As you know, I talk about the war week after week, the battles, the strategy, the home
front, the triumphs and the tragedies - week by week.
And those weeks add up, for this is week 200 of the war.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week the Ottomans occupied Aleksandropol and didn’t look like they were going to
stop marching any time soon.
There was the end of a treason trial in Paris, tension in Ukraine, the arrest of Sinn Fein
leaders for collaborating with the Germans in Ireland, and a mutiny in the Austrian Army.
There was actually yet another mutiny now in the Imperial army.
(Gilbert).
This one by Czech troops in Rumberg.
They refused to go to the front unless they were paid the money they felt they were due
from when they had been POWs in Russia.
They occupied the town and threatened to march on Prague.
Some took the train there, but they were intercepted.
At the court martial, ten men were sentenced to death and 560 imprisoned.
The mutiny may have been over, though, but the local governor warned Vienna,
And on
the 20th, at their barracks at Pecs, 2,000 Hungarian troops refused to go to the front
and occupied the barrack’s weapon stores.
Local coal miners helped them.
This mutiny was also suppressed.
But mutinies or no mutinies, that army was making plans.
I said last month that AH was going to have a new offensive in Italy, since the army was
getting back to strength with hundreds of thousands of former POWs returning from Russia.
Emperor Karl was deciding between the plans of Conrad von Hotzendorf, who wanted the main
offensive to be on the Asiago Plateau, and Borojevic von Bojna, who wanted to strike
the main blow on the Piave River, where he commanded.
Karl compromised between the two plans.
Borojevic would try to break the Piave line and move on Venice while Conrad would attack
the Italian Monte Grappa positions.
AH would have 65 infantry divisions and 12 cavalry divisions, which was more than the
56 total Allied divisions there.
The Allies, though, had two to one air superiority, and 7,000 big guns and 2,400 mortars to the
Austrians 6,800 artillery pieces, so it wasn’t exactly a huge Austrian advantage.
Speaking of the war in the air, it was pretty hot this week.
On the 18th, 33 British planes bomb Cologne, killing 110.
On the 19th, the Germans bomb British hospitals at Etaples, causing 300 casualties.
That night, 28 German Gothas bomb London, 49 people are killed and 177 injured.
Six Gothas were shot down by British pilots.
German air raids the 19th-23rd on French munitions dumps destroyed over 12,000 tons of Allied
ammo.
So on both sides, the war in the air, while still small, was a really visible part of
the war, and constantly more effective.
British Handley Page bombers attacked the Oppau chemical works, Mannheim gas works,
and the Karthaus railway workshop, and on the 22nd, 8 Gothas tried to bomb Paris.
Seven were driven off by anti-aircraft fire.
But the war in the air was about to take a back seat to a renewed active war on the ground
on the Western Front.
A few weeks ago, the Battle of La Lys ended, and with it the first wave of the German Spring
Offensives - the Kaiserschlacht.
But the second wave is set to begin next week, Operations Blucher, Goerz, and York, to cross
the Vesle and the Aisne-Marne Canal.
In “The German 1918 Offensives”, David Zabecki calls the preparations, “another
masterpiece of secrecy and operational security.”
In fact, the buildup was so well concealed, that even now - and right up to the attack
- the Allies had no idea where the Germans were going to attack.
At first, they thought near Arras, then a week later on the Scarpe, then a week later
at La Bassee Canal.
“Ironically, the intelligence section of the American Expeditionary Force had accurately
predicted the location of the next blow as early as April 25th... derived from order-of-battle
and logistics realities.
But the French and British rejected out of hand the assessment of the inexperienced Americans.”
(Spring Offensives)
The starting date was set for May 27th.
The Germans were also going to try to modify another campaign rather than join it directly,
but it’s one by one of their allies in Eastern Anatolia.
Lemme backtrack first a bit.
On the 19th, the Turkish 5th Caucasian Division captured Gullu-Balak and the Karakhach Pass
on the Aleksandropol-Tiflis Road.
