Published on 25 Apr 2016
It’s Chair of Wisdom time again and this week we talk about the experiments with body armor of World War 1, fortress design and the Belgian Armoured Car Division.
April 26, 2016
Body Armor – Fortress Design – Belgian Armoured Car Division I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
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April 25, 2016
The Battle of Jutland
The Battle of Jutland Animation from NIck on Vimeo.
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April 24, 2016
The Easter Rising – Ireland in World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special
Published on 23 Apr 2016
Easter 1916 was a turning point for Ireland and its situation between Home Rule and Irish soldiers serving on the fronts of Gallipoli and the Western Front. And even though the Easter Rising, the first armed uprising against the British was unsuccessful, the spark for Irish nationalism ultimately led to the establishment of the Irish Republic.
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April 22, 2016
The Muddy Graves of Russia and Kut I THE GREAT WAR Week 91
Published on 21 Apr 2016
With the spring in Russia and the Caucasus came the thaws on the Eastern Front and all the way down to Mesopotamia. The soldiers had to adapt to survive let alone fight. The Battle of Verdun still rages on though the French are not moving more airplanes to the area to break the German air superiority.
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April 21, 2016
Kaiser Wilhelm II, The Habsburg Empire & The Hunt I THE GREAT WAR Special feat. Rock Island Auction
Published on 20 Apr 2016
In this special episode we will have a look at the relationship between Germany and Austria-Hungary and how decisions were made during the Royal Hunt. This episode is supported by Rock Island Auction Company which supported us financially for this episode and with the pictures of the royal mounts.
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April 19, 2016
Shell Shock – The Psychological Scars of World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special
Published on 18 Apr 2016
The traumata of warfare were certainly nothing new when World War 1 broke out. But the extreme and prolonged exposure to machine gun fire, artillery bombardments and trench warfare led to a new kind of psychological disorder: Shell Shock. Soldiers who were perfectly fine on the outside, were incapable of fighting or living a normal life anymore.
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April 18, 2016
Justifying The Failure At Verdun? – The Falkenhayn Controversy I THE GREAT WAR Special
Published on 17 Apr 2016
Was Erich von Falkenhayn really planning to bleed the French white at Verdun or was his claim a fabrication after the fact? Contemporary historians have started to question Falkenhayn’s Christmas Memorandum which he claimed to have written in 1915 and which nobody had ever seen. Indy summarises the historical debate around the subject highlighting the arguments by Paul Jankowski and Alistair Horne.
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April 15, 2016
The Meat Grinder at Verdun – Brusilov’s New Plan I THE GREAT WAR Week 90
Published on 14 Apr 2016
The Russian offensive at Lake Naroch were an utter failure but the Russian General Aleksei Brusilov is already gearing up for the future mother of all offensives on the Eastern Front. At the same time the meat grinder at Verdun is sucking in German and French troops alive. Erich von Falkenhayn realised that his initial idea probably won’t work but he still tries to capture the Mort Homme and Cote 304. In far away Mesopotamia the siege of Kut is still going on even though the British and Indian soldiers are already killing the hunger with Opium pills.
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April 12, 2016
The Tragic Downfall Of The Lion Of The Isonzo – Svetozar Borojević I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
Published on 11 Apr 2016
Even though he was called “the thick headed Croat” no southern Slav had ever achieved the rank of Field Marshal before Svetozar Borojevic von Bojna. During World War 1 he was probably the best general of the Habsburg Empire and his deeds during the Carpathian campaign and especially the defence against the Italians at the Isonzo River made him popular and earned him another nickname: Lion of the Isonzo.
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April 10, 2016
Military Chaplains – German Skull Caps I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
Published on 9 Apr 2016
Chair of Wisdom Time! We are talking about Military Chaplains and the German Skull Caps. Bonus: Indy is preaching to all of us on why we shouldn’t compare numbers and statistics of the war without loosing touch with the individual fate.
