which were used in theaters outside of Europe. Tens of thousands of Number 4s were dropped in to the nations occupied by the Germans and used by resistance forces.

Jungle Carbines & Sniper Rifles

As the war progressed, the Number 4 Mark 1 was modified to serve as a jungle carbine, and a sniper rifle. In an environment where ambush and dealing with tree-posted snipers required a quick response and a high rate of return fire, the standard bolt-action Lee-Enfield Number 4 Mark 1 Rifle could not do the job. To remedy the situation, the British armed forces introduced a modified SMLE- the Rifle 5 Mark 1, with a barrel five inches shorter than the normal Number 4. Unfortunately, its shorter barrel caused serious accuracy problems. It was also plagued by a tooth jarring recoil and was slow to shoot. These characteristics made the weapon very unpopular with the troops, even though its shorter barrel and lighter weight made it suitable for close quarter combat in the jungles of the Far East where the gun was exclusively employed. On the positive side, the Number 5 Carbine proved very efficient as a grenade launcher.

Another variant of the Number 4 Mark 1 was the sniper version, which went in to full production in late 1942. Fitted with a Pattern Number 32 telescope, this rifle—designated the Number 4 (T) Sniping Rifle—proved to be an excellent sniping tool, and was used in every battle zone of World War II with more than 24,400 produced.

Retired From Service

When the Number 4 Mark 1 finally reached the line regiments during World War II, the men found using it very frustrating, mainly due to its complex sights. Many, especially the “old soldiers”, wanted to fight with the out- dated but still reliable World War I SMLEs. However, as the conflict progressed the men came to appreciate the new rifle’s advantages: handiness, light weight, and the ease and rapidity which it could be pointed and aimed.

The only persistent complaint regarding the Number 4 Mark 1, which ran the entire course of the war in Europe, was the difficulty in keeping it functioning in the field due to the abundance of rainfall. The incessant moisture caused frequent rusting of the bolt and barrel requiring daily cleaning and oiling of those rifle parts.

After performing yeomen service in the Second World War, the venerable bolt-action 4 Mark 1 soldiered on in the British Army until being retired from service in 1957, replaced by the Belgium made semi-automatic FAL (Light Automatic Rifle).

Originally Published January 16, 2015

by Christopher Miskimon

The German commander at the Battle of Aschaffenburg, Major Emil Lamberth, was a World War I veteran who had arrived in the city in June 1944 to assume command of the 9th Pioneer (Engineer) Battalion. Before the war he had been a schoolteacher who maintained his reserve commission. he was apparently a diligent officer because within a few months he was also working as the deputy to Lt. Col. Kurt Von Huenersdorff, the city’s garrison commander. At the end of January 1945, Lamberth took over that position himself.

The German and American View of Lamberth

As the Alied armies approached, Lamberth prepared the city to take its place in the local defensive line. He was made the Aschaffenburg combat commander despite the presence of higher-ranking officers, most likely because of his combat experience and apparent dedication to duty. His command required him to work with various party and municipal officials.

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When the battle began, Lamberth’s battle group consisted of a widely varied and largely untrained body of troops. That the defense of the city was conducted with such vigor and for so long is in part a testament to his leadership. There are tow different views of this man, however: Not unexpectedly, one view is mostly that of the American veterans of the battle while the other comes largely from the German side.

In the first case, many characterize him as an ardent Nazi who ruthlessly pushed his soldiers to fight a hopeless battle, with the full backing of his SS comrades. Some Hungarian POWs captured during the battle told their captors that more Germans wanted to surrender but their officers and SS overseers would not allow it. To discourage defeatism and surrender, he executed one officer, a Lieutenant Heymann, and another, a Luftwaffe man who felt he did not have any skills to bring into the fight. Troops and correspondents reported seeing a number of bodies swinging from lampposts.

There is other evidence that Lamberth was not in complete control of the fight. According to some independent accounts and Lamberths’ own postwar statement, SS and Nazi Party men constantly interfered with his conduct of the battle. Rather than act as comrades in arms, these Nazis were more like overseers.

Post-War Charges

Lamberth was tried for manslaughter after the war; at his trial he stated that Heymann had offered no defense to the charges against him. This caused the major to consider him guilty. Lamberth was found guilty himself and sentenced to four years in prison although the sentence was reduced because the court found Lamberth to be under pressure from the SS commission and Nazi officials.

A 1949 Aschaffenburg newspaper article states that Lamberth was drunk at the time he condemned Heymann, not an excuse for his conduct, certainly, but not something one would expect from an ardent Nazi intent on maintaining control in order to exact maximum casualties from his foe.

The truth is likely somewhere in the middle and will be colored by the pint of view of the observer. The Americans understandably were biased against Lamberth. He had forced them to fight a tough battle they did not expect and did not want. While he was within his authority to execute soldiers for cowardice, this was not something Americans generally did, and the concept would have repulsed them. Many of the American news statements about Lamberth were written with a dramatic flair; on the German side, many certainly made efforts after the war to distance themselves from the Nazis and to emphasize the fear and coercion they lived under during the Third Reich.

What can be said is that Lamberth seemed a skilled and experienced officer, given the 10-day defense he conducted. With his skills not in question, identifying the motivation for his actions remains problematic.

by Albert Mroz

Few would argue that Daimler-Benz is one of the most prominent and highly regarded motor vehicle manufacturers in automotive history. Its founders, Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz, long have been recognized as pioneer inventors of the gasoline-powered motor vehicle, first developed in 1886. But as the modern transportation industry quickly evolved in Europe after World War I, the company that would become Daimler-Benz and build vehicles named Mercedes-Benz found itself hijacked by a radical new political movement, one that exploited the company’s excellence in engineering and manufacturing. As it did with so much of German industry, the Nazi regime would take advantage of the automaker for its own brutal and aggressive agenda.

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Cameras in the Nazi era focused on numerous motor vehicles produced in Germany during those troubled times. The fascist fervor leading to World War II invited much media attention. Countless pictures of Adolf Hitler giving the Nazi salute while standing in one of his Mercedes-Benz vehicles still survive, providing a glimpse of both engineering excellence and political dysfunction that co-existed at the time.

The Height of German Engineering

Among the luxuries Hitler enjoyed as head of the Nazi Party were the best cars that Germany could produce. Those cars happened to be Mercedes-Benzes, some of the finest and best-designed automobiles in the world. The affiliation between Hitler and the auto manufacturer would span the better part of two decades. Mercedes-Benz would build many vehicles and other equipment for the German war effort.

From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there was little doubt that German engineering was in a position of leadership and dominance. Although Germany’s manufacturing and industrial output could not match that of the United States, the fact that automobiles were invented and first developed in Germany signified a true knack for imaginative engineering that would find real competition in only few other countries—the United States, Great Britain, France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Italy—in the first half of the 20th century.

The Origin of the Name “Mercedes”

The name “Mercedes” originated with one of the company’s sales agents, Emil Jellinek, who was unsatisfied with short-wheelbase Daimler-powered cars at the turn of the century. Jellinek, the Austro-Hungarian consul to Germany, had a taste for speed. Moonlighting as a sales agent for Daimler in Nice, France, Jellinek commissioned a new model, promising to personally buy the first 36 units, provided that his eldest teenage daughter’s name graced the car. He even changed the family name to Jellinek-Mercedes in 1903. The three-pointed star emblem, inspired by Gottlieb Daimler, was meant to symbolize motor transport for land, air and sea.

Ferdinand Porsche joined Benz and became chief engineer in 1923. Because of the severe depression throughout Europe, the two enterprises merged in 1926 to become Daimler-Benz. The cars built at Daimler were soon called Mercedes-Benz as well, sometimes abbreviated MBZ in automotive literature. Porsche created the supercharged Mercedes series of which the SSKL (Super Sport Kurz Leicht) became the epitome of performance. Its distinct sound was attributed to what was called the “elephant blower” supercharger, which produced a scream as it nearly doubled the horsepower.

In 1929, Dr. Hans Nibel became the new chief engineer, developing the 500K and 540K Mercedes-Benz, which became legendary for their performance and aesthetic qualities. Hermann Ahrens was the in-house designer of coachwork at Sindelfinger, where MBZ V-12 DB600 engines were built later for such Luftwaffe aircraft as the Messerschmitt Me-109.

The Cars for Hitler’s Entourage

Hitler had reason to be proud of his country’s best automobile. In 1939, when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a pact of non-aggression, Hitler gave a supercharged Mercedes roadster with a rumble seat to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Once the non-aggression pact was broken by Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin refused to use the car and gave it to one of his generals. It survived the war and was sold to a man in Sweden, who then sold it to an American after World War II. The car ultimately turned up in Arizona.

Hitler used a total of five 770K cabriolet touring cars for his entourage in Germany. The fact that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914 while riding in an open car may have influenced Hitler to always use enclosed MBZ saloon cars unless he was showing off in a parade. That precaution bore itself out after the assassination of General Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942 in an open car, after which incident Hitler transmitted an order for 20 armored MBZ 540K saloon cars. Hitler had already switched to heavily armored limousines and earlier had ordered two more 770K models.

The 770K model was known as Grosser Mercedes Offener Tourenwagen. With its 7655cc single-overhead-cam, dual-carburetor, straight-eight motor, which produced 230 hp when the supercharger kicked in, the vehicle was capable of reaching120 mph, even though it weighed 10,000 pounds. Its huge weight was partly due to the addition of 6mm floor armor and 3mm hardened door armor, plus 40mm thick bulletproof glass.

