World War I - 1915 - Let's Talk History

welcome back everyone as we continue our discussion of the great war world war one we're into part two which will be about 1915. if you didn't see yesterday's episode where we uh talked about the very first year of the war there's a link in the description that will take you back to that and i get a number of people uh asking me how they can help the channel uh get a couple emails a day sometimes saying hey can't really support you on patreon or be a member here on youtube how can i help well i'm so glad that you guys asked that question because there is something that every single person watching can do if you want to help this channel to grow and help this community to grow every time you watch a video if you could do three things for me it would be huge number one watch the video all the way to the end uh you know from the time that i start talking to the very end watch the whole thing number two hit that like button i i know sometimes we don't really think about it but if you hit that like button every time you watch a video if it's something you like uh that helps and then the other thing is to make sure that you leave a comment in fact i'm gonna challenge everybody watching every one of these videos i'm gonna try to remember to do this every time to just comment below either to add to the conversation or if you can't think of anything to add to the conversation let me know what you learned in this episode when it's over leave a comment and say you know the thing that i never knew that i learned in this episode is this and leave that as a comment the reason i ask you to do those things is because those three things all contribute to youtube recommending this channel to more people the more they see that people hit like the more that people watch the videos all the way to the end and the more that people comment and engage with the video that shows youtube that you like what you see and that means it'll recommend it to more people so every time you do that you help this channel and i'm grateful for it so on average we get about one like for every 100 views so if we even got that up to like one like for every 20 views that would be huge i had to stop and look because i knew as soon as i said those words that that wasn't right on average it's about one like for every 15 views uh it's not nearly as bad as the way i made it sound uh so if we get that down to like one like for every five views it'd be enormous and it would really help this channel to grow so thank you in advance for that let's go ahead and dive in to part two january 1915 world war one is just five months old and already around one million soldiers have fallen a war that began in the balkans has engulfed much of the world the central powers germany austria-hungary and the ottoman empire fight the allies britain france russia serbia and montenegro belgium and japan notice one thing that a lot of the allies have in common is red white and blue i mean think about it who are the uh the significant players on the allied side russia serbia france britain and then eventually the united states they all have red white and blue flags it doesn't mean anything it's just something i never really thought about before in poland and the baltic the russian army has suffered a string of massive defeats but continues to battle german and austro-hungarian forces and you know poland's such an interesting thing because a lot of us who are maybe more familiar with world war ii think about poland being right here but poland at this point hasn't existed for like 130 years something like that it was partitioned uh between the other great powers in a series of decisions in the uh decades leading into the napoleonic wars um and basically it's if you look at if you do research into people who immigrated to the united states from poland around this time most of them will say they were born in uh polish prussia or polish russia um because they were polish in terms of their ethnicity but in terms of the government they were under was typically either prussia or russia sometimes others austria-hungary had parts of it too but so you know people like the red baron uh manfred von richthoven uh where he was born his hometown would today be in poland uh but at the time it was part of prussia austro-hungarian troops have also suffered huge losses and are humiliated by their failure to defeat serbia big time in the caucasus mountains russian and ottoman forces fight each other in freezing winter conditions while on the western front french british and belgium troops are dug in facing the germans in trenches stretching from the english channel to switzerland so 1915 is kind of i don't want to say it's the forgotten year of the war but if you're most familiar as i am with the western front which here's the thing i've been basically living the western front for the last month or so because i've been doing hours of research every day as i prepare for my visit to the western front so that's really what i've been focused on 1915 is a comparatively quiet year on the western front i don't want to say it is quiet because there are a lot of casualties and there's a lot of fighting but compared to 1914 and especially 1916 uh and then even 1917 and 1918 it's pretty quiet because a lot of the focus shifts to the east shifts to the ottoman empire to gallipoli places like that as part of the world's first strategic bombing campaign germany sends two giant airships known as zeppelins to bomb britain they hit the ports of king's lynn and great yarmouth damaging houses and killing four civilians kind of a little bit of a preview of the blitz in world war ii right i mean this is the kind of thing that germany does then too they're they're first bombing uh during the battle of britain they're bombing a lot of civilian targets but then later on with the v2 rockets so this is something and you got to remember germany is in a position where they're limited in what they can do and and you might look at this and think well you know why would they target civilians uh you know what are they doing this for in their minds their civilians have been targeted by the blockade now obviously that's not the way that the allies see it the allies see it as a military blockade to try and bring them down militarily but this blockade has a huge impact on the home front and so it's it's something that in the minds