100 Years: Remembering World War One

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Britain set out Monday its plans to commemorate the centenary of World War I, including international acts of remembrance, cultural events and battlefield visits for English schoolchildren.

The commemorations begin on August 4 next year with a service for Commonwealth leaders at Glasgow Cathedral, a candlelit vigil in London's Westminster Abbey and an event at the St Symphorien Military Cemetery in Belgium.

The Glasgow service, which will recognise the contribution and sacrifices made by the countries of Britain's then empire, comes the day after the closing ceremony of the 2014 Commonwealth Games, being held in Scotland's biggest city.

"We have produced a fitting programme of events to remember and mark the actions of men and women from Britain, the Commonwealth and all the nations involved in the First World War," said Culture Secretary Maria Miller, who is in charge of the programme.

"On August 4, 1914, we entered the war -- a war like no other the world had seen.

"It is right we remember and mark the centenary of this momentous day in the world's history, bringing its importance alive for younger generations and remembering the price that was paid by all involved."

Britain has set aside £50 million ($80 million, 60 million euros) for the four-year programme marking the 1914-1918 conflict.

The Westminster Abbey vigil of prayer, penitence and solemn reflection will conclude with the last candle being extinguished at 11:00 pm -- the moment war was declared. The vigil may be replicated in churches and other places of worship around Britain.

The event at St Symphorien outside Mons will focus on reconciliation. The cemetery contains an equal numbers of Commonwealth and German graves, including the remains of the first British soldier killed in action on the Western Front and the last two Commonwealth casualties of the war.

National acts of remembrance will mark the first day of the Battle of the Somme (2016) and Armistice Day (2018).

The Gallipoli landings, the Battle of Jutland, and the first day of Passchendaele will also be marked.

But some critics complained that the government was failing to explain the reasons behind the war.

Historian Max Hastings said the government had taken a "non-judgemental approach".

He told BBC radio it was "as important that we prevailed over the Germany of that period as it was over the Germany of the Nazi era".

"The government is very frightened of taking any sort of view that might suggest we upset the Germans all over again."

In other projects, the Imperial War Museum in London will reopen in mid-2014 following the £35 million refurbishment of the World War I galleries.

Two schoolchildren and a teacher from every English state school will visit the Western Front battlefields in a £5.3 million project.

The war's last known combat veteran, Claude Choules, died in Australia in 2010 at the age of 110. He served in the British Royal Navy.


Source : Sapa-AFP /sdv
Date : 10 Jun 2013 16:51
 
Amazing that it will be 100-years since the start of the Great War. But good to see that efforts are being made to remind folks about it, a devastating part of our history that helped shape the modern world.
 
A war to be over by Christmas

Even for the darkest of pessimists, when the great powers of Europe went to war in August 1914, their troops were supposed to be home by Christmas.

"It will be a very short war -- a month, six weeks, perhaps," a French lieutenant, Charles Delvert, recalls a comrade telling him at the outset of the conflict.

"'No', I told him, 'It will be a drawn-out war -- at least three months,'" he writes in his diary.

French and German generals alike forecast lightning offensives lasting just a few weeks in the plains of north and eastern France where most of the fighting eventually took place.

But by the time the first major battle drew to an end on the Marne river in September, such optimism lay buried along with the half million men already dead or wounded, at the outset of the four cataclysmic years of World War I.

The Schlieffen Plan was a German war strategy that aimed to crush French forces before British reinforcements could arrive, and before Russia could mobilise its population and pose a threat to Germany's east.

Within six weeks, German troops and heavy artillery were to have marched through the Netherlands and Belgium to the French border, with politicians in Berlin standing behind their military chiefs.

"Taught to do so for generations, they believed it best to leave military matters to competent chiefs of staff," explained the German historian Gerd Krumeich.

French generals had devised their own war strategy, the Plan XVII, based on lessons from their 1870 loss of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany, and General Joseph Joffre had the support of President Raymond Poincare.

Joffre believe that motivated infantrymen would cut German forces in two with a drive through the two disputed regions.

Young French farmers, who made up 41 percent of conscripted troops, were called up from their fields to head for the front.

Many believed they would be back in time for the grape harvest in late September, while the pessimists among them allowed that victory might take a few months more, says historian Jean-Jacques Becker.

So certain were they of a short war that both the French and German sides had planned for limited ammunition -- and were to run into severe shortages from September.

Quickly, both the French and German plans came undone.

