The Great War - 1914-1918

The Dragon of the Somme from the really interesting (because different) website Great War in Archeology - that's a poignant, highly interactive website exhibiting recent archeological discoveries from the Argonne region in eastern France, where French and German troops engaged in trench warfare during World War I.
(It's a resource about the experiences of WWI soldiers, and also demonstrates the role of archeology in recovering new insights about the past. While everything written is in English [and German and French], some videos are in French only.)

Thanks Walter. A fascinating site,

There are hundred if not thousands of sites with sources and document about WWI - from local over regional to just special events.

Europeana 1914-1918, a project based at the University of Oxford, hosts a remarkable collection of primary documents relating to World War I, collected by individuals, libraries, and film archives across Europe.
Hundreds of letters, diaries, photographs, World War I films, official documents, and postcards are to be found there. Each resource type is further sorted by subject (Propaganda, Women, Aerial Warfare, etc.) or front (Italian Front, Home Front, Eastern Front, and Western Front), letting visitors explore the experiences and perspectives of European, American, Australian, and New Zealand soldiers.

Europeana 1914-1918 – untold stories & official histories of WW1

Danke. Some great reading Walter

I've been watching FREE WWII movies. Here are WWI movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CJQNdJT2NI

Operation War Diary, an ongoing collaborative project between the Imperial War Museum (IWM) and the British National Archives, provides rich information about the experiences of WWI soldiers by examining Unit War Diaries from British and Indian Troops.

The British National Archives has digitized these volumes - over 1.5 million pages, total - and now, in honor of the centenary of the war has collaborated with the IWM.

>diaries<

I visited the Imperial War Museum many decades ago, but still remember many of its content. I even remember the cannon in front of the museum. For some reason, I also remember flags hanging from the ceiling. I'm not sure that's true or not.

Who can say where we would be today ifGavrilo Princip hadn't
been in town when Ferdinand came to visit in 1914 - and changed the world.

The war began in any case regardless of whether Gavrilo Princip was in the city or not.
It was not the first attempted murder Ferdinand

In Flanders Fields -

The University of North Carolina's Rare Book Collection is home to the Bowman Grey Collection, which features hundreds of "war-themed cards produced in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and the U.S. during World War One (1914-1918)."
The collection includes postcards that feature war photographs, portraits of military officers, political cartoons, poetry, illustrations, and more. This collection will eventually include over 6,000 postcards.

http://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/graypc

Reviving this thread:
Britain tried to kill Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918 with secret RAF bombing raid, reveals archivesExclusive: 'In Germany it might well have turned the increasingly unpopular Kaiser into a martyred war hero and so perhaps even have saved the monarchy from collapse'

Remarkable unpublished evidence has revealed that in the final year of the First World War Britain attempted to kill Germany’s leader, Kaiser Wilhelm II.

The secret mission failed – but only just.

The evidence – largely unpublished documentation in the RAF Museum’s archives and documents in a private archive in France – show that exactly 100 years ago this Saturday, a squadron of 12 bombers took off from an airfield near Boulogne to bomb a French chateau which, intelligence work had revealed, was being used by the Kaiser as his secret Western Front operational residence.

The full story – partly revealed in a new book just published – started in late March 1918 when the German army launched the first of a series of major new offensives against the Allies.

The massive attacks were initially successful – but nevertheless some German soldiers were captured by the Allies. Some of these German PoWs were interrogated by French Intelligence – and one of them revealed to his interrogators that the Kaiser had just taken up residence at a chateau immediately outside a small French village called Trelon, three miles from the Belgian frontier.

By coincidence, one of the intelligence section’s interpreters on the staff of the famous French general, Philippe Pétain, was the owner of that chateau. In mid April 1918 he was given the job of interrogating the German prisoner-of-war in more detail – and, by using local knowledge, to check the veracity of the revelation.

This interrogator (a French officer named Frédéric de Merode) and his commanding officer then went to tell Pétain what they had discovered.

At some stage – probably in May and presumably in conjunction with the British – an "in principle" decision was taken to bomb the chateau. Indeed, De Merode (the chateau owner) was asked by the French military to give them permission to bomb the building. Patriotically, he agreed.

German sources reveal that the Kaiser stayed there on at least three occasions – from 21 March to 2 April; from 5 April to 15 April; from mid May to 1 June and possibly from around 26 April to around 1 May.

It may well be that British intelligence wanted to learn further details before any final political or military green light could be given to try to kill the Kaiser.

After all, they would probably only get one opportunity. If it failed, he would nevertheless realise that the Allies knew exactly where he was living and he would therefore promptly change his Western Front operational residence.

