About The Great War Society
The Great War Society, incorporated in 1986, is committed to the study of the First World War and
subsequent world events associated with that cataclysm and their importance for our lives today. The journal
of the society, Relevance, is published quarterly. Annual seminars are held at various locations throughout
the country, bringing together members, guests, and renowned scholars to discuss the events of the Great War
in more depth. Information about our seminars and special events like our annual Armistice-Veterans Day
commemorative will be available on the Website, announced in Relevance and distributed in mailings.
The Great War Society is a California nonprofit corporation and is exempt from income taxes under section
501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Contributions to the society are deductible to donors on their
federal and state income tax returns. Also deductible are $30.00 of annual membership dues.
A Message from Our President
NEW VISION - NEW MISSION - NEW RESOLVE
There are several important new pages on our Website recently
posted by Michael Hanlon, editor of the quarterly journal
Relevance and monthly e-newsletter the St. Mihiel Trip-Wire.
Mike and his talented staff have assembled a list of books and Web
links, along with incisive overviews that cover four major aspects
of the Great War: details about the first air war, the first
submarine war, and the first tank war, and why it became the first
true world war. These sections were prepared with the idea of
introducing people to the history of the period, but even long-term
students and enthusiasts should find something of interest:
www.the-great-war-society.org.
On page 33 you will see an advertisement for the society's new
lapel pin. This is just one of the ways we are encouraging pride in
our organization and its goals, and it is a nice
way to show your support that may get
people asking you "What's that?" -- an
opportunity to recruit! Also, let us know
if you did not receive one of our new
bookmarks. Every current member, new
member, and renewal was sent one of
these full-color bookmarks designed by Nic Solberg, the talented
designer who created our new Website and the lapel pin.
Last chance reminder: The Annual Seminar, September 11-13,
is a joint meeting of The Great War Society and the Western Front
Association (USA Branch) at the magnificent National World War
One Museum in Kansas City. The program can be found on page
26, and a registration form can be downloaded at our Website.
Dana Lombardy, President
The Great War Society
Board of Directors:
Dana Lombardy, President
Diane B. Rooney,
Director of Marketing
Thomas F. Olson, Secretary
Robert C. Denison, Treasurer
Salvatore Compagno,
President Emeritus
East Bay Chapter Chairman
Jack P. Creighton,
Director at Large
Robert J. Rudolph,
San Francisco Chap. Chairman
Herbert P. Stickel,
Director at Large
Robert H. Warwick,
Membership Chairman
George E. Young, Jr.,
Director at Large
Communicate with Us Through:
Email: [email protected]
Website:
www.the-great-war-society.org
Mail: Inquiries, Membership and
Submittals for Relevance:
The Great War Society
P.O. Box 18585
Stanford, CA 94309
Annual Membership:
$49 - Receive Printed Version of
Relevance (four issues)
$39 - Quarterly Online Download
of Relevance (four issues)
Payments accepted online at our Website
2
In This Issue
Michael E. Hanlon, Editor
Kimball Worcester, Assistant Editor
Tony Langley, Contributing Editor
Contents
2
5
About The Great War Society
Our organization, Membership, Directors and President's Message
Theme Article - Verdun: The First Air Battle for the Fighter: Part I - Prelude and Opening
Jon Guttman
A leading aviation historian describes a major step in the development and importance of the fighter aircraft
13
The Leaning Virgin of Albert
From our Website
One of the Great War's enduring legends
15
17
Passed by the Censor - Bombing Target Antwerp - August 25, 1914 by E. Alexander Powell
Contributing Editor Tony Langley
Theme Article - A Forgotten Story: The Ottoman Air Force - 1909-1918
1st Lt. Basil H. Aboul-Enein, USAF and Michael W. Ross, PhD, Dr. Med. Sc.
Story of the short-lived effort by the Ottoman Empire to develop a top-rung air service
22
Trivia Challenge - Oh, Canada!
New challenges for you World War I experts
23
List of Eleven - Memorable Women of the Great War
They helped make the world we live in today
24
26
Centerpiece - Bismarck and Prince Wilhelm: Things Are About to Change
2009 Joint Seminar with the Western Front Association-U.S. Branch
September 11-13 – Kansas City, MO. National World War I Museum
"Technology, the Treaty and the World War: From 'Tin Hats' to Tanks and 'Top Hats' to Territories"
27
Theme Article - Evolving Bombing Missions During the Great War
Steve Suddaby
How different air services chose to apply a new technology
34
Tone in e e cummings's The Enormous Room (1922)
Joseph Liggera
A World War I literary classic reexamined
40
Worcester's Flying Circus: Russia's Innovative IL'YA MUROMETS BOMBER
Assistant Editor Kimball Worcester
Continued on Page 4. . .
3
Contents - Continued
42
43
Wartime Humor - The Surprise Attack by Captain Alban Butler, AEF
Discovered by Shane Keil of Cantigny: The First Division Foundation and Museum
Reviews - Literature, Films, and New Media
Edward Brynn, Tony Langley, Len Shurtleff
Ireland, France, and war journalism
46
47
48
Members' Contributions - Our Father/Grandfather Frank Linhart, 75th Inf. Regiment, K.u.K.
George and Jan Linhart
Posters of the Great War
Documentary History
King George V welcomes the Yanks
COPYRIGHT©2009 The Great War Society
From the Editor:
Our president, Dana Lombardy, has asked me to lead the society's effort to assemble a comprehensive bibliography of
the very best books on the First World War. We will be using this as a "recruiting tool" for new members and selling it to
raise funds for our program to commemorate the centennial of the First World War, which is fast approaching. In this
column, I would like to give a status report about the project. First, let me say things have proceeded more slowly than
we would like. I have been busy taking over the production of Relevance, retooling our online newsletter The St. Mihiel
Trip-Wire, and supporting the upgrading of our Website. Some things have been accomplished, however.
We have decided that there will be two major streams of recommended works that we will combine for our final
listing. The favorites of our very well read membership will be a big part of the final work. Also, we are assembling an
expert panel of authors and editors to give us their views and to make sure we don't miss some essential works in their
specialties. Thus far, we have commitments from E.M. (Mac) Coffman, author of the most influential work ever
published on the American Expeditionary Force, The War to End All Wars; mystery novelist of the award-winning
WWI-centered Maisie Dobbs series, Jacqueline Winspear; and Len Shurtleff, former President of the WFA-USA, who,
besides being a frequent contributor of reviews to Relevance and the Trip-Wire, operates the most comprehensive
Website in the world dedicated to the literature of the First World War, Len's Bookshelf.
For the immediate future, I will continue to recruit experts for our advisory panel and build a listing of your favorite
works. To date, 36 of you have sent me titles, or full lists, of your favorite works. Please keep these coming. I'm hoping
to have a thousand recommendations that we can pare down to 101, the very best of the best. To send your recommended
titles, just go to our Website, http://www.the-great-war-society.org/, and look for the email link to my inbox under
"News and Events." Toward the end of the year I will make recommendations to Dana and the Board of Directors as to how
we should publish our final list. We will keep you apprised of the progress of this project, both on these pages and in
our newsletter.
MH
Also at our Website: We have added a scrolling announcement board on the right side of our homepage. Check there
for news on our chapter meetings, November 11th observance and special projects & events:
www.the-great-war-society.org
Cover image: "Ghost Over London" from Kriegstagesbuch (Daily War Book) by Otto Engelhardt-Kyffhäuser.
4
Verdun: The First Air Battle for the Fighter
Part I: Prelude and Opening
Jon Guttman
German Aircraft Patrolling Over the Western Front
When Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia
on July 28, 1914, it began a chain reaction that
escalated, country by country, alliance by
alliance, into a global conflagration. In the
course of that conflict, the evolution of aerial
warfare might also be said to have escalated.
Aerial reconnaissance had existed since the
French use of balloons in 1794, and the first use
of airplanes for that purpose was by the Italians
over Tripoli in 1911. The first tentative thoughts
of monopolizing the air predate that to July 23,
1910, when German pioneer airman August
Euler applied for a patent for a fixed, forwardfiring machine-gun mounting for an airplane,
using a "blowback shock absorber" and a
special gun sight. Later that year French airplane
maker Gabriel Voisin displayed a sketchy mount
for a 37mm naval cannon on one of his pusher
biplanes. In Britain, Captain Bertram Dickson
wrote a memorandum to the standing subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial
Defence, advising that the use of aircraft in time
of war to gather intelligence "would lead to the
inevitable result of a war in the air, for
supremacy of the air, by armed aeroplanes
against each other."
Further experiments with airborne gunnery
followed in the United States and Britain, and as
early as August 22, 1914, Lieutenants Louis
Aubon Strange and L. Penn-Gaskell of No. 5
Squadron, flying a Farman F.20, claimed to have
fired the war's first shots at a German airplane.
Occasional exchanges of pistol and carbine fire
followed, as well as a drastic resort to ramming
on September 8, which resulted in the deaths of
Austro-Hungarian crewmen Franz Malina and
Friedrich Freiherr Rosenthal, as well as the
Russian who attacked them, Piotr Nikolayevich
Nesterov. The first official shoot-down using
firearms occurred on October 5, when French
Voisin 3LA crew Sergent Joseph Frantz and
Sapeur Louis Quénault of Escadrille V.24 used
up their Hotchkiss machine gun ammunition
attacking an Aviatik B.I, after which Quénault
used a rifle to hit the pilot and bring down his
quarry, killing Feldwebel Wilhelm Schlichting
and Oberleutnant Fritz von Zangen of
Feldflieger Abteilung 18.
The Battle of Verdun: Fought February 21 - December
18, 1916, was World War I's longest battle. Its
battlefield remains a place of pilgrimage for the French.
5
In 1915 both sides set their sights on developing
an effective fighter airplane. The best platform
ultimately proved to be a tractor engine singleseat scout with the pilot using his machine gun
by aiming his plane at the enemy. That
arrangement, however, presented the challenge
of firing one's weapon gun without shooting the
propeller off. Early French methods involved
mounting the gun above the upper wing or
attaching steel wedges on the propeller blades to
deflect any rounds that struck it. Using the latter
on a Morane-Saulnier L parasol monoplane in
April 1915, Sergent Roland Garros downed
three German planes in quick succession before
being brought down on the 18th--either due to
engine trouble or an infantryman's rifle bullet
through his fuel line, depending on whose story
one believed. German notions of copying his
deflectors proved unworkable--they might have
been able to deflect copper-jacketed French
bullets, but steel-jacketed German rounds would
shatter them. In any case Anthony Fokker, a
Dutch designer working for the Germans, had a
better idea.
Two Fighter Pioneers:
Roland Garros and Oswald Boelcke
After almost being shot down while rashly
hunting alone in Allied territory, Leutnant
Oswald Boelcke decided that teamwork, rather
than lone exploits, would be necessary if fighters
were to gain a meaningful control of the sky. As
a minimum, he decided that a fighter pilot
should have a wingman flying slightly above
and to his side, guarding his tail. In spite of the
friendly rivalry that developed between them,
Boelcke and Immelmann worked quite
effectively together in this manner. Their scores
were tied at six by January 12, 1916, when both
were awarded the Orden Pour le Mérite.
Since July 15, 1913, Franz Schneider of the Luft
Verkehrs Gesellschaft (LVG) had held a patent
for using a series of cams and rods attached to
the trigger bar, to interrupt the machine gun's
fire whenever the propeller was in its way.
Ultimately adapting this Gestängesteuerung, or
pushrod control as he called it, to the Spandauproduced Maxim LMG 08/15 machine gun,
Fokker produced a series of monoplane
(Eindecker) fighters, the E.I, E.II, and E.III, that
came to dominate the sky from July 1915
through to nearly a year later. In the hands of
aggressive pilots like Leutnant Kurt Wintgens,
Otto Parschau, Max Immelmann and Oswald
Boelcke, the "Fokker Scourge," as the Allies
called it, launched an aerial arms race that
accelerated both the development of the fighter
plane and of tactics for its use.
While the primary French counterpart to the
Fokker Eindeckers came to be the Nieuport 11
and 16 single-seat sesquiplanes, with .30-caliber
Lewis machine guns mounted above the wings,
Britain's Royal Flying Corps was generally
"getting around" the problem by using pusher
aircraft, with the engine in the back driving a
propeller surrounded by a maze of latticework
supporting the tail surfaces. The first such
fighter was the two-seat Vickers F.B.5 Gunbus,
later joined by the Royal Aircraft Factory's
F.E.2b (Farman Experimental) and Geoffrey de
Havilland's Airco D.H.2, a more compact singleseat version of his D.H.1.
6
France's principal scout by the fall of 1915 was
the Nieuport 11 "Bébé," a smaller, single-seat
version of Gustave Delage's Nieuport 10
sesquiplane that had a 80-hp Le Rhône 9C rotary
engine that gave it a then sprightly speed of 88
mph. It was joined later that year by the
Nieuport 16, which mated a 110-hp Le Rhône 9J
engine to the same airframe. This slightly
improved its performance but made the plane
nose heavy, increased wing loading (8.46
pounds per square foot, compared to the 11's 7.4
feet per square foot), and adversely affected
handling overall.
Ever one to set the example, de Rose took to the
air in his own Nieuport 11, bearing a rose on the
fuselage side for easy personal identification.