There were three “jump” or pull-out seats behind the driver’s seat, allowing the car to seat a total of nine persons. Entirely upholstered in leather, it had a raised, five-inch-high floor on the right to make Hitler appear taller when he stood. The front seat folded back to give him more room while standing in that position. The car had a 51-gallon gasoline tank and a 150-mile range but could attain three miles per gallon around town. The car also featured four-wheel, independent-coil suspension, dual- system power brakes and 8.25 x 17-inch tires. Hitler ordered another completely enclosed 770K Mercedes in 1943, equipped with armor-reinforced steel roof in addition to the other armor and amenities of his previous cars.

An Explosion of War-Era Production

Hitler wanted to convey to the world the superiority of German engineering. At the time, Germany lagged behind in motorization. The United States had 1.4 people per car, while there were 49 people per car in Germany, which was even behind France and Great Britain. Hitler promised the German people that he would quickly develop the auto industry and began a rapid construction program of the autobahn highway system, the first of which was opened in May 1935. With support from the government, Mercedes-Benz doubled production from 6,000 cars in 1932 to 12,000 in 1934. By 1935, that number had more than doubled again to 25,000.

Two years later, the MBZ factory helped build 30 prototype Volkswagens, which were used for testing prior to series production. Instead of being mass produced as the “people’s car,” the VW was turned into a military vehicle during World War II, and the tens of thousands of Germans who paid into accounts for their KdF Wagens never got to sit behind the wheel of one on the road.

While Mercedes-Benz limousines embodied extravagance and MBZ-subsidized motor sports found success, at the other end of the spectrum Daimler-Benz developed several models of military vehicles, including trucks and half-tracks, in preparation for the war that Hitler and his cronies were planning during the late 1930s. From 1938 to 1942, Mercedes built 19,000 model 170VK vehicles. These were powered by the Daimler-Benz 1700cc M136 four-cylinder motor and were used as staff cars, signal-communication vehicles and maintenance/repair vehicles. A light scout car was built as early as 1934.

Mercedes-Benz built the G3a and G4, which were both 6×4 all-terrain vehicles. These were powered by an in-line six-cylinder or an eight-cylinder motor, respectively, the latter with up to 115 hp. There were 2,000 of the G3a models built, and they were used for a myriad of special purposes: as survey trucks, telegraph vehicles, mobile flash-ranging stations, sound-ranging posts, weather stations, mobile print shops, observation scout vehicles, radio communication vehicles and all-terrain transport. The G4 passenger model was a cabriolet and weighed 3.5 tons. It was nicknamed Bonzenkubel, meaning “bigwig bucket.” Only 72 of these were built, and Hitler used one as his staff car for various excursions and inspections in the field.

Gearing Up For the War

Gearing up for war, Mercedes became an important contributor to the arsenal of trucks needed by the Nazis for various purposes. Gaggenau became the main plant for this purpose at Daimler-Benz. Under the Schell Plan, most major German vehicle manufacturers were united and responsible for producing standardized, light all-terrain transports. Mercedes-Benz Types L1500, L1500A and L1500S were three variants of these vehicles, which were built as a 4x4s. A stood for Allrad-Antrieb, or all-wheel-drive, and S for Standard-Antrieb, or rear-wheel-drive. These were powered by a 2594cc four-cylinder motor. The 4×4 was used primarily as a troop transport.

MBZ also built the Type L3000 A and S, most of which were three-ton-capacity supply trucks, powered by a 75hp 4849cc four-cylinder motor. Daimler-Benz built approximately 8,000 of the trucks. Mercedes Transport Vehicles Types L/Lo 200/2500/2750/3000/3500 and 3750 all resembled one another but had different engines, lengths of bed and wheelbase. There was also the LZ 4000/6000/8000 series semi-tractor, which had the same appearance from cab forward as the L/Lo series.

Between 1935 and 1938, some 7,500 of the three-axle Type LG3000 trucks were produced by MBZ. Next to Henschel 33 trucks, these were the most common 4×6 three–ton, diesel-powered German trucks. From 1940 to 1943, the three-ton Type LG3000 A 4×4 was built as a medium all-terrain truck. It was joined in 1941 by the L4500 A 4×4 heavy all-terrain truck, which was rated at 4.5 tons.

The heaviest MBZ trucks were the Type L6500 4×2 trucks produced by MBZ from 1938 to 1940 and rated at 6.5 tons, with standard two-axle rear-wheel-drive. Only vehicles of the L4500 A series were built as Allied bombing and changes in strategic planning by the German high command halted production of most other Mercedes-built trucks by the end of 1943.

At the start of World War II, all privately owned vehicles with engines over 1000cc and rear-wheel drive were confiscated by the Nazis. This included all MBZ cars and trucks, which were considered “supplemental vehicles.” Most of the MBZ cabriolets became staff cars for the Nazi Party. The Wehrmacht also took Mercedes-Benz omnibuses and put them to use as troop transporters or laboratory vehicles.

Originally Published December 22, 2014

by Brian Belko

Do not let the happy and almost comical animation style fool you. Valiant Hearts: The Great War tells an emotional story about the gut-wrenching reality of war.

Taking place from 1914-1917, Valiant Hearts was inspired by actual letters written during World War I. The game puts players into the shoes of several playable characters, including Karl and Emile. Karl, deported from France after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was separated from his wife and young son. He is drafted into the German Army and thrust into war. Meanwhile, his wife’s father Emile, is drafted into the French Army.

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From the Beautiful French Countryside to the Dark, Cold Trenches

Following the loss of his unit in battle, Emile is captured as a prisoner of war and forced to labor as a cook for the Germans. Emile’s captor is the ruthless Baron Von Dorf who happens to be Karl’s commanding officer. Karl recognizes Emile, but is forced to flee with Von Dorf, who is known to use chemical weapons against his enemies, when their camp is attacked by the Allies.

These events launch players into an emotional trip through the various settings of World War I, including the beautiful French countryside and the dark, cold trenches that have become synonymous with the battles of WWI.

Style Trumps Gameplay

The 2D, action-puzzle game was developed by Ubisoft Montpellier. Released on June 25, 2014, the game employs a unique art style: while attempting to display the drudgery and grayness of war, the disproportioned character models and often too-bright color palette sometimes come up short. This is not to knock on the title, the things that it tries to accomplish. The story is still touching and really does leave an impact on most players.

However, the uninspired and unoriginal puzzles do drag the gameplay down at times. Luckily, the story more than makes up for these shortcomings. After the initial events in the plot, players must then attempt to help each of the characters meet more complex goals, from capturing Von Dorf to reuniting Karl with his wife and son. The game doesn’t come up short in storyline.

A Playable History

One of the more intriguing aspects of Valiant Hearts is the way the game seems to serve as a playable history textbook. Despite the cheery animation style, Valiant Hearts doesn’t pull any punches on the realities of trench warfare. Objects can be found throughout the game and serve as reminders of the Great War’s brutal conditions. These moments stick with the player long after the controller is set aside.

With the oversaturation of first-person shooter games in the war game market, Valiant Hearts: The Great War is a welcomed departure. Although not perfect, it does make an attempt to explore new gameplay styles and tell a heartfelt story. The path to the end is not without its potholes and rough patches, but then again, neither was World War I.

Originally Published July 17, 2014

by Arnold Blumberg

In 1917, when America entered the First World War, the United States Army tasked Brigadier General John T. Thompson, Chief of the Small Arms Section of its Ordnance Department, with designing a short-range, rapid-firing, large capacity infantry trench weapon. The general turned the job over to his own firearms firm, the Auto-Ordnance Corporation (AOC).

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Thompson and his team determined the .45-inch Automatic Colt Pistol cartridge used in the Colt M1911 semi-automatic pistol provided the most suitable rounds for the automatic weapon they envisioned. Due to the ammunition slated for the new weapon, the term “submachine gun” came into general use, referring to the gun’s sub-rifle caliber cartridge and its capability for fully automatic fire.

Origins & Development: The Annihilator

AOC manufactured the first working model, the “Annihilator I,” in 1919. It bore many hallmarks of later Thompson guns: a slab-sided receiver, rear and forward pistol grips, modified Colt M1911 box magazine and top-mounting cocking handle. Its rate of fire was 1,500 rounds per minute (rpm) and could only be fired in full automatic mode, but did not have cooling fins fitted, vital on a gun capable of such a rate. A modified version, the “Annihilator II,” and its variants, officially known as the M1919, soon appeared sporting the innovative Blish locking system (or sliding breech-block), a selector switch for full or semi-automatic fire, a blade foresight, finned barrels, removable front grip and a receiver machined with slots to insert the newly designed 20-round boxed magazine, as well as a 50- and 100-round drum. Altering the angle of the Blish lock reduced the rate of fire to 800 rpm, but the piece comprised only 11 major moving parts.

Christened by its inventors the Thompson Gun—and colloquially referred to as “Tommy guns”—General Thompson contracted with the Colt Patent Firearms Company to produce 15,000, at cost of $38.25 per gun. The first Colt Thompsons came off the manufacturing line in March 1921, each designated as “Model 1921A”. The weapon weighed 10 pounds 4 ounces, and as with all the Thompson models, its effective maximum range was 50 meters.

Through the early 1920s, General Thompson tried to sell his invention to European nations, but he had better success in the U.S. In 1926, AOC received orders for Thompson guns for both the United States Post Office and the Marine Corps. (The Marines guarded the mail trains, which needed armed protection due to a string of violent armed robberies that swept the country in the 1920s). Later, AOC delivered 1,500 Thompsons to the Navy. Additional sales in the commercial market were made to land owners such as Western ranchers, law enforcement agencies, and of course, organized crime syndicates.

