Russian Revolution

Protesters in streets.

By the winter of 1916/1917, the Russian army, economy, and country was in a shambles. Over 2 million soldiers had been killed in the fighting, millions more wounded. The tsar’s policies had resulted in food and fuel shortages and rampant inflation. By early March, the population of the capital of Russia, Petrograd (St. Petersburg), were fed up. On international women’s day in 1917, the workers began to strike and protest, filling the streets with tens of thousands of people. More joined each day including 170,000 nearby garrisoned troops. Workers broke into arsenals and took rifles. The capital was in chaos and the worker councils (called soviets) demanded the abdication of the tsar.  This was a true peoples revolution. By the middle of March, Nicholas II abdicated to his brother who abdicated the next day.

All the Soviet leaders we’ve heard so much about from Russian history such as Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky weren’t involved in any of this. They were still in exile during the March revolution.  They rushed and connived ways to get back to Petrograd as soon as they could. Stalin was the first to arrive and immediately resumed his old post as editor of Pravda, the Bolshevik newspaper. In the beginning of April, Lenin made it back to Petrograd and took control of the Bolshevik party. The Bolsheviks were one of many parties and players at the time. They soon became major players. Trotsky arrived in Petrograd in May. All summer and into the early fall, there was a power grab by the various parties including the Bolsheviks. By this time Lenin was in charge and planning for an armed rising within the provisional government. In the end of October, they were successful, but violent encounters between the various players continued.

Russian soldiers captured by the Germans.

In the middle of November 1917, Germany and Russia began negotiations for an armistice which soon followed. The end of November marked the beginning civil war in Russia that would last for four years with the Bolsheviks (communists) finally victorious. The armistice with Germany in the winter of 1917/18 allowed the Germans to move all their troops from the Eastern Front to the Western Front. The Germans hurried an offensive in France during the spring of 1918 in hopes of complete victory before the Americans could build up their troops in Europe. They weren’t successful, and by the summer of 1918 over 2 million American troops were in France.

History does not speak kindly of Nicholas II, the last tsar of the Russian Empire. He did not heed the warnings of Revolution from earlier protests and never instituted substantive changes in the government or the civil side of society. He blundered into the war, like so many of the other leaders at the time, refusing to see the reality of his own military might and those of the enemy. He and his family were put under house arrest in the spring of 1917 and executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.

 

 

The Irish Fought

Yesterday, I finished edits on a short story, Ghost Dog, to be published in a horror magazine in April. Its about an Irish soldier who fought at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Over 200,000 Irishmen served in the British Forces during WWI. About 35,000 died. It was an interesting time for Ireland as the Irish were divided over their loyalty to Great Britain. Many  Irish, the Nationalists,  wanted Ireland to be a separate country. This had been a political driving force for the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Unionists were loyal to Great Britain. Both groups enlisted, but their reasons varied.

Many Nationalists were swept up in the cause of protecting small sovereign countries like Serbia and Belgium from being taken over by larger countries. Many Irishmen joined for personal rather than political reasons. Job opportunities were limited in Ireland and poorly paid. Soldiers could earn almost twice what a common laborer could make.  Many men wanted to see the world and see what the war was about. There’s an Irish saying that may explain why some men signed up. Is this a private fight or can anyone join?

In 1916, sentiment about the war changed when two nationalist leaders and 1800 volunteers seized many public buildings in Dublin and proclaimed an Irish republic. This was called Easter Rising or the Easter Rebellion. The British sent in a sizable armed force and some 500 people were killed, mostly civilians.  The volunteers and their leaders surrendered, but shortly after, 15 of the Nationalists were executed by firing squad. This was a bad move by the British as it fueled anti-British sentiment and the Ireland independence movement.

