Dr. Mark DePue - Trench Warfare During WWI

good evening welcome so glad to have you all here tonight welcome to this evening's presentation my name is Alan Lowe and I'm humbled and honored to be the newly appointed executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum thank you thank you thank you before coming to Springfield last Friday I served for the past seven years as the director of the George W Bush Presidential Library Museum in Dallas Texas and before that spent all my most of my professional career in the world of presidential libraries and museums so I'm really really thrilled to be here as I said I've only been here a few days I've had such a warm reception from our great staff here our volunteers foundation state colleagues and of course our terrific guests my wife Kathy our daughter Carolyn and I look very much forward to settling in getting know you all and becoming active members of this wonderful Springfield community I'm really pleased with the superb programming that this library museum puts out and I know that this evenings presentation on trench warfare in the Western Front during the First World War is going to be gripping so thank you for being here thank you for your support of this wonderful institution and with that please welcome dr. Marc de PUE Thank You Alan it is very much appreciative that you have all come out tonight it's probably a little bit too hot to be outside today but I can guarantee even if you were outside you'd be a whole lot less miserable than the soldiers were going to be talking about today trench warfare has been a kind of a perverse fascination to mine for quite a long time the World War one in general has and most people who are interested in World War one that's not necessarily the the subject that draws them in but it has always been a fascination of mine in part just like it was for the Civil War it's impossible for me to understand how the soldiers did what they did over these long periods of time and what I hope to be able to accomplish today is give you a sense of exactly why they got bogged down in the trench warfare like they did and what what it was like for the average soldier and the challenges for the generals trying to figure out how to break out of those trenches I probably have mentioned this in previous presentations the one I did a couple years ago I think the first world war is the most important historical event of the last 200 years since the French Revolution now most people would think that's doesn't make a lot sense that it should be world war ii or something else but in my mind world war ii is an extension of world war one and the revolutions that occurred afterwards they break up with several empires after the first world war the redesigning of the world because of the Treaty of Versailles explain why I feel that way in fact you know what's been the the headline news for the last few years things that have been happening in the Middle East when were those country boundaries drawn at the end of the First World War but tonight it's a little bit different we're gonna be talking about that in a later presentation but tonight it's get a sense of why it was so traumatic for Europe for France and England and Germany in particular to have this incredible level of violence and destruction and loss of life like you saw in the First World War so very quickly you probably have seen this slide before if you've been to the other ones this is not exactly the sly fan plan but it gives you a good idea of what the Germans were trying to accomplish in the initial phase in 1914 the sweeping attack it was supposed to envelop Paris and crush the French army but first of course you had to go through Belgium and once you go through Belgium you have violated Belgium neutrality and that's what brings the frontier the excuse me the British into the war so August 4th excuse me August 2nd the Germans invade by August 4th you have the United Kingdom declaring war by September 5th you have the Battle of the Marne beginning to take shape where the French are finally recouping their losses and regaining themselves and and hunkering down for a long fight with the Germans and that's what they are a Vadhu September 5th through September 12 you have the Battle of the Marne and then after the Battle of the Marne this is a very very quick overview for 1914 what you have is the race to the sea now up to this point in that in 1914 in the fall what you have is a series of maneuvers on a massive scale with the enemy and the Tube sites always trying to outmaneuver each other and get that particular advantage so that you could attack in the flanks or overwhelming overwhelm them now what you have you have a solid line and then a series of envelopment all trying to get around the flank of the enemy so first the French would try to get around the flanks of the Germans and they would be able to extend the line the Germans would try to do the same thing the French would extend the line and they kept trying to do that until they got to the North Sea and at that point in time you have a solid line of trenches and the challenge from here on is for the generals to figure out a way to bust through the trenches to get into open terrain because they beloved believed in the value of mobility and maneuver and you could only win a decisive battle if you could do that punch through the lines get behind and envelop make the enemy respond to what you're doing so we're gonna see from 1914 all the way to the 1918 this continual struggle trying to figure out how to break out of these trenches once that happens and you get to the see the obvious reaction then for the soldiers is to dig in the Germans are really the first ones did they again so here's the Germans up on top here they had the advantage since they had occupied almost all of Belgium and a significant part of France to include much of its industrial and mining capacity they chose the best ground high ground dry ground in most cases they could back up until they found that and they were serious about digging in their trenches especially initially we're much better constructed whatever the engineering prowess of the Germans that we normally think of but I think more importantly they plan to stay there they were not going to go back on the offensive for a little while they knew they were going to have to defend themselves on the other side you've got the French and the Brits who are also going to be digging in their mentality is quite different especially the French their mentality was we need to push the Germans the dreaded Huns out of this sacred soil of France they know they're gonna have to go on the offensive to do that so they don't dig quite as elaborate trench systems all of this is happening in 1914 1915 you see the armies moving back and forth primarily the Germans were on the Eastern Front going after the Russians at that pert but both the French and the British tried offensives the the French and the largest scale because the Brits didn't have much of an army we'll get in that just a second it became obvious by the end of 1915 that for whatever reason the defense had the great advantage and here's a quote that I wanted to share with you here before he go too much farther the comment that was made by one author in trying to understand why it was that we got to this stage when this incredible era of enthusiasm and excitement and innovation had occurred before World War one had happened now that we got bogged down to this war his comment max Burke's is comment the children of the Renaissance in the age of reason and in the Enlightenment ended up massacring themselves in the mud and the blood of the trenches so in part it's our job tonight to try to understand that the thing I want to keep and keep in mind for all of us here as we go forward in trying to understand why the defense was supreme during this war is to try to understand what had happened in the 40 or 50 years before that if we think in our generation we were all convinced that we have seen this technological innovation in advance like no other generation in the world had ever seen we would be wrong because the generation that was born perhaps in the 1860s and came of age and were still alive during the the first world war and certainly the soldiers that that fought it they had seen incredible changes and just to give you a sense of that we all know that by the Civil War railroads had made a huge impact on the nature of warfare and the Telegraph had made a huge impact as well this is the dawn of the Industrial Age we're seeing it come to fruition what happens after the Civil War here's just a few 1876 the invention of the telephone that will factor in a big way in trench warfare later 1870s you've got the impact of electricity and really the innovation that that launches it all is the the light bulb Edison is kind of taking advantage of a lot of other and vane but 1879 he finally comes up with the right filament so the lightbulb can last for a long enough time and think of the impact just of electricity on our lives today and how that changed everything in the world here's another one that we sometimes overlook the growth of the chemical industry and especially in terms of explosive power dynamites invented in 1866 smokeless powder it sounds like a little thing it's very big for the First World War 1884 if you recall in the Civil War II err after you fire a few volleys of artillery and especially your your rifled muskets it's hard to see what's going on in the battlefield that's much less an issue now cordite another explosive 1889 vaccines are starting to become more prevalent so in the First World War we're saying this is the first war where combat casualties exceed deaths from from disease and illnesses so that's significant as well motor vehicles really got a launch in 1886 when Karl bents figured out how to develop a vehicle that he could produce at a decent scale and then start to sell think of the impact of just Motor Vehicles is going to have on our society today but even at that time photography had been developing over the the 19th century by 1895 it's not just photography you saw so much more of it in the First World War and capturing so much more of the movement but you also have motion pictures by that time and it's a relatively mature industry by the time you get to the beginning of the First World War radio 1902 another huge innovation although there's a cautionary tale on radio because it really doesn't impact what goes on in the battlefield until you get to the Second World War and finally the one that we always think about 1903 and the