April 2nd, 1915. On carts, on horse, but mostly walking they move. All over Europe. Some carrying bags,
some dragging huge amounts of possessions, but all too many empty handed. Forced from
their homes and their lands, and desperate for somewhere, anywhere to continue their
lives. These were the refugees of the Great War.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
When we left off, the Russians had just captured the Austro-Hungarian fortress of Przemysl,
which had been under siege for months. This gave them 120,000 prisoners and allowed three
Russian Corps to turn around and fight the Austrians and Germans in the Carpathians.
The French and the Germans were bombing each other in the west, and the Germans and Russians
skirmishing far to the north. Let’s begin this week in the south.
We spoke a few weeks of the typhus epidemic that had ravaged Serbia throughout the winter,
and that epidemic, combined with the huge casualties the Serbs had taken successfully
defending themselves against repeated Austrian invasions in late 1914, had Serbia pretty
much standing on her last legs, and now, with the epidemic winding down, she was something
of an easy target, although enemies Germany, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire had their
hands full at the moment.
Serbia’s neighbor Bulgaria had not concluded a formal alliance with the Central Powers
but was quite friendly with them, and indeed, Germany and Austria-Hungary had loaned Bulgaria
huge amounts of money.
So on April 1st, Bulgarian Turks launched an attack on Serbia just across the border
in Valandovo. This territory had been part of Macedonia, and was pretty hotly disputed
by Bulgaria and Serbia, and the purpose of the attack was to disrupt the Thessaloniki-Skopje
railway line and then head into central Macedonia and cause a rebellion among the Macedonians
against the Serbs. However, after a couple of days, the Serbs managed to drive the invaders
back across the border. 5,000 Macedonian Muslims went with them.
The Bulgarian government officially blamed Serbian troops for the attack, but you could
really see that Bulgaria’s commitment to solving the Macedonian issue, in other words
taking over all of Macedonia, and a formal alliance with the Central Powers seemed to
be just a question of time.
There was plenty of action in that neck of the woods this week, and lets look now to
the Bosporus, where the Russian Black Sea fleet bombarded the Turkish forts.
5 battleships, two cruisers, and ten destroyers were sent to do the job, but fog and the sinking
of two destroyers by the formerly German battle cruiser Goeben, now the flagship of the Ottoman
navy under the name Yavuz, caused the Russians to withdraw. If you’re wondering why the
name Goeben might seem familiar, it’s the ship that bombarded Sevastopol back in late
October 1914 in a successful yet very shady attempt to bring the Ottoman Empire into the war.
All this week, the wind was so strong in the Dardanelles that it was impossible
for the British and French to sweep away Turkish mines, so the chance for a swift victory through
the Dardanelles that the Allies had hoped for and indeed tried for a few weeks ago was
no more, as the region remained firmly under Turkish control and the defenses were built
stronger and stronger. But with a quick victory by forcing the straits no longer a possibility,
a land invasion was being slowly put together and English, Australian, New Zealander, and
French troops gathered and gathered in Egypt and the Aegean Islands.
Troops were gathering further north as well, though under less peaceful circumstances.
The Russian army in the Carpathian Mountains gathered 5,600 prisoners on March 29th.
What we’re seeing here is the final stages of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Third Winter
Offensive in those mountains. The first two were complete debacles, and the third seemed
to be going even worse, if possible. By March 27th, the Austrian strategy was simply to
halt Russian attacks when they could and defend their supply lines until German help could
hopefully arrive before all was lost. Those are pretty bad objectives for an offensive,
and indeed, the entire front was now in danger of collapsing.
It came to a head on March 30th. The Russians had advanced 5 kilometers in 24 hours, many
defending troops were too weak to retreat and simply collapsed in the snow, and Alexei
Brusilov, one of Russia’s most capable generals of the entire war, was now poised to break
through the mountains and pour into the Hungarian Plains.