Soldier recruitment from Ireland plummeted after the Easter Rebellion. Irish nationalism increased. Those who returned from the war after 1916 were often met with open hostility, as Tom Kettle predicted. Tom was a former nationalist MP who served with the British forces in the Battle of the Somme. He wrote, “These men (the 1916 rebellion leaders) will go down in history as heroes and martyrs; and I will go down – if I go down at all – as a bloody British officer.” Tom was killed on the Somme in the summer of 1916.

It only took Ireland eighty years to recognize the soldiers of Ireland who fought in the Great War. In 1998, they dedicated the Island of Ireland Peace Tower located in Mesen, Belgium to all the Irish people who had fallen during WWI. Tom Kettle and all his fellows were finally remembered.

Women Munitions Workers

I’ve been working on a short story about women munitions workers during WWI and so have been reading up on this topic. Women munitions workers were especially prevalent in European countries like the UK, France and Germany because of the loss of male factory workers and these countries long-term need for artillery shells. Estimates for the number of shells fired during WWI range from about 1.2 billion to 8 billion!  In the buildup for the Battle of the Somme as just one example, the British fired 1.5 million shells at the German trenches. That’s in just a few days.

The women munitions workers worked long hours (typically 12 hours/day, six days a week) under noisy, dusty, and hazardous conditions. Many women were exposed to toxic chemicals like TNT (trinitrotoluene). TNT was initially developed in the 1800s and used as a yellow dye. Later, it was found to be a good explosive. Because of its yellow dye properties, it turned the women workers a bright yellow, including their hair and skin. They were often called canary girls because of it. That was on the outside though. On the inside, it caused headaches, dizziness, anemia, spleen enlargement, and liver problems among other things. There were also reports of yellow babies being born from mothers who worked with these explosives. In the UK about 400 women died as a result of exposure to toxic chemicals. Others had debilitating illness for the rest of their livers. Due to the illness and deaths of women workers in the early years of the war, some safety precautions were implemented. For example, they would rotate women out of these jobs regularly to avoid them getting prolonged exposure to the chemicals.

But the jobs were dangerous. No doubt about it. Worker safety wasn’t job number 1. And women were generally paid much lower than what the men were paid, sometimes half of what they earned. Yet, it was still higher pay than what these women would have made in service, agricultural, and textile jobs which is why many of them left those jobs. Contrary to popular ideas, most of the women in the munitions plants were already working women. They had been maids or workers in textile or other factories. In Germany, for example, because of the British Blockade, there was a huge shortage of cotton. It was limited for use in military uniforms. That left thousands of textile workers (mostly women) out of work. Since they needed money and the munitions factories needed workers, they transitioned over to those jobs.

While women worked long and dangerous hours, some local businessmen tried to price gouge the women on rents. This happened in Glasgow, Scotland in 1915. But the working women fought back with a rent strike. It resulted in the British Parliament passing a Rent Restrictions Act which set rents for the remainder of the war at pre-war levels. Working women also used their numbers to combat food shortages and price gouging in Germany too. They also called for the end of the war. If they would have had their way, the war would have ended at least two years earlier than it did.

The Scottish Fought

The neat thing about being a WWI buff is that wherever I go, I find interesting WWI stuff. Even driving through a small town in western New York last fall, I happened by a WWI memorial (on right) and pulled over to snap a picture. Many U.S. towns and cities have WWI memorials, it’s just that most Americans don’t know much about them or the war they represent.

WWI memorials abound in Scotland as well.  On our recent trip there, I noticed them in towns, at the Edinburgh botanical garden and at the national museum. But the Scottish know a lot more about the Great War than most Americans because it touched every Scottish town and family in some way. Scotland had about 4.6 million people at the time and over 700,000 men fought. That represents about 30% of the male population. Over 100,000 men died with many more wounded. Deaths represented 2.2% of the population. In the U.S., deaths from WWI represented about 0.1% of the population. It’s easy to see how every Scottish town and family would be impacted. Scotland was also a big industrial area of Great Britain at the time. Many women had to fill the ranks in industry under lower wages than the men they replaced and often dangerous conditions.

