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Portrait postcard of Admiral Sir John Jellicoe of the Royal Navy. Appointed Commander of the British Home Fleets on August 2, 1914, Jellicoe was criticized for his leadership of the British fleet during the May 31, 1916 Battle of Jutland in which he failed to decisively defeat the German High Seas Fleet. He was made First Sea Lord later that year. The card was postmarked from Glasgow, Scotland, on January 7, 1915.
Turkish machine-gun crews, from 'Four Years Beneath the Crescent' by Rafael De Nogales, Inspector-General of the Turkish Forces in Armenia and Military Governor of Egyptian Sinai during the World War.
Central detail from a 1898 map of St. Petersburg, the Russian capital, from a German atlas. Central St Petersburg, or Petrograd, is on the Neva River. Key landmarks include the Peter and Paul Fortress, which served as a prison, Nevski Prospect, a primary boulevard south of the Fortress, the Finland Train Station, east of the Fortress, where Lenin made his triumphal return, the Tauride (Taurisches) Palace, which housed the Duma and later the Petrograd Soviet.
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.
A Russian Cossack and his mount jump the border into Germany, his lance aimed squarely at Berlin. This French fantasy of its Russian ally sharply contrasted with the slow advance into East Prussia of the Russian First Army and the disastrous offensive of the Russian Second Army that ended in its destruction at Tannenberg. Germany then turned back to the Russian First Army in the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes, and drove it from Russia. Illustration by Kunder (?).
"Visit from Admiral Jellicoe.A real sailor and a real Anglo-Saxon.He takes a serious view of the situation as a result of the submarine war. In February 500,000 tons were sunk, and against this between eight and ten enemy submarines were destroyed. It is extremely difficult to know when a submarine has been sunk. . . .The Germans are beginning to lack experienced officers." ((1), more)
"The total strength of the [Turkish] Eighteenth Army Corps, inclusive of the 14th Division, was given as 6,200 rifles and eighty machine guns; there were twenty-two field guns, twelve mountain guns and twenty-one howitzers of various models with limited ammunition. Part of the artillery had been lost in the last heavy battles and in the retreat. The evacuation of Bagdad was now begun, and the lightly wounded from the last battles were removed to Samara.On March 5th the fighting was resumed. A hostile infantry division and a cavalry division advanced. The latter turned the Turkish left. During the night of the 6th of March the Eighteenth Army Corps was withdrawn to the Diala position." ((2), more)
"Petrograd is short of bread and wood, and the public is suffering want.At a bakery on the Liteïny this morning I was struck by the sinister expression on the faces of the poor folk who were lined up in a queue, most of whom had spent the whole night there.Pokrovski, to whom I mentioned the matter, did not conceal his anxiety. But what can be done! The transport crisis is certainly worse. The extreme cold (43º) which has all Russia in its grip has put more than twelve hundred engines out of action, owing to boiler tubes bursting, and there is a shortage of spare tubes as a result of strikes. Moreover, the snowfall of the last few weeks has been exceptionally heavy and there is also a shortage of labour in the villages to clear the permanent way. The result is that at the present moment fifty-seven thousand railway wagons cannot be moved." ((3), more)
"Later that morning, I was strolling along my line when I saw Lieutenant Pfaffendorf at a sentry post, directing the fire of a trench mortar by means of a periscope. Stepping up beside him, I spotted a British soldier breaking cover behind the third enemy line, the khaki uniform clearly visible against the sky. I grabbed the nearest sentry's rifle, set the sights to six hundred, aimed quickly, just in front of the man's head, and fired. He took another three steps, then collapsed on to his back, as though his legs had been taken away from him, flapped his arms once or twice, and rolled into a shell-crater, where through the binoculars you could see his brown sleeves shining for a long time yet." ((4), more)
"They are shelling this place, but no-one takes any notice, being too fed up. Fires are forbidden in daylight, but it is better to die by a fire than live without one.And as for snipers, who cares for those. Why yesterday one of our heavies landed 6 shells about 30 yards on our left, just behind our own line. Cheerful Tommy Atkins takes not much notice. It is only a Bairnsfather incident: Your sincere friend Ivor Gurney" ((5), more)
(1) Entry from the war diary of Albert, King of the Belgians, March 4, 1917, on his visit from Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, Great Britain's First Sea Lord. Germany had resumed its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare on February 1 in an attempt to starve Britain into submission. 500,000 tons was a significant increase over the average of 320,000 in the preceding four months, a period in which the Allies sank only ten submarines in all theaters. Jellicoe overestimates the Allies' success in destroying U-boats. Halpern, in his A Naval History of World War I, writes that, 'in February, March, and April the Germans lost only nine submarines' (p. 341).
The War Diaries of Albert I King of the Belgians by Albert I, pp. 156–157, copyright © 1954, publisher: William Kimber
(2) After the loss of of British army at Kut-al-Amara on April 29, 1916 — an army that had over-extended its supply lines in a too-hasty advance on Baghdad — command of British forces in Mesopotamia was given to General Frederick Stanley Maude, who, in early 1917, more methodically worked his way up the Tigris River towards Baghdad. The ancient city fell the night of March 10–11.
Five Years in Turkey by Liman von Sanders, pp. 162–163, publisher: The Battery Press with War and Peace Books, publication date: 1928 (originally)
(3) Entry for Tuesday, March 6, 1917 from the memoirs of Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia in the Russian capital Petrograd. Nikolai Pokrovsky was Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, succeeding Boris Stürmer. As 43º will not freeze water and burst pipes, we assume (43º) is minus 43º Fahrenheit. The extreme cold had plagued the continent for a fortnight, but had eased in France by March 6.
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. III by Maurice Paléologue, page 213, publisher: George H. Doran Company
(4) German Ensign Ernst Jünger on his killing of a British soldier the morning of March 6, 1917. The British has sent a raiding patrol early in the morning of March 5, and attacked the section next to Jünger's earlier in the morning of the 6th.
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, pp. 124–125, copyright © 1920, 1961, Translation © Michael Hoffman, 2003, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 2003
(5) Ivor Gurney, English poet and composer, writing to the composer Marion Margaret Scott, President of the Society of Women Musicians from 1915 to 1916, on March 7, 1916. Gurney was a private in the Gloucestershire Regiment then in the Fauquissart-Laventie sector. Captain Bruce Bairnsfather was a British cartoonist, creator of Old Bill and his friends Bert and Alf.
War Letters, Ivor Gurney, a selection edited by R.K.R. Thornton by Ivor Gurney, page 143, copyright © J. R. Haines, the Trustee of the Ivor Gurney Estate 1983, publisher: The Hogarth Press, publication date: 1984
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