Unlike modern warfare, fighting a war on the scale of World War 1 in the early 20th century
demanded overwhelming manpower as a primary requirement.
When soldiers in the military fell short, young men volunteered for the service of their
homeland.
When that too didn't suffice, many nations had to take desperate measures to recruit
men in the army.
Conscription was introduced in many countries and young men were taken into military irrespective
of their will.
The British army practiced an unusual "pals recruitment system" to encourage men to join
the army.
This system allowed friends, family, and neighbors to enlist together in the recruitment drives,
and were promised that they would serve alongside their loved ones, rather than being arbitrarily
allocated to battalions.
The system was very successful, until the recruitment part.
Some towns and villages had almost all their male population enlisted together in pals
battalions.
But when such a battalion would go to the battlefield, almost all would die within hours
and consequently, the town or village where they came from would lose much of its male
population immediately.
For example - The city of "Leeds" had sent their men to form the "Leeds Pals" battalion.
During a battle, approx 850 out of 900 of their mean either died, went missing or got
severely wounded - that's 94% of the regiment - all from the same city or town.
Similarly, the Sheffield City Battalion lost 495 men in just one day in the battle of Somme.
This would create serious security issues in these towns that were now populated mostly
by women and old men.
Loss of manpower would shut down local industries - the major source of income of the town.
Since an entire generation of young men had just disappeared from the town, a large percentage
of the women population would never get married and there was a surge of orphan children and
helpless elderly people.
The ramifications were so devastating that the scheme was soon called off and battalions
were disbanded or amalgamated.
The Pals Recruitment System was never repeated later in the war or in WW2.
With similar motives, the British army decided to lower its enlistment standards to recruit
more men and formed "Bantam Battalions" composed of men who fell short of the army's minimum
height requirement of 5'3″.
These enlisted "Bantam" soldiers were said to be as short as 4'10" which was not
much taller than the standard issue Lee-Enfield rifle that they carried.
Since short height was no longer an issue, many underage young boys also found their
way into the army.
The Battalion served in some of the hardest-fought battles of the war and suffered heavy casualties.
As the war progressed, Bantams were replaced by taller men and these Battalions lost their
identity.
During the battle of Gaza in 1917, the unprepared British soldiers were having a hard time defeating
the Turkish-German army who were defending the city.
Their two prior attempts to enter the city had already failed.
A British soldier and intelligence officer, Richard Meinertzhagen, then came up with a
rather inventive plan that would later come to be known as the infamous "Haversack Ruse".
The plan was to place a dummy pocketbook containing falsified top secret information, in a canvas
bag and plant it before the Turkish army.
To further build the authenticity, things like fake letters from a fictional wife, sandwiches,
and an expensive (but worn) watch were also included in the bag.
Richard Meinertzhagen then "delivered" the bag by dropping it before the Turkish soldiers
when they were chasing him.
When the Turkish officials got a hold of the fake documents, they were fooled into believing
that the British forces would attack the more fortified part of the Gaza only after 7th
November while in reality, the actual strategy was to attack the less guarded part on 30th
October.
As the second part of the plan, Richard Meinertzhagen asked his men to drop opium-laced cigarette
packets in place of regular cigarettes packets that were being dropped with propaganda messages
over the Turkish army.
When the right moment came, the British army surprise attacked the sleeping Turkish men
stoned with opium and capturing the city of Gaza became much easier.
As interesting as this war-time story is, its authenticity is heavily disputed.
A prominent source of the events is the diary of Richard Meinertzhagen himself, the kind
of man that could not be easily trusted with his words.
Investigative biographies published after his death present him as a fraud for fabricating
stories of his feats and speculated he was also a murderer of his wife.
A large-scale theft and falsification in his ornithologist career were also revealed, when
it was discovered that the bird specimen he submitted as original discoveries, were actually
the ones he first stole from museums and collectors around the world.
Nevertheless, the stories of the Haversack Ruse themselves had a huge impact on the events
during WW2.
It inspired Winston Churchill to create the London Controlling Section, which planned
countless Allied deception campaigns during the war, such as operation Mincemeat and diversions
covering D-Day.
World war 1 was the first major conflict involving the large-scale use of aircrafts dropping
death from the sky.
And if you think the life of a fighter pilot was any better than an army soldier fighting
on the front, then you are mistaken, sometimes it was even worse.
Fighter planes had no brakes.
Pilots were not given parachutes, to ensure that they would do everything in their power
to land their plane safely, as Aircraft were a lot costlier than pilots.
Partway through the war, the Germans started issuing parachutes, but the Allies never did.
At the beginning of the war, aircrafts had no guns attached to them, and pilots were
shooting at each other using their pistols, shotguns, even rifles in a close-range aerial
combat called "Dogfight".
