World War I - Week 8 - September 21-27, 1914
POLITICAL
Sep. 21 - Winston Churchill gives a speech in Liverpool calling for 1,000,000 volunteers for the British Army. The British had difficulty setting up recruiting centers to handle the massive influx of volunteers.
Sep. 23 - Britain announces the impending end of the financial Moratorium. To prevent a financial panic at the outbreak of the war, government had issued a Moratorium on gold exchange and foreign bank notes to prevent a run on the banks.
Sep. 25 - British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith goes to Dublin to appeal to Irishmen to join the British war effort. Over 200,000 Irish would eventually fight in the War.
MILITARY
Sep. 22 - First substantial bombing raid by British airmen
Sep. 22 - Single German U-boat sinks 3 British warships in a single day
Sep. 23 - Serbian and Montenegrin forces press Austria-Hungarian army towards Sarajevo in Bosnia
Sep. 24 - Key Austrian-Hungarian fortress in Przemsyl with garrison of 150,000 surrounded by Russian army
Sep. 24 - Australians occupy town of Friedrich Wilhelm in German New Guinea
Sep. 25 - St. Mihiel and Argonne Forest captured by Germans. They would successfully defend these impregnable areas until late 1918 when taken by U.S. Marines and soldiers at great cost.
Sep. 25 - General Hindenburg placed in command of combined German/A-H forces offensive in Poland and Galicia
Sep. 26 - Siege of Antwerp in Belgium begins by Germans
QUOTES
"To the war of slaughter and battles was added that of propaganda and communiques. In this the French largely had the advantage. They did not cease to proclaim day after day the enormous German losses which attended every assault". - Winston Churchill
WEAPONS OF WAR
The new and vastly improved weapons used from the beginning of WWI were the culmination of exponential increases in killing power from that of only 50 years previous. The War itself accelerated progress even further. Air power, tanks, submarines, and poison gas are important components which deserve their own segments later in the series.
World War I was to a great degree an artillery war. About 70% of the battle deaths were due to artillery. For the first time in history, the majority of men killed in combat did not die from personal weapons. The new artillery were all breech-loaded with hydraulic recoil mechanisms. This advance negated the time-consuming need to reposition the piece after each firing. The shells were devastatingly more powerful and far more accurate that those used before. Aerial reconnaissance and balloon observation were great assists in targeting. 
The deadly machine gun was actually invented by an American, Hiram Maxim, 30 years before but he found no interest by the U.S. Army. He went to Europe to sell his patent, most eagerly adopted by the Germans. Firing 600 rounds per minute, the machine gun turned infantry attacks into mass suicide. 
Rifles, too, were far advanced from 50 years before. At the start of the U.S. Civil War muskets were slow to reload and accurate to less than 100 yards. All the WWI soldiers used bolt-action rifles with 5-10 round magazines and could hit bulls-eyes at a range of hundreds of yards.
Portable mortars were also a large factor in the trench warfare of WWI. It could deliver explosives on a high trajectory accurately into an opposing trench with deadly effect.
Even low-tech barbed wire would cost many thousands of men their lives. Developed in the U.S. for cattle ranching, a soldier crossing No-Man's Land through machine gun and shell fire would often find himself entangled in 40-100 yards depth of barbed wire to be helplessly slaughtered. 
Flamethrowers were introduced early in the war but were not as effective in trench warfare as later they would be in WWII against pillboxes and caves.
With the advancement of new weapons, two traditional weapons of war became nearly obsolete. The revered long bayonet on the end of a rifle was ill-suited in the close confines of trench combat. More useful were grenades, trench clubs, knuckledusters, and even entrenching tools. 
Most dramatically, World War I brought about the end of horse cavalry. Romantic mass cavalry charges were ineffective across shell-pocked battlefields facing machine guns, artillery, and entrenched riflemen. Used more liberally on the Eastern and Middle Eastern Fronts, cavalry was nearly useless on the Western Front. The British would lose 7,000 horses in one day, more than the legendary "Charge of the Light Brigade" in the Crimean War. 