of germany is justified things like unrestricted submarine warfare that will come later things like bombing civilian targets in britain this is just doing to them what is already being done by the blockade at sea at the battle of dogger bank the british navy sinks one german cruiser but the rest of the german squadron escapes and it's kind of interesting because then you have in world war ii another ship um named after the same general blue shirt some people pronounce it blucher some people pronounce it blue sure uh german speaking people help me out with that one because i've heard it both ways and i haven't really been able to find a a really good source telling me one way or the other but that very famous scene from the movie the king's choice where you have that br that german ship uh in night time uh pulling into the fjords in norway um and getting uh sunk by the defenses uh was also with the same name command of the seas has allowed britain to impose a naval blockade of germany preventing vital supplies including food from reaching the country by sea germany now retaliates with its own blockade it declares the waters around the british isles to be a war zone where its u-boats will attack allied merchant ships without warning britain relies on imported food to feed its population now they say without warning but at least initially usually the u-boats before they would sink those ships would give them a chance to evacuate the ship before they sank it they didn't just do like what they do later with the lusitania where they just fire a torpedo uh completely unannounced and completely unexpected and and killed you know thousands of civilians early on they did very often pull up line up for the shot and then give them a warning and get them a chance to get off before they sank the ship it just didn't always happen that way germany plans to starve her into surrender and you can see how in germany's mind there's no difference right you're blockading us so now we're going to put a net around britain and we're going to sink anything that comes your way and honestly i'm not defending it but i understand it i really do on the eastern front german field marshal von hindenburg launches a winter offensive and inflicts another massive defeat on the russian army at the second battle of missourian lakes the russians lose up to 200 000 men half of them surrendering amid freezing winter conditions and i talked about this before you see a lot of these huge numbers of troops being captured a lot of that comes because of encirclement a lot of it's because of the conditions like they said here but but there are multiple times that this kind of thing happens the russians have more success against austria-hungary typical the city of chamischel falls after a four-month siege netting the russians 100 000 prisoners austria-hungary's total losses now reach 2 million and they don't have the kind of unlimited manpower that russia does not unlimited obviously but nowhere near the numbers and this is the story of the eastern front it's german success and austro-hungarian failure and large numbers of men being captured on both sides meanwhile the british and french send warships to the dardanelles to threaten constantinople capital of the turkish ottoman empire and the person who takes a lot of the blame for the failure of the dardanelles and gallipoli and those things is the first lord of the admiralty winston churchill uh winston churchill's first lord of the admiralty uh in america you've got franklin roosevelt who is an assistant secretary to the navy just as his cousin theodore had been cousin and uncle-in-law i should say theodore had been uh it's kind of a thing that seems to be the case with these future world war ii leaders they believe a show of force will quickly cause turkey to surrender they bombard turkish shaw forts in the narrow straits but three battleships are sunk by mines and three more damaged the attack is called off [Music] on the western front the british attack at nerf chapel but the advance is soon halted by german barbed wire and machine guns british and indian units suffer 11 000 casualties about a quarter of the attacking force six weeks later at the second battle of ecru the germans attack with poison gas for the first time on the western front and this is one of the first times they do this and it actually is initially very successful the problem is they don't follow it up with large numbers of troops to exploit it uh and so really while men died from gas very rarely did poison gas turn the tide of a battle because pretty quickly they started to adjust to this and they started to provide gas masks and protection and things like that so yeah a lot of people died from it but i don't know that it really made any significant difference it could have at this battle but it wasn't exploited a cloud of lethal chlorine forces allied troops to abandon their trenches but the germans don't have enough reserves ready to exploit the advantage soldiers on both sides are quickly supplied with crude gas masks as a chemical weapons arms race begins and there's different kinds of gas that was used chlorine was very common and the problem with the chlorine gas and this was what was used in that famous attack of the dead men at the oz of yetz fortress on the eastern front is that when it gets inhaled it turns into hydrochloric acid in the lungs because of a chemical reaction and so basically now you've got hydrochloric acid inside your body and so you start to cough up pieces of your lungs and it starts to melt the flesh i mean it's just really really brutal stuff and it wasn't even the worst phosgene gas was the really nasty stuff that got used late in the war the allies land ground troops at gallipoli including men of the australian and new zealand army anzacs the anzacs their goal is to take out the shore forts that are preventing allied war if you ever heard that term anzac and you're not familiar with it australia new zealand army corps i believe is what it stands for anzac trips reaching constantinople but they immediately meet fierce turkish resistance and are pinned down close to the shore glibly was brutal the day before the landings the ottoman empire begins the systematic deportation and murder of ethnic armenians living within its borders and if you're in turkey or anywhere else and you want to start arguing that armenian genocide didn't happen