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Photograph of German Ace Kurt Wintgens, from a postcard of early German aviators including Wintgens, Boelcke, Immelmann, Mulzer, Buddecke, von. Althaus, Höhndorf, Berthold, Parschau, Frankl, von Cossel, and Windisch. Sanke card #408. The men are Kurt Wintgens — KIA, September 25, 1916, 19 victories; Oswald Bölcke (Boelcke) — killed in collision, October 26, 1916, 40 victories; Max Immelmann — KIA (accident collision), June 18, 1916, 15 victories; Max Ritter von Mulzer — accidentally killed, September 26, 1916, 10 victories; Hans-Joachim Buddecke — KIA, March 10, 1918, 13 victories; Ernst Freiherr von Althaus — died November 29, 1946, 9 victories; Walter Höhndorf — killed in flying accident, September 5, 1917, 12 victories; Rudolf Berthold — killed in political street fighting in Hamburg, March 15, 1920, 44 victories; Otto Parschau — died of wounds, July 21, 1916, 8 victories; Wilhelm Frankl — KIA April 8, 1917, 20 victories; Maximilian von Cossel — POW, August 1917; and Rudolf Windisch — MIA, May 27, 1918, 22 victories. Sanke card #408.
Russian troops fleeing a solitary German soldier. The Russian First Army invaded Germany in August 1914, and defeated the Germans in the Battle of Gumbinnen on the 20th. In September the Germans drove them out of Russia in the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes. In September and October, a joint German, Austro-Hungarian offensive drove the Russians back almost to Warsaw. Illustration by E. H. Nunes.
A pencil sketch of a barn from Eberhard, an Austrian soldier in Gleisdorf, July 20, 1915, to 'L. Frl. Olga!' — liebe Fräulein Olga, dear Miss Olga. In the left foreground is a field kitchen, labeled 'Küche'. It is addressed to 'Sehrgeehrtes Fräulein Olga Pichler' — Dear Miss Olga Pichler, in Graz, and was postmarked on the 21st. Gleisdorf is about 170 km south of Vienna, and 28 km east of Graz.
Turkish Interior Minister Talaat Pasha from 'Four Years Beneath the Crescent' by Rafael De Nogales.
". . . the fifth [production Fokker E.I], 5/15, went to Leutnant Kurt Wintgens.. . . Wintgens had previously earned the Iron Cross 2nd Class as an observer over the Eastern Front. He had then trained to be a pilot and demonstrated sufficient skill to be assigned Fokker E.I 5/15, which he flew while with Flieger Abteilungen 67 and 6b. It was with the latter Bavarian unit that Wintgens claimed a Morane-Saulnier L east of Lunéville on July 1, 1915, which went down too far in French lines for witnesses to confirm. . . .Finally, on the 15th [July], Wintgens was credited with a Morane-Saulnier over Schucht—although it is is curiously ironic that the French recorded no casualties between July 14 and 18." ((1), more)
"16th July [1915], MakovIt is raining heavily. Shells are already exploding nearby. Refugees are walking and driving from all directions. We are ordered to pull out of Makov immediately. It turned out that two of the injured are actually dead, so they were taken to the cemetery and I think they managed to bury them. The battle is raging, everything is shaking. In Makov there is a crush of people, an endless procession of carts, no way to get out of here fast. Screaming, noise and crying, everything is confused. We are supposed to be retreating, but in two hours we only make it down one street. In the end, we hardly make it to the bridge, where the longest queue is. Everyone is desperate to avoid being taken prisoner by the Germans. We cross the bridge and just about reach the road when the shells start exploding all over town. Several fall next to the bridge. We march six and a half miles in an hour and turn off to the side of the road to await further orders." ((2), more)
". . . By 17th July, the Germans had advanced perhaps five miles, but they had inflicted seventy percent losses on the defenders (including 24,000 prisoners, a quarter of the Russian numbers). This coincided with Mackensen's successes at Krásnik and Krasnostaw. Alexeyev pulled back his troops to the Narev, with corresponding withdrawals to left and right.. . . On 17th July, both Falkenhayn and Gallwitz—commanding the offensive—felt that they had planned things well enough. As the Germans came forward, they stumbled against increasing numbers of Russian troops, such that the 62 battalions and 188 guns that had faced the initial German attack rose to 100 and 600 respectively once the Germans arrived on the Narev. German attacks fared badly—the guns unprepared for Russian resistance, the troops defeated by machine-gunnery . . ." ((3), more)