His zeal had already been matched by several
French airmen before the Bébés arrived,
including N.12's Sergent Jean Navarre, an
unruly individualist whose combative nature fit
the new single-seater like hand in glove. Flying
a Morane-Saulnier N monoplane on October 26,
Navarre had attacked an LVG C.II, firing 100
rounds at ranges of less than 50 meters until its
wounded crew, Unteroffizier Otto Gerold and
Leutnant Paul Buchholz of Fl. Abt. 33, landed
near Jaulgonne. Navarre alighted nearby to see
them taken prisoner.
At N.3, Sergent Georges Guynemer achieved a
personal milestone in Nieuport 11 N836, on the
fuselage of which he applied the legend "Le
Vieux Charles" in reference to Sergent Charles
Bonnard, a popular squadron mate who had
transferred to the Macedonian front. On
February 3, 1916, Guynemer used it to shoot an
LVG down in German lines near Roye. "I had
my fifth," he wrote afterward. "I was really in
luck, for less than ten minutes later another
plane, sharing the same lot, spun downward with
the same grace, taking fire as it fell through the
clouds." German records note only one fatality
from the combat--Leutnant Heinrich Zwenger, an
observer of Fl. Abt. 27, killed between Roye and
Chaulnes-but both LVGs were confirmed.
Guynemer downed another at Herbecourt on the
5th, again killing the observer, Leutnant Rudolf
Lumblatt of Fl. Abt. 9.
Nieuport 11 (Bébé)
The availability of the Nieuport 11 at a time
when the Eindeckers were threatening to
dominate the sky led to the next logical step.
Born on October 15, 1876, cavalry Leutnant
Jean Baptiste Marie Charles, Baron de
Tricornot, Marquis de Rose, was one of the first
French officers to embrace airplanes as the new
Pegasus, training on Caudrons at Pau to qualify
for his civilian license on December 12, 1910,
and for Military Brevet No.1 on February 7,
1911. The late summer of 1915 found him a
major in charge of the air assets of the Ve Armée
when he ordered Escadrille MS.12 to re-equip
with Bébés. On September 23, the unit was fully
restocked and redesignated N.12, the first singleseat fighter squadron in history.
7
Another early Nieuport fighter unit was C.65,
which was originally formed at Lyon-Bron on
August 2, 1915 as an "escadrille provisoire de
chasse," with two Nieuport 11s, three Nieuport
12 two-seaters, and three Caudron G.4s. The
unit's first success, an enemy plane forced to
land on October 16, involved a two-seater crew.
The next involved a recent arrival in the
escadrille. Adjutant Charles Eugène Jules Marie
The observer whose fall Nungesser witnessed
was Leutnant Wilhelm von Kalkreuth of Brief
A.M., whose body was found at Nomeny. His
pilot, Vizefeldwebel August Blank, crashed at
Mailly. Nungesser had trouble eating and
sleeping for some time after that, but he
eventually got over it--and was subsequently
made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur.
Nungesser was an athletic man of the world who
had raced cars, boxed, and learned to fly while
in Argentina before the war. During the early
days of the war, Nungesser had served with
distinction with the 2ème Régiment des
Hussards, earning the Médaille Militaire before
transferring into aviation in November 1914 and
earning his military pilot's brevet on 17 March
1915. Assigned to VB.106, he flew 53 bombing
missions in a Voisin 3, the front nacelle of
which he personalized with a black skull and
crossbones. In the early morning hours of July
31, Nungesser and his mechanic, Roger Pochon,
went up in a new Voisin 3LA armed with a
Hotchkiss machine gun--an unauthorized flight,
since he was supposed to be on standby duty that
night--but as fortune would have it, they caught
five Albatros two-seaters staging a night raid on
Nancy and sent one down to crash. For deserting
his post, Nungesser was confined to his quarters
for eight days. For downing the enemy plane he
received the Croix de Guerre and later a
transfer to train in Nieuports.
By the end of 1915 neither side had made
significant progress on the Western Front, but
both sides had developed reasonably effective
fighting scouts. The next year would see a
number of attempts to break the deadlock on the
ground--and with them, the new fighters would
be put to the test in the first serious attempts to
achieve control of the sky above the battlefield.
Arriving at N.65 in November 1915, Nungesser
was assigned Nieuport 16 N880. Shortly after
taking off for a gunnery training flight on
November 28, Nungesser spotted two Albatros
two-seaters crossing the lines near Nomeny.
Climbing to 8,000 feet and placing the sun at his
back, he attacked. One of the Germans fled, but
the other put up a spirited fight until Nungesser,
using his last ammunition drum at a range of 30
feet, finally drove it down in a dive.
French Aerodrome, Verdun Sector
What Nungesser saw next took much of the
luster out of his second victory. "The observer,
still alive, clung desperately to the mounting
ring to which his machine gun was attached," he
reported. "Suddenly the mounting ripped loose
from the fuselage and was flung into space,
taking with it the helpless crewman. He clawed
frantically at the air, his body working convulsively
like a man on a trapeze. I had a quick glimpse
of his face before he tumbled away through the
clouds…it was a mask of horror."
8
The first began on the morning of February 21,
1916, when the old fortresses around Verdun-surMeuse came under a 10-hour artillery
bombardment, followed by an offensive
involving some 150,000 troops. Conceived by
German Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn,
the push was expected to overrun the weakened
defenses in that sector with an attack from three
sides. After some initial successes in the first
few days, however, the arrival of the French XX
Corps to bolster the shaken 30,000 defenders of
the XXX Corps, followed on February 25 by the
arrival of General Henri Philippe Pétain's IIe
Armée, slowed the German advance. By the 29th
the German momentum was faltering and 90,000
French reinforcements, as well as 23,000 tons of
ammunition, were arriving via their sole railroad
through Bar-le-Duc.
At the start of the Verdun battle the staff officer
in charge of the German 5. Armee's air arm,
Hauptmann Wilhelm Haehnelt, had 168 aircraft
at his disposal. Of those, only 21 were Fokker
and Pfalz monoplanes, which operated with
KEKs based at Avillers, Jametz, and Cunel.
Haehnelt's original strategy was for the fighters
to patrol the front constantly to form a Sperre, or
"blockade" against any French aircraft trying to
penetrate airspace over the 5. Armee. This task
was impossible for the Eindeckers, making it
necessary to supplement their numbers with twoseaters drawn from the Kampfgeschwader der
Obersten Heeresleitung (army command battle
wings) or Kagohls. Even then, constant
patrolling took its toll on the Eindeckers' rotary
engines, which could not stand up to the same
sustained activity that their more conventional
water-cooled contemporaries could.
German Eindecker Downed by Allies
At that point, Falkenhayn altered his strategy
from one of conventional breakthrough to a
battle of attrition, in which he expected the
Germans, using their superior positioning and
firepower, to bleed the French army white. What
it became was the longest and most agonizing
battle of the war. As such, Verdun also became
the crucible of the war's first deliberate effort to
achieve control above the battlefield through the
massed concentration of air assets.
While the French army reeled under the shock of
the German onslaught on February 21, its air
arm had the best of that first day, suffering two
men wounded and four injured, but claiming
eight German aircraft, of which half were
confirmed. Among the latter was a two-seater
claimed but not confirmed to Adjutant Jean
Navarre, recently transferred from N.12 to N.67.
While the French and British had already begun
equipping entire squadrons with scouts or twoseat fighters, the most specialized fighting unit
the Germans had by February 1916 was the
Kampf Einsitzer Kommando, or KEK. Created
originally by Inspektor Major Friedrich Stempel,
the staff officer in charge of aviation to Prince
Rupprecht of Bavaria's 6. Armee, the KEKs
consisted of two to four Fokker or Pfalz
Eindeckers that were no longer attached to
reconnaissance or artillery spotting Flieger
Abteilungen. Officially tasked with
Luftwachtdienst (aerial guard duty), the Fokkers
had a freer hand to roam the front and eliminate
whatever Allied planes they encountered.
Navarre scored a double victory on Febrary 26,
when he shot down a two-seater and an
escorting Fokker E.III of Kampfstaffel (or Kasta)
4 at Drienne-sur-Meuse, where Leutnants Georg
Heine and Alfons von Zeddelmann died and the
observer, Oberleutnant Heinrich Kempf, was
taken prisoner. That brought Navarre's score up
to five, and for the first time the French were
referring to him as an as or "ace," although two
earlier pilots, Adolphe Pégoud (killed on
August 31, 1915) and Eugène Gilbert, had been
credited with five aerial victories each well
before him.
9
Flying relentlessly in search of new prey,
Navarre soon acquired an additional sobriquet,
"la Sentinelle de Verdun." Ever the individualist-with more than a soupçon of ego--he advertised
his presence to the poilus he supported by
painting the fuselage of one of his Nieuport 11s
red and that of another, N576, in blue, white,
and red bands like the French flag. On March 2,
he brought another Albatros down between
Fleury and Fort Douaumont, where its wounded
occupants were taken prisoner.
observation post that would telephone his
aerodrome of any French plane's approach. Upon
being alerted, Boelcke or one of his men could
scramble up to intercept the intruder, thus
conserving fuel and lubricant for the plane, to
say nothing of time and energy for the pilot. The
success of Boelcke's system at Verdun did not
go unnoticed, becoming the German fighter
defense model for the rest of the war.
March 12 saw N.3's recently commissioned SousLieutenant Georges Guynemer score his eighth
success over an LVG near Thiescourt, killing
Unteroffizier Friedrich Ackermann and Leutnant
Friedrich Marquardt of Fl. Abt. 61. On the same
day, Boelcke drove a Farman of MF.63 down
just outside of French lines, where its dead pilot
and wounded observer were recovered, but it
was subsequently destroyed by German artillery
fire. Adjutant Auguste Metaire of N.49 was also
driven down wounded in French lines by another
rising Fokker star attached to Kagohl 1,
Leutnant Otto Parschau.
More future French aces opened their accounts
in March. On the 8th, Adjutant Pierre Henri
Edmond Dufaur de Gavardie of N.12 scored his
first of an eventual six victories over
Warmeriville and Lieutenant Paul Louis
Malavialle of N.69 downed an LVG over Étain-his first of five. Also having his baptism of fire
with N.69 was Aspirant Pierre Navarre, Jean's
twin brother, driving down an enemy plane near
Verdun that was only counted as a "probable."
In a second, combat minutes later, Navarre
himself came down wounded in French lines. He
was probably the first victory for Oberleutnant
Hans Berr, who would ultimately score 10 with
KEK Avillers, earn the Orden Pour le Mérite
and command his unit when it expanded into
Jagdstaffel 5, only to die in a mid-air collision
with a squadron mate on April 6, 1917.
On March 11, Oswald Boelcke reported for duty
at KEK Jametz. He had, in fact, been detached
from Fl. Abt. 62 for duty over Verdun at the
onset but was grounded by what he called "some
stupid intestinal trouble." Upon recovery, he got
Hauptmann Haehnelt's permission to establish
his own Kommando at Sivry, north of Verdun,
for two and, later, three Fokkers.
Boelcke, whose score then stood at nine,
recognized the inherent flaws in the Sperre
concept and, as he would do several times in
future, devised his own solution. With Sivry
lying just 11 kilometers behind the front, he
established direct contact with a forward
10
On March 13 Boelcke engaged a Nieuport
that had been attacking a two-seater over Fort
Douaumont and drove it off, coinciding
intriguingly with the fact that while attacking
another LVG that day, French ace Guynemer
was hit twice in the arm and wounded in the face
and scalp by fragments from his windscreen.
Boelcke than spotted what he described as
Voisin bombers heading toward Dun-Sur-Meuse
and attacked a straggler. As he closed in from
the rear, he reported seeing its observer climb
out onto the wing and wave at him trying, he
believed, to keep the crippled plane on an even
keel. Boelcke had to disengage when another
enemy plane attacked him, but later saw his
victim crash in French lines. Escadrille BM.118
lost a Breguet-Michelin 5 bomber that day
whose crewmen, Sergent Alphonse Vitry and
Brigadier Augereau, were both wounded. It is
also intriguing to note that French artist Henri
Farré painted a similar (or the same?) incident,
in which the Breguet's desperate observer lies
prone on the wing, clear of the pusher's airscrew,
shooting at the Fokker with his carbine.
He certainly did not have to tell de Rose twice.
By March 15, the major had responded by
concentrating his scout escadrilles around the
Verdun-Bar-le-Duc sector in provisional hunting
groups, or Groupes de Chasse Provisoires. One
consisted of N.65 and N.67 supporting the IIe
Armée from Bar-le-Duc, with N.23 serving as a
reserve at Vadelaincourt. N.15 and N.69, also at
Bar-le-Duc, were tasked with driving off
German aircraft in the Xe Armée sector. N.57
soon joined the effort from Lemmes. Instead of
conducting barrage patrols in certain assigned
sectors, all of these units were to aggressively
seek out and destroy any enemy plane they saw,
a shade of difference that was welcomed by the
budding fighter pilots.
March 14 saw foreign volunteers in the fore, as
Sous-Lieutenant Leith Jensen, a Dane in
Escadrille N.31, downed an enemy plane over
Montfaucon, and Sergent Viktor Georgyevich
Federov, an aggressive Russian Caudron G.4
pilot with C.42 who the French were calling the
"Don Cossack of the Air," was credited with his
second in cooperation with Soldat Pierre Lanero.