Wright brothers and the first foot and that's certainly going to change how warfare did as well but we still haven't touched on what it is that's getting the battlefield so to be so much and so much more dangerous and it starts with the evolution of the rifle the musket what we had for centuries and still a significant percentage of Confederate soldiers especially in some Union soldiers in the Civil War had muskets but as we know most Civil War soldiers had rifled muskets so it took the max range from 200 just having that rifling in the tube you can get a much greater muzzle velocity and much better at stability of the round going out so it takes it from two hundred to a thousand yards and for most of us it's tough to see past a thousand yards you know try to do that the problem and here's the big change for the Civil War from one round a minute for a musket because he had to cram that thing down to three rounds per minute that's a huge increase but now there's another revolutionary step that's being taken you've got breech loaders instead of putting the round on the muzzle you're loading it through the breech and you have smokeless powder and look at the difference in ranges we have the German 1898 Mauser 2200 way beyond what you can typically see an effective range not 200 but 550 yards now you if you can see the enemy that far out moving across no-man's land you can engage them and if you're a good shot you can probably take about the French model was labelled and a Lee Enfield for the the Brits these numbers over here the rate of fire a very subjective number when I started doing research because it involved a couple things did you take time to aim if you take time to aim it's a different story there's a second or two at least that you've got to do to work that through and you have to change your magazine so a five round magazine is what the Germans had the Lebel had an eight round magazine tube that was rather awkward they came out with a birthday rifle a little bit later but it was only three rounds and that's a disadvantage over a five-round because they got a fumble and change all this and then the Lee Enfield now I've seen as much as for the Lebel that it could fire 34 rounds a minute I don't know how you could do that changing this thing out every once in a while and at least making some attempt at rough attempted aiming so still look at the difference between what you had in the Civil War in here the lafalot II the battlefield has increased exponentially and those serried ranks of Civil War soldiers that he saw in in 1961 marching across in close ranks well that's a thing of the past now the best thing to do is to spread out a little bit and move much more quickly across the battlefield still there are other things that factor into this as well the machine gun that's the thing that usually comes to mind for people about the first world war the impact of the machine gun the Gatling gun was something that was being experimentally used at the very tail end of the Civil War never really made an impact in battle but sir Hiram Maxim here's an interesting personality he's an American who actually moves to England when he's 41 years old he is credited as being the inventor of the first effective water-cooled machine gun in 1884 it's 60 pounds so it's not light its belt-fed 7.92 millimeter caliber weapon that should sound familiar we still use that kind of caliber much of our weaponry today water-cooled 500 rounds permitted as long as your crew can keep feeding those belts into the machine gun and a well-trained crew then can sweep the battlefield back and forth and back and forth to the point where you can't hide from this you've got to start digging or hunker down maximum range effective range of 3,800 yards or even farther out and it developed a couple interesting nicknames that really is illustrative of the impact of the machine gun the English called it the lawn mower and I think about that the lawn mower excuse me that was the French term the English call that the devil's paintbrush now every country by the time you get to the First World War had some variation of the machine gun this is the German it's very close to what the maximum original design was the Vickers machine gun for the Brits was very close to the maximum designed to begin with you also have the French Hotchkiss and you've got the British Lewis machine gun now notice one difference here between the Lewis gun smaller caliber air-cooled and the German maxim gun it's much smaller it's much lighter and therefore it's going to be much easier to move into no-man's land with this and to move forward with the with the advancing infantry that's going to be increasingly important as you go down the road so here's the real killer of World War one and we sometimes lose track of this now you'll have to forgive me my early profession as a field artillery officer might show through on this improvements in artillery it's staggering to think of the impact of this one artillery kills something like 60% of the casualties in the First World War rifled artillery much like rifled firearms it's going to have a big impact on the range and the muzzle velocity you have breech loading instead of having a low through the barrel you're loading through the breech you have encased ammunition instead of putting a ball in and then a piece of powder behind that it's a separate action you can have it all in one encased the bullet the primer the propellant is all in one one encasement and that much that's going to load much more quickly you also have time fuses it's a little bit early in the development of it there's going to be a huge problem for the Brits later on but this is something that is certainly achievable by the time and what you want to do is to have an airburst so that it shrapnel flies and and kills the enemy as they're moving across open fields Oh Plus powder and here's the big one the last two are the really the big ones recoil system you think about if you're watching an old Civil War movie and they're halfway accurate you see the artillery round go off and there goes the cannon backwards and then they have to haul it back up again to but it put it into batter it put it back into position and how accurate isn't going to be the next time because they're gonna is the round gonna land anywhere close to it was the first time that's the challenge the French were the first ones to really develop this with the 75 millimeter gun that they've got right up here and you've got this pneumatic brake recoil system so a mixture of oil and air and the round is loaded the round is fired and that causes the recoil to occur but because of the nomadic system it comes right back into battery again almost immediately this took an awful lot of time and development this took a lot of different people working on that kind of a concept but it was absolutely revolutionary after they they achieved it in fact if you know anything about the Dreyfus Affair which roiled French politics for a decade or more the core of that whole incident was the possibility that the Germans were getting this secret about the recoil system some of the pieces of the recoil system that's how important the French thought this was now a good crew could fire this right weapon six thousand five hundred metres was the range approximately four plus miles and range much farther than a typical Civil War cannon could fire at the time half the range if it was a timed fuse but that's not a problem you're gonna land those in no-man's land typically but here's the interesting part the max rate of fire was determined to be thirty rounds per minute in other words you pull the lanyard the round goes out it immediately comes back into battery you open the breech you slam in another round and just that quick and if you have a trained crew you can really put down a lot of fire power and very quickly that's part one of this new incredible revolution in artillery part two is the indirect fire because now with the rains that you had in these weapons and some larger caliber weapons had a greater range you're not right on the frontlines you're a mile or so behind the frontlines you can't see where your rounds are landing so you have to have somebody a forward observer some way of figuring out where the round is landed and then you've got to pass that information back to the firing battery and let them know adjust the left go out farther in range in artillery lingo that's quadrant and deflection quadrant four range deflection for moving it left and right and it gets to be a very scientific way that you're passing the information back if you're in a fixed position you've got telephone wires that are hooking the frontline positions with you but again how far can you see from the front lines maybe a kilometer maybe it's tough to even see that far what's going on so we're gonna find out a little bit more about that in the future one of the authors I read about the improvements in artillery made this comment firepower artillery firepower had increased exponentially in range accuracy and lethality but battlefield communications had not improved since Julius Caesar invaded Gaul it's a little bit of a stretch you had the telephone but that's not going to work once you advance into no-man's land and again more on that a little bit later so what are the soldiers to do now that they've got these much improved rifles they've got machine guns sweeping no-man's land they've got artillery that's my barding into no-man's land they dig in and here's a little quiz for the audience here what do you suppose these German soldiers are looking for yeah ticks but especially lice the soldiers constant companion in the in the in the trenches so I'm not going to talk too much about this but I want to paint a picture if you if you will for what life is like for these soldiers and in many cases they're living here for days or weeks on end in the trenches maybe not in the first line trenches but in the trench system someplace they have a couple constant companions rats are a huge problem you have lice and obviously nits in areas where you have a high water table you had to deal with that and as you got closer to the coast you had a higher water table in many cases and you see some films oftentimes of these soldiers is constantly bailing out the trenches as they go well what's the consequence of that trench foot and what happens when you get to November and December in January then you have severe problems with that and when the rains come then this whole thing turns into a morass and all these nice revetments start to be a serious problems as