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Wall plaques commemorating the First and Second Battles of the Marne from the Dormans Chapel and Memorial, Dormans, France. © 2014 by John M. Shea
Victory Monument commemorating the Eighth Regiment of the Illinois National Guard, an African-American unit that served in France reorganized as the 370th U.S. Infantry Regiment of the 93rd Division. The bronze sculpture is by Leonard Crunelle and was erected in 1927.The regiment saw action at St. Mihiel, the Argonne Forest, Mont des Singes, and in the Oise-Aisne Offensive. The monument lists the names of the 137 soldiers of the regiment who lost their lives in the war. © 2013, John M. Shea
Profile of the Spad XIII in the collection of the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C. © John M. Shea
Amputees at a hospital in Budapest, Austria-Hungary in the summer of 1915. Some had lost their feet to freezing in the Carpathian Mountains in the winter. From 'Antwerp to Gallipoli' by Arthur Ruhl.
US troops digging in pause to watch a Whippet tank.
"'The big attack we'd been told about has begun . . . The sky is on fire. The ground shakes. The officers are quiet in their mess this evening. One tinkles on the piano. The others go to bed early. Nothing suggests success.'The Germans finally evacuated the village. After spending several sleepless nights in the cellar, shells bursting all around them, Hue and his family almost missed the actual moment of liberation during the night of 24/25 July. And when a French soldier arrived at their door they at first took him for a spy. But no — 'We really had been liberated! I'd hidden all our flags in the attic beneath the roof. I've brought them down. To-morrow we'll decorate all our windows.'" ((1), more)
"I say plainly that every American who takes part in the action of a mob or gives it any sort of countenance is no true son of this great Democracy, but its betrayer, and does more to discredit her by that single disloyalty to her standards of law and of right than the words of her statesmen or the sacrifices of her heroic boys in the trenches can do to make suffering peoples believe her to be their savior. How shall we commend democracy to the acceptance of other peoples, if we disgrace our own by proving that it is, after all, no protection to the weak? Every mob contributes to German lies about the United States what her most gifted liars cannot improve upon by way of calumny. They can at least say that such things cannot happen in Germany except in times of revolution, when law is swept away!" ((2), more)
"On 27 July, we were relieved by a company of the 164th. We were utterly exhausted. The commander of the relieving company was badly wounded on the way out; a few days later, my bunker was hit, and his successor buried. We all sighed with relief when we finally turned our backs on Puisieux and the storm of steel of the finale.Their advances showed how much the enemy's strength was increasing, supplemented by drafts from every corner of the earth. We had fewer men to set against them, many were little more than boys, and we were short of equipment and training. It was all we could do to plug gaps with our bodies as the tide flooded in. There wasn't the wherewithal for great counter-attacks like Cambrai any more." ((3), more)
"A boy from Idaho, a big broad boy, had his head all bound up and the tag around his neck, put on at a dressing station, said: 'Eyes shot away and both feet gone.' I talked to him and patted him on the shoulder, assuring him that everything would be all right now. He moaned through the bandages that his head was splitting with pain. I gave him morphine. Suddenly aware of the other wounds, he asked: 'Sa-ay! what's the matter with my legs?' Reaching down to feel his legs before I could stop him, he uttered a heartbreaking scream. I held his hands firmly until the drug I had given him took effect." ((4), more)
"The Central Workshops set to work in early June [1918] to prepare sledges for supply haulage, bridges upon which the Whippets could cross wide obstacles, and 'Cribs' for the heavy Tanks. These 'Cribs' were big hexagonal oaken crates, reinforced with steel, which were an improved and lighter version of the fascines which were improvised for the Battle of Cambrai. Training grounds and workshops hummed with the preparations, and when, in the last days of July, the call came, it was, as we shall see, found possible to launch 400 Tanks at little over a week's notice." ((5), more)
(1) Excerpt from Ian Sumner's They Shall Not Pass in which he quotes Alfred Hue, Mayor of Beuvardes, a village north of Château-Thierry. His house had been occupied by German officers and he and his family lived in the cellar. Earlier in the month, the Mayor had heard from French and American prisoners that the Allied attack, the Second Battle of the Marne, had begun.
They Shall Not Pass: The French Army on the Western Front 1914-1918 by Ian Sumner, page 200, copyright © Ian Sumner 2012, publisher: Pen and Sword, publication date: 2012
(2) Excerpt from President Woodrow Wilson's July 26, 1918 speech against lynching, made at the urging of Robert R. Moton of the Tuskegee Institute. In 1917, the year the United States entered the war, there were 38 lynchings in the country, 36 of them of Blacks. In 1918, there were 64, 60 of them of Blacks. (Counts from www.famous-trials.com/sheriffshipp/1084-lynchingsyear. Details on some two horrific 1918 examples of this loathsome community crime available at www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings. Both sources as of July 25, 1918.)
World War I and America by A. Scott Berg, page 508, copyright © 2017 by Literary Classics of the United States, publisher: The Library of America, publication date: 2017
(3) Excerpt from German Lieutenant Ernst Jünger's memoir Storm of Steel. Jünger was wounded on the third day of Germany's Somme Offensive, Operation Michael, in March, 1918. He returned to his regiment on June 4. The last German offensive of the war, the Champagne-Marne Offensive, ended on July 17. The counter-offensive that would end with Allied victory, began the next day. In the summer of 1918, 250,000 American soldiers were arriving on the Western Front each month, and being put into French and British Armies. French and British production of weapons including tanks and aircraft supplied the Allied armies, and far outpaced German production. The Battle of Cambrai was the first significant tank victory, a British victory, the gains of which were lost to German counter-attacks.
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, pp. 272–273, copyright © 1920, 1961, Translation © Michael Hoffman, 2003, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 2003
(4) Excerpt from I Saw Them Die by Shirley Millard, quoted in World War I and America. Millard served as a Red Cross nurse in a French military hospital. The heartbreaking boy from Idaho was likely a casualty of the Franco-American Aisne-Marne Offensive.
World War I and America by A. Scott Berg, page 513, copyright © 2017 by Literary Classics of the United States, publisher: The Library of America, publication date: 2017
(5) The British Tank Corps first saw action on September 15, 1916 in the Battle of the Somme advancing in too-small numbers on wet, shell-torn ground. They were first effectively used — well-coordinated with infantry, fighting on dry ground, against an un-prepared enemy — in the Battle of Cambrai in November, 1917. The Mark IV and Mark V tanks were slow, but could move in pace with the foot-soldier. The Whippet was a lighter, faster tank. In the paragraph preceding today's excerpt our author wrote, 'All through May, Mark V. machines were arriving in France at the rate of about sixty a week. . . . All Tank Units were to be ready for action—re-armed, re-equipped and re-trained—by August 1.' The fascines used at Cambrai were great wire-bound bundles of logs that could be dumped into a trench to allow tanks to cross.
The Tank Corps by Clough Williams-Ellis & A. Williams-Ellis, page 177, publisher: The Offices of "Country Life," Ltd. and George Newnes, Ltd., publication date: 1919
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