Tag: historical fiction

Research Notes – The Great War (13) The American President Hesitates

~ Meg ~ 17 Comments

My current work in progress is a historical novel partly set during the Great War. In order to write the time period accurately, I’ve been spending many hours reading and researching. I hope you find these bits of history as interesting as I do.

Woodrow Wilson became the 28th President of the United States in 1913, after serving as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and as Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913. Despite being a politician from the Mid-Atlantic states, Wilson was born and spent his early years in Virginia and Georgia, during the time of slavery and The Civil War. The dreadful war that tore the United States asunder had a huge influence on Wilson’s reluctance to commit an American army to fight on foreign soil, even for their closest allies. Nevertheless, by 1916, the USA was neutral in name only.

The war was fought not just with guns and bullets, but with food, clothing and other supplies. Barbed-wire, for instance, had been invented as a means of corralling the huge herds of cattle in the American West. Now it was being used as an obstacle to the soldiers trying to cross the ‘No Man’s Land’ between the trenches on the Western Front. These goods had to be brought in by ship from noncombatant nations willing to supply either side.

From the outset of hostilities, the British had squeezed German supply lines with a naval blockade. The Germans responded with their own lethal weapon – the U-Boat, a shortening of ‘unterseeboot‘, literally ‘undersea boat’. This terrifying weapon would have shifted the balance to a greater degree except for one factor: America. The American President, Woodrow Wilson, had condemned the use of the U-boat against neutral nations and civilian vessels. Fearing American entry into the war, the German government complied. Unrestricted submarine warfare was off the table. When German military commanders reviewed the situation, they realized adhering to these demands was the only thing saving the British from disaster.

The German U-boats patrolling the trade routes found targets in civilian ships despite the rules to stay away. The merchant ships of Britain and France often disguised their ships with flags of neutral countries but often didn’t fool the U-boat commanders stalking them. In those days, submarine captains only had the use of the periscope to decide whether a ship could be targeted or not. There was no sonar, no radar; all information was gathered by eyesight. It could be very easy to make a mistake and the captains tended to err on the side of ‘shoot first, ask questions later’. As a result, passenger liners like the Lusitania had been sunk in 1915 to enormous outcry in the United States. The American President threatened but still kept the nation out of the war.

By 1916, the British blockade was beginning to deeply impact Germany’s ability to wage war and to feed and care for its citizens back home. The potentially game-changing U-boats were being held in check and only at the behest of the United States. German leaders were finding this policy more and more incomprehensible. What did the Germans have to fear from America, after all?

At the time of The Spanish-American War, American military strength peaked at 210,000 men. This was in 1898. By 1907, it had dwindled to a mere 64,000 men. The British had that many casualties on the first day of fighting in The Somme. By 1914, the U.S. army had swelled to 98,000 men with another 10,000 added by 1916. The Germans were not intimidated by a 110,000 man army, deficient in experience and in both weapons and material for fighting a modern war. Militarily, the Germans ranked the United States with Denmark, Chile and Holland.

So it was on January 31, 1917 that Germany decided they would be hamstrung no longer. The Imperial German Government notified the American President that they would begin unrestricted submarine warfare the following day.

Images courtesy Wikipedia and Wired.

Research Notes – The Great War (12) Passchendaele 1917

~ Meg ~ 36 Comments

My current work in progress is a historical novel partly set during the Great War. In order to write the time period accurately, I’ve been spending many hours reading and researching. One of my characters will be in the mud of Passchendaele in 1917. I visited the area in 2013. It is still chilling to think of the horrors that the soldiers endured.

The stalemate along the Western Front in 1917 looked like it might finally be breaking, with successes by British and Canadian forces in taking Messines and Vimy Ridges, respectively. The German salient had been pushed back and the plans to break the line were being formulated. The forthcoming battle would officially be known as the Third Battle of Ypres, but would be more famously known as The Battle of Passhendaele, after the little village a few miles to the east of the site.

The area from Ypres to Passchendaele slopes continuously uphill—not an ideal way for the British to forge into battle. Even the soil around the area was about to become an obstacle. It had the consistency of clay—dense and heavy and prone to holding water. Before the war, the farmers who worked this land had needed to build up an elaborate drainage system to draw off the water during the rainy season. The battles fought in the area over the course of the war had demolished this fragile system, with the result that rain-soaked fields would become mires of thick, clinging mud. The success of the British advance in the Third Battle of Ypres was dependent on the weather cooperating.

June 1917 proved to be a good month for getting ready. In July the weather was for the most part agreeable, and the gun batteries came forward and took up their positions. The standard means of attack was to use heavy artillery to bombard the enemy in their trenches and then to send infantry ‘over the top’ to fight man to man. The initial bombardment could go on for weeks at a time, rendering the field into which the soldiers would follow a nightmare landscape of craters, rubble and ash. Though this approach had so far not proven to be an effective method, the generals were still enthralled by the idea of ‘more’ —more artillery cannons, more guns, more men, and not to mention, more casualties.

