World War I - Week 2 - August 9-16, 1914
POLITICAL
Aug 10 - France declares war on Austria-Hungary
Aug 12 - Britain declares war on Austria-Hungary
Aug 12 - Turkey receives gift from Germany of two battle cruisers as enticement to enter the war on the side of the Central Powers. In July 1914 Turkish crews were about to board two powerful dreadnaught battleships purchased by Turkey for $30 million and still in British shipyards where they were built. On July 28 the British Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, confiscated both ships to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. At the same time the powerful German cruisers Goeben and Breslau found themselves trapped in the eastern Mediterranean by the British and French fleets. They were gifted to Turkey to prevent their certain loss. Their names were changed to Turkish names, the Turkish flags wer rung up the poles, and the German crews donned fezzes to complete the masquerade.
Aug 14 - Russia issues proclamation promising reconstruction and autonomy to the Kingdom of Poland.
Aug 15 - Japan issues ultimatum to Germany demanding evacuation of Chinese port city of Tsing-Tao.
MILITARY
Aug 9 - First German submarine sunk by British cruiser H.M.S. Birmingham
Aug 10 After small early gains, French begin retreat at the first Battle of the Frontiers in Mulhouse
Aug 12 First major cavalry action when single Belgian division holds off an entire corps of German cavalry.
Aug 14 - Russians begin month-long rout of Austro-Hungarian forces in Galicia (today western Ukraine and southern Poland.) A-H would lose 325,000 men including 100,000 prisoners.
Aug 15 Serbs begin battle turning back Austro-Hungarian invading forces but would use up much of their sparse supplies of ammunition and shells.
QUOTES
The most terrible August in the history of the world. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes)
This war, like the next war, is a war to end war. David Lloyd George (British Chancellor of the Exchequer (Treasury Secretary) 1908-1915, Minister of Munitions 1915-1916, Secretary of State for War 1916, and Prime Minister 1916-1922)
The English change the whole situation-an obstinate people-they will keep up the war. It cannot end soon. Kaiser Wilhelm
That is how history is written. French General Gallieni (in civilian clothes) overhearing in a Paris caf another patron saying to another, I hear Gallieni has just entered Colmar (300 miles away) with 30,000 men.
Rape of B elgium
The German armies march through Belgium in the opening month of the war would gain them worldwide notoriety for its wanton brutality and destruction. While much exaggerated by Allied propaganda, their actions did much to bring them the moniker of Huns. It would only be exceeded two decades later by the Japanese Army in the Rape of Nanking.
-The total Belgian deaths during the war amount to 100,000 of which 60,000 were civilian deaths.
-Of the civilian deaths, at least 6,000 were executed. Priests, women as old as ninety, and even babies were shot or bayoneted. If a German soldier was killed by a sniper, as many as 100 civilian hostages would be simply lined up in the street and shot.
-Some 120,000 Belgian civilians were used as forced labor by the Germans.
- The burning of the treasured library of Louvain containing over 200,000 books and irreplaceable ancient manuscripts.
- Bombardment of the 700-year old Cathedral of Rheims.
The defense of Belgium was led by her 39-year old King Albert I. Though his tiny field army of 117,000 had no chance against the 600,000 of the best German units, the country chose to fight in defense of her honor.
King Albert I was much beloved in contrast to his predecessor, his uncle King Leopold II who was despised around the world for his plunder of the Belgian Congo. He took over the Congo Free State in 1885 as his personal property which made him the single largest landholder in the world. The colony was 76 times larger than the entire country of Belgium. It served solely to line the pockets of the greedy King mainly through the extraction of rubber. The natives were brutally enslaved and tortured and murdered if their quotas were not met.
The country of Belgium was the longest occupied country of the war from August 1914 until almost the closing days of the war in 1918. The Belgian Army under King Albert would continue to fight and hold a tiny patch of the country throughout the war.
The British Army (BEF British Expeditionary Forces)
As an island nation with the worlds largest empire, most of her power lie in the Royal Navy which surpassed the navies of the next two largest nations. The regular British army sent to France at the start of the War was only 150,000, smaller than Bulgaria or Serbia. In comparison, the invading German Armies in Belgium and France numbered over 1.5 million. Enlistees served for a total period of 12 years of active and reserve duty. Though small, it was an all-volunteer professional army. Most of its soldiers had battle experience gained in the colonial wars in the Sudan and the Boer War in South Africa.
