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Russia's 1917 Offensive — the Kerensky Offensive — a pencil sketch of a Russian soldier fleeing his trench as Central Power bayonets rise over it. The failed offensive was Russia's last of the war. By Ger. F. Kollar, addressed to Frau Hermine Kollar of Vienna.
1898 map of Petrograd, the Russian capital, Kronstadt Bay, and the Russian naval base of Kronstadt, from a German atlas. Petersburg, or Petrograd, is on Kronstadt Bay, an extension of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. Kronstadt was an important naval base. North and east of central Petrograd was the Vyborg district, site of many factories and housing for workers.
Watercolor self-portrait by Lance Corporal Hugh F. Ward showing himself bathing, washing, and delousing his uniform. Ward served in the 97th Field Ambulance, Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), 30th Division, B.E.F.
View from the Observation Tower on Californie Plateau, Chemin des Dames, France.
German postcard map of the Western Front in Flanders, looking south and including Lille, Arras, Calais, and Ostend. In the Battle of the Yser in October, 1914, the Belgian Army held the territory south of the Yser Canal, visible between Nieuport, Dixmude, and Ypres (Ypern). Further north is Passchendaele, which British forces took at great cost in 1917.
"Apprehension about how the Russian troops on the Romanian Front would respond when the offensive began was reinforced by the arrival of negative reports concerning the Russian offensive on the Southwest Front, where, as Berthelot recorded, 'many regiments refuse to march.' There Russian forces had enjoyed initial success, breaking through enemy lines at Zloczow (1–3 July) and Stanislau-Kalusz (6–12 July). But heavy losses and the arrival of Austro-German reinforcements from other fronts stalled the Russian advance. On 17 July, enemy forces launched a counteroffensive that broke through the Russian lines. The entire front began to dissolve." ((1), more)
"On the morning of the fifth [July] I met Lenin. The offensive by the masses had been beaten off. 'Now they will shoot us down, one by one,' said Lenin. 'This is the right time for them.' But he overestimated the opponent—not his venom, but his courage and ability to act. They did not shoot us down one by one, although they were not far from it. Bolsheviks were being beaten down in the streets and killed. Military students sacked the Kseshinskaya palace and the printing-works of the Pravda. The whole street in front of the works was littered with manuscripts, and among those destroyed was my pamphlet 'To the Slanderers.'" ((2), more)
". . . Thirst; Gas; Shrapnel; Very H.E.; Our liquid fire; A first sight of an aeroplane map . . . Does it sound interesting? May God forgive me if I ever come to cheat myself into thinking that it was, and lie later to younger men of the Great Days. It was damnable; and what in relation to what might have happened? Nothing at all! We have been lucky, but it is not fit for men to be here — in this tormented dry-fevered marsh, where men die and are left to rot because of snipers and the callousness that War breeds. 'It might be me tomorrow. Who cares? Yet still, hang on for a Blighty.'" ((3), more)
"The entire French front, from Verdun to St. Quentin, was violently bombarded during the night of July 19th in preparation for the German attack on the Craonne and 'Winterburg' Plateaux. Since Verdun, there had been no artillery attack comparable to this in intensity.Early on the morning of the 20th, the German troops moved out from the Ailette Valley in the direction of the eastern slopes of Craonne, expecting easily to reach the Chemin-des-Dames objective on the crest. At a fearful cost—so appalling in fact that the Germans have never cared to reveal the actual figures—they made a slight advance along a front of half a mile on the lower slopes of Craonne. But never a German soldier could attain the French lines on the summit." ((4), more)
"Haig and his staff devised a three-stage offensive; the first attack would strike south of Ypres near Wytschaete; the second would advance between Dixmuiden and Ypres; and the third would crash against Passchendaele. Haig, who sought nothing less than to 'smash up the whole of the Bosche [sic] Army', blithely ignored Foch's warning not to undertake a 'duck's march through the inundations to Ostend and Zeebrugge', which Foch considered to be 'futile, fantastic, and dangerous'. . . .On 21 July more than 2300 British guns subjected General Friedrich Sixt von Arnim's Fourth Army, part of Army Group Crown Prince Rupprecht, to a 10-day artillery bombardment that claimed 30 000 casualties, including 9000 missing." ((5), more)
(1) Romania entered the war on August 27, 1916, and was overrun by Central Power forces by the end of the year, driven out of Wallachia and Dobruja and back to Moldavia where the Russians held the Allied line. In July, 1917 they planned a joint Romanian-Russian offensive against German and Austro-Hungerian forces, but watched in dismay as the Russian Kerensky Offensive collapsed.
The Romanian Battlefront in World War I by Glenn E. Torrey, page 196, copyright © 2011 by the University Press of Kansas, publisher: University Press of Kansas, publication date: 2011
(2) Leon Trotsky writing of some of the events of July 18, 1917 (July 5 Old Style) and the next days following the July 16 anti-war and anti-government demonstrations in which government ministers were threatened and over 100 were killed. Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks, did not think the time was ripe for seizing power. Other Bolsheviks, as well as workers and soldiers, clearly did.
My Life: an Attempt at an Autobiography by Leon Trotsky, page 313, publisher: Dover Publications, Inc., publication date: 2007
(3) Ivor Gurney, English poet and composer, writing to the composer Marion Margaret Scott, former President of the Society of Women Musicians, in June or July, 1917 between the 1917 British offensives of Arras and Ypres. Gurney was a private in the Gloucestershire Regiment. 'H.E.' is high explosive shells; a 'Blighty' a wound that would send him back to Blighty, to England.
War Letters, Ivor Gurney, a selection edited by R.K.R. Thornton by Ivor Gurney, pp. 170–171, copyright © J. R. Haines, the Trustee of the Ivor Gurney Estate 1983, publisher: The Hogarth Press, publication date: 1984
(4) The Californie Plateau — called the 'Winterburg' by the German forces — is at the eastern end of the Chemin des Dames in Craonne, France. It was retaken by the French between May 4 to 6, 1917 in one of the last actions of the Second Battle of the Aisne, the Battle of Chemin des Dames.
King's Complete History of the World War by W.C. King, page 332, copyright © 1922, by W.C. King, publisher: The History Associates, publication date: 1922
(5) The French army mutinies of May, June, and July, 1917, that followed the failure of French Commander Robert Nivelle's spring offensive, the Second Battle of the Aisne, left Douglas Haig, commander of British forces in France, free to pursue his own offensive independent of the French. As our author makes clear, Haig's primary aim was victory and an end to the war. A secondary aim was ending that part of the threat of Germany's submarine warfare based in the occupied Belgian ports. The inundations that French general Ferdinand Foch referred to were the floods unleashed on their own land by the Belgians at the end of the Battles of the Yser in 1914. Haig's bombardment began the Third Battle of Ypres, also known as the Battle of Passchendaele. Rupprecht was Crown Prince of Bavaria. Foch was correct in his assessment of Haig's plan.
The First World War: Germany and Austria Hungary 1914-1918 by Holger H. Herwig, pp. 330–331, copyright © 1997 Holger H. Herwig, publisher: Arnold, publication date: 1997
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