save it i'm deleting the comment i got no patience for that the armenians are a long persecuted ethnic and religious minority suspected of supporting turkey's enemies [Music] tens of thousands of men women and children are transported to the syrian desert and left to die in all more than a million armenians perish the allies condemn the events as a crime against humanity and civilization and promise to hold the perpetrators criminally responsible and that's important because this is one of the first times you hear that phrase used crimes against humanity that's going to become a big big part of the aftermath of world war ii are the trials uh crimes against humanity becomes one of the charges that are leveled against japanese germans others to this day the turkish government disputes the death toll and that these events constituted a genocide on the eastern front a joint german austro-hungarian offensive and galicia breaks through russian defenses recapturing chemical and taking a hundred thousand prisoners seems to be the standard number it is the beginning of a steady advance against russian forces at sea the british passenger liner lusitania sailing from new york to liverpool is torpedoed by a german u-boat off the coast of ireland without warning [Music] 1198 passengers and crew perish including 128 americans so lusitania sinks really really fast and it sinks from one torpedo which i think surprised even the crew of the u-boat involved um it was carrying large amounts of munitions in fact um recent discoveries have shown exactly what they were carrying i want to look this up real quick so officially and this was acknowledged by the british government lusitania was carrying 750 tons of rifle and machine gun ammunition 1250 cases of shrapnel artillery shells with explosive burster charges loaded but no fuses or propellant charges in september 2008 303 cartridges of a type known to be used by the british military were recovered from the wreck um they said the cargo included 50 barrels and 94 cases of aluminum powder as well as 50 cases of bronze powder it was also secretly carrying a large quantity of nitrocellulose known as gun cotton although this was not listed on the cargo manifest so there's a lot of debate about this in part because there was this second explosion that was not caused by a torpedo but nobody knows for sure what it was caused by when bob ballard found explored the wreck the wreck was originally found in the 1930s it's only 11 miles off the coast of ireland so it's not real deep you can go down a diver can go down without having to be in a submarine or anything and um when bob ballard who found the titanic explored the wreck he said he didn't find any evidence of an explosion in the area where the munitions were being carried but of course that's the official munitions what else they were carrying maybe we will never know we do know that in the aftermath the germ or the british government dropped depth charges repeatedly on the site and tried to like destroy the wreckage almost a lot of people speculate they were trying to cover something up so um we'll never know for sure but uh it was the bottom line is that the lusitania is just one more thing that is used to say look at the bad guys the germans murdering innocent civilians including over a hundred americans and this starts to begin the outrage in the united states and is one of the events that people point to as helping push the us into the war a year later well two years later u.s president woodrow wilson and the american public are outraged but germany insists the liner was a fair target as the british used her to carry military supplies in may the allies launched the second battle of artois in another effort to break through the german lines the french make the main attack at vimy ridge while the british launched supporting attacks at ober ridge and festuber the allies sustain 130 000 casualties and advance just a few thousand yards that summer above the western front the fokker eindeka helps germany win control of the air it's one of the first aircraft with a machine gun able to fire forward through its propeller thanks to a new invention known as interrupter gear allied aircraft losses mount rapidly so before this you you didn't really have the ability to basically what this is allowing you is to is to aim your aircraft and fire in the direction that you're you're pointing basically you couldn't do this before the interrupter gear is fascinating technology because you can fire right through the propeller because there's a timing chain that basically what happens is the propeller is driving it and so you pull the trigger but the gun's not actually going to fire until it's able to do so at the correct timing through the propellers and so that's kind of a simplified version of how it works the allies had a version that was actually like when when you have biplanes and the second wing is up above they sometimes had a gun up there uh that fire obviously it was a little bit high but could do the same thing just in a slightly different way in what becomes known as the focker scourge opportunism italy swayed by british and french promises of territorial gains at austria-hungary's expense joins the allies now italy the the area they want is uh over here and they ask austria-hungary for the for the territory uh and if austria-hungary had given it up maybe italy stays neutral maybe they even join the the central powers at the very least they probably stay neutral but instead they get those promises from britain and france hey help us win the war after it's over will give you some territory but then they don't give them nearly the territory they were actually seeking but this is a huge deal because when you look at the numbers of troops that austria-hungary has to put in the mountains to fight against the italians i mean we're talking a couple of million think about what two million soldiers could have done uh over on the eastern front uh where they're already hemorrhaging manpower against the russians declaring war on austria-hungary and later the ottoman empire and germany the italian army makes its first assault against austro-hungarian positions along the asanso river and isanzo is going to be where the majority of the fighting on the italian front takes place there are multiple battles of essenzo and this is kind of one of the forgotten fronts of the war because there