Welcome to another Great War special
episode of out of the trenches where I sit here in the chair of wisdom and answer your questions about the First World War.
Juan Gerber writes who set the barbed wire in no-man's land and how? Please I need to know.
Okay [um], well I'll help you out there [um] men obviously
Laid the wire and no man's land now being part of a wiring
party being sent out as a wiring party was pretty much the least
popular job a soldier could be given because you'd have to go out there with these steel pickets up to
six feet long and rolls and rolls and rolls of barbed wire. Now the pickets were knocked into place with mallets that had you
Muffle the mallets so you couldn't hear the sound and the wire was fastened and top and bottom to the pickets and then rolled out
into what were called aprons this was mostly done at night and was
Incredibly dangerous you'd have to be as quiet as you could
and you'd often have to dive for cover from enemy fire and
you had to go pretty far from your trench to do this see the wire
emplacements were ideally far enough away from the trench that the enemy couldn't get close enough to lob a grenade into your trench
Huh, that's pretty far.
And they really were virtually impassable.
When you set them up though you might leave gaps that were the only way through so you had those gaps covered with machine guns
so you could slaughter all of the enemy when they came
funneling through the gap. Now if you were the one attacking and had to get through you first tried shelling the wire with artillery but
this was often ineffective, so you had to send men in advance with wire cutters.
How much fun does that sound? The British actually
developed a wire cutter, a wire cutter blade, that you could fit to the muzzle of your rifle.
And you could also use what was called a bangalore torpedo which sounds kind of dirty?
But well it was actually a long pipe
filled with explosives that would detonate under the wire. Now, wire was dangerous in other ways, too
It was dirty and it was rusty and just cutting yourself could lead to a lingering death from infection.
How much wire was used you may be asking yourself or asking me there are actually estimates that by
1918 over a million miles of barbed wire have been strung up in just Flanders Fields alone.
That's nearly twice to the moon and back on one theater of battle.
George Stevens writes,
Here's a question. I see a lot of soft hats on heads in the period footage
I understand the German helmets weren't helmets, but leather.
When did the sides learn that cloth doesn't stop bullets or shrapnel or much of anything?
Good question.
It was the French who began to use a steel
skullcap under their soft caps the kept ease and these steel skull caps were issued from March
1915 and they were soon replaced by the Adrian M
1915 Steel Helmets and by the end of 1915
Over three million of those helmets had been produced they were based on the French
Firemen's helmets of the time and they were adopted by the Belgians,
the Russians, the Serbians and the Italians and the central powers of course followed suit soon after the French,
seeing their effectiveness in stopping something.
Hugo E. Ruano writes how badly did the systematic movement of people out of Warsaw affect the Russian or the
Astro Austro-German War machine
Well, it especially affected the Russian one
The evacuation of Warsaw meant that you had hundreds of thousands of people including
hundreds of thousands of children and old people
clogging the roads and the roads as you went further east were poorer and poorer and quality and fewer and far between
Anyhow and Imagine trying to maneuver your army which was already on the defensive through roads
clogged with hundreds of thousands of terrified
Slow-moving refugees. It was a logistical nightmare for the Russians. It was one of many logistical nightmares for the Russians.
XxZonisxX or kiss kiss Zonis kiss kiss whichever one writes for out outside the trenches
What is happening in Luxembourg during the war?
Transport. Transportation is happening.
Luxembourg was the first country overrun in the war the night before Germany invaded Belgium
they invaded Luxembourg to take the telegraph and railway lines. If you think that
Luxembourg had any means of preventing this then you are very much wrong and that was it for Luxembourg,
It was occupied from the first day of the war to the last actually German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg
He justified the invasion by saying well the French were going to invade also.
He even said Germany would reimburse Luxembourg for the inconvenience however in
1915 when it looked like Germany might win the war the Chancellor changed his plans
And he said that it was going to now become a German federal state once victory had been achieved.
Actually you can check out that episode from the beginning of the war right here.
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