greatwar-1914

June 24, 1918 - British Drop War’s Heaviest Bomb
Pictured - The “SN” bomb weighed 1650 lbs. Puny by the standards of the next war’s “blockbusters” it was nevertheless the heaviest type of bomb used in World War One.
When the Great War began, planes... — **June 24, 1918 - British Drop War’s Heaviest Bomb**
*Pictured - The “SN” bomb weighed 1650 lbs. Puny by the standards of the next war’s “blockbusters” it was nevertheless the heaviest type of bomb used in World War One.*
When the Great War began, planes were useful only for reconnaissance. Nevertheless some pilots tried their hand at war by dropping bricks, darts, or grenades out of the cockpit onto troops down below. Nothing showed how rapidly airspace had been weaponized since then as the RAF’s use of a 1,650-lb bomb on June 24, the war’s heaviest explosive dropped by a plane. The bomb was dropped by one of the massive new Handley Page Type O machines, used for strategic bombing over Germany and occupied France and Belgium.

Source: Flickr / defenceimages ww1 ww1 centenary ww1 history 1918 history world war one first world war great war

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June 25, 1918 - Pershing Demands Three Million Americans in France by 1919
Pictured - American troops parade through London before heading to the Western Front. American reinforcements were decisive to turning the tide of World War One.
American... — **June 25, 1918 - Pershing Demands Three Million Americans in France by 1919**
*Pictured - American troops parade through London before heading to the Western Front. American reinforcements were decisive to turning the tide of World War One.*
American troops were involved in one of their first pitched battles in June 1918 as they struggled at Belleau Wood, where the Marine Brigade had taken a foothold in a German stronghold. This American force, however, was only the spearhead of a much larger planned deployment. On the Western Front three million Allied soldier faced three-and-a-half million Germans; American reinforcements were still needed to tip the scale in the Allies’ favor.
Pershing hoped to bring more men to France as quickly as possible. in June he wrote to President Wilson’s confidant Colonel House, urging rapid action. “The Allies are done for,” warned Pershing, “and the only them (especially France) in the war will be the assurance that we have enough force to assume the initiative.” To have that, Pershing demanded a doubling of Allied strength by expanding the 800,000 strong American army to three million in sixty-six divisions: “the least that should be through of.” He wanted them ready by 1919, which Allied leaders believed would be the decisive year of the war.

ww1 ww1 centenary ww1 history 1918 history world war one first world war great war

*A British bomber soars over the clouds.*

ww1 ww1 history ww1 centenary 1918 history world war one first world war great war aviation history

June 19, 1918 - Top Italian Ace Barraca Killed by Ground Fire
Pictured - Francesco Baracca poses in front of his SPAD S.XIII scout days before his death. Barraca’s personal insignia of a rearing black horse was adopted by Italian racer Enzo... — **June 19, 1918 - Top Italian Ace Barraca Killed by Ground Fire**
*Pictured - Francesco Baracca poses in front of his SPAD S.XIII scout days before his death. Barraca’s personal insignia of a rearing black horse was adopted by Italian racer Enzo Ferrari.*
As the sun neared its June meridian the Italian army was fighting for its life on the Piave River against repeated Austrian hammer blows. The Italians however could count on air superiority for their side. Clouds of their own fighters, and British and French ones, strafed waves of advancing Austro-Hungarian infantrymen.
One of the pilots overhead was Major Franceso Barraca. Like many pilots, Barraca was a former cavalrymen who brought his talents and his dash into the air during the Great War. Barraca counted 34 enemy machines downed, which made him the top Italian ace of the war. He had shot down ten alone during the Battle of Caporetto and given Italians one of their only bright spots of the battle.
Barraca met his end on June 19 during the Second Battle of the Piave. During a strafing run low to the ground his machine was seen to spin out of control and smash into a nearby hill. When Italian infantrymen counter-attacked across the hill days later, they found Barraca’s body with a bullet in the head. Officially his death was credited to Austrian ground fire, although the rear gunner of an Austrian plane also claimed the kill. Barraca’s legacy lived on, however. An Italian artilleryman named Enzo Ferrari adopted Barraca’s personal insignia of a rearing black horse for a race car after the war, and later, with the permission of Barraca’s family, used it as the emblem for his sports car factory.

ww1 ww1 history ww1 centenary 1918 history world war one first world war great war ferrari