are you know hundreds of thousands of deaths on the italian front that you know at least for me it's not an area that i i hear talked about a whole lot but is repulsed with heavy losses meanwhile the allies face a crisis on the eastern front the russians have begun a general retreat abandoning poland german troops enter warsaw on the 5th of august so what's one of the reasons why they would do this well you can see right there because russia has this kind of natural salient of territory backing up allows them to shorten their lines makes it easier to defend you're given up ground but you're shortening your defensive line and it makes it easier to be able to reinforce it makes it easier to be able to hold tsar nicholas ii dismisses the russian army's commander-in-chief grand duke nicholas and takes personal command mistake it will prove disastrous for the tsar as he becomes more and more closely tied to russian military defeat so now when russia loses who do you blame well the tsar's the guy that took charge he's he has taken personal responsibility for the disasters that are taking place on the eastern front and it's just going to be one more thing along with all the junk that's already been happening for decades on the home front that he's going to be blamed for that are going to lead to his downfall at gallipoli the allies land reinforcements at souvla bay but neither they nor a series of fresh attacks by the anzacs can break the deadlock conditions for both sides are terrible troops are tormented not only by the enemy but by heat flies and sickness world war one is the last major war where you have huge percentage of the deaths from disease rather than from battle wounds in fact just to give you an example for the united states there something over a little over 50 000 battle deaths and deaths from wounds uh and but there are over a hundred thousand total so uh slightly more than half of all the american deaths happen because of disease now understandably 1918 spanish flu breaks out it's one of the worst pandemics in human history and so that's responsible for part of it but all throughout the war you have huge numbers of deaths because of disease world war ii becomes the first war where most of the deaths occur because of battle in the atlantic a german u-boat sinks the liner ss arabic 44 are lost including three americans in response to further u.s warnings germany ends all attacks on passenger ships for now on the western front the allies mount their biggest offensive of the war so far designed to smash through the front and take pressure off their beleaguered russian ally the french attack in the third battle of artois and second battle of champagne the british with the help of poison gas attack at loss despite initial gains the attacks soon get bogged down with enormous losses on all sides now these numbers they look big the reason i say that the western front's relatively quiet in 1915 is because when you look at these numbers by themselves they look like a lot and it is a lot i mean we're talking about uh you know what 400 000 casualties that's a lot but when you compare that to what's to come it's not unfortunately the british take 57 000 casualties in one day at the battle of the psalm and this was an entire offensive put in perspective side troops land at salonika in greece to open a new front against the central powers and bring aid to serbia but the allies are too late bulgaria joins the central powers and their joint offensive overruns serbia in two months that winter the remnants of the serbian army escape through the albanian mountains serbia will lose something like a quarter of their population in this war i don't think any country suffered percentage-wise as badly as serbia did their losses are horrific by the end of the war a third of serbia's army has been killed the highest proportion of any nation [Music] fierce fighting continues on the italian front as italian troops launched the third and fourth battles of the issanso austro-hungarian forces though outnumbered a dug in on the high ground and impossible to dislodge in the middle east a british advance on baghdad is blocked by turkish forces at the battle of tessifon 25 miles south of the city the british withdraw to kut where they are besieged the allies abandoned the gallipoli campaign 83 000 troops are secretly evacuated without alerting turkish forces and uh so winston churchill steps down as first lord of the admiralty actually takes a commission uh as uh in the army and goes to goes to france to fight on the ground not a man is lost it's one of the best executed plans of the war the campaign has cost both sides a quarter of a million casualties [Music] see so i mean comparatively speaking the british lose what 57 000 in the great autumn offensive in france they lose a quarter million uh not just the british it's the commonwealth you know anzacs folks like that um lose a quarter million in the gallipoli campaign just horrifically disastrous for for the allies and i mean and for the ottomans 1915 is a bad year for the allies enormous losses for no tangible gains but there is no talk of peace instead all sides prepare for even bigger offensives in 1916. double down new tactics developed from earlier failures all sides still believe a decisive battlefield victory is within grasp so yeah um tomorrow we'll get into 1916. some pretty significant events of the war happen in 1916. some pretty uh memorable moments things that are probably very familiar if you've studied the great war at all that we'll be getting into so looking forward to that as i said before please hit that like button please leave a comment let me know something that you want to add to the conversation that maybe wasn't talked about about 1915 and if you don't have that let me know something you learned in this video today that you didn't know before either from the video or from me use that comment section below really appreciate it we'll see you again tomorrow thanks for watching you

Channel: Vlogging Through History

Views: 85,349

Keywords: great war, world war i (military conflict), world war one, world war i, archduke franz ferdinand, world war i video, 1914 to 1918, history channel, first world war, trench warfare, wwi video, kaiser wilhelm, the great war, military history, july crisis

Id: fo3PUphmARM

Length: 31min 24sec (1884 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 14 2022