well and if you don't have sandbags or this kind of a latticework holding up the sides of the trenches then you've got even bigger problem there was a pervasive smell and being in the trenches how would you smell if you didn't get a chance to take a shower or a bath for a couple weeks on end and the latrines were just a few feet behind and you had to run and cover in that and then you've got occasional gas which we'll get into a little bit and worst of all once you got into a battlefield scenario and in serious fighting then you probably have decaying flesh maybe it's rats maybe it's human flesh that you can't really get to and that's the pervasive smell that you have to deal with still the trenches were much better than being out in the open what's the alternative as far as they were concerned there was no alternative so they resorted to the trenches and just a little bit here in terms of description this first picture is not a real good representation in one respect a typical trench would be much deeper than this it would probably be somewhere from 10 to 12 feet deep and then you'd have to step up to the firing line and perhaps stand on that or perhaps kneel on that so you could fire out after the transistor got stabilized the last thing you typically want to do is to stick your head and expose your head out there because the enemy would would send people out into no-man's land snipers and take potshots anybody they happen to see so that's what a typical trench might look like except it would be much deeper and we'll see some more pictures that will illustrate that now here is the trench system because the initial assessment assumption that we would all have is it's one continuous line of one trench that was absolutely not the case at all it would be a system of trenches and because of artillery rounds possibly landing in the trench you can see the nature of the design of these trenches that were actually dug a zigzag pattern herringbone pattern anything that would prevent a round landing in one part of the the trench taking out a huge line of people in that trench by defensive that you would absolutely have to do that now to get a little bit closer look at this a closer look here you have the first line of trenches here you have a communications trench that connects these two and this is the one that the soldiers would move back and forth and probably somewhere along here would be located the latrines out of out of harm's way perhaps oftentimes the troops would be more concentrated in the second line of trenches and thinly populating the first line just because they were assumption that would be more dangerous there you also see a communications trench a sap that's going out into no-man's land and this is most likely a listening post here and it's subtle but anybody guess what these three lines might be right here that's your bands of barbed wire correct and that was another feature of the first world war so on the left that's the kind of defenses you would have at Petersburg and for those of you who were participating in the civil war presentations you know by the time you get to 1865 its trench warfare because even though thala t the weapons at that time and how do you slow down the enemy you have Abba T's with something like this or a line of sticks in the ground that trying to impede the advance you didn't have to worry about then World War one with the invention of barbed wire of course an American invention why was it invented for farm use for ranching use it was first used in warfare during the spanish-american war it was used in the sino-soviet war between the the sino-japanese war excuse me sino-japanese war in the early 1900s and during the Boer War the German excuse me the the British actually used it for concentration camps so it had a multiple ways of being used but it really found its use during the First World War as well and here's the challenge let's say you are across the crossing no-man's land and then you encounter these kinds of obstacles and you get hung up in the obstacles and not too many yards away is that German machine gun firing away at you so a huge problem and what to do with the wire how to get rid of the wire that before you actually advanced in the first place now you've already heard me talk about artillery but I wanted to get a sense of the kind of artillery that drove people into the trenches in the first place and now different kind of artillery that's going to be employed because they are in the trenches difference between guns in the how it sirs a gun generally is a high-velocity weapon a flat trajectory and oftentimes they think about a tank that has a gun on it you can typically see the target you're shooting at howitzers it's a little bit lower muzzle velocity typically a higher trajectory the advantage and an entrench warfare is you want to have it coming up if you're going to attack the trenches troops in the trenches you want it coming straight down instead so over time you're gonna see more and more heavier artillery being used here is the British 8th inch certainly the Germans had their equivalent of field howitzers of that scale the Germans also because they started the war with the assumption that they had to take out major fortifications in Belgium and France had developed these huge siege weapons well you can't put that behind a bunch of horses and dragging along you have to maneuver it around with probably in a rail line in almost all cases and that means it's not going to be moved quickly but if you have a very stable front this is the kind of weapon you want to be able to use more than anything else the Germans start the war with a big advantage in the number of machine guns per so per unit and especially in the number of heavy artillery that they had now you've got a weapon that can go after troops and trenches go after bunkers and both sides didn't just dig trenches they dug bunkers and again especially the Germans they dug a very elaborate system of bunkers that they would hide in during an enemy artillery barrage until the end of the barrage and then they'd come out of the bunkers and man the trenches afterwards so that's what you've got here and counterbattery fire in other words you'd rather take out the enemy's artillery before they blast you and that takes a level of sophistication knowing where the enemy artillery is how do you possibly see where the rounds are landing in the first place if the enemy batteries are a mile behind the front align trenches we'll get to that in just a minute here's another way to make life very miserable for soldiers during World War one and that's gas warfare tear gas was the first use in 1914 on a limited scale and the Russian front by 1915 the Germans had developed chlorine gas it was a visibly greenish of greenish cloud moving across the battlefield you could see it coming which was something of an advantage obviously but it would be very intimidating and when it was first employed it terrified the Brits that was being used against at Ypres I think that's how you pronounce it its wipers I think is how the Brits actually pronounce it it's a French word anyway in flanders area and the Germans weren't really prepared to exploit the advantage they had from that first deployment but then everybody starts using it afterwards chlorine is nasty stuff but it's not quite as bad as phosgene which was also developed and employed first in December of 1915 and it had a different smell than the the chlorine gas did and the disadvantage and a dant Vantage both at the same time it really didn't take effect if a soldier was contaminated with phosgene it didn't take effect for about 24 hours so they could actually fight and resist while the gas was first being employed but once it kicked in because because of that then actually most deaths due to gas during the First World War are due to Falls gene now the one we hear most so much about is mustard gas which is beyond the scope of what we're talking about they've 1917 and that also is nasty nasty stuff because whatever part of your body is exposed to it it's burnt so if you breathe it in it burns your lungs if you get it in your eyes and think about it how often do you sit there and rub your eyes about some thing especially in your kind of environment that they're in it gets in your eyes that's the kind of thing you're seeing right here nasty stuff causing serious blistering mortars and grenades as the war the fighting starts to get more sophisticated they're they're adjusting their tactics they're adjusting the kind of weapons that they use and increasingly mortars are handy things to have you can move them farther forward this one obviously has a fairly big punch this German mortar a lot of the mortars that were used were much smaller and therefore easier to go out in a no man's land and carry it's still a pretty heavy object to be hauling out there especially when you're taking ammunition along with you other new weapons grenades trench knives pistols carbines shotguns because Frank quite frankly those long rifles that we are showing to begin with once you get in the trench it's not real practical especially when you've got that long ban out on top of it you want a shorter carbine you want to have a shotgun or something like that and when you're mixing up in the trenches some nasty-looking trench knives that would develop as well just to give you a scale of how some of this is going to impact warfare the Brits manufactured 75 million of these bumps Mills bombs is that what they were called 75 million of them and that's just one country all the nations were doing the same kind of thing okay now back to the problems of observation on the battlefield the challenge that the artillery especially had if you're going to use it effectively we always think about aircraft and we think about the glamour if there is anything that's glamorous about the First World War I suppose it's about air warfare aerial combat between two fighter aircraft that's not what the aerial warfare was really all about especially initially hydrogen filled balloons used for observation used to adjust fire you get high enough you're far enough back you're probably out of the range of the enemy and you can see the battlefield how do they communicate they'd have a cable tethered from the balloon all the way to a truck on the ground and then that would be relayed back to the firing batteries sometimes you'd have fixed-wing aircraft going out for observation as well how did they get that message back well signal flags dropping notes down a variety of different ways again communication was a big problem during