June 13, 1918 - Bolsheviks Execute Tsar’s Brother Grand Duke Michael, First Romanov to be Killed
Pictured - Michael was second in line for the throne when his older brother Nicholas abdicated in March 1917. A proponent of constitutional monarchy, he... — **June 13, 1918 - Bolsheviks Execute Tsar’s Brother Grand Duke Michael, First Romanov to be Killed**
Pictured - Michael was second in line for the throne when his older brother Nicholas abdicated in March 1917. A proponent of constitutional monarchy, he reluctantly agreed to be Tsar in place of Nicholas’s son if the people would ratify his succession. The Bolshevik Revolution came first, however.
In the early hours of June 13, the Tsar’s brother Grand Duke Michael was removed from his house arrest in Perm and put in a horse-drawn trap, along with his British secretary Nicholas Johnson. Four Bolshevik secret policemen accompanied Michael, who asked where they were headed. “To the train station,” responded one of the guards, but in fact they drove into the nearby woods. There the guards forced Michael and Johnson out of the carriage and shot them. Wounded, Michael crawled towards Johnson. “Let me say goodbye to my friend,” he asked. The guards shot both dead and stripped their corpses, which were never found.
Whatever one thinks of the Romanovs and the Bolsheviks, Michael’s execution was a sad story. The Grand Duke was second in line to the Russian throne in 1917, but had spent much of his life trying to distance himself from the monarchy. In 1905 he had shocked his elder brother by marrying a twice-divorced commoner, Natalia Wulfert, with whom he lived in London. Only when the First World War broke out did Michael return to his native Russia to serve as a cavalry corps commander. His relationship with his brother remained chilly, especially when Michael warned Nicholas that his position was far shakier than he realized.
Michael proved the prescient one. The Tsar abdicated in March 1917 and chose Michael to take his place on the throne. Michael, who had spent his life trying to get further away from the Romanov crown, agreed on the condition that the Provisional Government ratified his succession, which it never did. Nevertheless he supported the new government, even when it declared itself a republic in September 1917. In his diary, Michael accepted the decision: “We woke up this morning to hear Russia declared a Republic. What does it matter which form the government will be as long as there is order and justice?”
When the Bolshevik revolution came in November, Michael helped Prime Minister Kerensky escape Russia. Because of this, and because of his claim to power, MIchael became a revolutionary target although he himself had nothing to do with the White movement. The four policemen who killed him had all been victims of Tsarist imprisonment, and forged the orders to execute Michael on their own initiative. Later they claimed they had shot Michael when he “tried to escape.”

ww1 ww1 history ww1 centenary 1918 history world war one first world war great war romanov russian civil war russian revolution russian history grand duke michael

June 5, 1918 - Allies Recognize Polish State-in-Waiting
Pictured - Polish soldiers of Haller’s Blue Army parade their colors on the Western Front. The participation of Polish soldiers in the Entente war effort helped win support for their national... — **June 5, 1918 - Allies Recognize Polish State-in-Waiting**
*Pictured - Polish soldiers of Haller’s Blue Army parade their colors on the Western Front. The participation of Polish soldiers in the Entente war effort helped win support for their national cause.*
During the Great War Polish nationalists appealed and fought for both sides in the hopes of winning support for an independent Polish state. A number of Polish legions fought in the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, whereas many of their compatriots fought with “Haller’s Blue Army” alongside the French on the Western Front. The entry of America into the war in 1917 became a turning point, as Wilson and millions of Polish-Americans supported the nationalists. The crushing terms Germany handed Russia during the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, meanwhile, pointed to the Kaiser’s dreams of empire in the east which had little space for independent entities. Both of these events thus turned Polish eyes towards the Entente victory as the only guarantee of independence.
That guarantee was won in June 1918. An inter-Allied council of Britain, France, and the United States at Versailles passed a statement that a free Poland “is one of the conditions of lasting peace and justice in Europe.” Meanwhile the Allied high commander Foch recommended that all captured Polish soldiers in the German and Austrian armies be treated as friends and recruited, if possible, into the Allied armies. Now came the hard part: figuring out what that Polish state would look like - something that Americans, French, British, and Bolsheviks, let alone Poles, had strong opinions on.

Source: scholarworks.gsu.edu ww1 ww1 history ww1 centenary 1918 history world war one first world war great war

June 14, 1918 - Preliminary Austrian Attack on Italian Front
Pictured - Italian mountain troops attack up the Tonale Pass. Fighting in Alps tested the determination of both sides.
The rumblings of the next Central Powers offensive came in Italy on... — **June 14, 1918 - Preliminary Austrian Attack on Italian Front**
*Pictured - Italian mountain troops attack up the Tonale Pass. Fighting in Alps tested the determination of both sides.*
The rumblings of the next Central Powers offensive came in Italy on June 13 and 14, 1918. A limited Austrian attack made some headway against Italian positions in the Tonale Pass, a mountain pass in northern Italy that went through the Allied lines. Italian artillery and machine-gun fire threw the Austrians back after several hours.
The German attack on the Western Front was dying down, but nevertheless the Central Power’s military heads believed the Allies remained at the point of collapse. In the Hapsburg military, the hapless Chief of Staff Conrad von Hotzendorf had been replaced by the more efficeient General Arthur Arz von Straussenburg. Twenty-one divisions of Austro-Hungarian POWs had been repatriated from the east and replenished Straussenburg’s ranks, although many of the returning soldiers had mingled with the Bolsheviks during their captivity and displayed a worrying understanding of revolutionary ideology. Mutinies in the Dual Monarchy’s army grew in number. Increasingly, “troops were needed to keep order on the streets,” writes historian Peter Hart. More optimistically, however, Straussenburg had also spent the spring drilling his troops in new assault tactics learned on the Western Front. For the first time in the war the Austrians had numerical parity in Italy with their enemy.
Yet the Italians had spent their time preparing too. After their disastrous defeat at Caporetto in October, they had withdraw to a defensive line on the Piave River north of Venice and replaced the incompetent Luigi Cadorna as Chief of Staff with the much more professional Armando Diaz. A stern martinet, Diaz reinvigorated Italian morale and improved the ordinary soldier’s lot. A coordinated effort by the Allied governments had also aided Italian industry, while experienced British and French advisors retrained Italian soldiers in the material warfare practiced in the West - no more pointless bayonet charges up the mountain slopes. The Austrians were preparing for a knock-out blow in the Italian theater, but the Italians were determined to weather the storm.

