The Assault, Verdun
French Patriotic Postcard Depicting the Role of Women During the First World War 1914-18, 1915
Ten Days That Shook the Nation - World War 1
Heavy Artillery on the Railway, October 1916
WWI Cemetery, Gallipoli Battlefields, Thrace
World War I Soldier, Banners, Photo
Title: Albert I (1875-1934) King of the Belgians in the First World War, 1914
Artist: Ilya Efimovich Repin
America in the 20th Century - World War I
World War I Aircraft
http://firstworldwar.cloudworth.com/index.php
Main page -- Latest WW1 news and articles
The truth behind the 28 Irish soldiers shot at dawn during WWI
28 Irish soldiers were executed by the British Army during the Great War for disobedience and desertion. For decades, the full story of how they died remained secret. For the first time, journalist Stephen Walker tells their story. --- In his uniform, lance-corporal Peter Sands looked at ease, back in the narrow streets in west Belfast. To the casual observer he looked like any other serviceman enjoying a few days' leave away from the horrors of battle. However, he harboured a secret: he should have been with 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles in France and was now listed as a deserter.
2007-10-26 | by belfasttelegraph | Executed Cowards of War
http://elblogador.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_archive.html
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Dermot Ahern Calls For Pardon For Executed Soldiers
Following El Blogador's call for soldiers executed during World War I for desertion to be pardoned, the Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs has called on the British Government to exonerate those Irishmen who were shot. It is now generally recognised that many of those shot in the Great War were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and would therefore have not been in full control of their faculties.
Dermot Ahern has laid before the Oireachtas a report prepared by his Department into the courts-martial and executions of 26 Irish-born soldiers by the British Army during the First World War.
In its findings, the report described a military system of justice which was flawed, which appeared to ignore clear evidence of medical afflictions, and which was marked by class-bias and a disparity in the treatment of different nationalities, including in particular Irish soldiers. A total of 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers were tried under this system and 'shot at dawn'.
Addressing Seanad Éireann on this issue today, Minister Ahern said that “our unwavering objective is to engage in finding an agreed resolution on this issue that would bring comfort to the families of those executed.”
The Minister recalled that this year marked the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. He stressed that it was in the spirit of recognising the experience and sacrifice of all our countrymen who fell during the First World War, that the Government had lent its support to the campaign to secure pardons for those Irish men who were “shot at dawn”.
“It is our objective to recover their memory from the dishonour that was done to them some 90 years ago.”
Posted by El Matador at 5:38 PM
Statue to honour World War I PM David Lloyd George criticised
Anti-war campaigners have criticised the statue to honour WW1 PM David Lloyd George. The Parliament Square memorial unveiled by the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall is the first to the "Welsh wizard" in London. A letter signed by Harold Pinter and others claimed he left a legacy of violence. But historian Kenneth O Morgan called Lloyd George a great radical who deserved to be honoured. Other signatories include John Pilger and Denis Halliday. They said Lloyd George's leadership saw bombing by British war planes across the Middle East, and left a legacy of violence: "All of which makes today's celebration of Lloyd George's legacy highly ... disgraceful."
2007-10-26 | by bbc | Museums and Memorials
October 1917: Lenin versus Marxism, the Bolsheviks and the Soviets
On November 7, 2007, Russia will mark the 90th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution - no longer an official holiday. It is time to recall the real, not mythical, history of that period. Paradoxically Vladimir Lenin had to overcome Marxism and the resistance of the Bolshevik Party and the workers', peasants' and soldiers' deputies before he was able to launch the Oct 25, 1917 attack against the Government entrenched in the Winter Palace. ... Future Red Army commander Mikhail Frunze opposed Lenin. Some memoirs imply that a number of Bolsheviks claimed that Lenin had lost his mind abroad and pushing the party toward an abyss.
2007-10-26 | by rian | Russian Empire
Nicholas II, the Last Russian Emperor
Nicholas II (1868–1918) from the Romanovs dynasty was the last Russian Emperor, aka Bloody Nicholas because of the tragic events on his coronation day and the notorious Bloody Sunday as ill omens of the impendent tragic future of the country, and Nicholas the Martyr due to the execution of him and his whole family by Bolsheviks. ... The former Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky recalled that once on his visit to Moscow he asked Yakov Sverdlov: "And where is the tsar?" - "That’s over. Shot down. We decided it here. Lenin believed we could not leave them a live banner, especially in such complicated circumstances".
