The First World War

[crinolynne]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

After the war, the American Red Cross commissioned the building of a monument on the Islay coast close to the scene of both tragedies.

Just a point of interest (or not), Islay is pronounced "eye lah". Knowing that will be somewhat helpful if you decide to go there to remember lest we forget and perhaps to enjoy the many excellent malt whiskies...

[scoundrel]

Just to make the sinking of the liner Otranto just a little bit sadder than it already was, she had in December 1914 been HMS Otranto, an armed merchant cruiser. The Admiralty had requisitioned her and attached 8 4.7 inch guns to her deck, four a side. When war broke out she was sent to the South Atlantic and ended up as part of the ill fated squadron commanded by Rear Admiral Christopher Cradock, and was present at the shocking British defeat, the Battle of Coronel, where Cradock's squadron was destroyed by the German East Asia Squadron under the command of Vice Admiral Maximilian von Spee.

When battle commenced, the Otranto drew heavy fire from the German heavy cruiser SMS Gneisenau and from the light cruiser SMS Leipzig. The Otranto's guns were out of range and she was too slow to maintain her place in the line as the faster units, HMS Good Hope, HMS Monmouth and HMS Glasgow tried and failed to close the range with the German ships so that they could do some worthwhile damage. Unable to play any effective part in the action and taking hits for no gain, the captain of the Otranto broke off without orders and on his own responsibility. Only Otranto and the light cruiser HMS Glasgow remained afloat after the battle ended. Both the Good Hope and HMS Monmouth went to the bottom with not one survivor: 1,570 highly trained peacetime sailors thrown away in exchange for Foxtrot Alpha.

The Admiralty were intensely displeased by Admiral Cradock's decision to seek out and fight a vastly superior force. There was a very old and slow and mechanically jinxed worn out dreadnought battleship assigned to Cradock, HMS Canopus, and given the self-evident disparity of force the Admiralty had expected Cradock to remain in company with the only ship he had which could outgun the German squadron. But it seems that Admiral Cradock preferred not to do this. No action was taken and no comment was made against the captain of HMS Otranto for deciding to break off the action without permission or orders. Certainly Churchill, First Sea Lord at the time, was quite satisfied that the Otranto had acted properly.

Except for the crew of SMS Dresden, the one light cruiser which escaped at the Battle of the Falklands a few weeks after Coronel, very few German sailors at Coronel survived the war. The crews of HMS Glasgow and of HMS Otranto as she then was were the only British survivors of the brief and bleak action at Coronel. Of the Otranto crew members, 84 ORs and 12 officers died on 6 October 1918, which will have been most of them. It means therefore that the British survivors of Coronel on Armistice Day were the crew of HMS Glasgow and very few crewmen from Otranto who were rescued.

[haroldeye]

Today is the 100 year anniversary of the battle of Amiens. The beginning of the end.

[Baresfan]

BBC had an excellent bit on Amiens: https://www.historyextra.com/period/...ry-remembered/

[scoundrel]

Between March and July 1918 the Imperial German Army had mounted a series of offensives, the most notable one being Operation Michael on 21 March. The Russians had been crushed by attrition and by misgovernment - they desperately craved peace but sadly were about to fight a civil war just as bad as the world war they had abandoned. Meanwhile, as well as being able to transfer about a million men, the peace of Brest-Litovsk released huge material resources into German hands - thus offering the opportunity to try for a military decision on the western front as well.

But just before the first actions took place for the Amiens offensive by mainly British and Commonwealth forces, the last of the German offensives actions had been reversed by a sharp French and American victory in the Second Battle of the Marne. This was the first important American contribution to the land war, although their air component was already becoming influential before this point, albeit flying second-hand French aeroplanes. 22 French infantry divisions participated in General Foch's counter-attack on 20 July, as did 2 American divisions under Foch's command. Another 8 American infantry divisions under American command supported the counter-offensive. Incidentally, an American infantry division in WW1 was much larger than a French or a British division, so those ten American divisions were a serious force.

By forcing the German Army backwards from the Marne, the French and Americans had left the Germans facing Britain's component in a much more exposed salient opposite Amiens and had prepared the scene as it were.

