What do you do to stop the enemy from sending his submarines and destroyers at you?
You try to destroy his harbors, and how do you do that?
You raid them by night.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week, the Battle of La Lys finished in Belgium, with the Germans unable to reach
their objectives.
The British also failed to hold Es Salt in Palestine.
The Americans were now arriving in France by the hundreds of thousands, but the Supreme
War Council could not convince their Commander, John Pershing, to put them into the lines.
The Bonnet Rouge treason trial opened in France and the Germans established a military dictatorship
in Ukraine.
Actually, this week in Ukraine, the former Russian Black Sea fleet arrived at Odessa
and surrendered to local authorities, but there was notable battle action at a port
far to the northwest.
On the 10th came a British attack on Ostend.
The Vindictive was to be filled with concrete and sunk in the harbor mouth in early morning
hours.
This was a sequel to last week’s attack and was meant to sabotage the harbor as a
German marine base.
The Vindictive left Dover at midnight, escorted by monitors, destroyers, motor launches, and
torpedo boats.
A destroyer went ahead to lay the guiding light buoy.
There was no bombardment to ensure surprise and the monitors anchored in their firing
positions at sea.
When the Vindictive arrived, the motor launches built a smoke screen around her.
Airmen above awaited the signal to bomb the town, and the Royal Marine Artillery in Flanders
made ready to neutralize the German coastal artillery.
15 minutes before the Vindictive made the harbor mouth, two torpedo boats torpedoed
the high wooden ends of the pier, destroying a machine gun nest.
This was the attack signal.
Everyone opened fire.
The Vindictive moved into position but a coastal fog obscured everything.
The Vindictive made three passes by the harbor entrance before finding it.
Under enemy fire, the Commander put her stem against the eastern pier and tried to swing
the stern around so she lay across the channel at her full length.
A screw broke, so this didn’t quite happen, and the Commander was hit by a shell and killed,
along with most of the bridge crew.
Still, they blew out the bottom of the ship and she sank around 200 meters inside the
harbor.
Or did they?
That’s one source.
Bryan Perrett wrote that the ship drifted out of the channel and stuck on a sandbank.
The result of this operation still rendered the harbor unfit for large ships like cruisers,
and made it tough for even destroyers or submarines to use it.
Within weeks, though, the Germans had dredged a channel around the sunken ships from this
raid and the one two weeks ago, and the German subs were back in business.
But you know, the original purpose of unrestricted submarine warfare had been to try to knock
Britain out of the war, and that hadn’t happened.
German army Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff still thought the defeat of the British was
not only possible, but was the key to the war, and it would happen in Flanders.
Operation Georgette though, had brought British and French reserves in droves up to Flanders,
so he needed to draw them away again before he could deliver his knockout blow.
The movement of the French reserves had left them thinned out in Champagne country, and
this was where he would strike.
Plans were in the works for further offensives to begin late in May, with the names Blucher,
Goerz, and Yorck.
The attacks would be against the French in the Chemin des Dames region, held by the French
since last spring.
The enemy was to be pushed back over the Aisne-Marne Canal, to be pushed across the Vesle, the
Germans would take Reims, and a secondary attack days later would cross the Oise and
the lower Ailette.
It was an ambitious series of plans, and the preparations were in full swing.
But with the failure of Operations Georgette and Michael, the Germans were starting to
run out of time and resources.
In fact, Ludendorff’s situation was now worse than it had been before Michael in March.
He no longer had the army with which he had begun the year, having taken well over 300,000
casualties in just the past 6 weeks.
That’s one out of every ten German soldiers on the whole Western Front, so yeah, they’d
literally been decimated.
Over 50,000 of the absolute best troops had been killed, and there just did not exist
replacements of the same quality.
A lot of the rest were demoralized, and they had reason to be, for though they didn’t
know the exact numbers, they knew that American troops were arriving in droves and as the
weeks passed those troops were ever more ready to join the fight in the field.