Within weeks, French soldiers were pushed back -- though they made a orderly retreat, and requisitioned Paris taxis to get fresh troops to the front.

Germans forces advanced to within 50 kilometres (30 miles) of the capital, forcing the government to flee south to Bordeaux, before they were stopped on September 6-9 in the first Battle of the Marne.

Neither the Battle of the Marne nor the First Battle of Ypres in October delivered a conclusive outcome despite horrific casualties.

By early 1915 the German and Allied forces were left facing off in a virtual stalemate from the North Sea to Switzerland, in the positions they were to defend for three years to come.

And instead of Christmas at home, French and German troops spent it digging dismal trenches to shield themselves from artillery fire, on what became known as the Western Front.


Source : Sapa-AFP /aw
Date : 07 Feb 2014 05:35
 
Ten milestones of World War I

From the first Battle of the Marne in September 1914 to the Allied counter-offensive of mid-1918, here are the 10 key moments of World War I:

--1914--

- September 5/12: After a month-long westward offensive, with Paris almost within reach, German troops are stopped in the First Battle of the Marne. A joint French-British counteroffensive led by French General Joseph Joffre successfully pushes them back north and east. The losses from this first major battle are dizzying, with some 250,000 dead and wounded on each side.

- November 17: The war, which all sides expected to be brief, shows no sign of ending as the Western Front stabilises from the North Sea to Switzerland. This marks the beginning of the conflict's iconic trench warfare, which lasts until March 1918. Dug in at times just a few dozen metres (yards) apart, the troops learn to live in the mud as protection from shelling.

--1915--

- April 22: First use of chemical warfare, in this case a chlorine-based compound, by the Germans at Ypres in Belgium. Two years later in the same area they experiment a second weapon, dubbed "Yperite" or "Mustard Gas."

- April 25: Start of the Armenian massacre by Ottoman Empire forces, with the arrest and execution in Constantinople of 2,300 Armenian figures. Over the next 16 months, the alleged genocide kills between 600,000 and 1.5 million people, according to various sources. The Ottomans dispute the numbers and the term genocide and say the Armenians were providing support for Russian troops.

The same day, French and British forces land at Gallipoli, along the Dardanelles straits to try and force open a supply line to their Russian allies. The operation, launched by Winston Churchill, is a dismal failure, with the Allies suffering 180,000 dead before they withdrew in January 1916.

--1916--

- February/June: The Battle of Verdun is launched by German troops and becomes the overall symbol of the war for France. Saved in extremis by General Philippe Petain, the French army and its German adversary suffer horrendous casualties numbering more than 770,000 of which more than 300,000 are deaths.

French infantrymen, known as "poilus," nonetheless stand their ground and prevent a decisive German breakthrough.

- July 1/November 18: The Battle of the Somme is launched by British troops and becomes the bloodiest of them all. Overall casualties number 1.2 million, of which 400,000 are dead or missing. Territorial gains are minuscule and this time it is the German soldiers who hold fast.

--1917--

- January 9: Germany declares all-out submarine warfare with more than 150 U-boats to break a British naval blockade and choke off supplies to Britain and France.

- April 6: The submarine campaign backfires as the United States abandons the neutrality it had observed up till then, in spite of attacks such as the 1915 sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania, and declares war on Germany.

- November 6/7: Following the overthrow of Czar Nicholas II in February, Russian Bolsheviks seize power during the October revolution, named according to the Russian calendar. On December 15, Lenin concludes an armistice with the Germans, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, which allows Berlin to redeploy forces to the Western Front.

--1918--

- July 18: After blunting months of German offensives, the Allies counter-attack at Villers-Coteret in what is dubbed the second Battle of the Marne. US forces participate in strength and tanks help to finally break through. German troops are forced into a general retreat that leads to the armistice of November 11.


Source : Sapa-AFP /nsm
Date : 12 Feb 2014 06:29
 
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I've been watching this series:

[video=youtube_share;qY3Sb8xiQ_c]http://youtu.be/qY3Sb8xiQ_c[/video]

I must admit that my perspective of WWI was pretty much confined to the trench warfare on the western front. People tend to forget about the conflicts in China, Africa (not to mention SA's involvement in Namibia), New Guinea, the eastern front and the Balkans.

The atrocities against civilian populations perpetrated by the Germans, Ostro-Hungarians and the Russians, not to mention the treatment of nationless minorities are truly an eye-opening prelude to WWII.
 
