Quotulatiousness

November 11, 2025

Four battles of the Canadian Corps

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Following on from part one (excerpted here), The Black Horse outlines four major battles that the Canadians fought on the western front during the First World War:

Sir Arthur Currie
Portrait by William Orpen, 1919.

The first part of the series was a political biography of Currie; the second part attempts to tell the story of the Canadian Corps at war through somewhat detailed account of four important battles. The piece is only partly biographical, it partly tells the story of Currie’s war, and partly tells the story the Canadian men who fought for the British Empire in the Great War. It’s a story of incredible martial prowess, but the careful reader will also observe a story of warring duties placed upon the leader of a colonial army; duty to his men, duty to the political leadership of his colonial people and the future of that nation, duty to the objectives of the imperial power on whose behalf he fought, and finally duty to glorious Victory. Currie ended his life understood by those with eyes to see as a great warrior and a military genius; but disliked by his men and hated by the leadership of his people because he prioritized the needs to the Empire and of Victory; but after the war the Empire was of limited service to Currie and to the Canadian people. I leave to the reader, to history, and to God, to decide the value of Victory.

[…]

2nd Battle of Ypres

In the spring of 1915 the early dynamic advances of the German army were a distant memory faded behind the great defeat at the First Battle of the Marne. Through the winter both sides had dug in; and many German troops were redeployed to the Russian front. German chemists Walther Nernst and Fritz Haber brought forward the idea of using heavier-than-air Chlorine gas, carried on the wind, to overcome the mathematical impossibility of conventional attack. On April 22, 1915, Albrecht of Württemberg led 7 German divisions to attack 8 Allied divisions, including the 1st Canadian Division under the command of Sir Edwin Alfred Hervey Alderson. The attack began with the release of 168 tons of chlorine gas at about 1700h along a 4 mile stretch of the front around Langemark.

[…]

Vimy Ridge

For a year and a half after Ypres, Currie & the Canadian Corps continued to fight desperate engagements along the Western front with no clear strategic conclusion. After heavy losses and a lot of hard-learned lessons at the Somme from Sept 1915-Sept 1916, the Canadian Corps and Currie with them had become both hardened by bitter experience, and desperate to find better ways to prosecute the war. In September 1915 he was recorded to have said “I did not care what happened to me, but to my men, to their wives, their mothers, their children and to Canada I owed a duty which I wanted to fulfill to the very best of my ability”. Later that year as the division struggled with desertion, he ordered the execution of a deserter despite a three hour plea for clemency by the divisional cleric. The decision restored discipline, but haunted Currie’s dreams long afterwards.

In May 1916 Julian Byng took command of the Canadian Corps, replacing Sir Edwin Alderson. In the fall of that year, after heavy losses in a series of engagements at the Somme, Byng was given the opportunity to reorganize and refit the Canadian Corps; he looked to Currie as a key partner in the effort. They replaced the ineffective Ross Rifle with the Lee Enfield, reorganized the platoon structure to include heavy weapons within each platoon [machine guns, mortars, etc.], and implemented new training and tactics like rehearsals for advances, and the “creeping barrage”, carefully coordinated intended to keep artillery shells landing slightly ahead of advancing men.

[…]

Hill 70

After Vimy, Julian Byng was promoted. Currie was promoted in turn to lead the Canadian Corps. He would lead the Corps that he and Byng had made into one of the most effective fighting forces on any side of the conflict and lead it to bloody victory again and again. There is perhaps no better example of the mastery of the Canadian Corps, from top to bottom, than the battle of Hill 70. “Hill 70 was as close to a perfect battle as was ever fought on the Western Front” wrote historian Tim Cook.

[…]

The Hundred Days Offensive & the Pursuit to Mons

As the winter of 1917-18 passed, a new set of highly political decisions concerning whether and how to reorganize the Canadian Corps for the next round of fighting were taken. As noted in part one, Currie opted to split up the newly formed 5th division to reinforce the four divisions of the Canadian Corps and triple the size of the field engineering element. The decision optimized the Canadian Corps as an attacking force; and when they returned to the front that’s exactly how they would be used. Between August 8th and November 11th, 1918, the Canadian Corps fought nine major battles advancing 86 miles, and suffering 45,835 casualties [The force that began the offensive was ~100,000]. By comparison, the substantially larger American Expeditionary Force, over this same period, advanced only 34 miles while capturing only half the number of prisoners, suffering roughly twice the casualties per German division defeated.