2007-10-26 | by russia-ic | Russian Empire
First World War in colour pictures
During World War I only the French photograph masters used the Lumiere brother’s autochrome technique offering a rare "painted view" of the life during the First World War. The French army is the primary source of these photographs from the war we are used to perceiving in "black and white".
2007-10-25 | by javno | Photographs, Pictures & Posters
Swastikas, SS insignias desecrates the grave of the WW1 soldier
The final resting place of Private J Shepherd, who fought for the 13th Battalion of the Royal Scots, is among dozens of memorials in a French cemetery to have been desecrated with Nazi graffiti. The grave of the Royal Scots soldier, who died at the Somme in 1916, was targeted by vandals who scrawled swastikas and SS insignias on over 30 headstones in the Peake Wood Cemetery. The vandalism has been condemned by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the McCrae's Battalion Trust. Peter Francis said the vandalism was a "shocking act of desecration" on the memory of the soldiers.
2007-10-25 | by scotsman |
Poster Propaganda - South Carolina before and during World War I
"A review of A Call for All: The Great War Summons the Palmetto State" examines the impact of World War One propaganda on South Carolina. A Call for All is part of a collaborative project, Forward Together: South Carolina in World War I, with exhibitions at 5 venues around the city. All governments use propaganda in the lead-up to a war. It is one of the most effective tools in gaining support for a policy that might be unpopular. Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays first formalized specific strategies in the early 20th century. Woodrow Wilson hired the pair to convince the public to support US entry into WWI.
2007-10-25 | by free-times | Photographs, Pictures & Posters
Slovenia's forgotten World War I front, Pictures from mountain trenches
Slovenia: Bloody WW1 campaign above the Soca River echoes in the mountains today. "The Italians were up there on the Kolovrat ridge," remarked Edward Granville. "When the fighting started in earnest in 1915 they selected their best troops, bersaglieri and alpini mountain fighters, to attack the Austro-Hungarians. But after a year they were using pretty much anyone..." There were 11 major Italian offensives on the Soca Front (the Isonzo Front) trying to break eastward into Austria. What these armies were doing, entrenched opposite each other along the Soca River mountains a few hundred feet apart, mirrored their Allies on the Western Front in Flanders.
2007-10-20 | by telegraph | Battlefields
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/main.jhtml?xml=/travel/2007/10/20/et-soca-front-120.xml
Life and death on Slovenia's forgotten front
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 20/10/2007Page 1 of 2
Ninety years ago, the young men of two armies met above the Soca River in Slovenia. That bloody campaign echoes in the mountains today, says Christopher Somerville.
In pictures: Slovenia's forgotten front
The victims are still remembered locally. A march is held in November each year at Lake Krn.
Kolovrat Ridge was the setting for a historical re-enactment which marked the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Caporetto this year.
Walkers can visit gun caverns, trenches and award-winning museums with photographs that leave you stunned and silent.
But the best way to understand the terror and futility of the battlefield is by climbing above it.
Staring out across the Julian Mountains today, it’s hard to imagine a more serenely peaceful prospect.
But the region was the site of fierce battles between the Italians and the Austro-Hungarians in the First World War.
Upland Escapes offer walking tours of this stunningly beautiful landscape, where more than a million Italians and nearly 700,000 of their opponents died or were injured for life
The terrified and half-frozen young men who left behind their fish tins, their helmets, their barbed wire and their boot soles remain ghostly presences.
A restored section of the Italian front-line trenches gives an idea of the environment in which the men fought and died.
The hills and mountains were like the battlefields of the Somme tilted at 45 degrees. The advantage was all with the dug-in defenders.
But Italian General Luigi Cadorna would not accept defeat easily. He pushed his troops through 11 fruitless and fatal assaults on the Austro-Hungarian line.
The closest Cadorna himself came to the front was Udine, nearly 50 miles away.