the war so once you have this kind of a object in the air hydrogen-filled I think about the implications of that obviously it becomes a major target and that's where your fixed-wing aircraft come in and that's going to evolve rather quickly as well they would carry metal darts that they would drop on the enemy and trying to hit them in the tension so they would drop hand grenades and then they started to drop bombs and things like that as well but they especially wanted to attack these operation aircraft whatever they'd be either balloons or other aircraft in the air because if you control the air and you control observation that makes your artillery much much more effective and as we said before that's the real killer of the war and by the time you get to 19 late 1916 now you see this aerial combat between two aces going after each other but that's the transition that you're getting and that's the reason that the air war is so important to begin with okay now that I've set the stage hopefully to give you an idea of what the nature of trench warfare was all about why they got bogged on the trenches what they're trying to do to break out of the trenches it's now time to transition here and talk about Verdun and then the some it's kind of an illustration of the REA this actually worked and both of these battles are 1916 the Battle of Verdun lasted from February 21st to December 18th 1916 nine months now obviously the level of intensity varied from day to day but nine months that they are exposed to this kind of the intense combat and Verdun if you're a Frenchman especially a Frenchman of that period of time was both a battle that you took intense pride about because the French ended up being victorious I guess they could describe it that way but also an incredibly painful experience because of the level of casualties that they experienced and this map here illustrates better anything I know just how futile this combat was you see the two shaded areas in the south this is where the Battle of Verdun occurred it's going to be a German offensive in 1916 we'll get to the details here in a bit but look how little terrain actually changed ground after nine months of combat and actually the Germans gained that and then they lost it again to the French in most cases and for the Battle of the Somme which isn't quite as long but even more deadly you can see how little terrain actually changed hands in the Battle of the Somme in the grand scheme of thing it was minuscule you start to wonder then if you're your average soldier the futility of what you're doing Erich von Falkenhayn he takes over as the commander the the commander in charge of the German forces after Helmut von MOCA basically comes close to a nervous breakdown in August September of 1914 then Falkenhayn is going to take over he's your typical Prussian career soldier he was the Prussian chief of staff not the German the Prussians chief of staff at the beginning of the war he is the descendant of Teutonic Knights doesn't he look every bit the soldier in this picture right here he had a reputation being Stern and severe somewhat visionary he had a different vision than many of the other officers did and why should this beam different from most places he was somewhat of a favorite of the kaisers court as well so it doesn't hurt to be popular in political circles at the time he thought that the war had to be won in the West that you couldn't win it against Russia because such a vast amount of terrain that you had to conquer and Russia that the whole German army could get swallowed up swallowed up there it had to be won in the West and the target was probably the French if you could figure out a way to take the French army out and then isolate the Brits well how do you do that he did not necessarily believe that you could have a breakthrough his experiences in the East and especially seeing what had happened in the Western Front in 1915 led him to believe that that was be very very difficult what he decided then to do was to find a spot on the map that the French people and the French brass would have so much what's the right word to use here that they would value so much that they would never want to sacrifice it that they would bleed themselves white defending that spot on the map rather than turn it over to the Germans and what Falkenhayn found was Verdun a old fortress city dating back into the early 19th century it was one of the fortresses that the Germans had actually conquered in the franco-prussian war but a couple generations before it was a point of intense pride for the French people as well and so on a very narrow front what Falkenhayn plans to do is to mass his artillery especially his field artillery and then punch his way through with that field artillery and have the joiner they have the French army then bogged down in this fight at Verdun now there's a lot of debate in terms exactly what his intentions were because he wrote about this afterwards in his memoirs and it kind of wrote about it from the perspective of what it actually happened trying to argue his case but I think there is some merit to the things that most historians would believe in terms of having this massive fight of attrition that maybe he didn't want to seize Verdun city itself that that wasn't important because if you seize the city then the French would back away and they wouldn't keep committing forces to that the key was to have the French keep funneling their troops into this fight so here is a quote from his memoirs after the war that Falkenhayn wrote if we succeed in opening the eyes of the French people to the fact that in a military sense they have nothing more to hope for England's best sword would be knocked out of her hand to achieve that object the uncertain method of a mass breakthrough in any case beyond our means is unnecessary we can probably do enough for our purposes with limited resources within our reach behind the French sector of the Western Front there are objectives for the retention of which the French General Staff would be compelled to throw in every man they have if they do so the forces of France will bleed to death as there can be no question of a voluntary withdrawal whether we reach our goal or not so a little bit more specifics on this as far as heavy artillery concerned the Germans are going to devote 542 heavy guns large calibre against some of these as large as the the big birth that we saw in the last picture three hundred and six field pieces on this very narrow front so thirteen hundred guns altogether once the head everything lined up they had some four hundred and twenty millimeter mortars the big Bertha's they had 15-inch naval guns that they were bringing in on and on rail cars and they had three hundred five millimeter mortars as well they also established air superiority for the reasons I had just talked about so they could dominate the skies and they could dominate the observation make their artillery that much more effective stormtrooper tactics they are starting to evolve different tactics and employing smaller level units not company or battalion size forces moving across together but smaller groups of squad or platoon level anywhere from 10 to 40 people moving across the battlefield highly skilled trained to maneuver given more initiative than the average infantryman would be so they can respond to the situation they see and especially go after the strong points that are identified they had a new weapon as well they had flamethrowers that they introduced in this battle and there's another very terrifying weapon if you're on the receiving end to see that that tongue of flame coming towards you also they knew that the French would counter-attack and the hope then was that the French would bleed themselves so badly that they would eventually sue for peace and turn the war over to the Brits and so now the Germans had to worry about the British Navy and there's much smaller British army as well so here's the opposite side the French side of it General Joseph Joffre served as the commander-in-chief of the French forces until later in 1916 he was the commander in chief Dean the early stages of the war he led them through the first initial stage of total disaster for the French as they retreated beyond their borders he led them to victory in the Battle of the Marne the miracle of the mark so he's somewhat of a hero to the French people he's an artilleryman an engineer by training but he like most Frenchmen is a strong disciple of the offensive that was one of the tragedies of 1914 especially they believed in the offensive so much that they sacrificed hundreds of thousands of French soldiers and trying to get a successful offense going so he's the architect of that but again he's also the architect of of the Battle of the Marne known as Papa Jafra and affectionately by the French people general Honore Philippe Pathan right here a different kind of beast altogether Jafra despised the man unlike most of the French officers he never really got any serious service overseas in the empire he spent most of the time and in France itself he was not a great fan of the offense that's what put him at odds with the rest of the French staff and and brass most of the time so he wasn't favoured by his superiors but he is at the point that right at the early stages of this battle he is going to be given command of the second army across from Verdun he actually believes that cannon conquers in infantry occupies cannon conquers infantry occupies well that's heresy to a guy like Jafra and most of the French in fact most of trained officer corps across the the European theater by that time he takes command early in this campaign he actually has double pneumonia in who first takes command but he's also a brilliant logistician as well and that's going to come in very handy in this one and finally the third person Robert Nivelle right down here when Patton is promoted after a couple months of the campaign novelle actually takes command of the second army in April now it says Verdun is a quiet sector that's before the Germans launched their offensive on the 21st of February in fact it was so quiet that the French decided to move most of the big guns out of these fortifications and what Verdun was it was a series of established elaborate fortifications with large bunkers heavily staffed kitchens hospitals the whole works and much of that had been stripped away because it was a quiet sector they needed this heavy artillery elsewhere so it was only partially man at the only opening stages now here's the map of Verdun a little bit closer view than the