Garyvdh said:
I see HBO is making another mini-series as a follow up to "Band of Brothers" and "The Pacific".
It's going to be about the Air War of WW2.

But I would also love to see a good mini-series on WW1.

Best we have right now is Gallipoli, Black Adder goes Forth, and Sergeant York!
Click to expand...

Really excited for Masters of the Air (the third mini-series being developed by Hanks & Spielberg). War movies about the air war are limited with the only two great ones coming to mind being Battle of Britain (1969) and Memphis Belle (1990). Tuskeegee Airmen was good too, but has a number of inaccuracies, especially when it comes to the B-17 scenes.

Also agree that World War 1 needs an historically accurate mini-series of its own. And like to see something that follows the experiences of soldiers from both sides of the war.
 
thestaggy said:
Really excited for Masters of the Air (the third mini-series being developed by Hanks & Spielberg). War movies about the air war are limited with the only two great ones coming to mind being Battle of Britain (1969) and Memphis Belle (1990). Tuskeegee Airmen was good too, but has a number of inaccuracies, especially when it comes to the B-17 scenes.

Also agree that World War 1 needs an historically accurate mini-series of its own. And like to see something that follows the experiences of soldiers from both sides of the war.
Click to expand...

pfft those films pale in comparison to that masterpiece Pear Habour
 
Dan Carlin's Blueprint for Armageddon series is being podcasted now and well worth a listen for an insight to the military tactics of WW1. The Battle of Marne is vividly depicted.
 
Would be nice if they made a mini series about the World War 1 air war, that would be a lot more brutal than WWII one. Though I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't love seeing Spits, Mustangs, 190's and 109s fighting it out.
Okay just did some research, not sure I'd call the 8th Air Force the masters of the air but oh well.
 
Lupus said:
Would be nice if they made a mini series about the World War 1 air war, that would be a lot more brutal than WWII one. Though I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't love seeing Spits, Mustangs, 190's and 109s fighting it out.
Okay just did some research, not sure I'd call the 8th Air Force the masters of the air but oh well.
Click to expand...

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/wings/ Still one of the best depictions of dogfighting in cinema.
 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/...ern-Italy-reveal-corpses-of-WW1-soldiers.html

whitewar_remains_o_2787501c.jpg
 
June 28, 1914: The Day that triggered World War I

by Calin NEACSU and Rusmir SMAJILHODZIC

Sunny Sarajevo was in festive mood on June 28, 1914 for the visit of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. But it was to be a dark day, and one that changed the world.

By 11 o'clock, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire would be dead, an assassination that plunged Europe into four years of horrific conflict that killed millions.

"There were flags everywhere, the whole city was covered with flags. As children, we had to stand in the front," one witness told Austrian radio in 1994 for the 80th anniversary.

Armed with bombs and guns and blending into the crowd along the archduke's route were half a dozen Bosnian Serb nationalists bent on freedom from Austro-Hungarian rule.

The night before the group had been partying in Sarajevo cafes and Gavrilo Princip, the sallow-faced 19-year-old who would shoot the archduke and his wife, even had a date with a young girl called Jelena Jezdimirovic.

"They decided to have an 'ordinary' evening, not to hide, in order not to attract attention," Bosnian historian Slobodan Soja told AFP.

Franz Ferdinand, resplendent in military tunic and plumed hat and in the region for army exercises, was in an open-topped car with reduced police protection on his way to city hall.

The first three militants, paralysed with fear, let the motorcade pass but a fourth, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, was able to lob a bomb -- which bounced off the archduke's car and exploded under the vehicle behind.

Unharmed, the archduke sped on to his destination, angrily saying in his speech: "I came to visit you and they throw bombs on me!"

General Oskar Potiorek, military governor of Bosnia, assured the archduke the situation was under control, but if Franz Ferdinand thought his troubles were over, he was wrong.

After the ceremony at city hall, the 50-year-old decided to visit the hospital where people injured in the bomb attack were being treated.

But driving back along the Miljacka river, the convoy took a wrong turn up a small street on the right -- named after the emperor Franz Joseph -- and had to stop and turn round.

"That was a fatal error," writer and Sarajevo chronicler Valerijan Zujo told AFP.

Believing that his group had failed and with Cabrinovic arrested, Princip, rejected two years earlier by the Serbian army as "unfit" to carry a weapon, was still mingling in the crowd.

And now, the archduke's Graef und Stift automobile stopped right next to him.

"The archduke was served up to him on a plate," said Soja.

