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Barbed wire entanglements near Sedd-el-Bahr, at the southern end of the Gallipoli Peninsula, 1915. Ships of the Allied Fleet lie offshore. Photograph from 'Gallipoli' by John Masefield.
The Cripple Entente: Great Britain, Russia, and France. Their flags behind them, King George V, Tsar Nicholas II, and President Poincaré show the effects of the initial German victories in 1914.
England's Distress: Postcard map of England and Ireland with the restricted zone Germany proclaimed around the islands, showing the ships destroyed by submarine in the 12 months beginning February 1, 1917.
A heavyset English sailor flies a panoply of flags of neutral nations including Sweden (civil ensign), Norway, Spanish Merchant Marine, the United States, Netherlands, Italy, and the Red Cross. Germany accused Great Britain of flying false flags on merchant and passenger ships, and of arming them. A postcard by P.O.Engelhard (P.O.E.), dated and postmarked January 15, 1916.
View over the battlefield of the Loretto Heights, France. Notre Dame de Lorette, a pilgrimage site, stood on the Heights, and was, with Vimy Ridge, part of the high ground seized by German troops in the Race to the Sea after the Battle of the Marne in 1914. French commander Joffre hoped to capture Loretto Heights and Carency, a village the Germans had fortified, in the First Battle of Artois in December, 1914. He tried to take the hill again in mid-February, 1915.
"Scared? Sometimes you were too scared to be scared. I would laugh at any individual who says he wasn't afraid. Those who say they were devoid of fear talk absolute phooey. I was paralysed with fear. I was so paralysed with fear on Chunuk Bair and in other placed on Gallipoli that I was sometimes incapable of action, but lucky enough to get away. Strange to say, though, at no point did I ever think that I wouldn't get home. I was wounded but I did get home. I was torpedoed in the Triumph but I still got home. That fortune-teller in Cairo had it right." ((1), more)
"The new Administration met for the first time on May 26 [1915]. From the very outset its defects as a war-making instrument were evident. The old Ministers had made an accommodation with their political opponents not on the merits but under duress. The new Ministers were deeply prejudiced against the work which their predecessors had done. . . . The Unionists had little confidence in the Prime Minister. . . . Mr. Lloyd George, the powerful politician whose action had compelled the formation of the Coalition, found himself on the morrow of his success in a position of singular weakness." ((2), more)
"On the 25th and 27th of May [1915] the recently arrived German submarines scored two great successes in that Lieutenant Hersing torpedoed the British battleships Triumph and Majestic off the outer coast of the peninsula. The enemy now temporarily withdrew the greater part of his battleships to the protected ports of Imbros and Lemnos and during the next few weeks the artillery support of the landed army came chiefly from the destroyers and torpedo boats. At the same time, however, all the effective means of defense against submarines were put in operation by the enemy who had at his disposal every kind of material he wanted. Thereafter the German submarines were unable, during the next seven months of the campaign, to score any success against the hostile fleet, except that they torpedoed a transport." ((3), more)
"If neutral vessels have come to grief through the German submarine war during the past few months by mistake, it is a question of isolated and exceptional cases which are traceable to the misuse of flags by the British Government in connection with carelessness or suspicious actions on the part of the captains of the vessels." ((4), more)
"During the night of May 29-30 we left Mazingarbe, replaced by the English, who took up positions there. We weren't sure of the direction in which we would be heading. At six in the evening the grenadiers left for the trenches in the 'Ouvrages Blancs' [White Earthworks]. A battalion headed out for the front, soon afterward.Our battalion left around midnight, doubtless following the other one. Upon leaving Mazingarbe we could see the front right nearby, a true volcano lit up by flares of every color. In the continual rumbling of cannon fire you could distinguish the crackling of machine-gun fire and grenades going off.This was the terrible Lorette sector." ((5), more)
(1) From the recollections of veteran Vic Nicholson of the New Zealand Wellington Infantry Battalion of his service in the Gallipoli campaign. The British battleship Triumph was sunk on May 25, 1915 by German submarine U-21 newly arrived at the Dardanelles with the loss of 78 men. Nicholson and two of his mates had their fortunes accurately foretold on the street in Cairo before they went to Gallipoli, Nicholson would be wounded but go home, the second would be badly injured but go home. The third would 'be in a fight,' but the fortune teller knew nothing further. This man died in the August 8 Battle of Chunuk Bair.
Voices of Gallipoli by Maurice Shadbolt, page 95, copyright © 1988 Maurice Shadbolt, publisher: Hodder and Stoughton, publication date: 1988
(2) By mid-May, 1915, failures of the British war effort were apparent. From the April 25 Allied invasion, the Turkish defenders on the Gallipoli Peninsula had held the Anglo-French invaders to little more turf than their initial beachheads. On May 15, the London Times broke the story of the shell shortage on which British Commander Sir John French blamed the British failure in the May 9, Battle of Festubert, intended as Britain's major spring offensive on the Western Front. British Prime Minister Asquith was forced to form a coalition government, bringing in Conservatives and appointing David Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, author of our excerpt above, was forced out of his position.
The World Crisis 1911-1918 by Winston Churchill, page 474, copyright © by Charles Scribner's Sons 1931, renewed by Winston S. Churchill 1959, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 1931, 2007
(3) Excerpt from the memoir of German General Liman von Sanders, commander of Turkish forces on the Gallipoli peninsula during the 1915 Anglo-French campaign. With little artillery on-shore, the Allied invaders relied on the naval batteries off-shore, and lost significant firepower with the withdrawal of the heavy battleships. Triumph was lost with 78 men, Majestic with 49.
Five Years in Turkey by Liman von Sanders, page 77, publisher: The Battery Press with War and Peace Books, publication date: 1928 (originally)
(4) Excerpt from the May 28, 1915 statement of German Minister of Foreign Affairs Gottfried von Jagow defending the May 7 sinking of the Lusitania. In his statement von Jagow further charges not only that 'practically all the more valuable English merchant vessels have been provided with guns, ammunition and other weapons, and reënforced with a crew specially practiced in manning guns,' but also that when disguised by neutral flags and markings, they 'attack German submarines by ramming them.'
The Great Events of the Great War in Seven Volumes by Charles F. Horne, Vol. III, 1915, pp. 196 and 197, copyright © 1920 by The National Alumnia, publisher: The National Alumni, publication date: 1920
(5) Excerpt from the Notebooks of French Infantry Corporal Louis Barthas. The British took over the left end of the French line, extending their own, and allowing the French to concentrate more troops for the Second Battle of Artois, which had begun on May 9, 1915. The two ridges of Loretto Heights and Vimy dominate the battlefield. The largest French military cemetery is at Notre Dame de Lorette on Loretto Heights, many of the dead having lost their lives in the battle Barthas was joining. An earlier church reputed to have held some bones of John the Baptist had been a pilgrimage site since the late nineteenth century.
Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918 by Louis Barthas, page 69, copyright © 2014 by Yale University, publisher: Yale University Press, publication date: 2014
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