It was still necessary to throw back the Armenian force covering the road junction at Amamli,
which itself controlled the highway to Yerevan, the Armenian capital, 125 km away.
This soon happened, and Armenian General Silikov (Silikian) near Yerevan was now faced with
pressure from the south, east, and north.
His main group was attacked near Sardarabad by Ottomans marching from Aleksandropol the
21st.
Using all his reserves, he counter attacked at the end of the week, and recaptured Sardarabad,
pushing the enemy back some 50 km north of the town.
That fighting will continue as the week ends.
What we’re seeing here is really the second phase of Ottoman action in the region this
year.
Batum and Kars had fallen so easily that Ottoman Minister of War Enver Pasha was thinking of
reverting to his 1914 Pan-Turanian Offensive, beginning with the conquest of Baku, and then
both Caucasian and Persian Azerbaijan, but continuing - assuming Russia kept disintegrating
and the World War also continued - with penetrating into Transcaspia and Turkestan, and one day
starting a Pan-Islamic revolt against the British into Southern Persia, Afghanistan,
and Northern India.
Only the new and shaky states of Georgia and Armenia stood in the way it seemed, and their
resistance was clearly not even close to insurmountable.
However, the big picture would require more troops, since the British might frown on the
taking of Baku and Persia, and perhaps even the Soviets would intervene against them.
So even though the situation in Palestine was precarious, Enver had diverted a division
on its way home from Romania to Batum instead of Palestine, and then brought in his Uncle,
Halil Pasha, to command what will be known as the Army of Islam on the Caucasus Front.
Halil Pasha had been the commander of the forces that encircled and finally forced a
British army to surrender after the siege of Kut a couple years ago.
He was also one of the main organizers of the Armenian and Assyrian Genocides, claiming
in his memoirs that he was personally responsible for 300,000 dead and this year - 1918 - in
Yerevan publicly declared,
Thing is, it wasn’t just the British who soon noticed Ottoman aspirations in the region;
the Germans did too.
And their plans might conflict with those of the Ottomans.
Remember, Germany now had control of the north of the Black Sea.
German Colonel Kress von Kressenstein, who had been working with the Ottoman Army in
Palestine, even appeared at the Batum Conference last week to establish good relations with
the Georgians in the Transcaucasian Diet.
See, the Germans didn’t care about Pan-Turanianism; they cared very deeply, though, about the
oil at Baku, of which they were in great need, but thought that if it was in Ottoman hands,
very little would be produced even if it was under Enver Pasha’s private control.
Kressenstein knew that the Georgian troops couldn’t stop the Army of Islam, but the
Turks - his allies, remember - might be embarrassed and replan if the Georgians were covered by
a German flag.
The Georgians, for their part, saw the Germans as their only protection.
Kressenstein was now mobilizing all men of German origin in and around Tiflis, which
included prisoners of war, people from old German settlements like Helenendorf, and even
his personal legation.
And here are a couple of notes to round out the week.
On May 16th General Mannerheim entered Helsinki with 16,000 men to celebrate the Whites victory
over the Reds.
Over a century of Tsarist rule, and six months of Bolshevik or German military control, or
just chaos, were now over.
On the 23rd, the British War Cabinet decided to send a 560 man military mission to Archangel
and a 600 man one to Murmansk.
They were offering to train the hundreds of thousands of anti-Bolshevik Russians to defend
themselves against any future Bolshevik attack.
And that was the week.
Another mutiny in Austria, action in the skies in the west, German preparations on the ground,
fighting way over in the southeast, and the Germans trying to figure out how they might
secure a new oil reserve.
From their allies.
I mean, that’s pretty heavy right?
Trying to semi-sabotage their allies’ plans so that they could get the oil?
But of course, the oil comes first.
I mean, from a 2018 perspective we all know the need for oil in war, but the Germans in
1918 were discovering that it was just as true back then.
And in modern war, sometimes oil comes before allies.
200 weeks of war, 200 weeks of coverage from us.
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