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Greetings, dear Sister, from Villa No Worries in the Carpathians, where spring has begun! An original pencil sketch on field postcard dated April 26, 1915, clearly meant to reassure his family.
To the Dardanelles! The Entente Allies successfully capture their objective and plant their flags in this boy's 1915 war game, as they did not in life, neither in the naval campaign, nor in the invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula.
German postcard map of the Western Front in Flanders, looking south and including Lille, Arras, Calais, and Ostend. In the Battle of the Yser in October, 1914, the Belgian Army held the territory south of the Yser Canal, visible between Nieuport, Dixmude, and Ypres (Ypern). Further north is Passchendaele, which British forces took at great cost in 1917.
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.
German and Austro-Hungarian forces under the command of generals von Hindenburg and Archduke Friedrich besieged Warsaw, and took it during the Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive. Austrians von Hötzendorf, Friedrich, and Pflanzer-Baltin form the bottom of the ring; the others are German. The flag and shield of Germany are on the bottom left; those of Austria and Hungary the bottom right.
"Storm and rain had uncovered the torn shreds of Austrian uniforms lying on the edge of shell craters.Behind Nová Čabyna entangled in the branches of an old burnt-out pine there was hanging the boot of an Austrian infantryman with a piece of shin-bone.Where the artillery fire had raged one could see forests without leaves or cones, trees without crowns and shot-up farmsteads.The train went slowly over the freshly-built embankments so that the whole battalion could take in and thoroughly savour the delights of war. At the sight of the army cemeteries with their white crosses gleaming on the plains and on the slopes of the devastated hills all could prepare themselves slowly but surely for the field of glory which ended with a mud-bespattered Austrian cap fluttering on a white cross." ((1), more)
"Aft of the mortally wounded enemy, our U-boat crosses her course. The ship lists heavily on her port side and tries to put out lifeboats. A terrible state of affairs must be prevalent on board. The electric generators have stopped and the ship is completely dark. In the sudden sinister darkness down below, surely no one can find the closed bulkhead doors. The invading water, the slanting decks, the suddenly sloping ladders, the boiler's explosion — all that must spread confusion and mortal terror." ((2), more)
"[The troopships] were already full of wounded. Eventually we arrived at a ship which had some space. My stretcher was winched up and lowered through a forward hatch onto the deck below. There were 600 wounded aboard that boat, two doctors, no nurses, no medical orderlies, no anaesthetics, and there we lay. I wasn't touched all the way to Alexandria. I lay there without any attention at all with these sticky bandages around me; they began to get a bit nasty. I don't know how long that voyage lasted. Perhaps four nights. Perhaps five. I lay looking straight up at the foremast the whole time. I was one of the luckier ones." ((3), more)
"At dawn on 29 April [1915], AE2, while submerged, observed a gunboat patrolling off Eski Farnan Burnu at the head of the straits. In an aggressive approach, Stoker dived under the gunboat, travelled down the straits and then returned back up, this time showing his periscope. In doing this, he hoped to give the impression that another submarine had succeeded in coming through the Narrows, unaware that E14 had already done so. Destroyers and torpedo boats came out to assist the gunboat in the pursuit of AE2. Stoker then doubled back to scrutinize the anchorage at Gallipoli, but found nothing worth attacking. He moved back out towards the Sea of Marmara, then half an hour later rose to periscope depth and observed the gunboat crossing his stern tube's line of fire. As the submarine was low on battery power, he decided to fire at the gunboat in an effort to bring the pursuit to an end, and at a range of 700 yards fired his stern torpedo. The gunboat altered course and, as Stoker was to learn later, the torpedo missed its bow by no more than a yard, while the gunboat gave up its pursuit." ((4), more)
". . . this meant leaving his troops exposed on three sides to artillery fire and suffering heavy wastage with little opportunity to reply.During the evening, however, one relief was carried out: the 12th Brigade (4th Division) (Br.-General F.G. Anley) arrived, and, passing the canal under heavy fire, took over the left sector of the front of the 10th Brigade and the whole of that of the 13th Brigade. By this change the three infantry brigades of the 4th Division, re-united, occupied the left of the British line supported by the artillery of the Canadian Division, which still remained in action. Br.-General Wanless O'Gowan on relief withdrew the 13th Brigade west of the canal, eventually collecting it in the wood a mile north-west of Vlamertinghe. Its numbers, after its battles at Hill 60 and before Ypres, in spite of reinforcements totalled barely fourteen hundred of all ranks." ((5), more)
(1) Excerpt from Jaroslav Hašek's novel The Good Soldier Švejk. Švejk (or Schweik) was a foot soldier in an Austro-Hungarian Czech battalion on its way to the front lines on the Russian Front. Nová Čabyna is on the southwestern side of the Carpathian Mountains which the Russians had been trying to battle through since the beginning of the year, but with inadequate munitions to do so. By April, 1915, when Švejk was approaching the front, Austria-Hungary had suffered nearly 800,000 casualties in the mountains since the beginning of the year.