The Scottish were renowned fighters. Many regiments wore woolen kilts with different Tarten patterns depending on the regiment. But according to many of the men who fought in France, the kilt wasn’t a particularly good choice especially in the wet cold muddy low lands. A kilt of the correct length and weight was supposed to shed water making it a good choice for the Scottish highlands. In the trenches, mud clung to the fabric causing it to be weighted down. The caked mud could also chafe the back of the legs resulting in dangerous infections. By 1918, many of the Scottish regiments were abandoning the kilt for battledress trousers for the reasons mentioned above as well as the danger of mustard gas which burns exposed skin.

 

My favorite WWI memorial in Scotland was in the botanical garden with a wooden marker about John McCrea and his famous poem “In Flanders Field” which I talked about in an earlier post. There was also a plot of poppies which must have looked beautiful in summer, but were long past when we went. Scottish troops also fought in Flanders and many died so the poem has direct significance. But McCrea was also the grandson of Scottish immigrants to Cananda so he holds a special place in the hearts of the Scottish for that as well.

 

 

Meuse-Argonne Offensive, September 1918

Over 14,000 American soldiers who died during the Meuse-Argonne offensive are buried in the American Cemetery there.

It was this time of year in 1918 when the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) headed the Meuse-Argonne Offensive against the Germans. It was one of the bloodiest battles in U.S. history with over 26,000 Americans dead and thousands wounded. Many of the dead were buried in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery near the village of Romagne-sous-Montfaucon. We visited this quiet lonely place a few years ago.

My great uncle Harry was part of the 37th division (the Buckeye Division) that fought during the initial days of the offensive and helped capture Montfaucon (a German stronghold). Harry’s letter to his family written in 1919 (after armistice) explains a bit of his experiences. This is the excerpt where he talks about the Meuse-Argonne offensive.

“Well we left the trucks somewhere in France and hiked to a woods near Recicort, stayed there a day and then we moved to the woods north of Recicort. Here we took up trench warfare until Sept 26 when after six hours of heavy shelling, we moved toward the German lines. Well, talk about things being blowed up. Every thing was shot to pieces. Well you may ask what was Jerry doing all this while, well he was sending over shells, and machine guns were going put-put all the time. The way the boys in khaki fell showed that old Jerry done some dirty work. One shell killed five men and wounded seven or eight more in my platoon. I was a runner between our Co and E. Co.

Private Harry Johnson, 1918

After 5 days of perfect Hell we were released by the 32 Div. On the last day while we were being relieved a Jerry shell killed six and wounded half a dozen more a few feet from me in the same ditch along a road. I was covered with dirt and blood from my comrades. A piece of shrapnel tore the stock of my gun off, just a foot over my head.

October 1, we hiked all night from dead man’s hill  to Recicort and rested one day. Got some mail also. Oct 2 we entrained in trucks and after a day of misery in them we detrained at a woods near Void. Here we got some cookies from a YMCA, but they did taste good. We left there and hiked all night to Jucy. Everybody was more or less sick as we all had a good sniff of gas on the drive.”

Harry’s division continued to fight near Verdun, and then went to Belgium where they remained until after Armistice.

U.S. Invades Haiti, 1915

John’s been in Haiti this week on a project working with coffee farmers, and it made me wonder what was happening in Haiti during WWI. Sure enough – plenty.

Following the assassination of Haiti’s president in 1915, President Woodrow Wilson sent in the U.S. Marines to restore order and maintain economic and political security in the region for U.S. interests. We occupied Haiti for another 19 years. It wasn’t just Haiti. We occupied Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Honduras around that time too. We also intervened in Panama, Guatemala, Mexico and Costa Rica. We didn’t leave any of Latin America alone except those places already controlled by Britain.

This was also the time of our so called isolationist policy, but really that only extended to Europe and getting involved in WWI. We had no qualms about butting into other countries to “protect” our interests. Sounds all too familiar.

