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Postwar postcard map of the Balkans including Albania, newly-created Yugoslavia, expanded Romania, and diminished former Central Powers Bulgaria and Turkey. The first acquisitions of Greece in its war against Turkey are seen in Europe where it advanced almost to Constantinople, in the Aegean Islands from Samos to Rhodes, and on the Turkish mainland from its base in Smyrna. The Greco-Turkish war was fought from May 1919 to 1922. The positions shown held from the war's beginning to the summer of 1920 when Greece advanced eastward. Newly independent Hungary and Ukraine appear in the northwest and northeast.
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.
Advertising postcard map of European Russia, with inset images of a mounted Cossack lancer, a troika, and St. Petersburg.
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 postcard of some of the battlefield of Artois, site of the First, Second, and Third Battles of Artois (1914 and 1915), the Battle of Loos (1915), and the Battle of Vimy Ridge (1917). Loos is in the upper right, the road to Vimy on the center right. The world's largest French military cemetery is on the heights of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette.
". . . I asked [Goremykin, President of the Russian Council] about a matter that has been on my mind for some time, the question of the Ukraine. He broke in:'There is no Ukrainian question!''But even if there's no Ukrainian question, or perhaps I should say no separatist movement in the Ukraine, you won't deny that there's a very strong particularist spirit in Little Russia.''Oh, yes! The Little Russians have a very original individual character. Their ideas, literature, and songs have a very pronounced flavor of the soil. But that only shows itself in the intellectual sphere. From the national point of view the Ukrainians are as Russian as the purest Muscovites. And from the economic point of view the Ukraine is necessarily tied to Russia.'" ((1), more)
"Early in April [1915], 30,000 British troops had been dispatched from India, under command of Lieut.-Gen. Sir J. E. Nixon, and the entire British forces were placed at three points — Kurna, Ahwas, and Shaiba. An army of Turks, 40,000 strong, led by German officers, attacked these positions on April 11th.For two days the Turks bombarded Kurna, but besides battering the bridge across the Tigris River, the shell-fire had little effect. The British gunboat Odin, and the fire of the shore batteries, succeeded in dispersing the Turkish boats on the river. At Ahwas, large bodies of Turkish cavalry appeared, but did not attack." ((2), more)
". . . there was a terrific explosion which shook all the windows of the room and made the chandeliers quiver. At the same time a huge cloud of purple smoke rose across the Neva, east of Petrograd. . . . A few less violent explosions followed. The flames of the conflagration illuminated the horizon. There could be no doubt; the great Okhta works — the most important of the factories for the manufacture of explosives, catridges, propellants, fuses, and grenades from which the Russian army is supplied — had been destroyed." ((3), more)
"The Allied batteries at Ypres opened fire on a zeppelin that was surveying the gun positions early on the morning of April 13th [1915]. The craft was so badly injured it fell a complete wreck, near Thielt.A zeppelin arrived at Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, April 13th, and aimed a dozen bombs at the arsenal and naval workshops, but though several fires were started, no material damage resulted." ((4), more)
"On 14th April at 11.15 P.M., after four days' artillery activity, the [German] enemy fired a mine at St. Eloi (4,000 yards south of Ypres) and began a methodical bombardment. An artillery barrage, in which the XI. Heavy Artillery Brigade, as well as the divisional batteries of the II. Corps, took part, was at once put down, and no infantry attack followed; but the incident attracted attention to that quarter, and was possibly intended to have that result." ((5), more)
(1) Excerpt from the entry for Saturday, April 10, 1915 from the memoirs of Maurice Paléologue, the French Ambassador in Russia. The Ambassador presses Goremykin pointing out that Austria-Hungary is supporting a Ukrainian national movement which has a society in Vienna and publishes in neutral Switzerland. Goremykin dismisses their efforts, claiming they have tried and failed to influence peasants and workers in sugar factories in Kiev and Berdichev, and that the authorities regularly confiscate socialist tracts from the same group.
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. I by Maurice Paléologue, pp. 328, 329, publisher: George H. Doran Company, publication date: 1925
(2) British and Indian troops defeated the Turks in the November 11 to 21, 1914 Battle of Basra in Mesopotamia, part of the Ottoman Empire. The forces retreated up the Shat el-Arab to Qurna (Kornah or Kurna) at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers which the British took on December 9, 1914. An oil pipe line ran from Ahwaz and the oil fields in Persia to Basra, a commercial and communications center, and the Persian Gulf. On April 12, an army of Turks, Kurds, and Arabs attacked British forces at Shaiba, four miles west of Basra. Turkish forces broke of the attack after three days, reportedly because of a mirage: an approaching British train appeared to be a large body of reinforcements.
King's Complete History of the World War by W.C. King, page 198, copyright © 1922, by W.C. King, publisher: The History Associates, publication date: 1922
(3) Excerpt from the entry for Monday, April 12, 1915 from the memoirs of Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador in Russia. The Ambassador was about to dine with one of his military attachés and two French officers with the munitions mission to Russia when Russia's Okhta munitions plant was blown up. Russia had inadequate munitions to support its offensives against the Central Powers, and was planning one against Silesia in southeastern Germany.
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. I by Maurice Paléologue, page 329, publisher: George H. Doran Company, publication date: 1925
(4) British and French forces reconfigured their position in the first half of April, 1915, with the British taking over some of the French line on the British left, leaving only two French divisions between the British and Belgian armies. This extended the British line from 19 to 30 miles, and left them primary defenders of the Ypres salient. The departure of the French, who had better anti-aircraft weapons, left the British exposed to Zeppelin and airplane observation which improved German artillery registration. With the arrival of better weather, and the winds that put the Zeppelins at risks, the Germans were also able to expand their attacks on England.
King's Complete History of the World War by W.C. King, page 154, copyright © 1922, by W.C. King, publisher: The History Associates, publication date: 1922
(5) With war on the ground static, and many of the strategic high points of Belgium and northern France relatively low, miners and mining units were employed in digging tunnels for the placement of explosives, literally to undermine the enemy positions. A month earlier, on March 14, the Germans had fired two mines at St. Eloi, Belgium, and, immediately attacking the stunned British defenders, had taken 'the Mound', a man-made hill about thirty feet high.
Military Operations France and Belgium, 1915, Vol. I, Winter 1914-15: Battle of Neuve Chappelle : Battle of Ypres [Second] by J. E. Edmonds, page 163, copyright © asserted, publisher: Macmillan and Co., Limited, publication date: 1927
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