Cyclamen were glowing pink under the beech trees on Mengore Hill in the mild Slovenian autumn air. But even their beauty, and that of the Soca River seen winding in milky turquoise bends between the mountains of the Julian Alps, could not soften the chill that went through me at first sight of the gun caverns.
Their naked rock mouths, opening like black wounds in the flanks of Mengore, had not healed at all in the 90 years since the horrific fighting of the First World War, when they belched smoke, flame and bullets again and again down the steep slopes of this hill.
A walking holiday with a different focus
Upland Escapes offer walking tours of this stunningly beautiful landscape, where more than a million Italians and nearly 700,000 of their opponents died or were injured for life.
"The Italians were up there on the Kolovrat ridge," remarked Edward Granville of Upland Escapes, pointing west to a long green mountain back. "When the fighting started in earnest in 1915 they selected their crack troops, their bersaglieri and alpini mountain fighters, to attack the Austro-Hungarians. But after a year or so they were using pretty much anyone who could be made to go over the top.
There were 11 major Italian offensives on the Soca Front - the Isonzo Front, as the Italians called it - trying to break eastward into Austria, but they never did get through." Edward gestured down the slope. "You can see why." The cause of the Italians' failure to take Mengore Hill was all too obvious. The hill is only a pimple compared with the majestic mountains round about.
But its slopes rise at an angle of 1:2 - in places, far steeper than that. A heavy-laden infantryman with a rifle to encumber him, a frightened young conscript already demoralised by one bloody repulse after another, outlined against snow or pale grass as he stumbled upwards among the decomposing corpses of previous assaults, made an easy target for an experienced machine gunner or sniper securely ensconced in a solid rock cavern high above. Mengore Hill, and the other hills and mountains around it, were like the battlefield of the Somme tilted at 45 degrees. The advantage was all with the dug-in defenders.
Upland Escapes specialises in walking holidays in carefully selected areas that other organisations don't frequent. Generally these settings lack such ferocious and poignant history. The company's Slovenian tour, however, goes right to the heart of the Alpine region contested so bitterly between the Allied forces, represented here by Italy, and the armies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In this 90th anniversary year of the last and greatest of the Soca Front battles, Edward had come out to Slovenia to guide me through a stunningly beautiful mountainous landscape, where over 29 months, and on a front less than 50 miles long, more than a million Italians and nearly 700,000 of their opponents - Austrians, Bosnians, Poles, Hungarians and Germans - died or were mutilated for life.
What these enormous armies were doing, entrenched opposite each other along the Soca River mountains only a few hundred feet apart, exactly mirrored the positions of their respective Allies 1,000 miles away on the Western Front in Flanders.
The Italian commander, the stubborn and autocratic General Luigi Cadorna, convinced himself after each catastrophic repulse that the next strong push, if determined enough, would achieve a complete and decisive eastward breakthrough - a "stroll to Vienna" - and victory. The Austro-Hungarian troops held most of the vital high ground and were determined to prevent that breakthrough, while awaiting their own chance to advance westward into the Friulian plain of northern Italy.
The stalemate produced a campaign as bloody and terrible as that on the Western Front, but one which - apart from Ernest Hemingway 's classic and romantic account of it in A Farewell to Arms - has remained all but unknown outside Italy, Austria and Slovenia.
By another row of defensive tunnels beside the path up Mengore Hill, Edward and I found a noticeboard with two faded black-and-white First World War photographs of this same location. The soldiers have built wooden "houses" out from the stark rock of the tunnel mouths; they have knocked up rough benches and tables where they sit amid wild flowers trained up into a tiny garden - touching efforts by lonely men separated from their families to bring a touch of the domestic and familiar into a place of filth, noise and death.
At the top of the hill we came to a chapel. From here Edward pointed out the mountain ridge where a young Erwin Rommel (later to become the famed and feared "Desert Fox" of the Second World War) won the coveted Blue Max decoration, storming the hilltop during the Austro-Hungarians' one great victorious offensive of October 1917.
Before that military triumph broke the stalemate on the Soca, General Cadorna (who never came nearer the front than Udine, nearly 50 miles away) drove and punished his troops with threats, demotions and executions to undertake 11 fruitless and fatal assaults on the impregnable Austro-Hungarian line. I saw more of these fortifications on another climb, this time up the domed hill of Humèiè in the northern sector of the line.