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An interesting sidebar to this one Mike. Many of the poorer Britishers who volunteered for the Army were illiterate. To help them fill out the enlistment forms, the recruiting officers had posters showing how to fill it out. In the section of the poster listing the name of the recruit, the example name was Thomas Atkins. Since many couldn't spell their real names, they put the example name in that box on the form. Thus, about 15% of the recruits in the newly formed army were enlisted as Thomas Atkins. The senior officers knew that this problem would occur, since it happened in the same way as far back as the Crimean War, but, with so many volunteers all at once, nothing could be done to correct it quickly. Ever since then, British soldiers have been known as Tommies.
Excellent TTGA!! I did not know why they were called "Tommies". Does that mean the illiterate American enlistees all signed their names as Joe Pillsbury? After all, they were called "Doughboys".
With the advent of new weapons, the slaughter was beyond belief.
The loss of 7,000 horses in one day is very difficult to wrap your head around.
''Doughboys'' goes back to 1840's. US Mexican war. it's said that seeing the US army marching there, were covered in a chalk like dust and they looked like dough.
Both of the supreme British commanders in the War, Sir John French and Sir Douglas Haig, rose up through the ranks as cavalry officers, considered to be the elite of the British Army. Both men held on to the futile belief through most of the War that what was required for victory was a breakthrough the German lines which could then be best exploited by the cavalry. To keep the cavalry close by the front lines to be ready for this phantom breakthrough, the horses were kept dangerously close and were often exposed to massive artillery bombardments. These intense and prolonged bombardments would kill hundreds of horses (and men) in a single minute of shelling.
The inability to accept that the cavalry was a thing of the past, seems to be prevalent in some of the ''leading military minds'' thorough out history.
The aircraft carrier, was thought to be ''nothing much'' by military leaders before WWII. Sad lesson that their closed minds learned.
WWI military leaders were also slow to accept the immense value of some other key weapons.
British supreme commander Sir Douglas Haig on the machine gun: "The machine gun is a much overrated weapon."
British Minister of War Lord Kitchener on the tank: "Pretty mechanical toy but very limited military value."
Pretty sad, when you consider that they were the ''military minds'' of the time.
It's always the ''grunt'' that pays the price for their arrogance.
What's amazing is that the grunts didn't rebel until millions had already been slaughtered. More than half the French army mutinied in 1917, the British suffered very low morale for a time only in the beginning of 1918, the Russians deserted the battlefield from late 1917 before complete surrender in 1918. German morale was uniformly high until the failed 1918 offensive in late summer 1918.
Surrender with sleep, dry clothes, and good food became a far better option than the certainty of a futile death in battle.
I'm really surprised about the the US not buying the machine gun. How stupid is that?
I am not sure why we didn't have the largeartillery power. Didn't we have cannons before?
And the fact that our own barbed wire was used against us... amazingly stupid.
I am amazed we actually won the war.
When the U.S. finally declared war on Germany in 1917, it was totally unprepared. At that time, we had only the 17th largest army in the world with a little over 100,000 active soldiers. Our only battle-ready force consisted of the 15,500 members of the U.S. Marine Corps. Mainly due to the efforts of Pres. Theodore Roosevelt we had a modern powerful navy, second in the world only to the British Royal Navy. When our army began to fight in force in 1918 the machine guns, tanks, artillery, and airplanes were supplied by the British and the French. While still neutral the U.S. had supplied the Allies with ammunition, artillery shells, food, and fuel.
When the War ended in November 1918, we had 3 million men under arms with another million planned for 1919 when the War was actually expected to conclude.
One of the best World War I films has just been added to Netflix today. It is Paths of Glory with Kirk Douglas. It gives some idea of the insanity of battle and the lack of consideration for the troops ordered to carry out suicidal attacks.
I saw the movie many years ago. Since it's on Netflix, I'll have to watch it again.