[scoundrel]

Although nigh on 100 years have gone by since the Armistice of 1918, we still very much live in the world which WW1 created. For example:

The fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire initiated a nationalist chain reaction in Hungary, Czechoslovakia; and Yugoslavia emerged as a Serbian kingdom full of bad blood between its own peoples. Unsurprisingly, the Serbs remembered being preyed upon with merciless and cowardly cruelty by ethnic Albanians as they fled in winter blizzards across mountain ranges to reach the Adriatic coastline of Montenegro and eventual safety on rescue ships sent by the British to take them to Italy. The Balkans make the ancient Vikings seem liberal and enlightened when it comes to the vendetta or blood-feud; and the Serbian folk memory of fleeing to Montenegro and Italy in 1915 was important during the Kosovo conflict three quarters of a century afterwards.

Much more widely influential though was the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The former Russian Empire lost the Baltic States, Finland, most of western Belarus as now is [it was the main land area of Poland in 1919-1939] and also the area which is now called Moldova but was called Bessarabia in those days. Ukraine and Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan also. Kars, Batum and Ardahan, areas bordering Turkey, were claimed as spoils by the Ottoman Empire. Russia lost most of her coal reserves, nearly half of her industrial base and over a third of her population.

In addition, the German side exhibited a brutish and swinish greed which shocked and appalled even their own negotiating team, led by the relatively fair, moderate and reasonable foreign minister, Richard Kuhlmann. Kuhlmann's main plan was to split the Entente alliance and secure a durable peace on Germany's eastern border. Instead, ss well as making the crudest imaginable land grab, Hindenburg and Ludendorff bled Russia savagely for food supplies because their own civilians were starving due to incompetent management of agriculture and the domestic economy. To enforce what amounted to the wholesale seizure of the 1918 harvest, over a million German soldiers remained in the Russian theatre - a policy enthusiastically driven by Hindenburg and Ludendorff, to the bitter alienation of Kuhlmann, who in the latter stages of the talks refused to talk to either man on the telephone, taking his orders in writing from messengers so that history would know who was responsible. It is arguable that history punished Ludendorff exactly as he deserved - a more lenient and honourable peace, such as Kuhlmann had advocated, would have released the million men occupying eastern European areas and doubled the numbers of men transferred to France in the spring and summer of 1918.

There were even more bitter fruits of Brest-Litovsk yet to come. The British, French and Americans had been assured by Kerensky that Russia was still committed to the Entente alliance. They regarded the coup by the Bolsheviks and the abandonment of the war so soon afterwards as a betrayal, especially as Russia was seen to be supplying the German side and undermining the British led naval blockade. This reaction was a major factor in the Intervention which in turn was the birth pains of the Cold War and the disastrously bad relations still apparent between Russia and most of the other European countries in general, but Britain in particular.

[TonyBlack]

Originally Posted by Mal Hombre

Of course "Black Jack" wasn't Pershing's original nickname,He started out as an Officer in an African American regiment so You can guess what that nickname was...

The name was originally "Nigger Jack", given to him by cadets he commanded at West Point, because they wanted to express their derision at his strict and harsh supervision style. It originated from his real and often expressed admiration and respect for the Black American soldiers he had commanded in the American Southwest. Even when it was tamed down to the more familiar "Black Jack" it was still intended as a slur, and it was never one which Pershing himself was ever known to have adopted or approved of.

[Captain ron]

Just watched Sergeant York on TCM. good movie

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by tmee2000

The Dresden escaped and sailed back around Cape Horn, into the maze of channels in southern Chile and evading Royal Navy searches until March 1915. On 14th March she was located in Cumberland Bay on Más a Tierra (Robinson Crusoe Island). By this time she was low on ammunition and supplies, worn out and no longer operational. After coming under fire and taking casualties the Dresden surrendered. A Lieutenant was sent to negotiate with the British, but this was a ruse to buy time. The Dresden was scuttled and the crew of about 300 interned in Chile for the duration.

One escaped back to Germany. It was the Lieutenant in the negotiating party- Wilhelm Canaris.

I only remembered recently, but there was another participant, or at least spectator in the Battle of the Falkland Islands on 8 December 1914. She was the SS Seydlitz.