one that you initially saw the initial advance for the Germans is going to be on the west side of the Meuse river so in this area right here do them all right here is the main linchpin fortress that the French had and you see plenty of other fortresses as use we're done vol is another one you've got more along this rod right down here and then battery locations as well scattered through here so it's a series of these fortifications interacting fire things like that that was the key to the success at least before the war the World War one actually began on February 21st in the morning at dawn German bombardments actually it's at 4:00 a.m. sorry about that in just a few hours the Germans fire 1 million shells against the fortifications and trenches primarily against the fortifications and the frontline trenches that you've got there saturation bombing intense meant to shock and destroy and to slaughter any Frenchmen were in those trenches at 4:45 p.m. approximately 12 hours later the German infantry assaults and and quickly gained territory as they move from this area towards these fortresses by the time you get to the 25th the 25th is the date that fort douaumont actually Falls with practically no resistance so it doesn't take long just a few days for the Germans to reach that point and by this time the French senior staff the French people were panicking because this is a disaster on massive scales the French soldier here's one comet they wanted to read of a French soldier about the time now the French are really gonna respond to this in a serious way I came up as a volunteer I wanted to see Verdun and take part in the great battle 150 of us left the bivouac by the time we got to up to the line there are only 30 of us left and we had not yet met the enemy oceans of mud dark skies like Golgotha at the hour that Christ died no trenches up there only holes and holes bone into holes all filled with the stink of the dead a nightmare with no morning to come so gives you a painting a word painting exactly what it was like and just think about it just trying to get up to the front lines the enemy artillery is decimating that particular unit before they even get there and that is a very demoralizing experience let me tell you but tan over time is going to rotate as troops frequently about every two weeks he wants to rotate a unit out and bring a fresh unit in so eventually it practically every unit in the French army is going to be rotated through this battle that goes on month after month after month April thirtieth he is promoted to command the Army Group center that consists of 52 divisions think about it 52 division that's a massive force that he's got in his control well over a half a million soldiers and Robert Nivelle as I mentioned before it takes over the army a few weeks later on June 8th fort Vall falls to the Germans and so they keep moving on and then July and October once you get to early July you have the Battle of the Somme so now you are finally distracting the Germans attention away from this this vortex of violence that you've got in Verdun but the battle keeps going on month after month after month here is the initial German advance you can see the impact of the flamethrower that they've got I certainly wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of that the sacred way this is part of the legend of the Battle of Verdun some debate about when that particular phrase the sacred way actually was coined was that during the battle or afterwards but it was the name for the absolutely crucial supply line there were rail lines that were eventually being able to be constructed but primarily it was this road that they're funneling troops and supplies back and forth and we're talking about on a massive scale way beyond what we had experienced in the Civil War we're talking about hundreds of thousands of troops that had to be maintained in those front locations and you can see some of the troops waiting to head up some of the troops heading up some supply lines coming in as well the French for Lu that was the image of the French soldier at the time he looks older doesn't he got a nice beard on him the reservist was very important part of the French army by this time you know they had all had initial service in the army and then they went into this reserves and they were all called up in those early days of the war back in 1914 voila Lu if I'm pronouncing it correctly it stands for the hairy one that was the name that they had for their soldiers so he had dough boys he got Tommy's he got the Huns he got the hairy ones is what the French were called here's one of after a while August 16th Falkenhayn himself is replaced because the war is not going well at that particular pine of Field Marshal paul von hindenburg and general Erich Ludendorff these were the heroes of the Eastern Front these were the heroes of the Battle of Tannenberg back in 1914 of the incredible successes the Germans had in the Russian front in 1915 now they are going to be replaced Falkenhayn because his battle of attrition by that time is a treating the German army just as much as it seems to be at ridding the French army so he's out Hindenburg and Ludendorff are in and over the next couple years you're going to see those two gentlemen grow more and more powerful with each and every month here's a good quote that gives you a sense of what was what it was like for the German soldier and the attitude they took towards it there will be no end of this until the last Frenchman and the last German hobble out of their trenches on crutches to exterminate each other with pocket knives or fingernails and why would they think anything else the Germans were stuck there much longer periods of time than the French war and you've got to feel a sense of resignation you know it's just a it's not a matter if you're gonna survive it's a matter of when you're gonna be killed or injured that had to be the attitude that they took October 24th because of niveles offensives now he has a much more offensive attitude than patan did he takes fort Dumont back it's recaptured November 2nd the French recaptured fort vault and by December 15th the last major push there eight French divisions attack the battle ends with something like eleven thousand Germans surrendering and it's getting into the winter and finally the Battle of Verdun comes doing that so here's the cost here's what it looks like here's fort Dhumal at the beginning of this campaign here it is after it's been seriously combined bartered probably sometime during the the point in time when the Germans took over that particular fortification and the Germans occupied in force after that so you can barely recognize the train but forty million military or excuse me artillery rounds later many of them centered at these fortresses that were so contested here's what it looks like and you start to look at that and you try to figure out what it's like for an infantryman to try to run across that terrain and you start to realize the serious challenges they had in trench warfare total involvement something like a 1 million hundred and forty thousand Frenchmen anywhere from 75 to 85 divisions had cycled through this particular battle over one and a quarter million Germans from 50 divisions they tended to stay longer when they did and now we get to the point of trying to figure out the casualties and I found trying to determine casualty rates for the First World War even more challenging than and frustrating for me than for the Civil War but here are the numbers for the Battle of Verdun 162,000 killed or missing for the French something like 143 thousand for the German so yes the Germans seem to have done better if we can believe the numbers take a look at the wounded and then the totals slightly more French where casualties in this war than Germans here's the challenging part of this missing why do you suppose these soldiers were missing well I think we know why they were missing because when they go on these assaults and somehow they die in the middle of no man's land someplace and you hear these in counts of they fall into a crater and then an artillery round lands and buries them and then on artillery round lands and uncovers them again and then another artillery round lands and buries them again who's to know what happened to these people and imagine the anguish then if you're the loved one back home and they don't know what happened but you can guess I mean you can your imagination dreams up the worse for you that's the horrors of Verdun and that's why he has such a psychological impact on it so having laid out what Verdun was like and having laid out what trench warfare in general is like I want to kind of go through an anatomy of a battle and then we'll turn our attention at the Somme itself and this picture illustrates the kind of destruction that you get with that level of bombardment so first you have the artillery preparatory fires in the early stages before the initial assault occurs and its goal is to cut the enemy wire now you have to depend on your artillery to do a couple things this is generally the smaller guns the 75 millimeter guns the British and the German equivalence of that you have to have a good air burst it's got an air burst at the right elevation if it's too high it scatters too much and it's not going to have the impact you want if the round impacts you got this nice explosion but generally what happens is it kind of tosses the the the wire up and it's still there it has to be you have to have good munitions and you have to have good officers and NCOs who can adjust that fire make sure it's effective in the first place and that's those are two huge ifs once you've got that you generally also want to have the artillery hit the trenches to try to destroy the enemy in the trenches to try to destroy the enemy in their bunkers and hopefully they'll never even emerge in the first place there will be empty trenches or filled with dead by the time you attack the trench lion often times is gassed supports them out as well and gas can work both ways I don't think you want to be an infantry advancing into an area that has already been gassed unless you're absolutely prepared so you have the infantry that em begins to advance and let's say that let's be optimistic and the infantry occupies the enemy trenches in the meantime you've crossed this area and look they had to build this road after they crossed it you can't bring any field artillery even a75 couldn't in cross that battlefield until you had some major improvement that the engineers going out there imagine being the guy who is