Here in the damp beech woods and autumn crocuses, the black mouths of the gun caves and their connecting tunnels yawned in the impossibly steep slope of a hill where thousands died.
My three-night stay was based at the farm of Vinko and Irena Kranjc in the upland hamlet of Koseè, under the 7,400ft peak of Krn, the highest mountain of the region. Everything you eat and drink is produced by the Kranjc family from their bursting orchards and lush green pastures. Near this homely paradise two contrasting museums filled out the Soca Front picture.
In the neighbouring village of Drenica, Mirko Kurinèiè has spent 40 years filling his attic with items collected from the battlefields. Displayed here in profusion are helmets with bulletholes, spoons and forks, homemade snow shoes, shell caps, diaries discovered under rocks, propaganda postcards ("Is your girl getting off with a spiv back home while you're dying on the Isonzo?"), and chest and groin protectors crudely forged of cast iron.
Very different is the immaculately organised, award-winning museum in the nearby town of Kobarid. A huge scale model of the entire region helps you appreciate the relative positions of the combatant armies.
But it is the contemporary photographs that leave you stunned and silent - Italian corpses contorted by gas attack, zigzag lines of soldiers toiling up snowy slopes, a field hanging of a "coward", bodies stacked like firewood, faces blown apart and crudely reconstructed, a naked man under the knives of bloodied surgeons while a general looks on with a smile of polite inquiry.
Kobarid is known to Italians as Caporetto, a name synonymous with disaster. The two museums furnish facts, figures and images of what happened on October 24, 1917 when the Austro-Hungarians initiated their first and final offensive on the Soca Front. A beautifully restored section of the Italian front-line trenches at Predolina just north of Kobarid gives an idea of the environment in which the young men fought and died.
But I only caught the terror and futility of the battlefield when I climbed with Edward high above Predolina on to the crest of the ridge around which the Austrian advance surged towards the north Italian plain.
The October 1917 Austro-Hungarian offensive would eventually grind to a halt in northern Italy on the Piave River, more than 100 miles to the west, a stasis that would last until the overall Allied victory in November 1918. The Italian troops high on this knife-edge ridge, however, reeling from the shattering effects of Austrian mines exploding under their trenches, hearing the shouts and screams of battle in the morning mists below, then fleeing headlong down the slopes of Mount Vrsiè to captivity or death in the valleys, knew nothing of the future.
Staring out across the mountains from the ridge today, it's hard to imagine a more serenely peaceful prospect. But the terrified and half-frozen young men who left behind their fish tins, their helmets, their barbed wire and their boot soles remain ghostly presences.
Soca Basics
From London Stansted, Ryanair (www.ryanair.com) flies daily to Trieste and Easyjet (www.easyjet.com) flies to Ljubljana. Hire car and onward route instructions included in Upland Escapes package. Upland Escapes (01367 851111, www.uplandescapes.com) organises flexible, independent holidays in beautiful, unfrequented upland areas. These include group or solo walks and cycle rides, guided or self-guided, from easy to challenging.
In Slovenia it has a choice of 20 self-guided walks, five escorted walks and four cycle routes, several featuring Soca Front sites. Breaks cost from £615 per week, including hire car, escort/guide, local b & b accommodation, packed lunch, maps and guidebook. Three-night minimum stay.
Other destinations include Italy (Abruzzo region), France (Alpes-Maritimes and Pyrenees) and the Canary Islands (Gran Canaria)
Pot Miru, the Walk of Peace, is a waymarked walking trail along the Soca Front. A leaflet guide is available from Pot Miru information centre in Kobarid (0038 6 5389 0167, www.potimiruvposocju.si).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ_1VsxhqqU&mode=related&search=ww1%20bi-planes%20soldiers%20battle%20tank%20omaka
War Without End 1/6
Tags: world war one treaty versailles wilson lloyd george clemenceau
WORLD WAR I
THE WAR TO END ALL WARS
WWI was a war without parallel - all previous wars were eclipsed by its scale of destruction. It was a struggle between Europe's great powers, which were grouped into two hostile alliances. The number of men mobilized by both sides totaled over 65 Million.