In the days before Ryanair and Easyjet, the closest to affordable mass transport for ordinary people was to sail steerage (third class) on a passenger liner. There was a huge migration of mostly poor to destitute people from Europe to the United States starting in the first half of the 19th Century. SS Seydlitz was one of many ships taking such people to a new life - she carried at least 1,900 passengers when full, possibly 2,050 (accounts vary) and only a few hundred of these berths were in first or second class. She was spacious, even with a full passenger load, fully electric and quite modern for her day although sailing in third class, her passengers were not being ill-treated.

Launched in 1901, she was refitted and upgraded in 1906 with more modern triple expansion steam engines, which raised her top speed to at least 14.5 knots. As well making journeys to Ellis Island from Hamburg, she was a regular visitor to the Far East, travelling to Yokohama and Australia via the Suez canal.

When the First World War was starting, the SS Seydlitz had a little bit of luck. She was in harbour in Sydney, Australia but she had already coaled up. France declared war before Britain, and so on 3rd August 1914 Sydney was still technically a neutral port. Seydlitz put to sea as scheduled, her destination ostensibly being Hamburg via Perth. The Australians almost certainly knew war was imminent but she was an unarmed passenger ship so they probably didn't see her as much of a threat, and no one tried to interfere. A few weeks later she turned up in the Argentinian port of Bahia Blanca, still nothing more sinister than a German passenger liner on the run and a potential blockade runner. However, in late October 1914 she departed from Argentina unannounced and was next seen in Valparaiso, a few days after Admiral Spee's victory against Admiral Cradock's squadron at Coronel. One must assume that she had been commandeered by the German Navy while in Argentina and was acting under orders.

Having coaled up in Valparaiso, she made rendezvous with Admiral Spee in the lee of Picton Island near Cape Horn. Sheltered by the island from the notorious wind and weather of these waters, Admiral Spee refueled and prepared his ships for the next mission. As well as Seydlitz, the German squadron drew 2,800 long tons of coal from a captured British collier, the sailing ship Drummuir. This ship was sunk after she had been emptied of coal and her crew and passengers were transferred to Seydlitz.

Seydlitz accompanied the German squadron into the Atlantic. She may not have transferred her coal yet, or she may have been retained in case the German squadron needed to use her as a prison and/or hospital ship.

On the morning of 8 December 1914 she was attached to the light cruisers, Leipzig, Nurnburg and Dresden when the heavy cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau separated and approached Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands. The whole German squadron fled when it was discovered that heavy British units were in the harbour and of course there was a tail chase in which the British gradually reeled in and sank everyone except the Dresden.

And except the Seydlitz.

Being unarmed, and also carrying prisoners, she did absolutely the right thing and broke away from the rest of the squadron once the stern chase was on in earnest and before the shooting began. The British did not detach any ship to pursue her. She headed south away from the frequented shipping lanes and ran as far as Antarctica, lying low for several days.

On December 18 she reappeared in Argentina, at the southern port of San Antonio Oeste, where she released the crew of the Drummuir. She went back to sea but if she was trying to escape, it didn't work. Returning to Bahia Blanca in February 1915, she reported herself as a hospital ship, which may have been one of her duties; but the Argentinian Navy weren't having any of that. Previously she had been a civilian ship entitled to protection in neutral waters, but now she was a German Naval Auxiliary with very limited rights in a neutral port. When her 48 hours expired and she didn't leave, she was quietly arrested.

Her crew sabotaged the engines in case Argentina were to join the war and hand the ship over to be used by the British; but this didn't happen. Instead the Seydlitz remained in port and her crew remained "guests" [prisoners] of the Argentinian Navy, much luckier men than they probably realised until afterwards - they missed the worst of the war.

Eventually, she was released by the Argentinians after the Armistice and her crew repaired the engines. She reached Hamburg safely in July 1919. After resuming her prewar job as a passenger and cargo ship, she was scrapped in 1933.

[scoundrel]

On another thread, Palo questioned the numbers committed by britain to the British Expeditionary Force, her land army in France. He put forward 500,000 as the British troop strength in 1918, which of course is below the approximately 1,000,000 the Americans had in theatre by the autumn of 1918. In reality, the strength of the BEF in 1918 was about 2,000,000 men but it was a multinational Empire force.