November 4, 2025

Sir Arthur Currie, Canada’s best general in WW1

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, InfantryDort gives a lesson in Canadian military history that your kids are unlikely to ever get in school:

Canada: Let us remind you of what your nation was once capable of, and likely still is again. Time will tell. Courtesy of @grok UNHINGED👇

SIR ARTHUR CURRIE: The Ontario slide-rule psychopath who turned war into a goddamn spreadsheet and made the Kaiser cry uncle.

Listen up, you trench-foot tourists and armchair Haigs. While Europe’s aristocrats were using human meat to plug shell holes, some lanky insurance salesman from Napperton, Ontario rolled up with a protractor and a grudge against inefficiency so pure it could sterilize a field hospital. Six-foot-four of quiet Canadian fury. No Sandhurst polish. No inherited estate. Just a militia gunner who looked at the Western Front and said: “This is sloppy. Let me fix your murder math.”

Vimy Ridge: the ridge that laughed at French corpses for two years. Currie hands every platoon leader a map accurate to the latrine, rehearses the assault until the boys can do it blindfolded in a thunderstorm, then unleashes a creeping barrage so precise it’s basically a Roomba made of high explosives. Four days later the ridge is theirs. France needed therapy. Canada needed a birth certificate.

Hill 70: supposed to be a sideshow. Currie turned it into a German obituary — 9,000 Canadian casualties for 20,000 German ones. That’s not a battle, that’s a hostile takeover with extra steps.

Passchendaele: Haig wants it. Currie says, “Fine, but it’ll cost exactly 16,000 of my boys”. Mud eats them like clockwork. Sixteen thousand. He predicted it to the body. The man could forecast death better than the Farmer’s Almanac predicts frost.

Amiens: the day the German army discovered existential dread. Currie’s corps punches twenty-two kilometers through the Hindenburg Line in four days like it’s made of wet cardboard. Ludendorff calls it “the black day of the German Army” and probably wet his monocle.

The Hundred Days: wherever the Canadians go, the war ends faster — Arras, Cambrai, Canal du Nord. German prisoners start asking for Currie by name like he’s the Grim Reaper’s polite cousin. “Wenn Currie kommt, bricht die Linie.” When Currie shows up, your defense budget becomes a suggestion.

And the best part? He’s not screaming. He’s not posing for propaganda photos with a riding crop. He’s in the back, recalculating artillery tables while lesser generals are still figuring out which end of the horse goes forward.

Post-war? Becomes principal of McGill because apparently breaking the German army wasn’t challenging enough. Gets slandered for “wasting lives” at Mons, sues the bastard for libel, and wins with the same cold precision he used to win battles. Even his lawsuits had kill ratios.

Runner-ups:
Sir Richard Turner — the human participation ribbon. Managed the 2nd Division like success was contagious.

Sir David Watson — followed Currie’s plans like IKEA instructions: mostly right, but slower.

Sir Henry Burstall — thought “supporting fire” meant “hope the shell lands somewhere in Europe”.

Currie carried their divisions like a Sherpa with a PhD in applied violence.

Verdict: Currie didn’t just win battles. He invented the modern battlefield while everyone else was still playing medieval siege with extra mustard gas. Montgomery called him “the best corps commander of the war”, and Monty would rather die than compliment anyone.

Share this if you’d let Currie balance your checkbook, plan your wedding, and end your existential crisis with a well-timed barrage. Canada’s greatest general was a nerd with a death wish for waste and a heart that bled maple syrup for every lost soul. Never forget.

February 28, 2024

Why Germany Lost the First World War

Filed under: Britain, Economics, France, Germany, History, Military, Russia, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Great War
Published Nov 10, 2023

Germany’s defeat in the First World War has been blamed on all kinds of factors or has even been denied outright as part of the “stab in the back” myth. But why did Germany actually lose?
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December 28, 2023

War-winning expertise of 1918, completely forgotten by 1939

Filed under: Books, Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Dr. Robert Lyman writes about the shocking contrasts between the British Army (including the Canadian and Australian Corps) during the Hundred Days campaign of 1918 and the British Expeditionary Force that was driven from the continent at Dunkirk:

There was a fleeting moment during the One Hundred Days battles that ended the First World War in France in which successful all-arms manoeuvre by the British and Commonwealth armies, able to overturn the deadlock of previous years of trench stalemate, was glimpsed. But the moment, for the British Army at least, was not understood for what it was. With hindsight we can see that it was the birth of modern warfare, in which armour, infantry, artillery and air power are welded together able successfully to fight and win a campaign against a similarly-equipped enemy. Unfortunately in the intervening two decades the British Army simply forgot how to fight a peer adversary in intensive combat. It did not recognise 1918 for what it was; a defining moment in the development of warfare that needed capturing and translating into a doctrine on which the future of the British Army could be built. The tragedy of the inter-war years therefore was that much of what had been learned at such high cost in blood and treasure between 1914 and 1918 was simply forgotten. It provides a warning for our modern Army that once it goes, the ability to fight intensively at campaign level is incredibly hard to recover. The book that General Lord Dannatt and I have written traces the catastrophic loss of fighting knowledge after the end of the war, and explains the reasons for it. Knowledge so expensively learned vanished very quickly as the Army quickly adjusted back to its pre-war raison d’etre: imperial policing. Unsurprisingly, it was what many military men wanted: a return to the certainties of 1914. It was certainly what the government wanted: no more wartime extravagance of taxpayer’s scarce resources. The Great War was seen by nearly everyone to be a never-to-be-repeated aberration.

The British and Commonwealth armies were dramatically successful in 1918 and defeated the German Armies on the battlefield. Far from the “stab in the back” myth assiduously by the Nazis and others, the Allies fatally stabbed the German Army in the chest in 1918. The memoirs of those who experienced action are helpful in demonstrating just how far the British and Commonwealth armies had moved since the black days of 1 July 1916. The 27-year old Second Lieutenant Duff Cooper, of the 3rd Battalion The Grenadier Guards, waited with the men of 10 platoon at Saulty on the Somme for the opening phase of the advance to the much-vaunted Hindenburg Line. His diaries show that his experience was as far distant from those of the Somme in 1916 as night is from day. There is no sense in Cooper’s diaries that either he or his men felt anything but equal to the task. They were expecting a hard fight, but not a slaughter. Why? Because they had confidence in the training, their tactics of forward infiltration, their platoon weapons and a palpable sense that the army was operating as one. They were confident that their enemy could be beaten.

[…]

It would take the next war for dynamic warfare to be fully developed. It would be mastered in the first place by the losers in 1918 – the German Army. The moment the war ended the ideas and approaches that had been developed at great expense were discarded as irrelevant to the peace. They weren’t written down to be used as the basis for training the post-war army. Flanders was seen as a horrific aberration in the history of warfare, which no-right thinking individual would ever attempt to repeat. Combined with a sudden raft of new operational commitments – in the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, Russia and Ireland – the British Army quickly reverted to its pre-1914 role as imperial policemen. No attempt was made to capture the lessons of the First World War until 1932 and where warfighting was considered it tended to be about the role of the tank on the future battlefield. This debate took place in the public arena by advocates writing newspaper articles to advance their arguments. These ideas were half-heartedly taken up by the Army in the later half of the 1920s but quietly dropped in the early 1930s. The debates about the tank and the nature of future war were bizarrely not regarded as existential to the Army and they were left to die away on the periphery of military life.

The 1920s and 1903s were a low point in national considerations about the purpose of the British Army. The British Army quickly forgot what it had so painfully learnt and it was this, more than anything else, that led to a failure to appreciate what the Wehrmacht was doing in France in 1940 and North Africa in 1941-42.

October 8, 2023

The Grave of Canada’s Greatest General: Sir Arthur Currie

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

OTD Military History
Published 23 Jun 2023

The grave of General Sir Arthur Currie in Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal, Quebec. Arthur Currie was the commander of the Canadian Corps from June 1917 to the end of World War 1. Appointed as the Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University in 1920, he held that position until his death in 1933.
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September 27, 2023

The British army between 1918 and 1940

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Richard Dannatt and Robert Lyman recently published Victory to Defeat, which chronicles the decline of the British army’s fighting capabilities in the interwar years. Robert Lyman posted a longer version of Gordon Corrigan’s review for Aspects of History (with permission):

The British Army ended the First World War well trained, well led, well equipped and capable of engaging in all arms intensive warfare. Of all the players, on both sides, this army was unquestionably the most capable of deployment against a first class enemy anywhere in the world. Twenty years later it found itself with very much the same equipment, but with very much less of it, and devoid of either the ability or the means to fight a war in Europe against an enemy which had absorbed the lessons of 1918 but which the British had forgotten. It was the British Army that had invented blitzkrieg (although of course they did not call it that, a term coined by the French press very much later) and used it during the Battle of Amiens and on into the “Hundred Days” that saw the defeat of the German Army on the battlefield, and whatever German myth later averred, it was the British Army that forced that victory on the Western Front, not the French and not the Americans. And yet, in 1939 and 1940 the British were roundly defeated in France and Belgium, in Greece, in Crete and in North Africa. In this important – and to this reviewer almost heart rending – book the authors describe how and why the victors of 1918 were allowed to become incapable of fighting intensive warfare a mere two decades later.

