The Great War - 1914-1918

Very interesting. Thanks for those links.

I'll note, however, that those are colorized photos, not color photos. Color photography existed at that time, but it was exceedingly rare and the equipment was very expensive. And some of the color choices are a bit odd. One of the photos shows German troops, some of whom appear to be wearing khaki-colored uniforms. Germans in the field wore feldgrau, except in the Middle East. And the colorizers apparently haven't reached an agreement regarding the correct shade of horizon bleu worn by the French troops.

The only German who photographed (officially) colour photos during WWI was Hans Hildenbrand (1870-1957). The colours aren't 'real' compared with what we are used now, all done in Autochrome Lumière.
Hildenbrand's archive in Stuttgart was destroyed in 1944, so only reproductions survived.
Spiegel-online published some in 2008
(link >here<)

The Feist sparkling wine company ("Feist-Sektkellerei AG") was the largest German one. [The Feist-family was Jewish - if that's of any interest.]
The above shown brand "Feist-Feldgrau" was exclusively produced for the German troops. The designer of the labels was Emil Doepler, a Art Nouveau illustrator, decorative artist, and art teacher.

More famous are his works for a chocolate brand (Stollwerk) and ...
Source: wikipedia

Feldgrau(field grey) became the prominent uniform color in 1910 when Prussian Blue(Dunkelblau} was replaced.

This photo was taken in mid 1915.

The soldier's Pickelhaube (spiked helmet) is covered with the canvas cover.

Pre-war helmet covers would have had the regimental number indicated by a large red Arabic number.
In 1914, the color of the number was changed to dark green, and in 1915, it was left off altogether.

The leather used in the helmet was imported from Argentina. In 1914, the British blockade caused the first shortage of the war, leather for helmets. Felt and fibre board as well as tin or sheet metal was used as substitute materials for making helmets. Spiked helmets continued to be produced for enlisted men until the spring of 1916, when the Stahlhelm, (steel helmet), was introduced.
The soldier is wearing the 1915 Transitional tunic. A wartime measure simplified the tunic and eliminated the complex Brandenburg and Swedish cuffs of the 1910 uniform and replaced them with simple turn back cuffs. This style cuff was well liked by the soldiers, as all military passes and other I.D. required to be shown to military authorities could be conveniently stowed away in the fold of the wide turn back cuff.

Up to the end of the war the 1910, Transitional and 1915 Bluse type tunics continued to be produced. The soldier's belt buckle is the pre-war brass and silver type. Attached to his rifle is the shorter, butcher bayonet.
http://www.worldwar1.com/sfgeruni.htm

In February 1915 Germany declared the waters surrounding British Isles to be a war zone in which ships could be sunk without warning, and began the first U-Boat campaign with unrestricted attacks against merchant and passenger ships. The British Navy retaliated in March by imposing a total sea blockade on Germany, prohibiting all shipping imports including food.


Higgledy-Piggledy, nursery rhyme reworked for propaganda purposes
Rhyme accompanying the caricature:

'Higgledy-piggledy, my black hun!
She lays mines where the trade ships run;
Friends and foes she treats as one -
Higgledy-piggledy, my black hun!'
(Source: Mile End Library, Queen Mary, University of London/ Queen Mary University of London Archives)

All of the belligerents experimented with uniform colors in the decade prior to the outbreak of war. This was new, as camouflage had never really been necessary in warfare before the introduction of smokeless powder and the widespread adoption of rifled firearms. Each army -- except for the French -- adopted some form of camouflage that reflected their own unique views of what was required to be inconspicuous on the battlefield. That meant khaki-green for the UK, field grey for Germany, "pike grey" (hechtgrau) for Austria-Hungary, and a sort of tobacco-brown for Russia. As I've mentioned before, each major combatant army, except Russia's, underwent a significant alteration in uniforms during the war.

Good point Joe

Plans to change uniforms (and uniform colours) were made in Germany from the 1890's onwards - the firts troops to get new (different) uniforms were those in the colonies.




