A November 11 question about rememberance of the Great War

[Pat Holscher]

I have a question regarding recalling the Great War.

In just three years, it will have been a full century since the end of World War One. Indeed, World War One is now as far removed from us as the War of 1812 as from combatants in the Great War. The Civil War was closer in time to World War One than World War One is to us, even though World War One still seems, to the history minded, as one of our modern collections of wars, perhaps nearly as much in our mind as the Korean War is.

Having said that, I note that for Europeans, and perhaps more particularly for the citizens of the United Kingdom and its Dominions, the Great War retains a certain present poignancy. Even more than World War Two. It doesn't really for Americans. We haven't forgotten World War One, but we don't recall it in with the same bitter sadness that many others in the English speaking world do.

What is it about the Great War that makes ti this way for the other English speaking peoples, or am I simply in error.

[Jim Bewley]

I read once that England lost almost an entire generation of young men in WWI. If that is true, it could explain the strong feelings.

[Trooper]

I doubt if there is a family in the nation untouched by the events of WW1.
Every village and hamlet has its memorial beside those in towns and cities.
Remembrance Day has real meaning still.

[Couvi]

The United States got involved late and didn’t lose the quantities of men that the rest of the Allies lost. Among WWI veterans it was remembered as the most difficult of events. I had a teacher that was a WWI veteran and it was his favorite topic.

I believe, also, that the media played a major part in the popularization of The Great War. The British media especially made a production of calling the Germans ‘Huns,’ and describing in lurid details the rapes and killings, etc. I am sure that this helped enlistments and threw the support of population in favor of the War.

I would be interested in knowing the opinions of the colonials that fought in the Great War for the Allies.

[Pat Holscher]

I doubt if there is a family in the nation untouched by the events of WW1.
Every village and hamlet has its memorial beside those in towns and cities.
Remembrance Day has real meaning still.

Is this not also true of World War Two?

Although, of course, British casualties were higher during the Great War.

[Pat Holscher]

I would be interested in knowing the opinions of the colonials that fought in the Great War for the Allies.

At least by observation, the Great War remains huge in the consciousness of Canadians and Australians as well. And of course in Rhodesia it was so strong that the date of their declaration of independence was associated with the Great War.

[Trooper]

Is this not also true of World War Two?

Yes, many of those memorials include the same family name from a second generation.

[Pat Holscher]

The United States got involved late and didn’t lose the quantities of men that the rest of the Allies lost. Among WWI veterans it was remembered as the most difficult of events. I had a teacher that was a WWI veteran and it was his favorite topic.

I know it made an impression on the children of some veterans too. I had a junior high school teacher who himself was a Korean War vet, which he would speak about, but he seemed more impressed by his own father's World War One service.

The American experience in WWI was a true bloodbath, but that tends not to come across as our actual participation in combat was so short. Quite frankly, the casualty rate of American troops was unsustainable. Had the war continued on into 1919 it'd be interesting to see if new formations continued to sustain such a casualty rate or if experience would have rapidly tempered it. There almost seems to have been a bit of a quiet acknowledgment on the American side that American troops would win the war as they were willing to be expended at such a prodigious rate, and the Germans wouldn't have been able to sustain it. We suffered "only" 116,000 dead, but at the rate we lost them that number would have been easily triple that or higher if the war had been fought to a combat conclusion.

Americans who lived through it were pretty impacted by it. But the larger experience of WWII really drowned it out for us. Indeed, not often really noticed, but a real impact of World War One is that during World War Two we very much emphasized the application of artillery in mobile warfare, which became the American way of war. The general American (and British) approach after 1918 was really to be willing to spend nearly any amount to remotely land steel on the enemy before a rifleman had to encounter him, which is frankly a good approach in my view. But I think that came about in part due to World War One.

I heard an interview some time ago of a book based on the interview World War One veterans that was really revealing, and I wonder if their view helps explain the lack of attention in the US. Unlike World War Two veterans, who sort of viewed the war as a big departure from their normal lives, World War One veterans seemed to have the view that life was really hard and short, the war wasn't much of a departure from it being hard and short, they expected to die in it, and if they lived they were returning to their hard and short lives. Just one more hard thing, it seemed. Given that they lived in an era when many came from pre mechanized farms, and those who didn't tended to work in dangerous industrial employments, I wonder if they just viewed things more grimly.

[Couvi]

This is very true, and is due in large part to developments in Field Artillery weapons, and especially in tactics and utilization. I am currently working on research for the FA Museum on “The Battery Detail,” a group of 30 people who went out with the Battery Commander to within sight of the target and computed ‘where the battery is,’ ‘where we are’ and ‘where the enemy is.’ Then the battery was given the azimuth and range to shoot. This greatly increased the power of the Field Artillery as it gave them the ability to shoot out of the line of sight, especially when the field communications gained the ability to lay wire and pick it up quickly.