We’ve talked before about the colossal challenge it was to get an American army ready for war,
but I’ll throw out a comparison here just to give you an idea of what had been accomplished
in little more than a single year.
When America joined the war, its entire army was smaller than the casualties the British
took at the Somme, or the French at Verdun, or even the Germans at Verdun.
Just saying.
Where would the Americans fight, anyhow, once they did actively join in force?
The British held the north and the French the approaches to Paris, so that pretty much
left the East, just south of Verdun.
Pershing approved of this , since a breakthrough that captured Metz could really hurt the Germans,
if he could pull it off.
He also did not listen to his allies and give top priority to the skills of trench warfare,
and thought the war ahead was a war of movement.
Whether or not that would be the case, he saw skill with the rifle as the key to victory
and was kind of blind to the effect of machine guns on infantry operations.
We’ve seen this often so far in the war, and that is the kind of thing that can come
back to haunt you.
Anyway, hundreds of thousands of men and millions of tons of stuff had to be brought in from
the French coast.
An office was set up in Paris where Chicago banker Charles Dawes managed and purchased
supplies.
This was all done day-to-day pretty much on a wing and a prayer since the magnitude of
even the “little” things was staggering.
Like to provide telephone set up for the American Expeditionary Force?
Yeah, the Americans installed 22,000 miles of phone lines, and leased 12,000 more from
the French.
That’s nearly 50,000 kilometers.
Which is 10,000 km more than the entire circumference of the earth, so there were some logistical
issues.
And those telephone lines were lit up this week by news of the ongoing Bonnet Rouge trial.
Lieutenant Marchand, an interpreter with the French army and an expert in German propaganda,
testified the 7th against the directors of the Bonnet Rouge newspaper.
He showed the similarity between the Bonnet Rouge and the Gazette des Ardennes, which
is a paper the Germans published in French in occupied France to dishearten soldiers
and the French population.
Some of the Gazette articles- which did not appear in the Bonnet Rouge because of censors-
also appeared in a German published paper in Zurich.
Marchand showed that in 15 different press campaigns, the Bonnet Rouge, the Gazette,
and the Zurich paper used the same arguments, cited the same facts, had the same style of
composition, and even made the same errors in citation.
The final phase of the trial is next week, but things are not looking good for the seven
accused.
Another paper was in the news this week, though not a newspaper.
On the 7th, the Peace of Bucharest was signed between Romania and Central Powers.
Its Conditions (Chronology): Immediate demobilization of Romanian army
Give Bulgaria back all territory Bulgaria lost in 1913 treaty after Balkan Wars.
Give central powers a strip of land so they completely control the mouths of the Danube.
An army of occupation to remain in Romania at Romanian expense.
This treaty in some ways did to Romania what the Brest-Litovsk treaty did to Russia.
Germany took a majority interest in the Romanian oil fields, Austria-Hungary was given 24%,
and this was under a 99-year lease.
And there was some action far to the south, in German East Africa.
Last week, British columns from the coast and Lake Nyasa force the Germans to River
Lurio, with British and Portuguese troops approaching from the south.
The Germans then retreated to Nanungu.
Now on the 5th, though, German General Von Lettow-Vorbeck is defeated at Nanungu by General
Northey and driven northeastward with heavy losses.
And the week ends, with a harsh peace for Romania, logistical nightmares in France,
a civilian treason trial continues, Germany makes plans for yet more offensives, and the
British try to stymie the German fleet.
Oh, and on May 9th, a German soldier named Adolf Hitler was awarded a regimental diploma
for outstanding bravery.
It’s crazy when you stop to think of all the stuff you have to do in this war other
than the actual fighting.
Equipping and supplying millions of men just boggles the mind.
50,000 km of telephone cables?
Someone has to put that all up, and connect everything, and keep track of everyone, and
that’s just one logistical issue of hundreds.
And millions of men are away from home so who’s going to do all this?
When you think about questions like that you realize that modern war is all encompassing.
If you want to know more about Adolf Hitler in World War 1, you can check out our episode
about that right here.
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