the signalman of the wireman who's got a roll of wire that he's hauling across the battlefield to try to connect the frontline troops with the commander's back in the trenches or maybe a mile behind the trenches so you can inform the general officers what's going on and what do you suppose happened to the wire that's laying on top of the ground the course it's cut and that's why you hear lots of different variations signal flags carrier pigeons but especially runners one of the most dangerous jobs in the First World War running back and forth delivering the messages of what's been happening in the combat because communication has absolutely broken down and that's going to be a huge problem so especially in the case of the Germans it was part of their their tactic standard procedure that if you get attacked then you stage a counter-attack and of course it worked both but the Germans were especially good at it so you can anticipate you attack you seize the enemy trenches and boy you better be ready for that counter-attack because you know it's coming and if you've only gotten half your force or a thirty-year force in those trenches in the first place what's likely to happen your tax your attackers are forced back this is the pattern that they got to by the time you got to 1916 how do you break through and it's not just one line of trenches it's not just two line of trenches in most cases it's more than that you might be able to break through one line of trenches then you still have the huge problem of what to do with the other two lines and the other line and that takes days to move all this equipment the supplies up the artillery up the reestablished communications before you can launch the next step and that's why again it gets all bogged down so let's turn to the Battle of the Somme but before we do that what we have to do here is take a look at Britain's new army because they start the war unlike all the Continental Army's they had a tiny tiny Regular Army they didn't need one they had they had the ocean to protect them they had the English Channel to protect them and as we know they dominated the oceans the British Navy was the best in the world the Germans tried to challenge them but they were nowhere close the British had two hundred and forty-seven thousand you know at the beginning of the war the Germans and the French armies numbered in the millions much of their army was overseas only 129,000 was based in England they did have a territorial force that was kind of like our reserves based around different places in England they were hardly up to the standards of the regulars at the time and the problem with that force of 129,000 most of them have got shipped to England in 1914 by the time you got done in 1915 most of those soldiers have been casualties both the Regular Force and many of the territorials now you have the problem really kicked off because Lord Kitchener at the beginning of the war envisioned unlike almost everybody else that this war wasn't going to be over by December by Christmastime he envisioned a long war so by August of 1914 he starts calling for volunteers and like so many of the young men in the First World War especially they came in droves with great enthusiasm and signed up they came at such levels that by nineteen by five months just by the end of the first year 1914 1 million Brits Englishmen had signed up and volunteered one year later by the end of 1915 they had three million but who's left to train them and how do you equip them that becomes the real problem and it doesn't take just a few months especially if you have Reap guys like me you know I've been out of the army for 15 20 years now they call me up and send me out to do training for these people and you know I knew how it was in the old Boer War but it doesn't work the same anymore and I'm out there training them how to March and things like that but that's only the rudimentary stuff it's a real challenge the British Army has to be raised very quickly because guess what France is doing they're screaming that the Brits get in the war in a much more serious way know what you know otherwise their attitude was yeah the Brits are fine then they can fight this war until the last drop of French blood didn't go over very well for the French so the Brits were in a big big hurry so training is one part of the problem and you think it's hard for the average infantryman imagine how you train officers and NCOs how do you train engineers and how do you train all these are Tory men I talked about how sophisticated that business had become well maybe you have the staff to train them in the first place what you don't have are rifles and uniforms and any other kind of equipment you can think of you certainly don't have artillery that they can practice with all of that stuff was grossly short now one of the things that occurred in 1915 such a scale that they have a name for the shell scandal of 1915 because the armies in Europe the British Army in France was crying out to be equipped with enough shells as they could fight effectively and this got to be a major scandal and it's one of the reasons that David Lloyd George they merged like he did they became see if I can find it here anyway he took positions of Lord of the Ministry of munitions I believe something like that one of the other things that Lord Kitchener did early in the war he appealed you can see the classic brochure right here Britain needs you he appealed to communities to raise their own battalions and all of these soldiers that were joined the same battalion then would be able to fight together in this glorious cause overseas and you don't want to miss the you don't want to miss the romance and the war this might be your only chance and again tens of thousands hundreds of thousands joined up just on that appeal own and that's where you get all these pals battalions because all the pals that joined up together to serve together and again if you think about what's going to happen later on the trauma that's going to cause to these communities is horrendous now as we go through the Battle of the Somme here one of the things I want to do is focus on the Grimsby chums and I'll talk more about them a little bit later but Grimsby is about 150 miles north of London it's a fishing village and it's gonna factor into our stories we move along here grand strategy December 1915 there is a meeting between general French of the British Army that's a confusion here general John French of the British Army commands at that time with Jafra talking about what they want to see happen in 1916 and they want to have joint offensive they want to have a combined offensive to put as much pressure on the and the Germans as possible and oh by the way want the Russians to do the same thing in the autumn or excuse me the other parts of the empire to do the same thing the Italians so that was the initial meeting shortly after that Douglas Haig takes command of the British forces Douglas Haig is another old soldier at Calvary men a Scotsman discipline would be a disciple of the defence of the offense again he's cold headstrong again he's socially well-connected it never hurts and he is if anything he's tenacious he's also a veteran of the Boer War and Indian Wars this is not going to be the same kind of war that he's going to encounter here and after the war this kind of a curious no he's a champion for World War one British veterans in February 14th Haig meets Joffrey before it was French meetings offering now they're gonna meet and this is before about a week before the the German offensive at Verdun they agree there's some discussion that the Brits wanted to do it elsewhere but they finally agreed to have a an offensive a joint offensive on the river Somme with the Brits on the north side the French and the south side and the French would be in the lead they would be the major push well a couple weeks later everything has changed because the French are fighting for the life and Verdun so the spring meeting comes and the warning that you offer puts out is if you don't do something now the British or the French army will cease to exist and now the British have to be in the lead so Haig's planned by this time is on a fairly large broad front larger than the Germans at envision a broad front of something like 25 kilometers he's going to attack in phase one and they're gonna have enough artillery to suppress the Germans and with theirs the Brits now in the lead and the French and support and Phase two they would seize the second line of Defense's for the Germans and possibly then afterwards if all goes well have a breakthrough and just to make sure that you are ready for that you have a cavalry Corps waiting behind the lines three whole divisions of cavalry waiting to exploit that at that breakthrough so that's still in their minds Henri Rawlinson here is the local commander of the Fourth Army in that region he has a little bit different vision of this he doesn't see that the breakthrough is going to be as possible he wants to concentrate the the firing in a smaller area and he wants to his strategy essentially his bite and hold you'd get a piece of land and you hold it and then you start moving things forward again until you can take it over of course eventually Haig's attitude is going to carry the day just a little bit about the terrain at the summit it is perfect for digging it's a nice rolling terrain chalky soil and it's perfect for digging and the Germans have done it in a major way in fact what they have now this is kind of hard to see this is thousand 2,000 3,000 4,000 all the way up to 9,000 here here's their first line trenches this is roughly where the British lines are so these are very close anywhere from a couple hundred yards to eight or nine hundred yards distance from the from the British lines that's the first line and then back here you've got the second line you've got all these communications trenches connecting all this stuff that's probably pushing the limit it or outside the limit of most of the British and French guns so you can't even attack them in the first day the third line what's the Germans are busily building in early 1916 is way behind way out of range for the British guns so that's what the the Brits and the French are going to have to deal with in the early stages I want to take just a quick listen to this the British bombardment starts let me make a couple of the comments here first the British plans 13 divisions 11 of those in the 4th army - and the 3rd army they will begin the campaign with a week-long bombard a thousand guns a hundred and eighty of