However it had one non-Empire component of which I had not been aware - the CEP, which is the Portuguese acronym for the Portuguese Expeditionary Force.

There were hostilities between Germany and Portugal in Africa starting August 1914 due to incursions and harassment of Portuguese territory in Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) and in Portuguese East Africa (Angola). The local Portuguese authorities cooperated with the British logistically and the German colonial authorities reacted by taking hostile action, which they were probably legally entitled to do. Portugal sent about 35,000 extra soldiers to Angola and Mozambique to strengthen the borders and to retaliate locally against German forces, but did not declare war officially.

The declaration of war actually came in 1916 and arose because German U Boats were sinking Portuguese ships without warning. Britain was Portugal's main pre-war export market and the Portuguese refused to abide by the German blockade. Germany declared war on Portugal in March 1916 because Portugal was not sufficiently neutral for Germany's taste - they had just interned the German and Austro-Hungarian ships in their ports and arrested the crews. Britain and France invited Portugal to send military delegates to allied conferences and the Royal Navy started to patrol Portuguese waters to detect submarines. There was more formal military cooperation between British and Portuguese colonial armies in Africa. Then, in August 1916, Portugal decided to fight Germany in France, accepting a British invitation to contribute a unit to the BEF, where it could draw on Britain for supplies.

There was also an artillery regiment which served with the French Army; but the main CEF force was to be two infantry divisions, incorporated in General Gough's First Army. These men had fully arrived by June 1917. They had seen no full scale battles before April 1918 but had been fully occupied in skirmishes and patrol activity and bu April 1918 they were way overdue to be rotated. Many units were badly understrength. The British BEF commanders were scheduling April 9 as the date for pulling the Portuguese out of the line and resting them in reserve positions.

Sadly, April 9 was the date of Ludendorff's Lys Offensive, which struck both Portuguese divisions and the two British divisions each side of them like a hammer. The Portuguese, already worn down, resisted but were driven back 18 miles in 2 days and very nearly overrun and lost, along with the British 44th Infantry Division just north of them. Luckily, they managed to stick together and retreat in an orderly manner, taking their toll of the attackers on the way, and were relieved on April 11 by advancing British reserve troops. During those two days the Portuguese lost over 7,000 officers and men, about 35% of their strength on 9 April. Their 2nd Division bore the brunt of it and had effectively been wiped out.

It could have been even worse, had it not been for Private Anibal Milhais.

Armed with a Lewis gun, Private Milhais held his position and covered the retreat of two Portuguese regiments and also a Scottish regiment, pinning down German attackers for several hours and allowing his comrades to evacuate the trenches. Eventually, the Germans bypassed him, thinking he was a strong point rather than just one man. He held his post anyway until he ran out of ammunition, then finding he was behind enemy lines.

For three days he tried to rejoin his forces but only got more and more lost. He had no food of course. On the third day, his luck improved and he found a Scottish major stuck in a swamp and rescued him from drowning. The Scottish officer knew where they were and was able to guide both of them back to Allied lines that night. Private Milhais was given a warm and friendly reception by the British when he returned, especially as the Scottish major had managed to glean the story of his single handed rearguard action and saw to it that the Generals higher up were told what he had done. Private Milhais himself would have said nothing; his report was obtained from him by the Portuguese through direct question and answer, based on what they had already been told by the British.

Two months later he reprised his previous heroism by pinning down a German surprise attack single handed (same Lewis gun) until a Belgian battalion was able to retreat safely to a second trench. In his report, the Belgian commander stressed the importance of Milhais's action in protecting his men.

For these two remarkable feats of courage in battle, Anibal Milhais was given Portugal's highest military honour, the Order of the Tower and Sword.

He experienced great hardship after the war and eventually in 1928 in desperation he emigrated to Brazil with his family of nine children. In Portugal, the government had done nothing to help him, but in Brazil he found to his surprise that his fame had preceded him and the ordinary citizens were disgusted that he was so down on his luck. They raised money to buy land for his family in his home village in Portugal and the story got around back in Portugal as well, embarrassing the government. To save their faces, they granted him a small military pension, which with the land enabled him to live a humble but decent life and support his wife and kids.

No millions for Private Milhais, but at least he had had a good life when he finally passed away in 1970.