The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek, page 592, copyright © Cecil Parrott, 1973 (translation), publisher: Penguin
(2) Excerpt from the memoir of Austro-Hungarian Captain Georg von Trapp, who had taken command of the submarine U5 and was patrolling the Adriatic Sea the night of April 26-27, 1915. The French fleet also patrolled the Adriatic both to supply their ally Montenegro, and to keep the Austro-Hungarian fleet from breaking out into the Mediterranean. After sighting then losing a French armored cruiser on the preceding days, Von Trapp correctly determined its likely location, and found the ship by moonlight. Closing on it, he fired two torpedoes, both of which struck the Léon Gambetta which went down in nine minutes with 684 of its crew. Von Trapp was Austria-Hungary's most successful submariner. He was later famous as the father of the Von Trapp Family Singers, portrayed on stage and screen in The Sound of Music.
To the Last Salute: Memories of an Austrian U-Boat Commander by Georg von Trapp, page 23, copyright © 2007, publisher: University of Nebraska Press, publication date: 2007
(3) Tony Fagan was felled at Gallipoli by a Turkish bullet that struck the identity disk in his left breast pocket, deflecting the bullet into his abdomen and out through his left buttock. He found his way to two lost fellow New Zealanders who carried him until finding stretcher bearers who brought him to Anzac Cove to be evacuated. In Alexandria, Egypt, Fagan recovered in 'an extraordinarily good hospital with Indian doctors and Sikh orderlies.' He had landed on the April 25, 1915, the first day of the Allied Gallipoli campaign, and was wounded on his third day. He returned to Gallipoli in the autumn, and later fought in France.
Voices of Gallipoli by Maurice Shadbolt, pp. 20, 21, copyright © 1988 Maurice Shadbolt, publisher: Hodder and Stoughton, publication date: 1988
(4) Under the command of Lieutenant Commander H.D.G. Stoker, the Australian submarine AE2, a British submarine of the E class, completed passing through the Dardanelles and entered the Sea of Marmora on April 26, 1915. The British submarine E14 followed shortly after, and the two met at a prearranged location on the 29th. Due to mechanical problems, the unusual conditions of the Sea and the Dardanelles — a dense layer of salt water flows east beneath a layer of fresh water flowing west from the Black Sea — or for some other reason, Stoker lost control of his ship during an engagement with the Turkish torpedo boat Sultan Hissar. With AE2 hit in three places, Stoker scuttled the submarine after his crew had evacuated.
Gallipoli — Attack from the Sea by Victor Rudenno, pp. 93, 94, copyright © 2008 Victor Rudenno, publisher: Yale University Press, publication date: 2008
(5) British, including Canadian and Indian Commonwealth forces, had suffered heavily in their defense of Ypres since the April 22, 1915 German poison gas attack broke the French line on the British left and created a gap of as much as 8,000 yards which the British struggled to close. Preparing for their Artois offensive, the French provided little support. Limited by their lack of shells to as little as two shells per gun per day, the British struggled to respond to heavy German shelling or mount an offensive. Their salient having been compressed from the north, the British prepared to withdraw to a shortened line they could maintain. At the request of the French, they postponed their withdrawal.
Military Operations France and Belgium, 1915, Vol. I, Winter 1914-15: Battle of Neuve Chappelle : Battle of Ypres [Second] by J. E. Edmonds, page 285, copyright © asserted, publisher: Macmillan and Co., Limited, publication date: 1927
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