Anyway, back to Haiti. Haiti was a French Colony until the early 1800s when the slaves revolted and won. It became an independent nation in 1804. Quite a victory! The problem was the French wouldn’t recognize Haiti, nor would anyone else, and they set up an embargo which crippled the new country. In 1825, Haiti agreed to pay reparations to France on the order of $150 million gold francs! The reparations were for “lost property” which meant slaves, equipment and land. Haiti took out high interest loans in order to pay this, and even though France eventually reduced the amount to $90 million, Haiti didn’t successfully pay it all back until 1947. No wonder the country has been fraught with so much economic strife over the years with a debt like that hanging over their heads.

SAY WHAT?

It wasn’t until 1862, after many of the southern states that still had slaves seceded that the U.S. granted diplomatic recognition to Haiti. From around the 1860s to the early 1900s, Haiti was relatively economically and politically stable. However by 1910, Germany was established as an economic powerhouse in Haiti through financial investments and marrying into the Haitian elite. They controlled the majority of the international commerce and funded some of the recent uprisings. The U.S. was concerned about this and even more so at the start of WWI when they feared that Germany might set up a military presence in Haiti. Thus, they sent in the marines.

The U.S. officials then took over the government functions, disbanded the army and put a U.S. trained police force in its place, installed a puppet government, censored the press, and used forced labor. The U.S. secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wrote their new constitution in 1917. Just another example of President Wilson’s adage of how the U.S. is “making the world safe for democracy.”

Rats!

Me in a French reenactment trench site on the Western Front, posing next to the rats.

I’ve been working on a WWI story about a wounded soldier who wakes up in No Man’s Land as evening approaches. He hears and see rats around him. That’s when he realizes he’s paralyzed, and there’s no getting away from them. It’s a pretty gruesome story, but so was the war. And so were the rats.

The rat stories from WWI abound. Conditions in the trenches were unhygienic to say the least. The dead were often buried nearby and in heavy rains would become exposed. Or under certain circumstances dead animals or men couldn’t be buried right away. These became food for rats which multiplied quickly. That’s why ratter dogs became so important. But even so, plenty of soldiers went a little crazy being constantly surrounded by rats. Other stories by soldiers mention waking up to the rats actually chewing on their wounds or biting their faces which always reminds me of the end of 1984 by George Orwell. Pretty horrible stuff.

Here’s a blow up of the picture I’m standing next to. It shows a French soldier with his dog and all the rats the dog caught.

Even Uncle Harry included references to the rats in some of his letters, although being a bit of jokester, he often made light of it. Here’s one of my favorite excerpts dated December 15, 1918:

“Well here we are sleeping in a barn among the rats and cooties both to numerous to mention. The rats have a great time sitting on our foreheads and pulling our noses. And our dining room is swell as it is a nice clean pig yard and with our mess pans on the ground and us on our knees we feed our faces. Well one good thing, what we don’t want we hand over to the four legged kind and with a grunt of satisfaction they come closer and look for more, that’s when they get a hobnail shoe well planted between their eyes.”

My own personal rat story is nothing compared to those of the soldiers in the trenches, but it was pretty unnerving to me. It was when I was in the Peace Corps in Kenya. During the rainy season, it wasn’t unusual for a rat or two to come into your house to get out of the rain. I had put up reed mats to make a ceiling in my little house/apartment which kept the place  getting too hot from the sun heating up the metal roof. Anyway, my friend Melinda was visiting. It was around 9 o’clock at night and we were reading and listening to the scurrying on the mats overhead. Needless to say, we were feeling uneasy.