The Tommy Gun Goes to War

A widespread lack of infantry weaponry for all armed forces in World War II prompted the U.S. Army to contract with the new owner of AOC, Russell Maquire, for 20,405 Thompson guns, now designated the M1921A1. By early 1942, half a million Thompsons had been manufactured. (By this time, the “Tommy gun” became the most famous submachine gun of the war. AOC was quick to see the importance of the nickname and quickly patented it). The majority of those deployed were the more soldier-proof Model 1928A1, and starting in that year, the famous Model M1A1. These were made more cheaply and robust than the 1928A, and had fewer parts. The former could fire 725 rpm, while the latter model shot at a rate of 600 rpm.

As the only submachine gun in its inventory, the Tommy gun was used by the early in World War II. It was perfect for close-quarter fighting and usually fired from the hip. In the jungles of the South Pacific, U.S. Marines used the gun in conjunction with the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) to good effect: the former’s tracer rounds acted as a passable target marker for a squad’s BAR man.

British Commandos and U.S. GIs in Europe both liked the Tommy gun for its rugged dependability and knock-down firepower, and it was certainly in the fighting across Europe that the Thompson excelled. It worked best in a temperate climate, and proved its worth many times over in the house-to-house combat of Italy and Northwestern Europe. Soldiers quickly developed effective fire tactics to use their M1A1s to maximum effect. For example, soldiers armed with the semi-automatic M1 Garand Rifle were often placed on point, with Thompson-armed men behind, more M1s following, and an M1 Carbine in the rear. This combination provided a comprehensive fire pattern, with long-range shooting suited for the Garand, close work by the Thompson, and intermediate range fire by the .30 caliber BAR.

Thompsons in Foreign Service

The Thompson entered British service in with the U.K.’s Commando units in early 1941. In addition to the original 100,000 sent to England, free French forces training in Britain received 6,000 of their own, as were Chinese forces fighting the Japanese. The Allies also sent enormous numbers of M1928A1s to the Soviet Union after Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia, in 1941. Unfortunately, these were never used, due to the Tommy gun’s inability to perform in Russia’s sub-zero climate.

The End of the Line

In 1942, the high cost of the Thompson gun—$108.00 per unit—caused the U.S. Army to introduce a replacement in the form of the M3 “Grease Gun”: its stamped, wielded and riveted construction was far cheaper to produce than the Thompson. After producing 1,387,134 since 1938, manufacturing of the Thompson ceased in 1944.

Originally Published February 18, 2015

by Donald J. Roberts II and Lawrence C. Schneider

Throughout the history of naval warfare, two factors have greatly influenced tactics: weapons development and the increasing range between opposing navies from which destruction could be delivered.

In the galley era, in which ships were mainly propelled by rowing, the primary weapon was the ram. Opposing navies approached each other head-on and, once engaged, the enemy would board. Although early firearms were mounted on ships by the end of the galley era, the ships could not support cannon large enough to determine the outcome of the battle.

By the 1500s, ships were large enough to carry a sufficient number of cannon to force a change in tactics. During this age of “fighting sail,” strong, large-sailed ships with multi-leveled rows of heavy cannon engaged each other broadside fashion in a single line to bring all of their firepower to bear. Eventually commanders such as Admiral Horatio Nelson learned to form their ships of the line into two battle groups to effectively disrupt the enemy’s line, break it into separate parts, and defeat the parts in detail.

Capping the T

At the beginning of the 20th century, the use of torpedoes and long-range guns forced commanders to engage enemy ships from thousands of yards away. With advanced fire-control capability and rotating turrets, the battleships of the day could effectively destroy enemy ships while maneuvering at fast speeds. The most desired tactic in battle was capping or crossing the T, in which a ship is positioned perpendicular to the enemy, allowing all of its guns to bear while receiving only forward guns from the enemy.

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Ideally, a commander tried to concentrate all the firepower in his line against the enemy’s line while reducing the enemy’s ability to return fire. As opposing forces approached each other, one column would steer to either port or starboard, allowing all guns to fire on the head of the enemy’s line. Minimal return fire was expected since only a few of the enemy’s guns could sight on the ships capping the T. Speed was critical to the success of this maneuver.

Modern Examples

During the Sino-Japanese War in 1905, Russian Admiral Zinovi Rozhdestvenski was ordered to the seas off the coasts of Korea and Japan with 45 ships to defeat the Japanese fleet commanded by Admiral Heihachiro Togo. In the Battle of Tsushima Strait, Admiral Togo crossed the T twice in his fight with Rozhdestvenski. Taking advantage of speed and firepower during the battle that continued into the night, Togo sank and crippled all but 12 of the Russian ships. Operating in loosely independent divisions, the Japanese were able to demonstrate the importance of uniformity in regard to ships, gun type, and tactics, which allowed them greater flexibility in battle.

In the Battle of Jutland during World War I, British and German fleets opposed each other in the hallmark naval engagement of the war. During the course of the battle, British fleets crossed the combined German fleets twice. In a battle whose victor is debatable, the Germans were twice subjected to heavy bombardment but were able to return to port. Although Britain lost many ships, she was able to shake off the losses and return her damaged ships to sea in a short time.

Commanders continued to strive to cap the enemy’s T in subsequent battles. By the time of World War II, aircraft carriers were changing naval tactics again, but not enough to prevent U.S. Admiral Oldendorf from famously defeating his enemy force by performing a textbook naval maneuver in the Battle of Surigao Strait.

Originally Published April 22, 2014

The “Mark IV” WW1 tank was rhomboidal in shape and came in two basic versions: male and female. The male version featured four machine guns and two 6-pounder (57mm) guns that were mounted on side extensions called sponsons. By contrast, the female version had only machine guns. Each vehicle was given a name corresponding to the letter designation of the battalion. For example, D Battalion tanks were named Deborah, Dominie, Devil May Care, Demon, and so on.

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The tanks had a crew of eight, including a driver, commander, two gearsmen, two gunners, and two loaders. The crews were protected by armor that was up to 12mm thick—about a half an inch. Steel plates used for armor were cut and drilled before being hardened. They were then riveted to an iron frame. Crews developed real affection for their metal beasts, insisting that each machine had its own unique ways and personality. If a tank was badly damaged, a crew would be reluctant to transfer to another machine.

When Armored Warfare Was In Its Infancy

By 1917 standards, the Mark IV was a marvel of modern technology. It proved to be a very effective weapon when the ground was good, surprise was achieved, and infantry support was available. But armored warfare was still in its infancy, and the Mark IV was not without serious flaws. It was found that the male’s 6-pounder guns could only be used effectively if the tank was not moving. The vibration from the tracks—among other things—prevented accurate use of the gun’s sighting telescope.

Very Harsh Conditions

The 12mm armor was proof against most ordinary bullets, although sometimes the Germans had deadly armor-piercing rounds. The real danger was artillery shells, which could turn a tank into a flaming coffin within seconds. At 28 tons, the Mark IV’s great weight was too much for its engine, transmission, and suspension.

In action, a tank was its own self-contained hell. The noise was so great that commanders had to scream at the top of their lungs, and temperatures often reached over 100 degrees, regardless of the outside weather. The Germans learned to fire machine guns at a tank’s vision slits. Ricochets and molten pieces of bullet fragments—including white-hot pieces of the copper jackets—would spray particles into the tank, an effect crews mordantly called a “splash.”

Crews sat beside the engine and transmission. There were no firewalls or any kind of protection. In practice, that meant inhaling a nauseating cloud of vapors, a stench that included gasoline, carbon monoxide, oil smoke, and cordite from shells. Crews had to endure such conditions for as long as seven or eight hours at a time during a major battle. Sometimes crew members would pass out or become violently ill.

This Mark IV, nicknamed “Clan Leslie,” is seen in Chimpanzee Valley on September 15, 1916, the day the tanks first went into operation. A total of 1,220 Mark IVs were built by the end of World War I: 420 males, and 595 females.

This Mark IV was captured by German troops, and was being converted for military use. Note the iron cross designs added to the sides.

A destroyed Mark IV. During WWI, tanks created hellish conditions for their crews, but the men who controlled them were often unwilling to transfer to another tank if their own was damaged.

An example of a female Mark IV. Unlike their “male” counterparts that came equipped with two 6-pounders mounted on the side, the female Mark IVs only featured machine guns.

Originally Published August 22, 2014

by Michael D. Hull

When American soldiers landed in France in June 1944 as part of the great Allied crusade to liberate Europe, they were well trained, fully equipped, and brimming with confidence. But, like their fathers two and a half decades earlier, they were in for a rude awakening at the hands of the seasoned, ruthless German Army.

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The GIs believed that, man for man, they were better soldiers than their foes and that they had more and better weapons. in combat, however, from the tangled Normandy hedgerows all the way to the gates of the Third Reich, the Americans found themselves learning bitter lessons and losing their innate naiveté.

Allies Outgunned, Outmaneuvered

As their British and Canadian allies had already learned, the GIs and their officers soon came to respect the resolute fighting qualities of their enemy. they discovered, with considerable chagrin, that although they possessed a greater abundance of weapons, some of these were decidedly inferior to those of the Germans.

The Wehrmacht’s machine guns and machine pistols had a higher rate of fire, its multiple-barrel mortars were more effective than the Allies’ single-tube weapons, and its self-propelled antitank guns were better.

In terms of armor, the difference was daunting, with German tanks frequently outgunning and outmaneuvering the ubiquitous American medium Shermans and the British Army’s Churchills, Valentines, and Cromwells. The third-ranking German tank was at least the equal of the Allies’ best tanks, and the formidable Tiger, mounting a high-velocity 88mm cannon, was superior to all armor in the European Theater of Operations.