De Rose, actively serving alongside his fighters,
claimed a German over Verdun, too far in
enemy territory to be confirmed. But the French
lost at least two Caudron G.4s that day, one
being credited to Hans Berr.
In spite of the accumulation of odd French
successes, the Fokkers, between their Sperre
flights and Boelcke's alert system, were
managing to interfere so effectively with French
reconnaissance missions that General Pétain felt
compelled to issue a significant order to his
chief of air operations: "De Rose, I am blind,
sweep the skies for me."
At 1500 hours on March 18, 23 Farmans,
Breguets, and Caudrons left Belfort to bomb the
German Alsatian town of Mühlhausen. When
they arrived, they found Fokker E.III monoplane
and new D.III biplane fighters waiting to
intercept them, courtesy of a Kampf-EinsitzerKommando detached from Fl. Abt. 68, based at
Habsheim. Led by Leutnant Otto Pfälzer, KEK
Habsheim consisted of Feldwebel Karl
Weingärtner, Unteroffizier Willy Glinkermann
and Vizefeldwebel Ernst Udet.
Told that there were two Allied planes
approaching, Udet was astonished to face 23 but
dived his Fokker E.III 105/16 into the middle of
the formation, fired at a Farman and saw it go
down in flames. Maréchal-des-Logis Edouard
Leroy of MF.29 went down with it, but his
observer, Capitaine Emile Victor Bacon, jumped
or fell from the plane, right in front of Udet.
Regaining his shaken composure, Udet attacked
a Caudron and disabled one of its engines, but
his gun jammed before he could finish it. It was
the first of 62 victories for Germany's future
second-ranking ace.
Our Contributor's Latest Book
11
All three of Udet's comrades claimed a Farman
as well---one in flames--but Pfälzer's was
disallowed, and indeed only three French aircraft
failed to return from the raid. In contrast to the
Germans' strict confirmation criteria, Escadrilles
MF.29 and MF.123 claimed four enemy planes
in the action, three of them Fokkers, but all of
the fighters returned to Habsheim. Their only
loss was an AEG G.II of Royal Bavarian Fl. Abt.
48, also based at Habsheim, which had joined
the action, only to collide with the Farman
crewed by Caporal Henri Rins of MF.29 and
Sergent Robert Dubar of MF.123, killing both
Frenchmen along with German
Offizierstellvertreter Fritz Hopfgarten, Leutnant
der Reserve Walter Kurth and Vizefeldwebel
Max Wallat.
were probably not victims of a scout but the
third victory for Caudron pilot Federov and the
second for his observer, Lanero. The day before
that, another Russian temporarily attached to
N.23, 35-year-old Adjutant Eduard Martynovich
Pulpe, had scored his third.
The Habsheim raid served notice that airplanes
could attack cities en masse--and that airplanes
were equally capable of making the bombers pay
for doing so. It also reinforced what everyone
was coming to realize, that single-seat scouts
made more effective interceptors than twinengine, multi-place "battleplanes."
March 31 saw a two-seater shared among no
fewer than three foreign volunteers in N.23--the
third victory for Swiss-born Sergent Théophile
Ingold, the third for Dutch Sergent Paul de Ram,
and the fourth for Pulpe before his return to
Russia. N.23 later lost its Swiss member when
Ingold was wounded in action on July 16, dying
of his injuries three days later.
On March 30, Federov--again with Lanero
manning the gun--was credited with his fourth
victory, but on April 3 he was wounded, and he
subsequently returned to Russia. There he would
be involved in the 1917 Revolution, but in spite
of his socialist convictions he became
disillusioned with the Bolsheviks and returned to
France in 1918, to score his ace-making fifth in
a more appropriate milieu--the cockpit of a singleseat SPAD XIII with Spa.89.
Back at Verdun, Navarre destroyed a two-seater
at Vigneville that day, killing Oberleutnants
Heinrich von Blanc and Robert Framich of
Kagohl 1, while Sergent Jean Chaput of N.31 an
LVG in flames at Les Eparges, his second of 16
victories.
Amid the activities of March 19, Boelcke
attacked two Farmans bombing German
positions on the Meuse and sent one crashing in
pieces in the German trenches near Douaumont,
killing Sergent Pierre Galiment and Leutnant
Jacques Marie Libman of MF.19. Two days
later, exploding anti-aircraft shells guided
Boelcke to a Voisin bomber that was engaging a
German two-seater. His gunfire caused the
French plane's fuel tank to explode, killing
Leutnant Jean Antonioli and Capitaine Félix
Le Crouart of VB.109. Oddly, the only German
loss on the 21st, Unteroffiizer Artur Reuschling
and Hauptmann Ernst Erdmann of Fl. Abt. 65,
End of Part 1
In the Fall 2009 issue of Relevance Jon Guttman
describes the increasingly intense struggle for air
supremacy over the Verdun battlefield, a tale
that includes the arrival of the Escadrille
Américaine . This article is an excerpt from Jon's
The Origins of the Fighter Aircraft published in
July 2009 by Westholme Publishing. It can be
ordered at Amazon.com or from the publisher at
1-800-621-2736.
French Ace Charles Nungesser
12
From Our
THE LEANING VIRGIN OF ALBERT
The starting point for any tour of the Somme battlefields, Albert is a small town in the province of Picardy. It found itself in the heart of some of the hottest action on the Western
Front throughout the Great War. Unfortunately, Albert had one target that towered over it,
making it an excellent observation post for whoever occupied it and an irresistible target for
opposing gunners. Twenty years earlier the town fathers, attempting to turn the community
into a destination for Christian pilgrims, had built an impressive Romanesque basilica crowned
with a gilded statue of the Virgin Mary holding up her baby son to God. The Virgin also appears
to be lame, an apparent message of the power of prayer for the handicapped.
The Albert Basilica Now and Then
During the early days of the war German artillery shelled the basilica, trying to knock it
down and prevent the French artillery spotters from using it. They succeeded only in
dislodging the statue of Mary, which by 1916 hung at a precarious angle just below the horizontal. This was just too visible and too heavenly connected for the soldiers passing through
the town. The Legend of the Leaning [or Hanging] Virgin was born.
The British version was that whoever knocked her down would lose the war, the Germans
apparently believing the opposite. Another version of the legend had it that the fall of the
Virgin would signal the end of the war. The details of the various versions seem secondary to
the belief by troops of all sides that the Virgin's natural descent was halted temporarily by a
divine hand so its final destruction could mark the war's end. It must have provided a double
psychic reassurance that the forces of Heaven had taken an interest in protecting the Virgin
and her child and would eventually take steps to end the suffering on the battlefield.
13
Interestingly, the man most responsible for finally knocking down the Leaning Virgin survived
the war and shared his tale many years later:
I have read with great interest Mr. Harvey's article
[in Air Pictorial magazine]. . .On page 136 there is a
picture of Albert Cathedral as it stood in 1917, and Mr.
Harvey makes a note that legend had it that the
monument's fall would herald the end of the war.
In 1918 I was on the staff of the 5th Corps, Heavy
Artillery, and an Army Order had been issued that no
more buildings were to be demolished by gunfire. One
early morning we had a telephone message from the
infantry colonel of the battalion holding the line quite
near to the Cathedral to the effect that he was
suffering heavy loss from machine gun-fire from the
cathedral tower, and he asked that we should blow the
place to blazes. My general was out on reconnaissance
work, and my brigade major was absent at the time so
I (quite a young captain) was in charge. Realizing the
Army Order and knowing that I should get no
satisfaction from Army H.Q., I chose one of the 8-in.
batteries in the corps, worked out some imaginary
trenches well beyond the cathedral, and then ordered
the major of this battery to fire a couple of hundred
rounds at these imaginary trenches, knowing full well
that the line of fire would go clean through the
cathedral!
The major was thrilled with this order and it was duly
carried out and the cathedral tower and most of the
surrounding cathedral was blown to hell, thus probably
saving the lives of many of our infantry.
Albert Basilica - 2008
F. G. Petch, M.C., Vice-President of the Air League,
London, E.C.2.
The succinct background summary is quoted in part from the Website: THE LIFE AND TIMES
OF A HERO: The Battle of the Somme from the Letters of William George Ashby
Bentley, 2nd Hampshires.
Petch's account is From Air Pictorial, Vol. 30, No. 7
Visit our Legends & Traditions at: www.worldwar1.com/heritage/
14
Bombing Target Antwerp: August 25, 1914
E. Alexander Powell
At eleven minutes past one o'clock on the
morning of August 25 death came to Antwerp
out of the air. Some one had sent a bundle of
English and American newspapers to my room
in the Hotel St. Antoine and I had spent the
evening reading them, so that the bells of the
cathedral had already chimed one o'clock when I
switched off my light and opened the window.
As I did so my attention was attracted by a
curious humming overhead, like a million
bumblebees. I leaned far out of the window, and
as I did so an indistinct mass, which gradually
resolved itself into something resembling a
gigantic black cigar, became plainly apparent
against the purple-velvet sky. I am not good at
estimating altitudes, but I should say that when I
first caught sight of it, it was not more than a
thousand feet above my head--and my room was
on the top floor of the hotel, remember. As it
drew nearer the noise, which had at first
reminded me of a swarm of angry bees, grew
louder, until it sounded like an automobile with
the muffler open. Despite the darkness there was
no doubting what it was. It was a German
Zeppelin.
Even as I looked something resembling a falling
star curved across the sky. An instant later came
a rending, shattering crash that shook the hotel
to its foundations, the walls of my room rocked
and reeled, about me, and for a breathless
moment I thought that the building was going to
Zeppelin Over Antwerp
15
collapse. Perhaps thirty seconds later came
another splitting explosion, and another, and
then another--ten in all--each, thank Heaven, a
little farther removed. It was all so sudden, so
utterly unexpected, that it must have been quite a
minute before I realized that the monstrous thing
hovering in the darkness overhead was one of
the dirigibles of which we had read and talked so
much, and that it was actually raining death
upon the sleeping city from the sky. I suppose it
was blind instinct that caused me to run to the
door and down the corridor with the idea of
getting from Zeppelins. But before I had gone a
dozen paces I had my nerves once more in hand.
"Perhaps it isn't a Zeppelin, after all," I argued to
myself. "I may have been dreaming. And how
perfectly ridiculous I should look if I were to
dash downstairs in my pajamas and find that
nothing had happened. At least I'll go back and
put some clothes on." And I did. No fireman,
responding to a night alarm, ever dressed
quicker. As I ran through the corridors the doors
of bedrooms opened and sleepy-eyed, tousleheaded diplomatists and Government officials
called after me to ask if the Germans were
bombarding the city.
Bourse, barely two hundred yards in a straight
line from my window. A hole was not merely
blown through the roof, as would have been the
case with a shell from a field-gun, but the three
upper stories simply crumbled, disintegrated,
came crashing down in an avalanche of brick
and stone and plaster, as though a Titan had hit it
with a sledge-hammer. Another shell struck in
the middle of the Poids Public, or public
weighing-place, which is about the size of
Russell Square in London. It blew a hole in the
cobblestone pavement large enough to bury a
horse in; one policeman on duty at the far end of
the square was instantly killed and another had
both legs blown off.
"They are," I answered, without stopping. There
was no time to explain that for the first time in
history a city was being bombarded from the air.
I found the lobby rapidly filling with scantily
clad guests, whose teeth were visibly chattering.
A converted commercial airship, LZ 17, made
the attack, dropping 1800 lbs of bombs this night.
The mission leader was Ernst Lehman, who
would survive the war, later to command the
doomed Hindenburg at Lakehurst, New Jersey
in 1937.
Guided by the hotel manager and accompanied
into the street, never stopping to reason, of
course, that there was no protection by half a
dozen members of the diplomatic corps
in pajamas, I raced upstairs to a sort of
observatory on the hotel roof. I remember that
one attaché of the British Legation, ordinarily a
most dignified person, had on some sort of a
night-robe of purple silk and that when he
started to climb the iron ladder of the fire-escape
he looked for all the world like a burglarious
suffragette.
By the time we reached the roof of the hotel
Belgian high-angle and machine-guns were
stabbing the darkness with spurts of flame, the
troops of the garrison were blazing away with
rifles, and the gendarmes in the streets were
shooting wildly with their revolvers: the noise
was deafening. Oblivious of the consternation
and confusion it had caused, the Zeppelin, after
letting fall a final bomb, slowly rose and
disappeared in the upper darkness. The
destruction wrought by the German projectiles
was almost incredible. The first shell, which I
had seen fall, struck a building in the Rue de la
16
. . .As a result of this night of horror, Antwerp,
to use an inelegant but descriptive expression,
developed a violent case of the jim-jams. The
next night and every night thereafter until the
Germans came in and took the city, she thought
she saw things; not green rats and pink snakes,
but large, sausage-shaped balloons with bombs
dropping from them. The military authorities-for the city was under martial law--screwed
down the lid so tight that even the most rabid
prohibitionists and social reformers murmured.
