WW1 kilted story

[madmacs]

Anyone who grew up in the 70's and 80's in the UK will no doubt remember fondly Commando Comics.

They're still on the go and still issuing 8 issues a month apparently.

Issue 4687 "First flight for Flanders" might be of interest to some.

[Theyoungkiltman]

That is nice...

[madmacs]

Having tracked a copy down... Standard story fare... Terrible artwork, especially when I looked at a 60's issue...

Still worth a read though.

[James Hood]

Those poor men.

Eternal honour and prayers to all who served the Allies in history's most tragic, unnecessary war.

[Theyoungkiltman]

Those poor men.

Eternal honour and prayers to all who served the Allies in history's most tragic, unnecessary war.

I think saying it was unnecessary isn't quite the right way to put it. War is not neccessary but tragically it is human nature to quarrel over sometimes the smallest things, thus war is inevitably a possibility.

[Mike_Oettle]

There certainly is an element of tragedy in the war zone that stretched from the Swiss border to the Flanders coast, but to call it unnecessary is stretching matters somewhat.
The tragedy is that advances in artillery, machine guns and aviation eliminated the mobility that has characterised wars before and since.
In every battle fought by the British on the Western Front, the cavalry stood ready to step in when the infantry had completed their task, and carry the fight to the enemy. But they were never used. The opportunity never arose.
The British did produce an invention that would revolutionise the way war was fought, in the form of the tank. But they had no clear idea as to how to use it. The initial battles in which tanks were used were unsuccessful for one reason or another, chiefly mechanical failure.
When they finally were used intelligently, they did make a difference on the battlefield. But this was in the dying days of the war, when British infantry charges carried the day and drove the Germans back.
And it is one of history’s most twisted ironies that when tanks were finally used effectively in conflict, it was the Nazi German war machine that used it to drive Belgium and France out of the affair entirely (apart from those who escaped to join the Free French and Free Belgians) and the British Expeditionary Force back to Dunkirk.

What was supremely unnecessary about the First World War was the high-handedness of staff officers. One group of staff officers was taken, shortly before most of them returned to Britain, on a quick tour of the trenches. (I believe they were the only such officers who visited the front line.) They had all been serving well behind the lines in comfortable accommodation, issuing orders that put men into those unsavoury subterranean conditions, with mud, inadequate sanitation and the constant addition of corpses close by – without once in all that time having any idea of the conditions the fighting men were operating in.
Bernard Montgomery, at that stage also a staff officer, remarked in his memoirs that this was a salutary lesson to him that commanders and their staff should always be aware of the conditions their men were coping with.

Yet despite all this it was necessary to hold the German advance back, and push forward against the enemy where possible.

It was equally necessary to engage in conflict on other fronts, to weaken the forces maintaining the German trench lines. It was for this reason that Britain pushed against Turkey from both the Persian Gulf and Egypt. It might have been more effective had the Gallipoli campaign been better managed, but delay rendered that another disaster (there was nothing wrong with the fighting ability and motivation of the troops landed there).
And although the Battle of Jutland was inconclusive, its outcome kept the German fleet in harbour – apart from the Unterseebooten that wreaked such havoc among Allied shipping. The Royal Navy showed its fighting spirit in the landings on the Belgian coast.
By the time the war ended, Germany’s colonies had been neatly parcelled up between the Allies, but eliminating the threat they posed was also a necessary aspect of the war.

One certainly can decry the vast numbers of young men sent to certain death. For close on a century people have loved to hate General Haig for his role in this. But in the end it was his strategic assessment that led to the final victory.
Regards,
Mike

[James Hood]

There is a school of thought among a number of military historians and "alternate historians," WW I was completely unnecessary.

The 20th century would have gotten along just fine, without it, tho not necessarily progressing at the same rate...for good or ill or both.

In this opinion, if Wilhelm II would have treated the archduke's assassination as the act of a single person, rather than the political will of Serbia, and NOT declared WAR, things might have gone differently in "our" history.

Please internet-query "What if WW I had not been fought?" for a few other points of view and extrapolations of what might have been. 'Believe this has also been addressed by scholars in, "What If?" speculative history tomes.

Even in a bio of the fallen houses of royalty after WW I, "The Fall Of Eagles," the author presents a case and ultimately d*mning sentence, "The only man who could have prevented the War was Wilhelm II and...."

