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French Farman two-seater planes on the Romanian front.
Postcard of a cross-section of the German mine-laying submarine UC5, captured by the British.
Zeppelin Kommt! Children play a Zeppelin raid on London. Holding his bomb in the gondola is a doll of the airship's inventor, Count Zeppelin. The other children, playing the English, cower, and the British fleet — folded paper boats — remains in port. Prewar postcards celebrated the imposing airships and the excitement they generated with the same expression, 'Zeppelin Kommt!'. Postcard by P.O. Engelhard (P.O.E.). The message on the reverse is dated May 28, 1915.
German pilot Kleim with his observer, ground crew, and LVG bi-plane. Kleim is marked with an 'x' above his head, standing, outer coat open, hands on his hips. The plane may be an early model C.II introduced in late 1915. It has wire wheels of the earlier B.I, and what may be an early exhaust pipe. The more typical C.II positions the exhaust at the midpoint of the engine.
Allied soldiers fortifying shell craters after an advance. From The Nations at War by Willis J. Abbot, 1918 Edition.
"The small unit of Romanian militia that responded to the initial cry of alarm on 23 November quickly retreated. The first serious Romanian counterattack was carried out early on 24 November by two battalions under the command of French colonel Ernest Mercier. 'After a semblance of resistance,' his Romanians panicked and fled. Mercier, left alone on the field, was seriously wounded. Despite these early encounters, the Romanian command failed to recognize the magnitude of the threat. A Romanian aerial reconnaissance flight on 25 November reported seeing a bridge but no troops on it or in the vicinity—this on a day when the greater part of the two infantry divisions, cavalry, and artillery passed over it. An operational order of MCG on the same day erroneously concluded, 'Weak enemy force has crossed the Danube.' Berthelot reflected the confusion existing at MCG: 'Some say only one regiment has crossed the river at Zimnicia. . . . Others are more pessimistic [saying] there are already three divisions north of the Danube.' Upset by the failure of air reconnaissance, he sacked the French officer heading the joint Romanian—French aerial operations." ((1), more)
"26th November [1916]Rumania is under even greater threat of invasion. The Government is said to have left Bucharest.In Belgium the deportations of unemployed, and even, it is reported, of other persons, grow more and more widespread.In France and England the problem of supplies has taken on a serious aspect.The Somme offensive is dying slowly, without the General Staff daring to admit it. The submarines are becoming increasingly active.The prospects of peace are more and more remote, but the speeches remain just as impassioned." ((2), more)
"I flew toward the Zepp and flew at right angles to and underneath him amidships, firing as I went under. I then turned sharply east, the Zepp turning east also. We then flew on a parallel course for about five miles and I fired 71 rounds at the Zepp. I estimated his ground speed to be approximately 70 mph. I was aiming at his port quarter and noticed first a small patch become incandescent where I had seen tracers entering his envelope. I first took it for a machine gun firing at me from the Zepp, but this patch rapidly spread and the next thing was that the whole Zepp was in flames. I landed at 12 midnight (British Time), engine and machine O.K. The Zeppelin which fell into the mouth of the Tees was still burning when I landed." ((3), more)
"On November 27 seven Zeppelins raided England, dropping more than two hundred bombs. Two of the raiders were shot down: in one of them, hit by the incendiary bullets fired by a British pilot, all twenty crewmen were killed. On the following day a single German seaplane flew over London, dropping six bombs on Kensington. 'I heard the explosions from the Foreign Office and thought they were practising with rifles at Wellington Barracks,' one senior diplomat, Lord Harding, later recalled. No one was killed, but six civilians were wounded. The raid marked the first aircraft as opposed to Zeppelin attack in the capital." ((4), more)
"During those five days the torrential rain and snow never let up. The walls of the trench were sagging; the precarious shelters which men had dug for themselves collapsed in certain places. Trenches filled with water.It's useless to try to describe the sufferings of the men, without shelter, soaked, pierced with cold, badly fed—no pen could tell their tale. You had to have lived through these hours, these days, these nights, to know how interminable they were in times like these.Proceeding in nightly work details or to and from the front lines, men slipped and fell into shell holes filled with water and weren't able to climb out; they drowned or froze to death, their hands grasping at the edges of the craters in a final effort to pull themselves out." ((5), more)
(1) Four infantry divisions — two Bulgarian, one German, and one Turkish — and one cavalry division, nearly 100,000 men in total, crossed the Danube River from Bulgaria into Romania between November 22 and 26, 1916, putting them 130 kilometers southwest of the Romanian capital of Bucharest. The French provided military advice and material to Romania, and sent a French Military Mission led by General Henri Berthelot. MCG was Marele Cartier General, the Romanian High Command.