As a result of the precautionary measures which
were taken, Antwerp, with its four hundred
thousand inhabitants, became about as cheerful a
place of residence as a country cemetery on a
rainy evening. At eight o'clock every street light
was turned off, every shop and restaurant and
cafe closed, every window darkened. If a light
was seen in a window after eight o'clock the
person who occupied that room was in grave
danger of being arrested for signaling to the
enemy.
A Forgotten Story:
The Ottoman Air Force - 1909-1918
1st LT. Basil H. Aboul-Enein, MS, MPH, USAF, BSC 1, and
Michael W. Ross, PhD, Dr.Med.Sc.
Among all major world powers of the 20th
century, the Ottoman Air Force (Osmanli Hava
Kuvvettleri) was conceivably one of the most
short-lived air force organizations that saw
active combat. Founded in June of 1909,
it was possibly the oldest combat aviation
organization known. As a result of realizing the
importance and inevitable significance of air
power prior to World War I, the Ottoman armed
forces began actively training their officers in
aviation and combat flights. Turkish officers
were sent to Europe to attend the 1910 International Air Navigation Conference in Paris (1).
coast to Algeria as well as the Balkans, most
of which was lost in wars of national
liberation and European influence in the second
half of the 19th century. By 1909, with its
capital at Constantinople (modern day Istanbul),
the Ottoman Empire was ruled by Sultan
Mehmed V, although his absolute power was
limited following the revolution of 1908. During
the First World War it was governed by a
triumvirate known as the Three Pashas: Enver
Pasha, Talat Pasha, and Cemal Pasha. The
Sultanate was abolished in 1922, and the
remnants of the Ottoman Empire in Asia Minor
became modern Turkey. Mahmut Sevket Pasha,
the Ottoman Minister of Defense, supported the
notion of a military aviation program as a subdivision of the Ottoman military. He established the
first Air Branch in the Ottoman armed forces in
1911. He sent Turkish officers Fesa and Yusuf
Kenan, who received the highest maneuvering
points in a piloting test, to France to study at
the Blériot flight school.
The Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century
(nicknamed “The Sick Man of Europe”), before
the start of World War I, covered most of what is
is now known as the Middle East. This consisted
of Asia Minor, the Arabian peninsula, Mesopotamia, Palestine, the Red Sea down to modern day
Yemen, and adjacent coasts. By the end of the
17th century, at the height of its power, it had
also comprised much of the North African
17
In 1911 Lt.Col Süreyya
Ilmen founded the aviation
commission in Constantinople.
Thus, the history of the
Ottoman Air Force began in
1911. His thesis from the
military academy was titled
“Airplanes,” and he was
Lt.Col. Ilmen
appointed head of the
air forces as a subdivision of the Ottoman
Armed Forces. By 1912 eight more officers
were sent to France, including Fazil Bey, to
receive French aviation diplomas (1). The first
airfield was set up at the village of Yesilköy in
Constantinople (today it is the site of Atatürk
International Airport). Two hangars were built
and the two officers who had gone to France
returned with two Deperdussin aircraft, one
military and the other a trainer (2). With the
establishment of the Air Academy in Constantinople (Hava Okulu) on July 3 1912, the Empire
began training its own officers, and by 1913
the world's first specialized reconnaissance
training program was activated by the Academy
and the first separate reconnaissance division
was established (1).
The young Ottoman Air Force almost
immediately saw action in the Balkan War from
September 1912 to October 1913. Although the
Air Force was still in its infancy, it proved very
effective in combat reconnaissance. One Turkish
An Ottoman Aircraft
During the Balkan War
of 1912
18
pilot, Fethi Bey, became legendary for his
aviation reconnaissance. It was during this war
that the first balloon company was established at
Yesilköy, located along the Marmara Sea about
seven miles west of Constantinople (2). When the
Turko-Italian War broke out in Libya, Turkish
forces there were attacked by Italian warplanes
(the first ever use of aircraft in war). During the
war with Libya, the Italians used aircraft for
reconnaissance and dropped bombs on Turkish
military units. The Ottoman Army had the
distinction of being the first ever to be bombed
from the air. On the other hand, the same
Turkish forces had the honor of being the first
to force down a warplane. Two senior Turkish
officers, the commanding officer of the aviation
forces, Lt. Col. Süreyya Bey and Engineer
Major Mehmet Ali, were sent to Europe to
obtain aircraft and arrange for pilot training.
Among other places, the two officers visited
England, and there acquired two Bristol Bomber
aircraft and two vehicles for aircraft transportation (2).
Upon mobilization in August 1914, the Ottoman
military had a total of eight planes assigned to
operational units and a further four assigned to
the flying school in Yesilköy. Among these
airplanes, only six were operational: two were
sent to eastern Turkey, and four remained at
Yesilköy. Although the Turks had used aircraft
for several years by now and had seen them used
for military purposes in the Libyan and Balkan
Wars, the cost of aircraft acquisition forbade
expansion (3).
In January 1915 the German military dispatched
Oberleutnant Erich Serno and a staff of 12
German aviation personnel to organize the
Ottoman Air Force. In order to make up pilot
and observer shortages in Ottoman squadrons,
Oberleutnant Serno’s men were sent out and
assigned directly to Ottoman squadrons. Early
operations were conducted mostly in the west
and south where weather conditions favored
flying. In the spring and summer of 1915, most
Turkish air operations consisted of
reconnaissance flights, in particular during the
British defeat at Gallipoli. The Turks frequently
flew over the British naval bases on Limnos and
Imroz Islands in the northern part of the Aegean
Sea. These sorties were flown, under the urgent
request of Generalleutnant Otto Liman von
Sanders, the German general who served as
adviser and military commander for the Ottoman
Empire, to investigate British preparation and
amphibious landing capabilities. By the end of
1915 there were a total of seven flying
squadrons in the Ottoman Air Force at the
following stations (4):
The military aviation structure of the Ottoman
armed forces was largely decentralized. The
units were organized into formations called
Tayyare Bolugu (flying detachments or aviation
squadrons). Each squadron normally had
between two to eight aircraft assigned, as this
was the maximum that the primitive logistics
system could support. When deployed, the
squadron did not come under any system of
centralized control but were under the tactical
command of the army or corps responsible for a
tactical area. The lack of a centralized air
command greatly hampered Ottoman air
operations since the fighting units fell under the
tactical command of the local commander, were
controlled operationally by the area army
commander, and finally were responsible to the
staffs in Constantinople for administrative and
logistical matters. In essence, the aviation arm of
the Ottoman Army was always a branch of the
general staff structure, and it never matured into
an independent arm or corps as it did in other
nations (3).
●
●
●
●
●
●
Squadrons 1 and 6 (Gallipoli)
Squadron 2 (Mesopotamia)
Squadron 3 (Uzunköprü, Western Thrace
of Turkey)
Squadron 4 (Adana, southeast of the
Taurus Mountains)
Squadron 5 (Constantinople)
Squadron 7 (Caucasia)
In order to man these squadrons, the Turks had
seven army pilots, three navy pilots, and three
civilian pilots. There were also 11 Ottoman
observers on duty and 23 Ottoman personnel
receiving training at Yesilköy. To compensate
for the pronounced shortage of Ottoman aviation
personnel, the squadrons at Gallipoli grew
decidedly heavy with German flyers. All
German aviators at this time wore Ottoman
uniforms when on duty. At the end of 1915 the
Ottoman Aviators from WWI
19
Turkish Pilots Pose Before
an Albatros Fighter
of Wisdom (1935) gives numerous descriptions
of the reconnaissance and bombing activities
of the Ottoman Air Force on the Medina front
and later in Palestine, for example:
German military assistance began to provide
increasing numbers of aircraft as well as
technical advice. The following aircraft were in
operation at this time:
●
●
●
●
●
Albatros B.I, C.I, C.III
Rumpler B.I; LVG B.I
Fokker E.I, E.III
Gotha LD.2, WD.I, WD.2
Pfalz AII
Unfortunately, the two escaped machines
had had time to go to Deraa, and return,
feeling spiteful. One was not clever and
dropped his four bombs from a height,
missing us widely. The other swooped low,
placing one bomb each time with the
utmost care. We crept on defenselessly,
slowly, among the stones, feeling like
sardines in a doomed tin, as the bombs fell
closer. One sent a shower of small stuff
through the driving slit of the car, but only
cut our knuckles. One tore off a front tire,
and nearly lurched the car over (8).
The total number of operational Ottoman
air squadrons had grown to 12 in 1916,
including a diminutive naval aviation unit. In
April 1917, the Turks had five aircraft in the
First Army, five in the Second Army, six in the
Third Army, five in the Fourth Army, 9 in the
Fifth Army, and 13 in the Sixth Army.
Numerically, the emphasis in the air in 1917 was
predominantly against the British in Palestine
(Fourth Army) and in Mesopotamia (Sixth
Army) and against possible future operations in
the Dardanelles (Fifth Army). They even served
on the Arabian Peninsula suppressing the revolt
led by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia).
An additional four German squadrons were
organized in Germany in July of 1917 for
service in the Ottoman Empire and became
operational in the Middle East in November
1917 (5). Lawrence in his Seven Pillars
We fitted admirably under a outcrop of
rock, fissured into deep natural trenches,
on the hill’s southern face. There we
waited coolly for the bomb: but it was only
a reconnaissance machine, a Pfalz, which
studied us, and returned to Deraa with its
news. Bad news it must have been, for
three two-seaters, and four scouts and an
old yellow-bellied Albatros got up in quick
succession, and circled over us, dropping
bombs, or diving at us with machine-gun
fire (9).
20
perhaps even a submarine, in the Aegean and the
shooting down of numerous British, French, and
Russian aircraft (2).
By 1918 the Turks had received a substantial
number of German aircraft: 37 in 1915, 72 in
1916, 108 in 1917, and 79 in 1918 including six
seaplanes. As Lawrence noted, many of these
were flown by German pilots. In July 1918
Serno’s office was renamed as the General
Inspectorate of the Air Force. Air operations in
the Turkish theaters would remain
inconsequential when compared with the
Western Front and most of the Turkish air
operations revolved around reconnaissance and
some limited bombing. In January 1918 the
battle cruiser Yavuz Sultan Selim (ex-German
SMS Goeben) enjoyed air support for its
indecisive sortie from the Dardanelles. Of
particular note was the loss of air parity on the
Palestine front in late summer 1918. During
Allenby’s great offensive at Meggido and in
Syria, the British paid special attention to
denying the Turks the capability to conduct
aerial reconnaissance. This greatly damaged
Liman von Sanders’s ability to accurately gauge
Allenby’s deception operations of September,
1918. Unable to observe, aerial squadrons were
likewise unable to protect the army from Allied
air attacks. Hence, retreating Ottoman forces
were mercilessly bombed from the air. At the
end of the war, the Turks had approximately two
hundred aircraft in varying conditions of
operability. Although no Ottoman pilots became
aces, both pilots and observers did shoot down
numerous enemy aircraft through the duration of
the Great War (6). Among the notable actions by
Turkish and German pilots in the Ottoman Air
Force was the sinking of several British ships,
With the end of the World War I and the
occupation of Constantinople and the looming
of revolution by group of aroused young Turks
led by Mustafa Kemal (Kemal Atatürk), the
Ottoman Air Force was disbanded. All
personnel, including pilots and teachers, were
either relieved of duty or retired, and all Air
Force governmental buildings were closed. The
Ottoman Air Force was closed by the Ottoman
Ministry of War and all personnel were formally
discharged. The Ottoman pilots were thus left
without planes and proper assistance and the
brief period of Ottoman aviation ended. Some
flight officers tried to build new units in
Constantinople, Izmir, and Konya with planes
left over from the war and tried to bring together
flight personnel, but were unsuccessful (1). The
demise of the Ottoman Empire occurred in 1922
and the Republic of Turkey emerged in 1923.
Subsequently, the Turkish military organized
what would become the Turkish Air Force in
1924, and the Turkish Air Force became an
independent branch of the military in 1933 (7).
Disclaimer
The views expressed do not necessarily reflect
those of the U.S. Armed Services, Department of
Defense or any Government agency and are not
in any way intended to supersede information
from official military sources.
References:
1.
4.
Istanbul: Havas, 2002
Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Kline, Stuart. A Chronicle
8. Lawrence, T.E. Seven Pillars of Wisdom:
2. Birbiri, Mehmet. History of the Turkish Air
Force. Retrieved July 20, 2007, from
http://www.incirlik.af.mil/. Official Website of
Incirlik US Air Force Base.
3. Erickson, Edward. Ordered to Die: A History
A Triumph. Anchor/Doubleday: New York, 1935.
of the Ottoman Army in the First World War.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.
9.
Ibid.
21
Kline, Stuart. A Chronicle of Turkish Aviation.
The Great War Society Trivia Challenge
Oh, Canada!
Canadian forces played a disproportionate and extraordinarily timely role in the war effort of the Allies. Here is a test of your
knowledge about their contributions.
11. Location of dressing station where John McCrae
1. This WWII Canadian general was in charge of the
was serving when he was inspired to write the poem
highly successful counter-battery artillery barrage at
In Flanders Fields in 1915.
Vimy Ridge.
2. This Canadian aviator was an "ace" on both the
Western and Italian Fronts.
3. In early June 1916 Canadian forces lost this
important observation point on the south edge of the
Ypres Salient but regained it a few weeks later.