Withstanding a Dozen Shermans

The most powerful tank of World War II, a single 67-ton Tiger II could hold up a dozen Sherman tanks, and often did. Known variously as the Tiger B, King Tiger, and Royal Tiger, the Tiger II carried a crew of five, had a 600-horsepower engine and a maximum speed of 21.74 miles an hour, and boasted a cruising range of 105.57 miles.

It could knock out with ease any Allied tank at considerable range, and its armor was so thick (1.58 inches to 7.09 inches) that few British or American weapons could destroy it. Fortunately for the Allies, production of the Tiger II behemoths was constantly disrupted by Anglo-American bombing raids and shortages of raw materials, so only 489 of them had entered service by the time the war ended.

The Tiger II served alongside the Tiger E in heavy tank battalions that were usually at the disposal of panzer corps commanders. Also carrying a crew of five, the Tiger E, sometimes referred to as the Tiger I, weighed 56 tons, had a top speed of 23 miles per hour, and mounted an 88mm L-56 cannon and two 7.92mm machine guns. A total of 1,350 Tiger I tanks were built.

Disadvantages in Size and Weight

After debuting in the Leningrad sector of the Eastern Front in August 1942, Tiger I tanks continued to serve in Russia for the duration of the war, as well as in Tunisia, Sicily, Italy, and France. As was the case with the Tiger II, the major defects of the Tiger I were its bulk and weight, which inhibited it tactically, and its limited operational range.

Rounds from the U.S. Army’s 57mm anti-tank gun had almost no effect on either the Germans’ 45-ton, 10-foot wide Panther tank or the slope-armored Tigers. The morale of many a U.S. infantryman was severely shaken when watching a Tiger destroy a whole transport column while a supporting Sherman’s 75mm shells bounced harmlessly off it.

Yet, while the powerful German tanks came to be looked upon with great respect by Allied soldiers, their size and weight were disadvantages, as was made patently clear on the Eastern Front and in the Ardennes Forest in December 1944.

The Mark V Panther Tank

The favorite of German tank crews was the Mark V Panther medium tank with its 75mm cannon. The heavy Mark VI Tiger, measuring 12 feet, 3 inches in width, could not traverse soft ground or use narrow forest tracks. Tank veterans of the cruel Eastern Front scornfully dubbed it the “furniture van.”

When Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s three panzer armies stormed through the thin American defense lines in the snow-clad, fog-shrouded Ardennes early on Saturday, December 16, 1944, the Nazi juggernaut seemed unstoppable. Many U.S. units abandoned their weapons and vehicles and fled in disarray, while others stood valiantly until overwhelmed.

German Supply Shortages & Mechanical Failures

However, the German thrust aimed at the strategic Meuse River and the vital Belgian port of Antwerp soon lost momentum as the retreating Americans reorganized, gathered strength, and began to hit back. The American response in the Bulge, buttressed with a swift and brilliant 90-degree maneuver by General George S. Patton Jr.’s Third Army and support at the Meuse River from British Army units, threw the enemy timetable off.

Hampered by wider and heavier tanks, the Germans found themselves unable to move through the area as speedily as they had in the blitzkrieg of May 1940. Also contributing to the Germans’ failure to exploit their bulge rapidly was a disabling shortage of supplies, particularly fuel, and the limited mobility of their monstrous, gas-guzzling armor. The few Tiger II tanks in the Ardennes were confined to a limited number of main roads and sparse, hard, frozen ground in the thickly forested, ravine-laced region. When any of the tanks broke down or ran out of fuel on the narrow roads, they blocked all other vehicles because the snow and ice-covered verges lay on top of mud into which tracks and wheels sank rapidly.

A Failed German Counter-Offensive

Despite the initial shockwave that rendered the U.S. high command inert for two critical days, the enemy counteroffensive, blunted by epic defensive actions at St.-Vith, Clervaux, Bastogne, and other locations, fell behind schedule. The Germans failed to gain strong protection on their flanks or to secure the road network in Belgium and Luxembourg.

The few good arteries would have to have been seized rapidly—both for German use and to prevent Allied reinforcements from rolling into the area. Four key junctions controlling the network—at St.-Vith, Malmedy, and Bastogne—would have to have been captured and held.

To maintain their offensive timetable, the enemy columns needed to capture the four junctions on the first or second day. This did not happen, so the last major German attack of the war, Adolf Hitler’s final gamble, crumbled, enabling the British, U.S., and Canadian armies to resume their massive push to the Rhine.

Originally Published November 18, 2014

by Victor J. Kamenir

In the English-speaking world, most students of military history would be hard-pressed to identify the time, place, or antagonists of the Canakkale Campaign. However, they would readily recognize it by its English name—the Battle of Gallipoli. The Allied troops who went ashore at Gallipoli believed they were fighting for democracy. Few Westerners realized (or at any rate admitted) that their Turkish opponents were fighting for an even higher ideal—they were defending their country. A significant portion of the Turkish soldiers who fought in the Canakkale Campaign were recruited from the towns and villages of the Gallipoli Peninsula. With their families close behind the battle lines, these soldiers were literally fighting for their homes. To them, the Allied soldiers were invaders who had come to defile their country and their Muslim faith.

All Eyes on Turkey

In 1915, World War I was in its second year. On the Western Front, the inexorable meat grinder of trench warfare had replaced the early war of maneuver. Stalemated British, French, and German armies stared at each other across the scarred Belgian and French countryside. Meanwhile, on the Eastern Front, where operations of Austro-German and Russian armies still maintained some measure of fluidity, things were beginning to bog down there as well. The eyes of both sides turned south, toward the Ottoman Empire. With the Turks firmly in command of both the Dardanelles and Bosporus Straits, a vital supply route between Russia and Western Europe had been cut. Russia needed weapons and munitions from England and France. In turn, those two countries needed Russian food shipments. To England and France, Turkey seemed like the soft underbelly through which a serious blow could be delivered at Germany. The Germans, for their part, were looking for a place to divert British and French efforts and relieve some of the pressure on the Fatherland.

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For more than a decade, the German and Ottoman empires had maintained close ties, especially in the military sphere. Shortly before the start of the war, a German military mission of almost 100 officers arrived in Turkey, invited there to overhaul the creaking Ottoman war machine. One of the most senior members of this mission was General Otto Liman von Sanders, who was destined to play a key role in the Gallipoli campaign. When the war started, Turkey initially maintained its neutrality. Then, in an act of either calculated effrontery or callous arrogance, England withheld two battleships it had been building for Turkey. The Turks’ indignation was understandable, since they had already paid for the battleships. Not only was England keeping the vessels, it also refused to return its client’s money.

Deutschland Uber Allah

German warships soon entered the picture. On August 10, 1914, hotly pursued by combined British and French squadrons, two German vessels, Goeben and Breslau, took refuge in Turkish territorial waters. In a sham sale, Turkey acquired the ships from Germany. Re-flagged under Ottoman colors and bearing the new names Midilli and Yavuz, the two ships were still manned by their German crews, who went through the ridiculous charade of wearing fezzes and pretending to be Turks. A rueful pun made the rounds: “Deutschland uber Allah.”

Turkey decided to enter the conflict on the German side. On October 27, the two newly acquired warships sailed into the Black Sea, bombarded several Russian cities on the north shore of the sea, and sank two merchant vessels. Although damage was minimal, Russia immediately declared war on Turkey. Great Britain and France quickly followed suit, and on November 3 combined British and French squadrons bombarded Turkish military installations near the entrance to the Dardanelles Straits, heavily damaging two small forts. Turkey, in turn, formally declared war on England and France. Another country had been drawn into the European bloodbath.

The Ottoman Empire was separated into the European portion and the Asian portion by the narrow Sea of Marmara. The Dardanelles Straits formed the gates to that British lake, the Mediterranean Sea, while the Bosporus Straits guarded the entrance to the Black Sea, dominated by Russia. The Gallipoli Peninsula (anglicized name of the small town of Gelibolu on the European side of the Dardanelles) gave its name to the upcoming campaign in the English-speaking world. The Turks named the enduring, bloody campaign that followed after the town of Canakkale, on the Asian side of the straits.

Originally Published April 27, 2014

by Mike Haskew

At least ostensibly, World War I ended first with the cessation of armed hostilities between the warring powers at the famed “11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month,” that is November 11, 1918. The official, or diplomatic, end of World War I came later at the Treaty of Versailles, June 28, 1919.

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Conflict Rages on in Russia

However, the conflicts that remained unresolved with the 1918 armistice or the 1919 treaty meant that World War I did not end until some time later. The political and ideological upheaval that gripped Russia for at least a decade prior to World War I did not cease when the new Bolshevik government of that nation made a separate peace with Germany, signing the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, and exiting the war.

Germany had facilitated the return of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the Bolshevik revolutionary leader, to Russia to foment civil unrest and knock Russia out of World War I. Although the German tactic succeeded, the Russian Revolution began in late 1917, and on the heels of the seizure of power in the country by the Bolsheviks a civil war was underway. The Russian Civil War did not end until 1922.

The End of the German Colonial Empire

Further, following the end of hostilities in 1918, the German colonial empire was dismembered. In the South Pacific, German New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and Nauru came under Australian mandate, while German Samoa was ceded to New Zealand. Of primary importance, Japan took control of the Marshall, Caroline, Mariana, and Palau island groups, encouraging Japanese imperialistic and territorial ambitions in the region. The Japanese established permanent installations and military fortifications on a number of these islands, which became the scenes of violent combat with American forces during World War II.