However, as late as 1908 the United States Field Artillery manuals were saying, “ . . . in the unlikely event that you have to shoot out of the line of sight, this is how you do it.” The thinking was very much that of the American Civil War, where batteries were shooting at troops in the open. With the advent of trenches in the Spanish-American War and the Russo-Japanese War, some thinkers were saying that guns shooting directly at troops in the open were no longer viable as front-line weapons and howitzers, with incremental charges and the ability to fire high-angles of trajectory, were the way to go. This proved true. After WWI, Field Artillery guns are relegated to shooting harassment and interdiction missions deep in the enemy’s rear and howitzers fired for friendly troops, and fired very close to them, something that wasn’t possible with high-velocity guns shooting directly at the target.

All of this led to the slaughter of troops, both in the open, and in trenches and bunkers. Often the bombardments themselves caused psychological casualties without inflicting physical damage. All in all, a WWI trench was a pretty miserable place to be under any circumstances.

[Pat Holscher]

All in all, a WWI trench was a pretty miserable place to be under any circumstances.

Indeed.

That's no doubt a big part of the reason that troops were rotated out of trenches fairly regularly after the trench war set in.

I've forgotten the details of it, but I heard it in an interview of a historian awhile back and I was really surprised how frequent it was. We often have the idea that soldiers lived in the trenches for months on end, but they actually didn't. Generally they cycled back out after a period of days, although that period changed as the war went on and depended upon the circumstances. But, generally, for the western allies troops went into the trenches, were there for a period of days or perhaps a couple of weeks, and were rotated back. They probably never rotated so far back that they weren't basically at the front, but they weren't in a trench the entire time they were at the front.

Indeed the BBC states that British soldiers were out of the trenches 45% of the time. 30% of the time they were in reserve trenches. 10% of the time they were in support trenches, and 15% of the time they were on the firing line.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/z3kgjxs

All that would be bad, of course.

I'm tempted to say that this in no way diminishes the horror of what they experienced, and in real terms, it doesn't. It does mean the routine view of that horror isn't quite correct, however. In terms of what they were exposed to, there was probably never a time when artillery wasn't a danger.

[Jim Bewley]

This book gives a real insight to life in the trenches during WWI.

http://www.amazon.com/Suddenly-We-Didnt ... 0891415939

[Couvi]

I'm tempted to say that this in no way diminishes the horror of what they experienced, and in real terms, it doesn't. It does mean the routine view of that horror isn't quite correct, however. In terms of what they were exposed to, there was probably never a time when artillery wasn't a danger.

Observation balloons were the eyes of the artillery on both sides and trained observers could spot a man moving at five miles, a horse at ten and a train at 30. The observers were connected by wire to personnel on the ground who directed artillery fire. Consequently, anything that moved was subject to draw fire. The term ‘when the balloon goes up’ that we use today started in WWI when troops observing the balloon rising knew that someone was going to get artillery called in on their position.

[Couvi]

The United States got involved late and didn’t lose the quantities of men that the rest of the Allies lost. Among WWI veterans it was remembered as the most difficult of events. I had a teacher that was a WWI veteran and it was his favorite topic.

I know it made an impression on the children of some veterans too. I had a junior high school teacher who himself was a Korean War vet, which he would speak about, but he seemed more impressed by his own father's World War One service.

The American experience in WWI was a true bloodbath, but that tends not to come across as our actual participation in combat was so short. Quite frankly, the casualty rate of American troops was unsustainable. Had the war continued on into 1919 it'd be interesting to see if new formations continued to sustain such a casualty rate or if experience would have rapidly tempered it. There almost seems to have been a bit of a quiet acknowledgment on the American side that American troops would win the war as they were willing to be expended at such a prodigious rate, and the Germans wouldn't have been able to sustain it. We suffered "only" 116,000 dead, but at the rate we lost them that number would have been easily triple that or higher if the war had been fought to a combat conclusion.

Americans who lived through it were pretty impacted by it. But the larger experience of WWII really drowned it out for us. Indeed, not often really noticed, but a real impact of World War One is that during World War Two we very much emphasized the application of artillery in mobile warfare, which became the American way of war. The general American (and British) approach after 1918 was really to be willing to spend nearly any amount to remotely land steel on the enemy before a rifleman had to encounter him, which is frankly a good approach in my view. But I think that came about in part due to World War One.

I heard an interview some time ago of a book based on the interview World War One veterans that was really revealing, and I wonder if their view helps explain the lack of attention in the US. Unlike World War Two veterans, who sort of viewed the war as a big departure from their normal lives, World War One veterans seemed to have the view that life was really hard and short, the war wasn't much of a departure from it being hard and short, they expected to die in it, and if they lived they were returning to their hard and short lives. Just one more hard thing, it seemed. Given that they lived in an era when many came from pre mechanized farms, and those who didn't tended to work in dangerous industrial employments, I wonder if they just viewed things more grimly.

An interesting YouTube article on this subject: The USA Before Joining World War 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57JKPEryvXQ