In the first part of the book the authors describe the build up to the First War, and their explanation of the so called “Curragh Mutiny” is much more accurate than many accounts by others (although the officers did not threaten to disobey orders, only to resign, and while Carson’s Ulster Volunteers were indeed incorporated into the British Army as the 36th Ulster Division, so were Redmond’s National Volunteers, into the 16th Irish Division). The authors then go on to show how the British government had, albeit reluctantly, accepted a continental commitment in 1914 and had despatched an expeditionary force to Belgium, described then and later as the finest body of troops ever to leave these shores. Fine they certainly were, well trained, well led and well equipped, but the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of professional regular soldiers was pitifully small, and with experience of imperial policing and not of war against a first class enemy. With the need to expand enormously and rapidly, this army had to adapt to a theatre where massed artillery, machine guns and barbed wire made any attempt to manoeuvre almost impossible. The book shows how by trial and error, by analysis of operations and by a gradually developing doctrine the British learned to use a combination of all arms to break through German defences and eventually to defeat them. With the infantry, the artillery, the armour, the engineers and increasingly the air all working together to get inside the enemy’s decision making circle, to get him on the back foot and keep him there, these were the elements of blitzkrieg, but it was the defeated Germans who were to absorb those principles and perfect them until twenty years after their defeat they were the most competent army in Europe.

After an excellent account of the British journey from an imperial gendarmerie to a practitioner of intensive war, the next part of the book shows how and why by the time the Second World War came along the British were incapable, not only of deterring war, but of fighting it. The “ten year rule”; the reluctance of governments to spend on defence; the political refusal to contemplate another war in Europe and the reluctance of the public to contemplate another bloodletting like that of the First War; the inability to experiment or to develop tanks and armoured vehicles; the seeming impossibility of reconciling the twin requirements of imperial policing and any commitment to land operations in Europe with the assets available; the myth of the “bomber will always get through” and the absence of any consistent war fighting doctrine, all are lucidly explained. Much of the fault is shown to lie with politicians, and surely the most disgraceful example of political interference was the sacking of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), the professional head of the army, by the leaving of a note on his desk by the very dubious Secretary of State for War, Hore-Belisha. The generals are not spared, however. Despite restrictions on funding and refusal by governments to accept that another war was looming generals could have spoken out, although it does have to be recognised that in a democracy the civil power is paramount.

August 8, 2023

How the Battle of Amiens Influenced the “Stab in the Back” Myth

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, France, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

OTD Military History
Published 7 Aug 2023

The Battle of Amiens started on August 8 1918. It started the process that caused the final defeat of the German Army on the battlefield during World War 1. Many people falsely claimed that the German Army was not defeated on the battlefield but at home by groups that wished to see German fall. One person who helped to create this myth was German General Erich Ludendorff. He called August 8 “the black day of the German Army”.

See how this statement connects to the stab in the back myth connects to Amiens and the National Socialists in Germany.
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July 22, 2022

QotD: Spoiler – there was no technological solution to trench warfare in WW1

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Quotations, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

On the one hand, the later myth that the German army hadn’t been defeated in the field was nonsense – they had been beat almost along the entire front, falling back everywhere. Allied victory was, by November, an inevitability and the only question was how much blood would be spilled before it happened. On the other hand, had the German army opted to fight to the last, that victory would have been very slow in coming and Foch’s expectation that a final peace might wait until 1920 (and presumably several million more dead) might well have been accurate. On the freakishly mutated third hand, it also seems a bit off to say that [the French doctrine of] Methodical Battle had won the day; it represented at best an incremental improvement in the science of trench warfare which, absent the blockade, potentially endless American manpower and production (comparatively little of which actually fought compared to the British and the French, even just taking the last Hundred Days) and German exhaustion might not have borne fruit for years, if ever.

