The Blow on the Yser, November 10, 1914, the sixth in a series of six postcards on the German invasion of France and the forming of the Western Front. The snaking bodies of French commander Joffre and German Kaiser Wilhelm turned to the north after the Battle of the Marne, shaping the Race to the Sea. Joffre has struck the Kaiser a roundhouse blow, sending his helmet flying. In the Battle of the Yser, the Belgian army, determined to hold native ground, inundated the coastal lowland along the Yser River. Behind Joffre's head is the small corner of Belgium they held throughout the war.From L'Attaque & la Riposte — Originale présentation des phases de la GuerreEhrmann, Édition Lorraine, a set of six postcards and envelope.Over maps of the French theater of operations on the western front in 1914 — Luxemburg, Belgium, northern France — cartoon figures of the French and German armies struggle. General Joffre represents the forces he commands. His adversary's upward-pointing mustache indicates Kaiser Wilhelm.
Image text: No. 6. 10 Novembre [Le Coup de l'Yser]From "L'Attaque & la Riposte — Originale présentation des phases de la Guerre" — The Attack and the Retort — Original Presentation of the Phases of the War — a set of six postcards and envelope by Ehrmann, Édition Lorraine. No. 6. Le Coup de l'Yser, the Blow on the Yser.The titles of the cards appear only on the envelope: No. 6. Le Coup de l'Yser.1re SérieReverse:Carte PostaleTous les Pays étrangers n'acceptent pas la Correspondance au recto. (Se renseigner a la Poste).Not all foreign countries accepts correspondence on the front. (Ask at the Post Office.)Edition Lorraine
A French Schneider 105mm L from La Musée de la Grande Guerre du Pays de Meaux, France. First put into service in late 1915, 1,300 of the guns were in service in 1918. A heavier weapon than the French 75, it was more effective against entrenched troops. © 2014 John M. Shea
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A map of the Russian-Turkish front from Der Weltkrieg 1914-1918, a 1930s German history of the war illustrated with hand-pasted cigarette cards, showing the Turkish Empire in Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian Seas and the Persian Gulf. To the west is Egypt, a British dominion; to the east Persia. Erzerum in Turkey and Kars in Russia were the great fortresses on the frontier.
Image text: Mittelmeer: Mediterranean SeaSchwarzes M: Black SeaKasp. M.: Caspian SeaKleinasien: Asia MinorTürkei: TurkeyRussland: RussiaMesopot.: MesopotamiaPersien: PersiaAgypten: EgyptKairo: CairoStellungen der: Positions of theTürken Jan. 1915. . .August 1916Russen Mai 1915 . . . Frühjahr 1916Engländer: November 1914 . . . Ende 1917Herbst 1918Positions of theTurks Jan. 1915 . . . August 1916Russians May 1915 . . . spring 1916English: November 1914 . . . the end of 1917autumn 1918
Entrenched German soldiers behind sniper plates at Slota Gora, September 26, 1916. Slota (or Zlota) Gora was in Polish Russia, west of a line running from Warsaw to Cracow. An original watercolor (over pencil) by O. Oettel, 12th company of Landwehr, IR 32 in the field. A sketch in pencil and red crayon is on the reverse.
Image text: Slota Gora26.9.16O.Oettel 12L.32.I. FeldeZlota GoraSeptember 26, 1916O. Oettel, 12th Landwehr 32nd RegimentIn the Field
The conditions British Troops faced in Flanders and Passchendaele.
Image text: British Troops in FlandersThe British Troops in Flanders have had to contend with almost incredible difficulties, owing to the autumn and winter rains, which have converted the ground into a morass of bogs and swamps. The photograph shows a domestic scene behind the lines. Some of the men are washing in the floods, while others are shaving and dressing before the day's work begins.S1Reverse:CS 684. Wt. 7685 - 74m. - 12/17/C. & S. E2202
French folding postcard map of Verdun and the Meuse River, number 9 from the series Les Cartes du Front. Montfaucon is in the upper left and St. Mihiel at the bottom.