The catalyst for the war was the assassination of Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand while he was visiting Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. Other countries in turn were drawn into the conflict.
For the first time war involved the use of new technology such as aeroplanes, tanks, and submarines. Trench warfare remains as a lasting image of WWI. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme 60,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded. The war lasted from 1914 - 1918.
When the fighting was finally over, no one could accurately determine how many had been killed, bur historians estimate that up to 10 million men lost their lives on the battlefields and another 20 million were wounded.
85 years later it is perhaps best remembered for the staggering loss of human life. In the decade following The Great War many had the firm conviction that it should be " THE WAR TO END ALL WARS".
Source BBC NEWS
German God of War Defeated
Woodrow Wilson
David Lloyd George
Georges Benjamin Clemenceau
Added: July 10, 2007
From: Shinobi022
Summer 1918. The last German offensiv... Summer 1918. The last German offensive failed to break the Allies. Unrest bordering on revolution at home spread demoralization to the German army. The central Powers's alliance was crumbling with Turkey exhausted, Bulgaria beaten, and Austro-Hungary trying to work its own armistice with the Allies.
The situation was ripe for a decisive Allied victory if only they would have the will to launch a great offensive. But who would want to press on the fighting when the war is obviously nearing its end?
Failure to reach a decisive military victory, coupled with vindictive terms of armistice imposed upon the German would undo all the sacrifices paid on the battlefields, sowing the seeds for the next great war in Europe.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgsdMwMaYjw&mode=related&search=ww1%20bi-planes%20soldiers%20battle%20tank%20omaka
War Without End 2/6
THE GREAT WAR
and the Shaping of the 20th Century
War in Bosnia...the struggle for peace in the Middle East...the Cold War and the Atomic Age...the spread of world democracy-much of today's world can't be fully understood until students learn about World War I and the unsettling peace that emerged afterwards. Now you can take high school and college students back to explore the events that set the course of the 20th century.
THE GREAT WAR and the Shaping of the 20th Century portrays the historical events that occurred between 1890 and 1939 through the words and experiences of people who lived through them. Extensive primary resource material involves students in the sights and sounds of these turbulent times. Autobiographical accounts convey the thoughts and emotions of soldiers and civilians whose lives were forever changed by war. And interviews with leading scholars explain important historical concepts every student should know, including:
How conditions, events and attitudes made war all but inevitable
What made World War I so different from other wars that came before it
How people of different countries, social positions and genders were affected by the war
Why "the war to end all wars" instead gave rise to a century of conflict
Chez Smith is right across the road from the River Somme, where the bloody Battles of the Somme unfolded.
North-Eastern part of France - Picardy, Artois, Flanders. From Paris in the Forest of Compi่gne to the site of the German surrender in a railway carriage.
The Chโteau of Bl้rancourt is the home of the Museum of Franco-American Military Co-operation. The lovely gardens were designed by two American landscape designers.
In order to get the feel of life in the trenches, a visit to the Historial Museum in Albert is a must.
This is right at the heart of the Somme battlefields.
The Canadian Memorial at Vimy Ridge has preserved some of the original trenches and its possible to walk in them. The moonscape of shell craters brings home the horrors of life on the front.
Just over the Belgian frontier is the town of Ypres, known as "Wipers" to the British tommies. The town was completely destroyed in World War One, and every evening the poignant "last post" is played.
1916-Wilson reelected on his 14 Points of Peace platform
1917-Germany begins unrestricted submarine warfare, US enters World War I, Congress passes the Selective Service Act, US grants Puerto Ricans US citizenship; War Industries Board, Committee on Public Information and Food Administration created, Espionage Act passed, US gov't federalizes railroads
End of WWI
1918-Germany surrenders to the Allies, world-wide influenza epidemic kills 22 million people.
Remember the Dead - Courtesy of Arlington National Cemetary, Virginia, USA
1919-18th Amendment (prohibition) ratified, Versailles Treaty, Chicago race riots
1920- Sacco and Vanzetti convicted of the murder creating a national public outcry, League of Nations is established, Nazi party organized in Germany, 19th Amendment ratified
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cJMjEcafTk
The First World War - War Without End 3/6