The British Army (nicknamed Tommies ) prided itself on its rifle marksmanship. Soldiers were given unlimited time and ammunition to hone their skills with many incentives to improve to the highest level. At the first major battle of the war against the British at Mons the Germans were astounded at the rapid and accurate fire they encountered against the British riflemen. They believed they were facing hundreds of machine-gunners though the British army had an insignificant amount of machine guns early in the war compared to the Germans. Eventually, the massive casualties of the War would require a draft, and over 8 million British and Commonwealth soldiers would serve in the war sustaining over 900,000 deaths and over 2 million wounded.
Field Marshal Lord Herbert Kitchener
In the first years of the War he literally was the face of Britain. This famous recruiting poster brought many thousands of eager volunteers who would be called Kitcheners Army. By early September nearly a half million British had volunteered to fight.
The Kitchener legend began in 1898 while fighting Muslim fanatics in the Sudan. At the Battle of Omduran his outnumbered force killed or seriously wounded over 27,000 whirling Dervishes of the army of the Mahdi at the cost of only 47 lives of his men. He would go on to further glory in Egypt and elsewhere. Called in 1914 to be the Secretary of State of War, he did much to prepare the British Army for the coming fight. While most thought the war would be over in a matter of months, Kitchener stunned the British Cabinet with his prediction that the war would last at least 3 years. His was a great soldier but a stubborn and difficult politician. His colleagues in the Cabinet were almost relieved when he died a warriors death at sea when the ship he was on sunk in 1916.
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One thing I was srtuck by was the fact that the posted map showed nothing of Poland . On today's map it is quite prominent :
Also the attack on Belgium was something I was uninformed about ... quite vicious .
Poland had not existed as an independent entity since 1795. Its territory was controlled by Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. It would only come into being again after the war's end in 1918.
Poland always seems to end up as the buffer state between 2 nasty powers ...
Less than 2 years after it was reconstituted Poland would find itself in a war with Soviet Russia.
Excellent pokermike,
The Belgium army under King Albert, was very interesting information. They held on to a small part of Belgium throughout the war.
The ''exchange'' of battleships between, German, England and Turkey was new information to me.
Keep up the series. Very interesting.
Battleships were a really big deal back then ...
The War would change so many long-held conceptions of military warfare. Within the first weeks of the war would end the idea that fortresses could be effective defenses. The ring of forts in Belgium were expected to hold out for nine months or more. German artillery would leave them in rubble in a matter of 4-11 days.
It would also be end of horse cavalry which I will address in a separate section in the next few weeks.
Before the war both sides spent billions (in today's $$) building super battleships (dreadnaughts) yet there was only 1 large-scale battle of surface ships in the entire war between Britain and Germany in 1916 which ended in a virtual draw. The lowly submarine would have much more far-reaching consequences. The unrestricted German U-boat campaign brought the U.S. into the War and almost starved Britain into submission.
The difference between country leader perceptions about "might" and real world strategy is startling .
You have done a great amount of work here, Mike. I'm liking this. It seems like pandemonium ruled.
Churchill was right, of course. The ships would have ended up in the hands of the Germans.
As the Taliban are well aware the only secure locations are secret caves in a mountain range .
Mike,
SMS Goeben was actually a Battlecruiser of the Dreadnought class (in today's navies they would be called Battleships). At the time she was scrapped by the Turkish Navy in 1976, she was the only Dreadnought Battleship still existing outside the US and was the oldest one still in existence.
Scrapped in 1976? From wiki:
SMS Goeben[a] was the second of two Moltke-class battlecruisers of the Imperial German Navy, launched in 1911 and named after the German Franco-Prussian War veteran General August Karl von Goeben.
Holy cow !! That ship was 65 years old when it was scrapped and was already old when the Germans gave it to the Turks. It must have been one extremely sturdy ship to have lasted that long. I am amazed.
Mike,
I am finding this series fascinating. I too, didn't realize that there was no Poland. It explains why in WWII, Hitler thought of Poland as German and wanted it asLebensraum.
And I never knew aboutBelgium either. I have been there, and now you would never know that they were so brought to rubble.
Great job. Love the quotes!
Thank you Perrie. I am heartened by the support shown so far for my first two installments. In addition to the interesting (and terrible) events of the war itself, the geo-political consequences resulting later in history were far reaching. The emergence of the U.S. as a decisive player on the world scene, the rise of Communism in Russia, World War II, and the geography of the entire Middle East all had their roots in the War.