The 50 years prior to the War had seen military medicine advance more slowly than other branches
of science, and without antibiotics, gangrene was a massive killer, but only one among many.
Bullets, disease, drowning, murders of civilians, and more, and as winter began and the carnage
continued, scenes of the worst horror imaginable were now not only very much real, they were
every day happenings.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week we saw the Austrians, with German help, pushing back the Russian colossus. Further
south in the Balkans, other Austrians had taken Belgrade but were now on the run, the
British Indian troops were nearing Qurna in the Middle East, and on the western front
it was unusually quiet after the interminable battles of the autumn.
The Western Front wasn’t especially quiet this week, though, as the British and French
made attacks that didn’t have any specific physical goal, but were intended to tie down
German forces and prevent them from being transferred to the Eastern Front to fight
the Russians.
German Chief of Staff Falkenhayn had committed to sending three divisions from west to east,
but refused to send more, even though General Ludendorff in the east repeatedly asked for
them.
In November, Ludendorff had launched a pre-emptive offensive against the Russians that had resulted
in the Battle of Lodz, a truly colossal engagement, with over half a million troops involved.
This attack had ruined Russian plans for an invasion of Germany, but the Germans had been
unable to take the city itself, which was a well-supplied strategic railway center.
This week they tried again, and after a series of frontal assaults using those three transferred
divisions managed to capture Lodz on December 6th.
The Germans advanced another 50 kilometers before they came up against Russian troops
that had dug themselves in to trenches. The Germans dug in as well and as winter came
on in force we see the whole center section of the eastern front frozen, physically and
militarily. It would remain so until the summer of 1915.
But if things seemed stalled in the west and the east, they were anything but that in the
south.
The Austrians seemed to have the Serbs beaten only a week ago when they took the Serbian
capital, but incredibly, only a few days later the Serbs had the Austrian army on the run.
The Austrians had fallen back to Valjevo, but the Serbs managed to surround them there
and in just a few days of fighting had taken over 20,000 Austrian prisoners. By December
10th, most of the remaining Austrian soldiers had left the country. Belgrade held out for
a few more days, but on December 15th the Serbian High Command issued a proclamation
that stated “Not one enemy soldier remains at liberty on the soil of the Serbian kingdom”.
This was an enormous defeat for the Austrians and an equally enormous victory for Serbia.
It was a huge blow to Austrian pride and confidence- I mean, if they couldn’t beat Serbia, what
would happen against Russia? And for Serbia it meant being in the news headlines all over
the world. The result was political and humanitarian aid, and people from around the world even
coming to fight for the underdog.
But there was a cost- the Serbs had suffered over 100,000 casualties in just a few weeks,
and the Austrian defeat certainly wasn’t irreversible. Serbia had drained her forces
down to the last dreg to beat the Austrians, and the country was devastated. Whole towns
were emptied, and refugees roamed the blasted countryside. One other thing often overlooked
- Serbia was now linked to the world by only a single-track railway to Salonika in neutral
Greece, through which all supplies had to be transported painfully slowly.
Disease was rampant throughout the country - cholera, typhus, and dysentery killed thousands,
and the poverty and misery would only get worse. In the First World War, over 60 percent
of Serbian men between the ages of 15 and 55 would die.
As for the Austrians, General Oskar Potiorek was finally relieved of his command for incompetence
since by the end of the year his army had suffered close to 300,000 casualties out of
a total deployment of 450,000. But Conrad von Hotzendorf was still chief of staff, in
spite of the fact that against both Russian and Serb, his operations had pretty much uniformly
ended in disaster.
Another, far more successful commander did meet his end this week, though, on December
8th at the battle of the Falklands.
A few weeks ago at the Battle of Coronel, German Admiral von Spee had given the British
their first defeat at sea for 100 years, sinking two cruisers and taking 1,600 lives. The outraged
British had subsequently redeployed their forces to try to intercept Spee wherever he
went, the Japanese navy had repositioned units to help, and two British battle cruisers,
the Invincible and the Inflexible had been sent to the South Atlantic.
