Western Front

12 Key excerpts on "Western Front"

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  Landscapes of Trauma

  The Psychology of the Battlefield

  • Nigel Hunt(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  12 World War I and the Western Front

  The Western Front. This is a rough indication of the length of the Western Front in the First World War, stretching from the English Channel to Switzerland. In the UK, we largely focus on the part down to the River Somme, a relatively short section of the whole line. The rest was held by French (and French colonial) troops for most of the war, with the United States joining in for the last few months (basically from September 1918). There are many sites beyond Ieper and the Somme that are worth visiting along the line.

  My father was born during World War I, and he was in the RAF from 1939 to 1945. I got to know him in the late 1960s, and from then until he died in 2012 his obsession was World War I. Even though he had fought throughout World War II, it was World War I that mattered to him. Like perhaps most people in the UK, his interest was centred around the Western Front. Furthermore, it was not the whole of the 440 miles of the Western Front from Nieuwpoort to the east of Dunkirk through to the Swiss border southeast of Belfort, but that relatively small section in Belgium and Northern France from the North Sea to the Somme, focusing in particular on those seminal battles of Ypres and the Somme, along with Loos, Lens, Arras, and so forth.

  A brief note on spelling. The place names in Flanders were commonly spelled in the French way (Ypres) and that is the way we usually know them when discussing World War I. In the modern world, the Flemish spelling is used more often (Ieper), so I have used the Flemish form when referring to the town, and the French form when referring to the battle.

  Ignoring the Eastern Front, the Italian Front, the Far East, Africa, and the sea war, World War I is, through British eyes, largely focused on this short stretch of the Western Front. I am also going to be guilty of ignoring the war in the rest of the world, but I will attempt a brief look at some other areas of the Western Front, largely fought over by the French and Germans, but also including the British (including the Empire troops) and the USA, for those who are interested in touring the length of the Western Front.

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  Landscapes of the Western Front

  Materiality During the Great War

  • Ross Wilson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 The Western Front, 1914–1918 INTRODUCTION This chapter details the broad history of the British Army on the Western Front, 1914–1918. It examines the geographical, logistical, multinational, governmental and social aspects of the British military in this sphere of conflict. This martial presence in northern France and Belgium during the Great War remains the largest endeavour undertaken by the British Armed Forces. The scale of operations was formidable; millions of men and women were transported from across the globe to occupy the myriad of vital roles required by the army. To support this endeavour, extensive networks of supply routes were organised from the Empire to Britain, across the English Channel and through the countryside of France and Belgium to ensure the functioning of the war effort (Horne and Kramer 2002; Chickering 2000) (Figure 3.1). The effect of these substantial systems amounted to a military occupation of the French departments of Picardie and Pas-de-Calais as well as Western Flanders. Indeed, a highly militarised landscape was formed within these regions. In this assessment it is important to maintain that, despite the significance and historical prominence attributed to ‘the trenches’, this was not the only environment encountered by individuals in the British Army. Rather, local towns, villages and farming communities, which were still inhabited despite the ravaging conflict, would have formed significant places for troops and labourers (see Gibson 2001). This chapter, therefore, presents a wider assessment of the British Army on the Western Front

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  Great Expectations

  Imagination and Anticipation in Tourism

  • Jonathan Skinner, Dimitrios Theodossopoulos(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Berghahn Books