Airplanes had become a means of reconnaissance and the reports brought back by the pilots stated that the German morale was low and conditions looked good for an attack. However, British intelligence-gathering during the war was neither very objective nor accurate. The spies were told what the commanders hoped was true, and the spies basically confirmed that it was.

The artillery began raining death on July 18th, with the infantry attack scheduled to begin on July 31st. But as the shriek and blast of the heavy mortars went on for those two weeks, the weather began to turn. At first, occasional heavy rains filled the myriad shell holes littering the fields and due to the poor drainage, they remained that way. Still, on that last day of July 1917, the men crawled from the trenches at day break, carrying 60-80 pounds of gear on their backs and began to advance. They made two miles by nightfall and considered it a good start.

The next day, the first of August, it began to rain in earnest. This was no summer shower; it was a steady, soaking, continuous downpour. It rained for two weeks straight. The already saturated soil began to dissolve. The shell holes filled and the engineers tried to build up wooden walkways around them. The soldiers were slipping in the mud, falling in, and with their heavy packs weighing them down, drowning. The boards laid down to create footing were little better. In the rain, they became slick so that the soldiers had to tread carefully. The Germans shot the slow moving infantrymen off the boards, they fell in the mud and drowned.

August gave way to September and still the rain fell. Despite all this misery, the attack went on and finally Canadian troops took and held the village of Passchendaele. The advance on the Ypres Salient had gained the British four miles at the cost of a quarter million men.

British military historian Basil Liddell Hart relates the story of a staff officer who visited the battlefield after the fact. As he gazed out at the sea of mud, he said, “My God, did we send men to advance in that?” He then broke down and wept as his escort led him away.

There would never be another battle like Passchendaele. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in Tender Is the Night that battles like those fought on the Western Front could never be fought again:

“See that little stream we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation. …This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes.”

He meant the only people that could fight that sort of battle were those who possessed a sure faith in their countries, their institutions, and their own unquestioned value systems. Only that kind of faith and confidence could prepare men sufficiently to endure the hell of such battles. Men like that were now gone: rotting in the fields of Belgium and France or if they lived, no longer in possession of such faith.

Nevertheless, the war itself had another year to run. New methods and new weapons were about to change the practice of war forever.

Images courtesy: Canadian War Museum, The Times of London, The Spectator, and Wikipedia

Research Notes – The Great War (7) The British Expeditionary Force

~ Meg ~ 27 Comments

I’m researching The Great War for my current work in progress: a historical novel set during that time. To write the period accurately, I’ve been reading and studying the war and the surrounding events. I hope you find these bits of information as interesting as I do. ~ Meg

At the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, the British were an unknown quantity. Their Liberal government was horrified at the prospect of war. The Germans were counting on that queasiness to overrule the British commitment to uphold Belgian neutrality as promised under the London Treaty of 1839. The German invasion of France, as dictated by The Schlieffen Plan, depended on the armies being able to swing south through Belgium. On August 2, 1914, Germany demanded right of passage for their troops to march through Belgium. The Belgians refused. The Germans came anyway and Belgium found itself at war.

The British responded by delivering an ultimatum. Germany ignored it. They had delivered their own ultimatum to Belgium, in which they promised to leave their territory upon cessation of hostilities and to make reparations for any damage caused by the troops. No one believed that for a minute. Belgian Premier Charles de Broqueville said, “If Germany is victorious, Belgium, whatever her attitude, will be annexed to the German Empire.”

German troops entered Belgium on August 3, 1914 and Britain declared war on August 4th. Britain would enter a war in which she had not been directly affronted. German Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke knew the British would enter the war with or without Belgian violation. He said, “[England] … fears German hegemony and true to her policy of maintaining a balance of power will do all she can to check the increase of German power.”

The B.E.F. – British Expeditionary Force had first been organized in 1907. Behind the scenes, an inner circle of the British government had made greater commitments to France in case of war than was widely known to the public. Nevertheless, the commitment to the cause was to be rather small: four infantry divisions plus cavalry and artillery; no more than 100,000 men. Compared to the 2 million invading Germans, this was a drop in the bucket. However, in the beginning, British involvement was as important for what it symbolized -allegiance with France- as for what it actually contributed. When asked the minimum number of British troops with which France would be content, the politician Georges Clemenceau famously replied, “One, and we shall take good care to get him killed.” The British plan largely consisted of falling in on the French left flank and following their lead.

By the time the B.E.F. reached position in Mauberge on August 20, the fighting was well under way. France’s offensive in Lorraine was in trouble and Belgium was being destroyed.