Well, one dumb rat went charging across the mat and didn’t realize there was a three inch gap between the mat and the wall. It came through and dropped inches away from Melinda’s head. Then it started running around my apartment. Well, of course we screamed and ran outside. My neighbor, Alice, came out and started laughing at us. The Somali guys across the street came over to see what all the laughing and yelling was about. When they heard the story, they charged into my house while me, Melinda and Alice waited outside. We heard all kinds of banging, yelling, and stomping going on inside. A few minutes later, the two guys come out. One of them was still holding his shoe in his hand, while the other was holding the dead rat by the tail.

I love a happy ending.

 

 

WWI Flying Ace

Halloween 1979.

So I was rummaging through a drawer of old photos, and I happened upon a Halloween photo from 1979 when I was a WWI flying ace and my hometown friend, Debbie, was a Maine fisherman. In my memories, Debbie was the ace and I was an overgrown girl scout, but the photo proved my memory wrong. Again! Funny how things work out though. Now, I’m a WWI fanatic, and Debbie moved to Bangor, Maine after college, although she’s not a fisherman.

It’s hard to believe that Orville and Wilbur Wright made their historic flight in 1903 and just eleven years later, airplanes were key aspect of military technology in WWI. No doubt, the war sped up their development. They were primarily used for reconnaissance early on, but by the end of the war, machine guns were mounted on them, they were used for dropping bombs, anti-aircraft weaponry had been developed, and daily dogfights were common sights.

On August 12, 1918, my great uncle Harry was in the trenches in the Baccarat Sector in France (a “quiet” sector)  and wrote to his sister, Alice, “you said that you saw an airplane when in Jamestown. Well here there is one flying over my head, and it makes me stick my head down when a shell whizzes over for there is no telling when it will burst.” Seeing an airplane would have been a big event for Alice back in 1918, but Harry was already starting to get used to the daily dog fights.

Being a pilot was probably the most dangerous job in the war. The typical pilot had a life expectancy of only several weeks which didn’t increase by much towards the end of the war even though the airplanes were better and more maneuverable and parachutes were finally issued by the various belligerents. Oh, all except  the Americans that is. Our military higher ups wouldn’t give them to the American pilots. They thought this might lead to too many pilots abandoning their planes at the first sign of danger. Only after the war did these geniuses realize it was a lot easier (and cheaper) to replace a plane than a skilled pilot, so they started issuing parachutes.

From a recent movie about the Red Baron. The only thing missing is a mustache. But check out the white scarf. How did I know?

Probably the most famous WWI flying ace was a German fighter pilot, the Red Baron (Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen). He was only 25 when he was finally shot down and killed in France on April, 1918. He was one of the first members of the German Air Corps and flew for over two years which was a very long time for those guys.

Poppies

This year, spring quickly turned to summer in Vermont. It’s only the third week in May but the hills are green, the fields are yellow with dandelions, the days are in the high 70s, and the stream running through the farm is getting low. The apple blossoms have been magnificent, but the bloom’s been short. Already the petals have started to fall.

My painting of the perennial oriental poppies in my garden. Not corn poppies, but similar.

It’s about this time of year when the red field poppies started blooming on the shell torn battlegrounds and graves in France and Belgium during WWI. This annual poppy, also called the corn poppy, was such a prevalent weed that it was often confused for the crop. The seeds could lay dormant in the soil for years, but once the soil was disturbed by plowing (or by an exploding shell for example), they germinated and grew, creating bright red fields from May through August.

In 1915, a Canadian soldier and physician, John McCrae wrote a well known WWI poem called “In Flanders Fields” which begins, “In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row.” The corn poppy became a popular symbol for Remembrance Day in Commonweath Countries.

Our own Memorial Day (originally called Decoration Day) started in the union states after the Civil War and was a day for decorating the graves of the soldiers who had died in defense of the country. During WWI, it came to be a day for honoring all those who died serving the nation during war. Moina Michaels conceived of the idea of using the corn poppy as a symbol of remembrance in the U.S. in 1915.