them heavy guns so much smaller percentage than the than the Germans had and some notion of an hour owing barrage now defeat artillery the smaller guns are supposed to cut the enemy wire the bigger guns are supposed to be counterbattery fire and dig the troops out of the trenches and the bunkers that's the assumption that they're make and then the plan is to have troops advance over an open terrain and generally because the assumption is going to be there's everybody's dead in the trench line so you're gonna be able to move relatively open and unobstructed and you've got sixty plus pounds on your back because that's what you need to to fight the war once you get across no-man's land you can't really run with sixty plus pounds on your back in the first place and sometimes you would be advancing behind a rolling barrage so that the artillery would be moving forward as you move forward that's tricky business you better know what you're doing as an artilleryman and you better have faith in the artillery if your infantry to do something like that the French have only five divisions and that's under General Ferdinand Foix now the troops right before this bombardment occurs and during the initial stages of the bombardment what are they doing they're doing everything but training because they don't have time to they're digging more communications trenches they're digging in communication lines six foot deep so it doesn't get disrupted as you move up to the front lines you're not digging forward to the Front's line obviously you're bringing all these supplies forward there's a one detail after another so again the bottom line is the British troops are not well enough trained for what they're going to be thrown into the assumption is the artillery will carry the day and the Brits that the infantry will have the easier time of it so the bonbarb it begins on the 24th and it continues afterwards and here is one German soldiers view of what's going on those opening moments if we ran out of food that night and never sent to get some at the field kitchen I was told tell your comrades the English will attack tomorrow morning took me seven hours to fetch the food and when I got back I couldn't find my dugout because the ground was so torn up then I saw one of my friends signaling to me I told one of my comrades we must be prepared the English will attack soon we got our machine gun ready at the top step of the dugout and we put our equipment on and we waited we all expected to die we thought of God we prayed then someone shouted they're coming they're coming we rushed up and got our machine gun in position we could see the English soldiers pouring out at us thousands and thousands of them we opened fire now on the British side 1.5 million shells had been fired in that preparation over those few days and as far as the average British infantrymen was concerned how can anybody live through this kind of a Bartman so they had this great optimism each Corps commander had had their own plan that they could adopt accordingly so there were some variations the mood in the trenches was very up you'll inform oast cases and I think to illustrate that I want to get into in the next slide here talking about the Grimsby chums in their example so July 1st at 7 8 7:30 a.m. the bombardment stops the infantry attacks 60,000 troops along a 13 mile front if you look right here you can get a good sense of the pack that he's got the long rifle with the bayonet on top that's the low that they're gonna have to carry and again that's your standard infantryman the wire men are going to have that spool of wire they're gonna be hauling across there as well and lots of other equipment has to go forward so I'm taking sandbags I'm taking digging utensils all kinds of equipment has to go over the top into no-man's land creeping barrage moving too fast in most cases in most cases and many cases at least the enemy wire is uncut in part that's because something like a third of the British artillery are duds mostly a problem with the fuses a lot of the artillery was manufacturing in the United States I'm not sure where the fuses were manufactured but that's a huge problem for in fact they're still digging up artillery rounds today the French farmers are in fact I was able to walk across the field a few years back and was very easy just to walk across and start picking up shrapnel that was still on top of the ground after it'd been freshly plowed what was the experience of the chumps well here's their experience four thirty the chums eat their breakfast along with the issue of rations five thirty they move forward to the jump-off positions and it's six o'clock they're in the positions and they break into song gives you a sense of their attitudes at that moment and includes little ditties like I love the ladies maybe some of the songs that we heard as we came in here 6:25 the artillery preparation intensifies and at 7:28 approximately an hour later a huge mind that it might had been tunneled by the engineers underneath the German lines and packed with 24 tons of high explosives underneath the German lines think about the crater in the the Battle of Petersburg but only much bigger that huge mine has detonated two minutes before they're supposed to attack huge explosion see this mushroom cloud of dirt and clay being thrown into the air the only problem is it was short of the German lines and it was a hundred yards wide now what becomes nothing but an obstacle for the troops as they move forward seven thirty companies a B and C go over the top in four lines they advance they go ten yards they drop they raise up again they move another ten yards they drop but as they go far enough they some of the soldiers start to realize well there dropping in there not getting up and they're not getting up because they've been hit the great assumption that the Brits all the way up the chain of command had was an absolutely falsehood the Germans were in their bunkers they emerge from their bunkers they manned their machine guns and they were able to call in the artillery and it became a killing field as far as a lot of the the British troops were yet just like clockwork nine o'clock d-company goes in advance just like they had planned in the first place experienced the same thing only a very small number of chums actually made it to the German trenches and eventually they're going to be repulsed most of the rest they lay injured in no-man's land or they managed to make their way back to the friendly Alliance and in many cases they didn't make their way back to friendly Alliance until darkness it occurred so that was the experience for the chums and much of the rest of the British Army so let's get a flavour again at some other quotes that hear this on the Germany English started advancing we were very worried they looked as though they must overrun our trenches we were surprised to see them walking we had never seen that before I could see them everywhere there were hundreds the officers were in front I noticed one of them walking calmly carrying a walking stick when we started firing we just had to load and reload they went down in there hundreds you didn't have to aim we just fired into them if only they had run they would have overwhelmed us and from the British perspective the trench was a horrible sight the dead were stretched out on one side one on top of each other six feet high I thought at the time I should never get the peculiar disgusting smell of the vapour of warm human blood heated by the Sun out of my nostrils I would rather have smoked gas a hundred times I can never describe that faint sickening horrible smell which several times nearly knocked me up altogether so July 1st that's the day of this I think most Brits would if you were to ask him what the saddest the most forlorn day in their history of that long country but that ancient country they would say it's July 1st 1916 the first day of the Battle of the Somme the Third Army results in the northern portion basically ended up in failure but the casualties were rather low but you get here from from this region right here all the way down to the road here between albear and Bapaume this is where the cassity's for the 4th British army were horrendous absolutely horrendous below the road this region right here the 13th Corps attack was much more successful and when you get down to the French sector who had a lot more heavy artillery and a little bit more sophisticated infantry tactics they did much much better so the decision is made by Haig and others let's reinforce success let's move our future attacks through here but the decision has to be made do we continue any the attacks just like in the Battle of Verdun they didn't really feel it I don't think they felt like they had too many choices they were getting a lot of pressure from politicians in London and especially a lot of pressure from their French allies to continue the the attack to take the pressure off the Verdun and so they decided to attack now casualties for the 4th British Army 19,000 240 killed in one day and you add in the rest of the Brits you got close to 220 thousand fifty-seven thousand four hundred total casualties of about a hundred thousand that were initially employed that's a huge percentage the French cassadee's something like fifteen hundred and ninety the Germans the numbers will widely in the German case but maybe 10 to 12 thousand casualties one particular battalion have suffered 684 Cassidy's 91 percent the chums lost right at 60% 15 officers dead or missing or wounded 487 men altogether so horrendous casualties but one of the problems that again this is a communications breakdown what are the generals think the Cassidy's are at the end of day one 16,000 dead maybe and the expectations were this is gonna be bloody we're gonna lose a lot of people but 16,000 is what they thought it would take days before they'd be able to serve all this out so yes they would continue the assault and one more quote here from a private from the fourth on the far side of no-man's-land I found the German wire cut but only three of our company got passed there there was my lieutenant a sergeant and myself the rest seemed to a bit hid in no-man's-land the officer said God God where's the rest of the boys I think that pretty much says it all so how long does this son last from July 1st all the way up to November 18th months and months of combat and I don't want to spend too much time going through this we pretty much it painted the picture I wanted to achieve a one thing the significant of this 141 day campaign is September 15th is the first use of