What the Treaty and Versailles Meant for Germany

At the same time, the terms of the Treaty of Versailles placed the blame for the coming of World War I squarely on Germany, stripped the country of European territory that was rich in natural resources, and placed severe restrictions on the German military while compelling the weak German government to pay millions of dollars in war reparations. During the 1920s and 1930s, Germany was wracked by civil and political unrest. The Nazi Party and its charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler, seized upon the perceived injustice of the Versailles Treaty to galvanize German nationalistic fervor. With the general support of the German people, Hitler led the nation into World War II, or as some might contend, a continuation of the Great War. In considering this series of events inevitable due to unresolved issues between the nations of the world, it is plausible that World War I did not end until 1945, when Hitler and the Nazis were defeated in Europe and Imperial Japan was subdued in the Pacific.

“This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.”

French Marshal Ferdinand Foch characterized the political environment that prevailed with the Treaty of Versailles by saying, “This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.” Foch missed his prediction by only two months. German tanks and troops streamed across the Polish frontier, igniting World War II, on September 1, 1939, roughly 19 years and 10 months after the treaty was signed.

Through the lens of history, an extended perspective is indeed provocative. In 1945, Germany was partitioned, and relations between the former Allied nations became fractured and polarized, giving rise to the half-century long Cold War, an era of unprecedented political and ideological rivalry between the United States and Great Britain on one hand and the Soviet Union on the other, that was arguably underway before the guns fell silent during World War II. The rival nations waged proxy wars and exerted tremendous global influence during the period.

Finally, one of the primary factors that influenced Imperial Russia’s entry into World War I was its long-held desire for a warm water port, free of ice year-round to facilitate trade. In 2014, pro-Russian separatists initiated conflict in the Crimean peninsula on the Black Sea, territory belonging to the sovereign nation of Ukraine. Subsequently, the Russian government announced its annexation of the Crimea. When did World War I end?

Originally Published August 4, 2014

by Peter Suicu

World War I, which had begun as a mobile and fluid conflict, at first seemed to be ideal for bicycles. Both sides used a large number of bikes to help troops get to the front lines quickly. But as the war bogged down into the hellish nightmare of trench warfare, the two-wheel machines were relegated to rear echelon duty. Cycles were used to some degree by sharpshooters in less static areas, as well as by scouts and dispatch riders.

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Following the war, the European interest in bikes expanded into leisure and sports. In the United States, too, cycling began to catch on, with venues such as New York City’s Madison Square Garden hosting daylong cycling races. With the advent of the radio, cycling faded as America’s premier sport, giving way to baseball, which was easier for announcers to call. Yet across the ocean cycling remained popular, and bicycles remained machines of war as much as machines of sport and peace.

A generation after the trench warfare of World War I, the renewed outbreak of war in Europe and Asia put bicycles back in the field. The German Army, even during its rapid-moving blitzkrieg campaign, still relied on horse-drawn carriages to transport men and equipment, and bicycles too played a part. There is a misconception that the Germans were fully mechanized and motorized during the war. In fact, Adolf Hitler invaded Russia with more horses than even Napoleon. For this reason, the bicycle was used in great numbers by the Germans for reconnaissance.

The Fuel Shortages of World War II

Wartime shortages throughout World War II also resulted in many nations utilizing the bicycle to save on fuel. This was especially true in isolated Great Britain during the Blitz, and followed even after the Yanks arrived in great numbers. The United States, which was also on wartime rationing, used bikes in great numbers, but unfortunately for collectors, few of American bikes survived the war.

“Given the rarity of these bikes today I would say it’s safe to assume that compared to other mass-produced military vehicles, bicycles were actually made in fairly small numbers,” says militaria collector Johan Willaert, who specializes in American Army items from World War II, including bicycles. “A lot of them must have been shipped over to the European and Pacific Theaters, but it seems a lot more were kept and used stateside.”

Willaert believes that there are actually more World War II-vintage bikes in European collections than in the United States, because most of these were bought in the States and shipped to Europe by collectors in recent years. “I know of only a handful of real ‘left-behind’ bikes in Europe while it seems they were not that uncommon in postwar surplus sales in the U.S.,” Willaert says. “I think they were used much more at U.S. camps and airfields than in Europe. The U.S. Army was much more mechanized and had no bicycle troops as such.”

Unlike other American gear from World War II, little information survives about the total numbers of bicycles produced. “It is not clear just exactly how many bikes were made for the U.S. Army on official wartime contracts,” says Willaert. “There seem to be no lists left or they haven’t surfaced to this day.”

Folding Bikes Specifically Designed for Warfare

While bikes were never utilized in great numbers by Americans, and in only a limited frontline role by the British military, a wartime enemy of the Allies used cycles in much larger numbers. “It was probably the Japanese who used the bicycle most during WWII,” says Robert van der Plas, coauthor of Bicycle Technology. “The invasion of Malaysia, with thousands of soldiers rolling into Singapore on bicycles, is one of the best-known instances. They used both folding bikes specifically designed for warfare, later rehashed for civilian use, and requisitioned bicycles from other occupied territories.”

The Japanese proved able to adapt and overcome obstacles with their bicycles. Since rubber was in short supply, Japanese soldiers learned to ride on the rims when the tires went flat and couldn’t be repaired.

After World War II, many of the wartime bikes passed to civilian hands as the world recovered from the horrors of war. This was especially true in Europe, where fuel was still hard to come by and where there had been an existing bike culture. “Bicycles have been a part of European history and culture for many, many years,” says Willaert. “For ages the bicycle has been a means of everyday transport for thousands of people, especially in Belgium and the Netherlands. The bicycle was a cheap and easy means of transport for people who couldn’t afford a car for decades.”

 Originally Published April 22, 2014

By Jerome Baldwin

By the fall of 1916, Canadian soldiers fighting in the trenches on the Western Front had already distinguished themselves in battle. In 1915, they had staved off disaster at the Second Battle of Ypres when they plugged a gap in the Allied line after panicky French troops fled in the face of the war’s first poison gas attacks. Amid the noxious clouds of chlorine, the Canadians had improvised gas masks—urine-soaked handkerchiefs held over their faces—and saved the day. Now, in October 1916, the months-long disaster of the Somme was finally drawing to a close. The Canadian Corps alone had suffered 24,000 casualties. Their morale badly shaken, they were relieved to receive orders transferring them out of the battle area, but that relief was cut short when they saw that they were going into line opposite the notoriously dangerous Vimy Ridge.

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Vimy Ridge

The Germans had taken the ridge in the first months of the war in 1914 and had managed to hold it ever since, despite repeated Allied attempts to capture it. Both the British and the French had tried to take it and failed, suffering heavy losses, and many on both sides considered it to be all but impregnable. Rising gently northwest from the Scarpe River valley, the ridge resembles a humpbacked whale, cresting at a height of 470 feet at Hill 145. About a mile north of Hill 145 was Hill 120, known as the Pimple. South of it was another hill, and the fortified positions of La Folie Farm, La Tuille, and Thelus, with Farbus on the reverse slope. While they held it, the Germans threatened the strategically important city of Arras and prevented the Allies from recapturing the Douai Plain and the coal-mining areas of Lens.

German troops at an advance post in the area between Laon and Saint-Quentin, France, during the Second Battle of the Aisne in World War I, April-May 1917.

The ridge was defended by three divisions of the German Sixth Army, under Col. Gen. Ludwig von Falkenhausen. The Germans had constructed a defense in depth, with three belts of trenches and fortified dugouts, some complete with electricity and running water. Gun emplacements had been dug into the forward slope of the ridge, and there was artillery on the reverse slopes as well. Bristling with machine-gun nests housed in concrete and steel pillboxes, protected by massive rolls of razor-sharp barbed wire, and pitted with huge craters and countless shell holes for attacking infantry to move through, Vimy Ridge was an extremely tough nut to crack.

From the heights of the ridge, the Germans had a clear view for miles around, enabling their snipers to turn the entire area into a virtual killing ground. It was lethal to be out from under cover or concealment in the Canadian lines—even at night; the wily Germans simply sent up flares that turned night into day. The Germans were supremely confident that no one, certainly not the colonial troops from Canada, could take Vimy Ridge. One Bavarian soldier defiantly told his captors, “You might get to the top of Vimy Ridge, but I’ll tell you this: you’ll be able to take all the Canadians back in a rowboat that get there.”

“Welcome Canadians”

When the Canadians arrived, the Germans hoisted up an ironic sign that read: “WELCOME CANADIANS.” The carnage of the war and the grisly evidence of the savage fighting that already had occurred there were all around, with nearly every surrounding farm and town reduced to piles of rubble. No-man’s-land was an eerie moonscape of massive craters, littered with debris and the remains of thousands of men. Bones, grinning skulls, and entire skeletons in rotting uniforms of French blue or German gray lay everywhere, and the air was filled with the sour stench of death. Riven with destroyed trenches, the terrain was honeycombed with tunnels through the subterranean chalk surrounding the ridge, which was devoid of vegetation along its shell-blasted length. As the winter settled in and the temperature dropped to record-breaking lows, the Canadians endured all the miseries of trench life while the underground war continued. The troops were often hungry and always cold, but the war was going to heat up for them very soon.

Three German divisions in Col. Gen. Ludwig von Flkenhausen’s Sixth Army defended Vimy Ridge above the Scarpe Valley in northern France.