Stepping up the car, 19-year-old Princip shot both the archduke and his wife Sophie at close range with a revolver, he in the throat and she in the abdomen.

"As the car quickly reversed, a thin stream of blood spurted from His Highness's mouth onto my right check," recalled Lieutenant Colonel Count Franz von Harrach.

"As I was pulling out my handkerchief to wipe the blood away from his mouth, the Duchess cried out to him, 'For God's sake! What has happened to you?'. At that she slid off the seat and lay on the floor of the car."

Franz Ferdinand repeatedly insisted "It is nothing!", but he gradually lost consciousness and he and the archduchess were pronounced dead 15 minutes later after arriving at the royal residence.


Source : Sapa-AFP /gm
Date : 20 Jun 2014 04:17
 
THE WEAKLING WHOSE SHOTS STARTED WWI
by Aleksandra NIKSIC

Gavrilo Princip, the 19-year-old whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo 100 years ago this June 28 sparked World War I, was weedy, bookish and a bit shy.

But the pint-sized peasant boy was also a passionate Serb and Slav nationalist whose rejection because of his size left with him with a point to prove.

"It was difficult to imagine that he, so small, quiet and modest, should have decided to go ahead with such an assassination," contemporary press reports quoted a judge at his trial as saying.

Princip was born in 1894 in the remote mountain village of Obljaj in what is now Bosnia, one of nine children, only three of whom survived.

He left home at 13 to join his brother in Sarajevo where schoolfriend Vaso Cubrilovic remembered him as someone of "restless soul who cannot settle, like he is always haunted."

Biographer Drago Ljubibratic described Princip as "reserved and quiet".

Once he got talking, though "he could be cynical and tough, persistent and even stubborn, very ambitious and a little boastful," he wrote.

A passionate reader, devouring adventure stories by Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas, he also dabbled in writing poetry but was too shy to show it off.

"Books mean a life to me," he often said.

In 1912 Princip moved to Belgrade, where he was swept up in a rising wave of anger against the Austro-Hungarian empire of the Habsburgs ruling large parts of the Balkans at the time.

He tried to join first the Serbian army, then the Black Hand, a Serb nationalist guerrilla movement, but both took one look at him and showed him the door.

For Serbian historian Vladimir Dedijer, this twin rejection was "one of the key motives that pushed him to make an exceptionally brave move that would prove the others that he was their equal."

He managed to join Mlada Bosna ("Young Bosnia"), a group of revolutionaries inspired by the anarchist and communist ideas coming out of Russia and Italy.

In 1914, having received weapons training with other members, the group learned that Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, would be in Sarajevo.

They decided to take their chance.

Numbering half a dozen and having spent the evening in Sarajevo's cafes -- Princip even had a date -- the group separated and lined the route of the archduke's motorcade on June 28, 1914.

The first three lost their nerve. A fourth, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, lobbed a bomb at the imperial car, but it bounced off and exploded under the vehicle behind.

Cabrinovic tried to poison himself and jump into a river and amid pandemonium was arrested. But Princip, instead of fleeing, wanted to finish the job.

When Franz Ferdinand's motorcade later took a wrong turn and had to stop and turn round, the 19-year-old -- by chance in just the right place --stepped up to the archduke's car and shot him and his wife at close range.

The consequences of their deaths were enormous. A month later Europe's system of alliances among the great powers had dragged the continent into the horrors of World War I.

At his trial in late 1914, where a judge described Princip as "weak and short with a long yellowish face, Princip was unrepentant about the assassination.

He insisted that he was a "Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs."

Princip escaped the death sentence because he was under 20 -- by less than a month -- and was given 20 years in prison and incarcerated in solitary confinement in jail.

In the harsh conditions, weakened by malnutrition, his tuberculosis worsened. Wasting away to a skeletal wreck, he died in 1918, a few months before the end of the war.

In 1920, his bones were dug up and brought to Sarajevo where they were given a decent burial and until the Balkan wars of the 1990s he was the city's favourite son.

But after years of bombardment and sniper fire by Serb forces, the people of Sarajevo, now the capital of an independent Bosnia, no longer want to honour him.

Two plaques commemorating Princip were ripped up and a bridge named after him reverted to its pre-1914 name, Latin Bridge, and his memory still splits the Balkans.

Princip is now "whatever person the observer wishes: hero, villain, liberator, terrorist," Tim Butcher, a British historian who has written a book on the assassin, told AFP.