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 9 G OING ON H OLIDAY TO I MAGINE W AR : T HE W ESTERN F RONT B ATTLEFIELDS AS S ITES OF C OMMEMORATION AND C ONTESTATION Jennifer Iles Introduction The First World War of 1914–1918 is now slipping beyond the realm of lived experience, yet it continues to wield a profound impact on the British imagination. The Western Front in Belgium and France, which was the decisive theatre of operations for the Allied troops, has created its own iconic representation and mythology and has secured a firm place in modern memory (Williams 1994: 19). Ninety years after the last shots were fired, Britain’s ‘Great War’ continues to provoke historical controversy and debate, and as Heathorn contends, its legacy still matters to ‘British society at large’ (Heathorn 2005: 1103). In many respects, Ferguson points out, the war actually remains contemporary and ‘unlike more recent conflicts (the Korean, for example), it is still newsworthy’ (Ferguson 1998: xxxiii). Despite some lapses since the Armistice was declared in November 1918, Binyon’s promise that ‘We will remember them’, which he made in his poem For the Fallen written in 1914, has largely been honoured. Although popular interest in the conflict remained dormant during the 1950s and early 1960s, the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of hostilities prompted a spate of new books about the war. 1 These publications, together with the broadcasting of the BBC’s groundbreaking 155 television series, The Great War , in 1964, reinvigorated public awareness of the Western Front battlefields and memorials (Simkins 1999: 30) and since the mid-1970s the Somme and Ypres Salient areas of the Front lines have been popular destinations for British visitors and continue to grow as tourist attractions (Saunders 2001: 45).

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  World War I

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • White Word Publications

    (Publisher)

  ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Chapter-2 Western Front Western Front For most of World War I, Allied and German Forces were stalled in trench warfare all along the Western Front. Photo by Ernest Brooks. Date 4 August 1914–11 November 1918 Location Belgium and northeastern France Result Allied victory. Collapse of the German Empire. Belligerents Belgium France and the French Overseas Empire United Kingdom and the British Empire • Australia • Canada • India • Newfoundland German Empire Austria-Hungary ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ • New Zealand • South Africa Italy Russian Empire Portugal United States Brazil Commanders and leaders No unified command until 1918, then Ferdinand Foch Moltke → Falkenhayn → Hindenburg and Ludendorff → Hindenburg and Groener Casualties and losses 7,947,000 killed, wounded, captured or missing 5,603,000 killed, wounded, captured or missing Following the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the German Army opened the Western Front by first invading Luxembourg and Belgium, then gaining military control of important industrial regions in France. The tide of the advance was dramatically turned with the Battle of the Marne. Both sides then dug in along a meandering line of fortified trenches, stretching from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier with France. This line remained essentially unchanged for most of the war. Between 1915 and 1917 there were several major offensives along this front. The attacks employed massive artillery bombardments and massed infantry advances. However, a combination of entrenchments, machine gun nests, barbed wire, and artillery repeatedly inflicted severe casualties on the attackers and counter attacking defenders. As a result, no significant advances were made. In an effort to break the deadlock, this front saw the introduction of new military technology, including poison gas, aircraft and tanks.

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  Consumed by War

  European Conflict in the 20th Century

  • Richard C. Hall(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  "•-: AUSTRIA-HUNGARY '--' .' " , - ', ,->, Trentino . ITALY Rome Sarajevo Adriatic Sea SandMto Tyrrhenian Sea V I T R R A A L G E R I A Front, 1915 '/////A Aus.-Ger. gains, 1917 Ger. gains, 1918 32 Consumed by War weapon—the tank. Although forty-nine of these mechanical fortresses were in operation at the beginning of the attack, only nine remained func- tional throughout the engagement. Though this first use of the tank was not auspicious, the British had introduced a weapon that had the potential to alter the battlefield. The Western Front was the most critical arena of the First World War. A German victory on the Western Front would ensure German success on the eastern fronts. The defeat of France on the Western Front would not only eliminate Germany's main continental enemy but also remove British troops from continental Europe and deprive the entente of the material wealth of the British Empire and the United States. German success in the east, however, was no guarantee of victory in the west. The material resources of Russia and eastern Europe were widely dispersed over a large land area that lacked a viable transportation structure. The failure of the Schlieffen Plan left the Germans without a clear strategic goal. After their initial advances in 1914, for the most part, they remained on the defensive in the west. The demands of the eastern front required them to manage their manpower carefully. They could not spread their forces too thinly on either the western or the eastern front. A serious breakthrough in either east or west could mean the end of the German military effort. Only at Ypres in 1915 and at Verdun in 1916 did they undertake major offensive efforts in the west. Neither was successful. The British and French remained consistently on the offensive.