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April 8, 2016
Zeppelins over Britain – Terror in the Skies I THE GREAT WAR Week 89
Published on 7 Apr 2016
As the other fronts are relatively quiet, the war is taken to the air. Zeppelins bombard Britain, the Italian and Austro-Hungarian air forces were fighting on the Italian Front and Greece was bombarded. The British and Greek civilians were now too casualties of this war with no end in sight. Though the Kaiser thinks the decision will be made at Verdun in the near future.
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April 5, 2016
Armed Neutrality – The Netherlands In WW1 I THE GREAT WAR Special
Published on 4 Apr 2016
The Netherlands were surrounded by World War 1 from 1914 onwards and their stance of armed neutrality made it difficult to manoeuvre between the Entente and the Central Powers. And while the Netherlands never joined the conflict in the end, the war took its toll on the nation.
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April 3, 2016
The Trench Cycle – What Happened to Captured Weapons? I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
Published on 2 Apr 2016
In this week’s episode of Out Of The Trenches Indy answers your questions about the trench rotation system, listening posts and captured weapons.
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April 2, 2016
QotD: The Anglo-Saxon encirclement strategy
In retrospect the fight against Napoleon seems to have engendered a new strategic method, later employed against Germany in two world wars and against the Soviet Union thereafter. The French might call it the Anglo-Saxon encirclement strategy. Its essential aim was to avoid direct combat with a formidable enemy, or at least to limit engagement to a minimum. Instead of confronting one vast army with another – at Waterloo there were only 25,000 British troops – the Anglo-Saxon approach was to take on the big beast by assembling as many neighbourhood dogs and cats as possible, with a few squirrels and mice thrown in. With the obvious exception of the Western Front in the First World War, that is how the two world wars were fought, with an ever longer list of allies large, small and trivial (e.g. Guatemala, whose rulers could thereby expropriate the coffee plantations of German settlers), and that is how the Soviet Union was resisted after 1945, with what eventually became the North Atlantic Alliance. Like the anti-Napoleon coalition, Nato was – and remains – a ragbag of member states large and small, of vastly different capacity for war or deterrence, not all of them loyal all the time, though loyal and strong enough. Like the challenge to British diplomacy in the struggle against Napoleon, the great challenge to which American diplomacy successfully rose was to keep the alliance going by tending to the various political needs of its member governments, even those of countries as small as Luxembourg, whose rulers sat on all committees as equals, even though they could never field more than a single battalion of troops.
Now it is the turn of the Chinese, whose strength is still modest yet growing too rapidly for comfort, and who are inevitably provoking the emergence of a coalition against them; the members range in magnitude from India and Japan down to the Sultanate of Brunei, in addition of course to the US. Should they become powerful enough, the Chinese will force even the Russian Federation into the coalition regardless of the innate preferences of its rulers, for strategy is always stronger than politics, as it was for the anti-communist Nixon and the anti-American Mao in 1972. China cannot therefore overcome its inferiority to the American-led coalition by converting its economic strength into aircraft carriers and such, any more than Napoleon could have overcome strategic encirclement by winning one more battle. The exact repetition of Napoleon’s fatal error by imperial and Nazi Germany is easily explained: history teaches no lesson except that there is a persistent failure to learn its lessons. It remains to be seen whether the Chinese will do any better.
Edward Luttwak, “A Damned Nice Thing”, London Review of Books, 2014-12-18.
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April 1, 2016
Verdun – A Nightmare to Annex I THE GREAT WAR – Week 88
Published on 31 Mar 2016
After the huge failure at Mort Homme the Germans decide to take Cote 304 and therefore go to the western edge of the Verdun salient to make progress. On the Eastern Front the Russian 5th army loses 28,000 men in the Lake Naroch offensive and runs in its own artillery fire while at home, the Russian minister of war will be sacked. On the sea, German U-boats strike down a hospital ship and a ferry, which they thought were troopships.
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