12. After planning the successful Allied evacuation of
the Gallipoli Peninsula, this British General was
named commander of the Canadian Corps and led
it through the victory at Vimy Ridge.
Bonus Challenge:
4. This former militia volunteer advanced through
ability and force of personality to become the senior
Canadian officer of the Great War.
5. On September 15, 1916, the Canadian Division in the
Somme sector, assisted by some of history's first
tanks, began an assault on this village.
6. In May 2000 Canada's Unknown Soldier was
selected from this cemetery near Vimy Ridge.
7. A posthumous Victoria Cross was awarded to this
Canadian cavalryman for leading one of the most
memorable charges of the war at Moreuil Wood in
1918.
8. This medical member of the Canadian Expeditionary
Force would share a Nobel Prize for the discovery of
insulin.
9. Canadian forces helped turn August 8, 1918, into the
"Black Day of the German Army." What battle started
that day?
10. The 27th (City of Winnipeg) Battalion of the Second
Division on November 6, 1917, captured this village
in Flanders whose name would become synonymous
with the futility of war.
45
22
This "Brooding" Canadian soldier near the
village of St. Julian, north of Ypres, marks
the site of one of the landmark events on
the Western Front, and one in which
Canadian forces played a critical role. What
was that event?
Eleven Memorable Women of the Great War
1. Tsaritsa Alexandra
Granddaughter of Queen Victoria; influenced by Rasputin, she undercut her
husband's war leadership, hastening the revolution; murdered with her family
by the Bolsheviks
2. Gertrude Bell
Traveler, archeologist, and intelligence operative; supported British forces in
Mesopotamia; advised on establishment of modern Iraq
3. Vera Brittain
Highly educated VAD nurse who lost her fiancé, best friend, and
brother in the war; wrote great memoir Testament of Youth
4. Edith Cavell
Matron of a Brussels hospital during the German occupation; executed for
helping Allied patients escape, becoming the war's greatest martyr.
5. Marie Curie
Double Nobel Prize laureate; designed and operated mobile x-ray
units for the French medical services
6. Mata Hari
Dutch dancer (Margaretha Geertruida Zelle) allegedly in the pay of the
German secret service; tried and executed by the French.
7. Dr. Elsie Inglis
Scottish physician and suffragette; established hospitals and medical
units staffed by women to most of the war's fronts; died of illness
contracted in Russia in 1917
8. Käthe Kollwitz
German graphic artist and sculptor; lost a son in the war and
expressed her pain in moving works of art, most notably the Grieving
Parents at Vladslo German Cemetery, Belgium
9. Rosa Luxemburg
Brilliant Communist writer and orator; co-founded Spartacus Party in
Germany; killed in uprising of 1919
10. Sylvia Pankhurst
Noted suffragette and Socialist who broke with her mother and
sister (Emmeline and Christabel) over their support for the war to
maintain a fully pacifist posture; later supported Communists in Russia
11. Gabrielle Petit
Belgian spy and national heroine; provided intelligence to Allies, carried messages,
and helped trapped soldiers escape before being betrayed and executed in 1916
Background: Vera Brittain, Mata Hari, Alexandra
23
Things Are About to Change
The old chancellor, looking fatalistic,
meets with the man who will soon assume
power and dispose of him.
24
Prince Wilhelm & Bismarck - 1887
Haughty and contemptuous, the future kaiser
unselfconsciously displays the character that will
help bring the world to war in the next century.
25
2009 SEMINAR - September 11-13
National World War I Museum
The Western Front Association – U. S. Branch and The Great War Society will hold a combined
2009 Annual Seminar at the National World War I Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.
The wide-ranging and compelling theme for the seminar combines the original seminar ideas
for both organizations:
“Technology, the Treaty and the World War:
From ‘Tin Hats’ to Tanks and ‘Top Hats’ to Territories”
The current schedule as of July 15, 2009 (subject to change) is:
Friday, September 11:
3:30 – 4:45 p.m. - Sign in at the museum and free time to visit the museum
4:45 – 5:00 – Welcome and orientation
5:00 – 6:00 - Presentation: Technology & the Treaty, Dana Lombardy
6:00 – 8:30 - Buffet dinner and post-dinner presentation: Paris 1919: The City of Light
and the Creation of the Post-War World, Diane Rooney
Saturday, September 12
8:00 - 9:00 a.m. - Sign in at the museum
9:00 – 10:00 – Presentation: Air Bombing Technology, Steve Suddaby
10:00 – 10:15 – Break
10:15 – 11:15 – Presentation: American Innovation during the War Using Archival Documents
as Case Studies, Mitchell Yockelson
11:15 – 12:15 – Presentation: They Were Fighting Men, Pellom McDaniels
12:15 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. – lunch and free time to visit the museum
1:30 – 2:30 – Presentation: Tanks and Procurement, Patrick Osborn
2:30 – 2:45 – Break
2:45 – 3:45 – Presentation: Art and the End of the War, Dr. Jan Schall
3:45 – 4:45 – Presentation: Grenades: An Explosive Topic! Doran Cart
4:45 – 6:00 – Free time to visit the museum
6:00 – 8:30 – Buffet dinner and post-dinner presentation – WWI Communications Technology:
From Feathers to Frequencies, David Beer
Sunday, September 13
9:00 – 10:00 – Presentation: Berlin Operation – December 1918, Scott Stephenson
10:00 – 11:00 – Presentation: Battle of Caporetto and Its Effect on WWII Tactics, Dr. Guy Cavallaro
11:00 – 12:00 – Seminar Wrap-Up
Seminar concludes at noon
Free admission to the Museum to Seminar participants is provided by the National WWI Museum.
Registration limit is 160 (first come/first served). Use the registration form included
with this issue of Relevance or visit www.the-great-war-society.org
26
Evolving Bombing Missions During the Great War
Steve Suddaby
Bréguet 14 - Finest French Bomber of the Great War
[Editor's Note: This article is a rearrangement and
condensation of a paper delivered at the 2008 seminar of The
Great War Society. The reorganization by national air
service is to show how defining the mission of bomber
aircraft evolved differently from nation to nation.]
The Great War was the first conflict to see more
than token aerial bombardment. The war lasted
long enough to experience extensive advances in
aviation and bombing technologies, which
themselves fostered developments in strategic
bombing theory, tactics, air defense, and civil
defense. Ultimately, the first halting steps taken
in World War I were to affect military, civil, and
political events through the rest of the century,
not least in launching the civil transport industry
which ties together our world today.
The Zeppelin was a source of great pride to
Germany--the one weapon they had that no one
else possessed--and a source of concern to every
country within hundreds of miles. Fregattenkapitän
Peter Strasser, the German navy's Führer der
Luftschiffer, saw the campaign against England
as no less than the key to winning the war.
In an August 10, 1916 letter to the Commander in
Chief of the High Seas Fleet, he said, "The
performance of the big airships has reinforced my
conviction that England can be overcome by
means of airships… through increasingly
extensive destruction of cities, factory complexes,
dockyards, harbor works… railroads, etc.
…airships offer a certain means of victoriously
ending the war."
From January 1915 through August 1916,
Strasser's airships ranged over the eastern half of
England and even Scotland with impunity.
Raiding only at night kept them safe from the
increasingly abundant antiaircraft artillery and
fighters. Normal machine-gun bullets could put
tiny holes in the hydrogen gas cells of the
airships but didn't cause the hydrogen to mix
enough with the oxygen to create a flammable
mixture. Often the pressure inside the gas bags
The German Experience:
A. The First Battle of Britain: Zeppelins
The First Battle of Britain was Germany's aerial
campaign against the British Isles with
Zeppelins, Gotha and Giant bombers, and small
floatplanes. The latter made limited raids against
coastal targets with only a few light bombs each,
doing no significant damage, and hence will not
be discussed further.
27
was less than surrounding air pressure, so they
barely leaked when punctured.
The airship SL11 was shot down on the night of
September 2/3 1916 and others quickly
followed. The Zeppelin raids continued until
August 1918, but after September 1916 they
were more dangerous to their crews than to their
prospective targets.
During these 20 months when the Zeppelins
were almost invincible there never were enough
of them to inflict much damage on England.
Nevertheless, their effect on civilians in targeted
areas was nothing less than traumatic. People
lost homes and loved ones. Thousands of people
stopped work in critical industries on the nights
of raids--British naval signals intelligence could
give warnings of raids hours in advance but
couldn't tell where in the country the raids would
occur, so everything shut down. The raids
caused anti-German (or anti-foreign) riots in
London and the port city of Hull. In Hull
hundreds of people left their homes and trekked
into the countryside night after night in all kinds
of weather to avoid being trapped in collapsing,
burning homes.
The original hope had been that the Zeppelins
would attack important military and economic
targets in England. Their lack of effectiveness
because of the blackouts, navigation difficulties,
extreme vulnerabilities, and inability to drop
large bomb loads made them de facto terror
weapons, capable only of dropping bombs on
cities and fleeing. They ultimately caused few
casualties (compared to daily losses on the
Western Front) and little property damage. They
may have been most effective in interrupting
munitions production and in pulling guns,
searchlights, and planes from the Western Front.
The Zeppelin campaign was also important
because it gave their crews critical experience
for establishing international Zeppelin air
transport in the 1920s and '30s.
Everything changed in September 1916. The
British by that time were able to develop
explosive and incendiary machine-gun bullets
which could set the airships' hydrogen aflame.
B. The First Battle of Britain: Gotha and Giant Raids
German Gotha
28
raids but had little success. The last Gotha raid
was conducted on May 19, 1918.
On May 25, 1917, the coastal town of
Folkestone, Kent, was hit by a daylight raid of
Gotha bombers based in occupied Belgium. The
afternoon raid caught shoppers in the streets,
killing 95 and wounding 195 civilians. This was
the start of "The Gotha Summer" of 1917.
The night-raiding Gothas were joined by Giant
(Riesenflugzeug) bombers for the first time on
September 28, 1917. These were huge,
multiengine bombers and were the largest planes
to attack Britain in either World War. Unlike the
Zeppelins and Gothas, none of them were ever
brought down over England. On two occasions,
they dropped 1000 kg (2200 lb.) bombs on
London. It is still possible, 90 years later, to see
the effects of one of these bombs at Warrington
Crescent in the Maida Hill area of N.W. London.
Through August of that year, there were nine
daylight raids by the German bomber group
Kagohl III striking London and other parts of
southeast England. These attacks killed 401
people, mostly civilians, and sparked antiGerman riots in London. The Home Defence
aircraft, which had been quite capable of
handling the Zeppelins, could not reach the
altitude of the Gothas fast enough or in
sufficient numbers to threaten the formations of
Gothas. Fighter squadrons were pulled from the
Western Front to try to protect the capital. The
Home Defence forces started creating the
London Air Defence Area (L.A.D.A.), a
telephone-connected system of antiaircraft
batteries in some sectors and patrol lanes for
fighter aircraft in other sectors. The government
set up a committee, chaired by South African
Gen. Jan Christiaan Smuts, to devise a long-term
solution to the air defense of England. Smuts-essentially a committee of one--recommended
establishing an Air Ministry and a Royal Air
Force, both of which would be independent of
the Army and Navy. The RAF was established
as a separate service on April 1, 1918, an event
which would not have happened without the
Gotha raids on London.
Over the course of the Zeppelin-Gotha-Giant
campaigns, the British built up an elaborate
defense system. After the fighter planes and the
fixed and truck-mounted antiaircraft artillery,
the most effective anti-Zeppelin tool was
probably the blackout. These were aided by
searchlights, sound locators, klaxon warning
horns, dedicated phone lines connected to a
"situation room," barrage balloons, signals
intelligence, aircraft spotters, volunteer Special
Constables, and Boy Scouts with bugles to
sound the "All Clear."
There were 118 raids in the First Battle of
Britain, but almost one third of those were the
inconsequential hit-and-run raids on the coast by
floatplanes. The Gotha and Giant raids
comprised only 23 percent of the total but
accounted for 58 percent of the casualties and 48
percent of the property damage. The raids
resulted in 1,414 killed and 3,416 wounded.
Property damage totaled £2,962,111, which
would be equivalent to $200-400 million in 2007
U.S. dollars. This author's statistical research has
shown that both the day bombers and the night
bombers were much more effective than the
Zeppelins in causing casualties and property
damage per thousand pounds of bombs. The day
bombing Gothas were more effective in causing
casualties than the Gothas and Giants at night,
The defenses did improve, and the German
bombing group felt sufficiently threatened to
switch to night bombing in September 1917.
Their first night raid was on the 4th, and they
conducted no day raids after that time. They hit
the city hard in the last week of September and
the first week of October, raiding it six times.
Unruly crowds mobbed the Underground
stations as people tried to find safety. In late
1917, the Germans tried conducting incendiary
29
though neither did better with respect to property
damage. Part of the reason for this is that the day
bombing started first, and civilian casualties
were almost always worst in the Great War the
first time a city was bombed.
The British Experience: The Independent
Force
The group that eventually became known as the
Independent Force, Royal Air Force, (IF,
RAF) was created as a direct result of the 1917
Gotha raids on London and an overestimation of
projected British bomber production by the
Smuts Committee. The IF started in October
1917 as three bombing squadrons near Nancy on
the French sector of the Western Front, a
location that was close to German cities and
industry. It never did become a very large force-only nine squadrons by the Armistice. By the
end of the war, they had conducted about 750
squadron raids against rail targets, airfields,
chemical and munitions plants, blast furnaces,
and German cities.
