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To the Dardanelles! The Entente Allies successfully capture their objective and plant their flags in this boy's 1915 war game, as they did not in life, neither in the naval campaign, nor in the invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula.
Map showing the territorial gains (darker shades) of Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece, primarily at the expense of Turkey, agreed in the Treaty of Bucharest following the Second Balkan War. Despite its gains, Bulgaria also lost territory to both Romania and Turkey.
Italy's armed forces at the ready in a 1915 postcard. In the foreground the artillery, infantry, an Alpine soldier (in feathered hat), and a Bersaglieri (in plumed headgear). Behind them are a bugler and lancer; in the distance marines and colonial troops. The Italian navy is off shore, an airship and planes overhead. On the reverse are the lyrics of a patriotic Italian March by Angelo Balladori, lyrics by Enrico Mercatali. It ends with a call to the brothers of Trento and Trieste, Austro-Hungarian territory with large ethnic Italian populations.
A bound, neutral Italy is sorely tempted by the appeal of Trieste. Trentino (the south Tyrol) and Trieste were chief among the war aims of those Italians who wanted to discard neutrality to war on Austria-Hungary. A postcard by V. Retrosi.
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.
"On November 30, [1915] when the wind had blown itself out at last, a reckoning was made, and it was found that the Allied Army had lost one tenth of its strength. Two hundred soldiers had been drowned, 5,000 were suffering from frostbite, and another 5,000 were casualties of one sort or another. It raised once more, and in an ominous way, the whole question of evacuation. Many of those who before had wanted to remain could now think only of getting away from the accursed place. But could they get off? . . ." ((1), more)
"The morale and the material state of our troops are desperate. Despite all the measures to prevent desertion, the number of troops is plummeting, and they are fleeing en masse. Deserters are fighting against our troops to clear their way to the villages of Istok and Mitrovica. They are selling weapons to the Albanians. Regiments number only a few hundred men. There is only enough food for the troops for another four or five days. All efforts to acquire food have proven useless." ((2), more)
"Operations petered out in the first week of December [1915], when heavy snowfalls obliterated trenches and wire. The Fourth Battle [of the Isonzo] had added 49,000 casualties to the 67,000 from the Third. Austrian losses were 42,000 and 25,000 respectively. Summarizing the reasons for the failure, the Italian official history of the war blamed the barbed wire, which was 'practically impossible' to destroy. Many months would pass before the Italians found a remotely effective solution." ((3), more)
"Never as in the deathly silence, when the trench is sleeping and 10 metres beyond lies an ambush of darkness and foliage, does one feel the presence of war. War is not in the explosion of grenades or a fusillade nor in hand-to-hand combat. War is not in what, from far off, one believes to be its terrible reality and which, close at hand, turns out to be a poor thing and makes little impression; it is — as Tolstoy realized — to be found in that curious space beyond one's trench, where there is silence and calm and where the corn is ripening to no purpose. It is that sense of certain death which lies 'beyond', there where the sun still shines on the age-old roads and the peasants' houses." ((4), more)
"On December 4 [1915], a few days after Joffre's appointment as commander-in-chief, French and British leaders attended a meeting at Calais in which the main point of discussion was Salonika. The meeting occurred at a time when the currents of the war seemed to be flowing against the allies. The Germans had broken through at Gorlice-Tarnów and driven the Russians back 350 kilometers; Joffre's autumn offensive had failed to make significant gains; the British were considering abandoning Gallipoli; the Serbs were fleeing across the mountains toward the Adriatic; and Sarrail's forces were withdrawing from Serbia toward Salonika." ((5), more)
(1) The storm that struck the Dardanelles and the Gallipoli Peninsula at the end of November, 1915, began with torrential rain on the 26th, turning into a blizzard that lasted through the 28th. The temperature dropped again on November 29. The deadly storm also stopped the spread of dysentery, what had taken almost 1,000 men each day for months.
Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead, page 320, copyright © 1956 by Alan Moorehead, publisher: Perennial Classics 2002 (HarperCollins Publications 1956), publication date: 2002 (1956)
(2) Excerpt from a report by leading Serbian military commanders on December 1, 1915, a day on which they decided not to launch a counter-attack on the invading combined forces of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria, but to obey the November 25 order to retreat through the mountains of Montenegro and Albania to the Adriatic Sea for resupply and evacuation by the Allied fleets. Tens of thousands of Serbs, military and civilian, would die in the retreat, of exposure, starvation, and attacks by bandits and other killers, mostly Albanian.
Serbia's Great War 1914-1918 by Andrej Mitrovic, page 150, copyright © Andrej Mitrovic, 2007, publisher: Purdue University Press, publication date: 2007
(3) Italian Commander-in-Chief Luigi Cadorna launched the Third Battle of the Isonzo River on October 18, 1915 on a 50-kilometer front with 1,300 guns, most of them 75 mm. field guns that neither cut barbed wire nor destroyed entrenchments. He followed hard on the end of the Third with the Fourth Battle on November 10 with even less artillery preparation.
The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919 by Mark Thompson, pp. 134, 135, copyright © 2008 Mark Thompson, publisher: Basic Books, publication date: 2009
(4) Excerpt by Scipio Slataper, an Austro-Hungarian writer from Trieste and Italian nationalist. His mother was Italian, his father Slavic. He and his wife were living in Hamburg, Germany when war broke out in 1914. They returned to Italy where, by the end of the year, Slataper was writing in favor of Italy's entry into the war. After Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary he joined the Sardinian Grenadiers using, because he was Austro-Hungarian, an assumed name. He was shot and killed on December 3, 1915 on Mount Podgora as the Fourth Battle of the Isonzo was drawing to a close.
The Lost Voices of World War I, An International Anthology of Writers, Poets and Playwrights by Tim Cross, page 320, copyright © 1989 by The University of Iowa, publisher: University of Iowa Press, publication date: 1989
(5) In a too-late attempt to save Serbia from being overrun by a German-Austro-Hungarian-Bulgarian invasion, France and Britain had landed at Salonica, Greece and moved north, but were prevented from providing any relief by Bulgarian forces. The British were eager to leave the new front, as they were soon to leave Gallipoli. The French argued for staying. 1915 had indeed been bleak for the Entente Allies. To the litany of Allied disappointment and outright failure above — the Gorlice-Tarnów Offensive, Joffre's autumn offensive, the invasion of Gallipoli, the defeat of Serbia, and the failed attempt to aide their ally — could be added Italy's failures in four Battles of the Isonzo River. General Maurice Sarrail commanded the French forces in Greece. On December 2, 1915, French President Poincare appointed General Joseph Joffre Commander-in-Chief of the French armies.
Pyrrhic Victory; French Strategy and Operations in the Great War by Robert A. Doughty, page 233, copyright © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, publisher: Harvard University Press, publication date: 2005
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