[Mike_Oettle]

The fall of the dynasties of Germany, Austria, Russia and Turkey was among the most significant outcomes of the First World War. Had this event (or multiplicity of events, since they involved four imperial houses and dozens of smaller German principalities) not taken place, Europe would have remained under the hegemony of these despots for a good deal longer.
It became possible to separate German Austria from the rest of the Habsburg realm. The Serbian royal house capitalised on this to seize control over the rest of what now became Yugoslavia (not necessarily the ideal outcome, as we have seen on both occasions when Yugoslavia was picked apart). Yugoslavia also benefited by acquiring the Austrian fleet and its bases.
Germany itself remained a colossus (or behemoth, if you prefer) that was not broken up until 1945. However, French obsession with punishment for the German race over having started the war saw to it that Austria was not permitted to join Germany and also lost much of the Tyrol.
(The Anschluss of 1936 did merge Austria into Germany, but that did not last.)
An entirely new nation, Czechoslovakia, emerged from the fall of Austria, having been sustained by a 19th-century nationalist movement in the United States and succeeding in seizing control from the Austrians in a matter of days. Its eventual break-up (like that of Yugoslavia, it was a drama first played out around the end of the 1930s and then repeated around 1990) cannot be blamed on the First World War.
The initial German-Austrian success in the east, resulting in the loss of vast tsarist territories to the Leninist revolutionaries, created new political entities in the shape of Ukraine, Belarus (White Russia, it was called then), Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland.
Poland regained its self-respect, if not enough of its proper territory, by expanding into Ukraine (this would be reversed in 1945).
Turkey lost almost its entire European foothold, as well as its Arab territories. The conversion of the Ottoman Empire into a secular republic with Ankara as its capital was a significant break with the past. But the Young Turks paid no attention whatever to a plan that would have created an enlarged Armenian state with access to the Black Sea.
Most significantly, the end of the First World War saw the emergence of the League of Nations. While in the long run it failed, its creation was a marked break with the past since for the first time there was a permanent forum for international co-operation.
Part of its failure can be laid at the door of the United States Congress, for repudiating the commitment President Wilson had made to the League. And of course its lack of teeth for enforcing orders for nations to withdraw their forces was revealed first in the annexations of Mussolini’s Italy and afterwards Hitler’s Germany.
Far and away the worst outcome of the First World War was Russia’s descent into communist misrule, with mass murders and gross mismanagement of the economy. This problem was not finally resolved until 1991, and Russia is still trying to emerge from that nightmare.
There is no argument whatever that the Versailles peace treaties were woefully inadequate and laid the ground for the outbreak of war in 1939.
But this can not be used as a justification for dismissing the sacrifices made by the Allies between 1914 and 1918 as a waste.
Regards,
Mike

[Theyoungkiltman]

The fall of the dynasties of Germany, Austria, Russia and Turkey was among the most significant outcomes of the First World War. Had this event (or multiplicity of events, since they involved four imperial houses and dozens of smaller German principalities) not taken place, Europe would have remained under the hegemony of these despots for a good deal longer.
It became possible to separate German Austria from the rest of the Habsburg realm. The Serbian royal house capitalised on this to seize control over the rest of what now became Yugoslavia (not necessarily the ideal outcome, as we have seen on both occasions when Yugoslavia was picked apart). Yugoslavia also benefited by acquiring the Austrian fleet and its bases.
Germany itself remained a colossus (or behemoth, if you prefer) that was not broken up until 1945. However, French obsession with punishment for the German race over having started the war saw to it that Austria was not permitted to join Germany and also lost much of the Tyrol.
(The Anschluss of 1936 did merge Austria into Germany, but that did not last.)
An entirely new nation, Czechoslovakia, emerged from the fall of Austria, having been sustained by a 19th-century nationalist movement in the United States and succeeding in seizing control from the Austrians in a matter of days. Its eventual break-up (like that of Yugoslavia, it was a drama first played out around the end of the 1930s and then repeated around 1990) cannot be blamed on the First World War.
The initial German-Austrian success in the east, resulting in the loss of vast tsarist territories to the Leninist revolutionaries, created new political entities in the shape of Ukraine, Belarus (White Russia, it was called then), Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland.
Poland regained its self-respect, if not enough of its proper territory, by expanding into Ukraine (this would be reversed in 1945).
Turkey lost almost its entire European foothold, as well as its Arab territories. The conversion of the Ottoman Empire into a secular republic with Ankara as its capital was a significant break with the past. But the Young Turks paid no attention whatever to a plan that would have created an enlarged Armenian state with access to the Black Sea.
Most significantly, the end of the First World War saw the emergence of the League of Nations. While in the long run it failed, its creation was a marked break with the past since for the first time there was a permanent forum for international co-operation.
Part of its failure can be laid at the door of the United States Congress, for repudiating the commitment President Wilson had made to the League. And of course its lack of teeth for enforcing orders for nations to withdraw their forces was revealed first in the annexations of Mussolini’s Italy and afterwards Hitler’s Germany.
Far and away the worst outcome of the First World War was Russia’s descent into communist misrule, with mass murders and gross mismanagement of the economy. This problem was not finally resolved until 1991, and Russia is still trying to emerge from that nightmare.
There is no argument whatever that the Versailles peace treaties were woefully inadequate and laid the ground for the outbreak of war in 1939.
But this can not be used as a justification for dismissing the sacrifices made by the Allies between 1914 and 1918 as a waste.
Regards,
Mike

It looks like we have a true WWI historian here!