Find old World War 1 articles here. Find information on uniforms, women, gas warfare, prisoners of war and more.
This cartoon pokes fun at the high cost of being charitable. Throughout much of World War One there was always the problem of what to do with the growing number of refugees and orphans -and the answer was never cheap. This drawing reveals a different Rea Irvin, but the drawing style for which he would be remembered is clearly emerging.
The famed Conde Nast illustrator from days of old, Ann Fish, assumed the nom de guerre, Hello in order to impart to her well-fed audience the terror of German Prussianism. In this cartoon, she illustrated what a German invasion of Manhattan would look like.
Five remarkable color cartoons from France. Modern Satirical art at this time was exceptional. KEY WORDS: La Baionette 1914-1918,Cartoons 1916,French Cartoon 1916,Modern Satirical Art 1914-1918,Satiric Art 1916,Crown-Prince Wilhelm Cartoon 1916.
Click here to see how weird the first car radios looked.
A piece of VANITY FAIR social satire concerning the returning American veterans of the World War I and how the industrial slaughter had changed them (as if such a thing could!).
With his characteristic wit and economy of line, the American cartoonist Gluyas Williams once again sticks it to the Kaiser!
The Greenwhich Village cartoonist Art Young and his anarchist editors at The Masses, Liberator and The New Masses recognized all too well that the average Joe did not have a dog in that fight that was raging on across the sea.
The socialist New York magazine The Masses
It always seems like a good time to diss a pacifist or two; and this cartoon is good for all conflicts.
Although the year 1919 (and spanning throughout much of the Twenties) was a period marked by a strong sense of anti-communism in the United States, the words war profiteer proved to be a term capable of getting a good many people in both camps riled up. This is a fine cartoon by Rollin Kirby that nicely satirizes that low breed of opportunist.
Click here to see how weird the first car radios looked.
Although the origins of chewing gum have been traced to many different parts of the ancient world, no culture has whole-hardheartedly embraced the stuff quite as thoroughly as the Americans. The Yankee bromance with chewing gum has largely been credited to the American industrialist William Wrigley, Jr. (1861 – 1932) for creating, in 1906, a gum that appealed broadly to the American palette – and when Americans went to war in 1917, Wrigley’s chewing gum was in their arsenal.
We added to this page a small column about Dr. Morris Nafash, who was one of the brilliant chemists at the Bazooka Bubble Gum Company.
Click here to read about the A.E.F. love for candy…
Click here to read about all the effort that was made to get cigarettes to the Doughboys.
Illustrated with six photographs, this 1918 article is one of the first pieces of journalism to document the planning, construction, testing and deployment of the Railway Batteries that were manned by the U.S. Navy in W.W. I France.
They dreamed a dream wherein a squadron of colossal trains, sheltered in armor plate, cruised constantly on dry land behind the battle lines. On each train a hundred bluejackets and their officers lived, ate, slept and worked the giant guns that rested upon mechanically perfect mounts and hurled explosive shells to the limit of their extreme ranges. In short, they dreamed the United States Naval Railway Batteries just as complete to the firing lines a few months later.
Railway-mounted artillery can be dated to the 19th century, however their shining moment came during World War One, and the most notorious of these was the German manufactured Paris Gun
The well-illustrated article attached herein first appeared a few months prior to the war’s outbreak and concerns the railway gun that the French had on hand at the time: 7.87 inch, 6 inch and 4.7 inch howitzers which were intended for coastal defense. By 1916 both sides in the war would be deploying enormous rail-mounted naval guns, capable of delivering a far larger blow.
Click here to read about the U.S. Navy railroad guns of W.W. I.
A seven page recollection of the history of the US Navy Railway Artillery Reserve, penned by W.W I naval veteran Bill Cunningham, who served as an officer on one of her five rail-mounted batteries. The unit was lead in collaboration by a hard-charging U.S. Army artillery officer but commanded by Rear Admiral Charles Plunkett (1864 – 1931), a veteran of the Spanish-American War. Cunningham described his first encounter with the admiral, who he first mistook as a member of the YMCA:
I looked up to see a tall stranger approaching. He wore a pair of black, I said black, shoes beneath some badly rolled puttees. He didn’t have on a blouse, but wore an enlisted man’s rubber slicker open down the front, and badly rust-stained around the buckles. His battered campaign hat had no cord of any sort He was strictly the least military object we’d seen in a couple of years, if ever.
Click here to read about the woman who entertained the U.S. troops during the First World War.
An article written for an American veterans organization one year after the war, the attached piece tells the story of the five American naval batteries that were mounted on specially made rail cars and deployed along the Western Front. The article is two pages long and is filled with interesting facts as to the whereabouts of their assorted deployments and what was expected of the naval crews who worked them.
THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT reviewed the third edition to Charles Hamilton Sorely’s (1895 – 1915) collection, Marlborough and Other Poems, with particular attention paid to an addition to that volume called Illustrations in Prose.
Sorely reminisced about his days before the war when he was briefly enrolled as a student at the University of Jena. During the war Sorely served in the Suffolk Regiment and was killed in the battle of Loos during the autumn of 1915.
The following five page article was written by the World War One poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886 – 1967), in an attempt to give a rough outline of what the British poets did in the Great War, making every allowance for the fact that they were writing under great difficulty….
A review of three volumes of World War One poetry: From the Front
The attached essay by Galloway Kyle (b.1871) concerns World War I poetry and served as the preface for his 1916 anthology titled Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men