My own recollection of Memorial Day was the Memorial Day parade in Jamestown, NY. We sat on the curb in front of Orpha’s house and watched the sights especially the marching bands. First, there was my oldest sister, Diane. She played the flute in the Lincoln Jr. High Marching Band and the Jamestown High School Marching Band. My mom was good at spotting her amongst the throng of band members. A couple years later, my brother Rick joined the ranks playing the clarinet. I remember sister Annie amongst the baton twirlers, but that was a short lived adventure. A couple years later, I was marching in the parade myself, playing the clarinet. My younger brother, Steve, sat on the curb watching his big sister faking notes and desperately trying to keep  her white buck band shoes in step.

My mom decorated the graves of family members by planting flowers, usually some geraniums or impatiens depending on whether the grave was in the sun or shade. Annie has taken over that job now including planting mom’s grave. I was probably in High School before I realized that Memorial Day was some kind of military holiday. For me, it has always been about family, whether trying to catch a glimpse of  a brother or sister in the parade, an after-parade cook out, or remembering those family members who are no longer with us.

U.S. Declares War on Germany

Ninety-eight years ago, on April 6, 1917, the United Stated declared war on the German Empire. The next day it declared war on Austria-Hungary. Since the start of the war in the summer of 1914,  President Woodrow Wilson had vowed to keep the United States out of the war. In fact, that was his 1916 re-election slogan – “He kept us out of war.” The U.S. policy was neutrality early on, however with the British blockade against Germany, we mostly sold goods to Britain and France. Then we let them buy on credit. By 1917, Britain and France owed $2.25 billion in loans to the United States, while Germany owed only $27 million. That doesn’t seem neutral to me.

There are many reasons given for the change in stance of the President and the country in deciding to go to war. In January of 1917, the Germans resumed unrestricted submarine warfare which meant they would again attack passenger and merchant ships, especially merchant ships since these were likely loaded with supplies for Britain and France. Following the sinking of Lusitania in 1915 and an unarmed French ship in 1916 by German U-boats, President Wilson threatened to terminate diplomatic relations with Germany if they continued attacking nonmilitary vessels. The Germans relented then, but by 1917 with the continued British blockade on their ports, they were desperate.

Another reason often given for the change in stance was something called the Zimmerman Telegram. British Intelligence intercepted and decrypted a telegram sent to Mexico from the German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmerman, which promised the Mexican Government they could recover territory they lost to the US in the Mexican-American war if they helped Germany win the war. As you can imagine, this made a lot of people mad.

While both of these reasons added fuel to the fire  and were great for getting the citizenry riled up, I can’t help thinking about the Russian revolution (which started in March 1917 with help from a mutinous Russian Army), and how if the Germans didn’t have to fight on two fronts and had to deal only with the Western Front, they probably had a pretty good chance of defeating Britain and France. And if they did, then what would have happened to our $2.25 billion in loans? You don’t have to scratch very far beneath the surface to find the monetary reasons behind any war.

Instead, we hear the rhetoric of “the war to end all war” and “making the world safe for democracy.” The latter is especially ironic since we didn’t even have democracy in the U.S. (e.g. women didn’t have the right to vote, segregation and intimidation ruled rampant for African Americans, treaties were broken with Native American tribes, and immigrants worked for pennies in life threatening situations). Worldwide, we had a system of colonization that was inequitable for the native peoples of Africa and Asia!

Harry on right. No date or description on photograph, but likely before 1917. Harry looks to be late teens or early 20s.

My own relatives, my great uncle Harry who would soon be drafted and fight in France, and his family (including my grandmother Esther) lived on a farm near Highland Corners in western Pennsylvania. They might have read about the U.S. war declaration in the local paper or heard it from neighbors. Like many Swedish Americans (as with German-Americans and Irish-Americans) they may even have been quite upset that the U.S. was getting involved the war. Yet, they were probably busy finishing up the  apple tree pruning in their orchard, checking on the honeybees to see if they had made it through the winter, and getting ready for bark peeling camp. The war would have seemed very far away.