They would stand up in their seat to shoot; however, Their seats had no seatbelts, and
there were many stories of pilots falling off their seats.
Their training was equally sophisticated.
In the British Royal flying corps, a person who could ride a horse and drive a car was
considered a perfect candidate for pilot training.
They were typically given 10-20 hours of air training before they were asked to fly to
France on their own.
But, in many cases, recruits were only given 2-3 hours of training in the air.
As a result, most RFC pilots lasted only an average of about 3 weeks once they arrived
at the Western Front.
This is why fighter clubs around the world named themselves the "suicide club" or "20-Minute
Club" because this is how much the life expectancy of a new pilot in combat was in 1916-17.
[4] The peace "Treaty of Versailles", that ended
the state of war between the German and Allied forces in 1919, contains an unusual demand
under the Article 246 -
"Within six months from the coming into force of the present Treaty, ... Germany will hand
over to His Britannic Majesty's Government the skull of the Sultan Mkwawa which was removed
from the Protectorate of German East Africa and taken to Germany."
The context of this rather unusual demand is that the Cheif Mkwawa was a tribal leader
who opposed the German colonization of East Africa and led campaigns that harassed the
German rule for years.
After he was surrounded by the enemy during a rebellion prior to World War 1, he shot
himself to avoid capture.
The German scoundrels had his body posthumously decapitated and shipped to Berlin.
Having fought for the British during the war, his tribe demanded the head of their hero
back.
But when this demand made its entry into the Treaty, Germans disputed the removal of the
said skull and the British government took the position that the whereabouts could not
be traced.
The demand was raised once again after the German defeat in World War 2.
Inquiries speculated that the Chief Mkwawa's skull could be one of the 84 skulls of East
African origin that were kept in Bremen Museum.
The skull which showed measurements similar to surviving relatives of Chief Mkwawa were
short-listed and the one with a bullet-hole was picked as the skull of chief Mkwawa.
After 5 decades of waiting, the skull was finally returned in 1954 and now resides at
the Mkwawa Memorial Museum in Kalenga.
Apparently, no other technological advancement in world war 1 proved as successful as the
German submarines or "U-Boots".
Over the course of the war, the Germans sank over 5,000 ships losing only 78 boats in the
process.
Alone U-Boat SM U-35 sank 224 ships during its lifetime and then surrendered after the
war.
Many of the ships that sank were one of the biggest of their times and were considered
unsinkable.
However, when the SM U-21 sank it's first ship, the HMS Pathfinder in September 1914,
it made the mighty British navy realize that the threat was real.
On 22nd April 1915, the German embassy placed a warning advertisement in newspapers informing
passengers that boarding RMS Lusitania could be dangerous as "a state of war exists in
British waters" and "vessels with British flags are liable to destruction in those waters".
Despite the warning, RMS Lusitania, the biggest passenger ship of its time, set sail and a
week later it was torpedoed by the German U-boat SM U-20.
The ship sank in only 18 minutes killing 1198 passengers and crew on-board.
Precisely how the ship sank still continues to be a mystery.
Later on, it was revealed that the passenger ship was carrying heavy ammunition under the
cover of passengers.
This was against the law, as passenger ships weren't allowed to carry war supplies at that
time.
Public opinion around the world began to turn irrevocably against Germany, as this was before
the time when the justification for the unrestricted killing of civilians was completely acceptable.
This event ultimately became a reason for the US' entry into the war.
But not all encounters with German U-Boats ended the same way.
When the Oceanline Olympic, the sister ship of the Titanic, encountered U-103 on its way,
she rammed into it instead of stopping.
The German U-Boat sank and the Oceanline Olympic came out almost unharmed.
This later supported the Titanic theory that it would have been a better idea to ram the
iceberg with the Titanic instead of turning away to avoid it.
Partway through the war, an artist and Royal Navy volunteer, Norman Wilkinson, came up
with the idea of covering ships in bold shapes and violent contrasts of color, called dazzle
camouflage.
This was the complete opposite of normal camouflage and was supposed to confuse the enemy rather
than conceal the ships.
Dazzle camouflage proved helpful in combating submarine attacks as they made it difficult
for observers to estimate the speed of the ship and its heading.
A form of this technique is still being used in Auto Industry to protect prototype cars
from revealing details in design and aerodynamics.
World War 1 saw some of the biggest examples of Heroism on the battlefield, but the story
of Alvin Cullum York or Sergeant York from the United States Army, is simply extraordinary.
On its way to infiltrate German lines and silence a machine gun position, his unit was
pinned down and suffered heavy casualties while capturing a bunch of German soldiers.
Newly promoted Captain York then took charge, and asked his remaining fellow soldiers to
guard the prisoners and continued on his way to attack the machine gun positions all alone.