ww1 ww1 history ww1 centenary 1918 history world war one first world war great war

June 9, 1918 - The New Revelation
Pictured - A typical seance scene. The belief that the living could communicate with the dead was widespread after the Great War, no doubt as a method of coping with tremendous loss.
The New York Times Sunday book... — **June 9, 1918 - The New Revelation**
*Pictured - A typical seance scene. The belief that the living could communicate with the dead was widespread after the Great War, no doubt as a method of coping with tremendous loss.*
The New York Times Sunday book review looked at Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s *The New Revelation* (price: $1) on June 9, 1918. The British author, famed for his hyper-rational sleuth Sherlock Holmes, made the scientific case in his new book for the belief that the living could communicate with the dead. Drawing on “thirty years of research,” Conan Doyle discussed how he had gone from a materialist to his new revelation, which he called a re-birth of the Christian religion.
Conan Doyle was not alone in his belief that the spirits lived on after death. Many Britons believed it too. Seances had become common in Britain, especially after the publication in 1916 of the book *Raymond* by the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge. Lodge how his son who had died at Ypres in 1915 still communicated with his family through mediums. Whether spirits existed or not, historians such as Jay Winter argue that the First World War strengthened traditional religion and forms of commemoration as families sought ways to cope with the deaths of countless loved ones.

Source: canadianmilitaryhistory.ca ww1 ww1 history ww1 centenary 1918 history world war one first world war great war

June 4, 1918 - Germans Capture Château-Thierry, Draw Closer to Paris
Pictured - A mixed line of British and French infantrymen await a German attack. The fighting of 1918 closely resembled the warfare of 1914 or even the US Civil War, with lines of... — **June 4, 1918 - Germans Capture Château-Thierry, Draw Closer to Paris**
Pictured - A mixed line of British and French infantrymen await a German attack. The fighting of 1918 closely resembled the warfare of 1914 or even the US Civil War, with lines of infantrymen rapidly moving and slugging it out in the open.
From his headquarters in the Belgian town of Spa, Ludendorff gleefully watched the results trickle in from Operation Blücher–Yorck, the German offensive along the Aisne river northeast of Paris. Reports showed that 50,000 Allied soldiers and 800 guns have been captured by his advancing troops. British and French prisoners streamed back to prison camps in the rear. On the first day of the battle the French had unwisely concentrated all their troops in the front-line trenches despite warning from the cautious General Petain not to do so; and when German storm-troopers came on after a furious artillery barrage, as they had done so two months earlier in March, they bagged thousands of Frenchmen sitting dumbfounded in the first trenches.
Ludendorff pushed his reserve divisions into the breach which had been opened in the Entente lines. The town of Château-Thierry fell into his hands, a bare fifty miles from Paris. Some pessimistic citizens of the French capital caught trains for safer provinces as they had done in August 1914. At the sharp end several Allied units disintegrated under pressure. Sixteen French divisions shattered; Pétain removed their commander and arraigned him for incompetence before a court. “This was the only time I saw a real rout,” wrote Lieutenant John Nettleton of the British 2nd Rifle Brigade. “…It was just panic flight; with each man, including me, thinking of nothing but saving his own skin.” But while Ludendorff had now put his entire force into play the Allies were still able to muster reinforcements, including two newly-arrived American divisions heading towards their first taste of combat: it would prove to be a bloody one.

Source: iwm.org.uk ww1 ww1 history ww1 centenary 1918 history world war one first world war great war

*A two-man British Bristol fighter banks in the clouds high over France in June 1918.*

Source: reddit.com ww1 ww1 history ww1 centenary 1918 history world war one first world war great war

A Canadian soldier puts on makeup to play a woman’s role in a play. Theatrical productions were a very popular entertainment for the troops, and required soldiers to play both male and female parts. — *A Canadian soldier puts on makeup to play a woman’s role in a play. Theatrical productions were a very popular entertainment for the troops*, *and required soldiers to play both male and female parts.*

Source: iwm.org.uk ww1 ww1 history ww1 centenary 1918 history world war one first world war great war

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