C. Other German Bombing: Zeppelin Raids
in the East
German naval Zeppelins made most of the
attacks on England, but raids on the Eastern
Front were conducted primarily by army
Zeppelins. They flew reconnaissance and
bombing missions on the Russian, Romanian,
and Macedonian fronts from August 1914 to mid1917. Their primary targets were cities, rail
stations, and supply depots. Notable cities that
were attacked included Warsaw, Bucharest, the
Riga area, Brest-Litovsk, and Salonika.
Zeppelins supported Operation Albion in
October 1917, which captured critical Estonian
islands in the Gulf of Riga. The intention had
been to provide a base for Zeppelin raids on the
Russian capital of Petrograd, believing that
adding to the turmoil already there would knock
Russia out of the war completely. The Germans
never did end up raiding Petrograd, however.
Despite their being a small air force, it's important
to understand that these four daylight and five
night-bombing squadrons were Britain's only
strategic bombing force in the last year of the
war. Consequently, they have been studied and
written about more in later years than any other
group of WWI Allied bombing squadrons. (In
English, at any rate.)
British de Haviland Bomber
30
Its role as a reprisal unit changed quickly, in part
due to French resistance to reprisal bombings. (It
was too easy for the Germans to reach important
French cities like Paris and Nancy, so the French
would inevitably come out on the losing end of
any tit-for-tat bombing of open cities.) The IF's
role as a strategic bombing force was thwarted
in large part by Maj. Gen. Hugh Trenchard, who
took over command in June 1918. He did not
believe in strategic bombing--at least not until
after WWI--believing that an air force's most
important role was in supporting the army.
Consequently, the IF concentrated on rail targets
that fed the German front lines and on enemy
airfields. By the end of the war only a tiny part
of the IF's effort had been expended on what we
would now call strategic targets: factories, blast
furnaces, and chemical and munitions plants.
Bombing efforts in 1914 started as tactical
attacks on troops beyond the range of artillery
using steel darts, leftover bombs from the
Morocco Campaign, and modified artillery
shells. France was quick to recognize the
potential for aerial bombardment with General
Joseph Joffre designating certain escadrilles as
bombing units as early as September 1914.
Groupe de Bombardement 1 (GB1) was created
with three Voisin bombing escadrilles two
months later.
Much of 1915 could be considered a "Golden
Age" of rapid development, impressive raids
against strategic targets, and little opposition. It
was clear before the year was out, however, that
this easy success would not last forever.
An eternal lesson of warfare is that the enemy
always adapts. The development of German
Aviatik two-seaters and the Fokker Eindecker
with a machine gun that fired through the
propeller spelled the end of daylight bombing.
The Aviation Militaire spent an entire year, from
autumn 1915 to October 1916, trying to adapt
with new tactics and new aircraft, but ultimately
it had to transition most of its force to night
bombing to avoid the fighters.
This author's research has shown that day
bombing by the Independent Force was more
effective than night bombing in causing
casualties and property damage (similar in some
ways to the German experience in attacking
England). Notably, the night bombers of the IF
were either lost or did not hit any target at all a
third of the time. Finally, the Independent Force
was not particularly effective compared to the
German strategic raids on England by the
Zeppelins and Gothas/Giants.
French Aerial Bombardment
The history of French aerial bombardment is a
story of pioneering efforts and continuous
improvement throughout the war in technology,
tactics, and training. French bombing started as a
long-range extension of artillery on the
battlefield, quickly evolved into being a strategic
bombing effort against the enemy's vital
industries, and finally became a very successful
tactical effort that helped blunt and then drive
back the German army's advances in 1918. This
author will present evidence for the thesis that
France was the world's greatest air power by
Armistice Day 1918.
31
During 1916, the bombers concentrated on the
Battles of Verdun and the Somme, generally
attacking rail targets that fed German troops and
supplies to the battlefields. A couple of famous
individual raids are worth mentioning. On June
22, 1916, nine Caudron G.4s of Escadrille C.66
attacked Karlsruhe in a reprisal raid for the
German bombing of Bar-le-Duc. The bombs hit
a circus, killing 117 civilians, 75 of them
children, and wounding another 152. The results
horrified even the French, but the Germans did
not attack another French city for six months.
On October 12, a joint Franco-British daylight
raid on the Mauser rifle factory at Oberndorf
ended in disaster for the Allies. With the
exception of the British two-seater Sopwith 1½
Strutters, they were chewed up badly by the
Caudron escorts attacked one rail station at
Damvillers, dropping 33 tons of bombs.
Fokkers and Aviatiks, and this was the death
knell for French daylight bombing with their
existing aircraft.
France was "the arsenal of democracy" for
aircraft manufacture during the Great War. She
supplied planes to Britain, Italy, Russia, the U.S.,
Belgium, and even Serbia and Japan. France
built more aircraft and, more important, more
aero engines than Britain or Germany. By
Armistice Day, with Germany defeated, France
for a few years was the world's number one air
power. (On November 11 France had nearly
twice as many aircraft on the Western Front as
Britain.)
The last year of the war saw the return of
daylight bombing--even mass bombing attacks-with the development of the fast and sturdy twoseat Bréguet 14. They started pouring in from
French factories in late 1917, and the resultant
flood of bombers allowed them to be used in
ways that no other country could duplicate. The
French aviation industry also developed the
Caudron R.11 bomber escort, which made the
Bréguet 14s even more dangerous to the German
interceptors. The result was massive raids on
German troops, bivouacs, ammo dumps, rail
lines, and pontoon bridges. The Bréguets and the
Caudrons played a critical role in repulsing the
German attempt to cross the Marne and reach
Paris in the 2nd Battle of the Marne, July 15-17,
1918.
Italian Bombardment
The best Italian bombers were the huge
Capronis, which were good enough to be built
under license by the French and the Americans.
(Some of them remained in Italian bomber units
until 1927.) The Italians used them to attack
ports (including Pola and Trieste), the AustroHungarian navy, rail stations, troops, supply
depots, and munitions factories. They had a
force of about 50-70 bombers during the last two
years of the war. These bombers played an
important role in the 1918 Battle of the Piave,
attacking Austrian bridges and barges, and
keeping them from crossing the river.
The French mass bomber attacks of 1918 were
unsurpassed in size during the First World War.
A couple of examples will suffice:
On May 31, 223 planes attacked German
troops around Ferè-en-Tardenois, dropping
almost 38 tons of bombs.
On October 9, 136 Bréguet bombers and 18
Italian Caproni Bomber
32
U.S. Aerial Bombardment
Russian Bombing: Igor Sikorsky's Il'ya
Muromets
The U.S. bombing effort came late in the war and
was small and poorly managed. Four Aero
Squadrons targeted close-in German rail stations
in daylight raids starting in the summer of 1918.
Three of the squadrons flew U.S.-built, Britishdesigned de Havilland D.H.4 "Liberty Planes"
and one flew French Bréguet 14s. The raids
were often conducted with too few aircraft for
the formations to protect themselves and
consequently suffered hideous losses from the
German fighters. A high point of the U.S. aerial
campaign was the St. Mihiel attack, in which
Billy Mitchell assembled hundreds of French,
British, and American bombers to help the U.S.
Army drive the Germans from the salient. Even
this farsighted effort suffered from bad luck;
terrible weather kept the planes grounded for
much of the battle.
Although the Russian Empire used a number of
small aircraft (usually French) for tactical
bombing, their most interesting contribution to
the topic was Sikorsky's Il'ya Muromets giant
bombers. These aircraft were four engine planes
used for tactical day bombing and long-range
photoreconnaissance. There were over 70 built
(some trainers) and they were flown in the semiautonomous EVK (Squadron of Flying Ships).
They were used against rail stations, antiaircraft
guns, and even German army bread factories.
[See our profile of the Il'ya Muromets on page
40.]
D.H.4 - Used as Bomber by the American Service
33
Tone in e e cummings The Enormous Room
Joseph Liggera
The James family--notably Harvard professor
William--lived within walking distance. I once
saw cummings on a tiny stage with one light
bulb. He read in the darkness some poem that
rhymed with "ink." In it he proudly proclaimed,
"We better bury the Statue of Liberty/ Before it
starts to stink." After that, he clamped down his
hat and disappeared into the night.
Summarizing a Literary Classic
[In 1917 the American poet Cummings] impulsively
joined the war, serving in a Red Cross ambulance unit
on the Western Front. His free-spirited, combative ways,
however, soon got him tagged as a possible enemy of La
Patrie, and he was summarily tossed into a French
concentration camp at La Ferte-Mace in Normandy.
Unexpectedly, under the vilest conditions, Cummings
found fulfillment of his ever-elusive quest for freedom.
The Enormous Room (1922), the fictional account of
his four-month confinement, reads like a Pilgrim's
Progress of the spirit, a journey into dispossession, to a
place among the most debased and deprived of human
creatures. Yet Cummings's hopeful tone reflects the
essential paradox of his experience: to lose everything-all comforts, all possessions, all rights and privileges--is
to become free, and so to be saved. Drawing on the
diverse voices of his colorful prisonmates--Emile the
Bum, the Fighting Sheeney, One-Eyed Dah-veed-Cummings weaves a "crazy-quilt" of language, which
makes The Enormous Room one of the most evocative
instances of the Modernist spirit and technique, as well
as "one of the very best of the war-books."
(T. E. Lawrence, quoted at Amazon.com)
In his account of this confinement in prison,
applying all his creativity and intelligence,
cummings reasons it out that no one
should bother with war. For students of
WWI, this is a reaction we don't usually get.
While musing in his enormous room, e e
cummings tosses up images of inmates in his
mind, dazzled by their differences--they speak
12 languages or so--but delighted by what
unites them. They, like America's claim to be a
melting pot, or tossed salad, are the common folk
the big nations are fighting to control, when these
men--and women too--would just as soon skip the
whole affair. To put it simply, although in jail for
a crime difficult enough to define as well as
charge him with, cummings finds the experience
not just a stint in an appealing Purgatory without
a Heaven but actually, for want of a better word,
fun. We might wonder how to enter the mind of
an absurdist to find deeper meanings about WW
I. What is required is to know that there are no
believable big ideas, rather there are personal
nervous tics one shares with his fellows. That is
what defines personal relationships. So why
fight?
Edward Estlin Cummings, hereafter e.e.
cummings, is best known for iconoclastic
theories on poetry and painting. He was also a
Boston Brahmin who knew at least the ancient
languages of Latin and Greek along with some
modern languages. During the Great War he was
in France with a friend designated as "B," who
was arrested for spying. This was a classic bungle
as neither B nor Cummings even considered
espionage. Both, at different times, wound up
imprisoned in an "enormous room" for a spell.
He was a Belgian, and therefore chewed and spat juice
night and day from the unutterably stolid face of an
overgrown farmer. (ER, p. 131)
cummings was the epitome of an Anglo tradition.
He attended Harvard, where his father, a
a Unitarian minister, was a professor.
34
cummings is arrested one night
and then jaunts through various
locations until his captors can
plant him firmly in their prison
network. Hence, he goes to bed
alone in the dark only to wake
and find himself on a small cot
with another 60 or so men
similarly housed. Everything there is a mess,
clearly a French one, for cummings and his
friend, William Slater Brown, whom he names
"B," in his study of life in the Enormous Room
(hereafter cited as ER). Moreover, everyone there,
inmate or criminal, acts not so much as an official
penitent or guard but as someone disconnected
from any norms of logic. Sui generis would put it
kindly. Under such conditions, what can one do?
Go mad, bust out, form a gang, plead? What
cummings does, and what makes his tale take us
on a tour of Gallic absurdity, is that he becomes
one of them. As if he were a poetic sociologist,
cummings watches to detect what does define
social interaction among a variety of men whose
crimes are not clear but who will muddle along
in hopes of leaving the ER as abruptly as they
were forced to enter it. While cummings
observes, he does not stand idle; he pitches in.
A variety of titles that match the individual's
personality are given. Thus there are "The Zulu,"
"The Machine-Fixer," "The Washing Machine
Man," and "John le Negre," a black man . At
times he is apt to fight, at other points turn away,
and also at a time when you really need him be a
down-to-earth friend. A nasty inmate whose name
suggests his personality is "The Fighting
Sheeney." He plays tough but is often a coward.
So easy is it to typecast so many personalities
that cummings can only wonder how they all got
there. The answer is in the "inscrutable" ways of
"God and . . . the great French Government." It is
as if the French authorities have nothing better to
do.
cummings figures the ER to be 80 by 40
feet. In one way, the ER is set up in a fashion he
defines as "ecclesiastical"; in another, it has peepholes through which he hoped to catch sight of
the promenades des femmes. The men might long
to have a stray smile come their way, but if this
desire were fulfilled, the promenade itself might
be sacrificed, for promenades, both of femmes
and hommes, demand precision timing. A
momentary glance may not be worth losing the
whole parade for faulty timing. cummings finds
these trade-offs the name of the game while
incarcerated. Early in his narrative he has not
taken a bath for days. Little by little, his need for
one tops everything else, including his joining the
promenade follies. He is ordered, "Il vous fait
prendre des douches." One can guess what is
coming. The water is cold, his clothes are wet, his
brief encounter and then quick exit from a
passage through the outside world to get to the
tubs further dampens his spirits.
