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Sculpture of a dead artillery man from The Royal Artillery Memorial, London, England. © 2013 by John M. Shea
Allied Commanders Henri Philippe Pétain, Douglas Haig, Ferdinand Foch, and John J. Pershing. Foch was Allied Commander in Chief, the other men commanders of the French Army, the British Expeditionary Force, and the American Expeditionary Force respectively. From The Memoirs of Marshall Foch by Marshall Foch.
Wooden cigarette box carved by Г. САВИНСКИ (?; G. Savinskiy), a Russian POW. The Grim Reaper strides across a field of skulls on the cover. The base includes an intricate carving of the years of war years, '1914' and, turning it 90 degrees, '1918.'
Austro-Hungarian graves in the Dolomite Mountains.
Metal grave marker of Deputy Paymaster Paul Wolke and Infantryman Paul Lindemann, died June 20 and 22, respectively, 1918. From the Laventie German Military Cemetery, Laventie, France. © 2013 by John M. Shea
"On Sunday morning, June 16th [1918], I opened the Observer, which appeared to be chiefly concerned with the new offensive—for the moment at a standstill—in the Noyon-Montdidier sector of the Western Front, and instantly saw at the head of a column the paragraph for which I had looked so long and so fearfully:"ITALIAN FRONT ABLAZEGUN DUELS FROM MOUNTAIN TO SEABAD OPENING OF AN OFFENSIVE"" ((1), more)
"If we can hold until the end of June, our situation will be excellent. In July we can resume the offensive. After that, victory is ours." ((2), more)
"In the afternoon, I took a solitary walk through the devastated village of Puisieux. It had already received a hammering in the course of the battles of the Somme. The craters and ruins had been overgrown with thick grass, dotted about here and there with the gleaming white plates of elderflower, which loves ruins. Numerous fresh explosions had ripped holes in the cover, and exposed the soil all over again.The main village street was lined with the debris of our recent stalled advance. Shot-up wagons, discarded munitions, rusty pistols and the outlines of half-decomposed horses, seen through fizzing clouds of dazzling flies, commented on the nullity of everything in battle. All that was left of the church standing on the highest spot of the village was a wretched heap of stones. While I picked a bunch of half-wild roses, landing shells reminded me to be careful in this place where Death danced." ((3), more)
"Conrad's divisions were too hard pressed to transfer men to the Piave. In fact, the opposite happened: the Italians transferred forces from the mountains to the river. When these reinforcements arrived, on 19 June [1918], the Italians counter-attacked along the Piave. They failed to crack the bridgeheads, but the Austrian position was untenable. Pontoons that had survived the bombing were damaged by high water and debris. Blašković's regiment (the 3rd Bosnia & Herzegovina Infantry) ran out of shells and bullets; the men fought on with bayonets and hand-grenades until a Hungarian regiment managed to bring up a few crates of ammunition from the river." ((4), more)
"Laying tapes over ground sounds delightfully simple; but throw in innumerable shell-holes and small ponds, wire and iron stakes, the possibility of 'stopping one,' or of meeting prowling Germans; mix all these on a dark night, and the operation of distributing 'millinery'—as Jones called it—by the compass was, to our minds, a good sample of hell. The tapes must not be too short, or they would not guide sufficiently. If they were too long they might be discovered, and the whole show given away. We laid over thirty tapes, some of them twice as we found they had been shifted—patrols were not too careful when they crossed them. Wire had to be cut away, or cleared to one side to make a path, as the tape had to be run out straight; someone had his work cut out to stop sentries loosing off when the tins, cans and old iron rattle on the wire when we cut it away." ((5), more)
(1) Excerpt from Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth. Brittain served in the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), and left the French front to care for her mother. After the Italian disaster of the Battle of Caporetto, the French and British sent troops to Italy to help prevent another collapse. Brittain's brother Edward, serving with the Royal Artillery, was among them. The Germans hoped to tie down these troops on the Italian Front, and prevent them and Italian troops from being sent to the Western Front where their Noyon-Montdidier Offensive had just been suspended. Brittain knew the code in which the war was reported: "The loss of a 'few small positions,' however quickly recaptured, meant—as it always did in dispatches—that the defenders were taken by surprise and the enemy offensive had temporarily succeeded." It would be nearly two weeks before she would receive word her brother had been killed on June 15 in that opening assault.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925 by Vera Brittain, pp. 435–436, copyright © Vera Brittain, 1933, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 1978, originally 1933
(2) Commander of the French Army Henri Philippe Pétain in June, 1918, after the fourth of five German offensives intended to seize victory before American soldiers arrived in force. The first two, Operations Michael and Georgette, had been against British forces in an attempt to separate them from their French allies, who come to their support. The second two, the Second Battle of the Aisne and the Noyon-Montdidier Offensive, were intended to prevent the French from supporting their ally. The Aisne offensive was successful beyond German commander Ludendorff's imagining, and distracted him from his original goal. By June 250,000 American troops were arriving each month.
Pyrrhic Victory; French Strategy and Operations in the Great War by Robert A. Doughty, page 459, copyright © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, publisher: Harvard University Press, publication date: 2005
(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, the 'recent stalled advance' he refers to. He returned to his regiment on June 4. The Battle of the Somme, a Franco-British offensive, began on July 1, 1916. Puisieux, France, is 40 km northeast of Amiens, and north of the Somme River.
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, pp. 262–263, copyright © 1920, 1961, Translation © Michael Hoffman, 2003, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 2003
(4) The Second Battle of the Piave was launched by the Austro-Hungarians on June 15, 1918 along a front from the Asiago Plateau to the Adriatic Sea. General Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf commanded the northern mountainous sector. With support from French and British troops, particularly artillery, the Italians stopped Conrad's offensive in after two days, allowing them to transfer reinforcements the the southern Piave River sector where the battle still raged.
The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919 by Mark Thompson, page 346, copyright © 2008 Mark Thompson, publisher: Basic Books, publication date: 2009
(5) Excerpt from the entry for June 20, 1918 from the writings — diaries, letters, and memoirs — of Captain J. C. Dunn, Medical Officer of the Second Battalion His Majesty's Twenty-Third Foot, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and fellow soldiers who served with him. Dunn's Battalion had been tasked with a raid on the German line, one for which they practiced six days before preparing as described. The raid was carried out on the 22nd. 'It was a thoroughly bad Show from start to finish.'
The War the Infantry Knew 1914-1919 by Captain J.C. Dunn, page 488, copyright © The Royal Welch Fusiliers 1987, publisher: Abacus (Little, Brown and Company, UK), publication date: 1994
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