Source : Sapa-AFP /gm
Date : 20 Jun 2014 04:27
 
THE HISTORIANS' VIEW: CAUSES OF WORLD WAR I
by Laurent MAILLARD

What led Europe at the height of its power to plunge into such a self-destructive conflict? Two historians, Gerd Krumeich of Duesseldorf University and John Horne of Trinity College, Dublin, offer their explanations.

GERD KRUMEICH: "Without a doubt, the roots of the conflict lie with the rivalries born of European nations' imperial ambitions. At the turn of the century, all believed that having an empire was vital for their development, even their survival in a world faced with rapid industrialisation and international competition.

Germany -- at that point Europe's leading industrial power -- was keen to acquire a colonial empire to match its economic dynamism. But it set about doing so in an aggressive way that was to upset the balance of powers on the continent. To Britain's alarm, Berlin embarked upon an naval arms race, it squabbled with France over African territories, and helped the Ottoman Empire -- Russia's great rival -- to modernise its army.

These initiatives were countered by Germany's rivals, leaving it with a sense of frustrated ambition. Berlin felt encircled by the British, French and Russians -- who themselves felt threatened by Germany's ambitions and closed ranks against it. That state of affairs fuelled an arms race during 1912 and 1913, coupled with a flare-up of nationalist sentiment in both Germany and France.

In Berlin, military leaders believed a war was coming and thought they could win only if it came soon -- before Russia was able to finish reinforcing its army. That explains the key role played by Germany in triggering the conflict."

JOHN HORNE: "For decades before 1914, an ideological rivalry set the dynastic and multi-ethnic empires of Eastern Europe against the principle of nationality, incarnated by the nation-states of Western Europe and founded on the principle of popular sovereignty.

In the Balkans, emergent nationalism, especially that of Serbia, threatened Austria-Hungary in particular. At the same time, the balance of power in Europe was profoundly modified by the unification of Germany in 1871.

This turned Germany into a great power while French strength gradually declined. Colonial and economic rivalries exacerbated these tensions, but were not their main cause.

The balance of power gradually came to depend on the equilibrium between two armed alliances and on concerted action by the great powers on both sides to prevent regional crises inflaming the entire continent.

This mechanism worked to limit the two Balkan Wars in 1912-13. But in July 1914 it failed. If those in power had understood the nature of the war to come, they would certainly not have embarked on it so casually.

Instead, they considered war a rational option, a risk certainly, but not one that would transform the very nature of the world in which they lived."

GERD KRUMEICH: "It seems clear to me it was the Germans who pressed the 'war' button by refusing, throughout the crisis sparked by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, to engage in any negotiation that would have allowed Serbia to withstand the aggression from Austria-Hungary.

The Austrian government decided to use the assassination to subdue Serbia, which had become, since the Balkan wars, a worrying neighbour with 'pan-Serbian' policies which threatened to pull apart the multinational Austro-Hungarian empire.

Germany, an ally of Vienna, saw the crisis as an excellent opportunity to test Russia's intentions: if Russia came to the aid of Serbia against Austria-Hungary, it would be war -- a war that Berlin thought it could win. If, on the other hand, the Russians allowed the Austro-Hungarian forces to wipe out Serbia, Russia would emerge weaker from the crisis.

The German government's calculations were driven by the military, who believed a European war was inevitable and that it would be better for Germany to enter it as quickly as possible. The other powers concluded from this that Germany -- deaf to any attempts at making peace -- wanted to go to war.

Russia, reassured by the support France had offered during the crisis, took the risk of a robust response in the hope of intimidating Vienna: for the first time it decided to introduce conscription while continuing to negotiate.

But this conscription in fact set in train the German war plan -- the Schlieffen Plan -- which meant that Germany, if threatened by Russia, would quickly attack and conquer France so it could then turn all its forces on Russia, avoiding the nightmare of a war on two fronts."

JOHN HORNE: "All those who accepted a Europe divided into two armed camps and the idea that war was an acceptable tool of politics -- if not a Darwinian necessity -- had their share of responsibility for the outbreak of war.

But the role of the Austrians and above all the Germans - without whose approval Austrian action was unthinkable - was fundamental.

The question of who was 'responsible' for the war must nonetheless be seen in the context of the conflicts and understanding of the European balance of power at the time.

It only became a fundamental issue after the conflict in view of the gulf between the causes of the war and its outcome, which destroyed the pre-war world."


Source : Sapa-AFP /gm
Date : 20 Jun 2014 04:25
 
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