You children of Merde, don't let this happen again. (ER,
p. 198)
America: The land of the flea and the home of the dag
[dago].(ER, p. 331)
Again he has a new way to look at meaning: it is
based on his reading of a great variety of
individuals all lumped together. So predetermined by personal folly, or even sin,
cummings finds that meaning, for both him and
the French, comes from chaos. Perhaps this is an
old thesis in new garb but not to the denizens of
the French purgatory. Plus, there is a women's
prison a short distance away with which they, of
course, communicate even under tight scrutiny
and fearsome threats of punishment if they do.
As time goes on in the ER, the French language
itself emerges as a challenge and a weapon. The
building where he is housed is called La Ferté
Macé and is not properly thought of as a prison
but rather a holding cell, a place to hang around.
Not only is the place "ecclesial": it was once a
35
seminary. Count Bragard is actually a friend of
some noted artists, is one himself, and has French
that is "glib and faultless." cummings's French here
might be compared to Pidgin English, even though
he knew the language. Anyone who struggled
through high school courses ought to be able to
keep up, although he sometimes does not make it
easy, nor does he translate. It is hard for him to
decide what term to use for the various ladies
who live in the building and whom he did not
expect to find in captivity. Some are not even
prisoners but women who stay in order to be with
their husbands. Then come the obvious female
criminals, guilty of the practice of the world's
oldest profession. cummings switches over to
French and characterizes them as putains. By
playing it square, cummings avoids offending,
but he may also be tweaking his audience if they
truly do not know the word, the sophisticated
French word, for prostitutes.
La guerre. Always La guerre. (ER, p. 330)
The broken French that he gives us captures his
tone that life is absurd, even a First World War
can't change that. Why try to prove otherwise?
French itself and its use in a non-prison that is
an ideal holding cell for men--and a fair number
of women--is ample proof that the world has
gone West. Why not call the ER a prison when
that's what it actually is? The answer is that the
French tendency is to make philosophers out of
any of us who can master the language and then
talk ourselves to death. At one point, Monsieur
Auguste, a five-foot tall Russian, who cries for
his wife all night, offers what cummings hands
on to us as a new version of Liberté, Egalité,
Fraternité. It is a love poem to a female duck.
As cummings writes, it consists of three quacks
in a row four times in the poem, plus three that
drift to the right hand side of the page. The word
"quack" and its spelling begin to lose letters as the
poem ends .
What, indeed, is happening, besides an
abandonment of fixing reality in the meaning of
words? In the world cummings has come to
accept, a prison is not a prison when it clearly is.
The poet he later becomes after the events in the
ER deliberately keeps his letters in lower case
some of the time and often writes down the
center of the page in what seems is actually a
word or two. How did his experience shape or
bring out his view that reality is contrary to fact?
The war gets the blame, although not often.
Rather the war seems to have given out the truth
that to large extent we are all simply players on
a Shakespearean stage. For contrast, consider the
advice of another writer on the war, "We are all
bitched from the start and you especially have to
be hurt like hell before you can write." Listen
closer to how Hemingway writes in a
36
full of nonsense as the old belief one could
turn lead into gold, if you could just get it right.
Why not write poetry that dribbles down the
page or goes quack? It is a better response than
trusting the system that was off track to begin
with and produced a war as if to prove it.
graphically realistic way and yet also stands
against the primary absurdity of the war, "There
were many words that you could not stand to
hear and finally only the names of places had
dignity."
cummings is not that direct. He re-creates the
war as he knew it. If anything, it is
subterranean. It was for him a war that he knew
as a catastrophe, one in which no one could
make things right and in which his conditioning
as a prisoner determined his rebellion against the
norms of society. Although he didn't do any of
the shooting in the war, his book exposes the
underbelly of its affects. Further removed even
from Hemingway's lethal reading of the facts, is
cummings's father's readings. His father's pleas
to Woodrow Wilson are used as a frame around
the book. He is trying to find out what has
happened to his son. He heroically attempts to
join the known and unknown together to make
what to him is logical. Facts put together make
reality. However, The Enormous Room will go
on to blast that reading, even though his father is
stuck with it. His father thinks that conventional
prose is organic to a successful plea for Wilson's
intervention. In short, his father, has confidence
that straight talk will win the day. It is unreasonable
to the father that Wilson was not brought up
short, to act as the words command, that he
move Heaven and Hell if need be to locate his
son.
If cummings is trying to do anything, it is to
upset that balance of conventional realities and
the even more conventional unity among them.
He experiences the hellish reality the war has
created. His father hopes for better but is without
his son's knowledge that something new is
afoot, a new vision, breaking away into a truly
world war. However elegantly the elder
Cummings presents his facts, they read as
something from a lawyer's brief with an appeal
whose power is stale. The war has shown that
the unity between faith and fair play is as chock
37
After his family may have absorbed his potential
demise, he was found again, but not in the right
place. Hence, the elder Cummings lists the problems the family has endured. The short version
of cummings's experience is that it took three
months to find, revive, and then send him home.
He was "entombed" by the French government
who presumed he was dead. Later this "cruel
error" was corrected. However, as far as anyone
can discern, there was "no charge whatever"
against him or that would justify "outrageous
treatment" of him as well as "horrible anxiety
and suspense" to his mother. Cummings's letter
chides the French for using a "mistaken report"
that his son was dead as "an adequate" report of
the time he was missing . If there is a sensible
explanation, it is that an "over-zealous French
censor" misread some letters and thought him a
spy.
When the Fighting Sheeny grinned you felt that he
desired to eat you. (ER, p. 391)
Is cummings unique? Does he demand justice
because he is an American come across an ocean
to pay his debt for France's help in his long- ago
revolution? No, not at all. He sees the ER as a
study hall. Most of the others there suffer a
similar plight. Almost no one knows if he will
be lost forever in the French minutiae of justice.
Logic does not equal remedy. If there were one,
it was not to fight it out in the legal system but
get to know as many residents as he can and to fit
into the culture of the ER. His role is not entirely
transparent as he plays his own part in the saga
of the ER and gets close to a number of people.
What he finds out about the war is at times as
clear as his father's prose. In his 1932
introduction, he claims disappointment on the
part of his readers who looked for something
of a war book. They didn't get it, and it is clear
they were not meant to get it. He wrote his
mother that he would not provide a trivial title to
his work such as The Story of the Great War.
Seen From the Window of Nowhere. What The
Enormous Room says seems obvious enough
but may be a poetic trick. The book is meant "to
explore an inconceivable vastness which is so
unbelievably far way that it appears
microscopic." There are a number of key words
in his simple direct sentence. One that leaps out
in this study of cummings's volume is "microscopic."
What everyone else assumes the war has done
is make the world a bigger place, not smaller.
Yet cummings's experience tells otherwise. Men
and women of all types defy analysis, except to
let themselves be manipulated by "incompetence
raised to the level of a Zen" (For this phrase,
I borrow from an inmate named Red Dog at MCI
Bridgewater in Massachusetts). They cling to
hopes of somehow being kicked out as illogically
as they were thrown in.
Having noted that big is small and that logic
won't help much when locked away in the
ER, the question arises: what role did
cummings play? What did cummings do? The
answer drives us to the Bible and its particularly
grotesque final book of Revelation. His
role in this hellish pit is to guide. Hence, he
designates the actual director of the semi-prison
as Apollyon, the king who reigns over the abyss.
He is also king of the locusts. The picture is
deep and apocalyptic. cummings himself, like
Apollyon, is frightening. He refers to the
Directeur as a "definite fiend" with three
powers, "Fear, Women, and Sunday," the last
two very odd choices indeed. It would be nice to
know cummings is kidding, but it doesn't much
seem likely that one has a sense of humor in the
actual Hell. Human touches make it more hellish.
One day, after the snow-fall, I received a complete set of
Shakespeare. (ER, p. 322)
This chapter consists of punishments. Le
Directeur is in control with the Surveillant
assisting, both in stages of "undress." For fear,
we get a long fuss over the state of the coffee. At
this higher level, a fair cup of coffee should be
coming along, but, alas, no. The cook has upset
something of the power structure by stealing
coffee and sugar. When he gets to the
plantons, hangers-on, cummings waxes as if
it were an Apollyon himself as well as is his
director. He notes a number of "witless,"
physically maimed men who find their stay in
prison a kind of vacation from the trenches.
These poor souls are scorned for their wooden
hands and glass elbows, which render them
incompetent to vie with the other men for the
favors of the women. Members of either sex
who get in trouble are restricted to hard, almost
inedible, bread. They are also apt to be locked in
a cabinet, left to cry out to the top of their lungs.
In fact, four of the women are brutalized but
remain undaunted. Things are so bad that
cummings is not sure whether or not "Renee
was in fact dead" rather than simply punished.
But his writing is "not to excite the reader's
pity," and so he focuses not on the weaknesses
but on the toughness of the women.
The Apollyon chapter, midway in the story, was
long awaited, but turns out to be overdone. Or is
it, like everything else in the ER, a necessary
telling? The sexual factors are presented at
length with nothing new, save they are visions of
Hell by a man speaking from the abyss. He then
passes on to the final weapon, Sunday.
cummings is not a Roman Catholic and seems
shocked to be presented with a bungling priest
and a congregation of both sexes, some of whom
came for devotions and many of whom just
exchange "signals." The priest has a surplice
"fiercely fearful." A number of people and small
38
groups are presented. At the end comes a
description of "three tiny old females" with
"wizened skulls" receiving the Communion
wafer "hungrily into their leathery faces," an
image with which cummings means to disgust
his readers. As he evaluates it, religion and
Sundays fail to offer healing or hope.
Moreover my being dirtier than usual I was protesting in
a (to me) very satisfactory way against all that was neat
and tidy and bigoted and solemn and founded upon the
anguish of my fine friends. (ER, p. 323-4)
cummings's choice to pose the prison warden as
the king of the locusts allows him to break loose
beyond obvious complaint to true hostility.
Rather shockingly, he puts it angrily, but logically,
"Never in my life before had I wanted to kill,
to thoroughly extinguish and to utterly murder."
He looks forward to the day, "Unto God I hope so."
There is a hardcore reality in this response
which ties him to Emerson's outburst in "SelfReliance." Emerson, too, seems fit for Hell and
cries out, "If I am the Devil's child, I will live then
from the Devil." With Emerson before him, comes
Norman Mailer, who says in "The White Negro":
"Here I obey the logic of the extreme
psychopath-even if the . . . action is to murder."
Subjects of the king of the locusts are crying
out. Certainly, this catalogue of horrors brings
cummings closer to the center of real war. Absurdity
gives way finally to logic and death. No amount
of black humor can swallow it whole.
Hemingway put it in that arch sophisticated way
he has, "I got hurt in the war." "Oh, that dirty
war." Just a touch of the real drives all the
protective covering of the absurd far away.
Should one take time to read The Enormous
Room? T.E. Lawrence thought so, as did
Robert Graves. Both felt it was the best
war book of the times. Hemingway, too,
praised cummings and called the The Enormous
Room "a really fine book." Whatever the
case, cummings never lets up in The Enormous
Room Near the end, cummings makes what
starts off as an heroic claim that reaches
beyond "the impossible to the best of my
ability." But fighting the inevitable, he learns, is
simply another "way of wasting your time." And
no matter how rough it is for 60 men, there are
always two or three more to make their fellows
enjoy "a little extra suffering." Lest we not
be made to feel enough pain, cummings resorts
to sprinkling cries of merde at the end of
his book. He also adds that what ruins the
American understanding of the war are our
preconceptions, which lend us a false air
of sophistication. He refers to Whitman by
fearing his own people might respond to him
with an angry "yawp." Lest any French think
cummings is one of them, he would take them
to America to see "The land of the flea and the
home of the dag--short for dago--of course."
Finally, he was let out of The Enormous Room
and stayed in Paris to regain his health. He then
joined the army as a pacifist and spent the rest of
the war in Fort Devens, Massachusetts.
What is his tone? His conclusion about war?
A very odd and punitive experience is what
taught him that the world is already committed
to its own absurdities. It doesn't need another
war, or another book, at least not from him.
Key Sources:
Cohen, Milton A. Poet and Painter: The Aesthetics of E. E. Cummings’ Early Work. Detroit: Wayne State, 1987.
Cummings, E. E. The Enormous Room. New York: The Modern Library, 1934.
Dupee, F. W. and Stade, George, eds. Selected Letters of E. E. Cummings. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969.
Rotella, Guy. Ed. Critical Essays on E. E. Cummings. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1984.
Sawyer-Laucanno, Christopher. E. E. Cummings: A Biography. Napeville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2004.
39
A Personal View of the War's Aviation from Our Assistant Editor
Kimball Worcester
Il'ya Muromets: Luxury to Lethality
Igor Sikorsky quickly adapted into his peacetime
luxury passenger transport tof he Grand Baltic
( Bol'shoi Baltiskii ) [also called the Russian
Knight Russkii Vityaz] into the striking bomber
Il'ya Muromets for use by the Imperial Russian
Air Service in the Great War. The early version
of the plane, the S-22, debuted in 1913 and
featured a saloon cabin (see below), a bedroom,
and a bathroom for its possible 16 passengers.