British intelligence officers in Amsterdam in neutral Holland had frequent contact with an underground espionage network in German-occupied Belgium and northern France called La Dame Blanche (The White Lady). It is known that the LDB had agents in the Trelon area – so it is likely that further information on the Kaiser’s movements was passed on (via Amsterdam) to British intelligence HQ in London. However, there was always a time delay – so information was always slightly out of date.

At the same time that the Allies discovered the precise location of the Kaiser (and more importantly realised that he was within bombing range), the German Spring offensive was giving British and French forces a terrible battering. The Germans were succeeding in pushing the Allies back more than 40 miles.

What’s more, in late May, at the battle of Chemin des Dames, the Germans captured 45,000 Allied troops and 400 field guns. For the Allies, it was a catastrophe. At that stage, even in late Spring, 1918, they must have feared that the Germans might even win the war.

So, it was in those dire circumstances that the French and the British appear to have finally decided to try to kill the German emperor.

Having taken off from Ruisseauville Airfield (near Boulogne-sur-Mer) at 4.50am on Sunday 2 June, 12 RAF De Havilland-4 bombers reached the Kaiser’s secret Western Front residence at Trelon at 5:25am. They dropped up to a dozen 50kg bombs and up to 24 11kg ones.

However, unbeknown to British Intelligence, the same German military successes that had probably triggered the bid to kill Kaiser Wilhelm, had also led him to leave the chateau to congratulate his generals at the front. As a result, he had left his Western Front operational residence 19 hours before the RAF struck.

What’s more, the British aircraft chose to attack at an altitude of only 500 feet – and to do so in single file. As a result the smoke from the initial few bombs billowed skywards and prevented many of the succeeding pilots from seeing their target.
[... ... ...]
John Watts, the grandson of one of the RAF airmen involved in the raid, believes that much more information on the raid must still exist in as yet un-studied files in archives in Britain, France and possibly Germany.

“My grandfather’s role was always part of family folklore. The remarkable new details now emerging from sources in northern France and RAF files is at last beginning to reveal what really happened,” said Mr Watts, a West Midlands military history enthusiast.

‘The Kaiser’s Dawn: the untold story of Britain’s secret mission to murder the Kaiser in 1918’ by John Hughes-Wilson (Unicorn Publishing)

Fascinating stuff. Please don’t let this thread die.

Earlier this week was the hundred year anniversary of the first American soldier killed in action on German soil. He was from a town in Michigan and they had some sort of commemorative event that was in the news.

EDIT: I guess this was the guy:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_William_Guyton

I'm glad Wikipedia had it. I'd already forgotten all the details besides that it was a town somewhere in Michigan.

Does anybody remember the book "Johnny Got His Gun"? I read it many years ago but I thought it was about Vietnam.......it wasn't, it was about a man gravely injured during the Great War. For me it was a horrific tale, I gave it to my nephew who was totally blown away by the account. War is awful, War is dehumanizing, War only destroys, everything and the soldiers who are sent out into conflict to be maimed, killed, horribly disfigured or emotionally destroyed. I hope and pray for a responsible government who will make decisions on only the actual threat and not squander the lives and welfare of the men and women who protect us.

My maternal grandfather was a medic in the Reserve Infantry Regiment 13He was active all the time .... besides three times in hospital due to gas poisonings.

He never talked about that (perhaps, because I was a child when I knew him).
He died of the late effects of these poisonings in 1957.
(I've only found out about that a few years ago, when I looked through papers after my mother's and aunt's deaths.)

This could be posted in a couple of other (active) threads, but here is the best place in my opinion:
Europe is at risk of slipping back to 19th-century power games

That's an interesting analysis, but I don't know that I agree with it. In 1914, Turkey controlled the middle east west of Persia and east of Egypt. The Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy not only no longer exists, it's previous component parts are all a part of the above-mentioned group of small nations. Germany does not control as much territory as was the case in 1914, and is not nearly so militaristic--it would take the Germans a generation to come up to speed militarily, and probably against the wishes of the electorate. Despite the moron in the White House, the North Atlantic alliance continues to be a counterbalance to the ambitions of Russia, shaky as it is. (After all, the Russians in spite of all of Putin's bluster are not nearly the military power they truly were in 1914. Looking at each era realistically and in its own context, the Russian army of 1914 was vastly larger, and had much better troops and equipment--it took the concerted efforts of vain, arrogant and incompetent officers abetted by an immense and ineffective, inefficient governmental apparatus to lose their initial campaigns. Russian soldiers at the outset had pretty good morale. I don't think any of those descriptions apply to the Russians of our era, and their military technology has fallen further behind the West with each passing year since 1991.)

I think this is one of those cases of an "expert" taking a dire tone because someone is actually paying attention to what he has to say. I'm unconvinced.