The Romanian Battlefront in World War I by Glenn E. Torrey, pp. 137–138, copyright © 2011 by the University Press of Kansas, publisher: University Press of Kansas, publication date: 2011
(2) Summary of the bleak situation facing the Entente Allies as 1916 drew to a close, the entry from the war diary of Albert, King of the Belgians, November 26, 1916. Romania was then being invaded by a German-Austro-Hungarian army that had broken through the Carpathian Mountains to the west, and by a German-Bulgarian-Turkish army to the east and south that had just crossed the Danube River and threatened the Romanian capital of Bucharest. German authorities were deporting Belgians to Germany as forced labor. Shortages in France and the United Kingdom had not approached those that faced Germany and Austria-Hungary, but German submarine activity had increased and threatened supplies of food and war materiel, particularly from the United States. The Anglo-French offensive on the Somme was ended in November with little gain and over 620,000 Allied casualties. The Americans, led by recently re-elected President Woodrow Wilson, were promoting peace, and Germany would soon make a proposal that France and Britain would immediately dismiss.
The War Diaries of Albert I King of the Belgians by Albert I, page 129, copyright © 1954, publisher: William Kimber
(3) Account by British Second Lieutenant Ian V. Pyott of his destruction of Zeppelin LZ 34 late on the night of November 27, 1916. Eight Zeppelins set out to bomb industrial targets in the British Midlands on the 27th, a stormy night in which the airships were visible in the glare from the cities and the aurora borealis. One of the eight never made the crossing of the North Sea. Max Dietrich, commanding LZ 34, was flying at 9,800 feet and in the beam of a searchlight when Pyott sighted him. Dietrich and his crew were all killed, Dietrich on his 46th birthday. Early the morning of the 28th, a second Zeppelin, LZ 21 was shot down by airplanes 10 miles east of Lowestoft and fell into the sea with no survivors.
The Zeppelin Fighters by Arch Whitehouse, page 159, copyright © 1966 by Arch Whitehouse, publisher: New English Library, publication date: 1978
(4) Eight Zeppelins set out to bomb industrial targets in the British Midlands on November 27, 1916, a stormy night in which the airships were visible in the glare from the cities and the aurora borealis. One of the eight turned back before crossing the North Sea. LZ 34 was picked up by searchlights and shot down by British pilot Ian Pyott shortly before midnight. A second Zeppelin, LZ 21, was shot down by airplanes 10 miles east of Lowestoft and fell into the sea with no survivors early on the 28th. The loss of the two Zeppelins followed those of loss of two others in September and one in October and marked the beginning of the end of the Zeppelin raids on England. The bombing by the L.V.G. presaged the air raids of 1917 and 1918.
The First World War, a Complete History by Martin Gilbert, page 302, copyright © 1994 by Martin Gilbert, publisher: Henry Holt and Company, publication date: 1994
(5) Excerpt from the notebooks of French Infantry Corporal Louis Barthas, writing of grim conditions he and his men faced in the Somme sector at the end of November, 1916.
Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918 by Louis Barthas, page 282, copyright © 2014 by Yale University, publisher: Yale University Press, publication date: 2014
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