Contrast the pre-war luxury of the photo left
with the formidable presence of the fully
armed Il'ya Muromets: only one of these aircraft
was brought down in the course of the war. Its
namesake warrior would have been proud
indeed. The epic hero Il'ya Muromets is the only
folk figure to be canonized by the Russian
Orthodox Church. His stature of valor and his
dedication to the protection of the Motherland
and the Russian people make him the ideal
namesake for Sikorsky’s massive and highly
effective bomber.
St. Il'ya Muromets
c.1150 - c.1204
Passenger Facilities in the
Original Configuration
Just a week before Sarajevo in 1914, the Il'ya
Muromets set a world record by flying from St.
Petersburg to Kiev in 14 hours 38 minutes with
just one landing. This kind of endurance and
range suited the aircraft ideally to become the
mainstay of bomber and reconnaissance
missions for the Russians on the Eastern Front.
Additionally, its capacity to carry significant
weight enabled it to arm itself with at least a crew
of three and 1100 lbs. of bombs and the defensive
armament included up to five machine guns.
40
IL’YA MUROMETS BOMBER
Armament: five .303 Lewis guns;
1500 lbs. max. bomb load
Ceiling: 14,100 ft.
Range: 373 mi. / 600 km
Endurance: 6 hrs.
Engines: four Argus, or
Salmson (in Type V Sunbeam
Crusader V8), 148 hp each
Height: two stories
Span: 101’ 5” / 72’ 2” & 30.9 m / 22.0 m
N.B. These specifications vary slightly
throughout the five different design
modifications during the war — the S-22
through the S-27.
Speed: 68 mph / 110 km/h
Weight: 11244 lb. / 5100 kg
• World’s first four-engine plane
• Total of 73 built for Great War purposes
• Engine armor up to 5mm
• Formed world’s first dedicated bomber squadron in February 1915
• Featured the first internal bomb bay as well as a bomb sighting device
• Designed by Igor Sikorsky and produced by the Russian Carriage Works
[Sikorsky Il’ya Muromets copyright Ivan Berryman and Cranston Fine Arts
41
]
Wartime Humor
Happy Days: A Humorous Narrative in Drawings of the Progress of American Arms 1917-1919 by Captain Alban Butler was
published by the Society of the First Division, AEF, in 1928. Capt. Butler was the aide-de-camp to General Summerall, then in
command of the First Field Artillery Brigade of the First Division. Following the First Division's success at Cantigny, Gen.
Summerall ordered his intelligence officer to put together a daily bulletin of news and humor to help keep up morale up as the
division held its defensive positions in the Cantigny sector. Capt. Butler began drawing cartoons for what became the brigade's
trench newspaper, The Observer. As word of the newspaper and Butler's cartoons spread, the paper found its way to all the units
in the division. Much of the history of the First Division during World War I can be found in Capt. Butler's humorous take on both
the horrific and mundane. Shane Keil of Cantigny: The First Division Foundation and Museum contributed this piece.
42
Reviews: Literature, Films, New Media
A Commemorative Volume, Edited by John Horne
Our War: Ireland and the Great War
Reviewed by Edward Brynn
Even 15 years ago the Easter Rebellion of 1916 dominated discussion of Ireland's role in World War I. No longer;
historians in Northern Ireland and in the Republic are focusing on the 35,000 Irish soldiers who died fighting for King
and Empire in a war at once seen as noble, hellish, midwife to Ireland's nationalists' aspirations, and counter to its vital
interests. By commissioning the 2008 Thomas Davis Lectures, Radio Telefis Eireann commemorated the 90th anniversary
of the Great War's conclusion with 10 examples of superb historical scholarship. The Royal Irish Academy's inspired
decision to supplement these lectures with color reproductions of documents, letters, recruitment posters, cartoons,
etchings, and other fascinating memorabilia has produced a unique testimony to a chapter in Irish history long
marginalized by pain and circumstance.
The editor, Trinity College Dublin's John Horne, sets wartime Ireland in the larger
context of the Western Front he has studied so assiduously during the last two decades.
Nine colleagues, some long eminent and some new to Irish history, offer poignant,
balanced, exceedingly informative essays on many dimensions of Ireland's
involvement: the role of women; recruitment; life in the trenches; incarceration; the
world of mud, disease, grotesque wounds, and death; haunting postwar memories;
inspired rhetoric; vexed and often inept politicians.
The text is impressive; the illustrations are truly priceless. The callous insensitivity of
trench war spills its horrors on an island poorly prepared to handle men shipped home
maimed and mentally broken. Dark, grainy photographs of Ireland's streets, indecently
cheerful recruiting posters, angry letters evocatively written, poignant appeals for help
from families desperately coping with maimed soldier-sons, all bring a new
understanding to Ireland's role in the war. Many items come from private collections.
Others have languished in archives too infrequently visited.
Our War: Ireland and the Great War is at once a coffee-table book and high scholarship. The footnotes, indexes, and
bibliography are comprehensive. The museum-quality paper stock adds luster to the illustrations. The 10 essays make no
effort to soften the pain of Ireland's wartime experience; heroism is acknowledged but not celebrated; gestures of good
will and evidence of ruthless calculation are handled with chilling candor. No book yet published so successfully
compels us to come to terms with this most troubling chapter of Irish history.
Our War: Ireland and the Great War: The 2008 Thomas Davis Lecture Series. Horne, John, ed., Dublin: Royal Irish
Academy, 2008, 305 pp. ISBN 978-1904890508.
Ambassador Edward Brynn is a retired United States Foreign Service officer with with two doctorates, one in English
History from Stanford and another in Irish History from Trinity - Dublin. He has taught at the National War College in
Washington, the U.S. Air Force Academy and the University of North Carolina - Charlotte.
43
Graham Robb's Study of Prewar France
The Discovery of France : A Historical Geography from
the Revolution to the First World War
Reviewed by Contributing Editor Tony Langley
Until 1 August 1914, no piece of news [in France] had ever reached the entire population on the same day.
That afternoon, in the Limousin, people heard the alarm bells that usually signified a hailstorm and looked up into a clear blue sky.
In villages from Brittany to the Alps, firemen rushed out at the sound of clanging bells, looking for the fire. In the little town of
Montjoux in the arrondissement of Montelimar, a car screeched to a halt in front of the mairie. A gendarme jumped out and
delivered a package. A few moments later, people in the fields were intrigued to see cyclists whizzing past carrying bundles of
posters. Near Sigottier, a man called Albert R. . . .met a young lad heading for his village. The boy claimed to be on his way to
announce the outbreak of war and round up all the men of the village. On hearing this, Albert R. . . .collapsed in tears of laughter
and wished him luck with his practical joke.
In places where newspapers were scarce and the main source of news was the weekly market, war came as a complete surprise.
According to a survey conducted in 1915 by the rector of Grenoble University, people were 'thunderstruck' and 'stupefied'. The first
inkling they had at Motte-de-Galaure, two miles from the busy Rhone corridor, was the order given on 31 July to have all the horses
ready to be requisitioned. Some men sang the 'Marseillaise' and looked forward to coming home a few weeks later with tales of
glory, but most were silent and dismayed. There was talk of hiding in the woods. At Plan in Isere, "the men of our peaceful locality
who were mobilized did not leave with the same enthusiasm as their comrades from the cities. Rather, they were resigned and went
out of patriotic duty."
In some parts of the Alps, men were making hay in the high summer pastures when messengers brought the news. Some had to leave
for the station in the next valley before saying farewell to their families.
This excerpt from Graham Robb's The Discovery of France is from the very last part of the
book, as it closes with the great watershed of the Great War in 1914. In general the book is about
the history and discovery of France outside of Paris in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's a very
comical book in a British sense, understated that is, but factual to a high standard and full of
interesting, intriguing, endearing, and puzzling facts about French history, local languages and
dialects, customs, clothing, cuisine, and whatnot seen in the regions in France outside of Paris.
I found it charming, and it gave me a sort of remembered recollection of the France my wife and I
came to travel through and discover during the 1970s and '80s. That was of course long after
the time period in the book, but the echoes of the 19th century were never far away in rural France
in those days.
But it's also a haunting book; the ghosts of the past flicker throughout the telling, and the author
recounts quite factually how the agreed-upon history of France as told in schools, institutes, and the
collective memory is mostly a (polite) fiction and far from what even a cursory reading of old
books, memoirs, tracts, and writings can tell us.
Anyway, I found the part about the spreading of the news of the outbreak of war in rural France to
be very evocative--certainly at odds with what some books would have us believe. And ever so sad, yet quite likely accurate. I can
readily believe farmers being called from their high pastures in the mountains, without being given time to pass by their homes first.
It strikes me as just the thing to have happened in the Pyrenees for instance, where Paris is far off and the rest of the world even
farther away.
The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War, Graham Robb, Picador, 2007,
ISBN 978-0-330-42761-6.
44
Irvin Cobb's Groundbreaking War Reporting
Paths of Glory
Reviewed by Len Shurtleff
Not to be confused with the Humphrey Cobb novel of the same title later turned into a
1957 motion picture directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Kirk Douglas, Irvin
Cobb's work was first published in 1915. This Paths of Glory is a revealing series of
firsthand impressions of the opening weeks of the Great War in Belgium, Germany,
and France written by Saturday Evening Post correspondent Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
(1876-1944). Cobb traveled by taxi, staff car, train, and horse-drawn carriage behind the
battle fronts in the late summer and fall of 1914. Despite German suspicions, he was
given remarkable access. He interviewed any number of German officers; Belgian,
French, and English war prisoners; German, Belgian, and French civilians and medical
personnel, as well as American diplomats and consular officials in Belgium. While he
is careful not to accuse the Germans of committing atrocities against civilians, he does
detail the destruction of life and property in reprisal for alleged Belgian armed civilian
resistance, the legendary francs tireurs so feared by German soldiers. His depiction
of the ruins of the Belgian university city of Louvain is particularly evocative. In
summary, Cobb describes Belgium as "That poor little rag doll, with its head crushed in
the wheeled tracks…" Not surprisingly, he finds many Belgian civilians to be morose, demoralized, and hungry. Some even
then were beginning to starve.
In language that must have shocked contemporary American readers, Cobb reports on the almost unending parade of
blood-soaked wounded streaming back from the fighting front and the heroic efforts of exhausted German, Belgian, and
French medical staff to cope with the carnage. He also visits and vividly describes the ruins of the Fort de Loncin and
other defensive works destroyed by heavy-caliber German and Austrian siege guns, views the front from a German
observation balloon, visits an artillery battery, and reports on German civilian attitudes toward the war. Even in the fall of
1914 Germans were publicly discussing the possible annexation of Belgium, as well as absolute German domination -political and economic -- over the European continent.
Paths of Glory, Irvin S. Cobb, Dodo Press, 233 pages, ISBN 1 4065 1397 0, $15.29 from www.bn.com.
Trivia Challenge Answers
1. Andrew McNaughton
2. William Barker
3. Mont Sorrel (Hill 62)
4. Sir Arthur Currie
5. Courcelette
6. Rouge Cabaret Cemetery
7. Lt. Gordon Flowerdew
8. Frederick Banting
9. Battle of Amiens
10. Passchendaele
11. Essex Farm
12. Sir Julian Byng
Bonus Question: The Brooding Canadian soldier stands near where the Canadian First Division
plugged the four-mile gap in the lines during the first gas attack on the Western Front, April 22,
1915. Their counterattack at Kitchener Wood that evening was later called by Marshal Foch "the
greatest act of the war."
45
From The Great War Society Member's Contribution Website
Our Father/Grandfather Frank Linhart
75th Inf. Regiment, K.u.K.
by TGWS Members George and Jan Linhart
Born in the Bohemian village of Zbraslavice in 1900,
Frank Linhart joined the 75th Infantry of the Austro-Hungarian
Army in early 1917. He saw nearly a year of action and
somehow ended up in Odessa at the war's end.
Frank with Some Unidentified Mates
Frank Linhart at Age 18
After repatriation, Frank settled in Prague, studied the flute at a
conservatory, and eventually earned a seat in the orchestra of
the Hungarian National Opera. Ambition and some already inplace relatives brought him to the Chicago area in 1923. He
played with the Chicago Symphony and was the band director
for a radio station. The Depression hurt many musical enterprises, so Frank eventually settled into a job with the Federal
Reserve Bank.
In 1928 the Linhart family brought into the world George Linhart,
current TGWS member and father of TGWS member Jan Linhart.
46
Posters of the Great War
War posters were art with a purpose. They helped counter the shortages of enlistees, war materials, and cash in the central banks.
Images of saintly nurses, suffering mothers, and inspiring goddesses motivated masculine patriotism. As the conflict ground on,
more realistic images of war-weary infantrymen and even maimed heroes sought to strengthen civilian resolve. [World War I]
posters show the power of lithographic art, making visual the attitudes, ideals, and contemporary understanding of World War I
and foreshadowing art's role in war propaganda through the war-torn century that followed.
An excellent section of World War I posters from
the Bruccoli Collection can be viewed at:
http://www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/hist/gwposters/posterintro.html
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Jay Williams of the McKissick Museum,
University of South Carolina, Bruccoli Collection
Documentary History
King George V Welcomes the Yanks
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