Exciting, isn’t it? The Germans trying to arrive in the nick of time, Siberian soldiers
advancing in the snows, the Austrians trying to hold on. The German forces that were trying
to get there in time were the beskidenkorps, a specially assembled ski corps, designed
for fighting in the mountains, and under the command of Georg von der Marwitz, who had
won the second battle of the Masurian lakes in February further north.
And that German offensive in the far north was renewed this week on March 28th, and on
the 29th the Germans took Tauroggen, in what is now Lithuania, but the week ended with
a clash of cavalry, and it was the Russian cavalry that this time had the best of the
German. Here’s something non-battle related to consider up there:
Six months ago, the German advance in Russian Poland had created a storm of anti-Jewish
sentiment, the Jews being accused by the Russians of helping the Germans. Now, further north
in Lithuania, the same scenario was being replayed, as the Germans advanced there.
There were many incidents of looting of Jewish shops and homes, and according to Martin Gilbert,
as many as half a million were forced to leave their homes by Russian Cossacks. Yet more
of the endless war refugees.
And we see more and more during the war, that people not actually fighting the war become
anyhow more and more involved, and pretty much always for the worse.
Look at the German U-boat campaign. It was stepping up enormously, and on March 31st,
29 ships were sunk- more on a single day than in the whole war up to that point. Thing is,
U-Boats weren’t going to be able to sink ships like British Dreadnoughts. They weren’t.
The British cruisers sunk by U-boat last September were a shock for the Royal Navy, but lessons
were learned, and they were simple. If a warship maintained a decent speed and a zig zag course,
it was safe. Subs had to surface to attack, and doing that cut their speed to about half
that of a warship, so they pretty much had to attack head on, which presented the smallest
possible target. Merchant ships and passenger ships were unfortunately far far easier to bring down.
Actually, the first British passenger ship sunk by a U-boat was the SS Falaba, sunk this
week. In a coincidentally related bit of trivia, that sinking resulted in the first American
citizen killed in the war: Leon Thrasher, a mining engineer. He was drowned when U28
torpedoed the Falaba en route from Liverpool to West Africa.
Also this week, on April 1st, French aviation pioneer Roland Garros shot down his first
German plane. This was remarkable because Garros was the first pilot able to fire his
machine gun between the blades of his propeller. His propeller was armored and steel wedges
deflected bullets that otherwise might have damaged the propeller. This brought the war
in the air to a new level, and the technology would only become more deadly when proper
interrupter gear was introduced later in 1915.
And the end of the week arrives, with the war in the air and beneath the seas growing
and growing. The Western Front is relatively quiet, in the east the Austrians struggle
to hold on, and in the south the Serbs see conflict once again. But all over Europe,
people are on the move.
In 1914, the Russian invasion of East Prussia caused around a million Germans to leave their
homes. There were over 150,000 Belgian refugees in Great Britain by the spring of 1915. Half
a million Serbian refugees managed to end up in Albania at some point. I’m getting
many of these numbers from an article by Peter Gatrell, and he also cites estimates of the
total wartime refugees for the Russian Empire as being as high as six million. We’ve thrown
a lot of numbers at you over the past eight months, but not that large; not in the millions,
but that’s where we now were. Millions of refugees, all over Europe, all looking for a home.
And they got sympathy, of course. Tons of sympathy, at least at first. Thing is, sympathy
and hospitality very quickly evaporated in a lot of cases when it turned out the refugees
had no money to pay for either food or accommodation, and many once again became victims. They often
didn’t speak the language; they were sick, they were too old to work; they were too young
to work, and one thing that characterized most of them was desperation, wherever they
came from and wherever they went. They were no longer on the front lines, no, and they
no longer risked daily destruction, but they had lost everything, they were in strange
and hostile environments, and they suffered terribly. Millions upon millions of them;
the refugees of modern war.
If you are interested in the flying aces of World War 1, check out our portrait of Manfred
von Richthofen aka the Red Baron right here.
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