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Stereo card of French Generals, Henri Philippe Pétain, Paul Henrys, and Émile Fayolle and French Raymond President Poincaré in the Verdun sector. Pétain is on the left and Poincaré behind him. Henrys is in the foreground, back to the camera, and Fayolle on the right.
Allied Commanders Henri Philippe Pétain, Douglas Haig, Ferdinand Foch, and John J. Pershing. Foch was Allied Commander in Chief, the other men commanders of the French Army, the British Expeditionary Force, and the American Expeditionary Force respectively. From The Memoirs of Marshall Foch by Marshall Foch.
Postcard view of the county of Kent, England, bounded by the River Thames on the north and the English Channel and Dover Strait to the east. The city and White Cliffs of Dover are in Kent. In November 1914, British naval and military authorities feared Germany was preparing to invade England.
Stereo card view of wounded Belgian soldiers in an Antwerp hospital attended by a Red Cross nurse. The nurse attends to a severely wounded soldier whose head, face, and hands are swathed in bandages.
The Royal Palace in Bucharest, Romania. A postcard altered to show the German flag flying over the palace.
"At 4:30 A.M. on August 20 [1917], eight divisions of French infantry swept forward. By August 26 they had driven the Germans off the heights and had captured ten thousand prisoners and hundreds of artillery pieces and machine guns. The French bombardment had been overwhelming. More than a thousand Germans died when one tunnel in the Mort Homme defenses was sealed up by accurate gunfire. And now, his objective accomplished, Pétain stopped the attack. His troops were amazed—'it has been too easy!'—and, as their trucks drove back from the victorious assault, observers marveled that men 'were singing, bursting with enthusiasm, their faces radiant with hope!'" ((1), more)
"The arithmetic of German casualties was in British numbers so enormous that, from forty years of hindsight, one wonders how any but the most gullible could have been deceived by them. Haig reported an even hundred thousand on August 21 and flatly stated that the end of Germany's resources was at hand—this on the basis of a paper written by Charteris, who, however, protested in his diary (he does not seem to have protested elsewhere), 'D. H. has not only accepted in toto my report . . . but he has gone much further.'" ((2), more)
"The British coast was looming ahead, and only ten of the original fifteen Gothas remained.Within minutes, the sky before them was smeared with the black smoke of exploding shells. The fire was coming from picket ships stationed off shore. Even more disturbing, aircraft were flying in small clusters just beyond the coast. The fighters, fifteen in all, were incoming bombers. They were British naval machines which had come up from air stations at Manston, Eastchurch, Walmer, and Dover on the Kent coast." ((3), more)
"I've been meaning to write to you again & again—but I've been so vastly bitter that I can produce nothing but gall and wormwood.The war is utter damn nonsense—a vast cancer fed by lies and self seeking malignity on the part of those who don't do the fighting.Of all the things in this world a government is the thing least worth fighting for." ((4), more)
"Ludendorff eliminated the option of extending the offensive when he informed Mackensen on 24 August [1917] that the Alpine Corps and the Austrian 13th ID would be transferred to Italy at the beginning of September. . . . The decision handed down from OHL caused much frustration among Austro-German commanders on the Romanian Front, beginning with Mackensen. He realized now that he would not be able to add the conquest of Moldavia to his many laurels. He left the front and returned to Bucharest on 23 August. A few days later he recorded his disappointment: ' Under tactically favorable conditions, a very promising operation could have been made which would have had significant political consequences. It is very regrettable that they make me dependent on events on other battlefields.'" ((5), more)
(1) In ending the French army mutinies, commander in chief Henri Pétain had promised his army that he would make greater use of artillery and other weapons before any infantry assault, and that his objectives would be clear and limited. His offensive at Verdun in August, 1917 met these conditions, and demonstrated how successful they could be. His soldiers responded, seeing that every battle need not be a slaughter. Pétain was recapturing territory lost in the German siege of 1916, and providing support for British commander Douglas Haig's offensive in Flanders, the Third Battle of Ypres.
Dare Call it Treason by Richard M. Watt, page 225, copyright © 1963 by Richard M. Watt, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1963
(2) Brigadier General John Charteris was Chief of Intelligence to General Douglas Haig, commander in chief of British forces in France. Haig had launched the Third Battle of Ypres on July 31, 1917. He failed to reach his first day objectives, and rain and heavy artillery had made his battlefield impassable by the second day. Our author, Leon Wolff, writes (page 150) of Charteris: 'It can safely be said that from July 31 to the end of the Flanders campaign Charteris lied steadily to the press, to the War Cabinet, and to his own chief, Field Marshall Haig.' 'D. H.' was, of course, Haig.
In Flanders Fields, the 1917 Campaign by Leon Wolff, page 156, copyright © 1958 by Leon Wolff, publisher: The Viking Press, publication date: 1958
(3) Fifteen Gotha bombers set out on August 22, 1917 to bomb Dover, Chatham, and either Southend or Sheerness on the United Kingdom's English Channel coast. Five soon turned back with engine or other problems leaving ten that quickly encountered antiaircraft fire and fighter planes coming to challenge them. Two of the bombers were shot down near Margate, a third near Dover. Bombs fell on Margate, Ramsgate, and Dover, with two killed and thirty-five wounded, one fatally. The attack was the last daylight raid of the war by the Gotha bombers.
The Sky on Fire by Raymond H. Fredette by Raymond H. Fredette, page 107, copyright © 1966, 1976, 1991 by Raymond H. Fredette, publisher: Smithsonian Institution Press, publication date: 1991
(4) John Dos Passos, an American ambulance driver serving with the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, with the French army at Verdun, writing to his friend Rummy back in the States. The French offensive begun August 20, 1917 was recapturing territory lost to German forces in the 1916 siege of Verdun. Quoted in World War I and America.
World War I and America by A. Scott Berg, page 409, copyright © 2017 by Literary Classics of the United States, publisher: The Library of America, publication date: 2017
(5) The German Mărăşeşti offensive began on August 6, 1917 in hopes of destroying Romania's army and seizing Moldavia, the only part of the country not occupied by Central Power forces. The German-Austro-Hungarian Oituz offensive began two days later. German General August von Mackensen had commanded a Central Power army in the initial invasion of Romania in 1916. With Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, General, Erich Ludendorff commanded the German army. Bucharest was and remains the capital of Romania. OHL, Oberste Heeresleitung, was German Supreme Army Command.
The Romanian Battlefront in World War I by Glenn E. Torrey, pp. 231–232, copyright © 2011 by the University Press of Kansas, publisher: University Press of Kansas, publication date: 2011
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