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  British Children's Literature and the First World War

  Representations since 1914

  • David Budgen(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The Western Front 29 years. Topicality was a key issue for these writers, whose works were often written soon after the events described. Thus, Brereton’s With French at the Front: A Story of the Great European War Down to the Battle of the Aisne appeared in 1915. With Joffre at Verdun: A Story of the Western Front was published in 1916. The Battle of Verdun did not end until December of the same year. In the present day, specific battles, such as the Somme and Passchendaele, have become synonymous with popular understandings of the horrors of the war. This was not necessarily the case during the war. Their names had resonance, but wartime novels did not always attribute special importance to them. Works set in the Gallipoli campaign, for example, were generally published in 1915 and 1916. Novels about the Somme tended to appear between 1916 and 1917. Escott Lynn’s Oliver Hastings V.C. (1916) was set in the Second Battle of Ypres, which had taken place the previous year. There was little difference between the significance of either, according to works of boys’ fiction. The focus on keeping up to date with current events stripped some of the battles of the symbolic importance that would later be attached to them. The body of the most prolific authors’ works almost acted as a fictionalized history of the war, from its inception to its denouement. Children could follow the events of the conflict through many sources. Indeed, contemporaneity would have been a major selling point for young readers of the period. Unlike late-twentieth-century works, wartime authors did not rely on a narrow range of settings in order to convey generalities about the horrors of war. In the first months of the war, from the Battle of Mons in August 1914 until the first battle of Ypres beginning in October of the same year, the conflict on the Western Front was characterized by movement rather than stagnancy.

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  Encyclopedia of Warfare

  From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

  • Adrian Gilbert(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Germany and Austria banded together as the Central Powers, and were opposed by Russia and France. The other remaining European great power, Britain, was hostile toward Germany, and, while it had an informal arrangement with France, it remained outside the formal alliance system. Italy, on the other hand, was formally allied with the Central Powers in 1914 but remained neutral until 1915 when it officially entered the war on the side of France and Britain.

  Trench warfare, although not a new defensive tactic in battle, became the indelible symbol of World War I, especially along the Western Front. Here, French soldiers are dug in at Verdun, a battle that lasted nearly the whole of 1916 and claimed a million casualties.

  In August 1914, German troops marched into Belgium, as seen here entering Brussels. Although they progressed steadily at first, within a few months they became entrenched in a defensive line stretching from the English Chonnel in the north to Switzerland in the south. Both sides remained along this line, known as the Western Front, for the remainder of the war.

  The European alliances were initially intended to be essentially defensive in nature, but a series of international incidents – Morocco (1905), Bosnia (1908–09), and Agadir (1911) – increased tensions so much that the European powers became polarized into two armed camps. The army general staffs began to draw up plans for the probability of outright conflict.

  The strategic situation was geographically determined: Germany and Austria-Hungary held the center, “surrounded” by France and Russia, while Britain occupied a peripheral position. By 1912–13, Germany had become increasingly concerned by the rising economic might of Russia, its millions of miles of railroads – and therefore capability of transporting millions of soldiers relatively quickly – and the German General Staff began to advocate war before the Russian Army could take advantage of the relative decline in German industrial and military power.

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  The Western Front Companion

  • Mark Adkin(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  As the French became sucked ever more deeply into the defence of Verdun, so their capacity to fight alongside the British on the Somme diminished rapidly – as time progressed one of the objects of the BEF’s efforts in maintaining the offensive on that river was to relieve the pressure on the French at Verdun who were hard pressed to hold their own. In the event, the war on the Western Front in 1916 consisted of these two major offensives – the Germans at Verdun, a struggle that was to become the longest battle of the war; and the British (with some French support) attacking on the Somme, which became the most costly battle of the war.