A New Offensive

Championed by the new Allied commander, French General Robert Nivelle, the wildly ambitious plan for 1917 called for nothing less than to break the German lines, end the stalemate, liberate northern France, and win the war. While the French attacked at Chemins des Dames, farther south, the British were to begin an offensive between Givenchy in the north and Croisilles in the south. It would be the Canadians’ job to protect the northern flank of the British attack, and that meant taking the bastion at Vimy Ridge. Canadian Corps commander Lt. Gen. Sir Julian Byng was given the daunting task in mid-January; the high command wanted it done by April 1.

Lessons from the Somme: Practice Makes Perfect

Byng was an aristocrat, a career British Army officer, and a personal friend of King George V. An experienced officer, he had fought in South Africa and at Ypres, Gallipoli, and, most recently, the Somme before taking command of the Canadian Corps in September 1916. In many ways, Byng was a man ahead of his time. While many officers went nowhere near the front line, he often went right up to the forward trenches, inspecting defenses and talking to the men. In an era when it was unheard of to brief every man on an upcoming attack, Byng insisted that everyone, down to the private soldier, know the battle plan inside and out. He told his officers: “Explain it to them again and again. Encourage him to ask questions. Remember also, that no matter what sort of a fix you get into, you mustn’t just sit down and hope that things will work themselves out. You must do something in a crisis.” It was an unprecedented approach to command and training, and it would prove crucial in the upcoming battle.

Byng was determined that the bloodbath of the Somme not be repeated. During the agonizing winter months, glaring problems had come to the surface: not everyone had been briefed on the entire plan and not enough training had been conducted. The enemy’s barbed- wire installations had not been destroyed, and intelligence about enemy positions and strength had been lacking.

To get around the problems, Byng arranged for German defenses to be simulated in the rear using flags and colored tape to represent enemy strongpoints, roads, and trenches; their accuracy was based on trench raids and aerial photographs. Attacks were practiced repeatedly and the men learned the “Vimy glide,” how to advance safely behind a creeping barrage. The attacking infantry was synchronized with the artillery to move forward at a pace of 100 yards every three minutes, which would put the Canadians right on top of a German position so soon after the artillery barrage that the defenders would have no time to recover. Mounted officers carrying flags represented the creeping barrage as the men moved over the mock battlefield and learned the new attack strategy. Timing was everything. Byng told the men bluntly, “Chaps, you shall go over exactly like a railroad train, on the exact time, or you shall be annihilated.”

The Effectiveness of Trench Raids

German barb wire is shelled before the Attack on Vimy Ridge.

During the fighting of the previous summer, thousands of British soldiers had been cut to pieces by German machine gunners while they got snarled on rolls of barbed wire whose five-inch barbs could ensnare a flailing soldier like a fly in a spider’s web. The wire was supposed to have been destroyed by Allied artillery at the Somme, but it had not—the shells exploded above the wire instead of on contact, and no one had gone out to verify if the wire had been destroyed prior to the attack. It was a case of criminal neglect that led to thousands of dead soldiers—the cream of British society and virtually the entire junior-officer class from the various elite universities. At Vimy Ridge, Byng intended to make sure that destructive No. 106 shell fuses were used; they did explode on contact and could blow pathways in the wire for attacking troops.

The fact that the shelling had been successful in destroying the wire was verified by trench raids that began at Vimy Ridge in December 1916. Armed with Lewis guns and Mills bombs, trench raiders provided invaluable intelligence from captured German documents and prisoners. When the raids began in December, they consisted of just a handful of men. Later, they would grow in size until well over 1,000 troops went over the top at any one time.

Besides gathering intelligence, the raids were used to familiarize the men with the territory they would be crossing on Zero Day. Each raid, in effect, was a dress rehearsal in working together. The raids had the added advantage of keeping the Germans in a constant state of tension, denying them rest and fraying their nerves. By the time of the actual attack on April 9, the Germans would be so exhausted that many of them were in no condition to fight.

The Cost of Preparation
Despite their advantages in intelligence gathering and experience, the raids were nevertheless costly—1,653 Canadians died at Vimy Ridge before the main attack even began, most of them in trench raids. But none was considered a real catastrophe until the largest raid was mounted on March 1, 1917, when 1,700 men of the 4th Division went over the top. Days prior to the raid, French civilians were inquiring about the upcoming attack. That should have raised a red flag in itself—if local civilians knew about the raid, the Germans too must have known. And they did. Some of those who had been taken prisoner had escaped the Canadians and made it back to their own lines with news of the buildup. Gas cylinders the Canadians were to use made a metal clanking sound as they were carried up to the line, alerting the Germans even more. Conversations in Canadian dugouts and tunnels had been overheard by Germans who had tunneled through the chalk close enough to eavesdrop. Some Canadian officers, realizing that another Allied disaster was brewing, tried to get the attack called off, but it was to no avail.

On the day of the raid, the Canadians unleashed deadly phosgene gas toward the German lines—delayed payback for the Huns’ poison-gas attack at Ypres—but some of the gas blew back into their own faces when the wind changed. Heavier than air, the gas also hung undispersed in the various shell holes and craters in which the attacking troops took cover, with predictably horrific results. The Germans had sited their machine guns to cover the gaps in the Canadian wire, conveniently marked with signs, turning them into kill zones. When it was over, there were over 600 Canadian casualties, many of them experienced officers and men whose absence on April 9 would be sorely felt.

“The Week of Suffering”

Despite the fiasco, the battle itself was fast approaching. Preparations continued with rising intensity; everyone knew the plan but not the date. In another unprecedented move, newly developed sound-ranging and flash-spotting techniques were used to determine the locations, with pinpoint accuracy, of German artillery on the ridge. British and Canadian guns targeted them and would soon blast them out of action. In the underground city the Canadians had created, work crews continued to chip away at the chalk, stringing communication cables back to the rear areas. Tools and ammunition were stockpiled in some dugouts, while others were prepared for everything from dressing stations to command posts. A light-railway system had even been built to bring the massive amounts of shells up to the hungry guns. Thirty miles of approach roads were constructed, two miles of tunnels were dug, and more than 40 miles of water pipes were buried to supply a subterranean city that was so large that the men frequently got lost in it, even with guideposts and street names.

During the final week before the attack, Canadian artillery and trench raiders turned the screws ever tighter on the Germans. Raids were conducted every night; the barrages became constant and much larger, with 2,500 tons of ammunition per day hurled at the Germans, who called the period “the Week of Suffering.” Heavy fire greatly impeded the enemy’s ration parties; creeping barrages and sudden intensification of fire on a particular section of trench line caused the Germans to raise an attack alarm, forcing them to stand to for an attack that never came and depriving them of much-needed sleep and food as they anxiously awaited the coming fury.

The Assault Begins

Royal Engineers fix scaffolding ladders in frontline trenches on the day before the start of the Arras offensive in April 1917.

Finally, in the early hours of April 9, the assault troops moved into position. Some were in the forward trenches, others lying on their bellies in no-man’s-land, waiting. Thousands more were crammed into the dozen subways, dug into the chalk, which extended rearward. With just minutes to go, the muffled order to fix bayonets ran up and down the line. The metallic sound of thousands of bayonets being locked into place filled the pre-dawn darkness as a late-season snowstorm blew in. At precisely 5:30 am, a single big gun fired, followed by 900 more, creating a noise so loud that Prime Minister David Lloyd George could hear it all the way back in London.

Because it did not exactly parallel the Canadian lines, Vimy Ridge was 4,000 yards away at the southern end, narrowing gradually until only 700 yards separated the two armies at the northern end. As a result, the 1st Division, on the right flank under the command of Maj. Gen. Arthur Currie, had the farthest to go. The division was expected to secure the Farbus Wood on the eastern slope by early afternoon. The first objective was just beyond the German forward trenches, known as the Black Line on the maps the Canadians carried. Following behind the creeping barrage as they had been trained to do, the 2nd and 3rd Brigades reached the jumping-off point on schedule, signaling with flags to low-flying aircraft that they had arrived.

The Infantry Advance

After 38 minutes the barrage, which had shifted ahead 200 yards, began to creep forward again as the men set out for the Red Line, a German trench called the Zwischen Stellung by its defenders. It was now 6:55 am. Resistance was stiffening; men fell to German machine-gun fire, but others stepped in to take their places and the attack momentum never slackened. Pockets of enemy resistance were bypassed for the “moppers up” to handle later. Some machine-gun nests were put out of action by extraordinary acts of courage. Private William J. Milne of the 16th Battalion (Canadian Scottish) single-handedly took two out during the attack and was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

The attackers reached the Red Line at 7:13—right on schedule. Once there, the 2nd and 3rd Brigades halted, dug in, and prepared to allow the 1st Brigade to pass through them and carry on the attack. By early afternoon the Canadians were safely in the Farbus Wood, with the shell-blasted village of Farbus securely in their hands.

Meanwhile, the 2nd Division, under Maj. Gen. Henry Burstall, also made good progress. Unlike the 1st Division, the 2nd Division encountered the heaviest fighting at the outset of the attack. German resistance lessened as they advanced farther east and fanned out as the front widened. With a wider front to cover, the Canadians required more troops, and the British 13th Brigade went with them. In all, some 30,000 British artillerymen took part in the Vimy attack, as well as infantry and pilots of the Royal Flight Command. One of the 2nd Division’s objectives was the hamlet of Thelus, a veritable haven for German snipers who used its cellars as cover. Now the Allied artillery zeroed in and blasted the village to ruins, ending the sniping. When the Canadians finally overran Thelus at 10:30, they found a German officers’ dugout complete with a fully stocked bar and a staff of five waiters.