All of which is to say, again, that the problem facing generals – German, French, British and later American – on the Western Front (and also Italian and Austrian generals on the Italian front) was effectively unsolvable with the technologies at the time. Methodical Battle probably represented the best that could be done with the technology of the time. The technologies that would have enabled actually breaking the trench stalemate were decades away in their maturity: tanks that could be paired with motorized infantry to create fast moving forces, aircraft that could effectively deliver close air support, cheaper, smaller radios which could coordinate those operations and so on. These were not small development problems that could have been solved with a bit more focus and funding but major complexes of multiple interlocking engineering problems combined with multiple necessary doctrinal revolutions which were in turn premised on technologies that didn’t exist yet which even in the heat of war would have taken many more years to solve; one need merely look at the progression of design in interwar tanks to see all of the problems and variations that needed to be developed and refined to see that even a legion of genius engineers would have required far more time than the war allowed.

It is easy to sit in judgement over the policy makers and generals of the war – and again, to be fair, some of those men made terrible decisions out of a mix of incompetence, malice and indifference (though I am fascinated how, in the Anglophone world, so much of the opprobrium is focused on British generals when frankly probably no British commander even makes the bottom five worst generals. Most lists of “worst generals” are really just “generals people have heard of” with little regard to their actual records and so you see baffling choices like placing Joseph Joffre who stopped the German offensive in 1914 on such lists while leaving Helmuth von Moltke who botched the offensive off of them. Robert Doughty does a good job of pointing out that men like Haig and Foch who were supposedly such incompetent generals in 1915 and 1916 show remarkable skill in 1918).

But the problem these generals faced was fundamentally beyond their ability or anyone’s ability to solve. We didn’t get into it here, but every conceivable secondary theater of war was also tried, along with naval actions, submarines, propaganda, and internal agitation. This on top of the invention of entirely new branches of the army (armor! air!) and the development of almost entirely new sciences to facilitate those branches. Did the generals of WWI solve the trench stalemate? No. But I’d argue no one could have.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.

July 4, 2022

QotD: The French solution to trench warfare

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military, Quotations, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

That isn’t to say that battlefield tactics hadn’t improved. Quite to the contrary, 1918 saw both the Germans and the Allies deploy far more effective systems for assaulting trenches, though I would argue that it was actually the French who came closest to having the matter as figured out as one could have it with the equipment of 1918. The French method, termed la bataille conduite (“methodical battle”) has an understandably poor reputation because this method failed so badly against the technologies of 1940 but as we’ve seen that was quite a different technological environment than 1918.

On the defensive, the French had adopted many of the same principles of the German defense-in-depth we’ve already discussed. On the offense, they came to favor (particularly under the influence of Philippe Pétain and […] Ferdinand Foch) an offensive doctrine designed to maximize France’s position in an attritional contest: that is to limit losses and maximize enemy casualties while still taking and holding ground. The system favored limited “bite-and-hold” attacks, ideally limited such that the attack stopped before triggering the inevitable German counter-attack. Remember that it was when the attacker ran out of steam and the defender’s counter-attack came that the casualty ratios tended to shift to favor the defender. In French thinking, the solution was just to not reach that point.

Instead, the French came to favor – and the British and Americans picked up the same method by the end – elaborately prepared small offensives. The elaborate preparation meant planning out the attack carefully, using shorter but carefully planned hurricane barrages (all of this planning, of course took time) and then seizing the enemy’s forward positions and just their forward positions. Instead of then trying to push through – the old French notion of assault brutal et continu (“brutal and continuous” – a “keep up the pressure till they break” method) which Robert Nivelle had favored – methodical battle focused on “bite-and-hold”.

Once you hit your limited objectives in that first rush where enemy resistence is disoriented (from the short, hurricane barrage) and weaker – and thus where the casualty ratio favors you – you stop and begin fortifying your position. You dig those communications trenches, move up your artillery and brace for the counter-attack. By the time the enemy realizes you aren’t going to attack his second or third line positions (and trigger his devastating counter-attack), you are dug in and prepared for his attack (the hold part of “bite-and-hold”). To reestablish defense in depth, the defender now has to back up to establish new lines to the rear (or launch his own fresh offensive, but by late 1918, the Germans were too weak for this). A long series of such attacks – with significant intervals for fresh careful planning and stockpiling resources – could slowly but surely lever your opponent off of key positions, one by one. It would also preserve a favorable balance of casualties, ensuring that in the end, the enemy runs out of men and shells before you do (that is the “rupture” that Joffre had always hoped for, but which arrived but two years too late for his career).