  The fighting around Verdun lasted ten months, at the end of which the French had clung on to the town and had pushed the Germans back from some, but not all, of their initial gains. Both sides were utterly worn out and to an extent demoralized by crippling losses, highlighting the sheer horror of the destruction of men and material by modern war. The battle had ended in stalemate. On the Somme the fighting began on 1 July and ended in mid-November with the British and French having advanced a maximum of 7 miles, and with even greater losses than either side sustained at Verdun. There had been no Allied breakthrough.

  By the end of 1916 the Western Front had cost the BEF 600,617 casualties – well over twice the number for the previous year. For the Germans the year’s loss had been 297,351 - 2.7 times that of 1915. These horrific figures would be eclipsed by those of 1917, with 1918, the year the war ended, seeing the worst losses of all.

  A French View of Verdun A French officer at Verdun, Major Roman, wrote of the appalling scene at the entrance to his bunker:

  On my arrival, the corpse of an infantryman in a blue cap partially emerges from this compound of earth, stones, and unidentifiable debris. But a few hours later, it is no longer the same; he has disappeared and has been replaced by a Tirailleur [light infantryman] in khaki. And successively there appear other corpses in other uniforms. The shell that buries one disinters another. One gets acclimatized, however, to this spectacle; one can bear the horrible odour of this charnelhouse in which one lives, but one’s joie de vivre,

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  Archaeology and Memory

  • Dusan Boric(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Oxbow Books

    (Publisher)

  Since the war these constructions have embodied national narratives about the war and its significance, and also hosted and partly structured the way in which successive generations have related to the war and, especially, to the massive losses it caused in families and communities, making the Western Front an immense site of mourning and memory Paola Filippucci 172 (see Winter 1995). Can the present-day work of archaeologists be seen as part of this and if so, how? In what follows I will try to answer this question by analysing the case of an excavation of a segment of Western Front battlefield next to a major memorial monument site, enabling a comparison between monumental and archaeological ways of approaching the war period. My data will be drawn from participant observation of the excavation and from an exhibition recently organised by the excavation team concerning their activities. Digging the trenches The excavation that I will discuss was conducted in 2005 by No Man’s Land, a British-based but international team that includes professional and academic archaeologists and some non-archaeologists such as, among others, a museum curator, a library curator, a policeman, an army operative, an IT consultant (see http://www. redtwo.plus.com/nml/). All are united by a passionate interest in the First World War and in the last few years they have conducted a series of excavations of war sites in different parts of the Western Front, sometimes in co-operation with local archaeologists and archaeological services. The excavations have been funded by a variety of sources, including in the case that I will discuss, by a television company filming a documentary series on the Great War (broadcast in UK on Channel 5 in September/October 2006, with the title ‘Trench Detectives’).

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  The Great War Through Picture Postcards

  • Guus de Vries(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5

  The Western Front

  1914

  T he first phase of the war in the west was shaped by the Schlieffen Plan, named after Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, who had died in 1913. Germany planned to avoid a war on two fronts by attacking along the northern flank through neutral Belgium, conquering the French capital, Paris, and gaining victory over France as a whole within six weeks. Afterwards, troops would then be free to move east for a war against Russia.

  But the German advance through Belgium was opposed by the strong fortifications on the Meuse river in Liège and Namur. The fortresses here were strong enough to resist the strongest guns that were in use at the end of the nineteenth century. Germany hoped that neutral Belgium would put up a symbolic resistance at most, and gave them an ultimatum on 2 August 1914. The ultimatum claimed that France was planning an attack against Germany across Belgian territory, and demanded Belgium must not hinder Germany’s defence. The king of Belgium denied this request and on 4 August, forces of the 2nd German Army entered Belgium.

  This posed picture shows Belgian soldiers in an imaginary fire fight against German attackers. In August 1914 Belgium could muster an army of 200,000 soldiers, who despite their mediocre equipment and training, put up an unexpectedly strong defence. The men wear leather hats that were later exchanged for French steel helmets. They carry the Belgian standard infantry weapon, the Mauser Model 1889 rifle.

  Belgian Army. Dog-drawn Maxim machine gun.