Spee was being hunted in the Indian, the Pacific, and the Atlantic Oceans, and this week he
made the mistake of attacking the Falkland Islands, arriving at Port Stanley December
8th, which the battle cruiser squadron had also decided to visit.
The battle cruisers were stronger and faster than any of Spee’s ships and though Spee
tried to run and eventually turned to fight, his ships were destroyed, with 2,200 German
sailors, including Spee himself, dying against ten British. Only the Dresden got away and
she would spend the next three months hiding in the sub Antarctic waters around Cape Horn
until cornered and forced to scuttle.
This battle marked the end of the High Seas activity of the German navy. After this, surface
fighting was limited to landlocked waters like the Black Sea, the Baltic, or the Adriatic.
One area of the world that was really just heating up though was the Middle East, where
the British Indian Army won the Battle of Qurna[ad], where the Ottomans had retreated
after losses at Fao and Basra.
Thing is, the British had pretty much secured their coastal oil production with those battles,
but the Ottoman defenses had been quite weak so they’d moved further in land. Qurna,
though, which is supposed to be a possible site of the Garden of Eden, was anything but
good as a base. Endless winds stirred up clouds of dust and the flood plain meant that when
you dug trenches, they just filled with water. Bad water, bad sanitation, the total lack
of communication except along the Tigris and Euphrates, and endless small raids by the
local Arab population further complicated things, and you could really see that this
campaign was going to be no picnic for anybody. The British also now began to wonder how strong
the enemy was actually going to be and just how big was the threat to the oil fields.
In other foreshadowing news, we see that the mobilization of Russian students began December
1st. This provided many more soldiers, but also gave Bolshevik student activists access
to the army.
Of course, when hundreds of thousands of your men are dying, eventually you need to recruit
more, whether too old or too young to traditionally serve. And one thing to consider too- though
so many troops of all ages died, even more were taken as prisoners of war.
The ICRC- the Red Cross- arranged visits to POW camps in all of the warring nations, and
they determined that the Germans, French, and British were following humanitarian guidelines
for military POWs, but not the Russians or Austrians. Now, we’ve already mentioned
before that many Austrian officers took pride in the atrocities committed in the Serbian
campaign, but John Reed, an American war correspondent, was at this point traveling through the Balkans
getting material for his soon to be published book, which would confirm for Allied readers
the barbarism of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, such as a photograph Reed was shown from Leknica,
showing over 100 women and children chained together, whose heads had been cut off.
But as awful and shocking as scenes like that may be, they really were just a drop in the
bucket. Think of life on the front lines in the west, for example. First off the destruction
from artillery fire from miles away: a huge belt of land littered with corpses; farms
and villages now just blackened masonry, the fields and trees destroyed, and the bodies
of horses, cattle, and sheep scattered throughout, dismembered, abandoned, or starving, while
the wounded men and animals cried out endlessly in pain. Thousands more die of disease or
rot in the mud and rain. The conditions would only worsen as the winter came on.
And winter was coming on all over Europe, and at the end of the week we still see sporadic
fighting in Flanders, the Germans being stopped by the Russians and settling in, the Austrians
being expelled from underdog Serbia, the German Pacific navy destroyed, and the British again
victorious in the Middle East. It’s two weeks to Christmas.
With all the battle talk and maps and strategy, it’s very easy to overlook what was going
on on an individual level in the war, and I’d like to end this week with a quote,
a scene of horror from 1914 recounted by Alois Lowenstein, “among a bunch of corpses lay
three wounded Frenchmen. One man had both legs shattered; the second’s stomach was
torn open; the third had tried to shoot himself until one of our chaps took away his revolver.
He fired twice at his own head to escape pain, but aimed clumsily, a little too high. The
skullcap was uplifted and he moaned in a fashion to melt the heart. Another man lay apparently
dead, but with one leg still twitching like that of a partridge that is unable to die.”
This was modern war.
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and you're wandering how this whole war began, you should check out our three-part prelude-to-war
series of specials. Right here.
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We'll see you next week.