He dispatched several German soldiers with his rifle, but by the time six Germans charged
him with bayonets, he was out of rifle ammunition, so he drew his .45 pistol and shot them all.
When it was all over, he and his men had taken 35 machine guns, killing at least 25 enemy
soldiers, and capturing 132.
York had single-handedly killed approximately 20 germans and convinced more than 100 of
them to surrender to him.
The story of his feat was so extraordinary and hard to believe that an investigating
team was sent to the area of the fight to find out the truth.
The team later supported all of his claims.
His actions made him a national hero, an international celebrity and the recipient of a Medal of
Honour.
He was once described as "the greatest civilian soldier of world war 1 ".
An interesting thing to note here is that Alvin York was a highly religious man.
He initially resisted serving in the army on the grounds that his religion, Christianity,
didn't allow him to take another man's life.
However, he was conscripted into the army as an infantry private through the compulsory
recruitment programme.
Even after the war, he remained a religious man and allowed for a movie to be made on
his life only because he wanted funds to start his bible school.
The country, that suffered the most casualties as a percentage of the pre-war population
was the Kingdom of Serbia.
It lost a total of 1.2 million inhabitants during the war, which represented over 29%
of its overall population and 60% of its male population.
To better visualize the disaster this country went through, the German Empire lost only
4%, the Russian Empire lost 2%, and France lost 4.3% of its population to the war.
Much of Serbia could never recover, and people left the country to avoid economic downfall
after the war.
But things didn't turn that bad for the kingdom of Siam, now known as Thailand.
After being neutral for 3 years, Siam declared war against the central power in July 1917
and sent troops to Europe to fight alongside the Allies.
By the time troops had reached France and finished their training, the war had come
to an end, however, a small number of their men participated in minor skirmishes in September
of 1918.
Siam lost 19 soldiers in total, all of them in accidents or disease except for 2, who
died before arriving in Europe.
At the end of the war, they joined victory parade in Paris with other participating nations.
Siam also participated in the Versailles Peace Conference and became a founding member of
the League of Nations.
Later on, it was rewarded with confiscated German merchant ships for its service
in
the War.
[8] WW1 was the very first
of
its kind.
The first major conflict among industrialized global powers that killed 10 million soldiers
and mutilated over 21 million more.
Europe suffered a bloodbath such as the world had never seen.
But it is called the Great War—not only because it was huge and momentous, but also
because it changed the nature of war itself.
The bombardment of cities by artillery and aircraft, obliterated the distinction between
civilian and military targets.
The war was further brought to civilians in the form of internment and genocides when
ethnic minorities were suspected of disloyalty.
The fighting turned even uglier when modern chemical warfare was born on the battlefields
of Belgium in April 1915.
Soon it became a tolerated form of weaponry used by all combatants on a frightening scale.
In 1918, one of every four shells fired on the western front contained poison gas.
But the clouds of chlorine, phosgene, or mustard gas don't follow commands, as they were run
by the wind's direction.
It soon became evident that they would not bring any tactical or strategic breakthrough
but would change the rules of engagement.
They served as a tool of horror that soldiers faced on the battlefield - the horror that
would haunt the world for centuries to come.
The Nobel Prize-winning novelist and writer of the famous Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling
was an early supporter of the UK's involvement in the war.
He wrote propaganda pamphlets and stories glorifying the British military as 'the
place for heroic men,' to encourage more men to join the British military.
He had an eighteen year old son named John Kipling who wanted to join the British Military;
but every time he applied, his application was turned down because of his poor eyesight.
Rudyard Kipling then used his good connections with the commander-in-chief of the British
Army and got his son selected for the Irish Guards.
On his very first battle, John Kipling possibly got a hit on the face and his body was never
identified.
He was declared missing since then.
Rudyard Kipling wasn't the only father with such a fate.
Of the 10 million military deaths, 5 million of the men who died in the war have no known
graves.
Finding bodies, let alone identifying and burying them, wasn't possible at places
like the eastern front where the war was fluid and covered large distances.
Bodies of those who got makeshift cemeteries were pulverized and lost by unceasing bombardments
as the war progressed.
The war had now been transformed from a killing machine into a vanishing act.
After his son's death, Kipling wrote these lines to reveal his feelings of guilt for
sending his unfit son to war......
"If any question why we died Tell them, because our fathers lied."
Many believe that these lines pointed towards the false promises made and lies told by nations
before the war.
The war that was fought as a "The War to end all Wars", in reality, ended NOTHING.
If it changed something then it changed geopolitical boundaries, the science of killing, and the
meaning of war.
The "peace" treaty, the came out of it in the end, didn't seem to care about peace
as much as it cared about keeping the losers on a tight leash and in poverty, a huge price
of which would be paid in the form of the bloodiest conflict in the history of mankind
only a few decades after the end of WW1.
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