Each episode of this show begins with a hook; something that hasn’t happened so far in
the war, but not today.
This week’s episode begins with a hook that has happened before, in fact, it happened
only eight months ago - revolution in Russia.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week, the Central Powers breakthrough on the Italian front - the Battle of Caporetto
- continued, with the Italians retreating all week and the Germans and Austrians taking
prisoners in the hundreds of thousands.
ANZAC mounted infantry performed brilliantly as the Ottomans were defeated at Beersheba,
the Canadians advanced slightly at Passchendaele, taking heavy casualties; the British government
announced its support for a National Home for Jews in Palestine, and there was ominous
unrest in Petrograd.
And as this week unfolded, that unrest grew and exploded.
On the 3rd, German and Russian soldiers fraternize on northern front.
On the 5th, Prime Minister and Minister of War Alexander Kerensky ordered troops outside
the city that he believed were loyal to him to enter the city to quell revolutionary activity,
but on the 6th they declined to do so.
That evening, the Bolsheviks occupied the railway stations, the bridges over the Neva
River, the state bank, and the telephone exchange.
On the 7th, more than 18,000 Bolsheviks surrounded the Provisional Government Ministers who had
holed up in the Winter Palace, and who were defended by fewer than 1,000 people.
More than 13,000 sailors from Kronstadt had arrived in the city, dedicated to revolution.
That evening the cruiser Aurora, anchored in the Neva, announced that it would fire
on the Winter Palace and fired blank charges to show it was serious.
By 0100, the Bolsheviks had overrun the palace and scattered the defenders.
On the 8th, Lenin proclaimed a new government - the Council of People’s Commissars.
Lenin was elected the Chairman of the Council, and was now nominally ruler of the capital
city.
Leon Trotsky became Commissar for Foreign Affairs.
This was the October Revolution - we’re still in October by the Russian calendar then
in use.
The first government decree that day was the decree of peace, which Lenin read out in the
evening to an ecstatic crowd.
On the 9th, Trotsky asked his ministry to translate it into foreign languages for immediate
distribution abroad, but 100 officials loyal to either the Tsar or the Provisional Government,
walked out.
On the 10th, 4 million copies will be sent to the front, calling for an end to the fighting.
One thing here, this new “government” did not have support of the moderate Socialist
Revolutionaries nor the Mensheviks in the Petrograd Soviet, and it had not been ratified
by any Constituent Assembly.
Until that could happen, it would be run by a series of ad hoc committees with no political
legitimacy.
As the week ended, it was still great turmoil in Petrograd and Moscow, since nobody had
any idea how this was going to play out.
There were a couple of things, though, that were playing out this week in Italy - Caporetto
and Cadorna.
Italian army Chief of Staff Luigi Cadorna had played very little part in the battle.
He hadn’t actually thought there would even be one once the snow had arrived in the Julian
Alps at the beginning of October so he’d taken a two-week vacation to Torino.
Even when he returned he still didn’t listen to the rumors about an impending offensive,
and that offensive had turned into a rout.
And the fighting was still going on.
On the 5th, the Germans crossed the Tagliamento and the Italians were again on the retreat.
On the 8th, the Germans were pushing the Italians toward the Piave River and that day outflanked
17,000 Italians, who surrendered.
The same day, Austrian troops coming down from the Dolomites and Julian Alps occupied
Vittorio Veneto, just 55km from Venice.
In ten days, the Italian retreat from Caporetto had been 100km, but at the end of the week,
the Italians were established behind the Piave.
King Vittorio Emanuele, who was technically in charge of the army called a meeting of
the leaders of the Western Allies for November 5th at Rapallo to try to deal with Italy’s
precarious situation.
Cadorna didn’t bother attending, and sent General Carlo Porro instead.
At the conference, Porro claimed the Germans had attacked with 35 divisions, not the seven
they actually had attacked with.
The Italians asked French and British Prime Ministers Paul Painlevé and David Lloyd George
for 15 British and French divisions to be sent at once.
The British sent in 5 artillery and infantry divisions and the French 6 (Caporetto).
The King was now furious with Cadorna and called for another meeting the 8th.
In English he told those assembled that the responsibility for the Caporetto disaster
lay with the Italian generals, and he called for the resignation of Cadorna and Luigi Capello.
Now Cadorna grew furious and blamed everyone but himself.
He refused to resign.
The king fired him.
The general consensus was that the Duke of Aosta, who was still undefeated, should replace
Cadorna, but the king didn’t want to appoint a cousin, so he appointed General Armando
Diaz as new Chief of Staff.