tanks during World War one it's an experiment the Brits started rather early on this in the fall of 1914 Churchill was one of the early champions of this even he though he was Lord of the Apple T he kind of took his took that under his arm 49 tanks were available on the 15th only 18 of them got out of got into no-man's land the first place all the rest of them broke down on the way to the battlefield and it didn't take long for the to them to be rather easy targets because they moved at one-half mile per hour so but that's shocked and again the Brits weren't ready to exploit it even that they had been more successful so the lessons of the first July first was you needed much better coordination with the artillery you needed much better observation capability he had to solve the communications problem that was a conundrum that they never really got a good handle on and then you had to deal with the the psychological impact of this and as I mentioned it was the darkest day of England's long long history basil a day Liddell Hart called it a tragedy of ayres AJP Taylor these are both major military historians after the war he called it the I day that ideally idealism perished on the Somme and here's another interesting footnote 1 of the cassity's in the German side was a young man 27 year-old Colonel or excuse me corporal by the name of Adolf Hitler he was a casualty at the psalm now I hesitate to even put these casualty figures up because when I started to do the research the casualty numbers were just all over the map but I wanted to give some sense of the scale of the loss and the impact that this is going to have on European society for generations afterwards just on the Somme itself for that five-month campaign four hundred fifteen thousand Brits two hundred two thousand French the numbers for the Germans any anywhere from four hundred thirty to 650,000 who knows so well in excess of a million casualties for the Battle of the Somme and I started thinking about why the numbers were all over the map well did they include prisoners of war did they include missing we talked about the the missing that we're in these battles did include a person being injured in July coming back to the battle being injured again later on or being killed later how do you count this stuff up so I for those cautionary tales for these numbers but the fact is that it was a traumatic experience for Britain for France and for Germany and it was a battle of attrition a war of attrition now which army was going to break first and that's a conversation for future presentations I think now you see the cemetery that Valle have actually visited that cemetery what's in that Cemetery seventy two thousand two hundred and forty six missing British Empire servicemen who died somewhere between 1916 and 1918 and the and the battlefield of the Sun that's seven and seventy two thousand people who couldn't be identified just found on the battlefield I'd like to encourage you to get a real sense of it in a different kind of a format with what I considered the classic film of the First World War and even though came out in 1930 it stands up incredibly well All Quiet on the Western Front that shows July 26 right here in this theater again very brief introduction and then we'll have a chance to see a movie that was so powerful that the Nazis banned it from theaters because like every first world war movie it's an anti-war movie how could it be anything else thank you very much for coming here tonight and give credit to our narrators as well so I always do this I have a terrible reputation but I went over a longer than I thought hopefully you know I appreciate you staying with it do I have any questions all the way in the back there yes sir okay the question is why did I think I understand it why did the British decide to join in this battle is that what you're not just you're talking about the decision in 1914 right okay they're the the British weren't quite as tight into the Alliance the pattern of alliances in 1914 as the French and the Russians were but the British did have an ironclad treaty with the Belgium's that if they were ever attacked that the Brits would come to their aid and so because of the this Lifan plan to begin with had it had the German army marching right through Belgium to get to the soft underbelly of France as soon as Belgium neutrality was violated that led to the decision for the British to come in in a major way the problem was it took them practically two years in the Battle of the Somme to really have a major military presence in Europe at that time yes right here sir General Patton has a very interesting history he is the hero of Verdun because of this defensive strategy that he had a year later after the Battle of Verdun not patan not Jafra but general Neville comes to be the commander-in-chief of the French army he is also very offensive minded and general Nivelle in 1917 launches another major offensive this time the Germans are in the defensive the French are on the offensive we've got to repel the the hated Huns from British soil or from French soil that offensive is an absolute disaster and after that offensive in 1917 you see something in the neighborhood of half the French divisions elements in the half the French divisions mutiny and refused to go on the offensive they might decide that it's okay to be on the defensive but that's a huge psychological impact on the French and General Patton comes back into the picture novellas fired patan comes in some very harsh disciplinary actions are taken but he ends up being the the hero on that respect as well and for the rest of the war the French are pretty much just waiting for the Americans to arrive so now you fast forward another generation you get to the beginning of World War two and all the trauma that the French had experienced I think has a lot to say about why the French army collapsed at the beginning of World War two the way it did and who is left to be in charge of the French government after the collapse retired General Patton so he's in charge of the Vichy government like you mentioned can you ask the question again well you know the last time we had the presentation about the origins of war you know that all of these royal families were intermarry inter interrelated all of them were and once the the opening shots fired they kind of put all that behind him the people were alley behind their particular government their particular army so that wasn't that wasn't a problem after that I saw a question up here yes sir it is if you've got your handout here the question is how does the hunter the Germans how does anybody figure out how to break out of Trance warfare and that is a subject for 19 excuse me 2018 2008 so if it was wait two years for that one yes sir right here PBS came out with a a series on World War one a couple years ago and it was much more about the human impact of World War one than it was about moving armies moving around on the battlefield and they have these gut-wrenching films of these soldiers who came back and they would crawl under a table and they would just have this twitch constantly and all these things shell-shocked that's the term that was used for this one and certainly not nearly the understanding that we have today I sometimes wonder if there was something different about that generation they dealt with it better or differently or the world war ii generation that they dealt with it differently but in most cases it was much more in the closet that was kind of thing that they didn't talk about but just horrendous kind of experiences and it wasn't uncommon at all that you see people on the streets of london or any major english city with missing an arm or a leg or both arms and things like that so it was certainly a factor then and plenty of soldiers were psychologically injured as well yes okay so the comet is that her great-uncle was in the ambulance corps Darren Ward one and only at the end towards the end of his life he started to see okay yeah I mean the human mind is an awfully difficult thing to understand and how could anybody not be affected by the nature of the combat that they had SR back here question is that they've been to the World War one and Museum in Kansas City yes I have Oh do I see a correlation between the intense nationalism that they had during the first world war with the kind of nationalism we might be saying in places like the North China Sea that the Chinese might have the Filipinos and the Vietnamese I made normally I would steer clear of that kind of a a question I'll make this comment I made this statement up front that the most significant historical event of the last two centuries was this war well what happened before that it was the French Revolution and what did the French Revolution unleash they spread the concept of nationalism through the rest of Europe all these countries that were ruled by ruled by kings and emperors and suddenly these people started realizing wait a minute we have our own national identity look what happened in the in the Balkans after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the the Warsaw Pact it is an incredibly powerful human force and I don't think human nature has changed that much so it's still a factor today yeah and everybody's got their own theory about why the breakfast vote went the way it did but nationalism certainly as part of that I think maybe one more question here yes sir a lot of this for especially for the British most of those shells were on relatively smaller size smaller caliber guns and if you're in a bunker that's 20 or 30 feet under the ground that's been reinforced doesn't matter how many of those rounds are gonna land on top even you're still going to be fine it's the larger caliber guns that are really gonna start digging you out or collapse the bunkers or seal people in and you know horrific things did happen there was certainly plenty of the Germans that were killed in that bombardment but nothing close to the scale that the Brits wanted and you know if a33 roms never even go off in the first place then it's a serious problem but it was because the Germans were good engineers to begin with and they built this elaborate bunker system primarily that's the reason okay thank you very much for coming you you

Channel: Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum

Views: 48,486

Rating: 4.7055216 out of 5

Keywords: World War I, Dr. Mark DePue, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, ALPLM, Trench Warfare

Id: Kq310eP4Eeg

Length: 102min 39sec (6159 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 23 2018