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Detail showing the plaque for 1918 from the monument to the Tank Corps, Pozières, France. The base bears plaques commemorating the Tank Corps and the years 1916, when tanks were first used in battle, 1917, when they were proven to be a weapon that could change the war, and 1918, when tanks were decisive in the Allied victory. The plaques for each year list the engagements in which the Corps fought. © 2013 by John M. Shea
German postcard map of the Romanian theater of war, with map labels in Bulgarian added in red. From north to south the labels are Russia, the Austro-Hungarian regions of Galicia and Bukovina, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and, along the Black Sea, the Romania region of Dobruja. Romania's primary war aim was the annexation of the Austro-Hungarian region of Transylvania, with its large ethnic Romanian population.
Peoples of Austria-Hungary in 1914 from Historical Atlas by William R. Shepherd. The empire's population included Germans, Magyars, Romanians, Italians, and Slavs including Croats, Serbians, Ruthenians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, and Slovenes.
Allied soldiers fortifying shell craters after an advance. From The Nations at War by Willis J. Abbot, 1918 Edition.
The Serb resurgent, a newly hatched eagle chick triumphant over the Hapsburg eagle. A bi-cephalic eagle was (and is again) the most prominent element on the Serbian coat of arms.
"On the Somme, a potentially dramatic turn in the Entente fortunes took place on September 15 [1916], when tanks were used for the first time in battle. Forty-nine tanks took part in the attack, moving forward on a wide front. Ten of the tanks were hit by German artillery fire, nine broke down with mechanical difficulties, and five failed to advance. But those that did manage to go forward were able to advance more than 2,000 yards, capturing the long-sought High Wood, and three villages, Flers, Martinpuich and Courcelette. Churchill wrote to Admiral Fisher, both of them then out of office and out of power: 'My poor "land battleships" have been let off prematurely and on a petty scale. In that idea resided one real victory.' Recognising the potential of the new weapon, Haig asked the War Office for a thousand of them. The Germans were far behind in their tank experiments." ((1), more)
"Under the increasing pressure of the Bulgarians the Rumanians are progressively evacuating the Dobrudja, and every day and night Austrian airmen bomb Bucharest from their base at Rustchuk.From the moment the Rudeanu agreement was thrown over these misfortunes were easy to foresee. The Rumanian Government is paying dearly for the mistake it made in directing its whole military effort towards Transylvania, allowing itself to be taken in by vague rumours from Sofia and particularly in imagining that the Bulgarians had abandoned the idea of a military revenge for the disaster and humiliation of 1913." ((2), more)
". . . by the time Cadorna suspended the attack late on the 17th [September], Boroević's army was in tatters. As Italian production increased, the artillery gap had widened. The quality of Austrian rations was slipping. The draft was despatching middle-aged intakes to the front with little training. Ominously, combat performance was starting to fracture along ethnic lines." ((3), more)
"The width of Nomansland diminishes from 1400 yards on the right, where one can sit on the parapet in shirt-sleeves, to 250 yards on the left. There are rats everywhere in numbers hitherto unknown. The C.O. had won an Open Race at a 46th Divisional Horse Show, on Yates's mare, and then gone on leave. He had seen the arrival of another draft of 95, 'awful sights, enough to break one's heart. The others were getting quite good and smart, now this crowd will put us back.' de Miremont is Acting O.C. He joined from West Africa in time to make his only acquaintance with a trench during twenty-four wet hours in reserve at Montauban Alley. He then declared that 'trench warfare is a sort of drill.' To the bewilderment of those who have lived through a year or two of it he is trying to square the fact to that idea (an idea he never gave up)." ((4), more)
". . . it was in the early hours of September 19 [1916] that the Drina Division fought their way to the Bulgarian eyrie and sent back to Batachin fifty prisoners as testimony to their achievement. Below them the Serbs could see that the Bulgarians had not yet accepted the loss of the Kajmakcalan. Such a key bastion could never be lightly abandoned; but, for the moment, the Serbian flag flew once more over a few hundred yards of Serbian soil." ((5), more)
(1) The September 15, 1916 British attack in the Battle of the Somme — the Battle of Flers-Courcelette — was the first use of the tank in battle. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill had been a member of the Asquith cabinet until being forced out in May, 1915 in the aftermath of the failed Gallipoli campaign. Churchill, an imaginative man, believed a surprise attack of tanks in great numbers could achieve the breakthrough the Entente allies so ardently desired. British Commander in Chief Douglas Haig, a man of more limited imagination, looked for some advantage in a battle that had already cost enormous numbers of British causalities. Although their use was premature, Haig recognized the tank's value. Asquith's son Raymond was killed in the Battle of Flers-Courcelette.
The First World War, a Complete History by Martin Gilbert, page 286, copyright © 1994 by Martin Gilbert, publisher: Henry Holt and Company, publication date: 1994
(2) Entry from the memoirs of Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia, for Saturday, September 16, 1916. A combined German, Bulgarian, and Turkish army under German General August von Mackensen attacked Romania from the south in Dobrudja, a region between the Danube River and the Black Sea. Colonel Rudeanu was the Romanian military attaché in France, and Paléologue had written of his work in July. The agreement he had negotiated with the Allies was that Romania would attack Bulgaria immediately upon entering the war in an attempt to link up with the Entente ally forces on the Salonica Front. Romania instead sent three of its four armies through the passes in the Transylvanian Alps to invade Transylvania, a region of Austria-Hungary with a large ethnic Romanian population. In the Second Balkan War of 1913, Romania had launched a surprise attack on Bulgaria which was already at war with Turkey and its allies in the First Balkan War, Serbia and Greece. Romania's political and military decisions seem hopelessly if not criminally naive. Bucharest and Sofia were and remain the capitals of Romania and Bulgaria respectively.
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. III by Maurice Paléologue, page 26, publisher: George H. Doran Company
(3) In an attempt to build on the success of his Sixth Battle of the Isonzo, Italian Commander in Chief Luigi Cadorna launched the the success of his Seventh Battle on September 13, 1916. General Boroević's Austro-Hungarian troops were mimicking the defensive tactics of German troops, lightly defending a front line, though supporting it with machine gun nests, so that casualties would be relatively light during the standard bombardment that preceded an infantry assault. Cadorna thought the Austro-Hungarians had two defensive lines; they had four.
The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919 by Mark Thompson, page 220, copyright © 2008 Mark Thompson, publisher: Basic Books, publication date: 2009
(4) Extract from the entry for September 18, 1916 from the writings — diaries, letters, and memoirs — of Captain J.C. Dunn, Medical Officer of the Second Battalion His Majesty's Twenty-Third Foot, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and fellow soldiers who served with him. The Battalion was then serving in the Somme sector.
The War the Infantry Knew 1914-1919 by Captain J.C. Dunn, page 259, copyright © The Royal Welch Fusiliers 1987, publisher: Abacus (Little, Brown and Company, UK), publication date: 1994
(5) Victorious but weakened by Austria-Hungary's invasions in 1914, decimated by typhus in 1915, and overwhelmed by the 1915 invasion by Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Bulgaria, Serbia's government and the remains of its army fled to the Adriatic Sea and eventual transport by its allies to the island of Corfu to recuperate. In the spring and summer of 1916 it joined the Allied forces on the Salonika Front in Greece, forces that had originally deployed to Greece to aid Serbia. In their preemptive attack on August 17, the Bulgarians had struck primarily at the Serbian sector of the Allied line, and drove the Serbs back. The Serbian success on September 19 was a further step in taking their country back.
The Gardeners of Salonika by Alan Palmer, page 81, copyright © 1965 by A. W. Palmer, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1965
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