"I was ready to follow my two buddies, when, all of sudden, I was overcome by an indefinable sensation of worry, anguish, fear. I was sure of it; this was the imminence of danger which I was feeling. . . .Many have escaped death, guided by intuition that they didn't even know they had. Everything may depend on the degree of sensitivity of our nerves, or how impressionable they are. . . .Therefore, of all the veterans of the 13th Squad, I was the only one left still fighting, along with the rationer Terrisse. All the others were killed or wounded. When would my turn come?" ((4), more)
". . . Under the circumstances now prevailing and in the presence of an enemy organization long since established, it seems wise not to base all our hopes upon the possibility of breaking through, or risk all our available reserves in an attempt to effect a victorious and decisive piercing of the line by mere force of numbers. On the contrary, our plan should be directed towards the conquest of certain dominant points of the terrain; each one of our attacks should have a distinct object, and one whose accomplishment would lead to some further result." ((5), more)
(1) The German Fokker E.I was a monoplane similar to the French Morane-Saulnier, and the first aircraft with an interrupter mechanism to allow a machine gun to fire through a rotating propeller, allowing the pilot to point his plane and shoot. The plane and its armament was superior to any of the Allied planes. With stalemate on the Western Front, fighter pilots with five or more victories, aces, were celebrated.
The Origin of the Fighter Aircraft by Jon Gutman, pp. 28, 29, copyright © 2009 Jon Gutman, publisher: Westholme Publishing, publication date: 2009
(2) Entry for July 16, 1915 from the journal of Vasily Mishnin, part of the Russian forces and refugees retreating before the German offensive launched on July 13.
Intimate Voices from the First World War by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, page 106, copyright © 2003 by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, publisher: Harper Collins Publishers, publication date: 2003
(3) The German-Austro-Hungarian Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive, now in its third month, continued. Still holding the city of Warsaw and some of its defensive fortresses, the Russians mounted a defense that temporarily held the invaders at bay. Stavka, the Russian High Command, did not think the line would hold, and soon, on July 22, ordered a resumption of the Russian retreat. Mackensen and Gallwitz were German generals, Falkenhayn the German Commander in Chief.
The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 by Norman Stone, page 180, copyright © 1975 Norman Stone, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1975
(4) Extracts from events of July 18, 1915, from the notebooks of French Corporal Louis Barthas. Barthas had joined two friends at their company's field kitchen, set up at a crossroads, when the sense of 'the imminence of danger' struck him. Thinking his comrades would deride him if he spoke of his fear, he went into a shop, and was browsing postcards when shells landed at the crossroads, wounding twelve men of his company including four critically injured cooks.
Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918 by Louis Barthas, pp. 101, 102, copyright © 2014 by Yale University, publisher: Yale University Press, publication date: 2014
(5) General Ferdinand Foch writing to French Commander in Chief Joseph Joffre in a paper dated July 19, 1915. Both sides had hoped for a breakthrough of the enemy lines as the path to victory — a breakthrough that Germany had achieved in Russia in the Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive even as Foch was writing. Foch was concluding that a general offensive on a broad front that aimed—or hoped-for a breakthrough was inadequate. The fighting the First and Second Battles of Artois earlier in 1915 had led to heavy losses for the Allies.
The Memoirs of Marshal Foch, translated by Col. T. Bentley Mott by Ferdinand Foch, page 209, copyright © 1931 by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., publisher: Doubleday, Doran & Co., publication date: 1931
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