Such a slow, expensive, bloody and unglamorous strategy was in some ways only politically possible once, by 1918, it had become apparent that all other options were exhausted. That said, to argue that this bite-and-hold operational doctrine broke the trench stalemate is probably not fair either. The progress of allied offensives in 1918 was extremely slow by even the standards of 1914. The German Spring Offensive was well and truly done in July and the Allied offensive picked up in August and ran through November as fast as it could (with Foch doing everything short of getting out and pushing the offensive to try to speed it up) and yet the final allied positions by November were not even in Germany. Even at its greatest distance in 100 days of unbroken victories by a force with materiel and numerical superiority, the front moved less than 100 miles and the overall casualty ratio was roughly even (around a million on both sides).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.

May 3, 2019

“The Lost Battalion” – The Meuse-Argonne Offensive – Sabaton History 013

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Media, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published on 2 May 2019

In the last months of the Great War, the Americans join the fighting on the Western Front in an effort to break through the German Lines for once and for all. The Americans launch their Meuse-Argonne Offensive in the fall of 1918. As part of the offensive, nine companies of the United States 77th Division under command of Major Charles White Whittlesey pushes through the German lines with remarkable ease. Little did they know that the German lines were not abandoned, but that they simply found a hole. The Lost Battalion was surrounded and the men had to fight for days, awaiting their rescue.

Support Sabaton History on Patreon (and possibly get a special edition of The Great War): https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory

Watch the Official Lyric Video of “The Lost Battalion” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSZtV…

Check out the trailer for Sabaton’s new album The Great War right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCZP1…

Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
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Sources:
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From the comments:

Sabaton History
1 day ago
We met up with Indy in the Argonne to film Sabaton History’s episode for “The Lost Battalion”. As it happens, our new album is about the First World War as well. We have published a video earlier today presenting the “History Channel Edition” for the upcoming Sabaton Album The Great War. This is a special edition of the new album that is an exclusive reward for people who generously support us on Patreon as a Hussar or higher. If you want to check out the video in which Joakim and Indy explain the contents of the special edition, click here: https://youtu.be/Nk-VN_PjZyg If you want to support this channel on Patreon, go here: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory

Thanks for your time and cheers! 🤘

November 11, 2018

Armistice – But Peace? I THE GREAT WAR Week 225

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

The Great War
Premiered 4 hours ago

On November 11 1918, the German delegation and the Allies reach an agreement for an armistice. At the 11th hour the guns go silent and the First World War is over, well at least the guns go silent but is it a peace already? Germany is struggling with revolution and civil war at home, the break up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire causes a lot of chaos. And in Romania, the men are taking up arms again.

November 9, 2018

Revolution in Germany – Armistice in Austria I THE GREAT WAR Week 224

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 8 Nov 2018

Unrest within the German Empire is spreading, resentment against the war, the hunger and the elites is turning into revolutionary action and with a mutiny in Kiel the wheels begin to turn quickly. Austria signs an armistice, the Macedonian Front collapses, Romania might enter the war again and the new German political leaders send a delegation through the lines in France. Their goal: An Armistice.

November 2, 2018

Austria-Hungary Disintegrates – The Ottoman Empire Leaves the War I THE GREAT WAR Week 223

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Middle East, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 1 Nov 2018

The Ottoman Empire has been on the retreat in the Middle East since the renewed British offensive in September and now, as the allies are threatening the Turkish heartland and also Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire calls for an armistice. The Armistice of Mudros is signed as the remaining Central Powers also struggle to keep their Empires together.

October 19, 2018

The Battle of the Selle – Ludendorff Resigns I THE GREAT WAR Week 221

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Italy, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 18 Oct 2018

As the Germans are retreating further and further during the Battle of the Selle, Erich Ludendorff – the German Quartermaster General, one half of Germany’s military dictatorship and mastermind behind the last big German offensive in spring 1918 – resigns under pressure by the Kaiser and the Reichstag. The German upper class realizes that their days might be numbered if the war continues in the current form and Austria-Hungary’s Emperor Karl has the same epiphany.

October 12, 2018

The Hindenburg Line Breaks – The Lost Battalion Returns I THE GREAT WAR Week 220

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 11 Oct 2018

The Hindenburg Line or Siegfriedstellung is the backbone of the German defenses on the Western Front and this week 100 years ago, the Allies break through during the Battle of St. Quentin Canal. At the same time, the political fallout within Germany continues and the Allied Army of the Orient continues its offensive on the Macedonian Front.

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