Diaz was a lot different from Cadorna.
He was from the south - from Naples - and was of Spanish descent.
He had originally been an artillery officer, though he’d spent the bulk of two decades
in Rome as a staff officer.
As a younger man, he had seen action in Libya, where he’d been wounded and decorated, and
in the World War he’d risen quickly through the ranks, commanding infantry regiments on
the Carso.
He became a Corps commander in April this year and his Corps was the only one to gain
ground in the 10th and 11th battles of the Isonzo River.
Unlike Cadorna, Diaz cared deeply for the welfare of his men and was concerned with
keeping casualties as low as possible.
His jobs now were to rebuild the Italian army and hold the Piave line.
Also at the conference, the Allies decided on the creation of a Supreme Allied War Council
for the western front.
This was to be a body charged with constantly surveying the field of operations as a whole,
and from the information gathered, coordinating the plans of the different general staffs.
There was a breakthrough on another front that also continued this week - the Palestine
Front.
Following the capture of Beersheba, Gaza now fell after a massive bombardment from ten
British and French naval vessels off the coast.
A German sub managed to sink two of them.
A combined infantry and mounted assault then hit the city, and in minutes overwhelmed the
defenses that Kress von Kressenstein had spent the year building.
This whole campaign featured more and more cavalry and mounted infantry charges, used
for their shock value, then culminating in hand to hand combat.
On the 8th, for example, the Warwickshire and Worcestershire Yeomanry charged Turkish
positions at Huj that were supported by machine guns and artillery.
“A whole heap of men and horses went down 20 or 30 yards from the muzzles of the guns.
The squadron broke into a few scattered horsemen at the guns and then seemed to melt away completely...
I had the impression I was the only man alive.
I was amazed to discover we were the victors.”
– Lieutenant Wilfred Mercer.
They then turned the captured machine guns on the fleeing enemy.
Any way you slice it, cavalry overrunning machine guns is a serious achievement, but
cavalry’s main advantage was that it could provoke total panic on breaking through.
However, in spite of British General Edmund Allenby’s success, the Ottomans repeatedly
escaped encirclement and withdrew to fight again.
And the Canadians were fighting again as well, on the Western Front at Passchendaele.
The assault November 6th was, in fact, to be an all-Canadian one.
In all the other sectors only artillery would engage.
Two Canadian Divisions attacked at 0600 - General Arthur Currie was going for speed and surprise,
and after just two minutes of shelling, the creeping barrage began.
The infantry had already crawled into no-mans land in the dark and thus avoided the German
artillery that now fell on their trenches.
By 0745, two battalions of the 1st Division were already 1km from their assault trenches.
The 2nd division had taken Passchendaele itself by 0740, “a pile of bricks with the ruin
of a church, a mass of slaughtered masonry and nothing else left on this shell-swept
height.”
The men could see in the distance across the far end of the remains of the village, a land
of tall trees and green fields, with undamaged houses and unmarked fields, an incredible
contrast to the battlefield.
Canadian troops drove the Germans off enough of Passchendaele Ridge for British Army Commander
Sir Douglas Haig to claim victory.
The price of this little victory was almost exactly what Currie had predicted a couple
weeks ago for it - 16,000 men.
And the week ends, with a new Italian Commander trying to stem the tide, British success in
Palestine, Canadian success at a heavy cost at Passchendaele, a Supreme war Council formed,
oh!
And Austrian General Svetozar Borojevic von Bojna is promoted to Field Marshal.
And there was another revolution in Russia.
But you know what?
This Bolshevik coup, for that’s what it is at the moment, was not the heroic rise
of the workers you find in Russian histories, it was “...the exhausted capitulation of
Kerensky’s moribund and virtually defenseless government.”
Seriously.
The under-1,000-people I mentioned that were guarding his government at the winter palace?
It was made up of teenaged cadets, a bicycle squad, two companies of Cossacks, and 135
wom n from a Women’s Death battalion who expected to fight Germans at the front and
had no desire to defend Kerensky’s government.
That was it.
Against tens of thousands of Bolshevik Red Guards and revolutionary sailors.
At least, though, there wasn’t a great deal of blood.
For now.
If you want to learn more about Russia before the revolution, you can click right here to
watch our special episode about that.
Our Patreon supporter of the week is Ninip Lazar - thank you for your ongoing support
on Patreon which makes this show what it is today.
Don’t forget to subscribe, see you next time.