Canadian machine gunners dig themselves into convenient shell holes on Vimy Ridge in support of the infantry attack.

The Essence of Speed

Despite the various warning signs, the Germans were surprised by the speed of the Canadian advance—some of the Vimy defenders were captured in their underwear. On the 1st Division front, attackers discovered a German dugout with meals still hot on the table, hastily abandoned by enemy officers. After subsisting for so long on bully beef and plum jam, the rich fare left behind by the Germans must have been the finest meal the fortunate Canadian soldiers ever tasted in their lives.

Exhausted and hungry, some of the Germans eagerly surrendered, and the trickle of prisoners quickly became a river. But there were many other veteran defenders who simply hid in their dugouts until the Canadians had passed, then emerged to shoot them from behind. Machine guns took a heavy toll on the attackers, their positions becoming easy to spot from the khaki-clad corpses that lay in front of them. To take them out, the Canadians used newly developed platoon tactics, attacking from three sides with Mills bombs and machine guns. They could not have known that they were using tactics their more mobile sons would use in the next war with the Germans.

The 3rd Division, under Maj. Gen. Louis Lipsett, moved quickly to take its objectives. The division had a shorter distance to cover and had only two enemy lines to reach, Red and Brown, before they would be on the eastern slope. After they had advanced nearly to the Brown Line, they began to take sniper and machine-gun fire from Hill 145 on their left. Some of the units there, such as the Black Watch from Montreal on the far left, were particularly hard hit. Something was definitely wrong on the neighboring 4th Division front.

Hill 145 Holds Out

Hill 145 was in the 4th Division sector, and it was vital that it be captured as quickly as possible. Under the command of Maj. Gen. David Watson, the 4th Division did not have the experienced officers and men it once had, owing to the raiding debacle of March 1. During the artillery barrage, the German trenches at the base of the hill were purposely not destroyed because one of the Canadian infantry commanders made the astonishing request that they be left intact for his men to use as cover from the fire expected from Hill 145. Subsequently, when the Canadians attacked, they ran into a wall of German fire that decimated some units, such as the 5th Battalion, which lost 346 men out of 400. While the 4th Division attack stalled, the advance on the far left moved ahead, passing between Hill 145 and the Pimple, both still in German hands. Right away, the Canadians started taking fire on both sides.

Canadian troops tend to a badly wounded German casualty at Vimy Ridge

One of the officers in the thick of the fighting was Captain Thain MacDowell of the 38th Battalion, who would win one of four Victoria Crosses in the battle. Chasing after some fleeing Germans, MacDowell followed them through a dugout entrance and down a long stairway, where he found himself instantly enveloped in darkness. Continuing to advance, he turned a corner and came face to face with 77 Prussian Guards—a seemingly hopeless situation. Thinking quickly, MacDowell called over his shoulder to a nonexistent group of men, as though he was leading a large force (there were only two of his comrades behind him on the surface). The ruse worked; the Germans raised their hands in surrender. By taking them up in small groups, MacDowell managed to conceal the fact that he was virtually alone. MacDowell was luckier than Milne: he lived to receive his decoration and eventually became the only VC recipient at Vimy to survive the war. The other two with MacDowell were Lance Sgt. Ellis Sifton of the 18th (Western Ontario) Battalion and Private John Pattison, 50th (Calgary) Battalion.

The success of the attack remained up in the air. If Hill 145 held out until dark, the entire operation would be in serious jeopardy. Under cover of darkness, the Germans would have all night to bring up reinforcements. Hill 145 had to be taken quickly, but where were the men going to come from? Once again the losses of March 1 came into play—there were no men left to spare. The 10th Brigade was slated to attack the Pimple the next day and so could not be tapped. In desperation, the 85th Battalion was found.

The 85th Battalion

The 85th (Nova Scotia Highlanders) was an orphan battalion, not attached to any division. It had arrived in France only a month before and to date had been tasked merely with menial labor such as building roads and digging trenches. The battalion was referred to derisively as “Highlanders without kilts,” but now history had plucked them from obscurity to be the last hope of the Canadian assault on Vimy Ridge. Attacking directly up the hill into the teeth of the German defenses, the green troops of the 85th Battalion so shocked the enemy by the sheer audacity of their attack that the Germans panicked and ran until the entire section was in full retreat down the reverse slope. Behind them, the 85th dug in. It was truly a miraculous victory.

Capturing the Pimple

Captured German Officers somhow maintain their swagger after the Canadian taking of Vimy Ridge.

Throughout April 10 and 11, the Canadians consolidated their positions. There were still some fierce small-group clashes, and snipers picked off men unfamiliar with their new positions, but the fierce counterattacks for which the Germans were renowned never materialized. All along the ridge, the Canadians gazed in awe at the peaceful French countryside to the east, which the war had barely touched. There, life went on as it always had. Green fields, green trees, and intact buildings seemed like another world compared to the shell-blasted hell of devastation and misery just over the Canadians’ shoulders.

On Thursday, April 12, as another snowstorm kicked up, helping to blind the German defenders, the 10th Brigade of the 4th Division attacked straight up the Pimple and captured it in 90 minutes. With that charge, the Canadian victory was complete. Vimy Ridge would remain in Allied hands for the rest of the war. The price, as expected, was high. The Canadians suffered 10,602 casualties, including 3,600 dead. But the capture of Vimy Ridge cemented the fighting reputation of the Canadian Corps. German Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg called them without hesitation “the best of the English troops,” and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George wrote admiringly, “Whenever the Germans found the Canadian Corps coming into the line, they prepared for the worst.”

Painful Victories and Sustained Stalemate

The Canadian success at Vimy Ridge was followed by similar success to the south, where the British Third Army, led by General Sir Edmund Allenby, punched through German lines for 31/2 miles—a near-miraculous distance after years of snail-like advances on the Western Front. The exultant British prepared to exploit their new openings, but they were quickly disappointed in their hopes. Thanks to a voluntary withdrawal by other German troops just prior to the assaults, the German Sixth Army commander, Baron Ludwig von Falkenhausen, had ample reserves to staunch the bleeding. Despite inflicting some 75,000 casualties on the Germans—and suffering some 84,000 of their own—the British were unable to exploit the stunning successes of early April. The war settled back into a stalemated slugfest.

The disgraced architect of the Allied spring offensive, General Nivelle, was replaced by General Henri Pétain, the hero of Verdun, who returned to a defensive war strategy he summed up succinctly: “We must wait for the Americans and the tanks.” In the meantime, 54 French divisions mutinied and refused to obey orders; thousands more deserted. By the time the spontaneous revolt was quelled, more than 100,000 war-weary French soldiers were court-martialed, of whom 23,000 were found guilty. Officially, only 55 soldiers were executed by firing squads, although French officers in the field shot down untold numbers of their own men or sent them forward unsupported to die beneath German artillery barrages. Pétain assuaged the army by promising that there would be no more French offensives in the war.

More Canadian victories were to follow Vimy Ridge, at places such as Arleaux, Hill 70, and Passchendaele. All were costly. As the war drew to a close in 1918, the Canadians spearheaded the Allied advance known as the Hundred Days. After the victorious conclusion of the war, Canada was given a seat at the peace negotiations because of the performance of its troops in the Great War. A total of 60,000 Canadians died in World War I, one in 10 who served at the front, about the same number of men as the United States lost in Vietnam—all suffered by a country of only 12 million people.

The Crest of Vimy Ridge, by Gyrth Russell was commissioned by the Canadian War Memorials Fund.

The Legacy of Vimy Ridge

For Canadians, Vimy Ridge represented more than just the capture of an enemy stronghold on a snowy April morning in 1917; it was the place where Canada literally grew to manhood. Having been a self-governing nation for only 50 years, Canada suddenly emerged from the colonial shadows onto the world stage by gaining the greatest Allied victory to that point in the war.

Nearly 20 years later, in 1936, thousands of Vimy Ridge veterans and their families traveled back to the ridge to witness English King Edward VIII and French President Albert Lebrun dedicate a monument constructed atop Hill 145 after 11 years of work and $1.5 million in costs. The French, for their part, had not forgotten the Canadian triumph that day—thousands more of their own airmen and soldiers were also present at the dedication. In a token of deepest appreciation, 250 acres on the ridge and the surrounding acres were given to Canada by France. Still honeycombed with the ruins of trenches, tunnels, craters, and unexploded munitions, much of the site is closed to the public for safety reasons. It remains, however, a sliver of Canada to this day, a proud but costly reminder of the organized hell that was the Western Front nearly a century ago in World War I.

Originally Published February 2010

By Earl Rickard

When the United States Army mobilized for defense in the fall of 1940, the peacetime draftees, National Guardsmen, reservists, and regulars carried Model 1903 Springfield rifles; the Guardsmen wore puttees; and all the soldiers covered their heads with the doughboy helmet—head-to-foot relics of World War I. Eventually modern equipment reached the field: leggings ousted the Guardsmen’s puttees, the gas-operated M-1 replaced the bolt action Springfield, and on June 9, 1941, the War Department authorized a chunk of personal protective armament destined for use by all United States servicemen in World War II: “Helmet, Steel, M1”—the GI helmet.

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The Resurgence of the Helmet

Warfare’s first helmets stretched back at least to the Greeks if not before. The Roman combat helmet served the legionnaires for centuries. Nevertheless, by the 18th century armor and helmets had all but vanished from the world’s battlefields. Then, early in World War I, a French soldier placed a metal food bowl under his cloth cap. The bowl deflected a projectile and saved his life. Intendant-General August Louis Adrian noted the soldier’s luck and ordered tests. The resulting “casque Adrian,” a steel cap liner, first appeared in 1915. The following year the cap liner evolved into the classic French Army helmet.