Image text: Les Cartes du FrontVerdun et Côtes de MeuseEchelle 1:32,000RoutesChemin de ferCanauxMaps of the FrontVerdun and the Hills of the MeuseScale: 1:32,000RoadsRailwaysCanals1. - Les Flandres2. - Artois, Picardie3. - Aisne, Champagne4. - Argonne et Meuse5. - Lorraine6. - Vosges et Alsace7. - Route des Dame et Plateau de Craonne8. - Région de Perthes9. - Verdun10. - Somme et Santerre11. - Plateau d'Artois12. - Belgique - FlandresA. Hatier. Editeur.8.Rue d'Assas, Paris.Outer front:Correspondence of the ArmiesMilitary Franchise
"The Second French Army made decided progress up to the end of September, but their action did not compel the enemy to evacuate his positions on the Aisne, nor did it seriously turn his flank.On the 26th, de Castelnau was heavily engaged, and was on that evening roughly on the line Ribécourt-Roye-Chaulnes-Bray-sur-Somme, with one cavalry division north of the Somme. On the 26th it was clear that the flanking movement of the Second (French) Army had for the moment failed, as the Second Bavarian Corps was on its left north of Péronne." ((1), more)
"One o'clock in the morning. At 7 it will have been seventy-two hours since, without interruption, we have been frightfully bombarded—seventy-two hours of endless, deafening uproar, which even the steadiest nerves can hardly endure!. . .This is becoming frightful. An explosion throws me against a wall of a trench. A Lieutenant tells me a shell struck in his shelter also. I rush out and see that all the bombproofs on the slope are burning. A shell striking an ammunition magazine causes a formidable explosion. The French keep on firing into the fire. How I hate them!How I admire the French artillery! They are the master gunners. We really cannot imitate them, I regret to say. Continuing to fire into the fire, the enemy provokes a more violent explosion than the preceding ones.God knows what they have blown up now! From this moment I have lost all sensation of fear." ((2), more)
". . . the situation deadlocked on all three fronts, and the early onset of winter — it snowed for the first time on 26 September — translated standoff into impasses, leaving the Turks with very little to show for a six-or-more-week campaign which had cost them at least 30,000 killed and wounded out of a total strength which had probably never exceeded a hundred thousand. By any standard, this was a disaster; not quite the catastrophe which had befallen Vehip's Third Army, perhaps, but nonetheless a calamity, and one which effectively spelled the end of Turkish offensive campaigning in the Caucasus. The final blow to Turkish morale fell before September's end, when Kemal ordered his 8th Division to pull back from Muş, and the Russians retook the city as easily as they had given it up." ((3), more)
"Slota Gora26.9.16O.Oettel 12L.32.I. Felde" ((4), more)
"At 11.45 D Company was forming up under some machine-gun fire. Two platoons of B arrived in time to advance with D at zero, noon. The only covering fire given was a few ineffectual smoke shells, because it was still thought that there were parties of the 98th Brigade in front, and there was no definite German position. Mann had just seen the other two platoons of B away when he was shot through the throat, and died almost immediately. Coster was shot through the head as his Company was entering a scraggy orchard, enclosed by a scraggier hedge, north of Jerk Farm : it is about 550 yards eastwards of Black Watch Corner. At this early stage the two Companies were losing touch. The extent of hedge, orchard and pill-box, and the consequent obstruction to view and control of movement, was underestimated on the map which had been our only source of information." ((5), more)
"At dawn on September 26 nine American divisions, amounting to two hundred and forty thousand men, jumped off into the old nomansland of the defense of Verdun. They had quietly replaced the French holding troops during the night, while one of the heaviest artillery bombardments of the war combed the German positions. The front on which they were to advance extended twentyone miles from the Meuse to the western fringes of the plateau of the Argonne Forest where they were to keep contact with Gouraud's Fourth Army advancing through the plains of Champagne east of Reims.Pershing's objective was to cut, in the vicinity of Sedan, the trunk line of railroad which furnished the Germans their chief lateral communication across their entire from from Metz to Valenciennes on the edge of Flanders. Giraud's objective was the same railroad a few miles further west at the important highway center of Mézières." ((6), more)
(1) In the 'Race to the Sea' the German and Franco-British Allied armies tried to outflank each other, forming a line that ran roughly north from Noyon.
1914 by John French, page 165, copyright © 1919, by Houghton Mifflin Company, publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company, publication date: 1919
(2) Part of a letter found on a German office slain in the French offensive in Champagne. He began writing at 1:00 AM, after nearly three days of continuous bombardment.
The Great Events of the Great War in Seven Volumes by Charles F. Horne, Vol. III, 1915, p. 314, 315, copyright © 1920 by The National Alumnia, publisher: The National Alumni, publication date: 1920
(3) Since the Battle of Sarikamish in January, 1915, the Russians had steadily advanced into eastern Turkey, territory with a large Christian population, much of it Armenian until the the Turkish government's genocidal attacks on that people. In September, 1916 Russia was reaching the limits of its advance in the Caucasus Mountains and eastern Turkey, but had also moving into Persia, an independent but weak country on which the Turks also had designs. Even as the situation in the Caucasus deteriorated, Turkish War Minister Enver Pasha sent troops to support the invasion of Romania. Turkish General Mustafa Kemal had been a hero in the defense of the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915.
Eden to Armageddon: World War I in the Middle East by Roger Ford, page 178, copyright © Roger Ford 2010, publisher: Pegasus Books, publication date: 2010
(4)
Slota Gora, September 26, 1916 by O. Oettel, Front, publication date: 1916
(5) Excerpt from the entry for September 26, 1917 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 entry covers his Battalion's part in the Battle of Polygon Wood. On September 28, he would write that his battalion had lost one-third of its men in the action, and 'more than 60 were dead. Mann was the greatest loss. He was an outstanding figure during the two years to a day he served with the Battalion.' Overall, the British suffered 15,375 casualties in the Polygon Wood battle, an engagement within the Third Battle of Ypres, begun two months before.
The War the Infantry Knew 1914-1919 by Captain J.C. Dunn, pp. 395–396, copyright © The Royal Welch Fusiliers 1987, publisher: Abacus (Little, Brown and Company, UK), publication date: 1994
(6) The Meuse-Argonne Offensive was the first of four offensives Allied Commander-in Chief Ferdinand Foch had determined on September 23, 1918: a Franco-American attack beginning on the 26th in some of the killing fields of the 1916 Battle of Verdun. The Meuse River flows through the city of Verdun; the Argonne and its forest lie to the west. American Commander in Chief John J. Pershing commanded the offensive, General Henri Gouraud the French Fourth Army on his left in Champagne. Although Henri Giraud would become a French general I don't believe he was one in 1918, but that this is a an error and that Gouraud is meant.
Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos, pp. 407–408, copyright © 1962, 2013 by John Dos Passos, publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