Seesoldaten ("Marines") in Kiautschou 1900

A Bavarian feldgrau uniform ( 2nd Chevaulegers-Regiment "Taxis" ["chevau-légers"], from Regensburg)

3 APRIL 1915

WESTERN FRONT: French pilot and aviation pioneer Adolphe Pégoud is credited with two "kills" of German airplanes. The second, a German Aviatik C two-seater observer, is Pégoud's fifth. Although the term would not be used until later, Pégoud's five aerial victories make him the first "ace" of World War I.


Pégoud was something of a daredevil, and recorded a number of "firsts" (that later were determined to be, at best, "seconds") as a test pilot prior to the outbreak of the war. He was the second to make a parachute jump from an airplane, and the second to fly a loop in an airplane, a feat that was captured by the Gaumont newsreel cameras:



Pégoud met the fate of many fighter pilots when he was shot down and killed in August, 1915. His mascot - a stuffed penguin - was recovered from the wreckage of his plane and is now on display at the Musée de l'Armée in Paris.

22 APRIL 1915

WESTERN FRONT: In the Flanders sector of the front, German troops release chlorine gas, which is carried by the wind to the French lines. The gas, which reacted to water to form an acid, blinded and suffocated the unprepared French and colonial troops, who fled their trenches in terror. French casualties numbered at least 6,000. The Germans, however, were unprepared to exploit this success, as many of their reserves had been shifted to the Eastern Front, and their own troops were equally unprepared to occupy the trenches that were still suffused with gas. A vigorous counterattack by Canadian units equipped with improvised gas masks limited the German gains.

The Germans had tried poison gas several months earlier on the Eastern Front, but weather conditions had rendered the gas ineffective. That prior failure helps to explain why the subsequent success in April, 1915 caught the Germans by surprise. Even if they had been prepared to exploit this breakthrough, however, it is unlikely they could have done any better than they did, given that the Germans were just as unequipped to deal with poison gas as the Allies were. In fact, a number of Germans were killed or injured in the process of opening the gas cylinders and pointing them at the French lines - the use of gas shells fired by artillery had still not been developed.

The bigger problem for the Germans was the fact that the prevailing winds on the Western Front blew from west to east - in other words, toward their lines. Those conditions favored the Allies. The Germans, as a result, largely abandoned chlorine gas came to rely more heavily on denser gases that did not disperse in the wind.

25 APRIL 1915

MIDDLE EAST: Allied forces, including a large contingent of Australian and New Zealand (ANZAC) troops, invade the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli, at the mouth of the Dardanelles. At some landing sites the Ottoman defenses are minimal, while other Allied beachheads come under intense counterattacks, and the beaches soon become a general scene of confusion and mismanagement.

The Gallipoli campaign was the brainchild of Winston Churchill and other "easterners" in the British cabinet. The easterners, in contrast to the "westerners," believed that the stalemate on the Western Front couldn't be broken and that victory could only be achieved on peripheral fronts, where the UK could exploit its mastery of the seas.

The plan might have achieved greater success if it had surprised the Turks, but an attempt by a British and French naval squadron to force the Straights in March not only ended in disaster, but it tipped off the Ottomans to Allied intentions. Even the relatively small force defending the peninsula was able to pin the Allies down on the beaches, as the rugged terrain afforded the Turks a significant advantage, while indecisiveness and lack of coordination meant that the Allies failed to follow up local successes.

26 APRIL 1915

LONDON: Italy and the Entente powers conclude a secret treaty, pledging Italy to enter the war against the Central Powers within a month. In exchange, Italy receives extravagant promises of territorial compensations in South Tyrol, the Adriatic littoral, and Africa.

The Treaty of London was not only secret from the public, but also from a large part of the Italian government. The pact was largely the work of the Italian prime minister, Antonio Salandra, and the foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino (who was half-British on his mother's side). Secrecy was needed because a significant portion of the Italian public remained neutralist in sentiment, yet the enticement of large territorial gains dangled by the Entente were too much for Salandra to resist, and far more than what the Central Powers could have delivered. Germany, in an effort to sway Italy, pressured its Austro-Hungarian ally to cede some territory in the Trentino, but this offer, greatly resented by Vienna, was dwarfed by the Entente's promises -- not surprising, considering that the Entente could be as generous as it wanted with other countries' territory.