In 1915 the British Army adopted the Brodie helmet (MkI), named for its designer John L. Brodie. When inverted, the Brodie helmet resembled a soup bowl. Although heavier and uglier than the French helmet, the MkI proved ballistically superior. It could take a hit better. In 1917, the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) landed in France without helmets. The AEF quickly chose the British design because of the better impact resistance and ordered 400,000 through the British Quartermaster Department. Back in Washington the Ordnance Department modified the British MkI helmet, increasing the overall ballistic strength 10 percent. The American version, standardized as Helmet, M1917, had ballistic specifications requiring the helmet to “resist penetration by a 230-grain caliber .45 bullet with a velocity of 600 f.p.s.” American manufacturers produced approximately 2.7 million M1917 helmets by war’s end.

With the Armistice in 1918 and the consequent evaporation of the AEF, the War Department entered peacetime with a large quantity of M1917 helmets. Nonetheless, the Ordnance Department and the Infantry Board wanted to find a better helmet, a helmet that not only satisfied the essential requirements of weight, ballistic resistance, and coverage but also the related problems of balance, method of suspension, and interference with other equipment. They chose a helmet designated the 5A and conducted tests at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1926. The 5A’s pot-like shape covered more area on the sides of the head but proved heavier, more easily penetrated, and interfered with firing a rifle.

The Army conducted further tests at the Aberdeen Proving Ground to compare the old helmet’s steel composition with the 5A.The M1917 proved superior. Consequently, the army rejected and abandoned the 5A in 1932. Even if the 5A had passed muster, the War Department’s stock of more than two million M1917 helmets versus the new helmet’s cost during the interwar years would have prohibited any spending by a parsimonious Congress that shrank military appropriations whenever possible. The anemic Depression-era Army had to soldier on with the doughboy helmet. One upgrade did slip through. In 1934, the M1917 received a modified lining of hair-filled pad. The steel helmet, two-piece canvas chin strap, and the new lining, with a combined weight of two pounds, six ounces, was then standardized as Helmet, M1917A1.

During training at the U.S. Army Ranger School in 1943, two soldiers are wearing the newly issued M1 helmet and liner. They have applied grass and leaves as camouflage.

A New Helmet for a New War

The 1940 defense mobilization brought new interest in helmet development. Army Ordnance magazine noted, “It was apparent that a washbasin-type helmet, originally designed to protect soldiers in trenches from fragments of shells bursting overhead would not be adequate in a war of movement where missiles could come from all directions—even from below, as in the case of parachute troops.” The year 1940 also brought a new assistant secretary of war, Robert P. Patterson, who well recalled the doughboy helmet’s faults. The former 77th Infantry Division Captain remembered the helmet as awkward, uncomfortable, and prone “to fall off in skirmish runs.” Patterson closely followed the new helmet’s progress, even to the extent of halting M1917A production until the replacement arrived.

Charged with developing a new helmet, the Infantry Board wisely tackled the problems of both helmet and suspension system concurrently. In a report on the helmet the board stated: “Research indicated that the ideal shaped helmet is one with a dome-shaped top following the full contour of the head and supplying uniform headroom for indentation, extending down the front to cover the forehead without impairing vision and down the sides as far as possible to be compatible with the rifle, etc., and down the back as far as possible without pushing the helmet forward when in a prone position, and with a frontal plate flanged forward as a cap-style visor and the sides and rear flanged outward to deflect rain from the collar opening. Following these requirements, the designers simply took the M1917A1, acceptable for protecting the top of the head, cut off the brim and added the sides and the front and back flanges.

The addition of a removable insert worn between head and helmet first appeared in 1932 during tests of the failed 5A. In 1940, the Army designers, at the suggestion of General George Patton, turned to the American playing field, borrowing the Riddell suspension system invented and patented by John T. Riddell, owner of a Chicago football supply manufacturing company. The Army Ordnance Department created a plastic impregnated fiber liner containing the Riddell suspension system. Covered with an olive drab cloth and fitted with an adjustable headband, the liner slipped snugly inside the helmet. In February 1941, the Infantry Board reported favorably on the first test helmet with liner designated the TS-3 (Test Section model 3).

The helmet’s outer shell, made of the same Hadfield manganese steel used in the doughboy helmet, acquired new specifications. Tests at the Aberdeen Proving Ground indicated the new helmet “would resist penetration by a 230-grain caliber .45 bullet with a velocity of 800 f.p.s,” an improvement over the old helmet’s resistance to a .45 bullet at 600 f.p.s. The steel outer shell weighed 2.3 pounds, and the liner seven-tenths of a pound for a total of 3 pounds. On April 30, the helmet was standardized, and on June 9, approved as “Helmet, Steel, M1.” The Ordnance Department supervised the procurement and development of the outer shell, while the Quartermaster Department managed the development and production progress of the liner and suspension device. The first contract for the helmets went to the McCord Radiator Company of Detroit, Michigan.

Tests and Modifications

The GIs reacted positively to their new headgear. The M1 helmet not only reduced or eliminated the rocking tendency so well remembered by Secretary Patterson, but also “did not interfere with firing the rifle from any position, did not obscure the field of vision too greatly, and was more comfortable to wear.”

The new helmet’s development corresponded with the Army’s National Guard mobilization and the nation’s first peacetime draft. The Army needed helmets quickly, but new helmet production could not begin until mid-1941. The War Department had no choice but to order the manufacture of 904,020 of the M1917A helmets during the first half of 1941. But the old “tin hat” soon made way for the new “steel pot.” The helmet M1 went into full production in August 1941, and by V-J Day a total of 22,363,045 had rolled off the assembly lines. According to Army historian Harry G. Thomson, it was “a record for quantity production.” The liner, however, traced a slightly rougher history.

A soldier who has also been wounded in the arm and leg shows a medic the piece of shrapnel that penetrated his M1 helmet but failed to cause a potentially fatal injury.

In the summer of 1941, the original liner, developed as a plastic impregnated fiber hat worn under the helmet, proved inadequate. Consequently, the Standardization Branch of the Office of the Quartermaster General (OQMG) enlisted the aid of several private firms to experiment with various plastics. In 1942, a regular plastic liner was developed, although this too had problems. The Army’s Research and Development Branch, the successor to the Standardization Branch, worked diligently to improve the liner by adding an adjustable headband, eliminating pressure points, and coating the liner with textured paint less reflective than the original. Their efforts finally produced a successful liner.

During the first stages of helmet and liner development, the OQMG sought to add a woolen head covering for warmth in winter. A knitted cap was adopted as a standard item in February 1942. But the Chief of Infantry disliked the cap, and in October 1942 the Army began the search for an all-purpose field cap. In the early months of 1943, using a ski cap as a starting point, the OQMG created “a windproof, water-repellent poplin cap with a stiffened sun visor, which gave protection to the eyes without protruding beyond the helmet liner.” Field cap, M1943 along with a new “pile cap of improved military characteristics … designed for wear in extreme cold,” became standard and replaced several different field caps then in use.

A modification to the M1’s chin strap hook fastener resulted after combat experience in the North African campaign. Too rigid, the fastener remained intact when subjected to the concussion of nearby explosions. With the helmet fastened to the chin, the explosion’s impact jerked the head back resulting in fractures and dislocations of the cervical vertebra. Army Ordnance redesigned the strap with a ball and clevis release device that “would remain closed during normal combat activities but would allow for a quick voluntary release or automatic release at pressure considerably below the accepted level of danger.” Subjected to the ordnance engineers’ rigorous and extensive testing, the new ball and clevis device ultimately released at a pull of 15 pounds or more and was standardized in 1944.

Performance as a Helmet and a Steel Pot

During the war, soldiers forced to live off the land with what they had quickly found other uses for the new helmet: a wash basin, cooking pot, and a latrine. Climbing from a foxhole during a barrage was dangerous for any reason. But more important for the average GI, the new helmet proved a lifesaver. A postwar Army report found the M1 helmet cut battle casualties by 8 percent or 76,000 soldiers. More than half would have been killed in action. Sergeant Amelio Pucci of the 11th Airborne Division was one of them.

Necessity is the mother of invention for a soldier who uses his M1 helmet as a sink to wash his hair in August 1944 during a lull in the advance along the Western Front in France.

In February 1945, during the retaking of Corregidor Island in the Philippines, Sergeant Pucci charged a Japanese position; his men saw him go down and noted the round hole in the center of his helmet. When another sergeant asked for Pucci, one of the men said, “He’s dead. Shot through the head.” A few minutes later the “dead” Pucci rose up with a tremendous headache but otherwise unhurt. The bullet’s force had spent itself penetrating the steel helmet and had rattled around between helmet and liner, falling out the back.

When the M1 helmets began rolling off the assembly lines in 1941, the old tin hat, like an old soldier, began to fade away, turning up on the heads of air raid wardens and civil defense workers. But fate dealt a bad hand to the old helmet during the war’s early months. The doughboy helmet, worn victoriously by the AEF in World War I, became emblematic in World War II of surrender and defeat.The photographs of American soldiers on Bataan and Corregidor wearing the M1917A1 helmets, hands raised in surrender, will forever mark the tragic early days of World War II. The old helmet remains a historical marker of America’s military unpreparedness. Similarly, when the United States launched the nation’s first offensive ground action at Guadalcanal, the 1st Marine Division splashed ashore wearing the new M1 steel pot, forever marking the GI helmet as a symbol of victory in World War II.

Originally Published September 2010