  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the machine gun entered the arsenals of almost all armies. The basic model was developed by the American Hiram Maxim in 1886 and played an important role in the First World War. The roughly 25kg weapon was transported on pack horses or horse-drawn carts, but in Belgium (and for a short while in the Netherlands as well), dogs were also used as draft animals.

  Belgium mobilised an army of more than 200,000 soldiers. The army command, with the king at its head, had six infantry divisions and one cavalry division at its disposal, forming a field army of around 115,000 men. Approximately another 90,000 men manned the fortresses and fortifications, including those at Liège, Namur and Antwerp. Immediately after the German invasion, 20,000 volunteers reported for duty.

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  Fighting the Great War

  A Global History

  • Michael S. Neiberg, Michael S. NEIBERG(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  [ 3 ] THE COUNTRY OF DEATH Stalemate on the Western Front The result of the fighting here [in Artois] is to show that the Germans can be driven back at the cost of an enormous effort, but that the thing is possible . . . . People in England must be prepared for a long war and I am afraid there are no brilliant or sudden victories to be ex-pected—the best stayers will win in the end. —Letter from British General Sir Charles Grant to his father-in-law, April 15, 1915 A s 1914 ended, the problem facing the Allied armies was at once deceptively simple and immensely complicated. The simple part lay in the obvious need to push the Germans out of those parts of France and Belgium that they occupied. The British, French, and Belgians all agreed on this war aim, unifying them at least on this one level. The complication came from the immense operational and tactical challenges posed by the new style of war. By the end of the year, a solid line of German defenses reached from the North Sea to the impassable terrain of the Alps. There were no longer any flanks to turn; consequently, strategic envelopments, like the one the Germans had so daringly executed at Tannenberg, were virtually impossible. To make the problem even more com-plicated, in 1914 and 1915 the Allies could not count on any sig-nificant superiority in manpower, nor did they have access to any weapons that the Germans did not also possess. The Germans had decided to conduct their main offensive for 1915 in the east and therefore determined to fortify their defensive positions in the west. They connected and improved the haphaz-ard system of field entrenchments that had developed during the 67 Race to the Sea and protected them with thick tangles of barbed wire. They added concrete in places and buried telephone and telegraph lines to protect them from enemy artillery fire.

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  Trial by Friendship

  Anglo-American Relations, 1917-1918

  • David R. Woodward(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  9 The Western Front Imperiled General Erich Ludendorff, the German army's de facto commander, rejected a defensive policy designed to achieve a negotiated peace. Instead, he gambled on victory in Western Europe in 1918 through battles of annihilation against the Anglo-French forces. His all-or-nothing strategy depended upon delivering a knock-out blow before the Americans arrived in sufficient strength to change the balance of forces decisively in favor of the Entente. The BEF was his initial target. On March 21, called by Hankey one of the decisive moments of the world's history, 1 the main German blow fell on General Sir Hubert Gough's Fifth Army, which had been weakened by continuous fighting in the Flanders quagmire. British defenses were beached in two places, and attempts to plug the gaps failed. The Fifth Army started to disintegrate. On the first day of the battle, Haig requested three French divisions as reinforcements. On the following day he issued a panic-stricken plea for twenty. Yet the French initially re-sponded by withholding their forces from the great battle. By Satur-day, March 23, the shape of the military catastrophe was becoming clear to the civilians in London. Lloyd George, who had spent the night at his home in Walton Heath, rushed back to London. The news is very bad. I fear it means disaster, he told his newspaper friend Lord Riddell. 2 Canceling a meeting of the War Cabinet, he took charge in the War Office, seeking to locate and send every available rifleman to France. At 4:00 P.M. the other members of the War Cabinet joined him to review the military situation. The deputy director of military operations on the General Staff, Walter Kirke, who had just arrived by plane from Haig's head-quarters, presented a report that mirrored the approaching gloom of a March evening in London. The British had been thrown back twelve miles, lost some 40,000 men, and abandoned not less than 600 guns.

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