My grandfather served at Gallipoli with the Anzac forces but alas he never spoke about it.
I'm reading a great book about the battle and I posted it on the reading thread.

7 MAY 1915

OFF THE COAST OF IRELAND: The RMS Lusitania, an ocean liner sailing from New York to Liverpool and carrying a total of 1,962 passengers and crew, is torpedoed by the German submarine U-20, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger, with the loss of 1,195 lives.

The German government had published warnings in the New York newspapers, advising passengers of the risks of travelling in areas where its U-boats were active. Although international law required submarines to hail ships before launching torpedoes, the rules were ignored by Germany after Allied governments instructed ship captains to ram submarines that broke the surface. In addition, the Lusitania was carrying a significant cargo of war materiel for the UK, which made her a legitimate target. Nevertheless, the storm of protest from the US made it difficult for President Wilson to maintain his administration's pledge of neutrality in the European conflict.

@RealTimeWW1, a Twitter project about the First World War, has been awarded first prize at the 2015 European Charlemagne Youth Prize ceremony, organised by the European Parliament and the International Charlemagne Prize Foundation on 12 May.

(The ‘European Charlemagne Youth Prize’ is the most recent development in the Charlemagne Prize concept. The prize is awarded by the Charlemagne Prize Foundation in Aachen, in cooperation with the European Parliament. The prize honors not individuals, but projects run by persons between the ages of 16 and 30. The projects must contribute to international cooperation, promoting ‘the development of a shared sense of European identity’ and providing a model for how Europeans can live together as a community.)

Just over a year ago, the project @RealTimeWW1 started to tweet about these kind of historical events and developments related to the Great War of 1914-1918. Masters students in European Contemporary History at the University of Luxembourg made it their task to give an impression of both general changes and personal stories that happened exactly 100 years ago


The students described their project as: "Not as a history of winners and losers but as a time when, regardless of their nationality, many mothers suffered the same anguish over sons lying in military hospitals. A time when men on all fronts wrote similar love letters without knowing whether they would ever see their beloved again."

A lot of information about the Lusitania (and the role of other Liverpool liners in WW1) on the website of the Merseyside Maritime Museum.

23 MAY 1915

ITALIAN FRONT: Italy declares war on Austria-Hungary, fulfilling the pledge it made to the Allies a month earlier in the Treaty of London to join the war. Italy did not, however, declare war on Germany.

Italy's failure to declare war on Germany no doubt reflected Italy's unwillingness to tackle an enemy which it was woefully unprepared to face. It also made clear that Italy's motives in entering the war were founded entirely on its desire for territorial gains at the expense of the Dual Monarchy. Although Italy did not take the same stance as the USA did when it entered the war "alongside" the Allies, it still fought a strange sort of parallel war against Austria-Hungary while the main effort of its partners was directed against Germany. For its part, Germany, despite professing its mythic loyalty (Nibelungentreu) to its ally, played along with the charade and regarded the Italian Front as solely an Austro-Hungarian affair.

Yet despite nearly a year of sitting on the sidelines, Italy was completely unprepared to join the war. It also picked a particularly bad time to enter the contest. In early May, forces from the Central Powers had punched a hole in the Russian lines at Gorlice-Tarnow and had already retaken much of the Austro-Hungarian territory that had been seized by Russia in 1914, including the fortress city of Przemysl. An earlier entrance by Italy could have diverted troops from the breakthrough and given assistance to the beleaguered Russian forces. Instead, Vienna, sensing correctly that Italy was about to attack, was able to transfer much-needed troops to the Italian border at a time when they were only needed for mopping-up operations in the Carpathians.

Battle of Jutland

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jutland


Battle of the Somme

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Somme

Thanks for reviving Joe's moribund thread orally. It's one of my favorites.
However it would be great if you posted some other sources than wiki.
Like you did on the Hiroshima thread. I learned a lot from that one.